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Edited on Fri Nov-19-04 12:23 AM by DemoTex
I am sickened, too, by that horrible "thump" or "thump-thump" when I hit an animal on the road. I cannot tell you how many times, up here in the mountains, I have come to a near stop for a squirrel, or opossum, or skunk, or turkey. Fortunately, there is absolutely no traffic to cream me from behind. When I do hit one of them, I am sick for days.
That too is the spectra of Vietnam, and the subject of some of my latest short stories. They will be collected into a novel at some point, if I endure, and will fall in a genre somewhat between Larry Heineman's Paco's Story and Tobias Wolff's In Pharaoh's Army. But, bad luck to talk about a work-in-progress. Just work! is my writing motto.
Fallujah is another thing altogether. This is not road-kill. Nor is it cut-and-dried homicide. We tapped danced around My Lai and never called it for what it really was. Thanks to Seymour Hersche that we ever found out anything at all. Maj. Powell was too busy and too successfully covering up the massacre in Pinkville on March 16, 1968. Ah, did he learn his lessons well. Oh, the term that best describes My Lai? WAR CRIME.
That is where we find ourselves in Fallujah. Gunshots from one Marine patrol in a mosque. A second Marine patrol rushing in.
"What's going on," Eltee says. "Didja shoot anybody in the mosque?"
Then the Eltee and his back-up unit enter the mosque, with an NBC news team following. The scene is as smoky and surreal as any from the Hue City battle half of Full Metal Jacket. Even on a TV screen eight time zones away, it reeks with pure hellish fear.
Young men should not have to do this. But they are there. They are in the mouth of the cat of death all of a sudden.
"The motherfucker isn't dead! He is playing dead!" we hear. The Marine puts his weapon to his shoulder, we see in the smoky room (why is it smoky? Other executions?). No, we say, we cannot witness another My Lai on the evening news. But we do. And no one says shit.
OK, back to the Marine after he raised, aimed, and committed himself to kill a cowering, severely wounded human being. This is the crux of what Don and I abhor (I think, and speaking for Don without his input, but he can change it with addendums). This young Marine, screaming, wounded in the face the day before, points his weapon towards the head of an unarmed, wounded young male.
Was he a booby-trap? My hurtin' face says yes! But. But!! That first patrol just went in and shot up the place. Shot this guy. Didn't they check for booby-traps? It is, after all, their job.
Slight pressure, BRASS (breath, relax, aim, slack, squeeze). Pow! Pow? That was the gun. Thunk! Thunk, those were the brains spilling from an alive man.
Bring 'em on.
Mac
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