The warmth of that moment came flooding back across him, its meaningless glory warming and giving him just the slightest tingle of energy. Maybe he would make it.
But then he went down, floundering, feeling the water flood into his lungs, and he struggled, coughing out buffalo shit and a million paramecium. A harsh grip pulled him out and he shook like a wet dog. It was Swagger, of course.
'Come on,' Swagger yelled through the din of pounding rain.
'We're almost out of the paddies. Then all we got is another set of hills, a river and a goddamn mountain.
Damn, ain't this fun?'
Water. According to the map, the river was called la Trang. It bore no other name and on the paper was a squiggly black line, its secrets unrevealed. As it lay before them in reality, however, it was swollen brown and wide, over spilling its banks, and was a swift, deadly current. The rain smashed against its turbulent surface like machine gun fire.
'Guess what?' said Swagger.
'You just got a new job.'
'Huh?'
'You just got a new job. You're now the lifeguard.'
'Why?'
'
'Cause I cain't swim a lick,' he said, with a broad smile.
'Great,' said Donny.
'I can't either.'
'Oh, this one's going to be a pisser. Damn, why'd you insist on this trip?'
'I was momentarily deluded into thinking I was important.'
'That kind of thinkin'll git you killed every damn time.
Now, let's see if we can find some wood or something.'
They ranged the dangerous bank of the river and in time came to a bombed-out village. The gunships and Phantoms had worked it over pretty well, nothing could have survived the hell of that recent day. No structure stood: only timbers, piles of ash liquified to gunk in the pounding rain, craters everywhere, a long smear of burned vegetation where the napalm splashed through, killing everything it touched. A cooking pot lay on its side, speared by a machine gun bullet, so that it blossomed outward in jagged petals. The stench of the burning still clung to the ground, despite the rain. There were no bodies, but just out of the kill zone a batch of newly dug graves with now- dead Buddhist incense reeds in cheap black jars had been etched into the ground. Two were very, very small.
'I hope they were bad guys,' said Donny, looking at the new cemetery.
'If we run this fucking war right,' Swagger said, 'we'd have known they was bad, because we'd have people on the ground, up close. Not this shit. Not just hosing the place down with firepower. Nobody should have to die because he's in the wrong place at the wrong time and some squid pilot's got some ordnance left and don't want to land on no carrier with it.'
Donny looked at him. In five months of extreme togetherness, Bob had never said a thing about the way the war was waged, what it cost, who it killed, why it happened.
His, instead, was the practical craft of mission and its close pal survival: how to do this thing, where to hide, how to track, what to shoot, how to kill, how to get the job done and come back alive.
'Well, nobody'll ever know, that's for goddamn sure,' said Bob.
'Unless you get out of this shit hole and you tell 'em. You got that, Pork? That's your new MOS: witness.
You got that?'
Familiar again. Where was this from? What did this mean? What sounded so right about it, the same melody, slightly different instrument?
'I'll tell 'em.'
'
'Cause I'm too dumb to tell 'em. They'll never listen to a hillbilly like me. They'll listen to you, boy, 'cause you looked the goddamn elephant in the eye and came back to talk about it. Got that?'
'Got it.'
'Good. Now let's scare up some wood and build us Noah's ark.'
They scrounged in the ruins and came up after a bit with seven decent pieces of wood, which Bob rigged together in some clever Boy Scout way with a coil of black rope he carried. He lashed his and Donny's rifles, the two 782-packs and harnesses, all the grenades, the map case, the canteens, the PRC-77, the flares and flare gun, and the pistols to it.
'Okay, you really can't swim?'
'I can sort of.'
'Well, I can a bit, too. The deal is, you cling hard to this thing and you kick hard. I'll be on the other side.
Keep your face out of the water and keep on fighting, no matter what. And don't let go. The current'll take you and you'll be one dead puppy dog and nobody'll remember your name till they inscribe it on some monument and
