Loon - Jack McLean [2]
Negron, Camacho, and Tillery slid into a small command bunker they’d dug out the night before. Had there been time, they’d have dug it a mile deeper.
Minutes passed. Camacho got final confirmation of the coming artillery bombardment from the rear and, eschewing the radio, yelled “ON THE WAY!” and leapt back into the bunker.
Around the perimeter, from hole to hole, came the cries of “ON THE WAY!” and “FIRE IN THE HOLE!” At once, we all got small.
Camacho, on Negron’s order, had instructed our supporting artillery to fire directly onto our position. We prayed like hell that none of the rounds fell directly into any of our fighting holes. We had little choice. The NVA had broken through our lines in several places and were now inside our perimeter.
The following seconds passed in near silence but for the sporadic crack of an enemy AK-47 rifle. Then it came. The air at once was filled with exploding artillery, flying shrapnel, and screaming boys.
Their boys.
The artillery air bursts, ordered by Camacho, had caught the enemy in the open. Instead of exploding on impact, the artillery had been fused to ignite in the air above the battlefield. It was slaughter.
With the last explosion, we leapt from the safety of our holes to reinforce the lines and ensure that every NVA soldier who had penetrated the perimeter was dead.
They were scattered everywhere, and they were all very dead.
2
KIDS LIKE ME DIDN’T GO TO VIETNAM.
I was comfortably reared in an upper-middle-class suburb, and my young life was directly out of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. From earliest memory, my parents said that I could be anything I wanted to be. Teachers, neighbors, and peers reinforced this ideal. Perhaps I might become a lawyer like my father or an artist like my mother. I developed a strong interest in architecture. I dreamed of creating fabulous modern buildings to rival those of Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright. Anything was possible, for I was to become the beneficiary of the best education that money and influence could secure.
The fathers of my generation had gone from surviving the Great Depression to crushing the Japanese and saving Europe. They came home with hard-earned pride and the promise to renew their interrupted lives.
The first act for most of our fathers upon returning home was to make us—millions of us, in unprecedented numbers. I was born on May 26, 1947, in the earliest wave of what became known as the great postwar baby boom. In a few short years, we would be more than half of the American population. The society that spawned us, however, was unprepared for our arrival. Each school year, our class was twice the size of the year before. Classrooms were bursting. Elementary schools could not be built fast enough. Town budgets were strained.
Still, we were a generation with limitless opportunity. America was flowering with unprecedented wealth. For the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the national economy was on a solid steady rise. The newly passed GI Bill of Rights afforded every returning veteran the opportunity to attend college, largely at the government’s expense. Skilled jobs were being created to meet the growing demand. Homes could not be built fast enough. Suburbs sprang up throughout the country to supply affordable housing for the burgeoning families. With the jobs and the homes came families and a demand for consumer goods and services that had been unimagined before the war. There grew an expectation that each family would have a car, washing machine, television set, refrigerator, and telephone. Unemployment fell to an unprecedented 2 percent of the workforce.
All was not perfect, however. Although we emerged from World War II as the sole nuclear power, the Soviet Union and others soon joined the club. We were good. The Russians were bad. The looming specter of a nuclear holocaust became vivid in our everyday lives, and many families built home fallout shelters. We practiced “duck and cover