The Rewards of War
By Bradley R. Smith
IT WAS DARK AND VERY COLD and I had been walking
for close to an hour. Now I turned West on Briggs and walked through
the parking lot behind Gottschalks department store. At the corner of
the building there I almost stepped on a sparrow lying on the concrete
walk.
The bird was still fluffy, as if it had just fallen from the sky. I
stood looking at it and after a moment a little gust of cold air stirred
up the bird's tail feathers and at that moment I recalled the three
Chinese machine-gunners I saw one morning on a mountainside in Korea.
They were the first dead humans I had seen and thought often times recalls
them to me.
It was a cold dark morning in February 1951 and the Chinese were on
a barren ridgeline in the bottom of their hole. They had died in a little
storm of jelly and fire -- American napalm. I saw myself as I always
do, standing on the edge of the hole looking down while the cold morning
air blows a film of brown dust over their blackened corpses. Even after
40 years I can see them very clearly. Odd, really.
During that winter sometimes the corpses were frozen into the paddies
and sometimes they lay in soft beds of snow. When spring came the corpses
ignored the rain and the mud washing over them and sometimes the skeleton
of a corpse would come up out of the earth to say hello. Sometimes the
skeleton was very small because most of the corpses were not soldiers.
Inside you there would be a movement you could not protect yourself
from. By early summer the corpses had become especially attractive and
the insects and flies and even the dogs liked them very much.
Later on in Vietnam it was always summer, no matter what time of year
it was, and the corpses understood that and the flies and dogs were
always happy.
In 1968, after Tet, the Saigon firemen would come into Cholon every
morning with their flatbed trucks and the long poles with the hooks
on the end. They used the hooks because the corpses would come apart,
and they found it unpleasant to be carrying one and have some of it
tear off in their hands.
Sometimes a corpse would be on its back, the wide-open dark eyes filled
with a pretty blue liquid that when you looked into it was bottomless.
If the corpse had been there more than a day or so when the firemen
dragged it toward the truck, its fingers would trail lines of black
ooze across the pavement.
There are many rewards to be gained by going to the wars, particularly
if you are a young man or a man young at heart. Afterwards you have
interesting stories to tell friends and certain special girls you have
your eye on. There are all those arresting images that you can watch
the rest of your life.
Often times war gives a young man the impression that he has accomplished
something, particularly if he survives it. But it's my view that the
value of war depends on what you leave behind, not what you take home
with you.
Now my stepdaughter's sweetheart is some place in the Arabian desert,
a rifleman with the 26th Infantry. We'll call him Daniel. Daniel may
soon be given the chance to see arresting sights in Kuwait or Iraq similar
to those that so many of us saw in Korea and Vietnam.
If it comes to war in the Arabian desert, what will Daniel be fighting
for? Freedom? That's what we fought for in Korea and Vietnam.
In Korea, we left behind uncounted corpses and 20 million Koreans in
the North condemned to live under a brutal dictatorship. In Vietnam,
we left 65 million people behind to live out their lives under the heels
of communist dictators. And the corpses - some say we left more than
a million corpses there. If you could pile them up all together, wouldn't
that be a sight?
When Daniel comes home he will have interesting stories to tell, and
there may be a young lady here to tell the best ones to. But what will
he have left behind?
Tens of millions of men and women living lives of spiritual desolation
under the heels of the Arab despots who are our allies today? And how
many corpses? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? More? The same old story.
On the other hand if Daniel doesn't come back, maybe his corpse will
form part of an interesting anecdote told by some other young man who
does. Maybe it will cause a little buzz among the flies and insects
of Arabia. If Daniel doesn't come home maybe his corpse will bring smiles
to the faces of a couple Iraqi dogs.
(This piece appeared in the Visalia Times Delta on 14 January
1991)
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