Read Online Profane Men by Rex Miller - Free Book Online Page B

corpsman.
    Hedgepath. Bad news.
    Price. The shooter.
    Warren.
    Ewell.
    Harold already falling back, dragging along at his own pace. Happy as a fucking clam like it was a walk in the park. Me and Jon D’Allesandro up front. All of us oblivious to the strings of our puppet masters just as Harold O. Grein is oblivious to us, HOG, some of us will call him. The only human, surely, for whom the Nam is a hobby.
    Jon, walking the point man’s slack, sums it all up for me as he turns and mutters to nobody in particular, “This green motherfucker is kicking my ass awready.”
    And I say comfortingly, “Hey.”
    â€œEh?”
    â€œThis ain’t even jump street yet, pops.”
    â€œSay?”
    â€œWe just
think
this is gonna get bad. We don’t know what bad is yet. They’re gonna show us some heavy-duty hurt before this Asian vacation is over.”
    â€œJust don’t fall down and go boom,” he says, eyeing Sweet Alice, my piece.
    â€œNever happen,” I assure him, but that was exactly what I was thinking.
    I’m not that nuts about us walking in single file. Why can’t we take the bus or somethin’? Bunch of guys with weapons. I flash on a nightmare image.
    I’m about thirteen and we’d gone our coon hunting. Me and my uncle Arthur and this friend of his. I don’t even remember the old dude’s name now. And he’d had a couple of snorts. It was a bad scene. We almost bought it that night.
    If it had been up to Arthur, it never would have happened, but this old guy had to be Mr. Sportsman. He knew everything about it. And he led us into some bad-ass swamp. You hunt coon at night. He was the point. I was in the middle. He stepped right into quicksand. I almost went down, too, but my uncle got me out in time. The old dude kept going down and you don’t fight and thrash around in quicksand, you try to freeze; the more you thrash, the deeper it takes you and suddenly the dude was up to his waist and going fast and he had us grab his gun and we almost had him outta there when he got a finger over a trigger and the .22 long-rifle shot went right by my ear there in the darkened swamp. I screamed and cried like a little baby. I was never so scared in my life. I never hunted much after that incident.
    Just shows you the kind of thing happens to people who don’t leave the little coons alone. They didn’t do anything. Just sitting around in trees doing whatever coons do, ya know? I mean, go fuck around with Mother Nature and see what happens.
    And here I am still making the same mistakes. Walking in a line behind guys with guns. Messing with coons and shit. Never learn. What if the point kid would walk into quicksand? What if somebody falls down and goes boom? You have to think about these things.
    Everyone is gathering around the lieutenant and his RTO, the radioman, a splib called Dusty who gets to hump the big radio, which is called, appropriately, a “prick.” The lieutenant has his map out and is taking a compass check. He came up through the ranks and could be worse as lifers go. But he’s got a real can of worms to deal with, a mixed bag of mercs, military and civilian oddballs, and God knows what. This is not the kind of a lash-up where you can make mistakes. He’d better be damn good with those maps.
    This sector of The Badlands resembles a huge letter
H
lying on its side. We are at the lower left of the recumbent
H,
with the top bar of the
H
being the blue feature. The middle bar is a trail or red ball that runs from the blue feature to where we are clustered now. We are moving parallel to the red ball through some abandoned rice fields to get to the tree line that borders the blue at its narrowest point. The tree line is a perfect ambush point if our intelligence has any chops whatsoever.
    â€œWhatcha got, Dusty?” the lieutenant asks his radioman.
    â€œI got something up on the high band, El Tee, listen to