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

divisional complex spread out along the sands of Chu Lai. Three artillery elements under a single command, two hospitals, six air units, logistical and transportation and communication battalions, legal services, a PX, a stockade, a USO, a mini golf course, a swimming beach with trained lifeguards, administration offices under the AdjutantGeneral, twelve Red Cross Donut Dollies, a central mail detachment, Seabees, four Military Police units, a press information service, computer specialists, civil relations specialists, psychological warfare specialists, Graves Registration, dog teams, civilian construction and maintenance contractors, a
Stars and Stripes
detachment, intelligence and tactical planning units, chapels and chaplains and assistant chaplains, cooks and clerks and translators and scouts and orderlies, an Inspector General’s office, awards and decorations specialists, dentists, cartographers, statistical analysts, oceanographers, PO officers, photographers and janitors and demographers.
    The ratio of support to combat personnel was twelve to one.
    Paul Berlin counted it as bad luck, a statistically improbable outcome, to be assigned to the 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade.
       His sense of place had never been keen. In Indian Guides, with his father, he’d gone to Wisconsin to camp and be pals forever. Big Bear and Little Bear. He remembered it. Yellow and green headbands, orange feathers. Powwows at the campfire. Big Fox telling stories out of the
Guide Story Book
. Big Fox, a gray-haired father from Oshebo, Illinois, owner of a paper mill. He remembered all of it. Canoe races the second day, Big Bear paddling hard but Little Bear having troubles. Poor, poor Little Bear. Better luck in the gunnysack race, Big Bear and Little Bear hopping together under the great Wisconsin sky, but poor Little Bear, stumbling. Pals anyhow. Not a problem. Shake hands the secret Guide way. Pals forever. Then the third day, into the woods, father first and son second, Little Bear tracking Big Bear, who leaves tracks and paw prints. Yes, he remembered it—Little Bear getting lost. Following Big Bear’s tracks down to a winding creek, crossing the creek, checking the opposite bank according to the
Guide Survival Guide
, finding nothing; so deeper into the woods—Big Bear!—and deeper, then turning back to the creek, but now no creek. Nothing in the
Guide Survival Guide
about panic. Lost, bawling in the big Wisconsin woods.He remembered it clearly. Little Elk finding him, flashlights converging, Little Bear bawling under a giant spruce. So the fourth day, getting sick, and Big Bear and Little Bear breaking camp early. Decamping. Hamburgers and root beer on the long drive home, baseball talk, white man talk, and he remembered it, the sickness going away. Pals forever.
       A truck took him up Highway One, then inland to LZ Gator, where he joined the 5th Battalion of the 46th Infantry of the 198th Infantry Brigade. There, in a white hootch surrounded by barbed wire and bunkers, a captain jotted his name and number into a leather-bound log. An E-8 took him aside.
    “You look strack,” the E-8 whispered. “How’d you go for a rear job? I can fix it for you … get you a job painting fences. Sound good?”
    Paul Berlin smiled.
    “You go for that? Nice comfy painting job? No paddy humpin’, no dinks?”
    Paul Berlin smiled. The E-8 smiled back.
    “Sound good, trooper? You get off on the sound of them bells?”
    Paul Berlin smiled. He knew what the man wanted. So, only faintly, he nodded.
    “Well, then,” the E-8 whispered, “I fear you come to the wrong … fuckin … place.”
       Walking down the hill toward Alpha Company, he passed a wooden latrine built over two sunken barrels. The first truly familiar smell of the war. He stopped, dropped his duffel, went in, closed the door, unbuttoned his trousers, and sat down.
    And for a long time he sat there. At home, comfortable, even at peace. Flies