Run Between the Raindrops Read Online Free Page B

sense of humor and a compulsion to emulate Ernie Pyle. We spent a lot of time together, back in the pre-Nam world and working with the 1 st Marine Regiment when they got sent north to reinforce the DMZ. Hooking up with him will make this whole exercise a lot more palatable.
    He sniffs at the canteen I offer and a huge grin spreads across his sunburned features. “Well, you’ve been back to Danang, I see. What’s the word from the rear?”
    “Major panic among the pogues who are sure the great piss-yellow hordes are about to descend from the north or something. Skipper sent me up here to join up with Task Force X-Ray and stand by to stand by.”
    He takes another slug of gin and passes the canteen. “Thought you were scheduled for R&R…”
    “I was—and if nothing happens in the next day or two, I’m out of here and headed for Hong Kong. Skipper promised.”
    Steve gets to his feet and shoulders his gear. “You’ve been a member of our beloved Corps long enough to know the value of promises. They are much like assholes. They all stink. Code of the Grunt: Promise in one hand, shit in the other. See which hand fills up first.”
    “Maybe we can wangle a trip to Hue, dude. Remember the last time we got up there?”

Hue—When it was Cool
    We are sight-seeing in a borrowed Jeep, half-drunk and half-listening to a historical rap from a buddy who is based in Hue with the American Forces Radio & TV outlet in the city. Sergeant Tom Young, a pal from stateside, is hosting two bush-beasts buddies and trying to make us believe he’d rather be out in the bush with us than stuck in his plush job. It’s bullshit and everyone knows it, so we just gaze like lechers at tight little Asian asses molded to bicycle or motorbike seats, as winsome girls in ao dais offer coy smiles or covert waves. It’s all bright colors and happy people, the opposite of what we are used to in the dirt-poor villages we patrol out in the hinterlands.
    Hue is a different thing, a sprawling impressive city shot through with national color like Rome or Paris where residents always seem conscious of living in and around their own history. Like a trio of tourists we visit The Citadel on the north side of the Perfume River, gawking at its splendor. It’s a fortress from an earlier time, a square mile of thick stone walls surrounding a sub-city that has grown up in the shadow of the ancient walls. There is a moat full of mud and pond scum surrounding the walls and all the measurements are precise. That moat is 40-feet across and 40-feet deep. It guards walls that are 40-feet high and 40-feet thick. Tom knows all the details.
    In earlier times Asian bandits, warring hill tribes, rival rulers and Mongol hordes attacked the walls. Now lichens, moss, and tropical ivy encroach on the great stone slabs, but they are no less intimidating for their age. Vegetation rises unevenly up the walls toward the broad tops where bracken and bramble grow wild. In a few more centuries the encroaching growth might form a lush, living carpet, crossing the walls and closing on the Imperial Palace, centerpiece of the Citadel complex. Tom says it was designed on the Chinese model, patterned after parts of the Forbidden City in Beijing.
    It was easy, staring up at those walls, to let your imagination run. The climbing ivy might be the gnarled fingers of attackers who die assaulting a hallowed fortress, casualties of another fruitless attempt to reach the inner city behind the Citadel walls. There are nine separate gates in the walls each one featuring a bridge that spans the moat. Inside the gates, string-straight avenues crisscross the Citadel’s interior which is a mix of stately homes and shanties. The shanties are new and crowded with people who look like they ought to be out in the villages wading in paddies. Many of them are war refugees who are seeking shelter behind Hue’s thick walls.
    Still, there’s a distinctive sense of ancient history here. The Nguyen Dynasty