Sergeant Dickinson Read Online Free

was walking around upright, it was very relaxed. When we were inside the mess hall the NVA machine guns started up again, and they started dropping mortar rounds in on us. We threw over the benches and tables and made ourselves as small as we could behind them. The Group commander was left standing with the master sergeant whose job it was to light his cigars. The master sergeant opened the door of the refrigerator and the Group commander stuck his head inside. It was very funny; we laughed, and nobody was hurt. The Group commander stopped talking about ambush patrols after that.
    The correspondent wanted me to say yes, I was fighting for Democracy.
    â€œOther things are more important,” I said instead.
    â€œWhat things?”
    He put the microphone up to my mouth. Frenzy surrounded his eyes, made them unnaturally round and buggy.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. I raised my can of fruit cocktail. “Food.”
    â€œFood? Oh, you mean about Southeast Asia being the rice bowl of the world, and like that?”
    â€œLike that.” I turned away from him. He asked the man beside me, “How does it feel to be eating C-rations on a Tuesday afternoon?”
    â€œBetter than eating them on a Saturday,” the man said, and laughed contemptuously.
    The woman lay on her back in a cave dug into the side of a trench. As I passed she opened her legs. I went on to wake up a man who was sleeping. When I saw her again, a Ranger was on top of her.
    I followed the shadow-sweep of the dying flare through the trench. Impatient of it, I stepped into the light and continued my round. A rock glanced off my shoulder; it had come from outside the perimeter. The Vietnamese standing beside me pointed to the bush beyond the wire; he was smiling either from amusement or bewilderment. I completed my tour of the camp and returned to the same spot. A second rock hit me. I pretended not to notice; I was hit again. “Whydoesn’t he shoot?” The Vietnamese shrugged and laughed. It was a question without an answer.
    A bullet, barely warm, fell on my shoulder. The other Americans were unbelieving. “It must have been fired from two miles away,” one said. I put it in my pocket beside the suicide round.
    The rat crouched on a sandbag at the entrance to the command bunker, its legs tucked under it, staring at me. I swung my rifle like a baseball bat. The butt hit it with a soft
phump
and it flew off the sandbag, landing on its side, its legs still tucked in. “It must have been dead before you hit it,” said an American. There was no blood on it. “The concussion must have got it. Or it died of fright.”
    They were in the wire, or where the wire used to be before the bombing, and we called in a strike on top of them and got down behind the wall of the inner perimeter. I heard a sound like
zzzzz
and looked over the wall. A shard of bomb frag was burning its way through the wall’s dirt pack; I saw it and couldn’t move, I was fascinated. It stopped at a stick of wood before it got to me.
    Three walls and the ceiling of the latrine were shot away. Idropped my pants and sat down over one of the holes and began to read
Studs Lonigan
. Occasionally I heard a
spang!
or a
thack!
when a bullet struck metal or wood. When I was finished I bent over to retrieve my pants; I waggled my ass at the perimeter.
    They had smeared other men’s blood on themselves and tied phony bandages on their arms and legs. We threw them out of the helicopter as fast as they climbed in. The pilot was shouting, trying to lift off. We jumped; the helicopter lifted and swung to the side, scraping off against the ground the Vietnamese clinging to its struts. Not more than a couple of them got out of the camp that way.
    Red dust kicked up to my left. I continued eating. I knew he would bracket me with his next round. It struck to my right. I slid a few feet down the slope of the bunker and to the left. The third round was