“Does he?” I asked.
Cruz laughed. “First month here, Charlie was inside the wire the first night. The next day, after they flew out the dead, they couldn’t find where Charlie came through the wire. He didn’t trip no flares. He didn’t cut no wire. A mystery. A week later Charlie came again. More killed. This time they found a tunnel entrance, inside the wire.”
“He dug under?” I asked.
Cruz laughed and shook his head. “They built the damn firebase on top of a whole series of tunnels already here.”
We kept walking. I saw crude holes scratched into the red clay and rock, about two meters apart and reinforced with sandbags. Foxholes. One had a .50-caliber machine gun. Cruz saw me staring and grinned, though it wasn’t really a grin. It was just a small upturn at the corners of his mouth, like I amused him. I realized he was laughing at me, at my naivete. “You’ll learn, Shutter,” he said.
“Shutter? At Da Nang, combat photographers were called Shooter.”
Cruz laughed. “Hey, Bean,” he called out to a shirtless marine filling sandbags with dirt. “What do you say? Shutter or Shooter?”
Bean is a large Black guy I met in our bunker. He flicked the butt of his cigarette. “We had a photographer in camp about a month ago,” Bean said. “I didn’t see him do no shooting, Corporal Cruz. So I say Shutter.”
Cruz shrugged like that’s the end of it. My name, what everyone will call me from here on out, had been decided.
I spent the rest of the afternoon doing a PMCS （preventive maintenance check） of my camera, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, and eating steak.
The sun lowered, a brilliant orange ball I photographed just before it slipped below the tree line. I put away my camera. It wasn’t the beauty that struck me, it was the silence the sunset brought. Everyone and everything got quiet, tense, like something was about to happen. The bush outside the wire shimmered and buzzed; I swear I could hear it breathing, billions of insects beating their wings. The tree leaves shook, but I didn’t feel a breeze. Eerie.
As darkness fell, I sat outside the bunker with the others shooting the shit. In the distance we could hear the boom of artillery fire and the occasional pop of M-60 machine gun fire. Cruz said it was likely another firebase probing their perimeter. As I started to relax, I heard a whistle, and in the time it took me to turn toward the sound, Cruz had yelled “Incoming” and shoved me into the bunker as the first loud explosion detonated. The ground rocked and shuddered, like an earthquake. Inside the bunker, dust fell from the ceiling beams. My adrenaline spiked. My breathing quickened. My joints tingled with anticipation.
“You just got another lesson, Shutter,” Cruz said, smiling. I could barely hear him. It felt like my ears were plugged with water.
He spoke louder. “Charlie comes at night.”
Chapter 4
June 4, 1979
High school had been a crucible of eight hundred young men from different cities, different socioeconomic backgrounds, different cultures, and different races competing to wear the blue-and-gold uniform and earn the right to fight side by side against our perceived enemies. Those of us who did not make the athletic cut became rear support. We learned instead the intricacies of each cheer and each fight song, and we shouted them out to our brothers on the battlefields, believing those cheers mattered not just to us, but to the rest of the world.
They didn’t.
And in a few months, I was sure they would not matter to me, or to many of the young men I had gone to school with. I’d watched my brother John drift apart from his high school friends; and guys in the class ahead of me, who swore they’d be best friends for life, did not even speak. My friends and I were also going our separate ways, some of us to college, some into the workforce, a few into the military. We would make new friends, get jobs, get married, have kids, move away. We would all invariably change. Some of us for the worse. Some for the better. But all certainly different. It seemed odd to think that the guys I’d spent every day with for the past four years, guys I’d studied with, taken tests with, played some sports with, and worked with on the newspaper, would soon be only a memory.
It was why, when I returned home from work, I allowed my friends to talk me into going to the drive-in theater in Burlingame. I was dog tired from the concrete work, and I had initially rejected the idea, but they hounded me until I relented.
“It’s our last summer together,” Mif said, in a tacit admission that he, too, recognized change was coming. “Come on, you’ll be home by midnight.”