by Chris Lynch
Snap.
There is a popular theory floating around, and that is that there are some peoples here, some shaman types indigenous to this land, who curse the head of every American soldier for every single day he is here. The curse says these soldiers will never, ever find peace because of the things they have done here. They will walk the earth as lost, empty souls at war with themselves and everyone else. Ineligible for contentment in this world or any other.
I don’t think much of that theory, but there it is.
I am on my belly, on the firing range. The range here is not big enough, but it is a range. With only the M-16, nobody expects to be very accurate much beyond two hundred yards anyway, so this is probably practice enough. I never miss dead center anymore, unless I sneeze or cough. Sometimes I work up a sneeze or a cough to see if I can do it anyway.
“Private Bucyk,” comes the voice from above me.
“Yes, sir,” I say, squeezing off another shot. I should probably be on my feet by now. But I am shooting.
“On your feet, private.”
An order, of course, is another matter. I will always be a soldier.
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant Systrom,” I say, at attention now.
The sun is blazing hot, as it always is unless it is chucking down rain. There is a glistening of sweat on the lieutenant, but I am soaked through.
“You know, don’t you, that being a sniper is about a lot more than fine shooting.”
“Fine shooting is only approximately twenty percent of the job, sir,” I say.
He smiles. “Ah, yes, I suppose I have mentioned it a few times. Anyway, yes, it is about stealth, it is about location and stalking and camouflage, independence …”
“Nerve, stamina, and transcendence, sir.”
“My,” he says, shaking his head, “I do talk a lot, don’t I?”
“Yes, sir, for a sniper you do, sir.”
“All right, all right,” he says, waving me to shut it. “What I want to know now is, how interested are you in learning the trade properly, formally?”
I feel my eyes go wide, even as the sun hurts them more.
“Ninth Division is running its own Sniper School these days, in-country. It’s an eighteen-day program, a tough program, fifty percent failure rate….”
“When can I start, sir?”
“Should I take that as you volunteering, Private Bucyk? Because this is strictly for volunteers. I can’t force you —”
I do my best to maintain my crisp and official voice, but it is hard.
“Are you toying with me … sir?”
He nods, shades his eyes from the sun so he can look more properly into mine.
“I will get to work on it and let you know. Meanwhile, how are you holding up?”
“Fine, sir.”
“You sure? No lingering…?”
“Corporal Lightfoot was a fine soldier and a fine man,” I tell him.
“You don’t need to tell me.”
“Arguello, and Kuns … Kuns hadn’t even earned his tattoo yet, sir. Body count was zero. Never even had a chance to —”
“He had every chance, private. Kuns was a shaker, you are a shooter. Sad as it is, but we are stronger without him.”
With that he turns sharply on his heel and marches toward the next thing.
If Sniper School had a motto, it would have to be, The Maximum of Death to the Minimum of People.
My father will be more than proud.
It is the most appropriately spent eighteen days of my life.
When I arrived in Vietnam, I knew a lot about shooting and a little bit about camo and concealment, observation techniques, and the precision skill of estimating the range of a target.
Now? I know almost everything about almost everything. I wear tiger-stripe camouflage gear. And I am personally responsible for one M-21 Sniper Weapon System.
Sometimes the universe and the Army get it exactly right.
“You are now thirty-five thousand times more deadly than you were before,” says Major Howell, addressing the graduating class of twenty-one of us.
I like the sound of that.
“Because while the average soldier in the field in this conflict fires fifty thousand rounds per kill, the average for the trained sniper such as yourself is 1.39 rounds. Do you know what that means?”
I am going to guess that he isn’t going to refer to how cost-effective we are.
“It means, men, that you are going to be very familiar with the concept of intimate killing. When you fire your weapon, a man is most likely going to die. When you get someone in the crosshairs of your sight, at that very instant in time you are going to know that individual, personally, more than anyone else ever will again. It takes a special brand of fighting man to handle that. This ceremony today certifies that each and every one of you is indeed that special kind of fighting man.”
Before I was good.
Now I’m special.
“Are you okay, Moxie?” Parrish asks as I sit on my bunk, polishing my weapon. Every day at Sniper School, one of the instructors would disassemble the weapon, and we would have to clean and oil it. Then he would put it back together again. We could never do the breakdown or reconstruct. Not until the last three days. I did the whole thing twenty-four times in the last three days. This weapon and I are so intimate, I would bet you that it would come if I whistled. That is, if I ever let it get far enough away that I would need to. Which I don’t.
“Of course I’m okay,” I say. “I’m more okay than anybody. Want to play some cribbage?”
I pull Lightfoot’s cribbage board and the cards out of my footlocker and lay them on the bed. Parrish stares a screwed-up face at it as if I’d just barfed there.
“No, man,” he says, but sits down as if the answer was yes, man. “That’s a Navy game anyway. That’s a submariners’ game.” He says the word submariners as if he’s got one caught down low in his digestive tract.
“How are you, then?” I ask.
“Not all that terrific, thanks for asking.”
Things are different now, since half our team got shredded to cabbage. We don’t have the same certainty and regularity we had as a unit. We are still here on the Benewah, but it seems like the Riverine identity is taking over a bit, like we have one foot in a green boat and the other in a gray boat and they are drifting different ways until something has to give.
“You know what they got me doing now? I go out every evening on one of those crazy PBRs,” Parrish says. PBR stands for Patrol Boat, River, the small craft you see all over the place here. “We do like the name says, and we patrol the river, but more and more it seems to me that we have the primary goal of exposing and soliciting enemy fire for somebody else to go clean out later. We are like one of those carnival shoot ’em games, you know what I mean?”
I know well what he means, and I smile at the thought of Paragon Park. I wonder what I’ll score when I get back?
“Man, Bucyk, I’m telling you, we get shot at every day. And the boat gets hit every day. The sound alone, of the pinging, and the whistling of rocket fire, is enough to put a guy right out of his mind.”
“Cribbage?” I say.
“No,” he says, “stop that. And it’s bad luck to steal board games from dead people. A fortune-teller in Saigon told me that.”
“That’s funny,” I say, pointing at him with one hand and polishing with the other.
“Is it?” he asks, though he is laughing. “I can’t tell anymore.”
“Listen, you want me to shoot these guys for you?” I say.
“Oh, Bucyk, would you? That’s awfully nice of you. Thanks, problem solved.”
“There.”
“There, what? I do have my own gun, you know. And it’s a real something, too. A 105-mm howitzer, baby, an absolute cannon. I think when I shoot the thing off, it scares the Navy guys on my own boat more than it does the VC on the banks.”
“Great. Then what’s your problem?”
“The pr
oblem, my man, is that no matter how many times I kill these guys —”
“I am thirty-five thousand times more lethal than you are, by the way, have I told you that?” I say, interrupting with an important and pertinent truth.
He stares at me deadpan.
“I once killed a guy with a cribbage board, have I told you that?”
“I like your moxie,” I say.
“Aw, now you’re just getting weird, man. Cut it out.”
“Please continue with your story.”
“No matter how many times I kill these guys, they are all right back there the next day. I mean, all of ’em. In the exact same nests, practically, as if to say they are just not bothered by what we are doing at all. I mean, what are we supposed to do about that? I realize I’m a corporal and you’re just a private, but come on, you stink of Real Army … take no offense….”
“Why would I?”
“So, I mean, where do we go from here? What do we do?”
I am preparing to solve this small problem for my friend when the boss comes in. Parrish and I stand at attention. He waves us back down.
“Lieutenant,” I say, “any chance I can ride with Parrish and his PBR this evening?”
“None whatsoever, corporal,” he says.
“But what if — corporal?”
He hands over some stripes. “The first of many field promotions, I imagine. Congratulations, Moxie,” he says, and shakes my hand.
Parrish then shakes my hand, too, adding, “Don’t get all excited, they’re giving these to everybody out here.”
“Sir,” I say as the lieutenant turns to leave. “Parrish’s PBR…?”
“Will have to get along without you. Your orders are to take three days off, after which time you will be reassigned. To some lucky operation that is in dire need of your specific set of skills and training. Congratulations again, Moxie. You are leaving the madness of the Riverine Assault Force.”
My head is swimming as I sit there. I consider all the possibilities.
And I think I like them all.
“What should I do for three days, lieutenant?”
“The beauty of that is, you can decide for yourself. I suggest you bug out, go to Saigon, live a little. Relax, refuel, refresh. Follow your heart, knock yourself out. But if I see you set foot on one single river assault vehicle before you go … well, just remember what distance I can pick you off from, soldier.”
I smile and nod and force myself not to say that I can now do the same thing from the same distance so I’ll wave to you through my starlight scope.
“Excuse me?”
I have wandered where I dared not tread before.
“Corporal Bucyk,” I say, saluting though I have no idea what rank the man is or if I don’t maybe even outrank him. I don’t care. I know what turf I am on and what kind of soldier I am addressing, and in my book he is worthy of a salute.
“Moxie,” he says, expressionless. The fact that he knows anything at all about me gives me a greater jolt than finding an enemy, a viper, or a corpse in the jungle. “What do you want?”
“I would like to go out. On operations. With you and your people.”
A wide grin opens up across a very partial set of tan-colored teeth with no enamel to them at all.
“You,” he says with mock shock, because I am certain he does not know the real kind, “want to be a LRRP?”
“No, sir,” I say. “But I have three days before transfer. Lieutenant says to do what I want. This is what I want.”
I feel already transformed as I prepare myself for the night. I am wearing my tiger stripes, which almost none of the other Army guys have. I have my face all painted up, the night-fighter cosmetic cream under my eyes to cut the glare from any incendiary action. I have my M-21 sniper rifle, my bandolier of ammo, my pistol, my knife at my side.
As I leave the Benewah for probably the last time before I leave it for good, I feel like I could win this thing by myself. I feel like I could take a small detour up the Mekong banks, and before Parrish and his new pals had to deal with any hostiles again I could go up there and see them dead and see that they stayed dead.
There is nothing worse than the feeling you have to kill the same enemy day after day after day.
Unless it is the feeling that you are not really killing him at all. I personally could not sleep with that.
But I don’t take any detours, because frankly I can’t wait to join up with these guys and get out there.
My man greets me once I cross the base and enter the almost segregated sub-compound of the LRRPs.
“All packed up?” he asks, a formality since he goes right to work pulling apart my knapsack, pockets, everything. “What’s this?” he asks, pulling the dried, chipped, and scored disc from my breast pocket.
“That’s my good luck VC head bone, sir.”
He nods and tucks it back in my pocket. “Everybody should have at least one of those. Listen, call me Makita, right?”
“Right,” I say.
He takes all my food and dumps it out right there on the ground. I brought the usual C rations: beans, something meatlike, fruit, peas, tuna.
“Nope,” he says, “nope, nope nope,” and with each nope tosses another can over his shoulder. “Here,” he says, handing me back a single can of peaches, “you can keep this.”
Though I’d been told that we would plan to be back by morning, you always make provision for an extra day at least. Now I have thoughts of being stranded out there with just my water and one can of peaches.
Makita reaches into his own backpack and starts shoveling compact packets of food into my bag. It’s all going too quickly, but I know it is the freeze-dried stuff that takes up less room and weighs less, and is a sort of LRRP perk.
“Most important of all,” he says, “this stuff don’t make any noise. You don’t want to get scalped just because you had to pull the lid off your stew. Our food is quiet food. Except the chili. The beans are like ball bearings, so don’t bother chewing or they will hear you in Laos.”
Twenty minutes later, we are up in the air. I am tagging after with a team of six grim-faced men covered in war paint and malice. We are chopping through the sky in a helicopter headed north. I see the Mekong running along below us, and it is still light enough that I can make out the traffic of our assault vessels chugging up and down and out to the edges.
Parrish is probably down there, cursing the whole thing.
Morris is probably down there. Morris could well be right there and trying to radio me, the big baby.
“What are you pointing at?” Makita asks me.
“Oh,” I say. “Didn’t realize I was. Just identifying craft. I don’t usually get this vantage point. Zippo right there.”
He nods, and we watch out the side as we pass over the countryside, and I think what a great carnival ride this could be, swooping low over the treetops where you can smell the green almost as much as the gunpowder and napalm. It’s a thrill ride, but maybe not what the average carnivalgoer is looking for.
I am not told where we are going or what we are doing, but I have been told that I will not be told, so I’m okay with it. A need-to-know basis is how Makita sees it.
“And I will let you know if I think there is a point at which you need to know.”
Apparently, LRRPs like to remain under deep cover even when they are talking.
“It’s a long country, Moxie,” he says, still scanning terrain off in the distance. It is long, top to bottom, and not all that wide. So while we are down here fighting away in the all-important Mekong Delta, and in all the areas surrounding Saigon and what’s supposed to be the Government of all South Vietnam, well, we are a whole lot closer to other countries than we are to the country we are supposed to be here fighting in the first place.
I am wondering where he is headed with this, but something intuitive tells me not to question a LRRP unnecessarily.
“Folks back home, I think they think this is like the Korean
War, you know, as if all these stupid wars in this part of the world are the same as long as one side’s a North Something and the other side’s a South Something and there are commies involved. Well, it ain’t just North versus South here, is it?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“No, it isn’t. It is North versus South, sure. But it’s also North versus South and South versus South and South versus everybody, and everybody versus us as in US. So the people criticizing what we are doing here haven’t got the first clue what’s going on. They think we’re supposed to be like the Redcoats or something, just standing up in a straight line, walking right up to the other side’s straight line, and settling things all neat and up front. Ain’t possible. Ain’t possible. So we have to do things otherwise. You understand.”
“I do, absolutely,” I say.
And I do, more or less.
“How’s your body count coming along?” he asks matter-of-factly, like I’m building a go-cart in the garage or something.
“It’s okay,” I say.
“’Cause it’s all they care about at this point. That’s not good, really. It’s not good warfare. Means either the people at the top don’t really know how to conduct a successful campaign or that they are giving up on actual progress.”
I don’t know how far I want to go with this individual into this particular verbal incursion. I am no expert, that is for sure. I shoot people. That’s it.
“Well,” I say, “I guess they figure as long as we have all these guns … and gear for blowing stuff up …”
“Ha,” he says, as much of a grunt as a laugh.
“I suppose free-fire zones are going to help with that body count thing, eh?” I say.
He turns an entirely quizzical look on me, like I couldn’t be serious at this stage of the game.
“They are all free-fire zones, Moxie,” he says.
