The last few drops from a dented canteen slid down the wounded private’s throat. This was Da Nang province, 1973.

Lieutenant Snipe Master held the kid’s head up and lied to him:
“It’s gonna be all right, son, we’re gonna make it just fine.”

It was the jungle, though, where the heat and the moisture made everything fester. Out here, wounds of the body and of the soul were hard to heal. If something got hurt, it was easier just to cut it off and keep moving than sit around and wait for it to turn black.

He heard the noise of birds screaming, saw them fleeing up through the canopy.

At the bottom of the hill, three VC were creeping along on spidery legs, guns wagging with each step. They looked behind every tree they passed, but they wouldn’t have any trouble finding them. The boy was leaking blood, so much blood, like the trail of dots in a table of contents.

“You should leave me here. Just give me a gun, and prop me up. I’ll take them out, and you can get away. No sense in us both dying, Snipe Master.”
“No bullets left in your gun. Had to use them.”
“What about your sniper rifle? If you get away, you won’t need it.”
“Only one bullet left in my gun, and I want to use it myself.”
“Well, we have one grenade left, at least.”
“Nope. I used that too.”

One of the VC crouched and picked something up out of the underbrush. He waved his comrades over and examined it with them. It was a pineapple grenade, like the yankees used.
“They must have just dropped it,” he said in his dirty language, “see? There’s no mud on it at all.”

He held it up for his communist friends to behold, and the last thing he heard was whatever incomprehensible gibberish they grunted to him in response. A rifle shot cracked from the top of the hill, and the bullet traveled faster than sound. The grenade took out all three Cong, their guts dispersing statistically on the jungle floor.

“Now we’re out of grenades and bullets,” said Snipe Master. He wiped off a bead of sweat, and his finger, when he pulled it away, was green with camouflage paint.

It took a day and a half to carry the man’s unconscious body out of the jungle. By that time, the wound had gotten worse, and he’d slipped into a fever. He’d started raving, and at one point Snipe Master had had to shove a rag in his mouth, to keep him quiet as he snuck past a Viet Cong base. When they got to the helipad and the boy was loaded onto the med chopper, he grabbed Snipe Master’s hand and said:

“You don’t understand, Snipe Master. Listen! No matter what, you’ve got one bullet left, and it’s me!”

He kept on like this, until he drifted up and the nose of the chopper spun around and took him out of the jungle. He’d asked around, but nobody knew the boy’s name, or whether he’d made it back to the states.

Ten years later, in Los Angeles, a small crowd in black dresses or black coats stood over the mouth of the new grave. The wind blew their clothing awkardly. They looked small from the other side of the cemetary, where the car was idling, and he was looking at the ceremony through binoculars. As he watched them, sometimes he would forget and think that his binoculars were a rifle scope, his left eye squinting, his right finger seeking out an invisible trigger.

“Say, aren’t you Professor S. Masterson? From the University?”

It was the groundskeeper. Foreign type. He’d been poking around for a little while, pretending to rake some leaves, and he’d finally decided to speak up.

“No, no, I don’t know who you mean,” he said. He stowed the binoculars in the passenger seat.

“Sure you’re him, I seen you on tv. You’re that guy who’s the expert on Snipe Master. What are you doin’ here?”

Then the groundskeeper put two and two together, and snapped his fingers.

“Oh, I get it! You must be here for that funeral over there.” He hooked his thumb. “That’s the funeral for that crazy old war Vietnam vet who saved Snipe Master’s life from that Greenpeace assassin squad. Paper says he jumped in front of a bullet for him. What would possess a guy to do that? Must have been guilt for all those war crimes the GIs committed in Nam, eh?”

Professor S. Masterson depressed the clutch and put the car into first. The big front end perked up, drifted onto the tarmac, and carried him out of the cemetary.

Some people who were supposed to have died in the jungle made it out alive, and some people who were supposed to be alive never made it out of the jungle.

He drove to the motel and filled two glasses full of Scotch.

Later, he killed some prostitutes.

Crap, I should have ended the story back there.