A Clean Kill in Tokyo

unnerving.
    “But you don’t trust me,” she went on. “That hurts.”
    “It’s not trust, Midori. It’s…” I said, then stopped. “I believe you. I’m sorry for pushing so hard.”
    “I’m talking about your dream.”
    I pressed my fingertips to my eyes. “Midori, I can’t, I don’t…” I didn’t know what the hell to say. “I don’t talk about these things. If you weren’t there, you couldn’t understand.”
    She reached over and gently pried my fingertips from my eyes, then held them without self-consciousness at her waist. Her skin and her breasts were beautiful in the diffused moonlight, the shadows pooled in the hollows above her clavicles. “You need to talk, I can feel that,” she said. “I want you to tell me.”
    I looked down at the tangled sheets and blankets, the shadows carving stark hills and valleys like some alien landscape in the moonlight. “My mother… she was Catholic. When I was a kid, she used to take me to church. My father hated it. I used to go to confession. I used to tell the priest about all my lascivious thoughts, all the fights I’d been in, the kids I hated and how I wanted to hurt them, kill them. At first it was like pulling teeth, but it got addictive.
    “But that was all before the war. In the war, I did things… that are beyond confession.”
    “But if you keep them bottled up like this, they’ll eat you like poison. They are eating you.”
    I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to let it out.
    What’s with you?
I thought.
Do you want to drive her away?
    Yeah, maybe that was it. Maybe that would be best. I couldn’t tell her about her father, but I could tell her something worse.
    When I spoke, my voice was dry and steady. “Atrocities, Midori. I’m talking about atrocities.”
    Always a good conversation starter. But she stayed with me. “I don’t know what you did,” she said, “but I know it was a long time ago. In another world.”
    “It doesn’t matter. I can’t make you understand, not if you weren’t there.” I pressed my fingertips to my eyes again, the reflex useless against the images playing in my mind.
    “A part of me loved it, thrived on it. Operating in the NVA’s backyard—the North Vietnamese Army—not everybody could do that. Some guys, when they’d hear the insert helicopters going off into the distance and the jungle go quiet, they’d panic, couldn’t breathe. Not me. I had over twenty missions in Indian country. People would say I had used up all my luck, but I just kept going, and the missions kept getting crazier.
    “I was one of the youngest One-Zeros—SOG team leaders—ever. My teammates and I were tight. We could be twelve guys against an NVA division, and I knew not one of my people would run. And they knew I wouldn’t, either. Do you know what that’s like, for a kid who’s been ostracized his whole life because he’s a half-breed?”
    I talked faster. “I don’t care who you are. If you wade that deeply into the blood and muck, you won’t stay clean. Some people are more susceptible than others, but eventually everyone goes over the edge. Two of your people are blown in half by a Bouncing Betty mine, their legs torn from their bodies. You’re holding what’s left of them in the last moments of their lives, telling them, ‘Hey, it’s going to be okay, you’re going to be okay,’ they’re crying and you’re crying and then they’re dead. You walk away, you’re covered with their insides.
    “You lay your own booby traps for the enemy, that was one of our specialties, tit for tat, but there are only twelve of you and you can’t win that kind of war of attrition no matter how much more you bleed them than they bleed you. You take more losses, and the frustration—the rage, the strangling, muscle-bunching rage—just builds and builds. And then one day, you’re moving through a village with the power of life and death slung over your shoulder, sweeping back and forth, back and forth, muzzle forward. You’re in a declared free-fire zone, meaning anyone who isn’t a confirmed friendly is assumed to be Vietcong and treated accordingly. And intel tells you this village is a hotbed of VC activity, they’re feeding half the sector, they’re a conduit for arms flowing south down the Trail. The people are giving you sullen looks. Some mama-san says, ‘Hey Joe, you fuck mommie, you number ten,’ some shit like that. I mean, you’ve got the intel. And two hours earlier you lost another