this is true i had a buddy in vietnam his name was bob kiley but everybody called him rat a friend of his gets killed so about a week later rat sits down and writes a letter to the guy s sister rat tells her what a great brother she had how together the guy was a number one pal and comrade a real soldier s soldier rat says then he tells a few stories to make the point how her brother would always volunteer for stuff nobody else would volunteer for in a million years dangerous stuff like doing recon or going out on these really badass night patrols stainless steel balls rat tells her the guy was a little crazy for sure but crazy in a good way a real daredevil because he liked the challenge of it he liked testing himself just man against gook a great great guy rat says anyway it s a terrific letter very personal and touching rat almost bawls writing it he gets all teary telling about the good times they had together how her brother made the war seem almost fun always raising hell and lighting up villes and bringing smoke to bear every which way a great sense of humor too like the time at this river when he went fishing with a whole damn crate of hand grenades probably the funniest thing in world history rat says all that gore about twenty zillion dead gook fish her brother he had the right attitude he knew how to have a good time on halloween this real hot spooky night the dude paints up his body all different colors and puts on this weird mask and hikes over to a ville and goes trick or treating almost stark naked just boots and balls and an m 16 a tremendous human being rat says pretty nutso sometimes but you could trust him with your life and then the letter gets very sad and serious rat pours his heart out he says he loved the guy he says the guy was his best friend in the world they were like soul mates he says like twins or something they had a whole lot in common he tells the guy s sister he ll look her up when the war s over so what happens rat mails the letter he waits two months the dumb cooze never writes back a true war story is never moral it does not instruct nor encourage virtue nor suggest models of proper human behavior nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done if a story seems moral do not believe it if at the end of a war story you feel uplifted or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie there is no rectitude whatsoever there is no virtue as a first rule of thumb therefore you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil listen to rat kiley cooze he says he does not say bitch he certainly does not say woman or girl he says cooze then he spits and stares he s nineteen years oldit s too much for himso he looks at you with those big sad gentle killer eyes and says cooze because his friend is dead and because it s so incredibly sad and true she never wrote back you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you if you don t care for obscenity you don t care for the truth if you don t care for the truth watch how you vote send guys to war they come home talking dirty listen to rat jesus christ man i write this beautiful fuckin letter i slave over it and what happens the dumb cooze never writes back the dead guy s name was curt lemon what happened was we crossed a muddy river and marched west into the mountains and on the third day we took a break along a trail junction in deep jungle right away lemon and rat kiley started goofing they didn t understand about the spookiness they were kids they just didn t know a nature hike they thought not even a war so they went off into the shade of some giant treesquadruple canopy no sunlight at alland they were giggling and calling each other yellow mother and playing a silly game they d invented the game involved smoke grenades which were harmless unless you did stupid things and what they did was pull out the pin and stand a few feet apart and play catch under the shade of those huge trees whoever chickened out was a yellow mother and if nobody chickened out the grenade would make a light popping sound and they d be covered with smoke and they d laugh and dance around and then do it again it s all exactly true it happened to me nearly twenty years ago and i still remember that trail junction and those giant trees and a soft dripping sound somewhere beyond the trees i remember the smell of moss up in the canopy there were tiny white blossoms but no sunlight at all and i remember the shadows spreading out under the trees where curt lemon and rat kiley were playing catch with smoke grenades mitchell sanders sat flipping his yo yo norman bowker and kiowa and dave jensen were dozing or half dozing and all around us were those ragged green mountains except for the laughter things were quiet at one point i remember mitchell sanders turned and looked at me not quite nodding as if to warn me about something as if he already knew then after a while he rolled up his yo yo and moved away it s hard to tell you what happened next they were just goofing there was a noise i suppose which must ve been the detonator so i glanced behind me and watched lemon step from the shade into bright sunlight his face was suddenly brown and shining a handsome kid really sharp gray eyes lean and narrow waisted and when he died it was almost beautiful the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms in any war story but especially a true one it s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen what seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way the angles of vision are skewed when a booby trap explodes you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself when a guy dies like curt lemon you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again the pictures get jumbled you tend to miss a lot and then afterward when you go to tell about it there is always that surreal seemingness which makes the story seem untrue but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed in many cases a true war story cannot be believed if you believe it be skeptical it s a question of credibility often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn t because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness in other cases you can t even tell a true war story sometimes it s just beyond telling i heard this one for example from mitchell sanders it was near dusk and we were sitting at my foxhole along a wide muddy river north of quang ngai i remember how peaceful the twilight was a deep pinkish red spilled out on the river which moved without sound and in the morning we would cross the river and march west into the mountains the occasion was right for a good story god s truth mitchell sanders said a six man patrol goes up into the mountains on a basic listening post operation the idea s to spend a week up there just lie low and listen for enemy movement they ve got a radio along so if they hear anything suspiciousanythingthey re supposed to call in artillery or gunships whatever it takes otherwise they keep strict field discipline absolute silence they just listen sanders glanced at me to make sure i had the scenario he was playing with his yo yo dancing it with short tight little strokes of the wrist his face was blank in the dusk we re talking regulation by the book lp these six guys they don t say boo for a solid week they don t got tongues all ears right i said understand me invisible sanders nodded affirm he said invisible so what happens is these guys get themselves deep in the bush all camouflaged up and they lie down and wait and that s all they do nothing else they lie there for seven straight days and just listen and man i ll tell youit s spooky this is mountains you don t know spooky till you been there jungle sort of except it s way up in the clouds and there s always this foglike rain except it s not rainingeverything s all wet and swirly and tangled up and you can t see jack you can t find your own pecker to piss with like you don t even have a body serious spooky you just go with the vaporsthe fog sort of takes you in and the sounds man the sounds carry forever you hear stuff nobody should overhear sanders was quiet for a second just working the yo yo then he smiled at me so after a couple days the guys start hearing this real soft kind of wacked out music weird echoes and stuff like a radio or something but it s not a radio it s this strange gook music that comes right out of the rocks faraway sort of but right up close too they try to ignore it but it s a listening post right so they listen and every night they keep hearing that crazyass gook concert all kinds of chimes and xylophones i mean this is wildernessno way it can t be realbut there it is like the mountains are tuned in to radio fucking hanoi naturally they get nervous one guy sticks juicy fruit in his ears another guy almost flips thing is though they can t report music they can t get on the horn and call back to base and say hey listen we need some firepower we got to blow away this weirdo gook rock band they can t do that it wouldn t go down so they lie there in the fog and keep their mouths shut and what makes it extra bad see is the poor dudes can t horse around like normal can t joke it away can t even talk to each other except maybe in whispers all hush hush and that just revs up the willies all they do is listen again there was some silence as mitchell sanders looked out on the river the dark was coming on hard now and off to the west i could see the mountains rising in silhouette all the mysteries and unknowns this next part sanders said quietly you won t believe probably not i said you won t and you know why he gave me a long tired smile because it happened because every word is absolutely dead on true sanders made a sound in his throat like a sigh as if to say he didn t care if i believed him or not but he did care he wanted me to feel the truth to believe by the raw force of feeling he seemed sad in a way these six guys he said they re pretty fried out by now and one night they start hearing voices like at a cocktail party that s what it sounds like this big swank gook cocktail party somewhere out there in the fog music and chitchat and stuff it s crazy i know but they hear the champagne corks they hear the actual martini glasses real hoity toity all very civilized except this isn t civilization this is nam anyway the guys try to be cool they just lie there and groove but after a while they start hearingyou won t believe thisthey hear chamber music they hear violins and cellos they hear this terrific mama san soprano then after a while they hear gook opera and a glee club and the haiphong boys choir and a barbershop quartet and all kinds of weird chanting and buddha buddha stuff and the whole time in the background there s still that cocktail party going on all these different voices not human voices though because it s the mountains follow me the rockit s talking and the fog too and the grass and the goddamn mongooses everything talks the trees talk politics the monkeys talk religion the whole country vietnam the place talks it talks understand namit truly talks the guys can t cope they lose it they get on the radio and report enemy movementa whole army they sayand they order up the firepower they get arty and gunships they call in air strikes and i ll tell you they fuckin crash that cocktail party all night long they just smoke those mountains they make jungle juice they blow away trees and glee clubs and whatever else there is to blow away scorch time they walk napalm up and down the ridges they bring in the cobras and f 4s they use willie peter and he and incendiaries it s all fire they make those mountains burn around dawn things finally get quiet like you never even heard quiet before one of those real thick real misty daysjust clouds and fog they re off in this special zoneand the mountains are absolutely dead flat silent like brigadoonpure vapor you know everything s all sucked up inside the fog not a single sound except they still hear it so they pack up and start humping they head down the mountain back to base camp and when they get there they don t say diddly they don t talk not a word like they re deaf and dumb later on this fat bird colonel comes up and asks what the hell happened out there what d they hear why all the ordnance the man s ragged out he gets down tight on their case i mean they spent six trillion dollars on firepower and this fatass colonel wants answers he wants to know what the fuckin story is but the guys don t say zip they just look at him for a while sort of funny like sort of amazed and the whole war is right there in that stare it says everything you can t ever say it says man you got wax in your ears it says poor bastard you ll never knowwrong frequencyyou don t even want to hear this then they salute the fucker and walk away because certain stories you don t ever tell you can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end not then not ever not when mitchell sanders stood up and moved off into the dark it all happened even now at this instant i remember that yo yo in a way i suppose you had to be there you had to hear it but i could tell how desperately sanders wanted me to believe him his frustration at not quite getting the details right not quite pinning down the final and definitive truth and i remember sitting at my foxhole that night watching the shadows of quang ngai thinking about the coming day and how we would cross the river and march west into the mountains all the ways i might die all the things i did not understand late in the night mitchell sanders touched my shoulder just came to me he whispered the moral i mean nobody listens nobody hears nothin like that fatass colonel the politicians all the civilian types your girlfriend my girlfriend everybody s sweet little virgin girlfriend what they need is to go out on lp the vapors man trees and rocksyou got to listen to your enemy and then again in the morning sanders came up to me the platoon was preparing to move out checking weapons going through all the little rituals that preceded a day s march already the lead squad had crossed the river and was filing off toward the west i got a confession to make sanders said last night man i had to make up a few things i know that the glee club there wasn t any glee club right no opera forget it i understand yeah but listen it s still true those six guys they heard wicked sound out there they heard sound you just plain won t believe sanders pulled on his rucksack closed his eyes for a moment then almost smiled at me i knew what was coming all right i said what s the moral forget it no go ahead for a long while he was quiet looking away and the silence kept stretching out until it was almost embarrassing then he shrugged and gave me a stare that lasted all day hear that quiet man he said that quietjust listen there s your moral in a true war story if there s a moral at all it s like the thread that makes the cloth you can t tease it out you can t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning and in the end really there s nothing much to say about a true war story except maybe oh true war stories do not generalize they do not indulge in abstraction or analysis for example war is hell as a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true and yet because it abstracts because it generalizes i can t believe it with my stomach nothing turns inside it comes down to gut instinct a true war story if truly told makes the stomach believe this one does it for me i ve told it beforemany times many versionsbut here s what actually happened we crossed that river and marched west into the mountains on the third day curt lemon stepped on a booby trapped 105 round he was playing catch with rat kiley laughing and then he was dead the trees were thick it took nearly an hour to cut an lz for the dustoff later higher in the mountains we came across a baby vc water buffalo what it was doing there i don t knowno farms or paddiesbut we chased it down and got a rope around it and led it along to a deserted village where we set up for the night after supper rat kiley went over and stroked its nose he opened up a can of c rations pork and beans but the baby buffalo wasn t interested rat shrugged he stepped back and shot it through the right front knee the animal did not make a sound it went down hard then got up again and rat took careful aim and shot off an ear he shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back he shot it twice in the flanks it wasn t to kill it was to hurt he put the rifle muzzle up against the mouth and shot the mouth away nobody said much the whole platoon stood there watching feeling all kinds of things but there wasn t a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo curt lemon was dead rat kiley had lost his best friend in the world later in the week he would write a long personal letter to the guy s sister who would not write back but for now it was a question of pain he shot off the tail he shot away chunks of meat below the ribs all around us there was the smell of smoke and filth and deep greenery and the evening was humid and very hot rat went to automatic he shot randomly almost casually quick little spurts in the belly and butt then he reloaded squatted down and shot it in the left front knee again the animal fell hard and tried to get up but this time it couldn t quite make it it wobbled and went down sideways rat shot it in the nose he bent forward and whispered something as if talking to a pet then he shot it in the throat all the while the baby buffalo was silent or almost silent just a light bubbling sound where the nose had been it lay very still nothing moved except the eyes which were enormous the pupils shiny black and dumb rat kiley was crying he tried to say something but then cradled his rifle and went off by himself the rest of us stood in a ragged circle around the baby buffalo for a time no one spoke we had witnessed something essential something brand new and profound a piece of the world so startling there was not yet a name for it somebody kicked the baby buffalo it was still alive though just barely just in the eyes amazing dave jensen said my whole life i never seen anything like it never not hardly not once kiowa and mitchell sanders picked up the baby buffalo they hauled it across the open square hoisted it up and dumped it in the village well afterward we sat waiting for rat to get himself together amazing dave jensen kept saying a new wrinkle i never seen it before mitchell sanders took out his yo yo well that s nam he said garden of evil over here man every sin s real fresh and original how do you generalize war is hell but that s not the half of it because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love war is nasty war is fun war is thrilling war is drudgery war makes you a man war makes you dead the truths are contradictory it can be argued for instance that war is grotesque but in truth war is also beauty for all its horror you can t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat you stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons you crouch in ambush as a cool impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies you admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion the great sheets of metal fire streaming down from a gunship the illumination rounds the white phosphorus the purply orange glow of napalm the rocket s red glare it s not pretty exactly it s astonishing it fills the eye it commands you you hate it yes but your eyes do not like a killer forest fire like cancer under a microscope any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifferencea powerful implacable beautyand a true war story will tell the truth about this though the truth is ugly to generalize about war is like generalizing about peace almost everything is true almost nothing is true at its core perhaps war is just another name for death and yet any soldier will tell you if he tells the truth that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life after a firefight there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness the trees are alive the grass the soileverything all around you things are purely living and you among them and the aliveness makes you tremble you feel an intense out of the skin awareness of your living selfyour truest self the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it in the midst of evil you want to be a good man you want decency you want justice and courtesy and human concord things you never knew you wanted there is a kind of largeness to it a kind of godliness though it s odd you re never more alive than when you re almost dead you recognize what s valuable freshly as if for the first time you love what s best in yourself and in the world all that might be lost at the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red and at the mountains beyond and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die even so you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun and you are filled with a hard aching love for how the world could be and always should be but now is not mitchell sanders was right for the common soldier at least war has the feelthe spiritual textureof a great ghostly fog thick and permanent there is no clarity everything swirls the old rules are no longer binding the old truths no longer true right spills over into wrong order blends into chaos love into hate ugliness into beauty law into anarchy civility into savagery the vapors suck you in you can t tell where you are or why you re there and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity in war you lose your sense of the definite hence your sense of truth itself and therefore it s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true often in a true war story there is not even a point or else the point doesn t hit you until twenty years later in your sleep and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her except when you get to the end you ve forgotten the point again and then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head you listen to your wife s breathing the war s over you close your eyes you smile and think christ what s the point this one wakes me up in the mountains that day i watched lemon turn sideways he laughed and said something to rat kiley then he took a peculiar half step moving from shade into bright sunlight and the booby trapped 105 round blew him into a tree the parts were just hanging there so dave jensen and i were ordered to shinny up and peel him off i remember the white bone of an arm i remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must ve been the intestines the gore was horrible and stays with me but what wakes me up twenty years later is dave jensen singing lemon tree as we threw down the parts you can tell a true war story by the questions you ask somebody tells a story let s say and afterward you ask is it true and if the answer matters you ve got your answer for example we ve all heard this one four guys go down a trail a grenade sails out one guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies is it true the answer matters you d feel cheated if it never happened without the grounding reality it s just a trite bit of puffery pure hollywood untrue in the way all such stories are untrue yet even if it did happenand maybe it did anything s possibleeven then you know it can t be true because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth absolute occurrence is irrelevant a thing may happen and be a total lie another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth for example four guys go down a trail a grenade sails out one guy jumps on it and takes the blast but it s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway before they die though one of the dead guys says the fuck you do that for and the jumper says story of my life man and the other guy starts to smile but he s dead that s a true story that never happened twenty years later i can still see the sunlight on lemon s face i can see him turning looking back at rat kiley then he laughed and took that curious half step from shade into sunlight his face suddenly brown and shining and when his foot touched down in that instant he must ve thought it was the sunlight that was killing him it was not the sunlight it was a rigged 105 round but if i could ever get the story right how the sun seemed to gather around him and pick him up and lift him high into a tree if i could somehow re create the fatal whiteness of that light the quick glare the obvious cause and effect then you would believe the last thing curt lemon believed which for him must ve been the final truth now and then when i tell this story someone will come up to me afterward and say she liked it it s always a woman usually it s an older woman of kindly temperament and humane politics she ll explain that as a rule she hates war stories she can t understand why people want to wallow in all the blood and gore but this one she liked the poor baby buffalo it made her sad sometimes even there are little tears what i should do she ll say is put it all behind me find new stories to tell i won t say it but i ll think it i ll picture rat kiley s face his grief and i ll think you dumb cooze because she wasn t listening it wasn t a war story it was a love story but you can t say that all you can do is tell it one more time patiently adding and subtracting making up a few things to get at the real truth no mitchell sanders you tell her no lemon no rat kiley no trail junction no baby buffalo no vines or moss or white blossoms beginning to end you tell her it s all made up every goddamn detailthe mountains and the river and especially that poor dumb baby buffalo none of it happened none of it and even if it did happen it didn t happen in the mountains it happened in this little village on the batangan peninsula and it was raining like crazy and one night a guy named stink harris woke up screaming with a leech on his tongue you can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it and in the end of course a true war story is never about war it s about sunlight it s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do it s about love and memory it s about sorrow it s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen 
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