Free The Phantom Blooper by Gustav Hasford

grunts standing lines on the perimeter hear the Blooper and get wired. There's shouting and movement. In ten seconds illumination flares are going to be popping up all over this A-O.
    I get a feeling that tells me I am in the process of becoming someone's favorite sight picture.
    The Phantom Blooper starts talking but I can't quite hear what he's saying and I hope that the grunts on the perimeter can't hear him either because the Phantom Blooper's grasp of the situation is too damned precise and if we listen to him we'll all go plain fucking crazy.
    Using my ears like an animal, I stalk the Phantom Blooper. My ears pick up each dot of sound.
    Bam . An M-79 grenade lifts a chunk of the deck in front of me, splattering me with mud and shrapnel.
    Dark shadows danced and turn into monsters and larger, darker shadows swallow them.
    Someone screams into my ear: "MORE ILLUM! MORE ILLUM! GOD DAMN, MORE LIGHT!"

    In the Marine Corps a mine detector means that you close your eyes, put your foot out, and feel around. As I probe for mines with my toes I have a fantasy in my brain housing group in which my battle tactics turn out exactly as planned.
    My fantasy of how I can be a hero begins like a movie inside my mind.:
    ...I have talked tough to the Phantom Blooper and I have debated, and because I am so interesting the Phantom Blooper has listened, and because I am so clever I have kept the Phantom Blooper stumped on complex philosophical questions. In fact, the Phantom Blooper is so determined to win the debate that he fails to notice that the sun has come up.
    From a cloudless blue sky four First Marine Air Wing F-4 camouflage-painted Phantom fighter-bombers on Tac-Air standby slide in low and booming, locked and cocked and bingo on fuel. In my fantasy I speak the magic secret formula of numbers into the Kid From Brooklyn's field radio. I say, "Watch my smoke to target and expend all remaining."
    Flames shoot out of the tails of my fantasy Phantom bombers as they hit their afterburners and roll over, banking gracefully. Marine pilots perform a ballet of aircraft and boon in to give the Phantom Blooper a taste of the only true American art form, the surgical air strike.
    Fantasy silver napalm canisters and fantasy black bombs tumble down from the aircraft. Hell in very small packages. Napalm canisters tumble down two at a time, end over end, floating, glinting in the sunlight, followed by a pair of X s on black dots--snake eyes and nape, want some, get some.
    The sky opens up and a piece of the sun breaks loose and falls down through airless space to the earth and the piece of sun hits the earth and splatters sacred gold fire across No Man's Land, a world of hurt coming down, rolling flames and thudding explosions.
    Inside the boiling rage of the orange and black fireball the Phantom Blooper and I die horrible deaths as all of the air is sucked out of our lungs by force and we suffocate and in the next red moment our bodies are burned to the bone and beyond and we are two nameless Crispy Critters trapped forever inside a red and black daytime nightmare...
    But that's only a fantasy.
    One moment I'm trapped inside a piece of the sun, and the Phantom Blooper and I are getting payback for burning Viet Nam alive, and four Marine pilots are radioing in, "Ah, roger that. Two confirmed, K.B.A., Killed By Air." And the next moment my beautiful happy fantasy is over and I'm abruptly back in the real world. It's dark, I'm cold, and it's raining.
    Hunkered down in the dark, butt-naked in a bombed-out wasteland. I'm muddy and stung by shrapnel. And my feet are cut all to shit.
    A lone illumination shell from the 81 mike-mike mortars section hisses up in a high arc, pops, burns, pours down a football field of harsh white light.
    The air I'm breathing turns into bullets and angry blips of red neon try to find my eyes. I know that the New Guy was sleeping, woke up when the Blooper laughed, got scared enough to shoot his own shadow, started working the