Sharpshooter (11 page)

Pvt. Arguello walks, half stooped over, to where the lieutenant is standing, and turns his back to the whole scene. He has the radio mounted on his back. Systrom is calling in details.

“Parrish, Bucyk, get over here,” Systrom says between exchanges with the base. “Get them up and taken care of.”

We sling our weapons over our backs and slither over there. We drop down, and we each take a fallen comrade.

I grab Lightfoot by his shoulders … then I just drop him again when his head bends even farther back. I shake and retch and try again and pull my hands back. I feel like I am tearing farther, actually tearing the flesh of his neck where it is still attached.

Systrom finishes at the radio, shoves me aside, and jumps into the hole with Lightfoot. I roll onto my side and watch as he picks up my friend. Picks him up, cradles him, balances that precarious neck of a very good man in the crook of his left elbow. He talks to him, nose to nose. I don't hear what he is saying. It's between them.

Machine-gun fire explodes all over the jungle, and I can hear the bullets shredding the foliage all around us. We have been ambushed, and it seems to come from every direction.

I leap down to join Systrom in the dead men's hole while Arguello and Parrish haul it back up to the hole I spent the night in. Bullets follow them all the way up until they drop like torpedoes straight down into the ground. Diving headfirst they seem as likely to have broken their necks as gotten shot.

The incoming is so heavy that there's not a chance in the world for us to shoot back. The few times I manage to get the muzzle of my gun and my own muzzle above the lip of the hole, all I can see is a tripling of ricochet, and the bodies of our men jiggering and juddering as they die for us again, again, and again.

The lieutenant had called in the coordinates for helicopters to collect us in the nearest clearing about two klicks away. Even if we could get out of the ground, there is no way we could get there now.

“Corporal Parrish will be calling in the firepower now, private,” Systrom says. “You hang in there, and we will be able to wait it out.”

“Yes, sir,” I say, though I am not too sure about that at all. I have been scared before, and I have been doubtful, but at no point so far in this whole mad mother tea party have I felt what I feel right now, and that is that this is it.

This feels like
it.

Suddenly, somehow, it all gets worse. Rockets, grenades, beehive shells start exploding all around and I see shrapnel flying right past, like darts embedding themselves in the ground right near us.

Then the throat-choking sound of chopper blades, three, maybe four gunships, and I wonder how all of a sudden our little band of nobodies got so important to the enemy.

“Where'd they get all this firepower?” I ask Systrom desperately.

“It's
ours
,” he says, shouting freely now as hell rains all over us. “But it'll kill you just as quick.”

And with that, Lt. Systrom shoots up out of the hole, grabs hold of Kuns's shredded, oozing corpse, and pulls it down over himself like a trapdoor spider.

“Sir!” I scream in horror.

“These men are dead, private. Do you wish to join them?”

A large-caliber bullet pumps the earth right by my ear.

I leap up, grab Lightfoot, and stuff him right down on top of me, squeezing him in the process, forcing gasses and fluids out of a hundred punctures, out of him and over me.

The most hellacious firefight I have heard yet rages on above us, as we cling to the lifeless for life and I beg a thousand times over for forgiveness from Lightfoot and his great Great Spirit.

It is, probably, two hours before the only sound we hear is the choppers. Lt. Systrom and I slowly push our way out, lay the men down yet again, and stand with some difficulty. We walk up to the other hole to check on Parrish and Arguello, and when we near them, we hear Parrish communicating with the choppers. There is no place else for them to collect us, so we still have to make our way to that clearing two kilometers away.

We reach the hole and look down at Parrish, finishing the message, talking from underneath the dead man with the radio on his back.

Three men up, three men down, and a long, heavy walk to the choppers.

I
don't believe in paying any attention to dreams. I don't believe in spirits or spooks or visions or mumbo jumbo of any kind.

Including this. Including mine.

I am looking straight into the face of Cpl. Lightfoot, my friend, which actually did happen, and he is dead, which he actually is.

Then his mouth drops open. We're facing each other, up close, and both of our mouths are wide open because, trust me, if a dead guy's mouth falls open in your face, yours does, too.

There is a breath, a last breath, an escape of the body gasses that build up inside as the tissue starts decaying and whatnot. Not shocking, I guess, medically speaking, but, you know … shocking.

But it's the spores. That is what tips it over into another thing, a thing that gets to me more than perhaps a soldier should be gotten to. The breath he puffs out in my direction is visible, like a cloud made up of tiny, tiny droplets of his blood, a mist of his blood, and I gasp, because trust me on this again, when a dead guy breathes up a cloud of blood spore, you gasp.

And so it winds up inside me, doesn't it? I breathed it all in, and I can feel it.

What's that all about?

There are reports all the time. Reports of guys doing their tours, hitting their almighty DERUS dates, and rotating out of here. They arrive back into society somehow unfit for society. Like, nuts beyond nuts, unable to readjust to a place where sneaking around and killing everybody and everything — you should see guys around here when they get turned loose on thickets with a machete — is just not the way things work.

I say, the guys who are loony tunes are the ones who got things exactly right while they were here. If you are here, it makes complete sense. There are, as far as I can tell, three ways guys get through the experience of Vietnam.

You can keep moving. The machine is built so that, if you want to, you can spend your whole twelve months in a state of constant motion, fake-fighting, passing through the war like a disinterested tourist.

You can acknowledge the reality of the situation, realize how close you are to horror every single day, and blow your mind out in a frenzy of nonstop nerve-racking.

Or, you can snap it. Like when you snap an ammonia capsule under the nose of a guy who is losing consciousness, and he comes popping out of it like some whole new creature with a whole new look. When you snap it here, you suddenly say, it's not really real at all, not the way they think it is. What is really real is, I am death. I am death walking through this thing, and so I can't possibly die.

Snap.

There is a popular theory floating around, and that is that there are some peoples here, some shaman types indigenous to this land, who curse the head of every American soldier for every single day he is here. The curse says these soldiers will never, ever find peace because of the things they have done here. They will walk the earth as lost, empty souls at war with themselves and everyone else. Ineligible for contentment in this world or any other.

I don't think much of that theory, but there it is.

 

I am on my belly, on the firing range. The range here is not big enough, but it is a range. With only the M-16, nobody expects to be very accurate much beyond two hundred yards anyway, so this is probably practice enough. I never miss dead center anymore, unless I sneeze or cough. Sometimes I work up a sneeze or a cough to see if I can do it anyway.

“Private Bucyk,” comes the voice from above me.

“Yes, sir,” I say, squeezing off another shot. I should probably be on my feet by now. But I am shooting.

“On your feet, private.”

An order, of course, is another matter. I will always be a soldier.

“Yes, sir, Lieutenant Systrom,” I say, at attention now.

The sun is blazing hot, as it always is unless it is chucking down rain. There is a glistening of sweat on the lieutenant, but I am soaked through.

“You know, don't you, that being a sniper is about a lot more than fine shooting.”

“Fine shooting is only approximately twenty percent of the job, sir,” I say.

He smiles. “Ah, yes, I suppose I have mentioned it a few times. Anyway, yes, it is about stealth, it is about location and stalking and camouflage, independence …”

“Nerve, stamina, and transcendence, sir.”

“My,” he says, shaking his head, “I do talk a lot, don't I?”

“Yes, sir, for a sniper you do, sir.”

“All right, all right,” he says, waving me to shut it. “What I want to know now is, how interested are you in learning the trade properly, formally?”

I feel my eyes go wide, even as the sun hurts them more.

“Ninth Division is running its own Sniper School these days, in-country. It's an eighteen-day program, a tough program, fifty percent failure rate….”

“When can I start, sir?”

“Should I take that as you volunteering, Private Bucyk? Because this is strictly for volunteers. I can't force you —”

I do my best to maintain my crisp and official voice, but it is hard.

“Are you toying with me …
sir
?”

He nods, shades his eyes from the sun so he can look more properly into mine.

“I will get to work on it and let you know. Meanwhile, how are you holding up?”

“Fine, sir.”

“You sure? No lingering…?”

“Corporal Lightfoot was a fine soldier and a fine man,” I tell him.

“You don't need to tell me.”

“Arguello, and Kuns … Kuns hadn't even earned his tattoo yet, sir. Body count was zero. Never even had a chance to —”

“He had every chance, private. Kuns was a
shaker
, you are a
shooter.
Sad as it is, but we are stronger without him.”

With that he turns sharply on his heel and marches toward the next thing.

 

If Sniper School had a motto, it would have to be,
The Maximum of Death to the Minimum of People.

My father will be more than proud.

It is the most appropriately spent eighteen days of my life.

When I arrived in Vietnam, I knew a lot about shooting and a little bit about camo and concealment, observation techniques, and the precision skill of estimating the range of a target.

Now? I know almost everything about almost everything. I wear tiger-stripe camouflage gear. And I am personally responsible for one M-21 Sniper Weapon System.

Sometimes the universe and the Army get it exactly right.

“You are now thirty-five thousand times more deadly than you were before,” says Major Howell, addressing the graduating class of twenty-one of us.

I like the sound of that.

“Because while the average soldier in the field in this conflict fires fifty thousand rounds per kill, the average for the trained sniper such as yourself is 1.39 rounds. Do you know what that means?”

I am going to guess that he isn't going to refer to how cost-effective we are.

“It means, men, that you are going to be very familiar with the concept of intimate killing. When you fire your weapon, a man is most likely going to die. When you get someone in the crosshairs of your sight, at that very instant in time you are going to know that individual, personally, more than anyone else ever will again. It takes a special brand of fighting man to handle that. This ceremony today certifies that each and every one of you is indeed that special kind of fighting man.”

Before I was good.

Now I'm
special.

 

“Are you okay, Moxie?” Parrish asks as I sit on my bunk, polishing my weapon. Every day at Sniper School, one of the instructors would disassemble the weapon, and we would have to clean and oil it. Then he would put it back together again. We could never do the breakdown or reconstruct. Not until the last three days. I did the whole thing twenty-four times in the last three days. This weapon and I are so intimate, I would bet you that it would come if I whistled. That is, if I ever let it get far enough away that I would need to. Which I don't.

“Of course I'm okay,” I say. “I'm more okay than anybody. Want to play some cribbage?”

I pull Lightfoot's cribbage board and the cards out of my footlocker and lay them on the bed. Parrish stares a screwed-up face at it as if I'd just barfed there.

“No, man,” he says, but sits down as if the answer was yes, man. “That's a Navy game anyway. That's a
submariners'
game.” He says the word
submariners
as if he's got one caught down low in his digestive tract.

“How are you, then?” I ask.

“Not all that terrific, thanks for asking.”

Things are different now, since half our team got shredded to cabbage. We don't have the same certainty and regularity we had as a unit. We are still here on the
Benewah
, but it seems like the Riverine identity is taking over a bit, like we have one foot in a green boat and the other in a gray boat and they are drifting different ways until something has to give.

“You know what they got me doing now? I go out every evening on one of those crazy PBRs,” Parrish says. PBR stands for Patrol Boat, River, the small craft you see all over the place here. “We do like the name says, and we patrol the river, but more and more it seems to me that we have the primary goal of exposing and soliciting enemy fire for somebody else to go clean out later. We are like one of those carnival shoot 'em games, you know what I mean?”

I know well what he means, and I smile at the thought of Paragon Park. I wonder what I'll score when I get back?

“Man, Bucyk, I'm telling you, we get shot at every
day.
And the boat gets
hit
every day. The sound alone, of the pinging, and the whistling of rocket fire, is enough to put a guy right out of his mind.”

“Cribbage?” I say.

“No,” he says, “stop that. And it's bad luck to steal board games from dead people. A fortune-teller in Saigon told me that.”

“That's funny,” I say, pointing at him with one hand and polishing with the other.

“Is it?” he asks, though he is laughing. “I can't tell anymore.”

“Listen, you want me to shoot these guys for you?” I say.

“Oh, Bucyk, would you? That's awfully nice of you. Thanks, problem solved.”

“There.”

“There, what? I do have my own gun, you know. And it's a real something, too. A 105-mm howitzer, baby, an absolute
cannon
. I think when I shoot the thing off, it scares the Navy guys on my own boat more than it does the VC on the banks.”

“Great. Then what's your problem?”

“The problem, my man, is that no matter how many times I kill these guys —”

“I am thirty-five thousand times more lethal than you are, by the way, have I told you that?” I say, interrupting with an important and pertinent truth.

He stares at me deadpan.

“I once killed a guy with a cribbage board, have I told you that?”

“I like your moxie,” I say.

“Aw, now you're just getting weird, man. Cut it out.”

“Please continue with your story.”

“No matter how many times I kill these guys, they are all right back there the next day. I mean,
all of 'em.
In the exact same nests, practically, as if to say they are just not bothered by what we are doing at all. I mean, what are we supposed to do about that? I realize I'm a corporal and you're just a private, but come on, you
stink
of Real Army … take no offense….”

“Why would I?”

“So, I mean, where do we go from here? What do we do?”

I am preparing to solve this small problem for my friend when the boss comes in. Parrish and I stand at attention. He waves us back down.

“Lieutenant,” I say, “any chance I can ride with Parrish and his PBR this evening?”

“None whatsoever, corporal,” he says.

“But what if —
corporal
?”

He hands over some stripes. “The first of many field promotions, I imagine. Congratulations, Moxie,” he says, and shakes my hand.

Parrish then shakes my hand, too, adding, “Don't get all excited, they're giving these to everybody out here.”

“Sir,” I say as the lieutenant turns to leave. “Parrish's PBR…?”

“Will have to get along without you. Your orders are to take three days off, after which time you will be reassigned. To some lucky operation that is in dire need of your specific set of skills and training. Congratulations again, Moxie. You are leaving the madness of the Riverine Assault Force.”

My head is swimming as I sit there. I consider all the possibilities.

And I think I like them all.

“What should I do for three days, lieutenant?”

“The beauty of that is, you can decide for yourself. I suggest you bug out, go to Saigon, live a little. Relax, refuel, refresh. Follow your heart, knock yourself out. But if I see you set foot on one single river assault vehicle before you go … well, just remember what distance I can pick you off from, soldier.”

I smile and nod and force myself not to say that I can now do the same thing from the same distance so I'll wave to you through my starlight scope.

 

“Excuse me?”

I have wandered where I dared not tread before.

“Corporal Bucyk,” I say, saluting though I have no idea what rank the man is or if I don't maybe even outrank him. I don't care. I know what turf I am on and what kind of soldier I am addressing, and in my book he is worthy of a salute.

“Moxie,” he says, expressionless. The fact that he knows anything at all about me gives me a greater jolt than finding an enemy, a viper, or a corpse in the jungle. “What do you want?”

“I would like to go out. On operations. With you and your people.”

A wide grin opens up across a very partial set of tan-colored teeth with no enamel to them at all.