Sharpshooter by Chris Lynch

killing, and why,” he says.
    â€œMakes sense,” I say.
    â€œLike I was saying, I never got the feeling I knew where I stood with the ARVN guys. I’ve heard stories that you would be fighting alongside some of these guys in the afternoon, training them, arming them, and whatnot. And then in the night some of these same guys will have changed their clothes and taken your training and bullets and pumped it all into one of our boys.”
    He shakes his head, screws up his eyes, as if he is experiencing the confusion and frustration fresh.
    â€œI want to know who my friends are, especially in a place as crazy and lethal as this. I never felt like the ARVN were our friends.”
    â€œNot like the Montagnards,” I say, like I really know anything.
    He looks up across the cribbage board. He puts his finger on his nose and squashes it down a bit. “The People,” he says, almost beaming.
    â€œSo, who are they?” I ask.
    â€œThe term itself means mountain people , but it refers to a number of different indigenous tribes of the Central Highlands. Those poor guys we found in the barrel were unusual in that they usually don’t come down to the lowlands. But because they are active along the same trails as the communists, and because the Montagnards are siding with us in fighting the communists … well, they got on the wrong path somewhere. Either they came too far down in tracking somebody or they got dragged down here as a message, but either way they paid the price for being in the game with us.”
    â€œOkay,” I say, “so why do they even bother siding with us?”
    â€œWell, truth is, they have a history of not being treated very well by any Vietnamese, North or South. They are a minority people, pushed around, herded up into smaller and smaller pieces of country, getting their land stolen for coffee plantations, shoved aside to live in pens, hilltop reservations. The Vietnamese majority mostly consider them savages. In the end, I think they’re mostly doing their best to defend their own reservations against anybody who threatens them. Sound like anybody we know?”
    I look at him, thinking about my dad’s stories of the Indian Wars, his tattoo, his founding fathers artwork.
    â€œYou never told me what your tribe was,” I say.
    â€œCheyenne,” he says with clear pride. “And just like the Montagnards, not warriors to be messed with.”
    â€œI’ll keep that in mind. In both cases.”
    He is staring at the game now, the board, the score, and my cards. “Do you even know how to play cribbage, or are you just being sociable?”
    Â 
    The difference now is: engagement.
    The Benewah is anchored in the Mobile Riverine Base on the My Tho River, not far from Dong Tam. Traffic of all kinds is a constant now, and we learn to sleep through a city-that-never-sleeps atmosphere, patrols leaving the vessel at all hours and helicopters plunking down and taking off from our roof like we are a commercial airport.
    The enemy, bolder than I ever imagined possible, is taking the fight to us in ways big and small and always unsettling.
    It is just after midnight, and I hear a great fuss on the deck just straight above my sleeping quarters; then, a few seconds later, I hear a whole lot more below.
    Bu-hooom-suplash … bu-hoom-suplash …
    I run up top to see what’s happening and find a whole lot of guys wondering the same thing, though probably nine hundred more are sleeping right through it or just not bothering to come up.
    â€œThere.” An officer is pointing to what may be movement in the water fifty yards away. Four different Navy shooters open fire at the spot for about thirty seconds before the officer calls them off. Echoes and smoke settle down as we all listen for what comes next. But nothing does.
    â€œBuddy, what was that?” I say to one of the shooters.
    â€œSappers, man. Sappers, right here.” He points