“I’m cool,” Donny said.
“See you in a bit, Sierra-Bravo-Four.”
onny watched the sergeant go. The man was like some Mars or Achilles or something, so lost in the ecstasy of the battle that he somehow didn’t want it to end, didn’t want to come back. Once again, Donny had the odd feeling that he was destined to witness all this and tell it.
To whom?
Who would care? Who would listen? The idea of soldiers as heroes was completely gone. Now, they were baby killers or, if not that, they were fools, suckers, morons who hadn’t figured out how to beat the machine.
So maybe that was his job: to remember the Bob Lee Swaggers of the world and, when the times somehow changed, the story could be retrieved and told. How one crazy Arkansas sumbitch, mean as a snake, dry as a stick, brave as the mountains, took on and fucked up an entire battalion, for almost nothing, really, except so that nobody would ever say of him, He let us down.
What made such a man? His brutal, hardscrabble childhood? The Corps as his home, his love of fighting, his sense of country? Nothing explained it; it was beyond explanation. Why was he so meaninglessly brave? What compelled him to treat his life so cheaply?
Donny made it to the top of the hill. It was a queer little empire, much smaller than the last hill, a little hump that overlooked the larger valley before it. Here is where they would fight.
He unstrapped his three Claymores bandoleers and took the things out, your basic M18A1 Directional Mine. Jesus, were these nasty little packages. About eight inches across and four inches tall, they were little convexes of plastic-sheathed C-4, impregnated with about seven hundred pieces of buckshot apiece. You opened a compartment, pulled out about one hundred meters of wire, unspooled it to your safe hole, and there crimped it to the Electrical Firing Device M57, which came packed in the bandoleer and looked like a green plastic hand exerciser. When you clamped it, you jacked a goose of electricity through the wire to the detonator, the pound and a half of C-4 went kaboom, and the seven hundred steel balls went sailing through the air at about two thousand miles an hour. For a couple of hundred feet, anything in their way — man, beast, vegetable or mineral — got turned to instant spaghetti. Just the thing for human wave attacks, night ambushes, perimeter defense or those annoying staff meetings, though the Marine Corps thoughtfully added the message FRONT TOWARD ENEMY for its dimmer recruits, so they wouldn’t get mixed up in all the excitement and blow a nasty hole in their own lines.
Donny pulled down the folding scissors legs on each mine, made sure that the front indeed faced the enemy, and set up the three of them about sixty feet apart, atop the hill. There was some little technical business to be done involving blasting caps, shipping plug priming adaptors, the detonator well, wire crimped and so on. Then the wire was fed backward, where he used his entrenching tool to dig a quick, low hole, though he knew that if he ever had to go to the mines, it meant there were enough zips coming at them that whether he survived the backblast or not was kind of a moot point.
He took a last swig on his canteen and tossed it away. He wished he had a C-rat left, but he’d left them back with most of his gear. Now, however, instead of the usual huge burden, he felt almost light-headed. He had no food, no canteen, no spotting scope, no Claymores. The only burden, beside his M14 magazines, was the goddamned PRC-77, tied tightly to his back by a couple of cruel straps. He even dared peel it off, and now felt really light. He felt like dancing. The freedom from the ache of going into battle with sixty pounds of gear and then twenty pounds of gear and now nothing was astonishing. He had trained himself to ignore the ache in his back; now it vanished. Cool, he thought, I get to die without a backache, first time in my career in the ’Nam.
Then the shot came, and Donny hastily pulled out his flare device, slipped a flare into the breech, screwed it shut and thrust it against the ground to fire. Like a tiny mortar, the flare popped out and hissed skyward, seeming to disappear. A second passed, then the night bloomed illumination as the flare lit, its ’chute opened and it began to float down into the valley, showering sparks and white. It was snowing light.
Bob was shooting now.
The last act had begun.
hey were much closer than he anticipated. The scope was cranked down to three power so that he could get as clear and wide a view as possible. Still, they weren’t targets so much as possibilities, squirms of movement that in their rhythm seemed human against the stiller spectacle of the natural world, though it was all made stranger yet by the rushing shadows the swing of the flare created as it descended.
He saw, he fired. Something stopped moving, or just went down. He’d had eighty rounds; he was down to less than twenty. God, I killed some boys today. Jesus fucking Christ, I did some killing today. I was death today, I was the Marine Corps’s finest creation, the stone killer, destroying all that moved before me.
Something moved, he shot it, it stopped. Clearly the NVA couldn’t locate him, and he was so close, and now the bossman had made a decision — to keep going, to take casualties, to make the rallying point for the attack on Arizona, to march through the minefields, as a Russian general had put it.
It was as though he were saying to Bob: You can’t kill us all. We will defeat you through our willingness to absorb death. That is how we won this war; that is how we will win this battle.
He could hear sergeants screaming, “Bi! Bi! Bi!” meaning “go, go, go,” urging the troops onward, but they could not see him because of his flash hider, the panic, the fear. The troops did not want to go, clearly. He’d gotten into their heads: that was the sniper thing; that was what was so terrible about the sniper. He was intimate and personal in a way which nothing else that kills in war can be; his humanness preys on your humanness, and it was hardest for even the most disciplined of troops to face.
He jacked out a round into the breech, fired, watched someone die. He fired again, quickly, in the fading light; then another flare popped, the light renewed and he saw more targets, so close it was criminal murder to take them, but that was his job tonight: he took them, reloaded, fell back through the high grass, emerged when another flare fired off, and killed some more. He was gone totally in the red, screaming urgency of his own head, not a man anymore, but a total killing system, conscienceless, instinctive, his brain singing with blood lust. It was so easy.
o Nhoung was gone. The bullet snuffed his life out in a second, drilling him through the neck with the sound of an ax hitting a side of raw beef. Nhoung died on his feet, and hit the ground a corpse. His soul flew away to be with his ancestors.
“We are dying! He can see us! There is no hope!” a young soldier screamed.
“Shut up, you fool,” yelled Huu Co, yearning to reach to the sky and crush those blasphemous flares with his bare hands, then rip the skulls from the bodies of the sniper and his spotter.
“They’re on the left this time,” he screamed again, because he had seen the XO fall to the right, pushed by the impact of the bullet.
“On the left. Fire for effect, brothers, fire now, kill the demons!”
His troops began to open fire helter-skelter, without much thought, the lacy neon of the tracers jumping through the darkness like spiderwebs, ripping vaguely where they struck tree or vegetation, but the point of it was to calm them while he figured out what to do.