Coursing Through My Veins

Chapter Three

The sun had set on the beach by the time the construction units arrived. Boats crept up and moored themselves along the coast, the men inside them spilling out like red and yellow candies from a shattered glass jar. Red headlamps flew and zipped across my vision. Soon hundreds of men were scattered up and down the peninsula, dousing the fires and combing the jungle for straggling jimmies.

I decided to remain by the platoon on the beach. Not all of these boys were built for what they had just walked through. They didn't have a choice either. Two soldiers sat on a rock next to where I stood. One of them was a Saltchian who had a cartoonishly prominent chin that was somehow accentuated by his cigarette and casual posture. The other one was absolutely about to throw up. I had no idea what to say to comfort him. I didn't know what was going through his head, although through each battle, every soldier thinks the same thing.

"Hey Walter?" the sickly kid said with a little more than a shaky voice. "D- do you think I killed anyone today?"

Walter shrugged and mumbled "I don't know" without opening his mouth, and took a drag of his stogie. "Probably."

He heaved, but expelled nothing. Walter chuckled. The kid's breath began to quicken. He started to sweat, soaking his already salt encrusted skin and clothes. "I uh... no, I- I didn't do it. I didn't..."

"Relax, kid, Jesus. I'm trying to enjoy my smoke here."

I watched him shake and hold himself, and I became overwhelmed with a sense of sympathy. I was like him once; I knew just how cold and bitter and cruel the first battle always is. "They're not dead because of you," I sighed. He slowly turned his tear-filled eyes toward me. "You didn't kill them because they're your enemy."

"What do you mean?" he stuttered.

I looked at the patch on his arm that had the golden Amity Group insignia stitched onto it. "I know you never wanted to be here."

I could see that he knew what I meant. He looked away from me, and began to snivel. "They- they said if I didn't enlist then..."

I cleared my throat loudly, before he could finish his sentence. He looked back at me, tears now flowing freely, and I made a slicing motion with my hand across my neck. I quickly looked around, making sure no one caught wind of what the kid was about to say. It didn't seem like anybody noticed anything. Instead, everyone was focused on the hovercraft arriving onto the bank, loaded with equipment and heavy machinery.

"What a crock o' shit," Walter said. "Listen, kid. It don't make a bit of difference who brought you out here or why. We're only out here to shoot the gumps. Now the gumps only know one thing, and that is 'shoot at whatever you don't know.' All we do is whatever the boys up there tell us, and when we're out there, in the jungle and the fields, and the gumps see us, they ain't gonna ask no questions. They're gonna see you and they're gonna shoot you. They don't give a single fuck who you are or what you really want to do, they're just going to shoot you. And it don't matter if they're the good guys or not. If someone's shooting at you, you have to shoot back, unless you're stupid or trying to die, and that makes you stupid. There's only one kind of good gump out here, and that's a dead gump. And that right there," a pair of soldiers emerged from the treeline, carrying a dead jimmy, burned beyond all recognition. It was more akin to a misshapen and unevenly cooked steak. "That's a good gump."

The kid finally threw up. He heaved a foul-smelling mass of indeterminate color all over the ground and his chest. The sight of it, combined with the acrid stench of the burned woods and blood and napalm, began to rile up bile in my own stomach. But it's been too long since I've eaten. Above me, a line of helicopters chopped their way across the sky single file. Flashing red lights on the helicopters' undercarriages barely illuminated large pieces of cargo suspended underneath the choppers. I had to focus my eyes on the cargo, trying to make sense of the half-lit cargoes. One of them seemed to be a large metal cylinder, no doubt a heavy duty container of some sort, and what looked like a yellow warning triangle...