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funny-looking pair of pliers—“and crimp a blasting cap onto some fuse.” He blew in the end of the cap and slipped a length of fuse into it. Then he squeezed the end of the cap with the jaws of the crimpers, and gave it a couple of tugs to show that it was securely fastened to the fuse.
    â€œNow when you get out in the field you’re gonna see hard-core engineers crimp these caps with their teeth, like in the movies. If you’re real lucky you might see one of them get his jaw blown off. Don’t do it.
    â€œIn all this bag of tricks,” he waved an arm at the pile of various explosives behind him, “the only things really dangerous to you are the blasting caps. The rest of it, you can burn or shoot full of holes, nothin’s gonna happen.
    â€œBut drop one of these blasting caps on the sidewalk—if you can find a sidewalk—and you’ll be lookin’ for a new pair of balls.
    â€œNow to put the cap in the C-4”—he broke off a piece of C-4 a few inches long—“you just punch a hole in it with the pointy-ended handle of the crimpers. The other handle’s a screwdriver, which you’ll never use.
    â€œMake the hole about as deep as the cap and push the cap in. Like this. Now follow me.” He led us over to a hole in the ground, big enough to hide a truck in. He set the piece of C-4 inside the edge of the hole.
    â€œLet me use your cigarette.” He took a cigarette from a guy and touched it to the fuse and blew on it. “You can use matches, but a cigarette works better.”
    The fuse started to sputter and he said calmly, “Get away and get down.” I ran like hell, not knowing whether to expect a firecracker or an H-bomb.
    â€œThat’s far enough,” he shouted. I hit the dirt and the thing went bang, a little louder than a rifle. We went back and sat down again.
    â€œMost of you prob’ly won’t ever use this stuff. Explosives are the engineers’ job. But you’ve all gotta know how to do it in case of an emergency, like all your engineers getting killed.” Oh yeah.
    â€œYou almost never use these things as weapons—you’ve got plenty of explosives made for that purpose. Mostly you use the C-4 for blowing down trees, either to make an LZ—helicopter landing zone—or to clear away enough of the jungle so that Charlie can’t come too close without you seeing him.
    â€œYou don’t want to blow down your trees one by one, so you use the det cord to make all the charges go off at once.
    â€œThis stuff”—he held up a coil of the white cord—“is nothing more than hollow plastic tubing filled with an explosive similar to C-4. If something goes bang at one end, the bang travels down the cord to the other end. To make sure everything goes off all at once, you ought to put a cap on each end of the det cord. But in a pinch, you can just wrap it around the explosive a few times.”
    He used the det cord to string together a bunch of different kinds of explosives, to show us where the caps went in each one. There were cratering charges, a Bangalore torpedo, a Claymore mine, a dynamite stick, and a number of other things that I never saw again. At the end of the session, he blew the whole thing up. Even scrunched down in a foxhole a block away, it was so loud it made my ears hurt. They rang all the next day.
    The week went by pretty fast. We learned about weapons, booby traps, jungle survival—even spent a night out in Charlie’s Country, on the other side of the barbed wire. Nothing happened, but it was spooky.
    It was like Basic Training all over again, but boiled down and concentrated and with all the bullshit taken out. In Basic they treated you as if you were a boy, and a moron at that—but there’s no room for tots or stupids in the jungle.
    When the week was over, they posted lists telling where everybody was assigned. Willy and I both drew B