STAND UP

 

Roy Dorman

 

       Twenty Miles Outside of Saigon

       South Vietnam

       August, 1968

 

       Eating something from a tin plate that tasted like beef stew, might even have been beef stew, Private First Class Billy Connors thinks he’s finally figured out “what’s it all about.”

       He’s been in Vietnam for a year and two months, and for the first night since he arrived in this god-forsaken place, he’s not scared to death.

       His surroundings haven’t changed, they’re still deadly, but Billy’s changed.

       A feeling of resignation has settled over him.

       He still doesn’t know what he’s doing here. Most of the guys around him don’t either. Saving the world from Communism? Most are skeptical.

       But Billy hadn’t known what he was doing back in the States either. 

       At age nineteen, he’d worked at a 24/7 Quik Mart days, and drank with his buddies most nights.

       One of those nights after he’d had too much to drink, he’d totaled his father’s car, and had messed up a couple of other parked cars on the avenue on his way home.

       It hadn’t been his first OWI. Or even his second.

       His dad had given up on him years before, and Billy had given up on his dad. He really hadn’t cared if that latest episode had widened the rift between them. But it had hurt him to see the pain in his mother’s eyes.

       A judge had given Billy the choice between six months in the county jail or enlisting in the Marines. The judge told him he could maybe “make a man of himself.”

       Billy had heard similar phrases before, many times from his dad, but had difficulty seeing the connections.

       But Billy joined up, and after a rough and tumble Basic Training in Georgia, he was off to Vietnam.

       Tossing the plate into the bushes near him, he again wondered about this whole Vietnam War thing. Were we winning? If so, what were we winning? Did war have to be the solution to every disagreement countries had?

       He wasn’t happy here, but he hadn’t been happy at home either.

       In fact, as much as he hated being in Viet Nam, he dreaded going home even more. There was nothing there for him. He felt if he went home, he might…, might do something awful. Like shoot his father. Or his boss if he got in his face once too often. Or even his mother if he couldn’t stand her looking at him with those sad eyes.

       Billy shuddered. Just having those thoughts convinced him he should end it here.

       It was nearing midnight. Billy knew there were snipers outside his company’s perimeter. They were there every night. They would yell insults in English at the troops and then laugh as though the war was a joke to them.

       “Hey G.I.!  I fucked your sister!”

       How ridiculous. As if somebody’s sister would come from Lansing, Michigan, or Topeka, Kansas, to have sex with some Viet Cong in the jungle outside of Saigon. It was more likely that one of his Marine buddies had fucked one of their sisters in a brothel in Saigon.

       Was all war this ridiculous, or was it just the war in Vietnam?

       Sometimes, snipers would take a few random shots where they thought the center of the camp might be. Just to keep things lively.

       Was this war just a game to them?

       A single tear formed and rolled down his cheek. Billy was going to use the war as it was using him and all of his buddies around him.

       All he had to do was stand up, light a cigarette, and wait until some lucky Viet Cong sniper zeroed in on him.

       He was now softly crying and it was difficult in the dark and through the tears to wrestle a cigarette out of his crumpled pack. But he did it.

       And then, Billy stood up.

THE END

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       Roy Dorman is retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Benefits Office and has been a voracious reader for over 70 years.  At the prompting of an old high school friend, himself a retired English teacher, Roy is now a voracious writer.  He has had flash fiction and poetry published in Black Petals, Bewildering Stories, One Sentence Poems, Yellow Mama, Drunk Monkeys, Literally Stories, Dark Dossier, The Rye Whiskey Review, Near To The Knuckle, Theme of Absence, Shotgun Honey, Punk Noir, The Yard, and a number of other online and print journals.  Unweaving a Tangled Web, published by Hekate Publishing, is his first novel.

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        Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Ángeles. His artwork has appeared over the years in Medusa’s Kitchen, Nerve Cowboy, The Dope Fiend Daily, and Rogue Wolf Press, Venus in Scorpio Poetry E-Zine.