When the fire started again, I moved down the wash with the bursts and the echoes following mortar rounds, looking. The wash turned to the left, then sharply back to the right, as I had remembered, and I moved down it on my belly, looking. If the two men had been deer instead of men, and this happening in a South Texas arroyo in the afternoon heat, one slow step then a long look and watch your shadow and don't turn your head quickly, I would have seen the men much sooner. But they were men with guns, not deer, and I was belly-flopped under the brush, each breath raising tiny dust-devils below my chin, and they were men with guns, hunting too, and not deer.
You don't look for bedded deer, but for an ear, a horn, a folded leg, a black nose, or a quick eye turning to see you. When my father taught me to still-hunt, he wouldn't let me shoot until I saw the buck before he did. He would stop, try to show me while I blinked and tried to see a whitetail where there were only gray shadows, then let the buck go. It's like those funny pictures that have a cow or a face hidden among blurred lines and shadows: once you see it, you wonder how you ever missed it. I shot my first buck through the neck where he lay, and he never got up. But I had never looked for men. This was a different game, but I always was a fast learner.
At the bottom of the slope, thirty yards from the trees, the wash broadened into a small sandy flat. I crept into the shadow of a bush and against a ten-inch bank, and lay on my back, feet downhill. Patience again. Let them make the first move to escape. Tetrick would send a patrol soon, and they would have to move. But while waiting, I saw them: the guy in the tree, easy, a foot, small, brown and dirty in a clump of leaves. The leaves moved in the wind, the foot didn't; fifty yards directly to my right. The one on the ground was harder, but after locating the one high, I knew just about where to look for the lower one. The grimy cloth wrapped around his head to keep sweat out of his eyes drooped a gray tag where it was knotted; I found that, then the dark eye beside it. The clump of brush where he sat, his legs crossed, was about thirty yards out from the trees and twenty yards left and above me. Two of them, one of me. They would kill two men on the patrol, then vanish into the thick forest. There should have been a third to cover the other two, but cockiness is not just an American fault.
During an automatic burst from above, I slipped a grenade from my harness, straightened the pin and pulled it. In the next mortar explosion, I flipped the Armalite from auto to single fire, and in the next explosion, I released the handle, waited, then threw the grenade in a high arc toward the clump of bushes, firing two quick rounds along the ground toward the VC while the grenade was in the air. On my side before the explosion, I laid four carefully aimed rounds two feet above the hanging foot. His single round was faster, but wide to the left and high, but mine were like axe blows in his chest, and bounced him off the tree trunk. He flipped out of the tree like a Hollywood stunt man.
The grenade had exploded and the bits of shrapnel sung past while I was turned. I rolled, then fired toward the bushes, twice, but there was no answer. The grenade had cut the brush in front of him, and he lay on his back, his rifle blown away from him. I ran to him, circling to the left, but there was no need for the caution. The grenade must have caught him as he tried to stand and to duck my two rounds at the same time. The left leg was completely severed at the hip, the genitalia, a bloody stump, and the stomach wall split from hip to navel. The black pajamas had been blow off, and he was naked in his death. Warm gray intestines looped out of his torn belly, loops furrowed with gashes dripping decomposed rice. The stink sputtering out as the guts kept contracting as if the business of life went on as usual. The eyes turned back as I walked up, and the breath came as fast as the flutter of a bird's wing. I shot him in the ear, then went to check the other.
He was dead, four bruise-ringed pin holes in a line up the chest; almost no blood in front; almost no flesh in back. An old rifle with wire holding the broken stock together lay beside the body. I shot him in the ear, then walked back up the slope to meet Tetrick and ten men coming at a dead flatfooted run.
(I know you'd rather hear about the fear, about my lungs seeming to lunge up my throat after air, about the infinitesimal but now eternal tremor clutching my hands, or about the dizzy reels of my brain, or the watery shit running down my leg. But you know that part by heart now. I did what I did. Two men died, two others lived, perhaps. It's not supposed to make sense. Fear and trembling is no excuse; action is no reason; dead is dead.)
"You shoulda let them go," Tetrick huffed as he arrived, grease gun swinging and fear in his face. "But you did good, kid."
"Yeah," I said, "Fine. How are the wounded?"
"Should be okay. Med-evac chopper's coming quick." He pointed over the hill where a black dot buzzed closer.
"Fine," I said again, then walked on up the hill, the men behind me carrying the two bodies.
They laid the bodies in front of the spotting tower, and everyone had to come see them, to gape at the guts hanging out of the one like an atrophied papier-mâché leg, to slap me on the shoulder, to point out my brilliant shooting. It wasn't unlike a successful hunt, back in camp with the drunk card players who only hunted peace from their pinched-faced Texas wives, middle-aged men with fawning mouths and bitter, envious eyes, and hands that grasped at your youth.
"Cover them up," I said to Tetrick. "Jesus Christ, cover them up."
"Let 'em get used to it," he answered.
And Morning answered too from behind: "Too late to be sensitive now. Not much to send home to Mamma, huh?"
I walked to my tent and lay down and let the fear wash out of me. When Morning walked into my tent, the shaking had just began to get bad, violent, like a fever convulsion, and the legs of my cot were rattling against the plank floor. A shaft of white hot sunlight plunged through the open flap into the blackness of my tent, and Morning's face was black and his head outlined in fire-haze white.
"They say the first one does that to you. But you'll get used to it," he said as he stepped in.
I raged off the bunk without thought. One hand filled with his shirt, the other with the bayonet off my boot, I shoved him back toward the door, tripped him, then kneeled on his chest, the bayonet against his throat.
"You keep your mouth shut now. You let me alone now. I liked killing those stinking little animals. I pretended they were you and all your stupid bleeding heart kind." I screamed, spittle flaying at his face like the dust motes suspended in the brilliant stab of sunlight. I lifted him off the floor, then shoved him out of the tent, followed him, pushed him again. He fell, rose angry, and started to come, but I had the bayonet low against my hip, and he stopped.
"You gutless mother-fucker," he said. "You got guts enough to drop that nigger blade, I'll bust your head for you."
"When it happens, son," I said, "You're going to die. But I want you to kill first. I want things to be even; then there can be hair and brains all over the place, then, yours."
He stepped back, his face twisted as if I'd hurt him. "No worry about that," he muttered. "No worry." He turned and wandered off, shaking his head, saying to Novotny, who had run up with some others, "What's with him?"
Though the question hadn't been meant to be answered, Novotny said, "Fuck with the bull, Morning, you get the horn."
I walked back in the tent. Morning's cigarettes were scattered across the muddy floor. He'd come to offer me one, yes, and his hand too, and his face had been twisted in pain as he walked away. Joe, Joe, you can't push and pull and fan around with life, then just say quits when you get ready. I hadn't given him time to say "sorry" and now he wouldn't listen to mine. Hard-headed bastard. I would have killed him now, if he had come back to the tent. The game was over between us. Shit, shit, shit. I lay down in the darkness, alone now, calm, resigned, anger gone, fear gone. I slept.