This story, published in 2007, uses language that Granta would not publish today. We are committed to making sure all previous issues of the magazine remain accessible to our subscribers in order to engage in a critical way with our history.

My buddy Meat’s the one who showed me the true joy of handling the M203. I mean, yeah, the M16 was okay. You hear a lot of us Marines making a big hoo-ha about our M16s. ‘This is my rifle, there are many like it, but this one is mine’ and all that. But after rolling with Meat, I’d take my M203 over an M16 any day.

You hear all those Nam doggies bragging on their old-school Blooper Gun, the M79 grenade launcher. It could blow up NVC from a hundred feet away. My instructor at Survival Evasion Resistance Escape school, what we called SERE, was Sergeant Bloodworth, a Force Recon Nam doggy who used to brag on how he could fire a grenade with the Blooper Gun and blow up a running NVC in mid-stride. But the Blooper Gun was a pain in the ass, an extra weapon you had to tote around in the bush. So after Vietnam, they came up with the M203 grenade launcher, which clips on to your service rifle. The M203 is one size fits all—jack that puppy into the forward receiver of your M16A2, your M4A1 carbine, whatever you got, and let fly. If you timed it right, your grenade would blow up right in the Iraqi soldier’s face. We called that a facial.

Because of my training in muay thai kickboxing, I’d been the punter for my high school football team down in Austin, Texas. Nobody in their right mind wants to be the punter. On Sundays you see all those other NFL guys doing what they’ve dreamed of doing since they could pee straight. And then there’s the team’s queer little punter, jumping up and down on the sidelines like he’s begging someone to punch his lights out. But there in the desert, with the M203 in hand, I was the quarterback. It definitely put a new twist on the term ‘long bomb’.

I scored my first facial back in February. I’d been in the desert for a month. We were in a firefight with a small pack of Iraqi soldiers—they’d ambushed our convoy as we crossed the bridge at Samarra—when I spotted a lone Iraqi perched on the berm. My guys were taking a lot of heat. I saw Meat pinned down in no-man’s-land, behind our Jeep, which was up on its side and covered in flames. Every time Meat tried to scramble out, this Iraqi sprayed the area with his AK-47. Tat-tat-tat-tat. I scrambled for cover behind some brush along the Euphrates. I was gasping for air. By then I didn’t have to use the M203’s sights, so I just cocked back and squeezed the trigger and watched the grenade sail through the sky. Straight towards the end zone.

At the last second, I shouted, ‘Yo!’ The Iraqi stood up and turned around. Just in time to make it a facial.

Touchdown!

Meat galloped up. ‘That’s right, G! You rollin’ tight! Hard core, baby! That’s hard core!’

I pumped my knees in a crazy war dance, a little number Meat and me liked to call the Baghdad Boogie. Meat jumped in too, right then and there. Meat’s version of the Baghdad Boogie was breakdancing, doing the robot. In his MOPP 4 gear, popping and locking with those AK-47 rounds whizzing by, Meat looked hilarious.

‘Who’s your monkey now?!’ I shouted at the sky. ‘Who’s got the big monkey dick now, bitch?!’

Meat stopped dancing and looked at me.

A hailstorm of rounds buzzed by us.

‘What?’ I said, the smile sliding off my face.

‘Anh Hung,’ Meat said. ‘Dude, why you gotta talk smack about Lam Binh? Talking about your big monkey dick like that? That shit’s completely disrespectful.’

Lam Binh. Always back to Lam Binh. Even out there in the desert, there was no escaping Lam Binh.

My twin sister Lam Binh’s the reason I became a Marine. Lam Binh or maybe Meat, though I never would have told Lam Binh that. Lam Binh has always hated Meat. Or at least since 1981. Me and Lam Binh were thirteen years old, living with our American dad in Austin. One day after school, before I knew what was happening, Lam Binh came streaking into my room naked, laughing her head off.

‘Hey! Let’s play a game!’ She jumped up on my bed, squatted over me so that my face was just a few inches from her vagina. Then she said the name of the game was POW. She said that POW meant Prisoner of War, and that some of the older girls had been talking about POW in the girls’ bathroom. Lam Binh said POW was like Truth or Dare, but way better. Lam Binh said she would tie me up and do things to me, and then I would tie her up and do things to her.

‘But first you have to get naked! Hurry up!’ she said.

‘Get the heck out of my room, willya?’ I shouted. But the truth is I couldn’t take my eyes off of what was right in front of my face.

‘Don’t be that way! You’ll like POW. But you have to get naked first.’

‘Okay. Hold on,’ I said. ‘Lemme go to the bathroom first. I gotta pee. Be right back.’

And with that I ran out into the woods behind our house. It was as if my legs had a mind of their own, ferrying me out into the wilderness.

The next afternoon Lam Binh repeated her performance. I was inspecting the shuriken Japanese throwing stars that I’d bought at a head shop when she bolted into my room, laughing. ‘POW! POW!’ she shouted. Only this time she was wearing cammies and a pair of combat boots. She looked like a regular GI Jane.

Lam Binh chased after me when I fled out into the woods, clinging to my stars. ‘Hold up!’ she cried.

I ran in a zigzag. I threw one of my stars as far as I could, so that when it struck the ground it would distract Lam Binh. I hid in a tree for a while. I lay down in the creek and used a dirty straw to breathe underwater as Lam Binh ran by, shouting my name. That’s how I first learned about Escape and Evasion.

And hunting, too. Because while my sister hunted me out in the woods that afternoon, I did some hunting of my own. I’d been practising with those throwing stars for a few weeks, nailing empty beer cans set up on the ground. But that afternoon I moved on to my first live target: I killed a field mouse from thirty feet away. Clean head shot. Then I nailed a couple of birds. Then a raccoon.

I wasn’t sure what to aim for next—there were too many squirrels, they were too easy—when I saw a stray dog that must have wandered into the woods from my junior high grounds down the street. It was a Scottish terrier.

I could hear Lam Binh calling out my name. ‘Anh Hung! Anh Hung!’

To be fair, I tried to give that Scottish terrier a head start before I began the hunt. But it just kept coming up to me with its tail wagging. Finally I got pissed and it ended up being me who had to run away from the dog—to get enough distance between us so that I could chuck my throwing star at it. But it kept running back to me! So I ended up having to take down that Scottish terrier from close range.

I hadn’t heard Lam Binh calling for a while, so afterwards I just headed home.

The next day, at school, it turned out that the Scottish terrier belonged to this blonde girl named Zoe in my algebra class. Zoe was the girl who had gotten everyone calling me Chinky Dinky Poo Poo, which all the kids eventually shortened to just plain Chinky Dink. There were LOST signs posted all around the school about Zoe’s missing dog that Friday morning. They said that Zoe had been walking her Scottish terrier, Tigger, around the school track, when a giant black man in a ski mask came running out of the woods and snatched the dog up and ran off. I knew that was a lie, but I couldn’t say anything, because then everyone would know it was me. I was scared as hell of getting caught, and so I can’t say I was too upset when I heard in the cafeteria that day that the police had already brought in a suspect for questioning, a semi-retarded black man I used to see playing Space Invaders up at the 7-Eleven.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a racist—in fact I hate racists. But as a minority, there’s only so much you can do for another minority before you have to think about what’s best for you. Besides, the way I figured it, I’d be a lot more useful to black people in the free world than locked up behind bars.

To prove my point, that afternoon I went up to Tolesha, the black girl in my world geography class, and offered to let her copy my homework for the rest of the year. Free of charge. Tolesha got bussed in from the other side of town and I figured she probably had a job after school, something that helped her family make ends meet, and being able to copy my homework would free her up to work more hours at her job. Turned out I was right. Because Tolesha, with a big white smile, gratefully accepted my offer.

When the final bell rang that afternoon, I raced out to the woods and hid that dead Scottish terrier where no one could find it.

When I came back to my house, I saw my new neighbour, Timmy, sitting in his wheelchair out in his backyard. He had only just moved to town, but he was already captain of the Students for Christ club at school.

‘Hey! Come here a sec!’ he said.

I trotted over.

‘Help me out, buddy. Fetch me that bird I just killed.’ He pointed at the ground under the bird feeder. I found a dead cardinal there and handed it to Timmy. He held up his fancy slingshot. ‘Pretty cool, huh?’

‘I guess.’ I held up one of my stars. ‘But not as cool as this.’

Timmy eyeballed the star with admiration. ‘You a soldier, too?’ he said. ‘What you been hunting, soldier?’

I stared at Timmy in his wheelchair. His legs looked weird, like pipe cleaners all twisted up below him. There was a red, white and blue sticker on his wheelchair that said: let us count our blessings. Something in his voice made Timmy seem hugely vulnerable, trustworthy.

The next thing I knew I heard myself confessing, telling Timmy what I’d done to the Scottish terrier. When I was done talking, Timmy practically bit my head off.

‘You idiot! Your sister’s always in those woods. She’s definitely gonna find that dog!’

Timmy was right. If Lam Binh discovered the Scottish terrier, she’d surely put two and two together. After all, Lam Binh was a genius. The star of the Gifted and Talented programme. Perfect score on the CAT test. Straight As.

I grabbed Timmy’s chair and wheeled him out into the woods. When we reached the little clearing, I said, ‘Here it is.’ Then, with Timmy barking instructions, I built a little fire.

Let me say this, though: the dogburgers were totally Timmy’s idea. One thousand per cent. Timmy insisted we go back to his house to get his dad’s hunting knife for skinning. Timmy brought the buns and ketchup from his kitchen. Timmy even brought paper plates in his backpack. And Timmy said if I didn’t help him eat the burgers, then he’d rat me out himself.

He said, ‘I’m on your side here. But I can’t do everything.’ He handed me a plate. ‘Now eat your chow, soldier.’

Scared of getting caught, I scarfed my first burger as the late afternoon sun bled through the canopy of leaves overhead. About halfway through I heard Lam Binh calling out my name, way off in the woods.

‘Anh Hung! Anh Hung! Come out, come out, wherever you are!’

Timmy said, ‘She’ll never find us. Hey, your sister’s hot, though. Do you like to fuck her or what?’

I didn’t know what to say, but I could tell Timmy would like me more if I said yes. So I said, ‘Of course. Whaddya think I am, a homo?’

We’d erected a spit over the fire. Timmy said he’d learned this stuff in Boy Scouts, and that one day he would become a United States Marine. Timmy said, ‘That’s why I pray so much. God’s gonna get me out of this here chair. Miracles happen.’

‘Whatever.’

‘It’s true. Shoot. You should read the Bible. And you should come to one of our Students for Christ meetings. Free cake and juice. Sometimes pizza. Then you’d know all this stuff. I’m gonna get out of this wheelchair soon. I mean, all I have to do is find Jesus, and then nail Jesus to a cross. Then God’ll get me out of this wheelchair, so I can become a Marine.’

‘A Marine?’ I said. ‘Give me a break. I’m going to train in the black arts of bushido. One day I’m going to be a Samurai warrior.’

‘What’s that?’ said Timmy.

‘Something that could kick a Marine’s ass with his eyes closed.’

‘You Chinese or something?’

‘Half Vietnamese. I was born in the tunnels of Cu Chi. My mother was a mighty NVC warrior. They called her Blue Dragon. My name means Hero in Vietnamese.’

‘Talk about serious freaksville.’

‘I thought you were my friend. If you’re not my friend, just say the word.’ I picked up one of my throwing stars.

‘You a Commie bastard? My dad says he killed all the Commie bastards in Nam.’

‘No, dickweed.’ I raised the throwing star, poised to throw.

‘Take it easy, dude. My dad says those Commie bastards could fight real good.’

‘Not as good as a Samurai,’ I said.

That’s when Lam Binh burst into the clearing. Her cammies made it hard to see her against the trees but the sun was glinting all around her. Her eyes swelled when she took in the scene. ‘What the hell are you guys doing?! What the frick is that?!’ she said, pointing to what was left of the Scottish terrier on the spit. She pinched her nose. ‘Whew. It stinks.’

‘Wow,’ said Timmy, his eyes suddenly filled with a weird light. ‘Why didn’t you tell me your sister was Jesus?’

I didn’t say anything. Timmy said, ‘Grab her! Get her before she runs away! Use the rope! It’s miracle time!’

I stood up, dusting my palms off on my jeans. I saw Lam Binh’s smile fade, replaced by a look of uncertainty. Then Lam Binh bolted back into the woods, and we chased after her.

I don’t want to talk about what me and Timmy did to my sister that afternoon. How we created a whole new version of POW, and how it changed all our lives forever. But I will say that those dogburgers were rancid. I was sick that night, throwing up everywhere. That’s how I came to be a vegetarian. And that’s how I gave Timmy his nickname, the name I’ve known him by ever since: Meat.

You might know Lam Binh from her porn movies, but you’d only know her by her porn name: V.J., which stands for Vietnamese Jesus. The same Lam Binh that graduated from Yale summa cum laude, with a double major in Post-Feminist Theory and Asian-American Studies. The same Lam Binh that was approached by the FBI about possible employment, and the same Lam Binh that told the FBI that she’d rather shoot herself in the vagina than work for the same American government that raped and pillaged Vietnam.

Or maybe you know Lam Binh from her anti-war commercials. A few months ago, during the build-up to the Gulf War, an international human rights organization hired Lam Binh to do a graphic series of anti-war commercials called ‘No Blood for Oil’.

Because of how graphic the commercials were, HBO was the only channel running the series. But when they became hot on college campuses, the media picked up on the whole phenomenon, and now they can’t get enough of Lam Binh: her father a decorated Vietnam Vet, her mother a member of the VC resistance, her brother a Marine deployed in Iraq.

I saw Lam Binh’s latest commercial before shipping out to Saudi Arabia. A bunch of us from 2nd Platoon were partying at Meat’s pad. We were playing quarters and doing shots of Goldschlager with the tunes pumping—Public Enemy, I think it was. The TV was on in the background with the volume off. When ‘No Blood for Oil UP came on, Corporal Danberger cried, ‘Holy shit! Here we go!’

On the TV, a chimpanzee in a Marine Corps dress blue uniform was beating his meat. He was standing on top of an MIAI Abrams tank in the desert and he had his trousers around his ankles. That chimpanzee was really going at it. Lam Binh was crouched below him with her mouth open. Suddenly the chimpanzee grimaced, like somebody had kicked him in the nuts. Then he came all over Lam Binh’s face. But when Lam Binh looked at the camera, the chimpanzee’s come was black. And shiny. Like oil. And it spelled the words no blood for oil across her face. Then in bold yellow letters the words fight the war against war: become a soldier for peace flashed across the screen.

‘Oooh-rah! Bomb’s away!’ Meat cried. Then he grinned at me and said, ‘That monkey gave your sister there a facial! Like his dick was an M203 firing grenades, yo! Oooh-rah! Yo Monkey!’ he said to me. ‘Tell your sister I seriously dig “No Blood for Oil III”! Tell her that’s my favourite.’ He made a circle with his hand and moved it up and down like he was jerking off.

The next night, I drove over to Lam Binh’s apartment in Oceanside for dinner. On the way I promised myself that I would never tell her what Meat had said. But of course I immediately spilled the beans. Lam Binh was in the kitchen, making pho—which our mom used to make for us when we lived in Saigon—and I was on the couch, cleaning my Beretta 9mm pistol.

‘Meat said he loves “No Blood for Oil III”. I mean, your art.’ That’s how Lam Binh told me to refer to her commercials. I didn’t mention the thing Meat did with his hand. ‘That’s how Meat put it,’ I said. ‘He seemed real sincere.’ I had my Beretta 9mm broken down into pieces, spread out on the coffee table. I ran a rag over the magazine catch assembly.

‘What!’ Lam Binh’s eyes got big. ‘Where does he get off? What an asshole!’

I knew I’d made a mistake by bringing it up. ‘I thought you liked Meat. I thought you’d forgiven him. That was all a long time ago. We were just kids.’

This was classic damashi, which in ninjutsu is used to mean ‘deception’. Shadowhand. I was trying to run some interference, to throw Lam Binh off the scent before she got any more pissed. Lam Binh is a worthy adversary, but I knew how to do this from SERE. In the POW part of the training cycle, Sergeant Bloodworth locked me up in this tiny wood box for a couple of days—you didn’t eat—and then he dragged me out for repeated interrogations. Sit you in the chair, jack you for information. I learned how to outsmart my interrogator with covert misdirection. How to tell a truthful story by telling lies. Because if your captors get the whole truth they’ll kill you—or kill your mates because you ratted them out. The trick is to tell your POW story without making your interrogator cut off one of your hands, or throw acid in your face. You’ve got to plot each word like your life depends on it, but give the impression that you don’t fucking care if you live. Your delivery has to be a perfect mixture of fear and courage. You also have to be ready to die. That part’s total Samurai.

Lam Binh said, ‘Are you fucking kidding me, Anh Hung? You’re gonna have to do a helluva lot better than this, with your Jedi mind tricks. Give me a break.’

By this point, I’d put the Beretta 9mm all the way back together again. The weapon was so clean you could wipe your ass with it. I chambered a round.

Then Lam Binh slammed a carrot down on the cutting board. She said, ‘Listen. I’ll. Tell. You. What.’ Then Lam Binh said she’d cut Meat’s dick off if he ever came near her. ‘Just like this!’ And brought the knife down right through the carrot.

The day after I scored that facial along the Euphrates, me and Meat were sent into Basra for a little Sneak and Peek under the cover of darkness. Intel had given the word that some Republican Guard were holed up in the local junior high school. A renegade band, using the school as a hide site, were terrorizing the locals and making hit and runs on our guys along Highway 10. We came flying over Basra in a Blackhawk and pulled into position above the school.

Hertz, the pilot, turned and shouted, ‘Okay, gents! Time for me to drop a load. Go! Go! Go!’

Meat and me jumped out the hatch. We fast-roped down about halfway and then busted through a second-floor window in a shower of glass shards. There were old desks strewn around the room and a chalkboard on the wall. It reminded me of our old school. I half expected to see a Scottish terrier running around with a throwing star sticking out of its head. Then a giant, bearded Republican Guard leapt out from behind a desk and charged Meat. He was running at top speed, but his pistol was steady and I saw the red light dance across Meat’s chest. And that’s when I knew we were in big trouble.

Photograph © Thomas Hawk