I was still chuckling when the sniper shot. Before my mind recorded the sound of the rifle behind me or the snap as the round whipped past my ear, a hole magically winked two inches to the right of the base of his spine, blood and dust clouded before him, and his legs buckled. But even as my mind wasn't recording, it was working. I dove and rolled into the high grass at the right of the trail. Another shot skimmed the grass tops up the slope, and the ricochet scattered chickens and children in the outer compound.
"Stay down!" I shouted, but everyone had already burrowed into the grass roots. The snipers held their fire now. Either cutting out or waiting without revealing their position, I thought. Two shots from different rifles: no automatic weapons. One shot down, one up: one man in a tree, one on the ground, and probably a third covering who hadn't fired yet. Thank God for the grass. The protection of the outer perimeter was two-fifty or three-hundred yards uphill. I had twenty-five men, counting myself, but only five weapons. "Smoke!" I shouted. "Holler it up!"
As the cry for smoke drifted back up the hidden line, I crawled as close to the trail as I could. The kid's body slowly stretched out, easily, carefully, as if he carried eggs on his back. Once flat, he lay as still as the dropped log, his hands out in front of his head. He began to moan, to whisper please, but the moan seemed almost conversational, detached as if he might be having a discussion with an ant crawling below him. A rivulet of blood, black in the dust, beaded red hanging on the trampled grass, crept sedately back down the trail.
"Hey," I whispered. "Roll over here. Roll over, kid."
Another face appeared between two clumps of grass on the other side of the path. It was the kid from the front of the log, and he was crawling out into the path.
"Stay put," I said, but he came on.
"Harvey," he said. "Harvey, you bastard, I told you to take the front, you fuck head, I told you, I told you."
"Stay put, soldier," I said. "Goddammit, stay put, and shut up."
"Digs, Digs," Harvey said calmly, "Digs, I think they done shot my balls off. I sure believe they did." As he talked, he sounded calmer, but his body shook in quick tremors.
"Oh, Harvey, goddamn you, Harvey," the other one said, reaching out along the ground for Harvey's hand. His thumb disappeared in a burst of dust, and while he was throwing himself back into the grass, three quick but spaced shots searched the grass around him. Harvey shook harder, as if by vibration he would sink into the earth.
"Roll over here," I told him again. "Please roll over."
"Sarge? Sarge, is that you?" he muttered into the ground. "Sarge, can you find my teeth. I lost my teeth."
His buddy appeared once more at the edge of the path, closer to the ground this time, holding out his hand so I could see the thumb missing above the second joint. "Sarge, they shot my thumb off. My fucking thumb, right off. What can I do, huh, Sarge?"
"You bastards, shut up or I'll shoot your heads off. Shut up."
I slipped the Armalite on automatic fire, threw a long burst downslope, then leaped across the trail. I landed on Harvey's teeth, laughed, kicked the other kid away from the edge, and as he rolled one way, I went the other. The sniper followed me, rounds stinging my face with dirt, burning at me as I rolled and crawled, until I thought that the automatic fire I heard was directed at me. The rolling and crawling went on after the sniper stopped firing, and when I stopped, my hands, with their own will and concern, flew about my body seeking wounds, blood, bone, gristle, searching until they found me intact, then nodding yes to my stupid face as the first of the smoke rounds dropped twenty yards downslope.
I went back to the two wounded, wrapped the bleeding hand and stuffed a T-shirt into the bleeding crotch, and sent them back through the lovely smoke with two men to help each. I screamed at them to tell Tetrick to give me mortar and automatic fire at random intervals; made them scream it back with angry faces at me. The two M-60s had stopped ranging and were beginning to traverse in short bursts cutting up the edge of the woods. I crossed the trail again, waited for more smoke and rifle fire, then shouted for the men to go.
The two VC rifles opened up, one right and high, the other left and low on the ground, two rounds apiece, my rational mind confirming what my instinct had already known, and I might have spotted the snipers but for some low rounds from behind me that sent me to earth again. The smoke, thick now, and the M-60s coming in hard at the edge of the trees kept the snipers down while the men moved uphill.
I slipped back into the thickest smoke, then ran back to my left, jumped the path again, the log and the bloody mark, then crawled another twenty-five yards to a brush-choked depression which ran down from the saddle between our two hills. Brush we had meant to clear the next day. The slight dip offered cover only because of thick growth, but the dip quickly became a dry wash as I moved downhill, and the brush was too tangled to move through. But at the bottom, just like the mesquite and cat-claw thick arroyos back home, I found eighteen inches of clear space under the growth, and I crawled down that until the smoke rounds and the covering fire ceased. I assumed that the men had make it back, so I waited for them to give my instructions to Tetrick.
I caught my breath in the pause, dropped the web belt with canteen and first-aid pack, changed clips, had a quick drink, then poured some water on the wash bottom and scrubbed the mud on my face, ears, neck, and hands, and waited. I assumed patience, in this case, to be a major virtue.
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.