Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“Cool,” one of the kids said. “What’s Hotel Echo?”

“High explosive,” said Donny. “As opposed to frags or white phosphorous.”

“Cool as shit!” the boy responded.

Music announced the site of the party far earlier than any visual confirmation. As at the Hawk and Dove, it blasted out into the night, hard, psychedelic rock beating the dark back and the devil away. He’d heard the same stuff over there, though; that was the funny thing. The young Marines loved the rock. It went everywhere with them, and if their tough noncoms hadn’t stayed on their asses, they’d have played it on ambush patrols.

“I wonder if Trig is here,” one of the boys said.

“You never can tell with Trig,” Crowe replied.

“Who’s Trig?” Donny asked again.

The party didn’t seem at all unlike any other party Donny had attended back at the University of Arizona, except that the hair was longer. Milling people of all sorts. The bar scene, though crammed into smaller, hotter rooms. The smell of grass, sickly sweet, heavy in the air. Ho and Che on the walls. In the bathroom, where Donny went to piss, even an NVA flag, though one manufactured in Schenectady, not downtown Haiphong. He had a rogue impulse to burn it, but that would sure blow the gig now. And really: it was only a flag.

The kids were his own age, some younger, with a few middle-aged men hanging around with that intense, long-haired look that the DC crowd so liked. Judging from the hair, only he and Crowe represented the United States Marines, though Crowe was far from an ambassador. He was telling some people a familiar story of how he almost got out of the draft by playing psycho at his physical.

“I’m nude,” he was saying, “except for this cowboy hat. I’m very polite and everybody’s very polite to me at first. I do everything they ask me to do. I bend and spread, I carry my underwear in a little bag, I smile and call everybody sir. I just won’t take off my cowboy hat. ‘Uh, son, would you mind taking off that hat?’ ‘I can’t,’ I explain. ‘I’ll die if I take off my cowboy hat.’ See, the key is to stay polite . If you act nuts they know you’re faking. Pretty soon they got majors and generals and colonels and all screaming at me to take off my cowboy hat. I’m nude in this little room with all these guys, but I will not take off my cowboy hat. What a fuckin’ hero I am! What a John Wayne! They’re screaming and I’m just saying, ‘If I take off my cowboy hat, I’ll die.’ ”

“So you weren’t drafted?”

“Well, they kicked me out. It took weeks for the paperwork to catch up, and by that time, my uncle had cut a deal with the Man to get me into a slot in the Marines that wouldn’t rotate to the ’Nam. You know, when this is over, all those charges will be dropped. Nobody will care. We’ll write the whole thing off. That’s why anybody who lets themselves get wasted is a total moron. Like, for what?”

Good question, Donny wondered. For what? He tried to remember the boys in his platoon in 1/3 Bravo who’d gotten zapped in his seven months with them. It was hard. And who did you count? Did you count the guy who got hit by an Army truck in Saigon? Maybe his number was up. Maybe he would have gotten hit back on the street corner in Sheboygan. Would you count him? Donny didn’t know.

But you definitely had to count the kid — what was his name? what was his name? — who stepped on a Betty and got his chest shredded. That was the first one Donny remembered. He was such a new dick then. The guy just lay back. So much blood. People gathered around him, exactly in the way you weren’t supposed to, and he seemed remarkably calm before he died. But nobody read any letter home to Mom afterward in which he told everybody how great the platoon was and how they were fighting for democracy. They just zipped him up and left him. He remembered the face, not the name. A sort of porky kid. Pancakey face. Small eyes. Didn’t have to shave. What was his name?

Another one got hit by a rifle bullet. He screamed and bucked and yelled and nobody could quiet him. He seemed so indignant. It was so unfair! Well, it was unfair. Why me, he seemed to be asking his friends, why not you? He was thin and rangy, from Spokane. Didn’t talk much. Always kept his rifle clean. Was bowlegged. What was his name? Donny didn’t remember.

There were a few more, but nothing much. Donny hadn’t fought in any big battles or taken part in any big operations with dramatic code names that made the news. Mostly it was walking, scared every day you’d get jumped or you’d trip something off, or you’d just collapse under the weight of it. So much of it was boring, so much of it was dirty, so much of it was debasing. He didn’t want to go back. He knew that. Man, if you let them send you back at this late date, when units were being rotated back to the world all the time during “Vietnamization,” and you got wasted, you were a moron.

Suddenly someone bumped him hard.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, stepping back.

“Yeah, you are,” someone said.

Where had this action come from? There were three of them, but big like he was. Hair pouring from their heads, bright bands around their skulls, dressed in faded jeans and Army fatigue shirts.

“You’re the Marine asshole, right? The lifer?”

“I am a Marine,” he said. “And I’m probably an asshole. But I’m not a lifer.”

The three fixed him with unsteady glares. Their eyes burned with hate. One of them rocked a little, the team leader, with his fist wrapped tightly around the neck of a bottle of gin. He held it like a weapon.

“Yeah, my brother came back in a little sack because of lifer fucks like you,” he said.

“I’m very sorry for your brother,” said Donny.

“Asshole lifer got him greased so he could make lieutenant colonel.”

“Shit like that happens. Some joker wants a stripe so he sends his guys up the hill. He gets the stripe and they get the plastic bag.”

“Yeah, but it happens mainly ’cause assholes like you let it happen, ’cause you don’t have the fuckin’ guts to say no to the Man. If you had the guts to say no, the whole thing stops.”

“Did you say no to the Man?”

“I didn’t have to,” the boy said proudly. “I was 1-Y. I was out of it.”

Donny thought about explaining that it didn’t matter what your classification was, if you obeyed it, you were obeying orders and working for the Man. Some guys just got better orders than others. But then the boy took a step toward Donny, his face drunkenly pugnacious. He gripped the bottle even harder.

“Hey, I didn’t come here to fight,” said Donny. “I just drifted in with some guys.” He looked around to find himself in the center of a circle of staring kids. Even the music had stopped and the smoke had ceased seething in the air. Crowe had, of course, totally disappeared.

“Well, you drifted into the wrong fucking party, man,” said the boy, and made as if to take another step, as Donny tried to figure out whether to pop him or to cut and run to avoid the hassle.

But suddenly another figure dipped between them.

“Whoa,” he said, “my brothers, my brothers, let’s not lose our holy cools.”

“He’s a fucking—” said the aggressor.

“He’s another kid; you can’t blame the whole thing on him any more than you can blame it on anyone. It’s the System , don’t you get that? Jesus, don’t you get anything?”

“Yeah, well, you have to start somewhere.”

“Jerry, you cool out. Go smoke a joint or something, man. I’m not letting any three guys with booze bottles jump any poor grunt who came by looking to get laid.”