Born on the Fourth of July

The Blood is still rolling off my flak jacket from the hole in my shoulder and there are bullets cracking into the sand all around me. I keep trying to move my legs, but I cannot feel them.

"Oh, get me out of here, get me out of here, please, someone help me! Oh, help me, please help me. Oh, God, oh, Jesus!"

I try to breathe, but it is difficult. I have to get out to this place, make it out of here somehow.

Someone shouts from my left now, screaming for me to get up. Again and again he screams, but I am trapped in the sand.

"Is there a corpsman?" I cry. "Can you get a corpsman?"

There is a loud crack and I hear him begin to sob. "They've shot my fucking finger off! Let's go, Sarge! Let's get outa here!"

"I can't move," I gasp. "I can't move my legs! I can't feel anything!"

I watch him go running back to the tree line.

"Sarge, are you all right?" Someone else is calling to me now and I try to turn around. Again there is the sudden crack of a bullet and a boy's voice crying. "Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus Christ!" I hear his body fall in back of me.

I think he must be dead, but I feel nothing for him, I just want to live. I feel nothing.

And now I hear another man coming up from behind, trying to save me. "Get outa here!" I scream. "Get the fuck outa here!"

A tall black man with long skinny arms and enormous hands picks me up and throws me over his shoulder as bullets begin cracking over our heads like strings of firecrackers. Again and again they crack as the sky swirls around us like a cyclone. "Motherfuckers, motherfuckers!" he screams. And the rounds keep cracking and the sky and the sun on my face and my body all gone, all twisted up, gangling like a puppet's, diving again and again into the sand, up and down, rolling and cursing, gasping for breath. "Goddamn, goddamn motherfuckers!"

And finally I am dragged into a hole in the sand with the bottom of my body that can no longer feel twisted and bent underneath me. The black man runs from the hole without ever saying a thing. The only thing I can think of, the only thing that crosses my mind, is living.

Men are screaming all around me. "Oh, God, get me out of here!" "Please help!" they scream. Oh, Jesus, like little children now, not like Marines, not like the posters, not like that day in the high school, this is for real.

"Mother!" screams a man without a face.

"Oh, I don't want to die!" screams a young boy cupping his intestines with his hands. "Oh, please, oh, no, oh, God, oh, help! Mother!" he screams again.

•

We are moving slowly through the water, the amtrac (amphibious tractor) rocking back and forth. We cannot be brave anymore; there is no reason. It means nothing now. We hold on to ourselves, to things around us, to memories, to thoughts, to dreams. I breathe slowly, desperately trying to stay awake.

The steel trap door of the amtrac is opening. I see faces. Corpsmen, I think. Others, curious, looking in at us. Air, fresh, I feel, I smell. They are carrying me out now. Over wounded bodies, past wounded screams. I'm in a helicopter now, lofting above the battalion area. I'm leaving the war. I'm going to live, I am still breathing, I keep thinking over and over, I'm going to live and get out of here.

They are shoving needles and tubes into my arms. Now we are being packed into planes and as each hour passes, I begin to believe that I am going to live. I begin to realize more and more as I watch the other wounded packed around me on shelves that I am going to live.

The journey seems to take a very long time, but soon we are at the place where the wounded are sent.

"What's your name?" the voice shouts.

"Wh-wh-what?" I say.

"What's your name?" the voice says again.

"K-K-Kovic," I say.

"No!" says the voice. "I want your name, rank and Service number, date of birth, the name of your father and mother."

"Kovic. Sergeant. Two-oh-three-oh-two-six-one, uh, when are you going to--"

"Date of birth!" the voice shouts.

"July fourth, nineteen forty-six. I was born on the Fourth of July. I can't feel--"

"What outfit did you come from?"

"What's going on? When are you going to operate?" I say.

"The doctors will operate," he says. "Don't worry," he says confidently. "They are very busy and there are many wounded, but they will take care of you soon."

He continues to stand almost at attention in front of me with a long clipboard in his hand, jotting down all the information he can. I cannot understand why they are taking so long to operate. There is something very wrong with me, I think, and they must operate as quickly as possible. The man with the clipboard walks out.

I am taken to a long room where there are many doctors and nurses. They move quickly around me. They are acting very competent. "You will be fine," says one nurse calmly.

"Breathe deeply into the mask," the doctor says.

"Are you going to operate?" I ask.

"Yes. Now breathe deeply into the mask." As the darkness of the mask slowly covers my face, I pray with all my being that I will live through this operation and see the light of day once again. I want to live so much. And even before I go to sleep, with the blackness still swirling around my head and the numbness of sleep, I begin to fight as I have never fought before in my life.

I awake to the screams of other men around me. I have made it. I think that maybe the wound is my punishment for killing the corporal and the children. That now everything is OK and the score is evened up. And now I am packed in this place with the others who have been wounded like myself, strapped onto a strange circular bed. I feel tubes going into my nose and hear the clanking, pumping sound of a machine. I still cannot feel any of my body, but I know I am alive. I feel a terrible pain in my chest. My body is so cold. It has never been this weak. It feels so tired and out of touch, so lost and in pain. I can still barely breathe. I look around me, at people moving in shadows of numbness.

I can hear a radio. It is the Armed Forces radio. There is a young kid with half his head blown away. They have brought him in and put him right next to me. He has thick bandages wrapped all around his head till I can hardly see his face at all. He is like a vegetable--a 19-year-old vegetable, thrashing his arms back and forth, babbling and pissing in his clean white sheets.

There is a general walking down the aisles now, going to each bed. A skinny private with a Polaroid camera follows directly behind him. The general is dressed in an immaculate uniform with shiny shoes. "Good afternoon, Marine," the general says. "In the name of the President of the United States and the United States Marine Corps, I am proud to present you with the Purple Heart," the general says. Just then, the skinny man with the Polaroid camera jumps up, flashing a picture of the wounded man. "And a picture to send home to your folks."

He comes up to my bed and says exactly the same thing he said to all the rest. The skinny man jumps up, snapping a picture of the general handing the Purple Heart to me. "And here," says the general, "here is a picture to send home to your folks." The general makes a sharp left face. He is marching to the bed next to me, where the 19-year-old kid is still pissing in his pants, babbling like a little baby.

"In the name of the President of the United States," the general says. The kid is screaming now, almost tearing the bandages off his head, exposing the parts of his brains that are still left. The general does not finish what he is saying. He stares at the 19-year-old for what seems a long time. He sharply marches to the next bed.

•

All his life he'd wanted to be a winner. It was always so important to win, to be the very best. But now it all seemed different. All the hopes about being the best Marine, winning all those medals. They all seemed crushed now, they were gone forever. Like the man he had just killed with one shot, all these things had disappeared and he knew, he was certain, they would never come back again. Even working in the food store that summer before he went to the war now seemed like a real nice thing. It seemed like so much nicer a thing than what was happening to him now, all the faces, the torn green fatigues, and just below his foot was the guy with a gaping hole through his throat.

The amtrac was heading back to the thick barbed wire where the battalion lived and everyone around him was quiet. There was no question in his mind they all knew what had happened--that he had just pulled the little metal trigger and put a slug through the corporal's neck. He was very nervous and his finger, the one that had pulled the trigger, was sort of scratching his leg now.

When they got back to the battalion area, he gave a quick report to a young lieutenant in the major's bunker. "They were attacking," he said, looking at the (continued on page 283)Born on the Fourth(continued from page 196) lieutenant's face, "and we moved backward."

"You retreated," the lieutenant said.

"Yes, we retreated and he got shot. He lived a little while, but then he died. He died there in the sand and we called for help. And then we put him in the amtrac. He must have run away when they started firing. It was dark and I couldn't tell."

"OK," said the young-looking lieutenant. "Come back again in the morning and we can go over it again. Too bad about...."

"Yeah," he said.

He was almost crying now as he turned and walked out of the big command bunker. There was sand all over the place outside and a cold monsoon wind was blowing. He looked out into the darkness and heard the waves of the China Sea breaking softly far away.

I killed him, he kept repeating over and over to himself.

He's dead, he thought.

Gripping his rifle, holding the trigger, he went through the whole thing again and again, tapping, touching the trigger lightly each time he saw the corporal from Georgia running toward him just as he had out there in the sand when everything seemed so crazy and frightening. Each time he felt his heart racing as the three cracks went off and the dark figure slumped to the sand in front of him.

Slowly he turned the rifle around and pointed the barrel toward his head. Oh, Jesus God Almighty, he thought. Why? Why? Why? He began to cry, slowly at first. Why? I'm going to kill myself, he thought. I'm going to pull this trigger. He was going mad. One minute he wanted to pull the trigger and the next he was feeling the strange power of a man who had just killed someone.

He laid the weapon down by the side of his rack and crawled in with his clothing still on. I killed him, he kept thinking, and when I wake up tomorrow, it will still be the same.

He opened his eyes slowly as the light came into the tent like a bright triangle. They were all starting to stir, the other men, starting to get up. And then he remembered again what had happened.

He went back to the big sandbagged bunker to see the major.

"That was a pretty rough night, Sergeant," the major said, looking up from the green-plastic maps on his desk.

"Yes, sir," he said. "It was pretty bad."

"Ran into a lot of them, didn't you?" the major said, almost smiling.

"Yes, we sure did. I mean, they just sort of popped up on us and started firing."

The major looked down at the maps again and frowned slightly. "What happened out there?" he said.

"There were a bunch of shots," he said carefully. "Everybody was shooting; it was a bad fire fight." He paused. "It was pretty bad and then Corporal was shot. He was shot and he fell down in front of us and a couple of the men ran out to get him. They pulled him back in. I think the others were still firing. The corpsman tried to help ... the corporal was shot in the neck ... the corpsman tried to help...."

It was becoming very difficult for him to talk now. "Major," he said, "I think I might have ... killed the corporal."

"I don't think so," said the major quickly.

"It was very confusing. It was hard to tell what was happening."

"Yes, I know," said the major. "Sometimes it gets very hard out there. I was out a couple of weeks ago and sometimes it's very hard to tell what's happening."

He stared down at the floor of the bunker until he could make himself say it again. He wasn't quite sure the major had heard him the first time.

"But I just want you to know, Major. I think I was the one who killed him. I think it might have been me."

There, he had said it. And now he was walking away.

For some reason, he was feeling a lot better. He had told the major everything and the major hadn't believed it. It was like going to confession when he was a kid and the priest saying everything was OK.

•

It was his friend the major who gave him his second chance. He called him into the command bunker one day and told him he wanted him to become the leader of his new scout team. Here was his chance, he thought, to make everything good again. This young, strong Marine was getting a second crack at becoming a hero. Here was his chance, he thought over and over.

He went out on patrol with the others the night of the ambush at exactly eight o'clock. One by one the scouts moved slowly past the thick barbed wire and began to walk along the bank of the river, heading toward the graveyard where the ambush would be set up. There was a rice paddy on the edge of the graveyard. No one said a word as they walked through it and he thought he could hear voices from the village. He could smell the familiar smoke from the fires in the huts and he knew that the people who went out fishing each day must have come home. He remembered how difficult it had been when he had first come to the war to tell the villagers from the enemy and sometimes it had seemed easier to hate all of them, but he had always tried very hard not to.

They were on the rice dike that bordered the graveyard. The voices from the huts nearby seemed quite loud. The lieutenant had sent one of the men, Molina, on across the rice dikes, almost to the edge of the village. The cold rain was coming down very hard.

He could see him waving his arms excitedly, trying to tell the lieutenant something. Stumbling over the dikes, almost crawling, Molina came back toward the lieutenant. He saw him whisper something in his ear. And now the lieutenant turned and looked at him.

"What is it?" he cried.

"Be quiet," whispered the lieutenant sharply, grabbing his arm, almost throwing him into the paddy. He began talking very quickly and much louder than he should have. "I think we found them. I think we found them," he repeated, almost shouting.

He didn't know what the lieutenant meant. "What?" he said.

"The sappers, the sappers! Let's go!" The lieutenant was taking over now. He seemed very sure of himself; he was acting very confident. "Let's go, goddamn it!"

He clicked his rifle off safety and got his men up quickly, urging them forward, following the lieutenant and Molina toward the edge of the village. They ran through the paddy, splashing like a family of ducks. This time he hoped and prayed it would be the real enemy. He would be ready for them this time.

He saw a light, a fire, he thought, flickering in the distance, off to the right of the village, with little dark figures that seemed to be moving behind it. He could not tell how far away they were from there. It was hard to tell distance in the dark.

The lieutenant moved next to him. "You see?" he whispered. "Look," he said, very keyed up now. "They've got rifles. Can you see the rifles? Can you see them?" the lieutenant asked him.

He looked very hard through the rain.

"Can you see them?"

"Yes, I see them. I see them," he said. He was very sure.

The lieutenant put his arm around him and whispered in his ear. "Tell them down at the end to give me an illumination. I want this whole place lit up like a fucking Christmas tree."

Turning quickly to the man on his right, he told him what the lieutenant had said. He told him to pass the instructions all the way to the end of the line, where a flare would be fired just above the small fire near the village. He felt the whole line tense, then heard the woooorshh of the flare cracking overhead in a tremendous ball of sputtering light, turning night into day, arching over their heads toward the small fire that he now saw was burning inside an open hut.

Suddenly, someone was firing from the end of the line, and now all the men in the line opened up, roaring their weapons like thunder, pulling their triggers again and again without even thinking, emptying everything they had into the hut in a tremendous stream of bright-orange tracers that crisscrossed in the night.

The flare arched its last sputtering bits into the village and it became dark, and all he could see were the bright-orange embers from the fire that had gone out.

And he could hear them.

There were voices screaming.

"What happened? Goddamn it, what happened?" yelled the lieutenant.

The voices were screaming from inside the hut.

"Who gave the order to fire? I wanna know who gave the order to fire."

"We better get a killer team out there," he heard Molina say.

"All right, all right. Sergeant," the lieutenant said to him, "get out there with Molina and tell me how many we got."

He got to his feet and quickly got five of the men together, leading them over the dike and through the water to the hut from where the screams were still coming.

Molina turned the beam of his flashlight into the hut. "Oh, God," he said. "Oh, Jesus Christ." He started to cry. "We just shot up a bunch of kids!"

The floor of the small hut was covered with them, screaming and thrashing their arms back and forth, lying in pools of blood, crying wildly, screaming again and again. They were shot in the face, in the chest, in the legs, moaning and crying.

"Oh, Jesus!" he cried.

He could hear the lieutenant shouting at them, wanting to know how many they had killed.

"What's happening? What's going on up there?" The lieutenant was getting impatient now.

Molina shouted for the lieutenant to come quickly. "You better get up here. There's a lot of wounded people up here."

He heard a small girl moaning now. She was shot through the stomach and bleeding from the rear end. All he could see now was blood everywhere and he heard their screams with his heart racing like it had never raced before. He felt crazy and weak as he stood there staring at them with the rest of the men, staring down onto the floor as if it were a nightmare, as if it were some kind of dream and it really wasn't happening. He knelt down in the midst of the screaming bodies and began bandaging them.

The lieutenant had just come up with the others.

"Help me!" he screamed. "Somebody help!"

"Well, goddamn it, Sergeant! What's the matter? How many did we kill?"

"They're children!" he screamed at the lieutenant.

"Children and old men!" cried Molina.

"Where are their rifles?" The lieutenant asked.

"There aren't any rifles," he said.

"Well, help him, then!" screamed the lieutenant to the rest of the men. The men stood in the entrance to the hut, but they would not move. "Help him, help him. I'm ordering you to help him!"

The men were not moving and some of them were crying now, dropping their rifles and sitting down on the wet ground. They were weeping now, with their hands against their faces. "Oh, Jesus, oh, God, forgive us."

"Forgive us for what we've done!" he heard Molina cry.

"You men! You men have got to start listening to me. You gotta stop crying like babies and start acting like Marines!" The lieutenant was shoving the men, pleading with them to move. "You're men, not babies. It's all a mistake. It wasn't your fault. They got in the way. Don't you understand?--they got in the goddamn way!"

And when it was all over and all the wounded had been taken away, he helped the lieutenant move the men back on patrol. They walked away from the hut in the rain. And now he felt his body go numb and heavy, feeling awful and sick inside, like the night the corporal had died, as they moved along in the dark and the rain behind the lieutenant toward the graveyard.

•

They were ten men armed to the teeth, walking in a sweeping line toward the village. It was beautiful, just like the movies.

I had started walking toward the village when the first bullet hit me. There was a sound like firecrackers going off all around my feet. Then a real loud crack and my leg went numb below the knee. I looked down at my foot and there was blood at the back of it. The bullet had gone through the front and blown out nearly the whole of my heel.

I had been shot. The war had finally caught up with my body. I felt good inside. Finally, the war was with me and I had been shot by the enemy. I was getting out of the war and I was going to be a hero.

"I just want you to know, Major. I think I was the one who killed the corporal. I think it was me."