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

Foreign influences

After an hour or so word came back to Spider to take ten, scarf some chow. He dropped the rucksack
with relief and flopped to the ground. His neck and shoulders and back and thighs ached. He was in
prime shape-he'd worked out every day from the time he got his draft notice until he left for Basic
Training, and Basic had been a constant aerobic hell of running and calisthenics-but this would take some
getting used to. It wasn't just the weight of the burden, but also the stop-and-go shuffling. And his
muscles couldn't relax, shift the burden around, any more than his brain could relax.
He rubbed his neck and looked around uneasily. He couldn't see either of the flanks. The only person
visible was Killer, about ten feet up the trail, looking through his rucksack.

He was hungry but didn't feel like challenging his nervous stomach with a can of cold greasy food. He
rummaged through two boxes of Cs and took out their jungle chocolate and cookies. The jungle
chocolate didn't melt in the heat, but it didn't taste like chocolate, either. It wasn't too bad with a cookie
and warm Coke. His mother used to give him warm Coke to settle his stomach; the association was
comforting.

Murphy came quietly down the trail to take up the rear position.

He sat down next to Spider and slipped out of his rucksack. "Havin' fun?"

"Tired."

"You get used to it." He frowned into the pack and pulled out a C-ration box. "Can't eat the eggs unless
I'm fuckin' starvin'."

"You short?"

"Hundred and two days. Guess in three days I'll call myself short. You got a while?"

"I'm not even countin' yet. November twenty-ninth."

"Jesus." He opened a can of beans and franks and popped a beer. "This your first hump?"

"Yeah. I was a clerk for a couple weeks."

"Quartermaster?"

"Naw, Graves. Over in Kontum."

"Shit, I'd get out of that, too. Gotta be a fuckin' bummer." He spooned a piece of fat out of the beans and
threw it away. "But you got a X-Ray MOS?"

A man's Military Occupational Specialty was determined by stateside training. "Oh yeah," Spider said.
"Did Basic and AIT at Fort Leonard Wood, that's all engineers. But I got incountry and they asked if
anyone could type. I was the only one who raised my hand, wound up in Graves."

"Go to college?"

"One year. Learned to type in junior high."