Sharpshooter by Chris Lynch Page B

to count them all.
    â€œI don’t agree with the way they have decided to keep score,” Systrom says to me as he takes his knife and cuts the trigger finger off a dead VC. They are his thing, trigger fingers. “But if there is a score being kept, we will score highest.”
    We are marching, silent marching, which is a brand-new skill I have mastered, up an incline into ever denser jungle. Supposedly, we are working a trail, though there is nothing here you could really call a trail other than a barely discernible parting of trees. The map, though, says it is a trail and that it is hot. There may be insurgents up at the top, or six feet in front of us. It is the height of day in crushing, brutal sunshine, but here under the canopy it is a constant damp dusk. We have been making our way up this parting since just after daybreak. My muscles have all been in a permanent clench the whole time, and my eyes have been strafing the area without a break, like the searchlights that switchback over the sky looking for hostile aircraft. If we were standing toe-to-toe with these guys, bare-knuckle fighting them all day long, it would not be more physically exhausting than this.
    I am paired with the lieutenant today, peeling off from the other guys so we can take an overseer’s position on higher ground than the main trail. We hike for about twenty minutes when he notices what looks like a nest in the top of a big palm.
    â€œPerfect,” he says.
    We shinny up the tree, hugging and scrambling and clawing up the forty feet to the highest point in the area. Once up, I am shocked at how right the lieutenant was. I feel we can see all of Southeast Asia from this spot, and the nestlike arrangement of the giant fronds allows enough space for a proper sniper’s lie-down, with the second lookout seated upright.
    â€œWow,” I say, taking in the full three-sixty of it.
    â€œGet down, soldier,” he growls.
    â€œYes, sir,” I answer, quickly squatting on my haunches.
    â€œI mean all the way down, private.”
    He holds the M-21 Sniper Weapon System out to me, and I try not to jump up and down. He takes my rifle and the binoculars he had given me before we set out. As I settle into the nest lying down, setting out the bipod legs of the rifle, Lt. Systrom takes his position crouched on one knee, scanning the area through the binocs.
    We hear things. There are occasional bursts of gunfire — no shortage of engagements far away and on the river. I hear, not too distant, the now familiar whoosh of the flamethrowers off the Zippo boats. There has been a serious escalation in napalm activity, burning away the natural camouflage that’s been letting the enemy attack our boats so effectively. The heat coming off the river from that napalm travels back through the jungle and right up the tree to us as if we had ordered air service straight from hell itself. On top of that, we are no longer protected by foliage, so the insane Vietnam sun is pounding our backs, right through helmets and fatigues and equipment like we were no more than fat fish in a frying pan.
    â€œSee anything?” Systrom asks me after a full hour of stillness.
    I say nothing. I keep my focus through the amazing scope that brings everything on the ground right up into the tree with us.
    I can feel my back doing a weird alternating thing. It’s drenched with sweat now. Now it’s baked crispy dry. Now it is sopping again.
    Until I feel it less. I feel my eye, dry, eye, my eye …
    My eye is in the jungle now. I am attached to the gun by my eye, and together we hover somewhere in the atmosphere between treetop canopy and leaf-litter soft ground. There is a movement here, there, some animal activity maybe, some VC maybe. But nothing in this jungle happens now without my noticing.
    Moving bushes are the thing we look for. Bushes that are suddenly in a spot away from where they were a minute ago, and I swear, I swear, I see one