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

and 50s all around the permeter. This place has been here for a year and never got hit. So you dont have
to worry.

"Better out here anyhow. Nobody fucks with you."

"Nobody but Charlie."

"Ah, shit. What do you know about it?" The other man had only been in Vietnam for one month.

"Just what I hear. Same as you."

Dust

Laterite is a ferruginous mineral, brick-red in color, that makes up much of the soil of the Central
Highlands of Vietnam. If the brush is cleared from an area during the dry season, this laterite manifests
itself as a fine red dust, like gritty talcum powder, that gets on and into everything.

In semi-permanent installations, the dust is often several inches deep, piling up in drifts like hot dry snow.
It's constantly airborne; making breathing difficult, dyeing the skin, fouling machinery, giving food an
interesting texture.

First Blood

That night a squad of enemy sappers cut their way through the barbed wire and set a satchel charge
under the 8-inch howitzer. Returning through the hole in the barbed wire, one tripped over a string that
set off a magnesium flare. All six of them were slaughtered by a.50-caliber machine gun, operated by the
guard whose drowsiness had let them through the perimeter in the first place. Their return fire was valiant
but only succeeded in amputating a cook's earlobe. The satchel charge went off but it was too small, and
only knocked a wheel off the howitzer. The NVA squad that had been waiting for the sappers' return
fired five hasty mortar rounds toward the American camp. All five rounds fell short (see "Entropy").

Attitudes

"God, you see them dead gooks?" The man who said this, grinning, had earned his nickname "Killer" by
single-handedly zapping an unarmed North Vietnamese soldier who'd come crashing through the woods,
shouting deleriously, a few months before. The first round, a head wound, had probably been sufficient,
but Killer had walked over to him, switched the M16's selector to full auto, and put seventeen more
rounds in a line across the man's back, point-blank, almost cutting him in two. He'd never killed anyone
before or since.

"Yeah." Spider had seen them from a distance. "Big shit. I seen worse."

(Spider wasn't lying. When he'd tried to slug the sergeant, he had been employed as a clerk at "Graves
Registration" in Kontum. Besides typing and filing, he had tagged the bodies of American soldiers,
inventoried their personal possessions, and sent them along to Cam Ranh Bay inside a plastic bag inside
an aluminum casket. He hadn't liked the job and after two weeks it had driven him a little crazy.)

"Monday." The medic Doc, walking by, gave Spider and Killer each their weekly malaria pill, an orange
disc just smaller than a cookie. This was in addition to their daily chloroquine.