BAD DAY FOR A VIET CONG

I was having lunch when the eastern perimeter alarm went off. One of our men in bunker twelve had seen a flash of light. When he checked it out with binoculars, he spotted a Viet Cong lying on the ground, checking out our defenses.

I called in a fire mission to our two 81mm mortar teams and had Sgt. Meyers call in an air strike farther down the mountain. The mortar teams each fired four rounds of high explosive in rapid succession. Several minutes later, two F-100 jets each made a napalm pass down the side of the mountain.

Ten minutes, start to finish. Long enough to kill a man twenty times over. Not long enough for him to run.

I can still remember wondering what type of soldier he was. Whether he had a wife back in some village, or a mother waiting on a letter that would never come. Whether he knew, lying there in the grass with his binoculars, what he was up against — two mortar teams and a flight of jets, called down on him because he’d been curious, or unlucky, or both. War doesn’t ask a man’s intentions before it kills him. It only asks where he’s standing.

The napalm hit the hillside in a rolling wall of orange, and even at that distance the heat reached across the valley and took my breath away — a physical thing, like a hand pressed flat against my chest. The air itself seemed to bend. Smoke climbed black and greasy where the jungle had been green a minute before, and the smell drifted up to us on the mountain: scorched earth, burnt vegetation, something underneath it I chose not to name.

I never saw a body. I never needed to. Some things you know without confirming them, and some men leave nothing behind for confirmation anyway — no grave, no name, no family notified. Just a blackened patch of hillside that would green over again within a season, as if nothing had happened there at all.

That’s the part nobody tells you about war. It’s not the killing that stays with you — it’s the ease of it. How quickly a man can go from a flash of light in someone’s binoculars to a scorch mark on a hillside. How a lieutenant can eat his lunch an hour later. I did. I don’t remember what it was. I remember the smell of the smoke, and I remember thinking, even then, that I would still be thinking about him twenty-five years on — a man I never met, never spoke to, never even saw clearly. Just a shape on a hillside, and then not even that.