At first Freeze Harris thought Nam was a crazy nightmare, an upside-down place where you were supposed to do everything that was forbidden back in the world, but after a while it was the world that seemed unreal. Cutting ears off dead NVA had become routine; stocking shelves at Kroger’s seemed something he’d only dreamed. Then, on a mission in the Iron Triangle, Freeze stepped on a Bouncing Betty that didn’t go off and nothing seemed real anymore. It was like he’d stepped out of Nam when he stepped on the mine. And now he wasn’t anywhere.
The day after Freeze stepped on the mine, the new brown-bar reported for duty. His name was Reynolds, and from the moment he arrived at Lai Khe, he had it in for Freeze. Freeze had just come in off the line that morning, and he was stumbling drunk outside the bunny club, wearing only his bush hat, sunglasses, and Jockey shorts. He had a bottle of Carling Black Label in one hand and a fragmentation grenade in the other. He was standing there, swaying back and forth, when Reynolds came up to him, his jungle fatigues starched and razor-creased, and stuck his square, government-issue jaw into Freeze’s face. “What the fuck are you doing, soldier?”
Freeze looked at the brown bar on Reynolds’ collar and saluted with the grenade. “Drinking, sir. Beer, sir.”
“I’m not blind, Private. I’m talking about the frag.”
Freeze looked at the grenade. He had pulled the pin after his first six-pack. If he let go of the firing lever, he’d have only four and a half seconds to make out his will. I, Mick Harris, being of unsound mind and body … He laughed.
There were red blotches on the lieutenant’s white face now. “What’s so funny, hand job?”
Freeze laughed again. He closed his eyes, woozy, and shrugged his shoulders. “You,” he said. “Me.”
Reynolds stiffened. “I’m ordering you to dispose of that frag immediately and safely.”
“Can’t,” Freeze said. “Beer tastes like piss without it.” He raised the bottle to his lips.
When he lowered it, the lieutenant had disappeared. Freeze looked around but didn’t see him anywhere. Maybe he’d never been there. Maybe he’d imagined it all. He took another long drink from the bottle, concentrating on his sweaty fingers gripping the firing lever. His hand was starting to go numb. It was almost like it was dissolving, disappearing. When he finished his drink, he looked at his hand. It was still there.
As he tilted the bottle back to take another drink, he heard someone say, “Here’s the son of a bitch.” He squinted toward the voice. The brown-bar was back, a sneer on his face. There was another face too, but this one was grinning. It was an MP. He had a harelip that made his grin look like it was splitting his face. Freeze imagined his face cracking like an egg and laughed.
Then the MP lunged at Freeze, grabbing his hand and twisting it behind his back. The sudden pain made Freeze groan and drop the beer in his other hand. While he looked down at the bottle foaming on the red dirt, the MP pried his fingers open. Then the pain was gone and Freeze looked up. The MP stuck the grenade in Freeze’s face and grinned. “My turn to play with this,” he said.
Reynolds said, “Cut that shit. Just toss the frag out on the perimeter, then take this soldier to the stockade and let him sleep it off. I’ll deal with him in the morning.” Then he turned and strode away.
Frigging brown-bar, Freeze thought, and imagined him stepping on a mine and blowing into a hundred pieces.
Only later, after the harelip had hauled him to the stockade and asked him his name, company, platoon, and squad, did Freeze find out that the brown-bar was his new platoon leader. “Your ass is gonna be grass come morning,” the MP said, laughing. “Reynolds, he’s your new LT.” But Freeze didn’t care. What could the bastard do to him? Send him to Nam? All he wanted to do was sleep. Sleep and dream. When he woke up, everything would be clear again, everything would be back to normal.
But the next morning he felt worse. He’d been dreaming about a mummy he’d seen in a museum when he was a kid. The mummy was the color of caramel, and in his dream he’d broken off one of its toes and taken a bite. Then a gum-chewing guard woke him, and for a moment he thought the guard had taken a bite too. “Feeling all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning, Private?” another voice said, and Freeze turned toward it: Reynolds, grinning.
The lieutenant tossed some wrinkled fatigues onto Freeze’s cot. “Get up and get dressed,” he said. “You’ve got a party to go to, and you’re the guest of honor.” Then he told Freeze that he and Konieczny were to report to the privies by 0700 for shit-burning detail.
Freeze sat up slowly, his head heavy and aching. “Konieczny?” he said.
Konieczny was the big, red-haired recruit just off the bus from Bien Hoa. It was bad enough to put him in the stockade, but to treat him like that twink Konieczny … He’d spent ten months in-country—ten fucking months—and he’d walked point for the first three. Nobody in his company had walked point that long, and they gave him a badge just for having survived. And now this new brown-bar was treating him like a goddamn twink.
“That’s right. Since he’s a new recruit, I thought you could teach him some of the finer points of shit-burning. Now chop-chop,” Reynolds said, then turned and left.
“You heard the man,” the guard said, then went back to chewing his gum.
Freeze watched the guard chew. Eat death, he thought, and smiled to himself. Chew that gristle down.
He tried to stand then, but his head was pounding so hard he sat back on the cot with a moan. He stayed there, dizzy, for a moment, then stood slowly and dressed. Each movement made his head throb.
When Freeze finished tying his boots, the guard escorted him back to barracks. Though it was still early, it was already so hot that Freeze’s shirt had soaked through by the time they got there. The guard said, “Enjoy your party,” and left. Freeze opened the screen door and went inside. It wasn’t much cooler in the hootch. All the men were shirtless, but their chests were still wet with sweat. Some of them had pulled their footlockers out into the middle of the wooden plank floor and were sitting on them playing cards and drinking Cokes or smoking joints. A few were lying on their racks reading magazines or letters. Others were talking and laughing about some photograph they were passing around. When they looked up and saw Freeze, they went quiet for a moment. Then Jackson put down his cards and said, “You okay, man?”
That’s what he’d said after Freeze had stepped on the mine. He’d come up to him, put his hand on his shoulder, and said, “Hey man, you okay?” Over and over, “You okay?” When Freeze had finally been able to answer, he told Jackson to fuck off, he was all right, leave him alone. But Jackson didn’t back off. None of them did. For the rest of the patrol, they all stayed close to him, thinking they were safe if they were around him. He had the magic, they said, the luck. He wasn’t going to get greased. The mine had proved that. So they stuck close to Freeze until finally he turned his M-16 on them and said he’d shoot the next mother who came near.
Now Freeze looked at Jackson, then at the others. Once he had been closer to these guys than to anybody in his whole life. But ever since he’d stepped on the mine they had seemed like strangers. He felt like he’d walked into someone else’s barracks, someone else’s life.
“Yeah,” he said to Jackson. “I’m okay.” Then he crossed over to his rack and pulled off his drenched shirt. Kneeling down, he started to dig through his bamboo footlocker.
“I hear you and Konieczny are going to a party,” Clean Machine said, then laughed. “Some people have all the luck.”
Freeze looked at him, but he didn’t say anything.
Duckwalk sat down on Freeze’s rack. “I hope you’re doing all right,” he said. “We been worried about you, bro.”
Freeze didn’t answer. He was trying to remember what he was looking for in his footlocker. Then it came to him: cotton. He found some in the neck of an aspirin bottle and tore off two chunks. Then he stood and turned to Konieczny, who was waiting in front of his rack, smiling uneasily. “What’re you laughing at, twink?” he said. Konieczny just stood there, looking confused.
“Ain’t nobody laughing,” Boswell said, and pushed his Stetson back on his head. “Ain’t nothing funny here.” Then he looked at Jackson. “You want to finish this hand, pardner? ‘Cause if you don’t I’ll be plenty happy to pick up that pot.”
Jackson looked at Freeze, his forehead creased. “You still with us?” he asked.
“What’s it to you?” Freeze said.
Jackson looked down and shook his head, then he picked up his cards and turned back to the game.
Freeze went outside then and stood in the heat, his head pounding. He wanted to go back to sleep. Maybe when he woke up he would be Mick again, not Freeze, and the mine would be just a bad dream.
In a moment, Konieczny joined him and they marched in silence up the hill to the latrine, each of them humping a can of diesel fuel. When they got there, Freeze stuffed the cotton up his nostrils, glaring at Konieczny all the while. Then they lifted the shelter off its blocks, exposing the fifty-five gallon drums cut in half, and started to soak the shit with fuel.
“Jesus,” Konieczny said. “This is number ten.”
Freeze didn’t say anything; he was thinking how much he hated Reynolds for making him do this. If the son of a bitch was here right now, he’d throw him into the shit barbecue. Lieutenant Crispy Critter. He smiled as he poured the fuel into the latrine.
“Make that ten thousand,” Konieczny said, his hand over his nose and mouth.
Though it was still early, the day was so hot and humid that the air seemed too thick to breathe. Freeze was breathing through his open mouth because of the cotton in his nose, and it felt like he was suffocating. His head throbbed and his stomach felt queasy. Then the smell of the diesel fumes and the shit suddenly penetrated the cotton and made him drop to his knees. With a noise like a bark, he vomited onto the red dirt between his trembling palms.
“You all right?” Konieczny asked, leaning over him.
Freeze wiped his mouth and looked up at Konieczny’s face, its freckles and peachfuzz and acne. The twink would be lucky if he lasted a week in the bush. Freeze could see him tripping a mine and blowing into the air, his body cut in half. He remembered how Perkins had looked after he triggered a Bouncing Betty. He’d had his wet intestines in his hands, and he was trying to put them back in. Or had Freeze just dreamed that?
He looked away, squinting in the sun. “Fuck you,” he answered.
“Just trying to help,” the kid said. He shrugged his shoulders and turned back to the work.
Freeze stood, his legs quivering. He thought about saying he was sorry, but then he’d have to explain and he didn’t know how to explain or even what to explain. So they finished soaking the shit without talking, then dropped matches on it. Black smoke curdled out of the pit, and the stench made them gag. Standing there beside the blaze, his eyes burning, head swimming, Freeze almost threw up again. And later, back in the hootch, he lay on his rack, the stink of the burning shit still thick in his nostrils, and heaved his guts into a C-rats can. His heart was beating fast, like it did when they were in a fire fight. What had happened? He’d been a strack soldier for ten months, an assistant squad leader—leader of the first fire team—for the past four, ever since C.B. got zapped. And now he was a shit-burner. God, how he hated that frigging brown-bar.
Hating the lieutenant made him feel better than he had since he’d stepped on the mine; it made things seem more real, more logical. So he stoked his hate, made it grow. Everything was Reynolds’ fault. Reynolds was the evil heart of it all. If it wasn’t for him, he’d be happy now, he’d be one of the guys again, nothing would have changed. The bastard was worse than Charlie.
Lying there on his canvas cot, Freeze imagined Reynolds walking point through knee-high brush. Then he saw him stop dead. He’d felt something under his boot. For a second, stupidly, Reynolds thought it was a scorpion, or a rock, but then he felt the pin sink and he knew it was the metal prong of a Bouncing Betty. Before he could move, or even think, the mine flew up out of the ground with a pop. Reynolds closed his eyes and covered his head with his hands, and for a moment, a moment that stretched out until it was outside of time, he waited for the explosion of light, the thundering roar, the hail of shrapnel. Then the moment ended and the Bouncing Betty fell back at his feet, dead. The main charge hadn’t gone off. Reynolds opened his eyes and stood there for several minutes, panting hard, the sweat rolling off his face and dripping onto the mine, his eyes staring into ozone. Hey, his men would say later, you should have seen the brown-bar freeze.
Freeze planned his revenge all afternoon. Then, an hour or so before dusk, he saw Reynolds go into the officers’ club. After waiting a few minutes to be sure he wasn’t coming back out, he snuck into Reynolds’ quarters. He had planned to fire a single pistol shot into his pillow and leave, but once he was there, that plan seemed too dangerous, even crazy. He had to do something, though, so he stole the two officer-grade steaks Reynolds had in his refrigerator. He stuffed them inside his shirt and left, almost giddy. He could just see the look on Reynolds’ face when he saw the steaks were missing.
Back in the hootch, Freeze put the smaller steak up for auction. He stood on his footlocker and dangled the slab in front of his squad. “What am I bid for this hunk of heaven?” he said.
Duckwalk was sitting on his rack, cleaning an AK-47 he’d souvenired from an NVA. He shook his head. “The LT’s gonna fuck you, Freeze,” he said.
“You’ll have his steaks for supper, but he’ll have your ass for breakfast,” Jackson agreed. “He’s gonna know you swiped his meat.” He took another drag on his joint and went back to playing solitaire on his footlocker.
Everybody was trying to act uninterested, but Freeze knew better. He knew how long it had been since anybody’d had a steak. To them, even the warm Cokes they got every stand-down were bennies.
“Let’s start the bidding at a bag of el primo no-stem, no-seed, shall we?” he said and grinned. He was having fun. He had crossed over the edge of hatred and now he was having fun. He could barely keep from laughing.
“Are you nuts?” said McKeown. “We buy that hot cow and we’re in as much trouble as you.”
“Smoke my pole,” Boswell said.
“Shit,” Clean Machine said. “I wouldn’t give one joint for your sister and your mother both.”
But before long, McKeown offered a pack of Park Lanes and soon they were all bidding. When it was over, Clean had shelled out four packs of Park Lanes and a handful of military payment certificates for the steak. Freeze stashed his loot under the floorboard beneath his rack, then ditty-bopped out to the perimeter where nobody could see him and hunkered down in some brush to broil his steak. He lit a tin of Sterno and set it over a little stove he’d made by puncturing an empty C-rats can. Then he started to broil the steak on a steel plate he’d ripped off the back of a Claymore mine.
Smelling the steak browning on the plate, he forgot the stench of the burning shit for the first time that day. He leaned back on one elbow, lit a Park Lane, and inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in his lungs. As he smoked, he looked out over the brush at the lead-colored sky and tried to daydream about going back to the world. He imagined he was back in Little Rock, lying on a lounge chair beside his apartment pool, catching some rays and checking out the talent. But the daydream began to unravel as soon as it started. First he couldn’t remember what his pool had looked like. Then he wasn’t even sure whether he’d had a pool at Cromwell Court or if that was earlier, at the Cantrell Apartments. And the girls that strolled by in their bikinis were faceless, vague. He tried to remember Mary Ellen, the girl he’d dated the fall before he enlisted, but nothing would come to him. He wasn’t sure of the color of her eyes or hair, the sound of her voice. He laughed. Then he listened to himself laugh. It was such a strange sound. He wondered why he’d never noticed how strange it was. He tried to remember Mary Ellen’s laugh, but it was no use. Ever since he’d come to Nam he’d been forgetting things, and now almost everything was gone. And what he did remember seemed more like something he’d overheard in a bar, some dim, muffled conversation. He couldn’t have seen Perkins holding his plastic yellow guts, or C.B.’s brains in his mouth, the top of his skull turned to pulp. He couldn’t have seen these things. It was impossible. Wasn’t Perkins transferred to another company? Hadn’t C.B. gone back to the world?
By the time Freeze finally remembered to turn over the steak, it had burned black.
After lights out, a heavy monsoon rain began to beat against the ponchos nailed on the outside of the hootch. The wind whipped the water against the green plastic, battering the hootch like incoming.
Then it was incoming. Duckwalk sat up in the rack next to Freeze’s. “You hear that?” he asked.
Freeze sat up, his poncho liner wrapped around him.
“Not tonight, Charlie,” Jackson moaned, “I’m having me a wet dream.”
They listened as the mortars walked in closer and closer. At first there was only a distant pop, then a closer thud. Then they heard the whistling of a round and the roar of an explosion.
“Shit,” Freeze said. And he and the rest of the men scrambled out of their racks, grabbing their M-16s, and double-timed in their skivvies out into the cold pounding rain. Through the rain’s thick odor of rot, they could smell the sharp scents of gunpowder and cordite. On the perimeter of the camp, M-79 grenade launchers and mortars were thumping into a sky green with star flares, punctuating the nonstop sentence of an M-16 on rock-’n’-roll.
In the platoon bunker, they huddled behind the wet sandbags, shivering, staring out at the dark. Konieczny was next to Freeze. “Are they gonna come through the wire?” he asked. When a star flare burst, his face turned green, a Martian’s, and Freeze felt the urge to laugh. Then he heard the whistle of an incoming round. He ducked and waited for the burst. It seemed to take forever. Looking around, he saw that everyone was still, as if they’d been frozen. He remembered the game he’d played as a kid back in Arkansas. Statues. It was like they were playing Statues.
Then the shell exploded nearby, raining shrapnel into the bunker, and everybody came alive again. Somebody started screaming.
Reynolds stood up at his end of the bunker. “Who’s down?”
Everybody looked around. But no one was hurt. Then the screaming started again. It was coming from outside the bunker.
“I’m dying!” the man yelled. “Help me!”
Before anyone could say anything, Reynolds had crawled out of the bunker and started to run in a crouch toward a man lying in the mud halfway between the second platoon hootch and bunker. Under the light of the star flares, Freeze watched the brown-bar drag the man toward their bunker. For a second he admired Reynolds for rescuing the soldier when he could have ordered someone else to do it, but then he felt the comforting return of hate. The hotdog, he thought. He’s bucking for goddamn Eagle Scout.
The moment Reynolds made it back, they heard the whistle of another mortar and ducked, holding their breaths until it exploded. Then they looked up.
Someone shined his flashlight on the man. “Jesus H. Christ,” Reynolds said then, and turned away, disgusted. The man was all right. He hadn’t been hit at all. Still, he was moaning as if he were dying.
“Save me,” the soldier pleaded. “Don’t let me die. I don’t want to die.” It was clear that he wasn’t talking to anybody there. He was staring up at the sky, his eyes blank as milk glass, and whimpering. And he wasn’t even a twink. He’d been in the bush long enough to get a bad case of jungle rot. It had invaded his face, and though he’d tried to hide it by growing a scruffy beard, it made his skin look raw.
They told him he was okay, but he kept on moaning and crying. Even after the mortars stopped falling and the machine guns faded to random bursts, he would not stop.
The rest of the men looked away, embarrassed, but Freeze couldn’t take his eyes off him.
The next morning, the other soldiers were laughing about the man who thought he was wounded, calling him a snuffy, a wuss, and praising Reynolds for risking his butt to save him. They even had a nickname for Reynolds now. “Man, did you see the look he gave that pogue?” Jackson had said. “It was righteous rabid.” And it stuck. All the while they prepared for inspection, the men talked about Righteous Rabid and The Wuss. A week before, Freeze would have joined in. But he wasn’t one of them anymore.
At inspection, Reynolds stopped in front of Freeze and poked him in the gut with his finger. “Private Harris,” he said, “you look like you’ve put on a couple of pounds since yesterday.” He looked Freeze in the eye. “Maybe you had an extra helping of ham and mothers? Or maybe the entire platoon gave you their cookies?”
Freeze stood there a moment. For some reason he was suddenly sleepy. He wanted to lie down and go to sleep right there on the floor of the hootch.
“I’m talking to you, Private,” Reynolds said.
Freeze just stood there. He was so tired he didn’t even have the energy to lie.
“So you did do it,” Reynolds said. Then he put his face in Freeze’s. “I’m going to report this little incident to Captain Arnold, and I’m going to recommend that you receive an Article 15. If I have my way, he’ll bust your ass to E-1.” Reynolds sneered. “But until then you can party. How does filling sandbags sound for starters?”
A mortar shell had blasted through the first layer of sandbags during the attack and ripped into the second layer, spilling sand like guts. It would take hours to fill enough sandbags to repair the bunker, and it was going to be another hundred and ten degree day. Already the sun was burning off the puddles left by the rain.
Freeze stared at the blue vein that popped out on Reynolds’ forehead, between his eyes, a perfect target. “It sounds like shit,” he heard someone say. It was a second before he realized he was the one who said it.
Reynolds stiffened.
“What did you say, pogue?”
Freeze said, “Cut me some slack.”
Reynolds’ eyes narrowed. “Maybe one Article 15 isn’t enough for you, Harris. Maybe you’d like another.”
Freeze stared at him. He was trying to hate him, trying to recapture the way he’d felt when he stole the steaks, but he couldn’t get it back. He wanted it back desperately, but it wouldn’t come. After a moment he looked down.
“No, I didn’t think you’d want any more,” Reynolds said then, stepping back and smiling. “I figured you’d had enough.”
The rest of that morning, Freeze filled sandbags in the dizzying heat, his back and shoulders aching, while a fat-ass MP named Hulsey stood by the bunker, throwing his walnut baton into the air and catching it. He was trying to see how many times he could spin the baton and still catch it. So far his record was six revolutions. Whenever he dropped the baton, he’d say “Uncle fucking Ho” and spit. Freeze stood, stretching his stiff back, and watched the MP fling the baton. He shook his head. He’d come halfway around the world to watch a man toss a baton into the air and try to catch it. And the MP had made the same trip to watch a man shovel sand. Freeze wanted to tell him how crazy it was, maybe suggest they go get a beer, but the MP caught the baton and said, “Seven. A new record! Let’s hear it for the boy from Brooklyn.” Freeze turned back to his work.
He finished repairing the bunker just before noon. He thought the brown-bar was done with him then, but after lunch, Reynolds gave him more scutwork to do. He mopped the barracks, unloaded ammo crates from a deuce-and-a-half truck, and then helped carry the wounded from medevac helicopters, humping stretchers down the metal ramp to the deck, where medics sorted the living from the dead. He was so exhausted from working in the heat that he could barely stand in the prop wash of the helicopters. He staggered in the hot wind, gravel swarming around him, stinging like hornets, and felt his hatred for Reynolds rise almost to madness. He knew Reynolds was just making an example of him, using him to prove to the others that he was in charge and wouldn’t take any shit, and he knew he’d back off as soon as he felt he’d made his point. But Freeze didn’t care. He still hated him. The bastard had treated him like a dead man’s turd ever since he came. He’d embarrassed him in front of his best friends, he’d turned them against him. He could hear the men now, talking and laughing about Righteous Rabid and Freeze. Well, he’d give them something to talk about. When they got out in the bush, he’d frag the son of a bitch. This decision made him feel suddenly calm, even happy, but then he saw Reynolds lying dead on the jungle floor, his eyes open to nothing, his face mottled with shadows cast by the sunlight flickering through the trees, and everything was as confused as a dream again because Reynolds was wearing Freeze’s fatigues and he was smiling. Grinning. Almost laughing. Freeze stood there in the prop wash until his partner yelled from the chopper’s cargo bay for him to hurry up and give him a hand.
A few minutes later, as he bent to pick up his end of a stretcher, he saw that one of the grunt’s legs had been blown off just below the knee and that the other was terribly mangled. Someone had laid the severed leg on top of him. He had his arms around it, holding it to his chest, and he was staring off somewhere, a slight smile frozen on his lips, as if he’d just heard something mildly funny.
“Heavy fucker, ain’t he?” Freeze’s partner said, as they hoisted the stretcher.
The next day the stand-down ended and the company was sent back out on line. They stood inspection, marched to the air field, climbed aboard the choppers and flew north over the jungle, finally setting down in the brush and bamboo of Tay Ninh province. Freeze was glad to be in the bush; he’d rather be in the shit, where all you had to worry about was someone greasing you, than in camp, where pogue officers like Reynolds policed your every move. He figured that Reynolds would let up on him now, but if he didn’t, Freeze would pick his moment and frag his ass.
Reynolds didn’t let up. The first day after they’d finished carving Fire Base Molly out of the jungle, stripping the foliage down to the bare dirt, digging bunkers, and stringing coils of concertina wire around the perimeter, he dispatched Freeze, Konieczny, and Clean to secure a helicopter supply drop for a tank column—three men to defend thousands of gallons of diesel fuel and tons of ammo.
“One dink with a hand grenade could blow the whole damn drop to Saigon,” Freeze complained, though he didn’t really care.
Reynolds looked at him. “The tank column is due at 1900 hours. Saddle up.” Then he turned and walked away.
Freeze raised his hand and sighted down his index finger at the lieutenant’s back. Bang.
Duckwalk turned to him, his thumbs hooked behind the silver buckle of the NVA belt he’d souvenired from a sniper. “Relax, bro,” he said. “He’s just the Army. What you expect him to do—be your friend?”
Freeze didn’t say anything. He shouldered his pack and headed out toward the supply drop with Konieczny and Clean. When they got there, Konieczny sat on one of the crates and radioed back to Reynolds. Freeze broke open another crate. “Chocolate milk,” he said, taking out a carton and shaking his head. “Chocolate fucking milk.”
“What’s your problem, Freeze?” Clean said. “I’m getting sick of this shit. We’re all getting sick of it.”
Freeze looked at Clean. Then he opened the carton and took a drink. When he finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t let this milk fall into enemy hands.”
Then he turned and humped off into a stand of bamboo a couple of hundred meters away and crawled down into a crater left by a mortar shell. He lay there, smoking a Park Lane, and thought about greasing Reynolds. He had to be careful; if he got caught, they’d put him in Long Binh Jail and the only world he’d go back to would be Leavenworth. But even that might be worth it. He imagined Reynolds face-down on the ground, his brains leaking out his open mouth. As soon as Reynolds was dead, he could rest. Everything would make sense again and he’d be at peace. He took out another joint and smoked it. The sun bore down on him, its heat a heavy weight, and soon he fell asleep.
He didn’t wake until he felt the ground tremble and heard the steel rumble of the tanks. The sun was hovering over the edge of the horizon, staining the countryside a dusty red. Climbing out of the crater, he sauntered back to the supply drop. He came up to Konieczny and Clean just as the tanks rolled over the rise.
Clean looked at him. “Thanks for your fucking help.”
Konieczny looked down the road and didn’t say anything.
Freeze didn’t know Clean had reported him until the next day, when Reynolds led the platoon on a reconnaissance-in-force. They humped through the jungle all morning, sweating under their packs; then, toward midday, they smelled shit cooking in the heat. It had to be an NVA camp. Through a stand of bamboo, they spotted a row of bunkers. Reynolds ordered Freeze’s fire team to go in first, and they approached in a cloverleaf pattern. But the camp was abandoned. Bombers had attacked it, probably no more than a week before, and there were tank-sized craters everywhere. In a few places, the ground was still white from the phosphorous the spotter plane had dropped to give the B-52s their target. There was no sign of the NVA anywhere. Still, Reynolds ordered Freeze to check out a bunker that hadn’t been caved in by the bombs.
“It’s crawling with fire ants,” Freeze said. “There’s no gooks in there.”
“I said check it out, Harris.”
“Why me?” Freeze said.
Reynolds glared at him. “Yesterday I gave you a direct order, and you subverted it. It will not happen again.”
Freeze looked at Konieczny, then at Clean. Clean crossed his arms on his chest and looked back.
So Freeze climbed down and checked the bunker out, and when he came scrambling out a moment later, the ants were all over him. He jumped up and down, swatting and swiping at the red sons of bitches, while the men laughed at him.
“You bastard,” Freeze said to Reynolds. “You motherfucking bastard. I’m not going to eat any more of your shit.”
“Oh yes you will,” Reynolds said. “You’ll eat it. You’ll lick your plate clean, and you’ll ask for more.”
Freeze stood there, breathing hate, and stared at Reynolds, an animal snarl on his face. He hated him more than he’d ever hated the NVA. He hated him more than the heat and the jungle, the leeches and mosquitoes, the monsoon rains, the smells of sulfur and shit and death, more than his sixty-pound pack, the blisters on his shoulders, the wet socks, the jungle rot and immersion foot, more than the lizards that cried fuck you, fuck you in the night, the thump of mortars, the booby traps, more even than the mine that hadn’t gone off.
“That’s a negative,” Freeze said, and before Reynolds could move, he snapped the bolt of his M-16, chambering a round, and shoved the flash suppressor into his belly, just under his ribs. The blood was drumming in his temples.
Reynolds sucked in a breath. The men stepped back. “Holy shit,” Konieczny said.
“Take it easy, bro,” Jackson said. “Everybody’s watching. You don’t want to do nothing when everybody’s watching.”
Freeze ignored him. He stared at Reynolds. Reynolds opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out. He closed and opened it again. Sweat began to bead on his upper lip. Freeze focused on one of the beads, and waited for it to slide down his lip and break. But it didn’t move. It hung there, as if time had stopped, as if there were no more time.
Then everything went out of Freeze. What was he so angry about? It didn’t mean anything anymore. It didn’t seem real. Nothing seemed real. The drop of sweat. The circle of men staring at him like he was a gook. Reynolds. He looked around at the craters that surrounded them. They could be on the moon. He lowered his rifle and sat down in the red dust, suddenly dizzy. His hands were trembling.
Then Reynolds blinked and swallowed hard. He looked around him and finally found words. “Konieczny,” he said, his voice shaking slightly, “get on the horn to HQ. We need to call in a chopper to remove Private Harris to the stockade.”
Konieczny said, “Yes sir” and began to call headquarters.
Reynolds looked down at Freeze then and, squaring his shoulders, said, in a voice that shook now more with anger than fear, “Get this son of a bitch out of my sight. Get him out of here before I kill him.”
But Freeze didn’t hear him. He wasn’t there. He had stepped on the mine and he was rising into the air, twisting and turning in the bursting light for one last peaceful second.