Gustav Hasford - The Short-Timers

Today I am feeling extra fine--I'm short. Twenty-two days and a wake-up left in country.

The Viet Cong rat crouches on a sandbag an inch from my elbow. I bend over and put his share of ham and mothers on the toe of my boot. The rat watches me with black bead eyes. Rats are little but they're smart. After the rat is satisfied I can be trusted, he jumps off the sandbag and into the slit trench. He hops up onto the toe of my boot. Eating, his cheeks are fat. He looks so very bad; he's beautiful.

Roll call.

The squad files out through the wire. We do not joke with the drowsy sentries who stand lines in bunkers constructed with sandbags and logs from the jungle and sheets of galvanized tin. We ignore the hundreds of grunts from the 26th Marine Regiment who are sprawled along the perimeter, ready to move out on Operation Gold. Our squad is walking point for a battalion. We ignore Claymore mines, rust-eaten Coca-Cola cans hung on the concertina wire with pebbles in them, red aluminum triangles with MINES and MIN stenciled on them, trenches full of garbage, catholes full of fly-sprinkled turds, and heaps of brass from our howitzers.

This time we do not salute Sorry Charlie. Sorry Charlie is a skull, charred black. Our gunner, Animal Mother, mounted the skull on a stake in the kill zone. We think that it's the skull of an enemy grunt who got napalmed outside our wire. Sorry Charlie is still wearing my old black felt Mousketeer ears, which are getting a little moldy. I wired the ears onto Sorry Charlie for a joke. As we hump by, I stare into the hollow eye sockets. I wait for a white spider to emerge. The dark, clean face of death smiles at us with his charred teeth, his inflexible ivory grin. Sorry Charlie always smiles at us as though he knows a funny secret. For sure, he knows more than we do.

Back on the hill, resupply choppers wop-wop down to earth like monster grasshoppers while mortar shells rip up the steel carpet of the airstrip.

We lock and load.

Our minds sink into our feet.

On a stump inside the treeline someone has nailed a scrap of ammo crate with crude letters that are black through the ground fog: ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER HERE. We do not laugh. Our eyes stay on the trail. We have seen the sign a hundred times and believe it.

We meet some guys from India Three-Five humping down from their night ambushes. Scuttlebutt is, nobody got in the shit. No VC. No NVA. Outstanding, we all agree. Decent, we say, and we ask them if any of their sisters put out. They offer to buy us free beer if we promise to pee down our legs and we're to be sure and write if we need any help.

Dawn.

We come to the last two-man listening post. Cowboy waves his hand and Alice takes the point.

Alice is a black colossus, an African wild man with a sweat rag of green parachute silk tied around his head; no helmet. He wears a vest he has made from the skin of a Bengal tiger he wasted one night on Hill 881. He wears a necklace of Voodoo bones--chicken bones from New Orleans. He calls himself "Alice" because his favorite record album is Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant . Cowboy calls Alice "The Midnight Buccaneer" because Alice wears a gold ring in his left ear. Animal Mother calls Alice "The Ace of Spades" because Alice sticks poker cards between the teeth of his confirmed kills. And I call Alice "Jungle Bunny" because it mocks Alice's truly savage nature.

Alice has a blue canvas shopping bag slung over his shoulder. The blue canvas shopping bag is filled with foul-smelling gook feet. Alice collects enemy soldiers; he shoots them dead, then chops their feet off.

All clear , says Alice with a hand signal. Alice's hands are protected by pigskin gloves. He hacks the jungle with his machete.

Cowboy waves his hand and we move along the trail, Indian-file.

Cowboy steps off the trail, jabs his gray Marine-issue glasses with his forefinger. In the gray glasses Cowboy does not look like a killer, but like a reporter for a high school newspaper, which he was, less than a year ago.

Humping in the rain forest is like climbing a stairway of shit in an enormous green room constructed by ogres for the confinement of monster plants. Birth and death are endless processes here, with new life feeding on the decaying remains of the old. The black earth is cool and damp and the oversized greenery is beaded with moisture, yet the air is thick and hot because the triple canopy holds in the humidity. The canopy of interwoven branches is so thick that sunlight filters through only in pale, infrequent shafts like those in Sunday-school pictures of Jesus talking to God.

Beneath mountains like the black teeth of dragons we hump. We hump on a woodcutter's trail, up slopes of peanut butter, over moss-blemished boulders, into God's green furnace, into the hostile terrain of Indian country.

Thorny underbrush claws our sweaty jungle utilities and our bandoliers and our sixty-pound field packs and our twelve-pound Durolon flak jackets and our three-pound camouflaged helmets and our six-and-a-half pound fiberglass and steel automatic rifles. Limp sabers of elephant grass slice into hands and cheeks. Creepers trip us and tear at our ankles. Pack straps rub blisters on our shoulders and salty water wiggles in dirty worm trails down our necks and faces. Insects eat our skin, leeches drink our blood, snakes try to bite us, and even the monkeys throw rocks.

We hump, werewolves in the jungle, sweating 3.2 beer, ready, willing, and able to grab wily Uncle Ho by his inscrutable balls and never let go. But our real enemy is the jungle. God made this jungle for Marines. God has a hard-on for Marines because we kill everything we see. No slack. He plays his games; we play ours. To show our appreciation for so much omnipotent attention we keep Heaven packed with fresh souls.

Hours pass. Many, many of them. We don't know what time it is anymore. In the jungle there is no time. Black is green; green is black--we don't even know if it's night or day.

Cowboy strides up and down our line of march. He reminds us to maintain ten yards between each man. Frequently he stops to check his compass and acetate map.

We hurt. We ignore the pain. We wait for the pain to become monotonous; it does.

Our New Guy sweats and stumbles and looks like he could get lost looking for a place to shit. A heat casualty for sure. The New Guy eats pink salt tablets like a kid eating jelly beans, then gulps hot Kool-Aid from his canteen.

Monotony. Everything samey-same--trees, vines like dead snakes, leafy plants. The sameness leaves us unmoored.

The fuck-you lizards greet us: "Fuck you...fuck you..."

A cockatoo laughs, invisible, laughs as though he knows a funny secret.

We hump up rocky ravines and I can hear Gunny Sergeant Gerheim bellowing at Private Leonard Pratt on Parris Island: The only way to reach any objective is by taking one step at a time. That's all. Just one step. One more. One more. One more

One more.

We think about things we will do after we rotate back to the World, about silly high-school capers we pulled before we were sucked up into the Crotch, about hunger and thirst, about R & R in Hong Kong and Australia, about how we are all becoming Coca-Cola junkies, about picking popcorn kernels out of our teeth at the drive-in movie with ol' Mary Jane Rottencrotch, about the excuses we'll have to invent for not writing home, and especially and particularly about the numbers of days left on each of our short-timer's calendars.

We think about things that aren't important so that we won't think about fear--about the fear of pain, of being maimed, of that half-expected thud of an antipersonnel mine or the punch of a sniper's bullet, or about loneliness, which is, in the long run, more dangerous, and, in some ways, hurts more. We lock our minds onto yesterday, where the pain and loneliness have been censored, and on tomorrow, from which pain and loneliness have been conveniently deleted, and most of all, we locks our minds into our feet, which have developed a life and a mind of their own.