Oddsplayer by Joe Rodriguez

Author:Joe Rodriguez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arte Público Press
Published: 1989-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Crowded in a confined bunker, incoming constant, soldiers talk, Maria. Not of the past, nor the future, not to escape the shelling, but to remember home.

None of the other Marines had writing paper. Perez composed a letter to her, anyway.

I quit college and found work to pay father’s medical bills. You, compañera, realized I would be drafted. Both of us knew many families with sangre in uniform and there were KIAs. The odds were clear. Chicanos from the university and the barrios protested.

The day for induction came. I went through the routine in dread. I felt like an Indio watching the Spaniards burn sacred books. I saw racks of skulls. The pioneers were drawing the wagons in a circle.

Soldiers talk to forget how they are changed by incoming. How can I ever go back, Maria? I cannot reconcile what I have become. Now I understand why I threw myself into my studies and read for hours.

Before Talbot sent me north into full combat, I went on patrol to a village named Four-Miles on our maps. The medic, Kirsch, found a young girl who was in a coma. Malaria, typhoid, plague—the corpsman couldn’t say. Her father wouldn’t let Kirsch treat her. He chanted prayers for the dead. The medic wanted to take her to a field hospital. Her father said keep her at home to die with her ancestors for luck.

I put my rifle to the villager’s head. By what right did he condemn his daughter? Why should he decide?

“Put down your piece, Bro,” my friend Hendrick urged. I can talk with Hendrick. We understand.

The village was Four-Miles on our maps. The war ran by remote control. Heat, flies, full light boiling. Who decides who lives or dies? I tried to remember. Felt buried alive.

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