Gustav Hasford - The Short-Timers

The tank commander's great mechanical body grumbles contentedly and rumbles away.

Cowboy double-times to meet me. He punches me on the arm. "Look!" Cowboy touches his right ear, carefully. "Look!" There's a neat little round hole through his right ear and a semicircular nick on the top of his left ear. "See? A cheap Heart! The round went through the helmet from behind, spun all the way around my head, then came out and hit me in the arm..." Cowboy holds up his right forearm, which has already been bandaged. "Did you see that tank? Was that tank bad? What a honey."

Doc Jay catches up to Cowboy, grabs him roughly, pushes him down. Cowboy sits on a splintered tree stump while Doc Jay tears the waxy brown wrapper off a compress bandage and ties the bandage around Cowboy's bloody head.

Alice and I walk around to the rear of the house.

We find Rafter Man standing over the sniper, drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola. Rafter Man grins. He says, "Things go better with Coke."

Animal Mother walks up and Rafter Man says, "Look at her! Look at her!"

We all stand over the sniper. The sniper is drawing her breath with great effort. Guts that look like colorful plastic have squirted out through bullet holes. The back of the sniper's right leg and her right buttock have been torn off. She grits her teeth and then makes a sound like a dog that has been run over.

Lance Corporal Stutten leads his fire team to the sniper. "Look at that," says Lance Corporal Stutten. "It's a girl. She's all busted up."

"Look at her!" Rafter Man is saying. He struts around the moaning lump of torn meat. "Look at her! Am I bad? Am I a menace? Am I a life taker? Am I a heart breaker? "

Alice kneels and unbuckles the sniper's web belt and jerks it from under her body. The sniper whimpers. She speaks to us in French. Alice tosses the bloody belt to Rafter Man.

The sniper begins to pray in Vietnamese.

Rafter Man asks, "What's she saying?"

I shrug. "What difference does it make?"

Animal Mother spits. "It's gonna get dark. We better hump back to the company area."

I say, "What about the gook?"

"Fuck her," says Animal Mother. "Let her rot."

"We can't just leave her here," I say.

Animal Mother takes a giant step toward me, puts his face up close to mine. "Hey, asshole, Cowboy is down. You're fresh out of friends, motherfucker. I'm running this squad. I was a platoon sergeant before they busted me. I say we leave the gook for the mother-loving rats."

Rafter Man is buckling on his NVA belt. The belt has a dull-silver buckle with a star engraved in the center. "Joker is a sergeant."

Animal Mother is surprised. He stares at Rafter Man, then at me. Then: "That don't cut no shit out here. This is the field, motherfucker. You ain't a grunt. You don't pack the gear to be a grunt. You want to fuck with me? Huh? You want to throw some hands?"

I say, "I wouldn't run this squad for a million dollars. I'm just saying that we can't leave the gook like this."

"I don't care," says Animal Mother. "Go on and waste her."

I say, "No. Not me."

"Then we saddle up and move... now. "

I look at the sniper. She whimpers. I try to decide what I would want if I were down, half dead, hurting bad, surrounded by my enemies. I look into her eyes, trying to find the answer. She sees me. She recognizes me--I am the one who will end her life. We share a bloody intimacy. As I lift my grease gun she is praying in French. I jerk the trigger. Bang. One round enters the sniper's left eye and as the bullet exits it tears off the back of her head.

The squad is silent.

Then Alice grunts, flashes a big grin. "Man, you are one hard dude. How come you ain't a grunt?"

Cowboy and Doc Jay are standing beside me.

Cowboy says, "Mother, I'm serviceable. Joker, that's a well done. You're hard.'

Animal Mother spits. He takes a step, kneels, zips out his machete. With one powerful blow he chops off her head. He picks the head up by its long black hair and holds it high. He laughs and says, "Rest in pieces, bitch." And he laughs again. He walks around and sticks the bloody ball of gore into all our faces. "Hard? Now who's hard? Now who's hard, motherfuckers?"

Cowboy looks at Animal Mother and sighs. "Joker is hard, Mother. You...you're just mean."

Animal Mother pauses, spits, throws the head into a ditch.

Cowboy says, "Let's move. We done our job."

Animal Mother picks up his M-60 machine gun, lays it across his shoulders, struts over to me. He smiles. "You know, Shortround never did see the frag that wasted him, that little kike." Animal Mother unhooks a hand grenade from the front of his flak jacket and pushes it into my chest-- hard . Mother looks around, then smiles at me again. "Nobody shits on the Animal, motherfucker. No body."

I hook the grenade onto my flak jacket.

Alice picks up the sniper's rifle. "Hey, number one souvenir!"

Rafter Man is standing over the sniper's decapitated corpse. He aims his M-16 and fires a long burst of automatic fire into the body. Then he says, "That's mine , Alice." He takes the SKS from Alice and examines it closely. He looks down and admires his new belt. "I shot her first, Joker. She'd have died. That's one confirmed for me."

I say, "Sure, Rafter. You wasted her."

Rafter Man says, "I did. I wasted her. I fucking blew her away." He looks at his NVA rifle belt again. He holds up the SKS. "Wait until Mr. Payback sees this! "

Alice is down on his knees beside the corpse. With his machete he chops off the sniper's feet. He puts the feet into his blue canvas shopping bag. He chops off the sniper's finger and takes her gold ring.

We wait until Rafter Man takes photographs of the dead gook and we wait until Alice takes photographs of Rafter Man posing with his SKS set in his hip and his foot on the mutilated remains of the enemy sniper.

Then, as we're moving out, Rafter Man sees a reflection of his face in the jagged teeth of a shattered window, sees the new smile upon his face. Rafter Man stares at himself for a long time and then, dropping the carbine, Rafter Man just walks off down the road, not looking back, not responding to our questions.

Cowboy waves his hand and we move out. Nobody says anything about Rafter Man.

We hump back to the Forbidden City and set in for the night.

I mark the short-timer's calendar on my flak jacket--fifty-five days and a wake-up left in country.

Later, in the dark, Rafter Man comes back.

The fighting continues all around us all night, sputters of violence here and there, a mortar round, a curse, a scream.

We sleep like babies.

The sun that rises in Hue on the morning of February 25, 1968, illuminates a dead city. United States Marines have liberated Hue to the ground. Here, in the heart of the ancient imperial capital of Viet Nam, a living shrine to the Vietnamese people on both sides, green Marines in the green machine have liberated a cherished past. Green Marines in the green machine have shot the bones of sacred ancestors. Wise, like Solomon, we have converted Hue into rubble in order to save it.

The next morning Delta Six cuts us some slack and we spend the day hunting gold bars in the emperor's palace.

We enter the throne room of the old emperors. The throne is blood red, studded with inlaid mirrors.

I wish I could live in the Imperial Palace. Bright pieces of porcelain make the walls vivid. The roof is orange tile. There are stone dragons, ceramic urns, brass cranes standing on the backs of turtles, and many other fine objects of undetermined origin and function but obviously of great value and great beauty and very old.

I walk out into the emperor's magnificent garden. I find Alice and Rafter Man looking at some crispy critters. It's impossible to determine which army the men were from. Napalm leaves less than bones. I say, "The aroma of roasted flesh is, admittedly, an acquired taste."