Restless Soul - Alex Archer [1]
He hated the leeches most of all.
He knew that they were clinging to him now. They were somehow always able to find their way up his pants and under his sleeves, into his boots, so they could gorge themselves on his sweet American blood. He’d led his men through brackish ponds and across streams and along a riverbank that morning and well into the afternoon, so there would be leeches on everyone.
He wanted to strip and pull the leeches off, but that would have to wait. There was another three hours or so left of what passed for daylight…the canopy was thick and not much sun was getting through. He had his orders to reach the firebase before dark and regroup with the rest of the platoon.
“Sarge…”
Gary scowled that someone had broken the relative silence. He turned to Private Wallem, a gangly hawk-nosed Texan who was pointing to just north of the trail. A body, mostly bones and scraps of dirty cloth, lay under a big fern.
“It’s one of theirs, Sarge. See? You can tell by the boots. Wonder if we got him or the jungle did? Guess it doesn’t matter. As long as it’s one of theirs and not…”
Gary shut out the rest of Wallem’s words and fixed his eyes on the body, angry with himself that he hadn’t spotted it. Not that it was all that interesting or all that important. But nothing used to get past him.
He’d set himself as point man for the patrol. The squad leader wasn’t supposed to walk point. He was supposed to take the second position. But Gary thought he had the keenest, most experienced eyes, and he wanted to be up front.
There was just too much green. He’d spent too many days in the jungle, and there were all those leeches, attached to his flesh, distracting him.
A good point man should have seen the body and not let anything distract him. What else had he missed? he wondered.
“War is always the same,” Gary thought, quoting President Lyndon Johnson. “It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in the world.”
The quote had stayed with him because Gary was sure he was going mad.
Johnson had said the words six months earlier, back in January, shortly before Operation Masher, a large-scale search-and-destroy operation against North Vietnamese troop encampments, began. Johnson had then changed the name to Operation White Wing, which didn’t sound quite so aggressive.
Gary and his men were a part of it, in the Bong Son Plain near the coast. A little more than two hundred American soldiers had died, but almost six times that many North Vietnamese. Gary thought maybe he’d get to go home after it ended, but his sergeant was one of those Americans killed, and he was assigned another tour, promoted to E-5 and given his rifle squad of ten to lead.
The leeches would get some more of his sweet American blood.
“Leave it alone,” he said of the corpse. Sometimes the enemy rigged trip wires and explosives around bodies. “Keep moving,” he ordered.
He checked his compass. West, definitely. They were humping due west on an established trail. It took too much effort to hack straight through the jungle; everything grew too tight.
He’d look at the map again in another few minutes. They were hard to read, the maps. He navigated mostly by gut instinct and the compass.
He heard the steady tromp of the men behind him, the annoying but comforting buzz of insects. The insects rarely quieted. They didn’t seem to mind the presence of soldiers from either side. When they did go quiet, that was when fear seriously twisted in his gut.
God, but he wanted to go home.
A sound like thunder, muted and distant, rumbled. It was a bomb, he knew, from a B-52. The planes carried up to a hundred, dropping them from as high as six miles up. The U.S. regularly bombed North Vietnam and lately had been hitting oil depots around Hanoi and Haiphong.
Gary had