MY RIFLE IS HUMAN, EVEN AS I, BECAUSE IT IS MY LIFE. THUS I WILL LEARN
IT AS A
BROTHER. I WILL LEARN ITS ACCESSORIES, ITS SIGHTS, ITS BARREL.
I WILL KEEP MY RIFLE CLEAN AND READY, EVEN AS I AM CLEAN AND READY. WE
WILL
BECOME PART OF EACH OTHER.
WE WILL...
BEFORE GOD I SWEAR THIS CREED. MY RIFLE AND MYSELF ARE THE MASTER OF
OUR
ENEMY. WE ARE THE SAVIORS OF MY LIFE.
SO BE IT, UNTIL VICTORY IS AMERICA'S AND THERE IS NO ENEMY BUT PEACE!
AMEN.
Sergeant Gerheim kicks Leonard's rack. "Hey--you--Private Pyle..."
"What? Yes? YES, SIR!" Leonard snaps to attention in his rack.
"AYE-AYE, SIR!"
"What's that weapon's name, maggot?"
"SIR, THE PRIVATE'S WEAPON'S NAME IS CHARLENE, SIR!"
"At ease, maggot." Sergeant Gerheim grins. "You are becoming one sharp
recruit, Private Pyle. Most motivated prive in my herd. Why, I may even
allow you to serve as a rifleman in my beloved Corps. I had you figured as a
shitbird, but you'll make a good grunt."
"AYE-AYE, SIR!"
I look at the rifle on my rack. It's a beautiful instrument, gracefully
designed, solid and symmetrical. My rifle is clean, oiled, and works
perfectly. It's a fine tool. I touch it.
Sergeant Gerheim marches down the length of the squad bay. "THE REST OF
YOU ANIMALS COULD TAKE LESSONS FROM PRIVATE PYLE. He's squared away. You are
all squared away. Tomorrow you will be Marines. READDDY...SLEEP!"
Graduation day. A thousand new Marines stand tall on the parade deck,
lean and tan in immaculate khaki, their clean weapons held at port arms.
Leonard is selected as the outstanding recruit from Platoon 30-92. He
is awarded a free set of dress blues and is allowed to wear the colorful
uniform when the graduating platoons pass in review. The Commandant General
of Parris Island shakes Leonard's hand and gives him a "Well done." Our
series commander pins a RIFLE EXPERT badge on Leonard's chest and our
company commander awards Leonard a citation for shooting the highest score
in the training battalion.
Because of a special commendation submitted by Sergeant Gerheim, I'm
promoted to Private First Class. After our series commander pins on my
EXPERT'S badge, Sergeant Gerheim presents me with two red and green chevrons
and explains that they're his old PFC stripes.
When we pass in review, I walk right guide, tall and proud.
Cowboy receives an EXPERT'S badge and is selected to carry the platoon
guidon.
The Commanding General of Parris Island speaks into a microphone: "Have
you seen the light? The white light? The great light? The guiding light? Do
you have the vision?"
And we cheer, happy beyond belief.
The Commanding General sings. We sing too:
Hey, Marine, have you heard?
Hey, Marine...
L.B.J. has passed the word.
Hey, Marine...
Say good-bye to Dad and Mom.
Hey, Marine...
You're gonna die in Viet Nam.
Hey, Marine, yeah!
After the graduation ceremony our orders are distributed. Cowboy,
Leonard, Private Barnard, Philips, and most of the other Marines in Platoon
30-92 are ordered to ITR--the Infantry Training Regiment--to be trained as
grunts, infantrymen.
My orders instruct me to report to the Basic Military Journalism School
at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, after I graduate from ITR. Sergeant
Gerheim is disgusted by the fact that I am to be a combat correspondent and
not a grunt. He calls me a poge, an office pinky. He says that shitbirds get
all the slack.
Standing at ease on the parade deck, beneath the monument to the Iwo
Jima flag raising, Sergeant Gerheim says, "The smoking lamp is lit. You
people are no longer maggots. Today you are Marines. Once a Marine, always a
Marine..."
Leonard laughs out loud.
Our last night on the island.
I draw fire watch.
I stand by in utility trousers, skivvy shirt, spit-shined combat boots,
and a helmet liner which has been painted silver.
Sergeant Gerheim gives me his wristwatch and a flashlight. "Good night,
Marine."
I march up and down the squad bay between two perfectly aligned rows of
racks.
One hundred young Marines breathe peacefully as they sleep--one hundred
survivors from our original hundred and twenty.
Tomorrow at dawn we'll all board cattle-car buses for the ride to Camp
Geiger in North Carolina. There, ITR--the infantry training regiment. All
Marines are grunts, even though some of us will learn additional military
skills. After advanced infantry training we'll be allowed pogey bait at the
slop chute and we'll be given weekend liberty off the base and then we'll
receive assignments to our permanent duty stations.
The squad bay is as quiet as a funeral parlor at midnight. The silence
is disturbed only by the soft creak-creak of bedsprings and an occasional
cough.
It's almost time for me to wake my relief when I hear a voice. Some
recruit is talking in his sleep.
I stop. I listen. A second voice. Two guys must be swapping
scuttlebutt. If Sergeant Gerheim hears them it'll be my ass. I hurry toward
the sound.
It's Leonard. Leonard is talking to his rifle. But there is also
another voice. A whisper. A cold, seductive moan. It's the voice of a woman.
Leonard's rifle is not slung on his rack. He's holding his rifle,
hugging it. "Okay, okay. I love you!" Very softly: "I've given you the best
months of my life. And now you--" I snap on my flashlight. Leonard ignores
me. "I LOVE YOU! DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND? I CAN DO IT. I'LL DO ANYTHING!"
Leonard's words reverberate down the squad bay. Racks squeak. Someone
rolls over. One recruit sits up, rubs his eyes.
I watch the far end of the squad bay. I wait for the light to go on
inside Sergeant Gerheim's palace.
I touch Leonard's shoulder. "Hey, shut your mouth, Leonard. Sergeant
Gerheim will break my back."
Leonard sits up. He looks at me. He strips off his skivvy shirt and
ties it around his face to blindfold himself. He begins to field-strips his
weapon. "This is the first time I've ever seen her naked." He pulls off the
blindfold. His fingers continue to break down the rifle into components.
Then, gently, he fondles each piece. "Just look at that pretty trigger
guard. Have you ever seen a more beautiful piece of metal?" He starts
snapping the steel components back together. "Her connector assembly is so
beautiful..."
Leonard continues to babble as his trained fingers reassemble the black
metal hardware.
I think about Vanessa, my girl back home. We're on a river bank,
wrapped in an old sleeping bag, and I'm fucking her eyes out. But my
favorite fantasy has gone stale. Thinking about Vanessa's thighs, her dark
nipples, her fully lips doesn't give me a hard-on anymore. I guess it must
be the saltpeter in our food, like they say.
Leonard reaches under his pillow and comes out with a loaded magazine.
Gently, he inserts the metal magazine into his weapon, into Charlene.
"Leonard...where did you get those live rounds?"
Now a lot of guys are sitting up, whispering, "What's happening?" to
each other.
Sergeant Gerheim's light floods the far end of the squad bay.
"OKAY, LEONARD, LET'S GO." I'm determined to save my own ass if I can,
certain that Leonard's is forfeit in any case. The last time Sergeant
Gerheim caught a recruit with a live round--just one round--he ordered the
recruit to dig a grave ten feet long and ten feet deep. The whole platoon
had to fall out for the "funeral." I say, "You're in a world of shit now,
Leonard."
The overhead lights explode. The squad bay is washed with light.
"WHAT'S THIS MICKEY MOUSE SHIT? JUST WHAT IN THE NAME OF JESUS H. CHRIST ARE
YOU ANIMALS DOING IN MY SQUAD BAY?"
Sergeant Gerheim comes at me like a mad dog. His voice cuts the squad
bay in half: "MY BEAUTY SLEEP HAS BEEN INTERRUPTED, LADIES. YOU KNOW WHAT
THAT MEANS. YOU HEAR ME, HERD? IT MEANS THAT ONE RECRUIT HAS VOLUNTEERED HIS
YOUNG HEART FOR A GODDAMN HUMAN SACRIFICE!'
Leonard pounces from his rack, confronts Sergeant Gerheim.
Now the whole platoon is awake. We all wait to see what Sergeant
Gerheim will do, confident that it will be worth watching.
"Private Joker. You shitbird. Front and center."
I move my ass. "AYE-AYE, SIR!"
"Okay, you little maggot, speak. Why is Private Pyle out of his rack
after lights out? Why is Private Pyle holding that weapon? Why ain't you
stomping Private Pyle's guts out?"
"SIR, it is the Private's duty to report to the drill instructor that
Private...Pyle...has a full magazine and has locked and loaded, SIR."
Sergeant Gerheim looks at Leonard and nods. He sighs. Gunnery Sergeant
Gerheim looks more than a little ridiculous in his pure white skivvies and
red rubber flip-flop shower shoes and hairy legs and tattooed forearms and a
beer gut and a face the color of raw beef, and, on his bald head, the green
and brown Smokey the Bear campaign cover.
Our senior drill instructor focuses all of his considerable powers of
intimidation into his best John-Wayne-on Suribachi voice: "Listen to me,
Private Pyle. You will place your weapon on your rack and--"
"NO! YOU CAN'T HAVE HER! SHE'S MINE! YOU HEAR ME? SHE'S MINE! I LOVE
HER!"
Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim can't control himself any longer. "NOW YOU
LISTEN TO ME, YOU FUCKING WORTHLESS LITTLE PIECE OF SHIT. YOU WILL GIVE ME
THAT WEAPON OR I'M GOING TO TEAR YOUR BALLS OFF AND STUFF THEM DOWN YOUR
SCRAWNY LITTLE THROAT! YOU HEAR ME, MARINE? I'M GOING TO PUNCH YOUR FUCKING
HEART OUT!"
Leonard aims the weapon at Sergeant Gerheim's heart, caresses the
trigger guard, then caresses the trigger...
Sergeant Gerheim is suddenly calm. His eyes, his manner are those of a
wanderer who has found his home. He is a man in complete control of himself
and of the world he lives in. His face is cold and beautiful as the dark
side surfaces. He smiles. It is not a friendly smile, but an evil smile, as
though Sergeant Gerheim were a werewolf baring its fangs. "Private Pyle, I'm
proud--"
Bang.
The steel buttplate slams into Leonard's shoulder.
One 7.62-millimeter high-velocity copper-jacketed bullet punches
Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim back.
He falls.
We all stare at Sergeant Gerheim. Nobody moves.
Sergeant Gerheim sits up as though nothing has happened. For one
second, we relax. Leonard has missed. Then dark blood squirts from a little
hole in Sergeant Gerheim's chest. The red blood blossoms into his white
skivvy shirt like a beautiful flower. Sergeant Gerheim's bug eyes are
focused upon the blood rose on his chest, fascinated. He looks up at
Leonard. He squints. Then he relaxes. The werewolf smile is frozen on his
lips.
My menial position of authority as the fire watch on duty forces me to
act. "Now, uh, Leonard, we're all your bros, man, your brothers. I'm your
bunkmate, right? I--"
"Sure," says Cowboy. "Go easy, Leonard. We don't want to hurt you."
"Affirmative," says Private Barnard.
Leonard doesn't hear. "Did you see the way he looked at her? Did you? I
knew what he was thinking. I knew. That fag pig and his dirty--"
"Leonard..."
"We can kill you. You know that." Leonard caresses his rifle. "Don't
you know that Charlene and I can kill you all?"
Leonard aims his rifle at my face.
I don't look at the rifle. I look into Leonard's eyes.
I know that Leonard is too weak to control his instrument of death. It
is a hard heart that kills, not the weapon. Leonard is a defective
instrument for the power that is flowing through him. Sergeant Gerheim's
mistake was in not seeing that Leonard was like a glass rifle which would
shatter when fired. Leonard is not hard enough to harness the power of an
interior explosion to propel the cold black bullet of his will.
Leonard is grinning at us, the final grin that is on the face of death,
the terrible grin of the skull.
The grin changes to a look of surprise and then to confusion and then
to terror as Leonard's weapon moves up and back and then Leonard takes the
black metal barrel into his mouth. "NO! Not--"
Bang.
Leonard is dead on the deck. His head is now an awful lump of blood and
facial bones and sinus fluids and uprooted teeth and jagged, torn flesh. The
skin looks plastic and unreal.
The civilians will demand yet another investigation, of course. But
during the investigation the recruits of Platoon 30-92 will testify that
Private Pratt, while highly motivated, was a ten percenter who did not pack
the gear to be a Marine in our beloved Corps.
Sergeant Gerheim is still smiling. He was a fine drill instructor.
Dying, that's what we're here for, he would have said--blood makes the grass
grow. If he could speak, Gunnery Sergeant Gerheim would explain to Leonard
why the guns that we love don't love back. And he would say, "Well done."
I turn off the overhead lights.
I say, "Prepare to mount." Then: "MOUNT!"
The platoon falls into a hundred racks.
I feel cold and alone. I am not alone. All over Parris Island there are
thousands and thousands of us. And, all around the world, hundreds of
thousands.
I try to sleep...
In my rack, I pull my rifle into my arms. She talks to me. Words come
out of the wood and metal and flow into my hands. She tells me what to do.
My rifle is a solid instrument of death. My rifle is black steel. Our
human bodies are bags of blood, easy to puncture and quick to drain, but our
hard tools of death cannot be broken.
I hold by weapon at port arms, gently, as though she were a holy relic,
a magic wand wrought with interlocking pieces of silver and iron, with a
teakwood stock, golden bullets, a crystal bolt, jewels to sight with. My
weapon obeys me. I'll hold Vanessa, my rifle. I'll hold her. I'll just hold
her for a little while. I will hide in this dark dream for as long as I can.
Blood pours out of the barrel of my rifle and flows up on to my hands.
The blood moves. The blood breaks up into living fragments. Each fragment is
a spider. Millions and millions of tiny red spiders of blood are crawling up
my arms, across my face, into my mouth...
Silence. In the dark, a hundred men are breaking in unison.
I look at Cowboy, then at Private Barnard. They understand. Cold grins
of death are frozen on their faces. They nod.
The newly minted Marines in my platoon stand to attention, horizontal
in their racks, their weapons at port arms.
The Marines wait, a hundred young werewolves with guns in their hands.
I lead:
This is my rifle.
There are many like it, but this one is mine...
Body Count
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked...
--Allen Ginsberg, Howl
A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.
--William S. Burroughs
Tet: The Year of the Monkey.
Rafter Man and I spend the Vietnamese lunar New Year's Eve, 1968, at
the Freedom Hill PX near Da Nang. I've been ordered to write a feature
article on the Freedom Hill Recreation Center on Hill 327 for Leatherneck
magazine. I'm a combat correspondent assigned to the First Marine Division.
My job is to write upbeat news features which are distributed to the highly
paid civilian news correspondents who shack up with their Eurasian maids in
big hotels in Da Nang. The ten correspondents in the First Division's
Informational Services Office are reluctant public relations men for the war
in general and for the Marine Corps in particular. This morning my
commanding officer decided that a really inspiring piece could be written
about Hill 327, an angle being the fact that Hill 327 was the first
permanent position occupied by American forces. Major Lynch thinks I rate
some slack before I return to the ISO office in Phu Bai. My last three field
operations were real shit-kickers; in the field, a Marine correspondent is
just another rifleman. Rafter Man tags along behind me like a kid. Rafter
Man is a combat photographer. He has never been in the shit. He thinks I'm
one hard field Marine.
We go into a movie theater that looks like a warehouse and we watch
John Wayne in The Green Berets, a Hollywood soap opera about the love of
guns. We sit way down front, near some grunts. The grunts are sprawled
across their seats and they've propped muddy jungle boots onto the seats in
front of them. They are bearded, dirty, out of uniform, and look lean and
mean, the way human beings look after they've survived a long hump in the
jungle, the boonies, the bad bush.
I prop my boots on the seats and we watch John Wayne leading the Green
Beanies. John Wayne is a beautiful soldier, clean-shaven, sharply attired in
tailored tiger-stripe jungle utilities, wearing boots that shine like black
glass. Inspired by John Wayne, the fighting soldiers from the sky go
hand-to-hand with all of the Victor Charlies in Southeast Asia. He snaps out
an order to an Oriental actor who played Mr. Sulu on "Star Trek." Mr. Sulu,
n