CHAPTER 16
14 AUGUST 1970
Everything went wrong on the 14th yet everything went right. To begin with the battalion TOC on the firebase did not make its standard wake-up calls. Brooks slept on. At 0400 El Paso, although he was awake with the radios, was dreaming about his mother. “Rafael,” she called to him as she had called to him ever since his father had been killed. “Rafael, come in and stay with your mother. Today, I am very tired.” “Isn’t the priest with you tonight?” he snapped bitterly at her. “Rafael,” she called. “I am an old woman whose husband has abandoned her. Why has he abandoned me?” She speaks Mexican-Spanish yet her speech, even in her native tongue, is poor. The boy turns and walks away from her. He passes the priest as he walks from his mother’s shack. The entire world
