Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (21 page)

When word finally did come down that the mission was being postponed for twenty-four hours, Marvel was as disappointed as everybody else. He still didn’t trust the insertion ship, but he always hated to see a mission delayed, and all this idle talk about going back home was beginning to depress him as much as it seemed to depress Mopar.

Feeling weak and let down and sleepy, Marvel trudged off to the ammo bunker with the others, turned in his Claymores, grenades, and C-4 plastic explosive, then went back to the tent to clean his weapon and grab a little sack time. He slept all afternoon, and that evening joined Mopar on top of the operations bunker. Together they sharpened their knives and watched the cloud cover break and scatter. Using Mopar’s whetstone, Marvel put a razor edge on the recondo dagger and nodded sympathetically as Mopar told him about his dull and galling leave. It was very sad and depressing. The poor dude hadn’t even seen Sybill Street, much less obtained any of her magic brown pubic curls.

“Ah, the hell with her,” said Mopar. “I feel kind of bad about my mother crying at the airport, but I don’t care that Sybill wasn’t there crying along with her.” He spat and lit a cigarette. “Wolverine’s right, Marvel. A soldier ought to spend his money on whores, and forget about the whole damn civilian world.” He shook his head and looked up at the stars and the clearing night sky. There was no moon in sight, but the floating clouds were like puffs of light smoke riding the wind to the west, and he knew they’d be going in for sure in the morning.

“I know it’s a lifer cliché, but lifers aren’t so dumb, you know. If the Army wanted me to have a girlfriend, they would’ve issued me one out of supply, just like Wolverine said. From here on, I’m gonna have a professional attitude toward women. If they ain’t pros themselves, I don’t want nothing more to do with them.”

Marvel nodded absently, wondering how long it would be before Mopar got honest with himself and put in to see a career counselor about re-upping. He was clearly headed in that direction. Marvel changed the subject. “You know, this is the kind of night I like best. The weather’s clearing up, and we’re going in on a mission in the morning. It’s good to have you back, Mopar. It really is.”

Mopar sighed. He looked out past the bunker line at the dark and abandoned rice paddies and the foothills beyond. He couldn’t see as far as the mountains, but he knew the sky was clearing out there, too, and the mission would not be postponed for another day.

“Yeah,” he nodded, “everything would be perfect if only that fool Tiger would hurry up and come home. I don’t mind leaving without him so much, but I sure hope he’s here waiting when we get back.”

Marvel pricked his finger for luck, then slid the Recondo dagger back in its scabbard and stood up. “I hope so too, Mopar. I really do.” He jumped off the bunker, looked up at the sky, then jogged down to the shithouse to ease the churning in his stomach. Premission shivers, premission jitters, and premission shits—for the first time since joining the Lurps, Marvel had all three at once.

Schultz was a jerk sometimes, but he had a lot of Airborne spirit, and he cared about his teammates. Mopar might hate him—and so might Marvel, for that matter, though he would never let on if he did. And then there was Gonzales, who hated everyone the same, and Wolverine, who tried to be hardnosed all the time, dropping people for push-ups when they fucked up the reaction drills. Schultz liked them all, but he knew they didn’t like him—or at least it didn’t seem that they did. He was sure about Mopar, but it was hard to say about the rest of them.

Still, Schultz had a lot of Airborne spirit, so when he saw Marvel come back to the team tent without Mopar, he decided it was time to visit the top of the operations bunker, just in case Mopar was still sitting there, moping over that girlfriend of his, who had obviously shot the poor dude down something awful. Schultz was part of the team now, and that made Mopar’s morale his own concern. So as soon as he had finished taping down his equipment so that it wouldn’t rattle in the field, he went off to cheer up Mopar.

At first he tried to sound reassuring, telling Mopar that he wasn’t the first guy to get shot down by some impatient girlfriend back home. “Why, back in my old company there were a lot of guys who got shot down something awful, Mopar. Worse than whatever it was that happened to you.”

Mopar groaned and looked away, hoping Schultz would take the hint and leave, but Schultz ignored the hint and went on unabashed.

“Why, there was this platoon sergeant in Third Platoon—a gruff old Orville Snorkle type of lifer. Been married ten years to some girl he knew in high school. And then one day they drop us some mail out of this resupply ship, and ol’ Sarge has got himself a letter with a picture inside, a picture of his old lady sixty-nining with some fat dude! So what’s he do, Mopar? What do you think that old lifer did?”

Caught up with the story, Mopar could only shrug and hope Schultz would come to the point without too much off-the-wall bullshit.

“Why, that old lifer passed the picture around the whole company, then stuck it in the band of his helmet cover and wore it there until the rain and wet leaves washed it all away. That’s what he did, Mopar. That there was the smartest lifer I ever knew.”

Mopar resisted the urge to hop off the bunker and knock Schultz on his ass. Schultz was trying to smooth things over the night before a mission. He was just trying to be friendly, but going about it the wrong way.

“Forget it, Schultz. Go back and study your map.”

Schultz smiled. Seeing Mopar’s sales resistance start to fade, he decided to make his pitch.

“What you need is a plan, Mopar. A plan. Now, it so happens I’ve been doing a little research, and I’ve come up with just the answer: Have you ever heard of a disease called granuloma inguinale?” Although he rarely carried his full aid kit on reconnaissance missions, Schultz had trained as a medic and took great pride in his knowledge of sexually transmitted disease.

“What’s that? Something like the clap?”

Schultz shook his head. “Worse, much worse! So much worse that it’s better by far for your purposes. It’s a VD, but one so rare Army medics don’t even look for it. You can smuggle it home with you. Then, after you’ve done what you have to do, you can get yourself cured, and don’t ever fuck her again. It’s a perfect plan, Mopar. Now that you got a plan, you can forget about what’s-her-name for a while and get your mind clear for walking point.”

Mopar was disgusted. He hawked and let fly with a real goober, hoping the wind would carry his missile on to Schultz’s boot, but not quite daring to aim it there in the first place. He missed by a foot.

“You know, Schultz,” Mopar said after a moment of thoughtful silence, “that’s just about the sickest thing I’ve ever heard. If we weren’t going out in the field tomorrow, I think I just might rip your fucking throat out for saying something like that about somebody you don’t even know. Sybill Street would never do anything like that cunt in your story, and I’d never do anything like your plan—not even to
your
girlfriend, or
your
sister!”

“I’m sorry, Mopar.” Schultz was sincerely apologetic. “I didn’t mean any offense—I was just trying to cheer you up.”

“Fuck off, Schultz!” growled Mopar. “I’ve had enough of your sicko crap for tonight. I was thinking about the weather when you came along—I damn sure wasn’t wringing my heart over Sybill, or anybody else.”

“Sorry, man,” said Schultz, “I was only trying to cheer you up.”

“Go on back to the tent,” said Mopar. “I don’t need no cheering up.”

W
ELL PAST FIRST LIGHT
the next day the insertion ship
Bad Moon Rising
flared over the Landing Zone, and the Lurps of Team Two-Four jumped out onto the defoliated hillside and began beating their way uphill for the woodline, a hundred meters to the west. Wolverine and Marvel had to get their commo checks on the move, for there was no place to lay dog here in the open.

Mopar, leading out on point, had to bite his lower lip to keep from cursing as he ducked and wove and crashed through the chest-high tangles of dead vegetation that had looked so much less formidable from the air. The pilot had dropped the team too low on the hillside, too far from the concealment and security of the wooded high ground that the defoliant planes had neglected to spray, and now there was nothing to do but bust ass and hope that the closest gook was a ridge or two away and unable to see or hear them struggling up the slope.

Mopar tried to set a fast pace, but the going was much slower and much more difficult than he’d imagined it would be when helping Wolverine plan the mission. He’d moved through defoliated areas before, but never one quite this strewn with hazards. Although all of the life had been sapped out of them, a few of the smaller trees were still standing, and when he brushed against their wilted branches, their leaves crumbled into an abrasive powder that worked under his collar and ground into his skin. When he tried to avoid the standing trees, he was forced to step blind over some of the fallen ones, and this was a good way to turn an ankle or trip and fall into the thorny fronds of dead palm that filled the spaces between the branches. Mopar kept his eyes on the ground ahead and tried not to look up at the woodline too often, because it was far too easy to imagine an NVA machine-gun crew hiding there in the leafy darkness. There was no way to move silently, and with almost every step he winced at the cracking of dry bamboo or the rattle of dead leaves. It seemed to him that he was making much more noise than the four men behind him, and once or twice when he glanced back, he could see Wolverine frowning at the racket that everyone was making. But there was no signal to slow down, and so Mopar kept driving on, straight ahead.

Although still low in the sky, the morning sun was fierce and hot, and there was almost no wind. The camouflage paint was beginning to run on Marvel’s face, and there was a smear of blood on Wolverine’s right cheek where a dry leaf or a thorn had cut him.

Now more than ever, Mopar resented the Air Force “Ranch Hand” crews—the defoliators—who lived in air-conditioned safety back in the rear and only saw the country they were destroying from the cool comfort of their airplanes. Mopar wondered if they thought they were accomplishing something worthwhile with all their spraying. If they’d ever had to hump a defoliated hillside in the sun, they’d know better. The defoliant planes never killed any enemy soldiers, but they killed everything else they sprayed. Everything else, that is, except the leeches. Even here, on this sere and lifeless hillside, there were leeches everywhere—inching along the ground, clinging to boots, and falling off dead leaves onto the passing Lurps. The damn things were almost indestructible. There were only two ways to kill them. It had to be one by one, with a squirt of bug juice or the end of a burning cigarette. But Mopar had no time for either method now. He was too anxious to get into the woodline; he would worry about the leeches later. They were sure to be even worse in the shade.

But at least there didn’t seem to be a machine gun waiting in the trees this time, for if there had been, it would have opened up by now. Mopar drove on without stopping, and the men behind followed up the slope and into the woodline.

Ten meters into the trees, Wolverine called a halt. The men formed up in their security wheel, then sat down carefully, rucksacks touching, to listen for sounds of movement. Marvel got a commo check with the artillery on Culculine without having to switch to a pole antenna, and Wolverine radioed the team’s position directly back to Pappy Stagg without having to go through the relay.

Mopar wasn’t sure, but he thought he could remember Marvel saying that J. D. had had to run up a pole antenna just to reach the relay team for his first position report in RZ Zulme. Of course, J. D. had gone in on the low ground to the north, and the weather hadn’t been this clear, but Mopar couldn’t help feeling that somehow J. D.’s commo problems had been—at least in part—his own fault. It seemed like half the time he’d been on J. D.’s team, they had stuck to the high ground, hunting commo. Mopar could remember one time when J. D. took out a dead battery for a spare. It was only human to screw up occasionally, but Mopar was sure that Marvel and Wolverine would never do anything
that
stupid.

After laying dog for more than an hour without hearing anything but normal jungle sounds and some very distant artillery fire, the team moved out to search the saddle of the ridge. There was little undergrowth, and movement was easy, but Mopar took his time, stepping and pausing, then stepping again. He swept his security zone cautiously, for he hadn’t been in the field for more than a month, and he was worried that his senses had been dulled by soft living and spending his leave indoors. It was reassuring to see Marvel back there on slack, even if he did look naked, now that he’d given his M-79 grenade launcher to Schultz. Still, Marvel hadn’t used the damn thing since that day Farley got killed, and it was better to have him give up the M-79 than the radio.

It didn’t really make much difference what sort of weapon he carried, Marvel was the best slackman Mopar had ever worked with. Every time he looked back and saw that goofy smile, Mopar knew he’d be safe, no matter what happened. Mopar was walking point with a silenced Swedish K this time, carrying his CAR-15 tied across his chest, and if anyone but Marvel had been walking his slack, the unfamiliar weapon in his hands would have been most uncomfortable.

Shortly after noon Wolverine called a halt. The team sat down in a tight wheel, and after Marvel and Wolverine made their commo checks and called in their situation reports, it was time for chow. Being the new man on the team and still ignorant of some of Wolverine’s rules, Schultz immediately pulled a beef and rice Lurp ration out of his thigh pocket and began to eat it dry. Normally the pointman ate first, but this time Mopar didn’t object. He exchanged glances with Marvel, and smiled with smug disapproval, for Schultz was really wolfing it down, blissfully unaware that it was bad form to eat more than a cornflake bar for lunch the first day out. The more a man ate, the more he had to shit, and it was unprofessional to shit more than once on a five-day mission. Not only was it unprofessional, but it was also inconvenient and possibly even dangerous. Turds and toilet paper were sure signs of passage, and anyone sloppy enough to gorge in the field would probably be too careless to bury his scat. Wolverine never made a big thing out of it, but both Farley and J. D. had insisted that everyone on their teams swallow a couple of paregoric pills the night before a mission. Although he was glad to see Schultz acting like a rookie, Mopar hoped that he’d at least had the sense to cork up with paregoric the night before. A turd could compromise everyone.