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

smiles at us with his charred teeth, his inflexible ivory grin. Sorry
Charlie always smiles at us as though he knows a funny secret. For sure, he
knows more than we do.
Back on the hill, resupply choppers wop-wop down to earth like monster
grasshoppers while mortar shells rip up the steel carpet of the airstrip.
We lock and load.
Our minds sink into our feet.
On a stump inside the treeline someone has nailed a scrap of ammo crate
with crude letters that are black through the ground fog: ALL HOPE ABANDON,
YE WHO ENTER HERE. We do not laugh. Our eyes stay on the trail. We have seen
the sign a hundred times and believe it.
We meet some guys from India Three-Five humping down from their night
ambushes. Scuttlebutt is, nobody got in the shit. No VC. No NVA.
Outstanding, we all agree. Decent, we say, and we ask them if any of their
sisters put out. They offer to buy us free beer if we promise to pee down
our legs and we're to be sure and write if we need any help.
Dawn.


We come to the last two-man listening post. Cowboy waves his hand and
Alice takes the point.
Alice is a black colossus, an African wild man with a sweat rag of
green parachute silk tied around his head; no helmet. He wears a vest he has
made from the skin of a Bengal tiger he wasted one night on Hill 881. He
wears a necklace of Voodoo bones-chicken bones from New Orleans. He calls
himself "Alice" because his favorite record album is Arlo Guthrie's Alice's
Restaurant. Cowboy calls Alice "The Midnight Buccaneer" because Alice wears
a gold ring in his left ear. Animal Mother calls Alice "The Ace of Spades"
because Alice sticks poker cards between the teeth of his confirmed kills.
And I call Alice "Jungle Bunny" because it mocks Alice's truly savage
nature.
Alice has a blue canvas shopping bag slung over his shoulder. The blue
canvas shopping bag is filled with foul-smelling gook feet. Alice collects
enemy soldiers; he shoots them dead, then chops their feet off.
All clear, says Alice with a hand signal. Alice's hands are protected
by pigskin gloves. He hacks the jungle with his machete.
Cowboy waves his hand and we move along the trail, Indian-file.
Cowboy steps off the trail, jabs his gray Marine-issue glasses with his
forefinger. In the gray glasses Cowboy does not look like a killer, but like
a reporter for a high school newspaper, which he was, less than a year ago.


Humping in the rain forest is like climbing a stairway of shit in an
enormous green room constructed by ogres for the confinement of monster
plants. Birth and death are endless processes here, with new life feeding on
the decaying remains of the old. The black earth is cool and damp and the
oversized greenery is beaded with moisture, yet the air is thick and hot
because the triple canopy holds in the humidity. The canopy of interwoven
branches is so thick that sunlight filters through only in pale, infrequent
shafts like those in Sunday-school pictures of Jesus talking to God.