"Joe Haldeman - 1968" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

Joe Haldeman - 1968

First week

A world of dirt

Spider was on a planet far away, a world better than this one. There was a beautiful princess involved,
and a reluctant hero, and dragons and swords, but it was science fiction, not fantasy. A big book
calledGlory Road, by Robert Heinlein.

"You still readin' that flyin' saucer crap?" Batman dropped two heavy boxes of C rations, raising a cloud
of red dust.

Spider didn't look up. "Bite my crank."

"Whip it out." Batman's face was a big black moon. He wiped it carefully with a green bandanna. "Let me
see your sixteen."

Spider started to frame a smartass reply, but let it go. "I'll do it." He unfolded his six-foot-two skinny
frame, stretched and yawned, stuffed the fat book into a side pocket. Spider was white, nominally; like
all the other white boys and men at the fire base, he was actually red, his unwashed skin deeply stained
with ground-in laterite dirt.

Spider retrieved his M16, which he had never fired, from where it was propped up against a low bunker.
The flash suppressor on the end of the barrel had three prongs that served as an adequate wire-cutter for
the baling wire that bound the boxes C rations came in: you slip the prongs around the taut wire and give
the rifle a quick twist; the wire gives way with a satisfying snap.

What Spider didn't know was that if you do this often enough, with enough force, you will begin to
unscrew the barrel. Then you can squeeze off a round and have the receiver explode in your face. This
would happen to a lot of soldiers before the army changed the design of the flash suppressor. But it's not
what happened to Spider.

Batman shouted "Chow!" while Spider snapped open the boxes.

"Happy fucking New Year," Spider said. "Get laid?"

"Sure I got laid. Didn't get off the fuckin' base." The boxes were deliberately upside-down. Batman
kneeled and opened them. Inside each were twelve meals in light brown cartons. If you exposed them
label side up, nobody would take Scrambled Eggs (which the army called Ham & Eggs, Chopped) or
Ham & Lima Beans (which the soldiers called Ham and Motherfuckers). This way, choosing your meal
was potluck, often the most exciting event of the day. "Didn't even get any beer. Had to pull fuckin' guard
while the clerks an' jerks partied."

Spider felt ambiguous about that term. He had been a certain kind of clerk for his first two weeks in
Vietnam. He hated the job, and lost it by shouting at a sergeant, and attempting to land a punch. In his
new position, Combat Engineer (Pioneer), he got to work with more congenial men, but other than that it
was dirt everywhere, unrelenting heat, hard labor, bad food, and the possibility of people shooting at you.
He didn't yet realize how dangerous it could become. Not many did. It was twenty-nine days before Tet,
1968.