The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(12)

You werent hurt.

They picked a bunch of metal fragments out of me from where the RPG took out the back of the gunship. I hadnt eaten in three days but I wasnt even hungry. All I wanted to do was sleep. About a week later I went on R and R and three weeks after that I was back in an AC-130 all strapped in and ready to die all over again.

Did you kill a lot of people?

Jesus.

Western waited. Oiler shook his head. You go to war you’re not really mad at anybody. You’re just trying to keep alive long enough to learn how to stay that way. It’s only when you start to see a few of your buddies get wasted that you really get a hard-on for those sons of bitches. The reason I signed up for a second tour was to try and get even. That’s all. Nothing complicated about it. Well. Not really all, I guess.

What’s the rest of it?

You get a taste for it. People dont want to hear that. Too bad. I thought our outfit was pretty much a bunch of pussies and then we got a new CO. Wingate. Lieutenant Colonel. And he started kicking ass and taking names. Day one. Everybody knew the war was shit. By late ’68 the whole thing was sliding off into the toilet. Drugs used to be just at the rear but by then they were pretty much everywhere. Guys shooting civilians. You got a new platoon leader and the first thing you had to decide was whether or not you were going to have to frag his fucking ass to save your own. The real problem was you couldnt get to the field grades. Cocksuckers hanging medals on each other for engagements they couldnt find on a fieldmap. I got back to headquarters and it took them a few days to get me reassigned. Which was fucked up. They never got it that you wanted to be with your buddies. You didnt want to be moved around. Just dumb as shit. I’d made E-6 by then so they couldnt have me mopping floors. But the colonel used to have me run errands for him. Then one day I heard him on the phone and I found out later that he was talking to a bird colonel up in operations and he told this guy that he didnt give a fuck. He said let me tell you something, Colonel. I’m here to kill people. And if I dont get to kill people I’m going to be a hard motherfucker to live with. And if you’re not here to kill people you need to let me know. Because I dont want to work for you. And then he hung the phone up. And I knew that he was my kind of guy. He was a warmongering motherfucker. And I was there to inflict painful death myself and that’s the only reason I was there. And you wont like this either. Did I kill a lot of people? I been asked that question a few times. But never before by a man. I told this one girl I was seeing that yes I had killed a bunch of gooks but that I hadnt eaten any of them. So what do you think? You had enough of this shit?

Go ahead.

I used to go up every afternoon to the patch-em-up. You couldnt make any sense out of the ward there. It was just a big plywood room with a bunch of sawhorses. No beds. They brought the litters in and set them on the sawhorses. That was it. I saw it full a few times. Like something out of the Civil War. One nurse told me that the guys who stepped on land mines you would think they would bleed to death with their legs blown off like that but that the blast cauterized the stumps. That’s handy, aint it? I’d lay on a table with just a towel over me while she picked pieces of aluminum out of me. Or steel. She was a damn goodlooking girl and I knew she didnt mind seeing me walk in there. I was a bufflooking motherfucker. But she was an officer and I knew that wasnt going anywhere. I asked her one time if she ever felt like calling me anything other than by my paygrade and she almost smiled but she didnt.

What did she say?

She didnt say anything. She’d seen so many of me it didnt even compute.

Did it hurt?

Pulling chunks of metal out of my ass with a pair of longnose pliers?

Yes.

Well. You would of had to of seen her. I’m going to say that it felt just about right.

Western smiled.

Anyway, mostly I just slept my ass off. There was a psyops sound-ship would show up about three oclock in the morning, just oaring away out there in the dark. Broadcasting the sound of a baby crying. Over and over. They knew that we werent going to send anybody up about that. If you shot it down it would probably just fall on you. After a while I got to where I kind of liked it. I’d just drift off back to sleep.

He looked toward the bar and held up two fingers and after a few minutes Paula brought over a couple of beers. Oiler held his beer up to the light and studied it. I can tell you this shit. But it’s not going to mean anything. I’m not even sure what it means to me. If I think about things that I just dont want to know about they’re all things that I do know about. And I’ll always know them. Too fucking bad. Somebody next to you takes a round and it sounds like it’s hitting mud. Well. It is. You could have gone your whole life without knowing that. But there you are. You know every day that you’re someplace that you aint supposed to be. But there your young ass is.

Rich boys went to college and poor boys went to war.

Yeah, well. I didnt really think like that.

Tell me about where you shot a bunch of gooks.

I shot a bunch of gooks.

You were in another helicopter crash.

I was never in one that didnt crash.

Is that true?

Yeah. That’s true. In this case we got called into an LZ where a Huey had been shot down going in. There were four guys in there that they were supposed to bring out. Lurps. You wouldnt think they’d of got theirselves into such a fucking mess. Two of them had stepped on punji sticks. We didnt make out much better than the Huey. Well, as it turned out we did make out a bit better because the Huey pulled up and wobbled off into the jungle and crashed and caught fire. We never saw any of those guys again. We found out later that there was a slick coming in behind us but when they saw all this mess they just pulled up. Smart guys. We’d had to dump a bunch of fuel for the weight in order to load our guys and I kept thinking what if something hot comes in here? Anyway, the tail hit the tops of the trees first and we nosed down. Rotors whacking the shit out of everything. The other doorgunner was a guy we called Wasatch and I jumped out and he just kept on firing and the ship was tipped sideways and one of these hot shellcasings went down the back of my flightsuit and it hurt like a motherfucker. What followed was four days in the jungle and a bunch of running firefights and I came out of there with only one guy left and he died in the chopper going out. You get a fucking medal for that? Gimme a break. That’s it, Bobby, I’m done.