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let it drop into his lap. Twenty-six years, and he was out fighting again; he should have been in a division operations, not running a leg company. Somebody had really fucked up. He consoled himself with the thought that only three first sergeants had been killed in Nam.
    “Something wrong, Sarge?”
    “Nothing,” Mayfield said. “Just wondering what it would be like having a desk job in Saigon.”
    “Dry,” someone commented from the front of the boat.
    The tango boats moved in a straight line formation down the river. Turning his head, Mayfield looked out through the metal gun slits. The jungle, thick and green, ran right up to the water’s edge. After four years of fighting in the Delta it was still all VC. Never again, he thought; not like this, not here. Even if he had to retire. Never again. That much he promised himself.
    Their harbor was a number of APB’s, APL’s, and World War II LST’s anchored out in the center of the Miaon River. It was the brigade’s base camp. They lived on these boats and deployed from them. If the S-2 found the gooks far from the coast, the choppers took them in. If close, the tangos were used for insertion. It really didn’t matter, though; any place in the Delta was wet.
    The boat suddenly slowed, and with the engines easing into a heavy rumbling, the men began picking up their gear. A moment later, the boat bumped gently against the hulls of the harbor and, sliding along their sides, came to a stop. Hunched over, the men started moving for the hatches. It was a bright, hot Delta day; the sky, a crystal blue, was almost as difficult to look at as the sun itself. The men climbed out, walked over the metal roofing of the tango boats and up the ladders to the LST’s and “apples.”
    There was no joking; indeed, there was little noise. On deck the company broke up into little groups of no more than four or five. Mayfield walked over to the railing, sat down, and began taking off his boots. While he was untying them, the adjutant came up and told him they’d gotten eleven replacements and he could have them all.
    “Any lieutenants?” Mayfield asked, pulling off his soaking boots.
    “No, just medics and grunts.”
    Mayfield began peeling off his socks. “Any ever been here before?”
    “No, all cherries.”
    “OK,” Mayfield said, carefully checking his feet. “Get ’em together.” He would have liked replacements to get used to the Delta first, but they were short.
    The new boys were in little groups toward the bow of the ship. Mayfield introduced himself and asked the married kids to raise their hands, then split them up so they wouldn’t be in the same platoon; he didn’t want all the married ones killed at once. After dismissing them, he went down to his bunk.
    Usually, they were out three days and rested one. That was a grueling enough schedule. Now, with the pick-up in activity, Brigade was cutting that down. It was getting to be three and a half days out and half a day back.
    Early the next morning, with only eight hours of rest, they were ordered to move out again. No one complained; as they got ready, a few of the troopers looked suspiciously at their peeling feet, but that was all. Mayfield wrote a quick letter home. He stuffed his usual six packs of cigarettes into his helmet and checked his ammunition clips. They took the things that would matter in a fire fight, nothing else. Nobody bothered with malaria pills; if it hit you malaria was good for six weeks out of the fighting. Nobody darkened his rifle barrel or carried charcoal to blacken his face. The land belonged to the VC. You couldn’t kill them unless you found them, which for the most part meant they had to find you.
    Only twice in the last four months had they surprised the gooks. The first time was on a sweep near Quang Tri; they were crossing some high ground. It was early in the morning, and they caught them sitting behind a hedge-grove, eating. They even had their weapons stacked. The Captain