Mad Minutes
by
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By that time, half a year into his first deployment, whenever Manny saw a dead body, he resisted the impulse to swing his head around to look, as if he had only just arrived in country. But he couldn’t control what his consciousness would process. How quick the mind could be. Was it a young person? Manny thought so, because of the tautness of his skin. Whatever his age, his face was blown off. And when your face is blown off, there’s a hole. There’s a void where, by rights, there ought to be eyes and stuff. There’s also an edge, and while the front of the faceless skull was removed cleanly, the skin must have torn away, because the excess skin wrapped over the crater’s edge like dough over a pie pan. Weren’t there rules? Didn’t the Geneva Convention forbid the roadside assassination of prisoners? What were these people, anyway? The local executioner’s M-16 had to have been placed just so at the back of the enemy’s head where the neck joins up with it, because that smallish bullet entered tumbling at such great velocity that the pressure caused the cranium to be blown out in front. Gone. The result was a young human, lying face (?) up to the sky, wearing a hole whose diameter began at the crown of the head and wrapped from ear to ear, leaving what? Was that the start of a nose? Manny suspected that if he could have made a close investigation and manipulated the fractional head in some pathologist’s way, he could have looked through nostrils from the wrong side. Tapioca brains spilled from the back into the dusty earth where their moisture was sucked away. And the old ladies, or young ladies that looked old beyond their years, squatted a few meters away, selling food. But that was the rule in Vietnam. Nobody touched an unclaimed body before the gods had been given the chance to reclaim its spirit. That was their deal. * * * The rain stopped, and the hot, damp air pushed at Miss Luu’s face. As they approached the hamlet of Ap Binh, they barely missed a water buffalo that a young boy was trying to coax across the road. A flock of chickens spanned from one side of the dirt street ahead to the other, but the mass of white exploded as they entered it, the panicked white birds scattering behind the speeding jeep. Miss Luu braced herself with her feet as they lurched this way and that, and the jeep’s wheels slipped sideways into deep ditches and puddles, spraying water out so it drenched an old woman who had been tending the chickens. The thatched roof houses squeezed in closer and closer as they entered the hamlet. Miss Luu saw something fly from between two buildings. The green canister stuck in the mud in front of them emitting a thick gray cloud that blocked the road, and she heard the lieutenant say, "Oh, f---!" At first, he put on the brakes, causing the jeep to skid, but then she felt the wheels spinning as they accelerated and entered the cloud. "Tear gas!" yelled the lieutenant. "Hold your breath," and even though she couldn’t see, she knew they were moving straight into the cloud. She heard two shots and a snapping sound like two parts of a leather belt being jerked together. Instinctively, she ducked down, but with the echoes, she couldn’t tell where the shots came from. Then she heard two loud pops from the lieutenant’s pistol. Her face and her eyes burned like hot peppers, and she kept them closed tight. She could neither see nor breathe. "You okay?" she heard him yell. "Yes. Okay," she replied, covering her face with her hands.
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About the Book
It’s the decade of free love in America, but Magnus Larsson is AWOL. Naïve and confused, he isn’t gettin’ any, free or otherwise. What he used to get were good grades, good enough to get him trained as a leader of men in Vietnam. There, however, he discovers that practical knowledge and common sense are more valuable than his cumulative grade point average. By the time of his second tour, Manny begins to suspect that many of the pacification projects assigned to him and his construction team have been chosen more for how they look on somebody’s report than how they help the local populace. With family skeletons and emotional vulnerabilities, he seems destined to fail. His confusion with the land and its people combines with unresolved issues from his past, causing him to seek the anesthetizing quality of alcohol. Happily, a woman comes into his life. Miss Nguyen Thi Luu is an interpreter for the Army Advisory Team who has family problems of her own. But of the girls Manny has known, Miss Luu alone exhibits such a calm sense of realism. Though their cultures are polar opposites, it is this simplicity to which Manny can relate. Miss Luu’s life becomes intertwined with Manny’s, but she is drawn as well into U.S. counterinsurgency operations when her old friend, Miss Phuong, gets mixed up with members of the National Liberation Front. Her challenge evolves to survival as the Communists take over the country. Manny and Miss Luu are attracted to one another, but Manny’s guilt for screwing up the lives of those around him points toward suicide. Love and spiritual meaning are locked in a battle against social dysfunction and manic depression in this story where heroes and angels are found in unlikely places.
About the Author
Bob Erikson grew up believing his uncle was a Pearl Harbor veteran who had psychological scars related to the trauma he had experienced. It wasn’t until Erikson was in architecture school during the Vietnam conflict that he learned of a family secret with which his mother had been burdened. While her brother (Erikson’s uncle) was indeed a survivor of Pearl Harbor, a decade after the attack he murdered his wife. In Erikson’s first novel, he creates a story based on secrecy and its role in family dysfunction. Erikson is an architect who served two Vietnam deployments as an officer with the U.S. Navy Seabees. In 1975, he co-authored Indianapolis Architecture, published by the Indiana Architectural Foundation, and he has written and edited articles for architectural publications. He experienced the onset of manic depression in the early eighties.