THE ART OF THE BAYONET
You're a right-hander. You spring forward from the right foot,
behind you. You take three quick steps forward, exactly in the rapid
movement you make in punting a football. You scream. You get
him with the tip of the bayonet blade right down there in the nuts.
You drive it in deep, you step back quickly as you rip it out quick,
you take two steps back . He pauses. He stares and mumbles poetically
singsong in a foreign language. You can't understand it. So much the
better for you . You take your time. He hasn't yet had time
to
fall.
Slowly you insert the blade in his large intestine. He gazes down,
fascinated. Something is entering his body. He doesn't know what to
make of this thing. You jab it into his body, as deep as you can get it.
Then, quick as before, you rip straight up from the intestine. You do
this in five seconds. Exactly. The instant you reach his jugular vein, or
anything else the blade can reach just under the tip of his chin, you pull
it out , step back with the same quick two-step, and turn your rifle
precisely around. He is falling. He is falling. Hurry. Hurry. Smash his
face in with the butt. Get him. Get him. Before he falls.
Now you are at leisure, so you slowly and almost luxuriously
ex~ricate
a government issued cigarette from the K-ration packet and
drag on it like Jay Gould pulling for five minutes on his cigar, and
you think, as he thought, Let the bastards wait, let the bastards wait,
I'm taking my own time, I want-
What do you want?
Leisurely you stroll into his village.
It
is now your village. He was
the enemy.
You poor miserable blind deaf American son of a bitch, as you
stand upright astride your dead brother's quivering body, giddy in
your triumph, a vulture is fluttering drunk in your brain erratic as a
blinded butterfly.
Suddenly the vulture poises perfectly still at some terrible height
in your skull, and screams, and tears its razor beak into its own liver,
and dies in mid-dream, and falls downward and downward and
downward into the pit of your own body, suicide, dead as a stone.
