War Baby Read Online Free PDF

opportunities for film the previous day and now it looked as if he might go home empty-handed. He needed something to sell .
    McCague did not wait for his decision. He was on one knee, aiming his M-16 at an imaginary enemy on the other side of the rice paddy. The rest of his rifle squad were watching him, laughing.
    ‘You crazy motherfucker, McCague,’ one of them said.
    If McCague had been home in Kentucky he would be spinning the wheels of his hotrod in the main street, Webb thought. Now someone’s let him loose with an Armalite in the boonies, and life’s still a big joke.
    ‘Ready there, mister?’ McCague said.
    Webb fumbled for his Leica. Without waiting for a reply, McCague fired a rapid burst into the tree line two hundred yards away. Almost at once there was a sound like angry bees in the air around them. McCague sat down suddenly, staring in dull surprise at the three small holes in the front of his utilities.
    ‘Jesus, shit, someone’s busting caps at us!’
    ‘Christ, man, get down!’
    ‘Corpsman up!’
    McCague was lying on his back now, his spine arched, his chest heaving, trying to suck in air. His mouth was gaping open like a beached fish.
    Webb was paralyzed with shock and disbelief.
    Something hit him hard in the side and he fell. He heard Ryan’s voice close to his ear. ‘Get your head down, you silly bastard.’
    ‘Where are they?’
    ‘There!’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘There!’
    ‘Corpsman up, goddamn it!’
    ‘Where are they?’
    ‘There!’
    ‘Where, for Christ’s sake, where? ’
    Webb listened to the bedlam around him. Now he understood what it was that Crosby and Prescott had been laughing at that first afternoon in the Hashish Hilton. Perhaps if he ever made it back to Saigon he would share the joke.
    The corpsman had reached McCague, was crouched over him, blowing air into his lungs. McCague was making gurgling noises, like a kid blowing bubbles in his bath. The medic pulled a scalpel from his kit and ripped open McCague’s shirt. There was a spurt of blood as he made two incisions in the boy’s neck, then he pushed a black tube into the trachea. McCague had stopped moving. The corpsman blew into the tube, watching for the rise and fall of the boy’s chest, feeling for the pulse at his neck.
    There was another shout from along the line, and another.
    ‘I’m hit.’
    ‘Medic up, medic up!’
    The corpsman grimaced; frustration, despair. He crawled away, elbows and knees, leaving McCague staring at the blue sky, the black tube flopping from the wound in his neck. Webb followed McCague’s stare, as if there were really something up there.
    Just blue sky, alive with death, pulsing with it. Webb hugged the earth, sucked it, embraced it. His camera was gone, dropped somewhere in the dirt. He looked around for Ryan. He had gone too.
    Madness. If I live through this I’m getting out of Saigon, out of Vietnam and I’m never coming back.
     
    * * *
     
    The Dakota dived low, with a sound like a foghorn. These things piss blood, Crosby had told him, and now he knew what he meant. It had three mounted machine guns, each with six barrels, firing eighteen thousand rounds a minute, every fifth round a tracer; it looked like a solid stream of red, death the color of carmine. How could anything live through that?
    It was followed in by a Phantom, its fuselage camouflaged in green and grey. Steel-ribbed cans tumbled down the sky, exploding in orange fireballs that broiled into choking black clouds. Webb opened his mouth in a silent scream, the concussion like hot needles in his ears.
    As the jets roared for home, the soldiers rose slowly to their feet from behind the embankment. The firelight was over. The forest crackled and burned and the choking black smoke from the napalm drifted.
    Webb found his camera. He looked at his watch; the whole thing had lasted less than twenty minutes. He would have guessed three to four hours.
    And he hadn’t taken a single frame.
    And I wanted to be a combat