Gustav Hasford: The Short-Timers

Hold. Alice raises his right hand.

The squad stops, now, within rifle shot of the DMZ.

Cowboy flexes the fingers of his right hand as though cupping a breast. Booby trap?

Alice shrugs. Just cool it, man.

Our survival hangs on our sniper bait's reflexes and judgment. Alice's eyes can detect green catgut trip wires, bouncing betty prongs, tiny plungers, loose soil, crushed plants, footprints, fragments of packaging debris, and even the fabled punji pits. Alice's ears can lock onto unnatural silences, the faint rattle of equipment, the thump of a mortar shell leaving the tube, or the snap of a rifle bolt coming home. Experience and animal instincts warn Alice when a small, badly concealed booby trap has been set on the trail for easy detection so that we will be diverted off the trail into a more terrible one. Alice knows that most of the casualties we take are from booby traps and that in Viet Nam almost every booby trap is designed so that the victim is his own executioner. He knows what the enemy likes to do, where he likes to set ambushes, where snipers hide. Alice knows the warning signals that the enemy leaves for his friends--the strips of black cloth, the triangles os bamboo, the arrangements of stones.

Alice really understands the shrewd race of men who fight for survival in this garden of darkness--hard soldiers, strange, diminutive phantoms with iron insides, brass balls, incredible courage, and no scruples at all. They look small, but they fight tall, and their bullets are the same size as ours.

A lot of Marines who choose to walk point have death wishes--that's the scuttlebutt. Some guys want to be heroes and if you walk point and are still alive at the end of the patrol then you are a hero. Some guys who walk point hate themselves so much that they don't care what they do and don't care what is done to them. But Alice walks point because Alice thrives on being out front. Sure I'm scared, he told me one night after we'd smoked about a ton of dope, but I try not to show it. What Alice needs are those moments when he can see into what he calls the "beyond."

Alice freezes. His right hand closes into a fist: Danger.

All of Alice's senses open up. He waits. Invisible birds scatter from tree to tree. Alice grins, sheathes his machete, lifts his M-79 grenade launcher to his shoulder. The "blooper" is like a toy shotgun, comically small.

Ancient trees stand silent, a jade cathedral of mahogany columns two hundred feet high, roots entwined, branches interwoven, with thick, scaly vines roped around solid trunks.

Adrenaline gives us a high.

Alice shrugs, lowers his weapon, gives us his usual thumbs-up, all clear; as if to say, I'm so cool that even my errors are correct.

Cowboy's right hand slices the air again, and we all shift our gear to less painful positions and move out, grumbling, bitching. Our thoughts drift back into erect-nipple wet dreams about Mary Jane Rottencrotch and the Great Homecoming Fuck Fantasy, back into blinking black and white home movies of events that did not happen quite the way we choose to remember them, back into bright watercolor visions of that glorious rotation date circled in red on all of our short-timer's calendars--different dates--but with the same significance: Home.

Alice hesitates. His gloved hand reaches out and plucks an oversized yellow orchid from a swirl of vines. Standing to attention, Alice inserts the thick, juicy stem into a leather loop on his ammo vest, the skin of a Bengal tiger. In rows of loops across the front of the vest hang two dozen M-79 grenade rounds.

Alice's blue canvas shopping bag is slung over his shoulder. The bag is tattooed with graffiti, autographs, obscene doodles, and a scoreboard of stick men recording Alice's seventeen confirmed kills. On the blue canvas shopping bag are fading black block letters: Lusthogs Delta 1/5 We Deal in Death and Yea, though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the evil and, in crisp new letters: DON'T SHOOT--I'M SHORT and a helmet on a pair of boots.

As he humps down the narrow trail, Alice hums, You can get anything you want...at Alice's Restaurant...

Cowboys stops, turns around, sweeps a muddy pearl-gray Stetson off his head.

"Break," he says.

Green Marines in the green machine, we sit beside the trail.

"I got to souvenir me an NVA belt buckle," says Donlon, our radioman. "The silver kind with a star. Go home with something decent or the civilians will think I was a poge, punching a typewriter. I mean, I'm short--thirty-nine days and a wake-up."

I say, "That's not short. Twenty-two days and a wake-up. Count them."

"That ain't short," says Animal Mother. "Alice is short."

Alice brags: "Twelve days and a wake-up left in country, ladies. Count 'em. I am a short-timers, no doubt about it. Why, I'm so short that every time I put on my socks I blindfold myself."

I grunt, "That's not short-enough, Jungle Bunny. The Doc is beaucoup short. Nine days and a wake-up. Right, Doc? You a single-digit midget?"

Doc Jay is chewing a mouthful of canned peaches. "I got to extend again."

Nobody says anything. Doc Jay won't be allowed to extend again. Doc Jay has been in Viet Nam for two years, treating major wounds with minor medical training. Doc Jay wants to save all of the wounded, even those killed in action and buried months ago. Every night dead Marines beg him to come into their graves. A week ago, our company commander picked up a football that was lying on the trail. The football blew him in half. Doc Jay tried to tie the captain back together with compress bandages. It didn't work. Doc Jay started giggling like a kid watching cartoons.

"I'm going to extend, too!" says the New Guy as he shoves his Italian sunglasses up onto his forehead. "Do you guys--?"

"Oh, screw yourself, New Guy," says Animal Mother, not looking up. Mother is holding his M-60 machine gun in his lap and is massaging the black vanadium steel with a white cloth. "You ain't been in country a week and already you're saltier than shit. You ain't been born yet, New Guy. Wait until you got a little T.I., candy ass, and then I may allow you to speak. Yeah, a little fucking time in."

"Gung ho!" I say, grinning.

Animal Mother says, "Fuck you, Joker." He starts breaking down the machine gun.

I blow Mother a kiss. Animal Mother is a swine, no doubt about it, but he's also big and mean; he inspires a certain tolerance.

"Joker thinks he has an outstanding program," Mother tells the New Guy. "Going to Hollywood after he rotates back to the World. If I don't waste him first. Going to be Paul fucking Newman. My ass." Animal Mother pulls out a deck of poker cards. The cards are dog-eared and greasy and have photographs of Tijuana whores on them. The Tijuana whores are establishing meaningful relationships with donkeys and big dogs.

Animal Mother deals draw poker hands to himself and to the New Guy.

The New Guy hesitates, then scrapes up his cards.

Animal Mother unbuckles his field pack and pulls out a brown plastic rack of poker chips--red, white, and blue. Mother takes a stack of plastic chips from the rack and drops them on the deck in front of the New Guy. "Where are you from, you little shit?"

"Texas, sir."

"Sir, my ass. This ain't P.I. and there ain't no way I'm gonna be no fucking officer. Never happen. Ain't even the assistant squad leader anymore. Now I'm a private--the most popular rank in the Marine Corps. Got more fucking ops, more confirmed kills, and more T.I. than any grunt in this squad--including Cowboy." Animal Mother spits, scratches the dark stubble on his chin. "Flipped a bird to a poge colonel at the big PX on Freedom Hill. Got me busted from sergeant. I was the fucking platoon sergeant. No slack. Just like back in the World. Back in Queens I took me a ride in this Lincoln Continental. It was a beautiful machine. The judge gave me a choice between the Crotch and hard time in a stone hotel. So I became a mercenary. I should have gone to prison, New Guy. There's less humping." Animal Mother grins. "So don't call me that 'sir' shit. Save that lifer shit for poges like the Joker."