Soldier

by Sean Tarjoto

Francis is the Unknown Soldier.

I didn't know it then. And I didn't know about it for 22 years and five months the end of the war. Just a note: I was born on January 12, nineteen-fifty-eight. In the year of our lord.

I'd assumed that I'd gone to war for substantial reasons. Good, patriotic reasons. My combat name was "Muther". Because I was one helluva mother-copulating and greasing destruction machine bent on the violent and irrecognizable death of every gook and gook-look-a-like. That included Asians, midgets, mutt dogs, villigers, and small children that just happened to run in the middle of my crosshair as I squeezed my M-16 named Charlene and felt the micro-eruptions of bullets pulling sonic booms.

But there I was killing villagers and 14-year old snipers. And here I was, at the edge of the clearing of a forest whose name I couldn't even pronounce. And there's my unit ducked behind fallen stumps and trenches. And there's about several hundred bullet shells sprawled over the terrain, slipped between blades of grass or duff or whatever grows in this crazy climate where mosquitos grow to the size of your gun. Bullets, whose copper shelling, twenty years from now, will finally start to crumble.

A hail of the stuff came over my helmet, I swung around over the jungle log, emptied my rounds, and swung back.

"Frank!" I'd actually yelled. I revealed my position to a more detailed extent and placed another postage stamp on my face to hell.

Francis was sprawled at the edge of the clearing, moving a leg.

Here's my self/half-cocked method of survival: Reload. Click. Make sure you aren't bleeding.

Instead, I looked at Frank again.

I thought, Dammit, the man was a pacifist. He was in the war because they caught him and he was simply too damn noble or scared or just plain dumb. He didn't escape with a well-timed Asiatic flu or sprained ankle. Evaluation physicals gave him an immodest honor by declaring he had a model physique. And they took him in, shaved his beard, shaved his head, and gave him a uniform and 400 free meals. He got his gun three weeks later.

Still, he wouldn't shoot at one goddman gook. Even if he was going to end up with a bullet in face and a grenade in the zipper. Damn pacifist. Now I'm gonna die because of him.

The Lieutenant 20 meters down the clearing was screaming something into his radio phone. He was trying to get air support and blame the holy hell out of the high-brass bastard responsible for sending his own entire platoon into a strange, strange, tropical forest whose trees tended to grow bullet holes. But he was yelling like a maniac and there were bullet caps grazing the air 9 inches above his mouth, so of course you can't hear what the man is saying in a cheap made in Korea radio halfway in the middle of Tae Kwon Doe or something. You can't understand what a man trying to dodge yellow streaks of bullet fire is saying in the Vietnam War. You just can't.

Of course, we got our support. Because, I'm alive. But Frank's dead. As well as a few others...and well, so's the Lieutenant. And that's because I decided to haul ass and he didn't. They gave him a Medal of Honor. They gave Frank the title of Unknown Soldier, I know it. They had to because we didn't drag him out of the clearing when them air support flyboys decided to zoom on in with their high velocity 25-pound BOOM-BOOM flying cigars. But that's just what I like to call them.

But Francis is the Unknown Soldier, lying in a tomb somewhere in Washington D.C. totally oblivious to his post-humous national honor. It's fitting, in a really damn appropriate way.