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

the St. Andrews crowd before you got drafted, remember? They're funny. "Passengers will please refrain
from using toilets while the train is in the station Darling I love you." We sang it all the way home. Guy
asked for my ID but didn't really look at it, good thing.

There's not much on the TV about Vietnam, so I guess things are pretty quiet. Hang in there.
Love, Beverly

Excrement

When he was working at Graves Registration, Spider was twice punished by being assigned the
shit-burning detail. This was the lowest-caste job in the army, and Spider pretended outrage and disgust
when it fell to him. Actually, he rather enjoyed it.

The latrines at his base camp were four-holer outhouses. Instead of emptying into a pit, though, the
droppings dropped into old fuel containers, fifty-five-gallon drums, with their top thirds cut off. Every
couple of days they would fill up, and whichever enlisted man was in least favor would be assigned
shit-burning detail.

You were given a pair of gloves reserved for the purpose. You locked the latrine and propped up the
swinging door at the rear that allowed access to the fifty-five-gallon drums. The smell was Olympian in
the tropical heat. You dragged the heavy drums to the side of the road and sat upwind, if there was wind,
which was rare.

In a few minutes or hours, a fuel truck would come by, and top off the drums with diesel. You would
float a gasoline-soaked crumpled piece of paper on top of the noisome mess and light it, and with luck,
that would coax the diluted diesel fuel alight, and soon you would have four festive bonfires pouring forth
choking black smoke with an aroma that is difficult to describe. They would burn for a couple of hours;
your job was to watch them.

As unpleasant as the detail sounds, it did give you lots of time to read. And it wasn't unreasonable for
Spider to enjoy it, at least on those days when his normal employment would have entailed the
manipulation of decomposed bodies and fractions of bodies.

While he was hauling the barrels of shit, Spider would sing, at the top of his lungs, "Passengers will please
refrain/from using toilets while the train/is in the station/Darling I love you," to the tune of "Funiculi,
Funicula."

Life is but a dream

It's a place that Spider visits almost every night. It is very cold and smells bad, bad like a butcher shop
with roadkill inside. Grace notes of Lysol and body wastes. The lights are bright and blue. There are
three barber chairs and in one of them a naked man sits dead and white, his hide sewn together in big
clumsy stitches that close his half-emptied body. One eye is a fish eye and one eye is gone.

The skinny black man who is Spider's guide stops at the corpse and shakes its hand. "Good evening,
Major." He giggles and moves the hand down, forcing against rigor mortis, so it modestly covers
shrunken genitals. "An officer and a gentleman."

Six dark green body bags are lined up next to a white porcelain-clad table with blood gutters. "Every day
is just like Christmas," the black man says. "Give me a hand here."