Free Bloods by Wallace Terry

killed all three of them. And Davis went up to the lieutenant and said, “Man, you fucked up again. Y’all can’t do nothin’ right.”
    We never found that boy.
    Davis, this little guy. He was a private ’cause he kept gettin’ court-martialed. But he was the leader with the LURPs. We was best friends, but I felt a little threatened. ’Cause he would always argue about who killed the last Viet Cong. “You got the last one, this one—these two are mine. I’ma jump ’em.” Sometimes he would carry me.
    Our main function was to try to see can we find any type of enemy element. They gave us a position, a area, and tell us to go out there and do the recon. We alone—these six black guys—roamin’ miles from the base camp. We find them. We radio helicopter pick us up, take us tothe rear. We go and bring the battalion out and wipe ’em out. You don’t fire your weapon. That’s the worse thing you do if you a LURP. Because if it’s a large unit and it’s just six of y’all, you fire your weapon and you by yourself. You try to kill ’em without firing your weapon. This is what they taught us in Nha Trang. Different ways of killing a person without using your weapon. Use your weapon, it give you away.
    I wasn’t suppose to carry a M-60 as a LURP. But I told them the hell with that. I’m carrying the firepower. Davis carried a shotgun. We would lay back, and then we’ll jump one or two. Bust them upside the head, take their weapons.
    Davis would do little crazy things. If they had gold in their mouth, he’d knock the gold out ’cause he saved gold. He saved a little collection of gold teeth. Maybe 50 or 60 in a little box. And he went and had about 100 pictures made of himself. And he used to leave one in the field. Where he got the gook.
    One day we saw two gooks no more than 50 yards away. They was rolling cigarettes. Eating. Davis said, “They mine. Y’all just stay here and watch.” He sneaked up on ’em real fast, and in one swing he had them. Hit one with the bayonet, hit the other one with the machete.
    Wherever he would see a gook, he would go after ’em. He was good.
    The second time I got wounded was with the LURPs. We got trapped. Near Duc Pho.
    We saw a couple of Viet Congs. We dropped our packs, and chased them. The terrain was so thick there that we lost them. It was jungle. It was the wait-a-minute vines that grab you, tangles you as you move in the jungle. Start gettin’ kind of dark, so we go on back to where we had dropped our packs.
    And that’s where they were.
    All of a sudden, something said boop. I said I hope this is a rock. It didn’t go off. Then three or four more hit. They were poppin’ grenades. About ten. One knocked me down. Then I just sprayed the area, and Davis start hittin’ with the shotgun. We called for the medevac, and they picked me up. We didn’t see if we killed anybody. Only three grenades exploded. The good thing about theViet Congs was that a lot of their equipment didn’t go off.
    I told them to give me a local anesthesia: “I want to watch everything you do on my legs.” I don’t want them to amputate it. Gung ho shit. But I was okay, and they got the frags out.
    Once the NVA shot down a small observation plane, and we were looking for it. We saw these scouts for the NVA. One was a captain. The other was a sergeant. They were sharp. In the blue uniforms. They had the belt with the red star. They were bouncing across the rice fields, and we hidin’. They was walking through there, so we snatched them. Me and Davis.
    We radio in, right? They sent the helicopter to pick us up, bring ’em back. Intelligence was shocked. The gooks wasn’t in pajamas. They had on uniforms. They were equipped. Intelligence interrogated them, and they got the whole battalion to go out and look for the plane.
    In the helicopter one of the gooks spitted in this lieutenant’s face.
    When we found the plane, it had been stripped. Nothin’ but a shell. The pilot was