You ate some brains this week. If you think that was a good plan, let me know. I’ll shoot you myself.
It wasn’t a good plan.
Pee test every week until you get to the other side of this.
Fine. Just… fine.
I’m on your side, Michael, but you’ve got to be on your side, too. I believe in you. You’re a good man. You can do this.
I know.
I’ll see you next week, Michael.
Not if I see you first.
[Pause.]
Just kidding.
There’s a meeting at Beth Israel at seven tonight. I’d like to see a signature on your card that says you made it.
Yeah. I’ll try.
Just remember: there’s a bullet in the head waiting for you if you don’t.
He Said, Laughing
By Simon R. Green
Simon R. Green is the bestselling author of dozens of novels, including several long-running series, such as the Deathstalker series and the Darkwood series. Most of his work over the last several years has been set in either his Secret History series or in his popular Nightside milieu. Recent novels include The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny and The Spy Who Haunted Me. A new series, The Ghost Finders, is forthcoming. Green’s short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Mean Streets, Unusual Suspects, Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, Powers of Detection, and is forthcoming in my anthology The Way of the Wizard.
Apocalypse Now is a strange, wild movie. In it, director Francis Ford Coppola retells Joseph Conrad’s classic Colonial-era novel Heart of Darkness by transposing the story to the Vietnam War. In one scene, American soldiers attempt to seize a beachhead while simultaneously blasting Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” and surfing. Robert Duvall, playing the mad Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, stands tall as mortars land all around him, and declares, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” From there things only get stranger and more surreal, as Martin Sheen’s character Captain Willard travels farther and farther upriver, seeking a rogue colonel named Kurtz.
But the process of filming the movie was as mad and out-of-control as anything that appears on film. Drinking and drugs were rampant among the crew. A storm destroyed the sets, and the borrowed helicopters were called away to fight real-life battles. Star Marlon Brando had become grossly obese and refused to be filmed except from the neck up while standing in deep shadow. Someone on the production had obtained real cadavers to use as props, which turned out to have been stolen from local graves. And director Francis Ford Coppola, who stood to lose everything if the film failed, threatened repeatedly to kill himself.
Sounds pretty insane. But on the other hand, at least they never had to deal with zombies.
Saigon. 1969. It isn’t Hell; but you can see Hell from here.
Viet Nam is another world; they do things differently here. It’s like going back into the Past, into the deep Past—into a primitive, even primordial place. Back to when we all lived in the jungle, because that was all there was. But it isn’t just the jungle that turns men into beasts; it’s being so far away from anything you can recognize as human, or humane. There is no law here, no morality, none of the old certainties. Or at least, not in any form we know, or can embrace.
Why cling to the rules of engagement, to honorable behavior, to civilized limits; when the enemy so clearly doesn’t? Why hide behind the discipline of being a soldier, when the enemy is willing to do anything, anything at all, to win? Why struggle to stay a man, when it’s so much easier to just let go, and be just another beast in the jungle?
Because if you can hang on long enough…you get to go home. Being sent to Viet Nam is like being thrown down into Hell, while knowing all the time that Heaven is just a short flight away. But even Heaven and Hell can get strangely mixed up, in a distant place like this. There are pleasures and satisfactions to be found in Hell, that are never even dreamed of in Heaven. And after a while, you have to wonder if the person you’ve become can ever go home. Can ever go back, to the person he was.
Monsters don’t just happen. We make them, day by day, choice by choice.