Rambo was siting on the gravel of the dirt road, near Ortega and Coletta, and he was keeping an eye on both.
He was too wet to sleep: had he fallen asleep with his clothes so wet, he would have woken up with pneumonia for sure.
On the contrary, Ortega had fallen asleep.
He was sleeping with his mouth and neck covered in blood. On his pale skin, the red looked almost scarlet. A cut inside the mouth is slow to heal and his tongue was still bleeding for sure.
The blood loss would lower his body temperature even more, that night.
That pallor was a bad sign and Rambo wondered if he should wake him up and force him to stay awake, like he was doing.
Anyway, sleeping in that temperature, and with no sleeping bags, wasn't a good idea for anyone.
They had slept for two hours a night for almost a month: skipping a whole night couldn't make them feel any worse than they already did.
Anyway, Rambo wasn't the only one awake.
Jorgenson was still muttering on his own, sitting with his legs crossed in the middle of the road, just a few yards in front of the rest of the group, alone.
According to Messner, no one in the group was lucid anymore: they were all broken, like zombies... And Rambo agreed with him.
According to Trautman, these were the kind of moments when soldiers used to die, and Rambo agreed.
Because he had seen it happening.
Trautman was right about many things and all things considered Rambo thought that was a good selection program.
In 'An Khe To', central Vietnam, Rambo saw a black kid tripping on his shoelaces while they were retreating, and dying just because of those untied shoelaces.
Rambo had seen quite a few people dying during his first tour but the Freeman episode, that day of one year ago, fixed itself firmly into Rambo's mind.
And while waiting for time to pass, Rambo remembered.
It was a sunny day over Souie Tre, in the An Khe To province.
The battle had raged for three hours - an extremely violent battle - and Rambo and the others were a reconnaissance team in the aftermath of it, with the purpose of searching for enemies still in place, because those enemies could launch what some used to call a 'second strike'.
The plain was flat, the grass high and dry.
Freeman, a nineteen-year old kid, sprang running at the first shot.
Rambo and the others had heard some Vietcong screams, then the first shots started flying and everyone ran for cover but Freeman, who sprang forward.
The Vietcong scout must have been a nervous type, because his first shots through the tall grass looked almost like shots in the air to Rambo, as if the scout's intention was to scare the American team more than attacking it. Maybe Rambo and his mates had found the Vietcong squad in a bad moment, and now they only wanted to keep the Americans away from them.
What happened next to Freeman wasn't caused by his equipment's weight nor by him being clumsy either: his shoelaces had become loose because of the many hours of uninterrupted marching.
During those eight hours of march they never stopped, so he never had the time to re-fasten them and, in the end, they obviously became loose.
When the guys of the team sprang running in all directions to disperse and get back to the previously-planned rally point in case of attack, Freeman instead was forced to stay behind.
Rambo could clearly see the grass between him and Freeman hit by the AK bullets and had the kid tried to cross that stream of grass to reach his mates he would have been hit for sure.
Two grenades exploded in the grass between them and the Vietcong: they had fallen short, as if barely aimed toward them.
Rambo didn't realize it but in the cold and darkness of that night in Fort Bragg, his memories became real. They became real images in the dark..
Rambo started seeing what he was remembering, smelling the smells and hearing the sounds of that day.
The grenades, fallen away from them and not dangerous at all, confirmed Rambo's idea that the VC hadn't really located them. They had just heard him and his mates and the Vietcong didn't want to engage.
The other members of Rambo's team were vanishing in the tall grass or out of danger already, but he and Freeman had to stay behind.
Rambo knew what to do.
He and Freeman only had to reach the rally point and survive there just ten minutes, then the reinforcements would have do the rest.
Maybe Ray – the team's radioman – was sending their coordinates already and soon helicopters would show up, or even tanks.
They only needed to hold on a few minutes so the situation wasn't so bad, but first they had to get to the rally point and Freeman was held back by the enemy fire.
“I'll cover you - Rambo screamed -. Ready?”
Freeman nodded.
As Rambo opened fire with his M-14, Freeman started to run.
After the second or third shot of his burst, Rambo stretched his head a little out of the tree he was using for cover, in order to get an angle of sight, but in front of him he couldn't see anything other than the tall grass.
The enemies were right in front of him, but he couldn't see them.
From that grass, a shot could come at any moment and hit him in the head.
He would have given everything to stop shooting and return to cover of the tree... But he had to cover Freeman, so he continued firing. It was a long road the guy had to cross in the open and Rambo had to cover him at all costs.
So he continued shooting at random because through that tall grass he really couldn't see a thing.
Fourth, fifth shot of the burst.
Had the Vietcong had an expert fighter - for example a well-trained sniper – he would have understood immediately that he was shooting at random, just to cover his friend, and had that fighter been real tough, he could try to hit Freeman (or Rambo) despite his cover-fire.
Rambo knew that the risk was real and Freeman, while running desperately, was terrified.
His eyes were wide open, his face disfigured by a mask of panic.
While he was running through that open field he was scared and in the middle of it, at the center of the meadow, something went wrong with his boots and caused him a moment of distraction.
Rambo turned then to Freeman, just to see where he was, and did it just in time to see his head blowing up.
The bullet had hit him in the center of his forehead while he was still running.
Rambo saw a particularly sharp image of that scene because it was a sunny day.
He saw a piece of skull jumping upward and something else dark squirting backward.
For a while, it was as if Freeman was still running, then he collapsed on the emerald-green grass.
Then he fell to the ground with a thud, his head out of control, landing on his nape.
Rambo had seen many war movies but was surprised by the difference between the big screen and reality: no actor can fall in the way he had just seen and from the way Freeman crashed his nape on the ground, Rambo understood that he was dead even before he reached the ground.
And when it did, his brain came out from his forehead
If up till then Rambo had only feared there might be an expert fighter inside that enemy team, now he was sure.
Freeman had stumbled on his laces – almost undone – and that minimal indecision had slowed him, making him a perfect target, much easier than Rambo, and the sniper had dared to stretch out, take aim and shoot even if under Rambo's cover-fire .
The only reason Rambo was still alive was that the enemy sniper had aimed at Freeman, not him.
Lucky... I am alive because of luck.
After having heard the enemy shot, Rambo adjusted his aim accordingly, and continued to shoot and scream his mate's name until his magazine was almost empty... But for no reason. He hadn't seen the sniper's muzzle blast, nor smoke or anything else, and he had jut continued shooting practically at random.
Some AK bullets started to strike the tree Rambo was using for cover, forcing him to stop shooting.
Rambo lay on the log and closed his eyes. With his against it, he could feel the tree vibrating with every single bullet sticking into the wood.
He let the almost-empty magazine fall to the ground and inserted a new one, then he tried to memorize Freeman's body position with regard to the team's rally point: they would recover his body later, when the ambush was over.
If Souie Tre hadn't fallen that morning it surely wouldn't fall that afternoon either... Nor that night: leaving the body there was the wisest thing to do, but at great cost anyway, for Rambo.
As the enemy fire took a pause, the young man cleared off from his cover, vanishing in the tall grass.
He succeeded in reaching the rally point safe and sound, where the rest of the team was waiting for him.
They knew Rambo and Freeman had found themselves stuck behind because of enemy fire and when Rambo came back alone, no one said a single word.
They didn't even ask him what had happened.
When Jorgenson, ten yards from Rambo, was struck on the head with a club, for Rambo it was like waking from a dream.
Jorgenson's head tilted to one side with a rapid movement and to Rambo the scene looked far away and unreal, much less real than Freeman's brain squirting in the air.
After seeing Jorgenson's head tilting - and hearing the sound it made – Rambo stayed still for such long while that it felt like an eternity, to him.
He tried to stand up – the slowness in doing so exasperated him, but he couldn't manage it.
An arm closed his neck inside a deadly grip, a big and muscular arm that lifted him from the ground until his feet weren't touching the earth anymore.
Rambo tried to free himself, but it was impossible.
Only then, during that fight, did he realize what bad shape he was in.
All of his arms, legs and back were hurting: every single muscle of his body had gone to the dogs because of the lactic acid.
Despite the terror and adrenaline, Rambo tried to fight anyway, but he had no more strength in his body. Too many days of hardship and scarce food had just ruined years of training.
That selection process had lasted for too long and that night they had paused too long in too much cold an environment. He couldn't fight... But he would give it a try anyway.
His attacker was a foot taller than him, but Rambo tried to use his training anyway. He tried to use one of the moves he knew for that kind of situation, but his attacker anticipated it before Rambo could even try it. He knew Rambo's move even better than Rambo did.
Rambo saw that there were at least four attackers and that they were attacking his entire group.
The last of the four went headed toward Ortega's direction, still lying inside his sleeping bag.
Only then did Manuel start opening his eyes, when the man was already about to hit him.
“No!” Rambo screamed.
The man was about to kick Ortega in the face.
Panic had taken hold of Rambo by then.
“No! NOOO!”
Ortega woke up completely just in time to receive a kick to his mouth, exactly as Rambo had feared.
To avoid choking, Ortega turned on his side, then puked gauzes and blood.
While he coughed and tried to breathe in vain, he launched a horrible, guttural noise.
A pool of blood appeared under his mouth, and yet he couldn't breathe.
Inside Rambo's mind, those bloody gauzes were the spitting image of Freeman's brains.
Rambo was losing consciousness.
They really looked like the brains of his friend Freeman, a nineteen-year-old factory worker from Illinois, “K.I.A., B.N.R.”, meaning 'Killed In Action, Body Not Recovered'... Because when they returned to the ambush place together with their reinforcements, Rambo and his team mates never found his body.
They just found some gray matter scattered on the ground and nothing else, which is why Freeman was classified as KIA/BNR.
Until the finding of his friend's pieces, a couple of his team mates had suspected that Rambo could have lied about the black guy's whereabouts, in order to hide the fact that he had simply abandoned him to the Vietcong.
But after the finding, on the contrary, no one had any more doubts about Rambo's version of the facts.
But the body was never found.
The Vietcong had taken it away with them and no one ever understood why.
Nowadays his body is probably still there, buried somewhere in the outskirts of the An Khe To province.
In war, even this kind of things can happen.
In war, everything happens.
It was the last thing Rambo thought before passing out.