A PFC pours it for me into a big khaki USMC mug, and I feel the great smell, then take a long, hard hot pull on it. Damn, that tastes good. That’s what a man needs in the morning.
Sitting in his living room, the fire burning away, Bob took another sip on the whiskey. It, too, burned on the way down, then seemed to whack him between the eyes, knock him to blur and gone. He felt the tears come.
06 May 1972. 0550.
I head to the S-2 bunker and duck in. Lieutenant Brophy is already up. He’s a good man, and knows just when to be present and when not to be. He’s here this morning, freshly shaved, in starched utilities. There seems to be some sort of ceremonial thing going on.
“Morning, Sergeant.”
“Morning, sir.”
“Overnight your orders came through on the promotion. I’m here to tell you you’re officially a gunnery sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. Congratulations, Swagger.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’ve done a hell of a job. And I know you’ll be bang-up beaucoup number one at Aberdeen.”
“Looking forward to it, sir.”
Maybe the lieutenant feels the weight of history. Maybe he knows this is Bob the Nailer’s last go-round. Three tours in the ’Nam with an extension for the last one, to give him nineteen straight months in country. He wants to observe it properly and that satisfies me. In some way, Brophy gets it, and that’s good.
We go over the job. We work the maps. It’s an easy one. I’ll go straight out the north side, over the berm and out to the treeline. Then we work our way north toward Hoi An, through heavy bush and across a paddy dike. We go maybe four klicks to a hill that stands 840 meters high and is therefore called Hill 840. We’ll go up it, set up observation and keep a good Marine Corps eyeball on Ban Son Road and the Thu Bon River. I’m done killing: it’s straight scout work. I’m here for firebase security, nothing else. Along those lines, we plan to look for sign of large-body troop movements, to indicate enemy presence, on the way out and the way back.
The lieutenant himself types up the operational order and enters it in the logbook. I sign the order. It’s official now.
I tell the clerk to go get Fenn. It’s 0620. We’re running a little late, because I’ve let Fenn sleep. Why did I do this? Well, it seemed kind. I didn’t want to break his balls on the last day. He really isn’t needed until we leave the perimeter, as the mission has been well discussed and briefed the night before; he knows the specs better than I do.
He shows up ten minutes later, the sleep still in his eyes, but his face made-up green, like mine. Someone gets him some coffee. The lieutenant asks him how he’s doing. He says he’s fine, he just wants to get it over with and head back to the world.
“You don’t have to go, Fenn,” I say.
“I’m going,” he says.
Why? Why does he have to go? What is driving him? I never understood it then; I don’t understand it now. There was no reason, not one that ever made no sense to me. It was the last, the tiniest, the least significant of all the things we did in the ’Nam. It was the one we could have skipped and oh, what a different world we’d live in now if we had.
Bob threw down another choker of bourbon. Hot fire. Napalm splashes, the whack between the eyes. The brown glory of it.
“Check your weapons,” I tell Fenn, “and then do commo.”
Donny makes certain the M14 is charged, safety on. He takes out his .45, drops the mag, sees that the chamber is empty. That’s the way I’ve told him to carry it. Then he checks out the PRC-77, which of course reads loud and clear since the receiving station is about four feet away. But we do it by the numbers, just like always.
“You all set, Fenn?” I ask.
“Gung ho, Semper Fi and all that good shit,” says Donny, at last strapping the radio on, getting it set just right, then picks up the weapon, just as I pick mine up.
We leave the bunker. The light is beginning to seep over the horizon; it’s still cool and characteristically calm. The air smells sweet.
But then I say, “I don’t want to go out the north. Just in case. I want to break our pattern. We go out the east this time, just like we did before. We ain’t never repeated ourself; anybody tracking us couldn’t anticipate that.”
Why did I say that? What feeling did I have? I did have a feeling. I know I had one. Why didn’t I listen to it? You’ve got to pay attention, because those little things, they’re some part of you you don’t know nothing about, trying to reach you with information.
But now there was no reaching back all these years; he had made a snap decision because it felt so right, and it was so wrong. Bob finished the glass with a last hot swig, then quickly poured another one, two fingers, neat, as on so many lost nights over so many lost years. He held it before his eyes as the blur hit him, and almost laughed. He didn’t feel so bad now. It was easy. You could just dig it out that simply, and it was there, before him, as if recorded on videotape or as if, after all these years, the memory somehow wanted to come out at last.
“He’s gone, he’s dead, you got him,” says Brophy, meaning, The white sniper is gone, there’s nobody out there, don’t worry about it. He should have been dead, too. We cooked his ass in 20mm and 7.62. The Night Hag sprayed him with lead. The flamethrower teams barbecued him to melted fat and bone ash. Who could live through that? We recovered his rifle. It was a great coup, waiting to be studied back at Aberdeen by none other than yours truly.
But — why did we believe he was dead? We didn’t find no body, we only found the rifle. But how could he have survived all that fire, and the follow-up with the flamethrowers and then the sweep with grunts? No one could have survived that. Then again, this was a terrifically efficient professional. He didn’t panic, he’d been under a lot of fire, he’d taken lots of people down. He kept his cool, he had great stamina.
“Yeah, well,” I tell the lieutenant.
We reach the eastern parapet wall. A sentry comes over from the guard post down the way.
“All clear?” I ask.
“Sarge, I been working the night vision scope the past few hours. Ain’t nothing out there.”
But how would he know? The night vision is only good for a few hundred yards. The night vision tells you nothing. It simply means there’s nobody up close, like a sapper platoon. Why didn’t I realize that?
He took another dark, long swallow. It was as if something hit him upside the head with a two-by-four, and his consciousness slipped a little; he felt his bourbon-powered mellowness battling the melancholy of his memory as it presented itself to him after all these years.
I slip my head over the sandbags, look out into the defoliated zone, which is lightening in the rising sun. I can’t see much. The sun is directly in my eyes. I can only see flatness, a slight undulation in the terrain, low vegetation, blackened stumps from the defoliant. No details, just a landscape of emptiness.
“Okay,” I say. “Last day: time to hunt.” I always say this. Why do I think it’s so cool? It’s stupid, really.
I set my rifle on the sandbag berm, pull myself over, gather the rifle and roll off.
I land, and there’s a moment there where everything is fine, and then there’s a moment when it isn’t. I’ve done this hundreds of times before over the past nineteen months, and this feels just like all those times. Then time stops. Then it starts again and when I try to account for the missing second, it seems a lot has happened. I’ve been punched backwards, come to rest against the berm itself. For some reason my right leg is up around my ears. I can make no sense of this until I look down and see my hip, pulped, smashed, pulsing my own blood like a broken faucet. Somewhere in here I hear the crack of the rifle shot, which arrives just a bit after I’m hit.