Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

The sip exploded on his tongue, hot with smooth fire, raspy with pouring smoke, with the totality that made him wince. His eyes burned, his nose filled, he blinked and felt it in his mouth, sloshing around his teeth. Even at this last moment it was not too late, but he swallowed it, and it burned its way down, like a swig of napalm, unpleasant as it descended, and then it hit and its first wave detonated, and there was fire everywhere.

He remembered. He forced himself to.

Last mission. Donny was DEROS. He should have been outprocessing. No, the little bastard, he couldn’t let anything alone. He had to be so perfect. He had to be the perfect Marine. He had to go along.

Why did you let him?

Did you hate him? Was there something in you that wanted to see him get hit? Was it Julie? Was it that you hated him so fiercely because he was going back to Julie and you knew you’d never have her if he made it?

Donny hadn’t made it. Bob did have Julie. He was married to her, though it took some doing. So in a terrible sense he had gotten exactly what he desired. He had benefited. Hadn’t seemed so at the time, but the one Johnny who came out of the fracas with more than he went into it was he, himself, Gy.Sgt. Bob Lee Swagger, USMC (Ret.).

Don’t think, he warned himself. Don’t interpret; list. List it all. Dredge it up. He had to concentrate only on the exactness of the event, the hard questions, the knowable, the palpable, the feelable.

What time was it?

0-dark-30, 0530, 06 May 72. Duty NCO nudges me awake, but I am already conscious and I have heard him come.

“Sarge?”

“Yeah, fine.”

I rise before the sun. I decide not to wake Donny yet; let him sleep. He’s DEROS tomorrow, on his way back to the world. I check my equipment. The M40 is clean, having been examined carefully the night before both by myself and the armorer. Eighty rounds of M118 7.62mm NATO Match ammunition have been wiped and packed into pouches on an 872 harness. I slip into my shoulder holster for my .380; over that I pull on my cammies, I lace and tighten my boots. I darken my face with the colors of the jungle. I find my boonie cap. I slip into the 782 gear, with the ammunition, the canteens, the .45, all checked last night. I take the rifle, which hangs by its sling, off the nail in the bunker wall, slide five M118s into it, closing the bolt to drive the top one into the chamber. I pull back to put on safe, just behind the bolt handle. I’m ready to go to the office.

It’s going to be a hot one. The rainy season is finally over, and the heat has come out of the east, settling like a mean old lady on us poor grunts. But it’s not hot yet. I stop by the mess tent, where somebody’s already got coffee going, and though I don’t like the caffeine to jimmy my nerves, it’s been so quiet of late I don’t see any harm in having a cup.

A PFC pours it for me into a big khaki USMC mug, and I feel the great smell, then take a long, hard hot pull on it. Damn, that tastes good. That’s what a man needs in the morning.

Sitting in his living room, the fire burning away, Bob took another sip on the whiskey. It, too, burned on the way down, then seemed to whack him between the eyes, knock him to blur and gone. He felt the tears come.

06 May 1972. 0550.

I head to the S-2 bunker and duck in. Lieutenant Brophy is already up. He’s a good man, and knows just when to be present and when not to be. He’s here this morning, freshly shaved, in starched utilities. There seems to be some sort of ceremonial thing going on.

“Morning, Sergeant.”

“Morning, sir.”

“Overnight your orders came through on the promotion. I’m here to tell you you’re officially a gunnery sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. Congratulations, Swagger.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’ve done a hell of a job. And I know you’ll be bang-up beaucoup number one at Aberdeen.”

“Looking forward to it, sir.”

Maybe the lieutenant feels the weight of history. Maybe he knows this is Bob the Nailer’s last go-round. Three tours in the ’Nam with an extension for the last one, to give him nineteen straight months in country. He wants to observe it properly and that satisfies me. In some way, Brophy gets it, and that’s good.

We go over the job. We work the maps. It’s an easy one. I’ll go straight out the north side, over the berm and out to the treeline. Then we work our way north toward Hoi An, through heavy bush and across a paddy dike. We go maybe four klicks to a hill that stands 840 meters high and is therefore called Hill 840. We’ll go up it, set up observation and keep a good Marine Corps eyeball on Ban Son Road and the Thu Bon River. I’m done killing: it’s straight scout work. I’m here for firebase security, nothing else. Along those lines, we plan to look for sign of large-body troop movements, to indicate enemy presence, on the way out and the way back.

The lieutenant himself types up the operational order and enters it in the logbook. I sign the order. It’s official now.

I tell the clerk to go get Fenn. It’s 0620. We’re running a little late, because I’ve let Fenn sleep. Why did I do this? Well, it seemed kind. I didn’t want to break his balls on the last day. He really isn’t needed until we leave the perimeter, as the mission has been well discussed and briefed the night before; he knows the specs better than I do.

He shows up ten minutes later, the sleep still in his eyes, but his face made-up green, like mine. Someone gets him some coffee. The lieutenant asks him how he’s doing. He says he’s fine, he just wants to get it over with and head back to the world.

“You don’t have to go, Fenn,” I say.

“I’m going,” he says.

Why? Why does he have to go? What is driving him? I never understood it then; I don’t understand it now. There was no reason, not one that ever made no sense to me. It was the last, the tiniest, the least significant of all the things we did in the ’Nam. It was the one we could have skipped and oh, what a different world we’d live in now if we had.

Bob threw down another choker of bourbon. Hot fire. Napalm splashes, the whack between the eyes. The brown glory of it.

“Check your weapons,” I tell Fenn, “and then do commo.”

Donny makes certain the M14 is charged, safety on. He takes out his .45, drops the mag, sees that the chamber is empty. That’s the way I’ve told him to carry it. Then he checks out the PRC-77, which of course reads loud and clear since the receiving station is about four feet away. But we do it by the numbers, just like always.

“You all set, Fenn?” I ask.

“Gung ho, Semper Fi and all that good shit,” says Donny, at last strapping the radio on, getting it set just right, then picks up the weapon, just as I pick mine up.

We leave the bunker. The light is beginning to seep over the horizon; it’s still cool and characteristically calm. The air smells sweet.

But then I say, “I don’t want to go out the north. Just in case. I want to break our pattern. We go out the east this time, just like we did before. We ain’t never repeated ourself; anybody tracking us couldn’t anticipate that.”

Why did I say that? What feeling did I have? I did have a feeling. I know I had one. Why didn’t I listen to it? You’ve got to pay attention, because those little things, they’re some part of you you don’t know nothing about, trying to reach you with information.

But now there was no reaching back all these years; he had made a snap decision because it felt so right, and it was so wrong. Bob finished the glass with a last hot swig, then quickly poured another one, two fingers, neat, as on so many lost nights over so many lost years. He held it before his eyes as the blur hit him, and almost laughed. He didn’t feel so bad now. It was easy. You could just dig it out that simply, and it was there, before him, as if recorded on videotape or as if, after all these years, the memory somehow wanted to come out at last.