The Reason You're Alive Read online

  She said, “He ate snakes?”

  So I said, “I did too. Tons of them.”

  That made her stick out her tongue and say, “Yuck!”

  And she was right, because snake is one nasty fucking meal.

  Then Ella said she didn’t want to talk about eating snakes, and so I said I didn’t either.

  “So Towel was just imaginary?” Ella asked. “Like Mr. Peanuts?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that one. I met Tao when I was rogue in the jungle. I hadn’t spoken to another American soldier for weeks. They say that after so many days in combat, every man is considered legally insane. That’s when I met Tao. After so many days in combat. No breaks. Very little sleep. Constant danger. Ceaseless uncertainty for days and days.

  I don’t even really remember the first time Tao and I bumped into each other. I only remember spending a few weeks with him on the hunt. All he wanted to do was kill Vietnamese people to avenge the murder of his family and the destruction of his village. He killed Vietnamese by the dozens and with an unending supply of rage in his heart. Soldiers had raped his sisters and mother and made his father watch before they rounded everyone up and burned them all alive—everyone Tao had ever known went up in smoke. He saw the horror show from a tree he had climbed. The Vietcong never looked up, and that’s why he was alive, or so the story went.

  By the time we met, we were both all-stars when it came to killing Vietcong, so we were a fucking dream team. We killed dozens a day. And we collected gold for him, killing those who had it, because I knew Tao would sure as hell need it. I was leaving after my tour. Going back to the USA. He was stuck there in the shit and would have to bribe his way into a peaceful existence down the line, especially if the commies won.

  The funny thing was that Tao only knew a limited amount of English, and I knew absolutely no Cambodian. Most of the time it was like we communicated telepathically, or maybe akin to a two-man pack of lions using pheromones. When a man is reduced to hunting and killing, words become useless—maybe even dangerous. Sometimes I felt as though we weren’t even human anymore. Like we had evolved—or devolved, maybe.

  Or maybe it was like when they bring in a Cuban or Dominican or a Jap or a Korean to play American baseball. The foreigner can’t speak with his teammates so well, but they all know the rules of the game, so it doesn’t matter once they’re on the field.

  When I really think about it, I remember Tao drawing pictures in the dirt with a stick to explain what happened to his village. It wasn’t too hard for me to guess what the pictures meant. War is predictable in the absolute worst possible ways.

  Our killing spree lasted maybe three or so weeks, and then one day I woke up in a tree and Tao was gone, along with the gold we had tied to high branches like goddamn monkey pirates.

  A stateside military shrink who debriefed me confidentially—or so he said—back in Kansas in 1967 suggested that I made up Tao as a sort of alter ego, and while that sounded like a load of shit, I couldn’t honestly argue that I was in my right mind during those three weeks. I can’t even remember everything that happened. It was like a long, long, fucking long nightmare. When I try to conjure pictures and movies in my mind now, everything is blurry, like I’m trying to peer through a window that’s been smeared with Vaseline.

  “I had a dog in Vietnam for a time too. His name was Bullshit,” I said to Ella, trying to change the subject, and that’s when my son barged in and said the tea party was over.

  “Why did you name your dog Bullshit?” Ella asked.

  “Are you happy now?” Hank said to me. Nice little rich girls aren’t supposed to say “bullshit,” I guess. But I hadn’t told Ella to say that word, I just told her the name of my dog in Vietnam. His name really was Bullshit. We even made him dog tags with bullshit stamped into the metal.

  “I’m tired,” I said to Hank, and it was true. I was fucking exhausted after only a few hours walking around in civilization free again. “These meds have me feeling dizzy. I think I oughta lie down in my room.”

  “You do that,” Hank said. As I made my way down the hall to the guest room, I overheard him telling Ella that I wasn’t thinking straight and she couldn’t believe everything I said. That they had to let my brain heal. And until that happened, she was supposed to think of my quote-unquote “stories” as “make-believe.” My ignorant son actually said my Vietnam experience was like a fucking fairy tale.

  I shook my head, because I began to realize that my brain surgery was going to be a convenient eraser for Hank. Anything cerebral I said from then on would be easily discredited because the government had cracked open my skull and taken a piece of my brain out. But what the fuck could I do about that? Nothing. So I laid myself down on the guest bed and thought about Bullshit.

  I found Bullshit in the jungle. He was a high-spirited little mutt, and he ran right up to me, barking and jumping and wagging his tail. When I bent down, he licked my face all over, which is when I knew we were going to be buddies. I’ve always loved dogs. More than I like most people, even. And so I named the little guy Bullshit and took him back to the base with me.

  Bullshit was a big hit. Everyone loved him. He got fat because so many of us were feeding him scraps. It was like the little guy died and went to USA heaven right there in Vietnam.

  I had a lot of trouble sleeping in ’Nam, but when Bullshit was snuggled up with me I slept soundly through the night, maybe because he’d bark if anything came close, so I didn’t have to keep one eye open all the fucking time. In the jungle you learn how to do that, by the way. You sleep, but you never really sleep. With Bullshit, I’d sleep on my side in the fetal position, and he’d curl up in the V between my shoulders and my knees. That was the best rest I ever got in Vietnam—maybe in my entire life.

  I tried taking him on patrol with me in the jungle, but he barked too much and was always giving away our position, so that was no good. I had to leave him behind whenever I went out killing gooks. He didn’t like that and would come looking for me, so I had to start locking him up or keeping him tied to a rope. I’d ask guys to feed him when I was gone, and that wasn’t a problem at all, but it was hard to get anyone to keep him in a tent because he would eventually shit and piss in there, and no one wanted that. No one was about to walk a dog on a leash in the middle of a fucking war, and so eventually someone would untie Bullshit and let him out to do his business. A few times he’d dart off and find me in the jungle, which was never good.

  The last time I left Bullshit alone, someone finally let him out to take a dump and he took off looking for me, but I never did see him alive again.

  When I returned to the base, I called for him and he didn’t come. I asked around, and the guys said they hadn’t seen him for half a day or so.

  I got a bad feeling. A lot of bad shit could happen to a little dog in the fucking jungle. There were giant snakes. King cobra. Pythons. Vipers. Nasty shit. Tigers. Land mines. Agent Orange. A million things that can kill your dog. Fucking punji-stick traps.

  But my worst fear of all was that he had been eaten by gooks, because they love to eat dogs and were unmerciful killers. They’d soften the meat by beating the dog. Just tie it up and start whaling on it, breaking bones as the helpless little pup shrieked out in pain. They’d boil it alive after that. Those fucking people were supreme savages.

  So I headed out into the jungle with a heavy heart, looking for Bullshit.

  Soon I came across Ding-Dong, who, like I said before, owed me a favor. And so I told him that my dog was missing, and I wanted it back.

  He looked at me like I was crazy, because in his mind being upset about a dog was like worrying about the well-being of a giant centipede or a mosquito. Gooks didn’t give a shit about dogs, didn’t understand the bond that happens between humans and canines. I’ve often wondered if that means they weren’t really human themselves, but I know that’s probably not a very politically correct thing to say these days. It was okay for our government to drop napalm on thos
e fuckers for years and years, but God forbid I suggest that they ate dogs, which they absolutely did.

  Ding-Dong loved being alive and he loved money even more, so I told him that I’d forget about the chicken blood on the VC uniforms he sold and give him a hundred US dollars if he found Bullshit. I gave a description—Bullshit was about twenty-five pounds and brown, hence the name—and let him know about the dog tags we put around his neck.

  “Bullshit. Dog tags,” Ding-Dong repeated, and then he was gone.

  It only took him a few hours to find Bullshit.

  Ding-Dong led me to a nearby village. A small gook child was wearing Bullshit’s tags around his neck. His mother was in her hut, boiling my dog like he was a common chicken. When I approached her, she smiled and offered to feed me my dog. I handed Ding-Dong his money and told him to leave, which he did quickly. Once the gook woman understood what was about to happen, she began offering me her body, but I wasn’t interested in sex that day.

  What would you do if you knew gooks had beaten your dog and then tried to eat him?

  Bullshit was my one comfort in a fucking nightmare, the only good thing that happened to me in Vietnam.

  He might have been the best friend I have ever had in my entire life.

  If you have a dog, I want you to think about him or her. Think about strangers tying your best friend up. Intentionally breaking his bones. Wearing his or her tags like a trophy afterward. Boiling alive and then eating your dog. It’s un-American and goddamn inhumane.

  How would you have righted that wrong?

  I did what you would have done—what any rational dog-loving American would have done.

  I made damn fucking sure that not a single one of those villagers ever ate another dog again.

  Period.

  I left devoid of ammunition and with flames licking the sky behind me. Then I wept alone in the jungle for Bullshit, too afraid to return to base because I didn’t want my army brothers to see me crying like a fucking girly-man.

  I don’t remember much of what happened between that experience and my going AWOL, which followed quickly. I remember killing gooks with Tao. Stockpiling gold. Eating snakes. Shooting every face I saw, including monkey faces that popped out of the jungle. Anything with eyes, we killed.

  But I don’t remember specific details.

  Maybe it’s like the way you might remember going to a certain grocery store many times when you used to live in a certain town decades ago, but you don’t remember the specific trips you took, or what exactly you purchased, or who you might have seen, or what was on sale. You just remember shopping at that store, but nothing else. You probably spent hundreds of dollars, purchased thousands of products even, but how specific can you be about any of it, really?

  If something out of the ordinary happened—like maybe you dropped an egg on the floor, or you walked out without paying by mistake but were too embarrassed to go back in and so you just drove away, or maybe somebody armed and dangerous robbed the store while you were there, or a local celebrity happened to bump his shopping cart into yours—you might be able to recall a detail about one of those things because the experience would have been out of the ordinary. But what happens repetitively usually gets lost in the fog of our memories and is easily forgotten.

  Killing people with Tao became my equivalent of going to the grocery store. To be honest, I remember the individual monkeys I wasted better than the gooks. I was always sorry when an animal caught a bullet. Animals don’t understand war. They never killed my friends.

  And I don’t know why I’m remembering this all of a sudden, but it seems significant, so I’m just going to include it here and now. The last fight I got into with my wife happened just before she died, and it was about groceries. Groceries. Toward the end she was so mentally fucked up she couldn’t even manage to keep food in our refrigerator, and she wasn’t feeding our son when I wasn’t home, although Hank would try to cover for her.

  Anyway, on this particular night, I came home a little late from work. Young Hank was curled up on the sofa, hugging his knees. When I asked what he had eaten for after-school snack and dinner, he looked away. Then I heard his stomach growl, and I knew he hadn’t eaten anything.

  I looked in the fridge, and we didn’t even have milk and bread; the cupboards were empty too, so I went out back and banged on Jessica’s art studio door until she answered a few minutes later. Then I screamed at her until she cried. I told her she only had to feed the boy twice a day—because he bought school lunch—and make sure there was something in the cabinets for an after-school snack. That was her only responsibility in the world. I made all the money, paid all the bills, made sure she had art supplies so she could spend all her time painting. Jessica kept saying the fluorescent lights in the grocery store ceiling made her feel insane and that there were bad people there who were spying on her. Her mind had finally snapped, but I didn’t want to believe it. I used my army training and tried to put the confidence in her by yelling. But of course that didn’t work.

  She fell to her knees and begged me not to make her go to the grocery store ever again.

  “You have to contribute something!” I yelled down at her in my frustration, and I think those words are what killed her, which makes me a murderer once again.

  The funny thing is this: I took Hank to the grocery store that night, just before it closed, and I let him eat chips out of the bag before we paid for them, and zoom through the aisles using the cart as a race car. And I also let him buy whatever the fuck he wanted. We filled the entire cart and then we dined at home on sugar cereal after his bedtime on a school night while Jessica sobbed in her studio. It might have been the best night I ever had with Hank—the closest I ever felt to my son.

  We didn’t know what horrors were just around the corner. All the signs were there, but we chose to ignore the obvious.

  I’d give my life in a heartbeat to go back in time and tell my wife she never had to go to the fucking grocery store again, and that her art was the best contribution to the family that she could ever make.

  But I can’t do that.

  So I have to live with my civilian guilt too.

  7.

  I may deploy colorful language from time to time, but I am not a racist, nor am I a bigot, despite what my son says about me.

  Because he doesn’t know shit about my life, Hank’s eyes fell out of his dumb liberal head when my good friend Sue Wilkerson came over to his house one night for dinner.

  Sue is genetically Vietnamese, although she is mentally American with a real red, white, and blue heart, on account of her being raised here in the United States by a Vietnam veteran named Alan Wilkerson, whom I respect unequivocally.

  Ten or so years into postwar civilian life, Alan decided to rescue an orphan from Vietnam. Maybe he got to feeling sorry about whatever the fuck he had done in the war. That was none of my business, so I didn’t ask him. Just an educated guess on my part. No one went into the jungle and came out clean. That’s a given. If you were there, you did exactly what all of the rest of us did to survive, which wasn’t pretty.

  What Alan told me was this: he didn’t want to procreate himself, because he’d been exposed to too much Agent Orange and therefore was afraid of impregnating his wife with a genetically altered baby. If a man’s sperm supply is supposed to look like sunny-side-up eggs, Agent Orange sticks a fork into the scrotum and makes scrambled. Basically, that nasty batch of chemicals is a wild card. We still don’t know exactly what the fuck Agent Orange does to human beings, because our government is run by cowards. But we do know that Alan’s fear is one hundred percent warranted.

  There are a lot of people here in the States, and even more in Vietnam, who are grotesquely deformed because of that shit the US government and motherfucking moron politicians made us spray everywhere. Kids born with four arms and no legs. Two torsos attached together at the belly button. Elongated alien heads. Bulging eyes. Nightmare shit. Just type “Agent Orange Babies” into the I
nternet. You’ll see the horrors that men in three-piece suits with no fucking understanding of war can unleash from a stateside desk.

  They told us it was perfectly safe. Wouldn’t hurt humans. Our sperm would not mutate. Fuck them. Every American politician during the Vietnam War who said Agent Orange was harmless should be forced to gargle with it until their tonsils glow.

  I truly feel bad for the fucked-up kids in Vietnam, but those people were mostly the enemy. The American Vietnam vets whose kids have inherited problems related to Agent Orange—those heroes should be given millions by the US government. But Uncle Sam is exceptional when it comes to fucking over vets. His screwing-veterans record is impeccable, and yet he never seems to have any trouble getting new recruits.

  Be all you can be.

  Army of One.

  Army Strong.

  Can anyone tell you what those slogans actually mean?

  Doesn’t matter.

  No one really gives a single shit about these things, I’m aware, but I have to keep saying all this anyway until the day I die. Too many American patriots and heroes have gotten fucked in the ass by Uncle Sam, who to this day is still doing a lot of ass-fucking when it comes to our psychologically and/or physically wounded veterans. If you don’t believe me or think I am exaggerating, visit your local VA. The horror show is on display daily. But you won’t go. No one goes. No one cares.

  I met Sue in spin class over in the city. I like spin class. Lots of hot, tight young female bodies in spandex. Great workout too. None better.

  My spin class instructor is named Timmy. He’s off-the-charts gay, definitely the woman in his gay homo relationship, and so I call him Gay Timmy. But before you go stereotyping against him, believe me when I say he has the body of a Navy SEAL. You would not want to fight this gay motherfucker, trust me. You might think I hate the gays because I was in the army and am a registered Republican, but you’d be dead fucking wrong. I respect those people.