The Hunters

The hunting issue presented a strange situation at times. After all, Dalton had grown up a city boy. The first time he ever touched a gun was in the Marine Corps. He was not a “hunter,” in the traditional, American sense of the word. He was a hunter no doubt, but a different kind.

For instance, every Thanksgiving or Christmas when they visited one group of the family, the men would always eventually get around to asking if he wanted to go out and “hunt.” The first reason he always as politely as he could declined was that he was there with his wife and children to spend time with the extended family, to hang out around the house and watch the obligatory drone of three NFL games while they ate Thanksgiving dinner, or watch the kids open presents on Christmas Eve or morning. Not to go out in the woods and play hunter. That was the excuse he made not to go with them. He’d honestly rather have his teeth pulled out of his head than go do their version of hunting.

When they visited her father — on the other hand — this kind of stuff never happened. Her father had been in the Army. He’d seen and employed his fare share of firearms, rifles, and shotguns in Vietnam. He didn’t need to hunt or talk about weapons. The topic never came up around his father-in-law. It was one of many reasons why Dalton enjoyed spending time with the man. His father-in-law was quiet by nature anyway, both in his speech and demeanor. But there was this aura about him; he had experienced things that went unspoken.

There was that one night after a long Christmas Day all those years ago when everyone had gone to sleep but the two of them. He had never felt very comfortable around her father; the man was very quiet, and their mutual interests were very few. But through many years, through some meandering conversations, they’d found some common ground.

Dalton’s and his own father had been athletes all the way through the college level. This provided a common — though very limited — topic of conversation they could both relate to. It provided something for them to talk about during those once or twice a year family gatherings.

But her father was not an athlete, at least not in the usual sense of the word. He had not played sports growing up or in school. He had grown up on a farm, and what little free time he had after school let out was spent in the fields, tending to the crops or feeding the livestock. He didn’t have time for the luxury of sports. This fact alone severely limited their topics of conversation.

In addition to all of this, the difficulty was compounded by the simple fact that this was after all, his wife’s father. Any man who wasn’t in some way uncomfortable to some extent around his father-in-law either didn’t care or was just a damn fool. The man was taller than Dalton, at 6 foot 5, the same height as Dalton’s own father, but more slender — not thin, but more wiry; more lean than Dalton and his father were built. It wasn’t intimidation or fear of his father-in-law that Dalton felt. It was more a sense of wanting to be respectful. Her Dad gave off an unmistakable air of power; of strength. And his relative silence made it even more palpable.

Her father was 6' 5", 200. Dalton was 6' 2", 225. Two pretty big men, but in different ways; each carried it differently.

They sat there in the living area, awash in that special, ephemeral glow of that lighting a decorated Christmas tree gives off in an otherwise unlit room, with thick glasses half-filled with small batch bourbon, neat, not even ice to defile it. And her dad had finally opened up, a little. And in doing so, they both — despite what seemed to be totally different backgrounds and upbringings — finally found their common ground.

Ia Drang Valley. 1965. Her father had been there as a young solider, on a foot movement from LZ (Landing Zone) X-Ray to LZ Albany. As her father rolled it out in halting, soft cadences, Dalton suddenly realized he had actually read about this engagement in his Marine Corps training, which had been immortalized in a best-selling book and Hollywood movie of the same name. But her father told his own version in real-time, in present tense, as if it were happening right that minute.

“We were in a ten-minute halt for water. It was calm. All of a sudden, a shot rings out in the distance from somewhere up ahead of us. We sort of freeze and stop what we’re doing. Then word comes back that recon had been shot at. Then that recon had hit an ambush. Then orders to Charlie Company, just in front of us, to move on line and roll up the flank.

My friend Bud Mitchell and I were sitting beside each other. All of a sudden a couple of shots ring out about twenty-five yards in front of us. By now we’re all standing up, scared. The call comes back: ‘Medic! Medic!’ The first group of medics in front of us takes off and Bud takes off with them. Now the leaves begin to shake as bullets are coming in from everywhere.”

Dalton couldn’t believe what he was now hearing. He held his glass still, the the bourbon without ripple.

“The guys in Charlie Company are yelling, ‘Get on line!’ I pushed my guys up on line, twenty-five yards inside the tree line, and suddenly all hell breaks loose. There was lots of shooting and it was difficult to maintain the line. I see movement and flashes out of my peripheral vision and put my M-16 on automatic and fire up high into the trees and something falls out. I crawled down to an anthill where a couple of guys are. I stayed there and found a guy who had a radio. I called in to see what the hell was happening. About then the net went dead; somebody got shot with his finger on the transmit key, or something. The last thing I heard on the net was the command element got hit.”

He was silent. They both sat there as Dalton digested what he’d just heard. Dalton heard his sleeping four-year-old, youngest son cough from somewhere in the back of the house. He was okay.

Her Dad continued. “Somehow we gained the upper hand and pushed them back. Without even realizing it, they had stopped firing. By the time we got everybody to cease firing, they had disappeared back into the jungle from where they’d come.”

Her Dad had been in the middle of that famous ambush, and lived.

It was then and there Dalton first realized that he’d never seen a firearm of any sort in her father’s house, which — come to think of it — didn’t mean there weren’t any. But the man did not “hunt.” That was obvious.

That was their ultimate common ground; neither one of them “hunted”in the typical American way, with clothes and guns purchased at Outdoor World, because they had hunted for real in the past. The type of hunting where the prey could return fire and kill you.

His own father had some pistols he knew of; he carried one under the driver’s seat when the family was traveling, and he kept a .357 in his chest of drawers at home. Dalton knew this because he snuck in and looked several times. He’d have got his ass beaten if his Dad had ever caught him, but his Dad never did. Not once. Dalton was good at infiltration, even as a kid. But even though the father had these weapons, he never once acknowledged or even spoke about the weapons.

It was the display thing. Well, that was just one of the things.

For instance, the rifle or shotgun in the back of the truck, as if to say to fellow drivers, “Don’t road-rage me bro! I got a gun! I’m a tough guy!” Or the gun case in a living room of the mansion or the faux-log cabin.

The open posturing. The signalling. The proverbial chest-beating, like a monkey actually.

What was that all about anyway? The open, almost flaunted, affectation with firearms and the man doing it never seeming to fit with it naturally; he of the pressed and starched Wranglers and designer, pearl snap western shirt from some fake-Western store tucked into the said too perfect jeans, finished out with 500-dollar cowboy boots that looked like they had just been taken out of the box and would fall apart in an hour on real ground. What was the point? Was it the need to project some contrived sense manliness?

Dalton had never gotten the point of it. He viewed them all as posers.

The truth was he had absolutely no desire to ride in some beaten up pickup out to the back forty and trudge through some woods looking for deer, or whatever the dumb, defenseless animal was.

The thought of sitting freezing up on some deer stand or against some tree made him cringe. Not because he wasn’t “tough enough,” but because he had countless times — unknown even to his wife — spent more time than any of these guys sitting freezing somewhere, in some hellish place in the mountains of Afghanistan or similar, waiting on a different kind of prey.

But it was not the kind that walked on four legs.

Dalton had hunted for real, and the stakes had been high. He had kicked in doors and put two rounds through the chest and one into the head as close as 15 feet. And then two or three more rounds when the guy was down to make sure he was dead; watched the guy’s chest stop rising through night vision sights until he went to the next room and did the same thing to a different bad guy. Caught a target out in the open and exchanged rounds old-West style until the target went down; walked up and did the same thing he did in the houses, just to make sure.

It was rare when he went movie-style, laying up in some sniper perch somewhere waiting for the target to walk into his gun sights, but it had happened that way too on a few occasions. But at least on those rare occasions, the target had the same brain he possessed — capable of returning fire or calling down hell on Dalton in the form of an airstrike or other form of high-explosive lethality — that could render Dalton to ashes in seconds if Dalton missed with the first shot.

And so he had no desire to “hunt” out in these otherwise peaceful woods. Sitting concealed and hidden somewhere and waiting for some dumb, unaware animal to wonder into the killing zone was not hunting; it was ambush. It was not sport. Any 5-year-old kid could do that. As was portrayed on social media every other day. And to what end?

But he wasn’t ever going to have these conversations with any of them in his extended family. Unless they pushed too hard. After all, none of them had ever served.

What the hell did they know?

Then one bright Christmas morning, they pushed a little bit too hard.

It had started when they arrived at that one side of the family’s house for breakfast. As soon as Dalton and family arrived, the men started playing deer-hunting videos.

On Christmas morning.

“Neil, get out of that kitchen with those women and come watch this!” he heard someone tease.

This was a first; no one had ever talked to him like that before. They were pushing, and he didn’t like to be pushed.

“Be nice,” his wife smiled as he felt her reach out and grab his arm, almost a nanosecond after the invitation. His wife’s grandmother — in her 80’s and one of the sweetest ladies he had ever known — came over. “You don’t have to go in there. Ignore them.”

He smiled. One thing he would never do was upset her grandmother or mother; that was just never going to happen. He enjoyed a rare marriage where he actually got along very well with almost all of his in-laws, especially the women. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t going to do anything to change that. But he smiled at her. “It’s okay.” And then he went into the living room where all the men were splayed out on their recliners and couches, watching deer-hunting videos as the women cooked the food.

It was a surreal situation.

He sat there for a few minutes, watching the people on the video fire high-powered rifles from near point-blank range into the thoracic regions of deer who had been unlucky enough to walk into the “hunters’” kill-zone. He didn’t get it. He thought, hell, this is like shooting fish in a barrel; at least challenge yourself.

Someone broke his thoughts.

“You ever hunt Neil?”

“Not really,” he said. A flat “No,” might have sounded too abrupt. He was trying to be nice.

“Whuddaya mean ‘Not really?’”

Apparently, they were going to push it as far as they could.

“I grew up in a city. There weren’t too many opportunities,” he offered.

A few low-muted grunts greeted this, followed by more sips of Folgers. Black, no creamer, because they were tough guys.

Someone decided to take the direct approach.

“Well, you’re a Marine right? You carry guns all the time right?”

“No.”

This was another strangely common misperception made by a lot of people. Everyone seemed to think Marines and everyone else in the military walked all over the place with rifles slung and pistols holstered, as if the only thing they did was go shoot things all day. Gun nuts or something like that.

Dalton started to get uncomfortable. How could he truthfully answer these questions in ways that wouldn’t sound patronizing or insulting? He wanted to be diplomatic.

He stayed calm and finally offered, “Not all Marines are hunters.”

A few more coffee-infused grunts followed this, but this time with too much a hint of smugness to it.

Dalton looked over and saw one of his wife’s uncles smiling a shit-eating grin.

It was all Dalton could take. He’d had enough.

It was time to drop the hammer.

“Is there something funny?” Dalton asked to nobody in particular.

The smile on the speaker’s face instantly vanished, as did the other less obvious ones in the room.

The uncle or whoever he was looked at Dalton with a blank expression. “No, nothing funny. I just figured a Marine might like to go hunting.”

Now the silence extended to the kitchen, where the women weren’t making any sounds.

Dalton held the man’s gaze for a few seconds, and then finally said, “You know, there is one kind of hunting that I do enjoy. But it’s not hunting deer or any other animal. No. The only kind of hunting I like is hunting humans.”

This was met with the quietest of silences. Any person in the room could hear a pin drop for a while. Muffled laughter came from the women in the kitchen.

The first person to get up and walk out of the living room was the offending uncle’s oldest brother.

No one said a word in response. Then another man walked out.

“You want to talk about that?” Dalton asked the questioning uncle. “Because we can go out back and I can show you how it’s done if you want. Go get your rifle and we’ll go out back and I’ll show you what kind of hunting I have done. If you have a man-sized target.“

The uncle got up and left the room. “What?” Dalton said as he left. “You don’t want to talk about that? Come on. Let me show you how to put a rifle round through a man’s chest from about 400 yards out.”

Now the other men in the room were laughing. The tension finally evaporated, to Dalton’s relief more than anyone else.

One of them got up walked over grinning, and said, “He got what he deserved,” and patted Dalton on the shoulder before going into the kitchen to get his eggs, bacon, and biscuits. And some more black coffee.

Nobody ever asked him to go hunting again. And he never wondered why.

Glen Hines is the author of the Anthology Trilogy of books — Document, Cloudbreak, and Crossroads — and Bring in the Gladiators, Observations From a Former College Football Player Who Was Never Able to Become a Fan, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing has also been featured in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, and the Human Development Project.