Facing The Enemy II

"Darjeeling!! Darjeeling!! Wake up, man, wake up, we got gooks in the wire!" Davey from Oxnard CA pulled the sheets off of Darjeeling and pulled on his arm. "Come on, man, get up, for Christ's sake!"
"How about for my own sake? Calm down Davey, it's probably just another test of the Red Alert System and the lifers are just messing with us again." Darjeeling pulled on his fatigues and boots and hopped toward the door of the hooch as he laced them up. Outside was chaos. People were running everywhere and he could hear 105 rounds going off. "Holy shit, Davey, Arty is firing horizontal!" He barely got the words out before he heard the whistle and hiss of the RPG and saw the red dot fly past him and Davey and on into the interior of the camp. He looked in the direction from where it came but didn't see anyone in the wire. Their hooch was the first hooch inside the base camp perimeter and the 25th. Infantry Division Artillery was next in line. The fact that the artillery units were firing in a horizontal position meant only one thing: The big guns were aimed level at either VC or NVA trying to break through the perimeter. This meant sapper squads and others rushing the perimeter to overrun it before being mowed down by the perimeter guards and artillery. The artillery round used for this was the notorious "beehive" round named for the sound it made as it threw thousands of one inch darts through the air. Darjeeling ran back into the hooch to grab his M-16 and bumped into Davey and Hector who were pounding on the platoon sargeant's door. The platoon sargeant had the only key to the weapons rack and he was passed out as usual. Two other GI's, Rick and Ron were frantically trying to break the bar on the weapons rack but to no avail. Darjeeling walked back outside realizing that it was useless to try to wake SSG Lupe out of his whiskey stupor. "That's the difference between being a juicer or a head, one's alive and the other's dead." Darjeeling rhymed to himself as he got down behind a barrel filled with sand and picked up the sandbag on top, looking for his stash. Fumbling around, he found the pack and reached in, digging out a Park Lane. He threw one after another of the empty tubes away and then crumbled up the pack and threw it on the ground. "Fucking ants," he said out loud to nobody as everybody was running this way and that in total confusion. A guy ran past him with no boots on. "The fucking ants ate my stash." He said out loud and the guy stopped and asked Darjeeling what he had said. "I said the fucking ants ate my stash, man, is that breakin' foul or not?" The guy just shook his head and ran off in the direction he came from. Darjeeling watched as the artillery quit firing and the guard towers stopped firing the M-60 machine guns. It was over with that quick. "Well at least they're high and they're not juicer ants," He said to himself as he walked back into the hooch where about ten guys were confronting the Puerto Rican SSG who had finally come to and stood in the hallway, reeling this way and that almost to the point of falling down, mumbling unintelligable words in half Spanish and half English. One guy told him that SSG stood for Sorry Suckin' Grunt and that pissed the sargeant off. He started swinging his fists in the air hitting nobody. Two of the GIs finally pushed him back onto his bunk and shut the door to his private room, blocking it with a chair so he couldn't open the door. Then out came the shotgun pipe and they commenced to blow pot smoke under the door in hopes of calming the sargeant who was now trying to break the door down. Finally it became quiet just as First Lieutenant Broberg came through the hooch door. "Leftenant Blowbird," Darjeeling called out coming to attention in the British style. "What's happenin', sir?"
"At ease men," Blowbird said, laughing, "it was a false alarm."
"What?" Nearly everyone said in chorus.
"Yeah, Big Dan, the clerk from HQ took some psylocybin and hallucinated a truck coming through the wire. It's all cool now. We did have one RPG come in but it was in the "no fire" zone and they had to send a patrol out. They won't find anything out there, though, they never do. What's with you, Darjeeling?"
"The fuckin' ants ate my Park Lanes. And how come Arty was firin' beehives?"
"They're just as high as you're ants are, Deej, or maybe as high as Big Dan. I think they were bored and wanted something to do for a change."
"Man, I'm crashin' on that note." Darjeeling slipped back under the covers, vying for a few hours sleep before the morning came.