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

Freedom Hill PX on Hill 327 in Da Nang. His eyes are begging me for an
explanation.
Rafter Man has been cut in half just below his new NVA rifle belt. His
intestines are pink rope all over the deck. He is trying to pull himself
back in, but it doesn't work. His guts are wet and slippery and he can't
hold them in. He tries to reinsert his spilling guts back into his severed
torso. He tries very hard to keep the dirt off of his intestines as he
works.
Rafter Man stops trying to save himself and, instead, just stares at me
with an expression that might be found on the face of a person who wakes up
with a dead bird in his mouth.
"Sarge..."
"Don't call me 'Sarge,'" I say.
I kneel down and pick up Rafter's black-body Nikon. I say, "I'll tell
Mr. Payback about your belt and about your SKS..." I want so much to cry,
but I can't cry-I'm too tough.
I stop talking to Rafter Man because Rafter Man is dead. Talking to
dead people is not a healthy habit for a living person to cultivate and
lately I have been talking to dead people quite a lot. I guess I've been
talking to dead people ever since I made my first confirmed kill. After my
first confirmed kill, talking to corpses began to make more sense than
talking to people who had not yet been wasted.
In Viet Nam you see corpses almost every day. At first you try to
ignore them. You don't want people to think you're curious. Nobody wants to
admit that corpses are not old hat to them; nobody wants to be a New Guy. So
you see lumps of dirty rags. And after a while you begin to notice that the
lumps of dirty rags have arms and legs and heads. And faces.
The first time I saw a corpse, back when I was a New Guy, I wanted to
vomit, just like in the movies. The corpse was an NVA grunt who died in a
great orange ball of jellied gasoline near Con Thien. The napalm left a
crumbled heap of ashes in the fetal position. His mouth was open. His
charred fingers were covering his eyes.
The second time I really looked at a corpse I was embarrassed. The
corpse was an old Vietnamese woman with teeth which had turned black after a
lifetime of chewing betel nuts. The woman had been hit by something bigger
than small-arms fire. She was killed in a crossfire between ROK Marines and
NVA grunts in Hoi An. She seemed so exposed in death, so vulnerable.
My third corpse was a decapitated Marine. I stumbled over him on an
operation in the A Shau valley. My reaction was curiosity. I wondered what
the rounds had felt like as they entered his body, what his last thought
was, what his last sound was at the moment of impact. I marveled at the
ultimate power of death. A big strong American boy, so vibrant and
red-blooded, had become within minutes a yellow lump of inflexible meat. And
I understood that my own weapon could do this dark magic thing to any human
being. With my automatic rifle I could knock the life out of any enemy with
just the slightest pressure of one finger. And, knowing that, I was less
afraid.
The fourth corpse is the last one I remember. After that they've
blurred together, a mountain of faceless dead. But I think that the fourth
corpse was the old papasan in the conical white hat I saw on Route One. The