No Hero, Part 1

 

I was 18 when I got there, and the Army was my first real job, and my first real time away from home. I learned to cheat where I could, because that’s what you were supposed to do, and if you weren’t stealing time or equipment, your supervisors would assume that you had, no matter if they could prove it. All in all, for a guy who already has an inclination towards fraud and a disdain for authority, I did okay.

You have to understand that this was just how it was, and how it probably still is almost six years later. You take what you can get when you can get it, and you make sure you don’t get caught. The Army was full of wonderful, life-affirming lessons on survival like that: how to punk a Sergeant First Class after not showing up for a mandatory fun formation; how to skip PT for almost six months; how to not show up with my section for Alerts, or even let them know I’m alive. Not only did I not get in trouble, or even reprimanded, I was considered promotion material; I had the LT in charge of my section talking to me seriously about going into the ROTC. I thought I was made of solid fucking gold, and that nothing could touch me.

Most of the people in my Company were mechanics, and so most of my friends were mechanics, too; Metallica fans, heavy smokers and big whiskey drinkers, and they liked to spend their free time playing pool and getting drunk with the Filipino whores that needed those ten dollar drinks to buy their freedom back from Mama San behind the bar. These guys liked to put up a front and talk a lot of shit, like guys do, and I was no different. We were downright mean to each other, name calling and pushing and the occasional sock to the head, but it was just between us and none of us really meant anything by the brutality. I know one time some drunk guy called my buddy Whitebear’s soldier girlfriend a whore and fully eight people turned around to kick that guy’s ass. We fought with each other, and bitched and heckled and played pranks on each other, but no one of us was going to let someone outside that fuck with anyone inside.

My friend Wade had a pregnant wife back home who he loved dearly. I know he teased, but unlike most of the married guys, he never fooled around with any of the whores, though he seemed sorely tempted to. I respected that. On the night before he went on leave to fly home and meet his baby daughter I sat up with him and we got drunk and talked about him being a dad. He was so amazed, he had all of this love and wonder and he was glowing he was so happy. It was one of the best nights I had over there. I walked him to the bus station at midnight after he filed his leave papers with the S-1 and wished him luck on his flight and his thirty days off.

 

When he got back he still had the glow, and to celebrate his return to the world, and because we were still on semi-lockdown a couple of months after 9-11, we got raging drunk in my barracks room. We started talking about what would happen when the North Koreans decided to kill us. We were only a few miles south of the JSA and the DMZ, on the main highway that lead directly to Seoul. Our beloved hillside was a roadblock for any oncoming communist horde that had its sights on the city just an hour to the south.  It was a joke on camp that the people to survive would be the ones who stole the civilian vehicles and drove south, and the dead would be those who followed the Alert procedures since we took so long to assemble, and the NK’s had had fifty years to sight our buildings with their artillery. So we joked: run, run, find a mama san in Pusan and wait out the war. It was a great laugh.

 

We were quiet for a little bit after this. Wade was obliterated, and I wasn’t much better. We’d been drinking steadily for a couple of hours, and had had probably a fifth each between us. Wade started talking about these guys he knew back home before he’d enlisted. Out of nowhere he started talking about why he killed them. I knew Wade had come from a rough background up around Detroit, doing drugs and getting kicked out of his house. We’d talked about it before, being he’d said his dad had leveled a gun at him and kicked him out of the house at 17. Now he was talking about how he’d been 14, and that he’d lived on the streets for a long time before getting his shit together and in the Army. He’d met his wife on the streets, and she’d been the one to really turn him around. But those three guys, all separate from each other by an indefinite period, Wade claimed to have strangled because they’d said inappropriate things about his future wife, or at least they were inappropriate to Wade.

I was drunk, but I had no idea what to say. Here was a guy who was as easygoing a guy as you could ever hope to meet, always ready with a sarcastic joke and a cigarette, suddenly changed, his eyes glazed and kind of dilated and he was breathing heavy. Because I was made of solid gold and Wade was my friend, I asked him what it was like to kill a man. He looked at me sideways, and asked me if I really wanted to know, and I shrugged and told him, yeah, what’s it feel like?

So he turned and wrapped his big strong hands around my neck and started choking me. We fell on the floor, but it was mostly Wade pushing me. I struggled, and kicked but he was determined, bigger, and had a better position. My head was in the dustpan behind the door, and Wade’s face was set in a terrible grimace. His eyes were black and his thumbs were squeezing my esophagus and I was pretty sure I was going to die. My hands pried at his hands but couldn’t get a purchase on his death grip. I remember now that I was thinking then that I didn’t want to die this way, mostly because my head was in the fucking dustpan. I just didn’t have the leverage to make him release me. I was thinking about how my roommate would find my body; how he’d have to shove the door open because I’d be lying in front of it and he’d have to move me to get in, where he’d find me so valiantly dead in our dustpan of chipped, black painted metal and so bent it took forever to scoop dirt with it, but a comfortable fit for my skull. My vision was blurring and growing dark around the edges, but I managed to squeak out, Wade, don’t fucking kill me, man. That seemed to shake him loose. Color returned to his eyes and he let go of my throat. He rocked back on his haunches as I gasped for air, and he was visibly getting control of himself, squeezing his hands into fists, releasing them, and then squeezing them back into fists. His chin was on his chest, his nostrils flared and his whole body shuddered. It took a few minutes to recover before he helped me to my feet, commanded me never to tell anyone what he’d done. After I assured him I’d never tell, he went back to his room to sleep it off.

A couple of us decided to go to Seoul the next day, spend a beautiful fall Sunday kicking around in the electronics district or gawking at the real life whores in their window cubicles. Wade decided to come with us, and he acted like nothing had happened and like we were the best of friends. I watched him, mostly because I was wary of the other guy in him, the killer, and I wondered if that guy would come back, if he’d turn his head to me suddenly with those black eyes and kill me on the bus or in the food court while everyone watched, but he was just good old affable Wade. I never saw that other guy again, and when I left Korea, I never saw Wade again, either.

 

I don’t think I’ve been made as entirely of solid gold since.