Fragging

Well Got Ding Dang It!  This here day is lookin’ like a buncha dashed intentions.  Ever had one of them?  Dashed intentions, that is?

I myself have had fewer of them of late; principally due to my hermetically sealed lifestyle.  When you lock ‘er down tight, you eliminate most of the opportunities for fuck-ups.  Kinda lahk livin’ inna cave or sumpin’.

That Plato fellah was on to sumpin’ with that Allegory of a Cave idea of hissen.  Yah gotta hand it to them Greeks sometimes.  They ain’t all about getting’ blahnd drunk on cuzo and draggin’ the world economy down inta th’ shitter!

Ah intended to rise at dawn o’clock, jump-start the old hart with a lotta coffee an’ nicotine and shit. Dang! If ah didn’t lollygag in bed until th’ middle of th’ morning—around 6:30!  Thit lollygaggin’ mixed breed Mutt Brigade didn’t help matters neither—jist lay there with Daddy, snorin’ ‘n fartin’ th’ morning away!

Ah intended to sit here in mah skivvies (Shit! Apologies! TMI!) an’ git this here monograph fired off; dang!  If Ed Sullivan ‘n Holden both weren’t takin’ a dump somewheres in mah Allegorical Cave of a brain!  Dang it! Dash it! Where AHR them boys when ah needem?  Off on a throne takin’ themselves one unauthorized holiday, th’ gawddamn lag-a-bouts!

Well, ahl jist show THEM worthless bastards uh thing ‘er two!  Ahl jist git starhted without ‘em; SWEAR TO GAWD AH WILL!  Hear THIT, ya gotdang pair o’ fuckin’ GITS?  Ahl jist sail this here Ship o’ State ahl on mah lonesum’!  Screw th’ pair of yah!  Gotdamn effete pricks, th’ PARE of YAH!

HARUMPH!

Pity I can’t post this with all the Spellcheck red and green squigglies showing.  This intentional mess is…well…a mess.

It was time for walkies.  Got the herd leashed up amid the frantic caterwauling of Clancy’s baying howl and the lemming-like pushing to be first out the front door.

As we Mutts and one Daddy rounded the second corner of the morning Iditarod, there was one of those 1959 folding plastic lawn chairs placed conspicuously on the easement.  As we neared, I could see there was a message taped to the other side; and I cringed.  I was sure it was going to say, “We have watched your dogs take one dump after another on our lawn!  Take it with you, Jerk!” Or something to that effect.

I’m sure they hadn’t thought through the impossibility of scooping some poop out of the St. Augustine and holding my sled team in check at the same time.  How could they?  Their single pet is a poodle-terrier mix about 13 lbs.  His stool is surely a snap to pick up.  They are always letting him out in the front yard sans leash to do his doo.

When he sees us coming, the Protector Instinct arises and he leaps at the Brigade, daring them to a punch-up if they should dare take another step closer to his turf.  Madam runs to gather Fluff-Fluff into her large arms and once again an International Incident is averted.

One of these days she isn’t going to be quick enough; Goofy is going to slip his surly bonds and Fluff-Fluff is going to end up being his early lunch.

Back from my resentful musings, I make the racing turn and the message comes into view.  Large font print on plain white paper, it reads, “If Obama is re-elected, just look at the mess he is going to inherit!”

Crikey!  Can’t I escape this political nyah-nyah-nyahing even on the ten minute Iditarod around the frigging block?

Then the inherent irony strikes me: here is an elderly pair of retirees making a smug political statement on their lawn, too cheap to buy (or steal) a campaign placard and too dumb to think of posting their double entente on the web.

I am tempted to sneak back after putting the dogs up, black out ‘mess’ and scrawl in ‘legacy’.  And screw the doggy poo clean-up.  But…I can’t do it.

That would be two separate acts of irresponsibility: leaving the doo in situ and committing an act of vandalism to counter their smug contention with one of my own. Not to mention adding to my hypocrite scoreboard, which is off the charts as I speak.

Well, at the last word in the last paragraph (666!) I will proceed forward into this here monograph without another single solitary quip of sardonic commentary, or even any serious clap-trap.

One of the most dehumanizing aspects of war is that individuals, faced with an instinctual drive to survive, often succumb to the ‘darker angels of their nature’ and commit atrocities with an abandon that subsequent ‘civilized’ scrutiny cannot fathom.

The often factitious rationale for brutality is ‘under orders’, or ‘imminent military necessity’, as if these coined phrases will automatically excuse such incidents as the My Lai massacre or the summary execution of prisoners in the streets of Saigon.

I cannot expand this discussion beyond my personal memories of Viet Nam; but it is a discussion that humanity seems unable or unwilling to engage, even though the same incidents occur today, just as they did forty years ago.

What I am talking about here…is murder.  Cold blooded amorally contrived murder of another human being.

Is the deed any less heinous for not moving past the impulse of the thought to execution?  Philosophers and theologians have debated this question before The Age of Reason and long after its passing.

My own experience and the guilt I harbor tell me that such a notion of whether, or whether not, is mute.  I thought the thought once and I don’t know what that makes me.  It certainly doesn’t make me innocent.

Lt Jg Hanover was an ivy school fop from Delaware.  My perception of him was tainted by the way I observed him treating his subordinates.  To him, they were all inferior and deserving of his scornful application of rank. 

There were two junior rank officers under Rambo and Sierra Charlie Two.  My little Jg was Ken Kenilworth (like the truck), a rounded round-faced bucktoothed cherubic son of a Hawkeye.  That’s Iowa’s Big Ten football team, for those of you not of the Midwest Persuasion.

No one in the Boathouse, or those attached had any qualms about Kenilworth; except Scott. Scott had a beef about everyone, especially the officer class.  Especially Reserve officers like Ken.

Well, I’m not here to praise someone I admired.  Today’s harangue is directed towards someone I despised.  Lt Jg Hanover; a jerk of the first order.

And now, before we begin the tale of Lt Jg Nemesis Hanover, everybody take out your Big Red Indian tablets & #2 pencils for today’s History lesson; there’ll be a quiz later—fair warning.

Fragging

1.   to kill, wound, or assault (especially an unpopular or overzealous superior) with a fragmentation grenade.

Speaking to airily dismiss the endemic incidents of 1969, one U.S. Senator remarked, “Second Lieutenants have been shot in the back by their men for a thousand years.”  Yes, that is true.  But there had never been 206 reported incidents of fragging in a single year.  In 1970, the count of reported fragging attempts ending in death or wounding reached 247 in Viet Nam.

Those were the statistics released by the Army back then.  Those numbers were what the military was willing to admit to.  The actual number has been obscured by time and history.  How would it strike you if an American city of perhaps, say, 100,000 population, had 200 homicides a year? Would the ‘statistic’ stick in you craw now?

As it became increasingly clear that a) We were pulling the hell out of the War and b) It was well-nigh time to keep your head down; fragging came into vogue.

Just a short sidebar to the Vet readers: When that unmentionable F-word popped into view on this page, each and every one of you instantly flashed to your own memory of fragging.  Did you know?  Did you consider the option?  Did you participate? Did you?

Sorry, guys.  Forty odd years doesn’t wash your hands.  Your whole fricking life, it don’t wash.  It won’t for me.  Seek in your own heart for the truth.  That is what I am trying to do here for myself.  Go fight your own demons.

And don’t--DON’T--fall back on, ‘You don’t understand’ or, ‘You had to have been there’.  This really is not a history lesson for the children of the 21^st Century; this is nothing more or less about the things we all did over there.

What I did over there, in Anno Domini nineteen hundred and seventy.

I don’t chose to dribble on about Hanover.  Suffice it to say that he was one of those gung-ho bastards’ thinking the War was his moment in time to be a participant in History.  Sick bastard sonofabitch.

One evening, at sunset, he came stumbling drunk down the causeway.  He was hefting a case of grenades, the type used by Security for clearing sappers from the water.  He walked to the end, a place where the nearest shack was 75 yards back.  There was nothing out there but Hanover…and all those little hand-held bombs.

Swaying to retain his upright balance, he began to pull pins and drop the grenades into the water.  Then he would lean over to watch them make that peculiar depth charge reaction of a muffled explosion and a geyser of water rising six feet up from the surface.

I followed him as far as the last shack and one little boy spied on another little boy playing a game.  As I observed this infantile display, I could see in my mind all the times he had unnecessarily taunted, humiliated and harshly ordered around my shipmates.  At the time, I was still Skimmer Coxswain, so I was exempt from this bully’s cheap shot ways.

I hated him and all his kind.  Then the thought came.  The unthinkable thought.

I glanced around; there was not another guy in eyesight or hearing of the two of us.  I measured the distance and calculated the timing: twelve seconds to close the gap.  Four seconds from pin-pull to detonation. As he would turn at the sound of boots clumping towards him, he wouldn’t have enough time to react; certainly not in his advanced state of slobbery drunk.  I would administer one forceful body block, and he would pitch into the harbor. 

The magnitude of my instant plan was not a matter of monstrous intent or fear of being caught at it.  It boiled down to the single consideration of timing.

I would have to begin my sprint at the exact moment that he stooped to pull the next grenade out of the box. One…two…three.  He’s looking at the grenade and turning it to have the pull ring facing his index finger.  Four…five…six.  He grasps the ring and hesitates two seconds before pulling.  Seven…eight…nine.  He leans over and delicately releases the device to watch it plop into the drink.  Ten…eleven…twelve. I hit him hard; he goes in under his head at the exact second of detonation.

Easy. Neat. Clean.  No one is going to come running if they hear an impact sound emanating from the end of the causeway.  With luck, his body won’t even be a floater.  He would just sink to the bottom; there to be supper to the crabs and fish.

When he didn’t report in the next day, someone would go to his quarters.  A perfunctory search would ensue.  In time he would be listed MIA, just another name on a classified list that was somehow…misplaced.

As I was contemplating murder, a God inspired thought came to me: that piece of shit out there was no different from me.  He was drunk and entertaining himself for the purpose of having a brief respite from where he was, what he was doing and what more he had to do until his Freedom Flight.

How was that one bit different from what me and the Boathouse Pirates did up in my hooch, night after night?  In that blessed fraction of an instant, I was gifted with clarity…and empathy for a fellow sufferer.

That thought saved his life…and my soul.

If I knew his whereabouts today, would an amends be in order?  To tell a man he was hated and despised enough to kill him, but that Divine Inspiration won out?

And who would it benefit?  Brings right back to the fore that philosophical question of homicide held in check: who but God could judge me now?