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

Spider soon learned that the GI had four enemies in Vietnam. They had four distinct ways of killing him.

The NVA were green-uniformed North Vietnamese Regular Army troops. They were the GIs'
counterparts, a mixture of career soldiers and draftees. They moved in relatively large units through the
jungle and engaged the Americans with "conventional" weapons: rifles, grenades, machine guns, artillery,
and sometimes even tanks. They occasionally employed small airplanes for reconnaissance, but didn't
have jet fighters in the south.

Most GIs had some sympathy for the NVA. From policing up bodies after a battle, or taking an
occasional prisoner, a composite picture emerged of the NVA private as young, scared, ill-equipped,
and undersupplied. A sixteen-year-old drafted out of high school would walk a thousand miles and go
into battle with a taped-together rifle older than his father, a cloth sack with a couple of dozen loose
cartridges, and a plastic bag of rice and dried fish heads. He could kill you with one of those two dozen
bullets, but it would take a lot of bad luck on your part.

There were two varieties of Viet Cong. The ones you encountered in the boonies were guerrilla fighters
who set ambushes, littered the landscape with boobytraps, harassed you with hit-and-run mortar and
rocket engagements, and sometimes came charging out of the night bent on suicidal mayhem. They
tortured prisoners and mutilated the dead. If a village tried to resist them, the village chiefs would be
found castrated and/or disemboweled and/or beheaded. The GIs saw them as dangerous maniacs, and
so did some of the Vietnamese.

The other VC were civilians, women and children and old men, who would walk up to you smiling with a
basket of soft drinks or a sexual proposition or a hand out, begging. Inside the basket or under the
clothing would be a hand grenade or satchel charge or just a loaded pistol. When the smoke cleared and
the bodies were tallied, the GIs would shake their heads in wonder. How could they hate us so much?
How could they value their own lives so little? And the lesson constantly fed back was this: Every slope is
an enemy; they don't care whether they live or die; they don't see you as a human being at all. Never turn
your back on one.

The fourth enemy was the army, the lunatics that had sent you to Vietnam in the first place, the ones that
ordered you out of the relative safety of base camp or bunker to go produce a body count. This
implacable enemy was personified by officers and noncoms, who sometimes perished from a perceived
lack of empathy with those beneath them. Vietnam was not the first American war where a significant
number of officers were killed by their own men, but it was the only war that produced a verb describing
the action: to "frag," because the preferred weapon for assassination was the fragmentation grenade,
ubiquitous and impossible to trace.

Love letter

January 3, 1968

Dear Spider,

Happy birthday to me! There's not much happening here. I hope you can say the same!

We're just hanging around, waiting for the new semester to start. Still just working afternoons. We went
down to the Roma for pizza last night, and I got served without using my ID. They've got a really awful
band. So we went down to the Zebra and watched Tommy Cole and the Belvederes, we went there with