SUICIDE

By my second month on Nui Ba Den, the M-16 had become dead weight. Every round of the mountain meant carrying it — up ladders, through bunkers, along the wire — and it slowed me down when I needed to move fast. I wanted something smaller. Something I could wear instead of haul.

The obvious answer was the sidearm I already carried, the M1911. But the 1911 came with a decision built into it: thumb the safety off, then pull. In garrison, that’s nothing — a reflex, half a second. In combat, half a second is the whole equation. I wanted a gun where the only decision was pulling the trigger. A revolver solved that. No safety to disengage, no mechanism to second-guess. Pull the trigger, and a round fires — every time, without exception, without a step in between. That certainty mattered more to me than firepower or capacity. Milliseconds count, and a revolver spent none of them on doubt.

A Navy F-4 pilot solved the problem. He traded me a revolver and holster for my Rolex — a fair deal, we both figured, until later. The gun looked like a Smith & Wesson, four-inch barrel, standard lines. But the cylinder rotated clockwise when fired — backward from every Smith & Wesson ever made. I didn’t think much of it at the time. A quirk. A story to tell.

It was a fun gun to shoot. Until the day I fired a hot round — double the usual recoil, a kick that rattled up through my wrist. After that, it wouldn’t fire reliably unless I was aiming downhill, or unless I pulled the trigger twice. The amateur gunsmiths on the mountain took a look, shrugged, and gave up.

I didn’t give up. I got obsessed with it.

Night after night, I’d sit with the thing broken open on a towel, turning the cylinder by hand, watching how it caught and released. I checked the timing. I checked the forcing cone. I ran a patch down the barrel looking for a burr that wasn’t there. None of it explained the double-pull, the downhill quirk, the hesitation. The mountain’s gunsmiths had already walked away from it. I decided I’d be the one to solve what they couldn’t.

That’s the kind of obsession that stops noticing what’s in front of it.

One night, working by lantern light in my bunker, I picked up a single round and dropped it into the cylinder — one chamber, out of habit, the way you’d load any revolver. I closed the cylinder. I raised the gun. And without thinking — without remembering, in that moment, that this cylinder turned the wrong way — I pulled the trigger.

The round went off in a space the size of a closet.

The gases burned the palm of my hand. The shock wave hit my ears like a slap from both sides. I dropped the gun, lost my footing, and went down hard on the floor of the bunker — flat on my back, ears ringing, hand on fire, the smell of burnt powder filling four square feet of dirt and sandbags.

Two soldiers burst in seconds later. They found me on the floor and came to the only conclusion the scene offered: I’d shot myself. Two days earlier, I’d gotten a Dear John letter. They knew it. Everyone on the mountain knew it. And for a few seconds, in that bunker, they believed I’d finished what the letter started.

It still bothers me, all these years later, that they thought I was capable of that. The letter hurt — I won’t pretend it didn’t. But I had over three hundred American soldiers whose survival depended on my judgment being sound. That kind of weight doesn’t leave room for a bullet and a bunker floor. Whatever the letter took from me, it didn’t take that.

The gun never did get fixed. Neither, really, did the story people talked about that night — the one where I nearly shot myself on purpose instead of almost shooting myself by accident, backward cylinder and all.