In Every Clime and Place Read Online Free PDF

pry bar. It was a good way to open locked interior doors without expending ammo, and it had a fairly obvious anti-personnel application. That didn’t happen often, but in close quarters, like a shipboard action or in a city or jungle, you might just meet an enemy at a range of a few yards, and the ACR was ill suited to bayonet fighting, and too delicate and sophisticated a weapon to just beat someone to death with.
    Whipping out a machete also had a tremendous effect on enemy morale.
    The Corps issued machetes with a black anodized blade and a camouflage-patterned fiberglass handle. Mine was a memento from Zaire. The blade was naked steel and the handle was wood. It might have been the only piece of wood on the assault craft. I saw Johnson eyeing it covetously.
    “Like it?” I drew it and presented it over my forearm.
    “It’s a beauty.” He held it reverently. “Where did you get it?”
    “One of N’Gaba’s rebels,” I replied. N’Gaba was a vicious warlord who’d managed to slaughter his way through central Africa, wrecking most of its culture and economy until we wiped his useless ass out. “Bastard took a cut at me with it. I ducked and stuck him with my Ka-Bar.”
    “Yeah,” Sgt Pilsudski called from his position aft. “That dumb guerilla should’ve known it wouldn’t dent your thick Irish skull.” He’d been standing about ten feet from me when it happened.
    I donned an expression of long-suffering patience. “I gotta take that from a Polack from Jersey? Why didn’t you shoot the prick before he closed with me?”
    “I knew you could take him.” Ski smiled. “If you were any kind of Marine. Why waste ammo? I’d’ve been pissed if anybody shot my first opponent for hand-to-hand combat.”
    He probably wasn’t lying. He came from a long and distinguished line of head cases. His family had a cavalry tradition in the Old Country. His great-great-great granddaddy was in the regiment that drew sabers and charged a German armored column in World War II. He was actually proud of that.
    I was just happy to have survived my one hand-to-hand fight. I shuddered at the memory.
    We had been advancing through thick brush in one of Ski’s flanking adventures. Suddenly a rebel came lunging out of the undergrowth swinging his blade at my head. I blocked with my rifle, lost my balance and went over. He jumped on top of me, raising his weapon for my last haircut. I twisted away, caught his wrist in my left hand and kneed him in the balls. When he folded up, I rolled him off me, pinned his right arm to the deck, kept my knee across his legs and drew my USMC Ka-Bar fighting knife. He grabbed at my throat with his left hand, but I kept my chin on my chest and stabbed him in the ribcage.
    I had seen the movies. He was supposed to stiffen up for a second, curse me, then go limp. Apparently he hadn’t seen the same films. He shrieked like a banshee and thrashed wildly. He almost got his right hand free.
    When I pulled my knife free, a gout of blood sprayed all over me. I poised my weapon and held on for dear life.
    I stabbed again.
    That time my blade went into his heart. I felt it scrape along his sternum on the way in. He gave a convulsive heave, then his energy drained away. I actually saw the life go out of his eyes. He struggled, weaker and weaker. I held him down until Ski pulled me off and called up a corpsman. It took me a while to convince them that all the blood on me was his. When we searched the area afterward, we found his rifle, an old Armalite with a round stovepiped in the chamber.
    “Luck of the Irish,” Ski had said. He picked up the machete and handed it over. “To the victor go the spoils.”
    I thought he was nuts. I still do, actually, but I’m glad he made me keep it. At that moment I would have thrown it into the bushes, but when I calmed down I came to accept it. Not as the trophy Pilsudski thought it was, but as a reminder that in the most dangerous moment of my life, despite stark