The Death of Major Great

An Atlantic “First”

by Tracy Kidder

Major Great had treated the men contemptibly. Pancho shot him with his — Swedish K. a green submachine gun which resembled a large insect. Jonesy cut his legs off, Ramses Jackson cut his arms off, and Macomb cut off the head with the power saw. I watched, then I ran and got a scissors and excised the lieutenant’s bar from my collar. Jonesy had traded a pornographic movie to the Engineers for two bags of cement and we froze most of Major Great in blocks. But the Major’s driver was a problem. We couldn’t leave him tied up in the Major’s jeep forever.

Jonesy took the jeep into Nuc Mao that night and traded it to an ammo humper for his daughter. But as for the Major’s driver, Macomb said. “That boy is enlisted scum like me.”

Pancho said it didn’t matter; it was too dangerous to let the driver live. Smiling at me, Pancho said it might be too dangerous to let any witness live. But no one, not even Pancho. wanted to kill the driver, yet no one wanted him alive. We were lucky to be living in an exotic country.

I was walking between the enlisted hootches that evening when something tripped me up. I thought it was one of Pancho’s booby traps, but when I got out my flashlight there was this thing like a giant fire hose. There was bare ground there for twenty feet and bushes on either side but though I walked all twenty feet I couldn’t find an end. It was a fat. green-and-speckled fire hose and it was moving, just sliding along with no end in sight.

I went for Pancho. He said. “Shaky.” He told me to get the sledgehammer. Macomb was there by the time I got it and apparently Macomb knew that this was what we had been waiting for. He was trying to stand on the large fire hose to keep it from getting away. But every time he got on he’d get carried off like on a conveyor belt.

Pancho rounded up one of the metal stakes you make bunkers out of and he drove that stake right through the back of the snake and into the ground with the sledgehammer, and pinned it there.

Pancho said we had better hurry because the snake’s head end would be starting back to see what had happened. So we carried the Major’s driver to the stake and set him down, all tied up. The driver was gone when I came back and Pancho was standing there saying. “Shaky. Shaky,”

But I knew our problems hadn’t ended there. When it came back, the snake’s head end didn’t take its original route. Instead, it circled one of the hootches, picked up the driver, and headed off, So it looked as though the snake would encircle that hootch like a hose clamp and crush it.

There had been trouble for months. We had two latrines, one just for officers. Underneath were fifty-gallon drums to catch the slop. Every week the men would pour kerosene in the drums and burn the slop, stirring the fire with big sticks. But Pancho refused to burn the stuff in my latrine. Others followed his example and in two weeks the slop drew rats, morale declined, the men stopped shining their boots, they grew Fu Manchu moustaches. Word of that at length got back to headquarters on the seacoast. And headquarters sent Major Great to whip us back in shape.

Just about that time Pancho started talking about how “short” he was, which meant he was going home soon. He walked around all day saying, “Short.” Whenever you asked him for help he would say. “I’m too short for that shit.”

While I wrung my hands and the snake began to crush the plywood foundations of the hootch, Pancho said he was so short he was afraid he might get stepped on, and he wandered off. It was Jonesy who got the power saw and cut the snake in two.

It had been a long day then and we were all covered with snake gore and too tired to dispose of the tail end of the meaty carcass. So we left it lying there. I went to the officers’ hootch and got in bed.

When I awoke that might and looked out from under the mosquito net, through the screen walls and across the moonlit ground, I saw a plague of little creatures. They were heading for the snake. Then I saw Pancho standing nearby in the moonlight. “Rats. Lieutenant.”he said, and laughed softly at me.

We opened cans of poison and rolled the poison orange flakes in balls of peanut butter, but the rats that died drew other rats to feed on them, I said we must burn them. Pancho said. “OK.”He got out his blowtorch and gasoline. The fire spread. Our hootches burned. It was just what I was afraid of. Others came from headquarters, surveyed the damage. The inspectors eyed my snipped-off collar, the men’s moustaches, their unshined boots and rusty guns. They nodded to each other. They called for sniffing dogs, to search for Major Great. The fire had not burned the cement blocks.

I saw it was no use. Leaving the others behind to answer questions, we packed our rucksacks quietly. We gave the ammo bumper’s daughter to the MP at the gate in return for safe passage. Then Pancho and Macomb and Jonesy and I stole off down Highway 1.

We left the road near Nue Mao and went into the hills, where Macomb died on punji stakes. Inland on the plains Jonesy began to rave at the sun. Someday, he cried at the yellow orb, he would be governor of Alaska! I said. “We leave him here.”

But Pancho shook his head. He walked away, a few steps. “Jonesy!” he yelled and Jonesy turned and Pancho shot him down.

It was hard losing my men that way. But I still had Pancho. a box who knew how to take care of himself. He never skirted a danger. In the forests he looked for things like cobras and the insidious finger-length krait. He killed them and hung them in little branches over the places where I lay to sleep, so that when i awoke I ‘d see these creatures open-fanged hanging down near me. I’d leap up and Pancho would laugh. “You’re shaky. Lieutenant.”

We wandered many days in gloom of giant trees. Parrots and monkeys watched us. I guessed bv feel mv beard had grown, but Pancho had no beard that I could measure mine by. We walked at the feet of smooth brown trees with tops that disappeared among the leaves of lesser ones. We found water under small stone bridges left there by the French, and in the forest gloom we saw leopards and silhouettes of elephants trudging.

One day we came upon a band of Viet Cong in rubber sandals. They were setting up an L-shaped ambush. We watched from a thicket, and in a little while a company of riflemen came stalking through the trees. Painted on their helmets was “1/26 The Gunlighters” and they were caught dumbfounded and howling in intersecting fields of withering tire. Pancho led us west into a grass valley. Three helicopters came out of the sk\. WARLORDS was painted on their sides, and men in striped uniforms jumped out of them. We peeked above the grass and watched them run to a little shack. Their guns crackled. I hey walked back to the helicopters and then they flew away. “Shaky.”Pancho said. We looked in the doorway of the shack and inside on a straw mat a naked man and woman in intimate embrace lay bleeding.

Afterwards I thought I saw on Pancho’s lace a faraway, lascivious look. “Let’s hit some villes, ' he said.

We traveled through many remote villages, where children peeked at us from behind their mothers’ legs, where Pancho received the gilt of a leopard skin, He wore the skin afterwards whenever we entered a village. He would come strutting in his robe down the dusty wagon tracks, barechested. his round belly sticking out and the green gun in his hand. Pancho said it was my job to talk to the people while he “pheebed around.”So I climbed up on things like oxcarts and spoke to the assembled natives. I told them about my wife; I said many soldiers left pregnant wives and children behind them, because it made this business seem less crucial if you knew there were more where you came from. It didn’t make much difference what I said. The men would sometimes raise their crossbows, uttering. “Bom-Nee-Bah! Bom-NeeBah!" The old hags, who sat cross-legged in the dust, swayed from side to side and moaned. Others found something to laugh at and covered their mouths with their hands. Meanwhile Pancho crept among the young girls. I would still be speaking when Pancho yelled, “This place is number ten. Lieutenant. Let’s get outa here.”

I grew impatient. One evening in a drunken folly I grabbed a woman. The toothless old dog cackled and made obscene gestures when I threw her over mv shoulder. I carried her to a rice paddy where Pancho found us. He looked at me and shook his head.

As we traveled on, my tongue found out a sore inside my lip. When it vanished, nothing. Then my hair began to fall. Despondent, I tried to murder myself, but Pancho caught me at it and took away my weapons. “You’re shaky. Lieutenant.”I understood his game. I had thought he admired me for mv education, but now I knew why he kept me with him. As long as I was his lieutenant I was responsible for what he did.

So Pancho made me mount the oxcarts, while he went among the young girls. He would lift their shy chins with a finger, then open their mouths and look inside and murmur, “Shaky.”

After a few villages our pathways were full of traps, such as The Mace — it was an enormous coconut full of long, sharp bamboo slivers. Suspended from a vine, the coconut swung head high across the path when my weary feet stumbled on the trip vine. A narrow escape, I felt. Pancho marveled at the thing. He severed the coconut from the vine and stuck it in my knapsack, saying you never knew when a “shaky” thing like that might come in handy. I found an ankle-biter. It was two hinged boards with long sharp slivers embedded in each board. When you stepped on it, the boards snapped together like jaws on your ankle. And I never saw a bamboo sliver in that jungle that wasn’t coated with human feces.

Pancho suspected the villagers. He said they were trying to impede our progress toward the place we were looking for. “I know how these zips think. They’re sneaky,” he said, and laughed low.

I chewed betel nut; my gums turned black. Perhaps I shouldn’t have watched them murder Major Great and cut myself adrift. There was nothing for me to search for now, except penicillin. But Pancho drove me on.

On a wagon path he hailed an ancient papa-san. The old man left his water buffalo and began to run. Pancho knocked him down, rolled him over, and sat down on the old man’s stomach. He stuck the barrel of the green gun inside the papa-san’s mouth. I always felt that Pancho spoke a kind of universal language, and the old man responded. With a terrible fright in his eyes he beckoned to the west, toward cliffs on which the sun was setting.

We had to scale steep hillsides and walk to the end of my endurance. But we found our village. The girls were slender and wore long white dresses when they came to meet us on the road. The men put down their weapons and put on colored loincloths. This was the place Pancho had sought for breeding. Here I would be bathed and my wounds nursed, it was a village such as others were said to have found in the old days, where entering soldiers were mistaken for gods.

I do not know how I looked to them that day, bearded and diseased and limping, but I think my height impressed them, because they were a small, delicate people. Pancho came in his leopard-skin robe, wearing his olive drab Army baseball cap. He carried the green gun.

The people prayed that we would stay. When we showed them we had no intention of leaving, they celebrated with a stately dance, almost a minuet.

“This place is number one.” said Pancho, grinning at me between mouthfuls.