Cracker!: The Best Dog in Vietnam

  Rick didn’t think he would ever be able to sleep. Finally, he decided he felt more comfortable on his back. He couldn’t remember ever falling asleep on his back in his life. He didn’t know why, but it had always been impossible for him to fall asleep on his back…. Then it was first light.

  Rick was surprised to see the guys just kind of standing around. Shouldn’t they get going? Camel seemed to be looking into space, concentrating. Then he turned toward Rick. “Try to get back into the moment,” he told him.

  Funny, Rick knew exactly what Camel meant. He concentrated, meditated almost, on just being there. His hearing and eyesight grew more acute. It was almost like a supernatural thing. But it was all real. Couldn’t put that off any longer. It was real. He was going to whip the world or he wasn’t.

  They began moving again, even faster than yesterday. Camel had received word that the prisoners were going to be moved to Hanoi that afternoon. Cracker alerted for booby traps time after time, but they still reached their destination pretty much on time. They all crouched in the bush, where Rick saw a hootch that was little more than a pigsty. It was the jail. He watched several Vietcong walk into the pen, and a moment later there was screaming. Rick felt his whole body freeze, but not in a normal way, more like something had taken control of it. He felt a brief fear that he wouldn’t be able to move again even if he wanted to. But Camel had warned him about some of the effects of adrenaline, the way it could freeze your body and prevent you from moving. He closed his eyes as tightly as he could for a moment and told himself, I can move. I will move. And then he did.

  They crept farther back in the bush, and Rick listened as Camel called the forward air controller who would direct the extraction helicopters and also the fast-mover planes that would support them during the mission. Okay, all according to plan. Rick felt alert but strangely calm. Camel said softly into his radio, “The hit is going down in thirty minutes.”

  Then Cracker froze. The hair on her neck stood straight up. Rick turned to tell Camel, but Camel had already noticed. He held up his palm. The other guys already knew whatever it was that was happening. They slipped under cover.

  Camel whispered to Rick, “Don’t move. Keep your dog still. Don’t you or your dog look at their eyes.”

  “Whose eyes?”

  “The V.C. They’re right behind us. They can sense it when your eyes are looking at them. Don’t look, even if you feel like you have to. Even if you feel like they see you.”

  Suddenly, it was as if Camel turned into a statue. Rick leaned into Cracker’s ear and said, “Easy. Easy, girl.”

  Cracker lifted her nose into the air and inhaled deeply. She could smell a lot of different people, but the smells were all mixed up together with dirt and gunpowder and moldy leaves and Camel and Rick. She moved her head slightly and heard Rick hiss, “Easy.” She froze, except for her nostrils, which kept inhaling. She could feel Camel’s foot touching her haunch. She didn’t have to look down to know it was Camel’s foot and not Rick’s. She just knew.

  Cracker felt an itch and thought about scratching it. But Rick had said that word-“easy”-with such urgency. She wondered whether “easy” meant “don’t scratch.” The Camel man didn’t move at all. It was weird.

  She heard the sound of men moving quietly through the jungle. Her ears rotated, but she couldn’t turn them in the right direction without also turning her head. Wasn’t it her job to alert Rick to the noise? But he had said, “Easy.” Did that mean she shouldn’t let him know about the noise? She heard an explosion in the distance and heard a man screaming. She smelled his blood. But she didn’t move.

  Rick’s hold on her was firm, but she could feel a tremor in his hands. There was a small hole in the bush, and she could see men walking by. Rick’s hand slid very, very slowly up over her eyes. Then she couldn’t see anything but the inside of his hand.

  Rick wondered whether a dog’s eyes could also alert the enemy. He watched out an opening in the foliage and could see people, not their whole bodies, but just bits of shadow and light. For a while he counted how many shadows passed, but when he got to a dozen, he stopped. Once, one of the shadows stopped, and Rick had a sick feeling that a man was looking right at him. He heard footsteps approaching and quickly lowered his eyes. It was like Camel had said, the man had sensed his eyes. He tried to send a thought to Cracker: Easy, girl, easy. She didn’t move. Man, she was a great dog. The footsteps paused. Rick felt certain the man could hear his heartbeat. He tried not to let even his lowered eyelids flicker. Dammit, though, he could hear himself breathing. It was quiet, but if he could hear it, maybe they could. The footsteps moved away. They paused again. They moved away again.

  Rick became aware of a stick or something digging into his thigh. He wondered what would happen if he shifted slightly. He lifted his eyes and waited. He didn’t see any shadows passing. He thought he could shift safely. But he turned his eyes toward Camel, who sat so still, he didn’t seem real. In fact, his eyes had taken on an eerie, almost waxy quality. So Rick didn’t move either. The feeling of the stick digging into him grew so intense, he almost thought it was worth it to move. But he didn’t. He waited. And waited.

  Cracker hated staying this still. She obeyed anyway. She felt as if she didn’t need to look to know everything that was around her. She could hear a bird in the distance. She could hear a leaf hitting another leaf. She could tell which way the soft breeze was blowing. She could smell that the air was clearing of human smells, except for those of Rick and Camel and their friends. But she ached to move.

  For Rick, staying still literally made his body feel as if it were in pain. He wouldn’t have thought it was so hard. He watched as his foot involuntarily started to twitch. He thought thirty minutes must have elapsed since the last of the enemy had passed.

  Suddenly, Camel’s eyes turned unwaxy. Rick heard a waterfall in his ears. It took him a moment to realize that the sound of the waterfall was coming from inside of him, maybe blood rushing through him.

  Cracker’s hair stood up again, and Rick spotted brush moving. Before he could react, the Yards were shooting. “We’re compromised,” Vukovich said, surprisingly calmly.

  Camel was already on the radio: “The hit is going down.”

  Cracker noticed that Rick didn’t tell her to come. Noise, running, explosions—everything was going on at once. Rick started running, so she ran with him. She could have run much faster, but she didn’t know where they were going. She could feel the urgency in the way they were running. The smells and sounds passed by so quickly, she couldn’t really process them the way she’d been taught, but she did smell gunpowder.

  Rick did everything the other men did. Basically, they were shooting at anybody who wasn’t them. Rick tried shooting at a guard and missed wildly. Then something savage filled him, and he aimed at another guard’s head and saw the man’s head explode. He was thrown into some kind of savage zone, and he wanted to kill, and he wanted to live. He felt like he was possessed by something, like maybe even the devil, and this thing had taken over his body. Suddenly he was thrown to the ground, watching a man lift a rifle and aim it at him. He thought, I’m dead.

  Cracker was already airborne by the time the man had lifted his gun.

  For Rick, everything went into slow time, clicking instead of flowing like in regular life. He tried to move, but he was going so slowly. So … slowly … he must be dead. The rifle was inches from his head, but when he tried to move to grab it, it seemed to be miles from his head.

  Cracker thumped against the man and heard his gun fire a moment later. She knew just where to sink her teeth: the man’s neck. Once his neck was torn, she swung around and saw Rick pushing himself up. He looked in her eyes for just half a second, and she could see he was fine. Then he started running, and she ran after him.

  Rick stopped right before Camel and Vukovich tore open the prison door, covered by the others. He saw movement and aimed at a Vietcong; he was back to moving in fast time now. Rick fired and
the man dropped. The prisoners emerged running, and he turned and ran with them.

  Camel, just ahead of him, shouted into his radio, “Go ahead and launch! We’re in contact now. Ready for extraction.” Moments later Rick heard the distant whir of choppers in the air. He kept running. He had a weird tunneling feeling, like all he could hear were his own footsteps and the footsteps of the people chasing them. He hoped they were running in the same direction they’d come from so that Camel knew where the booby traps were. Then Rick hardly cared about that. He just didn’t want to get caught by whoever was behind them. But he didn’t know how much farther he could go. His lungs burned. His thighs burned. His legs didn’t have any spring left in them.

  Finally, Camel threw out a smoke grenade to mark their location. Machine-gun fire sounded from behind—they didn’t have much time. A second later ropes fell through the air. Rick did the thing he’d insisted on during training. He snapped on Cracker’s harness to the ropes first while Madman snapped on Camel’s. That way, if the chopper absolutely had to lift, Cracker would be carried up to safety and Rick would be left to his fate. But Camel just had time to snap on Rick’s harness before the helicopter raised them into the air. Camel held them so they wouldn’t swing.

  Cracker faced forward so that the wind would hit her full on. Nothing was like this—not driving in a car with all the windows open, not even riding in a chopper. This was ecstasy.

  The sounds of machine-gun fire moved into the distance, and Rick looked down to see the woods they’d just run through. The wind pounded the back of his head. They roared forward and upward. Rick figured they must have been three thousand feet above ground. He clutched Cracker tightly. Camel glanced at him, a smile on his face. Rick saw three more Hueys, with a total of eight men dangling. All alive. Rick grinned.

  The helicopters landed at Katum, a Special Forces camp not far from the border. This was according to plan. Back to the plan!

  When everybody was on the ground, they all started talking at once. All the prisoners were bruised but in high spirits. He heard Vukovich saying, “And then the dog ripped open the guy’s neck,” and everybody was petting Cracker and saying, “Amazing dog” and “Good dog” and “What a dog.” It was like they all cared more about Cracker than Rick. But he was proud of her too. Madman knelt down and seemed to be murmuring to her. A different helicopter was already waiting to return Rick to Tay Ninh, where another chopper would take him back to his camp.

  Camel shook his hand. “You watched our back. You’re a good man. I’ll make sure to put in a good word for you and Cracker.”

  Rick got aboard with Cracker and tried to open his rucksack to change Cracker from her harness to her chain. For some reason, the sack was stuck closed. It was as if it were glued shut. Then he laughed.

  Seventeen

  RICK WOULDN’T HAVE BELIEVED IT, BUT HE FELL asleep on the chopper back to camp. The pilot actually had to shake him awake when they landed. He woke up disoriented and wondered for a second if he’d just dreamed the last few days. But the pilot said, “I hear she’s an amazing dog,” and he knew it was all true. He and Cracker got off.

  Rick and Cracker trudged toward Rick’s barrack while men rushed frantically in the opposite direction. One glared at him and shouted, “All available men!” Then U-Haul himself went running past but ran back to say, “Where the hell are you going? All available men.”

  Rick opened his mouth, closed it, then said, “I just returned from a special mission.” He felt a little, well, important now.

  The sarge seemed to be choking on his own saliva as he tried to scream his loudest scream. He looked at Rick as if he were a new breed of worm and screeched, “Is there something about the word ‘all’ that you don’t understand? There are men in trouble out there. Get yourself together and get your tail on a chopper!”

  Rick said, “What’s going on?”

  U-Haul said impatiently, “We got two major battles going on. Lots of casualties. All available men.” He dashed off.

  Rick couldn’t believe that “all available men” meant someone who’d just returned from rescuing four Special Forces soldiers and had barely slept for days. But when he got back to the hootch, every other handler was already gone. He kept thinking about the words “lots of casualties.” So he got fresh supplies for himself and Cracker and jogged to the helicopter pad. Only one chopper was left, so he and Cracker jumped aboard.

  They neared a field with men lying in the distance. When he and Cracker got off and the chopper left, the silence surprised him. Just the same, he crawled forward rather than walked. He spotted Uppy in a trench and made his way over to him.

  “How’s it going?” Rick said.

  “They broke the perimeter last night, but we established a new one and it’s holding so far. We tried to get everybody available here when the perimeter broke, but there was another big battle going on twenty klicks away.”

  It was already afternoon by now. “This has been going on since last night?”

  “Yeah—the middle of the night.”

  A gun fired, but just one, then a few fired, then silence again. Then Cracker noticed Tristie at the other end of the trench. A guy she didn’t know was holding Tristie’s leash. Where was Twenty-Twenty? She tried to pull herself up, but Rick pushed her down.

  Rick noticed Tristie too. He readied his gun and peered over the trench and saw Twenty-Twenty lying on his side in the field, almost as if he were sleeping. At first Rick just thought he was entrenched a little farther out, but then he saw blood seeping from Twenty. Rick froze in place and figured it was adrenaline freeze again. But then he realized it was his subconscious comprehending that if he made even one move, the momentum would carry him all the way to where Twenty-Twenty lay, and then they would both end up hurt. But he had to do something.

  “Where’s the damn backup?” he snapped at Uppy. “My buddy’s out there!”

  “It’s too hot to get him now,” Uppy answered, snapping his gum.

  Rick suddenly felt like grabbing that gum out of Uppy’s mouth and stuffing it up his nose. Instead, he tried to stay calm. He said, as if Uppy were an idiot, “But it’s quiet now.”

  Uppy answered, “My best friend’s out there too. We’ve known each other since second grade. You know?”

  Rick took in a breath. “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean nothing. I …”

  “Forget it.”

  Then Twenty-Twenty lifted his head to look up, and a shot rang out. But it wasn’t at Twenty-Twenty, it was at Rick, for sticking his head out of the trench. Savageness rose in Rick again. He wanted to blast every Vietcong in the world to smithereens.

  Tristie started barking. Somehow she’d gotten off leash and was leaping into the air. Twenty-Twenty screamed, “No, Tristie, stay. Stay!”

  Cracker yelped. Rick shouted, “Cracker, stay! Somebody grab that dog! Tristie, stay!”

  A soldier lunged at Tristie. But she was too quick. She lurched off. In mid-leap a single shot rang out. Blood splattered in every direction, and Trisitie fell like a stone, half in and half out of the trench. Rick and Cracker crawled frantically toward her as a soldier pulled her back in.

  Something about the triumph of the Special Forces mission mixed with the horror of seeing blood spurting from Tristie made Rick think he might be losing his mind. He cried out to nobody in particular, “What the HELL is going on?”

  The force of his cry startled Cracker. She’d never heard anything like it from him, and maybe nothing like it from anyone, ever. She’d heard cries of physical pain. But this was a different kind of pain, and also a different kind of Rick. She sniffed at Tristie: alive. She looked at Rick to tell him to do something. People could do things.

  Rick could hear Twenty-Twenty crying out, “Is she alive? Is she alive?”

  The blood from Tristie’s limp body oozed from her chest. She wasn’t moving. Rick held her muzzle shut and blew air into her nostrils. She came back to life, whinnying like a horse. Rick blew more air into her nostri
ls, then hollered, “Medic!”

  Uppy said, “The medic’s got a pile of humans he’s working on.” But then Uppy tore off his shirt and pressed it against the wound.

  Rick continued blowing into Tristie’s nostrils.

  Then she opened her eyes and looked right at him before closing her eyes and ceasing to breathe again. “Come on, Tristie!” He kept blowing, but she fell limp, and he knew she was gone.

  Cracker also knew she was gone.

  “Hey, Rick!” It was Twenty.

  Rick didn’t answer at first, because he knew what the next question would be. But then he ended up hesitating so long that he realized Twenty already knew what the answer was. Twenty-Twenty didn’t speak again.

  Rick gently set down Tristie’s head and turned away and didn’t move for a long time.

  Cracker laid her body over Tristie’s but kept a paw on Rick. She knew she couldn’t protect Tristie anymore, but she still felt protective. When a soldier moved nearby, she snarled and the soldier moved back. Tristie smelled muddy and bloody and just like Tristie, except dead. Cracker had smelled rats and birds right after they died, and they smelled different in death. After Tristie had smelled different for a while, Cracker knew it was time to take care of Rick again. She pushed against him. She couldn’t feel anything coming from him, like sadness or anything. That made her feel worried.

  The hot sun slanted from the sky and eventually descended as Cracker panted from the heat. Gunfire occasionally broke the peace. When evening fell, the trees loomed dark and large. Several times Rick thought he saw movement in the forest and raised his rifle. But it turned out to be a shadow. Rick squeezed Cracker to him and waited. A long time ago one of Rick’s uncles had taken him through the Mojave Desert in southern California. Weird-shaped trees called Joshuas filled the desert, their limbs bent, seemingly misshapen. Crazy, humanlike shapes. His uncle had told him that Joshua trees looked human because they once had been, in another life. He said the trees were ghosts and that each had a story to tell. Rick figured that after tonight these trees by the battlefield would have some stories.