Night Work by Dennis Foley

Author:Dennis Foley [Foley, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480472259
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-03-24T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

THE SMELL OF THE mess hall made Hollister’s already uneasy stomach pitch. The smell was the same in every army mess hall. A mixture of grease, coffee, disinfectants, and the dominant food of the day. Today it was sausage.

Vance and Sangean didn’t look much better than Hollister thought he looked. All three had very bad hangovers, but didn’t want to admit how bad to each other. It was a matter of honor to be able to take it. Hollister was the first to suggest it: “I’d give a month’s pay for one of those awful APCs that falls apart in your mouth before you can flush it down with something.”

The comment brought sympathetic groans from the other two, but not much more. They were too busy eyeing the coffee level in the glass tube on the front of the huge stainless-steel coffee urn.

“So what do you suppose ever happened to that shithead Signal officer last night?” Sangean asked.

“I hope he drowned in his own puke. I was working on a really good hangover when he screwed it up for me,” Vance said.

“Wish he’d been that successful with me,” Sangean said.

Vance took some bacon and some unevenly cut toast. Hollister chose the SOS, and Sangean had the dry cereal and three big glasses of milk.

They took a table near the far end of the room, away from the wilting steam table. Even at six in the morning, the combination of the Vietnamese heat and the humidity of the steam table could sap the energy out of strong men without hangovers.

Over breakfast they tried to come up with a consensus on what they wanted to ask the Chieu Hois. They knew the first thing that would be in doubt was their loyalty and the second was their combat effectiveness. In teams of only six men, one that wasn’t able or was unwilling to hold up his end was a significant loss in combat power.

They knew they would have to spend plenty of time training whomever they picked, and it was important that they not lose time on those who were just not up to it.

By the time they had finished breakfast, they knew what they wanted, but not how to find it. They decided just to wing it and see if their instincts were right.

They managed to get down, and hold down, the breakfast without embarrassing themselves. But the look of the three of them was enough to warn anyone not to mess with them until much later.

On his way to the jeep, Hollister lit his first cigarette of the day. It tasted awful, but satisfied some need to fill his lungs with smoke. The cigarette had swollen from the humidity in the mess hall and didn’t burn normally. He didn’t care. All he wanted was a cigarette.

The Interrogation Center was a large compound just off the road that connected the Long Binh and the Bien Hoa complexes. It was a prison, of sorts, that held up to thirteen hundred enemy POWs inside a combination of flimsy buildings and chain-link-fence enclosures.

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.