'Okay, Fenn, I can't save you from Vietnam, but I can get you some time off before you have to go if I can get your orders cut before Bonson's paperwork catches up with you.'
'Yes, sir.'
'You go change into civvies now. You be ready to take off as soon as possible.'
'Yes, sir. I-Thank you, sir.'
'Oh, just a moment. Yes, here she is.'
A woman walked into the room, pleasant, in her late twenties. Donny recognized her from the picture on the desk as Dogwood's wife.
'Here, Mort,' she said, handing an envelope over. She turned to Donny.
'You must be very foolish, young man.
Or very brave.'
'I don't know, ma'am.'
'Fenn, here. It's six hundred dollars, cash. It's all we had in our quarters. It'll take you and your girlfriend someplace for a few days.'
'Sir, I--' 'No, no, go ahead, son. Take it. Enjoy yourself. Pay it back when you can. And when you get to the 'Nam, keep your ass down. That shithole isn't worth another Marine.
Not a single one. Now go. Go, go, son. And good luck.'
PART II
SNIPER TEAM
SIERRA-BRAVO-FOUR
RSVN, I Corps February-May 1972
CHAPTER nine.
The rain fell in torrents in I Corps. It was the end of the rainy season and no rainier season is rainier than the one in the Republic of South Vietnam. Da Nang, the capital of this dying empire, was wet, but some further hundred klicks out, wetter still, lay the fortified fire base a few of the Marines left in the Land of Bad Things called Dodge City, a ramshackle slum of sandbags, 105mm howitzers, S-shops, bunkers, barbed wire and filthy, open four-holers. It was the tail end of a lost war and nobody wanted to get wasted before the orders were cut that got these sad boys home.
But there were Marines even beyond Dodge City, out in Indian Country. There, in a tangle of scrub trees near the top of a hill identified on maps only by its height in meters--Hill 519--two of them cowered in the downpour, watching the drops accumulate on the rims of their boonie caps, gather and finally drop off, while the rain beat a cold tattoo against the ponchos that covered both of them and their gear.
One of them dreamed of home. It was Lance Corporal Donny Fenn, and he was getting very short. In May, his four-year enlistment was up, he was home free. He knew his DEROS by heart, as did every man in the 'Nam, the ones who first came in 1965, the ones who were still there: Date of Estimated Return from Overseas Service.
Donny's was 07 May 1972. He was a two-tour guy, with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, and though he no longer believed in the war, he did believe, passionately, that he was going to make it. He had to.
On this wet morning, Donny dreamed of dry pleasures.
He dreamed of the desert, from where he'd come, Pima County, Arizona, the town of Ajo, and the hot dry air that pulsed down from the Sonoras out of Mexico, dry as the devil's breath. He dreamed of baking in such a place, going back to college, on to law school. He dreamed of a house, of a family, a job. Most of all, he dreamed of his young wife, who had just written him, and the words were inscribed in his mind now as he sat in the downpour: 'You keep your spirits high, Marine! I know you'll make it and I pray for that day. You are the best thing that ever happened to me and I cannot live without you, so if you get killed, I am going to be plenty angry! I might never talk to you again, I would be so mad.'
He had written her back just before this boonie jaunt: 'Oh, you sweet thang, I do miss you so. Things are fine here. I didn't know spiders could get big as lobsters or that it could rain for three solid months, but these are useful facts and will come in ever so handy back in the world. But the Sarge will keep me alive, because he's the smartest Marine that ever lived or breathed and he said if I got wasted, who the hell would he pick on and that would be no fun at all!'
Rolled into his hatband, swaddled in cellophane, was a picture of Julie, now out of her hippie phase, though she worked at the Tucson Veterans Hospital among the wounded from another war and was even talking of a nursing career now. In the picture, Julie's beauty was like a beam in the night for a man lost and starving.
A shiver rose through Donny's spine, a deep and relentless cold. The world had liquified: it was mud, fog or rain, no other elements existed. It was an almost incandescent world, whose low lights yielded no hint to time of day. The vapors simply floated in gray murk, a kind of universal declamation of misery.
Under his poncho he felt the coldness of one of the few M14s left in Vietnam, with a twenty-round magazine leaning into his leg, ready for instant deployment if Sierra-Bravo-Four were bounced, but that would never happen because the sergeant was so skilled at picking hides.
He carried two canteens, a 782-pack full of C-rats, mostly barbecued pork, four M26 grenades, a Colt .45 automatic, an M-49 spotting scope, a black phosphate-bladed K-Bar, ten extra twenty-round
7.62 NATO mags, three Claymore mine bandoleers, one M57 electrical firing device, a canvas bag full of flares and a flare launcher, and, enemy of his life, bane of his existence, most hated of all objects on the face of the earth, a PRC-77 radio, fourteen pounds of lifeline to Dodge.
'Commo check,' said the sergeant, who sat a few feet from Donny, gazing at the same rain-blasted, foliage- dense landscape, the plains and paddies and jungles and low, mean hills.
'Get on the horn, Pork.'
'Shit,' said Donny, for deploying the radio meant moving, moving meant breaking the steamy seal the poncho had formed around his neck, which meant cold water would cascade down his neck into the sweaty warmth of his
