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

"There sure is a lot of stuff to learn."
I'm whittling a piece of ammo crate with my K-bar jungle knife. I'm
carving myself a wooden bayonet.
Daytona Dave says, "Remember that gook kid that tried to eat the candy
bar? It bit me. I was down in the ville, scarfing up some orphans and that
little Victor Charlie ambushed me. Ran up and bit the shit out of my hand."
Daytona holds up his left hand, revealing a little red crescent of tooth
marks. "The kids says that our chop-chop is number ten. I bet I get rabies."
Chili Vendor grins. He turns to Rafter Man. "There it is, New Guy.
You'll know you're salty when you stop throwing C-ration cans to the kids
and start throwing the cans at them."
I say, "I got to get back into the shit. I ain't heard a shot fired in
anger in weeks. I'm bored to death. How are we ever going to get used to
being back in the World? I mean, a day without blood is like a day without
sunshine."
Chili Vendor says, "No sweat. The old mamasan that does our laundry
tells us things even the lifers in Intelligence don't know. She says that in
Hue the whole fucking North Vietnamese army is dug in deep inside an old
fortress they call the Citadel. You won't come back, Joker. Victor Charlie
is gonna shoot you in the heart. The Crotch will ship your scrawny little
ass home in a three-hundred-dollar aluminum box all dressed up like a lifer
in a blouse from a set of dress blues. But no white hat. And no pants. They
don't give you any pants. Your friends from school and all of the relatives
you never liked anyway will be at your funeral and they'll call you a good
little Christian and they'll say you were a hero to get wasted defeating
Communism and you'll just lie there with a cold ass, dead as a mackerel."
Daytona Dave sits up. "You can be a hero for a little while, sometimes,
if you can stop thinking about your own ass long enough, if you give a shit.
But civilians don't know what to do, so they put up statues in the park for
pigeons to drop turds on. Civilians don't know. Civilians don't want to
know."
I say, "You guys are bitter. Don't you love the American way of life?"
Chili Vendor shakes his head. "No Victor Charlie ever raped my sister.
Ho Chi Minh never bombed Pearl Harbor. We're prisoners here. We're prisoners
of the war. They've taken away our freedom and they've given it to the
gooks, but the gooks don't want it. They'd rather be alive than free."
I grunt. "There it is."


With my magic marker I "X" out a section of thigh on the nude woman
outlined on the back of my flak jacket. The number 58 disappears.
Fifty-seven days and a wake-up left in country.
Midnight. The boredom becomes unbearable. Chili Vendor suggests that we
kill time by wasting our furry little friends.
I say, "Rat race!"
Chili Vendor hops off his canvas cot and into a corner. He breaks up a
John Wayne cookie. In the corner, six inches off the desk, we've nailed a
piece of ammo crate to form a triangular pocket. There's a little hole in
the charred board. Chili Vendor puts the cookie fragments under the board.
Then he snaps off the lights.