War Lover (The Vietnam War Book 2) by Steven Hardesty

Author:Steven Hardesty
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Stevens & Marlin Publishing, LLC
Published: 2011-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

A Bird Dog glides down from a sky browning with dusk. It shoots over the roadway beside Firebase Marilyn canted on one wing as though the pilot is studying the road surface and then it returns, dropping down onto the asphalt. The gate guard standing beside Corbett says, “He supposed to land out there like that? not supposed to land on the highway, are they?”

The Dog draws up in front of Corbett Brown and John Gingles gets out of the rear seat and waves off the plane. The aircraft skitters down the road, jumps into the air and is gone. Gingles – showered, shaved, starched, a Swedish submachinegun slung around his neck, Army issue earplugs in a plastic holder hanging from a breast pocket button and a sleep mask in his hand – stands in the sand gazing at the firebase with its bright battleflags and howitzers cracking out gray smoke. “This is great!” he says to Corbett, “just great!”

Corbett leads an ambush patrol out of Marilyn and into the hills west of the firebase and Gingles says to him, “What we supposed to do out here?”

“Find something and kill it,” Corbett says.

“Easy as that?”

“Killing is easy – finding is hard.”

“Is that the grunt’s grand strategy?”

“Appears to be – we kill enough Chucks tonight, Marilyn won’t be sniped tomorrow – the day after, we go out and do it again.”

“You can do this whenever you want? Jesus, this is great!” says Gingles with such a delight that he surprises Corbett into a momentary delusion that there is a world outside the jungle where normal things exist, where there is no cutting off of heads, no snapshots of corpses, no blundering through forest looking for men to kill. That’s right, says one of Corbett, cleaving away to that very special London season when the Beatles come out onto the streets, 007 is seen everywhere from the back of a double-decker bus and veiled Arab women with gold bangles swarm through the shopping precincts. This young Mr. Corbett Brown in leather coat and purple tie standing at the door of the Ritz Hotel counting on his left hand the number of famous people who pass him and on his right hand the number of pretty girls who return his cheery American smile. He runs out of left-hand fingers. Not so the right hand. There are so many beautiful English girls with white-white faces, pale-pale hair and blue-blue eyes, girls wan as vampire victims, girls the persistent English rain will never let see sunshine, who do not notice Corbett Brown with his counting hands, or do not let him see that they notice. So many hundreds of girls! ignore him that Corbett begins to feel happy desperation creep over him. He stands there with one hand splayed and the other holding up several fingers and he wants to shout, “Beautiful girls! All of you, marry me!” but Mokrani says,

“Lieutenant, freeze!”

Corbett stops. Across his boot is stretched a black thread. Not me! he wants to whimper.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.