A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo

Author:Philip Caputo [Caputo, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Military, Vietnam War, History
ISBN: 9780805046953
Google: 2gksYQYq9UEC
Amazon: 1455884456
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1996-11-14T11:00:00+00:00

Chapter

Eleven

If I were fierce and bald and short of breath,

I’d live with scarlet majors at the Base,

And speed glum heroes up the line to death.

—Siegfried Sassoon

“Base Details”

Lying on my cot, I heard the crackling of rifle fire, the drumming of rain against the taut canvas above my head, and a voice calling, “Stand-to. Up out of the rack, hundred-percent alert.” It was very early morning, I was only half awake, and the rifle fire, the voice, and the sound of the rain seemed to come from far off. Then one of the eight-inch howitzers let go. I sat suddenly upright and knew I wasn’t dreaming. The small-arms fire was loud and fairly close. Webb Harrisson—it was his voice I had heard—stood at one end of the tent, unhooking the flaps.

“Hey-ey, P.J., you’re finally awake. I think we’ve got visitors again tonight.”

Parting the flap, he went outside. I grabbed my carbine from my footlocker and followed him. Jamming a banana clip into the carbine’s magazine well, pulling the bolt back to chamber a round, I ran clumsily in the mud toward the perimeter. I could not see Harrisson. The rain felt cold on my bare back. Off to the left, around 1st Battalion’s section of the line, muzzle-flashes winked in the darkness. Tracers from a machine gun streaked in swift succession across the flat rice paddies beyond the wire.

Slipping in mud that had been powdery dust before the rain, I fell and rolled into a foxhole just as a flare popped. The water in the foxhole was knee-deep and cold and silty-feeling inside my boots. Another flare went up, and another. They hung briefly in the black sky, then started to drift downward on their small parachutes, swinging back and forth, making a strange, squeaking noise as they swung in the wind.

I could see the rain slanting across the wavering orange circles of the flares, the outlines of the tents, two helmeted marines in a foxhole to the left front of mine, and, across the road, the thick, wet-shining barrels of the eight-inchers. The guns kept firing at their distant targets, as if they were indifferent to the petty skirmishing only a hundred yards away.

I guessed it was another probe. The night before—the night of June 22—the VC had tried to infiltrate Page 102

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through headquarters company lines. Now they appeared to be looking for weak spots in One-Three’s perimeter. That was only a guess—I had no idea of what was actually going on. The flares hit the ground, sputtered for a few seconds, and went out. The regimental sergeant major sloshed past me dressed only in a pair of green undershorts and carrying a Thompson submachine gun in one hand. I called him over.

Big and bulky, he jumped into the foxhole with a splash.

“Jee-suz fucking Chee-rist,” he bellowed, not caring who heard him. “You didn’t tell me this was a goddamned swimming pool, lieutenant.”

“Never mind that. What the hell’s going on?”

“How the hell should I know? Probably a couple of scared kids shooting at bushes.

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