Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

Jesus, the guy was a freak for birds. Some were his own paintings, and he had a considerable talent for capturing the glory of a bird in flight, all the details perfect, all the feathers precisely laid out, the colors all the hues of miracle. But others were older and darker, muted things that appeared to have been painted in another century.

Somehow he found himself talking to a girl about birds and told her that he, uh, hunted them. It wasn’t the right thing to say but she was one of those snooty Eastern ones, who wore her hair long and straight and had a pinched look to her.

“You kill them?” she said. “Those little things?”

“Well, where I’m from they’re considered good eating.”

“Don’t you have stores?”

This wasn’t going too well. This grouping was smaller and more intimate than last night’s and everybody seemed to know everybody. He felt a little isolated, and looked for Crowe, because even Crowe would have been a welcome ally. But Crowe was nowhere to be seen. And on top of that he felt incorrectly dressed: he was in chinos and Jack Purcells, plus a madras sport shirt. Everyone here wore jeans and work shirts, had long, exotic hair, beards, and seemed somehow in some kind of Indian conspiracy against the ways that he felt it was proper for a young man to dress. It made him uncomfortable.

Some spy, he thought.

“Don’t give Donny a hard time,” said someone — Trig, of course, simply appearing dramatically, an event for which he had a little gift.

Trig was more moderate today, his hair back in a ponytail, which he wore over a blue button-down shirt and, like Donny, a pair of chinos. He also had an expensive pair of decoratively perforated oxfords on, in some exotic, rich color.

“Trig, he shoots little animals.”

“Sweetie, men have been hunting and eating birds for a million years. Both the birds and the men are still here.”

“I think it’s strange.”

Donny almost blurted, No, it’s really fun, but held himself in.

“Well, anyway,” said Trig, drawing Donny away. “I’m glad you could come. I don’t know who half these guys are myself. People just hang out here. They drink my beer, smoke grass, get stoned or laid and move on. I’m hardly here, so I really don’t care. But it’s cool that you came.”

“Thanks, I didn’t have much to do. Well, actually, I wanted to talk to you.”

“Oh? Well, go ahead.”

“It’s Crowe. You know, he’s really borderline in the unit, and he keeps fucking up. I know he’s a smart kid. But if he gets booted from the company, his tour is no longer stabilized, and he could go on levy to the ’Nam. And I don’t think he’d look too good in a body bag.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“As he said, anyone who gets wasted this late in a lost war is a moron.”

“I’ll mention it.”

“Cool.”

Trig was also cool. Donny could see how he’d be a good man in a firefight, and while everybody wept or cowered, he’d be the one to go out and start bringing the people in from the beatings.

“Can I ask you?” he suddenly said to Donny, fixing him in one of those deep Trig looks. “Do you doubt it? Do you ever wonder why, or if it was worth it? Or are you foursquare the whole way, the whole nine yards?”

“Fuck no,” said Donny. “Sure, of course I doubt it. But my father fought in a war and so did his father, and I was raised just to see that as a price for living in a great country. So … so I went. I did it, I came back, for better or worse.”

They had now wandered into the kitchen, where Trig opened his refrigerator and got a beer out for Donny and then took one for himself. It was a foreign beer, Heineken, from a dark, cold green bottle.

“Come on, this way. We’ll get away from these idiots.”

Trig took Donny out on a back porch, toward two deck chairs. Donny was surprised to see they were on a little hill and that before him the elevation fell away; across the falling roofs, in the distance he was surprised to see the huddled buildings of Georgetown University, looking medieval in profile.

“I forget what real people are like,” Trig said, “that’s why it’s cool to talk to you. Nobody’s more hypocritical and swinish than the pretty boys and the fairies of the peace movement. But I know how important soldiers can be. I was in the Congo in sixty-four — I’d gone with my uncle to paint the Upper Congo swallowtail darter. We were in Stanleyville when some guy named Gbenye declared it a people’s republic and took about one thousand of us hostage and set out to ‘purify’ the population of its imperialist vermin. Murder squads were everywhere. Man, I saw some shit. What people do to each other. So anyhow, we’re in this compound, the Congolese Army is fighting its way closer and the rumor is the rebels are going to kill us all. Holy shit, we’re going to die and nobody gives a shit about us. It’s that simple. But when the door is kicked down, it isn’t rebels. It’s tattooed, tough-ass, kick-butt Belgian paratroopers. They were the meanest pricks I ever saw in my life and I loved them like you wouldn’t believe. Nobody would stand against the Belgian Airborne. And they got us out in a convoy, all the white people from the interior. We would have been butchered. So I’m not one of these assholes who says there’s no role for soldiers. Soldiers saved my life.”

“Roger that,” said Donny.

“But,” said Trig, holding it in the air, “even if I admire courage and commitment, I have to make a distinction. Between a moral war and an immoral war. World War II: moral. Kill Hitler before he kills all the Jews. Kill Tōjō before he turns all the Filipino women into whores. Korea? Maybe moral. I don’t know. Stop the Chinese from turning Korea into a province. I guess that’s moral. I would have fought in that one.”

“But Vietnam. Not moral?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

Trig leaned forward. Another of his little, unsung gifts: listening. He really wanted to know what Donny thought and he refused to pigeonhole Donny as a baby killer and Zippo commando.

Donny could not resist this earnest attention. “What I saw was good American kids trying to do a job they didn’t quite understand. What I saw was kids who thought it was like a John Wayne movie and got their guts blown out. I was in a place once, a forest or a former forest. All the leaves were gone, but the trees still stood. Only, they shined. It was like they were covered in ice. It reminded me of Vermont. I’ve never been to Vermont, but it reminded me of it just the same.”

“I think I know where you’re headed. I saw the same thing on the convoy out of Stanleyville.”

“Yeah, well, in this case we called in Hotel Echo, on a stand of trees because we saw movement and thought a unit of gooks was infiltrating through it. We got ’em, but good. Those were their guts. They were just pulverized, turned to shiny liquid, and it plastered the stumps and limbs. Man, I never saw anything like that. Of course it was a platoon of Army engineers. Twenty-two guys, gone, just like that. Hotel Echo. It wasn’t very pretty.”

“Donny, I think you know . Underneath. I can feel you getting there. You’re working on it.”

“My girl is already there. She’s coming in in this Peace Caravan deal they got going.”

“Good for her. Do you talk about it with her?”

“She says she decided she’d do her part to stop the war when she visited me in the San Diego Naval Hospital.”

“Good for her again. But — are you there?”

Donny couldn’t lie. He had no talent for it.

“No. Not yet. Maybe never. It just seems wrong. You have to do what your country tells you. You have to contribute. It’s duty.”

Trig was like a confessor: his eyes burned with empathy and drew Donny forward to reveal more.