Dead Warriors & The 30, 239-S0ldier Day

 
There are enough dead warriors in human history to break God's heart a thousand times over.  In God's eyes, all warriors are equal.
 
The great obvious but unnoticed fact about war is that it is counter-evolutionary.  Among all the beasts except for the human beast, the code is the survival of the fittest.  The human beast, however, has since caveman days killed off its bravest and strongest seed, leaving a scrawny humankind to face a horrific future. 
 
Everyone who has ever been in combat has images of dead warriors tattooed on their mind and on their soul, and those images never leave, and fifty years later those images can still send brave men into weeping melancholy.
 
I have three such memories to tell you about today, and it is fitting because this is Memorial Day Weekend; and what are we remembering?  Yes, Dear Reader, dead warriors.
 
The first tattoo on my soul was a dead Marine.
 
It was after my first battle, which I suppose would be better called a skirmish, but it was a battle to me, about 50 incoming mortar rounds in an area the size of a tennis court and machinegun tracers like water from a fire hose all night long.
 
That night of battle was a horror and a revelation, the moment when I learned to walk upon my fear like Jesus walked upon the water, a night I may have helped save a Marine's life, although I later heard that the helicopter was evacuating him was shot down.  I don't know, and likely I never will.
 
In the morning the enemy machinegunner was dead; he had stayed behind to allow his team to escape to fight another day; and as I stood up from my place beside a paddy dike, badly needing to take a piss, a Marine approached and said their were six KIAs, and one of them was a civilian journalist.
 
There were three of us combat correspondents on that operation called Union Two, and I could see one, the AP guy, so I assumed it must be Hugh Lunn, the Reuters guy, who had been killed, and putting my dick back into my pants, I began walking to where the bodies were laid out, expecting to find a good friend there dead; but there he sat, the Aussie son of a bitch, big smile on his face, the sun glinting off his red hair, smoking a cigarette.
 
Have you ever heard someone you cared for had died and then found that news was wrong?  It is a splendid feeling.
 
But back to that first tattoo.
 
Within that typhoon of memories, in the quiet center of that typhoon, there were on that morning six dead Marines laid out in a row; and the legs of one of those Marines were crossed at the ankles, like he was just kicking back at the beach watching the babes walk by.
 
Why I will never forget that tiny detail I do not know, but I know I will never forget it.
 
The second two occurred on possibly my hottest day of war and most certainly my luckiest.
 
I and my Japanese photographer sidekick, Toshio Sakai, were going from battlefield to battlefield looking for a big fight, so I would have something to write about and he would have something to photograph, but everywhere we went the action stopped just before we got there or began just after we left.
 
In retrospect I think God had something to do with this.
 
Anyway, we were flying in a formation of First Division (known as the Big Red One, and the Grunts joked, "If you are going to be one you might as well be a big red one) helicopters heading for a landing in one of those beautiful meadows that appeared in the jungles of what the Americans called, The Iron Triangle.
 
As we approached the landing the pilot was telling us it was a Hot LZ; but when we set down a few seconds later the incoming fire had ceased; and as I ran toward the tree line I nearly stepped on the body of a First Division Grunt hidden in the tall, beautiful, green, grass who had died not much more than a minute before.   He had come in on the wave of helicopters just ahead of mine; his uniform was brand-new clean, as if he were new to war, as if he had drowned in the font of his baptism of fire.
 
I know, it makes no sense, there were enough dead Americans around for a million eyes to see, but I remember that one.
 
The third tattoo on my soul was put there later on the same day.
 
Having missed that action Sakai and I decided to hop another helicopter in hope of finding hotter action.  Dig it, Dear Reader, we were looking for hot, hot war.  That's a mystery for the mystery pile.
 
We found ourselves at a body collection site, where bodies where being brought in on helicopter after helicopter.
 
Damn, it was a totally insane day.
 
The clouds were scudding fast enough to make a sailor dizzy and Sakai, who would win a Pulitzer for one of the photographs he had taken the day before, was taking pictures of the line of bodies juxtaposed with a line of still-living Grunts marching by them to board the helicopters that had brought the bodies in, when he was grabbed by the wrist by an angry Grunt and yanked along to the sergeant-major I was talking to; Sakai was saying in a pitiful, small voice, "Virgil-san, Virgil-san", and the Grunt was saying, "This man was photographing the dead"; and the hatred in the eyes of  the Grunts all around us was so thick a spider could have woven a web from it; and Sakai (and I as a witness) might have been murdered right then and there, but Sakai broke the spell by taking the film out of the camera and exposing it.
 
Dear Reader, things get tense on the battlefield.
 
It was in this context that I saw the third dead warrior who will always be tattooed on my mind.
 
There were 28 bodies laid out in a row.   I counted them, thinking I might live long enough to tell you about them; and that was very optimistic thinking because the chances of living through that day were slim.
 
Among those 28 bodies was the body of a First Division black soldier, and even as I tell you about this my heart aches.  He was lying face down on a olive drab plastic tarp and the wind was whipping the tarp and the tarp was slapping his face.
 
But the wound, the wound, Dear Reader, the wound I will never forget was not the wound that killed him.  No, it was another wound.  On his right wrist where a watch might have been was a circle about the size of a silver dollar, the thinnest most perfectly round slicing off of skin, a shallow, shallow skin-deep slicing; and where his black skin had been was as ivory white bloodless circle.
 
Why should I remember that?  Go figure.  And here I am thirty-nine years later blubbering like a baby as I tell you this story.  I love Memorial Day.  I hate Memorial Day.