What the Dead Girl Taught Me...

Copyright 2005 by Peter Childress

I sat in the sand on the beach, with her head in my lap while Angels’ tears caressed us in the form of a small drizzle from the evening’s dark sky. I held my poncho liner over her face to protect her from the rain while some of the guys were making jokes about us and laughing in the dark. She was warm and looked peaceful; her eyes were closed as if she were sleeping. She was a year or two older than me, and just a year ago I would have counted my blessings to have this beautiful young girl in my arms. But there were no blessings for any of us in this dark night, and what should have been Angels’ tears soon proved to be just the Devil pissing on both of us.

I had awakened near dawn of the morning curled up under a bush. Looking around me I saw crude booby traps spread around the area, rusted ten-penny nails twisted together to form four barbed spikes, each of them hoping for the touch of human flesh to satisfy the anger and hatred of their makers. I put one in my rucksack as a souvenir of Viet Nam.

For reasons known only to our eager commanders, our company left LZ Playboy in the middle of a moonless night to grope our way down the mountain and onto the plain leading to the South China Sea. If we were planning to surprise our enemy, it was a total success. They were no doubt surprised to hear us cursing the dark and the clanking, clanging cacophony of our gear as we took turns tripping and falling down in the dark. One platoon was so utterly lost that they spent the night on the other side of the mountain, joining up with us late in the morning after the rest of the company trudged into an old French villa on the northern lip of the half moon bay.

Bin Dinh province was somewhere north of Quinon and had a population of some 500,000 people we were told, and it seemed that about 450,000 of them were VC or Communist sympathizers dedicated to killing us. We were told that the South Vietnamese general in charge of the province north of us had a deal with the Communists: If they didn’t fuck with him, he wouldn’t fuck with them, so they had a safe base from which to fuck with us, instead. I don’t know if it was true or not, but fuck with us they did. Several times a day while we were on LZ Playboy, a nearly spent .30 caliber round would whistle overhead, fired by a sniper with a vintage WWII carbine the VC had salvaged from somewhere.

But this evening, the night after we came down the mountain, it had started to drizzle. The guys were nervous, and someone saw a figure running out of a house and shot at it. It was the girl whose head was now resting in my lap. She was shot in the leg, not that big of a deal, we thought, so we were waiting for Dust Off to come pick her up. I looked down at her again, ignoring the guys who were making wisecracks about us when she gave a little sigh and died.

She died of shock from the bullet wound in her leg, in the dark, in the rain, in my lap, in the beginning of the monsoon season of 1967, on the shore of the South China Sea. One moment she was breathing softly, a living being, a beautiful girl, and in the next moment she was dead, her body as heavy and empty as a lump of meat. It was one of the most profound and changing experiences of my life, because I literally –literally!- felt her soul leave her body and go somewhere else.

I can’t explain or describe it in words that would make any sense to the intellectual mind, except to say that on that cold and miserable and dangerous rainy night in 1967, something profound and wondrous and holy happened, something that will happen to every person born to the earth. I don’t believe that Jesus or Allah or God will welcome us to heaven and willing virgins. But I do know –not just believe, but know!- that whatever essence defines us in this life will continue in some form or another in the afterlife. And for that I am deeply grateful to that innocent victim of war, that young Asian woman, who taught me a secret of life by dying in my arms so many years ago.