Laughing War — Martyn Burke

Originally published by Doubleday. Bien Hoa airbase, outside Saigon,wasn't a very funny place, but Barney's job had one advantage: he alwaysplayed to a packed house. The soldiers flocked to his shows, and the war-zonecomedian coaxed his battle-weary audiences first into chuckles and theninto guffaws of healing laughter with material drawn from the lunacy aroundthem: the little old VC with the single-shot rifle taking potshots at the jets, theinternational peace-keeping mission, the Vietnamese car wash racket, the numbing routine of army life,the officers... ...One officer in particular: Colonel Isaacs, the blood-and-guts commanderof the base, a driven man whose soldiers pay the price of his obsessions.Barney often ridiculed his authority from in front of the footlights, and afterhours he wooed the colonel's woman, Donna, a beautiful singer with a secret.So far, he had gone unpunished.... . . the band began blasting out an off-key Colonel BogeyMarch. The audience went wild. But at this point in the eve-ning they usually went wild over almost anything……. And so Colonel Bogey races across the flatness like atide seeking shore. It is louder than even the laughter and thestrange yelling that comes from the Club and is momentarilylost in the unearthly whine of the F-lOOs as they return frombombing whatever it is that has to be bombed. Colonel Bogeywashes over the lone sentries and rushes on into the darknessthat lies beyond the perimeter. The darkness stretches on andon, beyond the wretches lying soaked and bloody in the swampnear Cambodia listening to the metallic voices in the headsetthat tell them why the F-lOOs cannot come back until dawn,and listening to the noises in the nearby jungle that might bemetal grating on metal. The darkness goes on forever. But thenineteen-year-old from Georgia can no longer hear the curlingchords of Jimi Hendrix s guitar as the Armed Forces Radiobrings him the Best in Rock. The nineteen-year-old fromGeorgia can hear none of this. A long thin knife protrudes fromhis chest at the place where his flak jacket should have beenbuckled. Thin bubbles of blood drip from his mouth. In hisfinal act as a sentry, he has died with his eyes wide open.