A/N: Had the urge to write another one. There's no "series" or anything, so you don't have to read Fragments to understand what's going on here unless you want to, but as an ardent reader and writer on the subject of the Vietnam War, I'm very intrigued by Hinton's post-book plans for Soda and Steve. This one is in Soda's POV.
Disclaimer: I don't own The Outsiders. There are three lines of dialogue toward the end from the movie Platoon which I thought were fitting to the situation. I don't own those, or the movie, either.
On Distant Ground
"Don't try and hide it, man. You're as jumpy as the rest of us. No doubtin' that."
My stomach gave a violent turn as I contemplated what lay ahead for me in the rice fields below the airplane, circling now just over Cam Ranh Bay, but I intentionally ignored the kid in the seat next to me anyway. I was in no mood to start up a conversation with him. I already felt like throwing up; no doubt I would if I opened my mouth.
"It's all right to be nervous, y'know. You ain't alone in this."
He chattered on aimlessly – must have been his nervous habit, talking – but I tuned him out, and instead focused on the view outside the window. Glory, it sure would be a pretty country, if there wasn't a war going on. It was a real tiny country, too – if you concentrated long enough, or hard enough, you could probably see clear across the border to Cambodia. But I wasn't much for concentration.
"You know they gotta be extra special careful about landing in this place? Those suckers shoot our planes down all the time … "
"Would you shut your trap?" I spat venomously, fed up at last with his senseless babbling. "You ain't makin' it any better, you know that?"
His face turned a light shade of scarlet but he grinned in spite of himself. "Man, I didn't even think you were listening."
"Kinda hard not to," I retorted, and turned my attention back to the window. We were closer to the ground now, moving in what seemed like slow motion. Nausea controlled my stomach and my knee trembled fiercely against my dumb efforts to stop it. Shit, I thought to myself. All this over a war. America sure knows how to treat a man.
"I really hope the temperature ain't too bad." I rolled my eyes, wondering how I'd even been able to tolerate him all the way here from Japan. "Buddy of mine was drafted last year," he went on. "He said it was real, real hot."
His buddy was right.
Stepping off of the plane and onto the red soil after having finally landed, I immediately felt something closely akin to suffocation. The humidity was unbearable and I wondered how I'd ever survive the next twelve months. If this wasn't Hell, it was about as close as you could get, and then some.
A staff sergeant who looked as if he'd become too used to the weather to even care made us stand in single file lines for I can't even tell you how long. It sure seemed like forever, though, and it made me mad – they wanted us here to fight a war, but at the same time they made us stand around in this potentially fatal heat without thinking twice about what that was doing to our vitality. We wouldn't prove very useful in a firefight if they kept this shit up.
The young GIs around me looked indifferent and miserable as the sergeant called off numbers one by one and wrote things down on a clipboard, and I couldn't help noticing the way we all looked in comparison to the older soldiers grouped together a few yards away.
Dirty, exhausted, unkempt, and terribly unshaven, they stood pointing and grinning and laughing at us like a collective faction of catty high school girls, for no reason barring the fact that while we had just arrived, naïve and imprudent, they were going home today. Today. Simply because of that, I think I'd be doing the same thing.
They didn't even seem to mind the heat. Getting out of it must have been their only motivation for putting up with it.
And in comparison to them, we looked so clean and fresh and terribly new. Maybe a little bit of dust covered our boots, but their black shine was still awfully visible. The old guys – they were all red, covered literally from head to toe with Vietnam's thick soil. Even their faces were no longer the creamy white that ours were. Everything about them set them apart from us. Stature, too, was different – to them, we could hardly be called soldiers. We were simply newbies, cherries, or FNGs. But they were hardened, seasoned infantrymen, ready for anything thrown at them. I admired and envied them all at once.
I snapped back to reality after the sergeant called out a number that turned out not to be mine, as I had thought, but the GI's next to me. He looked like he'd maybe fallen asleep, or at least dozed off, and I figured that could only be a result of the humidity. The kid looked confused and embarrassed, and a couple of us laughed at his expense, but that didn't last long. This heat – you could hardly function, let alone laugh, even if you wanted to.
Eventually the sergeant finished up and waved a hand, indicating that we were supposed to follow him. We did, reluctantly, and as he led us past the seasoned group, they stared at us like they'd never seen our species before in their lives. Twelve months had gone by since they'd been in our position, though, and I could see where it would be new for them.
"I'll be dipped in shit!" one said. He was a tall black guy with a youthful face. "New meat!"
"You kids gonna love the Nam," said another, "for fuckin' ever."
"Three hundred sixty-five and a wake-up. Oh, Lord," remarked a third, his voice distraught and pained and completely exhausted. I wiped beads of sweat from my brow, slowly realizing the extent of his words.
There was a fourth somewhere in there who laughed to himself. "I'm so short, I can sit on a dime and swing my legs," he said, giggling even more still. "I got an hour and counting left here, how many you boys got?"
Nobody answered. We watched them as they watched us. They were on their way back to the World and we were far from it. Some of us wouldn't even live to see the day where we would finally be in their position. That was enough to make me feel sick all over again.
The mountains surrounding us rose up like the green giants they were, semi-obscured behind a wall of haze due to the perpetual humidity and tropical atmosphere. But at the same time they looked scornful and cruel, as if mocking us, and I wondered if perhaps I was hallucinating. Or making this whole thing up. I wasn't really here, was I? My brothers would not have let this happen, would they?
There was no way in hell I'd be able to survive these next twelve months.
A/N: Ugh, I definitely need to go to bed now. I swear, I work so much better at night. Or, as of now, the wee hours of morning. Anyway, let me know what you think ...