“I don’t know how you felt,” he confessed, “when you got back from Nam. But I was so goddamn glad to have gotten my ass outta there in one piece, that no sooner had I hit land than I fell down on my hands ‘n’ knees and kissed the earth as if she were my own mother. And I woulda hugged her too, had I been able to get my arms around her. For I felt as if I’d freed myself of the monster I’d helped to create over in Nam, till this Frankenstein’s past came creeping back to haunt me.
“For almost a year,” he went on to say between fits of sobbing and outrage, “I’ve been forced to live like some goddamn animal, slitherin’ about the jungles of Southeast Asia on its belly, never knowin’, from one moment to the next, whether or not it’d survive the hunt. As both the hunter and the hunted I played the deadliest game of all, the survival of the fittest, killing other human beings—even women and children—fore they killed me. Like a beast, I trusted no one but the members of my pack and the gods back home, for whom I fought so diligently, that they might retain their dominion o’er the monsters they’d made outta me ‘n’ my cohorts in crime.
“Havin’ made a pact with the devil, early on, I traded lives with the other members of my pack, that I too might live as long as the gods back home. For unlike the Auddie Murphys and John Waynes, I held back to let the daredevils take the fall. As the face of my platoon changed, with the death of one after another of these poor fools, I imagined I was next in line to die. I musta died a thousand deaths fore I was released from this firestorm of bullets, for every time I watched one of these unsung heroes die, oddly enough, I saw a part of myself die…”
