Hooch Term Analysis

The village was a good ten minutes away and everybody seemed relaxed. I wasn’t. I was scared.

I had never thought of myself as being afraid of anything. I thought I would always be a middle-of-the-road kind of guy, not too brave, but not too scared, either. I was wrong. I was scared every time I left the hooch.

On the way to the chopper, I found myself holding my breath. I kept thinking of the noise I had heard when Jenkins got it. By the time we took off I was panting.

An image of the VC we had killed flashed through my mind. I wondered if he had a family? Had he been out on a patrol? When did he know he was going to die?

What was worse than thinking about him dead was the way we looked at him. At least we had cared for Jenkins, had trembled when he died. He was one of us, an American, a human. But the dead Vietnamese soldier, his body sprawled out in the mud, was no longer a human being. He was a thing, a trophy. I wondered if I would become a trophy.

“We won.” Walowick came in after the volleyball game and sat on the edge of the bunk. “They’re paying us off in beer.”

“Way to go,” I said.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Seeing that dead gook mess you up some?”

“A little,” I said. “Maybe even more than Jenkins.”

“Who’s Jenkins?”

The war was different now. Nam was different. Jenkins had been outside of me, even the guys in Charlie Company had been outside. Lieutenant Carroll was inside of me, he was part of me. Part of me was dead with him. I wanted to be sad, to cry for him, maybe bang my fists against the sides of the hooch. But what I felt was numb. I just had these pictures of him walking along with us on patrol or sitting in the mess area, looking down into a coffee cup. It was what I was building in my mind, a series of pictures of things I had seen, of guys I had seen. I found myself trying to push them from my mind, but they seemed more and more a part of me.

Later we went to the recreation hooch and watched the news. It was all about President Johnson trying to get a bill passed to help the urban poor, and then something about the Pueblo, which had been taken over by the North Koreans. Then there was a big thing on the Super Bowl, and whether or not the Packers had a dynasty going. It wasn’t real that people were thinking about things like that when all this shit was going on. It just wasn’t real.

Lobel damned near dragged Jamal into our hooch.

“Go ahead, tell him what you heard,” Lobel said to Jamal.

“Sergeant Simpson and Captain Stewart got into a fight,” Jamal said. “Captain Stewart told Sergeant Simpson that if he didn’t shut up and get out he was going to bust him down to private.”

[…]

“What they fighting about?” Johnson asked.

[…]

“He found out that Captain Stewart is volunteering Alpha Company all over the place. He asked him what he’s doing that for, and Captain Stewart said that if he didn’t want to fight, he shouldn’t have extended.”

What Jamal said went down hard. We didn’t mind doing our part because it had to be done, even though we didn’t have answers to why we were doing it.

But nobody wanted to go out and risk their lives so that Stewart could make major.