Another Man's Moccasins

No one was firing from the vehicle, but I could still hear noises from inside. The main hatch was open, and it looked like the majority of the personnel had escaped with only a few dead. I could smell the blood, so sweet it was almost sour, and was about to move on when I noticed a sergeant who was still breathing sitting with his back against the engine housing. I yelled at him. “Gunny, you all right!?”

His head wavered a moment, then he raised his face. His left eye was gone.

I scrambled through the hatch and grabbed his arm, pulling him toward me as another round of AK fire ricocheted off the tough hide of the armored vehicle and flew around the area where I’d just been standing. I had a flickering of anger at the men who had deserted the damaged sergeant as I staggered into the vehicle and placed him against the bulkhead. “On second thought, it might be a little safer in here.”

I grabbed a first-aid kit from the steel-plated interior and pulled out a pad and a box of gauze, carefully wrapping it around his head to stanch the bleeding. The round must’ve entered his eye and then exited at his closest ear, a miracle in itself. Then I slipped out one of the syrettes of morphine and stabbed the one-hitter into his chest.

He started and looked at me with the one eye. “Do you know what day it is?”

He had a thick Appalachian accent, and I studied him, stunned that he could still talk or hear. “What?”

I watched as he tried to speak with one side of his mouth. “Do you know what day it is?”

I swallowed in an attempt to work up some spit, but my tongue still felt like one of those fly strips. “I think it’s a Tuesday.”

He nodded. “It feels like a Tuesday.”

I smiled back at him and placed the sticker from the syrette on his lapel so that the medics would know he’d been dosed. “Yes, it does.” He mumbled something else as I checked the rifle’s banana-style magazine and found it had only two rounds left.

The attacking soldiers were getting closer, and it was only a short question of time before they hit us with another screaming antitank round or dropped a grenade in the hatch. I laid the almost-spent AK in the sergeant’s lap. “Sarge, I need you to sit tight, because if I don’t start laying down a little suppression fire, we’re about to be overrun.”

I saw that one of the M60s had exploded its barrel and that the other one didn’t look much better. I was trying to avoid the dead commander, but the .50 caliber machine gun looked like our last chance. I reached up and gently pulled the captain down from his position and set him beside the sergeant. He’d caught at least three rounds in the chest, and his expression was one of profound interest; he didn’t look surprised, and it was as if he’d known exactly what was happening to him as it had happened. I looked at the sergeant, who appeared to sink back a little as his one eye closed, and I hoped I could get us a little breathing room before he stopped breathing.

I checked the .50 and could see that it had never been fired. I racked the charging handle, braced my boots, and carefully raised my head up through the hatch. I could hear voices to my left and pivoted to see a number of VC crawling all over the M48 that I had abandoned.

I swung the barrel of the heavy machine gun around and tried to remember the numbers from basic and recalled that the air-cooled M2 would cycle 550 rpm if you let it, but that if you did, it would shoot out the barrel; so I pulled the trigger with just a little restraint— sprayed and prayed.

The weapon did everything it was designed to do, and I hoped that I would never have to see anything like it again.

I pivoted back to the ditch and laid suppression fire along the embankment; those who could crawl or run scattered into the hooches and grass like Wyoming wild turkeys on the third Thursday of November.

If I was going to get the sergeant and myself out of there, now was the time.

I jumped down from the commander’s platform and turned around in time to see Baranski. He was perfectly framed in the open back hatch of the armored personnel carrier, and he was smiling.

I stood there for one of those slow-motion frozen seconds as he raised Hoang’s silenced Walther PPK directly at my face and fired.

“Do you want to answer that?” His voice was coarse with enough gravel to fill a five-yard dump truck.

I looked up at Virgil’s eyes and tried not to focus on the damage to his left brow. “What?”

He exhaled a slight laugh. “You’re playing a very good game, but the phone is ringing.”

I looked down at the half-finished chess match and then up to the phone on the holding cell wall. “Thanks. You’ll let me know if I win, right?” I walked over and picked up the receiver. “Absaroka County Sheriff’s Offifice?"” I didn’t sound like I was sure.

“Walt?”

I came back fully when I realized it was Frymire. “Yep?”

“I’m over here at the hospital, but Sancho’s not here.”

That wasn’t like the Basquo. “What about Tuyen?”

“Sleeping like a baby.”

"Maybe he went to the bathroom or to get something to eat."”