Short Stories

Something to Die For

This is it; this is the day that I head off to Vietnam for my second twelve month tour. I finish packing what little I had to take with me and walk down the stairs and out the door. My buddy is waiting for me in the car outside my house in his uniform that is identical to mine. As we drive down the road people shout profanities and rude sayings at us. Vietnam is not a popular war we know, so we are used to the name calling. Many men did not go into this war willingly, but I did.

We reach the airport and meet up with the rest of the men in our platoon. We get on the plane that will fly us to Vietnam. On the plane, a bunch of the other guys in my platoon order food and drinks, but I just sit here looking out the window, thinking about my life thus far. All I know is war. I have never married nor had children, never even finished school. My parents had died by the time I reached the age of sixteen and I had no siblings that were still alive. After I voluntarily signed up to be in the war my whole family disowned me, especially my grandparents. All I have in this world is the war and the guys fighting beside me in it. The plane ride seems to go by fairly fast; I sleep most of the way. When the plane lands we all file off. From the airport we head, in big tanks, to the military base where we will live for about the next week and a half.

We arrive at the base at nightfall; the sky is a deep red on the low horizon. We eat a dinner of practically mush, which you acquire a taste for after twelve months, and I headed to the barracks where we settle in and fall asleep. 

I wake to a gunshot that sounds about one-hundred yards away. I jump up and grab my gun that I keep beside my bed and head outside to see what the commotion is. As I near the noise I see that it is just other soldiers from other platoons working on their shooting. By the looks of it they were way better shots than me. I approach the men and notice one is wearing a sergeant uniform. He introduces himself as Sergeant Arrow. The other two introduce themselves as Private Matthews and Private Harris. I introduce myself as Private Kelly and we all talk and shoot. Soon, an hour passes and we have to head to training for the day.

Training is not as brutal as I remember it being. The week of training passes by in a blink and soon soldiers are being sent out to fight. I learn that I have be reassigned to a new platoon, Sergeant Arrow's, which also contains Private Matthews. We are scheduled to go out into combat within the next week. 

On Tuesday night the platoon that I am part of gets sent out into the woods. We travel away from the base for about an hour when we figure we better set up a shelter for the night because dark is approaching fast. Sergeant Arrow sets up the perimeter, while the other guys and I look for good spots to watch guard from. Sergeant Arrow really stresses that one member of the platoon must be awake at all times on guard. I sleep for the first two hours and get the third shift on night watch. During my shift I notice that it is very peaceful and quiet, the noises are all noises you hear back in America if you are quiet enough in the middle of the night. I spend a part of the hour looking up at the stars and figuring out which stars belong to which constellations. It doesn't feel like we are over here fighting a war and that we could all be blown to bits at any moment; it feels like I am in the woods behind my old house where I used to always play. My hour seems to have passed fairly quickly and Sergeant Arrow comes to relieve me of my shift and sits down to take his shift. I am happy that I can go back to sleep.

I wake to the peaceful sound of birds chirping and the sun just starting to peak over the horizon in an orange glow. Today our platoon is to travel to an old town that is supposedly harboring the enemy. We eat a quick breakfast of the gooey, brown mush. We pack up our camp and head in the direction of the old town. We walk through the woods very carefully. The enemy is very crafty with their traps and the United States has lost many soldiers to their traps. The traps are designed to either kill or to injure to the point of being infected and then dying.

We reach the town at about noon and set up in an abandoned building at the edge of the town. From here we will be able to see most of what is going on in the town at all times. Arrow heads to the roof to scout and see if there are any snipers on the rooftops around this building. When he tells us the coast is clear we all get to the rooftop to set up our equipment. Then I spot a child running towards us, he couldn't have been older than the age of ten. I start to panic, the child could be a suicide bomber or just a normal kid, and the enemy has used little kids many times before to blow up camps and our soldiers. I am given the honor of making the call of shooting him or not. I choose to shoot the child, because one child dead would be better than our whole platoon dead and all our supplies being in enemy hands or destroyed. The rest of the night I just sit in the house, replaying shooting the child over and over in my head. What if he was an innocent child, but what if he wasn't. I finally drill it into my head that protecting my platoon is the most important thing that I could do out here in this place that I did not know. Tonight Arrow gave me no night watch shifts, I'm assuming because of the child killing.

I wake up in the morning to the sun peeking through a cracked window in yellow and orange streaks. I get up, grab my gun, and head to the roof, where I find the rest of the platoon awake and scanning the surrounding areas. One can hear ans see people working in the distance, they have all moved farther away from where we are camping out. I go back down to where my makeshift bed is and sit and eat some food. After I finish eating the platoon goes out for a walk to check out an area where Arrow had spotted suspicious activity the night before. As we near the old factory building we can hear people talking inside. We get as close as we can to the building and stay as quiet as humanly possible. We listen to what they are saying for about ten minutes and then we go to move away from the building to radio in for backup. They sound like they are planning to blow the city up; they knew we were in the city, just not where we were exactly. Then all of the sudden there is a loud crack of a twig and I turn around to see that one of my platoon members had miss stepped and snapped a twig in half. Everyone in the platoon gives him an awful look and we start to move faster towards the woods.

Shortly after the snap of the twig the woods and the surrounding area fell completely silent. Then, the huge, gray doors to the factory building flew open and out came ten men heavily armed with weaponry headed our way. We all take off sprinting towards the tree line, Arrow in the back and me in the lead. When we reach the tree line I turn around to make sure everyone was there and we are missing Arrow. I look out across all of the ground that we had just covered and see him lying about fifteen yards away holding his thigh. The others took off towards the house that we had made our base. Without thinking I rush over to him and grab him under his arms and start to drag him to the safety of the tree line where I could hopefully bandage his wound. That's when I hear about ten shots fired and I start to feel a warm sensation in my chest. I look down and notice that my uniform is completely covered in blood now. I start to feel light headed and start to stumble, until I completely lose my footing, drop Sergeant Arrow, and fall hard on the ground. The impact knocks all the air out of me. I just lay there helpless there on the ground, slowly bleeding out. I can hear my comrades running and calling in on the radio for a medic and I can hear a helicopter in the distance. My vision starts to become a blurry mess. I remember something my father told me once when I was a boy, "Son, we all have something to live for, all of us, even if it is the smallest little thing, but only the lucky ones have something to die for too," and God knows I do. Then I can no longer hear and everything  goes completely black.