"I am Team Arizona base camp, grid square Whiskey Delta 5120-1802.1 need Hotel Echo in the worst possible way, over."
"Shit, neg to that, Arizona-Six-Zulu. I have no, repeat no, fire support bases close enough to get shells to your area. They closed down Mary Jane and Suzie Q last week, and the Marines at Dodge are too far, over."
"Over, Lima-Niner-Mike, I am out here on my lonesome with eleven Americans and four hundred in digs and we are in heavy shit and I am running down on ammo, food, and water. I need support ASAP, over."
"I have your coordinates, Arizona-Six-Zulu, but I have no artillery fire bases operational within range. I will go to Navy to see if we can get naval gunfire in range and I will call up tac air ASAP when weather clears. You must hang on until weather breaks, Arizona-Six-Zulu, over."
"Lima-Niner-Mike, if that main force unit gets here before the weather breaks, I am dog food, over."
"Hang tight, Arizona-Six-Zulu, the weather is supposed to break by noon tomorrow. I will get through to Charlie-Charlie-November and we will get Phantoms airborne fastest then, over."
"Roger, Lima-Niner-Mike," said Arizona-Six-Zulu, "and out."
"God bless and good luck, Arizona-Six-Zulu, out," said Lima, and the freak crackled into nothingness.
"Man, those guys are going to get roasted," said Donny.
"This weather ain't lifting for days."
"You got that map case?" said Swagger.
"Let me see that thing. What were those coordinates?"
"Shit, I don't remember," said Donny.
"Well, then," said Bob, "it's a good thing I do."
He opened the case that Donny shoved over, went through the plastic-wrapped sheaves of operational territory 1 :50,000s, and at last came to the one he wanted. He studied hard, then looked over.
"You know, goddamn, if I ain't a fool at map reading, I do believe you and I are the closest unit to them Special Forces fellows. They are west of us, at Kham Due, ten klicks out of Laos. We are in grid square Whiskey Charlie 155-005, they are up in Whiskey Delta 5120-1802. As I make it, that's about twenty klicks to the west.-" Donny squinted. His sergeant indeed had located the proper square, and the Special Forces camp would therefore have been, yes, about twenty klicks. But--there were foothills, a wide brown snake of river and a mountain range between here and there, all of it Indian Territory.
"I'm figuring," Bob said, "one man, moving fast, he might just make it before the main force unit. And those boys would have to move up through this here An Loc valley. You got into those hills, you'd have a hell of a lot of targets."
"Christ," said Donny.
"You just might slow 'em up enough so that air could make it in when the weather broke."
A cold drop of rain deposited itself on Donny's neck and plummeted down his back. A shiver rose from his bones.
"Raise Dodge again, Pork. Tell 'em I'm going on a little trip."
"I'm going too," said Donny.
Bob paused. Then he said, "My ass you are. I won't have no short-timer with me. You hunker here, call in extraction when the weather clears. Don't you worry none about me. I'll get into that camp and extract with Arizona."
"Bob, I--" "No! You're too short. You'd be too worried about getting whacked with three and days till DEROS. And if you weren't, I would be. Plus, I can move a lot faster on my own. This is a one-man job or it's no job at all. That's an order."
"Sergeant, I--" "No, goddammit. I told you. This ain't no goddamned game. I can't be worrying about you."
"Goddammit, I'm not sitting here in the fucking rain waiting for extract. You made us a team. You shoot, I spot targets, I handle security. Suppose you have to work at night? Who throws flares? Suppose it's hot and somebody has to call in air? Who works the map for the coordinates and the radio? Suppose you're bounced from behind?
Who takes out the fast movers? Who rigs the Claymores?"
"You are fixing to git yourself killed, Lance Corporal.
And, much worse, you are pissing me off beaucoup."
"I am not bugging out. I will not bug out!"
Bob's eyes narrowed. He suspected all heroism and self-sacrifice because his own survival wasn't based on any sense of them, but rather on shrewd professional combat skills, even shrewder calculation of odds and, shrewdest of all, a sense that to be aggressive in battle was the key to coming out alive on the other side.
"What are you trying to prove, kid? You been a hard-ass to prove something ever since I teamed with you."
"I'm not trying to prove anything. I want no slack, that's all. Zero fucking slack. I go all the way, that's all there is. When I get back to the world, maybe then it's different. But out here, goddamn it, I go all the way."
His fierceness softened Swagger, who'd coaxed many a boy through bad times with shit coming in, who'd gotten the grunts moving when the last thing they wanted to do was move, who never lost a spotter to a body bag and lost a hell of a lot fewer young Marines than some could say.
But this stubborn boy perplexed him all the way, all the time. Only one of 'em who got up earlier than he did, and who never once made a mistake on the pr emission equipment checks.
"Donny, ain't nobody going to ever say you bugged out. I'm trying to cut you some room, boy. No sense dying on this one. This is a Bob show. This is what old Bob was put here to do. It ain't no college football game."
"I'm going. Goddamn, we are Sierra-Bravo-Four, and I am going."
"Man, you sure you were born in the right generation?
You belong in the old breed, you salty bastard, with my dead old man. Okay, let's gear up. Call it in. I'm going to shoot us a goddamn compass reading to that grid square, and when we're done I'll buy you a steak and a case of Jack Daniel's."
Donny took the moment to peel off his boonie cap and pull out the cellophane-wrapped photo of Julie.
He stared at it as the raindrops collected on the plastic. She looked so dry and far away, and he ached for her. Three and days till DEROS. He would come home.
Donny would come marching home again, hurrah, hurrah.
Oh, baby, he said to himself, oh baby, I hope you're with me on this one. Every step of the way.
"Let's go, Pork," sang Bob the Nailer.
CHAPTER ten.
After a time, Donny stopped hurting. He was beyond pain. He was also, ever so briefly, beyond fear. They traveled from landmark to landmark along Swagger's charted compass readings over the slippery terrain, the rain so harsh some time you could hardly breathe. At one moment he was somewhat stunned to discover himself on the crest of a low hill. When had they climbed it? He had no memory of the ascent. He just had the sense of the man ahead of him pulling him forward, urging him on, oblivious to both of their pains, oblivious also to fear and to mud and to changes in the elevation.
After a while they came to a valley, to discover the classical Vietnam terrain of rice paddies separated by paddy dikes. The dikes were muddy as shit, and in a few minutes, the going on them proved slow and treacherous.
Swagger didn't even bother to tell him, he just lifted his rifle over his head, stepped off the break and started to fight through the water, churning up mud as he went.
What difference could it make? They were so wet it didn't matter, but the water was thick and muddy and at each step the muddy bottom seemed to suck at Donny's boots.
His feet grew heavier. The rain fell faster. He was wetter, colder, more fatigued, more desperate, more lonely.
At any moment, some lucky kid with a carbine and a yen to impress his local cadre could have greased them.
But the rain fell so hard it drove even the VC and the main force NVA units to cover. They moved across a landscape devoid of human occupation. The fog coiled and rolled. Once, from afar, the vapors parted and they saw a village a klick away down a hill, and Donny imagined what was going on in the warm little huts: the boiling soup with its floating sheaves of bible tripe and brisket sliced thin and fish heads floating in it, and the thought of hot food almost made him keel o
ver.
This is nothing, he told himself. Think of football.
Think of two-a-days in August. No, no, think of games.
Think of ... Think of ... Think of making the catch against Oilman High, think of third and twelve, we've never beaten them, but for some odd reason late in this game we're close but now we've stalled. Think of setting up at tight end instead of running back because you have the best hands on the team. Think of Julie, a cheerleader in those days, the concern on her face.
Think of the silliness of it all! It all seemed so important!
Beating Oilman! Why was that so important? It was so silly! Then Donny remembered why it was important.
Because it was so silly. It meant so little that it meant so much.
Think of going off the set, faking inside, then breaking on a slant for the sidelines as Vercolone, the quarterback, broke from his disintegrating pocket and began to rotate toward him, curling around, his arm cocked then uncocked as he released the ball. Think of the ball in the air.
Think of seeing it float toward you, Vercolone had led you too much, the ball was way out of reach, there was no noise, there was no sensation, there was only the ball sliding past. But think of how you went airborne.
That was the strange thing. He did not ever remember leaping. It just happened, one of those instinct things, as the computer in your head took over your body and off you went.
He remembered straining in the air and, with his one hand stretched out to the horizon, the slap of contact as the ball glanced off his longest fingers, popped into the air and seemed to pause forever as he slid through the air by it, now about to miss it, but somehow he actually pivoted in air, got his chest out to snare it as it fell, then clasped his other hand against it, pinning it to him as he thudded to the ground and by the grace of a God who must love jocks, it did not pop out, he had caught it for a first down, and three plays later they scored and won the game, beating an ancient enemy for the first time in living memory.
Oh, that was so very good! That was so very good.
The warmth of that moment came flooding back across him, its meaningless glory warming and giving him just the slightest tingle of energy. Maybe he would make it.
But then he went down, floundering, feeling the water flood into his lungs, and he struggled, coughing out buffalo shit and a million paramecium. A harsh grip pulled him out and he shook like a wet dog. It was Swagger, of course.
"Come on," Swagger yelled through the din of pounding rain.
"We're almost out of the paddies. Then all we got is another set of hills, a river and a goddamn mountain.
Damn, ain't this fun?"
Water. According to the map, the river was called la Trang. It bore no other name and on the paper was a squiggly black line, its secrets unrevealed. As it lay before them in reality, however, it was swollen brown and wide, over spilling its banks, and was a swift, deadly current. The rain smashed against its turbulent surface like machine gun fire.
"Guess what?" said Swagger.
"You just got a new job."
"Huh?"
"You just got a new job. You're now the lifeguard."
"Why?"
"
"Cause I cain't swim a lick," he said, with a broad smile.
"Great," said Donny.
"I can't either."
"Oh, this one's going to be a pisser. Damn, why'd you insist on this trip?"
"I was momentarily deluded into thinking I was important."
"That kind of thinkin'll git you killed every damn time.
Now, let's see if we can find some wood or something."
They ranged the dangerous bank of the river and in time came to a bombed-out village. The gunships and Phantoms had worked it over pretty well, nothing could have survived the hell of that recent day. No structure stood: only timbers, piles of ash liquified to gunk in the pounding rain, craters everywhere, a long smear of burned vegetation where the napalm splashed through, killing everything it touched. A cooking pot lay on its side, speared by a machine gun bullet, so that it blossomed outward in jagged petals. The stench of the burning still clung to the ground, despite the rain. There were no bodies, but just out of the kill zone a batch of newly dug graves with now-dead Buddhist incense reeds in cheap black jars had been etched into the ground. Two were very, very small.
"I hope they were bad guys," said Donny, looking at the new cemetery.
"If we run this fucking war right," Swagger said, "we'd have known they was bad, because we'd have people on the ground, up close. Not this shit. Not just hosing the place down with firepower. Nobody should have to die because he's in the wrong place at the wrong time and some squid pilot's got some ordnance left and don't want to land on no carrier with it."
Donny looked at him. In five months of extreme togetherness, Bob had never said a thing about the way the war was waged, what it cost, who it killed, why it happened.
His, instead, was the practical craft of mission and its close pal survival: how to do this thing, where to hide, how to track, what to shoot, how to kill, how to get the job done and come back alive.
"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 breaststroke.
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 thro
at by night, dead kids in ditches, flaming vines, 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.
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