Cracker!: The Best Dog in Vietnam

by Cynthia Kadohata

  Cracker reluctantly stood up. Everything was all wrong. Even Rick was all wrong. Why wasn’t he listening to her? She pawed Rick over and over, but he just kept hauling on her leash. What was wrong with him?

  She turned her head quickly as she saw movement in the paddy. It was a rat! A big one! But then Rick was pulling on her again.

  She gave the rat one last mournful glance. Rick looked over and saw the rat scurry away. Relief spread through him. Maybe that’s why she was acting so nuts. They never should have let the dogs go after rats.

  Cracker smelled gunpowder, felt tension, and heard faint sounds coming from some of the houses. She growled, lay down, and refused to get up.

  The men all started laughing, and just like that, Rick felt a rush, exactly like the time in training right before he blew the booby trap. The laughing started to sound as if it were moving farther away from him, and everything suddenly seemed to go into slow motion. The second before it started, he thought, Ambush.

  Villagers dropped to the ground all at once, as if on signal, and a barrage of fire rang out. Machine guns! As Rick hit the dirt, he saw his slack man buckle over, blood spurting from his neck. Gunfire seemed to be coming from every direction. Rick let go of Cracker’s leash and struggled to get his M-16 free. He couldn’t see a single enemy, but gunfire burst from the houses. Charlie must have hidden in some tunnels under the huts. He blasted away at a hootch that had gunfire coming from it. A sudden sharp pain burned his right shin, but he didn’t have time to check it. Cracker tried to crawl on top of him, no doubt to protect him. But it hampered his shooting ability, so he shoved her off and kept shooting.

  He backed up in a crawl, shooting the whole time and not having the slightest idea if he was hitting anything. He set his rifle on auto even though he knew that meant he would use up his ammo more quickly. A bullet hit the ground right before him, kicking up mud in his eyes. It felt like acid. He tried wiping it out with his shirt, but his clothes were so filthy, he was just making it worse. He could barely see. He couldn’t see.

  Machine-gun fire exploded all around him. “Charlie doesn’t have enough machine-gun ammo to keep this up long!” someone cried out. So Rick wasn’t surprised when the machine-gun aspect of the battle quickly ended.

  Silence. Then a rocket-propelled grenade hit one of the APCs, blowing a hole in it. Pieces of the grenade ricocheted inside the APC. Someone screamed. The lieutenant must have called in for mortar fire, because a mortar exploded at the far end of the village. But Rick still had no idea what had happened. He couldn’t see a thing. Who was dead? Who was alive? And then he felt sudden panic: Where was Cracker? He cried out, “Cracker!” When she didn’t answer, he called out again, louder.

  Guys were starting to talk in a wary way, but not panicked. His own panicked voice sounded out of place. He could tell everyone felt relatively safe now. Finally, his eyes cleared enough that he could see. They still stung like mad, but at least he could look around and make out a blur of movement and color.

  But Rick couldn’t see Cracker anywhere. He searched out the cleanest spot he could find on his shirt and rubbed at his eyes. That helped a little. But he still couldn’t see Cracker. He knew she wouldn’t have strayed far from him, but he wished he knew where she was. He looked toward the rice paddy but didn’t see her. He doubted she would have gone toward the village, but he turned in that direction anyway, scanning the landscape. Some of the hootches were shot up so bad, they weren’t really hootches anymore. They were just piles of thatch now.

  The radioman was already calling for dust-offs. “Blood type O negative. That’s Oscar November. Appears to be sunken chest wound….”

  Rick tried to stay calm as he slowly scoured the countryside for Cracker. He tried to push the panic down. Someone started to urge him onto his back, saying, “Let me have a look at that leg.” The urging grew stronger, and another man helped, forcing him onto his back.

  “What? What leg?” Rick said. “I gotta find my dog.”

  “Lie still, Private.” It was the medic. Rick had that feeling again: What the HELL is going on? The medic applied a tourniquet and started an I.V.

  He heard the radio operator saying, “… Hanski, Richard. Blood type A positive …”

  Rick glanced at his leg and did a double take at the mess of blood and shrapnel. And just like that, it seemed as if the adrenaline of the battle drained from him and he could feel pain again. Intense pain. It was as if his eyes told him what his body didn’t: He was injured. He saw one especially long piece of metal sticking out of his leg, and he pulled it out, shouting at the sharp pang.

  The medic called to the radio operator, “Shrapnel injury to popliteal artery.”

  “… shrapnel injury to popliteal artery …,” the radioman echoed.

  The medic called out, “Resected tendon!”

  “… resected tendon …”

  The lieutenant leaned over Rick. “Don’t worry, son, we’ll have you dusted off right away.”

  Rick said, “Sir, I can’t find my dog. I can’t leave without her.” He grimaced. “Ah, man, my leg.”

  “We’ll take care of your pain,” said the medic.

  Rick felt his head start to swim. Must have been morphine. He tried to push himself up. “No,” he said. “No.” He saw one of the guys shaking a villager, who chattered nearly hysterically in reply. Everybody was talking to somebody. English. Vietnamese. His eyelids felt heavy. “I gotta find my dog.”

  “Lie down, soldier. We’ll find your dog.”

  Rick made a sudden great effort and pushed himself into a squat. “Ah!” he screamed. “Ah!” The pain from his leg shot through his entire body. He fell back down. “Oh, man. Oh, man.”

  The radio operator called out, “Dust-off’s on the way!”

  Rick thought of Camel: You have to try not to ask yourself whether you can do something…. You have to tell yourself, “I will do this.” He shouted out like a maniac, “I will push myself up!” And he did. He got up and shouted, “I gotta find my dog! Cracker!” The noises in the background seemed to fade. “Cracker!” He tried to call out, but his voice was weak and he fell to the ground. He could tell he might pass out soon. He said weakly, “I will do it,” but then he couldn’t. He lay back. “Doc. Doc. You gotta promise me you’ll find my dog.”

  “We’ll find your dog.”

  “You gotta promise….” He had this weird feeling that nobody else was real, that maybe he was already dead and they were alive, and he was just watching. “Gotta get my dog,” he said, or thought he said, but the approaching helicopter noise drowned his voice out. His head swam so badly, he didn’t know if the doctor answered or not.

  He wasn’t even sure if that was his own voice saying, “Find Cracker….”

  Twenty

  WHEN THE FIRING STARTED, CRACKER TRIED TO STICK close to Rick, but after he pushed her away, a burst of gunfire divided them and she had no choice but to go left while he went right. The gunfire seemed to be chasing her, so she kept going left while the gunfire followed. Finally, she reached the rice paddy, where she crawled along a dike to get away. Then she’d spotted that rat again. He was worth about ten wieners in her opinion. And he was slow! She crushed him in her teeth, but just as she did, she felt a sharp jerk on her leash. A man had grabbed it. She tried to lunge, but he pulled so hard that she yelped and fell to the ground. Then something pounded on her head. The last thing she remembered was the rat slipping out of her mouth….

  She woke up in some kind of dark room that smelled of human urine. Several men were talking in excited voices. A touch of light trickled in from somewhere. Her neck hurt, and her head pounded. Several men stood looking at her, laughing and pointing, and she knew the men were talking about her. She recognized the man who had grabbed her leash earlier. He held a stick now and was acting as if he were hitting something. Then he rolled his eyes as if he were passing out. All the men laughed.

  Then one man started yelling at her. The man with the stick raised it in
the air, and another man began calling “dog” to her. She stood up unsteadily. The men laughed at her again. As the man with the stick relaxed, she bounded away, sailing past them all in one leap. The second she landed, she flew into the air again, speeding as fast as she could down a long tunnel that smelled of dirt and of people. She kept running, through tunnel after tunnel. Sometimes people would look up at her surprised. One room was filled with children who shouted excitedly as she ran through. She didn’t know where she was going, just that she needed to keep moving.

  She moved much more quickly than the men chasing her. She smelled fresh air and moved toward that, up and up through a slender tunnel until she spotted the sky.

  She scurried out of the tunnel and tried to get her bearings, but she kept running. The sound of voices grew farther away. She didn’t stop until she reached a jungle, and then she stood perfectly still for a moment, hearing and smelling nothing but jungle noises and jungle smells. A bird called from a tree. She bristled a little but knew she had more important things to do.

  Cracker always knew what direction was what, but she felt something unfamiliar now: uncertainty. She always knew. But now she didn’t know, not for sure. If only her head would stop hurting. Why was it hurting? She tried to shake the pounding out of her head, but it wouldn’t go away. She turned to the left, then the right, then behind herself. She used to know in what direction Willie lived. But now she didn’t. She turned around again, then decided to go that way. She felt better after traveling a distance. This must be the right way. Right? She was thirsty and hungry, and the leash dangling from her neck annoyed her, but she felt confident again.

  She did feel anxious about being separated from Rick, but she felt confident about where she’d last seen him. She hoped he was still there. There was a moment that day when she thought she’d passed the same place twice, and she lost confidence and whined. But she kept going. She needed to find Rick. She trotted at the edge of a rice paddy. All the peasants in their big hats looked up and called to one another, pointing her out. She didn’t understand a word they were saying, but she knew she couldn’t let them catch her. A couple of them shouted something and started running in her direction. It was easy to outdistance them, even with the dogs she heard baying behind her. They were so far away, and she was so fast and strong. Her legs were unaffected by uncertainty.

  She understood now that she needed to avoid humans. Nobody could be trusted except Rick and people Rick trusted. She began moving more slowly but still steadily, making sure nobody saw her. The jungles took longer to move through, but unlike the paddies and villages, they were empty-of humans at least. Once, she did hear a human voice, but it was far away. Another time she stopped when she smelled one of the smells that Rick had trained her to respond to. She sat down automatically and pondered what to do. She could hear the wind passing over a string. She stood up and moved slowly until the noise grew louder and the smell of gunpowder filled her nose. Then she simply walked around the string and the gunpowder.

  She just wished she knew the direction for sure the way she used to. She pushed down any doubt and searched her mind for certainty. For a moment she just about had it. But the pounding in her head wouldn’t stop and she lost the certainty. When she was thirsty, she looked around until she found a trickle of water seeping up beneath some rocks. Rick never let her drink unless he gave her the water. But she was thirsty, so she drank, looking around guiltily every so often. The water tasted clean and fresh, so she drank as much as she could before she started to feel the pull of Rick. She had to get to him. He needed her. She helped him. She was important. She trotted on and on, even when her stomach growled with hunger. Hunger was important, but not like thirst. She couldn’t go on without water. But food, she could last awhile without that.

  The time came when the sky was dark and her body began to ache, and she didn’t think she could go farther. She’d walked long distances before but had never run so much in her life. She sniffed around the dark jungle. She knew she could see better at night than Rick or Willie, because they always moved around comically in the dark, with their hands in front of them to feel their way. That seemed funny to her sometimes. But this darkness was so dark that her eyes couldn’t gather enough light to know what was around her. Cracker could hear, though, and she could smell, and so she had a pretty good idea of where she was and all that was around her. She knew the size of the leaves hanging from the trees, how disintegrated the leaves on the ground were, how softly the wind blew-everything except what color it all was. She felt ants crawling on her back. She walked a little farther, to an area that didn’t seem to have so many ants, though she knew they would come for her.

  She sniffed around, first raising her head the way she’d been taught, but she didn’t smell anything unusual in the wind. Then she lowered her nose and sniffed the ground, the way she’d been taught not to do. She pawed at the dirt, clearing away a nice area of dirt to lie in. Even when she lay down, the anxiety of finding Rick still ran strong through her, but the feeling of needing sleep was even stronger. Before she closed her eyes, she raised her nose once more but smelled nothing special. She let herself sleep.

  Twenty-one

  RICK’S VISION BLURRED AS SOME GUYS LOADED HIM onto the dust-off. He thought he was only drowsy, but he must have passed out, because all of a sudden he saw that the chopper had landed. Even in his drowsy state, he could see how well organized everything was. Emergency personnel had already been alerted to what kind of injured were on board. Rick watched his slack man, who looked dead, being rushed off. A couple of guys carried Rick to an operating room, and then he was gone.

  He woke up in a Quonset hut with a door on each side. One of the doors appeared to lead outside, the other to a hallway. A couple of guys were flirting with a nurse. A young Asian doctor stood over him. For a second he thought he might have been captured.

  Then the doctor said, “Hi, I’m Dr. Kanamori. How are you feeling?”

  “I lost my dog. She didn’t dust off with me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m a dog handler.”

  “I’m sure someone took care of her. Let’s talk about your injury, and then we’ll get to your dog. In laymen’s terms, shrapnel pierced your right artery and tendon. We needed to take a piece of your left artery and sew it into your right one. We’ll keep you here a couple of weeks, but after that, it looks like you’re going stateside for rehab.”

  “You mean I’m going home?”

  “You sure are. Congratulations.”

  “But my dog. I’m a handler with the 67th IPSD. My dog was lost when they dusted me off.”

  The doctor paused, then turned to a nurse and gestured her over. “Linda, this is a dog handler from the 67th IPSD. His dog didn’t dust off with him. Can you check to see if the animal was found?”

  “Yes, doctor.” She hurried off.

  The doctor smiled at Rick. “Don’t worry, we’ll find your dog.” He sounded sympathetic, but Rick could tell he was in a hurry. “Now get some rest,” the doctor said before continuing down the aisle.

  Rick called out, “Do you know what happened to my slack man? His name was Rafael.”

  The doctor turned reluctantly. Rick wanted to say “Never mind,” but the doctor had already started talking. “Rafael didn’t make it. I’m sorry.” Rick waited for more, maybe the cause of death, but all the doctor said was, “He didn’t suffer.” Then he began talking to the next wounded soldier.

  Rick felt weird in his head, trying to get it all straight. For one thing, how come he felt worse about Cracker than about Rafael? He lay still and waited as his head cleared. Some guys were playing cards. He finally was able to push himself up. A guy glanced at him.

  “Poker?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Rick lay back, waiting for someone to tell him about Cracker. But hours passed and nobody came.

  By the end of the day Rick’s head felt fairly clear. But the clearer his head became, the more he could f
eel exactly where it was, “it” being the worry about Cracker. It was not in his heart, because that would be his left side. It was in his chest. Maybe it tended toward his left: nah, just his imagination. It all seemed unreal—the hospital, the guys playing poker and laughing. It felt irrelevant or something. What the hell was he doing here? What was everybody thinking? He looked around at the guys playing cards, reading magazines. What did they think? That everything was okay now? That they were gonna go on and have great lives or something?

  One of the cardplayers met his eyes. “Hey, bud, wanna play?”

  Rick shook his head. “Uh-uh. But thanks.” The guy shrugged, and a couple of them raised their eyebrows at each other, like they thought Rick was dinky dau.

  Rick looked at the guy who’d invited him to play. He felt like he knew the guy inside out, though he’d never met him. Mr. Socializer. That would have been Dan Devine at his high school. Last he’d heard, Devine had been drafted.

  Rick still felt the thing in his chest, the ache, the guilt. He wondered whether he should have tied Cracker to his leg. But everything had happened so fast. He went over the ambush in his head, over and over until night fell, and the next day he did the same thing all over again. The other guys in the hospital ignored him.

  Someone had sent his bag of stuff to the hospital. He went through it and came upon his bundle of letters. He counted Willie’s: thirty-seven. Jeez, the kid was dedicated. Then the idea hit him. Maybe Willie could help. Anyone who could write thirty-seven letters couldn’t hurt. If they each wrote thirty-seven, that would make seventy-four.

  One of the nurses came to help walk him up and down the ward to prevent blood clots and help stretch his tendon. They told him that the first few days he’d be on crutches, then on a cane. But he had to keep moving.

  He asked the nurse, “Can I get some stationery? Lots of it.”