Gustav Hasford - The Short-Timers

The poge colonel grins, bares his vampire fangs, takes step toward me.

I punch him in the chest with my wooden bayonet.

He freezes. He looks down at the wooden bayonet. He looks at the deck, then at the sky. Suddenly his wristwatch is very interesting. "I...uh...I've got no more time to waste on this unprofitable encounter...and get a haircut!"

I salute. The poge colonel returns my salute. We hold the salute awkwardly while the colonel says, "Someday, Corporal, when you're a little older, you'll realize how naive--"

The poge colonel's voice breaks on "naive."

I grin. His eyes fall.

Both salutes cut away nicely.

"Good day, Marine," says the poge colonel. Then, armored in the dignity awarded him by Congress, the colonel marches back to his Mighty Mite, climbs in, and drives away with his bloodless lance corporal.

The poge colonel's Mighty Mite lays rubber--after all that talking he doesn't even give me a ride.

"YES, SIR!" I say. "IT IS A GOOD DAY, SIR!"

The war goes on. Bombs fall. Little ones.

An hour later a deuce-and-a-half slams on its brakes.

I climb up into the cab with the driver.

During the bumpy ride back to Phu Bai the driver of the deuce-and-a-half tells me about a mathematical system he has devised which he will use to break the bank in Las Vegas as soon as he gets back to the World.

As the driver talks the sun goes down and I think: Fifty-four days and a wake-up.

I've got forty-nine days and a wake-up left in country when Captain January hands me a piece of paper. Captain January mumbles something about how he hopes I have good luck and then he goes to chow even though it's not chow time.

The piece of paper orders me to report for duty as a rifleman with Delta Company, One-Five, currently based at the Khe Sanh.

I say good-bye to Chili Vendor and Daytona Dave and Mr. Payback and I tell hem that I'm glad to be a grunt because now I won't have to write captions for atrocity photographs they just file away or tell any more lies because there's nothing more the lifers can threaten me with. "What are they going to do--send me to Viet Nam?"

Delta Six cuts Cowboy a huss and I'm assigned to Cowboy's squad as the first fire team leader--the assistant squad leader--until I've got enough field experience to run my own rifle squad.

There it is.

I'm a grunt.

Rolling thunder.

Clouds float across the white moon, clouds like great metal ships. Black wings beating, enormous objects falling. Arc Light in the monsoon rain; an air strike in the dark. A flight of B-52 bombers circle Khe Sanh, sprinkling eggs of black iron. Each egg weighs two thousand pounds. Each egg knocks a hole into the cold earth, punches a crater into the constricting web of slit trenches that forty thousand determined little men have dug to within a hundred yards of our wire. Black and wet, the earth heaves up like the deck of a great ship, heaves up toward the droning death birds.

Even in the fury of aerial bombardment we sleep, shadows in the earth. We sleep in holes we have dug with entrenching tools. The holes are little graves and hold the rich, damp odor of the grave.

The monsoon rain is cold and heavy and is thrown all over the place by the wind. The wind has power. The wind roars, hisses, whispers seductively. The wind claws at the shelters we have constructed with ponchos and nylon cord and scraps of bamboo.

Raindrops thump my poncho like pebbles falling into a broken drum. Half asleep, my face pressed into my gear, I listen to the sounds of the horror that is everywhere, buried just beneath the surface of the earth. In my dreams of blood I make love to a skeleton. Bones click, the earth moves, my testicles explode.

Shrapnel bites my shelter. I wake up. I listen to the fading drone of the B-52's. I listen to the breathing of my squad of brothers, nightmare men in the dark.

Outside our wire an enemy grunt is screaming at invisible airplanes that have killed him.

I try to dream something beautiful.... My grandmother sits in a rocking chair on her front porch shooting Viet Cong who have stepped on her roses. She drinks the blood of a dragon from a black Coca-Cola bottle while Goring my mother with fat white breasts nurses me and drives Germany on and on, his words cut from the armor plate of a tank....

I sleep on steel, my face on a pillow of blood. I bayonet teddy bear and I snore. Bad dreams are something you ate. So sleep, you mother.

The wind roars up under my shelter and rips the poncho off its bamboo frame, snapping the lines that secured it. Rain falls on me like a wave of icy black water.

An angry voice drifts in from beyond the wire. An enemy sergeant is saying dirty words I don't understand. An enemy sergeant has stumbled over a dead man in the dark....

Night patrol.

In the predawn sky a little metal star goes nova--an illumination round.

Eating an early breakfast in the red slime of a slit trench at Khe Sanh. Yesterday I made myself a new stove by punching air holes into an empty C's can. Inside the stove, C-4 plastic explosive glows like a fragment of brimstone. Ham and mothers pop and bubble in another olive-drab can while I mix and stir with a white plastic spoon.

On the horizon, orange tracers stitch the night. Puff the Magic Dragon, "Spooky", a C-47 flying electric Gatling gun, is pouring three hundred rounds per minute into some gook's wet dreams.

Taste the ham and lima beans. Hot. Greasy. Smells like pig shit. With my bayonet I lift the full can off the stove. I anchor the can in red mud. I balance my mess cup over the flame and pour in a packet of powdered cocoa and then half a canteen of spring water. With some slack, hot chocolate dilutes the sour aftertaste of halazone purification tablets.

A Viet Cong rat attacks. Obviously, he intends to bring my breakfast under the influence of Communism.

This is a rat I know personally, so I cut him some slack and do not set him on fire with lighter fluid the way my bros and I have done with his relatives. I stomp my foot and the rat retreats into a shadow.

In the light of the flare my bros in the Lusthog Squad of Delta One-Five look like pale lizards. My bros look up at me with lizard eyes. No slack. I gave them the finger. Their lizard eyes click back to their poker cards.

From his new strategic position, the Viet Cong rat stares back to assert his principles.

The illumination flare trembles, freezes Khe Sanh into a faded daguerreotype. Look at all the junk of modern war spilled across our dusty citadel, look at how bearded grunts hang on while the world spins and gravity cheats, look at the concrete bones of an old French outpost (patrolled at night by the ghosts of dead Legionnaires and by the Mongol horsemen of Genghis Khan)--see how the broken walls of the outpost are like rotting teeth, look out beyond our wire at a thousand acres of blasted moonscape, feel the cold hard terror and the calm of it.

During the past three months the rocky terrain around Khe Sanh has been pounded with the greatest volume of explosives in the history of war. Two hundred million pounds of bombs and whole catalogues of other weapons have torn and plowed the sterile red earth, have shattered boulders, have splintered and chewed the stumps of trees, have pockmarked the deck with craters big enough to be graves for tanks.

The flare floats down beneath a miniature parachute, swaying and squeaking, dripping sparks and hissing, until it hits the wire. Illumination dissolves.

In the darkness I am one with Khe Sanh--a living cell of this place--this erupted pimple of sandbags and barbed wire on a bleak plateau surrounded by the end of the world. In my guts I know that my body is one of the components of gristle and muscle and bone of Khe Sanh, a small American community pounded daily by one-hundred-and-fifty-two-millimeter artillery pieces firing from caves eleven kilometers away on Co Roc Ridge in Laos, pounded by fifteen hundred shells a day, pounded, pounded, pounded with brain-numbing regularity, an anthill beneath a sledgehammer.