Cracker!: The Best Dog in Vietnam

by Cynthia Kadohata

  Cody hurried over to him. “I was waiting. I heard what happened. I was on another mission, but we got back a few hours ago.” He ran his hand over Tristie’s head.

  Tristie’s body felt odd in Rick’s arms. She didn’t even feel like a stuffed animal. She felt like she was made of wood, and her body was curled into an unnatural position, her chin seemingly glued to her chest. Cracker paced back and forth, occasionally stopping to touch noses with Bruno, who sat somberly watching.

  “She was safe in a trench but wanted to go to Twenty-Twenty,” said Rick. A cloud broke and rain began flooding from the sky. And it was supposed to be the dry season.

  Cody said, “Let’s do it.” They glanced at the sky; but if this had to happen in the pouring rain, then it had to happen in the pouring rain.

  Cracker followed them to the place where all the dead dogs were. She lay in the mud with Bruno while Rick and Cody shoveled a hole. She knew exactly what the hole was for. She’d seen other men digging holes here, but this was the first time the hole was for a dog she liked. She felt kind of surprised when the loud man came and began digging with Rick and Cody. The loud man didn’t make a sound.

  Once, when the men took a rest, she started digging in the hole. For some reason, that attracted a crowd. A lot of the guys in camp came to watch in their ponchos while she furiously scratched her claws into the wet dirt. Mud flew everywhere. A couple of cameras clicked in the rain.

  Finally, Rick called her off, and she stood to the side and watched them dig more. Rick felt it again, the thing he’d felt out in the field earlier—the sense of being at the center of the universe, exactly where he should be, doing exactly what he should be doing. He and Cody gently picked up Tristie and lowered her into the hole. Everything was so slippery, they ended up dropping her down a little harder than they’d expected. Rick winced. Then he reached into his pocket and dropped in Twenty’s hair.

  They covered up the hole, and that was the last Cracker saw of Tristie. She could still smell her, even in the rain and beneath the mud, but she knew she wouldn’t see her again. She lay down on the grave.

  Cody turned to Rick, “What should we write on the sign?” Each of the graves had a sign posted on it.

  “Twenty said he wanted it to say ‘Sleep well.’” He looked over the graveyard: THE KING. RUFUS, ALL-AMERICAN BOY. REBEL, FASTEST DOG EVER. He looked at Cracker and felt a fierce determination rise in him. She would never die, he would make sure of it. He wouldn’t even think of what he might write on her gravestone, because she wasn’t going to have one.

  One of the guys who had good handwriting made the sign for them, and another guy with a camera took a couple of pictures to send to Twenty. Cody and Rick and a few other handlers smoked cigarettes together as the rain relented. Even Sarge smoked quietly. Then Sarge said, “Rest in peace. You were a great dog, Tristie.”

  Rick was suddenly desperate for a shower. He felt like if he could just shower, he could get rid of some of the memory of today. He kenneled Cracker and showered. Man, it felt better than any shower he’d ever taken.

  Afterward he washed Cracker and read his mail. He wasn’t surprised to find another letter today from the kid Willie. That kid was stubborn like nothing Rick had ever seen. But Rick still had never gotten around to writing him. What could Rick say to a kid about war that wouldn’t be glossing over the whole thing? Rick didn’t even sit down as he read the letter. It was just about the same thing every time:

  Dear Soldier,

  Hi. I am Cracker’s owner, or former owner. Since I’m only twelve, I guess my parents were the official owners, but she was really my dog. She was my best friend. Cracker likes wieners, walks, petting, and lying around. She also likes the beach and boats. I know I keep telling you a lot of the same stuff, but since I haven’t heard from you, I know you’re, not getting my letters.

  I took Cracker on a boat once. The only thing about her is that you can’t keep feeding her even if she begs you because she will never stop eating if you let her. Will you write me back and send me a picture? I am sure Cracker is doing really well because she is really smart. I taught her ninety words. Okay, sometimes she forgot a word, but she remembered most of them. She didn’t always listen real well, so I hope you taught her to listen so she doesn’t get hurt. Maybe someday Cracker will be my dog again. What do you think? Meanwhile, you take care of her.

  Yours truly,

  Willie Stetson

  P.S. Cracker likes to watch baseball games with me. I am a Cubs fan.

  Just about the same letter, over and over. Obsessive kid, not stubborn. Rick tried to remember himself at twelve. He smiled. He remembered feeling surprised way back then when someone called him a “kid.” A “kid” was seven, maybe eight. But not twelve. Rick couldn’t imagine Cracker being someone else’s dog. Cracker was his dog. He threw the letter to the side, then took a big breath and picked it back up. All right already. He’d write the kid. But then he put it off, unsure what he wanted to say.

  Cody was lying on his cot reading his mail. He got about five times more mail than anyone else in the squad.

  “Hey, Cody.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know what we should do?”

  “What?”

  “Sign up for a second tour of duty. Then we could stay with our dogs.”

  Cody looked sad. “Already thought about it. But this whole Vietnamization thing Nixon is doing—the North and South Vietnamese are gonna take over the war among themselves while the Americans pull out.”

  “I thought maybe that was just a rumor.”

  “I heard it’s for real.”

  Rick lay back and thought that over. “Hey, did you hear the rumor about that guy who got a vet to knock out his dog and then stuck him in his duffel bag?”

  “Yeah. Do you think that’s true?”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible. Like if you had a friend working customs or something.”

  But Rick knew in his heart that it wasn’t possible. No way could you sneak a dog as big as Cracker home. Besides, he didn’t have any friends in customs.

  He glanced at Willie’s latest letter. Maybe stubborn wasn’t so bad. Neither was obsessive. So he got some army-issue stationery and sat on his bunk with Cracker at his side.

  DEAR WILLIE,

  SORRY I DIDN’T WRITE YOU SOONER. I’M NOT MUCH OF A WRITER. CRACKER IS DOING GREAT. I THINK SHE’S THE BEST DOG IN VIETNAM. SHE’S NEVER MISSED A BOOBY TRAP. WE WENT ON ONE MISSION WHEN SOMEONE PUT IN A SPECIAL REQUEST FOR OUR TEAM BECAUSE OF HER REPUTATION.

  Rick chewed on the end of his pen and thought before writing more.

  I FEEL LIKE I KNOW HER BETTER THAN I HAVE EVER KNOWN ANYONE IN MY LIFE. YOU RAISED A GOOD DOG. YOU DID GOOD. SHE’S SAVED A LOT OF LIVES.

  JUST CURIOUS—DO YOU KNOW ANY SENATORS OR IMPORTANT PEOPLE WHO MIGHT PUT IN A GOOD WORD FOR HER? JUST ASKING, EVERYTHING’S FINE. JUST ASKING. GOOD LUCK WITH THE CUBS. I’M A FOOTBALL MAN MYSELF.

  Wisconsin had a baseball team—the Milwaukee Brewers—but they’d just moved from Seattle, and Rick wasn’t much of a fan.

  Then he decided to write another letter, this time to Twenty-Twenty’s uncle, the famous lieutenant colonel.

  DEAR LIEUTENANT COLONEL BUTLER,

  I AM A MEMBER OF THE 67TH INFANTRY PLATOON (SCOUT DOG). YOUR NEPHEW ORRIN “TWENTY-TWENTY” BUTLER IS A PAL OF MINE. IT HAS BEEN A PRIVILEGE TO SERVE WITH HIM. AS YOU PROBABLY WILL HAVE HEARD BEFORE YOU RECEIVE THIS LETTER, TWENTY-TWENTY WAS INJURED TODAY AND WILL PROBABLY BE SENT HOME. UNFORTUNATELY, HIS DOG TRISTIE WAS KILLED AS SHE TRIED TO GO TO HIM IN THE FIELD. MY PAL CODY AND I BURIED TRISTIE FOR HIM.

  THIS MAY BE OUT OF LINE TO ASK, BUT WHEN I DEROS AT THE END OF MY TOUR, I’M WONDERING IF YOU KNOW WHAT WILL BECOME OF MY DOG, CRACKER. SHE HAS SAVED A LOT OF LIVES, AND I FEEL SHE DESERVES A BETTER LIFE THAN DYING HERE IN VIETNAM SOMEDAY. I WAS WONDERING WHETHER YOU COULD HELP ME WITH THAT? AS TWENTY-TWENTY WILL TELL YOU, SHE WAS GREAT BUDDIES WITH TRISTIE.

  RESPECTFULLY,


  PRIVATE RICHARD CARVER HANSKI

  It was hard work writing to a lieutenant colonel. Rick had to look up a couple of words in a dictionary to make sure he hadn’t made any mistakes. Sounded crazy, but he’d never realized how useful a dictionary could be.

  When he finished, he went outside, wondering where Cracker had gone. Usually when he didn’t kennel her, she just lay next to him by his cot. He found her, lying on Tristie’s grave, sleeping. She was probably as tired as he was. But he was the kind of tired where although his head felt like it was full of dust and his body ached, his mind raced so wildly that he didn’t think he could sleep. His mind ping-ponged around everything that had happened over the last couple of days. He’d killed a man, shot another, and he couldn’t regret it. He’d seen his friend wounded and Tristie die. He’d watched a fellow soldier take his last breath.

  Cracker was so tired, she didn’t even wake up when he walked off. When he returned with food and water for her, she was still lying on the grave. He sat next to her, and she opened her eyes. She ate and drank halfheartedly. Though he’d just bathed her, dirt already covered her nails. Her paw pads were cracked. He’d give her another bath as soon as he got the energy, but at the moment he felt like he’d never have energy again.

  “Come on, girl, let’s sit somewhere else.” He got his poncho and they stretched out far away from the dog graveyard. He realized he’d already missed mess hall. He was starving, but for some reason, that felt good. It was like penance—why did one man die and not another? He stared at the horizon.

  He remembered staring at another horizon when he was a boy. He was visiting his maternal grandparents one winter and sitting on a lawn chair watching the northern lights. Back then anything had seemed possible.

  The next few weeks were pretty quiet, except Cody started to drive everyone nuts when he decided that Twenty-Twenty was right all along and that those eye exercises really did work. At least Twenty would do them off on his own, but Cody would start rolling his eyes right while he was talking to you. He’d be talking about one of his obsessions—mostly food—and suddenly his eyes would dart to the left and up and around. He swore his eyes were already getting better.

  One morning Rick and Cracker pulled another routine mission: clearing a village. It was a one-day mission, because it was Thanksgiving and the mess hall would be serving turkey to the men for dinner that night. The “Donut Dollies”—what they called the girls who worked as American Red Cross volunteers—would be doing the serving. All the guys were looking forward to it. American girls. Girls who could speak English.

  Rick and Cracker had cleared villages several times before.

  The unit Rick was supporting today took APCs—armored personnel carriers—to just outside a village to check for the enemy. This approach was a little irrational in Rick’s opinion, not that anybody cared about his opinion. APCs made so much noise that any Vietcong hiding out in the village would be long gone. The whole thing was so irrational, in fact, that some of the other assigned guys actually spoke of refusing to go. Rick had heard about some units that refused to follow orders, but this was the first time he’d heard such talk in person. In the end, everybody climbed aboard.

  Rick felt like he was suffocating inside the APC. It was his first time inside one. But he didn’t expect to see any action. There were lookouts all over the place. The Vietcong had lookouts and the ARVN had lookouts and the NVA had lookouts, and they all looked like peasants to Rick. He’d heard that sometimes the lookout could be a twelve-year-old girl and she might signal Charlie by doing something as simple as putting her hair behind her ear. Then Charlie would hide or move on.

  A few hours into the mission the APCs stopped for some reason. The lieutenant called out, “Just heard over the radio: They’re going to bring lunch before we clear the village. Today’s your day, gentlemen. The Donut Dollies are coming out here on choppers just to feed us.”

  The men cheered. They all threw down their sacks and sat in the sun in a nearby LZ, or landing zone, waiting for the girls. As usual, a lot of guys came over to pet Cracker.

  “I got a Doberman at home,” one told Rick. “What do you have?”

  Rick said a little sheepishly, “I don’t have a dog.”

  “Really? How’d you end up a handler?”

  He didn’t want to say he’d gone begging to a friend of a friend, so he said, “I had a knack for it.” The guy seemed to accept that.

  The sun felt good on Rick’s face. Everything felt pretty good at the moment. All the men were happy, the sky was clear, and—most importantly—girls were on the way.

  There was one Donut Dolly in particular they were all after. And she knew it too. Rick hated girls like that.

  “I hope Caroline serves me,” said one guy.

  Rick didn’t even know the guy’s name, but he replied anyway. “She’s a snob. I like a more down-home girl.”

  “She may be a snob, but she’s a foxy snob.”

  One guy had brought a radio, and they all quieted as “Hey, Jude” played on the army station. Then they all started singing, even when the song reached the part where the only lyrics were, Nah. Nah. Nah. Nah-nah-nah-nah. Cracker wandered around getting petted by all the men. Rick watched her proudly. This was shaping up to be a fairly acceptable Thanksgiving.

  When the choppers started roaring, all the men jumped up. Rick tried to get a glimpse of Caroline’s long hair. Not that he cared about the snotty princess, but he couldn’t help looking. There were only two choppers, but there were probably girls and food on both of them. There! He thought he spotted Caroline’s hair. But the choppers just hovered low above the LZ, and a couple of burly guys pushed big boxes out the door. Then the choppers roared off.

  For a second Rick tried to comprehend. Unless the girls were crammed into those boxes, there were no girls. Someone tore open a box, which was filled with smaller boxes, which were filled with turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing. All the guys were crying out, “Where are the girls?” The commander said he didn’t know. The radioman was calling into base and reported that the Red Cross had decided the girls should stay put because there had been a report of Charlie in the area. One man complained, “There are always reports of Charlie in the area. We’re in Vietnam, man.”

  The men ate sullenly before climbing back into the APCs.

  Cracker didn’t like the APC. It was noisy and all she could smell was gasoline. The smell filled her nostrils and she couldn’t get it out.

  The APCs tore through the jungle for another couple of hours—according to the lieutenant, they were going to a different village than planned. Who knew why? The guys hardly seemed to care. Rick just leaned back and accepted his fate.

  Rick rarely worked with Cracker on a leash anymore, but when they got out, he attached her so she wouldn’t chase any chickens or other animals. He looked around. The village was typical—just a hamlet, really—maybe twenty-five thatched huts surrounded by rice paddies. Jungle in the distance, an ox or two. Rick didn’t see anything that bothered him. Cracker seemed calm too.

  But as they walked on, he saw a young peasant girl at the edge of a rice paddy stand up quickly and scratch the back of her neck. Rick contemplated that. Could that be a signal to somebody? Camel had told him to listen to his intuition. Yet what were you going to do, arrest a girl for scratching her neck? Shoot her? The girl went back to work. Thirty or forty men, women, and children worked in the paddies, wearing conical straw hats and black pajamas. Cracker strained toward a chicken until Rick corrected her. He was glad now that he’d put her on a leash.

  He called out, “Can someone make them get those chickens outta here? She’s got a thing about chickens.”

  One of the guys started yelling at the villagers in Vietnamese. There was a lot of chatter among the villagers as they gathered the chickens and scooted them off.

  Cracker suddenly knew it was all wrong. She stood very still and tried to figure out what was going on. She whined and growled softly. She looke
d up at Rick and yelped, but he didn’t respond. She could feel it, a wave of tension rolling in from the peasants in the rice paddies. She squirmed on the leash, but Rick just tugged with annoyance and said, “No. No chickens!” The wave of tension was so strong, it was almost as powerful as the wind blasting from chopper blades when you climbed aboard. She pawed Rick, but again he just tugged with annoyance and said, “No!”

  Rick frowned at Cracker. She was mostly a perfect dog, but these damn chickens drove her crazy. Then she sat in front of him and just stared at him. He remembered how she’d done that with the gourmet chicken at Fort Benning. He looked around, but everything was peaceful. It was almost like an illusion. And part of the illusion was that he could almost literally hear Camel’s voice: Listen to your intuition.

  Nineteen

  HE SIGNALED THE LIEUTENANT “SIR, THAT GIRL JUST stood up and scratched the back of her neck. Maybe that was a signal of some kind?”

  The girl looked like she was about seven, if that. The lieutenant laughed. “You’re getting paranoid, Dog Handler. Vietnam’ll do that to you.”

  Rick pulled at Cracker. She refused to budge. This wasn’t intuition anymore. It was common sense: Something was wrong. “Sir!” Rick called out again.

  The lieutenant turned around, this time with impatience in his face. “Clear the village. I don’t have time to be scared of a little girl. Let’s just get this mission over with and get out of here.”

  The men gatheredt ogether all of the villagers and animals so Cracker could search the hootches. Rick had no choice unless he wanted to disobey a direct order. He pulled on the leash with all his might and said, “Cracker, come!”