Nguyen was gone into the night with the 106 round. I hadn’t given any thought at all as to whether the ammo box was marked with a flechette designation for its contents or not. There was no way to tell by feel, and there was no way I was going to use the flashlight...
I made it back to my cave under the rock wall of the cleft I was holed up in, the one I’d spent some time hoping to get back to. I laid in the darkness, shedding outer pieces of my wet rotting uniform, and wondering about the reality of the combat I was hopelessly...
The NVA soldiers moved back and forth in the tufted growth mud distance, like sidewinding snakes across a desert of nearly flat sand. The numbers, I instantly knew, although it was impossible to see individuals at distance even through the mildly magnified gun sight,...
There were fifty bodies, and right away everyone in the joined companies knew that the enemy soldiers were not NVA troops, or really soldiers at all. The uniforms were wrong and the ages were wrong. The bodies were of very young men and women dressed in peasant...