Close Quarters by Larry Heinemann

Author:Larry Heinemann [Heinemann, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307517708
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2005-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Christmas Day was a truce day. That’s the only reason I remember it.

On the twenty-fourth Romeo pulled out of Dau Tieng with a battery of 105s and laagered at some no-name fire base in a stand of old, wild-grown rubber trees. At four o’clock the next morning Quinn roused me for guard. I slipped on my field jacket for the chill. I wrapped my blanket around my shoulders and sat behind my fifty with my knees drawn up, but a breeze came between my legs from inside, and I couldn’t help shivering. The ground looked moist and even wet in spots, on the verge of frost. I pulled the blanket up over my head, blew on my fingers, and still I shivered. Christmas Day.

It was not very dark, not as dark as three or threethirty, say. A cast of gray-green half light filled the sky, thin black shadows that faded into dull hues of mere darkness. At three it had been pitch dark. At four a fluorescent pale lightness shown, like a low-watt lamp through opaque glass. Not shadows but not really day. If such a light falls across a just-born, he is marked. He will be a strange and moody child; a withdrawn and silent man. He will always be at the edge just on the brink of everything, looking up at love and work and people. He will push a broom. He will slide the slop bucket along with his foot, slapping the mop from wall to wall in quick and easy figure-eights, and on the day he dies there will be no sign, no revelation, no mourners. He will die on one of those days when fog hangs low over cities and airports are closed.

Christmas Day. There would be no tree hung with silver icicles and jumbo candy canes and homemade, handmade cookies; no uncles snoring in the front-room chairs; no living room scattered with paper and ribbons and boxes; no big sit-down dinner. Just the stink of bodies and fire-base rubble, and a rubber-tree woodline, always some fucking woodline. But then Quinn did have his Prince Albert tobacco can and I had that brandy fruitcake Jenny had sent me.

When the sky got light enough I boiled a canteen cup of instant coffee and sat the rest of my guard, warming my hands on the cup and letting the steam rise into my face, sipping now and again.

In the middle of the morning the resupply chopper came, dropping off mail and packages from the Red Cross. Each man got a couple books, a Red Cross pen and letterhead paper, toothpaste, cigarettes, a cigar, and a bar of Hershey’s Tropical Chocolate. Whoopie. I kept the cigar and traded Dewey one of the books and threw the rest away.

After lunch Quinn and I spread out in the back, smoking our smokes and munching fruitcake and washing it down with beers scrounged from the artillery. Dewey and a fucking new guy, Teddy, napped under the track in the shade.

I was breaking Dewey in as a driver, since Quinn decided that driving was out.

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