The Man Who Walked Away From War, Part I

     It wasn’t that Moreland was a jinx or had bad luck. Guys in the squad just didn’t like him.

       You get jinxes, same as you get lucky ones. Lucky ones, fire never comes close. You can be in the biggest firefight ever -- thousands of rounds cracking, dozens of grenades going off -- and stuff never comes near the lucky ones. In a firefight, the lucky ones are on one knee, busting caps like they’re on a qualification range, where targets pop up and you shoot them and they go down and come back up when the range NCO flips a switch and you shoot them again. That’s the way it was with the lucky ones. They knelt and fired, because bad stuff avoided them.

       Marsetti had the luck. Two times when the gooks hit at night, a grenade landed in Marsetti’s foxhole but didn’t go off. The first time a grenade landed in Marsetti’s foxhole, he didn’t know it was there until next morning, when the shit was over and we were policing up -- counting bodies, gathering the few weapons the gooks couldn’t get to when the people using them were dead. There was this loud “MOTHERFUCK!” and Marsetti came flying from his hole like he was launched by a rocket, and he was yelling in mid-air. Marsetti yelled “MOTHERFUCK!” again after he landed on the ground in front of his hole, and he beat his fists on the dirt. The rest of us grabbed weapons and hit the deck or jumped in our holes, figuring the gooks were coming back.

       Marsetti lay in the dirt for a while, not saying anything after the second “MOTHERFUCK!” He just stared around, eyes wide and vacant. Nothing happened -- no incoming or anything -- so we decided maybe there was a Two-Step in Marsetti’s hole, a bamboo viper or banana viper, and when it bites, you get two steps and then you die. After a while, Marsetti raised his head. His eyes were hugely round as though he’d seen a Two-Step or maybe a gook drawing a bead on him. He looked around, then stared straight into my eyes, grinning that crazy grin he had, and he said, real quiet, “There’s a motherfuckin grenade in my hole, Man. A fuckin gook grenade and the pin’s pulled.”

       I didn’t believe him. Marsetti was always pulling shit on us.

       He must have read my eyes. “No shit, Man,” he said.

       “Riiight,” I said, drawing it out the way you do when somebody’s pulling something on you. Then I stood up and walked over to the hole and looked in, and damned if there wasn’t a gook grenade in the middle of the hole, pin pulled and everything, just lying there. “Holy shit!” I said and I backed up fast, yelling, “Hey! There’s a live grenade in Marsetti’s hole!”

       The thing was, nobody knew Marsetti had the luck. When the gooks hit that night, Peabody was in the hole with Marsetti, and Peabody took an AK round through the neck. Not in a “Guess what? You’re dead” place, but bad enough he was medivacked when the gooks pulled out. It was still dark when Dustoff came in, with Sergeant Reid standing in the LZ and holding a strobe light so the pilots could see where to land. Sergeant Reid was a crazy bastard, but he had balls. We later heard Peabody went home. There was nerve damage or something.

       The second time a grenade landed in Marsetti’s hole, the thing hit him in the chest. That’s what he told me next morning. “Man, I was there, bustin caps like a motherfucker, you know? I mean rockin off some rounds, and this thing hits me in the chest. Right here.” He made a fist and tapped the center of his chest. “I knew what it was, Man. I mean, a grenade hits you in the chest, you know what it is.” The grenade hit Marsetti and bounced off, landing somewhere in the hole. I remember Marsetti yelling “Grenade!” in the middle of the fight, but I thought maybe he was throwing one at the gooks. He said he yelled “Grenade!” while flying from the hole. “Me and Chavez, Man, we unassed that hole, let me tell you. Laid behind it all night long, waitin for the fucker to go off, waitin for gooks to fuckin crawl in and fuckin waste us.” He shook his head. “Man, I was one scared dude. Chavez too.”

       Chavez said it was all true, and when we saw the grenade in the hole -- just like the first time, pin pulled and everything -- we knew Marsetti had the luck.

       The first time a grenade landed in Marsetti’s hole and didn’t go off, the LT wanted to call EOD (Explosive Ordnance Demolition -- crazy fuckers who blow stuff in place; walk up to a bomb or artillery round and place C4 next to it and then connect wires and a blasting cap and back off and blow the thing). The LT said EOD could come out and blow the grenade in place, but Sergeant Reid said Marsetti should just bury the thing, we didn’t have time to wait for EOD. Marsetti wasn’t too hot for the idea, shoveling dirt on top of the grenade, but Sergeant Reid said, “It’s your hole, and you can either bury the grenade or pick it up and throw it away.” Marsetti took the easy choice, lying on his stomach and raking dirt into the hole with his entrenching tool.

       The second time, Marsetti didn’t even ask what he should do. He told Sergeant Reid what had happened, then went back to his hole and filled it in. Standing up. “What the fuck,” he said when I came by. “Didn’t get me the first time, ain’t gonna get me now.”

       Marsetti definitely had the luck, but he had been there long enough to get it. Nobody ever arrived in-country with the luck. When somebody got it, the luck just settled over him. Nobody ever said he was working for the luck. It’s the kind of thing you can’t earn; it either comes or it doesn’t. Sort of like grace. You can’t earn grace, no matter how much faith you have, no matter how many good works you do. That’s what preachers back home said, anyway. God either gives you grace, and luck, or He doesn’t.

       After a time, when we all knew Marsetti had the luck, some guys wanted to be close to him everywhere he went, like maybe the luck would rub off or it had an aura and would settle over them the same way it settled on Marsetti. That didn’t work either. A couple of guys got wasted trying to get Marsetti’s luck, moving toward him in a firefight when they should have remained in place. After a longer time, we decided it was Marsetti’s gift. The spirit had landed on him, and we couldn’t share in it.

       Moreland, though ... Like I said, he didn’t have bad luck, but he wasn’t a jinx, either. Moreland had been in-country five months when he told me about the grunt who walked away from the war, and guys with bad luck don’t last that long. You get a guy who can’t watch where he’s going, his feet are too big, too heavy and he stumbles into tripwires, he won’t be around very long. You might think bad luck balances out the good luck, but that isn’t the way it works. Sometimes you get more good luck than bad, sometimes it’s the other way around. And a jinx isn’t the same as somebody who has bad luck. A jinx might trip a wire, and maybe that wire is connected so it doesn’t get the man who tripped it, but the man behind him. Or a jinx might draw heavy fire and the bullets find the guy next to him. Eventually, though, somebody who draws that much fire, it catches up to him. So, Moreland wasn’t a jinx, but he didn’t have bad luck either.

       The thing about Moreland was, nobody liked him. He was always bragging about stuff back home -- cars, girls, places he’d been. Lying, actually. All of us lied about that stuff, especially girls and cars. Moreland just didn’t know when to stop lying. Grunts know a liar when they see one, a real liar and not a simple bullshitter. And Moreland was a liar. He always had to go one up, always had to latch onto somebody else’s story, take it one or two steps further. In the five months I knew Moreland, he told the truth twice.