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Once outside the depot, Phil led Hank toward a jeep. “A Newsweek reporter lent it to me. I get to use it when he’s in the boonies.”
As he drove, Phil rattled on about the war.
“You get a rush when you’re in battle. I mean really in it. Man, I’m telling you. Not just for the grunts, for me too. Something inside you takes over, and you know, you take chances. You have to, if you’re going to get a good shot. You get hooked on risk, you know? Groov- ing on danger. After a while, it’s like there’s no limits. You want to go all the way. Get closer to the action. Artillery goes off, grunts get killed, gooks get blown up. And after every firefight, you think, shit, I made it past another one.”
Hank understood that Phil was pointing out how much further than Hank he had gone in confronting risk, and Hank simply nodded.
Water buffaloes sloshed in the paddies next to the road, a C-130 zoomed low. Phil swerved past check- points manned by U.S. soldiers who waved them through.
“There’s a guy I usually go to the boonies with, my close pal: Dan Barrow. He was an actor, you know, in a couple of movies.” Hank nodded. He’d seen Barrow in a movie, full of heroic derring-do. “Dan gave up Hollywood to come here. He really is like the charac- ter he’s played: fearless when we’re in a fire zone.”
At the Da Nang Press Club, the two drank beer with a dozen reporters and photographers. Like Phil, they’d come to the war zone to seek adventure and make a name for themselves.
“Did you hear about old Adams?” said a Time report- er. “He caught the green weenie in the air.” George Adams, a Marine colonel, had been shot down in a helicopter. “Yeah,” the reporter went on, “he’s the highest-ranking officer to take the big plunge.”
“Just another day at the job,” Phil said.
“You guys are pretty cynical,” Hank said.
“You let yourself get emotionally involved, and you stop taking risks,” Phil said. “You stop taking risks, then you can’t go all the way.”
They left the jeep parked outside the Press Club and walked through Da Nang, a city pockmarked with bombed and crumbling buildings ringed with sand- bags. People on the street were selling back-scratch- ers, stone pendants, filigreed fans, sexual potency
“Unless you go all the way, there’s no
personal redemption, no hitting bottom, no break- ing through to the other side—which is, Hank thought, what optimistic Americans believe happens when you hit bottom.”
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