The things that mattered

A long time later, I would think:

There was about the place a savagery that took all who entered, a tempestuous rage that clawed at the calm hearts of reasonable men. On some, the depravity fell as a light cloak, to be discarded when the sun of civilization again touched their shoulders. On others, the claws sank deep, darkening hearts and minds, freeing the barbarity that had so long drooled inside.

John held down the gook and said, "Kill him! Kill him, goddammit!" and I slid my knife beneath the gook’s ear and into his brain. It was an easy thing to do, a reasonable action of the time. That I threw up what was in my stomach made the event no less necessary. That John threw off the gook and fell to his hands and knees, cursing what we had done, made the killing no less reasonable. By then we had thrown up or thrown off all that was unnecessary. There were things that mattered and things that did not, and of those that did not matter, we gave little thought.

I cannot remember the things that did not matter. To live mattered, and all the words and pictures and reasons that made survival our only goal.

We thought of young women, daydreamed about girls we had known, and we put the thoughts into words, although the words did no justice to our dreams. Even those of us who in lives past, unnecessary lives, had the ability to speak our thoughts, now discovered our words lacked explanation.

We would say, "There was this girl . . . " and talk of eyes and breasts and legs, but even in our own minds we couldn't see her, not even a rational picture, only a dim, faceless figure that could have been any girl. We could speak of, say, a 1966 GTO convertible, baby blue, leather seats, 389-CID, four-in the-floor, and those to whom we talked knew. They had seen pictures of the car we described.

There were other pictures, other words. Experts of food never eaten, of whiskies and liquers never tasted, we described to each other restaurants never visited, of tables with white cloths and chairs padded soft. In those restaurants in Baltimore or Chicago or Dallas, the waiters and waitresses were mannered and sought only to please the customers.

We lied to each other, but those lied to knew the meaning of the words. In a sense, our tales transcended truth. We spoke in dreams, in hopes, of those things we wanted most, and when those dreams became, in our words, things we had once possessed, each of us understood.

Girls and women we talked of most. Our girls were tawny brown, ebony black, creamy white, with hair blonde or brown or auburn or black as midnight sky. Their eyes were green or blue or brown or black, their breasts perfect and carried high. All those girls were slim waisted. Their legs were long and their thighs round and soft to our touch.

Had those girls been there, in reality and not in our minds, we would have stared, afraid to touch. We would have stood outside their aura, basked in the smiles they gave us, sniffed the scent of purity. What we wanted was to have them near, to be near them.

To lie between their legs was, had we admitted truth to ourselves, secondary to simple nearness. What we would have done was hold their hands, touch our dirty scaled fingers to their clean skin.

Lust played no part in our dreams. There was passion, but that would have been eased had we the opportunity to only rest beside the girl in our dreams, feel her arms around us, know that when she stroked our temples and said, "It's okay," she spoke truth.

It all seems so easy now, so logical, because it was done. There was no thought to it, no conscious decision made; rather a reaction to an action. When I had the opportunity to think about what we had done and what was done to us, I remembered it in terms of that physics class in high school, one of Newton's laws, that for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. And that was the way things were. The gooks fired, we returned fire. On ambushes, we waited, and when the gooks sometimes came down the trails, we blew them away with Claymores and killed them with machine guns and rifles and grenade launchers, just as they killed our friends with mines and mortars and machine guns and rifles. In that, we all were equal.

It was easy and logical, easier now to think of than to do, but equally logical then and now.