Wayne Karlin
Orientation
“The hell you want?” the Gunnery Sergeant asks him, shaking his head, staring at the young Marine with ravaged eyes netted with veins crept up from his cratered nose, ridden hard and turned in wet, the gunny: three rows of ribbons on his chest, bronze star, two purple hearts from the Chosin reservoir. “You want to get into it?” The gunny waves vaguely in the direction of the war, a thousand miles south of Okinawa. “Do you know what you’re asking for?” Tears well, spill from the corners of the gunny’s eyes. The young Marine looks away. He wants the cost of those tears. “You’re a fucking idiot,” the gunny says. “Get the hell out of my sight.”
To a sandbag-rimmed hole in the side of a hill at Ky Ha. On the first night, the other man nods at him, says nothing, stretches out on three sandbags lined end-to-end embedded in the mud at the bottom of the hole, and goes to sleep. The young Marine remains awake, eyes straining into a darkness broken occasionally by the wildly swinging lights and undulating screams of parachute flares that reveal fragmented images of scrub jungle at the bottom of the hill. The air cracks. A few green tracers float into the hillside a hundred yards to his left. The night folds itself and shivers into the fluidity of dreamtime, what had been anticipated and imagined strobing in and out of reality.
His jungle boots wear in, get scrapped, caked with red mud; he tells himself they are a gauge of the experience that he, himself, is taking on. He practices his thousand-yard stare.
Villagers smile and bob their heads. A little girl attaches herself to him; he visits her family, gives them Salems; they’re crazy for the brand smile and bob their heads some more, the G.I. and the kids, chewing gum and cigarettes. He is a Kennedy kid. He is there to ask not what his country can do for him, but to do it to them instead.
A slight, blond machine gunner, Besar, in country nine months, is assigned to teach him things. He teaches the young Marine to dig two new holes fifty yards from their hole and leave them unrimed by sandbags. When a casual burst from the treeline probes the hill, Besar has him roll out behind the sandbags, scurry low with the machine gun over to the new hole, and fire from there, the ammunition belt curled in an upturned helmet. The next day, going out through the wire, Besar points out the sharpened stick on the ground oriented towards their position like an accusing finger.
One of the villagers who has smiled and spoken to the young Marine walks casually by the patrol, a hoe over his shoulder. “You souvenir me Salem?” he asks, and Besar wheels and cracks his mouth with his rifle butt. The man drops string-cut, arms splayed out, one finger pointing like a stick, as the squad walks silently past. “The fuck you do that for?” the young Marine asks.
That evening, before sunset, their backs against the sandbags, Besar takes a photo out of his breast pocket, passes it over, an ambush, down on the Batangan Peninsula. The ten or twelve bodies in the Polaroid are heaped on top of each other, blood-laced flesh swollen out in what seemed like huge lumps, as if from some strange plague. Some of them are women. Some may be children. There are shattered baskets on the ground around them, some still clutched by dead hands. Mangoes and green bananas spill from them. The fruit and the bodies blend in his eyes. “The fuck you think you are?” Besar asks him.
The memory of the photo becomes a picture that develops in front of his eyes whenever he brings his attention to it and sometimes when he doesn’t. Blank white. Faint suggestions of shape and color. Stains. The shapes finding their forms, small oblongs, longer oblongs. This a child, that a woman, that a mango. The colors blossom, spread as if illuminated by drifting flares. The details are sharper, petaled flesh, glazed open eyes. Clarifying into focus.
Pressed into service as a stretcher bearer on the pad next to B-Med after an operation. Harvest Moon. A high school prom name. It is raining. The dead on helicopter decks are heaps of dirty clothes. A thickset Black man is limping towards him, one arm in a muddy sling, one boot gone, ankle bleeding. “I’m a corpsman,” the man says to him or to someone not there or to himself. “I’m a corpsman.” He repeats the sentence in a monotone, over and over, out of a need to define himself or in defense against or outrage at some vast injustice or an admission of helplessness. Words scramble in panic in the young Marine’s head. Take on unexpected meanings that question or mock their original intent. A mango is a child is a shirt is a man is a curl of smoke from an eye socket that glows like a cigarette ember. Congeal into questions. “You souvenir me Salem?” asks a man with no jaw, tongue dangling, writhing like a muddy snake. The fuck did he think he was? I’m a corpse-man. The core of a man. A cored man. Looking into the corpsman’s face, the young Marine remembers practicing his thousand-yard stare. I’m a fucking idiot, he tells himself. He sees, lined up neatly just outside the B-Med tent, a row of the dead, the harvested of the moon. They are placed like dreamers with their heads next to the tent, feet, when there are feet, out. It is raining and their faces have all been covered with the same poncho he wears, and all of them are wearing his boots.
A veteran of the Việt Nam-American War who has worked on projects of literary reconciliation between former enemies, Wayne Karlin has published nine novels, a collection of short stories , three non-fiction books and a poetry chapbook. He has received two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paterson Prize in Fiction, the Juniper Prize for Fiction, and the Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in the Arts Award.
* Sketch of Wayne Karlin by Tran Nhung, used with the permission of the artist
Banner Art:
Paul Gauguin, Stilleben mit Mangofrüchten, Between 1891-1896, Wikimedia Commons
