Cracker! (21 page)

He called out, “Can someone make them get those chickens outta here? She’s got a thing about chickens.”

One of the guys started yelling at the villagers in Vietnamese. There was a lot of chatter among the villagers as they gathered the chickens and scooted them off.

Cracker suddenly knew it was all wrong. She stood very still and tried to figure out what was going on. She whined and growled softly. She looked up at Rick and yelped, but he didn’t respond. She could feel it, a wave of tension rolling in from the peasants in the rice paddies. She squirmed on the leash, but Rick just tugged with annoyance and said, “No. No chickens!” The wave of tension was so strong, it was almost as powerful as the wind blasting from chopper blades when you climbed aboard. She pawed Rick, but again he just tugged with annoyance and said, “No!”

Rick frowned at Cracker. She was mostly a perfect dog, but these damn chickens drove her crazy. Then she sat in front of him and just stared at him. He remembered how she’d done that with the gourmet chicken at Fort Benning. He looked around, but everything was peaceful. It was almost like an illusion. And part of the illusion was that he could almost literally hear Camel’s voice:
Listen to your intuition.

H
E SIGNALED THE LIEUTENANT
“S
IR, THAT GIRL JUST
stood up and scratched the back of her neck. Maybe that was a signal of some kind?”

The girl looked like she was about seven, if that. The lieutenant laughed. “You’re getting paranoid, Dog Handler. Vietnam’ll do that to you.”

Rick pulled at Cracker. She refused to budge. This wasn’t intuition anymore. It was common sense: Something was wrong. “Sir!” Rick called out again.

The lieutenant turned around, this time with impatience in his face. “Clear the village. I don’t have time to be scared of a little girl. Let’s just get this mission over with and get out of here.”

The men gatheredt ogether all of the villagers and animals so Cracker could search the hootches. Rick had no choice unless he wanted to disobey a direct order. He pulled on the leash with all his might and said, “Cracker, come!”

Cracker reluctantly stood up. Everything was all wrong. Even Rick was all wrong. Why wasn’t he listening to her? She pawed Rick over and over, but he just kept hauling on her leash. What was wrong with him?

She turned her head quickly as she saw movement in the paddy. It was a rat! A big one! But then Rick was pulling on her again.

She gave the rat one last mournful glance. Rick looked over and saw the rat scurry away. Relief spread through him. Maybe that’s why she was acting so nuts. They never should have let the dogs go after rats.

Cracker smelled gunpowder, felt tension, and heard faint sounds coming from some of the houses. She growled, lay down, and refused to get up.

The men all started laughing, and just like that, Rick felt a rush, exactly like the time in training right before he blew the booby trap. The laughing started to sound as if it were moving farther away from him, and everything suddenly seemed to go into slow motion. The second before it started, he thought,
Ambush.

Villagers dropped to the ground all at once, as if on signal, and a barrage of fire rang out. Machine guns! As Rick hit the dirt, he saw his slack man buckle over, blood spurting from his neck. Gunfire seemed to be coming from every direction. Rick let go of Cracker’s leash and struggled to get his M-16 free. He couldn’t see a single enemy, but gunfire burst from the houses. Charlie must have hidden in some tunnels under the huts. He blasted away at a hootch that had gunfire coming from it. A sudden sharp pain burned his right shin, but he didn’t have time to check it. Cracker tried to crawl on top of him, no doubt to protect him. But it hampered his shooting ability, so he shoved her off and kept shooting.

He backed up in a crawl, shooting the whole time and not having the slightest idea if he was hitting anything. He set his rifle on auto even though he knew that meant he would use up his ammo more quickly. A bullet hit the ground right before him, kicking up mud in his eyes. It felt like acid. He tried wiping it out with his shirt, but his clothes were so filthy, he was just making it worse. He could barely see. He
couldn’t
see.

Machine-gun fire exploded all around him. “Charlie doesn’t have enough machine-gun ammo to keep this up long!” someone cried out. So Rick wasn’t surprised when the machine-gun aspect of the battle quickly ended.

Silence. Then a rocket-propelled grenade hit one of the APCs, blowing a hole in it. Pieces of the grenade ricocheted inside the APC. Someone screamed. The lieutenant must have called in for mortar fire, because a mortar exploded at the far end of the village. But Rick still had no idea what had happened. He couldn’t see a thing. Who was dead? Who was alive? And then he felt sudden panic: Where was Cracker? He cried out, “Cracker!” When she didn’t answer, he called out again, louder.

Guys were starting to talk in a wary way, but not panicked. His own panicked voice sounded out of place. He could tell everyone felt relatively safe now. Finally, his eyes cleared enough that he could see. They still stung like mad, but at least he could look around and make out a blur of movement and color.

But Rick couldn’t see Cracker anywhere. He searched out the cleanest spot he could find on his shirt and rubbed at his eyes. That helped a little. But he still couldn’t see Cracker. He knew she wouldn’t have strayed far from him, but he wished he knew where she was. He looked toward the rice paddy but didn’t see her. He doubted she would have gone toward the village, but he turned in that direction anyway, scanning the landscape. Some of the hootches were shot up so bad, they weren’t really hootches anymore. They were just piles of thatch now.

The radioman was already calling for dust-offs. “Blood type O negative. That’s Oscar November. Appears to be sunken chest wound….”

Rick tried to stay calm as he slowly scoured the countryside for Cracker. He tried to push the panic down. Someone started to urge him onto his back, saying, “Let me have a look at that leg.” The urging grew stronger, and another man helped, forcing him onto his back.

“What? What leg?” Rick said. “I gotta find my dog.”

“Lie still, Private.” It was the medic. Rick had that feeling again:
What the HELL is going on?
The medic applied a tourniquet and started an I.V.

He heard the radio operator saying, “… Hanski, Richard. Blood type A positive …”

Rick glanced at his leg and did a double take at the mess of blood and shrapnel. And just like that, it seemed as if the adrenaline of the battle drained from him and he could feel pain again. Intense pain. It was as if his eyes told him what his body didn’t: He was injured. He saw one especially long piece of metal sticking out of his leg, and he pulled it out, shouting at the sharp pang.

The medic called to the radio operator, “Shrapnel injury to popliteal artery.”

“… shrapnel injury to popliteal artery …,” the radioman echoed.

The medic called out, “Resected tendon!”

“… resected tendon …”

The lieutenant leaned over Rick. “Don’t worry, son, we’ll have you dusted off right away.”

Rick said, “Sir, I can’t find my dog. I can’t leave without her.” He grimaced. “Ah, man, my leg.”

“We’ll take care of your pain,” said the medic.

Rick felt his head start to swim. Must have been morphine. He tried to push himself up. “No,” he said. “No.” He saw one of the guys shaking a villager, who chattered nearly hysterically in reply. Everybody was talking to somebody. English. Vietnamese. His eyelids felt heavy. “I gotta find my dog.”

“Lie down, soldier. We’ll find your dog.”

Rick made a sudden great effort and pushed himself into a squat. “Ah!” he screamed. “Ah!” The pain from his leg shot through his entire body. He fell back down. “Oh, man. Oh, man.”

The radio operator called out, “Dust-off’s on the way!”

Rick thought of Camel:
You have to try not to ask yourself whether you can do something…. You have to tell yourself, “I
will
do this.”
He shouted out like a maniac, “I
will
push myself up!” And he did. He got up and shouted, “I gotta find my dog! Cracker!” The noises in the background seemed to fade. “Cracker!” He tried to call out, but his voice was weak and he fell to the ground. He could tell he might pass out soon. He said weakly, “I
will
do it,” but then he couldn’t. He lay back. “Doc. Doc. You gotta promise me you’ll find my dog.”

“We’ll find your dog.”

“You gotta promise….” He had this weird feeling that nobody else was real, that maybe he was already dead and they were alive, and he was just watching. “Gotta get my dog,” he said, or thought he said, but the approaching helicopter noise drowned his voice out. His head swam so badly, he didn’t know if the doctor answered or not.

He wasn’t even sure if that was his own voice saying, “Find Cracker….”

W
HEN THE FIRING STARTED,
C
RACKER TRIED TO STICK
close to Rick, but after he pushed her away, a burst of gunfire divided them and she had no choice but to go left while he went right. The gunfire seemed to be chasing her, so she kept going left while the gunfire followed. Finally, she reached the rice paddy, where she crawled along a dike to get away. Then she’d spotted that rat again. He was worth about ten wieners in her opinion. And he was slow! She crushed him in her teeth, but just as she did, she felt a sharp jerk on her leash. A man had grabbed it. She tried to lunge, but he pulled so hard that she yelped and fell to the ground. Then something pounded on her head. The last thing she remembered was the rat slipping out of her mouth….

She woke up in some kind of dark room that smelled of human urine. Several men were talking in excited voices. A touch of light trickled in from somewhere. Her neck hurt, and her head pounded. Several men stood looking at her, laughing and pointing, and she knew the men were talking about her. She recognized the man who had grabbed her leash earlier. He held a stick now and was acting as if he were hitting something. Then he rolled his eyes as if he were passing out. All the men laughed.

Then one man started yelling at her. The man with the stick raised it in the air, and another man began calling “dog” to her. She stood up unsteadily. The men laughed at her again. As the man with the stick relaxed, she bounded away, sailing past them all in one leap. The second she landed, she flew into the air again, speeding as fast as she could down a long tunnel that smelled of dirt and of people. She kept running, through tunnel after tunnel. Sometimes people would look up at her surprised. One room was filled with children who shouted excitedly as she ran through. She didn’t know where she was going, just that she needed to keep moving.

She moved much more quickly than the men chasing her. She smelled fresh air and moved toward that, up and up through a slender tunnel until she spotted the sky.

She scurried out of the tunnel and tried to get her bearings, but she kept running. The sound of voices grew farther away. She didn’t stop until she reached a jungle, and then she stood perfectly still for a moment, hearing and smelling nothing but jungle noises and jungle smells. A bird called from a tree. She bristled a little but knew she had more important things to do.

Cracker always knew what direction was what, but she felt something unfamiliar now: uncertainty. She
always
knew. But now she didn’t know, not for sure. If only her head would stop hurting. Why was it hurting? She tried to shake the pounding out of her head, but it wouldn’t go away. She turned to the left, then the right, then behind herself. She used to know in what direction Willie lived. But now she didn’t. She turned around again, then decided to go that way. She felt better after traveling a distance. This must be the right way. Right? She was thirsty and hungry, and the leash dangling from her neck annoyed her, but she felt confident again.

She did feel anxious about being separated from Rick, but she felt confident about where she’d last seen him. She hoped he was still there. There was a moment that day when she thought she’d passed the same place twice, and she lost confidence and whined. But she kept going. She needed to find Rick. She trotted at the edge of a rice paddy. All the peasants in their big hats looked up and called to one another, pointing her out. She didn’t understand a word they were saying, but she knew she couldn’t let them catch her. A couple of them shouted something and started running in her direction. It was easy to outdistance them, even with the dogs she heard baying behind her. They were so far away, and she was so fast and strong. Her legs were unaffected by uncertainty.

She understood now that she needed to avoid humans. Nobody could be trusted except Rick and people Rick trusted. She began moving more slowly but still steadily, making sure nobody saw her. The jungles took longer to move through, but unlike the paddies and villages, they were empty-of humans at least. Once, she did hear a human voice, but it was far away. Another time she stopped when she smelled one of the smells that Rick had trained her to respond to. She sat down automatically and pondered what to do. She could hear the wind passing over a string. She stood up and moved slowly until the noise grew louder and the smell of gunpowder filled her nose. Then she simply walked around the string and the gunpowder.