1210 Hours
Our platoon leader gets something on the radio. Beyond this boundary is the alleged governor’s mansion, and surrounding the governor’s mansion is an alleged battalion of PRA, the Grenadan People’s Revolutionary Army, the tatterdemalion force that assassinated Maurice Bishop, the leftist prime minister. The PRA, with the help of Cuban advisers, was building an airfield that the Reagan administration viewed as a Soviet arms pipeline to Nicaragua and El Salvador. That, plus the State Department’s concern for the 600 Americans at St. George’s Medical School, was reason enough for the U.S. to invade. Given that the invasion, dubbed Operation Urgent Fury, took place only two days after a suicide bomber killed 241 marines stationed in Beirut, some Americans were rude enough to believe that Grenada was a face-saver for Reagan. But no one in our platoon much cares for equivocating geopolitical piffle. That’s all in the past, we say. We just want to lay down some paint.
Some believe that Dollack, despite broken ribs and a collapsed lung, is among us, fighting with the foot soldiers, playing a Cuban or American marine, no one knows which.
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Our platoon leader in the weeds ahead, finger to his lips, or approximately where his lips would be behind his face mask, delivers a few hand signals that the two soldiers nearest the correspondent take as their cue to rush forward and drop to their bellies. The war correspondent moves to follow, exposes himself above the brush line, is shot, and falls. Medic! he screams. Medic! His chest is on fire but he’s glad to be lying down where he can’t be shot anymore. Then around him men are down. The air fills with rat-a-tat and the trees overhead splat and spit with the pop pop pop popping of a horizontal hailstorm. Medic! A guy with a head shot walks past, murmuring that he’s fucked, he’s fucking dead, and it’s true, the medic can’t do a thing for a head shot. The medic finally appears in the clearing where we’ve all been massacred, but he’s shot in the head too.
We are sitting in the hospital, waiting to be re-resurrected, grooving on the reggae that’s pumping mood into the forest through speakers set up along the line of battle, when here comes the son of Wayne Dollack, bejeweled and silken and paisleyed, beaded and braceleted. He comes waving his arms like some mystical stork. He has frizzy long hair and a reddish goatee and wears a snakeskin Mad-Hatter-style top hat and Lennon spectacles.
the doctor, but his dad was like “We’re gonna do the damn thing. Because if people are having fun, then it’s like OK.” But his dad isn’t up to snuff and so Snake is sort of playing the part of his father, and that’s a heavy role to assume, the heaviest, to play Wayne Dollack. He’s sweated through three shirts and his tobacco-strained voice is almost gone, but he loves to play the MC as much as Wavy Gravy. You could see it in his eyes this morning when he addressed the troops, like he might have been introducing Jim Morrison to a million naked hippie chicks instead of giving a pep talk to 350 guys in camouflage.
The command post is supposed to be the one safe place where somebody can stop for a smoke or a drink of water or to unfog a mask, but the general isn’t taking chances with another assassination attempt. An hour ago a grunt came inside to clean his goggles and left a bomb. It took the general an hour just to get an engineer to rebuild. “Their mission is to kill me, but if nobody gets close to me it doesn’t happen. A spy will have a mission card. He has the mission of trying to eliminate me. So he’ll come over here and say, ‘I want to speak to the general over our surrender.’ I know he’s a Cuban. The one spy to come over here says, ‘I want to talk to the general.’ I says, ‘No you don’t, we’re winning,’ and I shot him. I been doing these long enough, I know Wayne’s thinking.”
