Two Faces

We rounded the corner of our street and came to an abrupt stop. We were returning from my grandfather’s small grocery where we had gone to get a cold grape soda. The five block trip was filled with pain – we were barefoot and the temperature was above 115, not unusual here in Phoenix. We could only make the trip by running through the incandescent dust from the narrow shadow of one telephone pole to the shade of the next.
He was walking up the street toward us, shuffling through the gravel and dust. He was wearing a hat, a brown snap brim, that was normal in the brilliant sun and stifling heat, but he was also wearing a woolen scarf, a heavy over coat, and leather gloves – the kind with fur inside. We hurried home and talked among ourselves – we came up with a variety of theories about who he was and what was wrong with him – most of them had a spooky backing nature to them.
Our parents told us that he probably had a circulatory problem. We bought that – not knowing what exactly circulatory meant. Our ten year old lives went on, school would begin in a couple of weeks and we needed to get as much vacation as possible.
I was following the sergeant by a couple of meters, he was pointing out things as we walked along the canal bank that fed the paddies. He handed me an M16 when I got off the helo and gave me a 15 second check out. I brought my own flak vest, and steel pot helmet but it was sweaty and too loose to do much good and still smelled like someone else. The flack vests and helmets were in our rooms and we put them on when there was a rocket attack on our base. We pretty much stopped going into the bunker, we figured the rats were a bigger hazard than the B40s were.
We flew two or three hops everyday and since we were providing direct support to US troops on the ground – most of whom were under attack – it was a really rewarding mission. The pilots were encouraged to spend a day and night with the ground troops – grunts – we were supporting to get a better idea of how we could improve our support. I had tried to avoid this experience, but since I was the XO, I finally got caught and was scheduled for my “boonies experience.”
The troops loved us, they knew our call sign – the Black Ponies – well and thanked us and bought us drinks whenever we met them. So, after being dumped from the helo we got a round of applause and some “hoh raws” when the sergeant told the guys who we were. They told us about several times when we had saved their asses – they loved the 5” zunis that were our bread and butter, and they really liked how quickly we could respond and how close we could shoot to their positions. especially at night.
Okay, I was ready to head back to Benh Thuy, this was all of the emersion I needed. However, we took off for a short patrol through their area. They knew it well and were comfortable – I wasn’t and kept looking over my shoulder and listening for anything that didn’t sound like the insects constant buzz and the ever present rumble of artillery in the distance. I tried to walk bent over, but that became tiring in a hurry. We stopped after a couple of hours for C Rations, and they delighted in showing me how to use C4 (a plastic explosive) to heat the cans of spaghetti or chicken ala king. It doesn’t explode unless it is hit hard – it just burns brightly - but who knew? All I did was put the pipper on the target and push the pickle.
School had been open for a couple of weeks, we were still enjoying the exploration of our route; it was only about a half a mile and soon we would know every pebble and blade weed. We climbed a fence and walked across a pasture – the cows hardly paid any attention and we were pretty sure there were no bulls there. On the other side we hopped the fence and walked along the irrigation canal. Water in the desert was a delight. In the winter there were pieces of ice that we could take out and throw at each other. There were some wide places that held water most of the year, enough to entice frogs to lay their strings of eggs, and for hair snakes to appear.
We were explorers; watching the changes and learning from watching what happened in the clear flowing water. So, we weren’t surprised when we saw something different in one of the small pools. It seemed to be large, but we could only make out the outline at first, so, we took a long branch we had found and started prodding it. Suddenly, the object turned, freed from the weeds that held it and rose almost out of the water. At first we saw the heavy boots, then the woolen pants started to appear and the overcoat, heavy with a mixture of water, and mud and strands of weeds and grass. Then, the scarf emerged and the head with the hat still firmly in place. We could see the white strands of hair swaying back and forth in the flowing water and the pale blue rummy eyes were wide open.
We ran, as fast as we could, we ran to the nearest house and shouted even though we were out of breath. A woman came to the door and we begged her to let us in. She finally figured out what we were talking about and fortunately she had one of the few phones in the area. She called the police and we started to calm down and catch our breath,
None of us slept that night, or for several nights to come. It was our first dead body – corpse - and we would remember it for the rest of our lives.
The mosquitos were thick, and the repellant seemed to attract as much as repel them even during the heat of the afternoon. The sergeant saw something and motioned for me to come up near him. He prodded the object with his jungle boot, he didn’t mind getting wet again they were always wet. The hulk moved slightly, then rolled over and bobbed to the surface. The “flip-flops with one foot still in it came up first, the murky water parted as the body rose. The black “pajamas” were next, and then we could see the head and the face and the flat conical straw hat that was still firmly attached. The face was white from the water and the crabs that had started to do their clean up work.
My head started to feel light, I felt dizzy, and my stomach wanted to expel the remains of the spaghetti with meat sauce. But I fought the reaction; I couldn’t let this destroy my image. The face I was looking at slightly obscured by the paddy water suddenly started to morph, to change into the face of the man in the canal from 25 years ago. Then the two faces merged and flowed back and forth, one became the other and I couldn’t keep them separate. I couldn’t look away. The sergeant called for the ARVN rep, pointed out the corpse and we moved on, thankfully. We had put in a couple of strikes near here a day or two earlier – but no, it was really unlikely.
All night long, mosquitos and hard ground and sleeping bag were not enough to divert my mind – the two faces were there, they played with each other, the merged and separated, they changed in waves and ebbs and flows.
I keep pushing hard the reality that the next night would find me having dinner in the Commodores mess with a glass of wine, a starched table cloth, white napkins delighting in relating the events of today; and that I would sleep between sheets in my air-conditioned room after a hot shower and a clean uniform. But I knew that the faces would find me during that night and for many nights to come.