War Year Read Free Page B

door fell open before the plane stopped taxiing. You couldn’t see much, except that everything was covered with red clay. All over everything was a thick white fog, bright in the morning sunlight.
    We rolled to a stop and the unloading ramp clanked down. Everybody scrambled out of that plane as fast as they could.
    Sure enough, there was another buck-sergeant there on the runway. He herded us into a line and marched us over to a bus. As we got on the bus, he checked our names off a list.
    The bus had metal screens, like thick chicken wire, over the windows. One of the windows had a bullet hole in it. The bus had a name painted over the fender. It was called “Last Chance.”
    Two guards, armed with machine guns, got on the bus. One of them spoke up: “All right, listen up! If there’s any shootin’, just get down under the seat and make like a turtle. We’ll take care of everything—right, Killer?” The other guy laughed in a dumb kind of way. “We’re goin’ through Pleiku City. There’s lots of VC there who’d just love to knock off a bus fulla green troops. No sweat, though. We ain’t lost a bus all week.”
    Guess we were supposed to be impressed. But I’d been in the army too long—less than a year at that—and seen too many phony tough guys.
    Have to admit I was getting a little scared when we went through the town of Pleiku. It took a long time to get through, too; seemed as big as Tulsa. Half the buildings were demolished. Bullet holes and shell craters everywhere. But there wasn’t any fighting going on, just lots of skinny little Orientals who stared at the bus as we went by. None of them smiled.
    There were fewer and fewer buildings and after a while we were out in the country. Nothing but red dust and a few scraggly looking bushes on both sides of the road—looked like the worst part of Oklahoma in the middle of the summer. And this was January.
    After a while we got to Camp Enari. A sign said “Welcome to the Fourth Division,” but I didn’t feel too welcome. It seemed more of a prison camp than an army camp—barbed wire everywhere, sentries with machine guns in towers all around the edge of the camp. A couple of privates rolled aside a big barbed-wire gate, and we drove through.

TWO
    â€œI’d like to welcome all of you to Camp Enari.” The major was pacing up and down, looking at the floor. We were lined up all around the walls of the big plywood building. A private was passing out clipboards and a thick wad of forms to each person.
    â€œâ€¦and I’d like to be able to say that you’re going to enjoy your stay here. Unfortunately, you won’t enjoy it—nobody ever has. And you might as well start getting used to the fact that there’s a war going on, on the other side of that barbed wire. Nobody’s ever gotten killed inside Camp Enari, though we’ve been attacked a few times. But most of you aren’t staying in Enari.
    â€œI’ll give you the facts right now. You’re going to spend a year—most of you—someplace here in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Some of you are going home early. About one man in twenty goes home dead. There are about forty men in this building, so figure it out. Maybe the guy standing next to you, maybe the guys on both sides of you…maybe you.
    â€œNow I’m not saying this just to scare you—but if you’re scared, you’re smart. You’ve got a much better chance to get home in one piece if you’re scared—careful scared, healthy scared—every day of the next three hundred and fifty-some. The guy who gets cocky, the careless one, he’s the one who doesn’t watch where he puts his foot and steps on a mine. He’s the one who lights up a cigarette at night and gets a sniper’s bullet through his brain. Or doesn’t keep his weapon clean and has it jam up when it could save his