Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien Read Free Book Online

indulgent, they let themselves be captured and frisked and interrogated.
    PFC Paul Berlin, who wanted to live, took the exercise seriously.
    “You VC?” he demanded of a little girl with braids. “You dirty VC?”
    The girl smiled. “Shit, man,” she said gently. “You shittin’ me?”
       They pitched practice grenades made of green fiberglass. They were instructed in compass reading, survival methods, bivouac SOPs, the operation and maintenance of the standard weapons.Sitting in the bleachers by the sea, they were lectured on the known varieties of enemy land mines and booby traps. Then, one by one, they took turns making their way through a make-believe minefield.
    “Boomo!” an NCO shouted at any misstep.
    It was a peculiar drill. There were no physical objects to avoid, no obstacles on the obstacle course, no wires or prongs or covered pits to detect and then evade. Too lazy to rig up the training ordnance each morning, the supervising NCO simply hollered
Boomo
when the urge struck him.
    Paul Berlin, feeling hurt at being told he was a dead man, complained that it was unfair.
    “Boomo,” the NCO repeated.
    But Paul Berlin stood firm. “Look,” he said. “Nothing. Just the sand. There’s nothing there at all.”
    The NGO, a huge black man, stared hard at the beach. Then at Paul Berlin. He smiled. “Course not, you dumb twerp. You just fucking
exploded
it.”
       Paul Berlin was not a twerp. So it constantly amazed him, and left him feeling much abused, to hear such nonsense—twerp, creepo, butter-brain. It wasn’t right. He was a straightforward, honest, decent sort of guy. He was not dumb. He was not small or weak or ugly. True, the war scared him silly, but this was something he hoped to bring under control.
    Late on the third night he wrote to his father, explaining that he’d arrived safely at a large base called Chu Lai, and that he was taking now-or-never training in a place called the Combat Center. If there was time, he wrote, it would be good to get a letter telling something about how things went on the home front—a nice, unfrightened-sounding phrase, he thought. He also asked his father to look up Chu Lai in a world atlas. “Right now,” he wrote, “I’m a little lost.”

    It lasted six days, which he marked off at sunset on a pocket calendar. Not short, he thought, but getting shorter.
    He had his hair cut again. He drank Coke, watched the ocean, saw movies at night, learned the smells. The sand smelled of sour milk. The air, so clean near the water, smelled of mildew. He was scared, yes, and confused and lost, and he had no sense of what was expected of him or of what to expect from himself. He was aware of his body. Listening to the instructors talk about the war, he sometimes found himself gazing at his own wrists or legs. He tried not to think. He stayed apart from the other new guys. He ignored their jokes and chatter. He made no friends and learned no names. At night, the big hootch swelling with their sleeping, he closed his eyes and pretended it was a war. He felt drugged. He plodded through the sand, listened while the NCOs talked about the AO: “Real bad shit,” said the youngest of them, a sallow kid without color in his eyes. “Real tough shit, real bad. I remember this guy Uhlander. Not such a bad dick, but he made the mistake of thinking it wasn’t so bad. It’s bad. You know what bad is? Bad is evil. Bad is what happened to Uhlander. I don’t wanna scare the bejesus out of you—that’s not what I want—but, shit, you guys are gonna
die.
”
       On the seventh day, June 9, the new men were assigned to their terminal units.
    The Americal Division, Paul Berlin learned for the first time, was organized into three infantry brigades, the 11th, 196th, and 198th. The brigades, in turn, were broken down into infantry battalions, the battalions into companies, the companies into platoons, the platoons into squads.
    Supporting the brigades was an immense