Cracker! (14 page)

Cracker followed Rick back as several other soldiers moved forward. She felt pretty excited. She knew there was somebody behind those bushes. It was exactly like so often before, when she and Rick had been in that other place. She recoiled slightly at something in the air. It was familiar from the other place, but she forgot the word Rick had called it. Her eyes stung a bit. Rick knelt next to her and murmured, “Tear gas.”

Then it seemed the whole world was shooting and shouting.
Bam! Bam! Bam, bam, bam!
“Get him!” “Did you get him?” “Got him!” “Watch out!”

Rick hit the dirt, holding Cracker down. Then, sudden silence, broken when someone from in front shouted, “Medic!”

Someone else cried out, “Call for the dust-off!” A “dust-off” was a helicopter to take out the wounded. That meant at least one of their guys had gotten hit.

As the medic rushed forward, Rick overheard someone saying a sniper had been killed. A couple of soldiers had been wounded, one of them badly. In a minute, men rushed by carrying that soldier, blood already seeping through a bandage on his face. Rick didn’t know his name. It was better that way. Another soldier had gotten hit in the arm. He walked by, his arm in a sling. He nodded at Rick and winked at Cracker as he moved past.

Their mission had been to find ’em and fix ’em, but they’d caught a sniper instead. Still, that was a big success. It was getting late. The lieutenant decided to head back, but he let the men take time to remove their leeches. Rick was surprised to see the men pull down their fatigues.
Aw, man.
Leeches stuck to guys all over the place. Rick pulled down his pants and saw a big, fat leech right between his legs.
AW, MAN!
He had to decide: Did he want to apply bug juice or a cigarette to the leech between his legs? He chose bug juice and watched the leech fall to the ground. Cracker growled at it.

Whenever the other guys happened to make eye contact with Rick, they nodded. Yessir, Rick and Cracker had racked up a lot of respect points today. He didn’t expect any more remarks about being a new guy.

He saw Rafael take off his boots. One of Rafael’s socks was bright red with blood. A leech must have gotten down his boot, then been squished. Rick had heard that it happened all the time. Those leeches could get anywhere. Insidious little freaks. The medic stopped by with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He took out another cigarette, lit it, and handed it to Rick.

“Thanks, Doc,” said Rick.

Doc nodded, then petted Cracker.

Cracker felt the man massage her head. “Good girl,” he said. That felt nice-but not nearly as nice as when Rick did it.

C
RACKER RAN AS FAST AS SHE COULD.
H
ER MUSCLES
had gotten stronger every day, and she loved to feel their power as she pushed off the ground to gallop. If she got caught, there would be a lot of trouble. So despite a nearly overwhelming desire, she didn’t stop to eat the steak she had clenched in her jaws, just ran as fast as she could. Tristie raced by her side, and a few other dogs ran behind them. The calls of the men grew farther and farther away. She spotted a row of tall cans in front of her. Smelled like gas cans. Right before she reached the cans, she pushed up on her back legs as hard as she could and felt herself soar into the air. But she never forgot to keep her mouth clamped. She knew she would make it; she cleared the cans by such a small amount that her back paws brushed them as she landed. She stopped for one second and swallowed the steak.

By the time the other dogs reached her, the steak was gone. She could hear yelling in the background. The noisy man yelled loudest of all. She hung her head low as the noisy man and all the other men ran around the cans. They smelled of sweat. Rick marched up to her. She hung her head even lower and whined. She lifted her eyes lovingly and pawed at Rick. Before Rick could say a word, the noisy man spoke up. “That was
your
dinner, mister. I’ve told you guys to keep those dogs on a leash.”

In the short time Cracker had been here, she’d noticed a change in the way Rick treated the noisy man. Rick was a lot more casual with him. Now he said, “Uh-huh, Sergeant,” all the while glaring at Cracker.

Twenty had managed to procure some steak by trading a pile of choice magazines he’d obtained from somewhere. Who knew where he got the stuff he traded? That was one of his specialties. Twenty had specialties, focuses. No generalist there.

The men pulled the dogs by their collars into the kennels. Rick pushed Cracker in and said, “Bad girl! I’ll see you tomorrow. No supper.” He walked off. Cracker looked around. Every dog was staring at her. She regurgitated the steak and sniffed at it.
Mmmm.
Smelled good. Very good. Then she swallowed it again and lay in the place where the setting sun slanted over the gated side of her kennel. She watched Rick’s back retreat into the distance. She liked steak.
Very, very good.
She closed her eyes and let the sun warm her face. Every day was pretty good. Sometimes Rick took her out to work. The days were mostly dry. The temperatures were pleasant in the mornings and evenings, but when she worked in the afternoons, she got hot. Whenever she tried to drink from anyplace except Rick’s steel pot or her bowl, he got mad at her. Right now she lapped up water from her bowl before lying in the sun again to fall asleep.

The next morning Rick showed up as usual with her breakfast. He fed her sullenly and left. She whimpered, and he turned around. She gave him a love look. “It’s not funny,” he said. “The whole unit got steak for dinner last night, and I got C rats.”

C rats, mmmm. Good.
Rick looked at her sternly, but she just wagged her tail. Then he cracked a smile and said, “Okay, let’s go.”

They spent the day with some other guys and dogs, jumping over the walls and through tunnels at the obstacle course the men had erected for the dogs to do what Cracker thought of as playacting. It was fun but not as intense as when they went out to work for real. The guys laughed more, and Cracker couldn’t feel much tension, except maybe a certain competitiveness among Rick and his friends. She tried to do everything he said really well. Still, she knew these days were just pretend. Once, she raced ahead of Rick without any command from him and did the whole obstacle course. Then she ran up to him and sat. She waited for his reaction and got what she wanted. A smile. A “good girl.”

Cracker loved playing. And every time she worked for real, more and more guys petted her and gave her food. Sometimes she could tell this annoyed Rick. He would say, “I’m her handler,” which Cracker took to mean that he felt jealous, so then she would sit next to him or lick his hand to let him know she understood. But she still liked the treats.

During the evenings Rick would brush her and tell her she was the best dog in Nam. She would hear the exact same words coming from the mouths of Cody and Twenty as they brushed their dogs. She didn’t know what the words meant, but she took them to mean “good dog.”

Sometimes, even on the slow days, something would happen that would remind Rick that men were dying out there. Like once, he saw some guys gathered around a radioman. Rick heard shouting and screaming. The shouting, he realized, had come over the radio and from a different unit. He heard a man scream in pain. He looked around him. Here in his little section of the war everything was peaceful. But he was hearing someone over the radio, screaming, maybe dying. He listened soberly to the sounds of battle. He heard the screaming die out, and he wondered whether that meant the soldier was better … or worse.

Over the next few weeks Rick pulled some routine missions, or maybe Cracker was such a good dog that she made everything go smoothly. They cleared a couple of villages—where Cracker found some ammo and V.C. food caches—and they set up a few ambushes during which the most exciting thing that happened was that Rick got so many mosquito bites, it looked like he had a rash on his arms. Clearing villages was pretty routine. You just emptied the village of humans and animals and took your dog through looking for weapons or food caches. The first time was hard because Cracker got real interested in the chickens and other animals that the villagers kept, and Rick couldn’t keep her focused. She didn’t seem to understand that she wasn’t supposed to chase small animals. Rick remembered how much she’d drooled when she’d seen the chicken at Fort Benning. Still, he felt he’d been able to control her pretty well here in country. Some of the dogs were even worse.

Every time they’d cleared a village here in Vietnam, she’d managed to find a few tunnels, but none of them seemed like V.C. tunnels. They were just the same old tunnels all the villagers dug to hide out in whenever the need arose. Nearly all the homes had double walls or secret tunnels. There were American soldiers called “tunnel rats” who specialized in exploring the more elaborate tunnels, when they could find them. Charlie had dug an elaborate system of tunnels throughout some areas of Vietnam. Nobody was sure exactly how elaborate the tunnels were, but it was rumored that thousands of people, even kids, lived underground. They slept, cooked dinner, went to school, planned attacks, all in the tunnels. Some of them didn’t see daylight for months at a time, and some came out only at night to stage ambushes, or even to work the rice paddies. All this was utterly amazing to Rick. One guy in his neighborhood back home had built a bomb shelter in his backyard and had actually tried it out for a week. Rick’s grandmother had said the guy was nutty as popcorn. Rick smiled as he remembered thinking that “nutty as popcorn” made no sense at all. Kind of like Twenty’s “for all intensive purposes.” The memory made him ache for home. Even for working in the hardware store.

It was hard for Rick to imagine living in a bomb shelter for a week, let alone a tunnel for several months. He couldn’t imagine Cracker doing it either. Would probably drive her insane.

One day when things were especially quiet, one of the cooks declared that he could heat up an entire mess hall’s worth of food in five minutes. “Watch this,” said the cook. “I’m gonna revolutionize this army.” Rick and Cody hung around for the show.

The cook took a thirty-two-gallon galvanized trash can and set it on three big food cans. He filled the big trash can with hot water and placed a stick of C-4 explosive under the can and lit it. It burned with a very hot and intense orange flame.

Cody, ever the optimist, said, “Hey, this might really work.”

As the water boiled, the can started to shake violently. “It’s gonna blow!” shouted Rick. He and the other guys took off and hit the dirt about twenty yards away, turning to watch the shaking can fall off its perch. The whole thing exploded, sending the can, food, and water in all directions. A captain appeared about thirty seconds later to chew out the cook. Every fly from Three Corps already seemed to be invading the area. The captain glared at all the men, who were now at attention. “None of you will be eating lunch today unless you care to partake in that food with the flies.” Rick wanted to protestwhen something like that was going on, of course you were going to watch. But he wasn’t about to argue with a captain.

Even Cracker heard the explosion from her kennel. She could tell it was nearby, and she felt a surge of worry about Rick. She didn’t see him again until that evening, when he came to take her for a walk. He seemed relaxed and happy. That was good. Then the very next morning he showed up tense and worried. That was bad. He quickly fed her and hardly petted her at all. He didn’t seem to be mad at her, though, just distracted.

“I’ll be back after breakfast,” he said. “We pulled a special mission.” He hesitated, then walked back to the kennel and opened Cracker’s gate and laid his forehead on hers. She liked that. She stood as still as she possibly could so she could concentrate on what he was feeling. He was worried. He pulled back. “You remember what a hot zone is, Crack?” He rubbed behind her ears. “They asked for us specifically.” He lowered his voice. “It’s a secret mission. I don’t even know what it is.” Manning, Wisconsin, had not prepared Rick for this. His whole future had been laid out for him there. Not many surprises.

Cracker sniffed at his pocket.
Wiener?
Rick pulled it out and heaved her a piece. “Got this from the chef.” She gobbled it up. “I don’t know how you stay so skinny.”

He closed the gate, and she saw him heave a piece of wiener to Bruno.
Hey, that wasn’t right … oh, well.

She sat by the gate and waited. He always came back a little while after he fed her. They were probably going to work today. She could tell by how tense he was.

Before Rick returned, she stood up and pushed the tip of her nose through the chain link. She knew he was coming because, well, she just knew. And there he was, with his rucksack on his back. Twenty-Twenty and Cody walked with him. Tristie slapped her paws on the ground and ran to the back of the kennel. Cracker did the same. Then they ran back to the gate and sat their best sit. Rick was almost here! Cracker began hopping in the kennel and pawing the gate.

She was surprised when the other guys walked off in one direction, and Rick heeled her in a different one. She and Tristie looked back at each other before walking off with their guys. Rick seemed nervous, so she felt a little nervous too. She looked up at him as they walked to the helicopter pad and climbed into a chopper. Even though nobody else was on board, Rick looked around anxiously. So Cracker looked around too but didn’t see anything unusual.

All Rick knew was that they were headed for Bien Hoa and that the mission involved Special Forces. Special Forces did a lot of secret stuff. Nobody would say exactly what that meant. The Special Forces were basically the roughest, toughest, fastest, smartest, best-trained American soldiers in Vietnam. They were like guys with engineering degrees and black belts at the same time. Superspecialists. In short, nothing like Rick. Rick had actually heard they ate the soles of their own feet when they were starving.
That couldn’t possibly be true
, Rick assured himself.
Could it?