Zombie Patriotism

by Bruce Patterson

* * *

Is it possible for a dead human body to feel colder than the steamy tropical air blanketing it? Here I am dragging this dead Vietnamese kid to the burn pile by his one good ankle and I'll be damned if his skin doesn't feel cold.

What a waste. My company was doing ghost time as a Quick Reaction Force operating from inside of our base camp. We'd been choppered out to Highway 19 in An Khe Pass because an American supply convoy had been ambushed by the Viet Cong. We'd been dropped behind the ambushing force with orders to cut off their retreat and to kill them if we could. But helicopter gunships had already done our work for us. The jungle flanking the highway had been defoliated by the US Air Force spraying Agent Orange, and the pilots of the gunships had no trouble locating their ant-like targets. So the only shooting any of us wound up doing was while finishing off one or two of the enemy wounded. This was peculiar enough because, if you ever found yourself on the wrong end of a gunship's mini-guns, you nearly always wound up in chunks.

Like this kid I was dragging to the burn pile. I was only 18 years old, but this kid didn't look to be older than 15. Still he'd been shot through by multiple 20mm high explosive rounds and, though I tried not to look at him, I knew that only about three-fourths of him was there. We had orders to gather up and burn all of the bits and pieces, but I'd seen a glob of brains I knew I was leaving for the fire ants no matter what my orders were.

I'd once taken a good long look into the nature of Vietnamese brains and I'd learned about all I could from the experience. It was just before Christmas, 1967, we were in the bush and we accidentally stumbled into some Viet Cong eating lunch. During the resulting chaos one Vietnamese kid deposited his nearly fully intact brains on the foot trail. In the aftermath of the firefight I happened to get positioned beside the brains while the way ahead was being cleared. And so, with time to spare, I wound up staring at them.

Because thoughts originate inside of brains, I wondered if these terrorist brains were different than my American brains, or whether communist brains were different than capitalist brains. Somehow it stood to reason that I should be able to see some physical difference. The boy was a communist and using terrorist tactics, the communists were on a global crusade against God and Civilization and they would settle for nothing less than the "defeat of America" and so the enslavement of all of mankind. Whereas I was an American and I was sent by Jesus and George Washington to bring peace and freedom to my little brown brothers here on the other side of the world. Because I was an American, I'd been anointed their protector and I was protecting them, guiding them toward the light and selflessly serving them just as Jesus had done for all mankind. Because I was an American, World Democracy was flowing from the barrel of my gun.

In the bush, whenever we killed some people during the day, that night we nearly always staked out their corpses. Using cover of night, the enemy liked to "retrieve their dead" and we liked ambushing their burial details. As luck would have it, what was left of my squad got elected to return to the bodies and to set the ambush that night. Staking out dead bodies was such an old trick of ours that, as my squad crept toward our overnight accommodations, we moved in silent slow motion for fear of getting ambushed ourselves. And when at last light we finally arrived back at the scene of the killings — this struck me as strange — the brains were gone. I don't know why I'd expected the brains to still be there, but I had. And seeing them gone made me realize that in one way both of our brains were the same. In the jungle, both were food.

When I arrived at the burn pile one of my hole mates was there to help me. He grabbed one end of the carcass, I the other and together, at the count of three, we tossed it onto the fire. Then I walked away from the heat and kept my back to it while I stood and took a break. I didn't believe that Good Guy/Bad Guy bullshit anymore. In November outside Dak To most of a company in my outfit got cut off and was annihilated. Overnight the North Vietnamese Army had custody of the GI's bodies and they had their way with them. Among other things, the NVA carved out their innards and built campfires in their ribcages.

So I knew one of the reasons why we were burning these VC bodies was for payback. It was payback plus a warning to the other VC nearby to keep away from us. If there was any more fighting to be done hereabouts while we were the Quick Reaction Force, then we were going to be doing the fighting and we were the baddest motherfuckers in the jungle. So see the charred corpses, smell the burning flesh and jump back!

Also we burned the gooks because they were pagans. They worshipped the earth, the sky and the seasons. According to their superstition, after they died they'd be joining their revered ancestors up in Paradise and there for all eternity they'd have their very own earthly bodies. And so if you mutilated their bodies here on earth then they'd stay mutilated forever. And the prospect of that supposedly scared the holy shit out of them and so acted as a powerful incentive for them to stay at home with their families where they belonged.

Because of that particular foxhole rumor, nobody knows how many Vietnamese went to their Happy Hunting Grounds missing their ears or other body parts (though, out of respect for the Native and African Americans in our ranks, so far as I know not ever did a Vietnamese get scalped or hung from a tree).

Supposedly these superstitious peasants also believed in a "third eye" sort of thing. They had this weird concept of a Buddha Eye that they supposedly took real seriously. So some GIs liked to shoot dead gooks in the middle of the forehead in order to give them what they wanted. Also, if a gook was severely wounded and it was time to put it out of its misery, it was customary to deliver the coup de grace to the head. So why not aim for the middle of the forehead? Anyway, once a GI had made his Third Eye, he might reach down and leave an ace of spades, a unit patch or some other sort of calling card stuck to the wound. Supposedly that also worked to put the fear in them.

If you looked at the reality of what we were doing in the right light, then it was clear that these gooks were not even humans in a spiritual sense. As our Chaplains were fond of reminding us during their pep talks, God held a special place in his heart for killers like us but not for killers like them. Since the gooks were all heading straight to Hell anyhow, it was no sin if we sped them on their way.

To avoid ground fire we'd come in real high in the choppers, and not a mile away I'd seen the village these dead gooks almost certainly had come from. "Come from" in the sense that their bloodlines might have reached back into the dirt of the nearby terraced rice paddies for one thousand or five thousand years. Still they were too young, too poorly trained and too hopelessly outgunned to be going up against professionals like us. Yet there they were, crackling on the burn pile.

We were about a week into the most famous of the VC's Tet Offensives, and all over the country peasant boys and girls like these were going up against us. The official line was that this latest burst of terrorist violence was only further proof of how, unlike us peace-loving Americans, these gook people over here simply did not value human life and democracy the way we did. How, judging by our high moral standards, human life was downright cheap to them. So when these gook people went up against all odds, when they willingly threw down their lives just for maybe one chance to kill some of us, it wasn't courage — it was fanaticism. They were stone crazy while we were not crazy in the least.

There is no "fog of war." If anybody is in a "fog," it's the war's cheerleaders back home on the safe side of the world. Because nothing is as personal as battle; nothing so white hot as cold, homicidal hatred.

I wasn't a zombie. I knew exactly what I was doing and what for. I also knew exactly what was happening to me as a result. I could see, I could hear, I could smell and I too had feelings and soul. I was just following orders but there wasn't the least bit of confusion in my mind about what was happening. With utter, icy clarity I knew that my heart was getting ripped out of me. Along with the gooks, my heart was getting thrown onto the fire and sent up as smoke, as steam.

Though at the time all I felt was a chill.