Pvt. Lukham wandered off often.  Unmistakably Nebraskan, Mel Lukham never tried anything but moonshine until he got to Vietnam.  Now his fair-haired covered brain was in a constant maze of colorful illusion.  He either stared at a picture he kept tucked in his helmet until the tears ran through the constant sweat on his freckled face, or smoked enough grass to forget why he ever cried in the first place.

I replaced him on the M60 that night.  When I jumped in the bunker, he didn’t even look up from the lit match he was holding.

“Luke, (everyone called him Luke) you’re done,” I said.

“Fuck, already?” 

He went to pinch the match out with his other hand, but the sweat from his approaching hand dripped off and extinguished it.  This prompted him to launch into his favorite joke.

“A country full of Phans but not a single goddamn breeze.”

I’d heard it so many times I could barely even smile at it anymore.

“I’m four hits in tonight.  I heard the monkeys, Kyle.  I think they were saying my girlfriend’s name.”  He moved in slow motion.

“Just stay out of Sarge’s sight, man.”

“I’m trying to stay out of my own sight, bro,” he said as he climbed out of the bunker.  I watched him zigzag in the wrong direction, out towards the perimeter.  He stopped at the edge of the razor wire (enough coils to turn a water buffalo into carne asade ten feet in) and stared at the jungle.

Maybe he was thinking about his girlfriend.  Maybe about how he’d adjust to life back on a tractor.  Or maybe he thought about the 14-year-old that nearly took him out the day before, until the kid’s gun jammed and Luke brought him down with his .45.

I’ll never know. 

Without a sound, he ran towards the perimeter.  He took the first seven or eight feet of razor without worry.  He was like a kid running into the ocean on the first day of summer.  But then that kid felt the cold cut through the numb, and Lukham went down.  You could see the reality breaking through his dilated pupils as he laid there.  I’m in Vietnam.  I’m surrounded by death.  I’m the son of Harriet and Alfred Lukham and I am a murderer.

He was terrified and bleeding, and I regret the words I yelled just as much now as I did the second they left my lips.  I never put it together until I’d heard what I said.

I saw a kid in trouble, a kid drowning in the red ocean of war.

And I called out for help.

“Luke’s in the wire!” I yelled.

I couldn’t even inhale my next breath before Pvt. McComb in bunker #3 opened fire.  That jumpy son of a bitch cowbow was new and gnawing at the sandbags, waiting for a moment like the one I’d accidentally just provided.

“Cease fire!  I said Luke’s in the wire, you fucking monster!”

I laid in my cot that night with my lips wrapped around a canteen full of rice vodka and drank until my memory was a blank sheet of ice.  Not much has changed since.

15/11/2006
RSS 2.0 / trackback