“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.
“He’s gone, he’s dead, you got him,” says Brophy, meaning, The white sniper is gone, there’s nobody out there, don’t worry about it. He should have been dead, too. We cooked his ass in 20mm and 7.62. The Night Hag sprayed him with lead. The flamethrower teams barbecued him to melted fat and bone ash. Who could live through that? We recovered his rifle. It was a great coup, waiting to be studied back at Aberdeen by none other than yours truly.
But—why did we believe he was dead? We didn’t find no body, we only found the rifle. But how could he have survived all that fire, and the follow-up with the flamethrowers and then the sweep with grunts? No one could have survived that. Then again, this was a terrifically efficient professional. He didn’t panic, he’d been under a lot of fire, he’d taken lots of people down. He kept his cool, he had great stamina.
“Yeah, well,” I tell the lieutenant.
We reach the eastern parapet wall. A sentry comes over from the guard post down the way.
“All clear?” I ask.
“Sarge, I been working the night vision scope the past few hours. Ain’t nothing out there.”
But how would he know? The night vision is only good for a few hundred yards. The night vision tells you nothing. It simply means there’s nobody up close, like a sapper platoon. Why didn’t I realize that?
He took another dark, long swallow. It was as if something hit him upside the head with a two-by-four, and his consciousness slipped a little; he felt his bourbon-powered mellowness battling the melancholy of his memory as it presented itself to him after all these years.
I slip my head over the sandbags, look out into the defoliated zone, which is lightening in the rising sun. I can’t see much. The sun is directly in my eyes. I can only see flatness, a slight undulation in the terrain, low vegetation, blackened stumps from the defoliant. No details, just a landscape of emptiness.
“Okay,” I say. “Last day: time to hunt.” I always say this. Why do I think it’s so cool? It’s stupid, really.
I set my rifle on the sandbag berm, pull myself over, gather the rifle and roll off.
I land, and there’s a moment there where everything is fine, and then there’s a moment when it isn’t. I’ve done this hundreds of times before over the past nineteen months, and this feels just like all those times. Then time stops. Then it starts again and when I try to account for the missing second, it seems a lot has happened. I’ve been punched backwards, come to rest against the berm itself. For some reason my right leg is up around my ears. I can make no sense of this until I look down and see my hip, pulped, smashed, pulsing my own blood like a broken faucet. Somewhere in here I hear the crack of the rifle shot, which arrives just a bit after I’m hit.
It makes no sense at all and I panic. Then I think: motherfuck, I’m going to die. This fills even my hard heart with terror. I don’t want to die. That’s all I’m thinking: I don’t want to die.
There’s blood everywhere, and I put my fingers on my wound to stanch it, but the blood squirts out between them. It’s like trying to carry dry sand; it slips away. I can see bone, shattered. I feel the wet. Again an odd second where there is no pain and then the pain is so heavy I think I’ll die from it alone. I’m thinking of nothing but myself now: there’s no one in the world but me. A single word forms in my head, and it’s morphine.
Bob looked into the amber bourbon, so still, so calm. The wind rushed outside, cold and harsh. He heard himself screaming, “I’m hit!” from across the years, and saw himself, hip smashed, blood pouring out. And he knew what happened next.
He took a swallow. It landed hard. He was quite drunk. The world wobbled
and twisted, fell out of and back into focus a dozen times. He was crying now. He hadn’t cried then but he was crying now.
“No!” he screamed, but it was too late, for the boy had leaped over the berm too, to cover his sergeant, to inject morphine, to drag the wounded man to cover.
Donny lands and at that precise moment he is hit. The bullet excites such vibration from him as it crashes through that the dust seems to snap off his chest. There’s no geyser, no spurt, nothing; he just goes down, dead weight, his pupils slipping up into his head. From far off comes the crack of that rifle. Is there something familiar in it? Why does it now seem so familiar?
The sound of it played in his ears: crisp, echoless, far away, but clear. Familiar? Why familiar? Rifles and loads all have their signature, but this one, what was it? What about it? What information did it convey? What message did it carry?
“Donny!” I cry, as if my cry can bring him back, but he’s so gone there’s no reaching him. He collapses into the dust a foot or so from me with the crash of the uncaring, and how I do it I don’t know, but I somehow squirm to him and hold him close.
“Donny!” I scream, shaking him as if to drive the bullet out, but his eyes are glassy and unfocused, and blood is coming out of his mouth and nose. It’s also coming out of his chest, pouring out. No one ever gets how much blood there is: there’s lots of it, and it comes out like water, thin and sloppy and soaking.
His eyelids flutter but he’s not seeing anything. There’s a little sound in his throat, and somehow I have him in my arms and now I’m screaming, “Corpsman! Corpsman!”
I hear machine gun fire. Someone has jumped to the berm with an M60 and is throwing out suppressive fire, arcs and arcs of tracers that skip out across the field, lifting the dirt where they hit. A 57mm recoil-less rifle fires, big booming flash, that blows a mushroom cloud into the landscape to no particular point, and more and more men come to the berm, as if repulsing a human-wave attack.
Meanwhile, Brophy has jumped, and he’s on both of us, and there are three or four more grunts, pressing against us, firing out into the emptiness. Brophy hits me with morphine, then hits me again.
“Donny!” I scream, but as the morphine whacks me out, I feel his fingers loosening from my wrist, and I know that he is dead.
Bob hit the bottle again, this time dispensing with the glass. The fluid coursed down. His mind was now almost thoroughly wasted. He couldn’t remember Donny anymore. Donny was gone, Donny was lost, Donny was history, Donny was a name on a long black wall. Were there even any photos of him? He tried to recall Donny but his mind wouldn’t let him.
Gray face. Unfocused eyes staring at eternity. The sound of machine gun fire. The taste of dust and sand. Blood everywhere. Brophy jacking the morphine in. Its warmth and spreading, easing numbness. I won’t let go of Donny. I must hold him still. They’re trying to pull me away, over the berm. The blackness of the morphine taking me out.
I sleep.
I sleep.
Days pass, I’m lost in morphine.
I’m finally awakened by a corpsman. He’s shaving me. That is, my pubic region.
“Huh?” I say, so groggy I can hardly breathe. I feel inflated, creamy with grease, bound by weight.
“Surgery, Gunny,” he says. “You’re going to be operated on now.”
“Where am I?” I ask.
“The Philippines. Onstock Naval Hospital, Orthopedic Surgery Ward. They’ll fix you up good. You been out for a week.”
“Am I going to die?”
“Hell, no. You’ll be back in the Major Leagues next season.”
He shaves me. The light is gray. I can’t remember much, but somewhere underneath it there’s pain. Donny? Donny’s gone. Dodge City? What happened to Dodge City? Brophy, Feamster, the grunts. That little place out there all by itself.
“Dodge?”
“Dodge?” he asks. “You ain’t heard?”
“No,” I say, “I been out.”
“Sure. Bad news. The dinks jumped it a few days after you got hit. Sappers got in with grenades. Killed thirty guys, wounded sixty-five more.”
“Oh, fuck.”
He shaves me expertly, a man who knows what he’s doing.
“Brophy?” I say.
“I don’t know. They got a lot of officers; they hit the command bunkers. I know they got the CO and a bunch of grunts. Poor guys. Probably the last Marines to die in the Land of Bad Things. They say there’ll be a big investigation. Careers ended, a colonel, maybe even a general will go down. You’re lucky you got out, Gunny.”
Loss. Endless loss. Nothing good came out of it. No happy endings. We went, we lost, we died, we came home to—to what?
I feel old and tired. Used up. Throw me out. Kill me. I don’t want to live. I want to die and be with my people.
“Corpsman?” I grab his arm.
“Yeah?”
“Kill me. Hit me with morphine. Finish me. Everything you got. Please.”
“Can’t do it, Gunny. You’re a goddamned hero. You’ve got everything to live for. You’re going to get the Navy Cross. You’ll be the Command Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps.”
“I hurt so bad.”
“Okay, Gunny. I’m done. Let me give you some Mike. Only a little, though, to make the pain go away.”
He hits me with it. I go under and the next time I awake, I’m in full traction in San Diego, where I’ll spend a year alone, which will be followed by a year in a body cast, also alone.
But now the morphine hits and thank God, once again, I go under.
The light awakened him, then noise. The door cracked open and Sally Memphis walked in.
“Thought I’d find you here.”
“Oh, Christ, what time is it?”
“Mister, it’s eleven-thirty in the morning and you ought to be with your wife and daughter, not out here getting drunk.”
Bob’s head ached and his mouth felt dry. He could smell himself, not pleasant. He was still in yesterday’s clothes and the room had the stench of unwashed man to it.
Sally bustled around, opening window shades. Outside, the sun glared; the three-day blow had lasted only one and then was gone. Idaho sky, pure diamond blue, blasted through the windows, lit by sun. Bob blinked, hoping the pain would go away but it wouldn’t.
“She was operated on at seven A.M. for her collarbone. You should have been there. Then you were supposed to pick me up at the airport at nine-thirty. Remember?”
Sally, who had just graduated from law school, was the wife of one of Bob’s few friends, a special agent in the FBI named Nick Memphis who now ran the Bureau’s New Orleans office. She was about thirty-five and had acquired, over the years, a puritan aspect to her, unforgiving and unshaded. She was going to start as an assistant prosecutor in the New Orleans district attorney’s office that fall; but she’d come here out of her and her husband’s love of Bob.
“I had a bad night.”
“I’ll say.”
“It ain’t what it appears,” he said feebly.
“You fell off the wagon but good, that’s what it appears.”
“I had to do some work last night. I needed the booze to get where I had to go.”
“You are a stubborn man, Bob Swagger. I pity your beautiful wife, who has to live with your flintiness. That woman is a saint. You never are wrong, are you?”
“I am wrong all the time, as a matter of fact. Just don’t happen to be wrong on this one. Here, lookey here.”
He picked up the uncapped bottle of Jim Beam, three-quarters gone, and walked out on the front porch. His hip ached a little. Sally followed. He poured the stuff into the ground.
“There,” he said. “No drunk could do that. It’s gone, it’s finished, it won’t never touch these lips again.”
“So why did you get so drunk? Do you know I called you? You were hopeless on the phone.”
“Nope. Sorry, don’t remember that.”
“Why the booze?”
“I had to remember some
thing that happened to me long ago. I drunk for years to forget it. Then when I got sober finally, I found I disremembered it. So I had to hunt it out again.”
“So what did you learn on your magical mystery tour?”
“I didn’t learn nothing yet.”
“But you will,” she said.
“I know where to look for an answer,” he finally said.
“And where would that be?”
“There’s only one place.” She paused.
“Oh, I’ll bet this one is rich,” she said. “It just gets better and better.”
“Yep,” he said. “I don’t never want to disappoint you, Sally. This one is really rich.”
“Where is it?”
“Where a Russian put it. Where he hid it twenty-five years ago. But it’s there, and by God, I’ll dig it out.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s in my hip. The bullet that crippled me. It’s still there. I’m going to have it cut out.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
It was dark and the doctor was still working. Bob found him out back of the Jennings place, down the road from the Holloways, where he’d had to help a cow through a difficult birth. Now he was with a horse called Rufus whom the Jennings girl, Amy, loved, although Rufus was getting on in years. But the doctor assured her that Rufus was fine; he would just be getting up slower these days. He was an old man, and should be treated with the respect of the elderly. Like that old man over there, the doctor said, pointing to Bob.
“Mr. Swagger,” said Amy. “I’d heard you’d left these parts.”
“I did,” he said. “But I came back to see my good friend Dr. Lopez.”
“Amy, honey, I’ll send over a vitamin supplement I want you to add to Rufus’s oats every morning. I bet that’ll help him.”
“Thank you, Dr. Lopez.”
“It’s all right, honey. You run up to the house now. I think Mr. Swagger wants a private chat.”
“ ’Bye, Mr. Swagger.”
“Good-bye, sweetie,” said Bob, as the girl skipped back to the house.
“Thought those reporters chased you out of this place for good,” the doctor said.