Nobody Wants You

“Nobody wants you

When you're down and out”

-Otis Redding “Nobody Knows You”

This jungle wouldn’t be complete without Otis Redding. Shit, if I had to sit in a little fucking rinky-dink trench outside Khe Sahn all day without my Redding, I’d probably end up rigging booby-traps in the shitter, like that crazy gook fucker in the 1/9 that killed his buddies, in a like-wise kinda’ way.

Me and my boys have been out here at Khe Sahn since that Tet New Year bullshit, and between you, me, and Lyndon B., I’ve dropped enough acid to kill a small horse. Actually, several small horses. Shit, I remember this one crazy fucking time with this grunt Matthew (we call ‘im “Tree-Fucker” now) who did a sheet of the hard shit and then shot his wad in a shelled out palm tree, right in front of the fucking press tent.

Goddamn, Tree-Fucker is one crazy son-of-a-bitch. When those VC bastards came at us during the Tet Offensive, Tree-Fucker was the first one on an M6, screaming and jiggling like he had been smacked in the ass by the almighty hand of God. He shot that thing until the barrel melted, and then shot some more, just letting the rounds bounce out all around the fucking jungle, hitting God knows what, but really, who gives a fuck? Hell, Tree-Fucker was probably high off his ass anyways.

That would happen a lot, grunts blowing off rounds into the bush, fucked up on some Lucy in the Sky, Cid, the Yellow Sunshine, all the same thing, they all fuck you up. But those VC, they had somethin’ special. The fuckin’ Jungle Grass. The Vietnamese piece de resistance. Jungle Grass wasn’t like the Mary Jane back home. The VC would cut this shit with somethin’ that’d keep you up and chuggin’ for days on end, just fuckin’ cruising, blastin’ through the leaves with whatever kind of ordinance you could get your dirty soldier hands on.

Some cats thought they cut the Grass with the blood of Americans, which is why you stayed up for days: ‘cause you were smokin’ good ol’ American perseverance. And being that it fucked you up so bad, I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute.

Usually, the big men on campus (i.e. whoever’s in charge of our clusterfuck of a camp) don’t mind too terribly if we’re blowin’ smoke rings or crunching pills, but every once in a while we get some fresh meat, straight outta’ West Point or some other pussy-ass shit, who’d write you up for disciplinary review, but the yellow slips they would give you are perfect rolling paper, so I choose to believe that they are a message from God.

Drugs were a big part of my little foray into the jungle territories. See, I spent a whole lot of my time sitting behind a barb wired mound of shit, waiting for some little brass balls to come flying at me from the dark treeline up ahead. Maybe then something exciting would happen, like I’d get shot in the ass and sent home. Or maybe some jack-off VC would rush our front and I’d get to put some of those taxpayer dollars to good by blowing some brass right back out at those jungle freaks, and just maybe I’d get a privileged glimpse of a gook doubling over, a hole blown right through his trouser-snake, or some other tragic shit like that.

Sometimes, you’d shoot Charlie, but he wouldn’t die. He’d just sit there, holdin’ his guts, and shouting “Di”, whatever that fuckin’ meant. See, no one spoke Vietnamese on our side, but we knew that “Di” could turn one small skirmish into a shitstorm of God-like proportions. Those fuckers would swarm the screamer like flies on shit, loaded up on dope and ready to die.

When that screaming happened, all we could do was wait. Unless some crazy grunt happened to be carrying some sort of boom-bang explosives that could be tossed over and right into the the lap of a Hoang Minh Thao lackey. But explosives were few and far between, and had to be nabbed from the heralded Supply Drop, which was always dropped outside of the damn camp. This kinda’ shit would happen because the choppers would drop the crates outside the fucking camps, too fuckin’ busy with their knobs and joysticks to pay any attention to the guys on the fuckin’ ground who were actually fighting in the war.

Usually, any good stuff (like new jackets, boots, canned peaches et cetera) were nabbed by either the gooks or a passing civvie, who was happy to finally have some fucking food and a gun to help them hold their own against whatever terrible things were to come. If you wanted any good shit, you had to be ballsy enough (or high enough) to hop the barbed wire and run through Charlie to get to the fuckin’ crate.

But hey, it isn’t all their fault, the pilots I mean. Whenever Charlie heard any sort of whub-whub, they’d rain hot fucking death from their mortar tubes, hoping to catch one of our metal birds. That’s probably the real reason the crates fell out of our area, now that I think about it sober.

Man, I had the opportunity to meet one of those crazy mother-fuckers who was prone to hopping wires and nabbing peaches for his buddies. In fact, he was my right hand by the time my tour had ended. Clay, that was the hep-cats name. He was half-negro, and he loved to Jib and Jive and move and groove to the rhythms of the jungle. Our first conversation went a little like this:

“Hey, you got a fork, nigger?”

“Yeah, and don’t call me nigger.”

“What?”

“I said don’t call me nigger. My momma’s whiter than Nixon’s ass cheeks.”

We’d been best boys since that. You see, I ain’t ever really had a friend I could call my best. Growing up in South Carolina, I was mostly content with goin’ to school, coming home, and doin’ chores. Then, as I grew up. goin’ to work, coming home, doing chores and takin’ care of my mama, who had the sleeping sickness something god awful fierce when she got to be about fifty.

Hell, my mama was the best on the block in her younger years. When all the other kids thought to run out to the vacant lots and play Soldiers, Mama kept me at home on account of her fear of me getting too keen on the idea of “shooting up the bad guys”.

Helluva lotta’ good that did me.

Now I sit here in a little fuckin’ hole, already six feet deep in the earth, waiting for the fucking dinks to waste me. That’s what happens here. No one dies, they get wasted, like an old banana left out on the counter.

And all you can do is wait. You wait to get wasted, by Charlie, by mosquitos, by a cheap hooker with the Hep from My Lai 4, but what it really all boils down to Uncle Sam. We sit here and wait to get wasted by the top dogs of the U.S. of A. Uncle Sam pulled me outta’ the drugstore where I was busting ass to make manager and sent me to the jungle, where I bust ass to stay alive while I hump it through Satan’s back fucking yard.

This really is hell, Truly Trudy. The people here, gooks and grunts alike, have no regard for the human life, me included. No one can comprehend just what the fuck is going on most of the time. It’s like this: you hear a sound you fucking blast it, ‘cause you’re not shooting a person. You’re shooting the idea of a person.

They (meaning good ‘ole Uncle Sam) give these 20-somethin’ year old hotheads tubes that shoot balls of hot screaming death, and then they expect us to play by some fucking “rules of engagement”, or some fancy shit like that.

I know plenty of guys who just say “fuck it” and shoot anything with two eyes and a dick. If you really think about it though,that’s what we’re trained to do. They shaved our heads and gave us a gun, and that’s all they had to do. We came with the bloodthirsty killer instinct already in our hearts. Well, most of us anyway.

I barely made it through basic. I blamed it on asthma, but eventually I had to be true to my school and fess up. I’m a terrible fucking soldier. My marksmanship scores were shit, my PT times were shit, and my navigational skills were shit. I couldn’t use a map to get out of the mall if I had to.

That’s why I smoke so much dope here. When I’m stoned, I can be as shitty as I need to be and it doesn’t make me feel any different, and when I hesitate to make a decision, I have something to blame it on. I used to have a drill sergeant, Sgt. MacNamara, who used to tell me that I hesitated too often, and that “hesitation was the mother of all fuckups”.

Then, when I got shipped out, I realized that hesitation is the key to survival here. The first law of the jungle: don’t be fucking hero, man. You see too many guys jumping on grenades for guys they met two weeks ago. Some people call this “bravery”, but I know better than that. That shit ain’t fucking bravery. Those guys just wanna’ get blown to shit so they can go home and hit on pretty nurses, but sometimes the only way to get home is in a wooden box.

Honest to God, no bullshit, I can’t wait to get home. I’m no fucking hero. Some nights I consider shooting myself in my lil’ piggies for a one way ticket to the Red Cross paradise. Over there, they’ve got pretty nurses and all you can eat pudding. Here we’ve got leeches and some dick named Charlie who thinks it’s funny to drop us in pits full of spears and shit.

Of course, you could always sign up for four more years and get a few months knocked off their tour, but who wants to sit at a fucking desk typing up expense reports, when you could be sitting in a fucking hole and try to get shot at?