Red Alert
We were locked down on base and I didn’t like it. Lying in my bunk, every sound, roaring loud or pin-drop soft, seemed to keep me awake. I would no sooner get used to the rumbling of jet engines taking off or landing or, loudest of all, being tested down on the flight line than the compressors on the air conditioner and the refrigerator would start humming discordantly. And no sooner would they switch off than I would spring awake to the buzz-sawing of cicadas, the weeeing of a mosquito, the clucking of a little household lizard called a jingjok, or the clinking of an empty beer can kicked by a combat boot just outside the door. In an uncanny way I preferred the high-intensity terror I felt in the air over the jagged mountains that divided Laos from Vietnam. That terror I knew would end in a few hours with our AC-130 gunship parked safely on the tarmac at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base and with Brendan Leary tucked snugly in his bed at Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng. Either that or it would end in quick, sweet death. A Red Alert, though, meant being stuck here on the ground, never knowing when you might be the target of a random mortar round or an anonymous sniper’s bullet. Never knowing when the local Bad Guys might launch a shoulder-mounted rocket like the one that killed Shahbazian’s buddies over at Danang.
An added complication on the ground was that Tom Wheeler and I had made a pact around the time of my discharge hearing not to use a gun if we could possibly avoid it, even in self-defense—our pale, private gestures at atoning for the sins of Lieutenant Calley and his men at My Lai. The first morning after going on alert, Tom and I talked it over during breakfast and decided the time had come to take action. We quietly stopped by Captain English’s office and told him we wanted to turn in our gun cards, which meant the armory would not be able to issue us an M-16 if the base were attacked. He took it coolly, almost like he had been expecting something like this. “I read your request for discharge, Leary, and your supporting letter, Wheeler. We know this isn’t something spur of the moment. Your request is granted. Just stay close and report to Command Post if we’re attacked. Hill and I will keep you plenty busy.”
Stepping out of English’s office we breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that if we had been in the Army over in Nam we’d probably be headed for Long Binh Jail. We were left with a moral conundrum we tried not to think about, however, in that other GIs would still be putting their lives on the line to protect us. I worried about the Air Policemen who were guarding the perimeter, on alert for a hard-core sapper team on a hell-be-damned suicide mission. When I thought of the cooks and clerk-typists being held in reserve who had not touched an M-16 since the day they shipped out, my head reeled. I shivered at the thought of them being sent out on night patrol, out beyond the guard towers, cloaked in darkness, probed by their own slithering shadows. I shook my head sadly, unable to imagine these ragtag amateurs inflicting more damage on their enemy, real or imagined, than they would inflict on themselves or other innocent bystanders.
“Leary, go get some chow.” I snapped out of my reverie and bolted up from the ready-room bus seat into something like attention. First Lieutenant Billy Hill, the night duty officer, had a voice that sounded like the cracked reed of a beginning clarinet player. He was the product of the Reserve Officer Training Program at a small college tucked away in the back woods of western Georgia. Hill once had a silken, mellifluous voice, he claimed, until he threw it out barking commands on the drill field during his tenure as cadet commander, one of the unpublicized perils of ROTC, Zelinsky had surmised. “If you get a mind to drink dessert at the NCO Club, it’s okay by me. Just make sure you don’t fall off your barstool. I’ll need every man I’ve got back here at ComDoc if there’s any real action. Even with your limited soldiering abilities, Leary, I’m countin’ on you to get us some pretty pictures.”
Leo Guttchock, apparently cured of jaundice, was off in the corner looking surprisingly efficient pointing a tripod-mounted Arriflex at a technical-looking grid chart taped to the wall. He paused a moment from running his focus tests and looked up. “I got you covered, Brendan.”
I might have been a little too eager grabbing my cap and bolting for the door. “Make sure you get your ass back here pronto if they sound the alarm,” called Hill.
The words felt like melted ice dripping down my back. “I’ve been thinking, Lieutenant—what happens if these sappers turn out to be from that large unit of hard-core North Vietnamese regulars that Sergeant Wu was talking about and they break through and start really tearing this place up? Even if some of our planes got off the ground, wouldn’t they be useless if the base were overrun, with GIs and VC going hand to hand, fighting door-to-door?”
“That’s why cameramen take pictures, Leary, and officers do the thinking. We’ve already got a flight of F-4s out cruisin’ the boonies, and those Phantom jocks ain’t gonna let any VC or terrorists or anybody else get within fifty miles o’ here. And even if the Commies were lucky enough to reach the perimeter, that’s where they’d be shit out of luck, because we got a couple o’ them ole Spectre birds up circling the base as we speak. You of all people oughta know how gunships can pick fly turds out of pepper when they fly close air support. Our boys in the 16th SOS are so ticked off at being cooped up on this rat-hole base for six straight days, deprived o’ their tii-rahks and massage parlors and conscience-alterin’ substances and rock ’n’ roll and pizza at Tippy’s that I’m afraid they would severely kick the butt of any Communist troublemaker who was foolish enough to show up.”
I couldn’t help admiring how well Hill had mastered his LBJ imitation, which got me wondering if the brash lieutenant might give up his movie-directing ambitions and run instead for a seat in congress. “The guys do seemed to be ticked, sir,” I said, stepping outside.
I had no sooner turned the corner of the ComDoc camera trailer than First Sergeant Link stepped out of the shadows. “What’s this I hear about you and Wheeler turning in your gun cards?” he growled.
“You heard correctly,” I answered, suddenly wanting a Mekhong and soda to wet my scratchy throat.
“You put him up to this, Leary?”
“I’m afraid we put each other up to it, Sarge.”
“Well, get this, Leary—if this base is attacked and I tell you to pick up an M-16 and get out to the perimeter to shoot some gooks, you’ll either do it or I’ll personally put a bullet through your head.”
I was having trouble thinking of a funny retort when Lieutenant Liscomb appeared from I don’t know where. “You put a bullet through Leary’s head and I’ll personally return the favor, if you’ve got any brains inside that thick skull of yours to blow out.”
I suddenly wanted a bottle of Mekhong, neat. Link tried to glare at Liscomb, but Liscomb wasn’t wasting any effort glaring back. He was the epitome of cool, looking at Link with his eyes wide open and clear. In fact, he gave Link a little smile and a little tip of his head. There might have been a pause.
“We’ll see about that,” said Link with a final glare at Liscomb and then me before he gave the lieutenant a half-hearted salute, made a slow about-face, and skulked off.
The enlisted men’s dining hall, offering free grub twenty-four hours a day, was located at the bottom of a knoll along the west side of the main taxiway near the gym and the engine test area. I headed in the opposite direction, toward the NCO Club. It had taken me a full year longer than anyone else I knew to make sergeant. For two and a half agonizing years I had been confined to cheaply paneled airmen’s beer bars and Sunday-school-wholesome USO clubs to while away my off-duty hours. I felt instantly at home in the Non-Commissioned Officers’ Club, the same sort of womblike security I used to find in my old East Coast fraternity house and in New England bars that served underage college guys. Except New England bars and East Coast fraternity houses didn’t have strange characters in khakis hiding outside in the shadows of palm trees. I stopped dead in my tracks, certain for a moment it was Link. Once I realized it was the deputy base commander checking haircuts, I made a hard right and ducked in the side entrance Harley Baker and Larry Zelinsky used to use to smuggle me in.
Safely inside, I headed for the bar and wasn’t surprised to see that Harley had gotten there ahead of me. I wasn’t thrilled about sitting with him, especially if he got off on one of his drunken tirades about Fuckin’ New Guys, which for him was anybody still on their first tour, or any of his other pet peeves, but since I didn’t see anyone else I recognized I figured I’d better not snub the closest thing I had to a guardian angel. His elbows had settled deeply and comfortably into the burgundy imitation-leather armrest that ran down the edge of a long, polished, Philippine mahogany bar that seemed to follow the curvature of the earth before disappearing into a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. The hard-drinking, mescaline-eating Spectre gunner barely noticed when I sat down at the stool next to him. “What in the name of Sweet Jesus are you going to do when they throw your ass out of the Air Force and make you get a real job where you’ve got to go eight straight hours without a drink?” I asked.
“Never gonna happen, draft dodger.” Harley did not bother to look up. He studied his swizzle stick as though he were looking through a gun sight at an enemy convoy—ambiguous shadows hidden in limestone caves and woven into dark tendrils of the jungle canopy. He squinted at the tiny trucks and squeezed his imaginary trigger. “There aren’t enough dumb shits around willing to go the places I go, do the things I do, fly the places I fly. An’ live to tell about it. Or, more precisely, tell about it if we were allowed to tell about it. That’s what I like about your Top Secret fuckin’ security clearance—if I decide you have a ‘need-to-know,’ I can talk to you about stuff I can’t tell my own mother. I go anywhere they send me an’ I get back. How can they ask for more’n that?”
“How about not disgracing the regiment when you’re off duty?”
Harley leaned over and gave me one of the three-inch-away glares that I might have hated most of his many quirks. “Where the hell do you come off with your holier-than-thou crap, you scrawny pacifist pinko? Mr. Crystallization of His Deeply Held Beliefs. You’re the kind of disgusting puke who’ll screw our women and smoke our dope and then turn right around and write to your congressman and the New York Times complaining about how this has corrupted your pure virgin soul.”
“You may or not be full of shit, but one night with Sii-da that I was too stoned to remember isn’t exactly ‘screwing your women.’ It just so happens that while we’ve been stuck here sitting around wasting our time the last few days, I’ve had nothing better to do than start worrying about what’s going to happen to you when you reach forty.”
“Never gonna happen. You of all people know I’ll never make it to forty.”
“But just in case God decides to play a cruel joke on the world and let you live—what then?”
“I’ll get another band together and take it on the road. I’ll have my pension to tide me over while we get started—”
“How many balding, pot-bellied forty-year-olds tour with rock bands? What are you going to do, switch to country and western?”
“Hell, no. Maybe I’ll get into construction with my brother. Maybe Mali and I’ll have a couple of kids—”
“Now I know you’re jiving me. Your cock’ll fall off before you ever get around to having kids.”
“You got that right, dude.” Harley took a sip of his drink and stared at the swirling ice cubes. He suddenly turned serious. “Maybe I’ll clean up my act. Maybe I’ll start right now, while we’re stuck on this goddamned base. Mali’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, y’know. She ain’t nothin’ like those first two wives. Gotta treat her right. She’s gonna make a helluva great mom.”
“I’ll drink to that.” I clinked my glass against Baker’s. “To Harley and motherhood!”
“Fuck you, you over-educated, elitist son of a bitch. Fuck you and your draft-dodging fellow travelers. You depend on us real soldiers to protect your ass, and then you turn right around and preach all this Peace, Love, Dove, Higher-Consciousness-Than-Thou crap. Wait till you’re out on the perimeter and some asshole is shooting at you just because you’ve got round eyes. You’ll shoot back and you’ll kill the mother and you won’t exactly feel good about it, but you’ll have had your first taste of blood and you’ll turn into a hungry shark, just like the rest of us, surviving on instinct. You’ve been trained to kill since you saw your first John Wayne movie, and when you finally do, when you reach down inside yourself and see what you’re really made of, you’ll have finally joined the Wolf Pack. Maybe you’ll finally know what it’s like to be a man. Think about it.”
I cleared my scratchy throat. “Wheeler and I turned in our gun cards.”
Harley was leaning so far over that he and I could barely keep from sliding off our well-worn Naugahyde bar stools. Firmly but gently straightening myself up, I forced him to back off. “You are about the dumbest son of a bitch to ever come down the pike,” he said, still managing to get a little spit on my face. “On base alert and you’re gonna let your M-16 stay locked up in the armory? You and Wheeler gotta be kidding me.”
“I haven’t touched a firearm since I applied for discharge as a conscientious objector. That wasn’t an act. Just because the brass shot me down doesn’t mean my beliefs have changed.”
Harley’s eyes were starting to bulge. “What the hell do you call that .38 in your survival vest?”
“I leave it in my locker. I’m not planning on getting shot down.”
“None of us are, genius. But if you are shot down or if I decide to throw your ass out of the airplane some night and those little brown bastards in black pajamas march you up to the Hanoi Hilton, try preaching to them about Peace and Love!” Harley waved for the Filipino bartender who came with the mahogany. I tried to quietly slip away, but Baker caught me by surprise, throwing out his arm like a big fishnet and hauling me in. I fully expected to be put into a chokehold. Instead, he turned to the barman and commanded, “Bring us a bottle of Mekong. We’re gonna get ripped.”
By the time we finished our first shot of fermented formaldehyde, the house band had started playing. In what seemed to me like one hot gulp, the band was on its second set and Harley had ordered our second bottle. Tiger, one of Sagittarius Smith’s secret weapons in the worldwide struggle to defeat Communism, appeared on the smoke-shrouded stage a few minutes later amid a surprised burst of applause and began dancing a woozy, sleazy striptease. The crowd went crazy, impressed as much by Smith’s ingenuity at smuggling her on base as by Tiger’s stab at dancing. There had never been a barbed-wire barricade that could deter Sagittarius from his life’s calling—bringing debauchery to his boys. Harley and Tiger, of course, were old friends from her days living with Pigpen Sachs. She joined us for a drink when she finished her floorshow, not bothering to put on more clothes than were necessary for medicinal purposes. She gulped down a whiskey and soda and dragged us back to her dressing cubicle, a dismal storeroom long abandoned by the janitors. Careful where I placed my feet, I worked my way across the remains of a linoleum floor. The air was stagnant, the heavy scent of disinfectant unable to camouflage a faint but persistent stench reminiscent of a back alley on skid row at high noon.
I collapsed into the twisted wreckage of a love seat upholstered in cracked, faded plastic splattered with stains that curdled my imagination. Harley sat in a hard wooden chair that belonged to a long-lost school desk. After throwing herself into Harley’s big, strong lap and covering his cheek with slobbery blisses, Tiger poured each of us another shooter of Thai embalming fluid, but I was unable to pay much attention to Harley and Tiger. I had gone involuntarily into a state of full combat readiness, my eyes dancing across the charred landscape, bracing for an invasion of rat-sized cockroaches. After a second shooter, my brain summarily CUT TO BLACK.
As Harley explained to me later, he had protested too little after I passed out and allowed Tiger to show him the desk drawer in the club office where Senior Master Sergeant Sagittarius Smith kept the keys to his jeep. They drove unmolested past several guard towers before ending up at the base garbage dump, where Tiger led Harley to a hole in the fence utilized regularly by the town’s nouveau riche rag pickers. According to reliable reports from the house band, Smith’s stomach tied itself into a sheepshank when he discovered Tiger’s dressing room was empty. He went to his office, opened the drawer where he kept his Maalox and discovered his keys were missing. The rest of the evening he stewed over the libidinal drought that began when the club membership mutinied more than a month earlier, forcing him to ship the Chirping Sparrows—the most voluptuous, tone-deaf, all-female rock band in all of Asia—back to Korea, at least until they could find a new lead singer. As usual, Harley had not concerned himself with the nuances of the big sergeant’s emotions any more than he gave a hoot about any support troop’s thoughts or feelings.
I had only needed a quick glance at Sagittarius Smith’s king-sized gut to figure that Tiger would try to sweet-talk Harley into being her chaperone. What I could not figure was why my deranged cohort would let himself get sucked in, risking every possible flavor of tropical scourge with a wicked vixen in leopard-skin toreador pants when he had the picture of modest grace, intelligence and beauty languishing in his half-empty bed at home. Mali was Mom material. All Tiger could promise was trouble.
Soggy thoughts of pot-bellied Smiths, languishing Malis, rampaging Harleys and syphilitic vixens were floating through my brain when I regained consciousness. My private movie must have jumped ahead a couple of scenes, however, because I was already outside and had no idea how I got there. Suddenly I desperately wanted to find my way back to the 601st. I needed to be standing by vigilantly at the ComDoc camera trailer. I felt a powerful need to pick up a camera and film heroically if I wasn’t going to be picking up a gun. I suddenly felt homesick for our squadron mascot, the Rat Pack rat. “We Kill ’Em with Fillum,” I thought. Now there’s a motto I can live with.
It should have only been a short four-block walk back to the ComDoc ready room, but I was hopelessly lost. I found myself near the Base Exchange and then up near the laundry emporium. I tried to carefully retrace my steps but instead of ending up at the club found myself at the base arts and crafts center. I heard gunshots coming from the northeast end of the main runway—the end pointed toward Laos and the Demilitarized Zone of Vietnam—and hoped it wasn’t Harley and Tiger getting pinned down. The night sky began to light up with mortar rounds and searchlights and tracers. I panicked and began running, feeling like the doomed, dumb-but-lovable character from Brooklyn in one of the old war movies I had watched with my grandfather as a kid. Back then I assumed I’d be playing the Errol Flynn part.
Persevering, I sprinted half the length of a football field—until a wave of dizziness spun me around in my tracks. I bent over double and tried to throw up but all I could produce were dry heaves. Dying would have been more fun. The mortar rounds seemed nearer, pounding at my guts as if I were a street urchin’s punching bag. When I looked up, I noticed I was amid the hootches occupied by the Rat Pack’s nonflying enlisted men. I felt a flash of relief—until I looked inside. The hootches were empty, and I could only vaguely remember that the revetment where they tested F-4 engines was only a stone’s throw away and that ComDoc was only another hop, step and jump from there.
“Why if it isn’t Brendan Leary, himself! What the hell are you doing over here? I thought you were on duty tonight.”
Zelinsky was sweaty and covered with mud. Chewing nervously on a wad of bubble gum, he looked like a dogface out of one of Ernie Pyle’s World War II–vintage cartoons, his helmet cocked jauntily to the side, the strap undone.
“They must have slipped me a Mickey at the club. Should’ve known it wasn’t a Shirley Temple when the straw melted. Hah hah.”
“You doin’ bad acid or what? Let me get you back to the ready room before Hill has your ass. Rumor had it that you’d headed downtown in a stolen jeep.”
I could still smell sulfur and cordite in the warm night air. Soon I was hearing the familiar clanging of the erector-set stairs that led to our tin and aluminum camera trailer. Just before I opened the door, I asked, “Are we still fighting?”
Zelinsky stared quizzically. “You haven’t started on opium, have you? The shooting stopped fifteen minutes ago. Kicked their ass. Ran them off before they made it onto the base. Word has it there were twelve of them, but for all their trouble, all they did was shoot out a few windows and put a couple of holes in the runway. Washington says he got some great stuff. Luckily for you.”
The door opened by itself and I took half a step inside. Jamal Washington gathered me up like a sack of potatoes and waltzed me right back out. “Got you covered, man. Duty report says you were diverted to perimeter defense. You might even get put in for a medal if they pull any bodies off the wire in the morning.”
“I think they might have a little trouble giving a medal to a guy who was never issued a weapon.”
“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” Washington replied. He was about the same size as my maternal grandmother. She’d developed her physique eating meat and potatoes on a small farm in Western Pennsylvania. Washington’s mama had fattened him up on the same southern soul food she’d been raised on before her family gave up sharecropping and moved north.
I was still on my feet, but my partner was shouldering two-thirds of my weight. “’Sreally nice o’you t’smooth things out with Hill,” I told him. “Guess I’ll jush head on back wi’ Zhelinsky.”
“’Ceptin’ you haven’t been assigned to Larry’s hootch for over a month—you’re a cameraman now, remember? Say good night to Sergeant Zelinsky.”
“Night, Lare.”
“Get some sleep,” Zelinsky replied before he disappeared into the smoke and fog. No sooner had he vanished than two shadowy forms called down to us from the roof of the admin trailer. “Leary, Washington—wait up.”
The silhouette who sounded like Tom Wheeler climbed down first. “Hey, man,” he said, “you look bad. I mean bad bad. You haven’t started drinking that Laotian rot-gut, have you?”
“I’ve got some real Laotian shit,” said the laconic, towheaded second figure who followed close behind. Dave Murray had been kicked out of detox and sent back to the ComDoc orderly room a couple days before we went on alert, not because he was cured, I suspected, but because they needed every breathing human being on the base at their disposal.
“What were you doing on the roof?” I asked.
“It was Shahbazian’s idea,” said Dave. “He got telling us about all the pleasant evenings they spent back at Danang getting thoroughly wrecked and watching firefights off in the distance from their barracks rooftop, so we thought we’d give it a try.”
“Luckily, tonight was a dud,” Tom added. “It wasn’t until we got up on the roof that Woody remembered how the VC turned out to be lousy sports and started firing rockets at them.”
“Where’s Shahbazian?” asked Washington.
“He said he’s not coming out of the latrine till this friggin’ alert is over,” answered Dave.
“Last time I checked he was sound asleep,” said Tom.
Wheeler and Murray might not have been considered virtuous in the conventional sense of the word, but when it came to generosity, the boys were virtuous to a fault. They insisted that Washington and I join them over at their hootch in the semiprivacy of the lockers and double bunk beds at the back of their quarters.
Dave was as high as I had ever seen him. “We get some good shit around here, but this is the best of the best—the stuff Papa-sahn usually keeps for himself,” he warned us. “Mole gave it to me for my getting-out-of-detox present.” Putting a hand-tooled metal pipe to his lips, he lit up and took a deep drag before handing it to Tom.
“He’s not kidding,” Tom said, gasping a little and passing along the pipe. We all did a couple of tokes while our two connoisseurs of weed searched their lockers for some clean clothes.
“Did you hear about the Chirping Sparrows?” Dave asked, savoring the inside information he was picking up from the orderly room radio and switchboard. “They were circling the base in a Klong Airways C-130 during the mortar attack.”
“Whoo-ee!” grinned Washington. “I can picture them on final now, primping their bouffants, freshening up their lip gloss for their triumphant return to Ubon.”
I needed to throw a cold water bucket of reality into the conversation. “We’ve got a goddamn war going on,” I said. “What the hell are the Sparrows doing using up airspace that belongs to gunships and fighter-bombers?”
“It’s the New Chirping Sparrows,” said Dave. “They got a lead singer who can carry a tune now.”
“If those warbling lovebirds really do show up in the middle of a Red Alert lockdown, aren’t you afraid Lek will get wind of it and have your tushie?” I asked Tom.
“I’m kinda hoping she’s forgotten about the night I got kidnapped by the Sparrows,” he answered. “Besides, she was still living with Mole back then.” He had peeled off his dusty fatigues and jungle boots and was exchanging them for a tie-dyed T-shirt and jeans. “She did have another one of her snits, by the way, and took off for Korat the night before we were put on alert.”
“I didn’t see her around when Dah stopped over, but I assumed Lek was avoiding her. She must have been in one pissy mood, though, because she filled Sii-da’s head with the crazy idea I wanted to tii-rahk her after all. And then Lek sent her out looking for me.”
“What was Dah doing at Ruam Chon Sawng?” Dave asked.
“She wanted to talk to Lek about you throwing her ass out,” I lied.
“This is really fucking up my head,” said Dave. “I don’t know whether to believe it or not that she and Mole were just snorting rock when I walked in on them. It’s so weird—Mole gives me a bag of Laotian weed, tells me it’ll mellow me out, and now we’re cool. Meanwhile, I’m in love with Tukada, but I can’t get hold of her while we’re stuck here on base. I love her, but I don’t trust her. I’m afraid I don’t trust anybody—just look at the way Lek dumped Mole to move in with you, Tom.”
“Mole was screwing up in the end,” said Tom. “He was going broke from his drug habit and wanted her to start working the bars again.”
I let out a long stream of ganja fumes. “Mole must be doing all right now if he can be giving away shit like this.”
“I don’t know whether to make up with her or trust my gut feelings,” Dave said. “My heart says one thing and my gut says something else. It’s making me crazy.” Tom and I shot each other a look but kept our mouths shut.
Washington collapsed into Tom’s unmade lower bunk. “What is it about these Thai bitches?” he asked. “When you watch them from a distance they look so cool and graceful and serene. And when they first shack up with you, all they need is a coupla hundred baht a month and, like magic, the laundry’s done and the floor’s swept and fresh fruit seems like it’s falling from trees.”
“It is falling from trees,” said Dave.
Oblivious, Jamal kept talking. “And when they peel it for you, they don’t just peel it, they carve it into little flowers and birds. You get thinking, Man, this is a helluva deal! Once you get used to it over here, you figure, Shee-it, man, who needs America with all its cars and electric appliances and the monthly payments that go with them? This is better—the best grass and tastiest food and the most beautiful women in the world, and it’s just pennies a day, man, like the encyclopedia salesman says, except this isn’t looking at the pictures—this is the real thing.”
I had melted into the corner. To be more precise, the killer stuff from Laos had melted me. Dave’s battered footlocker felt like a stack of Persian pillows. “This scene is great for the short run all right,” I muttered. “But what happens twenty years down the road when she’s fat and her teeth have turned black from betel nut and you decide you’d like to have a conversation with her in real English—not bar English?”
Washington let out one of his room-shattering laughs. “Ain’t worried about no conversation, man, and I ain’t worried about no twenty years from now. Ain’t none of us gonna live that long, anyhow, the way we been carryin’ on. I’m more worried about three months from now. When they start hitting you up for TV sets from the Base Exchange for their tired ol’ dyin’ daddies. I’m deeply concerned about how the minute you don’t deliver the goodies, there’s no more nooky. Just when you’ve gotten used to that four-foot eleven-inch body curled up next to you every night. So you give in and the next thing you know your year’s up and it never fails—I’ve seen it a hundred times now—you’ve gotten so used to that ninety pounds of Indochinese womanflesh that you want to wrap her up and take her home with you. Exceptin’ she’s got this kid back in Phitsanulok, see, and her papa-sahn’s got TB and she can’t go. Or it goes the other way—she’s just dying to go that great BX across the Big Pond. Got her bags all packed. Only you’re the one guy in a hundred who didn’t get a Dear John. So you’ve still got your fiancée back home, and you figure you better go back and check that out—you get thinking how she already speaks pretty good English and if your memory serves you right she was a pretty good kisser to boot. You kinda cross your fingers, and in the recesses of your dim little mind you figure if things don’t work out back in the World, you can always get back to Thailand and fetch your tii-rahk, your truest of true loves, who has no doubt been waiting faithfully on the back burner while you sort all this shit out.”
“And then there’s the Dave Murray Syndrome,” blurted Harley as he slammed through the screen door, caught his toe on the steel leg of one of the bunks and careened with a roar of thunder into Dave’s wall locker. “Dave here finds Miss Tukada Maneewatana, the perfect Asian hipster-lady, chomping at the bit to pile into a VW van covered with day-glow rainbows, ready to live Jack Kerouac’s dream and strike out across America, living on love and the twenty-three dollars they’ve managed to save.”
“Who’s Jack Kerouac?” asked Dave.
“He’s the beatnik writer dude who gave Dennis Hopper the idea for Easy Rider,” Tom explained.
“And if things get tight,” Harley said, “no sweat! They can always do a little panhandling or just a teeny-weeny bit of dope dealing. No hooking, of course. In Hippy-Dippy America, love is ‘free.’ But now comes the interesting part, because sooner or later he’s gonna have to show up in that little hometown of his in Iowa for a shower and a home-cooked meal. Maybe sign up for unemployment. And the last person there who didn’t have skin as white as the driven snow his great-grandfather personally rounded up and shipped to a reservation in Oklahoma.” He turned to Dave. “Have you ever wondered how your little Thai wench is gonna do at the local Safeway trying to bargain with the head butcher over the price of dried squid?”
“My family’s from Nebraska,” said Dave after his usual fifteen-second audio delay.
“I thought you went AWOL,” I said to Baker. “Thought you were spending the night at Tiger’s dump over in Hanoi-West.”
Harley shot us a pained grin. “I got thinking how I’d rather spend the night shooting at SAM missile sites over Dien Bien Phu than put any part of my body near someone touched by Pigpen Sachs.”
Harley was up to his usual no good and enjoying every minute of it. “I swear I could hear your bullshit clear out by the main gate. You realize of course that Washington here, for all his bitching and moaning, has actually got it made. Bringing a Thai chick back to Newark is gonna be like bringing home a blonde as far as impressing the brothers.”
“I ought to take you back to Newark. Have my momma fatten you up, pencil prick. Then maybe we could get you into the albino branch of the Panthers.”
“And so what is the question here?” Dave asked, studying the intricate patterns on his water pipe. “Who amongst us can decipher whether Ubon is heaven or a common whorehouse?”
Tom smiled with innocence and experience. “Maybe heaven is a common whorehouse. What else is worth doing for eternity?”
Harley cracked a shark-toothed smile. “We are down to basics now, aren’t we? Fucking and dope-smoking and killing and dying.”
“Is life really that simple and crude?” I asked, curling up on the floor.
Wheeler was smiling sweetly at a private joke. “Lek took me home with her last month to Ban Nang Sarawng over near Korat to visit her dad and her little boy. And it was amazing watching Lek with her dad. Dig it—there was none of the brash bullshit like when she’s hanging out with us. She’s just like the girls in the travel posters—sweet and respectful, you know? Shoes left at the door, the way she was brought up. She glides around her father’s bungalow in delicate, pattering footsteps, and her voice is gentle while she carves up vegetables and fruit and does the cooking. And the love and respect she showed her dad—it was real. She bowed down when she was near him as much as she seems to bloat up around Americans. I think she genuinely respects him for breaking his back in the rice fields from sunup to sundown.”
Tom gathered his thoughts a moment and then went on. “Shacking up may be popular back in the States, but it’s done pretty much on equal terms. Here it’s a life-and-death gamble. Imagine a worst-case scenario and the North Vietnamese Army ends up occupying Northeast Thailand? What would they do to a bar girl who had been sleeping with the enemy?” Nobody answered. “Even with a best-case scenario, what’s going to happen to her body and soul from ten years of sleeping with strange men? What she’s doing has got to be degrading, but can she worry about self-respect when this might be the only chance her family will ever have to own a TV set and buy some new land and rebuild their cottage on good teak stilts and maybe buy a new plow and harness and a couple of strong, young water buffalo? All thanks to the money she’s sending home.”
“Amen, Brother Tom!” cried Washington.
By three in the morning Harley had returned to his air-conditioned trailer over at the 16th Special Operations Squadron. My ears seemed to be working okay, but my eyes didn’t want to stay open. More perplexing, my body, which had been floating pleasantly, was now starting to shrink. Some New Guy nobody had ever seen before stopped by Tom’s hootch on his way back from the base bowling alley and swore that not only had the New Chirping Sparrows safely returned from Korea, they were already setting up for a late-night performance over at the club.
Washington, still stretched out on Tom’s bunk, seemed excited by the report, weakly shouting, “Praise God! And praise Sagittarius Smith!” He promptly fell into a deep slumber that made him look like an overstuffed teddy bear. Tom and Dave got it into their heads to go check it out over at the club. I had stopped shrinking, but now I was staring back at them from the dead, unable to move my lips.
I was certain I had become a Self-Contained Unit. An SCU. An indestructible steel box that could be dropped from a C-123 at any altitude over the nastiest mountain ranges of Laos, blow-torched, hand-grenaded or nuked. Nothing would make me squeal. Enough food, water and medicine to hold out indefinitely. My encrypting field transceiver was powered by a high-efficiency generator with plenty of back-up batteries. The SCU was steel, all right. I felt cold and hard and indestructible and absolutely numb. Self-Contained Unit. Ball of steel wool. Fetal, preconscious. Almost invisible.
So this is what Dave Murray’s Laotian shit does to you after the orgasms in your lungs die down. Laotian Leh. What the hell does “Leh” mean? I tried blinking my eyes in Morse code like I had seen in an old Lone Ranger movie when one of the Good Guys was about to be buried alive. Nothing happened. I didn’t want to be buried alive. I didn’t like being invisible. I blinked again, trying for a simple SOS like we had learned at Boy Scout camp. Again nothing happened. I felt a tiny knot of fear beginning to grow in my belly, a little shrapnel wound of anxiety that they might really, truly, inexplicably bury me alive after a day or two of non-blinking.
Tom and Dave nudged me and tried to stand me up. “Come on, man,” Dave implored. “We gotta get going if we’re gonna check out the Chirping Sparrows.”
Their voices echoed from across the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, powerful and loud like the voice of God. I yelled back with all my strength, but my little cricket lips could only produce the faint sound of a midget after inhaling helium.
“What’s he saying about a self-controlled eunuch?” Dave asked.
Tom threw a blanket over me and tucked it under my chin. “See you over at the club if you feel better.”
“Later, man,” said Dave.
I could hear my voice, deep inside my SCU, say that I could not move, could they please bring a forklift. My voice was growing smaller and seemed trapped inside my corrugated stainless-steel walls. Footsteps. Creaking hinge. The slam of the rickety screen door, an after-slam, and then silence.
My chest started to burst with fear that I was actually paralyzed permanently, that even though my mind had turned itself inside out, it had made a correct assessment of the situation after all. I felt desperately alone until, finally, the spasm in my chest loosened its grip and I sank into a deep, dark sleep.