Rage From the Edge

One of my high school math teachers was a retired marine who had served a few tours in Vietnam. He was a really likable guy who often told funny stories about the screw ups and practical jokes he saw perpetrated by many of the men with which he served. I say that he was likable because I want to point out that this guy was a firecracker. He could go off at any time on any person when the topic of death in Vietnam was raised. It was an odd juxtaposition; one minute he would be laughing and telling stories about how his company commander had bollixed an order form so that instead of the intended 1000 telephone poles, 1 million of the things had appeared at camp, to the next minute when some dumbass would ask him how many people he had killed while “in country.”

Doing that was like punching him in the stomach. He didn’t like to remember all the gruesome stuff that went on over there. He dealt with the monsters in his past by only remembering the good times. This was true for my four years in high school except for once. One time he slipped and talked about the death of one of his buddies in Vietnam, and when he told it, there wasn’t the tiniest bit of humor or that gleam that came to his eyes when somebody mentioned telephone poles.

He began his story by hitching up his pants and then casually tossing the chalk he constantly carried onto his bare, almost obsessively Spartan desk. The original question had been raised by one of the students: Should I buy a motorcycle?

Well, he said, you may like the idea of motor cycles, but let me tell you-hitch of the pants again-I had a friend die in Vietnam because of a motorcycle…

At the sound of the words “die” and “Vietnam” the class grew instantly quiet as if frozen by some glacier of grisly interest. The same kind of unmoving and uncaring stares you see when people go by a car wreck in slow motion. The class knew something was up, all those frozen eyes were on the math teacher.

“My buddy,” he began, “was in such-in-such company, doing work for such-in-such division, while also running errands and notes from such-in-such platoon to such-in-such commander. While I was on duty watching the camp’s main border at a checkpoint, he raced up to me on one of those army green painted motorcycles that you can't tell who made. He wanted to stop off at my guard shack to grab a couple of smokes for his trip. “Going up to such-in-such today, want me to grab you a case of beer or something?” he asked the young math teacher. “Nah, “ the teacher continued, “but maybe you could bring back a few of them such-in-such whores or something?” My teacher was always saying something about the whores in Vietnam, but I think he just did it to shock the young suburban kids who he was teaching.

“I dug a few cigarettes out of my pocket and gave them to my buddy. He stuck them in a pocket on his arm and then fetched out his army issue motorcycle helmet. This helmet was one of those kinds of helmets that has a small ridge just above the forehead and underneath that, a face visor that covered the wearer from the forehead on down to the chin. He revved the motorcycle’s engine once, grinned at me even though I couldn’t see his face, you just knew it was a grin because his eyes crinkled. Then he put his foot up on the peg and sped off down the gravel and dirt road that led away from me, my guard shack, and the camp. Routine business, be back in two hours.”

This is where that firecracker change came over my math teacher. This was where you could tell he was angry and sad and mad all at once about something that happened back then, and he was uncomfortable about it to the point where his skin turned a shade of Fourth of July. He started gesturing with his hands while he talked, it looked like he was trying to shake hands with an invisible somebody and it looked like he was swatting at invisible flies all at once. “The thing was,” he said cautiously, “was that it wasn’t routine business that day. For some reason, after eleven months of no action and absolutely no excitement, the Viet Cong decided to launch a mortar attack on our camp. The attack probably lasted only fifteen minutes, but when bombs are going off and buildings are getting pulverized and all you hear is the thud and thump of those mortars, everything slows down. It felt like that mortar attack took an hour at least. My buddy was on his way home during that attack. No, he wasn’t hit by a mortar…that would be stupid and have no point in me telling you to be cautious about motorcycles. So he was driving down the dirt and gravel road that led into the camp. I could see him from my crouched position in the guard shack, he looked to be going about sixty miles an hour and by the way he was jerking the bike around the road, I could tell he was having trouble keeping control of the thing on the slippy-slidy gravel.

My math teacher paced back and forth, more talking to himself than the class now. I pictured a young man, his blue eyes peeping above the sill of a window in a guard shack as he watched a distant man who was racing down a road on a motorcycle. The eyes were wide and incredulous as they roved under the green helmet he was wearing. A look of total concentration on his face, as if he were willing the motorcycle to maintain control and make it back in once piece.

"A bunch of things happened all in the same few seconds,” the teacher said. “My buddy’s front wheel hit a mortal round hole in the dirt of the road while at the same time, the back wheel got out from under him and started to slide sideways. I actually stood up in the guard shack to watch the accident even though there were explosions going off around the compound. Machine gun fire rattled the panes of glass in the windows. “

“The bike jumped,” he motioned with his hands as he said this. “It didn’t lurch forward or anything like that, it just hopped upwards like it was surprised or something. My buddy looked like a bronco rider in a rodeo. His hands left the handlebars and his body was thrown forward by the speed and force that the bike had once had. He did a flat somersault in midair and landed about fifty feet from the bike, which was dumbly staggering around on bent wheels until it hit the grass on the side of the road and collapsed in the ditch there. But my buddy didn’t just land. He bounced. It was like watching a skipping stone as it flashes across a pond. His body shuddered each time he struck the dirt and gravel and his head rebounded each time he hit. Somebody grabbed me by the shoulders and yanked me back down into the security of the guard shack.”
“I struggled amid the broken glass, flying papers, and upturned furniture of the shack as a scrambled to the open doorway. I was trying to see if I could peep around the doorway. Maybe my buddy was okay. He had taken a horrible spill, but he did have helmet on and that was something…right?”

“Within five minutes of his wreck, Sarge Such-in-such came running to the shack, he told us that the helicopters had spotted the enemy’s nest and was really pouring it on. The all-clear should be sounded in a few minutes. I didn’t wait that long. I got up off the floor and sprinted down the dusty road trying to get to my buddy before somebody in my unit stopped me. Nobody did and I got to his stretched-out form. Underneath the cracked visor, dirty with scratches and grime from his journey, I could see that his eyes were open. He had a strange grin on his face that didn’t look quite right. People talk about how clowns are creepy and it think it’s because of the smile they paint on. Well, my buddy’s smile wasn’t quite that creepy, but it still looked out of place on his normally brown alive mug.” My teacher took a short deep breath, more like an involuntary gasp than anything involving respiration. Then quit his pacing and turned to face the class, head on. All the firecracker red had left his face. The explosion was over, and you could only see the pale refection of a man who has gone beyond normal limits and is pushed out into the grim savagery of reality. He spoke slowly now, measuring each word.

“My first thought was to look after his wounds. After a quick glance, I saw that most of the blood on his uniform was from road rash. Bits of gravel stuck into his bare arms and he was going to walk with a limp for a while because he had landed badly on his side. No big deal, anybody who has ever ridden a motorcycle knows you are going to take a spill or two, and you will probably eat some gravel at some point. Then I figured I had better get the helmet off of his head. He wasn’t moving but I was sure he was alive and was going to need all the air he could get. I struggled with the straps for a few seconds before bringing my service knife-we called them k-bars-up to his chin. I cut the strap and while my hand was carefully pulling it out of the way, I noticed it was damp with tacky blood.”

“Oh shit,” I thought to myself, and my teacher actually said “oh shit” to the classroom. Yet another boundary we had crossed that day. “Oh shit,” my teacher thought to himself. He may have cut an artery or a vein in his neck. He told us that he searched around the throat of his friend and found nothing. Now was time to get that helmet off.

“I put my hands on the helmet like you would do anytime you were taking one off. I put my palms against the sides with my fingers towards the back. I could feel the dirt of the road under his helmet, but I could also feel that the helmet had been slammed pretty hard. Bits of plastic and jagged edges stuck out from the back of the thing, so I gave a quick tug and took the whole thing off his head.”

At this point, his voice was barely above a growl. The whole class was zeroed in on him and giving him undivided attention.

“When I got the helmet off, it was the only thing holding his skull together.” The class physically reacted as one. Just like a being repulsed, the students all moved backwards and gasped at the same time. It was involuntary. My teacher finished by telling us that the only thing left of his buddy’s head was a leaky puddle of destroyed tissue and bone…and only a barely recognizable face that was flattened out against that “god damned” road in Vietnam.

"And that is why I wont ride a motorcycle..."

Of all the stories I was told by that teacher, that was the only one that had any instance of sadness, regret, fear, and anger in it. And while the story was far too gruesome to be one that you would tell your students, nobody ever complained. Nobody ever bothered that teacher about “how many kills he had made over in ‘Nam,” and as if a little spark of sadness gives respect, it also humbled and made him more real.