Sharpshooter (9 page)

The enemy has been making a pretty good living here out of locating and inhabiting all the best places for ambush. The Brown Water Navy vessels that now buzz up and down the river are constantly under attack from these outposts. Rockets and grenades, machine-gun and rifle fire rain down from elevated spots in the jungle, making life hell for everybody.

Sniffing these guys out and snuffing them out — that's our job now.

Body count counts. I know I have killed men now. I don't know it, but I know it. I keep going out on patrol, and I keep coming back, so I know I am winning. Sometimes we see bodies, or parts of bodies, after we have conducted an assault — sometimes when we haven't conducted one yet. Lt. Systrom counts these bodies as ours. Even a part of a body is a body, four body parts counting as four bodies even if they may have belonged to the same body once.
Disconnectivity
is what he calls it, meaning if they ain't touching, we get to count them all.

“I don't agree with the way they have decided to keep score,” Systrom says to me as he takes his knife and cuts the trigger finger off a dead VC. They are his thing, trigger fingers. “But if there is a score being kept, we will score highest.”

We are marching, silent marching, which is a brand-new skill I have mastered, up an incline into ever denser jungle. Supposedly, we are working a trail, though there is nothing here you could really call a trail other than a barely discernible parting of trees. The map, though, says it is a trail and that it is hot. There may be insurgents up at the top, or six feet in front of us. It is the height of day in crushing, brutal sunshine, but here under the canopy it is a constant damp dusk. We have been making our way up this parting since just after daybreak. My muscles have all been in a permanent clench the whole time, and my eyes have been strafing the area without a break, like the searchlights that switchback over the sky looking for hostile aircraft. If we were standing toe-to-toe with these guys, bare-knuckle fighting them all day long, it would not be more physically exhausting than this.

I am paired with the lieutenant today, peeling off from the other guys so we can take an overseer's position on higher ground than the main trail. We hike for about twenty minutes when he notices what looks like a nest in the top of a big palm.

“Perfect,” he says.

We shinny up the tree, hugging and scrambling and clawing up the forty feet to the highest point in the area. Once up, I am shocked at how right the lieutenant was. I feel we can see all of Southeast Asia from this spot, and the nestlike arrangement of the giant fronds allows enough space for a proper sniper's lie-down, with the second lookout seated upright.

“Wow,” I say, taking in the full three-sixty of it.

“Get down, soldier,” he growls.

“Yes, sir,” I answer, quickly squatting on my haunches.

“I mean all the way down, private.”

He holds the M-21 Sniper Weapon System out to me, and I try not to jump up and down. He takes my rifle and the binoculars he had given me before we set out. As I settle into the nest lying down, setting out the bipod legs of the rifle, Lt. Systrom takes his position crouched on one knee, scanning the area through the binocs.

We hear things. There are occasional bursts of gunfire — no shortage of engagements far away and on the river. I hear, not too distant, the now familiar
whoosh
of the flamethrowers off the Zippo boats. There has been a serious escalation in napalm activity, burning away the natural camouflage that's been letting the enemy attack our boats so effectively. The heat coming off the river from that napalm travels back through the jungle and right up the tree to us as if we had ordered air service straight from hell itself. On top of that, we are no longer protected by foliage, so the insane Vietnam sun is pounding our backs, right through helmets and fatigues and equipment like we were no more than fat fish in a frying pan.

“See anything?” Systrom asks me after a full hour of stillness.

I say nothing. I keep my focus through the amazing scope that brings everything on the ground right up into the tree with us.

I can feel my back doing a weird alternating thing. It's drenched with sweat now. Now it's baked crispy dry. Now it is sopping again.

Until I feel it less. I feel my eye, dry, eye, my eye …

My eye is in the jungle now. I am attached to the gun by my eye, and together we hover somewhere in the atmosphere between treetop canopy and leaf-litter soft ground. There is a movement here, there, some animal activity maybe, some VC maybe. But nothing in this jungle happens now without my noticing.

Moving bushes are the thing we look for. Bushes that are suddenly in a spot away from where they were a minute ago, and I swear, I swear, I see one now.

It moves. It is not a breeze, a hallucination, or a tiger. It moves again.

I do not say a thing. I watch the bush. It moves again, stepping closer in our direction. It is one person, I am certain of it, though there must be others nearby.

A firefight. M-16 rifle fire explodes in the distance, joined by the machine guns, the grenades, as our guys engage about a half klick north of us. I feel Systrom shift next to me, training the binoculars on the area of the shooting. The distinctive snap of the enemy's AK-47 fire is clear in return. And there is a lot of it.

“I am going to need that weapon,” he says while still focused into the distance.

I
need it
, I'm thinking.
I need it more than you possibly could
.

I see him.

A small piece of the moving bush opens, and clear as lightning I see the barrel of the rifle; I see, even, the scope on the barrel of the rifle and the shooter's face pressed into it.

Snap-crack
, he gets off his shot.

The bullet whistles straight out and up, right past me, and I hear the small crash and the lieutenant's curse as the binoculars fall from his hand onto my back.

I see him. I see him.

It is four hundred yards, but it might as well be the dry stone wall at the back of the yard at the cabin in New Hampshire. He might as well be a raccoon.

I don't feel a thing. I am aware of squeezing the trigger, but this beautiful thing, so precise, so perfectly balanced and engineered and conceived, does not offer any resistance to my trigger finger. Nothing, no recoil, no bump. I don't feel like I have bones at all.

The scope offers me a view like a movie screen, only with twenty million times the clarity. I see the instant the shot hits the left-center of the man's forehead and throws him backward. I see the chunk of his head, face, temple, skull, whatever, fly off.

“I killed him, sir,” I say, trying to be cool, be a soldier, be a man for goodness' sake. I think I might be failing, but I try and I try again. “Got him, Lieutenant Systrom. I got him for certain. I can still see …” And I can, because I will not be relinquishing this spot with this site on this gun until someone absolutely insists.

He puts his hand on my shoulder.

Now I have bones.

I feel a very low-level tremor all the way through my body, and I feel it only because I can feel the lieutenant's feeling it. But it is not fear or nerves or shock or anything stupid like that.

It is thrill. It is adrenaline mixed with a shot of
absolutely
, and a bit more of let's-do-this-again pride.

“Well done,” he says calmly, but with some satisfaction that I can definitely hear.

“I will take that rifle now, private,” he says.

I am this close to answering
oh, no you won't
, even though that would get me a one-way ticket to military jail, but that is simply how huge I feel right now.

But I roll over on my back, straight out as if I am standing at attention horizontally. I present the rifle normally, with two hands, to my boss.

In exchange, he hands me down the binoculars. “Here ya go, have a look through those.”

I do. I hold them up to my eyes. I hold what's left of them up to my eyes, that is. The left telescopic tube is just as it was, and through it I see the blazing southern sky. The right tube has been shot in half, the far end of it gone off with the rifle shot, and the whole remaining piece of kit hangs together wobbly.

I have hardly even noticed the raging firefight our guys are involved in, which is continuing right now. But just beyond Systrom I stare with one eye through the solo binoc as one, then two massive helicopter gunships thunder past, heading right for the action. I roll over on my side, the lieutenant crouching beside me, as the gunships fly in low and hard, firing rockets and an impossible barrage of machine-gun fire into the area of the fight.

“I hope they don't hit any of ours,” he says low. “For goodness' sake, get that fat head down, Kuns….”

We are down at the base of the tree when Systrom's radio crackles to life.

“Yeah,” he says, “is everybody okay? Great. Right. Bring it in.”

He gives them the coordinates where we are to rendezvous, and we make our way across the sweaty four hundred yards of brush. I move through the jungle with the softness and silence of a big cat, and my feet do not feel any earth underneath. I am struggling with what I am feeling and trying to understand it at the same time.

How can I be so electro-charged on the inside, so full of rocket power, and at the same time be showing nothing but complete composure on the outside?

I notice Lt. Systrom checking me every few seconds out of the corner of his eye.

“You all right?” he whispers, an uncertain smile creasing his mouth.

I nod, silently padding across the soft ground toward our destination.

He nods in return.

It takes longer to cross the four football fields of distance than it would take to run a five-kilometer race in the real world. But we make it with all our body parts and life force intact, so it is worth the care.

Which is much, much more than we can say for this guy.

Lt. Systrom crouches right down, stopping for no niceties. He takes the rifle away from the enemy sniper, even though it isn't half the weapon the one he's holding is. Then he pulls the body by the leg out of the remaining cover he is in. Once he's got him in this small space of clearing, Systrom takes his hand roughly, like a tough old schoolteacher about to administer a few crisp lashings across the knuckles.

But that's not what he has planned for these knuckles.

I look at the Vietcong soldier, lying there, the top left quadrant of his forehead opened up like a little door off its hinges showing the whole pulp of the inside of his head.

I follow the line of shot, from where we were to where we are to where he is, to where a part of him isn't.

I take three strides toward his flimsy, stupid little bush cover that wasn't ever going to save him from me. I drop down on hands and knees, see the blood, fish around with my hands.

And pull out the hunk of head.

It is the size of the shell off a decent steamed clam.

When I think this, my whole body, for one second, aches for Massachusetts and a bowl of steamers and a Moxie or six.

I stare at the clamshell, then at the former owner. The shell fits exactly, perfectly, in my palm.

“In body-count terms,” Systrom says, “now he's a two-score.”

I look up when the other guys, Parrish and Lightfoot and Kuns and Arguello, come trooping, silent and stooped and sweaty but unmarked, into our cozy clearing.

Quickly, neatly, respectfully, I take the shell and rub it firmly along my thigh, cleaning up the stray bits and the wet bits as well as I can until it is not clean but clean enough for a person to carry.

I hold it between my hands, prayerlike, and I bow to the dead warrior.

Then I slip the fragment of him into my breast pocket and we begin the march back, two by two.

There is a slap at my back, Cpl. Lightfoot, I believe, but I do not acknowledge it because that would be out of order just now.

T
here's a cease-fire,” says the voice in my ear.

I leap up out of bed and find Lightfoot. I am not even sure what I am feeling, other than utter shock at the news because nobody, anywhere, has spoken of anything other than war, followed by war, followed by some more war for the foreseeable future. Which was fine by me.

He is laughing in my face, holding me by the shoulders.

“It's just for today,” he says.

I fall back down onto my bunk.

“It's for the holiday. Buddha's birthday.”

“You're kidding.”

“I am not kidding. Both sides have declared a cease-fire, twenty-four hours, from 0600 this morning until 0600 tomorrow. That means we have only twenty-three hours of peacetime left.”

“To do what?” I say, reaching under my bed to pull out one of my four remaining cans of Moxie. When the commissary guy finally brought the six-pack out to me, I had to wipe about a half inch of dust off the tops because, he said, nobody ever asks for it. That doesn't make any sense to me, but he did say if he was going to order any more he wanted the money in advance and an extra buck for his troubles. So I guess he meant it.

“How can you drink that stuff?”

“In the morning, you mean,” I say through an ecstasy of Moxie burp bubbles.

“Or the afternoon, or when you are conscious, or on any day that has a Y in it …”

“Because it is the beverage of the gods,” I tell him. “Because it is my strength, my power, my genius.”

Lightfoot stares at me, clueless. I feel sorry for the guy.

“Right,” he says, “so we got leave. They're just keeping a skeleton crew on duty today, giving the rest of us lucky slobs the day off.”

“Cool,” I say. “Think I'll go out to the firing range for a load of extra — what are you shaking your head at?”

“I am shaking my head at the most boring killing machine in the whole Army, that's what. I have a better plan for you.”

“Yeah?” I say. “What's that?”

“Commemorate,” he says sagely, standing right over me with his hands on his hips.

“What?” I laugh, sipping some more. “Commemorate what, exactly?”

“Commemorate
you
, Private Ivan Bucyk. The fact that you broke on through to the other side.”

“Other side of what?”

“Of the whole population of the world. There are those who know not and never will know the sensation of the human kill. And then there is us. The vast minority. We who know the righteous kill.”

It was righteous. It was right, and it was righteous, and the moment of it has come through the cinema of my mind about a hundred and thirty thousand times just like it is doing right now.

“Do I need to commemorate it?” I ask. “I feel like I already commemorated it. A lot. And like I'm gonna keep on commemorating it for the rest of my life.”

“Think of it like this. Catholic, right? Did you get a confirmation?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, it's like that.
Soldier of God
or whatever they called you then. Now you are a soldier of soldiers.”

He is very serious about this.

I swing my legs back over and to the floor.

“Okay, so how do you commemorate your first kill?”

“Why, with a tattoo, of course.”

Now I show him a little surprise, though I don't like to do that ordinarily.

“What? I mean … what? You want me to get a tattoo? That's your big idea?”

“Yes. We all got 'em.”

“What? No you don't. I've seen Systrom's, and Arguello's … and
you
don't have one.”

“Of course I do.”

He unbuttons his shirt all the way. He spreads the shirt like the curtains opening on a show. Underneath, he is wearing a tank-top-style undershirt, just like always. He starts squawking a kind of unveiling music.

“You sing like a goose, man,” I say.

“Shut up,” he says, and raises the T-shirt to his chin.

“Ta-dah.”

It is, to me, the nicest tattoo I have seen. It is a picture of an Indian warrior nearly naked and sitting bareback on a horse. The horse is standing tall and straight but its ears are back a bit, angry. The brave — long hair falling over his shoulders — is looking up at the sky with his arms spread out at his sides at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground. His palms are up.

“
Appeal to the Great Spirit
is what it's called,” he says, all modesty and reverence now. “I got it from a sculpture I saw.”

“It's amazing,” I say.

The warrior's head is right in the middle of Lightfoot's sternum, the arms stretching out below each pectoral across his ribs. The horse looks to be standing on the corporal's belt.

It is perfectly designed to fit right inside that tank-top undershirt.

“I can't believe I never saw that before now,” I say. “I suppose that's why you are about the only guy who never goes around with no shirt on.”

“Don't get me wrong,” Lightfoot stresses. “I am proud of this. I think it's beautiful. I take it out every once in a while. It's just that whatever I do here, in this place, is between me and the Great Spirit.”

I nod. I am staring maybe too intensely at the guy's torso, but I would pretty much defy anybody not to at this moment.

“So you got it after your first kill?” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “It's what we do.”

“Can I touch it?” I ask.

“What do you think, it's got texture or something? No, you can't touch it. Get one of your own, then you can go touch it all you want.”

He pulls down his shirt, and I pull on my boots.

“I'm not a big tattoo guy,” I say, “even though I like my dad's.”

“I'm not a big tattoo guy myself,” he says, placing a hand on his diaphragm, “but I like knowing this one is here. Makes me believe myself. If that makes sense to you.”

I think on it, maybe a few seconds too long.

“Never mind,” he says. “It will. Just let's get going.”

 

I don't like writing letters. I don't much enjoy talking on the phone, either, even when the phone is normal and clear and not crackling with static and storms and gunfire and screaming.

I had one of those conversations with Morris. Because he is a radioman now. And he called me. It was okay. Didn't feel like a conversation, like really talking to the guy. But it was okay.

He is right here.
Right here
, with me, somewhere. He is part of Operation Giant Slingshot after getting himself transferred to a Zippo boat in the Brown Water Navy. Before that, he was part of Operation Cocoa Butter out there on the USS
Boston
, floating off the coast, working on his tan and eating pineapple chunks with toothpicks. That's how I pictured it, anyway.

The thing is with Morris, is that contrary to what you would think, a little communication doesn't satisfy him for a while, which it certainly does me. No, a little communication makes Morris need more communication. Right away.

I have a letter.

I do hate writing.

Out comes my letter to Morris that I have been working on, almost since I arrived on the
Benewah.

The letter is tucked away again, safe until I can finish it later.

I have heard from Beck. Beck has not heard from me. We are both okay with that because of this main thing that you can say about Beck and me: We are opposites in almost every way except for the fact that we can get along without anybody's support just fine for as long as we need to. If we don't speak until the end of our enlistments, me and Beck will pick up as if four years and yesterday were about the same thing.

I have heard from Rudi, once in a letter where he sounded just like you would expect — scattered and battered and shattered. Then, again, when he was different. He was a lot of different in a little time. Well done, Marine Corps.

I have another letter from Rudi. When did he learn to write so much? Nobody needs this much communication. I have a job to do, and no time to be sitting around gabbing back and forth with other guys who have the same job to do — so get on with it. I am happy that he is doing well, and that nobody needs to feel sorry or scared or guilty for Rudi anymore but, you know, just the presence of the letter right there in front of me, in Rudi's underwater handwriting, is enough of an indicator that everything is fine, and so there's no big hurry to read what he has to say about it just yet, right?

I put Rudi's letter unopened in the footlocker with Morris's unsent letter so they can have a conversation together and keep each other company until I have the spare time to deal with them.