Raucous cheers erupted from the campaign staffers. Gordon was too stunned to react. For the first time he realized that it really might happen after all. That he might become Vice President of the United States.
‘What would you do?’ came Elaine’s question in his mind. It haunted Gordon.
Andre Faulk felt something hard probing at his side. He opened his eyes to see the barrel of a gun. Standing above him was a man wearing night-vision goggles under his helmet. His face was blackened with grease paint. The man held his fingers to his lips to shush Andre, just as another man roused Stempel from his slumber. Stempel was supposed to have been on watch. But he was sound asleep in the fighting hole beside Andre.
‘Huh?’ Stempel said with a start — kicking Andre in the process. Andre kicked him back as Stempel stared up at the M-16’s muzzle. The orange metal hood that would harmlessly deflect the blanks’ wads was just inches from Stempel’s chest.
The grease-painted man in front of Andre raised a rubber knife and swiped it slowly across Andre’s neck. He pointed with it then toward Stempel. ‘You two are dead,’ he whispered, then again raised his finger to his lips.
From the bushes all around them there emerged over a dozen black-clad attackers. The dark forms advanced up the hillside toward their sleeping platoon. Stempel’s head was darting this way and that. They both watched the ‘OPFOR’ — the Opposition Force composed of instructors — rush unopposed through their defenses. That was all he and Stempel could do. They were dead.
Andre punched Stempel hard on the arm. ‘Hey!’ Stempel hissed. That drew a sharp ‘Sh-h-h,’ from an ‘enemy’ soldier carrying a machine-gun right past them into the heart of their position. ‘What’d you do that for?’ Stempel whispered, barely audible.
‘You fuckin’ fell asleep, that’s why! God-damn, man! Shit!’
Stempel sagged back into the hole — a desperate, sick look on his face.
They both jumped as the roar of gunfire shattered the quiet. Harold turned to see the dark hillside above light up. A dozen muzzles blazed. It sounded like ten strings of firecrackers lit off at once, only a hundred times louder. Harold damped his hands over his ears, but lowered them when he saw Faulk staring at him in disgust.
Just as quickly as it had started, it was over.
From the darkness, Andre heard a skidding sound through the dirt. A man appeared out of nowhere. The hot muzzle of an M-16 was stuck in Andre’s side.
‘Get up!’ the man yelled as Andre recoiled from the burning metal.
They were prodded roughly with the muzzle up the hill. At their camp they came upon a confusing scene. The rest of their training platoon knelt under the swaying beams of half a dozen flashlights.
‘Kneel down!’ was shouted right in Andre’s ear.
Andre and Stempel knelt beside each other, and their captors roughly pulled their hands up onto their heads.
There followed several long seconds of silence. Then Andre heard the familiar voice of Staff Sergeant Giles — their drill instructor. ‘The Chinese don’t take no pris’ners!’
With that as Andre’s warning, there was a single boom from a rifle. A hot strobe gave Andre the start of his life. His profile lit the ground in front of him for an instant — kneeling, hands on head, helpless.
‘Mrs Faulk!’ Giles shouted. ‘The U.S. Army regrets to inform you your son is dead!
Andre was shoved roughly onto his face. His hands barely came down in time to partially cushion his fall.
There was another shot, and Stempel landed roughly on his chest with a thudding grunt.
‘Mrs Stempel! The U.S. Army regrets to inform you your son is dead!’
‘Good riddance,’ somebody mumbled from behind.
The process was repeated for each of the forty recruits.
Sergeant Giles took Faulk and Stempel apart from the others. The dim light of dawn turned everything gray. ‘All right. What I want to know is, which one of you pieces of shit was on watch? Which one of you assholes fell asleep and let your entire unit get massacred?’
Stempel’s head was hanging. His eyes were closed. He was shaking. He was crying, Andre realized.
‘It was me, Staff Sergeant,’ Andre said.
Giles’s eyes were already drilling holes in Stempel. He was slow to turn to Andre. When he did, he said in a calm voice, ‘You realize that even though this is training, you could be court martialed for falling asleep on sentry duty?’
‘Yes, Staff Sergeant!’ Andre replied.
‘And if it was during war, you could be shot?’
‘Yes, Staff Sergeant!’
‘But since I can’t shoot you, I’m gonna have to do the next worst thing I can think of, whatever that is.’
‘Yes, Staff Sergeant!’
‘He wasn’t on watch, Staff Sergeant!’ Stempel yelled all of a sudden — his voice thick with tears. ‘It was me, Staff Sergeant!’
Giles turned his attention back to Stempel. ‘Well, well, well,’ Giles said. “Pears to me that one of you is lyin’. Now that’s a awful serious offense.’ He looked back and forth between the two of them. ‘I cain’t figure no way of tellin’ which one is lyin’, and which one is tellin’ the truth. But it don’t really matter much, since one of ya is lyin’, and the other fell asleep on watch. So it looks like you’re both fucked.’
Andre caught a hint of a smile in his wrinkled eyes.
Lieutenant Chin couldn’t sleep. For three hours he had lain in his bunk tossing and turning, every muscle sore from the day’s work. Snores filled the long, open barracks as the other junior officers slept soundly. But Chin spent his time trying to trick his mind. Soothing images of his family’s farm. But it didn’t work. They had given way to new images. Images of disgrace. The sight from earlier that day of the young lieutenant who, like Chin, was from a peasant family. During the morning’s field exercise, he’d failed to follow water purification procedures before drinking from a river. He and his entire platoon had fallen ill. The Regimental Commander himself had stood the young officer up on the reviewing platform and shouted at him for over an hour. The entire Regiment stood at attention below.
During the long tirade, Chin could see the young man wince repeatedly. Not from the occasional blow on his legs or butt by the short swagger stick the Regimental Commander carried, but from the shouting — the words. ‘You can’t read, can you? Read this! Read it!’ All that Chin could hear from the young man were his sobs. Chin spun his legs to the floor in anger. Anxious. Wondering what it was in written manuals that he should know but didn’t. He knew his job. He’d been taught everything important in classrooms and in the field. And he could read. He knew all two thousand characters. It was just sometimes he didn’t understand.
He got up and walked the length of the darkened barracks to the lavatory. When he got there, he heard whispering from the mop closet. He groped along the wall for the switch. When he had found it, he opened the closet door and twisted the switch until it clicked — flooding the small area with light.
In the glare Chin saw four men squatting in a circle. Mops and brooms hung from the walls all around. One of the men rushed toward Chin and turned the lights off.
They were all officers in Chin’s infantry battalion. To his great relief they appeared to just be talking.
‘Come here,’ someone said in the darkness. He took Chin’s arm and pulled him into the room. Chin squatted down to join the rest of them.