Judges 9:32*

We set up ambush near a canal. The canal wasn’t an arrow-straight, concrete-lined waterway, but a glorified ditch, a winding, twisting narrow stream deep enough to carry small boats from village to village. Most canals were several hundred years old, dug when the Vietnamese came from the north and took land from the native population or pushed Khmers back east or Thais back south. 

The moon that night was big and fat and rose an hour after I set the squad on a wide treeless point that jutted from the bush and into the paddies. I hated big fat moons, except when on ambush in the rubber plantations and I could see the dinks when they came down trails or across clearings, carrying mortar tubes and bipods and base plates and shells they would drop down the tubes and send toward base camp where my bunk was. Or if I was at base camp, staggering from somebody’s tent and toward my own hooch and maybe had too much to drink, but not enough, because I could still walk. A big fat moon helped then, because maybe I would see tent stakes and piss tubes and not trip over them and fall down and make a fool of myself.

But there, stuck out on that point, with two hundred meters of flat open ground between the paddies and safety in the woods, and if shit got really bad, we would have to run across it ... I hated big fat moons.

I put Allen and his M-60 machine gun on the center of the point, and Frenchy, who wasn’t a squad leader yet, but would be in a month when Ben Thomas got stupid and dead at the same time. I put Allen and Frenchy and myself on the point, because from there I could see up and down the canal and anything that came by. The point was fifty meters from the canal and stuck into the paddies like a middle finger jabbing a message against fate and all that shit. I put Bo, Reese and Jim to watch the rear and the flats that stood between the point and safety in the woods.

The moon rose higher and got smaller, but no less bright. Paddy rice wasn’t tall enough to hide the canal, but dikes near the canal would make anything that came down seem to float through the paddies. Dinks used the canal to bring down weapons and ammunition and whatever else they needed to run their war, which wasn’t much. Intelligence people said the dinks ran small boats up and down the canal at night, probably during the daytime too, but we didn’t have enough people to check every boat that came along. Anything that moved at night was fair game, and it was easier to kill dinks than search them. The dinks knew that anything moving at night was fair game. They shot us, we shot them. That was the rule.

About midnight Frenchy nudged Allen and Allen poked me with an elbow. I looked left and saw a mast coming down the canal and the bulwarks of a boat. A mast? I had figured on a  small canoe, one of those hollowed-out logs the dinks used to take pigs and produce to market, but there came this big canoe with a mast. Allen shifted his gun left.

I had a parachute flare, the kind with a rocket in the end and a cap with a firing pin you fit over the end of the flare, and you fire the flare by slamming the end onto the ground  I didn’t do it that way, but rose to my knees and fired the flare with my hand. The flare whooshed into the sky, and a woman at the prow of the boat cut loose with one of those Chinese light machine guns. She could tell where the flare came from, and she just cut loose with the machine gun, and green tracers whizzed past my head. Then the flare popped and danced beneath its parachute, and I saw the woman. God, she was beautiful, standing at the prow of the boat, one foot braced against the bulwark, the butt of the machine gun at her right hip, and she ripped off a full pannier, right at me.

Frenchy yelled at me, and the woman reached down into the boat and grabbed another pan of ammunition and slapped it onto the gun and held the trigger down. Her face grimaced from recoil of her machine gun or fear, or maybe she grinned at the joy of it all. She ripped off about half that pan and then Allen opened up and stitched her with a ten-round burst. The woman didn’t fall, not right away, and Allen stood up and held his gun hip high and walked his shots down the boat, catching a man at the tiller and another man coming over the side. Allen stopped firing then, and there was a silence and I heard the woman’s body splash into the water. I called Jim from the rear position, and Jim put three rounds from his grenade launcher into the boat, and the boat blazed in the moonlight. The flare danced downward, parachute swinging on a small breeze.

I got everybody out then, running across the moonlit flat ground and into the trees, falling onto the ground and panting like hounds when the fox is finally dead.

Allen placed another belt of ammunition in his gun. He looked at me and grinned. His teeth flashed yellow-white in the moonlight. “Man,” he said, “that bitch had balls.”

·       Judges 9:32 -- “Get ye up, therefore, you and the people who are with you, and set up an ambush in the fields.” -- King James version