“Well, nobody’ll ever know, that’s for goddamn sure,” said Bob. “Unless you get out of this shit hole and you tell ’em. You got that, Pork? That’s your new MOS: witness. You got that?”
Familiar again. Where was this from? What did this mean? What sounded so right about it, the same melody, slightly different instrument?
“I’ll tell ‘em.”
“ ’Cause I’m too dumb to tell ’em. They’ll never listen to a hillbilly like me. They’ll listen to you, boy, ’cause you looked the goddamn elephant in the eye and came back to talk about it. Got that?”
“Got it.”
“Good. Now let’s scare up some wood and build us Noah’s ark.”
They scrounged in the ruins and came up after a bit with seven decent pieces of wood, which Bob rigged together in some clever Boy Scout way with a coil of black rope he carried. He lashed his and Donny’s rifles, the two 782-packs and harnesses, all the grenades, the map case, the canteens, the PRC-77, the flares and flare gun, and the pistols to it.
“Okay, you really can’t swim?”
“I can sort of.”
“Well, I can a bit, too. The deal is, you cling hard to this thing and you kick hard. I’ll be on the other side. Keep your face out of the water and keep on fighting, no matter what. And don’t let go. The current’ll take you and you’ll be one dead puppy dog and nobody’ll remember your name till they inscribe it on some monument and the pigeons come shit on it. Ain’t that a pretty thought?”
“Very pretty.”
“So let’s do it, Pork. You just became a submariner.”
The water was intensely cold and stronger than Zeus. In the first second Donny panicked, floundered, almost pulled the rickety raft over and only Bob’s strength on the other side kept them afloat. The raft floated diagonally across and the swiftness and anger of the river had it in an instant, and Donny, clinging with both desperate hands to the rope lashings Bob had jury-rigged, felt swept away, taken by it, the coldness everywhere. His feet flailed, touched nothing. He sank a bit and it gushed down his throat and he coughed and leaped like a seal, freeing himself.
It was all water, above and beneath, his chin in the stuff, his eyes and face pelted by it as it fell from the gray sky at a brutal velocity.
“Kick, goddammit!” he heard Bob scream, and with his legs he began a kind of strangely rhythmic breast-stroke. The craft seemed to spurt ahead just a bit.
But there came a moment when it was all gone. Fog obscured the land and he felt he was thrashing across an ocean, the English Channel at the very least, a voyage that had forgotten its beginning and couldn’t imagine its ending. The water lured him downward to its black numbness; he could feel it sucking at him, fighting toward his throat and his lungs, and it stank of napalm, gunpowder, aviation fuel, buffalo shit, peasants who sold you a Coke by day and cut your throat by night, dead kids in ditches, flaming villes, friendly-fire casualties, the whole fucking unstoppable momentum of the last eight years, and who was he to fight it, just another grunt, a lance corporal and former corporal with a shaky past, it seemed so huge, so vast, it seemed like history itself.
“Fight it, goddammit,” came Swagger’s call from the other side, and then he knew who Bob was.
Bob was Trig’s brother.
Bob and Trig were almost the same man, somehow. Despite their differing backgrounds, they were the aristocrats of the actual, singled out by DNA to do things others couldn’t, to be heroes in the causes they gave their lives to, to be always and forever remembered. They were Odin and Zeus. They were dangerously special, they got things done, they had an incredible vitality and life force. The war would kill them. That’s why both had commanded him to be the witness, he now saw. It was his job to survive and sing the story of the two mad brothers, Bob and Trig, consumed in, devoured by, killed in the war.
Trig was dead. Trig had blown himself up at the University of Wisconsin along with some pitiful graduate assistant who happened to be working late that night. They found Trig’s body, smashed and ruptured by the explosive.
It made him famous, briefly, a freak of headlines: HARVARD GRAD DIES IN BLAST; CARTER FAMILY SCION KILLS SELF IN BOMB BLAST; TRIG CARTER, THE GENTLE AVIAN PAINTER TURNED MARTYR TO THE CAUSE OF PEACE.
It had killed Trig, as Trig had known it would. That’s what Trig was telling him that last night; now he understood. He had to make it back, to tell the story of Trig and his mad brother Bob, eaten, each in his own way, by the war. Would it ever be over?
Someone had him. He swallowed and looked, and Swagger was yanking him from the water to the shore, where he collapsed, heaving with exhaustion.
“Now hear this. The smoking light is now lit,” said Bob.
From the wet river through the wet rain they finally reached the mountain. It wasn’t a great mountain. Donny had seen greater mountains in his time in the desert; he’d even climbed some. Swagger said he was from mountain country too, but Donny had never heard of mountains in the South, or Oklahoma or Arkansas or whatever mysterious backwoods the sniper hailed from.
The mountain was dense with foliage over hard rock, wide open to observation from hundreds of meters out. Pick your poison.
“Oh, Christ,” said Donny, looking at the steep slope. Time had no meaning. It seemed to be twilight but it could have been dawn. He looked upward and the water pelted him in the face.
“I want to get halfway up in the next two hours,” Bob said.
“I don’t think I can,” gulped Donny.
“I don’t think I can either,” said Bob. “And, what’s worse, if that goddamn main force battalion is in the area heading on that base camp, they’re sure to have security out, just the thing to keep boys like us out of their hair.”
“I can’t do it,” Donny said.
“I cain’t do it neither,” said Swagger. “But it’s gotta be done and I don’t see no two other boys here, do you? If I saw two others, believe me, I’d send them, yessirree.”
“Oh, shit,” Donny said.
“Well, look at it this way. We only got where we got ’cause we came through full monsoon. We go back, when the rains dry up Victor C. gonna come out. He’s gonna find us. He’s gonna kill us. We weren’t invited into his goddamn yard, and he’s gonna be plenty pissed. So we gotta make that Special Forces base camp or we are going to die out here for sure. That’s just about the size of that piece of shit and that’s all there is to it!”
He smiled, not out of happiness or glee but possibly because he was too exhausted to do anything else.
“Wish I had a Dexedrine,” he said. “But I don’t believe in that shit. Came back from my second tour with a monkey the size of a ape on my butt. Had to work like hell to kill that furry bastard, too. Now, that wasn’t much fun at all.”
The man wasn’t in Vietnam; in some sense he was Vietnam. He’d done it all: sniped, raided, taken hills, led recons, worked intel, advised ARVN units, run interrogations, done analysis, fought in a thousand firefights, killed who knew how many, visited hospitals, talked to generals. He was one part of his whole goddamned generation rolled into one. This was entirely new, but unsurprising: he’d been a speed freak. Maybe he’d done heroin, maybe he’d caught the clap, maybe he’d been tattooed, maybe he’d murdered prisoners. He was Trig, at least in the way that he’d done everything to win the war that Trig had done in his parallel universe to end it, a furious, relentless crusade, presaged on the obsolete notion that one man could make a difference.
“You remind me of a guy,” Donny said.
“Oh, yeah. Some hillbilly on the radio. Lum or the other one, Abner? They come from my hometown.”
“No, believe it or not, a peacenik.”
“Oh, a commie. He has long hair and looked like Jesus. His shit didn’t stink, I bet. Mine does, but good, Pork.”
“No. He was like you, a hero. He was bigger than the rest of us. He was a legend.”
“To be a legend, don’t you have to be dead? Ain’t that part of the job descriptio
n?”
“He is dead.”
“He managed to get his ass wasted demonstrating against the war? Now, that do take some kind of genius level intelligence. And I remind you of him? Son, you must have the fever bad.”
“He just wouldn’t quit. There wasn’t any quit in him.”
“Yeah, well, there’s plenty of quit in me, Pork. One more job, then I am going to quit for the rest of my life. Now, let’s just git a move on.”
“Which way?”
“We go up the switchbacks, they’ll bounce us. Only one way. Straight up.”
“Christ.”
“We’ll eat. Picnic time. It’ll be the last meal you git till this is over or you get killed and you get a nice steak in heaven. Dump your C-rats and your canteens and your 782. Use your entrenching tool. Set it at the angle. We going to use it to pull our way up, you got that?”
“I don’t—”
“Sure you do. Watch me.”
Quickly and expertly, he shed himself of most of his gear; only the weapons remained. He fished a C-rat out of his dumped pack, and quickly used his can opener to whip up cold eggs and ham, which he gobbled quickly.
“Go on, chow time. Eat something.”
Donny set out to do the same and in a few seconds was pulling down the barbecued pork, cold but flavorful.
“When we’re done, you gimme the radio. I ain’t carrying as much weight.”
“I’ll take your rifle.”
“The hell you will. Nobody touches the rifle but me.”
Of course. The basic rule. He remembered when Swagger had come looking for him, sitting forlornly on outpost duty at a forward observation post his third week at Dodge City.
“You Fenn?”
“Uh, yeah. Uh, Sergeant—?”
“Swagger. Name’s Swagger. I’m the sniper.”
Donny had a momentary intake of breath. In the dark, he could hardly see him: just a fierce wraith of a man sheathed in darkness, speaking in a dense Southern accent. Bob the Nailer, the one with the 15,000-piastre bounty on his head and over thirty kills. Donny had the sense that all was quiet, that the other men had just willed themselves to nothingness out of fear or respect for Bob the Nailer. Though he could not see the sniper’s eyes, Donny knew they burned at him, and ate him up.
“I just put my spotter on a medevac back to the world with a hole in his leg,” said the sniper. “I’m looking for a replacement. You shot expert. You have the highest GCT at Dodge. You have twenty-ten vision. You done a tour, won a medal, so you been shot at some and won’t panic. All that don’t mean shit. You was at Eighth and I. That means you done the ceremonial stuff, which means you have a patience for detail work and a willingness to be an unnoticed part of a bigger team. I need that. You interested?”
“Me? I—”
“Good perks. I’ll get you steak and all the bourbon you can drink. When we’re in, we live like kings. I’ll keep you off crap like night watch and ambush patrols and forward observation and shit-burning details. I’ll get you R&R anywhere you want. Bad shit: A) You don’t touch the rifle. Nobody touches the rifle. B) You don’t do drugs. I catch you with a buzz on, I ship you home under guard and you’ll spend two years in Portsmouth. C) You don’t call nobody gook, dink, slope or zip. These are the very finest soldiers in the world. They are winning and they will win. We kill them, but by God, we kill them with respect. Those are the only three rules, but they ain’t to be bent or even breathed hard on. Or, you can sit here in this shit hole waiting for someone to drop a mortar shell on your head. And somehow I got a feeling every shit detail, every shit patrol, every piece-of-crap garbage job that comes up, you’re number one on the fuck list. I hope you like the stink of burning shit because you’re going to smell a lot of it.”
“Back in the world, I had some problems,” said Donny. “I got a bad rap. I wouldn’t ‘cooperate.’ ”
“I figured it from your jacket. Some kind of infraction of orders? You lost your rating. Hey, kid, this ain’t the world. This is the ’Nam, have you noticed? It don’t mean shit to me, you got that? You do the jobs I give you one hundred percent and I’ll back you one hundred percent. You may get killed, you will work hard, but you will have fun. Killing people is lots of fun. Now, you want in or what?”
“I guess I’m in.”
Within thirty minutes, Donny had been relieved of duty and moved into the scout-sniper squad bay with S/Sgt. Swagger NCOIC—or, as some called him, NCGIC, Non-Commissioned God in Charge—and the only man whose word mattered anywhere in the world.
He had never broken one of the rules until now. He had weighed each M118 round Swagger carried against the one-in-a-million chance of an off-charge at Lake City; he had cleaned Bob’s .45, .380 and grease gun and his own M14 and .45; he shined and dried the jungle boots; he laid out and assembled the gear before each mission; he polished the lens of the spotting scope; he checked the pins on the grenades, the plastic canteens for mildew; he hand-enameled the brass on the 872 gear dead black; he did laundry; he learned elevation, windage and range estimation; he kept range cards; he filled out after-action reports; he studied the operating area maps like a sacred text; he handled flank security and once killed two NVC who were infiltrating around Bob’s position; he learned PRC-77 protocol and maintenance. He worked like hell, and he had never broken one of the rules.
Only Bob touched the rifle. Bob broke it down after each mission, cleaned it to the tiniest crevice, scrubbed it dry, rezeroed it, treated it like a baby or a mistress. He and only he could touch or carry the rifle.
“It ain’t I don’t trust you. It ain’t you drop it and it gets knocked out of zero and you don’t tell me and I miss a shot and somebody, probably me, gets killed. It’s just that the bedrock here is simple, clear, powerful and helps us both: nobody touches the rifle but me. Good fences make good neighbors. Ever hear that one?”
“I think so.”
“Well, the rifle rule is my fence. Got that?”
“I do. Entirely, Sergeant.”
“You call me sergeant around the lifers here in Dodge. In the field, you call me Bob or Swagger or whatever the hell you want. Don’t call me sergeant in the field. One of them boys might be listening and he might decide to kill me because he heard you call me sergeant. Got that, Pork?”
“I do.”
And he had never forgotten that rule or any of the rules, until now.
“I forgot,” he said in the rain to Swagger. “About the rifle.”
“Damn, Fenn, I was just getting to like you, too. I thought you’se going to work out,” Bob said, needling him ever so gently. But then it was back to mission: “Okay, you done eating? You got your shit wired in tight? This is it. Over this hill, through their security and then sleep a bit. Comes morning we get to do some shooting.”
Bob went first, down to soaked tiger camos and boonie cap, his rifle slung upside down on his back. He carried the M3 grease gun in one hand and the entrenching tool in the other, and he used the tool as a kind of hook, to sink into roots of trees or the tangles of vegetation to get himself up the steep incline a few more feet. He moved with slow, almost calm deliberation. The rain fell still in torrents in the darkening gloom, and it rattled off the leaves and against the mud. How could it rain so hard so long? Was God ending the world, washing away Vietnam and its sins, its atrocities, its arrogances and follies? It seemed that way.
Donny was fifty yards to the left, doing the same trick, but behind Swagger and working carefully not to get ahead. Bob was the eyes up front to the right; Donny’s responsibility was behind and to the left, the flank he was on.
But he saw nothing, just felt the chill of the biting rain, and felt the weight of the M14, one of the last few left in the ’Nam. For this job, really, the plastic M16 would have been more ideally suited, but Bob hated the things, calling them poodle shooters, and wouldn’t let a man in his unit carry them.
Every now and then Bob would halt them with a raised right hand, and both men would drop low to
the ground, hidden in the foliage, waiting, clinging desperately against the incline. But each time whatever Bob had noticed proved to be nothing, a false alarm, and they continued their steady, slow climb.
Twice they crossed paths, switchbacks etched into the vegetation, and Bob waited for five minutes before allowing them out on the open ground even for the seconds or so that it exposed them.
The darkness was falling. It was harder and harder to see. The jungle, far from relaxing as they climbed, actually seemed to be getting denser. There was a time when Donny felt himself cut off entirely from Bob, and a shot of panic came to him. What if he got lost? What would he do? He would wander these ghostly mountains until they caught him and killed him, or he wore down and starved.
You boys ain’t so tough, he heard from somewhere, and realized it was a mocking memory of a football coach somewhere back in his complicated athletic career.
No, we ain’t so tough, he thought. We never said we were. We just tried to do our job, that was all.
But then he came out of the rubbery-smelling thorns that had swallowed him, and saw a figure to the right and recognized it for its caution and precision of movement to be Bob.
He started to rise—
No, no—
Bob’s hand was up urgently, signaling him still and back. He froze and dropped on his belly low to the ground, even as Bob himself did the same.
He waited.
Nothing. No, just the sound of the rain, some occasional thunder, now and then a streak of distant lightning. It seemed so—
The next thing, he was aware of motion on his left. He did not move, he did not breathe.
How had Swagger seen them? How did he know? What gave them away? Another step and it was all over, but somehow, out of some trick of instinct or predator’s preternatural nerve endings, Bob had stunned him into silence and motionlessness a second before they arrived.
Time to Hunt Page 13