Guerrilla warfare. It ain’t just a job, it’s a guilt trip.
We were all pretty deadass-tired from walking for twelve hours, so Barber decided we could bed down for a few hours. Said it would work out perfect. By the time we hit the vil next afternoon, we’d be fresh. We crawled up on a little flattened ridge that was nearly covered by a small, low thicket of bamboo and shut our eyes. Thurman took his Starlight scope and stood watch.
By the time I closed my eyes, Roshland and Barber were breathing even and regular. I always wished I could knock off that easy, but I needed to unwind a bit. Didn’t take me long, as it turned out. Last thing I saw was Thurman creeping about, setting up perimeter.
I was dreaming about an old Chevy I used to own when I felt someone shaking me. I opened my eyes and saw the dim figure of Barber hunched over me.
“Time?” I said.
“Thurman’s gone,” he said. “Get your gear together.”
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and shouldered my ruck and rifle. The night had gone dead quiet while I slept. A gentle breeze skirted the trees, but it didn’t do shit towards stopping the sweat that ran down my brow. I popped a salt tab and took a pull off my canteen.
“What time is it?” I asked Barber.
“Just after three,” he whispered.
After three? Christ, we’d been asleep for hours. We crashed out just after 2300 hours, eleven ’o clock. Thurman should’ve roused us at one.
“What happened?” I heard Roshland say.
Barber didn’t reply. He scanned the darkness with his Starlight scope.
“VC?”
“No.” Pause. “I don’t think so.”
I kept watching him. His fuzzy, black outline told me nothing. But, then, I didn’t have to be told: If it had been Cong, they would have greased us all. There’s no easier kill than a sleeping man.
I looked through the thick jungle canopy overhead. The starry sky looked down between the branches, noncommittal. Whatever it had seen, it wasn’t for us to know.
We spent the next thirty minutes or so crawling through the foliage. There were no signs of Thurman…he was just gone. Almost like he had simply walked off or just disappeared into thin air. Or gotten himself zapped by Charlie. It didn’t seem possible, though. Thurman was good, the best I’d ever seen in the jungle. I couldn’t imagine anyone expert enough to take him without a sound.
Besides, why take him and leave us?
Barber called us together. It was 0400 by then.
“We gotta get moving. Thurman will have to take care of his own ass,” he said.
Barber took point and we fell in behind him.
The further we pushed on, the worse the terrain became. The jungle grew dense with long twisting vines that coiled down like tentacles and snatched at my boonie hat and gear, snagging and tangling. It was a real pain in the ass moving through it. We had to crouch down most of the way. The ground became muddy and then turned into swamp as we passed through low-lying areas, the muck coming up to our hips sometimes. The sky was streaked with indigo blue. There were birds cawing overhead and ten-foot pythons hanging in the trees, testing the air with forked tongues. You could see them in the bluish, pre-dawn light and that was enough. Every time I got close to one, I gripped the handle of my K-Bar, ready to slash at it if it made a move towards me.
But none did.
They just hung lazily by their tails, paying us no attention as if they saw crazy, mud-encrusted humans every day. And I guess they probably did.
I never liked snakes too much, but I’d gotten used to them like everything else in that goddamn country. For some reason, harmless as they were, they were getting to me that day.
Everything was.
But it was only the beginning.
Just after first light we regrouped at the perimeter of another little village. It wasn’t the one we were looking for. There was no mention of it on the maps. We sat out there in bush, reconning it, while Barber made up his mind about whether we should bypass it or not. In general, where you’re on a specific mission—that vil we had to hit, for example—you’ll go out of your way to avoid contact with not only the enemy, but the civilian population as well. Unless you find something so sweet and easy you can’t pass it up, you know, like that other little hamlet with the gooks by the fire. They were begging for it, so we gave it to them.
“It looks deserted,” Barber finally announced.
And it did.
Like a cemetery.
It was bigger than the last one, a good eight or ten huts crowded against the encroaching jungle. A place that size, there should’ve been some kids running around, an old lady or two at a cooking fire. But there was nothing. The silence was eerie. It was a heavy, almost physical thing. My military turn of my mind told me that what we had here was one sweet ambush, all primed and ready. Slopes were hiding in the huts, the woods, just waiting for our asses.
But I didn’t believe it for a minute.
I could smell death twisting in the air—warm, pungent, but not recent. There had been killing here or mass dying maybe yesterday, maybe the day before. I knew that much because I knew death: knew its smell, its taste. And this place was full of it like a drawer in a morgue.
We walked right into it. Not exactly SOP; usually you would skirt the perimeter, check the jungle for signs of unfriendlies. But, somehow, the three of us knew this place was empty.
And it was empty, all right.
No pigs or chickens. No people. Barber and I started checking the huts while Roshland patrolled back and forth with his sixty, looking for trouble. I prodded open the door of the first hut we came to and there was nothing living inside. My guts pulled up sickly at the smell. There was a little boy in there, maybe eight or ten. His decayed body had been nailed to a post. He’d been eviscerated, his head nearly cut off. His eyes were missing. His jaws were sprung open in a scream. He wore a beard of flies.
Outside, Barber said, “Pretty sadistic even for the Cong.”
“Yes,” I said, but could say no more.
The kid smelled bad, but he didn’t account for that smell of death we encountered upon entering camp. This was localized, small. The other was huge, omnipotent. It was draped over the village.
We checked two, three other huts and didn’t find a thing.
In the last hut we found another body. An older guy, maybe fifty, crouched in the corner. He had one arm up over his eyes like he was protecting his face or didn’t want to see something. In his other hand was a small homemade knife. He’d slit his wrist. He was stained dark with old blood. Ants and beetles were all over him.
It looked like he’d cut himself open before something got at him. As if death was better than what he was facing.
I’d seen some bad shit over there. Things that could warp a sane man. Shit so ugly, so horrible, so hideous it could’ve scared a maggot off a gut wagon. But by that point, nothing bothered me much. I’d long before shut down my humanity; it was the only way to survive, to hang onto what remained of your mind. So, yeah, I was steel, I was hard, I hadn’t had a decent human emotion in months and months.
But I was scared.
Scared like a kid in a spook house.
Everything was hot and dry and you could hear the brush crisping in the morning sunlight. Hot, yes, but my skin had gone cold and something inside me had curled up in a tight ball. It was more than the kid’s body, bad as that was. And it was more than the man’s body. It was just a raw, grim feeling I had. Just a deserted village? Sure, but there was something terribly wrong about it.
Roshland broke protocol and called out to us.
We ran over and found him in a little clearing between the hootches. He was a big, black bull of a man, but at that moment he was small and weak, a stick man smothering under all that killing hardware.