Angel
New Member
Audio: Salvatore Scibona reads.
Okinawa was a fever dream of mosquitoes and Falstaff beer.
A Marine Corps rule said they couldn’t put Vollie on the plane to deploy if he was too drunk to walk unassisted across the tarmac and up the stairs into the bird. Why did command make a rule like that if they were going to give you liberty to see the town the night before you flew out?
A buddy he’d met Stateside in survival training, a ranch hand from New Mexico, was teaching Vollie to drink himself sick. “The belly got to get swole up,” his companion said. “Loose that belt. Let the bubbles in down deep. You’re a beer camel now. They’ll put me on that plane in ten pieces is the only way. Tie me together in the cargo hold. We used to keep camels on the ranch. Two of them. Brother, could they drink up the whole irrigation ditch. See now, the way you doing, either breathing or drinking, that there is a mistake. You got to keep up breathing while the beer goes down.” He had a head full of cuspate teeth, and when he snored in the bunk his eyes opened, showing only the grisly whites while the irises pointed elsewhere inside the skull. His name was Bobby Heflin.
They headed to a different bar. Everywhere in the street people were trying to sell them laundry detergent, beer and cigarettes by the case, shaving products, all the brands of home in bright familiar packaging with the power to transport Vollie back to what already seemed a previous life: long afternoons under the lift in the dank garage, where a transistor sang catchy odes to gum and window cleaners and he timed the turns of a ratchet to the rhythm of the jingle beat.
They got to the new bar. Vollie took a seat at a long plank table where some squids were playing bridge, concentrated and insular and leaning back to hide their cards amid the narrow quarters of the table like a crowded raft. Heflin went away for more beers.
Then back on the Okinawan street and everybody trying to sell Vollie more detergent. Tide, the washday miracle, cleanest washes you can get. Winston, the filter blend that makes the big taste difference. Falstaff, beer that satisfies your taste for living. A C-141 came in low enough you could see the light warping behind its engines and a red cross painted on its tail fin, so its cargo would be what? Casualties, he figured. Get the package with the spear and you’ll know enjoyment’s here, because it’s Wrigley’s here, the biggest little treat in all the land. All this while he stumbled in streets lit beautiful as yards at Christmas, every moment more beautiful as the tropical dusk settled in, and the neon red lights everywhere invited him into establishments with silhouettes of what he had learned was a Martini glass. You could also buy a squatting ape carved out of a hollowed coconut, with a slot in its mouth for your spare change. You saved your money like that instead of blowing it on beer and trinkets to send to your folks, who had no need of conch shells that carried home the sound of the soughing sea. His folks were on a farm in Calamus, Iowa, too old to work the place on their own, but he had left them there, as though forgotten. He had volunteered.
Vollie led Heflin toward a cocktail lounge. Or maybe it was the other way around: Heflin led Vollie. Or the other, other way: both of them led by the red neon figure of a Martini glass suspended above the establishment’s door. The place inside swarmed with marines—you’d think an invasion was on—skinny pimpled white black, laughing idiots eager to get mowed down to the ankles, reaped like corn. Heflin had gone away again, because here he was coming back with two fresh cans. “Give me your life,” he shouted. Except it was knife he’d said, and he turned the beers upside down and stabbed them on the bottom and showed how to cover the hole then flip it right side up, crack the top, slip the tab into the can, and shoot the beer. All this Vollie did, but the beer tasted wrong. His can had halfway drained, the logo lion’s head leering, before it became clear the discombobulating foreignness of the beer consisted in its being hot beer, hot as blood. Then the can was empty, Falstaff the choicest product of the brewer’s art, and Heflin howling like a spanked dog, and Vollie felt a baseball bat smack him in the eyes: hold on, it was only the hot beer like a blow to the head. A girl—a perfect Japanese girl with shiny clothes—came by with a tray of Singapore slings and said, “Your job is to die,” except inflected like a question. “The hell it is,” he said. She repeated, “You want to buy?” Yes. And how. Another for his buddy? Yes, for the cowboy, too. Look at his shark teeth. Don’t kiss him, your mouth’ll get stuck in there. And the girl went away. If you were under the influence they weren’t supposed to put you on the plane. It bewildered him the motleyness of what you could buy from a single market stall—only he was pretty sure he was still inside the cocktail place and only thinking about the market stalls flanking the street outside—all the products of home though he was in Japan, and also face paint, magazines, hi-fis, porno, decals extolling the honor of the Third Marine Division, the Fighting Third; all for sale from the same codgers in the street, no distinctions whatever to clarify what you were supposed to buy from the one stall rather than the other, which was too confusing, and that was why he wanted to go back under the neon silhouette of the cocktail glass into the lounge, because the silhouette of the cocktail glass clarified things, made it plain what you were supposed to do in there. Except if he was looking at the sign he was outside, and how was he outside? He actually was outside after all. Because his drink was inside, so he went back in there. He sat on a high chair, and another shiny girl, a penumbra of light around her like a saint in a picture, wearing a brilliant, lithe, vertically striped dress like pulled taffy with a fluorescent light rod stuck in it she glowed so, approached him carrying a tray of plastic tumblers, red and frothy with straws and a quarter round of pineapple clipping the lip of the drinks and asked, Would he like a long beverage?
Later, he would remember the chair. A spindle-back chair that turned on ball bearings. He would remember he was sitting in this chair taking the plastic drink from the shiny girl, then not being greedy with the pineapple slice, taking only the one bite to avoid the sneaky pricks of pine that hid in the flesh. And he would remember he had yet to pay the girl and turned in the chair with a dollar in his fist lest she vanish before she could be paid, a sudden swinging turn that swept the chair from under him, and the very next thing—no time elapsed at all, a perfect glue or weave between the days—the very next thing, there’s a voice, a staticky voice over an intercom saying, “Gentlemen, fasten your seat belts. You are landing in the Republic of Vietnam.”
You’d see a guy was scared. They were all of them scared out of their minds even while stoned, but you’d see, what was it, the eyes too open, too reactive to movement or the glint of the sun on passing scooter windshields; eyes too certain they could see it coming, the moment, the fell turn; a crouchy way of moving around even when the guy had no gear to hump; and it all amounted to a greed to go on living, laced with the knowledge it was not to be. Like, I know I ain’t getting out of here. And then, a few weeks later, you’d hear that guy was dead.
There wasn’t any sense to make of this phenomenon. Unless God didn’t like you expecting too much and he punished you for it by giving you what you expected to get. And you might think, All right, then I’ll go ahead and expect to make it home. But that was just vanity. No available facts supported such a foolish assurance. Within a week of Vollie’s arrival in the country, he was picking shards of the head of a lance corporal off his shirt, a boy nearly his same age, and hair attached to the shards that smelled of smoke and Brylcreem.
You’d see a guy stop short three times while tying the same shoe, stop to look up at moonlight flicking off a rock while the river moved on it, stop and look, stop and look. And a month later that guy would be dead. The lesson was, anything you love so bad that everywhere you look you see how you’re going to lose it, that thing will be taken from you. Even your life.
So Vollie had a mantra—he had learned to meditate from Bobby Heflin, of all unquiet people, who’d read some magazine articles about Buddhism and a Buddhist’s all-eclipsing indifference to property, to life, to limb. Vollie had a mantra, and he sat still in the dark on his bunk with his back against the plywood hooch wall at Dong Ha, with his eyes half closed and his folded feet aflame from fungal itching, and he breathed deep and said within the mind, It don’t mean nothing. Into his consciousness came a vision of how he would lose his hand, the right hand, which played the melody on the Baldwin upright back home, and he said without speaking, It don’t mean nothing. Not that the fear didn’t mean anything, or the vision or the pain, but the hand didn’t mean anything. Then the vision of reaching into a hole in the ground, a hidden tunnel entrance, with the left hand, the harmony hand, reaching into the ground in the jungle knowing the V.C. had a whole world of interconnected tunnels, whole supply channels underground. A whole division might be waiting down there to bite off the hand so why was he doing this? But he was doing it in the vision and saw with lightning clarity the hole explode and the fire leaping out of it, and his own blood spitting on his face, and these two stumps at the ends of his arms like when a kid walks on the road in winter without gloves and bunches up the fists within the cuffs, except the hands were not hidden, melody and harmony, they were gone. And of the hands he said crisply in the mind, They don’t mean nothing. And he saw his silver-headed father sneezing in the hog barn, ailing in his bed, and said, It don’t mean nothing. Meaning he didn’t mean anything, the aging man at home, the red peeling face awaiting Vollie’s return. And he saw the farm with only his mother working it—it didn’t mean nothing. Cracked drain tile clogged with earth that made the meadow flood—it didn’t mean nothing. The apple trees unsprayed and the fruit eaten to pulp by curculios—it didn’t mean nothing. And he got up and went into a tent where a couple of dirt-caked convoy drivers lay on cots asleep in front of a TV showing a police movie, all sirens and shadows and waxy hair, the unsteady horizontal hold on the black-and-white screen catching the moment, the scene, and losing it and the scene running away like a loose blind, then catching it again, shadows and then glowing white human faces close to the camera, and Lauren Bacall looked out of the convex box into the night that reeked of monsoon funk, with lust and reproach in her face, as if to say, I dare you to forget me, too.
The country had been on fire from the moment he first landed. He’d only ever seen a big civilian city from the inside of planes or airports, and now he was outside on the tarmac—in his undress blues and carrying a sea bag, and the uncountable Falstaffs and Singapore slings were exacting their revenge on his head and guts—in a city, Da Nang, that was home to hundreds of thousands and was taking artillery fire, smoke rising like giant ghost trees from the rooftops.
Within a couple of hours he was assigned to the 26th Marines at a supply depot in the rear at Dong Ha, from which he was to run convoys up the dirt roads to the forward combat bases near the D.M.Z. at Camp Carroll, Lang Vei, Quang Tri, something called the Rockpile, and another spot that was just an airstrip, really, as it turned out—a road, a cliff, and an airstrip on a low plateau outside a village called Khe Sanh, although whatever human life in the village had been raptured lately, right before he passed through it the first time, so lately the cats were still delicately eating scraps in the hot trash heaps, the cats the souls of the sinners left behind.
Convoy orders were nice and simple: Keep going. A long line of trucks in single file, twenty, fifty, sometimes a hundred trucks. You get a flat tire, you keep going. He drove an M54, a five-ton truck with ten wheels, and you could lose a tire, as long as it wasn’t in front, and keep on up the slick road to the combat base. A truck disabled by whatever mechanical failure or land mine, you ditch that truck and keep going. If it obstructs the road you push it off the cliff, don’t matter if your mother’s inside. Do not stop. They were running candy canes and powder charges and everything in between—building supplies, shovels, canned milk—but the cargo and any disabled truck could be replaced. Two minutes stopped on a mountain road was plenty long enough for a convoy to get sighted and blown to hell from incoming.
Squads of grunts were guarding the road, on patrol or dug in, or some of them hiding in rock formations, because up near the D.M.Z. the place could have been Mars for all the cover any vegetation provided. But you hardly saw these dug-in or hiding squads and fire teams until you were right on top of them. And while the convoy headed back to Dong Ha the afternoon after a drop, the grunts guarding the road would throw a bag into your truck as you drove by, a burlap or polypropylene woven bag usually used for sandbagging but with a rock in it to make it sail like a projectile, and you’d snatch it coming in your window. Inside was a passel of rumpled lists of the supplies they needed: razor blades, rations, bullets, cigarettes, soap. Somebody wrote, Chicken soup or orange juice—we all got colds. It was Christmas every day, and Vollie was Santa Claus taking requests. Every list pleaded for beer, but he couldn’t find any for the longest time.
Sometimes the roadside grunts put mail in the sandbags along with the rock and the rumpled lists, and if they were dug in far enough from the road you had to square up, high on the mount atop the cab, where Vollie often manned a .50-calibre machine gun, to snag the thing from the air like a long fly to the outfield, and inside was a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Routenberg of Livonia, Michigan, and a rumpled note to the convoy demanding, if not beer, at least a couple of hundred pounds of grass. All Vollie had for them to drink was Coca-Cola. It turned out some guys made a casserole out of rations cooked in Coke. A Puerto Rican from the 2/9 Marines told him that was how you were supposed to cook pork, which was comical, trying to tell a Clinton County boy he didn’t know how to cook a pig.
There were whole villages made of Coke cases, and the ingenious Vietnamese had pleated together roofs for their huts out of the dissected Coke cans. The convoy had to slow up through one such village, and they should have known better because as they rolled into the village no kids were flinging themselves at the sides of the trucks, begging for candy and rations. Everybody was in a hut someplace.
Then a bomb detonated in the road. A Marine artillery shell, most likely, that had failed to explode and been rejiggered into a land mine. The mine blew off the front end of the truck right ahead of Vollie’s. Three men flew up and away from the explosion, but they still had their legs, and scrambled, flesh hanging in strips through smoldering fatigues—the automatic marine body that scrambles before it understands—into the back of Vollie’s truck. The convoy plowed teetering right over the cardboard village, right over the Coke huts, crushing who knew what, rice bags or people, under the listing axles, and the convoy did not stop. It got to Camp Carroll ahead of schedule carrying mail, tents, diesel fuel, kerosene, Winston the one filter cigarette that delivers flavor twenty times a pack, two wounded, one dead. He was Santa Claus and the mailman and a teen-ager driving tons of munitions through a monsoon-slick road in early February with rat-a-tat sniper fire in the distant hills as normal as birdsong. Winston’s got that filter flavor.
Then back in Dong Ha he found the Quonset hut where the squids were hiding their beer. If marines never stole from the Army and the Navy we could never win a war. A marine is a thief by training, tradition, and necessity caused by, Why are we always out of supplies and they’re so flush? Another marine from his convoy group lit a smoke bomb at the far end of the depot, and the squids went running to investigate while Vollie backed up his truck to the Quonset hut, and with a dolly, a ramp, and four men pushing they got a whole pallet of Hamm’s beer into his truck and covered it, and he was out of there before the quartermaster or anybody else was any the wiser. Clean cut with smoothness aged in—Hamm’s, it’s the refreshingest. Then the whole way to the Rockpile, they threw warm cases of beer down to the men popping from behind boulders, from under makeshift blinds, men joyous as retriever dogs to see the labels on the cases.
His convoy had nearly reached the Rockpile, midday, when a marine appeared like a vision hovering above the road in the distance. At first it seemed the warm beer was giving Vollie fantod hallucinations, but he’d only drunk the one, nice and slow to let the stomach take it, not even the one, a swig remained in the can he held with fingers that meantime guided the steering wheel. The marine wore a painted wooden sign around his neck. You could see his busted helmet and flak jacket, but the feet were too loose to be standing. He floated midair. A miracle. A marine with invisible wings. Then as the truck got close you could see the spike that had been introduced through his ass and into his torso, a thin spike you spied only when you were near enough to see his face—in fact a dead Vietnamese face about fifteen years old with flies nesting in the nose, dressed in old shreds of Marine fatigues. The sign around his neck read:
CAUTION:
This road patrolled by the Magnificent Bastards
2nd Battalion, 4th Marines
And a little drawing of a sea horse for a signature.
They slept that night at the Rockpile, or anyhow under it. There wasn’t any need to drive up the crazy mountain, or any road to climb it, didn’t seem. And in the morning they drove back to Dong Ha without stopping, occasionally throwing C rations of ham and motherfuckers at the Vietnamese in their loose-fit rags who lined the roads sometimes begging for food and sometimes pretending to beg for food so you would slow down if you were stupid and they would throw a grenade in your cab.
They pulled into Dong Ha, and the grinning screeching children swarmed begging frenziedly, and the trucks pushed through with all due haste. Farther along, near the base gate, an old woman—or not so old but without any teeth, the brown smiling gums gone to leather from chewing betel nut—waved her straw cone hat sweet and friendly by the roadside. Suddenly she bent low and fished at her skirt bottom. Vollie unholstered the 1911 pistol from his shoulder, or his hand unholstered it, jutted it out the window, and aimed it, the peaceful fleet hand that did its work while the laggard mind raced to understand what was happening.
Then the old woman, unfazed by a semi-automatic pistol aimed at her face by a dumb white teen-ager in a truck, pulled her skirt up over her belly and pulled down her shapeless drawers, calling, “Fucky-fucky five dollars.”
His hand drew his pistol back inside the cab. The trucks rumbled on through the gate, into the compound, and the men refuelled and parked at the tire shop and went to the mess and then to their bunks.
He had never seen a woman’s privates before, he had seen pictures and he had dreamed dreams, but the mind so unswerving in its misguided notions and expectations could not shake all night the weirdness that the fucking part was in the front of her, whereas in the female of all the other animals he could think of you found the fucking parts behind. The frontwardness, the face-to-face aspect of human fucking was itself backward. But no, that was another lie of the discordant mind. The body didn’t know we were made to do things the wrong way—it didn’t know this thing that wasn’t true. It got a hard-on all the same to see a woman without her clothes, even a decrepit one; though perhaps the hard-on came from the pistol he had aimed at her face and had not fired.
Ham and motherfuckers was ham and lima beans and even the starvelings up at Khe Sanh didn’t want them.
Do not stop the convoy.
But then one day while they were taking apart their pallets at Khe Sanh—uncommon to stop at Khe Sanh, rumors of a hell of a ruckus up there, what with the R.P.G.s and the 130-millimetre guns, so the Marine Corps was supplying mostly from the air—he heard a noise. He was unloading into a hooch and he heard a noise. He looked around him. The four other guys unloading with him were already gone. He ran out of the tent aware he was a step behind something important, and the body knowing more as always threw itself in the trench outside the hooch and landed on a dead grunt who, wait, was not dead but crouching, ducked and covered, in a stream that, wait, was not a stream but a trench filled two feet deep with water. The grunt threw Vollie off him. Vollie landed in the water. Six men crouched half submerged. The sun was setting through the drizzle. I have heard incoming real close and so I am in a trench, reported the idiot laggard mind, and I am afraid. Then the artillery was everywhere, the surface of the airstrip around him bubbling like a boiling stew, and they stayed in the trench until the sun had set two more times. Somewhere in there he heard a whistle and saw his truck blow up and he figured he would be here at Khe Sanh awhile longer.
Lucky he had dismounted his .50 calibre from the truck an hour before the barrage, intending to take her apart and clean and oil her that night and remount her the next morning, when they would have headed home to Dong Ha, sort of making nightly love to her, or to be honest not making love, about which he knew only the basic engineering strategy, more like grooming her, getting her ready like a sow before the fair, brushing, greasing. That the .50 calibre had not been destroyed was to prove useful in the two months he was stuck at Khe Sanh.
Everybody in the convoy who manned a .50 calibre had a name for it, usually stencilled with spray paint in the mounting plate above the cab. Guns named Winter Night, Mafia Inc. I, Mafia Inc. II, Voss, Shirley. His he named Hog Butcher, and his intimacy with her was such that, some weeks later, when the grunts mounted her atop the sandbags on the morning the N.V.A. finally came at them in person, a crush of figures like ants, innumerable, he almost snatched her down from the trench lip, fearful lest some harm should come to her and resentful these thieving bastards should touch her. Despite her name and job, he knew the Hog Butcher to be female.
He wasn’t the only truck driver stuck at Khe Sanh. Once the big assault started, they couldn’t get anybody through to sweep the road for mines and his whole convoy was stranded. Later, no road remained to sweep. Nothing fitting the term appeared to lead from the place. The base was an island in a lake of clay that bubbled with incoming and aerial bombardment. Mortar attacks killed several of the other drivers in the convoy, and he inherited one of their trucks.
For weeks, the perimeter of the airfield was bombed and rocketed and napalmed to such an extent that he kind of got used to the noise. He lived on a plateau with fire surrounding it. His question-asking apparatus having been extracted in boot camp, it didn’t occur to him to ask anybody what was out there to bomb so. He couldn’t really see what they were trying to hit. It was another driver who asked one of the infantry sergeants what they were bombing. “The enemy, knucklehead,” the sergeant said. “Don’t you know when you’re under siege?” Vollie could not see any enemy. He saw earth afire.
The enemy was underground.
Then there were transport planes, C-130s mostly, the Hercules, supplying them now because evidently no more convoys, but it pleased him the pilots followed the old convoy rule. Do not stop. A Hercules sitting still on a landing strip made a plum target, juicier probably than a stopped convoy since the flames would rise higher in the sky if it was hit. If you are too far away to count the number of your enemy dead, how else to measure success but by the height of the flames? So the pilots did this number where the plane flew low over the strip, sometimes low enough to knock off a man’s head if he were standing there. Its hatch dropped open in back, and a grappling hook in the airstrip snagged a loop of cord dangling from the hatch, and the plane kept going, the plane did not stop, but the cord inside was attached to a long succession of supplies on pallets that shot out of the cargo bay and somersaulted as the Hercules cleared the strip, never having touched down.
The base was getting shelled incessantly, the airstrip was a mess, and men ran out there to fill the holes with dirt and cover them with steel land matting while new shells made new holes farther up the strip. Meantime, everywhere around him except a few hills was under equally endless but much higher-flaming aerial bombardment from his own government. Yet he saw no N.V.A., he did not see massed troops. It was a siege in theory only. And there he was outside playing basketball with the grunts sometimes—the N.V.A. couldn’t mortar every inch of the compound at every minute so why not get some exercise?—and when he couldn’t sleep playing George Gershwin or Schumann songs on a mute piano he had made from a sawbuck tabletop and a Magic Marker, and it got so he could hear the music in his mind, even his mistakes, and steadily improved with this perverse way of playing piano, music minus sound leaving only the boy’s body at peace in articulate motion, alive and in time to the moving numbers that measure and govern everything from Schumann to jet propulsion and the pressure of the blood in your arteries. And he boiled rations over stoves made of old tuna cans filled with dirt and gasoline. And he was probably going to die, they would be overrun, and it didn’t mean nothing.
Then it was dark, late February. The Puerto Rican, Espinoza, had got hold of a pint of bourbon and shared it with Vollie, who had never drunk bourbon or any sort of whiskey. It tasted like Coke boiled to a gravy and cut with lighter fluid. He feared to smoke as he drank lest he catch fire. Espinoza sometimes appeared to be scratching his privates through his pocket while working a sunflower seed in his lips; in fact, he kept a rosary in the pocket and was mumbling prayers. He carried on this way even while they drank bourbon and played cards late at night in Vollie’s tent. It was about two in the morning when they had emptied the bottle and Espinoza got up to head back to his tent by the ammunition depot, but a minute later he came back saying he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face out there in the dark and fog. So Vollie cleared sleeping room for him in the tent he’d made, his makeshift Khe Sanh home on the dirt off the airstrip which was really, the tent was, nothing more than a half tent made from a parachute pegged to the dirt on one side and tied up to the door of his new truck on the other. And Vollie fell into dreamless inebriate sleep.
Then he woke up yelling, “It hit me. It hit me.”
Espinoza could be heard wrestling with the tent walls, tearing the top edge of the thing away from the truck, unable in the total dark of foggy moonless night to see the flap of the enclosure, the side Vollie kept open to let the breeze in and through which shrapnel had just evidently flown and drilled his face, his arms, his throat.
“It hit me,” Vollie said. The splatter somehow soft it was so warm. He couldn’t move or see. Unaccountably he had been hit only in the parts of him his fatigues didn’t cover. If he couldn’t get out of here it was probably because his legs didn’t work. “It hit me,” he said to nothing and no one and looked down to where his feet ought to be but saw nothing. However, it was dark.
Mind and body at last rendezvoused, and he sent his foot a message, speaking it aloud to put all his parts on notice to attend. “I’ll stomp my foot, and if I hear it then it’s still there.” The muscles of the upper leg then contracted, and a low quiet peaceful stamp sounded amid the nylon of the tent enveloping him like a shroud. He convened likewise with the other foot.
Outside, Espinoza said, “Who the fuck you talking to? Get under the fucking truck, man.”
He wasn’t hit, Vollie wasn’t, not exactly. Mud had splattered his face, neck, arms. A shell or a rocket had exploded nearby and blasted the mud through the opening of the tent. He discovered this under the truck, itself not the soundest of places to hide from a barrage. A couple of artillery flashes gave them a visual notion how to make it to the trench. They bolted for the perimeter. This entire interval—waking up believing he was hit, the experiment with his feet, the communing of mind with lower extremities, sliding under the truck, and hustling out to the perimeter and down into the trench with grunts already in there firing—had taken about as long as it takes to butter a piece of toast.
The grunts in the trench had mounted the Hog Butcher on sandbags and they were firing her. They had already used all but one box of the ammunition at hand. But Vollie had stolen and hidden about twenty boxes from a Hercules drop he had helped unload, stolen because that is what a marine does, and secreted them in a hooch about fifty yards away under a case of toilet paper, and he jumped out of the trench and darted top speed at the hooch, which under the circumstances seemed as far away as bumfuck Egypt.
He ran fast. Every step a stroke of wild luck. He turned a corner. In another artillery flash the hooch appeared low and dark through smoke. He had never run faster. But somebody had cut down a dead tree for firewood, leaving the stump three feet off the ground, and he struck it at a sprint right in his privates. He convulsed and screamed as though hit again, but wasn’t hit this time, either, not for real. He’d rammed his nuts into a tree. A parting of the smoke and something like dawn light coming over the mountain. And he made it to the hooch and overturned the toilet paper, they called them sweet rolls, gathered three ammunition boxes, and hobbled in his nut-crumpled state expecting to be hit and then to explode with all the rounds in his arms; and he was going as fast as he could, his eyes on the destination, the trench, to get behind the sandbags; but higher up, going on solid ground and running back toward the perimeter with the dawnish light, he had another vantage than before; and the light better; one of the boxes threatening to fall; and he tried to keep his eyes on the trench, to get back there; but he had this other vantage now, and his eyes looking upward squinted against the smoke—and that was when he saw them.
He had seen V.C. before, guerrillas, and he had seen shells coming and the 122-millimetre rockets. But now he saw the enemy themselves, the true enemy out of their burrows, the N.V.A. massed and swarming on human legs.
They were like ants, the way ants swarmed over a dead animal in the meadow, except they were all running this way. A few had made it near enough already you could see their shirts crisscrossed with bandoliers. And the laggard mind said, Hold on, those people over there want to kill me. All this in the two seconds before he got his head and his boxes down below the line of sandbags. He crouched. His privates screamed in pain. The grunt who had commandeered the Hog Butcher switched with him and got low to feed the machine her bullets from the new boxes while Vollie manned the machine, the Hog Butcher, who was in actual fact an anti-aircraft weapon that to fire directly on human beings violated some article of the Geneva Conventions, so said the scuttlebutt. Five rounds, pause, five rounds, pause; microscopic bits of the lands in her barrel flying out of her muzzle; and the red tracers streaming like lengths of glowing rope afire, fast at first then slow and peaceful in the deeper distance, then careening off at sharp angles when they hit a rock or for all he knew some kid’s brain bucket, his helmet, a kid whose tracers were coming right back at Vollie reciprocally, but the N.V.A. tracers were green....