Fort Bragg
Jorgenson stayed sat on his own, shaking his head.
It was late night by then.
Messner and Rambo tried to take stock of the situation.
They had two injured, Coletta with pneumonia and Ortega with a cut on his tongue to which stitches would have been a better treatment.
They had also taken the wrong road, but orientating would have been too difficult until the early hours of the morning, so moving that night was useless.
Not to mention that the temperature would drop very soon and that the whole test – they had understood it by then – was just a mix of orienteering, never-ending marching and cold-resistance. They had never had any real chance of getting back to the base in time, and instructors had given them this idea just to disappoint them even more.
Mind is your best weapon.
Messner and Rambo had dried and changed Coletta already.
They had put him a double layer of clothes on: Rambo had given him his ones too, his spare dry ones, and they had also made him an emergency shelter by stretching out a poncho with its strings. However, Rambo was going to pay a high price for his generosity during the next night hours.
Jorgenson was still murmuring on his own, far from the others, as if he was mind sick: for the rest of his group, he was now useless.
He really couldn't get rid of what he had done to Ortega.
He probably didn't want to get rid of it: he wished to pay for it... Maybe, he even wanted to quit because of it.
He continued to move his head in the same way, like a robot, and maybe he was crying too, but with the rain on his face you couldn't say for sure.
“What the fuck do we do now?” Rambo said to Messner.
“What can we do? If you fall asleep you'll be hit by hypothermia as fast as a torpedo and tomorrow you are gonna be worse than Coletta. Ortega must be constantly checked, cause he is at risk of suffocating with his own tongue if he loses consciousness. Coletta's condition must be watched carefully, 'cause if the wrong symptoms show up, we have to throw in the sponge for him. And personally I think Jorgenson is out of his head. In the end, we are all in deep shit... And all of that without even a single Vietcong shooting at us”
Messner made a sad smile.
Then he dried his forehead in vain and added:
“Jesus Christ, I can't stand it any longer”
He shook his head.
“I've had enough of this shit for good. And you Johnny?”
Rambo didn't reply.
“Do you want Coletta to die in here? Do you want to see him dying here in Fort Bragg? Isn't this absurd?”
Again, Rambo remained silent.
“Fuck John, have you ever been war?”
“I have been in Vietnam, yes...”
“Don't you think that over there we are already dying enough? I won't let Coletta die in the U.S.A.”
“The mission...”
“We are not in war for Christ's sake.... This is a selection, not a fucking mission. Coletta deserves to be rejected, not die. And if he is ready to die just to pass a selection process, I take my hat off to him... But no SOG for him. It's better being alive, isn't it? Cause if he dies here, what's the point? It's a fucking waste, that's it. A damn waste”
Again, Rambo stayed silent and his face had no expression.
“Fuck, I do really hate you, when you do that”
At that point, Rambo decided to reply.
“Messner... I have nothing against you but here, tonight... You have no idea.
Here it's easy. People don't die in here. You are not forced to decide who lives and who dies here. You don't have to order combat aircrafts to bomb the only one of your men stuck behind to save all of the others”
Messner understood immediately that Rambo was referring to an actual episode. Rambo was talking 'too much' - literally traveling with his mind - but about something he had really seen, and understanding it made Danforth's blood run cold.
That phrase, with the complicity of cold and fatigue, echoed inside his mind many times.
Killing the only one of your men stuck behind, to save all of the others.
The only one of your men...
It was one of those kind of things that happened in war, but the real one, not the one you saw in movies, or on television news.
Only those who had really been there knew about episodes like those.
The one that Rambo had just told him about was one of those kinds of episodes that no one ever used to say aloud... And one of the many.
Because in war – the real deal – things so bad happen that no one will ever talk about them, and Messner – who had been in Vietnam too – knew it very well.
Secrets so unmentionable that you can't even talk about them with other veterans, nor with the army chaplain either or with anyone else.
Messner too had lived a couple of episodes like those but he, unlike Rambo, would never have dared to say a word about them, not even that night.
“You see Messner... You can play at helping others here, if you want, because if it turns out bad, you just quit. But there... I have been in Khe Sahn. If you have no fucking clue about what you are doing, you die. If you do it wrong, you die. If you help someone that has just messed up, you die. Coletta is behaving just like that because he has never learnt this lesson. And the lesson is that when you try to do something beyond your ability in Vietnam, you don't go back home with a pat on the shoulder, saying 'at least I tried' . You don't get back at home at all”
“Ok, Johnny”
But Rambo's gaze stayed on him.
So Messner said:
“Understood, Johnny. Understood”
“Maybe you think that we are exaggerating here. You think something like 'we have one of us that is still losing blood from his mouth and another one with pneumonia'
Messner nodded.
He was specialized in first aid and yes, he thought they were exaggerating. They should reject them all rather than that.
But as Messner was still listening to him, Rambo left his phrase unfinished and the two young men stayed silent, listening to the rain.
“Tell me one thing, Johnny”
Rambo nodded.
“The speech you made before... Regarding the one stuck behind. It 's a real story, isn't it?”
“Napalm” said Rambo.
“They passed over him with napalm. They did what they had to do. They saved a whole platoon”