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 those 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.