‘This heat, the stupid bugs everywhere, the looks these people give me, this whole country hates me, even the damn elephant grass’, says Henry, a 19 year old private from Sacramento.

‘When I get back home I want to live in a city with nothing but concrete.’

‘Quit your yapping. We have to burn all the hooches. Leave nothing for the dinks’, says sergeant Nathan F. Johnson.

‘Some of these people have nothing to do with the Vietcong or the NVA. They’re just farmers. They’re already struggling. The kids don’t even have shoes.’

‘Raverman, these gooks got enough rice to feed a whole God damn NVA division. There are no innocents here.’

Raverman, whose real name is Raphael, says: ‘Sarge, think about it, look around, most of them are kids, women, old guys. Take the rice if that’s the problem.’

‘You want us to hop around the jungle with sacks of rice slung over our shoulders, Raverman?’

‘We don’t have to burn the whole village over this. We could throw the rice in the river. Maybe it’s not for the VC or NVA or whatever millitant group you can think of at all. Maybe they will go up to Saigon and sell it on the market.’

‘Yeah, and maybe they will stick their Czechoslovak AK-47s in the rice and a week from now some little yellow dudes in black pyjamas come crawling out of every sewer in Saigon and shoot us up. And what am I doing talking to you? We’re burning the hooches. Eddy, take your sqad and burn everything to the left of the central square. I will take the other two sqads and burn everything on the other side. Find me someone who speaks English so we can tell them to move out. We’ll give ‘em fifteen minutes. Tell ‘em to assemble by the bridge.’

‘You’re going to drive them right into the arms of the VC if you do this, sarge.’

‘Raverman, you worked in a damn chocolate factory before you got to the Nam. What do you know about war?’

‘Where are these people gonna go?’

‘We’ll take them with us, back to base camp. Put them together with the other refugees.’

‘These wouldn’t be refugees though. We’re displacing them. Why would they even want to follow us? How can they know we’re not just going to mow them down in a ditch?’

‘We are not displacing them, we are liberating them from the VC. Do you think these people enjoy having the VC come at night and take their rice?’

‘Have you asked them?’

‘Careful, boy, I got stripes on me, I don’t see any on you. Wanna clean latrines when we get back?’ ‘You’re going to put me on latrine duty anyway.’

‘Well, Raverman, nobody cleans them as good as you do. You got a real sense of responsibility. You’re the backbone of America, son. A bit soft on the inside, but a hard worker. Blue collar through and through. West Pennsylvania coal miner attitude’

‘Nobody in my family ever worked in a coal mine and my folks are from Maryland originally. Am gonna go to college as soon as I get out of here.’

‘Remind me, how many days you got left?’

‘185’

‘Sweet lord. You’re half way. We’ll have ourselves a little party to celebrate how short you are as soon as we’re back. You got the wrong attitude though. The way to survive here, is to start liking it. Work up an appetite for it. Sign up for a second tour. A third tour. The longer you’re here the less likely you’ll die.’

‘Thanks for the advice, but I will settle for one tour, sarge.’

‘It will grow on you, you’ll see. Don’t give up on the Nam just yet. It’s a lovely country. Nothing makes you feel more alive than a few million zipperheads ready to cut your throat. Am thinking about getting a place here after we flush out the commie rats. Hire a French-Vietnamese gal to cook for the family and baby-sit my boys while me and the wife sip a Mai Tai in a hammock. Yeah, I’ll hire one of those French-Vietnamese ones. Those mixed ones get me going good.’

Sarge produces some kind of hollering sound that Raphael assumes is typical in Texas.

A soldier taps the sarge on the shoulder: ‘Sorry, sarge, but these people ain’t moving.’

‘Did you make it clear we’re going to fire up the place?’

‘We did. They ain’t moving.’

‘Well, fuck it then. They will get their ass in gear as soon as this shithole goes up in flames.’

‘Sarge, HQ didn’t order us to burn any village.’

‘And is HQ somewhere around here? You see Major Anderson? Oh, Major Anderson, are you here? Private Raverman has a question. Nobody at HQ cares about this stinkhole, Raverman. HQ cares about killing VC and losing as few American boys as possible. The folks at home get a little sentimental when too many body bags start arriving. They love a little war, but only the part with the parades and the flag waving and the speeches.’

Raphael knows Sarge has a wife. He has three kids, three boys 10, 11 and 12. All three play Little League baseball. If he gets drunk everyone has to look at pictures of them. They seem to be happy kids. Sarge is hugging all three of them at the same time in many of the pics. The same guy is setting fire to hoochies and rudily shoving women and old men to the side who are begging him to stop.

Raphael wonders if sarge could do the same to white people. Intuitively his answer is yes. Tell sarge who the enemy is and he will do whatever to destroy that enemy. You give sarge a sense of direction and sarge gets going. If Raphael got wounded, sarge would carry him back to base camp. And if sarge thinks the VC is benefiting from a village, that village goes up in smoke. Sarge was a beer delivery guy before he got to the Nam. On the road driving from bar to bar all day. Got bored and volunteered for this shit.

Sarge was right. Now that all the huts are burning the locals are all fleeing. Some of the men are corraling them near the bridge. Women carry infants in their arms. The older men and women drag goats and pigs behind them.

Raphael is looking at 185 more days of this. ‘Push it down’, he says to himself. ‘Push it down, lock it up in a box inside and open the box back home. Not now.’

He stops another private running around with a jar of gasoline to speed up the fires. ‘How can you do this, Howard? What did these people do to you?’

‘Raverman, just shut up and make yourself useful. If these people didn’t feed Charlie this war would be over by about next week.’

‘The kids are feeding VC battalions too?’

‘Look, dude, once we kill every damn VC in this country those kids will have a better future too. Now go escort the refugees, man, if you don’t want help out here. I don’t know how sarge puts up with you questioning every damn fart you get a whiff of.’

Raphael joins the men herding the inhabitants together. He can see it on their faces. If they weren’t Vietcong supporters yet before the US troops arrived they are certainly fanatical VC supporters now. Raphael knows this war cannot be won. The best recruiters the VC has, are American Gis going around destroying homes.

Raphael picks up a child, maybe six years old, smiles at the mother who’s already carrying what looks like a two year old. The woman doesn’t smile back. Raphael offers the child some M&Ms he always has in his pocket. The kind of sweets that survive even this insane climate. The kid refuses. They move out. Back to base camp. Sarge puts old men and women in front ‘cause he thinks they know where all the mines are buried.

That’s disproven when one old woman steps on a so called ‘toe popper’ and has her feet cut to pieces. Other than that they make it back to base camp with no further incidents. ‘That mama-san can retire and sit out her days in a rocking chair now’, is all what sarge says about that. Sarge gets complimented by Major Anderson.

Raphael tells his buddies that collective punishment is not the way you win a war. ‘And what would you do?’, asks Howard. ‘Give every VC in the area a turkey dinner with mashed potatoes and ice cream for dessert and some Kool-Aid? Treat them to the sweet taste of capitalism to make the dinks forget about Ho Chi Mi?’

All the men laugh.

‘Here is the truth, Raverman. Disarm America and these dinks cross the ocean and burn the White House before you can say flower power. However, if they lay down their arms nothing will happen to them. There will just be peace.’

Raphael doesn’t answer. ‘What? No more arguments?’

‘My grandfather always said you can’t play chess against a pigeon.’

‘That’s supposed to be smart, Raverman?’ Raphael stops arguing and daydreams about how he will have long hair a year from now, and drive one of those Volkswagen vans, and girls around him who hate the war and love booze and Jimmy Hendrix and how he will be throwing his medals on the lawn of the White House.

The important thing now is to get as little blood as possible on his hands in the next 185 days.

His most dedicated contribution to making America safe.