"Gustav Hasvord. The Short-Timers " - читать интересную книгу автора Shrapnel bites my shelter. I wake up. I listen to the fading drone of
the B-52's. I listen to the breathing of my squad of brothers, nightmare men in the dark. Outside our wire an enemy grunt is screaming at invisible airplanes that have killed him. I try to dream something beautiful.... My grandmother sits in a rocking chair on her front porch shooting Viet Cong who have stepped on her roses. She drinks the blood of a dragon from a black Coca-Cola bottle while Goring my mother with fat white breasts nurses me and drives Germany on and on, his words cut from the armor plate of a tank.... I sleep on steel, my face on a pillow of blood. I bayonet teddy bear and I snore. Bad dreams are something you ate. So sleep, you mother. The wind roars up under my shelter and rips the poncho off its bamboo frame, snapping the lines that secured it. Rain falls on me like a wave of icy black water. An angry voice drifts in from beyond the wire. An enemy sergeant is saying dirty words I don't understand. An enemy sergeant has stumbled over a dead man in the dark.... Night patrol. In the predawn sky a little metal star goes nova-an illumination round. Eating an early breakfast in the red slime of a slit trench at Khe Sanh. Yesterday I made myself a new stove by punching air holes into an empty C's can. Inside the stove, C-4 plastic explosive glows like a fragment of brimstone. Ham and mothers pop and bubble in another olive-drab can while I mix and stir with a white plastic spoon. "Spooky", a C-47 flying electric Gatling gun, is pouring three hundred rounds per minute into some gook's wet dreams. Taste the ham and lima beans. Hot. Greasy. Smells like pig shit. With my bayonet I lift the full can off the stove. I anchor the can in red mud. I balance my mess cup over the flame and pour in a packet of powdered cocoa and then half a canteen of spring water. With some slack, hot chocolate dilutes the sour aftertaste of halazone purification tablets. A Viet Cong rat attacks. Obviously, he intends to bring my breakfast under the influence of Communism. This is a rat I know personally, so I cut him some slack and do not set him on fire with lighter fluid the way my bros and I have done with his relatives. I stomp my foot and the rat retreats into a shadow. In the light of the flare my bros in the Lusthog Squad of Delta One-Five look like pale lizards. My bros look up at me with lizard eyes. No slack. I gave them the finger. Their lizard eyes click back to their poker cards. From his new strategic position, the Viet Cong rat stares back to assert his principles. The illumination flare trembles, freezes Khe Sanh into a faded daguerreotype. Look at all the junk of modern war spilled across our dusty citadel, look at how bearded grunts hang on while the world spins and gravity cheats, look at the concrete bones of an old French outpost (patrolled at night by the ghosts of dead Legionnaires and by the Mongol horsemen of Genghis Khan)-see how the broken walls of the outpost are like |
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