We said it each day of our miserable lives. We said it when it rained, and when it didn’t rain, when it was hot, when it was hotter. “It don’t mean nothin,” we said.
We said it because it sounded tough. We said it to keep from crying. We said it because it might be true. We said it at rest, and the bloodsucking insects swarmed, and our faces swelled, and our hands swelled, and our lips swelled, and our ears swelled, and we thought about getting malaria, and we thought about how good it would be; you leave the boonies, you get malaria—unless you died from it.
But the dream of staying inside the wire, asleep on a cot in a hospital tent, hot chow, nobody shooting, made chancing a slow death worth it. How bad could that be? It don’t mean nothin, we said.
So we ditched the big orange pills; each day took the white ones. Skipping them won’t improve your odds, but made sense when you’re dog-tired. You’re thinking, what the hell. Why not? Maybe I win, maybe I lose, anything’s better than humping the boonies. Go for it, man. What are they gonna do? Send you to ‘Nam? But you don’t do it. You can’t. It’s just not right.
You shut up and saddle up. Your night on LP? Your turn on point? It don’t mean nothin.
We said it when dry sweat left white salt streaks on our stinking fatigues, worn some- times five, six days, longer, until clean one’s arrived. No tiger-stripes for us. Just the worn-out junk, grubby with mud, sweat, bug juice, gun lube, red-brown blotches from crushed leeches puffed up the size of ripe grapes with blood—our blood, some guy’s name tag stitched on the pocket. The new ones ragged in a day, rotting in four. At night, wrapped in poncho liners on the jungle floor, we’d twist and turn in our half-sleep between shifts on guard. At dawn, waking, a quart low, it don’t mean nothin, we said.
We said it when an enemy jeep, filled with ammo, exploded, killing eleven men. Said it when the mess tent took a direct hit. Don’t mean nothin we said after a sapper blew a bunker, the men inside pulped, burnt, crushed by sandbags and perforated steel.
On a hilltop, taking AKs, mortars and RPGs, 175s too close for comfort, when they said you can’t retreat, just us twenty now, burned out, used up, wanting off that place that reeked of death—we thought for sure they’d pull us back. Instead, we stayed ten days, C Company boosting our ragged line. Bluffing our way past 12 dead, 26 wounded, we never spoke of it again. But who can forget the battle of Hill 54, just one more story too sad to tell, in a war that don’t mean nothin.
