“No, but I saw a bunker take incoming. Look, R&R saw shit in it too. They’re afraid of it.”
Alfred laughed, “Those two are fucking strung out on speed. You seen that monkey they’ve taught to throw frags? Got him up on speed too. I wouldn’t believe anything they say.”
“I’ll get the scope. I’ll show you,” Jackson said.
He went to the TOC and returned with the scope. When he turned it on, the end did not glow again. He pointed it at Alfred’s observation bunker, and the scope seemed to be working perfectly. Unless Alfred could see it too there was no use going out to talk to him. Jackson looked one last time. The big end glowed, and he watched a soldier die, but this time he was not so sure it was a man operating a radar machine.
Jackson walked across the compound toward the bunker line, looking for a bunker that looked like the one he had just seen in the scope. Suddenly mortar rounds started dropping. Jackson dived into the nearest shelter, a recoilless rifle emplacement. The firebase’s mortars and 105s replied.
“Hey, it’s fucking Alabama,” a soldier said.
“Hale kick you out of the TOC?” another soldier asked.
“I—” Jackson began.
Rounds began to drop close to the emplacement and men scrambled for cover. Jackson heard the shrapnel whistle overhead.
“Get the fuck out of here, Alabama!” a soldier yelled. “You’re drawing fire just like fucking Light.”
The firing had stopped and someone shoved Jackson out of the emplacement.
“Go get somebody else fucked,” a voice yelled after him.
Jackson ran for the radar bunker.
Alfred could still be all right. Maybe it was the next incoming that was going to get him, Jackson thought.
But when Jackson reached the radar bunker, he found the bunker had taken a direct hit which had collapsed the roof. A group of soldiers were already trying to dig out Alfred’s body.
I don’t want to know this fucking shit before it happens, Jackson thought, gasping for breath.
Jackson returned to the TOC and sat up on the roof for a long time in the light rain. Although he kept turning the starlight on, it remained dark.
After Alfred’s death Jackson wanted to put the starlight away and never look at it again. He understood why Light wanted to get rid of it and how Light had known nothing was going to happen to him all those times Jackson had gone out in the bush to meet him. But other soldiers had died during the attack, and who was to say one of them, not Alfred, was the doomed soldier he had watched in the scope. The soldier might have died somewhere else, at Firebase Mary Lou or even over in Laos.
Yet every night, Jackson looked at the scope because he wanted to know what the future held for him. But he never saw himself in the scope, although he saw other soldiers die, always shadowy forms whose identities were uncertain. Jackson was sure he would recognize himself if he appeared in the scope. Jackson was never more afraid, choking and gasping for breath, than when he watched a doomed man’s image take form in the scope.
But Jackson gave no more warnings. He had learned how useless that was by his experience with Alfred. He never knew for sure who was going to die. No one would believe him, and soon his reputation would be similar to Light’s. Hale might banish him to the jungle.
Every night Jackson called Light on the radio but received no reply. He thought about going out to find Light but Light had warned him to stay at the firebase. Perhaps Light had seen something in the scope.
So Jackson kept watching men die in the scope, the starlight glowing the green light, the men’s bodies torn by shrapnel or bullets, and as the glow faded and the screen turned dark, Jackson was left breathless and afraid.
CHAPTER
18
Patrols began to report strange sightings out in the bush. They described a Buddhist monk dressed in yellow robes and carrying a rice bowl wandering about through the jungle. When pursued, the monk always disappeared into the trees.
Some of the men claimed the monk was real while those who had not seen him said he was a pothead’s hallucination. Gradually as sighting after sighting was reported, most of the men at the firebase came to believe the monk was real. The men had begun shooting at the monk, and a pool was formed for the man lucky enough to kill him.
But there were those who claimed the monk could not be killed. The monk survived a direct hit with napalm and had been seen walking out of the flames into the jungle. The monk escaped after a Spooky had caught him in the open with its Gatling guns. Yet the soldiers who started the pool argued that the monk was just smart, a dink monk in the service of the NVA.
Then the NVA began to attack both the fence and the firebase again. During the firefights, the soldiers discovered the NVA refused to give up their dead, willing to take five or six casualties just to rescue one body.
After a rocket attack on the firebase, Jackson went up to the roof of the TOC to call Light. A steady rain was falling. He spoke Light’s name into the handset over and over but received no reply, just the hiss of white noise.
“Tom Light, Tom Light,” Jackson said into the handset one last time.
“I’m here,” a voice said, coming not out of the handset but from behind him.
Jackson flinched and gasped for breath, smelling the jungle stink of Tom Light who stood before him, the rifle cradled in his arms.
“You got the starlight?” Light asked.
“In the TOC,” Jackson said.
“You get it.”
Jackson went into the TOC and returned with the starlight, careful not to wake Labouf who had just come off a shift on the big radio. Light put the starlight on his rifle.
“What you been seeing in the starlight?” Light asked.
“Troops getting wasted,” Jackson said. “Am I going to be in there. Will you know? You look and see.”
“I’ll know.”
“You know now?”
“Not until I see it in the starlight.”
“You tell me if you see me in it.”
“Nothing’s gonna happen to you.”
Light put the rifle to his shoulder and pointed it toward Laos.
“Fucking holy man is pressing me. Can’t get him without the starlight,” Light said.
Jackson said, “You’ll waste him.”
“Better than the Tiger. Different. Don’t even carry a rifle. But he knows just like I do when I got the starlight.”
“What’s he doing out there?”
“Raising their fucking dead. Dinks almost got me last night. I kept killing them, but he kept raising. They brought him in ’cause of me.”
Jackson sucked in a deep breath and said, “That monk can’t raise the dead.”
“Then why did I have to keep shooting the same fucking dinks over and over.”
“How could you tell? It was dark. You didn’t have the starlight.”
“I could tell.”
“Nobody can raise the dead.”
Light had gone crazy, Jackson thought. But was the holy man raising the dead any crazier than the troops dying in the starlight scope before they died for real?
“Listen, young trooper, he can do it,” Light said. “They brought him in to get me. Then they’ll overrun this place. Won’t be able to stop them.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m gonna waste his fucking dink ass. I can do it with the starlight.”
“Orange is young, full of daring/But very unsteady for the first go ’round,” a voice sang.
Jackson watched Reynolds & Raymond climb up on the sandbags.
Reynolds continued to play his M-16. Short-timer rode on his shoulder holding the dummy frag in his paws.
“We been trying to get Alabama to bring us out to meet you,” Raymond said. “You can bring back Jimi. Raise him right out of the grave. You can do it. Got the starlight. We’ll take a month’s leave. Fly back to the world and raise Jimi. We’ll pay. We know where there’s some money.”