Free Profane Men by Rex Miller Page A

tandems. An interface connected out along the long lines and an answering service relay interlocked, keying in a pre-record back into an infinity transmitter.
    The system was described as a “small miracle.” One senior official called it “ten thousand times more efficient” than the local service. (“Working, operator, working goddammit!”) Miraculous and unjammable.
    â€œThere ya go, El Tee! Got that booger.”
    â€œOutstanding,” he said, picking up the mike. “Phu Bai T&R, this is Toledo Six Actual, over.”
    Awwwwkkkkkk
— “over?”
    â€œPhu Bai, Toledo Six requesting triangulation on the following coordinates. Wait one, over.”
    Using their own long-distance relay system, the radio research unit would instantly begin triangulating on the latest KILL signal by means of the latest satellite technology. The ultimate in search equipment would lock in on the broad-beamed signal and an airborne triangulation unit would correlate the data as it was down-linked back to Phu Bai radio research.
    At 1330 we are at the edge of a bleached boneyard of drift beside the blue feature, a pile of white litter that lies strewn like a discarded ribbon alongside the riverbank. The load of quarter-mil Dexis, tepid Kool-Aid, and the fun of humping a ninety-pound ruck in this heat has really combined to start kicking my ass. I step forward into the deep drift, shifting my weight carefully and watching for trip wires and mines and things that go bump. I feel my boot crunch down through the dry driftwood, and hallucinate for a fraction of a second as I flash on a chunk of white wood the size and shape of a skull.
    My mind speeds through a blurred 16-mm print of Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Long John Silver, Blackboard, Jolly Roger, Terry and the Pirates, The Phantom. DWI driver’s ed films of skulls peeled open, decapitation in Cambodia, skull images. My boot crunches down through the fragile wood with a sound of pulverizing bone that totally bums me out. The last thing I need right now is to start hallucinating skulls.
    Parallel to the top of the
H
on its side, there is an overgrown, hardball trail that runs alongside the ribbon of drift as we continue to walk up river. Floating tree limbs leave amber stripes in the dirty water like small boats leaving a little brown wake. A wisp of smoke from some distant fire hangs above the green tree line in the distance. The RTO, who is walking my slack, says for no reason, “Wham, bam! Pineapple jam.”
    â€œSay what,” I mutter sotto voce without turning.
    â€œHuh?” D’Allesandro asks, and the guy in front of him turns and asks him,
    â€œD’jew say somethin’?”
    â€œJam,” I mutter.
    â€œJam it?” D’Allesandro says.
    â€œYou jam it,” the dude in front of him says.
    We continue through the afternoon heat and the endless day. Already a day two days long. We move parallel to the blue and slightly off the trail that is almost certain to be booby-trapped, inching next to the tree line. We are at the edge of paddies, which are bisected by a series of muddy dikes. The tendril of smoke can now be seen curling from a dogpatch village at the far end of the next field.
    Remember Dogpatch in the comic strips? That dogpatch looked like Richbitch City compared to the dogpatches here, impoverished hamlets begging to be Zippoed. A sickening stench hangs in the stifling, breezeless air around the hootches as we cautiously make our way toward the dogpatch, edging alongside the trail. We can hear a rooster crowing in the distance, crowing in Vietnamese in the heat of the day as we move into this all-penetrating pocket of smell. The lieutenant and Ewell continue their ceaseless call-and-response litany. “Spread it out . . . Don’t bunch up . . . Spread it out there . . .” which they alternate, repeating it over and over all day, every day. It is their joint — so to