CLICK, CLICK, BOOM?

In Vietnam, death could come from the most unlikely places.

An infantry lieutenant lent me an M-3 submachine gun, picked up during an ambush. Grease gun, they called it. Ugly, stamped-metal thing, but it worked. I’d never fired one. So I took it to the dump at Tây Ninh Base Camp to try it out. Another lieutenant came along, and one of his platoon sergeants.

The dump was as good a range as any. Nobody complained about noise there. We lined up bottles and cans on a berm and opened up from thirty feet. Twenty minutes of noise, brass piling up around our boots, until we ran dry.

Then we walked up to check our targets — and I saw something odd sticking out of the dirt. Green, dull, half-buried. A fuse. Still attached to a 155mm round.

Nobody moved for a second.

Kill radius: one hundred and fifty feet. We’d been standing at thirty. Three men, shooting blind at a berm, for twenty straight minutes, with a live artillery round sitting in the dirt behind it. One bad ricochet, one spark in the wrong place, and there’s no funeral with an open casket. There’s no funeral with a casket at all. Just a detail sent out to bag what they could find.

Then we saw it — the scars where our own bullets had skipped off the fuse. Again and again. Close enough to touch it and never set it off.

I called it in and had the round blown in place.

Afterward, nobody said much. We just drank the beer