by Chris Lynch
“I am sure he feels the same about you.”
Dusk is coming down quickly, and we can just barely see Lt. Systrom and Pvt. Kuns at the side of the trail in the distance. By my count I have shifted this man, this poor, worthy fighter, from one shoulder to the other thirty times. With the four of us ambulatory and the three of them along for the ride, we have each had periodic breaks, yet this has turned out to be backbreaking stuff. Especially with the requirement to stay on watch all the way down the road in case we missed anything the first time or anything new has popped up. Just keeping weapons at the ready is grueling in itself.
I can see the lieutenant’s scowl from fifty yards. It adds to the weight of the casualty to the point that I just about fall down at the boss’s feet when we meet.
“What’s this?” Lt. Systrom asks, and his look doesn’t suggest any answer is the right answer. “You had a duty. And picking up locals, however unfortunate those locals might be, was not part of that duty. So I ask again, why did I send out four men and get seven in return?”
Lightfoot does not waste words in his answer, reducing it, in fact, to just the very basics.
“Montagnards, sir.”
The way he is leaning up on his toes and forward, Systrom looks like he has a strong response prepared. Then he retracts.
He stares at Lightfoot, nods, and pulls up the radio.
We continue the heavy march, back toward our landing spot as the lieutenant calls for our ride.
As we lift the last body, then the last of ourselves into the same bullet-holed fiberglass boat that got us here, I feel practically boneless myself. I stumble into a seat next to Lightfoot as the boat motors out onto the river. I look around at everybody looking the same as me. Though not as much as me.
I am a rookie and feel it.
“Lightfoot?” I say into the corporal’s ear. “What’s Montagnards?”
“Our friends,” he says.
“Okay … right. Lightfoot …?”
“Shhhh,” he says, and pushes my face away. But gently.
Now I know.
I thought I knew fear, but now I know it.
I thought I knew horror, but now I know it.
I thought I knew tired … holy smokes, I thought I knew tired….
“Private Bucyk,” Lt. Systrom says from behind me as I’m just about into the mess for some dinner.
“Yes, sir?” I say, turning and saluting.
“I just wanted to check in and see how you thought operations went today. Your first real action. It’s not like they tell you it’s going to be, is it?”
“Not even close, sir. If they told me it was going to be like today on my first day, well, I just would have thought they were pulling my leg.”
“Right, well, now you know. Truth is, pretty much every one of your days is going to be a lot like today.”
I gulp. I know he can hear me gulp. That can’t stop me from gulping again.
“Sorry, kid, I should have been more specific. I meant my day today. I lay motionless as a hibernating turtle, covered in leaves on the top of a hill, all day long. Never saw anything to shoot at. Hardly even blinked. That starlight scope, by the way, gets awfully tiresome on the ol’ peep eye after a while.”
“I … would imagine it does, sir.”
I would also imagine he is telling me this stuff for a reason, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what that reason might be.
“I bet you’re hungry,” he says.
“I absolutely am, lieutenant.”
“And here I am, keeping you from your hard-earned meal after a long first day in the field. What’s wrong with me? Tell you what — go on in there and eat, get your fill, then meet me back out here afterward so we can have a talk. How’s that?”
“That is fine, Lieutenant Systrom. Sure.”
“Great, then. See you right here. What say, half hour, yes?”
“Well, sir, I was thinking more —”
“Half hour, tremendous. See you here.”
Now I’m worried all over again. Am I in trouble? Am I not in trouble? Does he like me? Is he taking me under his wing? Is he taking me outside to see what kind of man I really am?
Jeez, what am I worried about? What’s happened to me? I never used to worry about anything. That’s what was great about me.
Now I’m worried about being worried.
I look all around me before I step through the door of the mess. Nobody is watching, thank goodness.
I give myself such a belt across the face, I am sure my dad hears it and is smiling in my direction.
“There,” I say. “That’s better.”
Thirty minutes of wolfing later, I encounter the lieutenant standing right where he said he’d be. He has his beautiful sniper’s M-21 at his side.
“Fine, fine,” he says, looking at his watch as I walk up to him.
“If you don’t mind, sir, could I use the latrine before we begin?”
“Absolutely, private. I mind very much. Next time, plan your allocation of those thirty minutes more judiciously. Follow me.”
Okay, then. I follow right behind as Lt. Systrom marches double-time through the compound, past the commissary and the NCOs’ club and the BOQ, which is the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. Right past the dock and the boats all parked next to the big Benewah, out to the clearing where we have a makeshift six-station, three-hundred-yard firing range.
Lt. Systrom hands over the magnificent weapon, and my heart goes all beehive on me. I lift it, get a feel for it, raise the scope to my eye, and see that target through the early evening dark as clear as if it were about to bump into me. Already I feel like the rifle and I are one unit.
“You do know your way around a gun, don’t you, Bucyk?”
“I believe I do, sir.”
“You have dreams of being a sniper, don’t you, Bucyk?”
“I have those dreams every night, sir.”
“It is about so much more than shooting, you know, private. So, so much more. It is about stealth. It is about being a leaf in the forest rather than a baboon. It is about staying so quiet and so still for so long at a time you forget your own presence.”
“Yes, sir, I know this, sir,” I say, training the scope from one target to the next to the next and feeling I am the gun.
“So why did I spend all day today listening to you?”
I am no longer the gun.
“Sir?” I say, lowering the weapon to consider him.
“Your voice, Private Bucyk. All day long. From my high perch, my position of stealth, I listened to the sound of your voice from the farthest reaches of the trail.”
“I was whispering, sir.”
He is unimpressed with my defense, if he has even registered it.
“You see, being seen and heard in this line of work in this part of the world in this moment in history is the same as being dead. I have received very strong advance reports on you, private. I would like to not see you dead.”
“I would like to not see that, either, sir.”
“Well, if there were any serious enemy activity along that trail today, Bucyk, you would, in fact, be dead. Raise that weapon again and focus on the target.”
I do, and I do, and I am loving it again.
“The possibilities are great for you, soldier. The possibility that you never get there is far greater. But for right now, I want you to focus on that target. Stay focused on that target. Do not make a sound. Do not twitch a fiber. Do not have so much as a detectable brain wave until I return to tell you otherwise. Is that perfectly clear?”
I have my flaws, but I am certainly not untrainable. I learn.
I do not respond in any way.
“Good,” he says, and marches away again.
It seemed simple enough.
Stand, aim, point the gun at the target. I can’t think of any more natural thing to do.
But thirty minutes in, I feel it. The pain starts at the top of my right shoulder. Then it grows, travels, radiates dow
n my arm and up into my neck. There is a nerve toward the back of my neck that feels like someone has gotten in there with a pair of needle-nose pliers, has pinched it off, and is twisting, twisting, twisting like the elastic in those old balsa-wood propeller planes I used to build all the time.
My eye, the one I have on the target, has the sensation of a tiny hand scratching, the fingernails clawing lightly at the surface of the eye, then salty breath puffing lightly into it. I am sweating like I am personally the very source of the Mekong.
And I regret that missed latrine break more than any decision I ever made.
It has to be three hours before I hear footsteps coming my way. As they get closer it appears there are at least three, maybe four people coming. Relief, I am sensing relief, feeling relief, whether they are here to literally relieve me or not.
“Look at this disciplined piece of Army machinery here,” Parrish says, walking around me like he’s checking out a new car. Please don’t kick my tires.
“Very impressive,” Lightfoot says. “Do you suppose he’s trying out for the LRRPs?”
The LRRPs are Long Range Reconnaissance Patrollers, and they are legendary as the most maniacal people in the entire show. They go out all painted up for night patrols as far out into the scarylands as they can get, remaining frozen for hours at a time to capture or terrorize individuals and bring back useful information or guns or enemy combatants as a kind of bonus.
“Nah,” Arguello says. “One of his eyes is closed. LRRPs never close their eyes.”
I don’t care. Whatever they want to do to me now, I don’t care because I am right now doing the most important job in the Army, the war, the world. I can see the three of them, walking around me, trying to get me to move, react, exist in a physical way that I am just not going to do even if it kills me.
Maybe I will lose my mind and wind up a LRRP at the end of it all.
No, I won’t. Because I am not a LRRP. I am a marksman, and I am going to be a sniper.
“Would you like a drink?” Parrish asks, taking a long and theatrically slurpy sip off of what I think is ginger ale.
Moxie. All I can think of right now is Moxie. I miss Moxie. I want Moxie. When I get through this, I am going to make it my mission to secure a supply of Moxie. Moxie is my secret, my strength, my source. Moxie is my essence, and with it I cannot fail.
Lightfoot actually comes up close and blows on the side of my face softly. I have no idea what kind of torture this is intended to be, but it feels like heaven.
Arguello comes around the front of me and starts making sniffing noises.
“I don’t remember this guy smelling like that when he got here,” he says. “Smells like he’s rotting. Do you think he is rotting since he got here?”
“Yeah, now that you mention it,” Parrish says, “there is a little something foul going on there.”
“Is it coming from here?” Arguello says, crouching down right in front of me.
My arms are screaming with the pain now. My neck is going to snap. I can’t feel my hands.
After examining the area for several seconds, Arguello pulls a rolled-up magazine out of his back pocket. He begins to fan my already damp crotch area.
Oh, no. Oh, please, no.
I can feel the breeze coming through my clothes. I can feel the cool, can feel the humidity turning to frost as he fans faster and faster.
“Oh, man,” Arguello says, jumping away like I was one of the deadly bamboo vipers that are everywhere here.
“Jeez,” Parrish says from just behind me, “it’s worse on this side.”
They howl, they flail around, laughing and gagging and carrying on like evil circus clowns. I hear them getting farther away behind me, and I don’t think I have ever been happier at the prospect of aloneness.
“You’re doing great, kid,” Lightfoot says in my ear before he, too, melts away.
I stand there, in my reek, but frozen in position as I hear the last of their sounds trail off. I don’t know if I could relax my position now if I wanted to. A live version of rigor mortis seems to have gripped me at this point.
It is dead silent. I wait for more footsteps to come and none come.
“Very impressive” comes the voice from about three feet behind me, and the shock is nearly enough to make me twitch. But I don’t.
“If I didn’t know better, private, I would swear you were a part of the landscape. Except for the smell, of course. Since there are no skunks in this neck of the woods, I do believe you would have given your position away to any hostile troops within one kilometer.”
Lt. Systrom walks around to the front of me.
“And this is just the beginning, Bucyk. With skill like yours, shooting people is the easy part.”
It would be pretty easy at this moment, is what I’m thinking.
“But not only do you not have all the necessary traits of the true sniper, you don’t even look the part. You look more like Daniel Boone trying to pick off Injuns than a modern-day precision killing machine. Now, I want you to get down on the ground, take up a proper sniping position, and get a bead on that hostile target there for real.”
The Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz had less trouble moving after rusting in the forest all those years than I have right now. But I do it. I lower the rifle, feel the muscles in my shoulders, back, arms, hamstrings, moving more like steel cables and pulleys than real organic human parts. My pants feel all the more disgusting for the movement.
But I get down, stretch out, fold down the two bipod legs at the front of the M-21, and set my starlight scope on my enemy.
“Good,” Systrom says. “Bet that’s a relief, huh?”
I say nothing.
“Good,” he says, then wanders off to the tree line alongside the range. I hear him rustling around in the trees for a minute but can’t figure what he’s up to until he comes up and drops a full load of camouflage foliage on top of me. He spends a few seconds spreading big palm leaves and sticks and branches over me in what must be a lovely naturalistic arrangement.
“Remain the landscape, soldier. Keep at it until you don’t exist any longer. Or until I come back and tell you, whichever comes last.”
I listen to his crisp, marching steps, and it seems like he takes forty-five minutes and several thousand strides before he clears the area. It does in fact feel like something of a relief to be off my feet and to have my arms supported. My elbows are stuck into the moist and loamy-smelling turf, which is a whole lot better than the air that was holding me up before.
But after an hour I forget how much better I feel.
After two hours I feel nothing in my hands, my arms, my legs. My neck is hurting again.
After three hours, I feel nothing, anywhere, inside my body as well as out. Only my eye feels like an actual physical part of this world.
“I almost tripped right over you,” Lt. Systrom says, walking between me and the target.
Click.
I pull the trigger.
“Correct response,” he says, clapping his hands together one loud time as the birds in the distant trees sing up the beginnings of the tropical-dawn chorus.
“You were so good I almost forgot where I planted you. Truth is, I did forget about you. Meant to be here an hour ago. Sorry, soldier.”
It was very smart to leave the gun unloaded.
“On your feet, Private Bucyk.”
It takes me maybe a week and a half, I can’t quite tell, but I get to my feet. Lt. Systrom relieves me of the rifle. He nods at me and slits out a faint smile.
“Go have a shower,” he says.
I salute. He salutes. And we turn and walk side by side back to the Benewah. He even walks a lot closer to me than you would expect.
For the first time since I arrived a month ago, the Benewah is behaving like an honest-to-goodness sailing vessel. We are moving upriver.
The days had become a frustrating, repetitive slog of patrols to find and cut supply lines and harass the Vietcong whenever
we could flush them out. More and more we found ourselves working alongside regulars of the ARVN, which is the South Vietnamese army. We exchanged gunfire with the enemy once or twice a week without ever really getting close enough to see what we were achieving. But then we would come back the next day and the next week and we would find pretty much the same number of nests of fighters, the same number of listening stations and ammo dumps both full and empty, and one day looked exactly the same as the other in terms of accomplishing anything.
Which is why we are moving.
We have been handing over more of the responsibilities to the ARVN, because a program called Vietnamization is supposed to win this thing more quickly. I don’t know. I know that if some guys from some other country came in and told me they were going to Americanize America, I would get a little confused. Before knocking all their teeth out.
Maybe, I don’t know, but maybe this has something to do with the way our allies are looking at us a little funny, and we are doing the same to them now.
“I won’t miss it, that’s for sure,” Lightfoot says as we sit up on deck watching the riverbanks slip by. “Vung Tau and all that lower Mekong business just felt like a big waste of time and resources. Soon as you sweep an area, it’s infiltrated all over again. I’m glad to be headed north. Get closer to the source of all that insurgent activity and maybe have a chance to do something about it. Personally, I wish they would send us right up the whole Ho Chi Minh Trail, get the bull right by the horns.”
The Ho Chi Minh Trail is a path cut through the jungle all the way down from Laos, through Cambodia, and right down almost to the capital, Saigon, here deep in the south of the South. It is how most of the supplies come from North Vietnam to the Vietcong.
“It’ll be nice to feel like we’re getting something done, that’s for sure,” I say.
“Exactly. And the ARVN — I just don’t know about those guys. The longer we were there, the more I felt like they couldn’t care less which way this thing went. That was exhausting, as far as I was concerned.”
We start walking around the deck of the big tub. It is really a hulk of a thing, with its massive cannons and .30-and .50-caliber machine guns, its crane tower and gigantic helicopter pad like a bull’s-eye set right in the middle of it. It’s kind of like all the different pieces of the war machinery all grafted together, self-propelled and floating toward the action.