IN THE SUMMER of 1970, I had occasion to watch a seventeen-year-old girl die. She'd taken a bullet from a fifty-caliber machine-gun through the abdomen, so it was really pretty amazing that she'd survived the short helicopter flight that brought her to us.
We were at a firebase somewhere northwest of Saigon, a squadron headquarters (battalion level, in effect), and the medical facilities weren't the fanciest in Military Region III. They were the closest, though, and the medics had enough experience and cared enough to be pretty damned good. Not that it mattered. Nothing was going to save the girl by the time she got to a place that somebody could try.
The bullet was half an inch in diameter, weighed just under two ounces, and must have had a velocity of about twenty-five hundred feet per second when it hit her - spitting distance from the armored vehicle that fired it.
She was wearing black trousers and a beige ao dai, the attractive "skirt" with knee-length panels front and back which is traditional garb for Vietnamese women. There was some blood on the right front of the garment and a great deal on the left rear where the bullet had exited, but the resilience of flesh had puckered closed the lips of both wounds. The bleeding that killed her was internal, where a wide track through her torso had been jellied by hydrostatic shock.
It was a big bullet, that cal fifty, and it was probably going as fast on the other side of her frail body as it had been when it hit her.
The medics were pissed. They were too good and they cared too much to like losing a patient, even though they knew the girl couldn't have been saved. More specifically, they were pissed at me for trying to question the kid as they worked on her. I'd been ordered to do things I liked more, to tell the truth; but that was my job, and I got through a lot at that time by doing my job.
The girl didn't care, any more than she cared that somebody in the line troop which killed her had stolen her green-sequined shoes. She was in a coma from the time she reached the firebase to the time she died, not long after.
We got the story a few hours later, from the girlfriend who'd been captured in the same action. The two of them had been recruited by the VC a few weeks before - or abducted, if you prefer, since the girls wanted as little part of the war as I did or any of the other draftees I knew in Nam. Sometimes it's hard to draw lines.
The girls had been grabbed to transport rice from villages to local VC units. That was what they'd been doing that afternoon, each of them pushing a bicycle with a hundred-kilo bag of rice balanced on the frame, under escort of a VC soldier with an automatic rifle. While they were walking along the trail, they met an armored platoon on routine patrol.
That shouldn't have caused any problem. The platoon's half dozen ACAVs and Sheridans made enough noise to wake the dead, between diesel engines, the squeal and ringing of their tracks, and the assorted other noises of ten- and twenty-ton metal boxes moving down a path beaten through the jungle by water buffaloes. There was plenty of time for the trio to get themselves and the two massively-overburdened bicycles into concealment at the trail's edge.
They did that, and it would all have been fine - except that the escort panicked and popped a couple shots toward the vehicles as they came abreast. He ran like hell, then, showing a great deal better judgment than he had when he pulled the trigger. For all I know, he's still alive. Certainly he got through that afternoon uninjured.
The girls crouched down while the platoon opened up with everything it had, firing into the undergrowth on both sides. Cannon, more than a dozen machineguns, and the odd grenade launcher and automatic rifle, all spraying the immediate vicinity. Just thinking about it, the amazing thing is that only one round from all that storm of fire hit anybody. That's what happened, though; and of course, one was plenty for the kid who caught it.
So this isn't a story about an atrocity. The victim was in the active service of the enemy and, while nobody could see well enough to shoot at her as an individual, there would have been ample reason to do so on the information the gunners had. As for the shoes - both pairs, though we got the survivor's back for her - talk to me about that when somebody's put a couple rounds past your head and you've behaved like a perfect gentleman afterwards.
All things considered, it worked out about as well as it had any right to do. Only ... it gives me problems sometimes to think about a world in which seventeen-year-old girls are gutshot as a matter of course. Maybe there isn't a better way, maybe it's part of the makeup of the species. Certainly there's enough evidence to support that view.
But I sort of wish that more of the people who talk so blithely about "conflict" had had a chance to watch a kid or two bleed out on a stretcher.
A lot of fictional violence has been cleaned up. When I was a kid, I watched Davy Crockett shoot an Indian into a neat, bloodless swan dive from a tree branch. Nowadays you can see a lot of the equivalent thing on TV, folks using fully-automatic weapons which do even less obvious injury than Davy's flintlock had. In prose, the normal technique is for the victim to fall over, out of the storyline, and permit the author to get on to matters of greater interest.
And that's fine, no problem, we all do what we do.... But for my part, I don't want kids joining the Marines - or politicians voting to deploy those Marines - because at the back of their minds they have the notion that real violence is clean and cute.
Violence is sometimes necessary? Maybe; I won't advocate unilateral national disarmament until I'm willing to disarm myself, which at the moment I'm not. But the look and sound and smell of the results of people killing one another - that should be clear to everybody.
Everybody who might be asked some day to kill, or might vote that other people go out and kill for them.
- Dave Drake