The Rewards of War

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