First Blood

Teasle needed his co-operation and immediately tried to ease off. 'Sorry. I guess it's me who sounds wrong now. Don't pay attention. I'm just not happy unless I get miserable every once in a while.'

Again it came, that strange intense doubling of past and present: two nights ago when Orval had said 'It'll be dark in an hour,' and he himself had snapped 'Don't you think I know it' and then had apologized to Orval in almost the same words he had just said to Trautman.

Maybe it was the pills. He didn't know what was in them, but they certainly worked, his dizziness leaving now, his brain slowly revolving to a stop. It bothered him that the periods of dizziness were coming more and more often and lasting longer, though. At least his heart was not speeding and missing anymore.

He gripped the back of the truck to climb up, but he did not have the strength to raise himself.

'Here. Take my hand,' the radioman said.

With help then, he managed to get up, but too fast, and he had to wait a moment before he was steady enough to go and sit on the bench, shoulders at last relaxing against the wall of the truck. There. Done. Nothing to do but sit, rest. The pleasure of fatigue and relief he sometimes had after vomiting.

Trautman climbed up with apparently unconscious ease and stood at the back, watching him, and there was something that Trautman had said a while ago that puzzled Teasle. He could not decide what it was. Something about -

Then he had it.

'How did you know I was at the Choisin Reservoir?'

Trautman looked in question.

'Just now,' Teasle said. 'You mentioned -'

'Yes. Before I left Fort Bragg I called Washington and had your file read to me.'

Teasle did not like that. At all.

'I had to,' Trautman said. 'There's no need to take that personally either, as if I was interfering in your privacy. I had to understand what kind of man you were, in case this trouble with Rambo was your fault, in case you were after blood now, so I could anticipate any trouble you might give me. That was one of your mistakes with him. You went after a man you didn't know anything about, not even his name. There's a rule we teach - never engage with an enemy until you know him as well as yourself.'

'All right. What does the Choisin Reservoir tell you about me?'

'For one thing, now that you've told me a little of what happened up there, it explains part of why you managed to get away from him.'

'There's no mystery. I ran faster.' The memory of how he had bolted in panic, leaving Shingleton, made him disgusted, bitter.

'That's the point,' Trautman said. 'You shouldn't have been able to run faster. He's younger than you, in better condition, better trained.'

The radioman had been sitting by the table listening to them. Now he turned from one to the other and said, 'I wish I knew what you guys were talking about. What's this reservoir?'

'You weren't in the service?' Trautman said.

'Sure I was. In the navy. Two years.'

'That's why you never heard of it. If you had been a marine, you'd know the details by heart and you'd brag about them. The Choisin Reservoir is one of the most famous marine battles of the Korean war. It was actually a retreat, but it was as fierce as any attack, and it cost the enemy thirty-seven thousand men. Teasle was right in the center of it. Enough to earn a Distinguished Service Cross.'

The way Trautman referred to him by name made Teasle feel strange, as if he were not in the same place with them, as if he were outside the truck listening, while Trautman, unaware he was being overheard, talked about him.

'What I want to know,' Trautman asked Teasle, 'was Rambo aware that you were in that retreat?'

He shrugged. 'The citation and the medal are on my office wall. He saw it. If it meant anything to him.'

'Oh, it meant something to him, all right. That's what saved your life.'

'I don't see how. I just lost my head when Shingleton was shot, and ran like a goddamn scared rat.' Saying it made him feel better, publicly confessing it, out in the open, nobody criticizing him for it when he wasn't near.