Part 53 (1/2)

”Callahan, do you ever get tired of dealing with p.u.s.s.yfooters?” I asked with a sigh.

”All the time,” he said, looking down the track, where they were repairing the infield fence.

”That's what just happened to me. I got the feeling Raines is anything but. But he's surrounded by a bunch of p.u.s.s.ies.”

”It's your business to tell him?”

”n.o.body else was going to do it. Time somebody played honest with the man.”

”Did that all right,” he said. ”Just wonder what Dutch is going to say.”

”I wouldn't worry about Dutch,” I replied. ”I'd worry about Stoney t.i.tan.”

After a moment Callahan said, ”Yeah . . . ” and seemed awed at the prospect.

I didn't tell him what else had happened, that I was measuring the man to see what kind of stuff he was made of.

I wasn't sure I liked the answer.

58.

FLASHBACK: NAM DIARY, THE SECOND SIX.

The 182nd day: We know this village is a VC hideout. We go by the place, there's this pot of rice cooking, enough for maybe a hundred people, and there's some old folks around, a dozen kids, two or three younger women, that's all.

”They sure are skinny, to eat that much,” Jesse Hatch says as we walk by.

Flagler's replacement is this kid from Pennsylvania, handles a .60 caliber like it was part of his arm. He learns fast too. We call him Gunner. He says he used to hunt all the time, poaching and everything, summer and winter, since he was maybe eight, nine years old. Nothing scares him. He achieved ”aw f.u.c.k it” status before he ever got to Nam.

Anyway, we go back tonight to see if maybe the village is a gook shelter and there was activity all over the place. What we got is Gook City. We flare the place and hit it from both sides, only there's a stream on the back side of the village and they get on the other side and we are pinned down. There are green tracers going all over the place, rounds bouncing off s.h.i.+t, kicking around us.

We're pouring stuff into the hooches, just shooting the s.h.i.+t out of them, and all of a sudden one of them goes off. They must've had all their ammo stored inside because it was the Fourth of July-squared. Grenades, mortars, tracers, mines. Everybody's freaking out, running around. Then Hatch catches one in the leg from the other side of the stream and he goes over the side into the water and he panics and starts yelling that he can't swim and Carmody is yelling, ”Shut up, for Christ sakes” only it's too late and Jesse catches a couple in the head. Carmody and me, we go over the side and drag him back. But I knew he was finished. It was like trying to lift a house.

Carmody keeps saying, over and over, ”Why did he yell, why the f.u.c.k did he yell. f.u.c.kin' stream was only three feet deep.”

But it was dark and everything had gone wrong and Jesse couldn't swim. h.e.l.l, I don't know why I'm apologizing for old Hatch, look what it cost him.

The 198th day: The lieutenant's beginning to act weird. It started a couple of weeks ago when we lost Jesse Hatch. It's like he has a hard time making up his mind about anything.

Last night I go by his hooch and I say, ”C'mon, Lieutenant, let's have a beer.” And he just sits there, looking at me, and then he says, ”Let me think about it.” Think about having a beer?

Today he says, ”My luck's going bad. I shouldn't have lost Flagler and Hatch.”

”You can't blame yourself,” I say to him.

”Who'm I going to blame, Nixon?” he says, only he says it with bitterness. He's lost his sense of humor, too.

The 215th day: We got separated from our outfit and we were two days out in the boonies. We come up on this handful of gooks. Ten of them, maybe. We just break through some brush and there they are, twenty feet away plus change.

Everybody goes to the deck but the lieutenant. I don't know what happened. He just pulls a short circuit and stands there. This one VC has his AK-47 over his shoulder, he rolls backward and gets one burst off. Carmody takes three hits. He's lying there, a few feet away from me, jerking real hard in the dirt.

It's the shortest firefight I ever saw. It's over in about ten seconds. Everybody is shooting at once. We are on top of these people and Carmody is the only one gets. .h.i.t. One of the gooks jumps in the river and Gunner just goes right in after him, takes him out with his K-bar. Just keeps stabbing him until he's too tired to stab anymore.

I take the lieutenant in my arms and hold him as tight as I can and keep telling him it's going to be all right. I hold him that way until he stops shaking and I feel him go stiff on me.

It doesn't seem possible. A month to go, that's all he had. I don't know why I thought the lieutenant was invincible. You'd think I'd know better after six months out here.

The 254th day: It's almost six weeks since Carmody took it. I wish the h.e.l.l I would have time to thank the lieutenant. If he had just come around for a minute or two. s.h.i.+t, you just take too much for granted out here.

I've been acting squad leader ever since. They made me a sergeant. Doc, Gunner, me, we're the only old-timers left. Jordan beat the rap and rotated back to the World. The night before he left we got him so drunk, s.h.i.+t, he was out cold. So we tie him to the back of this PT-boat and drag him back up to the base, which is about eight or nine kliks. He almost drowned. By the time we got to the base, he was sober. So we got him drunk all over again. He was a wreck when he got on the chopper to Cam Ranh. I'll bet he's still got a hangover. Something to remember us by.

Can you beat that, six months and I'm an old-timer.

I never even told the lieutenant I liked him.

The 268th day: I got called down to Dau Tieng today, which is division HQ, and I talked with this captain who seems to run the whole show in this sector. He tells me I'm recommended for a Silver Star for this thing up at Hi Pien. It was a rescue mission and I guess I looked pretty good that day.

He asks me how I feel about the war. Can you imagine? How does anybody feel about the war, for Christ sakes.

”I've had better times,” I said. ”Like the time I had my appendix out.”

The captain has real dark eyes, like he needs sleep and could use a week or two in the sun, and he got a kick out of that.

”I mean, how do you feel about the war politically,” he says.

”I don't know about that,” I say to him. ”I'm not interested in political bulls.h.i.+t. I'm here because I was sent here. I don't even know what the h.e.l.l we're doing over here, Captain. Right now it looks like all we're doing is getting our a.s.s kicked.”

”Does that concern you? I mean, that we seem to be getting our a.s.s whipped?”

”You some kind of shrink or something?” I ask him.

He laughs again and says no, he's not a shrink.

So I say to him, ”n.o.body's over here to lose.”

Then he asks me how old I am and I tell him I'm twenty-one and he says to me, ”You're a d.a.m.n good line soldier.”

”I'll tell you, Captain, I'm almost a short-timer. I got six months left to pull and I got two objectives in life. Get me back whole, get my men back whole. I don't think about anything past that. There isn't anything past that. You start thinking about what's past that and you're a dead man.”

”I'm going to field-commission you,” he says, just like that.

”s.h.i.+t no,” I says. ”Don't do that to me, Captain. Gimme a break. What do you want from me?”

”I need a lieutenant on that squad and you're the best man for the job.”

”Look, gimme six stripes, okay, that way I outrank anybody else on the squad. I'll stay right there, do the same s.h.i.+t I been doing, but I don't want a G.o.dd.a.m.n bar, man. Bars get you killed. I'm walking away from this, Captain. I'm not dying in this swamp. You hand a bar to me, it's like a f.u.c.kin' hex.”