365 Days Read Online Free PDF Page B

ain’t no place that’s safe.”
    Twenty meters down the shore, Clay, shielding his eyes from the sun, waved at him and climbed into his boat.
    At least in Korea, he could walk off his hill and relax, Mayfield thought. Disgusted, he threw his M-16 to his RTO and climbed into the platoon’s command boat. A few moments later, they were running down the center of the river.
    No one talked. They had been out four days and they hadn’t been dry once. They had taken twenty casualties in the same area, whereas just two weeks before they had taken fifteen. Stretching out, Mayfield took a cigarette out of his helmet band and looked at it. Forty-three years old, he thought, and I’m back living on cigarettes and water. His troops lay sprawled around him; two or three were already cleaning their weapons. Mayfield watched them, realizing without the least satisfaction that if they had to they’d go again and again. It wasn’t because they wanted to or even believed in what they were doing, but because they were there and someone told them to do it.
    Strange war. Going for something they didn’t believe in or for that matter didn’t care about, just to make it 365 days and be done with it. They’d go, though; even freaked out, they’d go. They’d do whatever he told them. Three mornings in a row after lying in the mud all night, they got up and pushed the gooks back so the choppers could get the wounded out. They charged, every time, just got up and went, right over the RPD’s and the AK’s. No flags, no noise, no abuse. They just got up and blew themselves to shit because it had to be done. The same with ambushes. They’d do it, and if led right, they’d do it well. But they always let him know somehow that they would rather be left alone; it would be OK if they caught the gooks, but if they didn’t, that would be fine too. At first it had been disconcerting—troopers who didn’t care but who’d fight anyway, sloppy soldiers smoking grass whenever they could, but would do whatever was asked. Skeptical kids who made no friends outside their own company and sometimes only in their own squads, who’d go out and tear themselves apart to help another unit and then leave when it was over without asking a name or taking a thanks, if any were offered.
    It had taken Mayfield a while to get used to it, but after a month in Nam he began to realize and then to understand that his troops weren’t acting strangely at all, that, if anything, they were amazingly professional. They did what they were supposed to do, and it was enough. They had no illusions about why they were here. There was no need for propaganda, for flag waving. Even if there were, these kids wouldn’t have bought it. Killing toughens you, and these kids were there to kill, and they knew it. They took their cues from the top, and all that mattered from USARV to the Battalion Commanders was body counts.
    He was bewildered the first time he heard a company commander arguing with the S-2 that the four AK’s they’d brought in, even though they hadn’t found any bodies, meant four kills or at least three. “You can’t shoot without a rifle, can you?” he said. “Now, can you?” The killing thing seeped down to every rifleman. Some units were given a quota for the week, and if they didn’t get it, they were just sent out again. He’d heard about units of the 101st burying their kills on the way out and digging them up again to be recounted on the way in. Just killing made it all very simple, and the simplicity made it very professional. Everyone knew the job—even the dumbest kid. The time thing of 365 days just nailed it down; no matter what these kids did or how they acted, they knew they had only 365 days of it and not a second more. To the kids lying around him, Nam simply didn’t count for anything in itself. It was something they did between this and that, and they did what they had to do to get through it—no more.
    Mayfield took off his helmet and