empty cans and shell casings; asked remnants of fires; tattered socks and tank tops too worn out to bother with. It was always the same when they moved out, like a gypsy carnival that had packed up in the night and moved to another town.
He had run out of horse and was already beginning to feel the agonies of withdrawal. The stomach pains, the itching, the headache, the dry mouth. His hand was shaking so badly he could hardly write. Besides, it all sounded the same. He hardly heard the jeep until it was almost on top of him, and he jumped, startled, and then scrambled to his feel and stuck out his thumb. It reminded him of the day he had hitchhiked to Woodstock, or tried to. By the time he got there the music was a memory.
The dust-coated jeep whizzed by, then skidded to a stop, throwing out pounds of dirt and dust.
‘You oughta be careful,’ Gallagher said, a Cincinnati-flat accent, ‘I almost creamed ya.’
Prophet limped over to the shotgun seat. ‘How about a ride?’
‘Sure, hop in,’ said Gallagher, grinding the gears into low. ‘Where you headed?’
‘I lost track of the war,’ said Prophett, rubbing his arms.
‘Shit, you’re goin’ in the wrong direction. Action’s back there,’ Gallagher said, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder.
‘Where you headed?’
‘Thought I’d jog cross-country to Camranh,’ Gallagher said.
‘What’s your gig?’ asked Prophett.
‘Run a coupla service clubs down in S—town.’
‘Sounds real tough.’
‘It’s a living. You a reporter?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I know a few TV guys down country. Keep them happy, know what I mean?’
‘Right,’ said Prophett, huddling down in the seat, hoping the shakes wouldn’t get too bad. At least he could score there, maybe catch a Huey ride back up to the line. He draped a foot over the side of the jeep. ‘Camranh sounds fine t’me.’
‘I’d watch that,’ said Gallagher. ‘This road’s fulla cracks.
Hate to lose control with you hanging that leg over the side like —,
The words were hardly out of his mouth when they hit the land mine. Gallagher didn’t even hear the explosion; all he felt was the ungodly pain in the bottom of his feet, as if he had been hit with a baseball bat by Hank Aaron, and he was tossing head over heels in the air, trying to grab on to something, anything, only there was nothing to grab on to. He landed in a soggy ditch twenty feet away with a thunk that sounded like someone smacking a pumpkin with a board. The air hissed out of him. He rolled over on his back, out of the gooey mess, and stared up at the sky and thought, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, be kind to me. Don’t let me die here.
On the other side of the road the shattered jeep lay upside down, its wheels still spinning around, its undercarriage blown away. Prophett lay on his side, staring dumbly at his leg, which was trapped under the wreckage. He had forgotten withdrawal, the pain in his leg was so great. He slid up to a sitting position and pushed halfheartedly on the side of the vehicle, as if he thought it might just topple back upright. Then he passed out.
Then there was Wonderboy, rock star turned marine. He had left most of his face in the Mekong Delta.
Harswain was a short, lean stick of a man with a bushy mustache and hair like a porcupine’s and he still carried his swagger stick from the days when he was a DI at Parris Island. He sat on a log and drew little nothing doodles in the dirt with it.
‘You’ll know when it’s coming, pretty boy,’ he said to Wonderboy. ‘That round with your name etched into it. You’ll know it. It’ll come sighin’ ‘cross the field and it’ll spit in yer eye a second afore it eats up yer brain.’
He laughed.
Wonderboy felt a cold chill on the back of his neck. Fear nested in his chest and squeezed his lungs and he was out of breath. It was time for some relief. On the line for seventy-seven days. No break. Out of the first sixty that had gone up, there were fourteen left. He listened to Harswain and he thought about that bullet.
That was when Charlie hit. There was chaos — everybody running around, scrambling to get behind something, grabbing for weapons. Mail coming in. Harswain yelling at them as usual.
‘Get below his horizon,’ he was yelling and Wonderboy was snaking across the ground on his belly, crowding a downed tree and suddenly it was being chewed up a foot away and he cowered down behind it and got his piece ready and then he did a John Wayne, twisting, rising, throwing his rifle across the log, popping half a dozen caps at the jungle.
That was when he saw the bullet, or thought he saw it, that lead slug auguring through the air toward him as if in slow motion, spinning white-hot like an angry wasp, an ugly stub of lead whistling through the air.
He fell on his back with his eyes squeezed tight shut and waited, listening to more lead ripping the tree over his head, and then he dropped his gun and scrambled on his hands and knees away, toward the jungle, sobbing with fear, listening to Harswain’s scream, ‘Come back here, you lily-livered little freak, you. Damn you,’ heard him fire a burst toward his back and saw it chew the ground up around his feet but he didn’t stop. He stood up and kept running until he couldn’t run anymore. He fell on his hands and knees and threw up.
He heard the flamethrower nearby, felt the backlash of heat from it and peered through the jungle grass. The kid was twenty feet away, burning everything in front of him.
Perfect cover, thought Wonderboy, scrambling in behind him. Then somebody yelled, ‘Incoming!’ and he heard the sigh of the mortar falling down from the sky, and he pulled into a tight little curl like a slug in a garden. It was a direct hit on the tank, and the flamethrower and the kid erupted in a giant splash of fire that swept over him and a moment before he passed out he felt the skin on his face begin to melt. .
Finally there was Corkscrew and Potter. Now, there was a pair. Corkscrew and his brother, Hammer, had once run most of the class hookers in MoTown from the backseat of a gold-tinted stretch Lincoln, .while Potter had scratched out a living on an Arkansas farm where the earth was so poor ‘the ants climbed trees to fuck,’ as he delicately put it. They had come out of the war closer than twins.
They had been holding the hill in Dang Pang for two days against a bunch of VC that seemed w be everywhere.
On the morning of the third day Potter crawled around the top of the hill and checked pulses. The rest of his men were dead. Mortars had taken down most of the trees and rain had filled the shell holes with stagnant water. Baby mosquitoes popped from their eggs and skimmed along the surface of the smelly ditches. Now there were three of them. Potter, the poor Arkansas dirt farmer, and Corkscrew and his brother, Hammer, a couple of fast-living Detroit pimps who got caught in the draft. Dogface infantry soldiers all, with about as much in common as a banana and a glass of gin.