Chapters (42)
- Cover Page
- EARLY BIRD BOOKS
- Praise for the Writing of Richard North Patterson
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- About the Author
“For a while I scrounged and did odd jobs. When I run out of food, I went down to an army depot in Nashville and went in.” His voice was sardonic. “Nothing else to do but serve my country. Met a woman first stretch at Polk and before I knew it there’s a girl and then a boy who looked like Daddy. So I told myself training men was something I could do to take care of my family, even though I hardly saw them. For twenty years I keep Daddy in a corner of my mind I save just for that while I’m drilling and training, training and drilling, over and over until it was like I been asleep.
“I woke up one day in Vietnam with my kids gone and my wife run off, fighting a white man’s war in a yellow man’s country with a platoon that’s half black and all poor, and it come to me: I was helping white men murder niggers they’d needed to do some dying for them, like they’d needed Daddy. We was easy to send there and yellow men was easy to kill—niggers fighting niggers and nobody cares until they started taking white boys after college.” His stare challenged me. “Wasn’t hard to see why they don’t come themselves: the jungle’s hot and wet and filled with the V.C. cutting up my men and sendin’ them back in bags or missing something or maybe just paralyzed from the waist. Month after month we ship out body bags and cripples and they ship more blacks and poor whites to replace them. All I want is to ship some back alive; keep them from getting killed over something foolish or because they’re so bored and scared they’ve turned zombie on the same stuff college boys smoke for fun.
“About two weeks after I learn my wife run off I’m standing with Curtis, my scout. We’re near this jungle full of bugs and punji traps with bamboo stakes in them that the slopes rub with their own shit for poison. Curtis is this quick, rabbity kid with sharp eyes good for scouting, and we’re trying to figure where the Cong are. All the time he’s slipping out there nights to find them and then smelling and groping his way back through the bush. He’s got guts, but he gets more scared every time he goes out, so now even when he’s back he thinks about it all the time, and never smiles. He’s got two months left. I’ve started makin’ deals in my head: if Curtis makes it, don’t matter what happens to me. Just want him out alive.