Invasion

I would be admitting that the entire thing was real. I was not up to that just yet.
        When they were upon us, I stumbled to my feet, jarred out of the dangerous trance by a sudden and awful awareness of my mortality. Four of the enemy seemed maniacally determined to destroy me, no one else, just me, me alone, as if I were some personal enemy of theirs and not just any American. I caught the first of them with a shot through the chest, blew off the face of the second one, opened the stomach of the third, and placed two shots in the chest of the last man. Two shots: the first did not stop him. It had been in the center of his chest, heart-center, yet he came forward as if he were an automaton. The second bullet jerked him to the left and slowed him down considerably, but it did not stop him either. A half-breath later, he slammed into me. The thin blade of his rifle bayonet ripped through my shoulder, bringing lightning with it, pain like lightning, sharp and bright. We both went down in the wet scrub brush-and I blacked out.
        When I came to, the world was utterly silent, without even the voice of the rain.
        Something heavy bore down on me, and I felt curiously numb.
        But I was alive. Wasn't I? That was something, anyway. That was really something. Wasn't it?
        I opened my eyes and found that the dead soldier lay atop me. His head was on my left shoulder, his face turned towards me. His black eyes were open, as was his mouth. He looked as if he were still screaming.
        I tried to push him off, cried out as an intense wave of pain gushed down the right side of my body, and collapsed back against the soggy earth.
        Carefully I turned my head away from him and looked at my right shoulder where the bayonet had driven all the way through and into the earth beneath me. The dead man's hands had slipped down until they clenched the end of the barrel where the haft of the knife was affixed. I tried to reach across the body and pry those fingers loose. They were coiled so tightly around the weapon that I could not move them, not as weak and frightened as I was. Each tune I made another attempt to shake off the body or free the bayonet, the blood bubbled out of my wound and soaked the sleeve of my shirt. Already, I was drawing ants.
        We lay there for eleven hours. The ants came and scouted my face and chose to let me go until I died. They crawled inside the yellow man's open mouth and clustered over his eyes. I didn't want to watch them, yet I found myself staring helplessly. Time stretched into weeks and months: minutes became hours, tune was distorted, appeared to slow down-yet I seemed to be careening at a frightening speed down a narrow tube of time, toward a round black exit into nothingness.
        Screaming…
        This time it was me.
        I remembered the other three men I had killed, and my mind filled with images of rotting corpses, although I could not see them from where I lay. Four men…
        So what? I had killed a dozen men on other missions.
        Screaming…
        Now stop it, I told myself.
        But I couldn't stop.
        I might have killed a dozen men before this-but they had not seemed like men to me. The killing had been done from a distance, and I had been able to think of my targets as, simply, "the enemy".
        That made it impersonal, acceptable. Euphemisms made it seem like little more than target practice. But now, lying here in the scrub, I could not avoid the truth, could not avoid the fact that these were men I had killed. I saw my own sin-and my own mortality-in vivid terms. I saw that these were men, saw the un deniable truth, because I was looking directly into one of their faces (and
        Death looking back at me), looking into an open mouth full of bad teeth (and
        Death grinning in the rictus), looking at an earlobe that had been pierced for a ring that wasn't there now (and Death holding the ring out to me in one bony hand), looking at chapped lips…
        When they found me eleven hours later, I asked them to please kill me.
        The medic said, "Nonsense." The chattering heli copter blades made his words sound disjointed, mechanical. "You've been badly hurt, but you're well enough. You're incredibly lucky!"
        And then the dream began all over again. I was lying in scrub brush at the bottom of Hill #898, waiting for the enemy to attack, my rifle wrapped in plastic
        I