Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“You call me sergeant around the lifers here in Dodge. In the field, you call me Bob or Swagger or whatever the hell you want. Don’t call me sergeant in the field. One of them boys might be listening and he might decide to kill me because he heard you call me sergeant. Got that, Pork?”

“I do.”

And he had never forgotten that rule or any of the rules, until now.

“I forgot,” he said in the rain to Swagger. “About the rifle.”

“Damn, Fenn, I was just getting to like you, too. I thought you’se going to work out,” Bob said, needling him ever so gently. But then it was back to mission: “Okay, you done eating? You got your shit wired in tight? This is it. Over this hill, through their security and then sleep a bit. Comes morning we get to do some shooting.”

Bob went first, down to soaked tiger camos and boonie cap, his rifle slung upside down on his back. He carried the M3 grease gun in one hand and the entrenching tool in the other, and he used the tool as a kind of hook, to sink into roots of trees or the tangles of vegetation to get himself up the steep incline a few more feet. He moved with slow, almost calm deliberation. The rain fell still in torrents in the darkening gloom, and it rattled off the leaves and against the mud. How could it rain so hard so long? Was God ending the world, washing away Vietnam and its sins, its atrocities, its arrogances and follies? It seemed that way.

Donny was fifty yards to the left, doing the same trick, but behind Swagger and working carefully not to get ahead. Bob was the eyes up front to the right; Donny’s responsibility was behind and to the left, the flank he was on.

But he saw nothing, just felt the chill of the biting rain, and felt the weight of the M14, one of the last few left in the ’Nam. For this job, really, the plastic M16 would have been more ideally suited, but Bob hated the things, calling them poodle shooters, and wouldn’t let a man in his unit carry them.

Every now and then Bob would halt them with a raised right hand, and both men would drop low to the ground, hidden in the foliage, waiting, clinging desperately against the incline. But each time whatever Bob had noticed proved to be nothing, a false alarm, and they continued their steady, slow climb.

Twice they crossed paths, switchbacks etched into the vegetation, and Bob waited for five minutes before allowing them out on the open ground even for the seconds or so that it exposed them.

The darkness was falling. It was harder and harder to see. The jungle, far from relaxing as they climbed, actually seemed to be getting denser. There was a time when Donny felt himself cut off entirely from Bob, and a shot of panic came to him. What if he got lost? What would he do? He would wander these ghostly mountains until they caught him and killed him, or he wore down and starved.

You boys ain’t so tough, he heard from somewhere, and realized it was a mocking memory of a football coach somewhere back in his complicated athletic career.

No, we ain’t so tough, he thought. We never said we were. We just tried to do our job, that was all.

But then he came out of the rubbery-smelling thorns that had swallowed him, and saw a figure to the right and recognized it for its caution and precision of movement to be Bob.

He started to rise—

No, no—

Bob’s hand was up urgently, signaling him still and back. He froze and dropped on his belly low to the ground, even as Bob himself did the same.

He waited.

Nothing. No, just the sound of the rain, some occasional thunder, now and then a streak of distant lightning. It seemed so—

The next thing, he was aware of motion on his left. He did not move, he did not breathe.

How had Swagger seen them? How did he know? What gave them away? Another step and it was all over, but somehow, out of some trick of instinct or predator’s preternatural nerve endings, Bob had stunned him into silence and motionlessness a second before they arrived.

Before him the men passed by, no more than ten feet away, sliding effortlessly through the foliage and the undergrowth. He could smell them before he could see them. They had the odor of fish and rice, for that was what they ate. They were small, bandy-legged guys, the pros of the army of the Republic of North Vietnam, a point man, a squad leader, a squad in file picking its way carefully through the jungle high above the last path, twelve of them. They were bent forward under beige rain capes and wore regulation dark green uniforms, those absurd pith helmets, and carried AK47s and complete combat gear — packs, canteens and bayonets. Three or four of them wore RPG-40s, the hellish rocket grenades, strapped to their backs.

He had never been so close to the actual enemy; they seemed almost magical, or mythological, somehow, the phantoms of so many nightmares at last given flesh. They terrified him. If he moved or coughed, it was over: they’d turn and fire, whole minutes before he could get his M14 into action. He had a bad thought of himself dying up here at the hands of these tough little monkey-men sliding so confidently through the rain and the jungle that were exhausting him.

Almost as if one were talking to him, he heard the silence breaking a few feet away.

“Ăhn ỏi, mủa nhiêu qúa?”

“Phâi roi, chăc không có ngủỏi mỹ dêm naỳ,” came the buddy’s bitter answer, both voices propelled by the explosive lung energy of Vietnamese, so foreign to American ears and which sounded almost like belches.

“Bíhn sĩ ôi, dung nôi, nghê,” came a sharp cry from the head of the unit, a sergeant, the same the world over and whatever the army, clamping down on his naughty grunts.

The patrol moved slowly along in the dying light and the falling rain, then slowly disappeared around a bend in the slope. But Bob held Donny still for a good ten minutes before giving the okay, excruciating seconds of deathlike stillness in the cold and wet, which cramped the muscles and hurt the brain. But at last Bob motioned, and he slowly uncoiled and began to move up again.

Gradually Bob navigated his way over.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. How the hell did you see them?”

“The point man’s canteen jingled against his bayonet. I heard it, that’s all. Luck, man; it’s better to be lucky than good.”

“Who were they?”

“That’s flank security from a main force battalion. That means we’re getting close. They put out security teams when they move a big unit through, same as us. The sergeant had flashes for the Number Three Battalion. I don’t know what regiment or nothing, but I think the biggest unit up this ways was the 324th Infantry Division. Man, they close down that Special Forces camp tomorrow, the rain stays bad, they could get to Dodge City the day or so after tomorrow.”

“Is this some big offensive?”

“There’s several newly Vietnamized units there; it’d do ’em a lot of good to kick all that ARVN ass.”

“Great. I wonder what they were saying.”

“The first one says, Man, it’s raining like shit , and his buddy says, Ain’t no Americans coming out in this, and the sarge yells back, Hey, you guys, shut up and keep moving.”

“You speak Vietnamese?” Donny said in wonderment.

“Picked up a little. Not much, but I can get by. Come on, let’s get out of here. We got to rest. Big day tomorrow. We kick butt and take names. You bet on it, Marine.”

FOB Arizona was in bad trouble. Puller had lost nineteen men already and the VC had gotten mortars up close over to the west, and were pounding the shit out of them so that he couldn’t maneuver, and that main force unit would be in tomorrow at the latest. But worse: he’d sent out Matthews with a four-man assault unit to take out the mortars and Matthews hadn’t come back. Jim Matthews! Three tours, M/Sgt. Jim Matthews, Benning, the Zone, one of the old guys who dated all the way back to Korea, had done everything — gone!