Memories of Vietnam

Sugar, doo-doo-doo-doo—doo-doo

Vietnam wasn’t all CCR and Grass, man.

Ahhh, honey, honey -

It was mostly terrible music and Heroin. Families saluting cheap coffins draped in the flag. I often wonder how they’d feel if they knew their boys died because of an overdose, or from contracting syphilis from some back alley Saigon brothel. From some self-inflicted wound that happened to nick an artery, accidental suicide by overwhelming cowardice. We didn’t just fight the Viet Cong, we fought ourselves. Many of us wanted to die and just didn’t even know it yet. All Charlie did was help us along.

I don’t remember anything before ‘Nam. I think I was born in Massachusetts, if you can even say that I was born. It’s more like I became in Vietnam. Chemical defoliants ravaging the lush, natural green of the jungle. Shriveling from chemical burns until ancient life dropped from existence with a silent scream. But I heard it; oh boy did I hear it. Like nails on a chalkboard it dragged me into existence, ripping me kicking and screaming from the womb of some other place, just beyond the boundaries of our own.

Sometimes, when I try to remember my time in Vietnam, I see other places. Like memories of a dream I had long ago, frames and stills of muddy trenches lined with the cadavers of barely human shapes. They wear masks, things that look totemic, ritualistic, barely fitting the purpose of their design. I know I became during the war, but I also know I am made up of many, many other people; a patchwork quilt of suffering, made flesh.

I whispered into the ears of fresh-faced, Tennessee teenagers. Church going boys who’d never had an evil thought in their brief lives. Cut her fucking ears off, Killer, she died a virgin, so fuck her good. I snickered unspeakable horrors right into the frontal lobes of honor bound officers, men whose careers were as unblemished as a field of newly fallen snow. Kill them, Son, kill them all. The kids are future Cong and the women are just little Cong factories. They fired, and they laughed, and they fired some more, two hundred and fifty thousand rounds a minute. Gore and bone shards crisscrossing neat straw huts. If Jackson Pollock created art, then these are masterpieces, painted with the building blocks of life. Plasma, brains, carbon soup.

I stayed in Vietnam long after the troops left. I relished the stench of rot and decay, of fear and death, as hundreds of helicopters ferried all my potential cosmic bunkmates to safety. I remember sleeping for a long, long time in the deep, dark jungles and muddy, winding rives.

I woke again, many years later, I was in an airport, smiling as I walked past security. I am something new. I have an idea, a purpose and a knife. I whisper into the ear of a fanatic, it’s so much easier that way.

It feels so good to be awake again.

Submitted June 30, 2019 at 03:57PM by Iskander_Khan https://ift.tt/2Np3ZIn