SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

“So there I am, one big bastard on either arm, my hands cuffed behind my back, and my dick still hanging out of my fly,” Johnny drawled, carefully arranging the crown of royals in his helmet band from Jack to King. “They haul me in, and dump me on the bench like a sack of taters. I drop right on my nuts, and for a minute I swear I can hear bells ringing and angels singing.”

“Must have been a lucky drop,” Jenkins said, running the razor edge of his Bowie knife down his left cheek. He had a dozen scars attesting that blade shaving hadn’t always been so easy for him. “Ain’t much of a target to hit.”

“When my eyes uncross the chap’s staring down at me, his greens pressed and his little collar on,” Johnny continued, wiping his florid face on his sleeve and ignoring the commentary. “He tells the monkey patrol to take the bracelets off. Problem is my hands are still numb, so I’m trying to tuck myself back in still half a sheet to the wind and I can’t even bend my fingers.”

Simms was rolling up his poncho from the night before, Gardner was scraping the rest of his MRE between his yellow teeth, and Cooper was going through a last check on his med kit before slinging it over his shoulder. Nobody was really paying attention to Johnny; he was a radio with one station. He faded into the background more often than not, but his stories about what he did once his pretty Susan broke up with him were still better than silence.

“Finally I get my gun holstered, and the chap’s giving me that hellfire and brimstone look.” Johnny turned down the corners of his mouth so they cut deep grooves in his sweaty cheeks, and narrowed his eyes so his forehead wrinkled up. The expression added thirty years to Johnny’s face, and made him look like the chaplain’s red-headed younger brother. That got a chuckle out of some of them.

“The old man say anything?” Luke asked. His back was against a tree stump, and he was rolling a smoke just as thin and dark as he was. A smile played around the corner of his lips, like he’d heard it all before and still found it just as funny the second time around.

Johnny folded his arms across his chest, and like magic the twang was gone from his voice. Instead it was low, deep, and serious. “Is there something you want to confess, my son?”

That got some real laughter. Johnny grinned, and he was himself again. A few more ears turned, but the soldiers’ eyes stayed busy on the jungle. Luke touched his tongue to the paper, and dug out an old steel lighter. He flicked it, and touched the flame to the tip of his smoke.

“So I says to him ‘no sir, I can’t think of anything I’ve done that I need to confess.’ He puts his hand on my shoulder, leaning over me like he’s about to give me the facts of life, right? He looks me right in the eyes, and he says, ‘John, you need to confess before you go back out into that jungle. If you don’t there’s no telling what might happen.’”

“So what did you say?” Luke asked, the words dribbling up from his lips in a blue mist.

“Well I thought about it for a minute,” Johnny said, screwing up his face like he was trying to remember what year he needed to be born to buy a beer. “And I said to him, ‘Father, are you telling me I might end up in the Slog?’”

Gardner choked on his last swallow of runny eggs. Jenkins’ blade stopped, poised just under his jawbone. Even Simms looked up from his meticulous rolling and tying with a nervous, piano-wire smile on his face. Luke let smoke trickle out of his open mouth, dragging it back in through his flaring nostrils. The wind died down, and the trees leaned closer; as if the jungle was curious to hear the rest of Johnny’s story.

Everybody had a story about the Slog. A grunt in Baxter’s old squad said it was a ghost town set up by CIA spooks somewhere deep in the shit. The way he told it the ghosts took deserters, protesters, draft dodgers, and VC fighters, then did something to their heads. The spooks fed them dope, and poked around in their brains until all they could say was “yes sir” before turning them loose in the jungle with no fear, no pain, and a fully loaded M16. Baxter always shook his head and laughed, but he wouldn’t look anyone in the eye when they asked if he believed it.