Story for english
Change
There was something about the way the jungle smelled. The way it poked it’s tongue into every sense you had and every true way of life you thought you had. The way it’s dank, musty smell would envelope a certain feeling and crash through you, day after day. It would hint at danger but the uneasiness got more normal after awhile. It would make fun of you and taunt you with sounds of sweet jazz and rambling flutes, but everybody heard it. Everybody smelled it. Tasted it, lived in it, fought it off only for it to return again. But that smell does not compare to the smell of disgust and hatred a man can feel for another man.
It’s sad I guess but what are you going to do about it? Not much you can do, let alone if you even want to do something about it. So, it went on like this.
We’d just been humping through the jungle for a week or so. Just going and hoping not to catch an ambush. We’d been told we were going to be put up outside a little village called Bong Taing. We were to protect the little village, make sure it kept out of trouble and out of harm’s way. So we walked on up to the place and went right in, surrounded the perimeter. Summer rain had made it muddy in parts but bone dry in others. The paddies stretched out for miles on either side, like they never ended until they met the sinking sun. The people working them went on with their too quaint little lives. Well, we’d been informed the leader of the village had been taken down. Shot while he was walking to an event. No big deal, we all shrugged. We were all used to death. Dozens of people got killed a day, why’s this one different. Yeah well, these people cared. So naturally, they wanted a new leader. About three days later, we were told that we’d be protecting the elections for a new leader. We circled the small meeting place and the wide perimeter around it. All of us, protecting this little village square so these people could go on and pick a new guy. Seemed kind of strange but you get used to the strange out there. You embrace it because its all there really is.
These people trekked in from their farms just to have a small say in what they wanted from the town. They’d go in and come out, stand in line and just wait for a while. Time passed, the day after next the new leader had been chosen. Life went on, not much changed. About three weeks later, an assassination had taken place. The VC had taken him out. Again, an election. People trudged in from the farms and voted, went back out to work in the paddies. Again, a death. And so the cycle of new life and death had come, just as it’s always been, but it’s like someone had put it on rapid fire. Eventually, no one wanted the position anymore and the village fell. The important people of the town, the doctors, religious officials, and teachers all had been killed, leaving the place in much dismay and chaos. I remember, it rained a lot the whole time we were stationed there. Mud, everywhere. When you took a breath, you ate mud and dirt and stench and disaster. But there was nothing we could do against the killings. We couldn’t find a single person to blame. They hid too well, like shadows. Dangerous shadows that never could be found but you knew they existed. We left that town a few days after the decay had begun to set in. There was nothing more to protect there.
That village, filled with the shadow of doubt, empty of reason and order, ground me into the grime to see people live like that. Without something to hope for, without a memory of luck or a touch of hope. Later on in life somebody asked me why we didn’t stay longer. I asked what the point would have been to stay in a place riddled with lost hope. I don’t know. What’s the point of living just to see the face of death? What’s the point in pursuing on just to see a blank page at the end of a novel?
Rat Kiley always had stories to tell. Crazy things he’d heard from one guy or another. Some of them a bit embellished but it was something to hear, take the mind away from dingy reality for even a few minutes. You couldn’t always see the fine stitching, but you could see the holes sometimes. He came up to me the other day and asked me what the matter was. We’d just left Bong Taing and something had just poured out of me in that place. He slapped me hard across the shoulders and said to liven up a bit, there was a constant in every life and that was death. We’d all meet it someday, why brood over the eventual? We came to a stop off the road leading out of the village. We were preparing for a good long trek through the jungle and her captivating darkness. We’d gotten some good 50 miles out of the village and stopped for a short break. Rat turned to me and slapped my shoulder again. “Hey” he said. “ I gotta tell you something. I think you better hear it, for all our sakes man. There isn’t anything you can do about that place, it’s dead as a doornail.” And with that, he ventured on.
He’d gotten the story from some guy in one of the other infantry divisions. He twisted his hands up in fists and knocked them against each other while he talked. Something he hadn’t really done before and he talked quite a bit. He started off and just went with it, whatever it was.
When time was of a fresher state, there was a small town filled with disarray. Much like the town we’d just come from. It was hot and rainy, a pretty typical climate for the place. Not much order and there wasn’t much to do. But us guys got assigned on a sort of task. Everyday, we’d escort a teacher to the hill so he could teach the children. It wasn’t just any teacher, in just any town. It was a teacher who walked to school everyday with a band of ammo across his chest and an AK-47 strapped to his back. Everyday he would stand up on that hill with his chalkboard and teach those children. They’d look on and maybe they learned something.
“If I was them, I’d have learned about the art of war, I mean, fuck.” Rat spat out. “How the hell are you supposed to concentrate on math and stuff without worrying about being shot or something?”
We all chimed in with our agreement on the topic. How is anyone supposed to learn like that? It was a mystery to us. It was a sort of casualty. Not a physical death or decay, but a loss of knowledge and time. A casualty of the children’s minds, all they’d ever learn was how to be afraid. A pretty big loss if you asked any of us. Rat went on to say how the teacher had died one morning as they were escorting him to school. “A shot came out of nowhere, just bam, hit him right in the chest. Boom, instantly he dropped. They looked around but there were no VCs anywhere. Why the fuck did they kill a teacher? It wasn’t like he was teaching them about how to load a gun, he was teaching them math. Math, like numbers and stuff.” He broke off for a moment and his eyes got real still and kind of faded and gray. “Maybe so they could count the bodies after the war is over” And with that, Rat got up and just walked away.
I still don’t know what his intent was to do with that story, but if it was to scorch us all, it worked. We all kicked the dirt around under our feet and felt the deep hate for those who couldn’t just leave a teacher alone. A person whose supposed to do good for the world, an innocent one, helping children to live and grow. But he was shot. We shouldn’t have felt it so deep. Every day we saw this kind of shit, but this was different. The world changes when you’re deep in the heart of Vietnam. Everything you knew is twisted. Right becomes wrong, black becomes white. Civility into savagery and passion into dirt. Life is different here and there, that’s just the way it is. Change, like death is inevitable.