Sharpshooter

by Chris Lynch

  The action now is something called Operation Giant Slingshot. Those very enemy supply lines from the North that Lightfoot mentions have been crazy successful at keeping the insurgents too hot to handle all the way to within about thirty miles of Saigon. We’re being sent up there to cut it off and kill it dead, and we are assured that the sleepy part of the war is over for us.

  “Body counts,” Lightfoot says as he waves to a flotilla of sampans passing by. They are simple low boats that the locals in their triangular hats use to transport everything. Some of them are probably carrying guns to kill us with, I can never tell. Lightfoot gives them all a big happy smile with his wave. Nobody responds. “That’s what they want now, in terms of progress reports. Body counts. We are going into that jungle, young shooter, and we are going to shoot the daylights out.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  “Yes, sir,” he repeats, though with the same enthusiasm as he put into that fake smile. “That’s one reason you’re getting to be the teacher’s pet. Lieutenant’s looking forward to you picking off a lot of scalps for us. That’ll make the unit look good.”

  “Great. I’m looking forward to that myself.”

  “That’s nice.”

  I stop looking at Vietnam for a second and turn to the corporal. Despite what he says about me being Systrom’s pet project, the truth is that Lightfoot is the one who has taken me under his wing. He is the reason I know anything at all about this place and what we are doing.

  “What’s it like?” I ask him as he continues to stare off.

  “What’s what like?” he says, the smile for real this time since he knows full well what I mean.

  “Killing a guy. I haven’t done it yet. Not that I know of, anyway. You’ve been in-country what, six months already?”

  “One hundred and eighty-one days. DERUS, one hundred and eighty-four days from today.”

  DERUS. Date Eligible for Return to US. It is a topic of constant conversation among the guys in-country. This is the first time I have heard Lightfoot mention his.

  “Not that you’re counting.”

  “Not that I’m counting. And I had counted all of three of them when I first killed a man for certain. We were out on one of those same old patrols. It was getting near dark, and I swear I nearly stepped on this guy hiding under brush. He popped up, and I was carrying the M-60 machine gun that day, and boy was I glad. I was so scared witless I just pulled on that trigger and squeezed and screamed and fired from, like, three feet away, I fired about a million bullets into this poor sonofagun, all straight into his belly.

  “I was shaking so much when I stopped you would’ve thought I was doing some kind of celebration, with both hands on the gun, like an uncontrollable war dance, victory dance, something. I walked up to him and his whole middle was just soup, man. Then his foot twitched.

  “And I went into the whole lollapalooza all over again, screaming and shooting and pouring all the rest of the bullets I had into him, into his head this time, until his head just wasn’t even a head anymore.”

  It almost feels, as we stand there not talking now, as if we are actually letting the smoke clear from the shooting, as if it has all just happened all over again here before both our eyes and it’s settling again before we speak further.

  “So,” he says, turning and patting me loudly on the chest with his flat hand, “that’s what it’s like.”

  He leaves his hand there on my chest, and I wish he wouldn’t. Because I know there is no way he can help but feel the hammer of my heart, and I feel like a kid, stupid and weak and embarrassed.

  “Good,” he says to me then.

  “Good?”

  “Good. I was hoping to feel you had one of those in there. Do me a favor. Look after it.”

  It seems to me to be pretty basic common sense, so I don’t feel any need not to grant his request.

  “I will,” I say. “I will look after it.”

  He smiles, satisfied, just a tiny bit nutty. “You like cribbage?”

  We are belowdecks now, sitting on my bunk, which the Navy calls a rack but I will call a bunk, because this boat is green. He pulls down his cribbage board, and as he sets it up he throws a little bit more light where there was none before.

  “It helps if you have some clear idea of who you are killing, and why,” he says.

  “Makes sense,” I say.

  “Like I was saying, I never got the feeling I knew where I stood with the ARVN guys. I’ve heard stories that you would be fighting alongside some of these guys in the afternoon, training them, arming them, and whatnot. And then in the night some of these same guys will have changed their clothes and taken your training and bullets and pumped it all into one of our boys.”

  He shakes his head, screws up his eyes, as if he is experiencing the confusion and frustration fresh.

  “I want to know who my friends are, especially in a place as crazy and lethal as this. I never felt like the ARVN were our friends.”

  “Not like the Montagnards,” I say, like I really know anything.

  He looks up across the cribbage board. He puts his finger on his nose and squashes it down a bit. “The People,” he says, almost beaming.

  “So, who are they?” I ask.

  “The term itself means mountain people, but it refers to a number of different indigenous tribes of the Central Highlands. Those poor guys we found in the barrel were unusual in that they usually don’t come down to the lowlands. But because they are active along the same trails as the communists, and because the Montagnards are siding with us in fighting the communists … well, they got on the wrong path somewhere. Either they came too far down in tracking somebody or they got dragged down here as a message, but either way they paid the price for being in the game with us.”

  “Okay,” I say, “so why do they even bother siding with us?”

  “Well, truth is, they have a history of not being treated very well by any Vietnamese, North or South. They are a minority people, pushed around, herded up into smaller and smaller pieces of country, getting their land stolen for coffee plantations, shoved aside to live in pens, hilltop reservations. The Vietnamese majority mostly consider them savages. In the end, I think they’re mostly doing their best to defend their own reservations against anybody who threatens them. Sound like anybody we know?”

  I look at him, thinking about my dad’s stories of the Indian Wars, his tattoo, his founding fathers artwork.

  “You never told me what your tribe was,” I say.

  “Cheyenne,” he says with clear pride. “And just like the Montagnards, not warriors to be messed with.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. In both cases.”

  He is staring at the game now, the board, the score, and my cards. “Do you even know how to play cribbage, or are you just being sociable?”

  The difference now is: engagement.

  The Benewah is anchored in the Mobile Riverine Base on the My Tho River, not far from Dong Tam. Traffic of all kinds is a constant now, and we learn to sleep through a city-that-never-sleeps atmosphere, patrols leaving the vessel at all hours and helicopters plunking down and taking off from our roof like we are a commercial airport.

  The enemy, bolder than I ever imagined possible, is taking the fight to us in ways big and small and always unsettling.

  It is just after midnight, and I hear a great fuss on the deck just straight above my sleeping quarters; then, a few seconds later, I hear a whole lot more below.

  Bu-hooom-suplash … bu-hoom-suplash …

  I run up top to see what’s happening and find a whole lot of guys wondering the same thing, though probably nine hundred more are sleeping right through it or just not bothering to come up.

  “There.” An officer is pointing to what may be movement in the water fifty yards away. Four different Navy shooters open fire at the spot for about thirty seconds before the officer calls them off. Echoes and smoke settle down as we all listen for what comes next. But nothing does.

  �
�Buddy, what was that?” I say to one of the shooters.

  “Sappers, man. Sappers, right here.” He points over the side to the hull of our vessel, just about midship — just about directly south of my sleeping quarters. “We heard the clanging just in time. The sneaky devils attaching explosives to the side of the ship. We got ’em, though, I’m sure of that.”

  I am only partly reassured.

  “You sure you got ’em?”

  “Didn’t I just say I’m sure? I think I just said I’m sure.” He raises his night-vision binoculars, kind of dismissing my rude questioning of his Navy competence. “Bodies’ll turn up, don’t worry. Why don’t you just go belowdecks and lay your sleepy Army head back down and we’ll protect you, all right? Have a nice sleep.”

  I’m sure all the enemy look dead through Navy-colored lenses. I go away, but I don’t plan on a nice sleep. Which is good, because I don’t sleep too well the rest of the night.

  Or the one after. I hear things under the deck, under the boat, under the water. And where did all these mosquitoes come from? Jeez, there are billions of them. Relentless little monsters.

  “Slap more quietly,” Kuns says from a few bunks away.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  I hear something. No, I don’t. My hearing has become more acute since I have been in-country, I am certain of that. Maybe too acute.

  Clink, clank.

  I am not hearing things. I am hearing things.

  I can’t sleep, and anyway, I have to be up for patrol in another hour. I get up, dress, and head topside. There is a sentry with his rifle trained over the side when I get there midship, around the same spot as the other night. He is focused hard, like a hunting dog, on a spot near the bank.

  “Something?” I whisper.

  “Think so,” he whispers. He takes binoculars from around his neck, hands them to me, and I scan the same area as him.

  “Is that … are those … oxygen tanks? I see a swimmer with tanks on his back swimming this way,” I say. The swimmer appears to have something missile-like, about a foot and a half long, in each hand as he kicks toward us.

  “That’s what I thought,” he says, and opens fire.

  His first shot pops into the water with a big splash. Then a second, then a third. The swimmer goes under. Possibly. I don’t see him. Then I think I do. His hands are empty now, I think. Then I don’t see him again.

  Three more sentries come running up. Two break out grenade launchers and pepper the spot, big splashes geysering up with the explosions, but who knows what’s being achieved.

  The firing stops, the smoke and sounds again settle. The officer in charge wearily orders for divers to suit up and examine the hull. Again.

  We are walking straight into it on a regular basis, engagement, and we know it. That is precisely what we are here to do, and the adrenaline level is so high I can hear the whistling and wailing from inside my ears almost as loud as the frequent artillery exchanges I hear all around me.

  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.