A few minutes before nine on Sunday morning, Father Andrew O'Malley opened the door of the church sacristy by the merest bit and peered through the crack at the congregation which was gathering in the chapel for the nine o'clock mass. The church was perhaps half full, as best he could judge by the sliver of the chamber that was within his view, and a steady stream of additional worshippers moved quietly down the aisle as they chose their seats.
As he expected, Father Andrew saw that the Mayor was already seated along the center aisle in the first pew, dressed impeccably in his navy blue Sunday suit, his gaze focused fixed and serenely toward the altar directly in front of him. The Mayor's manner appeared to be that of a great seer in the deepest meditation. His physical posture, upright yet relaxed, bespoke of the supreme comfort felt by those at complete peace with their surroundings. His broad chest rose and fell smoothly with his breathing and his eyes blinked slowly at long intervals, conveying no reflection of any troubling thoughts which may have settled on his mind. For all the world might know from his outward appearance, the man was utterly free of any weight or worry that life may have laid upon him, or any care that he may have taken up of his own accord. And even for the many times that Father Andrew had seen the Mayor seated in this very same place at this very same time, and wearing this very same countenance, he retained a deep astonishment at the sight, for if any man in his parish carried upon his unbowed shoulders burdens beyond the norm of his fellow congregants, Father Andrew knew that the Mayor was that man.
The Mayor's wife sat closely at his side, and he cradled his hands firmly and lovingly around hers. With the exception of her medical appointments, the weekly church service seemed to be was the only remaining occasion for which she regularly left her home. She sat quietly and passively beside her husband, casting a similar gaze of tranquility at the altar which stood before them. She shared her husband's untroubled posture and his peaceful air, yet in her expression there was something missing—some foundation at the base of her person that marked a presence behind her features. Hers was an empty gaze, devoid of all but the thinnest of thoughts and meanings. Unlike her husband, she was not merely able to carry her concerns in an effortless and graceful manner; instead, her concerns had simply left her. And whatever new cares may have come to replace the old ones, they did not seem to trouble her at this moment. It was as if she were now immune to them; as if the baseness of the world were somehow banished from her company as soon as she passed through the church doorway and found herself seated in her familiar place, in the first pew, next to her husband.
Father Andrew closed the sacristy door and turned to an adjacent window which had been opened to admit the fresh morning air. The priest looked out at the wide green lawn surrounding the church and the thick woods beyond. He drew a deep, cleansing breath as he took in the view. The leaves of the oak and sycamore trees were yet approaching the height of their fall colors, and within another few weeks would descend from their branches. The sky was cast with a mellow hint of the palest blue and lightly streaked with wispy clouds of pure white. A calm breeze lifted the scents of autumn pine and lilac from the fields and carried them to the open portal of the church sanctuary. The priest took in this peaceful scene as he collected his final thoughts before beginning the mass.
Father Andrew was new to the town of Bazelton, having been appointed to the parish just that spring, and he was unlike any of the other priests who had previously been assigned to Saint Michael's. His predecessors had served the parish by largely orthodox means, obediently fulfilling their role as minister of the Word and administrator of the church. They had each dutifully celebrated the mass on Sunday mornings and had heard confessions on Sunday afternoons. They had blessed the vows of marriage at wedding ceremonies and had spoken words of comfort at funerals. They had administered the sacraments to those among the faithful who sought them and had faithfully delivered the Lord's message to all who had sought it. They had been good and holy men of the church and they had lived their lives and performed their work within the well-worn tracks of the profession which time and a centuries-old tradition had laid out for them. But Father Andrew thought rather differently than they had. Father Andrew thought that they had not done enough.
As part of his preparations for his assignment to this parish, Andrew had inquired of the church elders into the backgrounds of the priests who had served the community for the past few decades. Although the information was spotty, and revealed with some hesitancy and discretion, Andrew had come to see that all of his foregoers had been cultivated from nearly identical backgrounds. All had been raised in middle-class families and had led youthful lives largely free of educational, moral or financial want. Although none could be said to have abandoned a life of great wealth or privilege upon entering the priesthood, neither could any have claimed to have known a life of toil and drudgery prior to his ordination.
Andrew came from a world that was different from that of his predecessors. His desire to join the priesthood came to him relatively late in life, at the age of twenty eight—an age by which, he was sure, most men of the church had already completed their divinity studies and had been administering to their parishioners for several years.
Father Andrew had known more of the poor man's life than a great many of his fellow clergymen. He had been born into a Catholic working-class family fifty-four years earlier, in a tiny speck of a town cloistered among the deepest and most depressed hollows of northern Appalachia. Both of his grandfathers had worked the coal mines of the region for their entire working lives, as all of his great-grandfathers had done before them. His father had also worked in the mines for a time as a young man, but he managed to take one step up the economic ladder by holding employment in a steel factory in his later years. Andrew's father had been an enigmatic man, sometimes light-hearted and carefree, especially with the help of a beer or two in the evenings after his supper, yet at other times he could be gruff and irascible, often for no apparent reason. He had left high school after the tenth grade and cared little for scholastic endeavors. His proletarian life ethic had held that work was an immensely better instructor than any book, and there was nothing useful to be learned in school that could not be learned by sweating through a sixty-hour week. Throughout all the years of Andrew's upbringing, his father had provided a steady sustenance for his family and had asked for little in return beyond a due obedience and respect.
Despite his father's apathetic attitude toward schooling, young Andrew found the classroom to be an enlightening experience, and by the age of fifteen he had decided to pursue a college education and a professional career. Although his father understood little of, and appreciated even less, the things that Andrew studied at school, the older man knew that his son could earn a greater share of life's currency as an educated man than he could as an uneducated one. And so, despite his resentment at the unfairness of this reality, and a certain stubborn pride which prevented him from acknowledging as much to his son, the old man had accepted his son's decision to pursue an academic life without protest.
Andrew's mother shared no such reservations. She had been a simple woman and an obedient wife who demurred to her husband's authority on all matters except one. She had been raised by her parents in strict accordance with the teachings of the Catholic Church, and she insisted that her children receive the same upbringing as she had received. Her husband, being as indifferent to the Church as he was to the classroom, and therefore rarely an attendant at mass, allowed his wife to raise their children according to whatever religious precepts she favored. Thus young Andrew, accompanied by his mother and his siblings, had attended both mass and Sunday school every week without fail from his earliest days through to the very day that he left home for college.
The university asserted itself as the first profound turning point in Andrew's life. The breath and depth of the curricular choices that presented themselves to him afforded a greater environment for learning and maturing than even Andrew himself had expected. He chose a course of study directed primarily toward the liberal arts, and his degree was to be earned in literature, with concentrations in philosophy and theology. He found most of his professors to be engaging in their lectures and impassioned in their scholastic interests. He read voraciously among the great works of the western world and sought out other students and teachers who shared his growing enthusiasm for the written word and the abstract speculation. The horizons encompassing the scope of human thought—philosophical, religious and otherwise—which he had previously believed to be confined to one book, expanded by an enormous degree.
He marveled at the works of the great authors. Melville and Shelley and Hawthorne, among others, became his guideposts, his heroes. He probed the causes and pondered the consequences of Ahab's vengeance, of Frankenstein's ambitions, of Dimmesdale's transgressions. Was Ahab saint or sinner? he wondered. Was his madness a quest for justice, or an arrogant thirst for blood? Was Frankenstein's creature not Ahab's brother in spirit? Were their souls not equally tormented, their struggles not one struggle? Was Doctor Frankenstein's guilt not the very same as Dimmesdale's? Were they not both destroyed by something inside of them, something common between them? Some saintly thing which could not accept the entirely human act for which they both felt an unredeemable guilt? Were their sinful acts not one act? And, despite their mutual guilt and their shared fate, were they truly sinful?
Andrew was captivated by the subtlety and complexity of the questions which thoughtful human beings had posed to themselves, and even more so with the variety of answers which had been postulated through the ages and the vigor of the debate which flowed constantly around them. The world became for him a multiplicity of opinions and viewpoints, each of which held some degree of validity and virtue, yet none of which could claim to represent the omnipresent truth, being, as they were, in ever-debatable conflict with one another.
Although he could draw no universal conclusions from his readings and his meditations, he was nevertheless, he felt, able to see, faintly but objectively, into the soul of mankind. And what he saw there fascinated him. He saw that, indeed, some men were evil and some men were good. But he also saw, as he had never been able to see before, that the good men were not always good, for sometimes they were evil. And neither were the evil men always evil, for sometimes they were good. At last, the evil man and the good man became in his mind one man; and he saw, with all the firmness and the faith of the truly learned, that that one man, the manifold sum of all the virtues and vileness inherent in his humanity, must learn to live with himself, for he has no choice but to do so or to die.
He may have been born a poor man's son, but through his studies Andrew felt himself growing rich beyond measure.
* * *
Upon graduation from college, Andrew found himself in considerable debt. His need of a steady income, however, provided only a secondary inducement for employment. His material wants, beyond his obligation to repay his creditors, were modest and few. He searched, therefore, primarily for an occupation which would meld his intellectual curiosity with a growing desire to teach others of the things he had learned. Passing on to others the lessons derived of laborious study was as important in Andrew's eyes as the study itself; for to allow knowledge, once acquired, to live and die only within the mind of its discoverer was to waste not only the knowledge itself, but also the mind which had acquired it. Philosophy encased in a single mind, he had come to believe, was worthless.
Andrew accepted an associate teaching position at a small public college which was to begin three months after his graduation. The position paid a pittance relative to those sought by his more professionally-oriented classmates, and it would require longer hours, yet it suited the young and eager academic perfectly. Andrew saw in it the opportunity to earn his living while continuing his intellectual growth and contributing to that of his students.
The letter from his draft board interrupted his plans quite suddenly, however. Andrew held the crisply folded sheet of paper in his hands for an inordinately long time, struggling to assimilate the words that it contained. An evaluation of capacity for military service.
At that time his country was involved in an extended conflict in Southeast Asia, and he was unsure of his sympathies in the matter. He became torn between the opposing duties which he felt equally bound to uphold. His country was dear to him, and the idea of refusing to honor his draft notice was abhorrent. Yet the thought of taking up arms against a foreign people in their own land, the possibility that he might actually be called upon to kill another human being by his own hand, violated many of the very principles which he had spent the greater part of his adult life studying. He agonized for weeks over his dilemma without reaching a satisfying decision. When he reported for his physical examination he was still unreconciled to the prospect of military service which stood before him. He passed his examination easily and was told to expect another letter in a few weeks telling him where and when to report for basic training.
As his reporting date approached, Andrew's anxieties increased daily. His knowledge of the philosophies of the great thinkers became frustratingly irrelevant as he pondered his situation. The questions of the philosophers, so profound and stimulating to the intellect of the sheltered scholar, now seemed repulsively starched and antiseptic to the increasingly desperate draftee. The study of so many an abstract paradox had theretofore culminated in the mere turning of a page, yet to resolve his current dilemma in favor of either alternative would now turn not merely a page, but an entire human being, as the rifle-toting soldier would be a fundamentally different person than the conscientious draft dodger, neither of whom would retain the identity of the person he currently was nor the person he wished to be.
He did not ask to be put into this situation, he told himself repeatedly. Privately he reproached the politicians and the military leaders who prosecuted the war on behalf of his country as well as their counterparts overseas—the chief instigators and protagonists who could not resolve their differences peacefully. He felt his sanctity being violated as the reigns of his life were pried irresistibly from his hands by external events. The world was enforcing its will upon him, he saw, and there seemed little that he could do in response. To comply, his level of reluctance notwithstanding, to that course of action which was demanded of him was to allow himself to be defined by that demand. He was an individual, he protested silently; he ought not be forced to deny himself for a cause which others dictated for him.
And yet he was inextricably bound to that greater cause which trumped his personal revulsion, for he was an American, after all, and his citizenship was both an honor and an obligation to him. When his great-grandparents were persecuted in their native lands, when they were hungry from famine and threatened at the point of bayonets, America welcomed them and bid them to live free and prosper. The liberties which this nation offered had been purchased, he knew, by the blood of generations before him whom he did not know, yet to whom he was eternally grateful. Their sacrifices had been no less difficult than the service which he was now expected to give. His family had accepted America's generous offerings and lived free in its fold for four generations now, and each generation had heeded the nation's call to service when it came. Great victories had been achieved, and in the process, great sacrifices had been made. And throughout this history, the bonds of citizenship between a nation and a family had been forged in the kiln of war as well as in the sanctum of peace. Andrew acutely felt himself to be the product of, and the inheritor of, this legacy of citizenship. To deny its obligations would be to deny himself—a declaration which he could not make.
Desperate for another option, Andrew met with a member of his draft board and implored him for an alternative. He eagerly offered his services in any administrative capacity, volunteering to enlist for two or even three years if a non-combat role were available, rather than the required one-year engagement. Although the board member was besieged regularly with such inquiries from nervous recruits and routinely denied these requests out-of-hand, he felt in this case that Andrew's anxiety was sincere, and so he endeavored to help the young man in whatever way he could. He classified Andrew as a non-combat draftee, a classification which would allow Andrew to fulfill his military service to his country with no requirement to engage in hostile fire. He would likely be assigned to serve in the zone of conflict, but his duties would not involve firing on the enemy. Instead, his role would be administrative and logistical in nature, and he would, the board member felt, fulfill it admirably.
Andrew gratefully accepted the opportunity presented to him. He passed through basic training in eight weeks and, based on his education and a demonstrated aptitude in logistics, was enlisted as a corporal in the quartermaster company of an Army supply and service battalion.
Within another month he was in Vietnam, serving as a clerk at a supply depot not far behind the lines of combat. There he oversaw the flow of weaponry and food and materiel into and out of the depot. It was not a difficult assignment, and he caught on quickly to the requirements of the job. Supplies of all types were flown or shipped into the country in large crates and brought into his warehouse. These crates were then broken down into smaller containers for delivery to combat units throughout the theater of operations. His primary job was to track the movement of items through the depot, try to anticipate the amount of inventory of each item that would be needed to satisfy the future demand, and fill out the required paperwork accordingly.
Although he was technically stationed within a combat zone, Andrew saw very little of the war's consequences during his first few months in country. He worked at a gateway to the conflict through which traffic flowed almost entirely in one direction. In those early days the war had seemed to him like nothing more than an enormous invisible beast with a ravenous appetite. Every week it consumed vast quantities of provisions: canned food rations, clothing, ammunition, weaponry of all shapes and sizes, medical supplies, communications equipment, oil and gasoline, vehicles and spare parts, and hundreds of other items which were documented in his thick catalogs. The war's input was enormous, and Andrew accounted for all of it, yet the consumption of that input was done largely in other places beyond his sight.
And the process rarely seemed to produce any output at all. Andrew wondered at the efficacy of the entire endeavor. He often felt like a traffic cop stationed on a one-way road, watching a never-ending line of fully loaded vehicles passing on toward the horizon, transporting their wares to a destination unseen, and a purpose unpure.
* * *
Every man who has acquired a true and deep religious conviction can recall with great clarity the moment at which he adopted his faith. Andrew's moment came about four months into his tour of duty. A Marine unit had been ambushed the previous night in a valley about twenty kilometers from the depot and was unable to retreat safely. By morning they were desperately in need of resupply, yet they were more than a kilometer from the nearest usable drop zone and more than two kilometers from the nearest road, distances too great for the unit to cover on its own to resupply itself. The order had come all the way down from the highest echelons of command in the theater. The depot captain was to immediately send a truck of supplies to the driveable point nearest to the trapped unit. A second Marine unit would meet the truck at that point and carry the supplies on foot from there. Andrew took the order from the captain and had the supplies loaded onto the truck before the gas tank could be topped off. Having no one else available on such short notice, the captain assigned Andrew to drive the truck and ordered three armed soldiers to ride along in case of trouble.
Two of the soldiers rode in the back of the truck with the gear, while the third jumped into the passenger seat of the cab. Andrew was unfamiliar with the road leading to the rendezvous point, so he asked the private seated next to him if he knew the way. The private said he did. Andrew had not known the young soldier before they were hastily thrown together for this mission, but he seemed like a good kid. His last name was Warren, as Andrew determined from a brief glance at the name tag on the soldier's shirt as he drove the truck out of the depot and turned it down the unpaved road.
Private Warren was young. By the looks of him Andrew guessed that he had probably not yet seen his twentieth birthday. Despite his age, though, Andrew could tell that the kid was a veteran. He had the toughened, ragged look of an experienced grunt who had spent more than a few nights in the bush. The young man's body was lean, too—another indication of his experience. His arms were a compact mass of sinewy muscle covered by hairless skin browned by long exposure to a coarsening combination of sun and earth. His eyes were narrow and the skin of his face was tight—the result, Andrew recognized, of a steady diet of canned field rations, which replaced only about half the calories that a soldier burned off on an average day's hump through the jungle, and unfiltered cigarettes, which every foot soldier in Vietnam seemed to smoke in chains.
As they came to the main road that they were to follow, Andrew could not decide which of them was in charge of this mission. He felt a strange sensation as he sat next to the private who was both his senior and his junior, depending on how one chose to look at the two of them. Andrew had been twenty-four years old the day he arrived in Vietnam, and he quickly came to feel like a big brother to most of the other new recruits he met. He was five or six years older than the majority of draftees who came to the war straight out of high school, and he could not help but feel immensely more worldly than most of them. The new recruits were not only young, most were immature in every sense that mattered—immature to war, immature to responsibility, immature to life in general outside of the small towns where they had grown up.
Andrew had probably seen a thousand such draftees touch down at the airstrip adjacent to the depot. They arrived in country as green as newborn fawns, and most of them had not a clue as to where they were to go or to whom they were to report. Andrew was, by virtue of some paternal air that he possessed, the first person that many of them felt comfortable in approaching for information. He took it upon himself to assist these newcomers in whatever way he could. His job, after all, was to direct supplies to their proper units, he figured, so he might as well direct the human supplies in addition to the material ones. They could use a little friendly assistance in getting themselves situated, he told himself. God knew they could use all the help they could get.
Few of these recruits had entertained even the briefest thought of attending college, and almost none had received a degree as Andrew had done. They were not smart enough for college and not domestic enough for marriage. War was something for which they were neither disabled physically nor disinclined philosophically. And so they were drafted by the thousands.
Yet most of them were not stupid—at least not the ones who survived for more than a few months in the field. Combat was more than a test of physical conditioning and composure under fire; it was primarily a test of mental prowess. Any grunt will tell you that there is no instruction manual on how to be a soldier in a real war. You were assigned to a unit and that was about it; nobody told you how to do anything after that. You had to figure it out on your own as you went along. You had to learn for yourself how much gear you could carry on your back, and which items were essential and which were not, and how to keep your gear dry in the rain. You had to figure out which path through the bush was likely to be booby-trapped, and which signs to look out for to know that Charlie was near, and how to protect yourself when he was. Some things you learned through your own mistakes and some things you learned by observing the mistakes of others. When some other grunt was picked off by a sniper or got a leg taken off by a landmine, you found out how it happened and made sure you didn't repeat that guy's mistake. Out here you couldn't afford to skip class or miss a single lesson. After a while you either learned the lessons that the jungle taught or you didn't survive.
Private Warren seemed like a survivor. He seemed like so much more than the raw recruits that Andrew was used to seeing. He spoke very little as Andrew steered the truck along the rutted path that led to their appointed destination. The kid's eyes constantly looked forward, while Andrew's attention alternated between the road in front of him and the intense gaze of the young man to his right. All of the private's senses were tuned to the area surrounding the truck. His eyes did not blink, but darted rapidly from side to side, flashing repeatedly back and forth between the road surface and the dense brush on both sides of the road, the overhanging tree limbs and the cliff faces of the hills which came into view during those brief spans when the enclosing vegetation fell away. He rolled down the window on his side of the truck and told Andrew to do the same. His head rotated slightly from one side to the other every few seconds as his ears scanned the streams of sound that came into the truck cab from both sides. After a few minutes of observing this behavior, Andrew began to feel that his own presence was secondary to that of his passenger in this mission.
As the truck rumbled slowly onward and the narrow road twisted and turned and disappeared behind him in his side-view mirrors, Andrew was suddenly seized with the realization that he was now in combat. True, there was no ordnance being fired at him, nor any outward sign that the enemy was nearby, yet the intense concentrations of his companion gave him the unmistakable sense that they had entered the realm of the beast—the very same beast which Andrew had spent the past few months feeding. He was no longer just the feeder at the zoo, he thought to himself. Somehow, unexpectedly, he had fallen into the animal's cage.
How could this have happened? Andrew asked himself, suddenly nervous at the wheel. The bars which had been carefully forged to protect him, to keep him out of a face-to-face conflict with the enemy, had somehow failed him at a moment of lowered vigilance. Before he had taken a moment to realize what was happening, he had allowed himself to become trapped in the very situation which he had worked so hard to avoid. My God, he thought, what have I done?! A deep-seated panic took hold of his gut and spread quickly throughout his body. His heart started racing furiously, and perspiration seeped from his every pore.
He desperately wanted to ask Private Warren what sights he was watching out for, what sounds he was listening for. He wanted to help. He wanted to use his eyes and ears to detect danger too, but it was pointless now. The young soldier to his right had neither the time nor the inclination to teach him those things at that moment. He was just another rear echelon patsy to this kid, Andrew knew—as green to the veteran grunt as all those fresh-faced draftees had seemed to him back at the depot.
Andrew's heart nearly leapt into his throat as the private picked up his M-16 rifle and cocked back the bolt. The hollow metallic click of the ammunition round seating itself in the rifle's chamber sent a spasm of fear up Andrew's spine. He looked helplessly down at his belt and confirmed to his disbelieving mind that he carried no weapon on his hip. And in that awful moment he was stricken, for the first time in his life, with the self-altering sense of vulnerability which comes to those who wander defenselessly beyond their previously secure zone of safety.
He did not know whether to curse his lack of precaution in not arming himself for this mission or to simply resign himself to the apparent fact that he was not meant to be a real soldier. Even if he had brought a gun with him on this mission, he thought, what good would it do him now? Would he have the presence of mind to use it? Could he look down the sight of a weapon at the figure of another human being and pull the trigger? Back in the world, Andrew had told himself no. He had taken plenty of target practice as part of his basic training, but he could never imagine, despite the incessant barking of his drill instructor to the contrary, that he was shooting at the enemy. He had convinced himself that he could not kill another human being—a stranger whom he had never met and against whom he had no personal indictment. Now, with his hands locked tightly around the truck's steering wheel, he was not so sure.
What difference did it make anyway? he finally asked himself. He had no weapon and there was nothing he could do about that now. He did not dare suggest to Private Warren that they turn the truck around and return to the depot so that he could pick up a firearm for himself. He would have felt like a colossal fool to say such a thing, and besides, there was no time for that now. The Marines were probably already at the rendezvous point waiting for them.
As if reading Andrew's mind, Warren spoke for the first time in perhaps ten minutes. "We've got extra rifles and ammo in back in case we run into something," he said flatly, without diverting his eyes from the road.
Andrew swallowed hard. Damn, this kid is perceptive. "Okay," he replied weakly.
Of course, Andrew chastised himself silently. They were carrying enough weaponry with them to arm a small platoon. If anything were to happen, he could always run around to the back of the truck and arm himself there. The thought helped him to relax a bit, but his mind stayed on edge. For the moment, at least, Warren held a gun and he held only the steering wheel. It was an arrangement that he had to accept. It was, after all, the very arrangement that he had agreed to when he enlisted. Under the present circumstances, however, it seemed a less secure bargain than he had expected.
Andrew felt suddenly that the world he understood had somehow shrunk down to encompass nothing more than the cab in which he and his protector were riding. All things outside of this space were now shrouded in doubt. He shook his head in an attempt to clear his mind; he obviously was not thinking clearly. He took a deep breath and tried to relax. Indeed he tried, above all else, to convince himself that he could shoot his way out of trouble if the need arose. And despite his uneasiness about the position in which he now found himself, Andrew drew a palpable measure of reassurance from the fact that an experienced, well-armed soldier sat by his side, ready to fire unselfconsciously at any threat which presented itself. It seemed to be the only thing of which he could now be certain.
When the truck arrived at the rendezvous point, two dozen Marines rose out of the undergrowth like phantoms on one side of the road to meet them. Andrew left the engine running as he jumped out of the cab and walked on shaky legs to the back of the truck to help unload the supplies. He picked up one of the rifles and slung it across his shoulder, then opened the lid on a crate of ammunition cartridges, scooped up a handful of them and stuffed them into his pockets. One of the Marines eyed him suspiciously and paused as if he was about to say something. Andrew did not give him time to speak as he threw down the lid on the ammo crate, grabbed the handle on one end and helped another Marine carry it across the road.
The truck was unloaded in less than a minute. The Marines got the gear organized and disappeared back into the forest as Andrew and his crew scrambled back into the truck. Andrew jammed a cartridge into the rifle's ammunition slot and laid his newly acquired weapon on the floor beneath his legs. He threw the truck into gear and stepped firmly down on the gas pedal. Private Warren glanced first at the rifle and then at Andrew. His expression revealed neither scorn nor amusement at the prospect of seeing a loaded weapon in the possession of such a novice. Andrew caught the soldier's gaze for just an instant and read from it one of the first lessons of war. This is not a game, my friend, the private's eyes intoned. If you're going to carry that gun, decide right now that you will use it if necessary. Indecision will kill you.
Without saying a word, the private returned to his sentinel role as the truck retraced the same route it had traveled minutes before. Andrew gripped the wheel tightly as he squinted his eyes and set his lower jaw firmly in place. Yes, he told himself, I will use this weapon if required. I should have been more careful and not allowed myself to get into this situation in the first place. That was my mistake, but there is nothing I can do about that now. In the future I will be more cautious. I have learned my lesson. But for the time being, until I am out of harm's way, I will use whatever means are at my disposal to protect myself.
Andrew's decision had a calming effect on his psyche, and he was no longer in a state of internal panic. He remained alert for signs of danger, but the greatest danger no longer seemed to lurk within him. His indecisiveness seemed to have been expelled from his being, and he regained a sense of control over himself. The truck rolled onward.
Suddenly Private Warren froze in his seat, as if some occurrence, unseen and unheard, had somehow caught his attention. In one swift and silent motion he raised his rifle, crouched down below the level of the window and simply said to Andrew, "Step on it." The command was given in such a matter-of-fact voice that Andrew did not react immediately. He looked down with bewilderment at the young private, wondering what had come over him. Before he could even open his mouth to ask the question, Andrew heard a scorching sound rip the air, and the entire engine compartment of the truck exploded in front of him.
Andrew reflexively threw his arms over his face and fell to the floor of the cab. He landed hard on top of his rifle, as shards of glass from the truck's shattered windshield fell on top of him. The truck drifted to a stop in the middle of the road. Andrew blinked his eyes several times and held his hands over his ears for a moment, trying to regain his senses. His ears were ringing sharply, almost to the point of deafness, but otherwise he seemed to be uninjured by the explosion. He looked up to see Warren arisen from his crouched position, firing vigorously out the passenger side window at some hidden menace off in the brush. Andrew reached down and yanked his rifle from beneath him, but he could not position himself to fire at anything from his side of the cab.
"Get out!" Warren shouted over the din of his rifle. "They're over on this side of the road. Get down behind the front tire and shoot under the truck. I'll follow you out and take the rear tire."
Andrew moved immediately now. He opened the driver's side door, jumped to the ground and threw himself against the front tire. The engine compartment of the truck was completely engulfed in fire, and a thick column of black smoke rose from the front half of the vehicle. Andrew listened to the exchange of gunfire going on above him and looked under the truck to the opposite side of the road, trying to determine precisely where he should shoot. Warren was still shooting from the right side of the cab, and Andrew could hear additional gunfire coming from the rear of the truck. The other two soldiers had apparently also found the source of the ambush and were returning fire as well. Andrew heard the sharp pings of metal striking metal as enemy bullets hit the chassis of the truck. He peered under the vehicle and tried to spot the source of the attack, but his view was partially obscured by the smoke and he saw nothing unusual in the grass and trees across the road. He drew his weapon to his shoulder and watched for some indication of the enemy's location.
Warren leaped from the driver's side door and scrambled back to the rear axle. He lay prone on the ground, arching his torso around the tire and resuming his repulsion of the hostile fire. He no longer seemed to acknowledge Andrew's presence, but devoted all of his attentions to the invisible enemy across the road. Andrew watched him for a few seconds and was able to determine the area into which the private was shooting. Andrew assumed a similar procumbent position, drew in a quick breath and turned his rifle loose on the same small patch of vegetation, which now vibrated and shook with a wrathful vehemence. He saw no human forms appear across the sight of his weapon, but he fired nonetheless ardently into that turbulent area from which the ambush had been launched.
As he expended his magazine into the underbrush, Andrew marveled at the power of the weapons which he and his comrades commanded. For a few moments it seemed to him that the entire realm of nature was writhing in a violent spasm under the assault which they were unleashing. His adrenaline flowed freely now, and he felt a rush of energy surge through his veins. The chamber of his rifle grew hotter with every round he fired, and he felt its heat against the skin of his cheek.
The firefight raged on for several minutes, after which the opposing gunfire ebbed and then stopped altogether. Warren and the other soldiers checked their fire as well, and Andrew did the same. Andrew thought for a moment that the enemy must have retreated into the woods, but Warren continued to scan the area from his shielded position, and he held up the palm of his hand toward Andrew as an instruction not to move. An eerie silence descended over the scene as the two men watched and listened for any indication that the enemy was still present. The soft crackling of the fire in the engine compartment was the only sound which remained, and its black soot now mingled in the air with the white smoke from their rifles. Across the road the tattered remnants of the plant leaves became still, those that survived hanging loosely from their bent and broken stems, grateful that the fighting was over.
Out of the stillness another rocket-propelled grenade singed the air, this time ripping into the rear of the truck. It exploded with a thunderous roar, as the bed of the truck erupted in flames and the entire vehicle rocked ominously from one side to the other. Burning scraps of fabric from the truck's tarpaulin cover rained down upon Andrew and Warren, and the acrid smell of smoking embers filled the air.
Warren jumped to his feet and ran for the woods on the near side of the road, motioning with his arm for Andrew to follow. Andrew did as he was instructed, pushing himself up in an instant and following Warren into a narrow gap among the trees. The two men ran with unabating speed for what seemed like a kilometer or more. Andrew ran as swiftly as he could, straining desperately to keep up with the younger man racing away from him and praying that he would not trip or twist an ankle as he navigated his way through the thick foliage. Eventually the private slowed down and jumped into a shallow ravine that cut across their path. Andrew came up a few seconds behind him and fell to the ground gasping for air.
"What about the other two guys!?" Andrew pleaded between panting breaths.
"They're goners," Warren replied, an emotionless tone of finality in his voice. "Did you feel that explosion? There's no way they made it through that."
Andrew stared at Warren for a moment, then shook his head frantically. He was not yet ready to accept such a truth. "We can't just leave them there!" he implored. "We have to do something!"
"There's nothing to be done," Warren replied, barely moving his lips. "At least not right now. They're KIA, and that poz is crawling with dinks. We're only two men. We have to get back to base and report what's happened. The gooks will pick over that truck for thirty minutes or so and then be gone. Then our boys will come in and retrieve the bodies."
Andrew had to let these words sink in. He rolled onto his back and hugged his M-16 to his chest, as if it were his only remaining handle on reality. He tried to regain his sense of equilibrium. The world was spinning around him too quickly; it was hard for him to breathe, hard for him to think. If he could just lay there in that ditch for a while, he told himself, holding on to his warm rifle and hiding from the world, things would eventually return to normal. He lay on his back and looked up through the branches of the trees to the clear blue sky beyond. All was quiet now. The noon hour was approaching, and the sun was near its zenith. The woods around them were calm and tranquil. Except for the still-rapid beating of his heart, all of nature now seemed to be at peace.
He had not even known their names, Andrew suddenly realized. The two men who died in the back of that truck, whose lives had been sacrificed to the insatiable beast, were complete strangers to him. For that matter, he thought, the enemy itself was a faceless being, revealing no identity whatsoever to the men who had fought it. Andrew would always recall the events of this day through the veil of that reality. He had waged the most desperate battle of his life in the company of strangers, against an illusive yet decidedly dangerous foe—a foe whose worldly incarnation seemed to be nothing more than an unremarkable, indiscriminate patch of wild jungle.
And he had fought to a draw. The losses were calculable: two lives that were no more. And while the gains were not so tangible, they were no less important. He had learned some lessons which, he had to admit, could not be derived from theory. His world, despite his most cherished wishes to the contrary, could now be an ugly place that sometimes bit hard at the unprotected. And as he lay there in the ditch, smelling the stench of the smoke that clung to his shirt and feeling his heart slowly return to its normal rhythm, he was struck by the realization that perhaps his father had known more than he had been willing to see.
After a few minutes had passed with no sign that the enemy had pursued them in their escape, Warren rose to his feet. He lit a fresh cigarette and inspected the compass which was tied to his belt by a cord. Andrew rolled himself up from the ground and brushed ineffectively at the dirt which clung to his fatigues. The two men then hitched up their rifles and walked off into the woods in the direction of the supply depot, leaving behind them the ashes of things once held dear.