The Night In Question Read Online Free PDF Page A

his own nature. But this was different.
    In fact, B.D. could see a big difference. It was one thing to do something in the heat of the moment, another to think about it, accept it in advance. Anything meant anything, but B.D. never thought it would mean volunteering for an ambush party. He’d pulled that duty and hated it worse than anything. You had to lie out there all night without moving. When you thought a couple of hours had gone by, it turnedout to be fifteen minutes. You couldn’t see a thing. You had to figure it all out with your ears, and every sound made you want to blow the whole place apart, but you couldn’t because then they’d know where you were. Then they had you. Or else some friendly unit heard the firing and got spooked and called down artillery. That happened once when B.D. was out; some guys freaked and shot the shit out of some bushes, and it wasn’t three minutes before the artillery started coming in. B.D. had been mortared but he’d never been under artillery before. Artillery was something else. Artillery was like the end of the world. It was a miracle he hadn’t gotten killed—a miracle. He didn’t know if he was up for that again. He just didn’t know.
    B.D. rummaged in Ryan’s stuff for some cigarettes. He lit one and puffed it without inhaling, blowing the smoke over his head; he hated the smell of it. The men around him slept on, their bodies pale and vague under the mosquito-netting. B.D. ground the cigarette out and lay down again.
    He didn’t know Ryan all that well, when you came right down to it. The things he knew about Ryan he could count on his fingers. Ryan was nineteen. He had four older sisters, no brothers, a girlfriend he never talked about. What he did like to talk about was driving up to New Hampshire with his buddies and fishing for trout. He was clumsy. He talked too much. He could eat anything, even gook food. He called the black guys Zulus but got along with them better than B.D., who claimed to be color-blind. His mother was dead. His father ran a hardware store and picked up the odd dollar singing nostalgic Irish songs at weddings and wakes. Ryan could do an imitation of his father singing that put B.D. right on the floor, every time. It was something he did with his eyebrows. Just thinking of it made B.D. laugh silently in the darkness.

    Ryan was on a supply detail that weekend, completely routine, carrying ammunition forward from a dump in the rear, when a machine gun opened fire from a low hill that was supposed to be secure. It caught Ryan and several other men as they were humping crates across a mudfield. The whole area went on alert. Perimeter guards were blasting away at the hill. Officers kept running by, shouting different orders.
    When B.D. heard about Ryan he left his position and took off running toward the LZ. There were two wounded men there, walking wounded, and a corpse in a bag, but Ryan was gone. He’d been lifted out with the other criticals a few minutes earlier. The medic on duty said that Ryan had taken a round just above the left eye, or maybe it was the right. He didn’t know how serious it was, whether the bullet had hit him straight on or from the side.
    B.D. looked up at the sky, at the dark, low, eddying clouds. He was conscious of the other men, and he clenched his jaw to show that he was keeping a tight lid on his feelings, as he was. Years later he told all this to the woman he lived with and would later marry, offering it to her as something important to know about him—how this great friend of his, Ryan, had gotten hit, and how he’d run to be with him and found him gone. He described the scene in the clearing, the wounded men sitting on tree stumps, muddy, dumb with shock, and the dead man in his bag, not stretched out like someone asleep but all balled up in the middle. A big lump. He described the churned-up ground, the jumble of boxes and canisters. The dark sky. And Ryan gone, just like that. His best friend.
    This