Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

He smiled, not out of happiness or glee but possibly because he was too exhausted to do anything else.

“Wish I had a Dexedrine,” he said. “But I don’t believe in that shit. Came back from my second tour with a monkey the size of a ape on my butt. Had to work like hell to kill that furry bastard, too. Now, that wasn’t much fun at all.”

The man wasn’t in Vietnam; in some sense he was Vietnam. He’d done it all: sniped, raided, taken hills, led recons, worked intel, advised ARVN units, run interrogations, done analysis, fought in a thousand firefights, killed who knew how many, visited hospitals, talked to generals. He was one part of his whole goddamned generation rolled into one. This was entirely new, but unsurprising: he’d been a speed freak. Maybe he’d done heroin, maybe he’d caught the clap, maybe he’d been tattooed, maybe he’d murdered prisoners. He was Trig, at least in the way that he’d done everything to win the war that Trig had done in his parallel universe to end it, a furious, relentless crusade, presaged on the obsolete notion that one man could make a difference.

“You remind me of a guy,” Donny said.

“Oh, yeah. Some hillbilly on the radio. Lum or the other one, Abner? They come from my hometown.”

“No, believe it or not, a peacenik.”

“Oh, a commie. He has long hair and looked like Jesus. His shit didn’t stink, I bet. Mine does, but good, Pork.”

“No. He was like you, a hero. He was bigger than the rest of us. He was a legend.”

“To be a legend, don’t you have to be dead? Ain’t that part of the job description?”

“He is dead.”

“He managed to get his ass wasted demonstrating against the war? Now, that do take some kind of genius level intelligence. And I remind you of him? Son, you must have the fever bad.”

“He just wouldn’t quit. There wasn’t any quit in him.”

“Yeah, well, there’s plenty of quit in me, Pork. One more job, then I am going to quit for the rest of my life. Now, let’s just git a move on.”

“Which way?”

“We go up the switchbacks, they’ll bounce us. Only one way. Straight up.”

“Christ.”

“We’ll eat. Picnic time. It’ll be the last meal you git till this is over or you get killed and you get a nice steak in heaven. Dump your C-rats and your canteens and your 782. Use your entrenching tool. Set it at the angle. We going to use it to pull our way up, you got that?”

“I don’t—”

“Sure you do. Watch me.”

Quickly and expertly, he shed himself of most of his gear; only the weapons remained. He fished a C-rat out of his dumped pack, and quickly used his can opener to whip up cold eggs and ham, which he gobbled quickly.

“Go on, chow time. Eat something.”

Donny set out to do the same and in a few seconds was pulling down the barbecued pork, cold but flavorful.

“When we’re done, you gimme the radio. I ain’t carrying as much weight.”

“I’ll take your rifle.”

“The hell you will. Nobody touches the rifle but me.”

Of course. The basic rule. He remembered when Swagger had come looking for him, sitting forlornly on outpost duty at a forward observation post his third week at Dodge City.

“You Fenn?”

“Uh, yeah. Uh, Sergeant— ?”

“Swagger. Name’s Swagger. I’m the sniper.”

Donny had a momentary intake of breath. In the dark, he could hardly see him: just a fierce wraith of a man sheathed in darkness, speaking in a dense Southern accent. Bob the Nailer, the one with the 15,000-piastre bounty on his head and over thirty kills. Donny had the sense that all was quiet, that the other men had just willed themselves to nothingness out of fear or respect for Bob the Nailer. Though he could not see the sniper’s eyes, Donny knew they burned at him, and ate him up.

“I just put my spotter on a medevac back to the world with a hole in his leg,” said the sniper. “I’m looking for a replacement. You shot expert. You have the highest GCT at Dodge. You have twenty-ten vision. You done a tour, won a medal, so you been shot at some and won’t panic. All that don’t mean shit. You was at Eighth and I. That means you done the ceremonial stuff, which means you have a patience for detail work and a willingness to be an unnoticed part of a bigger team. I need that. You interested?”

“Me? I—”

“Good perks. I’ll get you steak and all the bourbon you can drink. When we’re in, we live like kings. I’ll keep you off crap like night watch and ambush patrols and forward observation and shit-burning details. I’ll get you R&R anywhere you want. Bad shit: A) You don’t touch the rifle. Nobody touches the rifle. B) You don’t do drugs. I catch you with a buzz on, I ship you home under guard and you’ll spend two years in Portsmouth. C) You don’t call nobody gook, dink, slope or zip. These are the very finest soldiers in the world. They are winning and they will win. We kill them, but by God, we kill them with respect. Those are the only three rules, but they ain’t to be bent or even breathed hard on. Or, you can sit here in this shit hole waiting for someone to drop a mortar shell on your head. And somehow I got a feeling every shit detail, every shit patrol, every piece-of-crap garbage job that comes up, you’re number one on the fuck list. I hope you like the stink of burning shit because you’re going to smell a lot of it.”

“Back in the world, I had some problems,” said Donny. “I got a bad rap. I wouldn’t ‘cooperate.’ ”

“I figured it from your jacket. Some kind of infraction of orders? You lost your rating. Hey, kid, this ain’t the world. This is the ’Nam, have you noticed? It don’t mean shit to me, you got that? You do the jobs I give you one hundred percent and I’ll back you one hundred percent. You may get killed, you will work hard, but you will have fun. Killing people is lots of fun. Now, you want in or what?”

“I guess I’m in.”

Within thirty minutes, Donny had been relieved of duty and moved into the scout-sniper squad bay with S/Sgt. Swagger NCOIC — or, as some called him, NCGIC, Non-Commissioned God in Charge — and the only man whose word mattered anywhere in the world.

He had never broken one of the rules until now. He had weighed each M118 round Swagger carried against the one-in-a-million chance of an off-charge at Lake City; he had cleaned Bob’s .45, .380 and grease gun and his own M14 and .45; he shined and dried the jungle boots; he laid out and assembled the gear before each mission; he polished the lens of the spotting scope; he checked the pins on the grenades, the plastic canteens for mildew; he hand-enameled the brass on the 872 gear dead black; he did laundry; he learned elevation, windage and range estimation; he kept range cards; he filled out after-action reports; he studied the operating area maps like a sacred text; he handled flank security and once killed two NVC who were infiltrating around Bob’s position; he learned PRC-77 protocol and maintenance. He worked like hell, and he had never broken one of the rules.

Only Bob touched the rifle. Bob broke it down after each mission, cleaned it to the tiniest crevice, scrubbed it dry, rezeroed it, treated it like a baby or a mistress. He and only he could touch or carry the rifle.

“It ain’t I don’t trust you. It ain’t you drop it and it gets knocked out of zero and you don’t tell me and I miss a shot and somebody, probably me, gets killed. It’s just that the bedrock here is simple, clear, powerful and helps us both: nobody touches the rifle but me. Good fences make good neighbors. Ever hear that one?”

“I think so.”

“Well, the rifle rule is my fence. Got that?”

“I do. Entirely, Sergeant.”