Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Jack

His name was Jack and he was six foot six, blue eyed and husky with years of work. They were young farm boys, most just turned eighteen, fresh out of high school and headed straight for the Vietnam war. He and his buddies were caught between the dread of the unknown and a strange excitement from traveling so far away from home, some for the first time. He was nineteen.


To the man they were masters of marksmanship—any one of them could pick the eye out of a squirrel at hundreds of yards. They’d done their basic training, but they’d been trained from the first time they carried a gun that it was never, under any circumstances, to be turned on another person. They talked about it quietly among themselves, wondering to each other if they’d be able to do it, to pull the trigger. Jack couldn’t imagine it, himself. Despite the desperate situation overseas, he knew that the enemy was going to be made up of other young men just like himself, just with a different skin, a different language. With the others, he asked himself if he could pull that trigger—and there was no answer. He dreaded finding out.

They were dumped out on the edge of the jungle after the long flight, and sent straight out to hassle a formation of the enemy, and hunt them down. For several days as they pressed inward through the steamy verdancy, so foreign to all of them, there was no resistance. They were apprehensive, but growing bolder as the hours passed and no shots were fired. He remembers they were cracking jokes; the sergeant just shook his head but didn’t say anything.

And then, as Jack haltingly says, everything changed. They reached a site where the Vietcong had just vacated, dust still settling from the air. And in the middle of the abandoned camp was the body of a soldier, not American but one of the Allied forces, strung up by his testicles, left to die. He was still warm.

The Vietnamese had left him there to intimidate the new American troupes following behind. It was the worst mistake they could have made. Jack cried as he sat in the chair in the office, reliving the moment when a bunch of innocent, uncertain farm boys transformed into mad killing machines. He choked out that they had torn across the jungle after that, mowing down anybody they came across, without a thought in their rage. Everyone. His broad shoulders shook as he sat with head bowed, telling us what he had never told his family, grieving for the loss of innocence in that boy he had been. And I thought, someday, Lord, make them pay for what they did to him. Make them pay.

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