Time to Hunt (17 page)

“Go on, chow time. Eat something.”

Donny set out to do the same and in a few seconds was pulling down the barbecued pork, cold but flavorful.

“When we’re done, you gimme the radio. I ain’t carrying as much weight.”

“I’ll take your rifle.”

“The hell you will. Nobody touches the rifle but me.”

Of course. The basic rule. He remembered when
Swagger had come looking for him, sitting forlornly on outpost duty at a forward observation post his third week at Dodge City.

“You Fenn?”

“Uh, yeah. Uh, Sergeant—?”

“Swagger. Name’s Swagger. I’m the sniper.”

Donny had a momentary intake of breath. In the dark, he could hardly see him: just a fierce wraith of a man sheathed in darkness, speaking in a dense Southern accent. Bob the Nailer, the one with the 15,000-piastre bounty on his head and over thirty kills. Donny had the sense that all was quiet, that the other men had just willed themselves to nothingness out of fear or respect for Bob the Nailer. Though he could not see the sniper’s eyes, Donny knew they burned at him, and ate him up.

“I just put my spotter on a medevac back to the world with a hole in his leg,” said the sniper. “I’m looking for a replacement. You shot expert. You have the highest GCT at Dodge. You have twenty-ten vision. You done a tour, won a medal, so you been shot at some and won’t panic. All that don’t mean shit. You was at Eighth and I. That means you done the ceremonial stuff, which means you have a patience for detail work and a willingness to be an unnoticed part of a bigger team. I need that. You interested?”

“Me? I—”

“Good perks. I’ll get you steak and all the bourbon you can drink. When we’re in, we live like kings. I’ll keep you off crap like night watch and ambush patrols and forward observation and shit-burning details. I’ll get you R&R anywhere you want. Bad shit: A) You don’t touch the rifle. Nobody touches the rifle. B) You don’t do drugs. I catch you with a buzz on, I ship you home under guard and you’ll spend two years in Portsmouth. C) You don’t call nobody gook, dink, slope or zip. These are the very finest soldiers in the world. They are winning and they will win. We kill them, but by God, we kill them with respect. Those are the only three rules, but they ain’t to be bent or
even breathed hard on. Or, you can sit here in this shit hole waiting for someone to drop a mortar shell on your head. And somehow I got a feeling every shit detail, every shit patrol, every piece-of-crap garbage job that comes up, you’re number one on the fuck list. I hope you like the stink of burning shit because you’re going to smell a lot of it.”

“Back in the world, I had some problems,” said Donny. “I got a bad rap. I wouldn’t ‘cooperate.’ ”

“I figured it from your jacket. Some kind of infraction of orders? You lost your rating. Hey, kid, this ain’t the world. This is the ’Nam, have you noticed? It don’t mean shit to me, you got that? You do the jobs I give you one hundred percent and I’ll back you one hundred percent. You may get killed, you will work hard, but you will have fun. Killing people is
lots
of fun. Now, you want in or what?”

“I guess I’m in.”

Within thirty minutes, Donny had been relieved of duty and moved into the scout-sniper squad bay with S/Sgt. Swagger NCOIC—or, as some called him, NCGIC, Non-Commissioned God in Charge—and the only man whose word mattered anywhere in the world.

He had never broken one of the rules until now. He had weighed each M118 round Swagger carried against the one-in-a-million chance of an off-charge at Lake City; he had cleaned Bob’s .45, .380 and grease gun and his own M14 and .45; he shined and dried the jungle boots; he laid out and assembled the gear before each mission; he polished the lens of the spotting scope; he checked the pins on the grenades, the plastic canteens for mildew; he hand-enameled the brass on the 872 gear dead black; he did laundry; he learned elevation, windage and range estimation; he kept range cards; he filled out after-action reports; he studied the operating area maps like a sacred text; he handled flank security and once killed two NVC who were infiltrating around Bob’s position; he learned
PRC-77 protocol and maintenance. He worked like hell, and he had never broken one of the rules.

Only Bob touched the rifle. Bob broke it down after each mission, cleaned it to the tiniest crevice, scrubbed it dry, rezeroed it, treated it like a baby or a mistress. He and only he could touch or carry the rifle.

“It ain’t I don’t trust you. It ain’t you drop it and it gets knocked out of zero and you don’t tell me and I miss a shot and somebody, probably me, gets killed. It’s just that the bedrock here is simple, clear, powerful and helps us both: nobody touches the rifle but me. Good fences make good neighbors. Ever hear that one?”

“I think so.”

“Well, the rifle rule is my fence. Got that?”

“I do. Entirely, Sergeant.”

“You call me sergeant around the lifers here in Dodge. In the field, you call me Bob or Swagger or whatever the hell you want. Don’t call me sergeant in the field. One of them boys might be listening and he might decide to kill me because he heard you call me sergeant. Got that, Pork?”

“I do.”

And he had never forgotten that rule or any of the rules, until now.

“I forgot,” he said in the rain to Swagger. “About the rifle.”

“Damn, Fenn, I was just getting to like you, too. I thought you’se going to work out,” Bob said, needling him ever so gently. But then it was back to mission: “Okay, you done eating? You got your shit wired in tight? This is it. Over this hill, through their security and then sleep a bit. Comes morning we get to do some shooting.”

B
ob went first, down to soaked tiger camos and boonie cap, his rifle slung upside down on his back. He carried the M3 grease gun in one hand and the entrenching tool in the other, and he used the tool as a kind of hook, to sink into roots of trees or the tangles of vegetation to get
himself up the steep incline a few more feet. He moved with slow, almost calm deliberation. The rain fell still in torrents in the darkening gloom, and it rattled off the leaves and against the mud. How could it rain so hard so long? Was God ending the world, washing away Vietnam and its sins, its atrocities, its arrogances and follies? It seemed that way.

Donny was fifty yards to the left, doing the same trick, but behind Swagger and working carefully not to get ahead. Bob was the eyes up front to the right; Donny’s responsibility was behind and to the left, the flank he was on.

But he saw nothing, just felt the chill of the biting rain, and felt the weight of the M14, one of the last few left in the ’Nam. For this job, really, the plastic M16 would have been more ideally suited, but Bob hated the things, calling them poodle shooters, and wouldn’t let a man in his unit carry them.

Every now and then Bob would halt them with a raised right hand, and both men would drop low to the ground, hidden in the foliage, waiting, clinging desperately against the incline. But each time whatever Bob had noticed proved to be nothing, a false alarm, and they continued their steady, slow climb.

Twice they crossed paths, switchbacks etched into the vegetation, and Bob waited for five minutes before allowing them out on the open ground even for the seconds or so that it exposed them.

The darkness was falling. It was harder and harder to see. The jungle, far from relaxing as they climbed, actually seemed to be getting denser. There was a time when Donny felt himself cut off entirely from Bob, and a shot of panic came to him. What if he got lost? What would he do? He would wander these ghostly mountains until they caught him and killed him, or he wore down and starved.

You boys ain’t so tough, he heard from somewhere, and realized it was a mocking memory of a football coach somewhere back in his complicated athletic career.

No, we ain’t so tough, he thought. We never said we were. We just tried to do our job, that was all.

But then he came out of the rubbery-smelling thorns that had swallowed him, and saw a figure to the right and recognized it for its caution and precision of movement to be Bob.

He started to rise—

No, no—

Bob’s hand was up urgently, signaling him still and back. He froze and dropped on his belly low to the ground, even as Bob himself did the same.

He waited.

Nothing. No, just the sound of the rain, some occasional thunder, now and then a streak of distant lightning. It seemed so—

The next thing, he was aware of motion on his left. He did not move, he did not breathe.

How had Swagger seen them? How did he know? What gave them away? Another step and it was all over, but somehow, out of some trick of instinct or predator’s preternatural nerve endings, Bob had stunned him into silence and motionlessness a second before they arrived.

Before him the men passed by, no more than ten feet away, sliding effortlessly through the foliage and the undergrowth. He could smell them before he could see them. They had the odor of fish and rice, for that was what they ate. They were small, bandy-legged guys, the pros of the army of the Republic of North Vietnam, a point man, a squad leader, a squad in file picking its way carefully through the jungle high above the last path, twelve of them. They were bent forward under beige rain capes and wore regulation dark green uniforms, those absurd pith helmets, and carried AK47s and complete combat gear—packs, canteens and bayonets. Three or four of them wore RPG-40s, the hellish rocket grenades, strapped to their backs.

He had never been so close to the actual enemy; they seemed almost magical, or mythological, somehow, the
phantoms of so many nightmares at last given flesh. They terrified him. If he moved or coughed, it was over: they’d turn and fire, whole minutes before he could get his M14 into action. He had a bad thought of himself dying up here at the hands of these tough little monkey-men sliding so confidently through the rain and the jungle that were exhausting him.

Almost as if one were talking to him, he heard the silence breaking a few feet away.

“Ăhn ỏi, mủa nhiêu qúa?”

“Phâi roi, chăc không có ngủỏi mỹ dêm naỳ,”
came the buddy’s bitter answer, both voices propelled by the explosive lung energy of Vietnamese, so foreign to American ears and which sounded almost like belches.

“Bíhn sĩ ôi, dung nôi, nghê,”
came a sharp cry from the head of the unit, a sergeant, the same the world over and whatever the army, clamping down on his naughty grunts.

The patrol moved slowly along in the dying light and the falling rain, then slowly disappeared around a bend in the slope. But Bob held Donny still for a good ten minutes before giving the okay, excruciating seconds of deathlike stillness in the cold and wet, which cramped the muscles and hurt the brain. But at last Bob motioned, and he slowly uncoiled and began to move up again.

Gradually Bob navigated his way over.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. How the hell did you see them?”

“The point man’s canteen jingled against his bayonet. I heard it, that’s all. Luck, man; it’s better to be lucky than good.”

“Who were they?”

“That’s flank security from a main force battalion. That means we’re getting close. They put out security teams when they move a big unit through, same as us. The sergeant had flashes for the Number Three Battalion. I don’t know what regiment or nothing, but I think the biggest unit up this ways was the 324th Infantry Division.
Man, they close down that Special Forces camp tomorrow, the rain stays bad, they could get to Dodge City the day or so
after
tomorrow.”

“Is this some big offensive?”

“There’s several newly Vietnamized units there; it’d do ’em a lot of good to kick all that ARVN ass.”

“Great. I wonder what they were saying.”

“The first one says, Man, it’s raining like
shit
, and his buddy says, Ain’t no Americans coming out in this, and the sarge yells back, Hey, you guys, shut up and keep moving.”

“You speak Vietnamese?” Donny said in wonderment.

“Picked up a little. Not much, but I can get by. Come on, let’s get out of here. We got to rest. Big day tomorrow. We kick butt and take names. You bet on it, Marine.”

F
OB Arizona was in bad trouble. Puller had lost nineteen men already and the VC had gotten mortars up close over to the west, and were pounding the shit out of them so that he couldn’t maneuver, and that main force unit would be in tomorrow at the latest. But worse: he’d sent out Matthews with a four-man assault unit to take out the mortars and Matthews hadn’t come back. Jim Matthews! Three tours, M/Sgt. Jim Matthews, Benning, the Zone, one of the old guys who dated all the way back to Korea, had done everything—gone!

The rage of it flared deep in Major Puller’s angry, angry brain.

This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Goddamn them, this wasn’t supposed to be happening.

Kham Duc was way out on its lonesome, near Laos, where it had fed in cross-border recon teams for years, but was largely invulnerable because of the umbrella or air power, so the NVA didn’t even bother with main force units close by. Where had this one come from? He was feeling very Custerlike, that sick moment when he suddenly realized he was up against hundreds, maybe thousands. And where the hell had this weather come from and how fast could this big-ass, tough-as-shit battalion get down here?

Oh, he wants us. He smells our blood; he wants us
.

Puller’s antagonist was a slick operator named Huu Co Thahn, a senior colonel, commanding, No. 3 Battalion, 803rd Infantry Regiment, 324th Infantry Division, Fifth People’s Shock Army. Puller had seen his picture, knew his résumé: from a wealthy, sophisticated Indo-French family and even a graduate of the École Militaire in Paris before deserting to the North in sixty-one after revulsion at the excesses of the Diem regime, he had become one of
their most able field grade military commanders, a sure general.

A mortar shell fell outside, close by, and dust shook from the rafters of the command post.

“Anybody hit?” he called.