Sympathy for the Devil by Kent Anderson

Author:Kent Anderson [Anderson, Kent]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Vietnam War; 1961-1975, Fiction, War & Military, Men's Adventure, Vietnamese Conflict; 1961-1975, Classics
ISBN: 9780553580877
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2000-07-31T23:00:00+00:00

His nose was bleeding. The APC skidded to a stop as Quinn hopped off and hit the ground running with seventy pounds of equipment. "You all right there, little buddy?" he shouted.

"Yeah, yeah," Hanson grunted, wiping the blood off his nose and lip. "Look at this." He reached down and grabbed the smoldering body by the back of its belt. He heaved up, jackknifing it Page 367

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at the waist, off the ground, holding the dead soldier easily. But the body had been opened by the grenade and a purple and silver load of guts fell heavily to the ground, trailing ribbons of muscle and membrane.

Hanson threw the body down. "Never mind. Never mind, goddammit. He's all fucked up. I'll find you another one.

The last thing they did was strip the bodies of negotiable war souvenirs, trdding material. They usually left the packets of letters, the snapshots of parents and sweethearts. Hanson told Quinn that killing people, then stripping their bodies of personal effects was "a new, aggressive school of social anthropology.

Twice he'd remembered to take an ear after a firefight, but neither one had worked out. He couldn't really get anything but the back part of the ear, not the little flap in the front, so they didn't really look like ears. He tried drying them on the tin roof of the teamhouse, but insects went after them, particularly a species of large red wasp. One of them spoiled during the rainy season, and the one that did dry wasn't recognizable as anything, looking like a piece of dried fruit, and Hanson threw it away.

Quang Tri

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Moonlight bled through chinks in the longhouse wall and threw silver bars of light across its smoky interior as a flight of Phantom jets sighed high overhead like wind through the trees. A new tapestry was still on the loom, almost finished, the most recent of the weavings that reflected everyday tribal life like illustrations in a history book. It was done in the traditional dyes, the background blue, green jungle at the bottom, showing longhouses and moon-faced buffalo looking out from the foreground. Tiny human figures bent over a green-and-brown plaid of rice paddy, and off in one corner a tiger stalked into the green wool, snarling over its shoulder. A black Cobra gunship with jagged fangs stitched across its nose dominated the tapestry, blotting out all but the borders of the sky, looming like a thunderhead over the scene below.

The pilot and gunner, their flat features woven in white yarn, looked full-face out the side of the canopy. Streaks of red yarn, indicating tracer rounds, were stitched from the nose of the gunship to the border of the design. The Bhade word for "war" and the word for "bamboo knife"

were the same, as tribal wars had been fought primarily with the long, elaborately carved knives. That seemed like a long time before, Mr.

Minh thought, turning from the tapestry to the

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