"Joe Haldeman - 1968" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

drags.

Just hang in there. You can make it through forty-five minutes, more like forty now, don't look at the
watch.He swallowed hard and spent an uncomfortable minute wondering whether it would be worse to
vomit or to lose control of one's bowels. Either end seemed possible. But you couldn't, youcouldn't. It
would be better to step on a mine and be vaporized. Or step on a punji stake. Nobody would blame you
if you lost control.Poor old Spider. God I'd shit too, they'd say.
The cramp subsided and Spider was able to relax at least one part of his body. Then he clenched up
again when the man behind him whispered, "Snake!"

A huge snake, as big around as a man's thigh, was coiled up in the crotch of a fat tree between him and
the right flank. It seemed to be sleeping; he couldn't see its head. "Reticulate python," he said
automatically, recalling the one in the Snake House at the Washington Zoo. (It was actually an Indian
python, but he was close enough.)

"Big motherfucker," the other guy said in agreement. Spider thought of the sergeant who had given the
orientation lecture, the first day in Vietnam. There are a hundred different kinds of snakes in Vietnam, he
said, and ninety-nine of them are poisonous. The other one eats you whole.

But Spider knew that pythons didn't eat people. Maybe babies. He stared at it, fascinated and unafraid.
He loved exotic animals; dragged Beverly to the zoo more often than she wanted to go. He'd never seen
anything in the woods bigger than a garter snake.

He had to move on, catch up with the flanks. Another twinge, don't look at the watch, maybe thirty
minutes, thirty-five tops.

Suddenly there was a distant rattle of machine-gun fire. Spider dropped to one knee. He looked around
and saw the flanks had disappeared, flopping out of sight into the brush. The man behind him had
flattened out, too, lying on his side, listening. Spider imitated him.

There was another short burst of machine-gun fire and a pop that was probably a grenade. Spider
thought it had to be at least a mile away, behind them, but he didn't really know. He could hear the
captain talking on the radio to someone.

After a couple of minutes a message was passed whispering up the line. "Cap says they had movement
back at the fire base, one of the OPs. We're supposed to wait." OPs were outposts, teams of two or
three men hiding in four or five places near the base, listening and watching for enemy movement.

Spider knew the OPs weren't supposed to shoot. Just report by radio and then tiptoe back to the base.

"Shit," the man behind him said. "If that's for real they prob'ly make us go back and play soldier."

There was no more machine-gun fire, but less than a minute later there were five faint pops from the
opposite direction, and a salvo of artillery rounds went overhead with a sound like ripping cloth. Then
five overlapping, echoing explosions from the fire base. Spider was about to ask why they didn't use their
own artillery, but he figured it out: the OP was too close to the fire base. To reach it with their own guns,
they'd have to shoot almost straight up, and that would be wildly inaccurate. (He'd paid close attention
during the artillery demonstration in Basic. A lot of it reminded him of science fiction.)

An older man Spider didn't recognize moved quickly up the right flank, speaking urgently to a few