Childhood's End - John Fetto

His childhood ended on a hill in eastern Laos just east of the central highlands of Vietnam. He was running, weaving through the trees, body bent low to the hill he scurrying up while God knew how many people were following him and the other three members of his team, following. He thought he could hear them, the crack of their brush as they rushed to keep. The little draw wasn’t on the map, but Hawley had seen it from the chopper, and at the end a narrow a cut between the mountains, not much bigger than his boot as he had stared down from the chopper that brought them in. Hawley was, sure his team was following right behind, trampling the brush behind him, as lead the way.

They had strung out like a line. Hawley leading on point. Sandman walking slack, team leader Willie behind. Finally, Jaybird, tail gunner, protecting the rear. Even as he climbed up the end of the draw, Hawley could hear the crack of breaking brush behind him. They couldn’t keep up with Hawley long legs, still he heard them, sometimes louder, some softer, the rock walls of the draw playing tricks with the sound. It didn’t matter that they dropped them in the wrong position, this was his family, his friends, better than any at the backwater, refinery town he’d left in California and he knew he could lead them out, thinking ahead like he always did and as his legs pumped and his lungs heaved, ready to burst, working it all out in his head, what he’d do at the top. He’d set a mine and as his friends cleared, he’d pull a wire ankle high across the trail, attached to the detonator. They’d all slide and stumble down the other side of the mountain, and when the first enemy soldier followed them stepped on the wire, he and everyone near him, would be shredded by six thousand balls of steel. The chase would be over.

As he reached the top of the draw, the wind rose, screaming in his ears, freezing the sweat soaked armpits of his fatigues and stinging his neck. He knelt, slung off his pack, and pulled out the curved explosive charge, faced it down slope and drove the two spikes on the bottom of it into the ground. He broke off a little brush laid it in front it and spooled out the wire, laid down in the dirt waiting for his team. It was then that the wind and the canyon showed him their great trick. The wind stopped burning his ears. Sound seemed to die and the narrow cut of canyon, expanding below, magnified everything happening below, but it lied, transforming the sounds of what he’d heard into something completely different. The crack of brush from his team following sharped into the sound of gun fire. Not close, not even moving up toward him, but trapped far away down at the bottom by the river in the reeds and bamboo, where they had first been ambushed. It couldn’t be true. He knew that they had to have been following him, so he waited for the sound to change back. But it didn’t change back to what he wanted. It changed to something word, the sound of gun fire dying, and a friend screaming, terrible sounds, inhuman sounds, each one, each awful note, searing his brain.