A tank intentionally runs over Rafter Man because he tried to run from it and cuts him in half (it drove around Joker and let him live because he stood his ground).


From the book:

"The deck trembles. A tank? I look up, but I can't see anything on the road. Yet nothing on earth sounds as big as a tank, nothing produces that terrible rumble of metal like a tank. It shakes my bones. I jump up, weapon ready. I look up and down the road. Nothing. But all around me is the clamor of rolling iron and the odor of diesel fuel.

Rafter Man is walking across the road. He does not hear the invisible tank. He does not feel the mechanical earthquake.

I double-time after him. "Rafter!"

Rafter Man turns around. He grins. And then we both see it. The tank is an object of heavy metal forged from a cold shadow, a ghost with substance. The black mechanical phantom comes for us, dark ectoplasm rolling in the sun. The blond tank commander stands in the turret hatch, staring straight ahead and into the beyond, laughing.

Rafter Man turns around.

I say, "Don't move."

But Rafter looks at me, panic on his face.

I grab his shoulder.

Rafter Man pulls away and runs.

The tank is bearing down on me. I don't move.

The tank swerves, misses me, roars past like a big iron dragon. The tank runs over Rafter Man and crushes him beneath its steel treads. And then it's gone.

Rafter Man likes on his back in the dirt, a crushed dog spilling out of its skin. Rafter Man looks at me the way he looked at me that day at the Freedom Hill PX on Hill 327 in Da Nang. His eyes are begging me for an explanation.

Rafter Man has been cut in half just below his new NVA rifle belt. His intestines are pink rope all over the deck. He is trying to pull himself back in, but it doesn't work. His guts are wet and slippery and he can't hold them in. He tries to reinsert his spilling guts back into his severed torso. He tries very hard to keep the dirt off of his intestines as he works.

Rafter Man stops trying to save himself and, instead, just stares at me with an expression that might be found on the face of a person who wakes up with a dead bird in his mouth.

"Sarge..."

"Don't call me 'Sarge,'" I say.

I kneel down and pick up Rafter's black-body Nikon. I say, "I'll tell Mr. Payback about your belt and about your SKS..." I want so much to cry, but I can't cry--I'm too tough.

I stop talking to Rafter Man because Rafter Man is dead. Talking to dead people is not a healthy habit for a living person to cultivate and lately I have been talking to dead people quite a lot. I guess I've been talking to dead people ever since I made my first confirmed kill. After my first confirmed kill, talking to corpses began to make more sense than talking to people who had not yet been wasted."

I was wearing it the night I was arrested. I don't wear it much anymore.