“It?s your business to tell him?”
“Nobody else was going to do it. Time somebody played honest with the man.”
“Did that all right,” he said. “Just wonder what Dutch is going to say.”
“I wouldn?t worry about Dutch,” I replied. “I?d worry about Stoney Titan.”
After a moment Callahan said, “Yeah and seemed awed at the prospect.
I didn?t tell him what else had happened, that I was measuring the man to see what kind of stuff he
was made of.
I wasn?t sure I liked the answer.
58
FLASHBACK: NAM DIARY, THE SECOND SIX
The 182nd day: We know this village is a VC hideout. We go by the place, there?s this pot of rice
crooking, enough for maybe a hundred people, and there?s some old folks around, a dozen kids, two
or three younger women, that?s all.
„They sure are skinny, to eat that much,” Jesse Hatch says as we walk by.
Flagler?s replacement is this kid from Pennsylvania, handles a .60 caliber like it was part of his arm.
He learns fast too. We call him Gunner. He says he used to hunt all the time, poaching and
everything, summer and winter, since he was maybe eight, nine years old. Nothing scares him. He
achieved “aw fuck it” status before he ever got to Nam.
Anyway, we go back tonight to see if maybe the village is a gook shelter and there was activity all
over the place. What we got is Cook City. We flare the place and hit it from both sides, only there?s a
stream on the back side of the village and they get on the other side and we are pinned down. There
are green tracers going all over the place, rounds bouncing off shit, kicking around us.
We?re pouring stuff into the hooches, just shooting the shit out of them, and all of a sudden one of
them goes off. They must?ve had all their ammo stored inside because it was the Fourth of July—
squared. Grenades, mortars, tracers, mines. Everybody?s freaking out, running around. Then Hatch
catches one in the leg from the other side of the stream and he goes over the side into the water and
he panics and starts yelling that he can?t swim and Carmody is yelling, “Shut up, for Christ sakes”
only it?s too late and Jesse catches a couple in the head. Carmody and me, we go over the side and
