“A green light,” Jackson said.
“That all, just green light?” Light asked. “Didn’t see troops getting blown away? They’re gonna die all right. You saw them in the starlight.”
“I didn’t see anything,” Jackson said.
Click, click, click, came a sound from the cot, and Jackson realized that Light was reassembling the rifle in the dark and doing it faster than Jackson had ever imagined possible. Now that Jackson’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness he could see movement from Light’s cot, but no shape he could say for sure was an arm or a leg.
“This ain’t a cheap ass M-16,” Light said. “Every part is milled, not stamped.”
He heard a series of clicks which meant Light was running a round through the action and then the single, sharp click as the firing pin came forward to strike an empty chamber.
“Weird through the starlight, ain’t it?” said Light.
Jackson decided to say nothing.
“When you look at the dinks through the scope, they look like men shined up on a wall with a green carbide lantern,” Light continued. “And sometimes I see things through it I’d just as soon not. What’d you see?”
Light was not much older than him, but Jackson had a feeling Light was ancient. He talked old.
“Nothing. Just green light.” Jackson said. “I’m not as dumb as the Yards. You raised any dead soldiers with it lately?”
“I might as well talk to a sandbag as to you,” Light said. “I thought you were smart,”
“I didn’t see—” Jackson began.
“Maybe you didn’t,” Light said, cutting him off. “One of these nights you will. Then we can talk.” Then Light continued, “Remember, set your radio long about sundown every day. Don’t you forget.”
“How will I find you?” Jackson asked.
“I saw a big rock up on the ridge when I was flying in today. That’ll be the place.”
“They’ll kill me. Hale don’t even like to send recon out there. The air force has napalmed the shit out of it, and the dinks haven’t left.”
“Dinks won’t touch you. I promise. Just remember, you’ll be out there anyhow with the major before it’s over. Without me you’re a dead man. You coming out?”
Maybe Light knew, Jackson thought. Maybe Light could watch the pictures in the scope and tell who was going to die.
Jackson took a deep breath and said, “I’ll be there,” but thinking at the same time, Goddamn war, fucking crazy Tom Light.
“Calm down, young trooper,” Light said. “You’ll be shooting dinks through the starlight ’fore long.”
Jackson lay down on the cot and tried to go to sleep, listening to a series of clicks as Light ran another round through the action.
CHAPTER
4
Jackson often climbed the guard tower next to the TOC and through a pair of glasses watched the men at the engineer camp completing the final circle of wire around their perimeter. The men called the mountain on which the engineer camp was built Little Tit and the mountain they lived on Big Tit while the narrow valley between the two was known as the Cunt. Sometimes, as he stood in the tower, he imagined that he was atop a gigantic reclining woman who lay with her head in Laos and her legs stretching toward the South China Sea.
When he tired of watching the engineers, he turned the glasses toward Laos. As he looked at the green mountains, their outlines indistinct in the haze of the dry season, he often thought of Tom Light who was wandering through the jungle somewhere on the woman. Already he had accumulated a stack of letters from Mississippi, the addresses on the envelopes neatly typed.
In the ammo bunker that morning he had awakened before dawn and turned the flashlight on Light’s empty cot. The guards at the gate and on the perimeter had not seen Light leave, and the pilots swore they had not taken him out by chopper. No one at the outpost ever mentioned Light’s name. At night he would set the radio on the frequency they had agreed on and wait for Light to call, but so far had heard nothing.
Every day the patrols went out, mostly into the Cunt, on search-and-destroy missions. Sometimes they found caches of rice or weapons, but they seldom brought back a body.
Before Jackson had become Hale’s RTO he had been assigned to Captain Wilson, Hale’s intelligence officer who was dead now, killed by a mine. He helped Wilson search the bodies of any enemy who were brought in. There were never many, at the most one or two a week. Jackson got used to the smell of feces and blood and burned flesh, but he never liked going through their pockets. Wilson was after letters, copies of orders.
Wilson usually sat beneath a parachute someone had rigged up to make some shade and waited for Jackson to bring him the documents. The captain always called them documents. Jackson remembered one man in particular. The patrols had not killed anyone for ten days, and all Hale could talk about was body count. Finally the chopper brought in the body of a young NVA soldier and dropped it on the pad.
Jackson stretched the man out, straightening one shattered leg. Then he went through the soldier’s front pockets. When Jackson rolled the soldier over to go through his back pockets, it was like the man was a rubber sack filled with water, heavy and hard to handle. Then Jackson searched the back pockets and found a picture wrapped in clear plastic of a small child. She stood on a stretch of green grass with trees behind her. Probably a park. The child held a white flower. A lotus?
“Found some documents?” Wilson asked.
He took Wilson the picture. Wilson looked at it a moment and put it in his pocket. Jackson wanted to smash him in the face.
“Strip him. Might have some more documents concealed on him,” Wilson said.
Jackson returned to the body and finished the job but found nothing.
As he thought of the picture, Jackson wondered if Light took dead men’s pictures out and looked at them.
Jackson always carried the radio because the ability to talk with the TOC anytime he wished made him feel secure. Radio men were often shot first in ambushes, but since Hale seemed determined to avoid going out in the field, Jackson felt safe for the present. Hale spent most of his time in the TOC working on his maps. And if the major did go out, Jackson believed he could count on Light’s promise of protection.
Sometimes he set the radio on a frequency assigned to the platoons and listened to the lieutenants talk to Hale in the TOC. During firefights he heard the fear in the voices of the young officers and their RTOs.
On clear nights he put on the whip and climbed up in the tower to talk with operators as far away as Qui Nhon on the coast. He wondered if with the addition of a longer whip he might be able to talk with Saigon or even Australia. There were even nights when he considered the possibility of reaching home. A chain of ham operators around the world might be able to patch him through to his parents or his girl who had taken a job in Birmingham.
“Loretta, Loretta,” he found himself saying one night into the handset as he thought about the girl, standing by himself in the darkness.
Static came out of the handset.
It was crazy, he thought to himself.
But he said it again, “Loretta, Loretta.”
Jackson promised himself he would never try it again. He did not want to come home from the war crazy.
At the firebase there was constant speculation about what the engineers had been sent up to the Laotian border to do. Some thought it was to build a road connecting the firebase with Pleiku while others claimed they were certain that the engineers were going to build an airbase in the Cunt.
One morning Hale assembled the two companies, Alpha and Charlie, and all speculation ended. Jackson with the radio strapped to his back stood next to Hale who had an M-16 cleaning rod in his hand. A big piece of plywood was nailed to a couple of two-by-fours behind him. Whatever was on it was covered with a section of parachute.