Sharpshooter by Chris Lynch Read Free Book Online Page B

of Rudi himself.
    I stand over the two of them, Toby holding his face together with his hands and Rudi half underneath him and smiling up at me like a dope.
    â€œDope,” I say, offering Rudi a hand up. “You gotta learn to get out of the way. You really gotta learn to get out of the way.”
    He is still smiling.
    I have to laugh a little, despite how much he’s worrying me at the moment.
    â€œWhat’s up with you, numbskull?” I ask.
    â€œNothing. I just … feel a little safer all of a sudden. I feel good, Ivan.”
    â€œThat’s swell. I feel like we are right back where we started a million years ago, with me fighting battles for you.”
    â€œYeah,” he says, still beaming. “Cool.”
    I can’t get away from him fast enough now.
    â€œI gotta hurry,” I say, scooping up my bag and opening the door to the bus station. “I gotta go kill everybody in Vietnam before you get there.”
    â€œThanks,” he calls, and I don’t dare look back.



N ot to be bragging or anything, but for about six and a half of the eight weeks of Army basic training, I could have run the whole show myself.
    They opened us up with the same “challenge” we ended up with, the Physical Combat Proficiency Test. This starts with the hand-over-hand ladder test, where you have to carry yourself from rung to rung, doing thirty-six of them within sixty seconds. Then there is an obstacle course that is an insult to obstacles. Then there is the fun part, where you have to crawl on your belly through the dirt, from one end of the field to the other, in the allotted time. And last there is the mile run. They didn’t tell me, but I am pretty sure I did the belly crawl faster than several guys did the run.
    Anyway, while it might not have been backbreaking stuff, it was at least interesting and it was exercise and it got us all closer to the important stage: fighting the enemy. Well, not all of us. If you don’t make enough points in the final round of tests, you don’t graduate from boot camp with the rest of the platoon, and that means you get recycled . Right back to the beginning of camp to give the whole thing another shot.
    There were five of those guys out of our platoon. I hope I never have to fight alongside any of them, ever.
    The reward, after day five of week eight of doing everything the Army wants us to do, is we get to see our MOS posting — that’s Military Occupational Specialty — to find out what the next stage of military life will bring our way. OJT, on-the-job training, is where we separate the desk jockeys from the grunts, the brainboxes from the cannon fodder. And not a minute too soon.
    If the Army has decided to make it their business to please me, then they are off to a fine start. Putting me in the Marksman Program not only shows very good sense but has the added bonus of creating one mighty happy soldier.
    And one ecstatic soldier’s dad.
    â€œExactly!” The Captain says when I call him from the pay phone as soon as I read my posting. There are a lot of guys waiting to use this phone, but despite the staring and grumbling I still want to stretch this moment as much as I can. “Exactly, Ivan. See, the United States Army does indeed know just what it is doing despite what that know-it-all Walter Cronkite says. They spot talent, they don’t mess around. They put that talent in position to flourish. You are going to go far in this career, boy, you just mark my words.”
    I am marking his words with a smile so big it hurts. Childish is what I am being, and so what.
    My comrades don’t completely agree with the so what part and begin actually rocking the phone booth.
    â€œDad, listen,” I say, laughing probably more than I should with an angry mob watching me so closely, “I have to give up the phone to some of the other guys now.”
    â€œThe other guys,” he says, allowing himself to be a