Featherstone sat amid a dark circle of fellow martyrs, all stoned. He was so still and depressed he seemed almost dead. But it was clear he wasn’t the ringleader here; another Marine was doing all the talking, a bitter rant about “We don’t mean shit,” “It’s all a game,” “Fucking lifers just getting their tickets punched,” that sort of thing.
Donny butted in.
“Hey, Featherstone, you wanna go light on that stuff. You may have to move fast tomorrow; you don’t want that shit still in your head.”
Featherstone didn’t seem to hear him. He didn’t look up.
“He’s gonna be dead tomorrow. What difference does it make?” the smart guy said. “Who invited you here, anyhow?”
“I just came by to check on Featherstone,” said Donny. “He ought to pull himself out of this funk or he’s gonna get wasted, and if you guys claim to be his buds, you ought to help him.”
“He’s gonna get zapped tomorrow, no matter what. We who are not about to die salute him.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to him. He’s going to go for a walk, then hide in the bush. A plane will come and shoot the fuck out of a zone 250 yards ahead of him. He’ll probably get a Bronze Star out of it and go back to the world a hero.”
“Nobody cares about heroes back in the world.”
“Well, he just has to keep his head. That’s—”
“Do you even know what this is all about?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell you. Classified.”
“No, not the shit about the Russian sniper. That’s just shit. You know what this is really about?”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s about the championship.”
“The what?”
“The championship,” said the man, fixing Donny in a bitter, dark gaze.
“Of what?”
“Of snipers.”
“What?”
“In 1967, a gunny named Carl Hitchcock went home with ninety-three kills. The most so far. Now along comes this guy Swagger. He’s in the fifties till that stunt you pulled off in the valley. They gave him credit for thirty-odd kills. I hear he’s up to eighty-seven in one whack. Now, he gets six more, he ties. He gets seven more, he’s the champ. It doesn’t mean shit to me and it doesn’t mean shit in the world, but for these lifers, let me tell you, something like that gets you noticed and you end up the fucking command sergeant major of the whole United States Marine Corps. So what if a couple of grunts get wasted to get you your last few kills? Who the fuck cares about that?”
“That’s shit,” said Donny. He looked at his antagonist’s name, saw that it was one Mahoney, and then recalled, yes, another college guy, Mahoney, always riding the line, dozens of Article 15s, angry and pissed off and just desperate to get out of there.
“It’s not shit. It’s how military cultures operate if you knew anything about it at all.”
“I’ve been with Swagger in the bush for six months. I’ve never, ever seen him claim credit for a kill. I record the kills in a book, as per regs. I have to do that; it’s the rule. The sniper employment officer writes up the kills. I just write down what I see. Swagger’s never asked me to claim kills for him. He doesn’t give a shit about that. On top of that, the number thirty-seven or whatever is completely made up; he had eighty rounds, he probably hit seventy-five of those, if he missed at all. The record doesn’t mean a thing. That’s a load of crap.”
“He just likes the killing. Man, he must like to squeeze that little trigger and watch some gook dot go still. It’s as close to being God as you can get. There’s something so psychotic about it, you—”
Donny hit him, left side of the face, hard. It was stupid. In seconds, he was down, pinned, and somebody kicked him in the head, and his eyes filled with stars. He squirmed and yelped, but more body blows came, and he felt the pressure of many hands pressing him down, and still more punches driving through. At last someone pulled his antagonists off him. Of course it was the pacifist Mahoney.
“Settle down, settle down,” Mahoney screamed. “Man, you’ll get lifers in here, and we are cooked!”
Donny’s head flared. Someone had really nailed him.
“You assholes,” he said. “You fucking crybaby assholes, you’re going to get your buddy wasted for nothing except your own sense of victimization. You have nothing to be sorry about. You made it. You’re golden.”
“All right, all right,” said Mahoney, holding the swelling that distended his face, “you hit me, they hit you, let’s call it even. No one on staff has to hear about this.”
“Man, my fucking head aches,” said Donny, climbing to his feet.
“You’re not going to tell on anyone, are you, Fenn? It was just tempers. We all get fucked if you tell.”
“Shit,” said Donny. “My goddamn head hurts.”
“Get him an aspirin. You want a beer? We have some Vietnamese shit, but I think there’s a couple of Buds left. Get him a Bud. Good, cold Bud.”
“No, I’m all right.”
He looked at them, saw only dark faces and glaring eyeballs.
“Look, let’s forget all about this shit, but just get him” — Featherstone, who still sat, zombielike, on the cot — “straight for tomorrow. Okay? He can’t be fucked up out there; he’ll get killed.”
“Yeah, sure, Fenn, no problem.”
“And let me tell you guys something, okay? You kicked the shit out of me, now you listen.”
Some eyes greeted his angrily in the low light, but most looked away. It was hot and rank with sweat and the odor of beer and marijuana.
“You guys may say Swagger is a psycho and he likes to kill and all that shit. Fine. But have you noticed how come we never get hit and our patrols don’t get ambushed? Have you noticed we haven’t had a KIA in months? Have you noticed our only wounded are booby traps, and they’re almost never fatal, and there’s almost no ambushes? Hasn’t been an ambush in months, maybe years. You know why that is? Is it because they love you? Is it because they know you’re all peaceniks and dope smokers and you flash the peace sign and all you are saying is give peace a chance? Is that why?”
No voices answered his. His head really hurt. He had been whacked good. His vision was blurry as shit.
“No. It has nothing to do with you. Nobody gives a fuck about you. No, it’s because of him. Of Swagger. Because the NVA and Victor Charles, they fear him. They are scared shitless of him. You say he’s psycho, but every time he drops one of them, you benefit. You live. You survive. You’re living on the goddamn time he buys for you by putting his ass in the grass. He’s your guardian angel. And he’ll always wear the curse of being the killer, the man with the gun, while you guys have the luxury of not getting your pretty little hands dirty. He’ll always be on the outside because of his kills. He takes the responsibility, he lives with it, and you guys, you worthless assholes, you’ll go back to the world on account of it, and all you can do is call him psycho. Man, have you ever heard of shame? You all ought to be ashamed.”
He turned and slipped out into the night.
he Russian lay motionless in the high grass, on a little crest maybe twelve hundred yards out from the firebase. In the dark, he could see nothing except the steady illumination of guard post flares, one fired every three or four minutes, and the occasional movement of the Marines from hootch to hootch in the night, as sentries changed. There was no sense whatsoever of anything wrong.
He was still tired from the nearly five hours of crawling, but felt himself beginning to rally as the energy flooded back into him. He looked at his watch. It was 0430. The Dragunov was before him in the grass; it was time.
Deftly, he rolled over a bit, unstrapped the pack, pulled it off his back and opened it. He took out a large cylindrical object, an optical device, mounted to an electronics housing. It was Soviet issue, PPV-5, a night-vision telescope, too clumsy to be mounted on a rifle but fine for stable observation. He set it into the earth before him, and his fingers found the switch. As a rule, he didn’t trust these things: too fragile, too awkward, too heavy; worse, one grew wedded to them, until they destroyed initiative and talent; worse still, one lost one’s night vision to them.