Bob’s mind slipped in and out; he tried to concentrate on the job ahead but it would not stay. At one point, he called a halt.
“I got to rest,” he said.
“We been pushing pretty hard,” Donny said.
Bob slipped down into the grass.
“You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“I’m okay. I only need a little rest.”
“I got some water. Here, take some water.”
“Then what’ll you drink?”
“I don’t need to shoot. I just fire flares. You need to shoot. You need the water.”
“You’d think, all this fucking rain, the last thing we’d be is thirsty.”
“I feel like I just played two football games without quarters or halftimes. Just two games straight through.”
“Oh, man,” Bob said, taking a big swig of Donny’s water, feeling its coolness rush down his flaming throat.
“After this, I’m going to sleep for a month,” said Donny.
“No, after this,” said Bob, “you are going on R&R to be with your wife, if I have to go to the goddamned general and ass-kick him myself.”
It was almost full dark. Somewhere birds were beginning to call; the jungle was close, just beyond the hill line. There was, however, nothing alive in view; once again, they seemed alone in the world, lost in the hills, stuck in a landscape of desolation.
Suddenly Bob’s mind sped to other possibilities.
“I got a idea,” he said. “You got tape? Don’t you carry tape? I think I told you to—”
Donny reached into a bellows pocket of his cammies, pulled out a roll of gray duct tape.
“This would be tape, no?”
“That would be tape, yes. Okay, now … goddamn … the spotting scope. Don’t tell me you dumped your spotting scope. You didn’t leave that back with your gear, did you?”
“Fuck,” said Donny, “I brought everything except a helicopter. Hmmm, sink, tent, Phantom jet, mess hall; oh, yeah, here…”
He pulled another piece of gear slung around his shoulder. It was a long, tubular green canvas carrying case, strapped at either end, which carried an M49 20X spotting scope, complete with a folded tripod. It was for glassing the really far targets.
He unslung it and handed it over.
“Now what?”
“Oh, just you watch.”
Greedily, Bob bent to the scope case, unscrewed it and reached out to remove a dull-green metal telescope, disjointed slightly, with a folding tripod underneath. It must have cost the Marine Corps a thousand bucks.
“Beautiful, ain’t it?” he asked. Then he rammed its delicate lens against Donny’s rifle muzzle, shattering it into a sheet of diamonds. He reamed the tube out on the rifle barrel, grinding circularly to take out all the glass and the delicate internal mechanisms for focus adjustment. He unscrewed and threw away the tripod. Then he seized the canvas case, took out his Randall Survivor and began to operate.
“What are you doing?” Donny asked.
“You never mind, but you get my rifle cleaned up. No rules today. Hurry, Pork, we gotta get a goddamned move on.”
Donny worked some rough maintenance on the gun, clearing the muzzle of mud and grass, scraping the dirt, and in a few minutes had it ready to shoot again. He looked back to see that Bob had sawed off one end of the scope case and cut a smaller hole through the other, giving him a green tube about twelve inches long.
Bob wedged the spotting scope tube back into the case.
“Here, you hold that goddamn muzzle up for me,” he commanded, and, working swiftly, commenced to wedge the scope case and scope on the muzzle, then wrap yards of tape around the case and the muzzle, securing the case so that it projected a good eight inches beyond the muzzle.
It looked like some kind of silencer but Donny knew it wasn’t a silencer.
“What is?”
“Field expedient flash suppressor,” said Bob. “Flash is just powder burning beyond the muzzle. If you can lengthen the cover on the barrel, it’ll burn up in there, not in the air, where it’ll light me up like a Christmas tree. It’s pretty flimsy and won’t hold much more than a few dozen shots, but by God, I don’t want them tracking my flash and hitting me with the goddamned kitchen sink. Now, let’s mount out.”
last fast.
The troops were driven by duty and destiny. An extraordinary accomplishment, the long double-time march from Laos, the ordeal of the sniper in the valley, the victory over the man, and now, on to the Green Beret camp at Kham Duc. Battalion No. 3 was just a kilometer away from the staging point, maintaining good order, moving smartly.
Huu Co, senior colonel, glanced at his watch and saw that it was near midnight. They would be in place in another hour, and could use a little time to relax and gather themselves. Then the assault teams would stage and the weapons platoon would set up the 81mm Type 53s, and the last stage would commence. It would be over by dawn.
The weather wouldn’t matter.
Still, it was holding beautifully for him. Above there was a starless night, gray and dim, the clouds close to the earth. In his old mind, his Western mind, he could believe that God himself had willed the Americans from the earth. It was as if God were saying, “Enough, begone. Back to your land. Let these people be.”
In his new mind, he merely noted that his luck had held, and that luck is sometimes the reward for boldness. The Fatherland appreciated daring and skill; he had gambled and won, and the eventual fall of the Kham Duc camp would be his reward.
“It is good,” said the XO.
“Yes, it is,” said Huu Co. “When this is over, I will—”
But Nhoung’s face suddenly lit up. Huu Co turned to wonder about the source of illumination.
A single flare hung in the sky beneath a parachute, bringing light to the dark night. As it settled the light grew brighter, and there was one lucid moment in which the battalion, gathered as it plunged toward its study, seemed to stand out in perfect clarity. It was a beautiful moment too, suffused with white light, gentle and complete, exposing the people’s will as contained and expressed through its army, nestled between close hills, churning onward toward whatever tomorrow brought, unhesitatingly, heroic, stoic, self-sacrificing.
Then the shot rang out.
uller dreamed of Chinh. His second tour. He hadn’t planned to, it just happened; she was Eurasian, lived in Cholon, he’d been in the field eleven months and, suffering from combat exhaustion, had been brought back to MACV in Saigon, given a staff job, just to save him from killing himself. It was a safe job back then, sixty-seven, a year before Tet, and Chinh was just there one day, the daughter of a French woman and a Vietnamese doctor, more beautiful than he could imagine. Was she a spy? There was that possibility, but there wasn’t much to know; it was brief, intense, pure pleasure, not a whisper of guilt. Her husband had been killed, she said, by the communists. Maybe it was so, maybe it was not. It didn’t matter. The communists killed her one night on the road in her Citreon after she’d spent hours making love with him. She ran through an ambush they’d prepped for an ARVN officiaclass="underline" just blew her away.
He dreamed of his oldest daughter, Mary. She rode horses and had opinions. She hated the Army, watched her mother play the game, suck up all the way through in the shit posts like Gemstadt or Benning, always making a nice home, always sucking up to the CO’s wife.
“I won’t have it,” Mary said. “I won’t live like that. What does it get you?”
His wife had no answer. “It’s what we do,” she finally said. “Your father and me. We’re both in the Army. That’s how it works.”