I wasn’t sure what to think when Alfred Martinez approached and begged me to shoot him. I'd been standing against a sandbag wall. I looked down at the M-16 he had clutched in his hand then up into his eyes, the pain evident, maybe a Dear John letter or a death in the family. I didn’t know.
“God damn it, Cano, man," he said, "shoot me. You have to. I can’t take it anymore.”
Martinez pronounced my name “Kano,” with a hard “K”, the way most guys in the military did, except Chicanos from the borderlands, who spoke perfect Spanish but struggled with English or had heavy accents. They pronounced my name correctly, “Cah-no” and gave me shit for not correcting everybody else, but not Martinez who could care less about such trivialities. He always said “Kano,” unapologetically and without an accent of any kind. “Come on, Cano, God damn it.”
All I could think to answer was, “What’re you crazy, Alfred? I'm not gonna shoot you.”
He was the only guy I called by his first name. I’m not even sure why. Maybe he acted more like an Alfred than a Martinez to me. He let out a whimper, not sadness, more like pain. “God dam it, just do it. Here.” He raised his weapon, holding it out to me.
His eyes were moist but no tears.
Martinez didn’t cry, no man, not him. He was a tough bastard, muscular, a high school wrestler who didn’t take shit from anybody, not even other Chicanos who chided him for not speaking Spanish. He was ready to kick anybody’s ass at any time if they wanted to test him. “God damn, Mexicans,” he’d say whenever they’d come around speaking Spanish, but if you questioned his Mexican identity, you’d better be ready to fight. "God damn right, I'm Mexican. So what?" he'd say.
It was evening, the sunset complete but not yet dark. We were at an artillery firebase on a mountaintop some place in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, a dangerous part of the country, enemy-controlled territory, where many villagers had never seen a “White” man before we arrived.
When I asked him why he wanted me to shoot him, the usually clear-headed, straight-talking Martinez said, “God damn it, Cano, if you won’t do it, I’ll do it. I swear to God. My head is killing me.”
“Your head? What, the pain? What do you mean?”
We were the closest to best friends two guys could get – yet different at the same time. I wasn't a smoker, had patience, made friends easily, liked to joke around, talk to everybody, and pretty much trusted people. Martinez was a chain smoker, an explosive temper, wary of people, didn’t have many close friends, and talked like he was giving orders.
We met at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the Army’s artillery school, Geronimo's final resting place, where in 1863, or thereabouts, the Union army headed by a Mexican American from New Mexico and his mostly Tejano volunteers defeated Confederate troops, ending the South's campaign to bring slavery into the Southwest.
Martinez and I hit it off right away, both of us Chicanos from urban California who spoke mostly English and little Spanish, my home, Santa Monica, right over the mountain from his in the San Fernando Valley, where we had a mixture of friends Chicano, Anglo, and Japanese at Van Nuys High School. That doesn’t sound like such a big deal, but in the military where you meet all sorts of guys, like Chicanos from small towns in Texas and New Mexico who rarely saw Anglos and spoke little to no English -- isolated, not unlike the Central Highland Vietnamese.
Martinez could barely utter a sentence without prefacing the first words, “God damn it.” In normal conversation, instead of calling guys by their names, he’d say “that MF” or just plain old, “F-er,” with no malice towards the guy.
After hanging out together for eight-weeks of training at Ft. Sill, we both volunteered for three more weeks of airborne training at Fort Benning, Georgia, where we were assigned the same barracks, so we saw each other every night and debriefed about the day’s training. It’s hard to explain how close guys can get at such a young age, barely a year out of high school, far from home, many for the first time, no parents to offer advice or comfort. We put on a brave face, macho-men, smoking, cursing, and pretending to ignore the danger we’d be facing.
Once we graduated jump school, we got our orders to Vietnam, the exact same time and place, October 1966 assigned to the 101st Airborne at Phan Rang. After a thirty-day leave, I saw Martinez again at a reception center in Long Binh, where we learned the Army had lost our orders. We hung out there for about three weeks, living in tents, carrying out some really rank duties, and getting drunk at night in a mess hall converted into a night club.
When our orders still hadn’t arrived, the commander asked if we wanted to go to Cam Rahn Bay and work with the engineers building a new base camp. Martinez and I talked it over and agreed any place was better than Long Binh, so they flew us to Cam Rahn Bay, where we stayed for a month-and-a-half, working with the engineers, boozing it up at night, engaging in military hijinks, and spending our weekends on the shores of the South China Sea.
Just when we thought Cam Rahn Bay would be a good place to finish our tour, our missing orders came through, both Martinez and I assigned to the same artillery battery, still companeros. We couldn’t have planned it more perfectly. When we weren’t working with our gun sections, we’d hang out and just talk. I guess we'd been with the battery about six months when Martinez walked over to my section and begged me to shoot him.
I knew I had to take him seriously because Martinez wasn’t prone to clowning around or playing jokes on people. The phrase "serious as a heart attack" fits Alfred's personality. If he said something, he meant it. I could see his face was swollen on one side, down along his jawline. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “What’s happening with you?”
Fighting back tears, he said he wasn’t sure. He only knew that his jaw and teeth were killing him, sore as hell, and he wouldn't survive another night of pain like that.
He said his jaw had been hurting the last few nights. The medic gave him some Darvon tabs to ease the pain. They were okay at first, relieved some pain but had stopped working. He said he asked for morphine, but the doc said definitely "no." He had to save that for emergencies. I saw the anger in his face, the way he gets when he's really pissed. He called the first sergeant an MF for refusing to let him catch a chopper and fly out to the infirmary back at our base camp to have a real doctor examine him. He said the medic had agreed with him that he should been flown out, but the first sergeant wouldn’t budge. Alfred thought the guy had something against Chicanos.
“Alfred, Man, shoot you? Come on. How can you ask me that? You’ve got to hang on.”
“MF’er, Cano, you're my friend, aren't you?” He said in a low threatening voice. “You’ve got to do it.”
Again, I looked into his face. I thought about it, shooting him, not seriously, of course, but I wondered, for a moment if I could I do it, shoot my best friend, a mercy killing? No, no way. That’s when the damn burst, the tears flowed, and he repeated there was no way he’d make it through the night. If I wouldn’t shoot him, he’d do it himself. "Swear to God I will. I'll do it, God damn it."
I told him he could make it one more night, to just hang on. Either that or he had to go back to the first sergeant and beg, make him see how bad it was. Martinez, still holding on to his rifle, turned from me, without a word, and walked back to his gun section.
I went back to my section. I had a hard time sleeping that night, waiting, for what, I wasn’t sure, a gun shot?
The next day when I went to look for him, he wasn’t there. His section chief told me an emergency Medivac had come in and taken him away later that night, after he threatened to shoot himself if they didn’t do something.
A couple of days passed. I waited. One day, on the afternoon mail chopper, I saw Alfred standing on the chopper’s skids, smiling, his rucksack on his back, and his rifle in hand.
I ran over to him. He pretty much described everything that went down after we’d talk that evening. He’d bucked the chain of command, gone past the first sergeant and directly to the captain who listened to the medic’s recommendation to call in an emergency chopper. Either that or they’d have a dead paratrooper on their hands.
Alfred said the dentist operated on him right away, didn’t even wait until morning. He’d had an abscess tooth. It was bad. If they hadn’t operated, the poison might have spread. He could have died.
They had him on pain killers and anti-biotics. It was all cool now, except for the fact that he had to face the first sergeant. “That racist MF’er.”
