The Daisy Ducks Read Online Free PDF Page B

could've been, twenty years
earlier. Dat's Fred Kaunitz. Big fella from Texas. Heard he can
wrestle a bull to the ground. Not a steer or calf, a bull. He's slow
and deliberate, and very careful. He was a smart kid, Fred, but
quiet. Strange maybe. Never talked much. Like I heard that bull story
from a friend of his, not from him. He never talked about himself. A
loner and a perfectionist. The best shot of all of us. Rifle or
shotgun, still target or moving, if it was in front of Fred's muzzle
it was gone."
    "And where is he now?"
    Roantis shrugged his shoulders.
    "Don't know. Last I heard, back on the family
ranch in Texas. I'll be tracking him down, but I'm sure he doesn't
keep in touch with the army guys. It wouldn't be like him, you know?
As soon as the job was done, he just went back to Texas. This one's
Vilarde. He's the one I want to find. That's why I came here
tonight."
    "Yeah? Well forget it, Liatis. I know I owe you
a big favor. Someday, if you're unlucky in a fight, I'll fix your jaw
for free. I'll pull all your family's teeth out—no charge. But I'm
not having anything to do with these guys. No way."
    "Amen," said Mary.
    "Vilarde is as solid as they come. He was second
in command in the Ducks. After the Ducks, I quit the army. I knew we
weren't going to win over there and I guess I was sick of it. I'd
been in one defeat already, up at Dien Bien Phu. I didn't need
another one."
    Roantis was getting morose again; I persuaded him to
put the booze away and switch to coffee.
    "Well here's what happened," he continued.
"It was on one of our sweeps eastward, from Thailand toward the
Vietnamese border. On the fourth day out we came up to a little
hillside at dusk and made dry camp. No lights or noise. There was a
tiny village down below us in a river valley. We glassed it in the
dying daylight just before we turned in. It was only thirteen or
fourteen hooches, some of them for three families. It was built along
the river, and there were all kinds of boats pulled up on the bank.
We planned to get moving before dawn and just bypass it, crossing the
river and then following the jungle and mountain trails looking for
tire tracks.
    "About four in the morning, Jusuelo wakes me up
and says there's noise in the bush. It was a platoon of Khmer Rouge
moving up and over our little hill. We snuggled down and froze and
let them go right over us. If we took them on we'd give away our
position and get badly chewed up, too. They went over the hill and
down to the village. We used a starlight scope to track 'em and could
see clear as day. They surrounded the village, and at first light
they stormed in there fast and got all the villagers out of their
huts.
    "Then they rounded them up in the central
clearing and made them sit down. Then they started the usual shit,
you know, hitting the wives and kids with rifle butts, cutting a
guy's head off —"
    "Usual? Usual! " Mary had risen from her
chair and was staring balefully at Roantis, whose manner was that of
someone recounting the details of a church rummage sale.
    "Yeah. See Mary, Asia isn't like Europe or
America. It just isn't. Not even in the most modern places. The
standard drill for these guerrilla groups is to enter a village and
terrorize it. Shows the people who's boss. Shows them they better not
screw around. So anyway, they killed two of the strongest men and
beat up some other villagers pretty bad. Now we thought of going in
right then, but we decided to use the terror to our own advantage."
    "So you stood by," said Mary, "and let
this happen so when you showed up you'd be the good guys."
    "Right."
    "You're no better than the Khmer Rouge, Liatis."
    "You're wrong, Mary. Know what? We were worse.
Because if we weren't, we'd be dead. So anyway, they left in
midmorning after taking all the rice and dried meat they could lay
their hands on. We went in at noon and helped bandage the wounded and
bury the two headless corpses. We were the heroes. We talked to the
old chief Siu Lok, for a