John Skarl

Pigman


I spent most of my adolescence pretending that I was someone else. A need to transcend the mundane manifested itself through the years I spent sitting around a table role-playing with character sheets and dice. Sometimes role-playing was war in the back of the allotment. In these fictional landscapes, the possibility of death lurked like a dark bird on a highwire.

Dungeons and Dragons experienced a rebirth during the nineties. It had been admonished as a game that further disconnected people from reality, inspired violent behavior, and in some cases, caused lasting mental harm. All three of these side effects could be true for all I know, though I have firm suspicions they are not. I thank God no one forbid our role-playing. Sometimes I wonder if Dungeons and Dragons could have vented Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s psychotic behavior into a harmless, hot steam. Our misfit group certainly had violent tendencies, and our discussions, had they been broadcasted or written down, could nowadays be considered grounds for expulsion.

We played other war games. I recall the dank dirt, clingy leaves, army surplus flashlight on one hip, canteen on the other. We had plastic guns—in some cases they were metal—they were all fake, but looked dangerously real. If there happened to be any sissy orange plastic, we pried those parts off or spray-painted them black. We humped the entire woods that spanned for five or six miles behind the allotment—these same woods later became the place we learned to drink or smoke—an irreverent place.

In sixth grade, a man came in to speak to us about the Vietnam War. James Crumb was the father of one of the girls in my class. He talked about how he was drafted. He spoke of his dread but also his sense of duty. He told us his weapon was the M-60 machine gun. That was the gun Rambo held with one arm. He had my attention. He gave us real answers to our questions: “Were you scared?” “Often.” “Did you kill anyone?” “Yes.”

He brought a cardboard box full of books telling his experiences in the war. I was a sixth grader with five dollars lunch money. I decided I could afford to go hungry. Those days I remember thumbing through military equipment guides, marveling over the pictures of guns, tanks and missiles in our library. Here was a living, breathing story. Crumb carried an M-60 machine gun, which could fire 160 rounds per minute. He called it the pig because of its weight, and the pig was called on often.

I still have Pigman. Its cover is a map of Vietnam highlighting the areas Crumb fought in or traveled through. I believe the memoir was self-published because the typeset looks like Courier and there are misspellings. None of these things mattered to me. Here was a true account—truth that wasn't filtered through the news or a history book.

At one point, he described diving into a foxhole to avoid mortar fire. Many others had the same idea, and soon he was buried under soldiers seeking refuge. When the shell hit, these bodies saved his life. He described finding a mass of slaughtered Viet Cong that had been exposed to the sun for weeks and he described their efforts to clean up the bodies on the side of a jungle mountain, how their sun-rotten skin stuck to his hands, the ravenblack smoke clouds, the barrel-rolling artillery planes, how, during the tour, his own reflection grew more and more unrecognizable. It was one book I never forgot.