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

I've got forty-nine days and a wake-up left in country when Captain
January hands me a piece of paper. Captain January mumbles something about
how he hopes I have good luck and then he goes to chow even though it's not
chow time.
The piece of paper orders me to report for duty as a rifleman with
Delta Company, One-Five, currently based at the Khe Sanh.
I say good-bye to Chili Vendor and Daytona Dave and Mr. Payback and I
tell hem that I'm glad to be a grunt because now I won't have to write
captions for atrocity photographs they just file away or tell any more lies
because there's nothing more the lifers can threaten me with. "What are they
going to do-send me to Viet Nam?"
Delta Six cuts Cowboy a huss and I'm assigned to Cowboy's squad as the
first fire team leader-the assistant squad leader-until I've got enough
field experience to run my own rifle squad.
There it is.
I'm a grunt.


Grunts


Behold a Marine, a mere shadow and reminiscience of humanity, a man
laid out alive and standing, buried under arms with funereal
accompaniments...
-Thoreau, Civil Disobedience


Rolling thunder.
Clouds float across the white moon, clouds like great metal ships.
Black wings beating, enormous objects falling. Arc Light in the monsoon
rain; an air strike in the dark. A flight of B-52 bombers circle Khe Sanh,
sprinkling eggs of black iron. Each egg weighs two thousand pounds. Each egg
knocks a hole into the cold earth, punches a crater into the constricting
web of slit trenches that forty thousand determined little men have dug to
within a hundred yards of our wire. Black and wet, the earth heaves up like
the deck of a great ship, heaves up toward the droning death birds.
Even in the fury of aerial bombardment we sleep, shadows in the earth.
We sleep in holes we have dug with entrenching tools. The holes are little
graves and hold the rich, damp odor of the grave.
The monsoon rain is cold and heavy and is thrown all over the place by
the wind. The wind has power. The wind roars, hisses, whispers seductively.
The wind claws at the shelters we have constructed with ponchos and nylon
cord and scraps of bamboo.
Raindrops thump my poncho like pebbles falling into a broken drum. Half
asleep, my face pressed into my gear, I listen to the sounds of the horror
that is everywhere, buried just beneath the surface of the earth. In my
dreams of blood I make love to a skeleton. Bones click, the earth moves, my
testicles explode.