Free Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien

but still strong. She lifted the robe. Her legs were brown and smooth and muscled. The skin was tight without lines or wrinkles.
    “Feel there,” she whispered as the others slept. “Do you feel it? I have endurance like a man. I walk as a man walks and I do not complain.”
    He tested her arms and shoulders.
    “I shall carry my share. I shall keep pace. I shall show courage and stamina.”
    Once more he felt the great strength of her legs, then he folded his hands together and squeezed. The fire made silver in her eyes.
    “You can persuade your lieutenant,” she whispered. “Tell him of my strength, so that I may join you to Paris.”
    “It’ll be treacherous,” he said. “Nothing easy.”
    “I am brave.”
    “Deserts and mountains and swamps.”
    The girl dismissed this with a wave. “To be a refugee is to know danger. I can guide you. Yes … I shall guide you! You will need me as a guide.”
    “Cacciato. He’s our guide.”
    “Cacciato?”
    “Yes, he’s—you know—he’s out there in front. A scout.”
    “No matter,” Sarkin Aung Wan murmured. She smoothed the robe about her legs. “No matter, Spec Four, because you will need me. I am strong, and soon you will need me greatly. And I shall love to see Paris.”
       The land was luminous. Pink coral and ferric reds, great landfalls of wilderness, and they moved through it for twelve days at a buffalo’s pace. No villages, no people. Only the road. The girl’s two old aunties wallowed in their grief. They rode along silently at the rear of the cart, facing backward, showing no interest in the journey or the passing countryside. At night they wailed. Coyotes, Eddie laughed. Stink Harris did not laugh. Dinks, he muttered: Dinks from Dinksville, Damsels from Gooktown. Silent through the sunny days, the old women howled endlessly through the nights.
    But the land was rich, the weather warm, and the slat-cart yawed and pitched its way up the widening road west.
    Once they spent the night in an abandoned tribal shrine. Once they spotted smoke on a distant hill. Once they found M&Ms scattered along a fork in the road, the M&Ms taking the northwest fork, and they followed the M&Ms. They slept through a fierce tropical storm; they nearly lost the buffalo in fast river waters; they shot quail for a Sunday feast. Many things, once, but mostly they rode the road west.
    Then they captured Cacciato.
    It happened at night, in the dark of fifth-hour guard. A strange rustling in the brush. A familiar soft whistling.
    Smoothly, like a cat, Stink Harris crept away from the fire, staying in shadows, moving in on the intruder from behind. Then he pounced. Screaming, he tackled Cacciato.
    “Got him!” Stink yelped. And it was true, he had him.

Eight
The Observation Post
    P osted lucid high over the sea and shifting sand, Spec Four Paul Berlin looked out on nighttime Quang Ngai. Nearly one o’clock. Ordinarily it would be time now to rouse the next guard. Time to pick through the sleeping bodies, touch Doc’s shoulder and whisper words of friendship, wait, and then, when Doc was fully awake, hand over the wristwatch and wish him well and curl at last into a warm poncho. Changing of the guard, rules passed down by dead men.
    Ordinarily.
    He did not wake Doc Peret.
    Instead he felt his way along the tower’s west wall to the ladder. He climbed barefoot over the double layer of sandbags, found the ladder with his feet, tested it, then went down fast.
    It was his bravest moment.
    Calmly, unafraid, he turned and walked to the sea. The sand was cool and wet-feeling. The waves, broken by a coral reef, came in like smooth unfolding mats, one draped evenly over the next,spreading themselves out with the calm repetitive motion of energy given and energy returned. Dimly, he could make out Oscar’s raft bobbing at anchor fifty meters from shore. Beyond the raft was open sea.
    He waded in to his knees, spread his feet, unbuttoned, and relaxed.
    High up were the stars like