On this wet morning, Donny dreamed of dry pleasures. He dreamed of the desert, from where he’d come, Pima County, Arizona, the town of Ajo, and the hot dry air that pulsed down from the Sonoras out of Mexico, dry as the devil’s breath. He dreamed of baking in such a place, going back to college, on to law school. He dreamed of a house, of a family, a job. Most of all, he dreamed of his young wife, who had just written him, and the words were inscribed in his mind now as he sat in the downpour: “You keep your spirits high, Marine! I know you’ll make it and I pray for that day. You are the best thing that ever happened to me and I cannot live without you, so if you get killed, I am going to be plenty angry! I might never talk to you again, I would be so mad.”
He had written her back just before this boonie jaunt: “Oh, you sweet thang, I do miss you so. Things are fine here. I didn’t know spiders could get big as lobsters or that it could rain for three solid months, but these are useful facts and will come in ever so handy back in the world. But the Sarge will keep me alive, because he’s the smartest Marine that ever lived or breathed and he said if I got wasted, who the hell would he pick on and that would be no fun at all!”
Rolled into his hatband, swaddled in cellophane, was a picture of Julie, now out of her hippie phase, though she worked at the Tucson Veterans Hospital among the wounded from another war and was even talking of a nursing career now. In the picture, Julie’s beauty was like a beam in the night for a man lost and starving.
A shiver rose through Donny’s spine, a deep and relentless cold. The world had liquified: it was mud, fog or rain; no other elements existed. It was an almost incandescent world, whose low lights yielded no hint to time of day. The vapors simply floated in gray murk, a kind of universal declamation of misery.
Under his poncho he felt the coldness of one of the few M14s left in Vietnam, with a twenty-round magazine leaning into his leg, ready for instant deployment if Sierra-Bravo-Four were bounced, but that would never happen because the sergeant was so skilled at picking hides.
He carried two canteens, a 782-pack full of C-rats, mostly barbecued pork, four M26 grenades, a Colt .45 automatic, an M-49 spotting scope, a black phosphate-bladed K-Bar, ten extra twenty-round 7.62 NATO mags, three Claymore mine bandoleers, one M57 electrical firing device, a canvas bag full of flares and a flare launcher, and, enemy of his life, bane of his existence, most hated of all objects on the face of the earth, a PRC-77 radio, fourteen pounds of lifeline to Dodge.
“Commo check,” said the sergeant, who sat a few feet from Donny, gazing at the same rain-blasted, foliage-dense landscape, the plains and paddies and jungles and low, mean hills. “Get on the horn, Pork.”
“Shit,” said Donny, for deploying the radio meant moving, moving meant breaking the steamy seal the poncho had formed around his neck, which meant cold water would cascade down his neck into the sweaty warmth of his body. There was no colder place than Vietnam, but that was okay, because there was no hotter place, either.
Donny stirred in the tent of his poncho, got the Prick-77 up and on, knew its freak was preset accurately, and managed somehow, leaning it forward precariously, to let its four feet of whip antenna snap forward and out into the wet air.
He brought the phone to his ear up through his poncho and pushed the on-off toggle to ON. And, yes, a shivery blade of water sluiced down between his shoulder blades, underneath his jungle cammies. He shivered, said “Fuck” under his breath and continued to struggle with the radio.
The problem with the Pricks wasn’t only their limited range, their dense weight, their line-of-sight operational capabilities but, more critically, their short battery lives. Therefore grunts used them sparingly on preset skeds, contacting base for a fast sitrep. He pressed SEND.
“Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, over?”
He pressed RECEIVE, and for his efforts got a crackly soup of noise. No big surprise, with the low clouds, the rain, and the terrain’s own vagaries at play; sometimes they got through and sometimes they didn’t.
He tried again.
“Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you read? Is anybody there? Hello, knock, knock, please open the door, over?”
The response was the same.
“Maybe they’re all asleep,” he said.
“Naw,” said the sergeant, in his rich Southern drawl, slow and steady and funny as shit, “it’s too late to be stoned and too early to be drunk. This is the magic hour when them boys are probably alert. Keep trying.”
Donny hit the send button and repeated his message a couple more times without luck.
“I’m going to the backup freak,” he finally stated.
The sergeant nodded.
Donny spread the poncho so that he could get at the simple controls atop the unit. Two dials seemed to grin at him next to the two butterfly knobs that controlled them, one for megahertz, the other for kilohertz. He diddled, looking for 79.92, to which Dodge City sometimes defaulted if there was heavy radio traffic or atmospheric interference, and as he did, the radio prowled through the wave band of communications that was Vietnam in early 1972, propelled by the weird reality that it could receive from a far greater distance than it could send.
They heard a lost truck driver trying to get back to Highway 1, a pilot looking for his carrier, a commo clerk testing his gear, all of it crackly and fragmented as the signals in their varying strengths ebbed and flowed. Some of it was in Vietnamese, for the ARVN were on the same net; some of it was Army, for there were more soldiers than Marines left by fifty-odd thousand; some of it was Special Forces, as a few of the big A-camps still held out to the north or west; some of it was fire missions, permission to break off search, requests for more beer and beef.
Finally, Donny lit where he wanted.
“Ah, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you copy?”
“Sierra-Bravo-Four, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six here; yes, we copy. What is your sitrep, over?”
“Tell ’em we’re drowning,” said the sergeant.
“Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, we’re all wet. Nothing moving up here. Nothing living up here, Foxtrot, over.”
“Sierra-Bravo-Four, does Swagger want to call an abort? Over.”
“They want to know, do you want to call an abort?”
The hunter-killer mission was slated to go another twenty-four hours before air evac, but the sergeant himself appeared to be extremely low on the probability of contact at this time.
“Affirmative,” he said. “No bad guys anywhere. They’re too smart to go out in shit like this. Tell ’em to get us the hell out of here as soon as possible.”
“That’s an affirmative, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six. Request air evac, over.”
“Sierra-Bravo-Four, our birds are grounded. You’ll have to park it until we can get airborne again.”
“Shit, they’re souped in,” said Donny.
“Okay, tell ’em we’ll sit tight and wait for the weather to break, but we ain’t bringing home any scalps.”
Donny hit SEND.
“Foxtrot, we copy. We’ll sit tight and get back to you when the sun breaks through, over.”
“Sierra-Bravo-Four, roger that. Out.”
The radio crackled to silence.
“Okay,” said Donny, “that about ties that one up.”
“Yeah,” said the sergeant, with just a hint of a question in his voice.
“Pork,” he said after a second or two, “was you paying attention while you were going to the backup freak? You hear anything?”
The sergeant was like a cop who could understand and decipher the densest code or the most broken-up sound bits on the radio.
“No, I didn’t hear a thing,” said Donny. “The chatter, you know, the usual stuff.”
“Okay, do me a favor, Pork.”
He always called Donny “Pork.” He called all his spotters Pork. He’d had three spotters before Donny.