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

Beneath mountains like the black teeth of dragons we hump. We hump on a
woodcutter's trail, up slopes of peanut butter, over moss-blemished
boulders, into God's green furnace, into the hostile terrain of Indian
country.
Thorny underbrush claws our sweaty jungle utilities and our bandoliers
and our sixty-pound field packs and our twelve-pound Durolon flak jackets
and our three-pound camouflaged helmets and our six-and-a-half pound
fiberglass and steel automatic rifles. Limp sabers of elephant grass slice
into hands and cheeks. Creepers trip us and tear at our ankles. Pack straps
rub blisters on our shoulders and salty water wiggles in dirty worm trails
down our necks and faces. Insects eat our skin, leeches drink our blood,
snakes try to bite us, and even the monkeys throw rocks.
We hump, werewolves in the jungle, sweating 3.2 beer, ready, willing,
and able to grab wily Uncle Ho by his inscrutable balls and never let go.
But our real enemy is the jungle. God made this jungle for Marines. God has
a hard-on for Marines because we kill everything we see. No slack. He plays
his games; we play ours. To show our appreciation for so much omnipotent
attention we keep Heaven packed with fresh souls.


Hours pass. Many, many of them. We don't know what time it is anymore.
In the jungle there is no time. Black is green; green is black-we don't even
know if it's night or day.
Cowboy strides up and down our line of march. He reminds us to maintain
ten yards between each man. Frequently he stops to check his compass and
acetate map.
We hurt. We ignore the pain. We wait for the pain to become monotonous;
it does.
Our New Guy sweats and stumbles and looks like he could get lost
looking for a place to shit. A heat casualty for sure. The New Guy eats pink
salt tablets like a kid eating jelly beans, then gulps hot Kool-Aid from his
canteen.
Monotony. Everything samey-same-trees, vines like dead snakes, leafy
plants. The sameness leaves us unmoored.
The fuck-you lizards greet us: "Fuck you...fuck you..."
A cockatoo laughs, invisible, laughs as though he knows a funny secret.
We hump up rocky ravines and I can hear Gunny Sergeant Gerheim
bellowing at Private Leonard Pratt on Parris Island: The only way to reach
any objective is by taking one step at a time. That's all. Just one step.
One more. One more. One more
One more.
We think about things we will do after we rotate back to the World,
about silly high-school capers we pulled before we were sucked up into the
Crotch, about hunger and thirst, about R & R in Hong Kong and Australia,
about how we are all becoming Coca-Cola junkies, about picking popcorn
kernels out of our teeth at the drive-in movie with ol' Mary Jane
Rottencrotch, about the excuses we'll have to invent for not writing home,
and especially and particularly about the numbers of days left on each of
our short-timer's calendars.
We think about things that aren't important so that we won't think