Twelve Months by Steven Manchester Page A

opportunity to open up and share the hell I’d experienced all those years ago. “As you know, my decision to join the Army was more my need to become the opposite of my father than anything else.”
    She nodded, wrapped both her hands around my arm and left them there.
    With little coaxing, I began explaining it to her and my mind went back…

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    It’s funny the things you share in common with people when you take the time to get to know them. Seth Cabral also had a bastard of a father, while Cal Anderson loved a woman as deeply as I loved Bella.
    And with Suse, it was nothing more than a twisted sense of humor that brought us as close as brothers. Other guys joked that Suse, Cal, Seth and I were the awesome foursome – together from boot camp through advanced infantry school right to deployment in Vietnam.
    We’d been trained by the government to kill and there was no better place to fine-tune our skills than in the jungles of Southeast Asia. We never slept in the hooches. The rats were as big as dogs and they nested just beneath us. Most of us had crotch rot from our knees to our nipple lines because we could never get dry. So, we stripped buck naked, climbed up on top of the hooches and called in artillery fire for entertainment. It was like the Fourth of July every night. And while we slept up there, three well-trained dogs patrolled our barbed-wire perimeter. There were two shepherds and a Doberman – and they saved our hides more than once.
    They knew every gap in the perimeter and could get in and out with ease. On several occasions, we’d wake to the sound of some Viet Cong screaming. The dogs would catch them in the concertina wire and gnaw on their flesh like they were slabs of prime rib. They’d eat them alive. The K9 Officer purposely didn’t feed them a whole lot and we were told not to throw them anything, either. This kept them hungry enough to hunt. Every morning, Sergeant Ruggiero would walk out and finish the trapped Viet Cong with a .45 round into each head.
    One of the saddest days in ‘Nam was when the K9 Officer wrapped up his tour and was preparing to ship back home. Sergeant Ruggiero told him that he couldn’t take his dogs with him. He said they’d tasted too much human blood – lived off it for twelve months – and there was no way they could be trusted back in the real world. As there was no way they’d take to another master, Ruggiero offered to shoot them. The K9 Officer thanked him. “But they’re my animals,” he said, “I’ll do it.”
    I walked over and watched. I felt like I was eight years old again, standing there with tears in my eyes. The man lined up his three loyal friends and fired the first round into the Dobie’s head. The shepherds never flinched. Then, one-by-one, he popped them off. I walked away, feeling horrible for the deaths of those animals. I was grateful for their service and believed then that I cared more for them than I did for most people. Dogs were different. They never chose to hurt a man. They did as they were told and never let us down…

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    I stopped there. Dead dogs were one thing, but the slide show in my head was starting to show human faces.
    Bella tightened her grip even more, but never uttered a word.
    For a while, I thought about the lunacy of Vietnam; skirmishing eventually grew into a full-scale war, with escalating U.S. involvement. The most savage fighting occurred in early 1968 during the Vietnamese New Year known as Tet. Although the so-called Tet Offensive ended in a military defeat for the North, its psychological impact changed the course of the war.
    We’d shipped in at the tail end of 1968 when President Johnson ordered a halt to U.S. bombardment of North Vietnam. In 1969, as President Nixon began troop withdrawals, Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnam president, died. Massive demonstrations of protest were