"Callahan, do you ever get tired of dealing with p.u.s.s.yfooters?" I asked with a sigh.

"All the time," he said, looking down the track, where they were repairing the infield fence.

"That's what just happened to me. I got the feeling Raines is anything but. But he's surrounded by a bunch of p.u.s.s.ies."

"It's your business to tell him?"

"n.o.body else was going to do it. Time somebody played honest with the man."

"Did that all right," he said. "Just wonder what Dutch is going to say."

"I wouldn't worry about Dutch," I replied. "I'd worry about Stoney t.i.tan."

After a moment Callahan said, "Yeah . . . " and seemed awed at the prospect.

I didn't tell him what else had happened, that I was measuring the man to see what kind of stuff he was made of.

I wasn't sure I liked the answer.

58.

FLASHBACK: NAM DIARY, THE SECOND SIX.

The 182nd day: We know this village is a VC hideout. We go by the place, there's this pot of rice cooking, enough for maybe a hundred people, and there's some old folks around, a dozen kids, two or three younger women, that's all.

"They sure are skinny, to eat that much," Jesse Hatch says as we walk by.

Flagler's replacement is this kid from Pennsylvania, handles a .60 caliber like it was part of his arm. He learns fast too. We call him Gunner. He says he used to hunt all the time, poaching and everything, summer and winter, since he was maybe eight, nine years old. Nothing scares him. He achieved "aw f.u.c.k it" status before he ever got to Nam.

Anyway, we go back tonight to see if maybe the village is a gook shelter and there was activity all over the place. What we got is Gook City. We flare the place and hit it from both sides, only there's a stream on the back side of the village and they get on the other side and we are pinned down. There are green tracers going all over the place, rounds bouncing off s.h.i.t, kicking around us.

We're pouring stuff into the hooches, just shooting the s.h.i.t out of them, and all of a sudden one of them goes off. They must've had all their ammo stored inside because it was the Fourth of July-squared. Grenades, mortars, tracers, mines. Everybody's freaking out, running around. Then Hatch catches one in the leg from the other side of the stream and he goes over the side into the water and he panics and starts yelling that he can't swim and Carmody is yelling, "Shut up, for Christ sakes" only it's too late and Jesse catches a couple in the head. Carmody and me, we go over the side and drag him back. But I knew he was finished. It was like trying to lift a house.

Carmody keeps saying, over and over, "Why did he yell, why the f.u.c.k did he yell. f.u.c.kin' stream was only three feet deep."

But it was dark and everything had gone wrong and Jesse couldn't swim. h.e.l.l, I don't know why I'm apologizing for old Hatch, look what it cost him.

The 198th day: The lieutenant's beginning to act weird. It started a couple of weeks ago when we lost Jesse Hatch. It's like he has a hard time making up his mind about anything.

Last night I go by his hooch and I say, "C'mon, Lieutenant, let's have a beer." And he just sits there, looking at me, and then he says, "Let me think about it." Think about having a beer?

Today he says, "My luck's going bad. I shouldn't have lost Flagler and Hatch."

"You can't blame yourself," I say to him.

"Who'm I going to blame, Nixon?" he says, only he says it with bitterness. He's lost his sense of humor, too.

The 215th day: We got separated from our outfit and we were two days out in the boonies. We come up on this handful of gooks. Ten of them, maybe. We just break through some brush and there they are, twenty feet away plus change.

Everybody goes to the deck but the lieutenant. I don't know what happened. He just pulls a short circuit and stands there. This one VC has his AK-47 over his shoulder, he rolls backward and gets one burst off. Carmody takes three hits. He's lying there, a few feet away from me, jerking real hard in the dirt.

It's the shortest firefight I ever saw. It's over in about ten seconds. Everybody is shooting at once. We are on top of these people and Carmody is the only one gets. .h.i.t. One of the gooks jumps in the river and Gunner just goes right in after him, takes him out with his K-bar. Just keeps stabbing him until he's too tired to stab anymore.

I take the lieutenant in my arms and hold him as tight as I can and keep telling him it's going to be all right. I hold him that way until he stops shaking and I feel him go stiff on me.

It doesn't seem possible. A month to go, that's all he had. I don't know why I thought the lieutenant was invincible. You'd think I'd know better after six months out here.

The 254th day: It's almost six weeks since Carmody took it. I wish the h.e.l.l I would have time to thank the lieutenant. If he had just come around for a minute or two. s.h.i.t, you just take too much for granted out here.

I've been acting squad leader ever since. They made me a sergeant. Doc, Gunner, me, we're the only old-timers left. Jordan beat the rap and rotated back to the World. The night before he left we got him so drunk, s.h.i.t, he was out cold. So we tie him to the back of this PT-boat and drag him back up to the base, which is about eight or nine kliks. He almost drowned. By the time we got to the base, he was sober. So we got him drunk all over again. He was a wreck when he got on the chopper to Cam Ranh. I'll bet he's still got a hangover. Something to remember us by.

Can you beat that, six months and I'm an old-timer.

I never even told the lieutenant I liked him.

The 268th day: I got called down to Dau Tieng today, which is division HQ, and I talked with this captain who seems to run the whole show in this sector. He tells me I'm recommended for a Silver Star for this thing up at Hi Pien. It was a rescue mission and I guess I looked pretty good that day.

He asks me how I feel about the war. Can you imagine? How does anybody feel about the war, for Christ sakes.

"I've had better times," I said. "Like the time I had my appendix out."

The captain has real dark eyes, like he needs sleep and could use a week or two in the sun, and he got a kick out of that.

"I mean, how do you feel about the war politically," he says.

"I don't know about that," I say to him. "I'm not interested in political bulls.h.i.t. I'm here because I was sent here. I don't even know what the h.e.l.l we're doing over here, Captain. Right now it looks like all we're doing is getting our a.s.s kicked."

"Does that concern you? I mean, that we seem to be getting our a.s.s whipped?"

"You some kind of shrink or something?" I ask him.

He laughs again and says no, he's not a shrink.

So I say to him, "n.o.body's over here to lose."

Then he asks me how old I am and I tell him I'm twenty-one and he says to me, "You're a d.a.m.n good line soldier."

"I'll tell you, Captain, I'm almost a short-timer. I got six months left to pull and I got two objectives in life. Get me back whole, get my men back whole. I don't think about anything past that. There isn't anything past that. You start thinking about what's past that and you're a dead man."

"I'm going to field-commission you," he says, just like that.

"s.h.i.t no," I says. "Don't do that to me, Captain. Gimme a break. What do you want from me?"

"I need a lieutenant on that squad and you're the best man for the job."

"Look, gimme six stripes, okay, that way I outrank anybody else on the squad. I'll stay right there, do the same s.h.i.t I been doing, but I don't want a G.o.dd.a.m.n bar, man. Bars get you killed. I'm walking away from this, Captain. I'm not dying in this swamp. You hand a bar to me, it's like a f.u.c.kin' hex."

So he gives me six stripes and a night on the town, which is kind of a joke, and the next day I'm back at Hi Pien and nothing is changed. It's the same old s.h.i.t.

The 287th day: We had this nut colonel who came up on the line. He was an old campaigner, you could tell. He knew all the tricks and he just ignored them. He didn't even make a lot of sense when he talked. I don't think he was wrapped real tight anymore.

Later in the day he was going to grab a medevac out and we're standing on the LZ on top of this knoll and he takes a leak right down the side of the hill, and just like that the VC start popping away at us. I don't know where they came from, and he's laughing, and I'm telling him, "Colonel, you better watch out, we seem to have Charlie all over the place."

"p.i.s.s on 'em," he says.

All of a sudden 9-millimeters were busting all around us. They must've busted fifty caps and the ground around his feet was churning up like little fountains. He finished, zipped up, and shot them a bird. Then the Huey comes in and he climbs aboard and they dust off. I thought, There's a guy needs to get off the line, bad.

"That crazy son of a b.i.t.c.h'll get somebody killed," Doc says. "He doesn't give a s.h.i.t anymore."

"What the h.e.l.l're they gonna do with him?" I say. "He's too crazy to send back to the World."

"I don't know, send him to the crazy colonel place," Doc says, and we all laugh about that.

The 306th day: Gunner was over in Saigon for a week of R and R and he meets this ordnance guy and they hang out and get drunk and raise some h.e.l.l. Anyway, the ordnance guy shows Gunner how to take the timer out of a hand grenade and when Gunner comes back, he sits around every night, taking the timers out of M-4's and then loading them into ammo packs. He puts five or six to each bag.

A coupla of nights later we're sitting on this LZ and the VC jump us. Gunner says follow him. He leaves the bags behind, we give them about thirty meters, hole in, and when they take the position we start a counter. Next thing I know there's hand grenades going off all over the place, gooks screaming, all this chaos. Then we went back and jumped them and took the position back. We wasted about twenty. Half of them only had one arm.

We did this a couple of times, moving off LZ's and what have you. Gunner keeps a coupla of bags of these grenades around all the time now. Every time we move out we leave a couple behind. It's like our trademark. f.u.c.kin' monkeys never learn. It works like a charm every time.

The 332nd day: We had this ARVN a.s.signed to us. I don't trust Vietnamese, not even the southerners. They have a tendency to run when things get hot. I know that's a generalization, but over here, sometimes generalizing keeps you alive. Anyway, this ARVN scout was on point and he runs into a sniper. One lousy sniper but this crud leaves the point and comes running back to report. What it was, he didn't have the guts to cream the f.u.c.king gook.

So he comes running back and the snipes pops off three men, one, two, three, just like that. We get up there and I get around behind the sniper and I empty half a clip into him.

When we get back to base I radio upriver and tell them I'm sending this creep ARVN back to them, I can't use him.

"Keep him," they say. "It's politics."

Poli-f.u.c.kin'-tics. Jesus! Politics my a.s.s.

Tonight we're camped out in the bush, he heads back into town to see his lady friend. I take off my shoes and follow him. He's going to the river to hop a ride and I jump him before he gets to the dock and slit him ear to ear with my K-bar, just drop him in the f.u.c.king river.

That's one son of a b.i.t.c.h isn't getting any more of my people killed.

The 338th day: This time when I went down to Dau Tieng, it was the captain and this lieutenant named Harris, who looked like he didn't take s.h.i.t from anybody, and we met in this bar which everybody jokingly calls the Cafe Society. I figure it's about the ARVN. They probably found him, he's some a.s.shole's brother or something. It doesn't even come up.

"You know the trouble with this war," the captain says. "We get these people. for a year. Just when they're getting good enough to stay alive and take a few tricks, they go home."

And I says to myself, Uh-oh.

The lieutenant says to me, "You got a real handle on what it's all about, Sergeant."

And 1 laugh. I don't know what's happening. two miles away and I say so.

"I mean out on the line," the lieutenant says.

"Oh, that," I says.

"Ever hear of CRIP?" he asks me.

I had heard some vague stories about a mixed outfit made up of North Viets who had defected to our side and called themselves Kit Carson scouts, plus infantry guys, some leftover French Legionnaires, and, some said, even some CIA, although you could hear that about anything. What I heard was that they were pretty much a.s.sa.s.sination squads. Our own guerrillas, like the Green Berets and the SEALS, which is like the Navy berets. Anyway I said no, because what I heard was mostly scuttleb.u.t.t.

"It's Combined Recon and Intelligence Platoons. Special teams. We keep them small, four or five people. You know how that goes, everybody gets so they think like one person. You move around pretty much on your own, targets of opportunity, that sort of thing. I think it would be just up your alley."

"I got ten weeks left," I said, and I said it like You must be nuts.

But it was funny, I was interested in what he was saying. I mean, this lieutenant was recruiting me, asking me to do another tour, and I was listening to the son of a b.i.t.c.h. And he went right on.

"We have a low casualty rate because everybody knows what they're doing. You go out, you do your thing, you come back, everybody leaves you alone."

"That's about what I'm doing now," I said.

"That's what I mean, you're perfect for CRIP. We need people, like you."

I'm getting a little p.i.s.sed. "What's in this for me, Lieutenant? just sticking my a.s.s out there to get whacked off for twelve more months? s.h.i.t!"

He says, "So what's back home? You work eight hours, sleep eight hours. s.h.i.t, Sergeant, all you got left is eight hours a day to live. Tell me this isn't better than bowling."

I told him I'd think about it and I got shacked up for two days and went back down to the squad.

The 347th day: We had this kid, a replacement, his first time on the line. I don't even remember his name. Anyway, we're rushing this hooch and there's a lot of caps going off and the kid twists his ankle and down he goes and he starts screaming. We all just stay down and all I'm thinking, as many times as I told this kid, "You go down, keep your mouth shut no matter how bad you're hurt," and he's losing it all.

They zero in on him but Doc gets to him first and he's dragging this kid by the feet, trying to get him behind something, away from the fire.

I hear the round hit. It goes phunk, like that.

I was hoping it was the kid but no such luck. Doc took one round, dead center.

Then the kid freaks out and runs for it and they just cut him to pieces too: What a waste, what a G.o.dd.a.m.n awful f.u.c.king waste.

Later on, the GR's come in with their body bags. Doc is lying beside a tree. He looks like he's taking a nap and I'm sitting beside him and this guy comes up with the bag and plops it down beside Doc and zips it open.

G.o.d, how I hate that sound. I hate zippers.

"Don't put that on him," I say, and I grab that G.o.dd.a.m.n green garbage bag. "Don't put that f.u.c.kin' bag on him."

"Hey, easy, pal, okay," the Gunner says. "He's gone. We lost him. Let them take him back."

You can't cry, you know. n.o.body cries up here. You cry, everybody thinks you're losing it. Doc had eight days. Eight f.u.c.king days to go. All that time, all that experience. All stuffed in a f.u.c.king garbage bag.

The 353rd day: Ever since, I been thinking a lot about Carmody and Flagler and Jesse Hatch. Doc Ziegler. Some of the others. The lieutenant's right; it is kind of a waste, spending a year on the line and then leaving it just when you really get so you know what you're doing. I've never been a pro before at anything. But I know how to fght these motherf.u.c.kers. I feel like I'm doing something positive, accomplishing something. You know, in my own way, doing something to turn this thing around, getting even for Jesse and Doc and the lieutenant, all the rest of them.

And one more thing. I wouldn't want to tell them this, or anybody else. I like it. I'm going to miss it . . . getting a gook in my sights, squeezing off, watching the f.u.c.ker go down. s.h.i.t, man, that's a jolt. That's a real jolt. There's not another jolt in the world like it.