Sharpshooter by Chris Lynch

little bit less of the Army team player he normally likes to be. “How many of the other guys have been assigned to the Marksman Program? Answer me that.”
    â€œI can’t answer you that, Dad, since I don’t have the answer. I will try and find out for you for next time, though.”
    The rocking gets more furious now, and so does the pounding on the glass. I am feeling pressure on my back as I try to hold the bifold door closed. It is still good-natured enough, the harassment, but it feels like it could possibly be turning. And, marksmen or not, these are now trained soldiers I am ticking off.
    â€œOkay,” Dad says, though, really, hanging up now is not okay, and we both want it to go on forever. “I’ll let you go, son. Go on, go on …”
    â€œThanks, Dad. Listen, I’ll call —”
    â€œI love you, Ivan,” he blurts.
    I stop smiling like a monkey. My heart pounds and, jeez, my eyes get all kinds of watered up. I just didn’t see it coming at all, and now look at me, in front of all the men and everything.
    It’s just not done. Not like this. Not between us.
    The whole Army seems to feel it, too, and the howling, pounding, rocking stops.
    â€œI am very proud of you, son,” he says, sniffing. Cripes. Sniffing.
    â€œYeah, Dad,” is the absolute best I can do right now, but I know my best is good enough right now. “Yeah, Dad.” Then, “Mom, huh?”
    â€œI will,” he says. “Of course.”
    Â 
    It was eight hours a day on the rifle range during that last week and a half of basic that got me my assignment. I went straight from there, Fort Riley, Kansas, to my AIT — that’s Advanced Individual Training — at Fort Benning in Georgia.
    But while it was my shooting at Fort Riley that got me into the Marksman Program, it was my shooting from much earlier that got me where I am now.
    â€œWhere on earth did you learn to shoot like that, soldier?” asks my instructor, Sergeant Bing. I am lying on my stomach, shooting at targets on the five-hundred-yard range. “Boys from Boston don’t show up shooting like that.”
    â€œNew Hampshire, sergeant,” I say, continuing my shooting. “With my dad. He was an Army captain in World War Two. A hero. We have a small shack of a place way up in the woods there. I’ve been a shootist since I was five years old.”
    â€œGood hunting?”
    â€œMostly just small stuff. Squirrels, rabbits, coyotes. And hippies trying to run to Canada.”
    â€œHa!” Sgt. Bing says. “Fire away, son. Fire away.”
    I do fire away, every day. I enjoy every minute of it and get better and better until it makes no sense to keep me any longer on American soil.

A fter the long, long flight, we can smell it as we get nearer to the action in Vietnam.
    I have been watching all the news and listening to all the stories and imagining my actual self there in the battle zone, but I have to admit this is not at all what I expected. The scent came into the plane during the last twenty minutes of our approach, but now as we come to a stop and the door opens and we take the stairs down to the airfield, it’s even more of a shock. It smells — it tastes — like if you took all of high school during the last week of classes, put it into a blender, and boiled it on the stove. The sweat and hormones of gym mixed up with all the leftover grease and garbage of the Dumpsters outside the cafeteria, mixed with any and every chemical you could get together from the physical sciences lab — the ones they always told you were not to be combined under any circumstances. Plus the parking lot smell at the end of the day, with guys peeling out and leaving doughnuts of rubber, and three-quarters of the old rustboxes the seniors drive burning oil enough to give every student his own personal toxic cloud for keeps. All that blended together in the hottest, sweatiest