The Things They Carried: List 3

But afterward he couldn’t stop bragging. He kept replaying his own exploits, tacking on little flourishes that never happened.

When he came to, there was a funny new look on his face, almost sheepish, as if he’d been caught committing some terrible crime.

Vietnam was full of strange stories, some improbable, some well beyond that, but the stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane.

Vietnam was full of strange stories, some improbable, some well beyond that, but the stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane.

Among the men in Alpha Company, Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up the facts, and for most of us it was normal procedure to discount sixty or seventy percent of anything he had to say.

He claimed to have witnessed the incident with his own eyes, and I remember how upset he became one morning when Mitchell Sanders challenged him on its basic premise.

No officers, either. You could let your hair grow, he said, and you didn’t have to polish your boots or snap off salutes or put up with the usual rear- echelon nonsense.

To the north and west the country rose up in thick walls of wilderness, triple-canopied jungle, mountains unfolding into higher mountains, ravines and gorges and fast-moving rivers and waterfalls and exotic butterflies and steep cliffs and smoky little hamlets and great valleys of bamboo and elephant grass.

They had their own hootch at the edge of the perimeter, fortified with sandbags and a metal fence, and except for the bare essentials they avoided contact with the medical detachment.

While the outpost was isolated and vulnerable, Rat said, he always felt a curious sense of safety there.

It was during one of those late nights that Eddie Diamond first brought up the tantalizing possibility.

It was an offhand comment. A joke, really.

At evening chow Mark Fossie explained how he’d set it up. Expensive, he admitted, and the logistics were complicated, but it wasn’t like going to the moon.

There was a novelty to it; she was good for morale.

At times she gave off a kind of come-get-me energy, coy and flirtatious, but apparently it never bothered Mark Fossie.

Sanders gave him a savvy little smirk.

What happened between them, Rat said, nobody ever knew for sure. But in the mess hall that evening it was clear that an accommodation had been reached. Or more likely, he said, it was a case of setting down some new rules.

Over dinner she kept her eyes down, poking at her food, subdued to the point of silence.

Mark Fossie tried hard to keep up a self-assured pose, as if nothing had ever come between them, or ever could, but there was a fragility to it, something tentative and false.

And yet even then their smiles seemed too intense. They were too quick with their banter; they held hands as if afraid to let go.

Shoulders hunched, her blue eyes opaque, she seemed to disappear inside herself.

The wilderness seemed to draw her in. A haunted look, Rat said—partly terror, partly rapture.

Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion.

“The sound. You need to get a consistent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these digressions, they just screw up your story’s sound. Stick to what happened.”

In the background, just audible, a woman’s voice was half singing, half chanting, but the lyrics seemed to be in a foreign tongue.

Head bowed, he was swaying to the music, his face wet and shiny. As Eddie bent down beside him, the kid looked up with eyes, not quite in register, ashen and powdery.

He wavered for a moment and then forced the gate open.

Thick and numbing, like an animal’s den, a mix of blood and scorched hair and excrement and the sweet-sour odor of moldering flesh—the stink of the kill.

Just for a moment the girl looked at Mark Fossie with something close to contempt.

She moved her hand in a gesture that encompassed not just the hootch but everything around it, the entire war, the mountains, the mean little villages, the trails and trees and rivers and deep misted-over valleys.

So when I heard from Eddie about what happened, it almost made me... Like you say, it’s pure speculation.

There were times, apparently, when she took crazy, death-wish chances—things that even the Greenies balked at.

It was his one eccentricity. The pantyhose, he said, had the properties of a good-luck charm.

More than anything, though, the stockings were a talisman for him. They kept him safe.

In the village of My Khe, as in all of Quang Ngai, patriotic resistance had the force of tradition, which was partly the force of legend, and from his earliest boyhood the man I killed would have listened to stories about the heroic Trung sisters and Tran Hung Dao’s famous rout of the Mongols and Le Loi’s final victory against the Chinese at Tot Dong.

He was not a fighter. His health was poor, his body small and frail.

The means for this were arranged, perhaps, through the village liberation cadres, and in 1964 the young man began attending classes at the university in Saigon, where he avoided politics and paid attention to the problems of calculus.

The road was a sort of boundary between the affluent and the almost affluent, and to live on the lake side of the road was one of the few natural privileges in a town of the prairie—the difference between watching the sun set over cornfields or over water.

Fed by neither streams nor springs, the lake was often filthy and algaed, relying on fickle prairie rains for replenishment.

In a soft voice, without flourishes, he would have told the exact truth.