"Gustav Hasvord. The Short-Timers " - читать интересную книгу автора

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked...
-Allen Ginsberg, Howl


A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on.
-William S. Burroughs


Tet: The Year of the Monkey.
Rafter Man and I spend the Vietnamese lunar New Year's Eve, 1968, at
the Freedom Hill PX near Da Nang. I've been ordered to write a feature
article on the Freedom Hill Recreation Center on Hill 327 for Leatherneck
magazine. I'm a combat correspondent assigned to the First Marine Division.
My job is to write upbeat news features which are distributed to the highly
paid civilian news correspondents who shack up with their Eurasian maids in
big hotels in Da Nang. The ten correspondents in the First Division's
Informational Services Office are reluctant public relations men for the war
in general and for the Marine Corps in particular. This morning my
commanding officer decided that a really inspiring piece could be written
about Hill 327, an angle being the fact that Hill 327 was the first
permanent position occupied by American forces. Major Lynch thinks I rate
some slack before I return to the ISO office in Phu Bai. My last three field
operations were real shit-kickers; in the field, a Marine correspondent is
just another rifleman. Rafter Man tags along behind me like a kid. Rafter
Man is a combat photographer. He has never been in the shit. He thinks I'm
one hard field Marine.
We go into a movie theater that looks like a warehouse and we watch
John Wayne in The Green Berets, a Hollywood soap opera about the love of
guns. We sit way down front, near some grunts. The grunts are sprawled
across their seats and they've propped muddy jungle boots onto the seats in
front of them. They are bearded, dirty, out of uniform, and look lean and
mean, the way human beings look after they've survived a long hump in the
jungle, the boonies, the bad bush.
I prop my boots on the seats and we watch John Wayne leading the Green
Beanies. John Wayne is a beautiful soldier, clean-shaven, sharply attired in
tailored tiger-stripe jungle utilities, wearing boots that shine like black
glass. Inspired by John Wayne, the fighting soldiers from the sky go
hand-to-hand with all of the Victor Charlies in Southeast Asia. He snaps out
an order to an Oriental actor who played Mr. Sulu on "Star Trek." Mr. Sulu,
now playing an Arvin officer, delivers a line with great conviction: "First
kill...all stinking Cong...then go home." The audience of Marines roars with
laughter. This is the funniest movie we have seen in a long time.
Later, at the end of the movie, John Wayne walks off into the sunset
with a spunky little orphan. The grunts laugh and whistle and threaten to
pee all over themselves. The sun is setting in the South China Sea-in the
East-which makes the end of the movie as accurate as the rest of it.
Most of the zoomies in the audience are clean-shaven office poges who
never go into the field. The poges wear spit-shined boots and starched