Grunts

[thedrifter]

Behold a Marine, a mere shadow and reminiscience of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, buried under arms with funereal accompaniments...

--Thoreau, Civil Disobedience








Rolling thunder.
Clouds float across the white moon, clouds like great metal ships. Black wings beating, enormous objects falling. Arc Light in the monsoon rain; an air strike in the dark. A flight of B-52 bombers circle Khe Sanh, sprinkling eggs of black iron. Each egg weighs two thousand pounds. Each egg knocks a hole into the cold earth, punches a crater into the constricting web of slit trenches that forty thousand determined little men have dug to within a hundred yards of our wire. Black and wet, the earth heaves up like the deck of a great ship, heaves up toward the droning death birds.
Even in the fury of aerial bombardment we sleep, shadows in the earth. We sleep in holes we have dug with entrenching tools. The holes are little graves and hold the rich, damp odor of the grave.
The monsoon rain is cold and heavy and is thrown all over the place by the wind. The wind has power. The wind roars, hisses, whispers seductively. The wind claws at the shelters we have constructed with ponchos and nylon cord and scraps of bamboo.
Raindrops thump my poncho like pebbles falling into a broken drum. Half asleep, my face pressed into my gear, I listen to the sounds of the horror that is everywhere, buried just beneath the surface of the earth. In my dreams of blood I make love to a skeleton. Bones click, the earth moves, my testicles explode.
Shrapnel bites my shelter. I wake up. I listen to the fading drone of the B-52's. I listen to the breathing of my squad of brothers, nightmare men in the dark.
Outside our wire an enemy grunt is screaming at invisible airplanes that have killed him.
I try to dream something beautiful.... My grandmother sits in a rocking chair on her front porch shooting Viet Cong who have stepped on her roses. She drinks the blood of a dragon from a black Coca-Cola bottle while Goring my mother with fat white breasts nurses me and drives Germany on and on, his words cut from the armor plate of a tank....
I sleep on steel, my face on a pillow of blood. I bayonet teddy bear and I snore. Bad dreams are something you ate. So sleep, you mother.
The wind roars up under my shelter and rips the poncho off its bamboo frame, snapping the lines that secured it. Rain falls on me like a wave of icy black water.
An angry voice drifts in from beyond the wire. An enemy sergeant is saying dirty words I don't understand. An enemy sergeant has stumbled over a dead man in the dark....
Night patrol.
In the predawn sky a little metal star goes nova--an illumination round.
Eating an early breakfast in the red slime of a slit trench at Khe Sanh. Yesterday I made myself a new stove by punching air holes into an empty C's can. Inside the stove, C-4 plastic explosive glows like a fragment of brimstone. Ham and mothers pop and bubble in another olive-drab can while I mix and stir with a white plastic spoon.
On the horizon, orange tracers stitch the night. Puff the Magic Dragon, "Spooky", a C-47 flying electric Gatling gun, is pouring three hundred rounds per minute into some gook's wet dreams.
Taste the ham and lima beans. Hot. Greasy. Smells like pig ****. With my bayonet I lift the full can off the stove. I anchor the can in red mud. I balance my mess cup over the flame and pour in a packet of powdered cocoa and then half a canteen of spring water. With some slack, hot chocolate dilutes the sour aftertaste of halazone purification tablets.
A Viet Cong rat attacks. Obviously, he intends to bring my breakfast under the influence of Communism.
This is a rat I know personally, so I cut him some slack and do not set him on fire with lighter fluid the way my bros and I have done with his relatives. I stomp my foot and the rat retreats into a shadow.
In the light of the flare my bros in the Lusthog Squad of Delta One-Five look like pale lizards. My bros look up at me with lizard eyes. No slack. I gave them the finger. Their lizard eyes click back to their poker cards.
From his new strategic position, the Viet Cong rat stares back to assert his principles.
The illumination flare trembles, freezes Khe Sanh into a faded daguerreotype. Look at all the junk of modern war spilled across our dusty citadel, look at how bearded grunts hang on while the world spins and gravity cheats, look at the concrete bones of an old French outpost (patrolled at night by the ghosts of dead Legionnaires and by the Mongol horsemen of Genghis Khan)--see how the broken walls of the outpost are like rotting teeth, look out beyond our wire at a thousand acres of blasted moonscape, feel the cold hard terror and the calm of it.
During the past three months the rocky terrain around Khe Sanh has been pounded with the greatest volume of explosives in the history of war. Two hundred million pounds of bombs and whole catalogues of other weapons have torn and plowed the sterile red earth, have shattered boulders, have splintered and chewed the stumps of trees, have pockmarked the deck with craters big enough to be graves for tanks.
The flare floats down beneath a miniature parachute, swaying and squeaking, dripping sparks and hissing, until it hits the wire. Illumination dissolves.
In the darkness I am one with Khe Sanh--a living cell of this place--this erupted pimple of sandbags and barbed wire on a bleak plateau surrounded by the end of the world. In my guts I know that my body is one of the components of gristle and muscle and bone of Khe Sanh, a small American community pounded daily by one-hundred-and-fifty-two-millimeter artillery pieces firing from caves eleven kilometers away on Co Roc Ridge in Laos, pounded by fifteen hundred shells a day, pounded, pounded, pounded with brain-numbing regularity, an anthill beneath a sledgehammer.
Today I am feeling extra fine--I'm short. Twenty-two days and a wake-up left in country.
The Viet Cong rat crouches on a sandbag an inch from my elbow. I bend over and put his share of ham and mothers on the toe of my boot. The rat watches me with black bead eyes. Rats are little but they're smart. After the rat is satisfied I can be trusted, he jumps off the sandbag and into the slit trench. He hops up onto the toe of my boot. Eating, his cheeks are fat. He looks so very bad; he's beautiful.
Roll call.


The squad files out through the wire. We do not joke with the drowsy sentries who stand lines in bunkers constructed with sandbags and logs from the jungle and sheets of galvanized tin. We ignore the hundreds of grunts from the 26th Marine Regiment who are sprawled along the perimeter, ready to move out on Operation Gold. Our squad is walking point for a battalion. We ignore Claymore mines, rust-eaten Coca-Cola cans hung on the concertina wire with pebbles in them, red aluminum triangles with MINES and MIN stenciled on them, trenches full of garbage, catholes full of fly-sprinkled turds, and heaps of brass from our howitzers.
This time we do not salute Sorry Charlie. Sorry Charlie is a skull, charred black. Our gunner, Animal Mother, mounted the skull on a stake in the kill zone. We think that it's the skull of an enemy grunt who got napalmed outside our wire. Sorry Charlie is still wearing my old black felt Mousketeer ears, which are getting a little moldy. I wired the ears onto Sorry Charlie for a joke. As we hump by, I stare into the hollow eye sockets. I wait for a white spider to emerge. The dark, clean face of death smiles at us with his charred teeth, his inflexible ivory grin. Sorry Charlie always smiles at us as though he knows a funny secret. For sure, he knows more than we do.
Back on the hill, resupply choppers wop-wop down to earth like monster grasshoppers while mortar shells rip up the steel carpet of the airstrip.
We lock and load.
Our minds sink into our feet.
On a stump inside the treeline someone has nailed a scrap of ammo crate with crude letters that are black through the ground fog: ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER HERE. We do not laugh. Our eyes stay on the trail. We have seen the sign a hundred times and believe it.
We meet some guys from India Three-Five humping down from their night ambushes. Scuttlebutt is, nobody got in the ****. No VC. No NVA. Outstanding, we all agree. Decent, we say, and we ask them if any of their sisters put out. They offer to buy us free beer if we promise to pee down our legs and we're to be sure and write if we need any help.
Dawn.


We come to the last two-man listening post. Cowboy waves his hand and Alice takes the point.
Alice is a black colossus, an African wild man with a sweat rag of green parachute silk tied around his head; no helmet. He wears a vest he has made from the skin of a Bengal tiger he wasted one night on Hill 881.
continued.......

[thedrifter]

He wears a necklace of Voodoo bones--chicken bones from New Orleans. He calls himself "Alice" because his favorite record album is Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant. Cowboy calls Alice "The Midnight Buccaneer" because Alice wears a gold ring in his left ear. Animal Mother calls Alice "The Ace of Spades" because Alice sticks poker cards between the teeth of his confirmed kills. And I call Alice "Jungle Bunny" because it mocks Alice's truly savage nature.
Alice has a blue canvas shopping bag slung over his shoulder. The blue canvas shopping bag is filled with foul-smelling gook feet. Alice collects enemy soldiers; he shoots them dead, then chops their feet off.
All clear, says Alice with a hand signal. Alice's hands are protected by pigskin gloves. He hacks the jungle with his machete.
Cowboy waves his hand and we move along the trail, Indian-file.
Cowboy steps off the trail, jabs his gray Marine-issue glasses with his forefinger. In the gray glasses Cowboy does not look like a killer, but like a reporter for a high school newspaper, which he was, less than a year ago.


Humping in the rain forest is like climbing a stairway of **** in an enormous green room constructed by ogres for the confinement of monster plants. Birth and death are endless processes here, with new life feeding on the decaying remains of the old. The black earth is cool and damp and the oversized greenery is beaded with moisture, yet the air is thick and hot because the triple canopy holds in the humidity. The canopy of interwoven branches is so thick that sunlight filters through only in pale, infrequent shafts like those in Sunday-school pictures of Jesus talking to God.
Beneath mountains like the black teeth of dragons we hump. We hump on a woodcutter's trail, up slopes of peanut butter, over moss-blemished boulders, into God's green furnace, into the hostile terrain of Indian country.
Thorny underbrush claws our sweaty jungle utilities and our bandoliers and our sixty-pound field packs and our twelve-pound Durolon flak jackets and our three-pound camouflaged helmets and our six-and-a-half pound fiberglass and steel automatic rifles. Limp sabers of elephant grass slice into hands and cheeks. Creepers trip us and tear at our ankles. Pack straps rub blisters on our shoulders and salty water wiggles in dirty worm trails down our necks and faces. Insects eat our skin, leeches drink our blood, snakes try to bite us, and even the monkeys throw rocks.
We hump, werewolves in the jungle, sweating 3.2 beer, ready, willing, and able to grab wily Uncle Ho by his inscrutable balls and never let go. But our real enemy is the jungle. God made this jungle for Marines. God has a hard-on for Marines because we kill everything we see. No slack. He plays his games; we play ours. To show our appreciation for so much omnipotent attention we keep Heaven packed with fresh souls.


Hours pass. Many, many of them. We don't know what time it is anymore. In the jungle there is no time. Black is green; green is black--we don't even know if it's night or day.
Cowboy strides up and down our line of march. He reminds us to maintain ten yards between each man. Frequently he stops to check his compass and acetate map.
We hurt. We ignore the pain. We wait for the pain to become monotonous; it does.
Our New Guy sweats and stumbles and looks like he could get lost looking for a place to ****. A heat casualty for sure. The New Guy eats pink salt tablets like a kid eating jelly beans, then gulps hot Kool-Aid from his canteen.
Monotony. Everything samey-same--trees, vines like dead snakes, leafy plants. The sameness leaves us unmoored.
The ****-you lizards greet us: "**** you...**** you..."
A cockatoo laughs, invisible, laughs as though he knows a funny secret.
We hump up rocky ravines and I can hear Gunny Sergeant Gerheim bellowing at Private Leonard Pratt on Parris Island: The only way to reach any objective is by taking one step at a time. That's all. Just one step. One more. One more. One more
One more.
We think about things we will do after we rotate back to the World, about silly high-school capers we pulled before we were sucked up into the Crotch, about hunger and thirst, about R & R in Hong Kong and Australia, about how we are all becoming Coca-Cola junkies, about picking popcorn kernels out of our teeth at the drive-in movie with ol' Mary Jane Rottencrotch, about the excuses we'll have to invent for not writing home, and especially and particularly about the numbers of days left on each of our short-timer's calendars.
We think about things that aren't important so that we won't think about fear--about the fear of pain, of being maimed, of that half-expected thud of an antipersonnel mine or the punch of a sniper's bullet, or about loneliness, which is, in the long run, more dangerous, and, in some ways, hurts more. We lock our minds onto yesterday, where the pain and loneliness have been censored, and on tomorrow, from which pain and loneliness have been conveniently deleted, and most of all, we locks our minds into our feet, which have developed a life and a mind of their own.
Hold. Alice raises his right hand.
The squad stops, now, within rifle shot of the DMZ.
Cowboy flexes the fingers of his right hand as though cupping a breast. Booby trap?
Alice shrugs. Just cool it, man.
Our survival hangs on our sniper bait's reflexes and judgment. Alice's eyes can detect green catgut trip wires, bouncing betty prongs, tiny plungers, loose soil, crushed plants, footprints, fragments of packaging debris, and even the fabled punji pits. Alice's ears can lock onto unnatural silences, the faint rattle of equipment, the thump of a mortar shell leaving the tube, or the snap of a rifle bolt coming home. Experience and animal instincts warn Alice when a small, badly concealed booby trap has been set on the trail for easy detection so that we will be diverted off the trail into a more terrible one. Alice knows that most of the casualties we take are from booby traps and that in Viet Nam almost every booby trap is designed so that the victim is his own executioner. He knows what the enemy likes to do, where he likes to set ambushes, where snipers hide. Alice knows the warning signals that the enemy leaves for his friends--the strips of black cloth, the triangles os bamboo, the arrangements of stones.
Alice really understands the shrewd race of men who fight for survival in this garden of darkness--hard soldiers, strange, diminutive phantoms with iron insides, brass balls, incredible courage, and no scruples at all. They look small, but they fight tall, and their bullets are the same size as ours.
A lot of Marines who choose to walk point have death wishes--that's the scuttlebutt. Some guys want to be heroes and if you walk point and are still alive at the end of the patrol then you are a hero. Some guys who walk point hate themselves so much that they don't care what they do and don't care what is done to them. But Alice walks point because Alice thrives on being out front. Sure I'm scared, he told me one night after we'd smoked about a ton of dope, but I try not to show it. What Alice needs are those moments when he can see into what he calls the "beyond."
Alice freezes. His right hand closes into a fist: Danger.
All of Alice's senses open up. He waits. Invisible birds scatter from tree to tree. Alice grins, sheathes his machete, lifts his M-79 grenade launcher to his shoulder. The "blooper" is like a toy shotgun, comically small.
Ancient trees stand silent, a jade cathedral of mahogany columns two hundred feet high, roots entwined, branches interwoven, with thick, scaly vines roped around solid trunks.
Adrenaline gives us a high.
Alice shrugs, lowers his weapon, gives us his usual thumbs-up, all clear; as if to say, I'm so cool that even my errors are correct.
Cowboy's right hand slices the air again, and we all shift our gear to less painful positions and move out, grumbling, *****ing. Our thoughts drift back into erect-nipple wet dreams about Mary Jane Rottencrotch and the Great Homecoming **** Fantasy, back into blinking black and white home movies of events that did not happen quite the way we choose to remember them, back into bright watercolor visions of that glorious rotation date circled in red on all of our short-timer's calendars--different dates--but with the same significance: Home.
Alice hesitates. His gloved hand reaches out and plucks an oversized yellow orchid from a swirl of vines. Standing to attention, Alice inserts the thick, juicy stem into a leather loop on his ammo vest, the skin of a Bengal tiger. In rows of loops across the front of the vest hang two dozen M-79 grenade rounds.
Alice's blue canvas shopping bag is slung over his shoulder. The bag is tattooed with graffiti, autographs, obscene doodles, and a scoreboard of stick men recording Alice's seventeen confirmed kills. On the blue canvas shopping bag are fading black block letters: Lusthogs Delta 1/5 We Deal in Death and Yea, though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the evil and, in crisp new letters: DON'T SHOOT--I'M SHORT and a helmet on a pair of boots.
As he humps down the narrow trail, Alice hums, You can get anything you want...at Alice's Restaurant...
Cowboys stops, turns around, sweeps a muddy pearl-gray Stetson off his head.
"Break," he says.
Green Marines in the green machine, we sit beside the trail.
continued........

[thedrifter]

"I got to souvenir me an NVA belt buckle," says Donlon, our radioman. "The silver kind with a star. Go home with something decent or the civilians will think I was a poge, punching a typewriter. I mean, I'm short--thirty-nine days and a wake-up."
I say, "That's not short. Twenty-two days and a wake-up. Count them."
"That ain't short," says Animal Mother. "Alice is short."
Alice brags: "Twelve days and a wake-up left in country, ladies. Count 'em. I am a short-timers, no doubt about it. Why, I'm so short that every time I put on my socks I blindfold myself."
I grunt, "That's not short-enough, Jungle Bunny. The Doc is beaucoup short. Nine days and a wake-up. Right, Doc? You a single-digit midget?"
Doc Jay is chewing a mouthful of canned peaches. "I got to extend again."
Nobody says anything. Doc Jay won't be allowed to extend again. Doc Jay has been in Viet Nam for two years, treating major wounds with minor medical training. Doc Jay wants to save all of the wounded, even those killed in action and buried months ago. Every night dead Marines beg him to come into their graves. A week ago, our company commander picked up a football that was lying on the trail. The football blew him in half. Doc Jay tried to tie the captain back together with compress bandages. It didn't work. Doc Jay started giggling like a kid watching cartoons.
"I'm going to extend, too!" says the New Guy as he shoves his Italian sunglasses up onto his forehead. "Do you guys--?"
"Oh, screw yourself, New Guy," says Animal Mother, not looking up. Mother is holding his M-60 machine gun in his lap and is massaging the black vanadium steel with a white cloth. "You ain't been in country a week and already you're saltier than ****. You ain't been born yet, New Guy. Wait until you got a little T.I., candy ass, and then I may allow you to speak. Yeah, a little ****ing time in."
"Gung ho!" I say, grinning.
Animal Mother says, "**** you, Joker." He starts breaking down the machine gun.
I blow Mother a kiss. Animal Mother is a swine, no doubt about it, but he's also big and mean; he inspires a certain tolerance.
"Joker thinks he has an outstanding program," Mother tells the New Guy. "Going to Hollywood after he rotates back to the World. If I don't waste him first. Going to be Paul ****ing Newman. My ass." Animal Mother pulls out a deck of poker cards. The cards are dog-eared and greasy and have photographs of Tijuana *****s on them. The Tijuana *****s are establishing meaningful relationships with donkeys and big dogs.
Animal Mother deals draw poker hands to himself and to the New Guy.
The New Guy hesitates, then scrapes up his cards.
Animal Mother unbuckles his field pack and pulls out a brown plastic rack of poker chips--red, white, and blue. Mother takes a stack of plastic chips from the rack and drops them on the deck in front of the New Guy. "Where are you from, you little ****?"
"Texas, sir."
"Sir, my ass. This ain't P.I. and there ain't no way I'm gonna be no ****ing officer. Never happen. Ain't even the assistant squad leader anymore. Now I'm a private--the most popular rank in the Marine Corps. Got more ****ing ops, more confirmed kills, and more T.I. than any grunt in this squad--including Cowboy." Animal Mother spits, scratches the dark stubble on his chin. "Flipped a bird to a poge colonel at the big PX on Freedom Hill. Got me busted from sergeant. I was the ****ing platoon sergeant. No slack. Just like back in the World. Back in Queens I took me a ride in this Lincoln Continental. It was a beautiful machine. The judge gave me a choice between the Crotch and hard time in a stone hotel. So I became a mercenary. I should have gone to prison, New Guy. There's less humping." Animal Mother grins. "So don't call me that 'sir' ****. Save that lifer **** for poges like the Joker."
I grin. "Hey, Mother, I'm big but I'm wiry..."
Animal Mother says, "Yeah, I know, you're so tough you bite the heads off animal crackers." Animal Mother turns to Cowboy: "Hey, Lone Ranger, they got your little sister in the Crotch. Here she sits, a lean Marine in the green machine." Turning back to the New Guy: "Our honcho is from Texas, too, little maggot. Dallas. He wears that Stetson so the gooks will see that they are dealing with a real Texan lawman."
Cowboy chews. "Play poker, Mother." Cowboy picks up a B-3 unit, a little can containing John Wayne cookies, cocoa, and pineapple jam. Cowboy cuts open the can with a little P-38 folding can opener on his dogtag chain. "I won't say it again."
Silence.
"Yeah, okay, you don't have to get hard. What are you going to do--send me to Viet Nam? Cut me some slack, Cowboy. You ain't John Wayne. You just eat the cookies."
Animal Mother grunts. "Bet a buck." He drops a red chip. He puts his cards facedown on the deck and continues to massage his disassembled machine gun with the white cloth. "New Guy, you just better not be no hero. Lifers get glory; grunts get killed. Like ol' Rafter Man. Went hand to hand with a tank. And Crazy Earl; shot gooks with a BB gun. Last New Guy we had sat down on a bouncing betty his first day in the bush. Rotated straight to hell. Blew away six good grunts. KIA and tough titty to you, ma. I got shrapnel through my nose..." Animal Mother leans forward and shows the New Guy his nose. "Worst part about it was that little maggot owed me five bucks--"
Alice spits. "You got to run them sea stories?"
Animal Mother ignores Alice and says, "This is no ****, New Guy. Stoke, our old honcho, thought he was Supergrunt. Got the thousand-yard stare. Every time he saw a dead Marine he'd start laughing. Pulled a tour of duty in a rubber room. He--"
Alice stands up. "Stow that Mickey Mouse ****, Mother. You hear me?"
Animal Mother doesn't look up. He says, "Thank God for sickle cell."
Alice scratches his chest. "No racists in a foxhole, Mother. New Guy, you'll do fine. No sweat."
"Sure," says Animal Mother. "Just watch me. Do what I do. These guys will tell you that I am a monster, but I'm the only grunt in this squad that doesn't have his head up his ass. In this world of ****, monsters live forever and everybody else dies. If you kill for fun, you're a sadist. If you kill for money, you're a mercenary. If you kill for both, you're a Marine."
"Yes, sir," says the New Guy, dropping two chips into the pot.
"I'm horny," I say. "I can't even get a piece of hand."
Animal Mother groans. "That was real funny, Joker. I don't get it." He drops two chips, then three more. "I raise you three bucks. Dealer takes two cards."
The New Guy says, "I'll take three cards. And I'm not a hero. Just want to do my job. You know, defend freedom--"
"**** freedom," says Animal Mother. Animal Mother starts reassembling the M-60. He kisses each piece before snapping it back into place. "Flush out your headgear, New Guy. You think we waste gooks for freedom? Don't kid yourself; this is a slaughter. You're got to open your eyes, New Guy--you owe it to yourself. If I'm gonna get my balls shot off for a word I get to pick my own word and my word is poontang. Yeah, you better believe we zap zipperheads. They waste our bros and we cut them a big piece of payback. And payback is a mother****er."
"Why talk about it?" asks Donlon. "The Nam can kill me, but it can't make me care. I just want to get back to the land of the Big PX in one piece. I owe it to myself."
"Why go back?" I ask. "Here or there, samey-same. Home is where my sergeant is--right, Cowboy?" I turn and look at Animal Mother. "You watch Cowboy, New Guy. Cowboy will tell you what to do."
"Yeah," says Donlon, plucking a pack of cigarettes from the elastic band around his helmet. "Cowboy takes this **** seriously."
Cowboy grunts. "Just doing my job, bro, just counting my days." He smiles. "You know what I did back in the World? After school, I shucked pennies out of parking meters. I had a red wagon to pour the pennies in, and I had a blue cap with a silver badge on it. I thought I was hot ****. Now all I want is a ranch with some horses..."
Animal Mother says, "Well some ****s smell really bad, and Viet Nam smells really bad, so I say, fVck it. And **** the lifers who invented it."
"I hear you talking," I say. "I see your lips move. But we all brown-nose the lifers..."
"That's an amen," says Alice, up the trail. He swats a mosquito away from his face. "We talk the talk, but we don't walk the walk."
Donlon glares at me. "So who the hell are you? Mahatma Gandhi?" Donlon aims an index finger at me. "You're honcho of the first fire team, Joker. That makes you the assistant squad leader. So you're no different. You just like to feel superior."
"****."
"I wouldn't sh!t you, Joker. You're my favorite turd."
"Fvck...you..."
continued........

[thedrifter]

"Quiet, Joker," says Cowboy. "Somebody's mother might be hiding in the bush and you're talking dirty. Keep it in the family, okay?"
"Yes. That's affirmative, Cowboy." I look at Donlon. "When Cowboy gives me the order I'll eat the boogers out of a dead man's nose. I ain't got the guts to rot in Portsmouth. I admit it. But I don't give orders. I--"
"Bull****," says Donlon. "You and your ****ing peace symbol. Why do you wear that thing? You're here, same as us. You're no better than we are."
"Look," I say, trying not to lose my temper, "Maybe the Crotch can **** me, but I won't spread my own cheeks."
Animal Mother interrupts: "You ain't got a hair on your ass."
My lips are trembling. "Okay, Mother, you can just eat the peanuts out of my ****. I'm not the author of this farce, I'm just acting out my role. It's bad luck to wear green on stage but the war must go on. If God had wanted me to be a Marine I'd have been born with green, baggy skin. You got that?"
Nobody says anything.
I say, "I'm just a snuffy. A corporal. I don't send anybody out to get blown away. I know that getting killed over here is a waste of time."
I stand up. I take three steps toward Animal Mother. "You be gung ho, Mother. You give the orders." I take another step. "But not me!"
Nobody says anything.
Finally the New Guy says softly, "Bet a buck."
Animal Mother looks at me, then starts dropping his chips into the pot one at a time. "Call...raise you..." Counting...counting. "Five bucks."
The New Guy thinks about it. "I call."
"Oh, Jesus H. Christ!" Animal Mother slaps his cards down hard, bending them. "Number ten! I ain't got ****."
The New Guy says, "Three jacks." He flashes his cards and rakes up the pot.
"Hey, Mother," says Donlon, laughing, "that was humble."
Alice says, "You sure bluffed out the New Guy."
I say, "Lose a few, lose a few--right, Mother?"
Mother tries to be cool about it. "I couldn't fold, could I? Had over four bucks in the pot. I thought the New Guy would fold. Most people are afraid of me..."
Donlon laughs again. "Your program is squared away, New Guy. What's your name?"
"Parker," says the New Guy, smiling. "Name's Parker. Henry. People call me Hank."
The New Guy counts his chips. "Animal Mother, you owe me nine and a half bucks."
Animal Mother grunts.
I say, still standing, "Lose a few, lose a few--right, Mother?"
"Who ****ing asked you, Joker? You're funny enough to be a lifer."
"Yeah? Well, when I'm a civilian first class and you're a bonehead funny gunny I'll buy you a beer and then I'll kick your ass." I sit down.
Cowboy grins. "You can buy me a beer, too, Joker. But you'll have to wait until I'm twenty-one."
Down the trail, someone laughs very loud. I say, "Hey, belay that noise. I'm making all the noise for this squad."
Lance Corporal Stutten, honcho of the first fire team, gives me the finger. Then he turns to the guy who laughed--a skinny redneck named Harris--and says, "Shut the **** up, Harris."
Animal Mother says, "Yeah, Harris, obey General Joker."
I say, "I'm ready to jump on your program, you ****ing ape..."
"So eat this monkey turd and choke on it, poge." Animal Mother spits. "You just can't hack--"
And then I'm on my feet, my K-bar in my hand. There's hot saliva on my lips and as I hold the big jungle knife inches from Animal Mother's face I'm snarling like an animal. "Okay, you son-of-a-*****, I'm gonna cut your ****ing eyes out..."
Animal Mother looks at me, then at the blade of my K-bar, then at Cowboy. His hand moves to his M-60.
Cowboy continues to eat. "Stow that pig-sticker, Joker. You know how I feel about that Mickey Mouse ****. Now get your head and your ass wired together or--"
"No way, Cowboy. Never happen. He's been on my--"
Cowboy jabs at his glasses. "Didn't ask to run a rifle squad in this **** tube war...but I will break your back, if that's the way you play..."
Donlon whistles. "Cowboy's--"
Cowboy says, "Shut up, Donlon."
I relax a little bit and then I slip my K-bar back into its leather sheath. "Yeah, yeah, I guess all this humping has given me diarrhea of the mouth."
Cowboy shurgs. "No sweat, Joker." Cowboy stands up. "Okay, ladies, stow the pogey bait. Let's saddle up. Moving."
"Moving" is repeated down the trail.
I struggle into my gear. "Hey, Animal Mother, I wasn't really going to waste you. It's just that I'm well, you know, a trained killer. Cut me a huss with my pack..."
Animal Mother shrugs and helps me into my NVA rucksack. Then I help him put on his field pack. I say, "Now you buy me Saigon tea?" Mother sneers. I blow him a kiss. "No sweat, maleen, I love you too much." Mother spits.
Cowboy waves his hand and Alice takes the point.
I say, "Break a leg, Jungle Bunny."
Alice gives me the finger. Then he raises his right fist and throws power. On the blue canvas shopping bag slung on Alice's back is the warning: If you can read this your too dam close.
Cowboy waves his hand and the squad moves out.
My gear feels like a bag of rocks, heavier than before.
Animal Mother tells Parker, the New Guy. "Don't follow me too close, New Guy. If you step on a mine I don't want to get ****ed up."
Parker steps back.
As is my custom, I salute Animal Mother so that any snipers in the area will assume that he is an officer and shoot him instead of me. I have become a little paranoid since I painted a red bull's-eye on the top of my helmet.
Animal Mother returns my salute, then spits, then grins. "You sure are funny, you son-of-a-*****. You're a real comedian."
"Sorry 'bout that," I say.
Searching for something we don't want to find, we hump. And hump. And when we're so bone-sore tired that our minds sever contact with our bodies, we hump even faster, green phantoms in the twilight.
From somewhere, from everywhere, an almost inaudible snap.
A bird goes insane. One bird sputters overhead. And a great weight of birds shift across the canopy.
Alice stands rigid and listens. He raises his right hand and closes it into a fist. Danger.
I slump forward. My body is aching with all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is hear to after every fiber of every muscle is begging you to stop but you choose to overrule such objections by a force of will stronger than muscle, bullying your body into taking one more step, one more step, just one more step...
Cowboy thinks about it. Then he says, "Hit it."
Wavering forms crumple to the deck as Cowboy's order is echoed from man to man back down the trail.
I say to Cowboy, "Bro, I was hoping a sniper would ding me so I'd have an excuse to fall down. I mean, I think I'm going to hate this movie..."
Cowboy is watching Alice. "Cut the ****, Joker."
Kneeling, Alice studies the few yards of trail he can see before it's swallowed by leathery, dark green jungle plants. Alice studies the treetops, too, for a long time. "It's not right, bro."
I say, "That's affirm, Cowboy. All my crabs are screaming, 'Abandon ship! Abandon ship!'"
Cowboy ignores me, keeps his eyes on Alice. "We got to move, Midnight."
The jungle is silent except for the squeak-squeak of a canteen being unscrewed.
"Hurry up and wait. Hurry up and wait." Alice wipes the sweat from his eyes. "All I want to do is make it back to the hill so I can smoke about one ton of dope. I mean, are you sure this is safe? I...wait...I heard something."
Silence.
"A bird," says Cowboy. "Or a branch falling. Or--"
Alice shakes his head. "Maybe. Maybe. Or maybe a rifle bolt going home."
Cowboy's voice is stern: "You're paranoid, Midnight. No gooks here. Not for maybe another four or five klicks. We got to keep moving or we'll give the gooks time to set up an ambush in front of us. You know that..."
Donlon crawls over to Cowboy, handset at his ear. "Hey, Lone Ranger, the old man wants a report on our position."
"Let's move, Midnight. I mean it."
Alice rolls his eyes. "Feets, get movin'." Alice takes one step forward, then hesitates. "I can remember when I've had more fun."
I say in my John Wayne voice: "Viet Nam is giving war a bad name."
Daddy D.A., who's walking tail-end Charlie, calls out: "HEY, MR. VIET NAM WAR, WE HOMESTEADING?"
Cowboy says, "Everybody shut the **** up."
Alice shrugs, mumbles, takes another step forward. "Cowboy, m'man, maybe old soldiers never die, but young ones do. It ain't easy being the black Errol Flynn, you know. I mean, if I don't get the Congressional Medal of Honor for all the crazy **** I do, I am going to send Mr. L.B.J. an eight-by-ten photo of my black bee-hind with a caption on the back, telling him what it is..."
Alice, the point man, moves out. He ditty-bops into a little clearing. "I mean--"
Bang.
The crack of an SKS sniper's carbine jolts Alice into a rigid position of attention. His mouth opens. He turns to speak to us. His eyes cry out.
contimued...........

[thedrifter]

Alice falls. <br />
&quot;HIT IT!&quot; <br />
Falling forward--now... <br />
&quot;Oh, no...&quot; Black earth. <br />
Dead leaves. &quot;ALICE!&quot; <br />
&quot;What...?&quot; Damp. Bleeding elbows. <br />
&quot;MIDNIGHT!&quot; <br />
Looking, not...

[thedrifter]

Cowboy says in a low voice: "Never turn your back on Mother. Never cut him any slack. He fragged Mr. Shortround."
I say, "What about you, Cowboy? I mean, if you get yourself wasted who will introduce me to your sister?"
Cowboy looks at me. His face is without expression. "I don't have a sister. I thought you knew that." Cowboy looks at Doc and Alice and the New Guy. "Mother's right. I've got to try. The sniper will see you pulling back and--"
"Hey, never happen. **** it. You can't do anything."
"Move them out, Joker. By the numbers."
"But Cowboy, I--"
"It's my job," Cowboy says. "It's my job...." Cowboy says, as though his guts are choking him. Then: "Okay?"
I hesitate.
"Okay, bro?"
"Sure, Cowboy. I'll get them all back to the hill in one piece. I promise."
Cowboy relaxes. "Thanks, Joker." He grins. "You piece of ****."
Donlon yells: "LOOK!"
Doc Jay has the New Guy across his lap. The New Guy's face is purple. Doc Jay is kissing the New Guy's purple lips in an attempt to breathe life back into the limp body. The New Guy squirms, claws for air. Doc Jay holds the New Guy down, zips out his K-bar, cuts the New Guy's throat. Air whistles in through the crude incision, blows pink bubbles in the New Guy's blood. The New Guy bucks, wheezes, coughs. Doc Jay spills his Unit One, paws through splints, compress bandages, white tape. Then, frantic, he empties his pockets. The Doc throws everything away until he finds a ball-point pen. He stares at the ball-point pen, draws his hand back to throw the pen away, stops, looks again, unscrews the pen, inserts the biggest piece into the hole in the New Guy's throat. The New Guy sucks in air, breathes irregularly through the small plastic tube. Doc Jay puts the New Guy down on the deck, gently.
Bang.
Doc Jay's right ear is split. Cautiously, the Doc touches the side of his head, feels wet, jagged meat.
Bang.
A bullet cuts off Doc Jay's nose.
Bang.
A bullet passes through Doc Jay's cheeks. He coughs, spits up uprooted teeth and pieces of his gums.
Animal Mother snarls, fires his machine gun into the canopy.
"Get them back," Cowboy says. He drops his Stetson and Mr. Shortround's shotgun. He pops another smoke grenade, lobs it in. He jerks Mr. Shortround's pistol from his shoulder holster. And before I can tell Cowboy that a pistol is useless in the jungle he punches me on the shoulder like a kid and runs, feinting as wildly as the narrow trail allows.
We wait.
I know that I should be getting the squad on its feet, but I too am hypnotized.
From nowhere and from everywhere comes the sound of something laughing. We all rubberneck to see who aming us is so stone-cold hard that he is enjoying a world of **** like this.
The sniper is laughing at us.
We try to pinpoint the sniper's position. But the source of the laughter is all around us. The laughter seems to radiate from the jungle floor, from the jade trees, from the monster plants, from within our own bodies.
As the dark laughter draws the blood from my veins I see something. My eyes try to focus on a shadow. Sweat stings my eyes, blurs my vision. And I see Sorry Charlie, a black skull, perched on a branch, and then I understand that only a sniper that does not fear death would reveal his position by laughing....
I squint. I strain my eyes. The laughing skull fades into a shadow.
Today I am a sergeant of Marines.
I laugh and laugh. The squad freezes with fear because the sniper is laughing with me. The sniper and I are laughing together and we know that sooner or later the squad will be laughing, too.
Sooner or later the squad will surrender to the black design of the jungle. We live by the law of the jungle, which is that more Marines go in than come out. There it is. Nobody asks us why we're smiling because nobody wants to know. The ugly that civilians choose to see in war focuses on spilled guts. To see human beings clearly, that is ugly. To carry death in your smile, that is ugly. War is ugly because the truth can be ugly and war is very sincere. Ugly is the face of Victor Charlie, the shapeless black face of death touching each of your brothers with the clean stroke of justice.
Those of us who survive to be short-timers will fly the Freedom Bird back to hometown America. But home won't be there anymore and we won't be there either. Upon each of our brains the war has lodged itself, a black crab feeding.
The jungle is quiet now. The sniper has stopped laughing.
The squad is silent, waiting for orders. Soon they will understand. Soon they won't be afraid. The dark side will surface and they'll be like me; they'll be Marines.
Once a Marine, always a Marine.


Cowboy stumbles into the clearing.
"We're moving," I say, more to Mother than anyone.
Mother ignores me, watches Cowboy.
Bang. Right leg.
Bang. Left leg. Cowboy falls.
Bang. The bullet rips open Cowboy's trousers at the crotch. "No...." Cowboy feels for his balls. He ****s on himself.
Animal Mother takes a step.
Before I can make a move to stop Animal Mother a pistol pops in the clearing.
Bang.
Then: Bang.
Donlon: "HE KILLED DOC JAY AND THE NEW GUY!"
Cowboy shakes himself to stay conscious. Then he shoots Alice through the back of the head.
Bang. Alice's face is blown off by the forty-five caliber bullet. Alice flops as though electrocuted.
Cowboy raises the pistol and presses the huge barrel to his right temple.
Bang.
The pistol falls.
The sniper has put a bullet through the center of Cowboy's right hand.
The squad bunches up behind the boulder again. I study the dirty faces of all my bearded children: Animal Mother, Donlon, Lance Corporal Stutten, Berny, Harris, Rick Berg, Hand-Job, Thunder, The Kid from Brooklyn, Hardy, Liccardi, and Daddy D.A.
"Stutten, take your people back."
Lance Corporal Stutten looks at Animal Mother, takes a step toward him. The squad is going to follow Mother and commit suicide for a tradition.
Mother checks his M-60. His face is wet with tears, Viking-wild, red with rage. "We'll go for Cowboy, give the sniper too many targets. We can save him."
I take a step into Animal Mother's path.
Animal Mother raises his weapon. He holds the M-60 waist high. His eyes are red. He growls deep in his throat. "This ain't no Hollywood movie, Joker. Stand down or I will cut you in half..."
I look into Animal Mother's eyes. I look into the eyes of a killer. He means it. I know that he means it. I turn my back on him.
Animal Mother is going to waste me. The barrel of the M-60 probes my back.
The squad is silent, waiting for orders.
I raise my grease gun and I aim it at Cowboy's face. Cowboy looks pitiful and he's terrified. Cowboy is paralyzed by the shock that is setting in and by the helplessness. I hardly know him. I remember the first time I saw Cowboy, on Parris Island, laughing, beating his Stetson on his thigh.
I look at him. He looks at the grease gun. He calls out: "I NEVER LIKED YOU, JOKER. I NEVER THOUGHT YOU WERE FUNNY--"
Bang. I sight down the short metal tube and I watch my bullet enter Cowboy's left eye. My bullet passes through his eye socket, punches through fluid-filled sinus cavities, through membranes, nerves, arteries, muscle tissue, through the tiny blood vessels that feed three pounds of gray butter-soft high protein meat where brain cells arranged like jewels in a clock hold every thought and memory and dream of one adult male Homo sapiens.
My bullet exits through the occipital bone, knocks out hairy, brain-wet clods of jagged meat, then buries itself in the roots of a tree.
Silence. Animal Mother lowers his M-60.
Animal Mother, Donlon, Lance Corporal Stutten, Harris, and the other guys in the squad do not speak. Everyone relaxes, glad to be alive. Everyone hates my guts, but they know I'm right. I am their sergeant; they are my men. Cowboy was killed by sniper fire, they'll say, but they'll never see me again; I'll be invisible.
"Saddle up," I say, and the squad responds. Packs are hefted up. The flap and rattle of equipment. A grunt, a growl, and the Lusthog Squad is ready to move.
I study their faces. Then I say, "Man-oh-man, Cowboy looks like a bag of leftovers from a V.F.W. barbecue. Of course, I've got nothing against dead people. Why, some of my best friends are dead!"
Silence. They all look at me. I have never felt so alive.
Semper Fi, Mom and Dad, Semper Fi, my werewolf children. Payback is a motherfvcker.
They shift their gear to more comfortable positions.
They wait for an order. I pick up Cowboy's muddy Stetson.
I wave my hand and the squad moves out, moves back down the trail.
Nobody talks. We're all too tired to talk, to joke, to call each other names. The day has been too hot, the hump too long. We've shot up our share of Victor Charlie jungle plants and we are wasted.
We wrap ourselves in pastel fantasies of varied designs and "X" another day off our short-timer's calendars. We look forward to imaginary bennies: hot showers, cold beer, a fix of Coke (because things go better with Coke), juicy steaks, mail from hone, and a moment of privacy in which to massage our wands, inspired by fading photographs of loving wives and girlfriends back in the World.
continued........

[thedrifter]

The showers will be cold, the beer, if there is any, will be hot. No steak. No Cokes. The mail, if there is any, will not be from sweethearts. The mail from hometown America, like the half dozen letters I carry unopened in my rucksack, will say: Write more often be careful if you think it's tough there bought this used car what a report card mother is taking shots nothing good on TV don't write depressing letters so maybe send me fifty bucks new furniture in the dining room for a ring quick buddy she's pregnant be real careful write more often and so on and so on until you feel like you just got a Dear John letter from the whole damned world.


We hump back down the trail.
Back on the hill, Sorry Charlie, our bro, will laugh at us one more time; Sorry Charlie, at least, will greet us with a smile.
Putting our minds back into our feet, we concentrate all our energy into taking that next step, that one more step, just one more step.... We try very hard not to think about anything important, try very hard not to think that there's no slack and that it's a long walk home.
There it is.
I wave my hand and Mother takes the point.


The Short-Timers
by Gustav Hasford


Sempers,

Roger