As the weeks rolled by, however, Andrew began to notice that his excitement was draining away, and a deep emptiness seemed to take its place. The flash of bullets exploding from the barrel of his gun no longer seemed to have the same hold over him. And Andrew began to feel a gnawing in the pit of his stomach when he saw the carnage that was being inflicted on the local people. Now when he returned to camp at night, Andrew found himself taking swig after swig of gin. The gin would burn his throat at first, but within an hour of swigging it, Andrew was numb to the day’s events. And that felt good, very good.
Chapter 6
A Searing Image
Time on the battlefront passed slowly for Andrew. Although Andrew received regular letters from home, the little Dutch village of Sint Pancras seemed a million miles away. Like Andrew, most of the other soldiers in his company lived lives of quiet desperation as each week one or more of their comrades were killed or wounded in the fighting. The only glimmer of joy in Andrew’s life was a three-foot-tall gibbon.
Andrew had been on leave in Jakarta when, as he walked through a market, he passed the gibbon. The ape was tethered to a pole and sat on top of it, peeling an orange. As Andrew passed by, the gibbon leapt off the pole onto Andrew’s shoulder, where it held out a segment of the orange it had just peeled for him to eat. Andrew smiled, and the animal seemed to smile back at him. Andrew bought the ape and took him back to camp.
The gibbon was a hit with Andrew’s fellow soldiers, who loved to pet and play with the animal. But Andrew noticed that sometimes when one of the other soldiers touched the gibbon near its waist, it often winced in pain. When he investigated, he discovered that the ape had something imbedded under its skin that caused the pain. Andrew took a razor and carefully cut into the gibbon’s skin. He was amazed that the animal just lay there and let him cut. Andrew pulled the gibbon’s flesh apart and discovered that the embedded object was a length of wire. Carefully he cut some more and then removed the wire. When the cut had healed, the gibbon never again winced in pain when someone touched its waist.
Having the wire removed seemed to bond the gibbon to Andrew. The two became inseparable. Sometimes Andrew would go running, with the gibbon clinging to his shoulders. At other times, especially at night when he had no one else to talk to, Andrew would sit and talk to his gibbon. He would tell the ape how he felt inside about the fighting going on around him. Somehow his conversations with the gibbon seemed to ease his conscience.
As the conflict dragged on, Andrew became recognized for his bravery and quick thinking on the battlefield. One day when he and his platoon were out on patrol, they came to a hill. Andrew sprinted off up the hill and was soon one hundred yards in front of the others, who were huffing and puffing their way up the side of the jungle-covered slope. But as he ran over the ridge at the top of the hill, Andrew came face-to-face with ten heavily armed guerrilla fighters. He was outnumbered and outgunned, and the rest of his platoon were still only halfway up the hill. Andrew thought fast; his life depended on it. He knew that if he opened fire on the guerrillas, they would fire back and he would be dead in seconds. The only way he could see out of the situation was to bluff the guerrillas. Instantaneously he raised his gun and pointed it at the guerrilla fighters. “The war is over for you,” he said. “Drop your weapons. You’re completely surrounded.” He said it as forthrightly and as convincingly as he possibly could.
Andrew’s heart throbbed in his chest as he waited to see what the fighters would do. To his relief—and amazement—the guerrillas threw down their weapons and surrendered. The bluff had worked, and his fellow platoon members were astounded when they finally stumbled over the ridge and discovered Andrew guarding ten prisoners at gunpoint.
One day an event occurred that Andrew could not even face talking about with his pet gibbon. The previous three weeks had been tense ones. Communist guerrillas had actively entered the conflict between the Dutch and the PNI. As a result, Andrew and his fellow soldiers were now fighting two different enemies. The fighting would have been much easier if the Communists and PNI fighters had fought in open warfare, but they preferred to plant land mines and set booby traps that could explode anytime and anywhere. The land mines in particular created much anxiety among the Dutch troops. One wrong step and a person could be blown to bits in a second.
On the day of the incident, Andrew was part of a squad marching through a peaceful village. The men were confident that no land mines were around, since the village was occupied with men, women, and children. Then BOOM! A deafening noise filled the air, and shrapnel fell like hail. The men had walked into a nest of land mines. Andrew turned his head just in time to see his friend Arnie blown apart by a land mine he had stepped on. The percussion from the blast threw Andrew to the ground. When he got up, Andrew was pulsing with rage. Surely the residents of the village knew of the location of the mines, or they would have stepped on them themselves. It seemed to Andrew that everyone else in the squad must have come to the same conclusion at the same time. Suddenly gunfire erupted all around him. It was as if the air had turned to molten lead, as frightened and angry Dutch soldiers opened fire with their rifles and machine guns, indiscriminately shooting at houses, people, animals, trees, anything that happened to be in their line of fire.
When the guns finally fell silent, the squad carefully made their way around the nest of mines and headed toward the edge of the village. All around them was destruction. The village was completely destroyed, and from the bodies strewn about, it seemed to Andrew that not a living thing had survived the onslaught. But they deserved it, Andrew rationalized. They knew the mines were there. They should have said something. By not saying anything, they were as culpable as the guerrillas who had planted the mines. Then he saw a sight that cut his rationalizing to shreds. On the ground in front of Andrew, lying in a pool of her own blood, was a young mother. Pressed at her breast was a baby. The mother and her child had been shot through with the same bullet.
What kind of animal have I become? Andrew asked himself as he stared at the mother and her baby. How could I behave like this? For an instant Andrew felt like putting his gun to his head and pulling the trigger. Why? Why? Why? All the killing suddenly seemed so pointless to him.
Andrew did everything he could think of to get the image of the dead mother and her baby out of his mind. He even went to talk to the company chaplain. But the chaplain tried to make a joke about the situation, and Andrew left feeling surer than ever that if there was a God, He was certainly not interested in a Dutch soldier on a tropical island in Southeast Asia.
The image of the dead mother and baby was burned so deeply into his consciousness that Andrew turned to the one thing he knew would fade the memory for short periods—alcohol. When he sat at the bar with his friends, Andrew drank twice as much as they did. It was only then, as the gin burned in his stomach and blurred his consciousness, that he could forget what he and the rest of the squad had done. But when the effect of the alcohol had worn off, Andrew would feel more worthless than ever.
Finally Andrew decided that he had nothing to live for, and he became the most daring soldier in the company. He reasoned that if he could not kill himself, the enemy could do it for him. He bought a bright yellow straw hat to wear when he was in combat, a beacon of his presence to anyone who wanted to shoot him. But somehow the enemy’s bullets always missed.
In the midst of his despair, Andrew received crushing news from home. One day a letter from his brother Ben arrived, describing a funeral in the village. It was only after he had finished reading the letter that Andrew realized that Ben was talking about their mother’s funeral. An earlier telegram informing Andrew of his mother’s death had apparently not been delivered.
After reading the letter, Andrew decided to go for a run in the jungle to try to find some peace of mind. But it was useless. With every stride he took, he thought about his mother lying in a coffin, and then images of all the people he and his company had killed flooded his mind. Once again Andrew turned to alcohol to dull the pain.
Sometimes, between drinking bouts, Andrew wrote letters to some of the people he had met while in training at Gorkum. He told them about how he felt and about some of the things that had happened to him since he had left Holland. But the people he wrote to all wrote back with the same reply: “You are serving your country honorably and following orders, so don’t let it trouble your conscience.”
But it did trouble his conscience—deeply. Andrew started writing about his feelings to Thile, the girl with the white skin and beautiful black hair he had met in Gorkum. Thile did not dismiss him with glib words but wrote back, telling him about how God could forgive him and how he needed to forgive himself as well. Her letters made some sense to Andrew when he was sober, but when he was drunk, he thought Thile’s advice to be simplistic and childish.
Once he even wrote a letter to Thile telling her what a farce his life had become. Despite his Christian upbringing, he no longer believed in God and didn’t seem to even care that he had killed women and children. He did not send the letter; that would have been too shocking for innocent Thile to read. Instead he stuffed it at the bottom of his duffel bag inside his mother’s Bible. Perhaps, he told himself, it would do some good in there.
The war continued on, and in February 1949 Andrew’s company was ordered to move out in a major new push against the rebel enemy. Andrew knew that his pet gibbon could not travel with the company and would have to be let go. So a fellow soldier drove Andrew and the gibbon deep into the jungle. “You have to stay here,” Andrew told his faithful little companion. Somehow the gibbon seemed to understand, because it stood perfectly still as Andrew got back in the jeep and sped off. Andrew looked behind, and there was the gibbon, standing and staring at him, making no attempt to follow. A deep sense of loneliness crept through Andrew. He would miss his pet. The gibbon had often seemed more human than ape.
Things were different once the gibbon was gone. Not only had he lost his companion, but also, after more than two years of combat, Andrew had lost his will to fight. He still wore his yellow straw hat and led the craziest raids, not caring whether he lived or died.
Three weeks after setting the gibbon free, Andrew was on patrol amid rice paddies outside of Jakarta. As his squad made their way along, wading in ankle-deep water and mud, the enemy opened fire on them. Suddenly bullets seemed to erupt from all around them.
“It’s an ambush,” Andrew heard one of his fellow soldiers bellow. “They’ve got us hemmed in on three sides.”
Andrew fired off round after round from his rifle at the enemy. Then all of a sudden he felt a sting in his ankle. Pain surged up his leg, causing him to fall to his knees in the rice paddy. When he looked down to see what the problem was, Andrew saw blood oozing from a hole in his right combat boot. He looked closer and saw that an enemy bullet had gone right through his ankle.
“I’m hit,” Andrew screamed.
Moments later two medics arrived and slid him onto a stretcher. Crouching low, they carried Andrew away, the yellow straw hat still on his head.
Somewhere along the way Andrew passed out from the searing pain in his right ankle. When he came to, he was in a field hospital. He could hear a nurse and doctor talking above him.
“I think we should try to save the leg first,” he heard the doctor say.
“But his ankle is a real mess,” the nurse responded.
