Place of duty--3

Place of duty—3

        After a while, Hunter said, “We need more people. We’re short three.”

        Billy D said, “Shoot, I heard in the armored cav, sometimes they go out, they only got three people on the tracks. Supposed to have four, but they go out with three and nobody on one of the machine guns.”

        “You need somebody on all your guns,” Wizard said. “I wouldn’t want to go out, not have somebody on a gun.”

        Hunter said to Kincaid, “You’re the first new guy we got in two months. Course, you’re not exactly a new guy.”

        “I guess not,” Kincaid said.

        None of us knew much about Kincaid. He’d done a tour with the Americal, farther north. He was from Virginia, and the five days he spent in the bush before we came in to Angelique, we could tell he knew what he was doing.

        Billy D asked, “How was it in the Americal?”

        Kincaid took a sip of beer. “Fucked up. We worked a lot of villages. There’re more villages up north, especially near the coast. You go in a village, everybody hates you. They don’t look at you. It’s like you don’t exist.”

        “Hearts and minds,” Hunter said, and Kincaid laughed.

        “Fuck,” Wizard said, and the disgust in the word was our disgust. He made a weird laugh. “Like folks say, you grab em by the balls, their hearts and minds got to follow.”

         Kincaid said, “Where there aren’t villages, you get mines. Lots of mines. Sometimes it seemed we lost a man a day, people not watching where they put their feet. Down here, there aren’t many villages. You see somebody in the bush, most likely he’s NVA.”

        Wizard laughed. “When he’s dead, he’s NVA.”

        “There is that,” Kincaid said.

        Hunter asked the question we all wanted to ask. Hunter was that way. There was nothing oblique in his approach to anything. “Why’d you come back?”

        There was irony in Kincaid’s laugh. “Well, you might say it was because of a woman.”