- Disgusting! - He shouts as he walks through the mud full of empty casings, as sunlight stops on the leaves of the jungle above him, he sees only the mud, the trees and his holstered M4.
The greenery around him brings him uncanniness, knowing that the enemy may be lurking in that tree he's looking at, or that bush that he just heard a noise in, or that tall grass right beside the muddy lake. Knowing his luck, he anxiously waits for action. For the opposite side to make a move, but nobody came.
Waving around his M4 rifle, once aiming at the bush and once the tree, he slowly marches forward. Despite the all-known all-powerful swamp. He lands a step on hard solid soil. He gets his other boot out of the dirt and shakes off remnants of water on his footwear and sneaks all the way through the mile-long jungle. Among the bushes and the tall grass, his head gets hot from his kevlar green helmet.
A sudden noise is heard, a shuffle from his right, a drop on 12 o'clock. What could it be? He awaits no answer and halts, as he aims his iron sight at the leaves, and he waits for what seems like eternity. Until a face popped up, a split second vision of his enemy, a sneaky guerilla waving around his Kalashnikov.
Hesitantly, he puts his index finger flat out on the trigger, a second feels like a minute, a minute like an hour. He puts the nail in the coffin. The sharp sound rupturing through his brain back-and-forth fills his ears, as the leaves fall down and burnt gunpower gets blown away by the slight wind.
A drop, a shuffle of the leaves acompanied by the splash of whatever remains of the water in the soil. Unsure, blinded by the greenery, he fires again. One, two, three, four. Four shots. That's five shots in total. The ringing in his ears intensifies as he squeezes the trigger more and more, until he approaches the bushes.
As anxiety fills him, so does stress, knowing that the Vietnamese teen might be waiting for him from beneath the bush, only stalling his movement to spot him and blow his brain out. No. He retreats, he pulls out his fragmentational grenade. He wraps his finger around the metal ring and pulls it out, throwing it into the soil.
He tosses it behind the bush, aiming his M4 at it once again, expecting to be deaf in four seconds.
And he counts.
Four,
Three,
Two,
One.
But there was no explosion. There was no gunpowder being launched into the air, there was no metal fragments in his arm, no ear drums being ruptured. He could still move his arm, hear the shuffling of the leaves made by the wind.
He could still see clearly infront of him.
Confused, he retreats. He turns around and runs directly back where he came from. He's stuck in the mud, he can't move his legs. He can't walk!
As he reaches for his radio, as his fingers feel the plastic and the metal of the vest and the radio, the last thing he sees is the Jungle. The last thing he hears is a gunshot. And the last thing he can think of is calling for help.
