I try to stand up. But all of my bones have shifted one inch to the left.
Suddenly a foot steps on my chest, pinning me. The sniper looks down, surprised. The sniper sees that I'm helpless, glances back at Rafter Man, gets ready to jump across to the other roof.
Rafter Man runs back up the incline and slides back down on his ass, ten yards away.
I reach for my grease gun.
The sniper turns toward Rafter Man and raises her SKS carbine.
The sniper is the first Victor Charlie I've seen who was not dead, captured, or far, far away.
She is a child, no more than fifteen years old, a slender Eurasian angel with dark, beautiful eyes, which, at the same time, are the hard eyes of a grunt. She's not quite five feet tall. Her hair is long and black and shiny, held together by rawhide cord tied in a bow. Her shirt and shorts are mustard-colored khaki and look new. Slung diagonally across her chest, separating her small breasts, is a white cloth tube fat with sticky reddish rice. Her B.F. Goodrich sandals have been cut from discarded tires. Around her tiny waist hangs a web belt from which dangle homemade hand grenades with hollow wooden handles, made by stuffing black powder into Coca-Cola cans, a knife for cleaning fish, and six canvas pouches containing banana clips for the AK-47 assault rifle slung on her back.
Bang. Rafter Man is firing his M-16. Bang. Bang.
The sniper lowers her weapon. She looks at Rafter Man. She looks at me. She tries to raise her weapon.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bullets shock flesh. Rafter Man is firing. Rafter Man's bullets are punching the life out of the sniper.
The sniper falls off the roof.
The tank fires into the ground floor beneath us. The house shakes.
I stand up. I feel like a dead man's shit. I walk to the front of the house. I wave to the blond tank commander. He swings a fifty-caliber machine gun around and aims it at me. I step into full view on the edge of the roof. I wave an "all clear."
The tank commander gives me a thumbs-up.
I pop a green smoke grenade and I drop it on the roof.
I limp over to the skylight and I climb back down into the library.
Rafter Man has already jumped into the library and is running down the shrapnel-scarred stairs.
Down on the street I watch as the tank rolls up to the last house still standing. I wave another
"all clear" and the tank commander gives me another smile and another thumbs-up and then the tank fires, blasting the top floor. If fires again, blasting the ground floor.
The tank commander's great mechanical body grumbles contentedly and rumbles away.
Cowboy double-times to meet me. He punches me on the arm. "Look!" Cowboy touches his right ear, carefully. "Look!" There's a neat little round hole through his right ear and a semicircular nick on the top of his left ear. "See? A cheap Heart! The round went through the helmet from behind, spun all the way around my head, then came out and hit me in the arm..." Cowboy holds up his right forearm, which has already been bandaged. "Did you see that tank? Was that tank bad? What a honey."
Doc Jay catches up to Cowboy, grabs him roughly, pushes him down. Cowboy sits on a splintered tree stump while Doc Jay tears the waxy brown wrapper off a compress bandage and ties the bandage around Cowboy's bloody head.
Alice and I walk around to the rear of the house.
We find Rafter Man standing over the sniper, drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola. Rafter Man grins. He says, "Things go better with Coke."
Animal Mother walks up and Rafter Man says, "Look at her! Look at her!"
We all stand over the sniper. The sniper is drawing her breath with great effort. Guts that look like colorful plastic have squirted out through bullet holes. The back of the sniper's right leg and her right buttock have been torn off. She grits her teeth and then makes a sound like a dog that has been run over.
Lance Corporal Stutten leads his fire team to the sniper. "Look at that," says Lance Corporal Stutten. "It's a girl. She's all busted up."
"Look at her!" Rafter Man is saying. He struts around the moaning lump of torn meat.
"Look at her! Am I bad? Am I a menace? Am I a life taker? Am I a heart breaker?"
Alice kneels and unbuckles the sniper's web belt and jerks it from under her body. The sniper whimpers. She speaks to us in French. Alice tosses the bloody belt to Rafter Man.
The sniper begins to pray in Vietnamese.
Rafter Man asks, "What's she saying?"
I shrug. "What difference does it make?"
Animal Mother spits. "It's gonna get dark. We better hump back to the company area."
I say, "What about the gook?"
"Fuck her," says Animal Mother. "Let her rot."
"We can't just leave her here," I say.
Animal Mother takes a giant step toward me, puts his face up close to mine. "Hey, asshole, Cowboy is down. You're fresh out of friends, motherfucker. I'm running this squad. I was a platoon sergeant before they busted me. I say we leave the gook for the mother-loving rats."
Rafter Man is buckling on his NVA belt. The belt has a dull-silver buckle with a star engraved in the center. "Joker is a sergeant."
Animal Mother is surprised. He stares at Rafter Man, then at me. Then: "That don't cut no shit out here. This is the field, motherfucker. You ain't a grunt. You don't pack the gear to be a grunt. You want to fuck with me? Huh? You want to throw some hands?"
I say, "I wouldn't run this squad for a million dollars. I'm just saying that we can't leave the gook like this."
"I don't care," says Animal Mother. "Go on and waste her."
I say, "No. Not me."
"Then we saddle up and move...now."
I look at the sniper. She whimpers. I try to decide what I would want if I were down, half dead, hurting bad, surrounded by my enemies. I look into her eyes, trying to find the answer.
She sees me. She recognizes me--I am the one who will end her life. We share a bloody intimacy. As I lift my grease gun she is praying in French. I jerk the trigger. Bang. One round enters the sniper's left eye and as the bullet exits it tears off the back of her head.
The squad is silent.
Then Alice grunts, flashes a big grin. "Man, you are one hard dude. How come you ain't a grunt?"
Cowboy and Doc Jay are standing beside me.
Cowboy says, "Mother, I'm serviceable. Joker, that's a well done. You're hard.'
Animal Mother spits. He takes a step, kneels, zips out his machete. With one powerful blow he chops off her head. He picks the head up by its long black hair and holds it high. He laughs and says, "Rest in pieces, bitch." And he laughs again. He walks around and sticks the bloody ball of gore into all our faces. "Hard? Now who's hard? Now who's hard, motherfuckers?"
Cowboy looks at Animal Mother and sighs. "Joker is hard, Mother. You...you're just mean."
Animal Mother pauses, spits, throws the head into a ditch.
Cowboy says, "Let's move. We done our job."
Animal Mother picks up his M-60 machine gun, lays it across his shoulders, struts over to me. He smiles. "You know, Shortround never did see the frag that wasted him, that little kike." Animal Mother unhooks a hand grenade from the front of his flak jacket and pushes it into my chest--hard. Mother looks around, then smiles at me again. "Nobody shits on the Animal, motherfucker. Nobody."
I hook the grenade onto my flak jacket.
Alice picks up the sniper's rifle. "Hey, number one souvenir!"
Rafter Man is standing over the sniper's decapitated corpse. He aims his M-16 and fires a long burst of automatic fire into the body. Then he says, "That's mine, Alice." He takes the SKS from Alice and examines it closely. He looks down and admires his new belt. "I shot her first, Joker. She'd have died. That's one confirmed for me."
I say, "Sure, Rafter. You wasted her."
Rafter Man says, "I did. I wasted her. I fucking blew her away." He looks at his NVA rifle belt again. He holds up the SKS. "Wait until Mr. Payback sees this!"
Alice is d
own on his knees beside the corpse. With his machete he chops off the sniper's feet.
He puts the feet into his blue canvas shopping bag. He chops off the sniper's finger and takes her gold ring.
We wait until Rafter Man takes photographs of the dead gook and we wait until Alice takes photographs of Rafter Man posing with his SKS set in his hip and his foot on the mutilated remains of the enemy sniper.
Then, as we're moving out, Rafter Man sees a reflection of his face in the jagged teeth of a shattered window, sees the new smile upon his face. Rafter Man stares at himself for a long time and then, dropping the carbine, Rafter Man just walks off down the road, not looking back, not responding to our questions.
Cowboy waves his hand and we move out. Nobody says anything about Rafter Man.
We hump back to the Forbidden City and set in for the night.
I mark the short-timer's calendar on my flak jacket--fifty-five days and a wake-up left in country.
Later, in the dark, Rafter Man comes back.
The fighting continues all around us all night, sputters of violence here and there, a mortar round, a curse, a scream.
We sleep like babies.
The sun that rises in Hue on the morning of February 25, 1968, illuminates a dead city.
United States Marines have liberated Hue to the ground. Here, in the heart of the ancient imperial capital of Viet Nam, a living shrine to the Vietnamese people on both sides, green Marines in the green machine have liberated a cherished past. Green Marines in the green machine have shot the bones of sacred ancestors. Wise, like Solomon, we have converted Hue into rubble in order to save it.
The next morning Delta Six cuts us some slack and we spend the day hunting gold bars in the emperor's palace.
We enter the throne room of the old emperors. The throne is blood red, studded with inlaid mirrors.
I wish I could live in the Imperial Palace. Bright pieces of porcelain make the walls vivid.
The roof is orange tile. There are stone dragons, ceramic urns, brass cranes standing on the backs of turtles, and many other fine objects of undetermined origin and function but obviously of great value and great beauty and very old.
I walk out into the emperor's magnificent garden. I find Alice and Rafter Man looking at some crispy critters. It's impossible to determine which army the men were from. Napalm leaves less than bones. I say, "The aroma of roasted flesh is, admittedly, an acquired taste."
Alice laughs. "This is such a fucking waste. I mean, this place is like a magic temple, you know? The gooks love this place. Blowing it away is like, oh, blowing away the White House. Except that nobody gives a shit about the White House and this place is ten times as old."
I shrug.
"It's crazy," Alice says. "It's just plain fucking crazy. I wish I was back in the World."
I say, "No, back in the World is the crazy part. This, all this world of shit, this is real."
Cowboy comes around later and says that Delta's company commander has passed the word to regroup on the beach at the Strawberry Patch.
We march. We look at the rubble we have made. We get tired of looking at it; there's so much of it.
Twilight.
What's left of Delta Company, 1st Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, First Marine Division, is sprawled all over the beach down by the River of Perfumes. The bearded grunts are sleeping, cooking chow, bragging, comparing souvenirs, and reenacting every moment of the battle, real and imagined, every man a hero beyond belief.
The Lusthog Squad is wasted. We have nailed our names into the pages of history enough for today. Canteens come out. It's too hot to cook so we eat cold C's.
Some of the guys are getting to their feet.
Donlon stands up, shouts, "LOOK!"
Five hundred yards north there is an island in the River of Perfumes. On the island a semicircle of miniature tanks is converging upon a frantic colony of ants. The ants drop their gear and sling their AK-47 assault rifles over their backs and they jump into the river. The ants swim for it.
All of the tanks open fire with ninety-millimeter shells and with fifty-caliber machine guns.
Some of the ants sink.
Cobra gunships buzz out of a horizon that is the color of lead and swoop in for the kill.
The ants swim faster.
The hovering gunships chop up the brown water with their machine guns.
The ants swim, dive, or, in their panic, drown.
Delta Company gets onto its feet.
Three Cobra gunships zoom down to within a few yards of the river and the helmeted door gunners machine-gun the ants as they flop in the water, trapped in a syncopated hurricane of hot air beating down from the swirling rotor blades, trapped in the water while their red life runs out through bullet holes.
Only one ant reaches the river bank. The ant opens fire at the gunships as they hover over the water like monsters feeding.
Someone says, "See that shit? He's hard-core."
One gunship detaches itself from the blood feast and skims across the River of Perfumes.
The chopper drops bullets all over the beach, all around the ant.
The ant runs off the beach.
The gunship zooms back to feed on the ants in the water.
The ant runs onto the beach and opens fire.
The gunship banks sharply and comes in low, rockets swooshing from under its belly and machine guns chattering.
Again, the ant runs off the beach.
The gunship is halfway back to the ants in the water when the ant on the beach reappears and opens fire.
This time the gunship pilot brings his ship in low enough to decapitate the ant with the chopper's skids. The gunship fires.
The ant fires.
Machine-gun bullets knock the ant over.
The gunship swings around to verify that it is a confirmed kill.
As machine-gun bullets snap into the wet sand, the ant stands up, aims its tiny AK-47 assault rifle, and fires a thirty-round magazine on full automatic.
The Cobra gunship explodes, splits open like a bloated green egg. The gutted carcass of aluminum and plexiglass bounces along, suspended in the air, burning, trailing black smoke.
And then it falls.
The flaming chopper hits the river and the flowing water sucks it down.
The ant does not move. The ant fires another magazine on full automatic. The ant is shooting at the sky.
Tired of firing into floating corpses, the remaining two gunships attack.
The ant walks off the beach.
The gunships hit the beach and sand dunes with every weapon they've got. They circle and circle and circle like predatory birds. Then, out of ammunition and out of fuel, they buzz straight into the horizon and vanish.
Delta Company applauds and cheers and whistles. "Get some! Number one! Out-fucking-standing! Payback is a motherfucker!"
Alice says, "That guy was a grunt."
While we wait for the gunboats to come and take us back across the River of Perfumes we talk about how the NVA grunt was one hell of a hard individual and about how it would be okay if he came to America and married all our sisters and about how we all hope that he will live to be a hundred years old because the world will be diminished when he's gone.
The next morning, Rafter Man and I get the map coordinates of a mass grave from some green ghouls and we hump over to the site to get Captain January his atrocity photographs.
The mass grave smells really bad--the odor of blood, the stink of worms, decayed human beings. The Arvin snuffies doing the digging in a school yard have all tied olive-drab skivvy shirts around their faces, but casualties due to uncontrollable puking are heavy.
We see corpses of Vietnamese civilians who have been buried alive, faces frozen in mid-scream, hands like claws, the fingernails bloody and caked with damp earth. All of the dead people are grinning that hideous, joyless grin of those who have heard the joke, of those who have seen the terrible secrets of the earth. There's even the cor
pse of a dog which Victor Charlie could not separate from its master.
There are no corpses with their hands tied behind their backs. However, the green ghouls assure us that they have seen such corpses elsewhere. So I borrow some demolition wire from the Arvin snuffies and, crushing the stiff bodies with my knee until dry bones crack, I bind up a family, assembled at random from the multitude--a man, his wife, a little boy, a little girl, and, of course, their dog. As a final touch, I wire the dog's feet together.
Noon at the MAC-V compound. We say good-bye to Cowboy and to the Lusthog Squad.
Cowboy has found a stray puppy and is carrying the bony little animal inside his shirt.
Cowboy says to me, "Keep your ass down, bro. Scuttlebutt is, the Lusthog Squad is headed up to Khe Sanh, a very hairy area. But no sweat; we can hack it. And maybe they got some horses up there. So if you ever feel hard enough to be a real Marine, a grunt, bop up to see us."
I pet Cowboy's puppy. "Never happen. But you take care, you piece of shit. We've got a date with your sister I don't care to miss."
Rafter Man says good-bye to Alice and to the other guys in Cowboy's squad. He shakes hands with Cowboy and pets Cowboy's puppy. In my best John Wayne voice I say, "See you later, Mother."
Animal Mother says, "Not if I see you first."
Rafter Man and I ditty-bop down Route One, south, toward Phu Bai. We hump in crushing heat for hours, looking for a ride. But the sun is without mercy and there are no convoys in sight.
We sit in the shade by the road. "It's hot," I say. "It's very hot. Wish that old mamasan was here. I'd souvenir beaucoup money for one Coke..."
Rafter Man stands up. "No sweat. I can find her..." Rafter Man ditty-bops into the road.
I start to say something about how it might be a good idea for us to stay together. There are still plenty of NVA stragglers in the area. "Rafter..." But then I remember that Rafter Man has got his first confirmed kill. Rafter Man can take care of himself.
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.
The Short-Timers Page 10