Chapter 17:  Shavings of the Little War

"Rick, your stories about Vietnam always kept me entertained," Dave said. "Perhaps your experiences in the war would make a good story for the sharing."

Rick thought about it for a minute. In the years since the war, he had only told his stories in the presence of people he truly trusted, and then often only when he had had too much to drink. Dave could see him struggling internally, admitting to himself that Carolyn, Julie, and Asotin were close enough friends that he could share his inner being with them. The flask of George Dickel magically appeared in his hand and he took a drink.

"You've hinted at your adventures before," Carolyn said, "but I want to hear what really happened. Please tell us." She smiled and at once looked like a child and an angel.

Something softened inside Rick's heart, and the lines in his face relaxed into an easy grin. "I guess it's worth a shot," he said as he settled into his best storytelling posture and scratched at his week-old beard.

"Do you know the difference between a fairy tale and a sea story?" he asked.

Neither Asotin nor the women knew.

"Well, a fairy tale begins with 'Once upon a time,' while a sea story starts out with 'This ain't no shit.'"

He shifted his body to relieve some of the hard pressure points and create a few new ones. Like an old dog sniffing out a place to lie down, he finally settled in and started to tell his story.

"This ain't no shit," he began.

When the war started heating up, I was struggling through the mechanical engineering curriculum at the North Avenue Trade School. Some folks called the place Georgia Tech, but most of us who went to school there knew better. I had forced my way through two years of junior college with a lot of midnight oil, but the serious stuff was taking its toll on me.

One afternoon, my dad called me on the telephone and told me that a suspicious-looking envelope from Selective Service had arrived in the day's mail. He had been an army recruiter for most of his long and distinguished military career, and he knew that the letter could only be a draft notification. We both knew that a draft notice meant immediate assignment to the ground war in Vietnam, because they didn't have any shortage of personnel clerks, quartermasters, or cooks. Go down and join the Navy today, he told me, or you'll have to open this letter and it'll be too late.

So I joined the Navy. My college experience got me accepted into the submarine service, and I went off to boot camp at Great Lakes, confident that I wouldn't have to die in the jungle. I was going to be a steely eyed killer of the deep.

Basic training was no breeze, but I made it through, and I was assigned to the customary sea tour between boot camp and tech school. Fresh duffel in hand, I traveled to San Diego and reported aboard a helicopter tender, a small vessel that provided logistic support to a Marine helicopter wing. It didn't matter that the ship was maintaining a wartime posture; I was only going to be aboard three months or so, and then I would head for Idaho Falls and learn to ride boats.

The first day, I was introduced to the leading first in charge of my billet. He was a fat, sloppy sort of guy, the kind of person it's difficult not to take an immediate disliking to. He wasn't my idea of military management, but he was a skimmer, and I would be spending my time with the killer elite, the ones who served aboard the most sophisticated vessels in the fleet.

"Hello. I'm m-Morgan," he said.

"I'm k-Kennedy," I answered.

"That isn't very f-funny, Kennedy," Morgan said. "You shouldn't m-make f-fun of m-my stuttering." His immediate hostility showed a real sensitivity to the impediment.

"I c-can't help it, Morgan. I stutter, too."

"Yeah, well, that's just so m-much bullshit," Morgan said, and I knew things weren't going to be very good while I was on the ship. I just had no idea how good they weren't going to be.

As if things weren't bad enough with Morgan, two days later we shoved off for Vietnam. It was the beginning of a really bad dream.

The voyage dragged on, and I tried several times to convince Morgan that I wasn't making fun of him. But the harder I tried, the more I stuttered, and by the time we got to our station in the South China Sea, Morgan was absolutely certain that I was the most insubordinate bastard in the history of the Navy. If he had had the authority, I'm sure he would have had me keelhauled.

I was trying my best to keep a low profile, but Morgan managed to get to me anyway. It was at morning muster, when we were all gathered in the wardroom for announcements and general horseshit, that Morgan announced a call for volunteers for temporary assignment to Amphibious Landing Squadron Six. ALS/6 was a Marine unit, and it spent most of its time humping the bush in-country. He didn't get many volunteers. After dismissal, Morgan chased me down and slapped a printed sheet of paper against my chest. The bastard had volunteered me for ALS/6.

"M-maybe next time you won't be such a f-fucking asshole, Kennedy," he told me before he turned around and waddled away.

I was pissed, but I knew enough to follow orders, so I reported to the Marine quartermaster on board. He issued me all the important shit for fighting in the jungle: jungle greens, jungle boots, canteen and belt, tin pot and liner, ALICE pack, flak jacket, a go-to-hell hat, and some extra dog tags.

"Lace one in the strings of each of your boots," the sergeant told me.

I asked him why.

"It's so they can tell which leg is yours when it gets blown off by a land mine," he told me matter-of-factly. "They don't like to mix bodies in the body bags." I thought he was joking, but I did as I was told.

When I moved on to the next station, the munitions sergeant, a grizzled veteran who spoke with a backwoods drawl, saw from my record that I was a Southerner.

"Ever do any coon huntin', boy?"

I allowed that I had gone after a squirrel or two in my day.

"Then try this on for size," he said, handing me a sawed-off shotgun. "Ought to make you feel right at home."

The weapon felt pretty good to me, and I liked the wooden stock a lot better than the hollow plastic one the M-16 had. I thanked him kindly and started to move on.

"When you get the chance, take a hammer and flatten the end of the barrel just a little," he told me as I was gathering my gear. "It'll give you a pattern that'll slice 'em in half at the belly button. You can collect gizzards instead of ears."

The next thing I knew, I was climbing out of a Huey at the end of the world. I had expected jungle, but Fire Base Annie was a little oasis of desert amid the greenery of the rain forest. The place must have begun as a natural clearing, but the Marines had cleared a fire lane that extended the vegetation-free zone far beyond its original boundaries. The bare, yellow dirt was broken by coiled concertina wire and olive drab sandbags piled up into buildings. I followed the rest of the guys into one of the hooches and started unpacking my gear.

One of the really nice things about these hooches was the local population. We didn't have any gooks on the fire base, but we shared the hooch with the biggest damn rats you ever saw. Some of them were as big as small dogs, and they didn't mind taking a bite out of whatever flesh was left exposed. After spending a few nights fighting off the rats, I began to wonder what fighting the gooks was going to be like. It couldn't be much worse, I thought.

The guys got so tired of the fucking rats that we set up an ambush for them one night. We all took our weapons to bed with us every night, but this time we stayed up and waited for them. We drew straws, and one poor grunt got assigned the flashlight. We got our shit together and waited for the rats in the dark.

It wasn't long before the first of the bastards appeared in the moonlight at the hooch entrance. We waited until he was well inside the sandbag walls, and then the light man hit him with the beam of the flashlight.

It sounded like the worst firefight you ever heard, and that rat knew his name was on one of those M-16 rounds. He was shittin' and gittin'. By some miracle, he made it out the door with all of us slinging lead at him as fast as we could. He made a beeline for the slit trench latrine.

In case you don't know about slit trench latrines, that was our toilet facility. Instead of digging a hole every time one of us wanted to take a shit, we dug one big hole and everybody shit in it until it was too raunchy to live with, and then we moved to another base. The rain always filled the thing with water, so it was sort of like a really gross swimming pool. It was wide enough to hit with your shit, but it was narrow enough to straddle while you were doing your business.

Some grunt from another squad was straddling the slit trench when we pulled off our rat ambush. You can imagine what he thought when this rat came hauling ass out of the hooch and made straight for the slit trench he was squatting over. We weren't about to let the rat get away, and the grunt saw the rat and the ambush fire coming straight for him.

"Don't shoot!" he shouted, and then he splashed into the slit trench on his belly.

His squad had just come back from their monthly visit to the tender, so he had a long time to wait before the rest of the squad would let him back into the hooch again. It would have been all right if they had kept him out of the chopper, too, but nobody gets out of humping the bush, not even if he smells like the slit trench.

We had officers on the base, but we never knew for sure why they were there. Most of the time it seemed like their job was making sure the war was as fucked up as it could be. Anyway, the sergeants were the ones who got things done; I worked for a veteran who held the rank of gunnery sergeant; the grunts all called him "gunny." It was his job to keep us alive in spite of what the officers did to us.

It wasn't long until the word came that it was our turn to go out on patrol. I loaded my gear faithfully into my ALICE pack, put on my helmet and flak jacket, and loaded my shotgun. I was ready to do my duty for God and country.

Full canteens, the gunny said, special order from the lieutenant. "Make sure they're damn full," he added, "and don't drink any of it."

Every man was going to have water in case he needed it, but a half-empty canteen might alert the enemy to our position by sloshing. I could tell that the gunny didn't completely understand the lieutenant's reasoning, but he wasn't about to complain. "If the Corps had meant for you to think, they'd have issued you a brain," he said.

"You in training for a marathon?" one of the guys asked me.

"Naw, he's just an FNG," another one answered for me.

"What's an FNG?" I asked, and they all laughed.

"That's the fucking new guy," one of them answered. "You can always tell the FNG by his helmet and his flak jacket." I noticed that nobody else was wearing either of them. Well, there was one other person wearing them. A huge black man I had heard them call Watson wore his flak jacket and his helmet, and he carried an M-60 machine gun as casually as if it were an M-16.

"Is he an FNG, too?" I asked, nodding toward Watson.

"Don't fuck with Watson, man. Anybody who can hump the bush all day with a tin pot, a flak jacket, and an M-60 is one bitchin' dude." I saw a flicker of admiration on the Marine's face.

Not wanting to be thought of as a wimp and eager to shed the FNG image, I left the flak jacket and the tin pot in the hooch, bringing with me the floppy, narrow-brimmed go-to-hell hat that all the other grunts were wearing. In the movies, the macho jocks wear them turned up on the sides like cowboy hats or tilted jauntily like an Aussie, but my squad all wore them turned up in the front and in the back and perched well forward on our heads. Any other way would have reduced our upward visibility, and the gooks liked to put things in the trees.

We'd been humping the bush for two hours or so when the gunny called a halt for breakfast. A chopper appeared from the south and dumped a case of C-rations, and we all gathered around to place our orders. I picked one labeled "scrambled eggs and ham," thinking it might be a good choice for breakfast.

Inside the carton, I found a green can that apparently contained the entree, a small pack of cigarettes, an envelope of instant coffee, some toilet paper, two sugar cubes, a can of biscuits, a can of pear halves, a P-38 can opener, and a small plastic spoon. I used the can opener to wrestle the can of ham and eggs open.

The eggs were nearly the same shade of green as the can, and the bits of ham were a sickly gray. It wasn't appetizing, but two hours of worrying about gooks can build an appetite. I tried to dig in with my spoon, but the concoction was so hard that the handle broke.

"Hey, man, how do you eat this shit?" I absently asked the Marine sitting next to me.

"Let me see that," he answered. I handed him the can.

He looked appraisingly at my breakfast, thought about it for a second, and then tossed the can over his shoulder, into the underbrush.

"Leave it for the gooks," he said. "Deadlier than a land mine."

"But what about my breakfast?" I protested.

"Here, try some of this." He divided his own breakfast of pound cake and fruit cocktail and offered me half. "This is about the only thing worth eating in the whole mess. And don't fool with those shitty little spoons, either. Eat with your Ka-Bar."

They hadn't issued me a Ka-Bar, and I told him so.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "You'll have to get somebody back in the world to buy one at a surplus store and ship it to you. The Corps has a shortage of them, you know." It seemed a little strange that you could buy a Marine Corps fighting knife at a surplus store while the Corps had a shortage of them, but nothing else had made sense to this point, either.

I finished my pound cake and fruit cocktail with the remnant of my spoon, and then we shared the can of pears I had found in my rations.

"My name's k-Kennedy," I said. "Rick k-Kennedy. I'm from Georgia."

"It don't pay to make no friends here," he said, "but seein' as you're gonna starve to death if the gooks don't get you first, I'll make an exception this time. I'm Carlton Thompson, from North Carolina. Call me Tommy."

"That's okay by me," I said. "I don't think I c-could c-call you c-Carlton." Tommy laughed, and he and I became friends. It was the biggest mistake of my life.

Three weeks later, the squad piled into a Huey and flew back to the tender for showers and a little rest. It occurred to me that I might have a word with Morgan, so I went looking for him while the rest of the guys hit the showers. Tommy went with me; said he wanted to see what I would do to Morgan when I caught up with him. We didn't find the fat bastard, not this time or ever, but I haven't given up on evening the score yet.

Then there was the day when we were humping along a peaceful beach when all the gooks in the world opened up on us. We scrambled into some gullies that the monsoon rains had worn in the sand and started peppering away at whatever we could see to shoot at. Watson, the gunny, and I were in a shell-hole that was almost like a foxhole.

Somehow, in the confusion, Watson had gotten turned around and was protecting our rear. There wasn't anything there except this one gook kid, who must have been eight or nine years old and was running like hell to get away from the fighting. I remember his hair really well--it must have been a foot and a half long and streamed out behind him like a Red Baron scarf. Watson spotted him and opened up with the M-60.

I watched as Watson tracked on the gook kid. As he ran, the kid's feet were kicking up rooster tails in the sand, and the slugs from Watson's machine gun were getting closer to him with every step. The kid probably set off the ambush, so I wasn't too worried about him.

The gunny was watching, too, and just as Watson was about to nail the kid, the gunny slapped him on top of his tin pot with the barrel of his M-16.

"This way, you dumb shit!" he ordered.

Watson got off the M-60 immediately. "Oh, okay, sarge," he said as he turned around and started peppering away nonchalantly in the other direction. I'm sure the gook kid wondered what in the hell happened, but Watson didn't give it a second thought. Neither did I.

We lived through the ambush, which was mostly noise anyway, and went on our way as if nothing had happened. I was a little uncomfortable because the C-rations and the horse pill they gave us for malaria had given me the trots.

"You been takin' that pill?" Tommy couldn't believe it. "All that shit does is give you malaria so they don't have to figure out what's got you. Feed it to the rats and let them get the shits."

"That's great, man, but what do I do now?"

"Seems to me you got a C-ration imbalance," he said. "First off, you got to understand the principles of grunt nutrition. You eat the pound cake 'cause it'll make a turd. When you're plugged up, you drink the grape kool-aid 'cause it gives you the shits. When you figure you've shit enough, you eat the peanut butter and it plugs you up again. Got that?"

"Right. Got any peanut butter?"

He didn't have any, but it was chow time and I managed to pick out a ration box that had a can of peanut butter in it. The stuff was dryer than a popcorn fart, but I didn't have to shit again until the next time I drank the grape kool-aid.

Before too long, Tommy's birthday came up, and we had to go out on patrol. It seems like the Corps always wants a guy to walk point on his birthday, but it just doesn't seem right for a decent human being to have to be the first in line to an ambush on his birthday. Tommy protested, but I insisted on walking point for him that day. I was scared absolutely shitless the whole day, but I lived through it.

Looking back, it didn't really make much difference whether I walked point for him or not. He walked backup, and the gooks always set up their ambushes so that the first two shots got the point man and the backup. If we had walked into something, he still would have gotten nailed.

And then it was Thanksgiving. The brass had been promising us a hot turkey dinner for weeks, but we were stuck in the bush when the day rolled around. We were still hopeful, though, and everybody thought we were in for a treat when the chopper brought dinner around. Even if we had to sit on the ground in the stinking jungle, a hot turkey dinner was still a hot turkey dinner. I could imagine the field kitchen pots in the back end of that Huey.

You can imagine how pissed we were when they didn't even land. They just dumped out the usual case of C-rations and a couple of the big, canned dynamite turkeys that sometimes get sent to the forward field kitchens. Dynamite turkey--a genuine field delicacy, like those scrambled eggs I had tried to eat my first day on patrol. It was just like somebody stuffed a stick of dynamite up a turkey's ass and set it off. They'd gather the pieces and put them in a can; nobody but a grunt would be dumb enough to eat it. Some turkey dinner--just C-rations with a little extra spam on the side.

Watson was more pissed than the rest of us, and before anybody could stop him (nobody would have been able to stop him, anyway), he grabbed the flame thrower and torched the turkeys. He was going to have a hot turkey dinner, by God, come hell or high water. He kept pouring the fire to them until they burst from the heat, splattering reconstituted turkey meat all over hell's half acre. I had to eat beans and motherfuckers that night, but I laughed until I cried.

Beans and motherfuckers. If you were going to pick something to feed to your worst enemy, beans and motherfuckers would be near the top of the list. According to the nomenclature on the can, it's "lima beans and ham," but nobody in his right mind could ever associate the two. When you open the can, the first thing you see is a layer of orange grease. You scrape that shit off with your Ka-Bar, and what you find underneath is some pasty green stuff with gray flecks floating around in it. If you have a good imagination, you can associate the green stuff with lima beans, but all you can ever say about the gray flecks is "what are those little motherfuckers?" Hence the name, beans and motherfuckers.

Nobody ever liked beans and motherfuckers. Well, nobody but Watson and a spider that Tommy and I got to know. Watson would smack his lips and say "Mmm-mmm! Beans and motherfuckers! Just like Mama used to make! But then that's why I ran away from home and joined the Corps."

Then there was this spider that lived in the hooch. He was a big, brown and yellow thing that looked poisonous. He was so mean, in fact, that even the rats left him alone. Tommy and I fed him beans and motherfuckers, so he was our friend. We could even tell his moods from the way he walked across the hooch floor. If he was pissed off, he would kind of slink along close to the ground. If we gave him a motherfucker, he'd chow down on it for a minute and then his mood would change and he'd get all bouncy. Next to Tommy, that spider was my best friend.

We lived through the Thanksgiving patrol, which was mostly a waste of time anyway, and made a trip into Chu Lai a few days later. The gunny gave us a tour of the city, taking particular interest in a bar he had apparently visited before.

Right away, I noticed something funny about the place. In all the other GI bars, there were these little gook girls that would sell you a warm Coca-Cola for a quarter. Real money was against the rules, but they would take GI script just like the real thing. Only in this place, the Coca-Cola girl had a tray of live, baby chicks. There were gook whores in the bar, too, but anybody who would fuck a Vietnamese was to lazy to jack off.

The next thing I knew, the gunny sergeant had given the girl a couple of script quarters and taken two chicks from the tray. I followed him to a stage in the center of the bar that turned out to be a pit. At the bottom of the pit was a stuffed crocodile.

Great, I thought, he's going to get his rocks off feeding chicks to a stuffed crocodile. As I watched, he dropped a chick into the pit.

The bird knew something was wrong immediately. He ran around to every corner he could reach and even tried to climb up the wall. Then, in the flicker of an eye, that stuffed crocodile came to life and there wasn't anything left of that chick but a wisp of downy feather floating in the air. I wouldn't have believed something so big could move so fast if I hadn't seen it myself.

The crocodile's eyes were open now, so the gunny showed us how agile the beast was. He took the other chick and lobbed it toward the crocodile's head. The crocodile caught it in midair. He didn't even chew.

Everybody took a turn feeding chicks to the crocodile, and then the gunny, who had had a few beers by now, shouted for attention.

"Watch this," he shouted. "I'm gonna show you how a real Marine does it."

He had a fresh chick already. Holding the bird in his right hand, he bit its head off as though he were pulling the pin from a grenade. He lobbed the "grenade" into the pit and then spit the "pin" in after it. The crocodile greedily ate them both.

Vietnamese beer was awful, and it made your piss burn, but it was a lot better than grape kool-aid and canned milk. After a few rounds of "Ba Me Ba," the local brew, all of us were lobbing fluffy grenades into the crocodile pit. The damned feathers stuck to the roof of my mouth. I don't remember much else about that evening, but I didn't wake up in the brig so everything must have been all right.

There was one curious thing the next morning. Watson had one of the baby chicks with him. Said he was going to raise it and have fried chicken. The gunny sergeant told him to forget it, that if the Corps had wanted you to have a chicken they would have issued you one, but Watson was determined. He hid the chick under his hat and took it out to play with it whenever the gunny wasn't looking.

"Hey, Watson," Tommy asked, "what're you gonna feed that monster?"

"Beans and motherfuckers, man," Watson answered. "What else?"

Tommy made a face. "One thing's for certain," he said. "Ain't nobody gonna fight you for a piece of that chicken."

Watson took real good care of that chicken. It lasted a long time, too. It was growing feathers and could run fast enough that most of us couldn't catch it by the time the gunny finally caught him and made Watson get rid of it.

"What're you going to do next, Watson, plant a fucking watermelon vine? Get rid of the god damn chicken before I stuff him up your ass." I got the feeling that he could follow through on that threat, too.

Tommy had this girlfriend back home in North Carolina. They were going to get married as soon as Tommy came home from the war. Tommy had left her in good hands, he said, because his brother was looking after her for him. Just when things were going great, we were alive and all, Tommy gets this letter from his girl telling him that she had reconsidered and wasn't going to marry him after all. In fact, she had decided to marry his brother instead, and would he please bundle up all the pictures and love letters she had sent him and ship them to his brother.

Tommy's old man was a neat sort of guy. Every week, he'd ship Tommy a quart of moonshine, packed in popcorn inside a Maxwell House coffee can. It just so happened that he got his girlfriend's letter on the same day he got his weekly shipment of moonshine. The two of us sat there and mixed his moonshine with C-ration grape kool-aid and drank every damned bit of it while he took turns vilifying her to the heavens and wishing she would reconsider.

When all the 'shine was gone, Tommy decided it was time for action. First, he bundled up all her pictures and love letters and put them in an empty ammo can. Then he scrounged the flame thrower and torched them. Burned them to ash. We dumped the whole mess into a box and started to seal it up to send to his brother, but then Tommy had another idea.

"Let's send him that god damn spider," he said.

Half a quart of moonshine does a good job of dimming my senses, so I went along. After all, I'd be sending my second best friend back to the world without killing him first. We lured the spider into the box with a little bit of beans and motherfuckers and then we sealed it up. Tommy mailed it to his brother the next day.

It probably took that package more than a week to get to Tommy's brother, and that spider was probably pretty mad by the time he got let out of the box. I can just imagine him, jumping out of the box: "Where's my beans and motherfuckers, asshole?"

The blackest day of my life came on my birthday. It was right before Tet 1968, back when the way we were handling the war and beating the hell out of the gooks was big news on TV. The brass set up a milk run patrol for the media to film, and we got selected to be the actors. The only problem was that they forgot to tell the gooks.

As usual, the Corps wanted me to walk point on my birthday, but Tommy wouldn't have any part of it. I had made him walk backup on his birthday, so he wasn't about to let me take point that day. He didn't figure it was too risky, seeing as it was a milk run for the press and all.

There we were, walking down this country road, looking like Marines for the press. We put on our mean faces so they could get good tape for the good people back home, the ones who were burning their draft cards and spitting on returning veterans. Tommy was on point, and I was walking backup, about fifteen yards back.

Two quick AK-47 shots rang out, and Tommy was down. For some strange reason, I was looking in the right place, and I saw the muzzle flashes from the underbrush alongside the road. It was a classic L-shaped ambush, and we had obliged them by walking blindly into it.

In a split second, the whole world had turned to fireworks. Bullets zipped past my head like supersonic mosquitoes, but I crawled to where Tommy had fallen. I don't even remember how I got there, but there I was. Somebody in the gook ambush had fucked up; Tommy had taken two bullets, both his and mine. He wasn't moving, but his eyes were open and I could hear a faint rasping from his chest.

"Jesus, man," I said to him. "Why'd you go and piss 'em off like that?"

"Needed a good show for the folks back home," Tommy coughed.

I screamed for the corpsman, but the medic was pinned down like the rest of us. All I could do was watch as Tommy's life drained out onto the fucking road.

"Tell my old man I died like a Marine," Tommy said, and then he died.

I screamed as loud as I could and emptied my shotgun on the bushes that the shots had come from. I might have gotten one or two of them, but the gunfire kept on coming. Over the racket, I heard the gunny yelling at me.

"Kennedy, you asshole, get on that fucking radio and get us some help! And if you fuck up, I'm gonna stuff that microphone up your ass and pull it out your god damn nose!"

I had forgotten that I was carrying the radio pack. Looking back, I can see that the radio made it even more unbelievable that I made it out alive. The gooks always zeroed in on the antenna, because they knew the radio could bring a rain of death from the sky. Anyway, I unhooked the mike and surprised myself with the calmness and lack of stuttering that my transmission carried.

"Red Rover, Red Rover, this is Country Boy, Country Boy, Over." Not an instant's hesitation, not even on the "c" sounds. I don't know whether I was more scared of the gooks or the gunny sergeant.

We were lucky. There was a Shadow fixed-wing gunship airborne, and he was on station in minutes. The most beautiful sight I have ever seen is that ugly old airplane, circling our position in a big, left turn.

"Where are they, Country Boy?" Shadow asked.

"They're in the trees next to the road," I answered, barely able to form the words in my throat, I was so mad and scared.

"Where are the friendlies?" Shadow asked.

"We're all on the road and in the ditch next to the road," I said.

"Jesus, that's close," Shadow said. "I can't shoot that close to where you are."

"Might as well go ahead and shoot," I told him. "I'd rather be shot by an American bullet than a gook one."

"Well, keep your fucking head down," Shadow said, and then he went to work. I tried to flatten out on the roadway and wished I didn't have any buttons on my shirt so I could get lower.

That guy could thread needles with the guns on that crate. I heard this rain of lead falling in the trees not more than twenty feet away, and I turned my head to look up and see where the airplane was.

"I said keep your fucking head down!" Shadow shouted over the radio.

I looked up anyway, and Shadow was so low I could see the pilot's face. I had watched these guys work before; usually, they flew high enough that you couldn't even tell there was anybody in the airplane, and their tracers burned out a long time before the slugs made it to the ground. But this guy, I tell you, was flying low. The tracers were still burning when the bullets hit the jungle, and I could see that the pilot was grinning like a cat eating shit as he blew those gooks away. I swore that if I lived to tell about it and ever found that pilot, I'd buy him enough drinks to give him cirrhosis of the liver.

By the time that firefight was over, Shadow had killed nearly a full company of VC, but the gooks had gotten everybody in the squad except the gunny and me. It was a lonely ride back to Fire Base Annie, just the two of us in that chopper. I swore I'd never make another friend again, because it hurt too much to lose the one I had.

"Did you ever find that gunship pilot?" Carolyn asked.

"It took me several years," Rick said, "but I finally ran into him by c-coincidence."

"How many drinks did you buy him?"

"We c-closed the bar a time or two, but he insisted on buying a few, too."

"Do you ever see him any more?"

"Every damn day."

They looked at Dave.

"Yes, that was my airplane," Dave admitted. "The whole crew got a DFC for that mission. I just wish we could have gotten there sooner."

"It wouldn't have been soon enough for Tommy," Rick said.

It was quiet for a while.