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

rotting teeth, look out beyond our wire at a thousand acres of blasted
moonscape, feel the cold hard terror and the calm of it.

During the past three months the rocky terrain around Khe Sanh has been
pounded with the greatest volume of explosives in the history of war. Two
hundred million pounds of bombs and whole catalogues of other weapons have
torn and plowed the sterile red earth, have shattered boulders, have
splintered and chewed the stumps of trees, have pockmarked the deck with
craters big enough to be graves for tanks.

The flare floats down beneath a miniature parachute, swaying and
squeaking, dripping sparks and hissing, until it hits the wire. Illumination
dissolves.


In the darkness I am one with Khe Sanh-a living cell of this place-this
erupted pimple of sandbags and barbed wire on a bleak plateau surrounded by
the end of the world. In my guts I know that my body is one of the
components of gristle and muscle and bone of Khe Sanh, a small American
community pounded daily by one-hundred-and-fifty-two-millimeter artillery
pieces firing from caves eleven kilometers away on Co Roc Ridge in Laos,
pounded by fifteen hundred shells a day, pounded, pounded, pounded with
brain-numbing regularity, an anthill beneath a sledgehammer.
Today I am feeling extra fine-I'm short. Twenty-two days and a wake-up
left in country.
The Viet Cong rat crouches on a sandbag an inch from my elbow. I bend
over and put his share of ham and mothers on the toe of my boot. The rat
watches me with black bead eyes. Rats are little but they're smart. After
the rat is satisfied I can be trusted, he jumps off the sandbag and into the
slit trench. He hops up onto the toe of my boot. Eating, his cheeks are fat.
He looks so very bad; he's beautiful.
Roll call.


The squad files out through the wire. We do not joke with the drowsy
sentries who stand lines in bunkers constructed with sandbags and logs from
the jungle and sheets of galvanized tin. We ignore the hundreds of grunts
from the 26th Marine Regiment who are sprawled along the perimeter, ready to
move out on Operation Gold. Our squad is walking point for a battalion. We
ignore Claymore mines, rust-eaten Coca-Cola cans hung on the concertina wire
with pebbles in them, red aluminum triangles with MINES and MIN stenciled on
them, trenches full of garbage, catholes full of fly-sprinkled turds, and
heaps of brass from our howitzers.
This time we do not salute Sorry Charlie. Sorry Charlie is a skull,
charred black. Our gunner, Animal Mother, mounted the skull on a stake in
the kill zone. We think that it's the skull of an enemy grunt who got
napalmed outside our wire. Sorry Charlie is still wearing my old black felt
Mousketeer ears, which are getting a little moldy. I wired the ears onto
Sorry Charlie for a joke. As we hump by, I stare into the hollow eye
sockets. I wait for a white spider to emerge. The dark, clean face of death