Chapter 15: Mother and Child

Sodapop could feel himself changing again, metamorphosing into another man. It had happened before when his parents had died, and he had become a man who loved too hard because he was acutely aware of how quickly people could be lost.

And then Sandy had left him, and he had transformed again, this time into a man afraid to love for fear of being hurt.

And once more, when Dallas and Johnny had died, he became a man who was lost in the world, afraid to touch anyone or anything because everything he loved disappeared. He was helpless against it.

And now, he was changing again. He was changing into a man who no longer threw up at the sight of his comrades, the only people in this strange country who were on his side and who understood him (literally—despite being in country for nearly nine months, he still couldn't speak one word of Vietnamese), falling dead beside him.

He no longer reacted to the sight of dead bodies, dead Americans, dead Viet Cong, dead children, rotting on the roadsides in the same ditches and trenches where they had been shot.

He couldn't react to Two-Bit and Steve falling apart, either. Steve became increasingly violent—he shot wildly and without mercy, sometimes filling a man with as many as ten bullets before he was satisfied he was dead.

Two-Bit didn't show any inner turmoil, but he no longer cracked jokes or tried to cheer up the others. Not since Mohammed, his young Muslim friend, had fallen to sniper attack during a raid.

Soda wrote to Sandy once, telling her how much he still loved her and that he really didn't care that the child wasn't his, and that all he wanted was her back. That her memory was all that was keeping him alive, and that he hoped she hadn't moved on so easily. That he hoped she didn't hate him like the young college students they talked about on the radio did.

That was one thing about the war that irked him more than everything else, somehow. Those protesters hated the soldiers for being Vietnam. As if they had asked to be here. He wished they could come and see the conditions here for themselves and have to be in country themselves. Hah, then they'd see that no one in their right mind would ask to come here.

He had written the letter over a series of three nights. It was ten pages long, the longest thing Soda had ever written. He read it over once, and then tore it up and left the scraps in the mud of their campground the next morning.

It was strange. Some of the soldiers said now that combat was the only thing reminding them they were alive—something they didn't have to take passively, they way they had to take others' deaths, or the rain, or the gangrene.

The gangrene. Some of the men had taken off their shoes after weeks to see that their flesh was rotting off. They had had to be sent to the first aid camp to be treated.

Anyway, Soda didn't agree with them. About only feeling alive in combat. Actually, combat was the place he felt the most dead.

He saw himself killing others, and watched people shoot at their own countrymen. Soda would never, ever forget the day a young South Vietnamese mother and her terrified daughters had hidden in a trench beside them, keeping their heads down and trying not to scream as bullets flew above them.

That was the day Mohammed had died. He had been trying to escort them away from the gunfire, so they could get to the main road and escape, but he had taken a shot first to the shoulder, and then to the back.

He had bled out. The young mother had tried to staunch the bleeding and tie tourniquets but it was too late. He died within ten minutes of being shot.

Soda never felt like it was him shooting or being shot at. Nor was it someone else. It was him, but it was his body dismembered from his mind, a puppet someone else was using to make him do things.

He never really understood why he felt that way. Maybe he was trying to make himself blameless. Maybe it was just a way to deal with the guilt.

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It was August of 1968. Ponyboy was entering his final year of high school, and was beginning to fill out college applications.

Darry was working overtime again. Ponyboy had gotten a job at the DX over the summer, and was continuing to work there part-time now that school had started again.

Darry didn't know about the job at first. He would have flipped if Ponyboy had told him. But then he had had to go to the doctor, who diagnosed him with ulcers from too much stress and working too much.

Ponyboy had then shown him the money he had earned. He hadn't spent a penny of it; he had been saving it to help pay for college. He presented it to Darry as soon as his older brother came home from the hospital.

"You can't keep working this hard, Darry," Ponyboy had said before Darry could argue. "You'll kill yourself first."

So Ponyboy was still working at the DX, doing the counter job Soda had done before. The manager was the same one who had hired Soda, and he always grinned and shook his head whenever he saw Ponyboy talking to a female customer.

"Just the same as your older brother," he said. "All the young ladies' cars just happen to break down on the opposite side of town. Hoo boy."

Ponyboy wasn't taking too many hard classes this year, and he was sure glad of it. Between track, his job and school, he didn't have much time left.

He had been dating this pretty young girl, Cathy, but he had broken up with her. She was gorgeous, but he could tell she still wasn't over her ex-boyfriend, Bryon Douglass. He didn't have much time for dates anyway.

He still wrote Soda daily, no matter how tired he was. He hoped his brother was getting all his letters.

He wondered how post worked over there. He knew Vietnam was damp, because a lot of Soda's letters were crinkled like they had been wet.

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