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The story of a young Marine lieutenant in Vietnam, and his anti-war and politically active sister, in the epochal year 1968.

Excerpt

It became increasingly miserable and cold. Flanagan tried mightily to avoid thinking of Jill, amusing himself instead by visualizing a sunny, sandy Florida beach with plenty of bikini-clad young beauties. It didn’t work, but it did help that his heavy sleepiness dulled his full range of senses. He fought back by realizing that he was in charge, that he was the single individual in a group of nearly forty Americans who alone decided many small things and several big things, such as the conditions under which these and other men might fight and subsequently die. Here they were, far away from home and family, in the cold rain, on the wet ground, ostensibly without sleep, scared, tired, alone, their muscles aching, their bowels perpetually loose, their inevitable rashes itching and perhaps even bleeding, still hungry even though they’d eaten their last meal out of a can, wearing the same clothes they’d worn for more than a week, and, if that wasn’t enough, in grave danger of being wounded or killed by a crafty, stealthy, dangerous enemy. And most, if not all, were having difficulty concentrating.

What a great deal, Flanagan concluded. Who could ask for anything more? Soft beds, clean sheets, warm women-a thing of the past. That was then; this is now. Reality these days is a rainy rice paddy, where a man’s free to be outdoors, smoke cigarettes, cuss, spit, shoot rifles, and kill people. What’s a little Asiatic combat amongst friends, anyway? he thought, as much in disgust as amusement.

The time passed with a dreadfully slow tempo. He glanced at the luminous dials of his watch and saw that it was six more hours until first light. He went over in detail every likely ambush scenario he could envision, and the resultant actions required of him as the platoon leader. He was bothered, as usual, by the idea of an enemy force of large size choosing this night and this place to make their presence known, in which case he and a lot of others would never live to see the sun rise. Otherwise, he felt confident he could manage events to his own satisfaction.

Then five more hours.

He went over the names and faces and duties of all the men in his platoon. He had made it a point on the previous day to spend some time with the new guys, to learn their names and find out enough tidbits about them to retain at least one or two pertinent items in his memory. Their hometowns; their training levels; their strengths and weaknesses; their family situations, to the extent that he knew them; their overall abilities as Marines. Satisfied, he then reviewed the old-timers in the same fashion.

Then four more hours.

He played an entire Beatles’ concert in his head. He liked the old stuff best, from ’64 and ’65, and tended to represent those songs in his concert list in far greater proportion to the more recent releases. The new stuff seemed different, way too hippyish, and the change in the Beatles’ music and appearance had been faster and deeper than he would have preferred. Why couldn’t they just stay with the old stuff in the old style? Why did they have to change everything so radically?

He was glancing at his watch after the last song of the show, just as the Fab Four were taking their bows to the screams and the applause, when the claymore to his far left exploded with a deep, frightening boom.

Read more about Shall Never See So Much and Gerald Gillis HERE.

Copyright 2010 Gerald Gillis. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.