Would you shoot them for us. If we are being honest with ourselves, and we are, aren’t we, or what’s the use, the old man had never been much of a sharpshooter. He was only as good as he had to be at the time. The sharpest shooting is kind of NOT shooting at all. Navigating through choppy seas of shit, best to be quiet.
Every time the old man thought shooting, he thought that sunny afternoon, spring in suckful San Antonio, height of the Vietnam War. The draft and people shooting at you in the jungle and that was the last place he had wanted to go. He remembered that afternoon at Luckless basic training. They’d been marched out into even a dustier than usual shithole and handed a carbine and pointed at some distant mounds. Each mound topped by a target, like a nipple.
Turns out the old man had been shooting at the wrong target and was never allowed to hold a military weapon not ever again. The next guy over to his left had so many holes in his target, he was sent to sniper school. The old man always hung left.
He hung around what was called Casual Barracks for the next twelve weeks, could’ve been seven, maybe three. Trust me, seemed a lifetime for an eighteen-year-old soldier in the middle of a war. Wasn’t one of those good wars.
Thankfully, what he did those days he did not recall. Maybe some John D. MacDonald novels. Dress Her In Indigo. The Dreadful Lemon Sky.
But he was not alone and one day all their orders arrived. Thirteen soldiers and twelve were shipped to a war-torn Asia for latrine duty. His orders – he still had them around somewhere – and one was sent to Bavaria to spy on the Czechoslovakian military. He had no idea where that was. He just knew it wasn’t Vietnam.
But that’s another story.
The old man was an athlete. He didn’t need to learn, he absorbed. He thought about back in the day, he was a player/coach and benched himself when a better scorer showed up. He had hated that. But it was the right thing to do.
And the right thing can be hard sometimes.
Would you shoot them for us.
Hell, no. Double hell, no.
Hello. No.
But maybe just maybe I can help them go missing.
