Last
Hope
He was a small boy, probably no older than ten, and he was crying something in a language I did not understand. One of his tiny brown hands pointed at the rice paddies behind him; the other grabbed a fistful of my camouflage uniform and tugged insistently. I crouched until we were of a height, and watched the way his black eyes flickered from me to the nearby rushes and back to me.
"What do you want?" I asked, enunciating each word in the manner of those who cannot communicate across a language barrier. "What's wrong?"
He continued to drag at the cloth covering my legs. A part of me knew it was right to follow him, to see what it was that had him in such a frantic state. A part of me visualized the woman who had stumbled into our camp a week earlier, handed the sergeant a baby, and exploded in a shower of shrapnel that had killed both the sergeant and the tiny girl. This, I decided, was a matter to take up the chain of command.
As a matter of course, the officers chose that moment to enter into a heated discussion, excluding those of us with fewer stripes and chevrons. Next to me, the tugging intensified and the boy howled at me in sharp-sounding words I could not grasp. My pitiful course in basic Vietnamese had not prepared me for this.
"Peterson, move up!" called Gregory from behind me. "We don't got time to spend messin' with all the chinks run across the road."
"You speak Vietnamese, Gregory?"
"Hell no, boy. I live in Nam, sure, but I ain't learnin' the friggin' language."
What was the boy trying to say? I moved forward, and he stayed with me, his fist closed firmly around my pants. "Look, kid, you're going to have to let go," I said gently, hoping he could understand at least a few of my words. "We're only on patrol, but if some Cong pop up from behind that elephant grass over there, I'm gonna have to be able to swing my gun."
No reaction was visible in his round face. A tear formed at the edge of his eye and trailed through the grime coating his right cheek, and he still pulled, still pointed.
"Peterson, you can't get that kid off you and you're gonna have to knock him off."
I spun on Gregory with something akin to rage pounding behind my eyes. "Don't touch him, Greg. He's not doing anything. He's just a kid."
Gregory snorted. "Yeah, well, kids 'round here come with mines."
"He hasn't exploded yet."
"Just cause he ain't killed you yet don't mean he ain't gonna."
Turning away from the caustic man behind me, I concentrated on the boy standing at my side, watched every movement of his lips, every twist of his bare feet as he dug them into the ground to slow my advance. I bent to loose his fingers from my pants and he latched onto my hand, his tiny fingers surprisingly strong. With my free hand, I made a downward gesture, hoping he would interpret it as I intended and slow his speech. From the next sentence he uttered, considerably more deliberate than those preceding it, I picked out "woman," "house," and "my." Or I think I did.
I had opened my mouth to reply when the sound of carbines shattered the quiet tramp of feet. There were yells, and screams, and Gregory fell behind me, his neck split by a series of bullet wounds. Picking up my own weapon, I looked toward where I had heard the shots, but no more came.
Gomez, who was behind Gregory in our line, came forward, inch by nerve-wracking inch. "What the hell was that?"
"I don't know," I said from my own prone position. "Where'd they shoot from?"
Absent-mindedly, I glanced down at the Vietnamese boy who had followed me. His fingers still clutched my pants, but beneath where they curled a wet stain spread like a five-pointed star. "Hey, kid," I said. "You okay?"
He was silent.
"Kid," I said again. "What is it?" In an impulsive and potentially deadly move, I dropped one hand from my gun and moved it down to check on him. I pried his fingers from their grip and lifted his limp arm, turning it over and noting the rivulet of blood that streamed down the underside of his arm from a neat hole directly below his armpit. I shook him. "Kid. Kid, get up! We have to keep moving."
When he had finished his halfhearted advance and lay at my side, Gomez grabbed my uniform and jostled my shoulder, forcing me to turn and acknowledge him. "He's not going anywhere, Peterson."
I shook my head. "Of course he is. He wanted to show me something, and he's going—"
"Listen to me, Peterson," Gomez said in a harsh whisper, not relinquishing his grip on my arm. "That kid's dead. If you lie here face down in the dirt and pretend that he's not, you will be, too. Let's move."
I shook my head again. "You don't know what you're talking about, Gomez."
"Dammit, Peterson, I grew up in Chicago. I know what a dead man looks like."
"He's not dead." I refused to listen and instead let my gun drop altogether, turning to the boy and tangling my right hand in his hair, bringing the other up to pull his chin toward me. I stared into his eyes: large and open and unseeing. A bit of grass stuck to his forehead and I brushed it off. "Come on, kid."
With one hand, Gomez grabbed my collar and shook me. "Snap out of it and get up, soldier. We've got to keep moving."
He must have physically dragged me along, because somehow I made it back to the pitiful collection of tents we called a base. I don't remember what happened after we left the boy in a little dull heap beside the elephant grass. I was transferred out of the unit several days later, sent back to the States a week after that. My family welcomed me home, smiling and laughing and taking Polaroid photos that showed me with a silly grin on my face from my ingestion of an indecent amount of alcohol.
I don't remember much from the weeks and months after Nam. I don't remember much of Nam, either. In fact, all I remember is how to say "woman," "house," and "my."
That and a single little suntanned face with two huge black eyes, staring up at me, knowing me to be one last hope.