CHAPTER 47
It was still dark when my cot rattled. Snake was standing over me. “Off your ass and on your feet, sonny boy. It’s time to play war.” He tossed a tiger stripe camo shirt to me. “Put that on.”
“What time is it?” The shirt smelled like shit, and had no name or rank or any other military insignia. Snake was wearing one just like it.
“Time to get your ass up, we got a long walk. Let’s go.” He started for the ladder.
I rolled out, grabbed my rucksack, strapped the machete on the back, and slung my rifle. By the time I got outside, Snake was already at the guard post, and I had to run to catch up. The dim glow of early morning showed in the sky beyond the mountains. “Where we headed?”
“To teach you how to use that killing machine you’re carrying.”
Snake moved at a steady clip, following a track he obviously knew well. After an hour we came to a rice paddy and started across the dike. We’d got most of the way when a kid who looked to be about ten years old came running to meet us. He had on a boonie hat that was way too big and a wide, gap-toothed grin. “Chao anh, Sergeant Snake. Chao anh.”
Snake picked him up and swung him around. “Hello, Huy, how you doing, boy?” Snake sat down in the dirt, and the kid plopped on his lap. They chatted back and forth in broken Vietnamese and hand gestures. Finally, Snake reached in his ruck and handed the boy a c-rat box. “You go home now.” Snake patted him on the butt and pushed him back toward the village. The kid waved with one hand; he had a death grip on the rat box with the other.
“Making friends with the population, huh?”
“Come by here every chance I get on the way out. These are basically good people who are caught in a shit storm they didn’t make.”
It surprised me to hear a grizzled man like Snake talk that way. After seeing his fierceness in the firefight when the camp was attacked, it would have never occurred to me he could sit in the mud and play with a kid like a kind uncle. I liked this side of him, but wondered how he kept the two separate.
At the end of the dike we veered left, skirted the village, and headed into the jungle. Snake found a small path and worked up a high hill, slowing his pace and walking more cautiously. His head moved constantly. I could swear his nose twitched, like he was smelling the air. After crossing the crest, he took us in a southwest direction leading down to a wide valley. There were bomb craters everywhere, and the vegetation was dead as a winter cornfield. When we got to a cleared spot, Snake swept the area with his binoculars.
He dropped his ruck. We sat and wiped sweat while he talked. “I want you to pay full attention for the next couple of days. You either learn and live, or stay stupid and die. This ain’t a practice game.” He waved at the mountains around us. “There are little brown people out here that want to kill you. If they catch you and know you’re a sniper, they’ll make you suffer a long time before letting you die. First thing, take off one of your dog tags and stick it in your bootlaces so if you get blown up somebody can ID you.” He waited while I did what he said. “From this minute on, forget everything about the world back home, because if you’re going to survive in this work, you’ve got to learn to focus on nothing but the work, to become part of what’s here, and understand your job is to kill people, plain and simple. There ain’t nothing back there that’ll help you out here. Understand Uncle Charles is one tough little bastard, and he’s fighting for a purpose. We’re just fighting ’cause they tell us to.” Snake’s jaw was set hard, and his words were almost angry. “Any questions?”
If he was trying to scare me, he succeeded. The serious expression on his face caused my butt to pucker. “No.”
He handed me the binoculars. “You see that piece of steel hanging off that banyan limb?” I followed the direction of his arm. “That’s your four-hundred-yard target. Now, imagine in your mind a hundred-yard football field behind it, and at the end of that you’ll see the five-hundred-yard target. Flip the field over and you’ll have the six-hundred-yard target. There’s no yardsticks out here, so that’s the way you adjust your distances. I hung these things out here almost a year ago to sight my rifle.”
“I see them.”
“We’re going to concentrate on the five-hundred-yard target so you can learn to allow if the shot is shorter or longer. To get a feel for the wind, watch the tops of the elephant grass, see how much it’s moving and from what direction. If you’re somewhere you don’t have grass, watch the treetops. You have to learn this good because you’re usually only going to get one shot and it has to count. You miss and some very pissed-off folks will be on your ass.”
“Aren’t you afraid somebody out here will hear us?”
“You know the kid on the dike?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s up in the bush at the top of this hill. If somebody’s coming, we’ll know.”
I took a prone position and chambered rounds, getting the hang of it after thirty or so, and began pinging the first target regularly. Snake watched with his binoculars and kept correcting, telling me to feel the target and let the natural settings help me adjust my sight. By the time we moved to the second, I was starting to understand and didn’t waste near as much ammo. Six hundred yards was a long way, and, while I got so I hit it, most of the shots weren’t center mass, the sure kill zone. We practiced until dusk, then rolled out ponchos for sleeping. Night fell, and we found a soft spot in the grass, used C-4 for heating ham and lima beans, then wrapped into ponchos and lay down. The air got chilly, and the sky clouded over. The dull boom of artillery sounded in the distance and occasionally we heard the roar of jets and saw flashes from bombs being dropped. Eventually things got quiet. “Dark out here, ain’t it, Sarge?” It was like the blackness was stuck to you.
“Like a shantytown at midnight, son. You’ll get used to seeing with your ears as much as your eyes. The jungle will teach you its sounds, and you’ll learn to recognize what ain’t natural. Your eyes will get to be like a cat’s. Them and your brain are all the tools you got to work with out here.”
“What about snakes? No offense.”
He laughed. “None taken. They might crawl in with you, but all they’re doing is trying to stay warm. Nights up here can get cold. Try not to do too much rolling over in case one climbs in, it tends to piss ’em off. Tigers are what you got to be careful of, them and Rock Apes walking up on you.”
“Rock Apes? What the hell are they?”
“Oversized monkeys or undersized gorillas, take your choice. They’ll throw rocks at you, or run up and scream and holler. Saw one on a night mission with the recon boys last year. The guy on watch started yelling like somebody was killing him, and when we got there one of them apes was beating the dog shit out of him. Funniest thing I ever saw.” He rolled over. “Try not to snore, it attracts attention.”