James Crumley - One to Count Cadence

Don't be surprised that I had a troubled youth. I learned about masks long before Joe Morning.

But there are other things: Gut a bear, slice the thick belly skin with a keen knife, ease the blade through the membrane, cut around the anus and the genitals, split the diaphragm, reach up the chest cavity, grasp the esophagus and the larynx, cut them through, then pull from the top, pull the guts out with your hand, the pink lungs, the muscular heart smashed by a mushrooming lead-nosed bullet, the still-moving intestines, wash the clotted black blood off the ribs with an old cloth. But don't stop there, skin the manlike carcass hanging from a barn rafter, pepper him to keep the flies away, let it cool as the weather decrees, then butcher, slice the flesh, saw the bones, and wrap the meat in freezer paper, eat the backstrap chicken-fried and roast the forelegs and smoke the rear, and eat your bear, knowing as you chew, as you digest, his mortality is yours, and this is what he would do to you, though with more animal reason and less waste, and even then what you've learned is only the beginning. It is not as simple as this, not at all, but this is a beginning.

If politicians, revolutionaries, reformers, preachers and priests, generals, Gold Star Mothers and the Daughters of the American Revolution, Veterans of Foreign Wars and Sons of the Republic, if they had to field dress and butcher and eat all the useless dead they contract with warriors to produce, then… God, how the beef market would fall.

You will excuse the digression. Looking back, it seems I'm saying that I butcher game with more love and understanding than I have when I butcher men. Don't believe it. But don't pity me, either. I may be down but I ain't dead.

You will excuse the digression. As I told you, the smell of blood makes me slightly sick.

The rest of that week and the next were tense but busy. The antenna field was finished then mined, and that night two VC were killed trying to cut the cables. The bunkers were roofed with logs and sandbagged, and small concrete ammo bunkers were built into the sides of the mortar pits. An arrangement of pits and earthen walls protected all but the top half of the radio vans and the roofs were sandbagged against mortars. The generators and gasoline came, and a field kitchen too with cooks, stoves, and hot meals. The troops began to feel at home. They were brown and healthy, the last drop of San Miquel had been sweated out, and those who didn't have cat fever looked as if they could go hunting bears with a willow switch, between trips to the latrine, that is. The Det had already dug eight and filled six latrines, and used enough toilet paper to raise wood pulp stocks 3 8/10 points on the big board.

On the morning before we were to begin operations at 1600 the next day, a Caribou chopper appeared filled with tons of warm beer. Saunders had saved our beer rations for one big bust. Everyone in the Det, except me, spent the whole day drinking warm Schlitz, puking, and getting totally wiped. I broke up seven different fights, none of which drew a bit of blood from either fighter, and pulled at least twenty men out of tangles with the wire, which drew a great deal of blood. They went on after sundown, as long as they could keep enough beer down to keep their buzz up, and I spent the night poking Benzedrine down sick, sleepy guards, praying they didn't shoot each other, worried until I finally took the live rounds away from them, deciding that if the VC came this night we could hold them off just as well with empty beer cans. Once, on my rounds, I heard Saunders and Morning in one of the latrines talking about their football past, recounting every single football game they played in, saw, or even heard about. They really pissed me off. Who was I that I shouldn't be drunk? Why was I always responsible? I stormed the latrine, shouted to Saunders that he could take care of his own god-damned Det because I was going to rack out, by God. As I walked away, I heard him say to Morning, "That Krummel is sure a mean drunk, huh?" The bastard, I thought, but I had to smile. And the next morning at 0600, he was up, showered, shaved, and handing me a fifth of Dewar's, and the young men were up, out of their tents, as ready as they were ever going to be for what was to come. I had two pulls on the bottle, and when I lay down on my bunk, I was as peaceful as I had ever been.

At 1600 that afternoon, I mounted the night guard, Trick One climbed into the vans for the first swing trick, and the 721st Det was back in operation. At 0315, approximately, the first mortar round fell in the outer circle among the sleeping militia troops, a woman began screaming, the attack started, and the 721st went out of operation.

At almost the same moment as the first mortar explosion, two Bangalore torpedoes blew the inner and outer wire, one at the east gate of the outer circle, the other to the side of the M-60 bunker at the eastern point of the inner triangle. The inner wire had been blown by VC members and sympathizers among the provincial militia, about thirty of them. The mortar rounds kept coming in, walking across the compound, and a quick flurry of small-arms fire and three or four automatic weapons lashed at the hill from the edge of the clearing, east and north. The M-60s answered quickly, but the one at the eastern point just as quickly stopped as it was overrun.

I had been checking the guard at the western inner gate, and as I ran back to the CP Bunker, circling around the mess tent, a fragmentation round landed ten feet to my right. The concussion lifted then casually tossed me through the back door of the mess tent. As I tumbled, I thought only one thing: Jesus, not so soon. I fell among pots and pans and the sleeping mess cook, but I couldn't hear the noise. I got up, kicked pots one way, the cook the other, and ran back outside, and I couldn't hear the sound of my laughter. The ringing in my ears was pleasure compared to the storm of noise assaulting them when the ringing stopped. I seemed intact, though, but my shirt had disappeared. I ran on without it.

Men milled everywhere, like cattle in a lightning storm, two and three men throwing themselves at one slit trench, men slitting the sides of burning squad tents to get their footlockers out, men running still clutched in mosquito netting, and mortars falling steadily now, throwing men in long looping dives along the ground. Rifle rounds snapped past, usually overhead, but an occasional red explosion or black hole stung among us; sparks trailed above our mortar pits, now, answering, and the rifle fire slowed. I hit and pushed my way through the flying naked arms and legs, screaming Alert Positions! but it seemed that no one heard me, no one felt my blows, not one returned them. I stopped by my tent for the shotgun and two bandoliers of ammo, slung them, then ran for the CP Bunker. Fifteen feet from the bunker, our M-60 began to wink at me from the mortar pit behind the eastern emplacement. I dove and rolled into the communication trench, falling among five or six crouched troops holding smoke grenades. I shook them, shouted at them, then kicked them, but they refused to move. I threw the grenades for them, so we had a bit of smoke cover about thirty-five yards out, and the M-60 slowed its rate of fire. As I turned to go back to the CP, the troops were beginning to throw grenades on their own, smoke and fragmentation, but they were mostly short, and the M-60 began to answer with waspish vehemence. Two troops were hit with a single burst directly in front of me. One's right arm came back mangled from a throw, forearm hanging at an oblique angle; another's brains and bits of skull rained upon my back. I threw the dead one out of the trench before he stopped kicking, and dragged the other to the CP. An aid station had been set up in the guard section, so I left him with the white-faced medic.