Conscientious Objector

This piece is a response narrative for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call.  It was inspired by this Autoficitonal seed. For this call, we asked people to write a response to another author’s autofictional submission, based on the original piece and this bit of cryptic world lore.

This, and other Worldbuilding pieces are being published to a Wiki, which will allow contributors to edit, link, and otherwise annotate their work and that of their peers.

What good is a gun against Bouncing Bettys, toe tappers, and boobytraps?

I thought it was going to be easy to tell this story because I lived it all, every gory, glorious millisecond, from the moment I was drafted to the blast that was the very end of me. Of us. Of me and Dave. I’m a ghost now, a real ghost if you know what I mean. I’m the ghost that will follow you home like a Japanese demon. But I’m not as sexy as a demon. Some might even go so far as to think of me as having been a boring man. Because I had one foot in the seminary when I was drafted and then suddenly I had one foot in the grave.

One foot in hell.

I used to never let a swear slip my lip. My mother and I were real Catholics. Like Dorthy Day Catholic. Moma was devoted to God, social justice, and me, and not always in that order. We took turns. Of course, God is everything but sometimes I cried louder than everything.

I might repeat myself trying to tell you this story. The frequencies get fuzzy and I won’t know what I just said or I’ll feel my spectral voice start to blur into static and bleed out into …Steve Winwood?

Do you hear him? Singing, “I’m a man, yes I am. . .”

I don’t get it either, these weird things have been going on since the moment I stepped foot on the femme fatal soil of Southeast Asia.

I dictate to fingers that don’t belong to me and I don’t know from paragraphs or punctuation so let’s just shitcan any expectations around proper grammar. Grammar never mattered in the bush, never mattered in the bunker, never mattered, never mattered, never mattered.

God is everything and God was jungle, mist, mountains, muddy rivers, mama sans, and monks. God was the paddies and the villes. God was all the grammar we needed, even when we screamed, “FUCK YOU, GOD!”

It’s the most beautiful prayer there is because it’s true.

You know how you people (I mean you modern, undead people) are all driving around these days with your tiny computers invisibly connected to your electric cars and you text with your mouths and that dumbass robot Siri just so literally translates? I’m like that now, like the space between a living human voice and the kind of dumb literal nature of the AI universe.

I know. I know everything, almost like robots and the universe, but not at all like God. For the record, if anyone is keeping records anymore or ever did, God is not as literal as Siri or the universe.

God is hilarious, probably the funniest Thing that ever was or ever will be.

Just cause I’m dead don’t mean I don’t laugh as I look at the news streaming in through all the thoughts and the soft bodies of the tourists at the Cu Chi tunnels. They’re my raido now.

I keep up with the times through their misery tourism.

I photobomb influencers taking selfies in my tomb.

I am not the only haunt of Cu Chi, obviously, we got us a real crowded bit of Bardo around here.

We’re all putting invisible bunny ears behind your silly heads.

Ya’ll don’t even know how many of us are walking through you as you’re walking through us as you’re walking through the tunnels and trees.

The tunnels don’t stink as much as they used to if you know what I mean.

Rotten mangoes and old Coca-Cola. Charlie bones and my bones and Dave’s bones all mixed up and stinking like cavities. The smells fade like the horror, the memories.

But I don’t know where Dave went. Nobody ever has a bad thing to say about him but that doesn’t mean he hit the jackpot of Nirvana the way I hit that wire the day we died. I believe there’s some canonizing the dead about old dead am me Dave. Pardon my French if you know what I mean but like Dave wasn’t no saint.

But I ain’t tryin to tell the truth about Dave.

Sometimes I’m a Florida redneck, sometimes a priest, a scholar, a philosopher.

I’m easily confused.

The base nature of flesh still soils the soul.

I get stupid, I’ve been here so long, haunting this godforsook bunker, chilling the passageways of the tunnels, sharpening sticks that don’t exist.

Water buffalo swim in the rice paddies of my memories and I get so mesmerized by the beauty of them, exploding.

Everything was always exploding, every day was the fourth of Tet, every wall was a Bastille to break and burn.

The French built the Hanoi Hilton out of stone but the locals kept their huts strictly grassy and easy to light.

We were blowing out the Zippos with our ghost lips if you know what I mean. Even before we were dead.

I can tell you the facts of the matter: my name, rank, the date, what the weather was like that day. I can tell you how I was born a bastard to a woman who was rich enough to not have to care what anybody thought, that my father died on Omaha Beach, that my mother didn’t love him but slept with him as an act of service. That she called me her favorite sin. That she taught me the true nature of sin, how it’s a word borrowed from archery, and that it just means missing the mark.

And so she named me Mark. RTO Mark Rogers, AKA Radio Raj, Padre, Pod, Poderick for long. The guys called me lots of names and I don’t know why they don’t remember me fondly to the Widow Dave who never told us her name when she wrote down her side of the truth.

Dave told us, but I forget. He showed us her picture, that I did not forget.

A pretty brunette with an long nose and freckles. She wore lipstick and a white dress to her wedding.

She carried one Easter Lilly.

I can’t feel my legs or my arms or the jazz of my heartbeat when me and Dave climbed down into this bunker.

But I can feel the bitterness of the widow when she said I carried a radio instead of a gun.

I’ll ask again what good is a gun against Bouncing Bettys, toe tappers, and booby traps?

Look around. Everything is tan as sand, even the light.

The bunker was empty except for a bed and a bomb.

We went down in there together because as radioman I was Dave’s right hand.

As radioman, I knew everything then too, as much as you could know within the confines of the arrogance and ignorance that was running our end of the conflict.

I knew where we were going, I knew if there’d be fire, I knew when we could stop. My handset and headphones operated on a spiritual level too. I could pray for us all into

the ethers and God, in His capacity as everyfuckingthing, would zip by overhead—shiny and pointy and black—and rain down napalm on the enemy.

But they weren’t my enemies. I had no enemies.

I could have got a full deferment. We had the resources and my preparations for entering the priesthood was more than enough to qualify me for CO-status. But I thought what about all the other boys who weren’t called to the fold, who weren’t the scions of a Florida orange empire and gaudy brothel-lookin steakhouse?

It didn’t seem socially just for me not to go.

But I wouldn’t handle a weapon, that was the compromise. And so I trained for the best job in the platoon. I always walked in the middle of march formation, next to Dave, the safest place in the least safe place on earth.

In addition to keeping us connected to the outside world and God as we may have experienced Him through the awesome power of a B-26 bomber, I also tended to the spiritual needs of men who were lonely, scared, dying. I listened to confessions, I administered last rites, I helped non-Catholics perform acts of contrition, I pretended to transubstantiate C-rations so we could take communion on particularly sad and scary Sunday mornings.

The truth is in the secrets they said to me, in the ways they bled on me, in the vivid color of a man’s eyes right before he dies.

The truth is I can’t tell you the truth because the war is over and I’m dead stuck here in this Cu Chi bunker waiting for Godot.

The truth is it wasn’t raining and we were in a paradise full of snakes and spikes and people who just wanted what we thought we had— freedom and independence.

The truth is your car and your TV and your hamburgers and cokes and fries killed us.

The truth is I ate a mango that morning that I bought from a little girl in a white ao-dai.

She had a crooked smile and she rode away from me on a broken bicycle.

The truth is the dirt is red because of all the centuries of blood spilled on it.

The truth is my antenna was supposed to be fastened down.