The sounds of the chopper that took the stocky senior officer away faded, leaving the battlefield eerily quiet. It was a long time since Singer had heard any gunfire. Even the distant bombing had ceased. Most of the men stood in restless, staggered groups along the road. The shrill chirping of a lizard announced its survival and the return of natural sounds.
“It ain’t nothing like you imagined, is it?” Bear asked.
“You think I wanted this?”
“Man, we all want to prove ourselves. It’s what fucks us up.”
Singer dropped his face and turned away. He felt the big hand on his shoulder.
“It ain’t your fault, man. We all been there. Except maybe guys like Shooter who found it just like they thought it would be and loved it. Look what it got him.”
Bear shook his head as if dismissing it all. Singer couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Maybe now you’ll wish for quiet days.” Bear took his hand from Singer’s shoulder.
That wasn’t what he wanted now, but Singer was afraid to tell him.
For a while they stood silent.
Down the road, Singer watched Top move through the company, the RTO nearly running to keep up. Men started forming a staggered double column. Lieutenant Creely, the second platoon leader and ranking officer after the captain, approached Top, and Top waved his hand as if swatting a fly and walked away.
“Why’s Top running things?” Singer asked.
When Bear didn’t answer, Singer turned to see Bear staring at the jungle, maybe thinking about their charge across the open ground that made Singer feel so alive or about his mama and the house he said he would buy her when he got home.
“Bear, why’s Top running the company?”
“Better Top than one of—”
Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! An AK-47 on full auto. The sound exploded in the silence that had settled over the battlefield.
Men fell to the road around him. For a second Singer heard the echoes of Sergeant Edwards’s earlier command: “Charge the tree line!” But everyone else was down and he was aware that he stood alone, offering the most appealing target. Still, he took a step, hesitated, then dove to the ground. With nowhere to go, he threw himself on top of Bear. The road edge depression offered only the illusion of cover.
“I’m hit,” Bear said in a low, unexcited voice.
It was silent again after the AK stopped as abruptly as it started. For a moment it seemed as if everyone held their breath, uncertain of what happened and what was next.
“I can’t believe some motherfucker shot me.” Bear turned his head. “How bad is it?”
“I saw him. But I can’t find him now,” Singer said.
In the instant before diving atop Bear, when he looked toward the crater, he saw him—the top half of him, anyway. A lone, helmeted NVA in an olive-colored shirt standing at the jungle edge, firing an AK from his shoulder. But Singer lost sight of him while getting down. Now the NVA had disappeared. So near the crater. Rhymes’s vacant stare petitioned him. He rose on a knee. Bear pulled at his arm.
“Let someone else. How bad?”
His ears rang with the muzzle blast of an M60 as it opened up from the slope just above him. He buried his head down on Bear’s back. A line of red tracers streamed overhead, disappearing into the ground near the crater. It had to be Trip.
No one else fired, perhaps concerned about hitting the two GIs who materialized at the jungle edge. Singer watched the two Americans working toward the crater. Could he run and safely join them with the M60 firing just above his head?
“Damn, tell me what it looks like,” Bear said.
Singer turned away from the line of red tracers and the two GIs. Bear’s back showed no blood. No hole that he could see or feel.
“My neck,” Bear said.
Lifting up to see, Singer pulled Bear’s fatigue collar back, expecting the wound to be worse after what he had already seen today. What he saw surprised him.
“Can you move?”
Bear cranked his head around, trying to see his wound or to read the expression on Singer’s face.
“Just tell me. You’re heavier than you look.”
“Can you move your legs?”
Singer felt Bear wiggle beneath him.
“I could walk home if they’d let me.”
“Shit, you’re a lucky fucker. There’s nothing, Bear. No blood. Nothing. Just a small mark. Shit.” He stared at the small white spot on Bear’s black skin where the bullet had passed through his neck without hitting the spine or any blood vessel. Incredibly, the hard AK bullet had barely torn the flesh. “Damn, you’re lucky.”
“Guess I’m going home early.”
“You’ll be back on the street before I’m eating breakfast,”
“Thanks for covering me.”
“Hell, you had the best spot. There was nowhere else to go.”
Beneath him, Bear’s body trembled. At first Singer thought the big man was crying. Then he heard the laugh, even with the noise of machine gun fire.
The tracers still had the shooter pinned. A few others on the slope behind Singer had joined in with M16s. The two men working the treeline were inching in on the spot. The NVA was trapped. Singer shifted off of Bear. He still wanted in on it.
Bear large hand settled on his back.
“Man, ain’t you learned nothing today? They’ll get him.”
Singer looked at Bear’s face, the streaks on his dusty cheeks, eyes that showed concern.
“You still think this is your war?”
“You’re going home.”
“Be careful. You’ll become another Shooter.”
Singer turned back to not miss the finale.
The two men were almost there. Methodically, one fired into the ground just in front of his feet while the other stood ready to take on any NVA who jumped up. The second man covered while the first reloaded. Trading off, they eased ahead through thigh-high brush to the shot-up ground. The second man fired into the new ground while the first stood braced. Then they repeated the process, moving ever closer. Second-tour guys. They’d done this before. A line of tracers from Trip’s machine gun pinned down anyone farther ahead, shifting west as the two men advanced.
Singer raised his head and tightened his grip in expectation.
Just after he started to fire again, the lead man jumped back, continuing to fire while the second American opened up, as well. Then they stopped and waited, rifles ready, staring at the ground. Trip held up on the machine gun. Singer held his breath.
Finally one of the men got down on his stomach, his head and arm disappearing in the ground. The other man stepped closer, pointing his M16 to the same spot. The first man pulled back, rising to his knees, and heaved an NVA from the hole. While his partner stood over the unmoving NVA, his rifle pointed at the man’s chest, the first man reached in a second time and hauled out the man’s AK-47. With the AK shouldered, he grabbed the NVA’s foot and dragged him toward the road.
The NVA’s head and body flopped over the uneven ground. It reminded Singer of dragging a deer in from the woods, pulling the carcass through the brush and over downed timber. A trophy he would hang and display from the large oak tree in the yard, where his friends would come to admire it and congratulate him. But there was some sadness mingled with the sense of triumph.
The NVA lay motionless and bloody in the dust of the road where the man dumped him. Singer had to stare a long time before he saw the slightest movement in the man’s chest. Though the NVA was still alive, no one moved to help him. The man who dragged him in dug through his pockets while the other still pointed his M16 at the man, as though even near death the NVA might make a break for it and need to be shot again.
The company slowly regained their feet. Most ignored the dying NVA, though a few men moved closer and stood around the man. Singer could see well enough from where he was, as the NVA was dropped just a few feet away, as though they’d known what he’d been wishing. The man’s shirt was dark with blood and a thin stream of blood ran from his mouth and down his cheek. His eyes were clouded. It was hard to say what he saw.
Bear insisted on standing and waved off any effort to bandage his neck.
“Get away from me, man,” he said when Sergeant Milner tried to examine his wound.
Singer stayed beside him, though they both were out of words. Everyone looked up as the sounds of slapping blades as a Huey grew from the east. It came alone this time, without a Cobra escort.
They crouched below the spinning blades. Bear climbed in unassisted.
“Take care,” Singer said loudly to be heard above the rotor noise.
“Be careful, man.” Then Bear grinned and slapped the eagle patch on his shoulder.
The wounded NVA was thrown onto the helicopter deck next to Bear, the man he shot. Singer heard the sharp crack when the man’s head hit the floor. Bear patted the man’s leg.
The Huey rose in a din of a surging engine, revving blades, and a storm of churned-up road dust. The men nearest the chopper turned their faces away, fatigues whipped tight against their bodies by the wind. Squinting, Singer looked into the dust, feeling the sting on his face, and watched Bear disappear. A loneliness settled over him as the chopper receded. Even after he walked back and found Trip, the emptiness remained.
“You can bet there’s more of them sitting in holes waiting,” Singer said.
“As long as they stay down until we leave, I don’t care.” Trip felt the barrel of his M60.
“They’ll sneak off when we’re gone.”
“Let the fuckers go.”
“We should leave an ambush behind.”
“You want to stay?”
“If it means getting the guys who got Rhymes, Stick, and Doc.”
“You can never fix it. Be happy we’re leaving. We survived.”
“Did we?”
Trip didn’t reply.
Without any further word, the company began moving down the road toward LZ Birmingham. Men moved and others followed. Progress was plodding, likely more from exhaustion than any special care. Trip swung the big gun at his hip, sweeping it along the jungle. Ghost had shown up and was shuffling along, head down, rifle on his shoulder. There was still no sign of Sergeant Royce, but Sergeant Milner didn’t seem worried by his absence. Top paced back and forth along their diminished column.
Twice Singer caught himself in those first meters looking to find Rhymes and Bear, unable to orient himself without their presence.
He couldn’t understand things. The day had started with so much promise, but he could no longer recall his elation at returning to his squad. Now there was no squad. So much had gone wrong. Had he kept the radio and stayed with Sergeant Edwards, he wondered if they all might still be alive. Or if he’d just stuck with Rhymes, might he have changed events at the crater, and would Rhymes be beside him now? How had they gotten separated? The charge. Yes, the charge. He had to figure out what happened.
When he stopped and turned he could no longer see the ambush site. He needed to go back and check. He was forgetting something. He’d left something behind.
“Keep moving,” Sergeant Milner said, moving past without waiting.