Point of Impact Read Online Free PDF

telegram.
    DEAR COOT , it said, YOUR PAL COL. BRUCE IS THE REAL MCCOY. HE LED AN APC ATTACK ON A BUNKER POSITION, WAS HIT TWICE, AND PULLED HIS MEN OUT OF THE BURNING THING HIMSELF. THEY SAY HE DID BECOME A COP IN ARIZONA. SEMPER FI, BUD .
    That learned, Bob stopped in at Sara Vincent’s travel agency—Sara was Sam Vincent’s divorced daughter, and a woman so plain she’d even scare Mike—and bought his tickets, made arrangementswith Sam to check his property once or twice a day, and feed the dog, and tried to get himself ready for the world again.
    He was all right, too, until the last night. He knew he had to get up early for the drive to Little Rock and just when he’d thought he had everything checked out and was ready for the sack, it came over him. That’s the way it came: fast, without preparation, without announcement. It just came and there it was.
    It was a bad one. He hadn’t had it so bad since the president declared the little war in the desert a victory, and America went on a bender and everybody was happy except himself and maybe another million boys who wondered why nobody put up ribbons for them twenty years ago, when it might have mattered.
    Now you hold it on down, he told himself, aching for a glass of smooth brown whiskey to flatten himself out, knowing that if he had one many more would follow.
    But there was no whiskey, nothing to blunt what happened in his mind. The memories hit him hard. He remembered the VC he shot who turned out to be an eight-year-old boy with a hoe—it had looked like an AK through the 9× at eight hundred meters in the bad light of sunset. He remembered the smell of burned villages after the Search and Destroys, and the crying of the women and the way the goddamned kids just looked at you during his first tour. He remembered the bellytime, moving through the high grass, avoiding the crest lines, as the ants crawled over you and the snakes slithered by and you just lay there, waiting, for days sometimes, until someone passed into the kill zone eight hundred meters out and you could put them down. He remembered the way they fell when hit, instant rag doll, the toppling surrender, the small cloud of dust it raised. So many of them. The “confirmed” kills were only the ones with a spotter there, to write it in the log and make a report.
    But mostly he remembered the sudden shock as his hip went numb and he collapsed and slid down the earthen dam of the perimeter. He looked down and saw the smashed flesh, the pulsing red. Remembering, he put his hand on the wound, and it throbbed some. Then he remembered Donny scrambling down.
    “No!” he yelled, “get your young ass back,” and the bullet came from so long away it arrived a full second before its own sound. It drilled Donny in the chest and tunneled to his spine. He was dead before he collapsed against Bob and lay across him that long morning.
    “Hell of a shot, Bob,” the major said later. “We made it over a thousand yards. Who knew they could shoot that good? Who knew they-had a man that good?”
    You could never forget stuff like that, not really. But he learned somehow not to let it rag him most of the time; he could ride it out in the mountains or in the solitude.
    Bob sat at what had passed for a kitchen table. His rebuilt hip ached a bit, all that plastic instead of cartilage. He could feel what he called his own personal night passing over him. Of course the time of day had nothing to do with it. What he called his own personal night was about the feeling of being nothing, of having no worth, of having spent himself in a war nobody cared about, and having given up everything that was important and good. In other days, this was what got Bob off on his drinking, and drunk, he turned mean as shit.
    But now he didn’t drink, and instead he threw on a coat and went out into the harsh Arkansas night and walked the mile or so downhill. Inside Aurora Baptist, some kind of service was going on. He heard the black