Sharpshooter (8 page)

“Yes, sir, I know this, sir,” I say, training the scope from one target to the next to the next and feeling I am the gun.

“So why did I spend all day today listening to you?”

I am no longer the gun.

“Sir?” I say, lowering the weapon to consider him.

“Your voice, Private Bucyk. All day long. From my high perch, my position of stealth, I listened to the sound of your voice from the farthest reaches of the trail.”

“I was whispering, sir.”

He is unimpressed with my defense, if he has even registered it.

“You see, being seen and heard in this line of work in this part of the world in this moment in history is the same as being dead. I have received very strong advance reports on you, private. I would like to not see you dead.”

“I would like to not see that, either, sir.”

“Well, if there were any serious enemy activity along that trail today, Bucyk, you would, in fact, be dead. Raise that weapon again and focus on the target.”

I do, and I do, and I am loving it again.

“The possibilities are great for you, soldier. The possibility that you never get there is far greater. But for right now, I want you to focus on that target. Stay focused on that target. Do not make a sound. Do not twitch a fiber. Do not have so much as a detectable brain wave until I return to tell you otherwise. Is that perfectly clear?”

I have my flaws, but I am certainly not untrainable. I learn.

I do not respond in any way.

“Good,” he says, and marches away again.

 

It seemed simple enough.

Stand, aim, point the gun at the target. I can't think of any more natural thing to do.

But thirty minutes in, I feel it. The pain starts at the top of my right shoulder. Then it grows, travels, radiates down my arm and up into my neck. There is a nerve toward the back of my neck that feels like someone has gotten in there with a pair of needle-nose pliers, has pinched it off, and is twisting, twisting, twisting like the elastic in those old balsa-wood propeller planes I used to build all the time.

My eye, the one I have on the target, has the sensation of a tiny hand scratching, the fingernails clawing lightly at the surface of the eye, then salty breath puffing lightly into it. I am sweating like I am personally the very source of the Mekong.

And I regret that missed latrine break more than any decision I ever made.

It has to be three hours before I hear footsteps coming my way. As they get closer it appears there are at least three, maybe four people coming. Relief, I am sensing relief, feeling relief, whether they are here to literally relieve me or not.

“Look at this disciplined piece of Army machinery here,” Parrish says, walking around me like he's checking out a new car. Please don't kick my tires.

“Very impressive,” Lightfoot says. “Do you suppose he's trying out for the LRRPs?”

The LRRPs are Long Range Reconnaissance Patrollers, and they are legendary as the most maniacal people in the entire show. They go out all painted up for night patrols as far out into the scarylands as they can get, remaining frozen for hours at a time to capture or terrorize individuals and bring back useful information or guns or enemy combatants as a kind of bonus.

“Nah,” Arguello says. “One of his eyes is closed. LRRPs never close their eyes.”

I don't care. Whatever they want to do to me now, I don't care because I am right now doing the most important job in the Army, the war, the world. I can see the three of them, walking around me, trying to get me to move, react,
exist
in a physical way that I am just not going to do even if it kills me.

Maybe I will lose my mind and wind up a LRRP at the end of it all.

No, I won't. Because I am not a LRRP. I am a marksman, and I am going to be a sniper.

“Would you like a drink?” Parrish asks, taking a long and theatrically slurpy sip off of what I think is ginger ale.

Moxie. All I can think of right now is Moxie. I miss Moxie. I want Moxie. When I get through this, I am going to make it my mission to secure a supply of Moxie. Moxie is my secret, my strength, my source. Moxie is my essence, and with it I cannot fail.

Lightfoot actually comes up close and blows on the side of my face softly. I have no idea what kind of torture this is intended to be, but it feels like heaven.

Arguello comes around the front of me and starts making sniffing noises.

“I don't remember this guy smelling like that when he got here,” he says. “Smells like he's rotting. Do you think he is rotting since he got here?”

“Yeah, now that you mention it,” Parrish says, “there is a little something foul going on there.”

“Is it coming from here?” Arguello says, crouching down right in front of me.

My arms are screaming with the pain now. My neck is going to snap. I can't feel my hands.

After examining the area for several seconds, Arguello pulls a rolled-up magazine out of his back pocket. He begins to
fan
my already damp crotch area.

Oh, no. Oh, please, no.

I can feel the breeze coming through my clothes. I can feel the cool, can feel the humidity turning to frost as he fans faster and faster.

“Oh, man,” Arguello says, jumping away like I was one of the deadly bamboo vipers that are everywhere here.

“Jeez,” Parrish says from just behind me, “it's worse on this side.”

They howl, they flail around, laughing and gagging and carrying on like evil circus clowns. I hear them getting farther away behind me, and I don't think I have ever been happier at the prospect of aloneness.

“You're doing great, kid,” Lightfoot says in my ear before he, too, melts away.

I stand there, in my reek, but frozen in position as I hear the last of their sounds trail off. I don't know if I could relax my position now if I wanted to. A live version of rigor mortis seems to have gripped me at this point.

It is dead silent. I wait for more footsteps to come and none come.

“Very impressive” comes the voice from about three feet behind me, and the shock is nearly enough to make me twitch. But I don't.

“If I didn't know better, private, I would swear you were a part of the landscape. Except for the smell, of course. Since there are no skunks in this neck of the woods, I do believe you would have given your position away to any hostile troops within one kilometer.”

Lt. Systrom walks around to the front of me.

“And this is just the beginning, Bucyk. With skill like yours, shooting people is the easy part.”

It would be pretty easy at this moment,
is what I'm thinking.

“But not only do you not have all the necessary traits of the true sniper, you don't even look the part. You look more like Daniel Boone trying to pick off Injuns than a modern-day precision killing machine. Now, I want you to get down on the ground, take up a proper sniping position, and get a bead on that hostile target there for real.”

The Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz
had less trouble moving after rusting in the forest all those years than I have right now. But I do it. I lower the rifle, feel the muscles in my shoulders, back, arms, hamstrings, moving more like steel cables and pulleys than real organic human parts. My pants feel all the more disgusting for the movement.

But I get down, stretch out, fold down the two bipod legs at the front of the M-21, and set my starlight scope on my enemy.

“Good,” Systrom says. “Bet that's a relief, huh?”

I say nothing.

“Good,” he says, then wanders off to the tree line alongside the range. I hear him rustling around in the trees for a minute but can't figure what he's up to until he comes up and drops a full load of camouflage foliage on top of me. He spends a few seconds spreading big palm leaves and sticks and branches over me in what must be a lovely naturalistic arrangement.

“Remain the landscape, soldier. Keep at it until you don't exist any longer. Or until I come back and tell you, whichever comes last.”

I listen to his crisp, marching steps, and it seems like he takes forty-five minutes and several thousand strides before he clears the area. It does in fact feel like something of a relief to be off my feet and to have my arms supported. My elbows are stuck into the moist and loamy-smelling turf, which is a whole lot better than the air that was holding me up before.

But after an hour I forget how much better I feel.

After two hours I feel nothing in my hands, my arms, my legs. My neck is hurting again.

After three hours, I feel nothing, anywhere, inside my body as well as out. Only my eye feels like an actual physical part of this world.

“I almost tripped right over you,” Lt. Systrom says, walking between me and the target.

Click.

I pull the trigger.

“Correct response,” he says, clapping his hands together one loud time as the birds in the distant trees sing up the beginnings of the tropical-dawn chorus.

“You were so good I almost forgot where I planted you. Truth is, I did forget about you. Meant to be here an hour ago. Sorry, soldier.”

It was very smart to leave the gun unloaded.

“On your feet, Private Bucyk.”

It takes me maybe a week and a half, I can't quite tell, but I get to my feet. Lt. Systrom relieves me of the rifle. He nods at me and slits out a faint smile.

“Go have a shower,” he says.

I salute. He salutes. And we turn and walk side by side back to the
Benewah.
He even walks a lot closer to me than you would expect.

F
or the first time since I arrived a month ago, the
Benewah
is behaving like an honest-to-goodness sailing vessel. We are moving upriver.

The days had become a frustrating, repetitive slog of patrols to find and cut supply lines and harass the Vietcong whenever we could flush them out. More and more we found ourselves working alongside regulars of the ARVN, which is the South Vietnamese army. We exchanged gunfire with the enemy once or twice a week without ever really getting close enough to see what we were achieving. But then we would come back the next day and the next week and we would find pretty much the same number of nests of fighters, the same number of listening stations and ammo dumps both full and empty, and one day looked exactly the same as the other in terms of accomplishing anything.

Which is why we are moving.

We have been handing over more of the responsibilities to the ARVN, because a program called Vietnamization is supposed to win this thing more quickly. I don't know. I know that if some guys from some other country came in and told me they were going to
Americanize
America, I would get a little confused. Before knocking all their teeth out.

Maybe, I don't know, but maybe this has something to do with the way our allies are looking at us a little funny, and we are doing the same to them now.

“I won't miss it, that's for sure,” Lightfoot says as we sit up on deck watching the riverbanks slip by. “Vung Tau and all that lower Mekong business just felt like a big waste of time and resources. Soon as you sweep an area, it's infiltrated all over again. I'm glad to be headed north. Get closer to the source of all that insurgent activity and maybe have a chance to do something about it. Personally, I wish they would send us right up the whole Ho Chi Minh Trail, get the bull right by the horns.”

The Ho Chi Minh Trail is a path cut through the jungle all the way down from Laos, through Cambodia, and right down almost to the capital, Saigon, here deep in the south of the South. It is how most of the supplies come from North Vietnam to the Vietcong.

“It'll be nice to feel like we're getting something done, that's for sure,” I say.

“Exactly. And the ARVN — I just don't know about those guys. The longer we were there, the more I felt like they couldn't care less which way this thing went. That was exhausting, as far as I was concerned.”

We start walking around the deck of the big tub. It is really a hulk of a thing, with its massive cannons and .30-and .50-caliber machine guns, its crane tower and gigantic helicopter pad like a bull's-eye set right in the middle of it. It's kind of like all the different pieces of the war machinery all grafted together, self-propelled and floating toward the action.

The action now is something called Operation Giant Slingshot. Those very enemy supply lines from the North that Lightfoot mentions have been crazy successful at keeping the insurgents too hot to handle all the way to within about thirty miles of Saigon. We're being sent up there to cut it off and kill it dead, and we are assured that the sleepy part of the war is over for us.

“Body counts,” Lightfoot says as he waves to a flotilla of sampans passing by. They are simple low boats that the locals in their triangular hats use to transport
everything
. Some of them are probably carrying guns to kill us with, I can never tell. Lightfoot gives them all a big happy smile with his wave. Nobody responds. “That's what they want now, in terms of progress reports. Body counts. We are going into that jungle, young shooter, and we are going to shoot the daylights out.”

“Yes, sir,” I say.

“Yes, sir,” he repeats, though with the same enthusiasm as he put into that fake smile. “That's one reason you're getting to be the teacher's pet. Lieutenant's looking forward to you picking off a lot of scalps for us. That'll make the unit look good.”

“Great. I'm looking forward to that myself.”

“That's nice.”

I stop looking at Vietnam for a second and turn to the corporal. Despite what he says about me being Systrom's pet project, the truth is that Lightfoot is the one who has taken me under his wing. He is the reason I know anything at all about this place and what we are doing.

“What's it like?” I ask him as he continues to stare off.

“What's what like?” he says, the smile for real this time since he knows full well what I mean.

“Killing a guy. I haven't done it yet. Not that I know of, anyway. You've been in-country what, six months already?”

“One hundred and eighty-one days. DERUS, one hundred and eighty-four days from today.”

DERUS. Date Eligible for Return to US. It is a topic of constant conversation among the guys in-country. This is the first time I have heard Lightfoot mention his.

“Not that you're counting.”

“Not that I'm counting. And I had counted all of
three
of them when I first killed a man for certain. We were out on one of those same old patrols. It was getting near dark, and I swear I nearly stepped on this guy hiding under brush. He popped up, and I was carrying the M-60 machine gun that day, and boy was I glad. I was so scared witless I just pulled on that trigger and squeezed and screamed and fired from, like, three feet away, I fired about a million bullets into this poor sonofagun, all straight into his belly.

“I was shaking so much when I stopped you would've thought I was doing some kind of celebration, with both hands on the gun, like an uncontrollable war dance, victory dance, something. I walked up to him and his whole middle was just soup, man. Then his foot twitched.

“And I went into the whole lollapalooza all over again, screaming and shooting and pouring all the rest of the bullets I had into him, into his head this time, until his head just wasn't even a head anymore.”

It almost feels, as we stand there not talking now, as if we are actually letting the smoke clear from the shooting, as if it has all just happened all over again here before both our eyes and it's settling again before we speak further.

“So,” he says, turning and patting me loudly on the chest with his flat hand, “that's what it's like.”

He leaves his hand there on my chest, and I wish he wouldn't. Because I know there is no way he can help but feel the hammer of my heart, and I feel like a kid, stupid and weak and embarrassed.

“Good,” he says to me then.

“Good?”

“Good. I was hoping to feel you had one of those in there. Do me a favor. Look after it.”

It seems to me to be pretty basic common sense, so I don't feel any need not to grant his request.

“I will,” I say. “I will look after it.”

He smiles, satisfied, just a tiny bit nutty. “You like cribbage?”

We are belowdecks now, sitting on my bunk, which the Navy calls a rack but I will call a bunk, because this boat is green. He pulls down his cribbage board, and as he sets it up he throws a little bit more light where there was none before.

“It helps if you have some clear idea of who you are killing, and why,” he says.

“Makes sense,” I say.

“Like I was saying, I never got the feeling I knew where I stood with the ARVN guys. I've heard stories that you would be fighting alongside some of these guys in the afternoon, training them, arming them, and whatnot. And then in the night some of these same guys will have changed their clothes and taken your training and bullets and pumped it all into one of our boys.”

He shakes his head, screws up his eyes, as if he is experiencing the confusion and frustration fresh.

“I want to know who my friends are, especially in a place as crazy and lethal as this. I never felt like the ARVN were our friends.”

“Not like the Montagnards,” I say, like I really know anything.

He looks up across the cribbage board. He puts his finger on his nose and squashes it down a bit. “The People,” he says, almost beaming.

“So, who
are
they?” I ask.

“The term itself means
mountain people
, but it refers to a number of different indigenous tribes of the Central Highlands. Those poor guys we found in the barrel were unusual in that they usually don't come down to the lowlands. But because they are active along the same trails as the communists, and because the Montagnards are siding with us in fighting the communists … well, they got on the wrong path somewhere. Either they came too far down in tracking somebody or they got dragged down here as a message, but either way they paid the price for being in the game with us.”

“Okay,” I say, “so why do they even bother siding with us?”

“Well, truth is, they have a history of not being treated very well by any Vietnamese, North or South. They are a minority people, pushed around, herded up into smaller and smaller pieces of country, getting their land stolen for coffee plantations, shoved aside to live in pens, hilltop reservations. The Vietnamese majority mostly consider them savages. In the end, I think they're mostly doing their best to defend their own reservations against anybody who threatens them. Sound like anybody we know?”

I look at him, thinking about my dad's stories of the Indian Wars, his tattoo, his founding fathers artwork.

“You never told me what your tribe was,” I say.

“Cheyenne,” he says with clear pride. “And just like the Montagnards, not warriors to be messed with.”

“I'll keep that in mind. In both cases.”

He is staring at the game now, the board, the score, and my cards. “Do you even know
how
to play cribbage, or are you just being sociable?”

 

The difference now is: engagement.

The
Benewah
is anchored in the Mobile Riverine Base on the My Tho River, not far from Dong Tam. Traffic of all kinds is a constant now, and we learn to sleep through a city-that-never-sleeps atmosphere, patrols leaving the vessel at all hours and helicopters plunking down and taking off from our roof like we are a commercial airport.

The enemy, bolder than I ever imagined possible, is taking the fight to us in ways big and small and always unsettling.

It is just after midnight, and I hear a great fuss on the deck just straight above my sleeping quarters; then, a few seconds later, I hear a whole lot more below.

Bu-hooom-suplash … bu-hoom-suplash …

I run up top to see what's happening and find a whole lot of guys wondering the same thing, though probably nine hundred more are sleeping right through it or just not bothering to come up.

“There.” An officer is pointing to what may be movement in the water fifty yards away. Four different Navy shooters open fire at the spot for about thirty seconds before the officer calls them off. Echoes and smoke settle down as we all listen for what comes next. But nothing does.

“Buddy, what was that?” I say to one of the shooters.

“Sappers, man. Sappers, right here.” He points over the side to the hull of our vessel, just about midship — just about directly south of my sleeping quarters. “We heard the clanging just in time. The sneaky devils attaching explosives to the side of the ship. We got 'em, though, I'm sure of that.”

I am only partly reassured.

“You sure you got 'em?”

“Didn't I just say I'm sure? I think I just said I'm sure.” He raises his night-vision binoculars, kind of dismissing my rude questioning of his Navy competence. “Bodies'll turn up, don't worry. Why don't you just go belowdecks and lay your sleepy Army head back down and we'll protect you, all right? Have a nice sleep.”

I'm sure all the enemy look dead through Navy-colored lenses. I go away, but I don't plan on a
nice
sleep. Which is good, because I don't sleep too well the rest of the night.

Or the one after. I hear things under the deck, under the boat, under the water. And where did all these mosquitoes come from? Jeez, there are billions of them. Relentless little monsters.

“Slap more quietly,” Kuns says from a few bunks away.

“Sorry,” I say.

I hear something. No, I don't. My hearing has become more acute since I have been in-country, I am certain of that. Maybe too acute.

Clink, clank
.

I am not hearing things. I am
hearing
things.

I can't sleep, and anyway, I have to be up for patrol in another hour. I get up, dress, and head topside. There is a sentry with his rifle trained over the side when I get there midship, around the same spot as the other night. He is focused hard, like a hunting dog, on a spot near the bank.

“Something?” I whisper.

“Think so,” he whispers. He takes binoculars from around his neck, hands them to me, and I scan the same area as him.

“Is that … are those … oxygen tanks? I see a swimmer with tanks on his back swimming this way,” I say. The swimmer appears to have something missile-like, about a foot and a half long, in each hand as he kicks toward us.

“That's what I thought,” he says, and opens fire.

His first shot pops into the water with a big splash. Then a second, then a third. The swimmer goes under. Possibly. I don't see him. Then I think I do. His hands are empty now, I think. Then I don't see him again.

Three more sentries come running up. Two break out grenade launchers and pepper the spot, big splashes geysering up with the explosions, but who knows what's being achieved.

The firing stops, the smoke and sounds again settle. The officer in charge wearily orders for divers to suit up and examine the hull. Again.

 

We are walking straight into it on a regular basis, engagement, and we know it. That is precisely what we are here to do, and the adrenaline level is so high I can hear the whistling and wailing from inside my ears almost as loud as the frequent artillery exchanges I hear all around me.