'You fools, we'll all go. Reload, make ready, shoot at anything that moves. Kill the American demon.'
'Kill the demon, my brothers!'
He watched as the feet began to move toward him.
Get small, he told himself. Be very, very small!
He went into a fetal position, willing himself into a stillness so total it was almost a replication of genuine animal death. It was a gift he had, the hunter's gift, to make his body of the earth, not upon it. He worried only about the smell of his sweat, rich with American fats, that could alert the wisest of them.
Feet came so close.
He saw canvas boots, and a pair of shower clogs.
They won this fucking war in shower clogs!
The two pairs of feet sloughed through the grass, each vivid in the perfection of its detail. The man in shower clogs had small, dirty, tough feet. The clogs were probably just an afterthought, he could fight barefoot in snow or on gravel. The other's boots were holey, torn, taped together, a hobo's comic footwear, something Red Skelton's Clem Kadiddlehopper might wear. But then the boots marched on, passing by, and Bob scooted ahead, slithering through the grass until he came to a fold in the earth. He rose, checked around, and saw nothing in the mist, and then raced off to the right, down the fold, toward the column, which had probably resumed its movement toward Arizona.
Then he crashed into the soldier.
NVA.
The two looked at each other for one stupid moment, Bob and this obvious straggler, the idiot who'd wandered away. The man's mouth opened as if to scream even as he fumbled to bring his AK to bear, but Bob launched at him in an animal spring of pure evil brutality, smashing him in the mouth with his skull, and driving downward on him, pinning the assault rifle to his chest under his own dense weight. He got his left hand about the man's throat, crushing it, applying the full pinning weight of his body while at the same time reaching for his Randall knife.
The man squirmed and bucked spastically, his own hands beating at Bob's neck and head. Then one hand dipped, also for a knife, presumably, but Bob rolled slightly to the left and drew his knee up and drove it into the man's testicles with all the force he could muster. He heard the intake of breath as the concussion folded his enemy.
Then he had the knife, and no impulse halted him. He drove it forward into the belly, turned it sideways so the cutting edge sliced into entrails, and drew it to the left.
The man spasmed, fighting the pain, his hand flying to Bob's wrist, gagging sounds leaking from a constricted throat. Bob yanked the knife out and stabbed upward, feeling the blade sink into throat. He fought for leverage over the dying soldier, got himself upright and astride the heaving chest and drove the blade two or three more times into the torso, the man arching with each stroke.
He sat back. He looked about, saw the Remington a few feet away. He wiped the Randall blade on his camoflaged trousers, and slipped it back into the upside-down sheath on his chest. He checked quickly: two pistols, a canteen. He picked up the Remington but had no time to look for his hat, which had fallen off in the struggle. A lick of salty blood ran down from the point on his crown where he'd head-butted the North Vietnamese, and it arrived at the corner of his mouth, shocking him. He turned, looked at the man.
Why had it been so easy? Why was the man so weak?
The answer was obvious: the soldier was about fourteen.
He'd never shaved in his life. In death, his face was dirty, but essentially undisturbed. His eyes were open and bright but blank. His teeth were white. He had acne.
Bob looked at the bloody package that had been a boy.
A feeling of revulsion came over him. He bent, retched up a few gobs of undigested C-rat, gathered his breath, wiped the blood off his hands, and turned back to the path that lay ahead of him, which led to the column.
I am war, he thought, this is what I do.
Huu Co's political officer Phuc Go was adamant. A stocky little man who'd been to Russian staff school, Phuc Go had the blunt force of a party apparatchik, a man who lived and breathed the party and was a master of dialectics.
'Brother Colonel, you must move, despite the cost. To waste more time is to lose our precious advantage. How many can a single man kill? Can he kill more than forty, possibly fifty? That is well under a twenty percent casualty rate, that is entirely acceptable to the Party. Sometimes, the fighters' lives must be spent to accomplish the mission.'
Huu Co nodded solemnly. Up ahead, sporadic fire broke out, but the column had bogged down again. There was no word from the flanking patrol and no word from the sappers who'd been recalled. Still, the American assailed them with well-aimed shots, cadre his particular specialty.
How did he know? Cadre wore no rank pins, carried few symbols of the ego of leadership such as riding crops, swords or funny hats. Leaders were indistinguishable from fighters, both in party theory and in actual practice. Yet this American had some instinct for command, and when he fired, he brought down leaders, not always but in high enough percentage to be disruptive.
'He is hitting our cadre, brother Political Officer. And what if we push on, and he robs us over the kilometers of our leadership? And we get to the objective and no leaders come forth and our attacks fail? What will the party say then? Whose ears will ring the most loudly with criticism?'
'Our fighters can produce leaders from amongst themselves. That is our strength. That is our power.'
'But our leaders must be trained, and to squander them for nothing but the ego of a political officer who seeks the glory of seeing his column destroy an American fort late in an already victorious war may itself be a decision that is commented upon.'
'I wonder, dear brother Colonel, if indeed there are not vestiges of Western humanitarianism, the sick
