Sand in the Wind Read Online Free

never forget that night,” Hyatt continued, and it was his change of tone that most unnerved Kramer. He was no longer talking, or even speaking. It was as if he were reading lines, lines he had read a thousand times before, each word imperatively following from the one that preceded it. His emotions seemed to stem as much from the words themselves as from their meaning — as if their meaning were lost to him, and could only be found by repeating them again and again. “There wasn’t any moon; you couldn’t see a thing. You wanted to reach out and touch someone. Even if there was somebody right next to you, you were all alone. Two choppers circled right over us for an hour trying to find a place to land. The noise was scaring us shitless.    .   .   . I guess everybody felt better when they gave up and left. I can’t ever remember a time as silent as when those choppers left. We knew those men had to be medivacked, but I know damn well we were all relieved.
    “The silence didn’t last long though, maybe not more than a few seconds. One of the wounded moaned real loud — no words, just a moan. That fucking sound cut through me like a razor. Then I heard some garbled words from the same direction. All three of them started mumbling, crying, moaning — one or two of them begging to die. I said to myself — maybe out loud — ‘God, please, please let them die. Don’t torture them.’ They were filled with morphine, but it didn’t do any good. They went on all night.
    “The Gooks must have heard them. I guess it gave ’em pleasure — God knows they’ve suffered enough — because they started yelling and laughing at us. I don’t think there was more than four of ’em, but they came in close, maybe twenty-five yards and from different sides. They were yelling and laughing like a bunch of jackals — never fired a shot. We could hear the brush move as they changed positions. It was the only time I’ve actually hated them. I’d lost men to them before, good men, but I never hated them.
    “A few of my men lost their cool. What cool? Nobody had their cool that night. The idea that it was our own mortars that did the damage, that’s what made it worse. You don’t expect to lose men to your own mortars. Some of my men fired at the sounds, giving away their positions by the muzzle flashes, knowing they didn’t have a chance to hit anything. If there had been more than a few Gooks out there, we would have been in real trouble.    .   .   . They didn’t leave till an hour before dawn. All night they kept it up, all fucking night.”
    Hyatt paused, and when he began speaking again, it was in a calm, deliberate tone. “It seemed like the sun was never gonna come up. Even when it did, it came real slow. All we could see were shadows, then bushes,   .   .   .   trees, rocks,   .   .   .   each other’s silhouettes. Nobody even felt like chasing them. We were beaten. We didn’t want revenge, we just wanted to get out of there. When it got barely light enough, we started to clear an LZ for the chopper. Nobody gave any orders — not me, not my squad leaders. Everybody knew what to do. They all moved slowly, with their heads down. We couldn’t look at each other’s faces. Each one of us was alone, trying to figure things out   .   .   .   because if what happened that night was real, God, what the fuck could be unreal?
    “Nobody looked up when we first heard the choppers. Then, very slowly as we directed it in, everyone’s eyes locked on the medivac chopper. The gun ships that came with it didn’t prep-fire the area. I think we were all glad of that. As the medivac landed, we stared at it as if it was some sort of useless miracle. The men carrying the wounded and dead didn’t run towards it. I never saw that before. Always, when a chopper landed, they ran to it. One of the crewmen motioned for them to hurry up, but they ignored him, walking real slow with the stretchers.
    “After the medivac