Stan shoots the approaching NVA, one soldier after another, rounds cracking past his own and Jerry’s face as Jerry struggles with his M-16. At last, he gets it working, and he and Stan shoot as more soldiers charge them in what appears to be a suicidal charge. The enemy force finally breaks off, and Stan helps Jerry gather his gear and they move back to Rivera. Not long after, Dennis Tinkle and Terry Hinote get hit. Hinote drops, a wound to the shoulder. Tinkle gets it worse: the gunfire rakes him, sweeping him off his feet, where he drops in a courtyard in front of a thatched house. He lays screaming and writhing in his own blood, which is pooling around him. Recon calls for a medevac but the request is refused—the gunfire is too heavy. The morning is worsening by the minute. When the platoon captures a wounded NVA soldier, he tells them their objective is to overrun and kill all Americans. A little after one p.m., Alpha Company arrives by chopper to reinforce the outnumbered platoon.
Heavy machine-gun, RPG, and small-arms fire rattles across the several hundred yards of ground separating the NVA and VC from Recon and Alpha Company. As far as Stan can tell, one of the guns is about fifty yards away across a rice paddy, across a narrow dirt road, next to a hooch. Now that he’s got his bearings, Stan can see the bunker where the attack is coming from. It’s constructed of stacked logs and sandbags. There’s a machine gun firing out of a hole in the wall; there’s another gun beside the bunker; and three or four NVA soldiers shooting AK-47s, as well as a couple of RPG gunners.
Stan says to Russo, “We’ve got to do something.”
He thinks for a minute. “I’m going to destroy that bunker.” Stan holds up a LAW (light antitank weapon). It weighs about six pounds and fires a rocket meant to destroy tanks.
“You’re too far away,” Russo is saying.
“I’m going to charge it.”
“Parker, I’m telling you, you are a dead man if you do.”
Stan likes Russo. He has this energetic way of talking. Russo, all business, says to Stan, “They’re going to cut you down, man.”
Stan says, “I don’t give a crap,” and he means it. “Let them kill me, you know? I’m tired of it. I’m tired of this. I’d be better off dead anyway.” And Stan sits back. There, he’s said it, though he never meant to.
He adds, “We’d all be better off dead. This life is terrible. We’re already dead. We just don’t know it yet.”
Russo says nothing. Stan hopes Russo will speak up. That he’ll point out that wishing to be dead, to get killed out there in the fields of fire, is not a natural thing to say, that it’s bad for your health. That it’s a sign of a crazy man. But Russo is quiet.
Stan gets up and turns and over his shoulder says to Russo, “Give me cover fire, and holler back to the rest of them guys—cover me!”
So Russo hollers back, “Hey, listen up! Parker is going to assault the bunker. Give him cover fire!”
Stan strips off his ruck, grabs up the LAW, his M-16, and when he stands up, all hell breaks loose. The air is filled with bullets. At the other end of the rice paddy, the leaves and bushes and trees are jumping as the fire coming through them shreds the foliage. Then the leaves get blown away and there’s nothing for the bullets to hit. It’s a clear, drilling path from them to him.
He’s zigzagging, running this way, that way, and the bullets are whipping past him, just nicking past him. The paddy water is flying up at his feet, and there are RPGs swimming low over the ground, dropping lower and lower and plowing into the water and exploding. With some of the explosions, Stan does a somersault as if to get over the sound of the explosion itself, like a circus performer, and he rolls out of this and extends back up onto his feet and keeps running. It’s the damndest thing you ever saw, Parker sprinting atop the narrow dike along the paddy with water on either side. And Wongus there, saying something like, He’s got that angel with him today. Stan’s running and huffing and puffing with the LAW clenched in his left hand, firing his M-16 with his right hand, when suddenly he feels the LAW lurch ahead of him. It’s been shot out of his hands. He stoops down as he approaches and scoops it up and keeps running. The fire increases. He falls on his butt and gets up and reloads. A bullet enters his head. But it’s not his head, it’s his helmet; it enters on the right side and zings right around the helmet on the inside the way you would run your finger along the inside of a bowl to lick the frosting clean. And then the bullet exits, spinning Stan in a circle. He falls face-first into the muddy rice paddy. He sits up. His hairline stings. He’ll look at that later. Oh, hell, he can’t help it; he takes off his helmet and looks at the hole going in and the hole going out and he can’t believe his noggin’s intact. He runs a finger along his scalp where it hurts and traces a line right around his head. He puts his helmet back on and sits there. He doesn’t think he can run much farther. He’s pressed his luck too much already, and he says, Lord, you’ve got to help me out. Come on, I’m almost there, and he leaps a few more steps forward and lands behind a dike. He’s in about six inches of cold water but he’s safe behind the berm. The NVA are pouring fire into the dirt, and he thinks, I am in a fix now. He thinks to himself that he’d better kill these bastards now or for sure they are going to kill him.
He’s about sixty feet from the bunker where the machine-gun and small arms fire is coming from. Sixty feet. That isn’t so far; in fact, he’s too close. He rises up to shoot, and immediately the NVA gunners open on him. He raises just the M-16 over the berm and dumps more rounds in the direction of the bunker. Bwipp bwipp bwipp. That was useless. He can’t take the bunker with small arms fire; he needs to fire the LAW. He’s got one round in the weapon. That’s it. One and done. He realizes he’s stuck. Every time he falls back to avoid the next fusillade, he can hear the guys behind him yell, “Are you hit?” He spots a cooking pot, picks it up, holds out his M-16, and places the pot on the barrel, the plan coming into focus now. He extends his arm and raises the barrel, and the pot begins to dance on the end of the barrel as the gunfire swarms it. He drops it back down, not wanting to get his M-16 shot up. But he realizes he has a second, maybe two, when the NVA are going to be shooting at the pot and during that time he might pop up and fire the LAW. He raises the pot another time and it’s attacked. Whang whang whang. Drops it. Raises it again. Drops it. Now he immediately sits up, sights down the barrel of the LAW, pushes the plunger, and watches the twenty-inch rocket sail like a line drive, headed for the narrow aperture in the NVA bunker through which they’ve been shooting. The rocket enters the hole and disappears.
The bunker blows up. The sky is filled with yellow smoke, burning pieces of thatch. Stan figures everyone inside and near it has to be dead. He looks up at the sky, squinting. “God that’s beautiful,” all that fire, all that destruction, all that will no longer be shooting at me, and in the silence—for his ears are blown out by the gunfire—comes a crackling noise like the sound of leaves burning, of autumn nights at home. Pieces of the bunker and parts of dead enemy start falling back to earth, smacking the ground and the muddy rice paddy water around him. He looks over the berm and no bullets meet him. It’s quiet except for the nice crackling noise.
And then the ammo that didn’t blow up in the bunker starts to cook off in the fire—RPG rounds, mortars. The random firing is the loudest yet, and Stan, dazed, no doubt in shock, puts a fresh magazine in his M-16 and grabs two other mags, gets up, and starts shuffling toward the bunker. There’s debris flying out of it now, whirring and whizzing—jagged bats leaving a burning house. He sees something moving ahead, limbs moving through the burning debris, and he can’t believe that any of the NVA are alive. He walks up and dumps a magazine into them, killing them. They are dead, and he keeps walking. He’s walking to where the crackling is coming from, and it’s a large hooch, twenty by twenty feet, and it’s been the VC command headquarters. There’s more movement, this time out of the corner of his eye, and it’s Russo running to congratulate him on assaulting the bunker. Stan turns to greet his friend just as the other human being reaches out too, a
s if to embrace him. The two men look at each other and realize they have never met, that they are total strangers, and that, in fact, they are bound by the rule to kill each other—a rule they did not write but now inhabits every fiber of their being by virtue of finding themselves in this rice paddy.
Stan reaches out for the man’s arm, and the man reaches for Stan. They recoil, as if in horror. Stan looks at the face, the eyes, the khaki uniform, and the crisp red star on the soldier’s helmet. Both are startled and turn and run away and then they both turn back and face each other at nearly the same time. They stand and stare, confused. Sonofabitch, is that an NVA soldier? Stan has run back to where he’d dropped some ammo. He bends to pick it up and fixes to draw down on the NVA soldier when he sees the guy throw something at him.
It comes sailing toward him, a high arc, nice lift. And Stan’s pretty sure the guy has played some Little League baseball, like him too, the way he’s delivered the throw from the outfield. But the ball is actually a grenade and comes to stop in the dirt at his feet. Stan can hear the fuse inside fizzing like two bees trapped in a jar, getting louder. He looks up and he can see the NVA soldier looking at him. Stan is actually down on one knee with his right hand out, his left glove hand ready to scoop up the baseball, and instead he thinks, I better stand up and shoot this guy.
He’s about four feet from the grenade.
It explodes.
At the last available moment Stan turns to his left. His right side—his shoulder, ribs, and hip—is shredded with shrapnel. His whole right side starts to burn. His eyeballs are filled with orange light. A flash. And sailing backward, he sees blue (from the sky), green (from the trees), and white (from the smoke filling the air) before he hits the ground. He’s never been in so much pain. In fact, he doesn’t even really hear the explosion until after it’s over, until after he lands on his back, looking at the blue, the green, the white, and he’s intensely aware of himself—where he ends and where the rest of the earth begins—because everywhere there’s pain. He looks at the green and thinks that the green is not pain. The blue above him is not pain. He blinks and finds it amazing that even his eyelashes hurt at their very roots, right around the pale rim of skin surrounding each lash. He can’t believe he’s alive.
With the grenade’s explosion, he falls back with such force and makes such a splash that the cold water in this bit of rice paddy splashes up and over the smooth mud sides of the paddy’s dike, the way the water can overrun the top of a tub and slop across the floor—except now the water comes back. It comes rolling back into the pool that he’s fallen into, and since he’s lying on his back and looking at the sky and since his mouth is open, still in a silent scream, the water runs into his mouth. It tastes like worms and dirt and metal. He starts coughing. But he realizes that maybe he should be quiet and not make so much noise because he doesn’t know who’s still in the area. He can’t hear Russo or the rest of the platoon, some of whom are engaged in another firefight, during which Rivera, Dove, Russo, Ron Kleckler, and Lindsey Kinney will be wounded. And because he can’t hear anything, Stan thinks that he’s died and that his life is draining slowly, perhaps into the pool of water; he’s still able to be aware of things, but he’s growing less and less aware. The truth is, he can’t hear anything because he’s lying in six inches of water and his ears have filled with it, so that everything has that faraway, tinny sound of a boat motor on a summer lake somewhere, of gunfire and grenade and a LAW rocket ringing in his ears as if the water that had entered his ears had trapped the sound inside his head. Then the sound starts rushing out, and he is sure that this is another sign that he is dying. In fact, what it means is that his eardrums are burst. His head is ringing and aching.
He realizes, I can’t be dead, because dead men can’t hear anything, and he is hearing something—something approaching him, and he lies back in the water. The water gets in his eyes, and he wipes them with his hand. When he moves his hand away, he sees, silhouetted against the sky, a tall, thin NVA soldier looking down at him, studying. Stan freezes.
It’s the same guy who threw the grenade.
He slowly lifts his rifle at Stan.
Stan is looking up, straight up, into the small metal hole in the end of the rifle. It’s about six feet away, a perfect black hole, and he’s staring wide-eyed, trying not to blink. The guy’s khaki uniform, the leather boots, his hank of hair hanging out from under his helmet. Stan’s trying with all his might not to blink as he looks right into the barrel, his whole life shrunk and focused right to this point, about a quarter-inch in diameter, so close. All the fighting and traveling and the snowy mornings walking to school and getting beat up in the school yard in New Mexico and his mother lashing the bikes to the truck and trailer, their home, as their father drives away to a new ironworking job and a new patch of dirt to park the trailer while he works and eventually they move on again. Stan moves on through time and space, even when he was a little boy, moving, always in two places, where he’s just been and where he’s headed to. He was even born in two places at once, on the Texas/Arkansas border in that place called Texarkana, with the state line itself painted as a white stripe up the middle of the courthouse steps. Now he lies in the water staring right at the guy and the guy is staring at him, and Stan knows he’s trying to figure out if he’s alive. Stan’s thinking, He’s fixing to shoot me. I’m a dead man again.
The NVA soldier points the AK close to Stan’s cheek like he’s going to fire. Then he drops it away from his face and looks, really looks, at Stan. Then he places the rifle back, moves the pad of his finger over the trigger, begins to press, when a sound, or something—movement?—distracts him and he turns his head. Then he looks at Stan, drops the rifle to his side, and turns on a trot and disappears from Stan’s view. It’s been like lying in a grave and looking up at a rectangle of sky. Stan feels himself breathe for the first time in several minutes.
He doesn’t dare move for twenty, thirty seconds. He doesn’t want to move at all. He doesn’t feel like he can move; he hurts everywhere.
He sits up now to take in the damage and looks at the holes in his green commando sweater, and it’s been shot up, though there’s no blood where the holes are. His web gear, the chest-mounted pouch he was wearing when he took off running to assault the machine gun, is gone. He doesn’t know where he lost it. And he looks around for the trains, he can hear them. Now there are at least four of them, one coming from each direction of the compass, north, south, east, and west, and it seems they will intersect in his head, the roaring sound is so loud. But then other sounds become apparent—sounds of shooting, men shouting, the sounds filling the void where he’s been living for the last five minutes.
He cranes around and looks back in the direction he’d run from and sees someone waving at him “Get down!” Small arms fire erupts from the place that Stan had assaulted because the NVA have come to reinforce their destroyed position. The shooting’s coming from about fifty feet away from Stan, across the dirt road that runs through the village. He can’t see it because he can’t lift his head to look. It grows in intensity, and he stays ducked down.
I can’t stay here, he thinks, and he starts to elbow-crawl up out of the water, pulling himself up to the drier edge of the dike so that just his legs are in the water. He’s managed to end up at the spot where he last had his M-16 and reaches up slowly to pull it down from the dike just as more bullets strike around him. He crawls right up against the dike for protection, trying to think of a next move.
The thing is, he can’t believe how transitory the pain is. First it’s there one minute, and then gone. And then back like a plate of hot steel laid on his bare skin—his leg mostly. His leg’s burning up. He thinks it’s broken. He thinks his ribs are broken. He reaches down with his hand and rubs his leg, and it comes back to him covered in blood. He thinks, My, look at that, and feels around, like a man frisking himself, up at the top of the leg and down as far as he can reach, which isn’t far, to check that everything
is there. And that’s when his hand brushes past something, something sharp and jagged, and he stops: Whoa, what’s this? His fingers stop on the hard shape, and he looks down and discerns that it’s a piece of metal, shrapnel. He pinches it between his thumb and forefinger and thinks, Now or never, and pulls. It slides out of his leg meat and emerges as a piece of knife-shaped steel, about as long his forefinger. He lifts it and looks at it and decides that it belongs in his shirt pocket as a souvenir, so he reaches inside his shot-up commando sweater and drops it in there and pats it and thinks, There, that’s done. When he moves his hand, it bumps into something else; something is sticking out of his ribs on his right side. It’s a bigger thing, sharper. He pulls that out, but this time, the effect is different: the hole where the steel had been suddenly fills with blood, oozes, and starts dumping blood down his side. He thinks he should put the metal back into the hole and almost tries to, then shakes his head, trying to clear his thoughts, and realizes he’s going to bleed to death or at least pass out. He jams his left forefinger into the hole on his right side so he can leave his right hand free, his trigger hand, and he figures out a way to bandage himself. He’s got his left arm across his stomach with his finger jammed up between his ribs, and with his right hand, he bunches his shirt into a kind of plug shape about the size of the hole, removes his finger, and stuffs the shirt into the bloody hole. Oh man does that hurt, but it hurts so good, in a funny kind of way. He reaches into a pocket and unrolls a cloth bandage that he wraps around his rib cage, around and around a few times, tighter and tighter, cinching himself up, battening the shirt around the hole, and, brother, does it continue to hurt. But the bleeding slows. That’s good. He picks up his weapon and places the stock of the weapon against the wound and scooches up against the side of the dike, leaning into it. The weapon’s stock presses into the wound, applying steady pressure, which he’s pretty sure is going a long way to stopping the bleeding altogether. He sits there leaning into the dike with the shooting going on overhead and doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. Somebody’s going to have to come and get him. He can’t elbow-crawl backward from his position. After about ten minutes, Troy Fulton inches up to him; he’s made it all the way from the houses where the gun battle started, up to Stan. Stan hadn’t even seen him coming. He’s so glad to see Troy again. His voice is calm. He looks at the bandage job Stan did on himself and says, “Parker, that’s real good handiwork.” And then he says, “I can’t do anything more for you,” and he explains they just have to wait for the medevac and that the ground fire is too heavy right now.