365 Days by Ronald J. Glasser Page B

know where the shit is too. A piece of bamboo where it shouldn’t be, wood chips, a bullet hole in a tree. They’ve got to know, too—remember that, and look for the signs yourself.”
    They set up their own ambushes: L’s, V’s, and X’es, and lay in the slime for hours to pull them off. They went through mock-up VC villages. They were ambushed themselves. “No, no, no. You charge toward the firing, dammit, it’s your only chance. Now get the hell up and do it again.” They got used to the noise of being shot at and the confusion. Macabe, twisting through the water, learned to read from the noise and the splashing of the bullets what kind of ambush it was and where the bullets were coming from.
    “If you fall into an X-type ambush, you’re just fucked,” the instructor offered, kneeling down to draw an X in the mud. “Whichever way you come into it, they got you; any way you move they can light you up. If you come in through this side of the X,” he said, drawing a line from the outside of the X to the place where the limbs crossed, “and you move this way”—moving the line down through the lower side of the X—“the other two limbs, just by turning around, can still have you.” He looked up. “Just roll up and die, because there’s nothing you can do. The L’s and V’s are different. If you move fast enough you’re out. Like the L,” he said, wiping out the X and making an L.
    They listened and then went out to practice again; it was endless. What they did well once, they did a second time, to do it better. They went on night amphibious patrols, pulling their rubber boats through the jungle tangles, launching them into the shallow water, paddling silently, cautiously, down the narrow waterways. Watching the banks as intently as if their lives depended on it, they sat in the boat, listening to the soft rippling of the water moving past them, feeling singularly alone and ageless.
    The jungle training was to end with a night jump at low level into the cypress swamps of southern Florida. They were to be dropped twenty miles from the coast, and were given ten days to get to the coast for an offshore amphibious pickup, followed by a water insertion farther up the coast.
    The 197th Brigade stationed at Dalton and support by SF troopers were to be out in the swamps to stop them. It was understood that if the offshore pickup was missed, they would have to hump it to the second objective. It was that simple.
    “Nervous?”
    “Yeah, a little,” Macabe said, carefully placing his C-rations into his rucksack.
    “What do you think it’s gonna be like? I mean, low level, in the dark. You wouldn’t see anything until you hit.”
    “Probably as bad as we all think,” Macabe said.
    He sat on the flight line with the rest of them, listening to the wind whistling through the open darkness above them, hoping it would build up so the mission would be canceled. It wasn’t and they jumped, black and lonely at low level, on a windy Florida night.
    Just as they jumped the wind shifted, setting into them. It took Collins into a tree and broke his pelvis. It took Macabe and slammed him into the ground. He hit hard, and rolling reflexively, cut open his cheek on a rock. Before he could get up to collapse his chute, it had puffed out and dragged him through a small patch of water. Struggling, choking, trying to keep his head above the slime, he finally managed to get to his knees and cut himself loose. Disgusted, he knelt there gasping, soaked in three feet of muddy water. Forcing himself to vomit, he threw up as much of the foul liquid as he could. To drown, to die in this, he thought. Fuck it! And he left the chute unburied.
    It took four hours to regroup. For five days they moved east through the swamp. Sweating, sleeves rolled up, chewing salt tablets and drinking the smelly, chemically treated water, watching, point out ahead, they sloshed through the water. Gradually the swamps thinned, the water began forming