TOUR 365

by

R. Signore
(Tour 365 refers to the military euphemism for one year
of service in Vietnam)

*****

There must be somewhere out of here

Said the joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion
Can’t get no release

***

Saigon is sweating in the heart of December, two days

before another New Year. We smoke marijuana on a balcony

rooftop and watch spider-leg flares slide down the night.

Snuff and I, two friends from the start, smoke until our

foreheads buzz. Once in awhile we look at the stairway, a

fire escape that leads to the street. We worry that MPs,

sergeants and captains, will rush up and find us and send

us to jail. But we know it won’t happen, we’ll smoke till

we burn, our exile will end and then we’ll leave.

There is a vague moon and slow moving night clouds and

choppers that carry the wounded and dead. Their spotlights

split open the marshlands and saw grass where VC burrow

into the earth. The enemy reminds me they’re smart like

insects. They dream of digging beneath the hotels, set off

explosives and watch us fall down. Crowded hotels cramped

with soldiers who smoke and drink and wish they were home.

They sell off their rations of cigarettes and all the

garbage they buy from the Cholon PX. They spend the money

on whores and tea girls and tell themselves they are

protecting the world from the Communist bastards who want

to steal America from the Americans.

Nine stories above Saigon, Snuff and I think we know

better. Our hotel is a bleak and crusty shell of concrete

abandoned by the French in ’54. I sometimes think that at

any minute the stairways will collapse and the moldy rooms

will corrode into dust and Snuff and I will be trapped

beneath the rubble , smoking and talking to each other as

if nothing happened. I have three months left in-country,

but Snuff has only three weeks. Tonight, we’re celebrating

his…….well, I guess, his impending departure. He wants to

go home but, at the same time, he wants to stay in Saigon.

He loves the marijuana, and, unfortunately, he loves the

women, too.

Fuck!” he says as he leans toward the railing - seeds

crack, ashes scatter, “Fuck! I think I’ve got another case

of the clap.” He sways on the concrete bench and drinks out

of his plastic canteen. The water smells like chlorine from

a swimming pool. “This is the third time I’ve gotten it?

You’d think I’d find just one whore who was clean enough to

fuck. Just one. But no, I stick in my dick and out comes a

disease. Why can’t I just stay away from them?”

He rolls a tiny ball of hair between his fingertips.

He has a bad habit of pulling hairs out of his moustache

and, with a small amount of spit, rolling the hair

together. He leaves the little balls everywhere: on the

rims of chairs, beneath dinner trays, between teletype

keys, inside shirt pockets and underneath the shot glasses

of bar-girl teas. He even left one underneath Colonel

Pearson’s glass desk cover, directly over a picture of the

colonel’s twin adolescent sons and a nine year old daughter

who looks like Pearson himself. In fact, they all look

alike. Pointed noses. An acre of foreheads. Beady, bullet

eyes. All of them stand at attention in front of the

camera: the boys with white gloves and tightly creased

pants; the girl in a stiff, long-sleeved dress.

“Shit, they’ll never get the clap,” Snuff says. “ I’d

bet anything the fucking colonel shoves broom handles up

their asses just to make them stand up straight.“

Sirens scream in the streets, whine up to the rooftop

and remind us of curfew. Snuff bends over the railing and

sees the old woman who lives in the courtyard below cooking

a sweet smelling meat on a small, outdoor grill. A dog

sniffs at her cuffs and yelps when she slaps him with a

stick. The dog bites the stick, tugs, then pulls it away

and runs into the tenement hotel across the street. The

hotel is filled with dwarves and amputees. They perch on

window sills and call out in the night: “GI wan’ numba one

blow job! GI wan’ go all night!”

Their bedrooms have light bulbs that hang like tiny

moons and yellow Venetian blinds and window ledges where

they sit and show their white panties. One of them bends

out of her window and squeezes milk from one of her breast.

She calls “GI wan’ numba one tea. I gib you numba one tea!”

“I should have fucked one of them,” Snuff says. “What

could they have? Who would want to fuck them? They‘ve got

to be disease free.”

Artillery thuds along the Saigon River that twines

through a jungle of ashes and burnt tree stumps. The oily

water washes against the Victory cargo ships crammed with

supplies and citizen sailors who sometimes wander into the

wrong parts of the city and end up a floating corpse. The

corpses are everywhere in the river. Bullets in their

backs. Knives between their ribs. Their heads half shaven

and green from the river slime.

“At least they get to go home,”

“You’ll be there soon enough,” Snuff replies almost

remorsefully. “Just remember, you won’t find any marijuana

like this back in the world.”

Deep sighs of sucking down smoke. Deep swallows.

Deep, raw coughing.

“Stop talking so much shit,” Snuff says. “Sing about

Mrs. Murphy. Sing about when you fucked her.”

“I never fucked her. I wanted to but she was older

than me. She wouldn’t even look at me.”

“Sing about her anyway.”

I sing

Oh, Mrs. Murphy I wanted your ass

I wanted to lick your pussy, too,
But all I got was Vietnam
And a raging hard on over you

Ping! My cheap guitar slings out of tune. Ping! The

neck warps and the strings are too rusty. They snap from

humidity. Ping! Everything sweats into wetness, especially

Shea who sold me the guitar for ten dollars. He stood in

the hotel lobby, woozy and dizzy from the wet heat. His

uniform clotted with perspiration. Patches of salty wetness

stained his underarms, his collar, the center of his back.

He wiped his face with a soaked handkerchief.

“I’ve got to pay my whore,” he whined. “She said

she’ll never leave the bar if I don’t give her more money.

She needs to survive and I don’t want her fucking anyone

else. Just me, man, I can’t stand the thought of her

fucking someone else! Look, I’ll give it to you for ten

dollars. I bought the fucking thing for fifty. I’ll never

learn how to play it. I started learning the tarot cards.

She wants me to tell her about her future.”

Blond, bland Shea. Tall as a tower. Chaotic and

contradictory. Hates the war. Loves the war. Hates America.

Loves America. Hates his parents. Loves his parents. Hates

the whores. Loves the whores. Right now he’s obsessed with

a prostitute half his size. In a month, maybe less, he’ll

want to kill her. He won’t do it but he’ll want to.

He pushed the guitar against my body, and as soon as I

gave him the ten dollars , he disappeared into the gas

fumes and soot and the mamsans carrying bowls of fruit and

his whore who pretends to cry because it’s the way she gets

more money.

***
 Louie, Louie
Me gotta go
Louie Louie
Me gotta go now

***
Street corners are busy with the bleeders of disease.

Rituals of purgation. They apply hot bamboo tubes to the

throats and necks of sick people. They grin at the QC,

White Mice, who look for draft dodgers and AWOLS and VC.

The bleeders manipulate each tube, making a spiked collar

that makes purple splotches that look like birthmarks.

***

Oh Mrs. Murphy, I’m so alone

Singing here in the burning grass,
All I want to do is go home
And put my face in the middle of your ass.

***

Snuff lives in Elmira with self-indulgent parents and a

pinto dog named Virgil. A seventeen year old girl named

Susie wants to marry him and have five children and live in

a country house somewhere in upstate New York. He tries to

write to her once a week, but as the months pass, he

forgets her more and more. He carries a curl of her pubic

hair on top of her picture in his wallet. They fucked once,

the week before he was shipped out, but Snuff doesn’t

remember much about it.

“I was too drunk! All I know is she kept on telling me

that she wanted to get married when I got back. Now, I

don’t want to marry anyone!”

Under his metal cot he keeps a collection of letters and

cassettes stuffed in a cardboard box. One of the tapes is

from his Aunt Lucy who says she lights candles and blesses

his picture with holy water. Another is from his mother

who talks while she prepares supper. In the background he

can hear dishes clanking and water running while she goes

on about how long she waited for his father to come home

form World War II; and then, ten years later, she wished he

had never come home at all. He turned into a monster. Beat

on her. Beat on the kids. Beat on strangers in the bar

rooms. Beat on the police who threw him into jail and

eventually had to beat on him. He became a mad alcoholic.

We hear his mother close the kitchen cabinets as she

notes she’s out of coffee. She wonders if he is eating

right, and if he’s lost a lot of weight. Snuff likes the

background noises on her tape. Especially when she opens

her kitchen window and he can hear someone starting a car,

or birds making noise or the wind in the oak trees.

***

Bobbing in the river: a body beaten, a body drowned.

Pale green flesh. Head half-shaven. Face down, staring at

the murky bottom. Like a lost buoy, it drifts to the oily

shore where a crowd of onlookers point at the spot where an

ear was cut off.

***

TUCK-A-TUCK-A-TUCK-A-TUCK-A-TUCK-A. A red

cross helicopter chugs through the darkness on the way to

the Third Field Hospital. Snuff stands and yells at its

flickering lights, “Hey you fuckers, stay away from me. I’m

going home in 3 days. I’m short!” TUCK-A-TUCK-A-TUCK-A-

TUCK-A. The copter tilts forward as if to acknowledge

Snuff’s request, rises and glides over the rooftop. A foul

odor suddenly saturates the night. Dead animals? Sour food?

“The old lady's cooking a fucking dog,” Snuff says.

He blows a stream of smoke into the air. “God I hate that

smell.”

“I use to smoke cigars in basic. When we went to the

latrine and everyone was shitting and pissing at the same

time, I almost gagged to death. I put a book in front of

my face and smoked a cigar to keep out the smell. It always

worked..”

“Marijuana’s better.” He sucks in a long breath of smoke,

hold it in his lungs and then exhales with a cough. “It

takes you where you want to go.”

****

Moonlight fondles the dead men

sinking in the delta mud
kisses eyebrows and moldy places
with a breath of yellow love

****

Shea was afraid that Death followed him everywhere.

The old woman selling rice on the sidewalk outside the

hotel was waiting to throw a grenade into his lap. The

skinny creature with a boa constrictor wrapped around his

arm was planning on strangling him. The boy on a bicycle

with fluttering chickens tied together at the feet was

really a VC who would shoot him when he got the chance.

Death was his shadow, and the longer he lived with his bar

girl, he was convinced Death was sliding around him like a

mist. She told him so because she saw it in the Tarot cards.

Twice a day, morning and night, Shea said, she laid

out the Tarot cards and told him about the future. When the

cards predicted he’d be safe for the next 24 hours, Shea

would stay with the bar girl in her alley way room. But if

the cards suggested danger: the hanged man, a skeleton

walking, pentacles and swords clashing, Shea would devise

schemes to disappear for sometimes over a week. Once he

even went as far as swallowing a handful of malaria tablets

and come up with such a severe case of diarrhea he was

unable to leave his hotel room. Of course, he failed to

tell the medics that the Tarot cards predicted he would die

in a bomb blast at six in the evening of the following day.

When six the next evening came and went with nothing

exploding except Shea’s bowels, he returned to his bar girl

and wrote a letter to his mother that a bomb blast had

occurred and that she, in the event of it happening again

and taking away his life, should give away his Angora cat

to his sister who always showed so much love for it.

***

Snuff sings:
Shea is a friend of mine
He resembles Frankenstein,
When he dances on the tables,
He resembles Betty Grable.

He laughs and lights another joint.

***

365 days are slow and thick and seem to last forever.

My life is cargo statistics, reports on ammunition, the

tracking of ships up and down the river, and standing guard

on the rooftop of the old French mansion we use as

headquarters, surrounded by the dirty river and hundreds of

sandbags stacked around the doorways and foundation. Most

of my time is spent in memory, thinking about flowered bed

sheets and soft women.

***

On guard with Nelson, plump, read-headed, crouched

behind the sandbag barrier along the river. Nelson wants to

go home and be a lawyer. He is nervous and worries that a

VC will sneak up in the middle of the night and slit our

throats.

“Did you know,” he says, “ aiming his rifle at the row

of shacks across the river, “that all our problems, that is

society’s problems, can be solved with politics?” His

impish body swallowed in a steel helmet and flack jacket,

bloats with confidence. After he gets his law degree, he

wants to be a congressman. “Politics is the only way we’re

going to solve this damned war and everything it’s done to

ruin America.”

The lights from cargo ships glisten on the river. I

turn on the tiny radio hoping to quiet Nelson,

Mean Mr. Mustard sleeps in the park

Shaves in the dark, trying to save paper
Sleeps in a hole in the road
 but nothing stops Nelson. He corners you with his

theories. He slashes you with his opinions.

“You don’t believe in politics? You’re like the rest

of them! Whine and cry about how the country is run but

you do nothing about it! I’m right, aren’t I?”

Saving up to buy his clothes

Keeps a ten bob note up his nose
Such a mean old man, mean old man

“I know, I know,” he goes on, “you don’t want to talk

about it. All you care about is music and smoke. You must

have some idea about how we got to where we are? Don’t you?

Don’t you?”

“God.”

“God!?”

Yeah, God!“

“You don’t really mean that? What God? The world has

so many. You just can’t believe it.”

His sister Pam works in a shop

She never stops, she’s a go-getter
Takes him out to look at the Queen

“God has nothing to do with the way we are. It’s

politics, don’t you get it? Politics!”

In the dark across the river, wirey figures crawl

through tall grass wanting to kill us. Nelson lights a

cigarette, squints into the darkness, sees nothing. He is

on a roll now. His mind is immune to the sweltering air,

the drone of the ship generators, the whirr of small motor

cycles in the city behind us. “Well then tell me, Sig, why

the hell do you think we’re here if it isn’t politics?”

“Money.”

“Money!?”

Only place that he’s ever been

Always shouts out something obscene
Such a dirty old man, dirty old man

Nelson shakes his head and ticks his tongue on the

roof of his mouth. His dark rimmed glasses slip down the

rim of his nose, and he pushes them back with his middle

finger. Money was nothing more than a way to finance

politics. The black market. The money changers. The whores

waiting outside the bars on TuDo street. The pimps with

their bony fingers imploring you to consume some flesh. All

are victims of politics.

“Look,” he says, I know how you guys make money selling

your beer and cigarette rations to the slopes. What do you

make, triple the money? I’m not stupid. But all you do is

give money to the slopes so they can give it to the VC and

the VC can kill us, one by one, not because of money, but

because of their politics. We need a new order! A new

social order run by politicians who understand that order

is more important at times than an individual’s freedom.

You got that? If everyone did what they wanted to do, the

world would be in chaos!”

Such a dirty old man, dirty old man

“I know you don’t care, but I do. I do.”

Nelson reveals that he cares so much he has sent on onion

skin letters to 33 Senators and 94 Representatives, the

president’s entire cabinet, the Vice-President, William f.

Buckley, Jr. and Barry Goldwater, giving them a list of 25

solutions for ending the war and restoring order to

America.

“One day I’m going to use them when I enter politics.

That’s after getting my law degree. I don’t want to be a

lawyer, but that‘s the only way....”

I turn off the radio and stretch toward the river. There

is a noise out there. An unusual noise. Nelson quickly

jumps and slips down behind the sandbags

“What do you hear?”

”Listen!”

A sampan putters softly over the water. They are not

suppose to be on the river at this time of night. We have

orders to fire on any of them if they come close to the

compound. We listen but the putter slowly disappears and I

can see nothing on the river. The water laps against the

bunker. Electrical generators hum further down the dock.

 “Out there! Out there! I just saw a light skimming under

the water.” Nelson pointed to a spot near one of the cargo

ships disgorging jeeps down a metal ramp. “Maybe the slopes

are trying to blow up that ship.“

I strain to see. I squint hard hoping to see the light

and the VC swimming under water and crawling out of the

water and up the anchor of the ship. But there is only the

reflection of the ship’s lights. Nothing else.

“But I know I saw something. They do these kinds of

things, you know. What if they blow up that ship and all we

did was sit here and watched.”

“No one is going to blow up that ship. They’ve got too

much to lose. What would happen to all their televisions

and motorbikes?”

Nelson shudders. His porcine eyes pinch at the darkness,

searching out confirmation of what he saw.

“ God damn, don’t be an ass. I saw a light under the

water. Someone is trying to sabotage that ship. This could

be the real thing. That ship is in danger.”

“Fine. So what do you want to do about it?”

“ I think you should tell the sergeant-of-the-guard.”

“He’ll laugh at me! If the ship blows up, you can say you

were right, and if it doesn’t, we won’t be two assholes.”

“Are you crazy? Lives are in danger! If that ship blows

up there’s no telling how many people will die. I say we

tell the sergeant-of-the-guard.”

“Okay. Go tell him. I’m not going to wake up his stupid

ass.”

Nelson is disappointed. Small rolls of flesh bunch on his

forehead. He once said that when he looked in the mirror

his face showed interesting contours and bumps that gave

him character. It was, he said, the kind of face a person

could trust.

He rubs his face and gas grumbles in his stomach. He’s

convinced that he has seen the enemy. He despises my

indifference, and fumes that I won’t go tell the sergeant-

of-the-guard. Something lurks behind his disappointment.

Lessons in military codes of conduct. He inhales and puffs

out his chest and then deflates. He says, “You know I don’t

want to have to report you for insubordination. But if I

have to I will.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re forgetting who out ranks who. I asked you to

notify the sergeant-of-the-guard, and you refused the

request. If I give you a direct order and you refuse, then

that is going to be insubordination. And you know what that

means?”

“No, I don’t know what that means.”

 He bites his bottom lip. He is the schoolboy who has been

appointed class monitor while the teacher rushes to the

bathroom and no one in the class listens to him.

“Refusing a direct order? You don’t want to make me do

it.”

“And I’m not going to tell the sergeant anything.”

“You asked for this. You know that. You asked for this.”

He pauses and tries to stare me down. “I...I order you to

go and inform the sergeant-of-the-guard that we have a

possible encounter with the enemy.”

“And I’m telling you that there’s no way an E-5 is going

to tell an E-4 what to do so he can avoid the

responsibility himself. Remember, you saw the light. I saw

nothing.”

He scowls and sulks. He doesn’t know what to do. His

politics has failed him.

“You really shouldn’t have said that,” he says. “ I never

did anything to you. I wasn’t asking much for you to go and

tell the sergeant what I saw. You shouldn’t have let it go

this far.“

“That’s why you should go and tell the sergeant.”

Nelson doesn’t know what to do. He glares at me. Shakes

his head, regretfully. Orange ship lights turn his skin

brown and sickly. He needs to make a decision.

 “Then at least keep an eye on the river until I get back.

You can do that, can’t you?”

He places his steel helmet on top of the sandbags and

rushes to the mansion to tell Sergeant Evans of what he

saw. I watch him leave and rest my chin on the burlap

sandbags we spend so much time filling. Hated sandbags.

Weekly spilled and refilled, spilled and refilled for no

purpose but to remind us that sergeants have power over

privates, and lieutenants have power over sergeants.

I wish Nelson would stay away and leave me alone for the

rest of the night. I hold my steel helmet in front of my

face and talk to myself. Home. Friends. Women. One dream

after the other. Nelson is a fool. Mind rot. The river is

as quiet as a dead man.

Mrs. Murphy I dream of you

Your round ass and the things you do
The silent room where your husband lies
Lost in the sweetness of your thighs.

I wait in the dark, half watching, half dreaming, every

so often aiming my rifle at the spot where Nelson saw the

light under water. Maybe he saw a ghost. Thousands have to

be haunting this country. The river must be filled with

them sailing under water. Swallowed. Eaten by fish and

covered in mud. Night thoughts in day dream.

Nelson’s voice approaches me, dejected. Shaky. “I can’t

believe it,” he says, “ I just can’t believe it. It’s as if

no one thinks there’s a war going on. It’s unreal. Unreal!”

Ship lights leap off the glare of his glasses. Glisten on

his oily nose. How many more times in his life will he

appear the fool. Absurd. Tilting at an angle as if the

world is out of round?

“You know what Evans told me? You know what that stupid

ass said? ‘Don’t be such an asshole and get back on duty.’

You believe that? He told me to forget it!”

“Evans is full of shit,” I say, trying in some strange

way to comfort Nelson’s ego.

“Not only that! He said the next time I leave guard duty

for such a stupid reason, he’d make sure I got a court

martial. Me! A court martial! I can’t believe it. I just

can’t believe it.”

“You probably woke him up. He’ll forget about it in the

morning.”

“That’s not the point. We’re in a war. I was doing what

they told me to do.”

“We’re in an occupation, and never do what the Army tells

you to do.”

He presses against the sand bags and coils his arms

around his rifle. He stares at the river, the dark, the

lights that reflect the ghostly enemy. He says nothing.

Hears nothing. In all probability, wishes he could just

disappear.

But later, inside the air-conditioned conference room on

the top floor of the mansion, guard duty over, two hours

before we have to return to the ships and the sailors who

sit on decks, smoking cigarettes and waiting to return to

the open sea, we lay on the floor surrounded by

innumerable statistics on plexi-glass boards, written in

different colors of crayon, and drink stale, bitter coffee.

Nelson hasn’t said anything for over an hour. Somewhere

inside him is dead. I try to resurrect him.

“How long have you been married, Nelson?” I ask,

attempting to bring him out of his death.

“Two years,” he says automatically.

“It must have been hard on you both when you were

drafted?”

“We didn‘t like it, but we both knew I had a duty.”

“I would hate being away from someone I loved for such a

long time.”

“It wasn’t easy. But now that I’m short, it doesn’t

bother me anymore.”

“Short. I wish I were short.”

“You will be. We all get to leave this shit-hole.”

He finishes his coffee and wraps himself in a green

sheet. “What sign are you?” he asks, as he makes a pillow

with his shirt.

“Libra.“

“That’s a good sign. Not too political, but not a bad

sign. Eisenhower was a Libra. He was a great president. If

he were president now, we wouldn’t be here. That’s for

sure.”

“For sure.”

“He got us out of Korea. He knew what war was all about.“

And then he says nothing. He lies there, not sleeping.

Separate. Distant. A stranger. But just as I begin to drift

into a sleep, he almost moans, “ I still can’t believe that

asshole, Evans. Some day someone will die because of him. I

know it. I know it.”

***

Get this: Nelson waiting to board his flight back to the

world. He is bent to one side by his overstuffed duffle

bag, and he holds out a gift. It is the I Ching, the Book

of Changes. “Use it,” he says. “It brought me good luck.

Maybe it’ll do the same for you.”

***

Oh, what a lucky man he was.

Oh, what a lucky man he was.

***
 Snuff sucks down another cloud of smoke. He weaves back

and forth and says that one day he wants to try LSD. Maybe

when he gets back to Elmira and to the girl who wants to

have children and set up house and live happily ever after.

“I bet some acid would make you live happily ever after,”

he says, then passes the joint and tells me to see how long

I can hold in the smoke. “That’s all the I Ching I need,”

he says. “Take my head and place it somewhere else bedsides

here.”

***

I Ching. Whisper the words when sitting next to Snuff. He

says the book is nothing more than confusions. “A bunch of

lines telling the future. You’ve got to be kidding.”

“It tells you about the future.”

“Who gives a shit. I don’t give a shit about the future.

If you could show me it for real, then I might believe you.

But the only future I got is right here.”

“A lot of people take it seriously.”

“You talk too much, Sig. Smoke some more. That’ll take

your mind off things.”

***

Moonlight fondles the faces half sunken in the river mud.

It kisses their eyebrows with yellow lips. It reads the

pictures in their pockets. It has done this before. Many

times before.

***

When I was drafted I was sent to Fort Gordon,

Georgia. The middle of August. Red sun. Red dirt. Red heat.

Red recruits crowded into moving vans with tiny windows.

Crushed and gagging for air. T-shirts soaked in sweat. A

landscape of bald heads with nicks and bumps and scars. We

screamed!

“Let me out of here.”

“I’m no animal.”

“This ain’t a fucking concentration camp.”

“I’m suffocating to death.”

A boy with huge glasses sucked on blue candy and coughed

out blue saliva. His humid arm stuck against me. He

whimpered. “They drafted me out of college.”

“Weren’t you deferred?”

“Yeah, but I…”

He hacked out another glob of blue saliva. “I failed all

my classes. I hated college. I really want to be a

carpenter. ”
 His name was Schulz and he smelled like new shoes. He

stared at his new boots and wondered why they were so heavy.

“Shit,” he said, “I hope they send me to helicopter

school. I want to kill me some gooks.” He sprayed an arc of

imaginary bullets with an imaginary machine gun. “God,

that’s got to be a good ass feeling.”

We spilled out of the moving van bus and on to a barren

red field. Schultz imagined a field of dead bodies. Bodies

piled on top of each other. Heads splattered. Arms cut off.

Legs dangling from the hips. Explosions. Machine gun fire.

Just like in the movies.

“Shit man! “ he said, “I’ve got every reason in the

world to want to kill someone. Look what that mother

fucking private did to my arm.”

On the inside of his arm was a patchwork of purple

bruises and swollen clots. Stab holes from needles and

inoculation guns.. His skin was very white and the bruises

looked deadly.

“The asshole couldn’t find my vein. He almost took my

arm off. Look at this one. He jabbed me five times – five

times! – before he found any blood. Stupid ass. “

 A thunderclap shook the air and a light rain fell on

our shoulders. Rain streamed down Schultz’s face and

bubbled on his lips.

“And you know what that Sergeant said,” Schultz

continued, spitting rain in all directions, “ ‘ Just let me

pull out his cock and I’ll find blood!’ I’m lucky he

didn’t stab me in the jugular vein. Shit! ” The word

sloshed in his mouth. “Shit!” I moved away to avoid being

smothered in his foul breath and green teeth. I stood by a

colony of ant hills and watched red ants skitter over the

top of my boots as they tried to avoid drowning in the

rain. Bees swirled around a trash barrel of empty soda cups

and candy bar wrappers. The rain came down harder, and I

was weighed down by the soaked t-shirt and the shaved head

and the thought that later, in the dark of the barracks,

the bunk bed creaking with every turn of my body, all I’d

do was think of home. My room of books and music. My

grandmother’s Bible and Gaugain’s women holding plates of

fruit ripe as their breasts.

A platoon of men tromped behind a rigid sergeant who

carried a banner with the head of a white eagle surrounded

by an arc of stars. They splattered the rain and shouted in

cadence:
 I want to be an airborne soldier

I want to go to Vietnam

I want to be an airborne soldier

I want to kill a Viet Cong.

Schultz admired their efficient tempo as the rain let

up and a large horse fly landed on his cheek. He squashed

it and a pimple of blood popped between his fingertips.

“The next time they ask for blood, I’ll give them

this.”

And later, in the citadel of a bathroom, I sat next to

Schultz who in turn sat on a toilet in the crowded latrine,

pale as death and smoking cigarettes. Schultz sighed, a

sigh that seemed to shake the skin on his face. “You know,”

he said, “I’ve been in this army for two days and I still

don’t know what I’m suppose to fucking do. No one does.”

“Just wait for orders.”

Schultz pulled the roll of toilet paper and made a

pile on his lap. A sparrow flew through an open window,

panicked and knocked against the ceiling as it tried to

find a way out. Schultz yelled for someone to snap it with

a towel, but the bird suddenly dove toward the sinks and

darted back out the window.

 “Quick little mother, “Schultz said. “If I hadn’t been

shitting I would have caught it. I’m good at catching

things. “

He pulled up his pants. His belt buckle jangled.

“Hey man, did you hear about those guys fucking each

other in the ass? No shit! They were caught in the shower

by the first Sergeant. I guess that’s one way of getting

out of the army. Maybe the cook should have put more

saltpeter in their food. They never would have gotten a

hard on then.”

He laughed, wandered over to the wall of urinals, and

spat into it.

“I never get hard-ons,” he continued. “ I think there

may be something wrong with me. Right before I left home I

tried to fuck this girl who lived next door. She wasn’t

very good looking but she had great tits. She said she'd

suck my cock as a going away gift, so we went to her cellar

and she sucked me for an hour. Nothing happened. My dick

was like a little worm. It flopped around in her mouth

until I gave up. Imagine that! Giving up a blow job

because you couldn’t get hard. I still don’t get hard, not

even in my dreams.”
 ***

Look over yonder

What do you see
Sun is arising
Most definitely

***

“I never thought I’d get drafted, “ Snuff says. “I

thought I was safe. But then, my number came up.” He

laughs. A cocky laugh. He doesn’t seem to care about a

thing.

“Why should I,” he says, “ it only gets you in

trouble.”

Snuff is not his real name. He can’t remember who

nicknamed him Snuff, but the nickname seems right because

it reminds everyone of a funny cartoon character. Although

he was adopted, he likes to think of himself as an orphan.

Someone who was just dropped off at the doorsteps of a

couple who needed to have a child.

“Once I tried to find my real parents. That was a

trip! I wanted to know why I looked the way I did. I mean,

how did I get this fucking face with a ski nose and no

eyes. I didn’t know where to start, so I just drove around

places I thought they may be. You believe that? One night I

got so frustrated I drove my car into a telephone pole at

sixty miles per hour. I almost killed myself. I took it as

a message that I shouldn’t look for anyone. Little over a

year later I’m here and nothing I did seems to matter.”

A cluster of ashes falls on his collar and tumbles

down to his lap. He wipes it off and laughs. Marijuana has

burned holes in almost all of his clothes. He wants to see

how many holes he can get away with.

“You know, Sig, one day we should go back to Bangkok.

This time not for the dope or whores, but really to see

what the fucking place was like.”

The statue of the dying Buddha. Reclining on his

elbow. Layered in gold leaves. Smiling.

“We smoked our fucking brains out,” Snuff says, “and I

can’t remember anything but the whores.”

“They were beautiful.”

“Beautiful. I cold use a couple of them right now.”

“There’s always Gummers.”

Gummer gives a hummer

Of a blow-job to the boys,
sticks her thumb up their holes,
keeps them rigid as a pole,
Gummer gives a hummer
of a blow-job to the boys.

***

A sour odor rises to the rooftop. Again. It could be

Schultz decaying in the rice fields or under the streets or

where ever he went after his training.

 I bet the old lady is cooking a rat, “ Snuff says.

The old lady lives in the courtyard below. She lives

inside a box of cardboard and wood. She cooks on a small

grill and most of the time the food smells rancid. She

picks at the coals with a short stick and rocks back and

forth on her haunches. She looks up when she hears a voice

howling from the transit barrack on the floor directly

below us. The men howl a lot. Their voices echo in the

courtyard. They scream: “Stay away. Bastard. Go back,” or

“ My eyes are burning. My eyes are burning. My skin’s on

fire,” or “ Get off my back. ” or “ I’m drowning in fire.”

When one voice stops, another begins until the entire floor

is a calamity of screams. And then, just as quickly as the

shouting begins, it suddenly stops, as if all the men in

the transit barrack are carried away to another part of the

war.

The transit barrack is really an old ballroom of

tessellated tile, tall windows, and narrow cubicles divided

by white bed sheets. Men stay there while they await orders

to another part of the country. When it is windy, the wind

wails through the large hall and the men curl on the thin

cots unable to sleep. One night I wandered through the

barrack looking for Shea. I silently walked between the

hanging sheets and the men sleeping or staring at the

ceiling or trying to read a book. I saw a Sergeant in

jungle fatigues, his hat cocked over his forehead, his

mouth half opened, teeth cracked, teeth missing, snoring. I

saw a soldier with a scar across his chest and a tattoo of

an eagle on his stomach. I looked at all of them, waiting

to get out of Saigon, unglue themselves from the humid city

and the center of the war. Most of them slept soundly, but

by the doorway I met a man whose eyes glistened like two

dimes.

“I can’t sleep,” he said. “This place is too hot. I’d

rather be out shooting gooks then sitting here in the

middle of hell. “

A light went on in one of the cubicles casting a blue

color and silhouetting a rotund figure bent over and

looking for something under his bed. He pulled out a boot,

held it above his head, turned it over and over as if he

were looking for a message, then slid the boot back under

the bed and turned off the light.

“What was that about?” the man with the money eyes

asked.

“He’s probably looking for something poisonous. Every

night I go to bed hoping some insect doesn’t crawl into my

boots. Most of the time I forget to look at them in the

morning. A friend of mine found a scorpion once. Almost got

him good.”

“I’ve got to get out of this city,” the man said.

“I’ve never hated a place more in my life. I don’t even

like the whores.”

“Where you headed.”

“Hell if I know, I’m still awaiting orders. I hope I

get back into the jungle. I love it there. No bullshit. No

assholes. Just the war. You stationed here.”

“Movements. Along the river.”

“A crock of shit?”

“A crock of shit.”

“I figured.”

In the distance we heard a quick burst of rifle

chatter. A painful cry. Someone shot in the street below.

Another cyclo driver or shoeshine boy or deaf mute catching

a stray bullet in the right eye and straight out the back

of the head, and bleeding all over the sidewalk or on the

ultra-polished boots of the Marine guard who huddled inside

the concrete turret in front of the officer’s hotel.

THUNK!

The red tracer split open the night and the bullet

struck the shoeshine boy who worked in front of the hotel.

Brown flecks of polish scattered to the ground when he

buckled over. The Marine guard thought the boy was playing

and yelled “Get the hell out of here, slope!” but when he

realized the boy was dead, he crouched down and wondered

why he hadn’t heard the bullet hit.

“Death is silent,” the man with the money eyes said.

“Maybe that’s why I like the jungle. You can hear animals

and smell the earth and you don’t feel so alone.”

****

All is loneliness
Loneliness before me
Loneliness before for me.
Loneliness

****

Three old men join the woman in the courtyard . They

squat in a circle, shuffle a deck of cards and arrange them

in the shape of a cross. One of the old men looks up and

waves at me. He pokes his friend and they all motion for me

to come downstairs.

“You want your fortune told?” Snuff asks. “They’ll do

it for nothing. They did it for me and scared the shit out

of me. That small guy there. He picked up a card and said

it meant I’ll die in a very hot place. Not here, but

somewhere hot. He said a blood clot in my brain would kill

me because I drink too much. Or something like that. It’s

hard to really tell what they say. All they do is cluck

like a bunch of hens and move their hands all around.”

The smallest man tilts backwards and drinks from a

beer bottle. The old lady’s shrill voice sings as the other

two sway and pat each other on the shoulder. The one

drinking the beer suddenly throws the bottle across the

courtyard and seems to collapse backward against the wall.

Everyone tries to console him.

***

Out there, toward Long Bien, helicopters slide under

low hanging clouds. Artillery flashes while money changers

gather outside the barbed wire compounds and taunt the

guards in their wooden towers.

At Long Bien the earth is hard and treeless, and new

arrivals stand at attention on concrete basketball courts

scanning the horizon for Viet Cong. They’ve been told the

VC are everywhere. They’ve just got off a bus with thick

wire mesh covering the windows so no one can throw in a

bomb. The buses lurk through the morning dimness until the

wooden guard towers of Long Bien Reception Center come into

view. Spirals of barbed wire tangle on top of tall fences,

shiny and sparkling when the sun comes out in the morning.

The men stand quietly on the concrete court. A

Sergeant with a tight fitting uniform and rings of sweat

under his arms slaps a clipboard against his thigh and

shouts:

“You call this a formation? Gentlemen, let me see some

order. Let’s dress it up. Dress it up.”

He is tall and thin and looks like he’s been in the

army for centuries, although he’s no older than thirty. He

licks a white cream that protects his lips from blisters

and paces in front of the patchwork of new arrivals. He

stares. Surveys their postures. Looks at their faces. He

stiffens and announces with intense precision:

“Gentlemen, welcome to Vietnam.”

No one applauds but this doesn’t seem to bother the

Sergeant. The air fills with a faint drumming from

somewhere outside the base, but the Sergeant seems unaware

of it. A small Puerto Rican nervously twitches around and

whispers “Sounds like someone’s getting ready to bomb us.”

“Gentlemen,” the Sergeant continues, “ this reception

center will be your home for one or two days. For some of

you, you may be here longer. We’ll try to assign you to a

unit somewhere in-country as quickly as we can. Until then,

you will have to wait and remember that you’re still in the

army.”

Feet shuffle. Someone coughs. The Sergeant stares as

the sun becomes hotter and hotter. Burning. Outrageous.

“Now if you men want to stay in this limbo for the

rest of your tour, do something stupid; but, if we fail to

get you out of here that means we fail to take the war to

the enemy and, gentlemen, that means defeat. Defeat! And

gentlemen, I for one am not ready to accept defeat without

a fight, and you men are my battle. Is that understood?”

Behind the Sergeant a large canvas water bag is

suspended from a cross board. A small Vietnamese woman in a

white shirt and black pants that looks like pajamas stoops

to pour a cup of water. The Sergeant notices her and

gestures for her to go back to work. The woman bows and

hobbles off while the Puerto Rican whispers “How does he

know she’s not a VC?”

The Sergeant continues.

“Because some of you men have already been processed

back in the states, you already know where you’re going.

The rest of you will be assigned to barracks to wait for

orders. But that doesn’t mean vacation, gentlemen! When you

hear a formation called, you better be here and ready to

get your orders, no matter where you are.”

Another Vietnamese woman waddles by carrying two

buckets on a pole. Her hat is shaped like a cymbal and she

tilts it over her eyes to keep out the sun.

“She looks like a VC,” the Puerto Rican insists.

“How can you tell?”

“Look at the way she’s looking at us. I bet she’s got

a grenade or something in her pussy. All she has to do is

pull it out and then it’s over for all of us. I tell you

man, I can just tell she’s a VC.”

On the rim of a low hill bulky trucks growl and spin

up dust. A vague figure stands in the dust next to two

smaller figures bent over and scraping the ground. The

standing man points at black smoke rising out of oil drums.

The oil drums are filled with shit and the shit is burning.

The smoke plumes into the sky and swirls when a trio of

helicopters pass over, their wrinkled shadows skidding over

the earth and towards the Sergeant who ignores everything.

He raises his clipboard and follows a list of names with

his index finger:

“The following men have been assigned to the 101st

Airborne Brigade: Hector Gonzalez, Richard Camilla, Howard

White…..”

An abrupt list. The Sergeant stops for a moment

because his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. He

pushes a cherry colored candy through his lips then flips

to another page on the clipboard. He grins and surveys the

leftover men in front of him.

“Once you men put you gear away, report back here for

the following details. “ He looks around and points. “You,

you and you, report back here to sweep out the transit

barracks. You four men, I need some sandbags filled. And

you two report to the mess hall.”

He points to the Puerto Rican who is shading his face

with the palm of his hand.

“You! Pick another man. Fast.”

The Puerto Rican quickly touches my arm.

“You two men go to the mess hall right over there, and

fill up two barrels with ice, then bring them to the

colonel’s trailer. Over there.”

Nested against a communications tower, beige and dirty

from the reddish dirt, is a long trailer with a wooden

porch, a patio table and chairs.

“The colonel needs that ice right away. So move it.”

The Puerto Rican expects an emergency. The ice is

needed to freeze a wound, preserve a limb, or soothe

someone’s pain, but after dragging the barrels of ice over

the red dirt, we find a colonel lounging under a patio

umbrella drinking a cup of coffee bolstered with vodka. The

bottle of vodka is almost empty, and a number of cigarette

butts surround his lounge chair like white worms. He stands

when he sees us struggling with the large barrels, offers

us help but falls back down in the lounge chair.

“Just leave them there,” he says. “Want a drink?”

 “No sir.”

“No sir.”

He smiles, aware of our awkwardness with his rank. He

pours the last of the vodka into his coffee cup and plinks

his finger against the bottle..

“Don’t worry,” he says, “I’ve got more where that came

from.” He swallows the entire cup of coffee. “ So where are

you two boys from?”

“Boston, sir.”

“New York, sir.

“I’m from Rome myself. Rome, New York.” He laughs.

“Site of the famous Rome State School for Mental

Defectives. My father use to run the place. Wanted me to be

a psychologists and take over the school. I couldn’t do it,

just couldn’t do it. I hate crazy people.”

He lights a cigarette and adjusts the umbrella to

cover him with more shade. A thick silence spreads over

everything, as if the entire camp has suddenly discovered

it had no reason to be awake. In the distance a muted Red

Cross helicopter floats over the sun, a quiet servant

carrying body fragments to hospitals. The colonel picks at

a thread hanging form his collar and looks around as if

he’s in an alien land and has no idea of how to free

himself.

“What do you boys think of the war? You’re not one of

those hippie protestors, are you? Those little mother

fuckers. They’re the reason we can’t win this war. Every

time we drop a bomb somewhere, they whine about it.”

The Puerto Rican nods in agreement. I think he’s

trying to win the Colonel’s favor. But, the Colonel ignores

him and keeps right on talking.

“Can you imagine anyone protesting the D-Day invasion?

Shit! They would have been shot as traitors. Shit, what the

hell am I talking about? I use to believe in virtue. That

it was happiness. And wisdom, courage and justice, these

things mattered. Especially justice. Without it the wrong

doers prevail. But look, look at this hole in the world.

Unprotected. Open to any invaders. No justice. No honor. I

drink to it. No. No, I drink to them, the enemy, those

fucking cockroaches!.”

He closes his eyes and appears to fall asleep. We

stand there, quiet, motionless, watching him breathe. Beads

of sweat pop up over his lip. Gnats jump on and off his
forearms.

“Sir,” the Puerto Rican shakes the colonel’s shoulder.

“Sir, what would you like us to do with the ice?”

The colonel groans. “Oh, leave it there. Just leave it

there. The pool party’s been cancelled. Just go back to

your barracks. Go back.”

“Pool party,” the Puerto Rican hisses as we start back

to the barracks. “ Here I am half way around the world,

worried that someone will throw a bomb in my lap, and he

tells me the pool party has been cancelled. What the fuck!”

We take some ice in our hands and rub it over our

faces. A small Vietnamese girl carries a wash bucket filled

with clothes. The Puerto Rican watches her intently,

whistles, snaps his fingers and squeezes his crotch.

“Not bad for a slope,” he says “Tight little ass. I’d

like to fuck her. No, what the fuck am I talking about? I

don’t want to fuck any of them. All I need is to bring home

one of their diseases. You know they carry some pretty

weird ones. I heard about a guy whose cock was rotting off

because he screwed one of them in the boonies. Had to be

sent to Japan. Hell of a way to get out of here! No, I’m

going to stay away from that shit. I didn’t come here with
anything, and I’m not going to bring anything back.”

And later – two, three days – in a slated outhouse

with wood toilets constructed over oil drums, the smell so

putrid we smoke cigars to keep from choking, the Puerto

Rican shakes his shirt by the middle button and sings

Mother, mother , mother

There’s too many of you crying;
Brother, brother, brother,
There’s too many of you dying.

“Shit,” he says, “I wish I had my guitar. I’d really

sing then. But it’s so fucking hot my strings would rust

away.” A slice of sun burns through the slats and divides

the Puerto Rican in two. “I haven’t stopped sweating since

we got here. They should pick better places to have a war.

San Juan. Rio. Not some place where you sweat your balls

off.”

***

Snuff sucks in the last of his marijuana and flips the

butt over the railing. It falls like a tiny firecracker

into the courtyard and lands next to the old lady who is

now alone. She doesn’t notice it.

“I was scared shitless when I got here,” Snuff says“

Fucking Charlie was mortaring the airfield when I landed

and the people on the ground acted like nothing was

happening.”

“They didn’t want to scare you.”

“Bull shit! They didn’t know what to do. They made us

hide behind a pile of sand bags until the attack was over.

I thought I was going to get killed my first day in

country. That would have really shit.”

****

Some folks inherit star spangled eyes,

oh they'll send ya down to war.
But when you ask 'em how much should we give,
They'll only answer, more, more, more.

****

The evening was charcoal on the highway to Saigon. The

wide asphalt road cut through the saw grass and rice fields

leading away from Long Bien. And then another bus

surrounded me like a green prison. The vinyl seats were

slit. The arm rests were freckled with rust. Bayonet knives

had scratched on the inside walls: “Fuck The Army.” “Kill

all Gooks.” “Short.” A bull of a black sergeant sat next

to me. He read a magazine article on the labyrinth of

underground tunnels outside of Saigon. The light became too

dim so he finally stopped reading. He wheezed, “Saigon.”

 “Sir?”

“Saigon. You know anything about Saigon?”.

“It has a zoo.”

“Yeah.”

“And it’s suppose to have a lot of whores.”

“Everyone’s a whore in Saigon. What else?”

“It’s the heart of the war.”

“You got that right. Shit, there’d be no war if there

wasn’t Saigon. Filthy city. Smells like dead rats and

garbage. This is my third time there.”

“Third time.”

“Fuck yeah! Best tour of duty in the war. Good pay.

Quick rank. Anything you want.. It once was called the

Paris of the Orient. You can still get the best French food

there. The Vietnamese loved the French. A lot of them still

speak the language. Too bad things had to change.”

He tipped his head against the window and bounced

with every bump in the road.

“Don’t get me wrong, I think we should be here. The VC

are worse than animals. No conscience. They’d kill their

own children to get what they want. They’d destroy Saigon

and everyone in it just to prove a political point. We’re

the only ones standing between them and the extermination

of everyone who helps us. “

He crossed his hands over his round belly, snorted and

scratched the skin puffing out of his stiff collar. He

twined his right leg over his left and contorted in such a

way that he looked like he was trying to hold himself

together.

“I hate the VC,” he went on. “Last year during TET

they murdered the girl I was living with. I didn’t love her

– well, you know what I mean, not the way you’d love an

American girl – but we lived together and she was a pretty

good girl. She was sixteen and tight. I mean tight. The

fuckers didn’t have to kill her.”

The bus slowed down because the road was blocked by an

over-turned jeep and a red cross truck with flashing

lights. The jeep was mangled and a Korean soldier crouched

near the hood wincing and holding his bleeding hands.

“Looks like someone tried to blow him away,” the

Sergeant remarked. “ Everyone hates the Koreans. They call

them Zips. Nasty bunch of bastards. They smell like their

dried fish, and they stink up the whole country. Anyone

could have tried to kill him. Anyone.”

The bus slowly nudged its way through the clutter of

metal. I saw the Korean open his mouth and spit out a

stream of blood. The bus shifted into higher gear, and the

Sergeant shook my elbow and said “Look, see those yellow

lights in the distance, they’re the lights of Saigon.” He

lit a cigarette and the smoke from his match curled into

five dissolving rings. “We’re almost there. Thank God. I

can’t wait to get fucked. I love those little hairless

pussies.”

****

There's a man who leads a life of danger

To everyone he meets he stays a stranger
With every move he makes another chance he takes
Odds are he won't live to see tomorrow

****

“And it’s hairless pussy that keeps giving me the

clap,” Snuff says. White marijuana smoke twines over his

head, spreads over the roof top and twists around the

laundry hanging on lines strung from a flagpole. A gust of

wind flaps the empty arms and flaccid legs. A shadow figure

reaches up and yanks a pair of pants off the line. It’s

Francis, Florido’s wife. She folds the pants, tucks them

under her arm, and waves at us as she returns to her room

downstairs.

“Florido must be nearby,” Snuff remarks. “She never

goes anywhere without him. They’re almost joined at the

hips.”

Francis is mud skinned, tubular cheeked, and precisely

dressed in tailored fatigues. A large, brown comb protrudes

from her back pocket, and she precisely uses it to part her

hair down the middle. Precisely. Small boned and short

enough to pass under the clothesline without touching her

head, she whistles like a man and lives with her husband,

Florido, on the transit barrack’s floor. She joined the

army when Florido was drafted, and when he was ordered to

Vietnam, she somehow managed to go with him.

“Never, no one will ever keep us apart,” she said the

day he received his draft notice, and she meant it. “I’ll

follow him even into hell.”

They’ve been in-country for four months, and Florido,

true to a promise he made to his mother – “I’ll send you

home something ever week.” - manages to capitalize on his

exile from Trenton, New Jersey, by turning his shabby hotel

room into a bulging store of illegal goods and services. In

hollowed out stereo speakers bought on the Black Market, he

sends back pounds of marijuana to his friend ,Willy, who

lives with his alcoholic step- mother and stays out of the

Army because he has a psychiatrist who says he wets the bed

at night. In return, Willy sends Florido “Greenbacks,”

American money to trade on the Black Market for four times

the value of the military script issued to soldiers.

With the “greenbacks” Florido expanded his business to

include trade in PX cards, phony IDs - mostly for the black

soldiers who deserted their units and now live in a hotel

up the street - boots, fatigues, cigarettes and food, and

most especially weapons like pistols, rifles and knives. He

takes advantage of the inflated value of everything and

swears to his wife that when he returns to Trenton, he’ll

have enough money to start a business and buy a home.

“I want children, too. Lots of them.”

“I want seven,” she says. “Or maybe more. I always

wanted a big family. I only have a brother and we never

talk to each other. He blames it on the war, but he never

talked to me!”

In their room next to the transit barrack, they can

look down on the street and the spot where Sergeant McKay’s

right arm was blown into two distinct pieces after buying

two .38 pistols with shiny leather holsters from Florido.

Sergeant McKay had been in-country for only a week. Florido

thought he was kind of stupid, but he thought every

sergeant was stupid because all they wanted was rank and

would do anything to get it. They were swollen with their

own importance and many of them liked to think they were in

the old West .They’d buy pistols to wear on their hips,

broad brimmed hats and cowboy boots to wear on R&R - all

supplied by Florido who is an expert at negotiating with

the mamasans in the black market.

When Sergeant McKay lost his arm and lay in the street

sobbing and stunned, Florido, when he had heard about the

explosion, immediately wondered how he could confiscate the

holsters without being noticed. He didn’t care about the

.38s because they were cheap and almost unusable, but the

holsters were something else. He thought of running

downstairs and stripping the holsters off Sergeant McKay’s

body under the pretense of helping him, but he thought too

late and too slowly. Two MPs were already attending to

Sergeant McKay who blankly looked up at the Saigon sky and

knew he would be heading home.

 Francis told Florido not to worry because holsters

weren’t as valuable as the marijuana and hashish they

stored under their bed. Holsters were too much trouble for

the money they brought in return, and, as Florido watched

the MPs consoling the wounded Sergeant, still wondering how

to get the holsters, Francis carefully cataloged the items

they were preparing to sell on the black market and

everywhere else:

MY LIST
10 stereo speakers.
2 Magnavox televisions
4 Panasonic televisions.
13 Norelco Carry-Corders.
7 Amplifiers.
12 Toshiba transistor radios.
5 Reel-to-Reel tape decks, Panasonic.
8 35mm Konica Auto-S cameras
6 Polaroid 250 Land Cameras
98 Colgate toothpaste tubes.
29 bottle of Old Spice cologne.
7 Norelco Triple Head shavers

Francis loves to make lists, most especially

lists of all the items she thinks will make them wealthy.

She has lists for everything and pins them on a cork board

next to her bed. There are lists for jobs that need to be

done, lists of people who are primary clients, list of

places to sell in the streets and lists that tabulate the

value of American money on the foreign exchange. Lists of

soldiers she hates and lists of soldiers she likes. Lists

of relatives to write and lists of friends who never write.

Lists of drugs to buy and sell, and drugs that don’t sell

at all. And the most important list, the list that

calculates the amount of money they daily make, weekly

make, monthly make and are projected to make by the time

they leave Vietnam.

Florido admires her organizational skills and ability,

but not as much as Colonel Pearson who often daydreams of

seducing her on top of his desk, right next to the pictures

of his wife and children and Snuff’s tiny hairball. Francis

doesn’t seem to notice the Colonel’s lust, or. if she does,

she has an acute sense of Colonel Pearson’s sexual weakness

and manipulates his daily routine much to the irritation of

First Sergeant Stevens.

Colonel Pearson hates Florido. He wishes Florido

killed by a VC or one of the teenage cowboys who rides

motorbikes through the streets and snatches cameras and

wallets from unsuspecting GIs. The cowboys are as much an

enemy as the VC, and Colonel Pearson imagines one of them

running his motorbike into Florido as Florido squats next

to a mamasan in the black market. Squash him. Hit him over

the head with an iron bar. Shoot him in the stomach. Leave

his body among the skinned monkeys hanging in the stalls of

the market place.

Francis knows Colonel Pearson hates Florido. How many

times has she heard him snicker when Florido has to fill

sandbags to stack around the building? Or stand guard by

the river in the darkest part of night? But she still

ignores the Colonel’s advances because she fanatically

loves Florido. She sits in the colonel’s cramped office on

the top floor of the French villa converted into a military

compound and gazes out at the row of shacks across the

river. She stares with admiration at dark skinned Florido

at the river’s edge, scooping shovels of sand into bags -

his skin shiny with sweat, his beard shiny with sweat, and

the two revolvers on his hips shiny with sweat. She rolls

her sleeves above her elbows and thinks of Florido’s

brother, Herman, who also wants to marry her. She thinks of

Herman’s face. The cyst under his right eye. His plump

finger once inserted into her pussy and almost, almost

making her cum. He seems so strange to her now , and she

shudders when she thinks that she could have married him

and not Florido.

Florido’s brother was so angered by Francis’

rejection, he vowed that one day he’d kill both of them.

He called her up in the middle of the night and told her he

wanted to stab her in the throat and cut off his brother’s

balls. He told her he always hated Florido because Florido

always got what he wanted. When Francis asked him if he

wanted to be drafted, too, all he said was that he’d join

the army to make sure he could follow the two of them , and

some day, some where, kill them both. It was fortunate that

he failed the IQ test for the military, Francis thought, or

else he just may have carried out his promise. And it was

also fortunate that he finally found another woman and

married her, although once she received a postcard from him

with a short note: “I still want you. But I am happy .

Don’t forget me.”

Florido ignores his brother. Always did. He’s more

worried about how much money he’s going to steal, or how

many ounces of marijuana he can sell. In Vietnam he has

found his home and worries about nothing. Not the VC. Not

the South Vietnamese. Not even the Vietnamese teenager

who’s been assigned to help him in the arm’s room. A frail,

wiry boy who was rejected by the ARVN and was given the job

by Colonel Pearson when the Colonel finally got tired of

him waiting every day at the gate of the compound, begging

for food and offering anyone who passed by a good time. The

Colonel thought it a brilliant idea to give the boy to

Florido. Either the boy would kill Florido or drive him

crazy.

No such luck! Florido drove the boy crazy, instead.

He worked him to death, made him repeatedly clean and

polish every weapon in the armory until they lined up

against the wall like glossy metal soldiers. The boy became

so worn out and angry. he too started dreaming of ways to

kill Florido.

Florido wanted to kill the boy, just for the taste of

it. He thought of locking him inside the concrete bunker

and dropping a gasoline bomb down the air vent. Then he

thought of stabbing him with one of the bayonets kept in

the metal trunk on the floor and throwing his body in the

river. But he settled on torturing him.

Florido loved being surrounded by all the company’s

weapons: pistols, rifles, gas masks, ammunition, all under

lock-and-key with Florido as their caretaker. He loved the

M-16s most of all because they were light and plastic and

deadly. He sent one back to New Jersey in bits and pieces,

and expected one day to use it if his brother came around

and tried to fuck his wife. During alerts – the city in

danger of sappers and snipers and VC loose in the streets

or on the edge of the river – Florido not only carried his

two pistols, he also slung a web of ammunition over one

shoulder and an M-16 over the other.

“I see one VC,” he said, “I’ll blow him away in a

second. I hate the little fuckers. I’ll blow out each and

every one of their eyeballs.”

Florido thought that all the Vietnamese were his

enemy, even the boy in the armory because he smelled like

dead fish and looked like a skeleton.”

“Goddamn slope!”

Florido told Francis that he was thinking about

cutting off the boy’s thumb just for the hell of it. She

accused him of acting just like his brother but said she

loved him anyway. Florido fucked her and told her he wanted

to at least give the kid a heart attack.

And one day he almost did.

The concrete bunker of the armory was cold and dark.

Florido kept the air conditioning on 65 degrees and bragged

to everyone, including his wife, that he was the most

comfortable person in Vietnam.

“Cold as hell, that’s what I keep it. I’m not going to

sweat my ass off in this fucking hole of a city.”

 The Vietnamese boy hated the cold dampness, and spent

a lot of time shivering as he crouched on the floor and

oiled down weapons. The day Florido almost gave him a heart

attack, the bunker was extra cold because of the monsoon

rains, and the boy couldn’t stop his body from shaking. He

spread a thick oil over the square barrel of Major

Johnson’s .45. The oil dripped on the floor into a large

puddle. Florido charged across the bunker and screamed.

“You stupid fucking idiot! You goddamn slope!”

He threw his half-eaten apple at the boy and hit him

on the side of his head.

“You goddamn slope idiot!”

The boy jolted and winced when Florido stood over him

and raised his hand to slap him. He grabbed the pistol from

the boy.

“You mother fucker! You stupid motherfucker! Why the

hell did they send you to me? Look at this mess. This floor

was spotless! You dumb fuck. I’m going to blow your head

off. You know that? I’m going to put a bullet right through

your fucking face.”

The boy violently shivered and sobbed and Florido

swelled and puffed. Florida bent over and dragged his

finger through the oil on the floor, then slashed a glob

across the boy’s cheek.

“Fucking slope!”

He pulled the boy up, pushed him against the wall and

pressed his head into the concrete.

“You stupid fucking slope! I’m going to show you. I’m

finally going to kill me a fucking gook.”

The boy’s sobbing was uncontrollable, but Florido was

unaffected. He was busy loading a clip of ammunition into

Major Johnson’s pistol.

“GI numba one,” the boy finally managed to moan.

“Numba one, no numba ten.”

“Shut your fucking mouth, slope. I’m going to blow

your fucking ass away. You know that, I’m going to blow

your head into tiny little bits of slope shit.”

“GI numba one, numba one.”

“I’m going to tell them you turned on me. You tried to

fucking shoot me. You VC bastard. That’s what you are, a

fucking VC bastard.”
 “No VC, no VC. GI numba one.”

The boy tried to crunch his head into his shoulders as

Florido held the pistol up to his temple. He cried. He

moaned. His eyelids fluttered. He held his hands close to

his chest in a prayer position and rocked his shoulders

back and forth.

“You fucking slope,” Florido yelled one last time

before he squeezed the trigger of the pistol.

BLAM!

The noise echoed against the walls as the bullet

slammed into the concrete ten inches from the boy’s nose.

The boy jerked and twisted and then collapsed on the floor.

Unconscious. Immovable. His skin whitened. His arms spread

out. Florido broke out into laughter and jumped around the

room in a mock polka. He kicked ammunition boxes in time to

his dance and howled in pleasure.

“Stupid fucking slope. He really thought I’d kill him.

Stupid fucking slope!”

***

And it’s one two three, what are we fighting for

Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, next stop is Vietnam
And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates
 Ain’t no time to wonder why, whoopee we’re all gonna
die

***

“What did Colonel Pearson do about it?” Snuff asks,

blowing a smoke ring about his face and then blowing it

towards Florido’s wife who’s taking down the last of her

clothes..

“Nothing!”

“And what about her? She ever say anything?“

“She loves the bastard. She was probably more worried

that Florido would be transferred somewhere where she

couldn’t go.”

A weak voice is suddenly heard by the stairwell.

“Francie. Francie. Come on down now. I miss you, baby.”

It’s Florido and he’s whimpering in a tone of repentance.

“I’m sorry for talking that way to you. You know I really

love you, baby. Oh Francie. Francieeeeeee.”

At the top of the stairwell Florido and Francis

embrace. One solid shadow. The wind gently blows their

clothes on the line. Florido kisses her along the neck and

we can hear her whimper. Then they disappear.

“They’ll die together,” Snuff says, “and they’ll

probably go to hell together.”

“If not hell, somewhere close to it.”

The marijuana makes me dizzy. I slide off the bench

and lay prostrate on the tile. The night is damp with

humidity. Soon the dew will smother the entire city. The

floor is hard as hell, and for a moment, I have the feeling

that I am falling.

***

You gotta go where you wanna go

Do what you wanna do
With whoever you wanna do it with

***

Ashes. Thin flakes swirl in a spiral and climb over

the ninth floor carrying more putrid smells. The old woman

in the courtyard pokes a burning stick at a piece of meat

and tosses it on the ground for her dog. Her dog barks as

if it has three throats. Its eyes are red and its beard is

greased with phlegm. Its belly is swollen and he claws and

tears the piece of meat into shreds. Snuff picks a small

piece of concrete from a broken statue of a bird and drops

it into the courtyard. The dog jumps, looks up and howls.

 “The fucking dog eats like Lieutenant Johnson.

Snorting and slobbering. Fucking pig!”

“Johnson’s fatter.”

“Johnson’s a slob. I don’t know why the army ever

kept him.”

“It’s hard up for lieutenants.”

Lieutenant Johnson comes from the same city I come

from, Chelsea, across from Boston, poor to lower middle

class, tenements and wooden porches overlooking the Mystic

River. Johnson’s father is a doctor, and my father is an

alcoholic. His father owns buildings while my father tries

to build them. His father is a successful investor, and my

father is a bankrupt failure. His father writes him twice a

week and mourns his service in Vietnam, and my father

doesn’t even know I’m in Vietnam.

“I could do without that asshole Johnson,” Snuff says.

“He’s paranoid. Thinks everyone is out to get him.”

Johnson! Fat thighs. Pink knuckles. Slightly cross

eyed. A pin-striped mustache settled over a top lip so

swollen it completely smothers any indication of a lower

lip. Jowls. Three distinct rolls of flesh flutter under his

collar whenever he says “Saigon.” And one passion: mashed

potatoes and gravy for dinner, and a bowl of cornflakes

soaked in milk-of –magnesia for breakfast, especially

before he has to be driven through Saigon on official

business.

Saigon makes him nervous, seeps into his ostentatious

eyes like humid poison. The amputated bodies. The sad

faces. The clutch of traffic – cycles, motorbikes, jeeps

and half-tracks – strangling the circled streets. The

narrow alleys with animals hanging in doorways. The swarm

of children pulling at the edge of your uniform, rib thin,

suffering from sleepless nights under trucks or on window

ledges or beneath the balcony where men in civilian clothes

plot out more useless strategies to win the war. Too much

clutter. Too many people.

I nudge the jeep through a crowd of children playing

in the street in a monsoon rain.

“Just push them aside,” Lieutenant Johnson says,

“They’re like little mosquitoes. That reminds me, I forgot

to take my malaria pill. Shit! I’ll die from my own

stupidity.”

The rain is dark gray and we are lost in the confusing

streets of Cholon. The wetness covers the wind shield and

there’s no way to see outside through the plastic side

windows that are zippered close. A small boy runs next to

us, a hazy ghost through the rain soaked plastic. He shouts

and waves his arms, then dissolves back into the rain.

“Dumb little shits,” Johnson snickers, “They’re better

off dead.”

He stirs a paper cup of coffee with his finger and

takes out two slices of white bread he has been saving from

the mess hall. He loves to eat and talk about eating. He

claims the one thing he misses most back in the world are

the restaurants. His wife, his child – a two year old girl

, plump, inflated, kept in his wallet next to his wife

who looks like starvation – they’re missed, but not, it

seems, like the Italian restaurants in North Boston or the

hoagie shops in Revere or the drugstore counter in Malden

with spicy hot chili and chocolate shakes.

Another group of children dance in front of the jeep,

their honest bodies slick with rain.

“You know what I once did, Specialist? Now you can’t

tell anyone about this. Oh, so what if you do, no one would

give a shit. I once gave a couple of kids some of those

green olives from the mess hall. You know, those fat salty

ones with a pit in the middle. They didn’t know what they

were. They just thought it was food. So, I told these kids

to eat them, seed and all. Shit, you should have seen their

faces. Scrunched up. Choking. Trying to chew the seed with

their rotten teeth. I loved it. Loved it!”

I turn down a flooded street where people huddle in

doorways, pants rolled up to their knees. The sky beats

down thick, claustrophobic darkness. The engine sucks in

water and stalls in what turns out to be a dead-end alley.

Debris from garbage piles drifts in the torrent, and a man

with a newspaper umbrella tries to look through the plastic

window. Johnson waves him away then eats his last piece of

bread.

“I don’t like being stuck here, Specialist.”

The bread is a mash that bubbles in the corner of his

mouth. He paws his holstered revolver and wipes a circle of

clarity in the mist of the window. He squints, unable to

see anything clearly, and takes out a chocolate bar from

his breast pocket. He snaps it into little pieces and pops

them all in his mouth. Brown saliva glistens his lips. His

cheeks puff out.

 “Any one of these people could get us, Specialist.

We’re sitting here like ducks in water.”

“What do you want me to do, sir? The engine is wet.”

“I know! I know! You don’t have to tell me the engine

is wet. I know about engines. I’ve been around them long

enough to know what happens when they get wet. I just don’t

like it here. Be ready, that’s all, be damned ready for

anything to happen.”

Under an open pavilion a group of people stare at us

through steam from a kettle of noodles. They’re on a

platform above the water and they look warm and safe. They

point at the jeep as if it is a museum piece set down in

the middle of their alley. Two small boys suddenly dash

naked through the group and cart wheel in the water. One of

the boys walks on his hands while the water crests around

his head. Johnson scrutinizes their movement and places his

revolver on his lap.

“You remember Revere Beach, Specialist.” Suddenly

sentimental, as if he’s facing the last moments of life on

earth.

“I spent summers there, sir. My friends and I bicycled

all the way from Park Ave just to go on the rides. All
except the Cyclone ride. I hated the Cyclone.”

“Scared me, too. I heard that a sailor once fell out

and killed himself.”

“I heard the same story.”

“I once saw a man shot out of a cannon. They called

him the Human Bullet. Shot him right through the air and

into a net. I always wondered how his feet withstood the

explosion. Why weren’t they destroyed when the cannon went

off?”

“Did you ever see the freak show, sir?”

“Freak show! I don’t remember that.”

“They had a guy named Pasha, the Frog Boy. He didn’t

have any bones in his arms or legs so everything flapped

and looked like a frog. I had a friend, Jimmy Mulligan,

who….”

“Jimmy Mulligan? I went to school with a Jimmy

Mulligan. Did he have a hair lip?”

“Right in the center of his mouth.”

“Mulligan. I remember how he ate. Food would get all

over his face, like he couldn’t find his mouth. He was kind
of disgusting. Didn’t he have a sister, Grace, or

something?”

“Irene. She was pretty good looking.”

“I don’t remember. All I remember is that hair lip.”

“It was ugly.”

“We probably know a lot of the same people, but I

don’t remember you?”

“I went to another school. Malden High. My father

lived in Malden after my parents divorced. I decided to go

there.”

The rain thunders on the jeep’s canvas roof, and

Johnson screws his body from side to side in an effort to

keep an eye on the alley around us. He bites off another

piece of chocolate bar and begins to settle in the seat

when a huge form appears out of the rain and starts banging

on the hood.

“Hey Sig, it’s me, Shea. Let me in! Let me in!”

Johnson bolts in his seat and drops his pistol on the

floor. He scrambles to find it. Two chocolate bars slip out

of his jacket pocket and he steps on one of them in a panic.

 “You fucking asshole, “ the figure in the rain

screams. “Let me in before they kill me.”

I start to unzip the window but Johnson stops me.

“Don’t you dare open that window. Specialists. You

trying to get us killed?”

“But sir it’s Shea.”

“I don’t care who it is. We don’t open these windows

for anyone.”

“But sir, it’s not….”

Two Vietnamese suddenly leap on Shea and struggle to

pull him to the ground. Shea, twice their size, throws them

off, frantically crawls over the top of the jeep, and runs

into another alley. One of the two men chasings him jumps

on the hood and presses his face against the windshield.

Johnson puts his hands on top of his head in a gesture of

surrender, but the man on the hood yells “Numba ten fuckin’

GI,” and then he imitates someone injecting heroin into

their arm. “Numba ten, numba ten.” He slides off the hood

and with the other man, runs into the alley where Shea has

disappeared.

“We should have killed them,” Johnson yells, his

pistol safely back on his lap.

“Aren’t we going after him, sir?”

“Are you crazy, specialist? We’d never find him now,

not in these alleys. If he’s smart he’ll be on the other

side of town by now.”

“But it’s Shea, sir!“

“And like us, he shouldn’t be here. He’ll get back. He

always does. Besides, it looks to me like he’s crazy on

drugs. Didn’t you see that, specialist?”

“I couldn’t tell, sir. He did recognize us.”

“You. Not me. I’ve seen shit like this before. And

I’ll be damned if I’m going to get killed because of some

asshole who can’t stay where he belongs. We’ll report what

happened to the MPs. They’ll know what to do. He should

know better, anyway. You know that!”

Johnson holds his pistol against his chest with one

hand and finishes a chocolate bar with the other. The rain

slackens to a drizzle, patters on the canvas, slips in

rivulets along the front window. Water churns around the

tires, carrying garbage towards a clogged sewer. Johnson

opens the plastic window enough to stick out his face, gasp
and suck in some fresh air as if to purify and amend his

action.

“Why can’t Shea ever get with the program,“ he says as

an after thought.”

“It’s Shea, sir. He can’t get with any program.”

“I’ll tell the colonel about him. Something’s got to

be done. When he gets back I’ll bring him in front of the

colonel.”

“He’s not there a lot. He likes to go AWOL. We were

drafted together.”

“Ah, a draftee. I wonder how he got to this place?”

“Maybe he was lost like us.”

“Maybe.” Johnson pauses. “Try to start the engine

again. I want to get out of here.”

I crank the engine but it’s still too wet. We sit in

silence. As the rain slackens even more, the Vietnamese

slowly begin to emerge from their shelters. They walk

around the dead jeep. Some look in, smile, frown. Some

simply walk by as if we’re invisible.

“You do know, Specialist, that these people hate us.

Any one of them could throw a grenade in here and blow us

into hell. They can’t be trusted. One day, mark my word,

they’re going to turn on us and we’ll be retreating all the

way to the ocean like a bunch of mice. They’ll try to kill

us all. They’ll steal everything we have: gold teeth,

wedding rings, wallets.

The last of the rain consents to listen for just a

moment, then, unexpectedly, pours out of the clouds again,

pounds on the jeep forcing us to close ourselves in again.

We sit there until it’s dark. Saying little. Waiting. The

alley dissolves in the rainy night, and our breathing

steams up the inside of the jeep until it’s hard to taste

the air without gagging. Johnson eats his last candy bar

and closes his eyes. He seems to sleep for the longest

time. The last thing he says is “Sometimes, Specialist, I

think we’re at the end of the world.”

****

What the world needs now,

is love sweet love
It’s the only thing
that’s there’s just too little of

****
Snuff hears a raspy voice at the top of the

stairwell. “Goddamn little mother fuckers!”

It’s Sergeant Platt. He raps a metal pointer against

the rod-iron stairs and swats at a moth hovering by the

light of the landing. He’s drunk, as usual. He spends most

every night in the Enlisted Men’s club drinking rum and

beer and feeding coins into slot machines, rows of slot

machines as Phillipino rock bands imitate Jimi Hendrix –

“scuse me while I kiss the sky” – and topless girls pull at

their nipples.

He isn’t really a Sergeant, but he likes to be called

Sergeant ever since he made Specialist, 5th Class. “It’s the

same rank as a Buck Sergeant,” he said, “So all you fuck

heads call me Sergeant Platt.”

He stumbles across the patio but stops at the little

stage where trios of French musicians once played for

tourists from Paris. He stands on the stage and starts to

drunkenly sing, off key,

“What a day for a daydream

What a day for a day dreamin’ boy,
I’ve been lost in a sweet dream
Dreamin’ ‘bout my bundle of joy…..”

“Stupid ass!” Snuff said. “His only bundle of joy is

the bag of shit he has for a brain.”

Sergeant Platt finishes his song and waddles toward

us. Even in the half-darkness I see his paste white face.

His shaved to the skull head. His short arms and the

ridiculous metal pointer that expands and collapses

according to his moods.

“He probably uses it instead of his prick when he

wants to get fucked,” Snuff says just as Platt arrives and

sways and aims the metal pointer, fully extended, at

Snuff’s forehead.

“I know what you two are doing up here. You can’t fool

me. None of you can fool me. You’re smoking that shit.

That’s what you’re doing. Admit it.”

Snuff blows a puff of smoke in the air. I say nothing.

“”Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anyone. Shit! I

can’t blame you. It’s this fucking city. That’s what it is.

This fucking city. Move over.”

He collapses the pointer and squeezes in between Snuff

and me. He smells of cigarettes and alcohol.

“I know you guys hate this place. Probably wish you

were somewhere else. Nha Trang. Vung Tau. But I’ve got to

kind of admit that I like it here.”

He lights a cigarette and throws the match over the

side.
 “Shit! All the booze you can drink. All the pussy you

can eat. And what, every once in awhile some asshole throws

a grenade at you. Shit, more people die in car accidents

back in the world than die in Vietnam. That’s right! I read

it in Time.”

He leans into Snuff’s face and grins. He looks happy

and content in a stupid way. The war is treating him right.

“You’re lucky you’re an orphan,” he says to Snuff.

“You know, adopted and all that shit. There are times I

wish I never had any parents. No, it’s true. Sometimes I

wish my mother had abandoned me, and I was raised in some

run-down orphanage.”

His voice is shaky and saturated with vengeance. He

leers at Snuff as if passing judgment. Snuff ignores him

and looks at the ring of darkness that surrounds the city’s

border. Danger beyond. A great deal of danger.

“I’m going to tell you guys something that no one else

knows. You’ve got to promise me that you won’t repeat a

word of this to anyone.”

We stay silent.

“I joined the army to get away from my mother. I know,

I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. I had to get away

from her because she’s crazy. Completely fucking crazy!”

Again he leers at Snuff.

“Now, there’s a reason she’s so crazy. I have to admit

that, but I still had to get away from her. I still had to

get away!”

He waits for one of us to ask a question. He rests his

shoulder against me. We remain silent.

“Ten years ago….Ten? Yeah, ten years ago my sister

Melinda just disappeared. Vanished into thin air. She was

14. Walking home from school someone just snatched her up

and she was gone. Can you believe that? One moment she was

here and the next moment she was gone. A lot of people said

she was taken by the Hell’s Angels because they were in

town. They were drinking and doing a lot of drugs in one of

the parks, and no one, not even the police, dared to tell

them to get out of town. So everyone thought that they had

kidnapped my sister but no one had any proof. We searched

everywhere. The neighbors and everyone helped us, and then

one day the cops came to our house and told my mother that

she was probably dead because it had been so long since she

was abducted. Well, you can imagine what happened to my

mother. She went berserk. 100% crazy. She told the cops

that they had no proof my sister was dead, and as far as

she was concerned, the Hell’s Angels had drugged her and

kidnapped her and were using her as some kind of a slave.”

He reaches into his shirt pocket for his cigarette

lighter. He flips the top open and shut. Slink. Click.

Slink. Click. The noise is irritating.

“My mother said she’d never give up searching for my

sister, and for the past ten years that’s all she’s done.

She dressed herself all in black and took off! She went

everywhere. North Dakota. Maine, Idaho. Florida. You name

it and she went there. She’d come home for a day or two,

then some stranger would call and say they had seen one of

the fucking flyers she had distributed, and bang, she’d be

gone again. When my father died a few years ago, she stayed

home for a few months, but that didn’t last long. Before

you knew it, she was gone again and I was left alone.”

The dog in the courtyard is barking again, and

growling. Snuff looks over the railing and shouts, “Get

him, boy. Go get him!” He sits down again as if Sergeant

Platt is invisible.

“Most of the time the house was empty. Nothing was

ever in the refrigerator and I had to count on neighbors to

feed me until I was old enough to get a job. My friends

were afraid to come over the house when she was there

because she was so weird, and when she wasn’t there they

were still afraid to come over because it was a house where

a person had disappeared. You know, all my sister’s things

were still the way she left them the day she disappeared.

Her room was like a shrine waiting for her to walk in and

start her life where she left it. Anyway, one night after

my mother had gotten home after being gone for close to a

month, I sat in the kitchen with her and tried to talk to

her about something besides my sister. I started joking

around, you know telling her jokes to make her laugh, but

she wouldn’t crack a smile. Then I told her a riddle: ‘Why

should you always carry a watch when crossing the desert?’

God, she went off on me. She started screaming that I was

the Devil and then she threw her cup of coffee at me. The

next day I joined the Army and I haven’t been home since.

Four years. I don’t even write her.”

No one said a thing. A breeze the odor of gasoline and

garbage swept over the balcony.

“Why should you carry a watch across the desert,”

Snuff suddenly asks.

 “What?”

“The watch in the desert. Why?”

“Oh, it’s simple.”

“Yeah.”

“It has a spring in it.”

“A what?”

“ A spring. Get it? Spring. Water.”

“No wonder she threw a cup of coffee at you,” Snuff

said. “That shits! It’s stupid!”

“I was only trying to make her laugh.”

“I don’t care. It’s too dumb to laugh at.”

Sergeant Platt stands, his back to the railing. He

isn’t mad, just confused, as if we’re supposed to feel

sorry for him, or something. But he isn’t the kind of guy

you feel sorry for, even if he does have a sister who

disappeared and a mother who went crazy.”

“I’m going to Fitzmaurice’s room,” he says, fed up

with our indifference. “I’m in charge of making sure that

no one steals another thing. Either one of you want to

come?”

“No, I like it here,” Snuff says.

“OK. OK. I got it. You two need to smoke. OK. I’m out

of here.”

He raps his metal pointer on the railing and melts

into the clay darkness. I hear him choke on something. His

own anger? His mother’s words? A blister in his throat?

“I think I hate his guts,” Snuff says. “Every time he

says something I want to punch him in the mouth.”

“He can’t help it if he’s an asshole.”

“Bullshit! You know why he’s going to Fitz’s room? He

wants to steal all the rest of the shit himself.”

“What could be left? Socks and underwear?

“Not even. Fitz threw away his socks when they told

him he had jungle rot. The socks kept in too much moisture

and his feet were rotting away.”

***

How can people be so heartless

How can people be so cruel

Easy to be hard Easy to be cold

 ***

Fitzmaurice was an all right guy before he went crazy

and had to be sent to a hospital in Japan. Tall,

excruciatingly tall, and bony, excruciatingly bony, his jaw

bone jutted out, his cheeks were angular and lumpy, his

hair was like a nasty paste and his skin was speckled with

red marks, maybe old pimples, but red like measles. He

worked in the mess hall as a cook’s assistant but was so

inept at handling even the most basic military meals, that

the mess Sergeant, Sergeant Flakes, kept him busy by

sending him every morning to the Saigon market. He shopped

for vegetables and fruits and sometimes the fly covered

birds and small animals hanging from hooks in the merchant

stalls. He’d bring the food back to the mess hall and

Sergeant Flakes, never trusting the food wasn’t poisoned,

would order him to give it to the children who lived in the

alley next door.

Fitzmaurice liked the children in the alley. They were

his friends and gave him a reason for being in Vietnam. He

enjoyed throwing them the sliced pieces of fruit and

watching them devour it like little cannibals. But most of

all he absolutely loved a twelve year old girl who he named

Little Bird. She was tiny, very tiny - the top of her head
came up to his thighs - and she was excitable, very

excitable. When Fitz appeared in the alley with his plump

basket of food she would spin and spin and play the clown.

At first, she acted very shy, but as she got to know him,

she’d jump on him and wrap around his leg clinging like a

small monkey.

Fitz treated her very special. He loved her high

pitched squeal, her long hair twisted around her neck, her

skin smudged with grime. Her small fingers gripping his

pants. Beside the food from the market, after meals he’d

sneak out trays of hot dogs or chipped beef and bring it to

the alley where she lived under a tarp with two other

children. Like most of the children in the alley, Little

Bird was Amer-Asian. Her mother had abandoned her, and her

father could be any one of a thousand soldiers who trooped

into the Saigon bars and spent their military money on teas

and fucking.

Fitzmaurice even thought of adopting Little Bird and

bringing her to Philadelphia where his mother lived. He

thought his mother would love to have a “grandchild”

because the only child she had was him, and he never wanted

to marry, never planned to marry, never dared to marry.

Marriage was not in the cards for him, he’d say, and he
thought of making the military a career until one night in

the EM club he went crazy after a Filipino strip show.

Flipped out. Lost his head. Went completely insane.

No one knows what happened. Some said the Filipino

dancer excited him like he had never been excited before;

someone else said that the sperm in his brain finally

drowned his brain cells. “He should have jacked off more,”

the Captain confided in Snuff, but really, no one had a

clue that he was crazy, or going crazy, or was a closet

loon who couldn’t hide it any longer. He never twitched or

raved or babbled to himself. He never seemed threatening.

True, there were strange moments when he’d jam his face

into yours and imitate John Kennedy – “And so my fellow

Americans, Ask not….” – and then tighten his voice and

imitate Robert Kennedy – “A journey of a 1,000 miles begins

with one small step,” – and then he’d ask if he sounded

like them, and although he sounded nothing like them, you

praised his imitation because for some reason, maybe his

eyes or his sad face, you didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

But the night he went crazy he stood in the middle of the

EM club and shouted that the Jews were a soulless people

and that Jesus was the Savior because he not only saved us

from sin, He saved us from becoming Jews. And when Klien,

the Jew, told him he was full of shit because Jews not

only had souls, but were more intelligent then any Goy,

Fitz fell to his knees and said that Jesus was entering his

body in the shape of a light that traveled from his right

shoulder to his left hand and out to his fingertips and

would strike all Jews dead.

“Like lightening,” he said. “The wrath of Jesus leaps

out of my fingertips ready to strike at those who won’t

believe.”

Now nothing really happened except that Klien wanted

to smash a beer bottle over Fitzmaurice’s head, but Fitz

did go down to the street and into the alley where Little

Bird and all the other children slept, and he crawled under

the truck where Little Bird was coiled with a pack of half

naked children and started singing in a high falsetto voice:

Give me a ticket for an airplane

One way ticket to my baby again,
Lonely days are gone,
I’m a coming home
My baby wrote me a letter

All the children started laughing, laughing, - it must

have sounded like a party under there – but then Fitz said

the lightening was coming and started to beat on them with

his fists. He slammed their heads against the ground and

into the truck’s metal frame. The children screamed and

screamed, and, those who could, scurried out from under the

truck and scattered , while the others took the full fury

of Fitz’s rage and had their bones bashed and their heads

squashed into unconsciousness. The noise eventually

attracted the QC and the MPs, but not before Fitz had

severely hurt an eight year old boy and his six year old

sister. The MPs grabbed his long legs and yanked him out

from under the truck – kicking and shouting – and one of

the QCs had to fire his .45 into the ground before Fritz

calmed down and let them tie his hands and carry him away.

Little Bird was never seen again. She disappeared into

the city. An easy thing to do. The alley children move from

alley to alley. Two of them were sent to the hospital with

broken arms and bruised faces.

“I knew that Fitz was crazy,” Snuff says. “No one else

did, but I knew. I knew. I saw him in a bar once, buying

tea after tea for every whore in the place. Then one of

them tried to grab his dick and he punched her in the face.

Almost knocked her out. I thought every whore in the place

was going to kill him. They jumped his ass and scratched

the shit out of him with their fingernails.”

“How did he get out of there?”

 “A couple of infantry guys saved his ass. They loved

throwing the tea girls around like they were a bunch of

manikins. It was one hell of a fight.”

***

Breathe the humid air. The sticky air. The damp air,

clogging the nostrils, seeping with wetness. The body turns

into a syrup, sticking to shirts and underwear and socks,

and the armpits stick together like adhesive tape and one

day the monsoons will come and there’ll be more wetness and

mold and foot rot and we still will be here. Even after

we’re gone.

***

So Fitz was taken away, wrapped and packed into a

Medivac by a sweet nurse with licorice breath, and Sergeant

Platt ordered Clement and Gardner to pack up all his

belongings and ship them back to Philadelphia, care of his

mother. Clement, an ex-football player from a junior

college in the Midwest had a razor sharp temper and no

tolerance for psychos who “fuck around with dirty kids who

smell like swill and steal your money.” Clement wanted to

send them all to a pig farm, along with most of all the

Vietnamese, because they all smelled. according to him, and

their teeth were black and always falling out.

Clement was an obsessive teeth brusher. He had the

whitest teeth except for a brown spot shaped like a donut

on one of his front incisors. He tried to scrape it away

but was unsuccessful and concluded it must be a left over

sin from the days he was an altar boy and a petty thief.

His closest friend, Gardner, was obsessed with football

-high school, college, pro, running backs, full backs,

quarterbacks, those who played and those who really had no

future in the sport but, like Clement, pretended they could

have gone pro if only their knees hadn’t given out. Snuff

thought that Gardner sucked Clement’s cock because they

were always together, and Gardner had pudgy lips that were

always coated in Vaseline.

“I know it’s true,” Snuff says. “Whenever I get around

them I can sense that something else is going on."

I was supposed to watch them when they packed up

Fitzmaurice’s room because Sergeant Platt claimed it was in

the regulations that a third party had to accompany any two

people entering a private residence. I knew that was a

crock of shit and that Sergeant Platt, like Snuff, probably

thought the two of them were sucking each other off and he

didn’t want anything going on in Fitzmaurice’s room, or he

wanted some absolute proof as if I would have given it to

him.

So I just sat there. Indifferent as usual.

Fitzmaurice’s tiny room was claustrophobic and stuffed with

dirty clothes that smelled sour with sweat and rancid

cooking oil. Gardner’s first reaction was to cover his nose

with his soft hand and cough. He had, as he insisted, a

delicate nose. He took a small notebook from his breast

pocket and wrote: “Humid. Warm. Viral conditions.” Then put

the notebook back into his pocket.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Writing down the atmospheric condition of the room.”

“He’s a records man,” Clement explained. “Ask him the

daily weather since the day he got here and he has it. Show

him what the weather is today.”

Gardner flipped open the book. “April 8. 0845. 97

degrees. Sunny. Humid. Looks like rain.”

“So what did you write about this room.”

Gardner looked around and shook his head. “There’s

probably a virus waiting somewhere in here. This is the

filthiest shit I’ve ever seen.”

 “Yeah, just think, this fucker handled the food we

ate, and he was a pig.”

The room was a clutter of green fatigues and t-shirts

and underwear crumpled into wads and stuffed in every space

available. In an over flowing footlocker. Under the cot.

Piled in and on top of a bureau. Most of the clothes were

soiled, as if instead of washing them, Fitzmaurice simply

rolled them up and wore something different..

“Where did he get all these uniforms from?” Gardner

said, picking up a shirt by his fingertips and throwing it

on a pile on the floor. “

“It looks like he stole them. Look, some have his name

on them, but others have name tags ripped off. I bet he

took them out of the mamasan’s wash bin.”

“Or maybe they belong to the dead,” Gardner added.

“What do you think, Sig?”

The mildew and dampness smothered the senses. I felt

nauseous and wanted to vomit. “I need some air.”

“Go out in the hall. We’ll take care of this shit,”

Clement said.

“That’s okay. I’ll survive.”

 “This was one hell of a crazy fuck,” Gardner added.

“Maybe we should just burn all this shit.” He opened a

duffle bag and tipped it upside down. Balls of rolled up

green socks tumbled out. “Like balls of shit!”

Clement discovered a smaller duffle bag under the bed

and placed it on top of the cot. The bag was heavy and for

a moment Clement thought he had discovered something

valuable like a trove of military script. He unzipped the

bag and dumped the contents on the oily sheets. A rain of

pornographic photographs, 2” x 2” and semi-glossy, spewed

out into a pile. Hundreds of small black and white photos

of every possible sex act imaginable: men with women, women

with women, women with animals, boys with old men, women

tied and gagged and men putting coke bottles, cucumbers and

metal rods inside assholes and pussies.

The picture cards are sold everywhere in Saigon by

shoe shine boys and cab drivers, and Sergeant Platt must

have been one of their best customers. Clement held up a

batch of pictures tied together by a rubber band and

excitedly flipped through them. Teenage girls spread their

legs and opened their vaginas as wide as possible. Some of

the girls were no older than thirteen.

“Look at these pussies,” Clement gasped. “ They must

be form Hong Kong. They sure don’t look Vietnamese.”

Gardner grabbed the pack and gawked at every picture.

“Look at this, man, just look at this! Check this out, Sig.”

He held out a picture of a small girl sitting on a

chair and pulling her legs up to her shoulders.

“She doesn’t even have tits yet,” I said.

“That’s how I like them, “Clement said, grabbing the

card away from Gardner. “I want this batch.”

“What do you mean?”

“I found them, so I get to keep them. They’re mine

now.”

“Fuck you,” Gardner said. “They don’t belong to

anyone, so we split them.”

“Not these. I’ll split the rest, but not these. I love

teenage girls. I love their little pussies.”

Gardner grabbed the deck and when he did the cards

exploded all over the clothes on the floor.

“You fucking idiot,” Clement shouted and dove after

the cards in an effort to grab as many as he could. Gardner

dove after him and in the turmoil the two of them managed

to mix all the cards together.

“You’re a mother fucker!” Clement pushed Gardner who

was squatting over a group of pictures of women pushing

metal rods into their pussies. Gardner fell backwards on

his hands, but, as he did, he kicked Clement in the shins.

I watched. I wasn’t going to get into the middle of

two big jerks beating on each other over dirty picture

cards.

Clement knuckled Gardner on the thigh, and Gardner,

red and furious, kicked Clement again and sent him into a

pile of soiled fatigues. Clement started to pull himself up

but Gardner was quick and jumped across his chest and

slapped him over and over on the side of the face. Clement

was stunned by the ferocity. He howled and bellowed and

blew up into a large whirl of anger.

They churned in a blur of grunts and punches. They

choked each other until their faces were red and the fat of

their cheeks puffed up, ready to pop, ready to fill the

room of soiled clothes with spit and blood and loose teeth.

“You’re a mother fucker,” Clement gurgled, pounding

Gardner’s head on the floor. “The pictures are mine. Mine!”

 Gardner squirmed and flailed and managed to pull

himself away from Clement. On his haunches, on his hands,

he scurried to a corner of the room, spidery and almost

sobbing. Clement started to crawl towards him over the sea

of filthy clothes.

“Stop man, let’s just stop,” Gardner whimpered. “We’re

friends. Remember? Tell him to stop, Sig. Tell him to stop.”

I said nothing but Clement, still breathing heavy,

gushed, “You’re a mother fucker.”

“I know, I know, “ Gardner said, “ but hey man, you

can have all the pictures, I don’t care. Take all of them!”

“All I want are the young pussies. I don’t want the

others.”

“Take them all. Take them all.”

“I don’t want them all, asshole.”

Clement crawled around the floor gathering the cards

into a pile and making sure he carefully placed the young

girls into a separate pile. The stench of the soiled

clothes seemed to cloud the room, and an oily sensation

seeped over me and I shivered at the thought of touching

another piece of Fitzmaurice’s clothing.

 “I’m getting out of her,” I said, but Gardner was too

busy whimpering and Clement was too busy collecting the

cards. Neither one of them heard me. I slipped out of the

room and as I closed the door I heard Gardner say “ Could I

have at least a couple of the young pussies? One or two?”

I didn’t hear Clement’s reply.

***

But you tell me, over and over again, my friend

Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction

***

A red flash on the edge of the river. A sputter of

chaser bullets. Another quick flash. Then silence.

“Someone must be trying to get across the river,”

Snuff says. “Probably a slope wanting to steal off the

ships.”

“I hate the river. Nothing but an oil sludge.”

“Try swimming in it. The filth will pull you under.

When I first got here I thought, great, at least I’ll have

a place to swim. I went in and almost drowned.”

“I went across it once with asshole Jeans. He wanted

to see the other side.”

 “For what?”

“He’s an asshole, that’s why!”

“Asshole,” Snuff hisses. A round cloud of smoke exudes

from his mouth and nostrils. The smoke coils and the face

of Captain Jeans stretches out over the balcony. A sullen

face. Grayish white, with dark bags under the eyes like

finger prints. He stands like a pole. His stiff uniform is

precisely tucked. Precisely fitted. He wears wire-rimmed

glasses that glint in the sun. They flash like lighted

semaphores. He is the company commander.

“A fuck head,” Snuff says.

Captain Jeans thinks he is immune to pain - and even

death - because he was raised by a Protestant father who

found virtue in the denial of pain. He also believes in

wrath. Consummate and all consuming wrath! Like his father,

he believes that man’s wrath is like God’s wrath: a

definite sign of caring.

“Hate, specialist! It’s a form of caring. If we didn’t

have hate it’d mean we didn’t care about what happens. When

I show my hate, I’m saying I hate your sin, just like God

hates sin. Hating sin is good.”

 I don’t know what to make of his theory of hate. Or

what to make of him. On the small boat puttering across the

river he told me he wanted to help the Vietnamese because

they were sinners.

“They have to be sinners, just look at their skin

color. It’s like brown oil.”

We were taking the boat across the river because

Captain Jeans was new and wanted to see a village and not

a city. He thought Saigon distorted your view of the

people.

“The city people got to be different than the

villagers! A lot of men in the city look like fags. They

hold hands when they walk down the streets! And they let

their women be whores! I think they’re good people, but the

city does something to them.”

The boat puttered across the oily river, slick black

and smelling of stench. Captain Jeans sat at the fore and

looked across at the village that was coming out of a

morning fog. A fire flared in the center of the village,

but it was hard to tell what was causing it, search and

destroy or some morning ritual. On the other side of the

village another fire flared up and Captain Jeans thought

the two fires were like Indian signals. Not far from us a

Victory ship was starting its turn around to head back down

river towards Vung Tau and then to the Pacific and home.

Seaman watched us from the prow of the ship as our small

boat rose over the small swells. One of them yelled

something but I couldn’t hear him, and Captain Jeans wasn’t

paying attention.

When we were about half way across the river he held

up his right hand and waved for me to slow down. The motor

made so much noise that it hurt my ears and I was glad to

slow it down to a purr. Captain Jeans then sliced his

finger across his throat and pointed to the something in

front of him.

“Look, look over there! A body. Floating!”

A few feet in front of us a man’s body floated face

down in the river. His head was half-shaved and his arms

were spread out as if he had drowned while swimming. His

hands were puffy and extremely white. He wore a blue, Navy

shirt and the lower part of his body disappeared in the

slimy water.

When I cut the engine, our boat drifted toward the

body until the bow bumped against his head. Captain Jeans
reached over and grabbed the collar of the blue shirt,

pulled upward and rolled the body over revealing the man’s

face.

“I know that man, sir.”

Captain Jeans held on to the shirt as we drifted north

and farther away from the shore.

“What are you talking about, Specialist?”

“I think it’s Angelo, sir. Specialist Angelo. He use

to be the Company clerk before you got here.”

“The one who disappeared?”

“Yes sir, the one who disappeared.”

“Looks like the VC got him.”

“Could be anyone, sir. The men hated him. The

Vietnamese hated him. He was a real prick. An asshole, sir.”

“Don’t talk that way about the dead, Specialist!”

“Yes sir, but it’s true. He was always trying to get

someone in trouble. Well, someone got him.”

Captain Jeans carefully stood in a crouch and dragged

the body towards the middle of the boat. The body bobbed as
his boots clanked on the metal bottom. The boat rocked back

and forth and almost took on water.

“I can’t hold on to him much longer, Specialist. His

body must be saturated with river water. Let’s try to get

him to shore.”

“We can’t drag him, sir. The motor will never make it.”

A PBR emerged from behind the Victory ship now slowly

steaming down river. The PBR was about a quarter of mile

away and churning up the river into white foam.

“A PBR, sir. Maybe they can help us.”

“Try to get their attention, Specialist. Wave at them.

Stand up and wave at them.”

“I stood up and flailed my arms in the air, but the

PBR slid like an arrow away from us.

“Take my .45 and fire it in the air. Take it. Hurry up

before they get away.”

I bent over and took his .45 out of his holster.

“I’ve never fired a .45, sir.”

“Just push up the lever on the side and fire.”

 “This lever, sir.”

“Yes! Now fire! But watch out for the kick.”

I fired the .45 into the sun. The loud blam and the

abrupt kick pushed me down and backwards. The boat rocked

again, but I managed to hold my balance. Captain Jeans

gripped the dead man’s collar and used him as ballast. The

men on the PBR didn’t seem to hear the gunshot so Captain

Jeans ordered me to fire again and the same thing happened,

but this time the PBR slowed down and noticed us. I waved

my arms and a figure on the bow of the PBR waved back.

“They see us, sir.”

“Good. Any longer and I’d have to let the body go. He

must weigh a ton.”

“They’re coming. They’ll know what to do with him.”

“I hope so.”

Captain Jeans looked at the inflated body. It was

Angelo, all right. The distorted face and swollen skin

couldn’t hide his pernicious sneer and hateful pallor. When

he disappeared from the company, went into the city and

never came out again, no one cared. It took Captain Silver,

Captain Jean’s predecessor, a week to even report that

Angelo was missing. Some of us thought that maybe one of us

killed him. We had fantasies. Cutting his throat, biting

his jugular vein, smothering him in the middle of the

night. But as weeks passed, and then months, three and a

half months to be exact, we all forgot Angelo and went

about our business and assumed that one day we’d hear

something about him. We did.

The PBR pulled up next to us and the sailor on the

bow, an immense man with a solid fat belly and two guns in

a holster on his hips, grinned at our efforts to hold on to

the dead body. The sailor on the PBR was so large he had

trouble leaning over and reaching down.

“Try to get closer,” he yelled to the Chief

maneuvering the PBR into a position parallel to our boat.

The PBR squeezed against Angelo’s body forcing Captain

Jeans to jump back and let go off the collar. The body

slipped under the water as the Captain yelled for them to

pull the boat away. The Chief couldn’t hear him and kept on

manipulating his PBR against our boat until Angelo

completely disappeared somewhere beneath us. The large

sailor stared screaming “Pull away! Pull away!” but by the

time the Chief heard him, Angelo’s body was gone.

“Where is he? Where is he?” Captain Jeans yelled. “Do

you see him, Specialist?”

“He’s probably under one of the boats,” the large

sailor said. “Let’s drift apart and see if his body pops

up.”

The large sailor indicated to the Chief to cut his

engines. The two boats sat quietly in the middle of the

river and drifted as we peered into the water looking for

Angelo’s body. The water was ashen gray and reflected our

faces stretched over the sides of the boats, unable to see

anything beneath the surface.

“Did you know him?” the large sailor asked. He was on

his knees and grunting because his size made him

uncomfortable. “Or did he just pop up in the river.”

“We knew him,” Captain Jeans replied. “He disappeared

from our company a few months ago.”

“We find a lot of bodies in the river. Sometimes

they’re VC and we just let the fish and the weather take

care of them. Sometimes they’re our guys. We can’t always

take them with us. You know what I mean?”

Captain Jeans shook his head and stretched even

further over the boat. His reflection on the water was

white and wavy, and he stirred it up with his hand because

he thought his reflection could be stolen by the dead

Angelo. He told me that later, after the PBR left because

it couldn’t wait for Angelo’s body to pop up again. And

once we decided that Angelo sank to the bottom and it was

useless to wait around any longer - mainly because it was

getting dark and chances were that if we stayed on the

river, we’d end up like Angelo - we started back to the

city side, and Captain Jeans told me his theory of

reflections.

“I don’t know what you believe. Specialist, but I

believe in God. His force. His power. Everything that is

good is His creation. Made with a purpose. But everything

that is evil is made by the Devil, and those things,

Specialists are just reflections. Imitations. So when you

look in a mirror, you don’t see God’s creation, you see the

Devil’s work. That’s why I don’t look in mirrors or water

or anything that shows the Devil’s work, Specialist. It’s

the Devil I’m looking at and the Devil will try to steal

you into Hell. And I’ll tell you this, Specialist, I’m not

going to Hell.”

“Yes sir. But where do you think Angelo went?”

“Hard to tell, Specialist, but it was very strange

that we lost his body. Very strange!”

By the time we reached the shore, it was evening. Two

guards were posted on the edge of the river in front of the

French mansion that now served as a military compound. They

stood inside a sandbag bunker and played cards. One of the

guards, Reese, was from California and had the habit of

yelling orders at everyone who came toward his guard post,

no matter what their rank or association.

“Identify yourself,” he called out as we yanked the

boat on to the bank of the river.

“What the hell are you talking about, Reese?” Captain

Jeans said. “You know who I am.”

“I have orders to request everyone to identify

themselves, sir,” Reese responded.

“And I gave you the orders, Reese, now stop acting

like an idiot.”

“Sir, I am sorry, but you have to identify yourself.

So does the Specialist.’

Captain Jeans shook his head. “OK Reese, I am Captain

Jeans, 407th Division, TMA-MACV.”

 “And you, Specialist.”

“Your friend and fellow asshole, Specialist Sig, 407th

Division, TMA-MACV.”

“That’s all I wanted to hear. You two may pass.”

Captain Jeans sneered at Reese as he walked towards

his office, a small concrete bunker next to the main

building. The bunker was once a large storage shed that had

been converted into the Company office. Captain Jeans hated

it but gave up trying to move when he found out that the

only other place he could set up the company office was in

a large closet in the main building that was being used for

Top Secret conversations between officers. He slammed the

door that led into the office and disappeared. For a

moment, I thought that maybe he would never come out again

or that his reflection was stuck inside and his real self

had vanished.

***

I’m going up the country, baby don’t you want to go

I’m going up the country, baby don’t you want to go

I’m going to some place where I’ve never been before

***

“ Jeans is crazy,” Snuff says. “A week ago I saw him

on TuDo street standing like an idiot in front of a bar

window looking at the whores. They were waving at him.

Showing their tits. Lifting their skirts. All he did was

stare and look crazy.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. I watched him for a few minutes. That’s all.

What was there to do? Ask him if he wanted to have a beer

with me? No fucking way!”

“No fucking way!”

“Maybe he was looking for a church and made a wrong

turn. That’s what I think. Instead of going left, he went

right, right into Hell.”

****

It’s easy to get lost in Saigon, a city of torturous

streets. Just ask Shea who made it back to our unit, even

after being chased by Saigon thugs he cheated out of money.

He was slick with cards and pool and money changing.

Someone always fell for one of his scams and then tried to

beat him or kill him or complain to the company commander

who paid more attention to Shea being AWOL than any of his

cheating ways.

Shea was always going AWOL. He’d disappear for a week

or two, and then he’d show up smiling and telling some

bullshit story about being captured by VC whores in Cholon

or trapped in an underground tunnel near Ton Son Nhut. He

didn’t care if anyone believed him, and he didn’t care

about the Article 15 the Captain would slap on him like a

traffic ticket.

“The next time, Shea,” the Captain would threaten.

“The next time what?” Shea would reply. “You’ll send

me to Vietnam!!!!”

Shea’s lack of fear protects him. Most of us wish we

could be like him.

****

Every once in awhile when Shea runs off I try to look

for him. Not for any reason except that we were in basic

together and that sort of means something. Maybe one day

he’ll be found dead and then I’ll feel guilty that I hadn’t

tried to find him. What will I write his family? Dear Mr

and Mrs. Shea, Your son took off and someone killed him and

I never tried to find him even though we were in basic

together and we thought of each other as friends. So every

once in awhile I look for him so I won’t feel too guilty.

****

One day looking for Shea I found myself in the

courtyard of a Cao Dai temple. I thought it was a whore

house, and I thought I saw a young girl with snaky hair

disappear through the courtyard entrance. I thought she was

telling me to follow her but when I entered the courtyard -

pushing aside a metal gate that screeched on rusty hinges -

the girl had disappeared. The courtyard reminded me of a

church grotto with just enough sunlight to nourish a

fountain of flowers in the center of the yard. It was also

surrounded by a series of black doors and painted on each

door was a pyramid with an eye in the middle and sun rays

radiating outwards in a square border. I thought of the

pyramid on a dollar bill but found out later it was the

Divine Eye of Universal Salvation. The air was silent. The

doors were silent. The red flowers in the fountain were

silent. This would be a good place for Shea to hide for a

few days. Maybe the snaky haired girl led him through the

gates, and maybe he was behind one of those doors having

all the sex he wanted. Yes, it was a perfect place to hide.

But he wasn’t there.

****

“Better than the AWOL hotel!” Snuff coughs, wildly

coughs, hacking from the marijuana smoke, almost choking.

“Give me some water,” he says between coughs, then sloshes

down the chlorinated water from his canteen. “You don’t go

into that hotel unless you want to stay. Anyone else will
be thrown off the roof. It’s not a place for visitors.”

****

The AWOL hotel is near the center of Saigon. Decaying.

Run-down. Peeling walls six stories high with a swimming

pool on the roof. Anyone who wants to leave the war can go

there. It is filled with men who turned their backs on the

fighting, on home, on the world. They survive by selling

marijuana soaked in opium, stolen ration cards, phony IDs,

money orders, and anything else that pays for their air-

conditioned rooms and protection from the MPs. It is a

mini-corporation of mostly black men and Hispanics who

realize they have more against the white man than the

Vietnamese, so they bury their identities and pay off the

QC or White Mice to keep out anyone they think will send

them back to the jungle or fire bases or river boats that

glide into gunfire with a 50/50 chance of survival.

I thought Shea might be one of them. He was crazy

enough to abandon any chance of going back to the World.

Blonde hair. Blonde eyebrows. Blonde skin. An incongruity

among the dark skins. Nevertheless, the idea would have

appealed to him because he wanted to be a black man. He

said he hated being so white. Like high school composition

paper. He wanted to talk like a black man, gesture and joke

like a black man, walk with a swagger and tell everyone to

go and fuck themselves. Just like, he said, a black man.

But at the same time he loved the war. He even wanted to

drop nuclear bombs on Hanoi. So it was a slim chance that

he would have run away to a hotel where everyone thought

the war was a white man’s war against other races. A slim

chance. But there was nothing you could put past Shea.

I looked for him anyway.

I stood outside the AWOL hotel facing three White Mice

in white shirts and baby blue pants and .45s strapped to

their waists on shiny leather belts. They had small,

feminine hands hugging the butts of their pistols, but they

looked dangerous. When I started towards the entrance of

the hotel they pulled themselves together, shoulder to

shoulder, and refused to let me pass.

“You no lib here. No can go in.”

“I’m looking for a friend.”

“Go way. No here.”

The middle one had a whip coiled around his neck like

a brown snake. When he spoke the whip slipped off his

shoulder and I saw that it was also coiled around his

waist. The others grinned and tapped on their chest and

said something in Vietnamese that made the middle one

detach the whip from his belt and laugh.

 The cluttered traffic in front of the hotel reeked of

oil and gasoline. A boy on a bicycle, dead chickens

dangling off the back fender, shouted at one of the guards

who yelled back then spit. Motorbikes blared. Trucks.

Jeeps. A monsoon of noise. More boys bicycled by. They must

have known the White Mice were more interested in

protecting the men in the hotel than snatching any one of

them off their bike and putting them in the army. A girl in

an ao dai of liquid silk walked by and distracted the mice.

They teased her but she ignored them.

I tried once again to talk to the guards. “My friend.

Blonde. Very white Tall.”

I stretched my hand above my head but they didn’t want

to understand me.

A bulky black man opened the door to the hotel

entrance. I heard a squall of noise, and I saw shadows

scattering into rooms while cursing the person who opened

the door. Their voices faded as the door shut and the black

man yelled back “Eat shit mother fuckers.”

He had a gold tooth that glistened in the middle of

his teeth. His shirt sleeves were torn off at the shoulders

and his arms were covered with tattoos: AIRBORNE, TROPIC

LIGHTENING with a thunderbolt, MOTHER with a black rose. He

looked at no one but seemed eternally aware of the present.

I stopped him.

“Maybe you can help me. I’m looking for a friend of

mine. He’s been AWOL and his parents are writing me and

want to know if he’s still alive.”

His yellow eyes looked at me, indifferent. “So what!”

“All I need to know is if he’s all right. “

“You see that door. Everyone behind that door is all

right. It’s you, mother fucker, who ain’t all right. You’re

out here and out here don’t mean shit.”

Stone face. Solid. And not a show of emotion.

“I need to find my friend. His mother is dying,” I

lied. “Maybe he’d like to get in touch with her before she

does.”

“Who is this guy?”

“Shea. Gary Shea. He’s tall, blonde. Talks like he has

something caught in his throat.”

“I haven’t seen anyone like that. There’s only one

blonde guy in that building but he doesn’t sound like the

guy your looking for.”

“Could I go in and see? I won’t stay long. I owe it to

his parents.”

He looked in my eyes. His lips turned downward. He

looked like he wanted to bite a chunk of skin off my face.

I thought of ways to make friends with him. Offer him a

cigarette. Tell him I probably have black blood in me.

Moorish blood. Clotted with history. But I didn’t know how

to talk to him and he brushed past me and toward a cyclo

driver with skinny legs and dirty sneakers. A man without a

left arm rushed toward him and extended out his only hand.

The black man dropped a crumple of money in his hand, shook

his head at me and said “You see what’s out here? Pimps and

cripples. You want to go inside. You go ahead. Maybe you’ll

decide to stay.” He nodded at the QC and in an instant one

of them opened the front door of the hotel and let me enter.

***

I see the bad moon arising.

I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightnin'.
I see bad times today.

***

The hallway was dark and humid. Frantic voices whined

and moaned and spit.

“Who turned off the fucking lights?”

“Not again. Someone didn’t pay the electric bill!”

“We’re going to suffocate if someone doesn’t get the

air turned on soon!”

I managed to find a stairway as the end of the hall –

or what seemed to be the end of the hall – and sat down. I

didn’t know if I should go up or simply go back to the

streets and the gray sky and the monkeys hanging off meat

hooks and the moon ready to rise out of the river .

Lights flickered. Two men stood outside their doors

trying to light cigarettes with moist matches and wiping

sweat off their chest with military green towels.

“Should I start the count,” one said.

“I give it to 30,” the other said.

“You’re on. One…Two….”

When he got to eleven the lights vibrated on and the

hallway was a series of bare light bulbs and ribbons of

cool air drifted out of open doors and a squall of voices

yelled “Fuck yes,” and feeling very alone I climbed the

stairs until I reached a landing and a man with a loud

face, unshaven, plump, glasses slipped to the brim of his

nose, and Time magazine opened to an essay on Nixon’s plan

to end the war.

“You going upstairs?” His breath stank of sour cheese.

His clothes stank of shit.

“I’m looking for a friend?”

“There’s no friends here!” He twitched. Waved the

magazine in front of his face. “Where you from in the

world?”

“Boston.”

“What part of Boston? When people tell me they’re from

Boston they really mean Falmouth or Ipswich, or some place

far from the city.”

“Revere.”

He nodded. “That’s close enough. I’m from Charlestown.

Right near Bunker Hill. You ever go to Charlestown?”

“Every summer. The Charlestown swimming pool.”

“Yeah, I remember that place. You Italian?”

“Sicilian.”

“I’m Irish. Most of the time we Irish can’t stand you

Wops.”

“I lived next door to the Mulligans. We were always

fighting.”

“Seems kind of stupid now. Especially here.”

“Yeah!”

“We hated the Jews the most. There was always some

jew-boy to kick the shit out of. They always thought they

were better than everyone else Want a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Anything?”

“Cigarettes.”

He lit a cigarette and blew the stench of smoke over

his head.

“This hotel is a graveyard. Graves everywhere. I live

in one. Third floor. Nothing in the room except an old bed

that smells of piss and a foot locker. I think, maybe I

should go back to the world, but then, go back to what

world?”

He rolled his neck around his shoulders. I heard

cracking. Little knots. Each one a misery.

“I joined this fucking army. Can you believe that?

Went to Germany, met a girl and got married. The army was

going to let me stay there my entire tour. I even had a

kid. A boy. But then I got it into my head that I wanted to

see this fucking war. I was with the 52nd Signal Battalion

in the Delta. I was there two months when I got word that

some Nazi asshole rammed into my wife’s car and the baby

was thrown against the window and died. I went crazy. I

mean really crazy. They gave me orders to go back to

Germany but I came here instead. I haven’t been out of this

place for two months. My wife must think I’m dead, too.”

From a shadow nave near the stairwell, a voice

shouted “Don’t believe the asshole. He’s filled with shit.

Pure shit!”

“Fuck you, too!”

A skeleton shade stood on the landing. Grinning. He

too smelled like food. Ham and cheese and mustard and

pickles. “He’s been here for only a month. He doesn’t know

shit! Another month and he’ll be crying to go back to the

world. All I have to say is Fuck the World. I’d rather die

in this stink hole than go back. Fuck them all!”

And as quickly as he appeared, he disappeared, and the

boy from Charlestown said “Everyone talks shit around here”

and he aimed his Time magazine at my head and asked “Did

you hear about the concert in California? The Rolling

Stones and the Hell’s Angels. They stabbed some poor

fucker in the audience. Assholes! They should come here.

They can kill as many people as they want!”

****

Please allow me to introduce myself,

I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been round for a long long year,
stole many a man's soul and face

*****

Flies swirled around a light fixture in the hallway.

Scooted around, charged with electricity. I tried to leave

but he tugged and begged me to stay a little longer.

“I need someone to talk to. Someone from the outside.

I’ve got to know what’s really going on. Is Nixon stopping

the war? He’s a Quaker, you know. Quakers are against war.

My wife’s against the war, but every one else in my family

is for it. Get that! They want me here! Well, fuck them, I

wasn’t there when my kid died, and I won’t be there when

they die.”

His shoulders rolled in discontent, and there was no

where to turn but back to the grave of his room, the

grayness, the small lights, AFVN squawking Paul is Dead,

Paul is Dead, it’s on the album cover, he’s the one walking

barefoot, he’s the walrus, I am you and you are me and he

gasped one last gasp before he closed his door and

disappeared.

***

On the sixth floor landing of the AWOL hotel three men

squatted and played a game of hearts in their underwear.

Naked chests. Sweaty. Oily. They shouted at each other.

“Mother fucker, I’ve got you by the balls now!“

“Fuck you!”

“Fuck you!”

“No, fuck you!!!”

When I tried to slip by them they shouted even louder.

“Hey asshole, get the fuck out of the light!”

“Mother fucker.”

“Who the fuck do you think you are?”

The one with thick eyebrows and black eyes and

effeminate hands, real effeminate hands, stood up and

barked “You smell like a piece of shit? Are you a piece of

shit?
 He stared at me as if through a fog. I shrugged my

shoulders and said, “We all smell like shit, we’re in

Vietnam.”

Everyone laughed, twisted and contorted like monkeys

and said they couldn’t disagree with that and that Koreans

smelled worse because they ate fish shit and BLAM, a pistol

shot went off in my head and again, again, I saw the

Korean’s face blown off right before my eyes near TuDo

street at three in the afternoon, blown off by a Vietnamese

cop who hated Koreans more than he hated the VC.

“I’m looking for a guy named Shea,” I said as they

continued to howl and fart and shout at each other even

louder.

“You know why we smell like shit?” one of them asked.

“We all lost Jesus. Jesus was my friend. He was with me 24

fucking hours a day. But I lost him. I lost him.”

“That’s right. That’s right.” the other two added.

“You want to know how many villages I burned down? You

want to know how many old ladies I kicked in the ribs? I

poisoned everything. Stole anything. I even told one old

man I’d kill him and his entire family if he didn’t let me

fuck his daughter. She was 15 and he let me. Said nothing

about it, either. Shit, I even tried to kill my sergeant,

but he killed himself instead and saved me the trouble.”

 Everyone stopped laughing and looked at each other.

They looked uncomfortable, then one of them broke the pause

and said “I think we should throw this mother fucker out

the window for getting in the way of our game.”

“Leave him alone,” the one who lost Jesus replied,

“He’s just another piece of shit. That’s all.”

***

On the roof patio two whores sat on bar stools and

opened and closed their legs to the rhythm of

Sugar, ah honey honey

You are my candy girl
And you've got me wanting you.

A scrawny bartender rolled his head with the rhythm and

wiped the bar top with a rag. There was a narrow swimming

pool with blue-green water. On the edge of the pool a man

in his underwear sat on the pool’s edge smoking a cigar and

drinking beer. His stomach was plump and hairy. He had a

tattoo of an eagle on his right chest. A small eagle

wrapped in the American flag and standing on a tree branch.

The tattoo looked as if it had faded under the white hot

sun.

I bought a Vietnamese beer that looked like it had

small wooden chips floating in the bottle and tasted like

formaldehyde. The whores ignored me. They looked at the man

by the pool. I could tell they belonged to him. They

giggled and wobbled their legs and tried to sing along with

the song but their voices sounded like shrieks and the man

by the pool yelled “Shut your fucking mouths and just sit

there.” They giggled some more, but their giggling was very

self-conscious.

Shea was no where to be found. The roof top was empty

and seemed to be the under the sole control of the man by

the pool. We drank our beers - he from the pool’s edge, me

on the barstool - the whores squirmed and the bar man wiped

and wiped. The sun heated up the roof and the pool water

seemed to steam. The man by the pool pulled himself up from

the pool’s edge and walked towards me. He scowled and

lumbered and left footprints from water behind him. His

underwear dripped from the pool water. One of the whores

handed him a towel but he threw it back at her.

I don’t need a fucking towel,” he said. “ I need to

know who the hell you are.“

“I’m looking for a friend. His name is Shea, I....”

“You’re CID. I can smell it.“

“CID! You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m looking for my

friend....”

“Bullshit! Did you hear what I said: Bullshit. You’re

fucking CID. I hate you fuckers. You come up here and all

you want is my pussy and my money“.

 “I’m just looking....”

“Get the fuck out of here and tell the rest of those

CID mother-fuckers they don’t scare me. You see these

whores. They’ll cut off your balls and play pool with them

if I tell them to. And you see this little fucker who was

nice enough to sell you a beer, he has a special way of

cutting up body parts. All I have to do is say when and

your ass will be floating in the river. You got that!”

The two whores stared at me, and the bartender

whistled a Vietnamese song. The song was a warning. I know

it was a warning.

***

I see the bad moon arising.

I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightnin'.
I see bad times today.

***

“You should have told the guy to go fuck himself,”

Snuff says, as he leans over the side and extends his neck

to look down in the courtyard where a horde of noise

echoes. “A bunch of cowboys are fucking with the old

people,” he says.

And sure enough a group of teenagers are shouting and

poking at the old people who squat and try to ignore them.

“Leave them alone you assholes,” Snuff yells over and

over until he gets the teens attention. They stick up their

middle fingers and yell back, “GI, mudder fucker. Go to

hell, GI!!” They continue to poke and pinch the old people.

“Little fucking assholes,” Snuff says and takes out

his .45 pistol which he always has trouble firing because

it either jams or jolts him so badly he misses everything

he aims at.

“This will scare the fuckers,” he says, and then

fires. Blam! Blam! And the courtyard vibrates with the

noise and the boys look up and the old people cower and

Snuff fires again, the bullet going nowhere, but the teens

don’t know it and scream “GI, numba ten.” They run in all

directions. Even the old people. Ducking. Weaving. The

courtyard empties and all that is left is the stench of

smoke form the food cooking on the small grill.

“The fucking MPs are gong to come up here if you keep

that up.”

“No they won’t,” Snuff says. “Who gives a shit if

someone kills another slope. I’ll probably get a medal.” He

shoots again into the deserted courtyard until his clip is

empty and a voice is heard shouting from below. It is Hill,

the data collector. He keeps tally of how much ammunition

is off-loaded at Cat Lai, an ammo dump up river.

“Who the hell is shooting,” his disembodied voice

calls. “Is it you, Walters. You’re a fucking crazy asshole.”

Snuff snickers and snaps back from the railing’s edge

and says he hates Hill because he’s a stupid mother fucker

who thinks he’s important because he keeps track of

ammunition and everyone knows, except the officers, that

he lies about the ammo, makes up his own figures - figures

that sound reasonable because, in the long run, no one ever

pays any attention to them because the ammo keeps coming

and coming. And Snuff hates Hill also because he saw Hill

eating a can of Canadian bacon, raw, straight out of the

can, and thought that Hill looked like a little pig.

Hill yells again from below, “ Is it you, Walters?”

Snuff laughs and says there’s no need to answer

because Hill is too fat and lazy to walk up the stairs to

find out who is shooting into the alley.

****

Mrs. Murphy had giant teeth

That nipped you skin
And scarred your cheeks
But all in all
And with some luck
Mrs. Murphy was a damn good fuck.

***
Hill sat in his office chair, pudgy, oily, looking

out at the river from the second story of the French

mansion which is nothing more than old desks, chalk boards,

rusting typewriters, sandbags and an ice box salvaged from

what was once the servant’s quarters. He rocked back and

forth, his hairy hands tangled on his stomach, looking

somewhat like a small ape, and coughed up what he called

the dirt of the city, the swill of the river.

“You ever get near one of those fucking Koreans,” he

said, (BLAM). “They smell like fish. Salty fish. I thought

the Chinks in Cholon were bad, but no way. The Koreans

smell the worst.”

He scratched his whiskered face, smudged like shoe

polish, and confessed he was going to refuse the medal the

army wanted to give him for his year of service.

“It’s a so what kind of thing,” I said.

“You don’t get it, do you? “

“Get what?”

“I didn’t want to be in this fucking army.”

“Neither did I.”

“You’re different. You don’t care. I care. I was in

protests marches and all that kind of shit. They got me

here just because I didn’t want to go to jail. I’d be a

hypocrite to take an award.”

His face drooped over a long green record book where

he kept his numerical observations like : 2,000 tons ammo -

Phu Bai or 1,000 tons ammo - Dong Ha - and he erased a set

of numbers he thought were exaggerated. “Fucking army. They

always lie. From the day I got into basic until now I’ve

never heard the truth. Did I ever tell you that they first

gave me orders for Germany, but when they found out I was a

protestor, they changed my orders for this shit hole.

Imagine that.”

“How did they find out you were a protestor. You

didn’t tell them, did you.”

“No, a fucking traitor told them. Back in basic. His

name was Greenfield. It was his third time in basic because

he was waiting for the army to give him CO status. He

thought by being a conscientious objector he’d get out of

Vietnam. So, while he was waiting for the army to decide,

he was sent through basic three times. He didn’t do

anything. He just sat in the barracks all day. I thought he

was honest. I mean, a guy protesting the war right in the

middle of the army. That’s something to admire, don’t you

think?”

Hill had the habit of clicking his teeth when he asked

you a question. Little clicks. Like a telegraph. Sometimes

it would drive you crazy.

“So we became friends. Not good friends, but we talked

about the war and all that shit. He told me about going

AWOL. He said he just walked off the base and hitchhiked to

New York City where he hung out for a month. The MPs picked
him up coming out of a movie.”

He rolled his chair to my desk and slid a postcard of

the Empire State Building in front of me. “See this? I use

to live in the city. Before I was drafted. Before

everything.” He kissed the card and flipped it on to his

desk.”

“ So this asshole is brought back to basic by the MPs

and he’s put in my unit. He tells me all about being CO and

how it was going to get him out of the army. He said he’d

go AWOL again if it wouldn’t affect his CO status, We were

friends for a couple of weeks, then one night, I don’t know

why, maybe the pressure of basic, maybe I just didn’t want

to be in the army, I decided to go AWOL. It was a quick

decision. It wasn’t planned or anything like that. But I

was an asshole to tell Greenfield. I thought I could trust

him since he hated the army and the war so much.”

“Don’t trust anyone.”

“You can say that again. I took off, just walked off

the base and hitchhiked into Augusta. I was gone maybe four

hours, hanging around a couple of bars, trying to decide

where I wanted to go. But, just as I was about to get on a

bus to head out west, the MPs showed up and arrested me.

Turns out Greenfield told them where I was thinking of

going, and they wasted no time in finding me. Man, did I

suffer for that. I got extra duty for weeks and they docked

my pay an entire month.”

“What’d you do to Greenfield?”

“Told his fucking ass off. I wanted to kick in his

head but I was already in enough trouble. He got his,

though, he got his.”

“What happened to him?”

“They gave him CO status alright, but then they sent

him to Ft. Hamilton and made him a medic. A medic without a

rifle. Asshole. He’s probably dead by now, at least I hope

so.”

***

How can people be so heartless

How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold

***
Snuff sways and cackles. A shadow figure in the

darkness. Calm. Indifferent. He says, “Hill doesn’t deserve

anyone’s time. I don’t know how you can listen to him. He’s

nothing but a bag of nerves. An ugly dude who can’t even

get fucked by the whores.”

“I have to work with him. You’re upstairs in

communications doing nothing but smoking your ass off,

while I’m downstairs having to listen to his shit. A week

with him and you’d end up cutting off his balls.”

 “If the fucker has any balls.”

***

I am everyday people, yeah yeah

***

When Hill first came to Vietnam he decided to think

of himself as a pacifist liberator. I suppose it was a way

to deal with his compliance. He wandered through the

Saigon market or strutted by the bars on TuDo street, his

M-14 slung over his shoulder, his green hat tipped back,

his face smug and superior. He tussled the hair of

shoeshine boys who in turn would scream at him because he

was waking up their ancestors. He explored the CaoDai

temples and was confused by the statues of their favorite

saints like Joan of Arc, William Shakespeare and Lenin. He

was cautious when a CaoDai priest came near. They were

different. They only ate vegetables and prayed in front of

a triangle with a shining eye in the middle. He thought

that they were like the Ku Klux Klan and carried on secret

assassinations when no one was looking. He vowed never to

turn his back on one of them.

He also promised himself that he would stay moral.

Walk by the bars on Tu Do street and pretend he didn’t hear

the caterwauling whores or the pimps with their cheap

offers or the money lenders promising profits or the shoe

shine boys offering filter-tipped cigarettes of marijuana,

some soaked in opium. He was not going to give in to the

filth and dirt, no, not him, he was against the war back

home and he wasn’t going to promote the ugliness of the war

now. Or so he said, until the inevitable happened. He met a

tiny whore who tugged on his shirt while he tried to keep

on walking with his M-14 pointing to the sky and his nose

tilted up to the sky.

She promised him a blow-job, cheap, “numba 1.” She

promised to jack him off for a little more than a drink in

the bar. She promised him a numba one fuck, all night, for

as little as his ration card. She promised and promised and

he tried to ignore her, stay aloof, but she coiled around

him and pinched his stubby cheek and patted his abnormally

stiff crew cut and touched, yes, touched his ass. No one

had ever done that, ever! So, before he knew it he was

sitting in a dark corner of a bar called the Australian and

buying her one tea after the other, little shots of caramel

colored water that he thought was whiskey, and she rubbed

him until he climaxed in his underwear. Her name was Kim,

or so she said, and Hill fell in love with her.

It wasn’t long before Hill began to visit the

Australian most every night, and always in the corner Kim

would rub him to a climax as he fell more and more deeply

in love. And then one night when he and Shea decided it was

time for Kim to do more than rub his dick, the two of them

showed up at the Australian only to find that Kim wasn’t

there, and, in fact, would never be back.

“What do you mean she’ll never be back?” Hill said to

the bartender.

“She go home. Delta. Her husband die.”

“Husband! She never told me she had a husband.”

“He soldier. He killed by VC. VC numba 10, no numba

one.”

Shea told me that Hill almost collapsed. I don’t

believe him because it sounds like something Shea would do,

but Hill did leave the bar, crushed, despondent, and told

Shea that he needed to be alone. “Go to your girl,” he

said. “I need some time to think.”

Hill was gone for two days. Some of us thought he was

dead, murdered somewhere in Saigon by Cowboys or VC. Some

of us thought he was in some hotel whimpering over his lost

love. But as he told it, he left the bar thinking about Kim

and immediately went into the Chicago bar and met another

girl, but this one was not like Kim, this one was more

conniving.

“I gib you numba one fuck,” she said, sticking her

slippery tongue into Hill’s ear.

Hill squirmed and quickly forgot Kim who only rubbed

his cock while it was still in his underwear.

“What’s your name?” he asked, as if her name had

anything to do with fucking.

“My name no name,” the whore giggled. “My name no

name. You numba one GI. Buy no name tea.“

She crossed her legs, pulled up her skirt and showed

Hill her panties. “You like no name?” she asked. “You numba

one GI. I gib you numba one fuck.” She licked his ear again

and tapped her index finger against his crotch. He could

feel his cock getting hard.

She laughed and put his hand on her leg and told him

to feel her pussy. She nodded at the bartender who quickly

brought her two teas. She had a brown blemish on her

forearm the size of a quarter, and she pulled down the

sleeve of her shirt when it was exposed. Hill ignored it.

All he cared about was finding another girl to love.

“Where you from?” he asked her. His usual stupidity.

Try to get to know the girl as if she were going to be your

girl friend. Like home. The pretty girl on the front porch

talking to you all night about school and football games

and the latest parties. Then, maybe, you get to kiss her

and touch her tits or, some times, rare times, actually
slide you hand up her dress and feel her damp, squishy

pussy.

“Cholon,” the girl replied. She sipped the tea and

shifty-eyed the bartender who poured two more shot glasses

of tea.

“I’m from New York City. You ever hear of New York

City?”

“New Jork City numba one. Numba one. Very big. Like

titty,” she said as she cupped her tits and pushed them

together. “Numba one titty. GI like?” She puckered her lips

and made a sucking sound.”

Hill could hardly control himself. He stuttered.

Sweated. Got a hard on. The girl giggled again then grabbed

his hand and let him touch her tits. The bartender brought

over two more teas and whispered something to the girl. She

laughed and shook her head in agreement to something. “You

pay and we go fuck,” she said.

“Pay? Yes. I pay. Who? Who?”

“Pay bar. You pay bar. Then we fuck.”

Hill paid the bar man for the drinks, the girl and a

room. Excited. Horny. He was finally going to get fucked.

No more cock rubbing or kissing in the dark corners. Now he

was going to actually feel his cock inside a pussy.

He followed the girl out the tinted doors and on to

the street. He noticed she limped and he couldn’t tell if

it was a war wound or birth defect. He was too shy to ask

and wasn’t sure she would be able to explain anyway.

The street was crowded and noisy. While they waited

for a pedi-cab, Hill exchanged 40 dollars of military

script for piasters. He thought it was something he’d never

do. Month after month the sergeants said that anyone

exchanging money was helping the enemy. They took our money

and bought weapons on the international market. You were a

scum ball, a traitor, the enemy himself, if you exchanged

your military script, or greenbacks from the states, for

their cheap ass piasters. Hill didn’t feel like a scum ball

or a traitor, he was a numba one fuck, and the whore in the

back street was showing him exactly what that meant.

“Where we going?” he asked when he heard her tell the

driver something in Vietnamese. She seemed to know the

driver and he seemed to understand her quick direction.

“I gib numba one blow job.”

“Blow job! You said numba one fuck.”

“Yes. Yes. Numba one fuck. But now, numba one blow

job.” She smiled and he couldn’t resist relaxing when she

opened his pants and slid her purple lips over his prick

and sucked. Loudly sucked. As if every sound telegraphed a

turn down a street, a crawl through an alley. Hill never

saw the cluttered slums, the mamasans squatting by open

fires toasting bits of meat, gaunt children running next to

the cab, the ever increasing darkness. He rolled his head

whenever she rolled hers. Moaned when she touched his

balls. He wanted the moment to last forever. He was amazed

at how good it felt. He grunted and moved his hips as a

wave as cum spewed out into the whore’s mouth. She flapped

her hand in front of her face as if she were choking, stuck

her head out the window and spat the cum into the night.

Hill moaned. Caught his breath. “You numba one, co,

numba one. Now we go fuck. Yes.” He reached over to hug

her, but she tapped the cab driver on the shoulder and he

abruptly pulled over to the curb. She opened the door and,

his pants around his thighs, shoved Hill out. He landed on

the street. Dumbfounded. Lost.

“You numba one GI,” she laughed, as she slammed the

door and the cab disappeared into the musty alley.

Sitting on the sidewalk with his pants around his

knees, Hill called out: “Hey, come back here. I wanted

more.” But the cab didn’t return, and when Hill pulled up

his pants, he discovered that his wallet was gone along

with his stash of greenbacks worth five times more than any

Vietnamese money.

“Mother fucking slope,” he cursed. In a doorway behind

him, barely visible, an old mamasan saw what had happened

but decided to simply leave the boy on the ground alone.

***

Get back, get back

Get back to where you once belonged
Get back, get back
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back Jo Jo

***

Snuff cackles at Hill’s misfortune. His name almost

gurgles in his mouth.

“He’s such a dumb fuck,” Snuff says.

“He really hated the slopes after that.”

“He always hated the slopes. He’s like one of those

assholes in basic who kept on scaring us about this place.

I had a captain who said he had to kill an entire family

because they tried to stab him when his back was turned.”

“I had a first sergeant who spent the day screaming at

bayonet practice, ‘Never turn your back on a slope.’ He was

always trying to scare the shit out of us.”

“I hate the lifers. All they do is lie and try to

scare you. We had one gung ho fucker who’d walk around

while we were cleaning rifles and tell us how he gave out

poison candy bars to kids because he knew they were really

VC. He was so filled with shit.”

 “They’re all filled with shit!”

***

Oh-oh-oh-oh (magic)
Oh-oh-oh-oh (magic)
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh (magic)
Oh-oh-oh-oh (moment)

***

Typewriters clack out cargo stats and weights of

ammunition. The French Villa. A bureaucracy of soldiers

clicking off secret documents and staring out the glassless

windows at the jungle across the river where VC - Charlie

- Victor Charles - The Cong - would like to know what we

know. The colonel. Colonel Pearson, bald, tough, dirty

lower teeth from chewing tobacco, turns the pages of Time

magazine and remembers Korea. The cold. The dirt. The odor

of oily jeeps struggling in snow. For him, Korea was a

better war, even if his best friend was killed there. Next

to him is Major Clark, who Snuff believes likes men a

little too much, nibbles the butt of a pencil and worries

that Colonel Pearson will say something to him. They don’t

get along. Major Clark resents the fact that Colonel

Pearson is an artillery officer who was placed (or

misplaced) in charge of a unit that was in the business of

transportation. Across the room is Specialist Nelson. He

studies a collection of figures - the war on paper - and is

determined to win an Army Commendation Medal by the end of

his tour. He stays at his desk, an M-14 leaning against the

wall and a mock hand grenade as a paper weight. He takes

pride in the fact that he never leaves to take a piss

unless he absolutely has to.

Hill is the prominent one. Maybe because his arms are

so hairy, or maybe because he smells like fart, or maybe

because he never stops talking and when he talks his voice

is loose and loud. But I think it’s because he’s obsessive

when it comes to taking sneak peeks at the Vietnamese

secretary Kim Wa. She has a double chin and a scar across

her forehead. No one knows how the scar got there, although

Hill believes it came form the war and Nelson believes it’s

a birth defect. She doesn’t do much because she doesn’t

understand English, so most of the time she slouches behind

a book of English grammar and practices her Ts and Ds. Her

father also works for the army although no one knows what

he does. Once in awhile he visits the colonel and they look

at a printout of cargo figures, and then he disappears for

a month and comes back to look at another printout of cargo

figures.

Kim Wa is the father’s gift to the steamy room. Her ao

dai flows over the wood floor when she walks and she always

smiles at you. Some of us think she’s flirting, but most of

us know she’s juts nervous because she doesn’t understand

what we say. She drifts by Hill’s desk like a swan, drops a

message from the upstairs communication room on his desk

then drifts back to her chair and grammar book. Hill snaps

his pencil in two and pretends it’s Kim Wa’s chunky neck.

The truth is he wants to fuck her even though he hates her.

“You remember those World War 2 movies?” he asks,

while glaring at Kim Wa murmuring to herself.

“Which ones?”

“The ones where everyone is united and proud to be

Americans fighting against evil in the world.”

“That was all bullshit propaganda. Hollywood was a

whore for the government and still is. They needed people

to fight.”

“You’re fucking crazy! World War 2 was a good war. My

father is living proof of that! When the Japs bombed Pearl

Harbor he joined up like everyone else. No one ran away to

Canada. No one dodged the draft.”

“Everyone did what they were told like good little

girls and boys.”

“Bullshit! My Dad joined the Navy. He knew he had to

get the Japs.”

 “Did he?”

“They sent him to the Atlantic. He didn’t understand

why since he wanted to go to the Pacific. But after seeing

a couple of those movies, he knew why he was fighting.”

“Like I said - propaganda. The government can prove

pygmies are a threat to national security.”

“Man, you sound like a commie. You should be

investigated. Maybe you should have gone to Canada.”

“I don’t like the cold.”

***

Vietnam. The television production. A daily

newsreel at suppertime.

“Pass the beans, honey.”

“Yes dear.”

Blam!

“Look at that, a boy just lost his leg, honey.”

Blam! They watch the black and white and wait for

color. They see boys crouch behind a wall and two shadows

running and they can see that the two boys are really
SCARED!

“Blow the commie VC away--you idiot,” a sergeant

screams. “Lock and load, ready on the right, ready on the

left, ready on the firing line!”

They see the two boys dive into a bunker without any

weapons. They’re wearing jungle fatigues. They were close

to being shot. What was wrong with them? They were a half a

squeeze from death?

“I love the beans, honey, but the steak was too tough.

By the way, where’s Johnny?”

“Johnny?”

“Yes, Johnny, our son.”

“Oh, him! He’s over there! Next to the boy with a

bullet in his head.”

****

And it's one, two, three,

What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam;
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.

***
 “You’re a fucking traitor,” Hill says. “Just another

fucking traitor.”

***

Hill’s fatigues fit him like a road tramp in a

Depression era movie. He stands at the office window

watching the loading and unloading of cargo ships and

envies the sailors who pull at heavy chains and prepare to

sail down the river into the Indian Ocean and back to the

world. San Diego. New Orleans. Anywhere but here!

He stares at the gray river and notices two boys

splashing in the water. They look like they’re drowning.

One of them is trying to get the attention of the sailors

on the ship’s deck, but the sailors don’t see them. Hill

whispers, “I hope they drown.”

On the edge of the loading dock an MP spots the two

boys. He walks to the edge of the dock and shouts at the

boys to get away from the ship. The boys flail and

flounder. One of them starts to panic and is grabbing on to

his friend’s shoulders. They bob and splash. The MP shouts

at them again, but this time he fires his M-16. Bullets

splunk in the water, but the two boys are more concerned

that they are drowning. A sampan slides out from behind the

ship. The men on the sampan ignore the boys as they attempt

to gather loose lumber thrown overboard by the sailors.

 Hill mutters, “Monkey assholes. Spend millions of

dollars on them and they steal from us. Shoot their asses

off! Blow them out of the water!”

One of the boys desperately grips a large piece of

floating lumber and manages to stay afloat. The other boy

holds on to him. The MP yells, “You little bastards,” and

tries to fire another round at the boys, but his rifle

jams.

The boys paddle toward the sampan and hold on to the

stern. The men on the small boat laugh at them and then

laugh at the MP who is slamming his palm against his rifle.

The boys and the sampan drift away, and one of the boys

raises his middle finger above his head and waves it at the

MP.

“Little fuckers,” Hill hisses. “I hope they’re chopped

into bits by the ships propeller.” His eyes widen as the

propeller, huge and golden, slowly churns and creates a

strong undercurrent. But the boys are too far away to be

sucked under and by the time the MP un-jams his rifle, the

boys have glided into the middle of the river. They soon

disappear.

“”If I had my way, I’d kill them all,” Hill says.

***

When I was seventeen

 I stood by the window screen
Peeking through the blinds at my backyard,
And out of her door
At the age of thirty-four
Came Mrs. Murphy and her cat, Reynard.
I watched her ass
As she wiggled past
Holding in her arms the Monday wash,
I watched he thighs,
She hung her clothes to dry,
And I wanted to kiss her puffy twat.

***

Snuff work in the communication’s room - a small attic

beneath the concrete dragon that adorns the crest of the

roof. The room is cramped with teletype machines and if the

VC knew this, one well-placed rocket could destroy our

entire operation. Such an idea makes Shea nervous, and

Snuff has fantasies of a rocket piercing the wall and

exploding in the middle of his chest.

He once thought - because Hill had convinced him -

that Kim Wa was a spy for the VC. Hill said that she was

passing on all kinds of information to the VC, such as

where the communication’s post was located, and that the VC

were already making plans to take out the post. Now Hill

knew that Kim Wa liked Snuff. More than she liked him, in

fact. She was always smiling at him and trying to get his

attention. Snuff ignored her because he thought she looked

like a piglet. The whores on Tu Do street were better.

Sexier. Leaner. And they didn’t care if they couldn’t speak

English.

Hill hated Kim Wa’s English - which wasn’t really

English but a collection of phrases from her English book -

“Yes sir, I like to read.” “Yes sir, I gib to my family.” -

and using Snuff, he decided he would try and get Kim Wa

fired.

He did it this way:

The Vietnamese had no or little toilet paper. They

were always scrounging for tissue-like carbon copies or the

computer reports generated by MACV at Tan Son Nhut. Most of

the time the reports were two or three days old and too

outdated to be useful to anyone. The war never looked

backward. The reports piled up in a storage room and,

although they were marked SECRET, waited six months and

then were burned in a perforated barrel by the river.

Kim Wa coveted the reports as they stacked higher and

higher. Where we saw useless paper, she saw toiler paper.

Where we saw inflated statistics, she saw place mats. Where

we saw improbable projections, she saw hand towels. And

when Hill slowly opened the storage room, he knew Kim Wa

was taking count of the growing collection of reports and

desiring them. He also knew that she was suspicious of him

and never trusted him since the day he had a fit about

having to work across form her.

 “What if she’s a VC?” he protested to Captain Jeans

who was in charge of hiring civilian workers. Hill believed

Captain Jeans showed little discrimination in choosing who

would work around the Villa. After all, one of the people

he hired ended up killing an MP and then disappearing back

into the city.

“You can trust her,” Jeans argued. “She comes from a

good family. Her father is an ARVN colonel who works in the

embassy. He and the colonel have become good friends.”

“That doesn’t make her clean.”

“Well, you’re going to have to trust me on this one.

She’ll work here until we can find another place for her.”

Hill glared at her for weeks. She tried to avoid

looking at him because she was afraid of him, but he made

sure she saw his hairy arms, his angry eyes, his sneering

smile.

But she liked Snuff and this afforded an opportunity

for Hill to make his move to get rid of her. Snuff was new

in-country then, so he knew little of what was going on.

When Hill told him Kim Wa was a possible VC, Snuff believed

him and went along with Hill’s scheme.

“All you have to do,” he told Snuff, “is to give Kim

Wa a couple of reports to take home. She may not want them

at first, but tell her it’s okay to take them.”

 ‘What if she still doesn’t want them.”

“Oh she will. She likes you too much.”

“Fuck that shit.”

“She likes your hair. It’s blonde. The Vietnamese love

blonde people because all of them are black heads.”

Hill laughed at his pun but Snuff didn’t get it until

later, but he did cooperate with Hill. There was a chance,

he thought, that Kim Wa was a VC and he would be doing a

service to his unit to get her fired.

At first Kim Wa was hesitant to take the reports, but

after looking into Snuff’s blue eyes and touching his soft,

blonde hair for good luck, she took six reports and started

to walk off the compound with them in her arms.

The MPs immediately arrested her for being a spy.

“Stupid bitch,” Hill said. “I showed that stupid

bitch.”

But Kim Wa’s father was a colonel in the ARVN and when

he heard of what happened to Kim Wa, he called Colonel

Pearson and the colonel, feigning shock, quickly went to

the MP station and got Kim Wa released. He lied to the MPs

and told them the reports were not SECRET but declassified

and useless. He wasn’t telling the truth, but his story

worked and a week later Kim Wa was back, sitting across

from Hill and reading her English grammar book. She

suspected Hill was the evil person behind her arrest, and

she wanted him killed by the VC. She wished she knew a VC

because she would have paid him to assassinate Hill, and,

maybe, Snuff, too.

***

“I regret that ever happened,” Snuff says. ”I was new

in-country. I should have shot Hill myself. Here have

another joint.” He coughs out smoke. “We need to be fucked

up to go to the whore houses.”

“You sure you’ll make it?”

An affectionate grin through his mustache. “Just aim

me in the right direction and make sure I don’t fall off

the roof. I’ve been pronounced dead once already. I don’t

want to go through that again.”

“We’re both dead. Or might as well be.”

“Not the kind of dead I was. I was drunk as hell and

slammed my car into a telephone pole at ninety miles an

hour. If I hadn’t been drunk, I probably wouldn’t have

survived. The cops took one look at me and said I was dead.

I could never have survived the impact. They covered me

with a sheet and were bringing me to the morgue when I

fooled them. I rose from the dead right there in the

ambulance and scared the fuck out of everyone.” He pauses

and drags deeply on the marijuana. “Shit, Sig. If I were

dead I would never have known it. I didn’t feel a thing. It

was like being asleep.”

Smoke streams out of his nostrils, turns into mist and

dissolves. “I had a friend who was an epileptic,” he says.

“He had one of those fits and drove his car into a canal.

That was two years ago. Before I was drafted. They said

three people tried to pull him out of the car, but the car

sank before they could get through the window. The car was

quickly sucked under and it was ten minutes before they

could find his body. They said his face was purple and his

eyes were like glass. I had a weird thought then. That

while he was drowning I was at home eating or watching some

dumb television show. I don’t know. Death is weird. Yet

it’s what’s supposed to happen. I think about death but now

it doesn’t seem to matter much.”

“I don’t like the idea of just disappearing from the

world.”

“Yeah, but in two hundred years most everything here

will be gone, and in fifteen million years nothing will be

around. Nothing will be remembered”

“You scare the shit out of me.”

“Doesn’t scare me. Kind of comforts me. This war, and

all wars before it, will melt into a million more events.

Everything will have been done for nothing.”

 Snuff fill his lungs with smoke, counts to ten then

exhales. “Maybe you’re right. Then maybe you’re not. Smoke

another joint and relax.”

***

Smoking. Smoking.
Toking. Toking.
Ruminating on anything.
How the moonlight mellows reason,
How the colonel’s voice did sing.

***

Sing! By God, the old bastard can sing! His voice

bellows and echoes against the bulky ships as he runs on

the gravel road that surrounds our French villa. He runs

down the quay where cargo workers unload crates of

mechanical parts. He glistens and chants out loud:

“Chucka, Chucka, Chucka, Wooooo

I am running after you.”

He runs four miles every day. He runs in white silk shorts

with a red bandana tied around his head. A towel flaps from

behind his shorts. He runs and pretends he’s in combat,

chasing Charlie through the swampy rice paddies, crawling

into trees and calmly waiting to kill the enemy with sniper

fire. He runs because he hates Major Clark and wants to cut

Major Clark’s throat with one of his four bayonets. He runs

away from the urge, but the running never works. The image

of Major Clark and his swishy walk and girlish voice and
thin fingers holding a pencil like a little prick, and his

consistent questions: “Colonel, do you think our numbers

are wrong? Colonel, do you think we should let the enlisted

men in the secret closet? Colonel, do you think MACV will

approve of our travel arrangements? Colonel, do you think

we should get more info from Dong Ha?” Colonel. Colonel.

Colonel. Chucka. Chucka. Chucha, wooo. I am running after

you. He runs expecting any day to receive a new assignment.

Infantry. Artillery. Any place but here where his face

shines like an Indian head nickel and scrunches into

expressions of bitterness. He runs away in his heart from

what he terms “The Unreal Army.” The pencil pushers. The

statistic makers. The excess luggage that bloats an already

bloated army. He runs until he grows fierce and charges

toward the sunset daring anyone to stop him.

***

Snuff, smoking heavier: “Promise me one thing, Sig.

When we get back to the world we’ll see each other again.

I’d like to see you in a few years from now. I’d like to

see what we become. Maybe we’ll talk about old wounds.”

“What wounds?

”We’ve got to have some.”

“Yeah. the fourteen stitches from the bald whore in

Cholon. That should get me a purple heart!”

 ****

A month after I arrived in-country, Shea took me to a

whore house bar in Cholon. I didn’t know what I was doing,

but I trusted Shea who talked about Cholon as if it were

the safest place in Vietnam. I didn’t know that most of it

was off-limits because it was the first place Charlie

attacked in the TET offensive. It’s the Chinese district

and, from what everyone says, the Vietnamese hate the

Chinese.

Shea and I rode to the bar in a tiny, blue car that

looked like it came out of a Disney cartoon. We went into

the bar and bought two bombity-bombs - Vietnamese beer with

small chips floating in what looked and tasted like

formaldehyde. The bar was a large room with vinyl booths

and chrome chairs and shot glasses stacked on tables and

ceiling fans twisting smoke in all directions. The room was

stuffy and humid. We sat in a red booth and two whores came

and stood over us.

“No fucky,” Shea said. “We want number one cigarette.”

One of the whores immediately left while the other

grinned and showed she had very few teeth even though she

couldn’t have been older than eighteen.

“Numba one cigarette numba ten. I gib numba one blow

job. You wan blow job?”

 “Go fuck yourself,” Shea said. The whore stuck her

middle finger in his face and walked away. “The marijuana

is better out here,” Shea went on. “ It’s soaked in opium.

Really gets you wrecked!”

We bought two more beers and watched the whores

coiling around whoever wanted them: a man dressed in

civilian clothes (CID, Shea explained. You can always tell

by the short sleeved white shirts.), two Chinese who threw

a great deal of money on the bar, and a few stray soldiers

who, like us, weren’t supposed to be there.

“I want you to try this smoke,” Shea said.

“Soaked in opium!”

“It’ll give you a trip. One time I smoked it and ended

up in some hotel near the river and I didn’t know how I

even got there.”

An unusually tall Chinese girl with a large head of

hair came into the bar from a back room. She lit a

cigarette, looked at the bartender and clicked her lighter

open and shut. It was smoky in the bar but the girl could

still watch herself in the mirror behind the bottles of

liquor. The smoke smudged most of the faces in the bar, and

she had to squint hard to see what she thought she saw:

Shea’s blonde hair, white skin and jittery hands.

There was a jukebox in the back part of the room. A

soldier was pounding on its side because he had lost his

money. A song started to play

Dizzy
I'm so dizzy, my head is spinnin'
Like a whirlpool, it never ends
And it's you, girl, makin' it spin
You're makin' me dizzy

“Shit!” Shea said.

“What’s wrong?”

“See that big whore over there?” He nodded at the tall

whore who plucked at her hair with a small comb.

“What about her?”

“I used to live with her.”

“She’s big!”

“A great fuck, too. But she’s crazy. Real fucking

crazy.”

The girl ordered a beer from the bartender, all the

while looking into the mirror at Shea. She chugged the beer

like a man.

“How long did you live with her?”

“About a month. During TET she hid me under her bed

for three days. Two VC broke into her room but they were so

impressed with her size, they refused to search the room.”

“They probably wanted to fuck her.”

“VC don’t fuck.”

The girl slid off the stool and, with the beer bottle
in hand, she started to make a path through the room. Other

whores backed out of her way. Men gazed at her, amazed by

her size. She wore a red and white polka dot dress and

swayed with hostile sexuality. Half way across the room she

shrieked “Shea!!!” He pretended to ignore her, but she was

hard to ignore. She came up to the table and stared down at

him.

“Why you here, Shea?”

“Go fuck yourself, co!”

“You fuck you. Numba ten mudda fucka.”

“Fuck you!”

The girl vibrated venom. She screeched in Chinese as

she poured beer on Shea’s head.

“You fucking whore,” he yelled, and stood up. He was a

head shorter than the girl and looked like a little boy in

front of a giant. She slapped him on the side of his head,

and he slapped her back. They shouted, spat, slapped and

charged at each other. The people in the bar crowded around

and encouraged them to fight even more. Shea shoved her

against a table and swung his beer bottle at her face,

“You fucking whore!” He broke his beer bottle on the

edge of the table, turning it into a jagged weapon. The

crowd laughed as the girl broke her beer bottle on the edge

of the same table. They both half squatted and circled

around each other, jabbing the bottle in the air. It was

then I decided to play mediator. I was an asshole! I should

have walked out, especially when I found out later that

they fought like this a number of times before.

I stood between them and tried to push Shea towards

the front door. He was lost in his shouting. “Fucking

whore! Fucking dumb whore!” She shouted back. “Numba ten,

GI, numba ten!!” She jabbed her bottle and nicked the

backside of Shea’s hand. He lunged at her and missed her

belly by inches. The crowd kept on laughing, edging them

both on. I grabbed Shea’s arm and pulled him to the door.

“We’re getting out of this fucking place.” He half-resisted

as I pushed him out the door and into the street where a

circle of cab drivers shouted for our fare. The big girl

stood at the door screaming, and when I looked at her, she

grabbed her big head of hair and pulled it off her head. It

was a wig! She was bald! Not shaven, but bald! She held her

hair in her hand and then she threw it at Shea. When the

hair landed on the sidewalk, she threw her broken beer

bottle. The bottle missed Shea but hit my elbow. At first,

I didn’t realize that the bottle had gashed me, but then I

got inside the tiny blue cab and saw blood dripping down my

arm and covering the back of my hand.

Dizzy
 I'm so dizzy, my head is spinnin'
Like a whirlpool, it never ends
And it's you, girl, makin' it spin
You're makin' me dizzy

****

“A bald whore,” Snuff says.

“Bald as an egg. Shea told me she lost her hair after

a B-52 strike. I don’t know why. Maybe she had the shit

scared out of her. Whatever, she left me with a wound.”

“You can get a purple heart for that.“

“Bullshit! More like an idiot’s medal. Shea went back

to the whore the next night. He spent a week with her then

left again. She’s probably looking for him now. Just like

us.”

***

Rubber soles scratch on gravel and Colonel Pearson

runs and sneers and snarls in disgust over the latest

edition of Time magazine. “Another story that lies about

the war. A bunch of traitors!” He wishes he were back in

Korea. 1951. Life or death. The vehement winters. The cold

hills and the thousand evil communist gnomes. He has a scar

on his right thigh - the result of a Chinese bullet - and

whenever he touches it, secretly when no one is watching,

he thinks of youth and coming of age and his sudden, or so

it seems, manhood.
 Back in his office overlooking the river, he drops the

magazine on his desk. His tiny metal eyes survey the large

glossy map of Vietnam that covers his entire desk. He taps

his fingertip on the snap shot of his family glued over the

city he most despises, Hanoi. His entire family has tiny,

metallic eyes. Even his wife. They are tense in front of

the camera. Graveyard faces. Solid. Unwavering. His wife

could have been a Salem witch burner. She stands at

attention behind a maroon couch. Her children sit like

department store manikins. There are two boys, twins,

overweight, muscular, and a plump girl around thirteen. The

sons are impressive. They wear white turtle neck sweaters

and US flag lapel pins. Their eyes squint. Their jaws are

solid. They resemble Colonel Pearson who doesn’t really

miss them because he loves the army more. The only trouble

is he wants to get back in combat, but the army thinks he’s

too old. He’s requested transfers to combat groups a number

of times, but his request are either ignored or lost in the

catacombs of MACV, the mini Pentagon at Tan Son Nhut.

So he resents his command and reads the tissue thin

pages of his overseas edition of Time magazine and rereads

the anonymous reporter’s account of the battle they are

calling Hamburger Hill.

***
 I found my thrill
On Hamburger Hill
On Hamburger Hill
Where I’ll be killed!

***

He wants to get into the battle. His chair squeaks

when he leans back and recalls the smell of bullets. The

smell of sweat. The smell of enemy dead. He closes his eyes

and imagines the charge, the comrades in arms, the truth of

battle, but when he opens his eyes and sees nothing but the

chattering officers and enlisted men gathering cargo

statistics as if they were bullets, he wants to strip off

his uniform and run until his skin falls off.

***

“Pearson is an asshole,” Snuff says. “A flaming

asshole! He came upstairs yesterday and complained about

how long it took to get the morning report. He’s the kind

of asshole who can’t ask for anything without demanding it

first. I told him I’d get the report to him when they came

in. He looked at me as if he wanted to put a hole in my

forehead. ‘You’d do better than that if you know what’s

good for you.’ Fucking asshole!”

“He hates us all!“

“And all of us hate him!”

Snuff flips a cigarette butt over the railing and

watches the red ash disappear into the dark.

***

“You know, Specialist,” Colonel Pearson yells from

across the room with the high ceiling and seven gray desks.

His tone is professorial and the entire room gets ready for

another one of Colonel Pearson’s lectures.

COLONEL PEARSON’S LECTURE: # 102

SUMMARY: The room is filled with too many exits. Everyone

can leave but no one ever returns. This is not the way of

war. The dead sing. Memory is bittersweet. There is nothng

honorable about every day being the same. Your eyes are

meant for crying.

“You know, Specialists,” he says to me, I had a weird

dream last night and you of all people were in it.”

His eyes glisten. His shiny head flashes like the

bottom of an aluminum skillet.

“I dreamed that you and I were in Korea charging a

hill. We were almost to the top when I ordered you to throw

a grenade into an enemy bunker. You laughed and threw the

grenade, killing everyone inside. When I woke up I thought

that maybe I should send you into the field. I can arrange

it.”

“Why would you do that, sir. I’m happy here in Saigon.”

“I thought you should get the experience of killing

someone face to face. To hell with this shit of shooting at

shadows on the river. A couple of months in the field and

you’ll like Saigon even more.”

He grins and imagines all of us hiding in the saw

grass and waiting for the enemy. He holds up Time magazine

and peeks over the edge. He wants us all on our bellies

with dirt in our mouths. He wants to glare through battle

smoke and find the VC hiding in holes.

“Sixty days! Sixty days and I’d have this entire

company ready to level Hue and bring back no survivors.

There’d be no pacifist in my company. No wishy-washy

chicken asses always changing sides. Ignoring the word of

God! Once God was talked about at Harvard, but the last

time his name was heard, the janitor had just fallen down

the stairs. Godless generation! Tomorrow you’ll be asking

Jesus for salvation from Doomsday while today you sit on

your ass!

“You kids think you know all the answers when you’re

nothing more than whining babies. First, they gave you the

Peace Corps and you brats turned it into an outfit of

misfits handing out free candy to people who aren’t worth

it. Then we gave you college and all you do is protest. You

scream ‘Love’ but it’s in your heads and not in your

hearts. All you’ve got in your hearts is sand.”

 (Colonel Pearson stops for a second and dares anyone

to contradict him. His face twitches as Kim Wa’s typewriter

clacks out punctuation marks.)

“We were asked to come here by the Vietnamese. Did you

forget that? They want us here.”

(Kim Wa continues typing. She doesn’t understand what

the colonel is saying.)

“Diem wanted us here. Thieu wants us here. You can’t

distort the issue. We kill commies here or we kill them in

California. You kids don’t get it and that’s why this war

is taking so long to win.”

He pauses and looks at his magazine again. He wants to

be in 1942 when no one asked questions. Everyone was

willing to die. Everything was clear. Life magazine was a

catalog of truth and not overstated lies. In 1942 they knew

who the enemy was. They knew how to tell the difference.

****

YOUR FRIEND FROM YOUR ENEMIES or

HOW TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JAPS AND CHINESE
Life Magazine, December, 1941

The Chinese are public servants. They walk erect.

The Japanese are warriors. They walk with a stoop.

The Chinese have eyes that slant up.

The Japanese have eyes that slant down.

The Chinese have parchment yellow skin.

 The Japanese have earthy yellow skin.

The Chinese have a higher bridge to their nose.

The Japanese have a flatter nose.

The Chinese never have rosy cheeks.

The Japanese sometimes have rosy cheeks.

The Chinese have scant beards.

The Japanese have heavy beards.

Southern Chinese have round, broad faces

Japanese have more round-faces.

Chinese have the rational calm of tolerant realists.

Japanese have the humorless intensity of ruthless mystics.

****
Colonel Pearson throws his magazine in the trash just

as Lieutenant Johnson swaggers to his desk and hands him a

report on bright yellow paper. Lieutenant Johnson has a

white speck of bread stuck in the corner of his mouth. His

shirt is showered with bread crumbs.

“If I’m not bothering you, sir,” Lieutenant Johnson

whispers, “I’d like you to look at....”

“Everyone bother me, Lieutenant.”

“Yes sir, but, I think, ahem, I think you should look

at these figures. there isn’t enough cargo getting to Hue.”

“Well get it there, Lieutenant.”

“How sir?”
 “How? How? That’s your job Lieutenant!”

“I understand, sir, but getting it there....”

“If you were in combat right now, Lieutenant, would

you ask me how to shoot at the enemy?”

“No sir.”

“Then Lieutenant just do it! I don’t give a damn about

your figures. Get the cargo to Hue if it takes carrying a

pallet on your back.”

“Yes sir.”

Lieutenant Johnson squirms and squeezes his baloney

thighs together. The colonel disgusts him. He’s unfit to

command an administrative post. Unfit to speak. Unfit to

think. Unfit to even to make a decision. He should be in

the field where he wants to be. He doesn’t know how to

collect, collate, and examine information. Lieutenant

Johnson’s three rules of administration. He doesn’t

understand the importance of the “back up men.” The “brains

behind the entire business.”

Colonel Pearson hands the yellow sheet back to the

lieutenant and adds, “ I know you don’t understand me, or

my logic, but I don’t think that’s really necessary. The

main point is to remember that a tugboat can’t push a ship

with its engines working backwards.”

Lieutenant Johnson isn’t sure if he’s been insulted or

not. He returns to his desk, slips the yellow sheet of

figures under his ink blotter and begins to write a letter

to his mother. Colonel Pearson leans back and savors his

parting comment. He admires his witticisms. His quick,

incisive remarks. He bloats like a Chinese sage and lodges

what he has said to Lieutenant Johnson in a special part of

his mind. For years he has been gathering choice sayings

with the hopes of one day putting them in a book for

eventual publication. They span the circuit of situations

people usually find themselves in.

A SMALL SAMPLING

Well, that looks like Noah saying it looks like rain.

What the superior considers wrong, everyone will consider

wrong.

Everyone has brothers, but I alone have none.

The dirt of the country makes the rulers of the world.

Flowers are ugly once they’ve been walked over.

“And furthermore, Lieutenant,” Colonel Pearson called

across the room the moment Lieutenant Johnson wrote in his

letter “I’m having difficulty with this old colonel”, Cut

an onion under water and you’ll never cry. The same holds

true for war.”

Lieutenant Johnson politely smiles, but the colonel

understands the disdain beneath the lips, the sneer beneath

the forehead. He understands the resentment over his

position, the anger at his indifference to officer farewell

parties, poker games, weekly visits to steam bath houses,

the whores. But no matter how much the other officers hate

Colonel Pearson, he hates them more.

****

The colonel runs. “Johnson has no balls! Put a gun in

his hand and he’ll shoot his foot off” Runs past the villa

with the dragon on the roof, the converted rooms of

standard green. The villa is in decay and someday will fall

down. Already the walls are damp and moldy and the old

concrete fence is sliding into the river.

But the colonel runs. Muscles tense. His lean body

shines. He has white hair on his chest. Runs. Until the

twilight turns him into a ghostly runner wishing he could

disappear into the darkness. Forever.

***

The day I left for the Army

I knew I was going to Vietnam.
My friends drank to my departure
And promised to write me a number of times.

And when I got on the airplane

I saw them staring at me
The observation window was cloudy
With tears and sobs of pity

The silver eagle was roaring

Because I sat on its back
 There was no palace of pleasure
There was only mortars and flack.

I think of the crows that were bathing

In my backyard during a rain
Now I think they were all laughing
Because I will never again be the same.

***

Helicopters with search lights glide overhead:

TUCKA-TUCKA-TUCKA-TUCKA

They blast our ears and drown our voices. Snuff stands and

shakes his fist, “You fucking noise makers, “ but he can

hardly be heard. “Charlie’s across the river. It’s only us

down here!” The helicopters glide away, and Snuff rises and

bends over the railing. Below the tin roofs clutter around

the hotel and reflect the moon. We can see into some of the

rooms where the inhabitants sleep on the hard floors

smelling like dead fish. Nucmam! Marinated fish oil. A

special sauce that covers the odor of rancid food.

Marijuana seeds crack. Bright ashes splatter. “Wow!”

Snuff says as the ashes land on his hand. He shakes them

off and continues smoking. Tonight we’re smoking heavier

than usual because we’re going to ride the cyclos around

the city. We sit in the basket seats and speed through the

city as if we were in our own movie.

“You see that building over there?” Snuff asks,

pointing to a four story building we a rooftop garden and

French architecture. “The Saigon police chief has a

mistress on the third floor. Hill saw them together, but I

have trouble believing him. I don’t think these slopes care

about sex. The boy selling pictures of a whore with a conch

shell in her pussy cares about one thing and one thing

only: money!”

“A guy up in Tuy Hoa once told me that he and a few

other guys were in town and they couldn’t find any whores

so they knocked on a door and asked the papasan if he had

any women to sell. The guy sold his wife and daughter for

ten dollars a piece.”

Snuff drops back on the bench. Standing stoned is too

much for him. “These people will sell anything for a

dollar. Anything!”

***

Left a good job in the city,

Workin' for the man ev'ry night and day,
And I never lost one minute of sleepin',
Worryin' 'bout the way things might have been.

***

A soft flare lights up a part of the night. Shots are

fired. Tracers dash and dissolve above the rooftops. Some

Vietnamese soldier firing out of nervousness. Afraid of the

dark. Afraid of the noises. Afraid of his own people. They

are awkward soldiers. Their steel helmets are too big for
their heads. Their flack jackets are too heavy for their

bodies. They are suspicious of everyone. They stop people

for no reason. Maybe to show they control the war when they

really are impotent and generally unimportant. Most of us

ignore them. Most of us don’t care if they die.”

***

Whoever has seen what I have seen

The damp nights when deaf mutes
Dance in the streets, their breast oozing milk
Whoever has felt what I have felt
The fear that someone wants to kill you
Slit your throat or put a bullet in your heart,
Whoever has dreamed what I have dreamed
Nightmares of cemeteries
And bodies without hearts
Whoever has dressed like I have dressed
A baggy uniform with too many pockets
And boots with canvas and steel toes
Then come out of hiding and tell us now
What kind of cowards boys really are
and what kind of cowards they’ve always been.

***

The half-moon lingers on my face.

***

“Who’s that?” Snuff whispers, sighting a shadow at the

top of the fire escape on the other side of the roof. A

squat shadow. It lights a cigarette. Blows smoke into the

night. Paces around in a circle. Looks in our direction.

Maybe it sees us. Maybe it doesn’t. I hide my marijuana but

Snuff openly smokes his. I’m afraid of someone catching us

and sending us to LBJ with its high fence and reputation

for abusing pot smokers.

I throw my joint over the railing. Sparks flash as it

hits a corrugated roof below.

“Wasting good shit,” Snuff says, refusing to throw his

marihuana anywhere.

“It looks like Sergeant Evans.”

“Evans is sleeping.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s always sleeping. Even when he’s awake.”

Sergeant Evans hated us and it was easy to imagine him

stuttering and rehearsing what to say at our court martial.

“Y-Y-Yeas sir. On the th-thirteenth of D-D-December I

dis-discovered the de-de-defendants sitting on the r=roof

top patio and sm-smoking M-M-MARIHUANA. m-m-my

recommendation is th-that th-they be dis-dis-dishonorably

dis-dis-discharged from the United States Army. Th-Thank

you.”

I think it’s a zip,” Snuff says, cupping his joint and

remaining calm.

“How can you tell?”

“I can smell him. Take a deep breath. Smell the odor

of fish.”

A “zip” is a Korean. Not many people like them. They

are deadly. Some say that they are the most deadly in hand-
to-hand combat and others say they are the most deadly and

destructive when they use their fire power. Some people

call them “Devil Raiders” because they have a kill ratio of

1 to 17. All of them seem to be named Kim.

I think the Vietnamese hate them most. They think

they’re in the war for profit and nothing else. They live

in Saigon because they can buy things cheap at the American

PX and sell them to taxi-drivers and black marketers at

inflated prices. Some of the taxi drivers don’t trust them

because they believe that all the Koreans want to do is

kill them.

The first time I saw a Korean killed was on the road

from Long Binh to Saigon. He was driving a jeep when a boy

on a motorbike zipped up to him and threw a grenade in his

lap. Everything exploded and the jeep rolled into a gully

carrying the shrapneled body. His head flopping backwards.

His hands flapping in spasms. His life quickly over. The

boy slipped away in the sudden snarl of traffic, and all of

us, the privates and sergeants, the Vietnamese squashed

inside motor scooter buses, the guards on the bridge, the

farmers in the rice fields, all of us froze for a second

before we thanked whatever powers there be that the boy

didn’t kill us.

***
 A KOREAN STORY

There was a Korean who lived on the 7th floor with

three other Koreans, and he was shot in front of our hotel

by a Vietnamese policeman. This Korean, I never got his

name so I’ll call him Kim, loved to walk at night in

Saigon. He had no curfew because he was Korean, so he could

go anywhere at anytime. He walked the night streets under

chattering rain. Walked and walked and walked. Through the

tangle of alleys. Along the side streets and near the

river. He’d see MPs in front of military hotels talking in

quiet conversation. He’d see the reporters and white

shirted civilians talking on the patio of the Continental

hotel. He’d see a secretive figure looking out a doorway

near him and the two would eye each other and say nothing.

The rain was the only speech. Dripping off the roofs,

splashing in the gutters. Soaking the city in a small

monsoon.

One night Kim found a dead body by the river. Someone

had cut off its hands. He didn’t think much of it because

it was a Vietnamese. The river was a polluted waste. The

buildings were veiled in black and the ship lights

reflected on the river as if they came from beneath the

water. He hated the river because he thought it brought bad

luck. He wasn’t wrong.

 During one of his night walks he encountered a

Vietnamese policeman who didn’t like to see him walking

around Saigon. Saigon was not his city. After ten o’clock

Saigon belonged to the Vietnamese. He ordered Kim back to

the hotel but Kim refused to budge. The policeman insisted

and nudged Kim in the direction of the hotel. Kim

reluctantly gave in and started for the hotel. No one knows

why but the policeman decided to follow Kim and when they

arrived at the front entrance the two of them started to

argue. Maybe it was because the Marine guards were at their

post and watching. Or maybe it was because I was smoking a

cigarette next to the concrete barrel that protected the

hotel from sappers who would drive their bombs into the

lobby. Or maybe Kim had decided to finally confront the

officer after being followed for two blocks. Whatever it

was, Kim decided to argue with the policeman. They shouted

at each other although neither knew what the other was

saying. They stood nose to nose, waving their arms in all

directions, and then, without a pause, the policeman pulled

out his pistol and shot Kim directly in his heart. His

body simply dropped. Plopped to the ground. He jerked about

for a moment and then became absolutely still. The

policeman gestured for the Marine guards to come out from

behind their concrete barrier and take the body away, but
they just stood there. One of them called for an ambulance

while the policeman wrote in a small pad. None of us wanted

to touch the dead body. None of us wanted anything to do

with the killing. We just waited for an ambulance to carry

Kim away. Just waited.

***

It's your thing, do what you wanna do.

I can't tell you, who to sock it to.
It's your thing, do what you wanna do.
I can't tell you, who to sock it to.

***

The figure at the stairwell stares at us. I see his

shadow. The glow from his cigarette.

“I bet he’s smoking a joint,” Snuff says.

“Cigarette.”

“Joint.”

“Cigarette.”

“Who gives a shit,” Snuff concludes.

Within a few minutes the shadow disappears and Snuff

adds, “Told you not to worry. No one’s going to catch us up

here; and if they did, I’d deny what I was doing anyway.”

I light another joint. Lungs wheeze. Throat burns. The

two of us become numb and still. We prefer it this way.

***

“I have only two fears,” Nelson said a week or so

before he left and returned to the world. “Death and going

home.”

“Shit! Send me home before I die,” I answered.

“I don’t think anyone will know me when I get back,”

Nelson continued. “I’ll be a stranger. They’ll know me for

what I was and not for what I am.”

“You’re fucked up!”

“Me? At least I don’t spend my time smoking that shit

and trying to forget where I am. You and Snuff are always

fucked up.”

“So. It’s Vietnam, asshole!”

“Vietnam or not, it’s the wrong thing to do. One day

you’re going to be busted, and then what’ll you do?”

“Who’s going to tell? You?”

Nelson grunted and turned away because I knew, and

everyone else knew, that the one source, maybe the only

source, of gossip and rumors was him. For a long time most

of us suspected him of being a company spy or simply a

gossip who would eventually get someone in trouble. He was

always dragging someone aside and spreading the latest

gossip.

“Hey Sig,” he said in the bathroom while watching his

urine splatter in the toilet. “The Captain is wise to you

guys. He knows you’re smoking dope. Someone gave him a list

of those who were buying smoke near the mess hall, and,

from what I hear, you and Snuff are on it.”

Plump, fleshy Nelson! His red hair a flag of false

warnings. If you looked close enough you could see he was

balding and starting to look like an old man. Short and

impish, he frowned a lot and expected everyone to panic

when he leaned over them and whispered the gossip, yes

whispered, as if he was letting you and you alone know that

this was a big secret and you were privileged to know what

the secret was.

“Don‘t you care if the captain knows you smoke.?”

“He believes everyone smokes.”

“You don’t care?” Nelson was disturbed by

indifference. “This could be serious. He could have you

arrested and send you to LBJ.“

He stood and looked into a rust spotted mirror. He

picked his nose hairs and gazed at the gap between his

teeth. “You and Snuff better cool it for awhile.”

“Maybe. Then maybe not. For one thing how could the

captain prove we were smoking when he never saw us do it?”

“That’s just it. He knows! I was in his office and I

heard him tell Sergeant Evans that a CID agent had been

planted in the company.“

“Probably to get Evans. That corrupt bastard.”

 “That’s what I thought, but I heard the captain say

that the army wanted to make an example of marijuana

smokers so they’re putting CID agents in all the companies.

Then he gave a lead on who it may be.”

“And who was that? Major Clark?”

“Don’t be funny. The captain said Shea.”

“Shea! You’re crazy. He’s never here. Besides, he was

drafted like the rest of us.”

“So he says! Evans saw him on TuDo street with a guy

he knew was CID.”

“I don’t believe it. Shea?”

“Maybe the way he acts is just a front. Maybe when he

disappears he’s really writing up reports. Did you ever

consider that possibility?”

“It’s all bullshit! Shea CID? No fucking way!”

From that time one Nelson went on a mission to tell

everyone that Shea was a spy, but the men ignored him

because Shea wasn’t around enough to know what anyone did.

And then Nelson’s gossip backfired. Clement decided that

Nelson was the spy and everything he said was nothing more

than distraction. He plotted with Gardner to throw Nelson

in the river with a concrete block tied to his feet.

Gardner liked the idea but preferred instead to smother

Nelson with a pillow while he was sleeping. Then they

simply decided to shoot him and blame it on the VC, but, in

the end, they decided to treat him like he was invisible.

BUT - and Clement meant BUT - if one person was busted,

Nelson was a dead man!

Three days after the silence began, Nelson started to

go crazy. When he’d talk to anyone they’d walk away from

him. They forced him to eat alone and forced him to walk

the streets without someone on his right or left. When he

tried to ask them questions, they made ugly faces and shook

their heads as if to say “Ask me again and I’ll kill you.”

“You know,” Nelson said to me one night after guard

duty, pushing the end of a chocolate bar into his mouth,

teletypes clacking messages, a wall of cryptic papers

surrounding us, “I don’t understand why no one is talking

to me.”

I said nothing. I wanted to stuff his mouth with a

towel. I think I even wanted to kill him.

“You’re not talking, too. Why? What happened? I

thought we were friends. I never did anything to you. Did

I? Did I?”

Silence.

“Alright. Alright. I don’t give a damn if no one talks

to me. I’m short. You can let all of them know that. I

don’t need their stupid conversations.”

 He sulked and placed a blanket on the floor.

“I’m going to sleep. Fuck you and everyone else. You

can think whatever you want of me. I don’t give a shit.

I’ve got far more important things to do besides making

friends.”

He took out of his canvas pouch a copy of The Report

of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder.

“This is more important than any shit around here. The

world’s going crazy. Mad. It needs to change. This is

important. Not some game you guys are playing on my head.”

Silence.

“Like I said, I don’t care. You may think I’m a smart

ass. You may think I’m strange. You’re all a pile of shit

in my eyes.”

Silence.

“When I was in high school everyone made fun of the

way I looked. My red hair. My white skin and freckles. I

didn’t care. I knew one day they’d need me because I want

to be a lawyer. You understand? A lawyer. I....”

His voice quivered and I almost felt sorry for him.

But Nelson was hard to feel sorry for because the moment

you felt sympathetic, he’d say something stupid like “You

all talk to Shea and he’s CID. But you won’t talk to me?

Assholes. You’ll all find out. One way or the other.”

 “Asshole?” I blurted out, irritated with his incessant

chatter. “You’re the asshole. Don’t you get it? They think

you’re CID?”

“What?”

“You heard me.“

The teletype machine clacked out a list of USO

entertainers visiting the troops in and around Saigon:

Martha Raye, The Jackson Brothers, Miss USA.....The roll of

paper spilled to the floor while Nelson shivered from the

accusation.

“Me? I was drafted like the rest of you. All I want to

do is get back home and become a lawyer. How can anyone say

I’m CID. I never wanted to come here in the first place. I

hate the army!”

“You can say whatever you, but they think you’re CID.“

“But why? Why? What did I ever do? Shea’s the one! He

knows Saigon like the back of his hand. He’s got to be the

one. Not me.“

“You have to convince them. they think it’s you and

that all you’re doing is diverting the blame to Shea.”

He twined his fingers together and shook his head in

disbelief. “I don’t know how to convince them I’m not a CID

agent. They probably wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

“Probably.”
 “What do you think?”

“Cover your ass.”

“But what if someone gets busted.”

“Then you’re dead meat.”

“Fuck! That’s all I need. The VC on one side and you

guys on the other.”

He stared at the floor as the teletype clacked out

another message: IN THE PAST 24 HRS MACV REPORTS 12 KIA,

34 WIA, 2 MIA. RVN FUGURES NOT AVAILABLE.

Nelson glanced at the message and crinkled the pages

of his book and said something unintelligible. Outside the

small window ship lights flickered on the river.

****

A month later Nelson was on his way back to the world.

I drove him to Tan Son Nhut at 5 in the morning. His duffle

bag fat, full and as big as the back seat of the jeep. It

was a warm. sticky morning. It wouldn’t be daylight for

another hour and Nelson was worried that buried in the

darkness was a VC or cowboy who would kill him before he

got on the plane. He was unusually quiet. Maybe because he

was so afraid.

“They should have given us someone to ride shotgun,”

he said.

“No one wanted to get up this early.”

 “Then why are you doing it?”

“I was told to.”

The rest of the ride was silent. I half hoped a VC

would come out of the darkness and shoot him. I was tired

of his whining voice, his self-love, his intellectual

arrogance, his I-am-right-and-you-are-wrong attitude.

I pulled the jeep up to the shabby terminal where a

Vietnamese guard ordered Nelson in the direction of the

security gate.

“Well, I guess this is it?” he said, yanking the

duffle bag out of the jeep. He lifted the bag on to his

shoulder and wobbled.

“You know Sig, you and everyone else was all wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“Yeah, about me being CID. I still think it’s Shea,

and maybe before you leave this place, you’ll find out.”

“Maybe.”

He stared at me a short while as if he wanted to say

something else. Then, “Sig, I’ve got to tell you something.

You should know the truth. I’m not CID, but, but....I did

tell Captain Jeans about you and Snuff and a few other guys

always smoking that shit. I didn’t want him to report you,

or anything like that. All I wanted him to do was warn you

guys to stop before you got into deep trouble. I’m sorry.
Really sorry.”

“I always knew you were a lying mother fucker.”

“I said I was sorry. Besides, you know what Jeans

said? He said that if he told you or anyone anything about

their smoking, he’d have to tell the entire company and he

didn’t need that kind of shit on his hands. You believe

that?”

“You’re still a lying mother fucker.”

He reached out his hand but I just drove away, wishing

someone had beaten his head in. I looked into the rear view

mirror and saw him walking towards the security gate, and

then I turned the jeep back into the Saigon darkness.

***
Red-headed Nelson back in the world
Wants to study law,
He’ll cheat and sneak and squeak and reek
But people will hold him in awe.
But we all know wherever he goes
He’s nothing but a liar,
And one day still we’d like to steal
Everything he desires.
***

Sergeant Evans stutters in front of the morning

formation.

“R-R-Right f-f-face! Aw-Aw-awder aums!”

His spoon eyes shine like metal. His long nose points

at the men in green sticking their rifles at the sky. Rifle

bolts ring shut. Hands slap wooden and plastic stocks. The
formation stands at attention and waits for Colonel Pearson

to emerge from the doorway behind the sandbags. The

protected doorway. No one is going to kill Colonel Pearson.

He struts across the dirt basketball court and orders the

colors to be unfolded.

Two blocks away a funeral procession begins its slow

walk to the graveyard across the bridge.

Sergeant Evans stutters “A-A-At ease!”

The formation comes to parade rest and stares toward

the city. They are bored. Colonel Pearson kept them waiting

and Sergeant Evans - hung over, tongue white, piss in his

underwear, another all night drunk in some dirty whore

house where rats run under the beds and flesh eating whores

suck out your life - tilts and silently curses the colonel

who treats him like someone he owns, someone purchased the

day Pearson got rank and privilege.

In a high window overlooking the basketball court, Kim

Wa watches the formation with Florido’s wife . They are

talking about something. Maybe Colonel Pearson’s disgust at

the formation’s sloppy drill and ceremony. Colonel Pearson

looks around for Captain Jeans. Jeans should be here and

not this idiot Sergeant Evans who wears sandals and white

socks because he has the jungle rot.

“J-J-Jungle r-r-rot, that’s wh-what I g-g-got. I-I c-

can’t w-wear my regular b-b-boots or my f-f-feet will r-r-

rot off!!”

Colonel Pearson would prefer that Sergeant Evans

didn’t exist. “Such men can’t exist!” he mumbles to himself

while Snuff, standing in the front row of the formation,

inflates his chest - Snuff, the peacock - and intentionally

drops his rifle. The rifle thumps on the dirt court and

stuns Colonel Pearson. Horrifies Sergeant Evans who, even

with his hang over stupor, wants to start screaming. He

comes to attention, spins around on his left heel and

violently stutters, “Sp-So-Specialist! P-p-pick up your w-

w-weapon!”

Snuff picks up the rifle and drops it again. Sergeant

Evans twitches. Shakes. Is about to burst. About to

explode. “S-s-solidier,” he yells. “Wh-wh-what is wrong w-

w-with you?”

Snuff pretends ignorance. He looks Snuff in the face.

Snuff leans on one hip and shrugs his shoulders.

“B-boy you l-lock those heels wh-when you st-stand

before m-m-me.”

Snuff shifts to mock attention. Evans looks deep in

his eyes. He doesn’t want to yell at Snuff because Snuff

reminds him of his Uncle Samuel who saved him from his

mother. They looked just alike. The blue eyes. The russet
mustache that curled on the ends. The plump but leathery

skin. How could he scream at Snuff when it was like

screaming at his uncle.

It’s a strange story. Evans was one of four brothers.

He never knew his father who deserted the family when he

was two, and the desertion, according to Evans’ mother, was

the reason behind Evans’ stuttering. His brothers, all of

them older, died in one way or another before they reached

the age of twelve:

One of them died when he set himself on fire. His

hobby was filling his mouth with lighter fluid and spitting

it into the air, igniting it like a liquid bomb.

Unfortunately, one day he filled his mouth and started to

laugh just as the fluid drooled out of his mouth and on to

his flannel shirt that ignited the moment he lit the match.

One of them died when he tripped on an old trolley

track that hadn’t been removed yet. He fell in front of one

of the electric buses that had replaced the trolley cars.

The brother would have survived since the bus driver

stopped in the nick of time, but when the brother crawled

out from the front of the bus, a city dump truck hit him

and that was that.

The last one died when he fell off the roof of his two

story home. He was an acrobat of sorts and spent a lot of

time jumping from one roof to the other. One day he decided

to try what he called the jump-and-return-jump routine.,

That is, he would jump to one roof, swiftly turn, and

spring jump back to the previous roof. He performed the

trick only once before, but the second time he missed on

the return, flipped and fell directly on his head.

Sergeant Evans was the last son left and his mother

became a neurotic mess to keep him alive. She consumed

tranquilizers and bourbon and her long, protective hand

locked Evans in the house where he drew bad pictures of

landscapes and watched TV westerns. She walked him to and

from school and ordered all his teachers not to let him out

of the classroom, even for recess. She accompanied him

everywhere. Go to the playground and there was Mom sitting

on a bench making sure Evans only played in the sandbox. Go

to a children’s party and she was there, drunk and

tranquilized, but still making sure that no one bullied,

touched or sneezed on her son. There was no way that this

boy would die.

It could have been possible that Evans would never

have joined the army had it not been for his Uncle Samuel

who suddenly popped into his life at fourteen. Evans could

have stayed a sissy forever, stuttering his way through

life, but Uncle Samuel, his mother’s brother, came home

from an eight year enlistment with a tiny Korean wife who

washed her laundry by hand and ate hot dogs everyday to

prove that she was American. Uncle Samuel was on his way to

Fort Benning, Georgia, and decided to visit his sister who

he thought had gone crazy after the death of her sons, and,

he discovered, that his sister, by any measure, had gone

crazy. Her house was a shambles. A collection of old

magazines and newspapers, dusty books, smelly sheets, sooty

screens, shredded carpet, moldy refrigerator, oily stove,

liquor bottles, dishes stacked in the sink with dried food

stuck to every plate, soiled clothes strewn around stained

furniture that gave off the odor of an old wet dog.

Everywhere was chaos except in Evans’ room which, by some

natural desire for order, was clean and tidy.

His sister was also impossible to talk to. Even his

Korean wife tried to reason with her - in Korean, perhaps

expecting some kind of understanding, but it was no use.

The sister yelled, “Go to hell, all of you,” and sometimes

she’d blurt out “What are you looking for?” In short, she

made no sense.

So Uncle Samuel focused on little Evans who by now was

infatuated with his uncle’s dress uniform and the ribbons

and the medals and the stripes on the sleeves and the shiny

shoes and the glistening belt buckle. He listened to every

word Uncle Samuel said, and they were words of hope.

“Boy, I’m going to give you something important,” he

said, “ my address. When you get older, seventeen, you come

to me and I’ll make sure you become a soldier. You won’t

have to put up with any of this crap, that’s for sure boy.”

And then Uncle Samuel left and three years later Evans

looked him up and soon afterwards he became a soldier. He

discovered cleanliness, orderliness, discipline, and,

inevitably, the NCO clubs where he could buy cheap liquor

and drown out the memory of his childhood, and the last

letter his mother wrote to him a week before she died:

Dear Son,
I am dying because you, like your father and
brothers before you, deserted me. What ever
you do, where ever you go, anywhere in the
world, know this: you killed your mother.
What more can I say?
Murderer.
Love,
Mom

So Evans stayed in the army, drank and climbed up the

ranks. He had already been to Kentucky, Georgia, Germany

and now Vietnam where he stands in front of Snuff trying to

let Snuff know that, although he’s screaming at him, he

doesn’t really mean it. He just doesn’t want Colonel

Pearson to send him north where the chances of getting

killed are higher that serving in a dilapidated French

villa on the Saigon River.

 “W-W-Wipe that d-d-damned smirk off your f-f-face,”

Evans commands. “D-D_Don’t be a wise g-g-guy in my c-c-

company. We have no r-r-room for them.” He checks out to

see if Colonel Pearson hears him. “Y-Y-You may think you’re

t-t-too good for this f-f-formation, that you c-c-could be

doing other things, but you’re not t-t-too good for this or

any f-f-formation the army d-d-decides to have. Y-Y-You’re

just like the r-r-rest of us. You d-d-don’t belong to

anyone else. We-We own you and wh-when we t-t-tell you to

d-do something, you d-do it. Is that understood?”

“Yes.”

“Yes wh-what?”

“Sir.”

“N-N-Now let’s t-try that a-a-again.”

Snuff inflates his chest and shouts at the top of his

lungs “YES SIR!!!” His voice cracks and crumbles into a

whine. The formation laughs while Colonel Pearson gnashes

his teeth and wants to spit. He walks over to Evans, pushes

him aside and addresses Snuff.

“Listen here, Specialist. You had better straighten

up. I’m giving you one warning. I’ll have you out of here

every night doing rifle drills, and if that doesn’t work,

I’ll ship your ass to the boonies. You can get your balls

shot off at the DMZ. Is that understood?”

 “Yes sir,” Snuff slowly but sincerely replies. Colonel

Pearson looks at Evans as if to say “That’s the way you

handle these men,” and returns to the center of the court.

For a second he glances at the long funeral passing by the

compound’s front gate and winding towards the river.

***

Oh Captain, My Captain,
Listen to what I say,
The dead watch out formation
As they plod along their way.
Ringing bells in the morning,
Drumming a thunder’s chant
They ignore the men in formation
They ignore the colonel’s rant.
They follow a small covered casket,
Clouds dressed in white,
Another child taken to the graveyard,
Where it is always night.

***

The formation stiffens on the basketball court.

Florido’s wife puts on a scratchy record that plays the

call to colors through a speaker in the window. Seventy-

five men stand like poles and salute the flags of two

countries. The sergeant salutes the colonel. The colonel

salutes the sergeant. The formation salutes the flags.

The funeral procession ends with a boy clashing a

cymbal, and a girl drifting by in a flowing white Cao Dai

and long black hair. She is crying

Colonel Pearson ignores them. He climbs on top of a

small box and announces in a voice that tries to drown out

the clashing cymbals: “This morning I have a few medals to

present.”

***

You made me so very happy

I'm so glad you came into my life
You made me so very happy
You made me so so very happy baby
I'm so glad you came Into my life

***

The army loves medals. They have hundreds of them.

They have the Department of Defense Distinguished Service

Medal and the Legion of Merit Medal and the Defense

Meritorious Medal and the Meritorious Service Medal and the

Joint Service Commendation Medal and the Army Commendation

Medal and the Army Good Conduct Medal and the National

Defense Service Medal and the Vietnam Service Medal and the

Republic of Vietnam Defense Medal and the Republic of

Vietnam Training Service Medal and the Humanitarian Service

Medal and the list goes on and on and on......

***

“Fuck the lifers and their medals,” Snuff says. “They

try to give me one and I’ll tell them to shove it up their

ass.”

“You’ll freak Evans out if you refuse one of his

medals.”

“Who gives a shit! Give me a medal for sitting at a

teletype and writing messages that don’t mean shit? You

crazy? Give me a medal for all the whores who gave me a

five dollar blowjob. Give me a medal for the number of

times I got gonorrhea. Give me a medal for all the pot I’ve

smoked. That deserves some recognition.”

***

Smoking. Smoking. Smoking. A toke before breakfast. A

toke before guard. A toke on the road to Long Binh. A toke

before getting laid. If the VC want our typewriters. our

computer reports on tissue thin paper, our adding machines,

our damp desks, our sand bags, everything and anything,

they can have them. We don’t give a damn! We’re numb and

dumb and it ain’t shell shock. It’s smoking. Smoking.

Smoking.

***

Beyond the city another firefight erupts. Red tracers

scribble across the darkness and suddenly end. Where? Into

the ghost of the Frenchmen lying in the graveyard outside

of Tan Son Nhut? One hundred tombstones white and glaring

in the middle of a traffic circle with one empty grave

saved for the first American to die in Vietnam. The first

death of an American serviceman in Vietnam occurred Sept.

26, 1945. OSS Major A. Peter Dewey was killed in action by

the Communist Vietminh near Hanoi. Some say it happened

later. 1959. Whatever. The ghosts are everywhere and the

firefight finds one after the other. One of them could be

Jim. His shadow rising out of his body, envying Snuff and

me.

***

Jim was a gem of a guy - ghost - we met in a Bangkok

hotel. R-and-R. Six days and no war. A nineteen year old

shape-shifter who in a flash became a Mexican, an Egyptian,

an Italian, and once - we were very high - a German. We

chased whores in strip clubs where they gathered like

luscious cattle on a dance floor in bikini bottoms with

numbered cards dangling around their necks. “I want number

12. No, number 16. No, number 25.” And the whores sat with

us and drank Coca-Cola and sold their specialties, and some

of them wanted us to buy them for a week so we could

pretend they were girlfriends - just like home - but Jim

wanted nothing to do with that. Only Snuff bought a girl

who was erotic Indian. And we traveled from massage parlors

where naked girls soaped us down in small tubs and rinsed

the war from every crevice to hotel rooms where we set the

AC so cold we thought - we were very high - thought it was

snowing in Bangkok.
 Yes, Jim was a gem of a guy - ghost - who saw the

horror, the horror, and twitched and scratched and spoke so

softly we had to put our ears close to his lips when he’d

say things like “I don’t care what anyone says, we’re no

better than animals. Maybe they’re even better. They don’t

make war,” or “I hate the fucking army, but I’d never

desert my buddies. The VC can kill me, but I won’t let them

kill my buddies.”

And Jim loved the whores - tall, short, plump, skinny

- he had to have a different one every night, and one of

them drank so much beer she drenched Jim’s bed in piss, but

it didn’t bother Jim who gave her extra money because he

thought she could use a doctor. But he never tried to talk

to any of them. None of us did - we were very high - and

they would prattle on in broken English, wanting money.

Wanting clothes. Wanting jewelry. Wanting to go to America.

And every so often Jim would silence them by smashing a

beer bottle against the wall, and they would cower and then

Jim would laugh, laugh - we were very high - and the girls

would take up the laughing, and soon everything would be

back to normal, but we all knew there was a shadow person

inside Jim, a layer of fog beneath his skin. Look close

enough and you could touch its see-through shape. A ghost

ready to rush out of every pore at once and pounce on you.

 And the afternoon we visited the statue of the Golden

Buddha, Jim said “ I hate the truth. Death is always here.

Right next to me. Sometimes crawling on my back and resting

on my shoulder.” The statue was five and half tons of solid

gold, fifteen feet high and smiling beyond the three of us

looking up and wondering how they kept the gold from being

stolen over the past eight hundred years. But the statue

made Jim think of other things, like death, and Snuff and I

didn’t know what to say so we said nothing.

“The VC know what they want,” Jim went on, the shining

Buddha behind him,. “All we want is to go home, and all

they want is to kill us until we do.”

And it was back to the cold hotel room and more whores

and more smoke and more beer and by four in the morning

everyone was asleep except Jim and me, and I thought my

body was floating towards the balcony - we were very high -

when Jim decided to talk before he returned to Phu Bai.

****

JIM TALKS

“You know a lot of people make fun of me because I’m a

Mexican, like that’s supposed to mean I’m not American or

something, but, fuck, I’m more American than most people,

and I know I’m more American than any Cuban. They’re just a

bunch of runaways who are waiting for daddy to let them go

back to Cuba. They don’t give a fuck about America. My

family moved to California in 1910. You believe that. Shit,

they’re immigrants who haven’t lived in America that long.

We moved to the valley and worked our asses off. Still do.

Shit my family probably put more food on your table than

your own father. We hate the work but we believe in

America. More than those fuckers who spit on us. You know

that. Spit on us. A friend of mine wrote me that when he

got home some hippie mother fuckers spit on him while he

was waiting for a bus. Shit, he almost killed them. But

then some old bag called him a ‘baby killer.“ We never

killed any babies. Who the fuck are they talking about?

Mother fuckers!

“My family fought in all the wars. My grandfather was

one of the first to sign up for World War I. My father

fought in World War Two and Korea. When they sent me a

draft notice it didn’t bother me. I knew I’d be okay. I

come from a family of survivors. We’re all soldiers. Always

was and always will be. My grandmother told me we may even

go farther back than World War One. My great-grandfather

fought in the Mexican-American War. He was at the famous

battle of Monterey, and he was in Mexico City when the US

attacked the city and forced a surrender. We were really

Mexicans then.
 “My favorite uncle fought in the Pacific during World

War Two. He wrote comidos, story songs. One of them was

about being in the Pacific. I don’t remember much about it

except two lines: ‘I sing my death on sands of doom/The sun

burns my face, the bullets burn my soul.’ Or something like

that.

“I’ve grown up a lot since I’ve been in the army. I’m

young but I’m now a man. I used to be a lot of trouble. I’d

suddenly flip out and rage. I’d break things or try to find

people I could beat the shit out of. My school made me go

to a therapist. I was 14. The therapist was one of those

touchy-feely mother fuckers who was a guy but really a girl

underneath. I told him to fuck himself and he said I was

angry because I thought white people hated me as much as

they hated black people. Everything for that asshole was

black and white.

“When I told my dad he sent me to our priest. Now

there was an asshole. Some Irish fag with freckles all over

his face and these big puffy lips that said ’I love to suck

cock.” He told me that it was evil to be violent and that

the devil had got inside me and I had to fight the devil

with my spirit. I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking

about. He was nothing but a crock of shit. Fuck man, God’s

more violent than any man could ever be. We make atom
bombs, but God drowns the entire world because people are

having a good time.

“I knew they’d put me in the infantry when I was

drafted. Remember all those tests they gave us when we

first got in the army? The psycho ones? I could tell by

the way the questions were that they’d see how violent I

could be and put me in the infantry. I’m glad they did. I

don’t think I could do some desk job or shit like that. I

couldn’t just sit around and wait for someone to blow me

up. That’s something my brother could do. He’s that kind of

guy. Sit around and do nothing. And, believe it or not,

he’s my twin brother. That’s right. Twin brother.

“You want to know how strange the fucking world is.

They took me to the psych because they thought I was

violent, and I was, but I’m not anything like my brother.

He’s a fucking sadist. But he does it quietly. No one

knows, except me. You know what he did one time. He took

two cats and tied their tails together, then he hung them

over a clothesline and watched them claw each other to

death. He found an old mangy dog once and took it to the

field and shot it, just to see what shooting something was

like. When our cat had kittens he froze them to death in

the freezer. I’m telling you a fucking sadist! He goes out

with thirteen and fourteen years old girls because he can

control them with his little mind games. Cruel games. He

knows how to make them feel so bad they’d do anything to

feel good again. One of them even let him carve his name on

her shoulder blade. I always wondered how he got away with

that. Now he’s one mother fucker who should have been

drafted, but he’s home, doing nothing, hanging around the

house, smoking weed and driving my parents crazy.

“Fuck man, I’m talking as if I’m never going to talk

again. I guess I need to get some shit off my chest.

Getting stoned is good for that. Makes you want to talk

about everything. Well, maybe not everything. I still have

trouble talking about Hamburger Hill. Fucking

slaughterhouse. My platoon was a blocking force on the

other side of the hill. We were told to wait there and not

let one gook off the fucking hill. We were going to have a

real victory. One to show the news people and the rest of

America. Fuck! It was a mess. We were on that hill for nine

fucking days. In the rain. Eating fucking K-rations and

smelling each other’s shit. But we were lucky. The fuckers

on the other side had to climb that fucking hill and chase

those bastards down to us. They were fucking dying! But

they took that fucking hill. They’re mean mother fuckers

when they want to be. When they got to the top of the hill

and the CO tried to chopper in, they wouldn’t let him land.
They threw everything at him: rocks, frags, everything.

They knew it was all for nothing. They knew that they’d go

back down the hill and the next day Charlie would own it

again. All the while we waited on the other side. In the

fucking rain. Shooting at anything that moved. I think, and

don’t you ever fucking repeat this or I’ll find your ass

and kill you, I think I shot one of our own men. Not on

purpose. But it was dark. Real dark. I thought everyone was

behind me. I thought the noise was Charlie trying to sneak

up on us. It was raining. It was dark. I couldn’t see shit.

I shouldn’t have panicked but fuck, I wasn’t the only one.

Three of us started firing at noise. Man, did we let it

rip. The next morning it was still raining, but we could

see in front of us and there was this guy from another

platoon curled up on the ground. We looked at each other

and said we’d never say a thing about it. Ever. Now you’re

the only one who knows and you won’t ever say a thing.

Right? Right?”

***

Right!

I saw the pale bodies in plastic bags. The body bags

under the sun. The crowded air strip at Phu Bai. The metal

containers overfilled with the dead from the A Shau valley,

Hamburger Hill. I saw the dead as I sat in a jeep headed

north to Dong Ha. One of them was probably the guy that Jim

and his friends killed. But there were so many they all

looked alike.

***

I never saw Jim again. One night he disappeared in

Bangkok and never returned to his room. A ghost.

Evaporating into thin air.

“He probably went AWOL,” Snuff says, flipping the tip

of a smoke over the railing.

Saigon chokes on smoke everywhere. Car fumes. Jeep

fumes. Motorcycle fumes. Marijuana fumes. Lots of marijuana

fumes. The smoke saturates everything. Fish carcasses.

Skinless monkeys hanging in the market place. The crowded

market place where Hill, sweat rings under his arms,

sniffed the air like a dog and declared that the smoke will

smother the entire city. “And they deserve it. They don’t

know how to take care of their own land. . They don’t want

to take care of their own land. I hate them and once you’re

in-country long enough, you’ll hate them, too. It’s easy to

do.”

“That’s one thing Hill was right about,” Snuff says.

“They are easy to hate. I can’t wait to get away from them.”

“How often do you think of going home. I think about

it all the time.”

 “I do, too. I get so sick of counting days, but I

can’t help it. And I know, shit, I know that once I get

back all this shit will be like it never happened. We’ll

read some history book and it’ll sound like a war we never

were in.”

“Ten years, twenty years from now they’ll write about

this war and forget how much we never wanted to come here

in the first place. They’ll make it sound like we all

wanted to be here to fight for freedom. Politicians.

Historians. I hate them both.”

***

What goes up must come down

Spinnin' wheel got to go 'round
Talkin' 'bout your troubles it's a cryin' sin
Ride a painted pony let the spinnin' wheel spin

***

Sitting like a statue. The mind a Buddha. The Golden

Buddha. Smirking smile. I know something that you don’t

know. Bombs. Thundering bombs. Every night they surround

the city. Flashes of cloudy light. Rumbling. Rumbling.

Light another joint and watch the show. Boom. Down comes

the front of an apartment building. Boom. Hundreds of holes

in the ground. Big as swimming pools. Boom! The ammo dump

at Cat Lai like the fourth of July. Boom! The old French

mansion shakes and the dragon on the roof vibrates and

Snuff turns white as a sheet. And Brickell runs down the

stairs with his pants around his knees because he was

taking a shit the moment the BOOM came down and he did more

than shit. “I thought my entire asshole was coming out!

Boom! An oil dump blows and black smoke drifts like a

plague over the river. Boom! And angels and demons are

everywhere. Inside the bowl of my steel helmet. Their

voices echo: “Get out of here....get out of here....get out of

here.” And BOOM mosquitoes slide down my sweaty cheeks,

starving because of bloodless skin, and BOOM Captain Jeans,

jittery and afraid, orders Snuff and me to drive at two in

the morning where BOOM is everywhere. Drive to the

officer’s hotel to pick up Colonel Pearson and Major Clark

and bring them back to the villa because, jittery and

afraid, he thinks that one more rocket and one more mortar

and there’ll be no more villa, and Captain Jeans doesn’t

want to make any decisions about all the facts on the

plexi-glass board, or the secret documents locked in the

glass fish tank contraption where AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

are allowed to open secret messages and convey with a look

the seriousness of the document. And BOOM the colonel and

the major nervously crouch behind the Marine and the

concrete pill box, and when we arrive, Snuff, the driver,

myself the shotgun, my M-14 smelling of cleaning oil,

unlocked and loaded, shouts at Snuff to drive back to the

villa as fast as he can, so Snuff smashes the accelerator

and pops the clutch, and the colonel and the major bump and

bounce against each other. The major’s helmet rams into the

colonel’s jaw and the major yells “Fuck this shit! Slow

down, Specialist!” But the colonel yells back, “I’ll court

martial your ass if you slow down,” so we speed through the

streets and BOOM the major yells “We’ll have to evacuate

the compound,” and the colonel yells back “Fuck if we

will!” And the jeep swerves and jolts and BOOM another

building is hit by a rocket, concrete crumbles, stairways

collapse, just as we turn into the compound, all of us

feeling important because this is war and we’re in the

middle of it and this is what makes us men and we scurry

behind the sandbags that hide the doorway that hides the

bureaucratic rooms that hide the facts and more facts and

BOOM Snuff says “Maybe they’ll blow the whole fucking place

up,” because he’s afraid. We’re all afraid. BOOM!

***

I’m Captain Jeans of the horse marines

I feed my horse on rice and beans,
Whenever some one looks my way,
I feed my horse a clump of hay.

***

Captain Jean’s shiny boots clack on the conference

room floor. “This is TET,” he says to the colonel. “The VC

are at it again.”

The men in the room, especially Colonel Pearson, say

“Ahem!”

“This year,” Captain Jeans continues, “ we are ready.

The South will be defended. No more repetitions of ‘68. We

will not be caught off guard.”

“Ahem.”

“Ahem.”

Everyone: “Ahem.”

Captain Jeans paces in front of the plexi-glass

board, takes a short breath, and points at his briefing

charts: illuminated numbers and foreign destinations: Vung

Tau, Phu Bai, Cat Lai, Long Bien. “And right here,” he

indicates with the pointer, “ we already know that enemy

activity around the Saigon area has increased three fold in

the last forty-eight hours.”

“Ahem.”

“Ahem.”

Colonel Pearson speaks. “I’m not totally convinced

that these figures compel us to act in any extraordinary

way to protect the compound. We keep our guards on twenty-

four hours a day. And besides, we’re strategically useless

to the VC.”
 Captain Jeans twitches his nose. What is wrong with

Colonel Pearson? Didn’t he just spend a night with mortar

and rockets? Is he a fool? One rocket hitting a ship on the

river and there’d be no way another ship could get up the

river.

“The VC hate us, colonel,” Captain Jeans argues. “They

don’t care about what we do. They care about who we are. In

our general vicinity, right now, the enemy has conducted

three terrorist attacks upon the civilian population, There

is no hiding the fact: we could be next!”

“Ahem.”

“Ahem.”

“Ahem.”

“We could be next,” the colonel repeats. Maybe the

captain is right, he thinks. Maybe the enemy is about to

attack. Visions of battles bristle his imagination. The

enemy at the gates. The enemy storming through the offices

and killing the defenseless men. No! He can’t have that!

Captain Jeans taps on what he considers the most

important figure. “Seventy percent of all the compounds in

the Saigon area are now under red alert, sir. They know the

importance of being prepared, and, needless to say, we too

know that necessity. In short, sir, TET ‘69 has arrived.

The enemy is close. Too close. We need to act now.”

 Colonel Pearson has seen TET ‘68 - on the news back

home in Georgia. Walter Cronkite showed him the enemy

overtaking the US Embassy. The tanks in the street. The VC

in a checkered shirt taking a bullet in the head. And when

he got to Saigon he drove through Cholon, the Chinese

section of the city where the VC attacked first. He saw the

demolished buildings. He saw the walls with hundreds of

bullet holes. It could happen again, and Captain Jeans, in

spite of his jittery, jerky self, could be right.

“I suggest, colonel, we go to red alert!”

“Red alert. Ahem. You consider this that serious?”

“Yes sir, I do.”

“You suggestions, captain?”

“Well, colonel, I have a few but perhaps you have some

that I may not have though of.”

“Ahem.”

“Ahem.”

“Ahem. Yes, captain. First, ahem, we double the guard.

How many men to we have on duty now?’

“Six, sir.”

“Make it twelve. And I want them to search every

person who enters this compound, and I mean search them.”

“Even our own personnel, sir.”

“Those we don’t know, captain.”

 “Yes sir.”

“If we’re going to do this we’d better do it right and

take absolutely no chances.”

“Yes sir.”

“Also, all men on guard will wear flack jackets and

steel pots. I’ve caught too many of you men without helmets

on and that can be very dangerous. If Charley decides to

rocket one of those ships out there, there’ll be one hell

of an explosion. Any soldier not wearing a helmet could get

his head blown off.”

“Yes sir.”

Captain Jeans scribbles the colonel’s orders into a

pocket notebook. Listed inside are also the men he most

dislikes. At the top of the list is Shea.

“And captain, I want as few Vietnamese workers around

here as possible. They can take a vacation for the time

being. I don’t want one of them to turn out to be a VC all

this time and have it known that we hired him.”

“Even Kim Wa, sir?”

“Even Kim Wa. I trust her but I think it’s better she

stay home.”

“Yes sir.”

“Do you have any suggestions, captain?”

“Well, sir, I think we’d better keep the men on a

schedule of 36 hours on and 12 hours off. That insures that

most of them will be here instead of in their rooms. In ‘68

most of them men were confined to their hotel rooms and

unable to protect this place. There was no attack on the

compound, but the enemy did get a block away. This year

they could get closer.”

“Ahem.”

“Ahem.”

“Ahem.”

“And, sir, I think it may be time to come down on

Shea. He’s gotten away with his games for too long now.

Maybe we can lock him up in the communications room where

he can do some good.”

“Lock him up?”

“Just for the time being, sir. Personally, I think he

should be court-martialed, but that’s your call, sir.”

Colonel Pearson looked around the room of “ahems“. The

major and lieutenant didn’t know what to say. The company

clerk held his pencil over his clipboard ready to write

down the order. Captain Jeans awaited an answer.

“Yes, captain, Shea has been a problem. Let’s find him

and assign someone to keep an eye on him. But I don’t think

we should lock him up. That wouldn’t be good for morale.”

“Yes sir. I’ll put him on guard duty where he won’t

even think of leaving.”

“That’s good captain.”

“Ahem.”

“Ahem.”

“Ahem.”

***

MEMO

CAPTAIN JEANS PROWLS THE COMPOUND IN THE

DARK. CHUBBY LT. JOHNSON FOLLOWS HIM. THEY
SPEAK IN WHISPERS. THEY PEEK BEHIND TRASH
BARRELS AND SAND BAG MOUNDS. THEY WANT
TO KILL A VC. OR MAYBE THEY WANT TO KILL
SHEA.
***

SNUFF SPEAKS:

And there I was on guard duty, walking back and forth

on the balcony, smelling the fucking swill-hole river,

talking to the concrete dragon on the roof. TET ‘69.! Shit!

Made me wonder if I’d ever get through the Sixties. I had

this idea that someone would blow my head off the last

night of 1969, but I was so fucking bored walking guard

that the idea kept on running out of me and down my shoe

like piss. I tried everything to stay awake. I counted the

number of steps from the north side to the south side of

the balcony. Did you know there’s 58 steps, toe to heel. I

even counted the number of fucking sandbags piled against

the iron railing. Ninety-eight. Believe that shit? Ninety-

eight sandbags. And everyone was one I filled. And then I

thought I must have filled about a thousand of them because

the sandbags are everywhere.

It was a black night. I think I saw a little piece of

the moon, but the river was dark except for the lights from

the cargo ships. I could hear the drone of their generators

and their hum made me sleepy. I mean sleepy! Shit, I’d been

on guard for three hours already. And you know what that

means. Three hours of holding my steel helmet in front of

my face and making noises to keep me awake. Brooooom.

Broooooom. Cluck. Fuck. Shit like that! Anything to stay

awake. But nothing was working. I couldn’t stop yawning.

The air was filled with smells: garbage, dead fish,

diesel oil, smog and smoke. I closed my eyes and that was

all I had to do. I went right into a dream. A strange one!

I was lying on a castle floor, stripped naked to the waist.

Deaf mutes surrounded me and grunted animal noises. A

severed hand appeared above my head and began to grow in

size. I tried to crawl out of the circle of deaf mutes, but

they kept me trapped. Grunting and jumping on my back. I

could feel their hands pulling at my arms. I thought they

wanted to strangle me, but then, I said to myself, oh shit,

those aren’t dream hands. Their real hands. Fuck! I woke up

to Captain Jeans yanking on my arm, and Lieutenant Johnson

eating a fucking candy bar and smirking.

“Wake up, soldier,” Jeans yelled at me in one of those

loud whispers.

“Sir?” I muttered, still half asleep.

The captain smelled of lime cologne. The lieutenant

smelled of chocolate. They glared at me with rabbit eyes. I

swear they were stoned.

“It looks like you were sleeping, specialist. Isn’t

that right, Lieutenant?”

“Yes sir. You’re right.” Lieutenant Johnson the kiss-

ass said. The chocolate dripped out of his mouth and he

sucked it back in.

I put the steel helmet back on my head. I could feel

it bumping on my skull. I was asleep but fuck if I was

going to admit it to them. So I said, “ No sir. I was just

staring at the river. It makes me daydream. That’s all!”

“We’ve been standing here for almost a minute,

specialist, and we saw you sleeping. “

“Like I said, I was just staring at the river.”

Captain Jeans and those shiny boots understand the

river. He’s addicted to watching it. There were mornings I

saw him climb to the balcony and look up and down the river

and select possible targets he thought the enemy would

destroy. He studied the ripples and currents. The oily

patches. The floating debris. He’s sure the river is a

dangerous pace.

“ You know, specialist, somewhere under that shit and

scum the enemy could be sneaking up on us in a midget

submarine! Aren’t I right, lieutenant?”

Asshole Johnson would have agreed with anything the

captain said. He ate that fucking candy bar and bobbed his

head up and down.

“I want you to stop and think of this, specialist,”

the captain went on. I really thought I was in a dream now.

“Imagine frogmen sneaking underwater and planting satchel

charges on our live support generator. Or on one of those

cargo ships tied up to the dock. If one of those would

sink, this river would be clogged for weeks.”

“Maybe months,” Lieutenant Johnson spit out.

“Yes, maybe months,” the captain said. “I don’t know

if you realize it or not, but we are at war. The enemy is

everywhere and anywhere! Right now he could be creeping

into our compound. He could be crouching right over there

in the shadows. Waiting. Just waiting for you to fall

asleep. Any second now he could sneak up on us and slice

our throats. Aren’t I right, lieutenant?”

“Yes sir,” Johnson said, his cheeks bloated with candy.

 “Here on the roof?” I asked. “I mean, come on.” We

were three stories above the ground and Charlie would have

to kill everyone inside before he reached us. But Jeans

didn’t see it that way. No, he went on. “Right here on the

roof, specialist! Right now he could be downstairs quietly

cutting everyone’s throat. Do you realize the consequences

of falling asleep?” The three of us. Just us! We’d be left

to fight the enemy off.”

I knew he was thinking Alamo. I even think he wished

everyone downstairs was being killed so he could be a hero.

You know, stand face to face with Charlie, bayonet and .45

in each hand. Shouting “God bless America” and all that

crap! He a stupid mother fucker and I really think he

thought the enemy could be killing all the men downstairs.

I knew he wanted me to care, but fuck, my mind kept on

drifting off to up state New York. The trees on the side of

the mountains. The girls in my high school. I even thought

of the summer I dug telephone pole holes. I got boils on my

back from too much sun. I just couldn’t keep my mind on

Captain Jeans who, by know, got so excited he really did

think he heard someone on the river.

“Do you hear that, lieutenant? Listen!”

It was the first time I saw Lieutenant Johnson stop

chewing his candy. “What exactly, captain?”

 “That! Don’t you hear that? Like someone rowing.”

Lieutenant Johnson wrapped his fingers around the rod

iron railing and leaned his plump body towards the river. I

knew he didn’t hear anything, but he didn’t want to

disappoint the captain. “Yes, I hear it now,” the dumb fuck

said.

“It’s most likely a river boat, sir.” I said.

“I know it’s a river boat, specialist, but which way

is it going and who’s in it? “

I had no fucking idea! Pitch dark. Couldnn’t see a

thing. All I could hear was a boat puttering. One of those

dinghies. I tried to see where it was but fat-assed

Johnson, panicked and said, “There! Look closely. It’s

there!” And still I couldn’t see anything. Maybe a tiny

light. Maybe. But only those two assholes pay attention to

shit like that. I mean, how many times do you see little

boats on the river? Morning, noon and night!

Lieutenant Johnson stretched even further over the

railing, erect, like a see-saw., balancing his chubby body

on his chubby stomach. He was trying to impress the

captain. All I had to do was touch his head and he would

have lost his balance and fallen straight down on his head.

The asshole!

“There it is again, captain,” the lard ass announced.

Do you hear it?”

“I hear it, lieutenant!“

And the two of them were now leaning over the railing

and pointing to a spot somewhere in the river. I still

couldn’t see anything. Everything was still dark as hell.

And then, shit, the captain turned to me and said,

“Specialist, fire in that direction.”

“Fire in that direction?” I asked, “What direction. I

don’t see any thing.”

And Lieutenant-Kiss-Ass-Johnson said “ When the

captain orders you to fire at something, specialist, you

fire. You don’t ask any questions. You don’t hesitate.”

“But I don’t see anything,” I said. “What am I firing

at?”

“That,” the captain said pointing at the river and the

darkness. “Right there. There’s a light and I think

someone’s trying to sabotage one of the ships. So fire

right there, specialist.”

Shit! You know how many times I fired my rifle. Zero.

Zip. None. So here I was aiming into the darkness and

wondering if the fucking thing would even go off, and then,

blam, a clip of ammo emptied out like it was nothing, I saw

the tracers hit the water and I heard some splashing. I

couldn‘t believe what I had just done. Then the captain

said, “Good work, specialist. If there was anyone there,

they’re not there now. That was one hell of a good round of

ammo.”

“Put in another clip and try it again,“ Lieutenant

Johnson said. He was excited like a little fish over how

fast the rifle went off and the danger in the dark. I

shrugged my shoulders, I mean, what was I suppose to do. If

these assholes wanted me to fire into the black water where

I couldn’t see a thing, then shit, what could I do about

it. Besides - and I’ve got to admit it - it felt good

laying down a line of fire like that. It was the first time

I felt like I was a real soldier. You know, a guy who is

really in the war and not just watching it happen around

me, waiting for someone to shoot me in the head because I

didn’t see anything coming. The three of us waited there. I

think the captain expected to hear a dead man moan or

someone yell that they were wounded but when everything

returned to normal silence, the captain said that if I

hadn’t followed orders he was ready to court martial me,

just like he was going to court martial Shea who hadn’t

shown up for duty and was somewhere in Saigon fucking his

whore and forgetting his obligations. The lieutenant agreed

with the captain and said it would be a good day when we

got rid of Shea and sent him to LBJ for being an AWOL
asshole, and all I wanted to do was shove the butt of my

rifle in the lieutenant’s face because when he said that he

shoved another candy bar in his mouth and reminded me of

this kid I knew in the tenth grade who used to whine about

everyone picking on him, and he was the fattest fuck I had

ever seen and all he had to do was stop eating for awhile,

but no, he'd whine and every time he did there was

something gross in his mouth like cookies or candy or some

shit like that. I thought the lieutenant was a fat ass with

a bigmouth so I said that I had seen Shea and that I

thought he was downstairs and that no he didn’t go to his

whore in Saigon and yes he was fixing one of the jeeps we

took to Long Binh every day to pass messages back and forth

and other kinds of shit like delivering a transit to his

company. For a second the captain and the lieutenant

believed me, but then the captain remembered that he called

roll no more than four hours ago and there was no Shea. So

he got mad at me for trying to cover Shea‘s ass, and then

he said that he was going downstairs to call port security

to make sure we killed someone and warned me that I would

be court-martialed for lying but it would have to wait

until after TET ‘69 was officially over, and we all retuned

back to normal, Well, sure as shit the captain forgot all

about it, and the lieutenant forgot all about it because he

wanted to eat his fucking food and nothing more. But I

still remember those fucking words the captain said before

he went downstairs. “Now specialist, if you take your eyes

off the river just once, you’ll have your ass sent to LBJ

as fast as you can say I’m sorry.,” and then he left and

all that went through my mind as he spun around on those

fucking shiny boots was “Fuck the army!” That’s right. Fuck

the army.”

***

F. T. A.

FUCK THE ARMY

***

F. T. A. Graffiti of disgust and anger and rebellion

over marching drills and shaved heads and sweaty boots and

soggy food. Angry letters penciled on memos and instruction

manuals or carved on the walls of latrines or on desk tops

and barrack sidings and the bathroom door where Sergeant

Evans sits on the toilet, squeezes and struggles with

constipation, but still is angry enough to stutter “F-F-F-

T-T-T- A!!! He grunts and pushes his bowels down and

nothing happens. But F. T. A. still stares him in the face,

insulting him and the putrid food that rots into a brick

deep inside his intestines. And below that another message

delightfully carved into the wood:

 L. little
I. idiot
F. fuckers
E. eating
R. rotten
S. shit

Sergeant Evans leans over his knees and runs his

fingers over the letters. He catches a splinter in his

forefinger and curses, “Th-the f-fucker who w-wrote this

sh-should b-be court m- martialed.”

He turns red, squeezes hard, and a quick blast of shit

erupts from his rectum. His toes curl. His teeth gnash. His

jaw ripples. “F-F- T-T A! I w-want to k-kill th-this m-

mother f-fucker! It m-must b-be Shea!”

All the years of service. Korea. Germany. Ft. Dix.

Vietnam. Honor. Pride. Dignity. And now to end like this!

Sitting on the toilet trying to rub insults off doors! He

lifts his ass off the toilet and resolves to take action,

to nail Shea - yes, Shea - against the wall! No one was

going to get away with destroying government property on

his watch. He’ll order every door in the building removed,

sandpapered, repainted and replaced. The men will rebel.

They’ll know it’s Shea who got them into this! They’ll take

care of him on their own. And who will benefit? Evans

didn‘t dare say it aloud, but he envisions himself winning

a commendation for such action.

 He snaps his belt together, wipes his sleeve over the

brass buckle and doggedly walks to Captain Jean‘s office .

Jeans will love his plan. He could see his face now!

***
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the sunshine in
Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, the sunshine in

***
What Sergeant Evans didn’t know as he walked down the

wooden stairs, clunking like his stutter, sweating from his

long repast in the bathroom, was that Captain Jeans was

writing a long memo filled with personal observations about

Sergeant Evans, who, he decided needed to be sent back to

the states for mental observation or, at least, a drying

out.

***

THE MEMO

TO: Colonel Paul Pearson, TMA-MACV, 407tth Trans Group

FROM: Captain Ronald Jeans, TMA-MACV, 407th Trans Group

SUBJECT: SERGEANT EVAN’S BEHAVIOR

Sergeant Evans has been under our command since July 15,
1969. During his time in our company I have observed a
number of peculiar characteristic that may suggest we
return Sergeant Evans to the states for observation. The
following is a brief summary of observations I have made
regarding his behavior:

1. Sergeant Evans occupies the E-6 slot in the motor pool.

He knows little about motor vehicles, however, since he was
assigned to our unit I felt that the motor pool was the
best place for him. However, the men have had problems with
him. In his first month of duty he declared that Jesus
Christ had come to him in the night in the form of a light
that traveled from his left shoulder to his right, and then
down his center. He informed Specialist Watson, motor pool
maintenance, that Jesus Christ intended another visit, and,
at that time, he would advise Sergeant Evans of his mission
in life. After a week he announced that Jesus Christ had
visited him in a bar on TuDo street and told him his
mission was to save the prostitutes and throw out all the
money changers. Although he hasn’t yet begun to act on this
“vision,” he continues to talk about methods by which he
could accomplish the tasks. He plans, for instance, to set
up as many prostitutes in an apartment building where he
would watch over them nightly. Specialist Watson complained
about working for such a “loony,” that his work became
shoddy because, he said, he had to worry about Sergeant
Evans. That is why I shifted Sergeant Evans to the arm’s
room with Specialist Florido.

2. Although it is lighted and air-conditioned, Sergeant

Evans complained about the position due to his “phobia” for
small, crowded places, and his intense dislike of
Specialist Florido. I ignored his phobia - it is best to
face fear than run away from it - I was forced to transfer
Sergeant Evans to acquisitions because of an incident that
broke out between Sergeant Evans and Specialist Florido.
Sergeant Evans accused Specialist Florido of selling
weapons on the Black Market. Specialist Florido took great
offense to this and started smashing empty ammunition boxes
against the wall while Sergeant Evans screamed that he
would have Specialist Florido court-martialed. Needless to
say, Sergeant Evans had no proof of Specialist Florido
selling any weapons on the Black Market and simply made the
allegations because he, Sergeant Evans, came to work
drunk. Sergeant Evan admitted to drinking but only because
of his “phobia,” but Specialist Florido claimed that
Sergeant Evans had been drinking every day and quite
heavily. I have a tendency to believe Specialist Florido. A
number of times I have smelled alcohol on Sergeant Evan’s
breath - a stench of alcohol at that.

3. I finally reassigned Sergeant Evans to my office where

he performed a number of insignificant details. I had the
opportunity to observe him closely where I noticed he spent
a great deal of time going to the PX in Cholon. I suspect
Sergeant Evans may be the one selling to the Black Market.
however, I have no proof. This suspicion, however, should
be investigated.

4. Finally, Sergeant Evans has a great deal of conflict

with Vietnamese nationals. Recently, in preparation for the
upcoming IG inspection, I placed Sergeant Evans in charge
of a number of Vietnamese nationals to clean up the
compound area. I specifically put Sergeant Evans in charge
of sand bag detail and trash burning. I viewed Sergeant
Evans taunting and ridiculing the Vietnamese nationals and
even going as far as accusing them of loving Ho Chi Minh
more than they loved the United States. The nationals try
to ignore him, but Sergeant Evans is extremely aggressive
towards them and, in fact, should be removed from any
association with the Vietnamese.

It is on these grounds that I think it would be better for

Sergeant Evans to be reassigned to a company state side and
possibly undergo some from of counseling. I believe it
would be extremely advantageous for Sergeant Evans to
undergo such therapy. I have already made plans to replace
his position with another NCO from the ranks, quite
possibly Sergeant Platt.

Captain Ronald Jeans

cc: Major David Clark

Lieutenant Ralph Johnson

***

Captain Jeans reread his memo. He wants to add more

but doesn’t want to sound too prejudiced towards Evans.

After all, the pale, needle-nosed sergeant stands outside

the door watching the captain slip the memo under his desk

blotter, having no idea that the memo is about him and his

removal from the company. Captain Jeans nods his head to

allow Sergeant Evans to enter.

“M-M-May I have a w-w-word with you, s-sir?”

Captain Jeans hates the stuttering. He wants to choke

Evans until it stops or slap him on the back and shout

“Come on, jackass, sit it out!!!!” Instead he tries to

shorten the conversation before it even starts.

“I haven’t much time, sergeant. I’ve got to go out to

MACV. Can’t this wait?”

“Ah-ah-ah it’ll only t-take a m-minute, sir.”

“You sure?”

“Y-yes sir.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s th-the bathroom d-doors, s-sir.”

“The what?”

“The b-bathroom doors.”

“What about the bathroom doors, sergeant?”

“They’re d-dirty, sir. D-dirty writing all o-over

them, sir.”

“Then get some men to clean them sergeant. Why do I

need to know about them.”

“I th-think I know w-who did it, sir.“

“And who do you think it is, sergeant?”

“Sh-Shea, sir. I j-just know he d-d-did it. I can t-

tell by the writing.”

“There is no way to really know that, sergeant. Just

have some men wipe off the writing, or something.”

“B-But I would like to g-give the de-de-detail to

Shea, sir. He de-deserves it.”

“Then give it to Shea. If you can find him.”

Captain Jeans stands and brushes by Sergeant Evan

before Evans can get out his THANK YOUs because he’s

excited with the idea of snapping up Shea and exacting a

bit of his old revenge like taking down the doors and

sanding down the foul language until it disappears

somewhere inside the wood and then re-painting the doors

with a glossy green that looks like the jungle in mid-

afternoon.

***

Come on people now

Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another
Right now

***

It wasn’t long before Captain Jeans got rid of

Sergeant Evans but not back to the world for psychiatric

help or mustered out and sent home to his loon mother with

her little batch of poisonous letters - one for each day he

was in Vietnam:

Dear Son,
Do you even think I’m still alive? How many more
nails do you want to put in my coffin. Maybe I should die.
You’d probably be happier then. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?
Love,
Mom.

No, Evans was sent to Dong Ha on the DMZ where he

lives in a sandbag bunker with another sergeant who has a

diagonal scar across his face (hand-to-hand in the Korean

War) and a deep hatred for draftees and officers.

And in return Dong Ha sent Sergeant Rodriguez to us. A

5’2” Cuban who smells like cigars with a Groucho Marx

mustache and thick, rectangular glasses tinted light brown

and I Hate Castro tattooed on the top of his right hand .

He says he was one of the upper class in Havana before

“that bastard Fidel took our business and money” and forced

him to flee to Miami where he lived behind a small grocery

store with his uncle and family who had come to Miami when

Baptista threw him out.

“I joined the army,” he says, “because I want to kill

communist. Any communist. If they want me to go to China I

will. I hate the communist. Every fucking communist bastard

deserves death. That mother fucking Kennedy. He was the

biggest communist of them all. I’m glad my people killed

him. I would have pulled the trigger myself if I had been

in Dallas.”

***

“Man he really hates Kennedy,” Snuff says, blowing smoke

into the humid wind. The lights from the whore house across

the street flicker. Naked dwarves in quick silhouette. Arms

flailing. Shrieks.

“We probably wouldn’t be here if Kennedy had never

been shot.”

“Don’t be too sure about that!” Snuff says.

***

I liked Kennedy. I remember when he was shot. They let

us out of school and everyone was crying and no one could

understand what had happened and then there was Oswald and

he didn’t really look like someone who wanted to kill a

president and then there was Ruby and he looked more like

the kind of guy who would have shot Kennedy but then it was

all over and no one seemed to care much about what happened

because life goes on and power is power and there is no way

anyone can shake the greedy bastards out of the trees and

drown them all, once and for all.

***

SNUFF SPEAKS:

“Talking to Rodriguez is like talking to a wall of

shit! Talks out of his asshole. Cuba this and Cuba that.

Kill Castro. Drop bombs on Havana. Nuke them. Invade them.

Like we should give a shit. You know what he said to me?

Just because I talk to you that doesn’t mean we’re friends.

I wanted to push the little fuck out a window or run over

him with a jeep. The asshole.”

“Asshole!”

“But then he goes on and on about his family! Like I

give a shit!. He trapped me in the communication room and I

was too nice to tell him to shut the fuck up. All night

duty with an asshole who never stopped talking. He told me

his parents and sister were crazy. He said even the dogs in

his house were crazy. It was leaving Cuba that did it, he

said. Now, what does a dog know about Cuba? And yet he kept

on saying they all were mad because they had to leave their

home. Bullshit!”

“Bullshit!”

“He said his mother kept him dressed like a girl until

he was six, and then she had a little girl and started

dressing him like a soldier. He hates his sister. Says

she’s the ugliest thing that ever came out of Cuba. Hairy.

Fat. She even has a mustache! Told me no one but a monkey

would ever fuck her, and then again he had his doubts that

a monkey would even fuck her.”

“Shit head!” Suck in smoke. Blow out smoke. A steam

pipe mouth. Repeat. “Shit head!”

“He came over from Cuba in ‘59. He was 15 and his

parents told him that they’d be going back as soon as

Kennedy helped them. But then there was the Bay of Pigs! It

was all Kennedy’s fault. Kennedy left the men on the ground

and Kennedy never gave them air support and Kennedy

promised the army would help and Kennedy, Kennedy,

Kennedy!!! He almost pissed his pants with happiness when

Kennedy was killed. But get this, he doesn’t think Oswald

did it. He says Cubans did it. They wanted to get even for

the Bay of Pigs. They thought Johnson would invade Cuba or

at least try to assassinate Castro. Now he thinks Nixon

will because he’s a Republican. ’Republicans have balls!’

He thinks when Nixon ends this shit he’ll get rid of

Castro.”

“They probably killed Bobby Kennedy, too.”

“This fucker would kill anyone related to JFK. He’s

just as crazy as Evans. At least Evans didn’t run at the

mouth all the time. This guy never stops talking. And it’s

always about Cuba. In Havana you could get anything you

wanted before Castro. He makes it sound like Saigon. And

still, with pussy everywhere, he told me about an uncle who

fucked the cows on his farm outside of Havana. You believe

that! Everyone liked to fuck cows, he said, and that’s why

Castro came to power. He wanted to stop all the Cubans from

fucking their cows and get back to fucking their wives. And

ass-fucking! Forget about it. Every virgin in Cuba has been

ass fucked because they’re trying to save their pussies for

marriage!”

“So Rodriguez likes to butt fuck people?”

“Count on that. We’ll wish Evans was still here. He

promised he was going to make everyone’s life miserable if

we didn’t shape up.”

“What the fuck is he talking about?”

“Marijuana. And Shea! He swears he’s going to get Shea

for something and put him in LBJ for at least a month. And

I don’t think this guy is kidding. I mean, anyone who fucks

a cow is going to fuck you.”

“You got that!”

****

Those were the days my friend

We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way

****
SIG SPEAKS EXTREMELY STONED:

There is war, Vietnam

and I am skinny and morose and hating America,

I stabbed at dummies stuffed with cotton in Georgia
as bees swarmed over their leathery skin
and I shot at treetops in the damp swamps of Virginia
where the mothball fleet waited in the white mist of the
St. James River
and I sleep on rooftops in Saigon on the other side of the
world
knowing my soul will never go home again.
There is war, Vietnam,
Part of the lie. A Mongol invader.

and I knew the boy who hung himself

and the boy who carried frogs on the end of his bayonet
and the boy who pretended to be a conscientious objector
and the boy who would loose both his legs in a mortar
attack
and the boy who deserted into Canada

and the booby traps ripping out of trees

and punjab sticks ripping through the feet
and the best way to hide in the jungle
and the best way to die in an ambush
and the slow march to burn down a village
and the admonition “Don’t touch the women and children.”

and the city of skinless monkeys

and the silent rockets dropping out of the sun,
and bodies floating in the Rung Sat River,
hands pointing to TuDo Street
and the moneychangers, legless pimps,
and the dwarf whores with tits filled with milk
and the bargirls crowded at plate glass windows:
“Buy me tea, GI, buy me tea,”
and metal stairways to steam bath rooms,
hand jobs, blowjobs, jack offs,
and fucking above the narrow alleyways
where the steel faced Korean smelling like a dead fish
was shot in the face by white mice
and the whore’s voice behind a gauze curtain
whispered so her father couldn’t hear:
“GI numba one, no numba ten.”

Oh! Johnson promised Rolling Thunder

and Nixon promises Niagara Falls,
and the monsoon rain is metal and fire
and men pray all the targets are found
and Sergeant Fowler burns trash by the river
secret papers about the war
swirl of ashes in the gray sky,
but nothing like his fear:
“If they win, they’ll cut off our fingers,
steal our rings, and let us bleed.
Vengeance for a belt of shriveled ears,
extracted teeth and bits of bones!”,
and plump Melvin Laird, missile head,
races through the streets to Tan Son Nhut,
the only one to go home
before his own bombs fall on him.

Oh Melvin Laird, Melvin Laird,

I have a story that’s a lie about you,
crawl into the back of your limousine
and watch the ashes stick to you window.

***

Those who know me, please forget me.

I am no longer the person you think I am.

Scratch out my name from your address book.

Pretend you met someone else.

***

“I’m going to take a piss,” Snuff says. rising from

the concrete bench and dissolving into the soft night.

Alone. Below me the city. Motorcycles puttering.

Brakes squealing. Music from a distant rooftop: You never

give me your number.....” City lights flicker and beyond

flashes of artillery, B-52 bombings, and a sea of shacks

squeezed around Saigon like too many coffins.

Saigon was built for 600,000 people but millions of

refugees attach to the core of the city like insects to a

corpse. They live in shacks and under old canvas and inside

abandoned cars or under trucks and buses that move away by

morning. There is a refugee camp in Cholon but no one cares

about the bleak faces or puffy bellied children.

They make my stomach jitter.

***

I was born in World War II. On the day I was born the

headlines said

8TH ARMY LANDS BEHIND GERMANS.

My father was in the Phillipines getting drunk and dancing

with girls with naked tops. He got so drunk he fell out of

a jeep at 40 mph and twisted his knee. To this day he gets

a 20% disability from the government. He gave me one line

of advice before I shipped out: “Try to ignore what you

see.” He tried although the images of dead Japanese on Iwo

Jima never left his mind, especially when he heard the song

I’ll Never Smile Again. “Thank God I never hear that song

much anymore,” he said. “At one time it nearly drove me

crazy.”

***

If I close my eyes and hold my eyeballs still, close

my senses and run my fingers around the inside of my skull,

I can shrink into a man the size of gnat crawling through

the cellar window screen and disappearing in the garden

behind our house. A man without morals. A man who stays

away from his mind.

I wasn’t always like this.

 Three years ago I sat on a window sill in a friend’s

New York City apartment overlooking a crowded street in

Greenwich Village. He’s an artist who’s against the war and

sculptures small, twisted figures of people who have been

killed by napalm. He tangles the hard clay figures into

different shapes then scorches them with an acetylene

torch. He hasn’t sold many, maybe two or three, but he

can’t stop configuring and reconfiguring the tortured

shapes as if he alone is doing penance for the charred

corpses. I told him I would never let them send me to

Vietnam. I’d go to Canada or hide in the city or simply

refuse and suffer the result. I lied to myself. The draft

notice came and I submitted to their anal examinations and

piss tests and throat explorations and verbal insults until

three nights ago the man who was supposed to go to Canada

or hide in that deadly city stretched himself on a massage

table and got a blowjob from a woman who said her husband

was a soldier in the Delta. And when she brought him to a

climax and then spit him out, he asked her how long had her

husband been fighting.

“Six year.”

“VC?” he asked.

“No VC. VC numba ten. He fight for American. Kill many

VC.”
 “You see him? When?”

“I no see him two year. He gib me no money. I sucky

American They hab money. Gib numba one blowjob. Yes?”

She grinned and wiped her mouth with a towel.

”You give number one blowjob. Yes!”

She slipped behind another curtain where another

soldier was waiting for a blowjob or hand job but no

fucking because she only did number one blowjobs and hand

jobs and there was no way she was going to let an American

cock inside of her, some of them were too big and some of

them were too dirty and some of them were just not worth

the money.

***

HUE!

Across the rice field on a small road in a small jeep

I saw dead oxen rotting in the sun, and the outskirts of

the city smoking, and I turned to Colonel Pearson and

asked “Will we be safe in there?” and he just looked

straight ahead, probably wondering how the two of us got

stuck driving into Hue a little over a six months after the

city had been destroyed and all we had was an M-16 and a

.45 and the obligation to find a way north to Cua Viet

where there was a small outpost for the movement of

materials down the northern rivers. Colonel Pearson wanted

to find out if the outpost was necessary and if someone

else could do the job because the eight men we had there

seemed to be doing nothing but sending messages back to

Saigon that they had nothing to do but collect statistics

that someone else was collecting.

HUE!

Scattered hamlets and men fishing for food and finding

scarred bodies and women crouching and washing clothes in

buckets and burial mounds on flat ground and the intense

heat boiling the rice fields and the buildings ahead

useless with bullet holes and everywhere the mountains like

Chinese paintings, mist covered, serene until the huge

trucks roll and thunder and cross the broken bridges where

an old guardsman picks his nose in a metal tower while he

tries to read an English primer and......

***

“You okay,” Snuff says as he returns from the

bathroom. “You looked like you were really flying.”

“I was just talking out loud.”

“You’d better watch yourself or someone is going to

think you’ve gone crazy.”

He sits next to me and lights up another joint. I am

what they call “totally wasted” but in more ways than one,

but Snuff believes we should smoke until we can hardly walk.

 “I was thinking about writing a story,” he says, “

about all the people I know who smoke marijuana. When I

first started smoking this shit I thought I was alone, but

now, fuck, everyone I know smokes. I’ll call the story The

Uncountable Sum. You think that’s a good title? The sum

meaning some of us smoke, but there are so many of us that

I can’t count them all.”

“What would the story be about?”

“Smoking. What else? I’ll write about all the guys who

came over here good little boys and turned into potheads.”

“Like me.”

“Like us.”

***

Can you surry, can you picnic

Can you surry, can you picnic
Surry down to a stoned soul picnic
Surry down to a stoned soul picnic
***

Colonel Pearson in the conference room with Captain

Jeans and 22 enlisted men. Today’s topic: Military Justice

and Letting Out Secrets.. The conference room is the war

room, is the locked-and-bolted chart room, is the coldest

room in the building. The conference table has a shiny

plastic top soiled with fingerprints, and the walls are

covered with plexi-glass chart boards. When the room is

dark, grease-penciled numbers in red , green and white are

illuminated by neon lights. They show the war with numbers

attached to straight lines, triangular lines, horizontal

lines and some lines that make no sense. One chart presents

the total weight of rock moving from Vung Tau to Saigon to

build a road through the jungle. Another line rises and

falls and then rises again showing the number of bananas

reaching the Saigon ports in a months time. The most

important line tells how many ships are in-country,

although the line is a lie since no one cares how many

ships are in-country just so long as everyone gets what

they need, and there’s so much shit brought to Vietnam it’s

hard for anyone to go without a thing.

We all stand around the conference table as Colonel

Pearson squirms in his leather chair. He may have

hemorrhoids. He places a yellow pad on the table and

announces he has some rules and regulations that we need to

know. The men shuffle and lean against the chart boards,

smudging some of the numbers. Captain Jeans coughs a

delicate cough. The air-conditioner, on full blast, whirrs

and still finds it hard to cool down the stuffy room.

Colonel Pearson rubs his bald head and sees his reflection

in the table top. He smiles at himself then quickly

changes expression.
 “Gentlemen,” he says, “I have a few items I need to

address to you. First, Captain Jeans informs me that the

jeeps are at the lowest level of maintenance since

Christmas inspection. This is a serious matter, gentleman.

If any one of those jeeps broke down between here and Long

Bien, or even Tan Son Nhut, any one of us could be in

serious trouble. I want this problem solved by the end of

this week.”

His order was direct and Captain Jeans smiled because

it was really his order but no one was paying much

attention to Captain Jeans and his obsession with the jeeps.

“Now, secondly, we are still having a problem with the

burning of trash! Gentlemen, trash, all trash, must be

burned. Every piece of paper that leaves this building must

be burned in the barrels outside. I don’t want to find some

mamasan taking our reports home for toilet paper. The wrong

Vietnamese may wipe his ass with them, if you know what I

mean!”

The room snickers although Captain Jeans doesn’t see

anything funny with what the Colonel says. There were spies

out there! Tiny old mamasans who’ve been caught with typed

reports stuffed under their black pajama shirts. Sure, the

reports were meaningless - cargo statistics, promotions,

even a list of enlisted men’s birthdays - but just the fact

that the MPs caught them did not make the unit appear very

vigilant.

“Remember gentlemen, we didn’t make those burn barrels

for nothing. You cram everything paper in them and spin

those barrels until every ash has floated over the city of

Saigon.”

Colonel Pearson shuffles the papers in front of him.

“ Before going on to the most important point today, I

would like to remind you men of what it means to go AWOL.

This does not apply to all of you, but those of you it does

apply to better listen up.”

He’s obviously talking about Shea who squats against

the wall. He has found another Chinese girl friend in

Cholon and swears she looks more American than even

American girls. The girl is half his size but has large

breast, something unusual in the Chinese. He says she likes

to walk on his back and can even spin around while sitting

on his dick. This time, he says, he’s really in love. I

don’t think Colonel Pearson cares.

The colonel continues: “Any one in the army, or for

that matter, anyone in the armed forces, who leaves his

duty post, can, and must be court-martialed. Add on to that

failure to obey an order or regulation and that person is

in one hell of a problem. So, if any of you are thinking of

leaving, or for that matter, know anyone who is thinking of

leaving, you’d better think twice about it because it’s

serious business.”

No one is thinking of leaving. We only dream of

getting back to the world and out of the Saigon shit-hole.

We keep calendars of little squares on drawings of naked

girls, and we block out each square to mark the number of

days left in-country. Square 365 is directly in the middle

of the girl’s pussy. We all know we have to wait - that‘s

what war is all about. None of us are going AWOL - except,

maybe, Shea.

“Now for the most important item on today’s agenda,

and I stress important! By now you all know that the

president has begun his program of troop withdrawal. This

is an important step that could be easily upset by

inaccurate or exaggerated information. Newsman will

eventually be prowling around hoping to get information on

our unit and what’s happening to it. They’re sneaky

bastards! Like cockroaches! So gentlemen, if any one of

them comes up to you wanting information, keep your mouth

shut! A fly in the milk can ruin the whole drink. Any

information you give an asshole reporter will be corrupted

and sent back to the world as truth. If anyone gives out

information, I’ll be forced to take the necessary action

and have that man court-martialed under article 94 which is

sedition, gentlemen, out and out sedition. Releasing

classified information is illegal. Is that understood?”

The colonel scans the stoic faces. The room is

hopelessly silent. He expects dissent. The men are mostly

draftees. Hippies and protestors who had long hair and

walked around in sandals. A few chairs squeak. Some boots

shuffle. But nothing is said. Colonel Pearson repeats, as

if daring someone to speak: “I asked if you understood?”

From the corner where he squats and sucks on his top

lip, Shea raises his hand. ”Sir.” Colonel Pearson wants to

ignore him but Shea repeats even louder, “Sir!”

“What is it you want,” and Colonel Pearson almost

spits, “Specialist Shea?”

“I don’t get it.”

“Get what, specialist?”

“Should we be silent if some newsman wants to know our

opinion about the war. After all it’s just an opinion.”

Colonel Pearson shifts in his chair and twitches his

cheek. His nerves seem to be shaking beneath his uniform.

“That’s just the point, specialist. We don’t want them

to know your opinion because they don’t need to know you

opinion. They’re blood suckers who want us to loose this

war. In fact, some of them are communist sympathizers. They

hate America. They’ll use your opinion to warp how

Americans see the war. They don’t need to know anything!”

“Yes sir, but I think.....”

“Think?” Colonel Pearson interrupts. “Think?” He

stiffens his body and looks at Captain Jeans who is also

stiffening his body. “You know, specialist, maybe you think

took much. Now I’m not the smartest man in the world, in

fact, I barely finished college, but I know enough not to

talk about my country when what I say hurts my country. I

never even think about saying anything. You may call it

blind obedience, but I call it ‘cheerful obedience.’ How

else can an army function? Especially when it’s at war? No,

you’ve got a job to do and orders to obey. I suggest you do

them both.”

“Yes sir, but....”

“But what? You, specialist, are damned lucky you

haven’t already been court-martialed. Your ass has been on

the line for awhile with all your Chinese girlfriends and

staying away from work for so long. Both Captain Jeans and

I can attest to that. So, if you want to express your

opinion, I suggest you’re heading for more trouble and

maybe, even, a court-martial. I hate court-martials. Did

you know that I was in the army for ten years before I even

heard of a special court-martial. Ten years! Now they’re

common as hell. And why? Because of people like you who

think they know more than the government. I’ve seen

privates talking back to sergeants, and specialist thinking

they know more than lieutenants. Lower ranking men talking

back to higher ranking men! Disgusting! I’d sooner send a

man to jail then let him get away with talking back to his

superiors. Now I told you not to talk to newsmen, and for

you that should be reason enough.”

Colonel Pearson squints at Shea, daring him to speak.

I can see Shea holding back. Is this the time to tell the

colonel what he really thinks? Would it be worth it? Or is

the Chinese whore in Cholon more important. The colonel

waits for Shea to say something, but Shea smiles, a smirky

smile, and says nothing. The whore is more important.

***

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do

Two can be as bad as one
It's the loneliest number since the number one
No is the saddest experience you'll ever know
Yes, it's the saddest experience you'll ever know

***

My tongue is dry. My tongue is thick. I elbow Snuff’s

ribs and worry about the future. Last night I cast the I

Ching but it had nothing to say. The hexagrams were mildew,

like my feet, rotting from sweat and fungus. I am dumb from

too much marijuana. I think of home. Pleasant letters from

girls I knew. Some talk about being pregnant, loneliness,

some talk about the latest movies and family. I carry vague

connections.

“When I got my draft notice,” I tell Snuff, “ I should

have written FUCK YOU across the page and sent it back to

them.”

“You would have gone to jail.”

“Think so?”

“Shit yeah. Jail is their best threat. I say fuck them

all, but not all the way.”

“I say fuck them all, all the way.”

I sing:

Mrs. Murphy had giant teeth

That snapped at your lips
And scared your cheeks,
But all in all
And with some luck
Mrs. Murphy was a pretty good fuck.

***

Snuff is grinning. I can see his teeth. He swallows a

waft of smoke and lets out a wheeze. “Can you imagine

living in Saigon for the rest of your life?” He cringes. We

are anxious to get out of our past, the things we have

seen. The old lady dying from grenade shrapnel, next to

her, a skinny soldier already dead. Children weeping. Noise

every where.
 “You should be glad it wasn’t you,” Snuff says. “It

could have been you. That would have shit. If anyone should

die around here it’s them. It’s their war. They wanted it.”

***

The morning after I first saw someone die in this war,

Hill stuffed a pancake into his mouth and acted disgusted

by my reaction.

“Haven’t you ever killed anything?” he asked. “It’s

the easiest thing to do, and real easy once you’ve done it

a couple of times.”

Hill considered himself an authority on killing things

- most especially small animals. When he was a boy he spent

weekends hunting with his father. He loved the excitement

of hunting.

Hill’s memory:

“I remember the day I shot my first deer. I hid behind

some brushes in the woods and waited for one to come into

view. I waited for an hour when suddenly, right before my

eyes, I saw this big, golden deer. It stood in this opening

in the forest. I think even God wanted me to kill it

because it was the only place the sun was shining. I was so

nervous I thought I’d stop breathing. But deer are dumb and

it stood there like no one was around and then, get this,

it bent its rear legs and took a shit. I never thought

about deer shitting. It looked kind of funny. Even

pathetic. It was so caught up in its shitting that it

didn’t even notice me aiming my rifle and imagining where I

was going to put the first bullet. Imagination has a lot to

do with hunting. You just don’t pull the trigger like some

of these assholes around here. You put an image in your

head and imagine where the bullets will go and how it will

penetrate the animal and then what the animal will look

like after it’s shot. At first I imagined I’d shoot him

right between the eyes, but I wasn’t that good a shot yet,

so I waited for the deer to come a little closer and turn

sideways. It seemed like hours before it turned, but then,

BLAM! and that little fucker dropped faster than a lead

ball. I was surprised by how fast it fell, but I kept my

cool and pumped a few more rounds into its belly to make

sure it was dead. Afterwards, I felt kind of high, you

know, my head was light and I felt a little dizzy. I didn’t

think it would be that easy. I still got the head. My

father stuffed it and put it in his garage next to the head

of the first dear he shot.”

Hill finished his breakfast and lit a small, almost

black cigar. Smoke clouded his unshaven face. He blew his

nose into a napkin then vigorously wiped his nose clean.

“There’s nothing like hunting to cure your fear of

killing someone. In a way it makes you feel good. Alive.

One summer a bunch of us got cases of beer and went hunting

for ground squirrels. We got so drunk we shot so many

squirrels they filled up the entire back of the truck. By

the time we got home the next day, the little fuckers were

smelling so bad their stink was all over us. No one wanted

to get near us. My girlfriend almost vomited when we pulled

up to her house to show her all the squirrels. She made me

throw the clothes I was wearing into the garbage.”

“What did you do with the squirrels?”

“We threw them away. They’re no good to eat. You hunt

them for fun. And I mean fun! For one thing, they’re sharp

and hard to outsmart. If you’re alone you can’t kill them.

You need a couple of guys. One guy hides and the other

chases the squirrel right into where you’re hiding, then

Wham!, you shoot them as close as ten, maybe twenty feet.

It’s funny as hell to see their reaction when they discover

it’s a trap. They freeze, so it’s hard to miss. Becomes a

carnival shooting gallery.

“In a way they’re like slopes: easy to kill when you

really want to kill them.”

He rose from the table, turned and strutted out of the

mess hall. Ribbons of cigar smoke followed him. Ribbons.

***
 We're caught in a trap
I can't walk out
Because I love you too much baby
Why can't you see
What you're doing to me
When you don't believe a word I say?
We can't go on together
With suspicious minds
And we can't build our dreams
On suspicious minds

***

SNUFF SPEAKS:

“Before they sent me here I was an honor guard in

Georgia. I helped carry coffins to the graveyards. Bad

duty. Depressing. After awhile I got good at guessing how

much of a guy’s body was inside the coffin. Sometimes I

could feel a body bumping and sliding around. No arms. No

legs. Sometimes nothing but arms and legs.

“Once we were carrying a coffin over a muddy road to a

brand new graveyard. There was only open field, and the guy

who was inside was going to be the first person buried

there. It was really strange. All morning it sprinkled rain

so the casket handles were slippery wet. then there was the

family crying and screaming and his wife wailing and

throwing her body across the coffin. Every time she did I

thought we were going to drop the coffin. The worst came

when we got to the grave site and one of the guys standing

on the edge of the grave fell on top of the coffin when the
earth gave way. Then we all started slipping and the coffin

hit the ground and I could feel the guy’s body bounce

inside. It was a mess.

“After that every one kept on slipping in the mud. The

chaplain’s prayer book fell in the mud and got soaking wet.

He had to make up the ceremony from memory. I couldn’t look

at the family. I thought the mother was going to throw

herself into the grave. Her husband held her back but she

kept on sliding around in the mud. Tell the truth, I was

glad they gave me orders here. I don’t think I would have

survived that duty.“

***

Shadows grow inside the two of us, seep out of our

mouths and walk behind the refrigerated coffins where

volunteers and draftees sleep forever.

Do they have the right arms and legs?

Are their dog tags jammed behind their teeth?

Was their uniform starched and pressed?

Were their boots polished to a shine?

Boots!

And the feet sweat. The feet burn. The feet sing:

Hey, look my toes are falling off,

Must be I got the Jungle Rot!
Every one, one two three,
Grab your partners and sing with me:
Do the Jungle Rot,
 Do the Jungle Rot
Wipe your feet with dirty socks
And do the Jungle Rot.

So we sit on bar stools in old Saigon , our feet rotting

off while on the TV above the bar Ricardo Montalban warns

us not to sell our military script because it helps the

enemy buy AK47s. But do they have the Jungle Rot? Or are

their feet clean or not?

***

“What the hell are you talking about?” Snuff asks as

he pushes my shoulders and shakes me. “Come out of it!

You’re too stoned. We need to go on a cyclo ride.”

“What time is it?”

“Nine. Why?”

“I thought it was the middle of the night. I really

thought it was the middle of the night.”

“I need Gummer,” Snuff says. “I’m tired of this shit

box roof top. I can smell the Frenchmen who died here in

the fifties.”

Snuff is anxious to descend the stairwell down the

side of the hotel. It spirals down the street and leads to

the alleyway.

I rise from the bench and search for the money I

received from selling my beer ration to a taxi driver. The

driver grunted when he lifted the cases of Budweiser. “You

numba one GI, no numba ten.” He didn’t know what he was

talking about. I’m like everyone else. If anyone in the

world saw me now they would say they never knew me.

I find the money and follow Snuff across the patio.

Another cyclo ride to the bars and whore houses and the

black alleys and the wide streets and the along the docks

and out to Cholon. Mounted in a plump basket in front of a

motor bike, we are carried like children through the city.

We find our way to the top of the stairwell. Snuff

grabs the railing because he’s afraid of losing his

balance. We begin our descent. I look up and see a small

part of the white moon. Beneath me a dark ocean of city

where sane-less men can easily drown.

***

Maybe we’re all drowning. Maybe we already drowned and

are walking under the ocean. Maybe when we return home

Snuff will drown in more drugs and overdose in a Florida

motel while he waits for his girlfriend to come out of a

shower.

Our descent is noisy with the clanking of our boots.

Nine stories down and on every floor we can look into the

cramped rooms of bunk beds and posters of naked women and

stacks of uniforms washed and pressed by tiny old ladies

with large hats and thin blouses. Shea lives on the eighth

floor. When he’s there. The room is empty now. I can see a

small light and a stack of black and white porno pictures

and a uniform laid out on the bottom bunk waiting for

someone to wear it. No one shares a room with Shea. That’s

how Captain Jeans wants it. He’d be a bad influence on the

other men. Drinks too much. Smokes too much. Has no respect

for authority. If Captain Jeans had his way Shea would be

in jail, but it’s Vietnam and the only jail is here and

everywhere.

***

“They’re all fucking assholes,” Shea said as he was

ordered by Captain Jeans to take the early morning guard

duty shift or suffer severe consequences. Ever since the

episode with Green, “Specialist Green” as Shea called him,

Shea has been afraid of guard duty. But stop, let Shea

tell the story:

“ I had guard duty on the roof-top of the old French

mansion with Specialist Green. The roof is flat except for

the flag tower that’s used as a communication room.

Teletypes, telephones and a top secret telephone booth were

stuffed into the cramped tower when they first converted

the mansion into the headquarters of the transportation

group, but the most obvious structure is the green and

white dragon that’s coils like a guardian on the spine of

the roof. The Japs built the dragon in ‘43, a symbol of

domination, I think. It curls and sneers at the Saigon

river and, late at night, I think it screams at the dark.

But that’s just my imagination at work.

“ That night I wanted to be with my whore, but instead

I spent the night with Specialist Green and his neurotic

bullshit. I tried to ignore him and the dragon, but

Specialist Green said the dragon was a symbol of bad luck

and that I’d better be careful about what I said.

Specialist Green said the dragon reminded him of the Jesus

picture his mother had on her living room wall. The Jesus

eyes followed him around the couch and chair, behind the

television and to the entrance to the hallway that led to

his bedroom. Green came from San Francisco, and he said his

soul hung outside his body like a wrinkled handkerchief

turning black because he hated the Jesus picture so much he

wanted to destroy it.

“I like guard duty at six in the evening because the

city is still noisy with the noise of the street markets

and whore bars. The workers along the river are still

unloading supplies and you can hear the sailors laughing

and playing cards on the decks of the old Victory ships. In

the evening no one seems to worry about dying or getting

rocketed, but at night, everything is different.

“ The worst shift is from two in the morning to

daybreak. The city is very quiet then, and it’s easy to be

afraid of every sound. A motor scooter suddenly becomes a

guerilla on the prowl, and music from a juke box in the bar

a block away sounds way too lonely.

“Specialist Green hated the bars and the whore. He

even predicted that he would die between two and six in the

morning while a whore gave a hand-job to the MP who guarded

the entrance to the mansion gate. Green imagined that the

MPs throat would be quietly slit as the MP ejaculated all

over the girl’s hand, and he asked me to shoot him if I

found him with his throat cut open and still alive.

“I promised him I would shoot him - it didn’t matter

to me - but then again, I always make promises I don‘t

keep. Every whore I meet I promise to take back to the

world. Sometimes the promise gets me a free piece of ass

and marijuana. Sometimes it gets their trust and they want

to move in with me. One of the girls, a refugee from a

village in the Delta, trusted me enough to take me to her

alleyway home. We fucked in a small room where the entire

family slept on the floor. No one awoke as we spread a

grass mat in a corner. Her grandfather slept next to use

and I saw his shadowy figure and the hole of his open mouth
wheezing. I even promised the girl I’d take her grandfather

back to the world, too; the old man shuddered in the dark

and almost woke up. Then, his vibrating snore suddenly

stopped. He opened his eyes and stared into the darkness.

His eyes never blinked, and he never turned to see fucking

his granddaughter. He closed his eyes, turned his back to

us, and never woke again. I was lucky that night because

thirty minutes after I left, a rocket from across the river

destroyed the alley and killed everyone in the girl’s

family except a brother and a small baby who were sleeping

under a window ledge.

“Rockets attack Saigon without any warning. They sail

in from the low fields across the river, without sound or

any specific direction. Most of the time they explode in

the overcrowded tenement buildings jammed with refugees

sleeping in hallways and cluttered rooms. They rarely hit

the bars on TuDo street, or the cargo ships docked along

the river.

“One of the rockets almost killed Specialist Green.

The attack came at five it the morning when the two of us

were standing guard. I was on one side of the roof balcony

talking into my steel helmet and trying to stay awake.

Green was on the other side of the balcony staring at the

dragon’s eyes and plotting to cover them with black paint.

He thought the black paint was the only way to stop the

eyes from moving and following him around; besides, he

said, a blind dragon was a symbol of good luck. Anyway, the

rocket that almost killed Green exploded in front of the

sandbag bunker directly below us. The night turned a sudden

whiteness. The old mansion shuddered, and Green was thrown

against the tower’s wall, right beneath the dragon’s jaw.

“Something left his body because he suddenly went very

pale. His pores opened all at once, and the ghost that

lived inside him flew out like water through a sieve. Green

said it was a ghost that had been living inside of him ever

since he was a boy. The first time he felt it was at his

next door neighbor’s funeral. The neighbor’s casket had

been placed in the living room for everyone to view the

body. Green said that the body smelled sweet and when no

one was looking he poked the neighbor’s face and felt

powder on his fingers. Nothing moved. Not even the purple

lips he had once seen smoking a needle thin pipe.

“Green felt weird so he hid in a corner, but he said

he saw the neighbor’s ghost get up and smile and drink a

glass of wine. The ghost said nothing and simply watched

Green back out of the room and hide behind his mother and

her large, leather purse. Green knew from that day on we

all had ghosts inside our bodies and that the ghosts were
always waiting to be released. He said it didn’t always

mean death when they got out of your body, but something

was suddenly missing from inside the body and it didn’t

take long for you to figure it out because you’d walk

around feeling an emptiness inside of you.

“After the rocket attack Green spent the next day at

the infirmary under observation. They wanted to see if

blood would spurt out of his nose and ears from internal

bleeding. He tried to tell them that his real insides had

already escaped , but they didn’t believe him and sent him

to a psychiatrist who told him it was a reaction to the

rocket blast. When Green told him that he had lost his

soul, the psychiatrist just looked at him and sent him back

to duty.

“ When Green came back to guard duty, his hatred for

the dragon was driving him mad. It was nothing but bad

luck. A guide for rockets. It even gave him visions. He

swore he could see the rockets whenever and wherever they

were fired. Clear as needles. And he saw where they landed.

One night he saw them land on Bien Hoa. Another night he

saw them destroy a bridge outside of Cholon. ‘Now that my

soul has left me,’ he said, ‘my ghost is wandering out

there without me. That’s why I can see rockets.’

“After that I decided I needed to go AWOL for a couple

of weeks. I had a whore in Cholon and sure enough she told

me that there had been rockets exploding near her home, the

same rockets that Green had told me about. When I got back,

Jeans put me on extra guard duty, and I was back on the

roof with Green who had turned into a real nut. He sat

beneath the dragon, cross-legged and said he could see war

everywhere in the world.

“ ’I saw a death in Africa,” he said, ’just the other

night. A man reached over to drink from a canvas bag and a

mortar went through his back. The visions are spreading.

They’re going to eat me alive.’

“ His visions spread into European back streets, the

old buildings, emergency vehicles and screaming bodies

falling out of the sky. He saw a woman in New York City in

a cellar, half naked, her head on a pin-striped pillow, a

bullet between her eyes. He saw a car explode in Miami and

a Cuban blown into pieces, his cigar flying into the front

room where Green’s mother was writing a letter with the

Jesus eyes watching her.

“He even got a letter from his mother who said people

were dropping bombs everywhere. The neighbor’s car was

cherry-bombed and gutted by fire. She had to leave

Baltimore. She had to hide somewhere safe. She hated the

news because someone she knew could be among the daily list
of the dead and assassinated. She had to go north but she

had no money. Only debt. Lots of debts.

“The letter drove Green over the edge. He walked from

one end of the balcony to the other promising to get home

somehow.

“’ Shea. I need you t help me on this one,” he finally

said. ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’ “

“ ‘Now? At three in the morning?’” I said.

“ ‘Nam. I’ve got to get out of ‘Nam.’ ”

He slumped against the dragon’s foundation and propped

his M-14 against the wall.

“ ‘I want you to smash my kneecap.’”

“ ‘Are you crazy? They’ll never be able to repair a

kneecap. You’ll be crippled for life.’“

“’I can’t take these visions anymore. They’re like bad

trips. Real bad trips.’”

“’What makes you think they’ll end once you’re out of

this place?’”

“’It’s this place! This dragon. This city This war.

I’ve got to get out of here and you’ve got to help me.’”

A flare burst over the river and hissed. Green looked

beyond the sparkling light and said if I didn’t crush his

kneecap, he’d throw himself off the roof. I would have let

him but I also wanted to hit him. Green was an annoying

asshole. Whining about everything from food to how much it

cost to have a whore.

“’If they catch me I’ll go to jail,’“ I said.

“’I’ll tell them I fell. They won’t know anything.

Just help me.’“

“I thought about it and then decided to end his whiny

voice. I gave him my green handkerchief and told him to

crumple it in his mouth and bite down hard. He wadded it

into a ball and pushed it between his teeth. We waited for

the flare to fade and burn itself out in the river. He

looked at the tip of his left boot, wiggled it side to

side, and told me I was an angel. Me an angel! More like a

fucking devil!

“ I lifted the M-14 by the moist barrel and, like a

baseball hitter, aligned the rifle butt to this knee. ‘The

flares almost out,’ I said. ‘Hold your breath, bite down

and don’t scream.’”

“The hiss of the flare sputtered. The light dimmed and

the night got very black. I swung the rifle at Green’s

vague figure and felt the soft jolt of wood to bone.

Green’s voice suffocated behind the green handkerchief. He

didn’t even moan.

“ He was taken to the same hospital that treated him

for shock. I caught up with him the next evening and found
him asleep by a window that overlooked a helicopter pad.

Red Cross choppers thundered around him. Up and down. Up

and down. I thought he’d wake up but he stayed sleeping.

Like he was almost dead. I left and went back three days

later but he was already gone. A nurse told me that all the

doctors were busy the night he came in - there had been a

pretty bad firefight nearby -so they simply amputated

Green’s leg because they had no time to repair it. They

sent him back to the states the afternoon before my visit.

“I got only one letter from Green three months later.

The letter said nothing about his leg. He said his mother

had died of a heart attack shortly after he returned home.

He tried to spread her ashes over the Chesapeake Bay, but a

policeman stopped him and told him he had to go out to sea

to do that. It was against the law to spread someone’s

ashes along the shore. He decided to keep her ashes in a

metal jar in the back of his refrigerator.

“He ended by inviting me to Baltimore. Said I could

get a lot of good smoke there, and that he had a next door

neighbor who was beautiful and would fuck me. He said he

still had visions. One was about a Vietnamese boy standing

by a light pole and pissing out blood. A nurse told him to

stop but the boy couldn’t stop pissing and pissed out so

much blood that the gutters were flooding. Blood was up to

everyone’s ankles, and then, get this, he saw me floating

face downward towards TuDo street. He said the vision came

to him while he was driving over a bridge near Chesapeake

Biscayne to watch a sunrise. He said the vision meant I

should be careful or else something bad was going to happen

to me. I read the letter and decided to go AWOL with my

girl for a few days. I needed to get away. I think that’s

when Captain Jeans really decided to court martial me. He

wanted me to check out some jeeps in Bien Hoa but I was

nowhere to be found. And, to tell you the truth, I really

didn’t give a shit.”

***

Do you know the way to San Jose

I've been away so long
I may go wrong and lose my way
Do you know the way to San Jose
I'm going back to find some peace of mind
In San Jose

***

I spiral down the metal stairs, Snuff far in front of

me. He almost runs down because he is afraid of falling,

but I am caught in the spiral. I grope the railing like a

blind man. One slip and I could fall to the ground and wake

the mamasan sleeping on the cobbled alley floor next to her

grandson. They sleep on a straw mat under an army canvas.

In the daytime the boy sells marijuana in wrapped cigarette

packages - 20 for a dollar. They’re called Park Lane and

they come with filter tips. Others are soaked in opium and

also neatly wrapped. They’re 20 for a dollar, too. They

knock your head off. One moment you’re sitting in a bar and

the next moment you’re in a hotel lobby across town in

Cholon talking to a papasan who serves formaldehyde beer

and smirks at your rolling eyes and bobbing head. All you

want to do is lie down - anywhere - and watch the spinning

darkness and the naked whores massaging your neck and

holding a tube to your mouth and more opium more opium more

opium until you don’t even know if you’re dead.

“I’ll wait for you in the front of the hotel,” Snuff

yells from the alley.

I watch one foot follow the other. I’m a spider

crawling down a net woven to the wall. I can spy into each

window where men clutter in bunk beds and smoke and drink

and wait to go back to duty, the mindless duty of war

offices and guard posts and driving officers to meetings

where the war is going well. If you can believe it!

In a pale green room on the eighth floor, I can see

Sergeant Rodriguez lying on his small bed, his right arm

across his face, his left arm dangling off the side of the

bed, a book on the floor. He must have fallen asleep

reading because he has his boots and pants on . And then

again, it’s Rodriguez and he’s always prepared for

something. He’s all determination and focus. A small

volcano with sporadic eruptions.

“I got my energy from living with my family.

Everyone’s crazy in my house. My mother - she lives on

tranquilizers and hates living in America. My father hates

me because I didn’t join some secret organization to

overthrow Castro. My sister - my poor sister - she’s very

sick. Always sick. Has some emotional disease. The last

time I was home she told me not to ever come home again or

else one day the house would trap me like it trapped her

and I’d never leave again. Even the dog is crazy! That’s

what they do. Drive everything crazy!”

In his sleep Rodriguez looks at peace. I think it’s

funny that in the room right below him, Brickel, the

company clerk, is holding one of his queer parties with a

group of Marines. In fact, he could be sucking a cock right

now as Sergeant Rodriguez snores.

***

Sergeant Rodriguez on homosexuals: “I hate fags! All

of them. Fairy boys! Swizzle wrists! Butt fuckers! I hate

them all! I cut one with a knife once. In New Jersey. He

gave me a ride home and tried to touch my leg. I cut his

cheek with my pocket knife. The fucker! I should have

stabbed him in the ear. I hate Castro but he’s doing one

thing right: getting rid of all the fags!

***

Brickel is a queer
Brickel is a queer
He loves the smell of underwear
Brickel, Brickel,
Brickel is a queer

***

I knew from day one that Brickel was a queer. He tried

hard to hide it, but the soft way he typed up ration cards

and leave papers and walked around his desk touching his

little glass paper weight or opening his mail with a

stiletto knife - all too fluid, all too feminine. I don’t

know if Sergeant Rodriguez suspected him, but Captain Jeans

knew something was different about him because the good

captain treated him with tremendous care.

“He’s the best company clerk is this part of Vietnam,”

was his excuse, but I think he enjoyed Brickel’s feminine

touch in the cramped closet of the company office. No, he

didn’t get blowjobs! He just gave Brickel free range over

company matters - who was going on R and R first, who was

going to accompany the colonel when he inspected Dong Ha or

Cua Viet or Danang, who was going to get an extra ration

card (under the table) because Captain Jeans thought the

person was doing a good job.

 Now Captain Jeans was also pretty dumb when it came to

reading people, and, in spite of Brickel’s girlish

gestures, Jeans was determined to believe that Brickel was

a family man who was married and had two children back in

Washington D.C. Brickel would receive tapes from home and

everyone who was in the office would have to listen to the

little kids squealing and saying how much they missed him.

“They never called him Daddy, or anything like that,“

Snuff said. “And notice, you never hear a wife talking.

He’s got to be a fag.”

Just the same the tapes were there and they convinced

Captain Jeans - and most everyone else - that Brickel was

as much a man as anyone else in the unit and would probably

kill anyone for saying something else.

But I found out. I found out.

***

I can see Snuff in the alley. A shadow. Smoking and

cackling and talking to the shoeshine boy and his

grandmother. He’s probably buying more smoke. I’m on the

seventh floor and I can see into Brickel’s room and

although it’s dark I know something is going on because

Brickel -in his own words - “loves to give blow jobs.”

***

Whole Lotta Love

 Whole Lotta Love
You need Loving

***

Brickel’s room is above mine. I’m on the sixth floor.

His room has a small balcony that overlooks the courtyard

and on many nights music floats out his window, echoes

against the chipped walls and old paint, and slides like

dark prophecies through the window blinds: Mother, mother,

we don’t have to escalate.....” A silk voice. A reminder

that the war is everywhere.

The music is clear. Brickel has the best sound system

in the hotel - except for Florido. I sometimes wonder if

the two of them have their own little black market. It

would be an odd combination. Grumpy and Picky. Macho and

Sissy.

The night I found out Brickel was queer I was lying on

a canvas cot alone on the rooftop and sweating from the

Saigon heat. I spit in the air and let it fall like a spray

on my body. My elbow was hurting from the beer bottle gash

and the pain only made me think about the time in my

childhood when Jimmy Mulligan beat me to a pulp for calling

his father a cripple. Mulligan was 12 and I was nine. He

was in love with my sister. She was fourteen and the color

of a brown beetle. Her skin glistened and she had a

birthmark the shape of a quarter moon on the back of her

neck. Whenever Mulligan saw her, he wanted to touch the

birthmark.

Mulligan lived across the street where his father sat

in front of the living room window, immovable and mostly

mute. His spine was broken from an auto accident. Most of

his body, from neck to toe, was useless. His head flopped

sideways and when he tried to talk there was only a

gurgling sound.

Mulligan started the fight. He liked to pull my hair

while spinning me around, calling me “pussy boy” or “little

turd.” I usually took it, but one day he pulled my hair so

hard I thought he was going to yank it out in clumps, I

screamed, “ You’re a dump cripple like your dad.”

He stopped spinning me, but then he proceeded to pound

on my body and threw me against an abandoned car my father

had left in the front yard. My face hit the side mirror and

I smashed my ear until it bled. I was in pain for at least

a month, and Mulligan never talked to me again.

So hating pain, hating heat, sweat all over me, Ray

Charles drifting to the rooftop Georgia, Georgia, the whole

day through.....” his voice an invitation to visit

Brickel’s room, just an old sweet song.....I walked down

the three flights of stairs in a t-shirt and underwear.

Rubber flip-fops slapped against my feet. The smell of

fried fish from the Korean’s room.....keeps Georgia on my

mind....I knocked on Brickel’s door....Georgia, I’m say

Georgia....and there was Brickel in his underwear holding a

beer, his chest shiny from humidity. Panting. Out of

breath......a song for you....”What are you doing here?” he

said, behind him ghostly shadows swayed to....comes as

sweet and clear....”I heard the music and thought I’d stop

by,” I said. A black light laminated the room with purple

shade. The ghostly shadows pressed against each other....as

moonlight through the pines....”Come in. Come in. I just

never expected a visit from you. I always thought you

didn’t like me.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, knowing I

didn’t like him because he acted like a little bitch

delivering messages for the captain, posting them on a cork

board and happily underlining each man’s duties for the

week. “I heard the music from the roof.”

“We’re having a little party,” he giggled. “You can

come in if you dare.“

Ray Charles groaned into Barbara Streisand...People,

people who need people....and Brickel led me into his room

and said “The beer is in the bathroom” then disappeared

into the crowd of dancing ghosts...are the luckiest people

in the world.....I stood next to a black light poster of

Jimi Hendrix, a halo shivering around his puffy head, his

presence out of place..... Everyone in their underwear.

Unfamiliar shadows. Dog tags glittered pale yellow. They

paid little attention to me, the awkward watcher, gawking

as I made my way toward the bathroom for a beer....we're

children, needing other children...on one side of the room

beds were pushed against the wall, and shadows lolled on

them rubbing, squirming, laughing.....and yet letting our

grown-up pride hide all the need inside....a long arm

reached out of the black light and wrapped around my

shoulder. It belonged to a tall shadow with a squealy voice.

“Hi! I’m from Long Binh. Wanna dance?”

I didn’t know what to say. Men don’t ask other men to

dance. I slid out from under his arm and said I was told

there was beer in the bathroom.

“My goodness! There’s lots of things in the bathroom,”

he twittered. “Would you like me to take you there?”

“I think I can find it. I live upstairs,” I said as

that gave me secret knowledge of every room in the hotel.

“Ok,” the shadow replied and he mingled with the

dancers....Acting more like children than children.....who

were hanging over each other and swaying.

The bathroom door was closed, and when I knocked no

one answered. I opened it and found Brickel on his knees

sucking a large olive cock and masturbating himself. When

he saw me from the corner of his eyes he seemed to grin and

pushed the cock deeper into his mouth. I was curious to see

Brickel swallow the entire cock, but I was also

uncomfortable, so I turned around and weaved my way out of

the party....Lovers are very special people.

The next day Brickel gave me an extra ration card. He

didn’t tell me not to tell anyone what I had seen, but he

did say he knew I liked to sell things on the black market,

and that it was ok with him and he wouldn’t tell anyone

like Captain Jeans or the colonel, and that’s the way it

should be because everyone in Vietnam was doing something

he didn’t want other people to know about.

“That’s most people everywhere,” I said, and he smiled

and explained that half the men the night before were

Marines from Long Binh who got a weekend in Saigon for

having an exquisite number of KIAs when they were up on the

DMZ.

“Marines?”

“Yeah. A pretty tough bunch of mother fuckers if you

ask me.”

We never talked much after that, but, once in awhile,

Brickel would slip me an extra ration card to keep me

illegal; and, without hesitation, I’d go to the PX in

Cholon and buy cigarettes and beer and small appliances and

immediately sell them on the black market.

***

How can I be sure

In a world that's constantly changin'
How can I be sure
Where I stand with you

***

I wonder if the bolts will pop free of the wall, and

the metal stairs will collapse under my feet. Anxiety. I

exaggerate the distance to the ground. Panic. My head

buzzes like a tiny electric motor. I hear my brain humming.

It has a falsetto pitch of tones. I am nine years old and

standing next to my father who sits on a high stool in a

barroom drinking down his wages. He flirts with a chubby

barmaid and leaves her tips that should have paid the

electric bill or gas bill or any other bill we had piling

up on the kitchen table and haunting my mother like war. My

father drove himself into madness with alcohol and lust.

Twining down the stairs. My legs moving quickly. My

father disappears into his invisible death and the Woodlawn

cemetery where snow and rain turn his ground placard green.

I arrive at the second floor landing. Snuff yells, “You’re

almost here, asshole. Twenty , more steps! Run down the

mother fucker!”

Like a swimmer preparing to swim a long distance under

water, I inhale and exhale through my teeth. “Here I come,

mother fucker, “ I yell back. “If I fall, don’t pick up the

pieces.”

I rush down the last twenty steps. Metal rattles. The

stairway shakes. Round and round. Twining and twining. I am

dizzy, but when I make it to the final steps, I leap to the

ground and almost fall on my face.

“Some day you’ll run down all the stairs like that,”

Snuff says. “It’s quite a rush!”

“Fuck no!”

“Fuck yes!”

***

THE CYCLO

The cheapest way to travel in Saigon is in a three-

wheeled contraption called the “cyclo.” There are two

kinds: one is a carriage with a cushioned chair attached to

the back of a bicycle and used for short journeys from home

to market. GI tourists love their slow, quiet rides around

plazas and traffic circles, the giant statue of two

soldiers perpetually attacking an enemy, or the stiff

ancient warrior hero pointing at the tawdry city. We rarely

ride them and prefer the motorized version. It sits two in

a wide carriage with a vinyl seat attached to a noisy motor

scooter engine that vomits oily smoke as it nudges in and

out of traffic. Next to tiny Honda motorcycles and

bicycles, cyclos dominate the streets, bouncing soldiers

over the bumpy brick roads but moving fast through the

claustrophobic traffic.

Cyclo drivers are usually skinny and are always

smiling beneath a floppy hat or a safari hat or a ball cap

or, when they can get them, an army jungle hat. They gather

like drones around the military hotels dressed in white,

short-sleeve shirts, black shorts or pajama bottoms and

rubber thongs. Some of us worry they’re really VC waiting

to drive us into an alley to cut our throats (Nelson), but

most of us know they’re the guides to an underworld of

sexual pleasure, smoke, or anything illegal you want to do.

They take you to the pimps and whores and money changers

and small boys who lead you to their sisters or mothers.

They argue with you about the cost of everything and say

things like “beau coup” or “you numba ten, Gi, no numba

one,” or “I gib you ti-ti.” They are cunning and smart and

are good at conniving extra money out of drunken soldiers

stumbling around TuDo street like lost children. Sometimes

they’re unlucky. Like the time Hiam, a six foot four giant
from Montana, got so tired of listening to a cyclo driver

whine about the cost of carrying him around the city, he

picked up the cyclo and the driver and flipped them on

their side. “Don’t fuck with me,” he shouted as he threw

his beer bottle against a light pole. “I’m tired of being

fucked by you little bastards.

***

The alley leads to Hung Dao Street where the cyclo

drivers gather under glaucous streetlights playing cards

and smoking cigarettes. When Snuff and I appear the small

shoeshine boy who lives in front of the hotel opens his

shoeshine box stuffed with packs of marijuana. Packages of

Park Lane. Cellophane wrapped. Filter tipped. Some soaked

in opium.

“GI buy numba one cigarette,” he nags, tugs at the

edges of our fatigue jackets and follows us to the cyclos.

A skinny driver pushes the boy aside and plants himself in

front of us. His breath smells like vegetables and

cigarettes. “You wan numba one girl?” he asks. “I hab numba

one mamasan. She gib you numba one fuck. Ten dolla.”

“You have numba ten fuck,” Snuff snaps back.

The driver looks confused. He squints through one good

eye. The other a wrinkled scar. “No, numba one. No numba

ten. You like, no pay. No like, no pay.” His head bobs. He

smiles and smiles and smiles until my face hurts from his

smiles and smiles and smiles.

“Let’s see what he’s got,” Snuff says. “Maybe we’ll

find another Gummer.

***

Gummer gives a hummer of a blowjob to the boys!

Without a trick
She gives a lick
and makes us all her faithful toys!

***

THE CYCLO RIDE

The traffic on Hung Dao street is a tremor of noise.

Trucks and jeeps and motorcycles push each other through an

oily smog. The cyclo driver perches on his plump seat,

rolls his shoulders and tips his head. His hand twitches on

the handle-bar controls , and his foot presses the metal

gears that cluck as the cyclo cuts into the traffic.

“I take you TuDo. Numba one mamasan.”

The engine loudly mutters and a surge of sudden power

lurches us backward. A green military bus covered in

protective screen roars next to us like an elephant. A

soldier behind the screen smokes a cigarette and looks

straight ahead. He looks new in-country. Afraid to look

anywhere but forward. Afraid of the thunderous vibration of

traffic. He’s been warned that the VC are everywhere. Under

trucks. Riding sideways on the backs of motor bikes.

They’re even the long haired girls in white ao-dais flowing

like flags. They wear pure white to stand for purity. The

older unmarried ones wear shades of soft pastels. The

married ones wear vibrating colors over white and black

pants. They seem to hate the Americans.

The cyclo driver curses the bus for pulling in front

of him. He leans and turns the cyclo around the back of the

bus but immediately hums up to a cluster of motorcycles

puttering in idle because two jeeps have collided. A

Vietnamese soldier is yelling at two American sergeants who

are too drunk to notice that their jeep’s bumper is locked

into the bumper of the Vietnamese’s jeep. The cyclo driver,

annoyed by the delay, spits and shouts and finds a way to

slice around the traffic when he spots a small opening

between the street and sidewalk.

Cylinders vibrate. The left wheel of the cyclo rolls

up on the sidewalk, and we all tilt sideways, squeezing

around the traffic clog until we are on the open boulevard

speeding towards TuDo street. The cyclo rattles in ecstasy.

“Take us to the pussy,” Snuff sings as he lights a joint,

cupping his hand around his lighter. “You want numba one

cigarette” he asks the driver who grins and shakes his head

no.
 We ride on a street of air. Glide over cracked

concrete. Girls with long black hair stare at us, their ao

dais blossom around them. A boy on a bicycle carries

chickens on his back fender. An old woman squats in a

doorway, a bright light blinding her. A Vietnamese soldier

yawns next to her. Mustard faces. Two dogs chew on

something red. Bald monks in yellow robes walk inside an

aura. A woman sits on a stool with bamboo tubes stuck to

the back of her neck. The tubes are hot and suck out

disease. Fish cook on an outdoor grill. A man with one leg

walks on crutches like a wounded spider. The cyclo speeds

by them until we stop at a streetlight, and Snuff pulls out

a fourth of July sparkler from under his fatigue jacket. He

lights it and the sparkles sprays in all directions. He

raises it above is head. “This should show us the way,” he

says, and the driver laughs and we are no longer on a main

street but on a narrow street of crowded slums and refugees

jammed together over small televisions watching an

astronaut bounce on a black and white moon courtesy of the

Armed Forces Vietnam Network!

The sparkler lights our faces. A blinding brilliance.

No shadows. The night is shapeless. There is only the

vibrato of the cyclo and a sudden brrrrrrrrr. Two small

Honda motorcycles zip next to us. A boy shouts “GI! GI!“

and one of them grabs the sparkler out of Snuff’s hand and

pulls ahead of us. The night of shadows slowly reappears

and I see that the boy on the other Honda is waving a small

pistol at us. “GI. GI. Kill GI.” He cackles with laughter

and swerves in front of us. The sparkler waves in a circle

and the boy yells “So long, GI!“ and the two of them cut

down a side street and disappear.

The cyclo idles and the driver is frozen. “I sorry,

GI! I sorry.” He doesn’t want us to blame him. “No VC.

Cowboy. No VC. “ he says about the boys.

“Why in the hell did they do that?” Snuff asks.

“They just wanted to scare us.”

“Shit, if they had asked I would have given them all

my sparklers!“

***

All the world over, so easy to see

People everywhere just wanna be free
Listen, please listen, that's the way it should be
Deep in the valley, people got to be free

***

The cyclo swings out of the side street and nudges

through a crowded market place. Friday night. Crowds mob a

multitude of food stands. Hawkers with ripe vegetables and

luminous fruits. Dead animals hanging from hooks. Dead

monkeys. Dead birds. Dead pigs. Dead dogs. Half-cut

carcasses. Red and gray. Flies swelter. The sellers whip at

them with rags. Kettles of boiling noodles. Columns of

steam rise as small girls bend under plump rice bags. A

lady with the right side of her face missing carries two

squirrel monkeys on her forearm. A man with a snake wrapped

around his throat. A boy swings a cage of multi-colored

birds. Another boy carries three jittery roosters by their

claws and jokes at a bald priest in orange robes. The

priest holds a bowl in one hand and an umbrella in the

other.

On a corner a small group of men drink a formaldehyde

beer and watch a magician produce flowers from under a

handkerchief. An acrobat bends his rubber body backwards

and bites a metal cup and drinks the water inside without a

drop spilling from the side of is mouth.

An amputee with no legs slides around on a tray with

wheels. The people ignore him. He’s a bad omen.

Giant loudspeakers located on high roofs whine atonal

songs in high-pitched Vietnamese. I think of the song I

read by Ho Chi Minh. When the prison doors are opened, the

real dragons will fly out.

As we nudge free of the stifling traffic and

meandering crowds, the driver takes another side street

passing the wall of assassinations. It was near here a

Vietnamese general put a bullet in the head of a suspected

VC. The photo made the world news. The VC in a plaid shirt

with his instant grimace. The general with his casual

indifference. Or so it seemed.

***

It was Captain Jeans who pointed out that this was the

famous spot that probably changed a lot of minds about the

importance of the war. Driving back from a meeting of

company commanders, he almost excitedly pointed at the wall

and said, “That’s it! Look! That’s it!”

“That’s what?” I asked. I had a case of dysentery and

was squeezing the cheeks of my ass together hoping my

bowels wouldn’t explode and bubble out shit.

“That’s the wall. A lot of people were shot there. Tet

‘68. There isn’t a person in Saigon who won’t remember how

scared shitless they were. The VC were everywhere. They

even crawled out from under the old race track near Cholon.

I was on the docks and they fired at us from across the

river. I wanted to yell at them: ‘Stupid fuckers, this is

the crap you buy on the black market!’ I never want to go

through something like that again!”

I tried to quickly maneuver through the traffic. The

shit kept on trying to come out of my asshole. Captain

Jeans chattered away, oblivious to the waves of chills that

shivered my bowels.

Chatter. Chatter. Chatter.

As if he were the official historian of the Tet

offensive.

“No one expected TET. Everyone thought the war was

almost over.”

I was having trouble listening to Captain Jeans. My

stomach trembled and a small amount of liquid seeped out of

my ass. He went on talking anyway.

“Who knew the VC would pull a major attack on Saigon.

They like to play tricks. It’s their nature.”

A rumble of gas groaned in my lower gut.

“I was a first lieutenant then. I had been in-country

for two months. Me and this other fellow, Ted Braddis. Poor

fucker!”

The turmoil in my stomach went quiet. I thought maybe

the last of the dysentery and passed out of me in that

small stain of liquid.

Captain Jeans continued, his mind landing somewhere

else. “Did you know that medieval peasants who tried to get

rid of the plague, stuck their heads in urinals thinking

they’d escape death?”

“What happened to your friend, sir?”

“Friend? What friend, specialist?”

 “The one you were just talking about, he came over

with you.”

“Oh, Braddis! He wasn’t a friend. I didn’t know him

long enough to be his friend.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“He’s the one who is sorry. He was in-country two

months. One morning he decides to get some water from the

blister bag hanging outside our hooch and Bam!!!! a mortar

round came in and blew off his legs and left arm.

“Bad luck!”

“Worse. He got hepatitis from the blood transfusions,

and the last I heard he was at some hospital in the states

still bleeding at his stumps. Can you imagine leaving

parts of your body in this fucking sweat hole?”

“ I don’t even want to leave my fingernails here.”

We drove down the street where a few years before a

Buddhist monk soaked himself in gasoline and burned himself

to a crisp. Jeans said, “And right over there in TET I was

shooting at anything that moved on the street. I hid behind

those trees and just kept on firing without even looking. I

kept on saying to myself ‘I’m not supposed to be doing

this. I belong in an office!’ Damn! It was a good thing I

took my basic training seriously.”

We turned on to TuDo street where bar girls in short

skirts fanned themselves in bar room doorways and rolled

their hips and shouted “GI, Numba one!” One of them ran

toward the jeep at a stop light and touched Captain Jean’s

arm.

“Hey GI, where you go?”

“Get your hands off me!” the captain exploded. The bar

girl shrugged her shoulders and hissed. “GI numba ten.

Numba ten.”

My bowels grumbled. I thought I’d have to run into one

of the bars before shitting all over myself. I ignored the

captain’s reaction although I could see that he was

uncomfortably self-conscious.

“Sir, I need to go to....”

“You need to get us back to base. That’s what you

need.”

“But sir, I....”

“Do as I say specialist.”

I turned the jeep off of TuDo street and drove along

the river where small boats loaded large cargoes for

transport to villages in the south. I wanted to swerve and

watch Captain jeans fall out of the jeep just as I blew

shit all over myself. The captain was unaware. He was lost

in thought until he asked “Tell me, specialist, did you

ever go to bed with one of them?”

 “One of whom, sir?”

“Those girls. Those bar girls.”

“Once or twice.”

“Once or twice!”

“Yes sir.”

“Don’t you have a girl back home. specialist?”

“Kind of. Yes sir.”

“Don’t you have any feelings for her?”

“Some sir.”

He rubbed his palms on his knees. “Did you think of

her when...when you....you.....”

“No sir.”

“Not one thought.?”

“I don’t remember sir.”

“Don’t remember. She must not be much of a girlfriend

if you don’t remember.”

“There were other things on my mind, sir.”

“Other things!”

We slowed down and motor cycle fumes almost gagged the

captain who had no idea that I was squeezing my ass so

tightly I thought the shit would blow out my pores.

“Weren’t you afraid of getting a disease?”

“Kind of. I guess.”

“Did they ask questions about what you do. A lot of

them are really VC or VC sympathizers. You know that!”

“No sir. No one said anything. We never even talked.”

He paused and looked at me as if I were a freak of

nature.

“I don’t get it specialist. Are they that good?”

“Pretty good sir. Especially the ones from the

Australian bar.”

“I don’t want to hear any more of this, specialist.

I’m not married, but I do have a girl back home and I

wouldn’t want to bring her back some strange disease.”

“Me neither sir.”

The captain fell into a trance of silence while I

concentrated on containing the storm in my bowels. I sped

up the jeep, shuttled around traffic and managed to reach a

bathroom before the shit inundated my pants.

***

Captain Jeans, the little machine,

is really a man inside;
he surely adores the Saigon whores
but whenever he’s near them he hides.

***

We all want to hide. Slip into a safe coat of flesh. Become

wind. Rain. Scattered ashes whirling through the burning

villages. Beneath the coats our ricket bones change into

rubber. We walk like deadly scarecrows.

 ***

The cyclo bounces. Snuff yells at the driver to go

faster as he partly stands and shouts “Look Ma, no hands!”

and almost falls out. I pull the edge of his jacket, and he

drops back into the seat.

“You trying to kill yourself?”

He sings: Back to back, belly to belly, I don’t give a

damn ‘cause I’m done dead already.”

The cyclo bounces over brick streets and rusting

railroad tracks. Bounces and bounces and bounces. Snuff

remembers roller coaster rides. His balls tingling.

Whiplash. Almost falling out of the open car as it careened

toward an abyss. I remember Revere Beach and the Cyclone

and my drunken father dragging me toward the monster ride

and calling me a little chicken bird for not wanting to

ride with him to the top where a sailor fell out just as

the cars dove down, down and up, up and the fright searing

through me and my father laughing at me because I was so

afraid to go downnnnnnnnnn!

“You’ll go crazy being afraid of so many things.”

“You think that’s why Fitzmaurice went crazy.”

“Fitzmaurice was born crazy. He was a pervert.”

“They still made him a sergeant.“

“They make anyone a sergeant! The army likes to do two

things: give out rank and give out medals to every asshole

that walks.”

“Well you must be an asshole because they keep on

wanting to give you a medal.“

“Yeah, for sitting in a communications tower and

jacking off!”

***

ARMY MEDALS

So you’re just sitting there looking out at the heat

and the rain and the dark river where you have seen dead

people floating and Sergeant Evans or Sergeant Rodriguez or

Sergeant Fowler who is as small a Mickey Rooney walk in and

hands you a medal and orders you take it because there are

a lot of medals to go around and he says he has at least

ten for service and you laugh because you have that dinky

service medal you got for finishing boot camp and Sergeant

Fowler frowns at your sarcasm and hands you a little box

with a blue and green and white ribbon and says this is a

JOINT SERVICE COMMENDATION MEDAL just for you and you don’t

know what you did to get a JOINT SERVICE COMMENDATION MEDAL

so you toss the box with the medal and ribbon into a small

drawer where there are other medals. Medals and more

medals. Medals galore. They squeeze next to each other like

little coffins. We have

 THE MEDAL OF HONOR
THE SILVER STAR
THE ARMY DISTINGUISHED SERVICE MEDAL
THE BRONZE STAR
THE PURPLE HEART
THE JOINT SERVICE COMMENDATION MEDAL
THE ARMY COMMENDATION MEDAL
THE GOOD CONDUCT MEDAL
THE NATIONAL DEFENSE SERVICE MEDAL
THE VIETNAM SERVICE MEDAL
THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM CAMPAIGN MEDAL
THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM PRESIDENTIAL UNIT CITATION
VIETNAM GALLANTRY CROSS UNIT CITATION
and 62 more kinds of medals to pin on our living or
dead bodies.

***

Come on people now

Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another Right now

***

“I told Evans to shove the medal up his ass,“ Snuff

says as the cyclo putters on to TuDo street. “He wanted to

shoot me. He said I was hanging around with Shea too much.

I told him the only thing I wanted from the army was my

discharge papers. So he ordered me to talk to the captain.

I guess he can’t believe someone doesn’t want his piece of

shit medal. “

***

Somewhere in Dong Ha, stuffed like a sandbag in a

smelly bunker, Evans must be stuttering hate and

indignation. His red face must be burning his yellow hair

and the freckles on the back of his hands must be frying.

He’s probably dreaming of getting rid of all the draftees,

snapping their spines in twos, dipping their heads in vats

of wax and sending electrical shocks into their ass holes.

He’s probably screaming to himself but no one listens

because he screams with a stutter.

***

The cyclo jolts and stops on a corner at the end of

TuDo street. Snuff finishes the marijuana. Smokes it down

to the brown filter then flips it against a bar window

where whores cackle and taunt and stick out their tongues

like snails. Small. Straight black hair. Thick make up.

They squeal and coo and cuss and stab long fingernails at

the night and chant “GI, buy me tea. GI numba one! GI! GI!

GI!”

Along the length of TuDo street, tree trunks are cut

and burning. The smoke mixes with the gasoline smog. The

eyes sting. At one end of the street an immense statue of a

soldier charges an invisible enemy. At the other end of the

street the Virgin Mary smirks at the pimps and whores and

money changers and the soldiers prowling the tea rooms and

the infinity of bars. A street of thieves. A street of

whores. A street of pimps. One of the pimps, his black

mouth the smell of vegetables and cigarettes, escorts us

off the cyclo and asks “You wan’ numba one girl? I hab

numba one mamasan. She gib you numba one fuck. Ten dolla.”

“You have number ten fuck!” Snuff replies, pushing the

pimp aside.

The pimp looks confused. He squints through one good

eye. The other eye a wrinkled scar of flesh. “No, numba

one. No numba ten. You like, you pay. No like, no pay.” His

head bobs. His shoulders stoop.

“A slope Steppin Fletchit!” Snuff laughs. “Let’s see

what he’s got. Maybe we’ll find another Gummer.”

The pimp is excited and leads us into an alley of

small lights and shadowy doorways. The alley is unpaved.

Dirt and dust and so many angles we easily loose our sense

of direction. Left. A woman crouched in front of a

television watching a Vietnamese soap opera. A high-pitched

actress weeps. Another left. And another. A man with no

legs sits on a mat pushing strings of noodles into his

mouth. A small child in underwear wraps his arms around the

amputee’s neck.

“Hey papasan! Where you taking us,” Snuff asks, but

the pimp bends forward, shakes his head and mutters “Numba

one fuck. Numba one!”

Another turn and the alley narrows. There is less

light but more people. Quiet people. Mostly staring. Some

with hands reaching out. Some with heads looking down. And

as we pass, a soft noise of song comes out of the dark.

“Where the hell are we?” I ask.

“Fuck if I know. Maybe we should have gone to Gummers.”

“It would have been easier. Hear that?”

We were close to the song now.

“Sounds like someone dying.”

“Or someone making love.”

On a small stool a blind girl in a blue ao dai sits in

a circle of light. Her skin looks like beige silk. Her

hands are in a prayer position. She slowly rocks back and

forth. Her song sounds sad. Isolated. Mythological. The

pimp pats her on the shoulder as we pass, but she ignores

him and continues singing.

We turn into another alley and the pimp calls out in a

shrill voice. We can’t understand him. After one more turn

it seems we have reached the end of the alley. Sitting in a

doorway, silhouetted and small, an old woman drinks soup

and slithers a long noodle into her mouth. She snorts.

“Mamasan hab numba one girl,” the pimp says. “They gib

numba one fuck. You like. You pay. You no like. No pay.”

The mamasan slurped the soup and kept on snorting.

“How much?” Snuff asks.

“Ten dolla short time. Twenty dolla long time. Reallll

long time.”

“Too much,” Snuff argues. “Five dollar long time.”

“Five dolla? No. No. Ten dolla. Short time.”

“Let’s see what they got,” I say. “Then we can talk

money.”

The pimp chatters and the mamasan grins. Black teeth.

A black hole in her mouth. She stands up, all four feet of

her, and holds the bowl of food against her stomach. “ You

come. Numba one girl. Numba one.” She shuffles into a smoky

hall with yellow lights and the smell of artificial cherry

syrup. A liquid spray from Hong Kong to mask the odor of

body sweat and semen. In doorless rooms soldiers fuck and

grunt, naked asses pump against small girls who stare at

the ceiling and moan “Ohhhhhh baby, Ohhhhh baby.”

The mamasan leads us to the end of the hallway and to

a small room where five girls no older than 15 sit on pin-

striped mattresses soaked in the stench of urine. Two of

the girls are naked and playing cards. The others in

grayish pajamas simply sit with their knees against their

chests, gazing blankly and scratching insect bites.

“This place smells like piss!” Snuff says.

Now Snuff isn’t the kind of person who’ll turn down a

cheap whore, and he doubts that we would have to pay any

more than five dollars for any of the whores, maybe even
less. But the rooms were rancid and reeked and Snuff was

sure that he’d catch another dose of clap or maybe even

something worse.

One of the girls - the smallest, the thinnest, the one

in gauze pajamas dotted with small birds - slides off the

bed and unbuttons her top. Her face is powder white, but

the rest of her is colorless. She grabs my hand and jerks

my fingers. “Numba one,GI. Ten dolla short time. I like GI.“

The other girls ignite into a frenzy and bounce on the

bed.

“Numba one fuck, GI. No numba ten.”

“I gib number one sucky.”

“GI wan numba one pussy?”

The sweatiest girl shifts to the edge of the bed,

curls up her legs and opens her pussy. Another girl rubs

her belly, and another pushes her fingers into her vagina

and squeals. The overhead light flickers - somewhere near

Saigon a B-52 is dropping bobs. The ground rumbles,

slightly vibrates. The girls laugh.

It’s all too much for Snuff. “Fuck you,” he says,” I

wouldn’t fuck any of you with a steel prick.”

I start to leave but the mamasan stands in the doorway

and shoves her empty soup bowl against my stomach. She

insists we look more closely at the girls. Have one of

them. Two or three of them. ‘Five dolla,” she yells. “Five

dolla.”

“Fuck you,” Snuff says, and bumps the mamasan against

the doorjamb. Her bowl falls and breaks on the floor.

It’s times like this you want to erase the last hour

of two of your life. Go back in time. Create an alternative

future.

No escape!

The tiny girls turn into vicious spiders when the

mamasan wails and tried to pick up the pieces of the

shattered bowl.

Angry banshees.

They leap on to our backs. Claw our necks. Rip at our

clothes. Slap our heads. Snuff tosses them off like stuffed

dolls, but the one with the small birds on her pajamas, is

wild and determined to scratch off my flesh. She crawls

over my back, shrieking, cawing, cursing. Her fingernails

catch my ears and one of them slices my earlobe. Snuff sees

the trouble I’m in and tries to yank her off my back, but

she wraps around my neck even more and won’t let go. I

swing in a circle, but she still clings to my shirt. Only

when I back up and squash her against the wall does she let

go and drop to the floor.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Snuff yells and runs
into the alley way where it seems like a thousand shadows

emerge out of the dark shaking their fists with vengeance.

“Holy shit!”

And we run in the direction we came from. Panicked.

Not looking back. We can hear the mamasan screaming like a

siren alerting the world of our sins. The small girls

scream. The alley people scream. The dogs scream. The cats

scream. Even the rats scampering across the shit piles

scream. And we keep on running. Caught in the maze of

alleys. Forgetting landmarks. Without a guide. Two little

green rats. Frantic. Foolish.

“How the fuck are we going to get out of here?”

“Fuck if I know. Just keep on running.”

The alley voices are everywhere shouting, calling,

telegraphing our running presence to everyone. We push

aside any shadows that stand in our way. Stumble over pots

and pans and beggars and small children holding out

cigarettes. But we are running nowhere. We can’t find TuDo

street, or any street, only the interminable alleys. We are

wheezing and sweating and ready to let loose with cries of

panic, cries of shame, when a familiar voice calls out from

one of the alley doorways.

“In here, you dumb fucks. Get in here!”

In the hazy doorway, in underwear and smoking a

cigarette, standing like a savoir, is Shea.

***

SHEA: The alley was filled with rats and mosquitoes. I was

covered in mosquito bites. I scratched until each dot bled.

I had a seventeen year old girl then. A great little fuck.

She loved getting on top of me and twisting around in a

circle. Anyway, I heard a lot of screaming outside of the

room I was in and when I went out to see what was going on,

I saw Sig and Snuff running like two scared chickens.

SNUFF: I think I sweated off five pounds running down that

alley. I was like one of the rats, except I was probably

more scared. Everyone looked like a deadly shadow, so when

I saw Shea, standing under this little outside light and

grinning, I thought I was seeing a mirage. All I could do

was ask him what the fuck was he doing there.

SIG: I was afraid someone would shoot me and leave me in

that alley for the rats to eat. But when I saw Shea, the

first thing I thought was wasn’t he supposed to be on guard

duty. Funny the things you think of in the middle of a

crisis.

SHEA: I didn’t give a shit about guard duty. All I cared

about was pussy, especially Hoa’s pussy. She was my flower

and that night was our last night together and I knew we

would never see each other again.

SNUFF: Shea’s girl friend was a beauty. A real beauty.

SHEA: Her pussy was tight and she had never sucked a dick

before she met me. There were a lot of girls like that.

Young ones. Old ones. They’d do anything for you because

they hoped you’d fall in love with them and bring them back

home to the world. I got to admit I felt something for

each one of the girls I lived with but bring them back to

the world? Never. Never.

SIG: His girlfriend was all over him. Her blouse was open

and I could see her small tits. She had a birthmark on one

of them. A big brown spot that looked out of place.

SHEA: I told them to get inside my room. The crowd looked

pretty mad, but I figured they’d cool off once those two

guys were inside. I was wrong.

SIG: The room was small. Like a closet. I couldn’t figure

out how Shea could live in such a primitive place. There

was only candle light. A thin, I mean thin, mattress on the

floor. A couple of empty rice bowls and a bottle of Scotch.

SHEA: I was in love, or I thought I was in love. Hoa was

quite a girl and I maybe I would have taken her home to the

world if the army hadn’t threatened me with a court-martial.

SNUFF: Shea told me he paid ten dollars for the room, and

the mamasan who owned it - or rented it, I never did

understand Vietnamese ownership, slept outside while Shea

screwed this young girl.

SIG: Shea never cared about anything. Or so it seemed. I

could hear the small crowd outside the room. I thought they

were going to charge in and drag us out, but Shea, true to

himself, lit a joint and told us to smoke some to quiet

down.

SHEA: I loved smoking dope. Especially in Vietnam, Their

grass is the best. Gets you higher than hell and it’s fun

to fuck on.

SNUFF: I smoked the grass and thought about getting back to

the world and selling it for a lot of money and becoming

rich. I have friends who’d die for this kind of weed. Two

hits and you start making an entrance into paradise. By the

time you’re finished, you’re on the other side of paradise.

SIG: There’s nothing like Vietnamese grass!

SHEA: The crowd outside quieted down. I really didn’t want

to keep them in there for long because it was the last

night I was going to be with Hoa. Sergeant Rodriguez was

fucking me over. He was pushing Pearson to court martial

me. Too many AWOLs. He wanted me court-martialed for

abandoning my post or something like that. I mean, man, the

charges were serious.

SIG: I didn’t think Rodriguez would go as far as court-

martialing Shea. Rodriguez was an asshole, a real asshole,

but who would they have to blame if they locked up Shea.

Just didn’t make any sense.

SNUFF: We sat there smoking for awhile. I liked Hoa. She

had these big brown eyes and a sweet giggle that made you

want to take her home to the world.

SIG: I smoked but I was still worried about the crowd

outside. There were probably ten of them and they weren‘t

leaving. They were waiting us out. I know they were.

SHEA: Hoa was a beauty, I tell you. She was from the Delta.

She had been in Saigon for only a month. I found her in a

bath house. She was the towel girl. I knew from the moment

I saw her I had to have her. 17! Ripe! Beautiful! I even

thought it wouldn’t be too bad to take her back to the

World. But after Rodriguez got through with me, I’d either

be in Na Bhe or LBJ. He wanted to get rid of me one way or

the other.

SIG: I didn’t think they’d do anything to Shea. The army

doesn’t work that way. Most of the time it covers up its

fuck-ups. Makes the Colonel look bad who makes the major

look bad who makes the captain look bad and so on and so

on.

SNUFF: The crowd outside got smaller, mostly a bunch of

teenagers who hadn’t been drafted yet, but they got

noisier, too. Shea had Hoa stick her head out the door and
see what was up. She came right back in. They were saying

that we had beaten up some mamasan and they were going to

get us for that. They also wanted to beat up Hoa because

she was a whore for the Americans, but it was probably

because she was from the Delta. The people in Saigon

thought the people from the Delta were a bunch of hicks.

SIG: Hoa got real scared. She scrunched in a corner and

started to whimper. Shea had to hold her and tell her

everything was going to be ok. We just had to figure a way

to get out of there.

SHEA: They were a bunch of teenage cowboys who would have

cut off our balls for a dollar. I tried to comfort Hoa but

she thought Sig and Snuff were just evil because they

wanted to buy little girls.

SIG: I couldn’t believe everything got so turned around.

The old mamasan sold dirty little girls for profit and lied

about us because we didn’t want to buy them. Could you

think of anything more crazy!

SNUFF: Everything had gotten crazy! I wished I had brought

the .38 Florido had sold me because I would have shot my

way out of that alley. Just like a western movie. Guns

blazing. Everyone ducking. Riding out of the canyon like I

was some sort of John Wayne.

SHEA: I wanted to help those guys but everything was

getting out of hand. Hoa wanted nothing to do with them. I

wanted them to get out because it was probably my last time

with Hoa, but we couldn’t figure out a way of getting them

around the cowboys. Outside the crowd of them were getting

pretty worked up and I thought that any second they were

going to come charging in and rip us all into pieces. Not

pieces. They couldn’t have done that because I would have

blown a couple of them away. Shit, can you imagine what the

news people would have done with that story. MASSACRE IN

SAIGON and all that kind of shit happened because of a good

reason.

SNUFF: And then all the yelling stopped and all we heard

was an old man’s voice shrieking and sounding angry. Hoa

stopped crying and Shea said “That old son of a bitch!“

SHEA: It was the old man I called TuDo because he would buy

and sell you anything, just like the street. Have twenty

dollars green and he’d exchange it. Military script? No

problem. Money orders back to the state. You got it.

Anything illegal TuDo had it or could do it. He was the

first one to sell me heroin, but I didn’t like it. I like

speedy drugs because I’m basically lazy. TuDo didn’t like

anyone getting in the way of his business, most especially

the teenage cowboys who could ruin an alley by scaring away

GIs who were always looking to buy something. And even

though he was half French, he had the respect of the people

and that mattered in the back alleys where they depended

upon men like TuDo.

SIG: Thank God for TuDo, that’s all I got to say.

SHEA: When I looked out I saw TuDo standing in front of the

boys - there were like twelve of them - while all the other

people disappeared. He held one of the boys by his shirt

collar and was saying something like he would get them

drafted in an hour if they didn’t get out of the alley. He

told one he’d have their fingers cuts off. My Vietnamese

wasn’t too great because I could never get the pitch right,

so sometimes I heard things that had little or no meaning.

The boys panicked! They begged him to let their friend go

and when he did, they beat it out of the alley.

SNUFF: I bought some smoke from TuDo after that and told

him anytime I needed to exchange money I’d look him up. He

smiled. He had a gap between his front teeth.

SHEA: TuDo told me the old lady was always trying to cause

trouble with her little girls, and he decided he was going

to shut her down and take over her business. He didn’t like

selling prostitutes but this wasn’t the first time some GIs

got stuck in the alley because of her. When it came to

business, TuDo didn’t like anyone screwing with his, not

even his own people.

SIG and SNUFF: Thank God!

SHEA: Yeah! Thank God!

***

Only the strong survive

Only the strong survive
Hey, you gotta be strong
You gotta hold on
I said don't give up, no don't

***

WHAT SNUFF AND I HAVE IN COMMON

- Marijuana. The smell. The taste. The tingling head. The

distortion of time. The seeds popping like firecrackers.

The “I don’t give a shit” attitude.

- Led Zeppelin and a “Whole Lotta Love,” Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Sex

in echoes and chiming symbols.

- Hating the corruption in South Vietnam and the government

that betrayed its people when they let Americans occupy

their country.

- The girls on motorbikes with ao dais floating like flags

and their straight backs sitting nobly erect.

- The money changers who exchange our monopoly looking

military script for the piasters we take to the Chinese

whores in Cholon. “They taste better than slopes”.

(Snuff)
- Keeping a level head when talking to the MPs. Snuff

treats

them like lost friends: “Hey, mother-fucker, how’s your

family doing back in the world?”

- The steam bath houses and the tiny girls who lather up

your body until you look like a snowman smothered in

bubbles.

- The truth: there’s no such thing as the future. “Where is

it? Can you touch it? Fuck no! it’s all in your head -

the

deadliest place to be. So why worry about anything.”

(Snuff again.)

- The Beatles. We think they’re over-rated, especially

songs

like “I want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You, Yeah,

yeah, yeah.” What kind of dumb, teeny bop shit is that?

They should have stayed in Liverpool. And what kind of

name is Liverpool? A pool of liver! I think of a bloody

piece of liver floating in a bowl of water. I hate liver!

I hate the Beatles!

- Having no regrets! Or maybe one: coming to Vietnam. “I

should have gone to Canada. Hell, I live close enough.

But

I thought I was doing the right thing. I didn’t want to

be

like those self-righteous fuckers who wanted to know why

let myself get drafted because they never would have let

themselves be drafted. And I say, “Yeah, sure.” And they

say they’d run to Canada, and then they tell me their

draft number is something like 335 and I’d want to put my

fist through their faces but I’d act like a killer

instead. I’d tell them I couldn’t wait to get to Vietnam

because I wanted to zap me a Cong. That really shut them

up. It even scared them! (Snuff, one more time)

- The belief that psychiatrists are a waste of time. “When

you try to do something for your head, you always do it

more damage.”

- Bangkok, Thailand. R and R. The best week of our lives.

The bar girls with wallet sized cards that guaranteed

their pussies were clean. The two midget Mexicans who

sold

the best tacos and fajitas. The ivory carved trinkets and

bridges with laced handrails. The king’s white elephant

chained to a post at the zoo. The marijuana! Five dollars

a pound. Green and without stems. The king’s life-sized

cardboard cut-out waving on every corner. The statue of

the golden Buddha. The Buddha before enlightenment. The

 Buddha everywhere. Everyone suffers. Everyone has pain.

- the 3x5 porno pictures we send home to friends with brief

messages on the back like: “You don’t know what you’re

missing,” or “Having fun in sunny Vietnam.”

- the Chicago bar because all the whores know who we are.

***

THE CHICAGO BAR

isn’t really a bar but a second floor walk up with a damp,

dilapidated stairway the stench of urine. The bar is a room

with small tables and wooden folding chairs and a plywood

bar top with bins of ice and cans of Budweiser. Across the

hall an old couple lives in another small room and collects

50% of all the profits made from the tea girls and money

changing.

The bar has only seven regular tea girls who are

watched over by an obsessive mamasan. She counts every

dollar more than once and smokes black cigarettes that

smell like cabbage. The tea girls wear short skirts and no

bras and suck down white strings of noodles slathered in a

sauce of decayed fish - when they’re not hustling drinks.

Snuff ate the noodles once and spent most of the night

puking into an aluminum sink.

Dao, the bartender, is a middle-aged Cantonese with

wire-rimmed glasses and a wheeze in his lungs. He reads

poetry and is always friendly. “My friend. My friend. Dao

no see you long time. You wan’ beer? “ And without waiting

for an answer, he opens two can of Budweiser and slaps them

on the bar. “GI no come long time. GI work too much maybe?”

Dao loves to ask about what we do. Snuff thinks he may

be a VC, but the army thinks everyone is a VC. I think he

just likes to be friendly. He tried to teach me Chinese

characters because he said they are pictures that mean more

than words can say. He taught me

which means PEACE.

“You better start making all the money you can while

there’s still time,” I tell Dao. “The words out that Nixon

will have us all out of here by next year. He wants to look

good for re-election.”

Dow frowns. His face creases. “GI go, Vietnam big

trouble. VC kill Chinese. They no like Chinese.” He pokes a

towel in a glass and twists it around. “GI money keep

people alive. GI go. Bar girl hungry. Family hungry.

Everyone hungry. Sad day GI go home.”

Snuff swallows half his beer. “They should never have

let us come here in the first place. Now that we’re

leaving, everything is going sour. Money. Food. Clothing.

You name it. Everything will be hard to get. The people

won’t know how to live.”

“Vietnam no place to live,” Dao replies. “I live here

all my life. Never see happiness.”

“You never know. The Vietnamese have been around for a

long time and they’ve managed to survive everyone.”

“Maybe French come back. Saigon happy when French

here.”

“The French are a bunch of tongue sucking perverts,”

Snuff says. “You help them and they love you, but when you

ask them for help they hate you. Bunch of perverts. Nothing

more. “

Dao says he likes the Americans better than the

French, but I think he’s lying. He recites a poem he wrote

and says it’s about the French. It translates like this:

The French are like air

Fake dragons
Tiny lizards
They crawl under wet logs
Puff up to fight
But run when the fields are on fire!
They leave dead insects behind!

“I think you’re talking about the Americans,” Snuff

says.

His eyes widen. “No! No! Americans numba one, no numba

ten.”
 Dao doesn’t want to make us mad. He hunches over the

bar and pats Snuff’s hand. “French very bad. Americans very

good.”

The bar is mostly empty. Aside from the two of us,

there are only three other soldiers in the bar. Two are

holding girls on their laps and rubbing their backs One is

drunk asleep on a table. In the corner, unseen but

powerful, the queen bee, the old mamasan, counts small

piles of money and chastises one of her girls for not

keeping a previous customer drinking. The girl is crying

and asking forgiveness.

Next to the record player that Dao keeps alive playing

the same five albums over and over and over -she came in

through the bathroom window - a couple presses together

and pretend they are lovers while the other girls cross

their legs, chew gum, smoke black cigarettes, and gaze at

the empty doorway hoping to hear someone coming up the

stairs. Some of them are attractive, although they powder

their skin white and their red lips are sticky wet. One of

the girls plays cards with an obsessive concentration. She

reminds me of Ling, the eighteen year old refugee from the

Delta.

****

I met a gin-soaked, bar-room queen in Memphis

 She tried to take me upstairs for a ride
She had to heave me right across shoulder '
Cause I just can't seem to drink you off my mind

****
LING
called herself Ann and sometimes Grace. She was liked

because she tried hard to look like and talk like an

American. She studied English with a Red Cross nurse who

tried to keep her out of the bars, but there was more

money, much more money, in being a “tea girl.”

“Tea Girls” are not prostitutes although prostitutes

are tea girls. Tea girls will sit and talk to you,

depending on their English. They’ll stroke you, comfort

you, admire you, hold you, praise you, and even try to make

you think you’re not in Vietnam. The charge? Two dollars

for a shot glass of brown tea that’s supposed to look like

liquor. As long as you keep on buying the shots the tea

girl can stay at your table for as long as you want.

Ling was strictly a tea girl. She didn’t do anything

but play girlfriend. Sometimes someone would try to get her

to give a hand job, and she would simply excuse herself and

tell them to find some other girl in the room.

She hated being a tea girl. Baiting soldiers. Poaching

them like plump eggs. Touching them. Especially the hairy

ones. Her mother disowned her because of her occupation.

Called her dishonorable. Threatened to tell her boyfriend

who was fighting in the Delta.

“Only rich people can afford to be honorable,” Ling

said. “They have money. No need be a tea girl.”

Ling was small, but in her flowing ao dai , her black

hair streaming over her shoulders, her confidence when

walking, her arrogance when smiling, she looked tall and

lean. She was proud of how she looked, and, unlike other

tea girls, she never lowered her face even when sad. She

thought of herself as a creature beyond the forces of war.

“Ling someday leave Vietnam,” she proclaimed. “Go to United

States. Become someone. Vietnam very ugly. Not for Ling to

live.”

She thought Snuff and I were a possible passport to

the states. She liked Snuff better because he had blond

hair and blue eyes. On slow nights she would spend time

asking questions about where we were from, and we would buy

her teas and talk about the Atlantic Ocean in the summer

and snow storms in Boston and Christmas dinner and driving

to New York City to see the Empire State building and

dancing to loud music in warehouses with multi-colored

lights and the floor like liquid gel and swimming in the

Miami River and almost drowning in the wake of a tour boat

taking tourists to see the Indian village along the river

and girlfriends and drive-in movies and just lying on the

beach with the sun searing you and days after your skin

peeling off as if it were burned by napalm.

Ling wanted to know about our girlfriends. What they

liked to wear. Where they liked to go. What they talked

about and if they went to school and what kind of houses

did they live in and the department stores they shopped in

and the food they ate, the movies they saw, and if they

were happy. Always: were they happy! She lost herself in

our world, our inaccurate world, warped by distance and

fragmented memories. She wanted to know everything and we

would try to tell her but it was impossible because we

often wondered if that world still existed.

She would whimper. “Ling want to know. Ling want to

know.”

And Snuff would go on about snow storms smothering the

earth with silence, and a tornado he once went through, it

ripped off his garage door, and what autumn looked like

with falling leaves red and brown and dead. And on napkins

he drew crude pictures of New York state, the houses and

skyscrapers. The mountains and lakes. Details he didn’t

even know he remembered.

Oh sad eyed Ling. Little bird trapped. We wanted to

take you home with us. Another nest. Another cage. We heard
your sad, sad words: ”Ling hate Vietnam. Someday go to

United States. Vietnam bad dream. Nothing more,” and we

asked you about your family and wouldn’t they miss you if

you moved to the United States and you said “Most of my

family die. My brother die in the war. My father leave to

the north. My mother sick in refugee camp. My boyfriend far

away. I tea girl. I learn English. Someday I go United

States. Study in school. Be very happy. “

“I would like to see you happy,” Snuff said. I thought

with Ling he was unusually tender. I suspected he was

almost falling in love with her. Or maybe he was just

trying to make her happy for a short moment because he knew

and I knew she’d never get to the United States.

Snuff noticed a string tied around her forefinger. “

You want to remember something? “

“Remember nothing. Mamasan put on finger. Make

headache go away.”

“I hope so,” Snuff said. “I sure hope so.”

Snuff kept on seeing Ling for over a period of three

months. Sometimes he saw her as much as three times a week.

He fantasized that he could get her back to the world. “She

could be my mistress, man. Can you imagine that? I’ll have

a wife and a mistress. Could you ask for anything more?”

But then like vapor Ling disappeared. No one knew

where she had gone. She simply disappeared. Some said she

moved to Danang where her mother lived in a refugee camp.

Some said she became a massage girl in the Delta to be near

her boyfriend. Some said she found a rich soldier who took

her back to the United States. Some said she was a VC and

wanted to get back to killing Americans. Months passed and

she faded from Snuff’s mind and then one day when the

monsoon rains swallowed the streets and Snuff and I sat in

the dampness on the Chicago Bar, rain dripping off the

window eaves, Dao sitting on a soda crate, the place empty

except for one girl staring out the window singing a

Vietnamese song about the world crying, that day,

unbearably humid, Dao told us that Ling was in a hospital

up north. She was visiting her village in search of her

sister - we never knew she had a sister - when the South

Vietnamese or North Vietnamese or the Americans, Dao didn’t

know exactly who, attacked the village with napalm. Half of

Ling’s body was burned but she would survive. The person

who told Dao the story also said Ling was going to be sent

to the US for treatment.

“She must have been burned pretty bad,” I said to

Snuff who wasn’t saying anything. He was as quiet as the

rain. For a long time. And then out of nowhere, he said

“She finally got to go to the world. Hell of a way to get

there.”

***

Way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be,
Way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be,
Way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be.
Etc.

***

A tea girl plays solitaire and looks up to see if

there are any new customers. She smiles at us, but she

knows we won’t buy her tea. Snuff wants to go elsewhere..

“I’m horny!” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

He tips Dao and reminds him of the scheme they have

planned for the following afternoon. Dao is to meet him

with enough money to purchase two Akai tape decks. Dao

smiles and agrees. We’ll all make some money on the deal.

Snuff from Dao. Dao from the black market.

We rumble down the wooden stairs, singing “You never

give me your money.....”

***

On the street two MPs sit in their jeeps and watch the

parade of money lenders and whores and cyclo drivers and

GIs laughingly drunk and mamasans with large hats carrying

food baskets across their shoulders and motorcycles

whirring and always the girls in the ao dais flowing by

like silk flags.

 “Hey Snuff, why don’t we walk the other way. One of

those fuckers may want to search us. I’ve got a lot of

grass on me.”

Paranoia. It’ll destroy ya’. The MPs sneer and glare

and are almost erotic with their authority. Snuff says,

“You show them fear and they’ll bite like dogs. Just relax!”

Relax? One MP rubs his shiny red-white-blue helmet

with a handkerchief and olds it up with admirations, but

the other notices Snuff’s pants and orders him to stop

walking.

“Say soldier, you know the regulation about pant

cuffs, don’t you?”

Snuff is unmoved and calm. He looks at his pant cuffs

and agrees that they’re not tucked into is boots. “Sorry,”

he says, grinning, “I forgot. You know how it is. War and

all that!”

“Well tuck them in and keep them in,” the MP insists.

“Or else I’ll have to fine you.”

Snuff unlaces his boots, tucks in his cuffs, then re-

laces his boots. For a moment I half expect the MPs to

order us against the wall and empty out our pockets, but as

soon as Snuff finishes his last cuff, the MP holds up his

helmet next to his friends and the two of them prattle on

about how the Vietnamese appreciate the way we stay dressed

and neat because.....

His lecture is interrupted by a scratchy voice over

his jeep radio. He picks up the mike. “Say over again.

That’s right. I think we have a couple of potheads.”

POTHEADS!!!!!!

Flashes of LBJ! Long Bien Jail! Angry MPs smashing

heads behind a high fence covered with canvas. I grab

Snuff’s elbow and pull him across the street.

“What the fuck is wrong with you,” he asks, jerking

away from my hand.

“They’re going to fucking bust us!”

But the MPs haven’t moved! One is still on the radio

and the other still admires his helmet.

“What the fuck is going on with you, Sig?”

“Didn’t you hear them?”

“Hear them? What are you talking about?”

“That guy said ‘we got a couple of potheads‘.”

“You must be going deaf! You heard their call signals.

You know, one popa two charlie, or something like that.”

“You’ve got to be kidding?”

“No man. You’re fucking up tight.”

“I just can’t seem to get my head together.”

“So.”

“I smoke and my mind just chatters out of control. I

can’t think straight. I try to think of home but all I get

are crazy pictures of a gym class in school and falling

asleep in history class.”

“I hated history. It’s never true anyway.“

“Yeah, but I like history, but I can’t remember

anything I learned. I’m like senile. An old man in a young

body.“

“You need some smoke man.”

“No, it makes me....”

“Makes you what? Relax. Don’t be an asshole.”

“I guess you’re right.”

I light a joint and pass it to Snuff. Seeds pop. White

ashes speckle our uniforms. Our shadows glide over shop

windows where the intricate ivory statues and porcelain

dragons pose for the outside world. In one of the windows a

finely carved ivory bridge extends over a garden, and a

slight lady, perhaps lamenting a lost lover, crosses the

bridge’s crest, a tiny parasol on her shoulder.

“I’d like to be walking with her right now,” Snuff

says. Be like Alice or Mary Jane and shrink myself into a 3

inch boy and walk across the bridge to....to paradise.”

***

Magic sand, Magic sand,

Make me small at my command
 ***
We wander pass the bars and steam bath houses. We have

been down this street many times before, but, no matter how

many times we pass the doorways and windows, no one

remembers us. We are and will always be strangers. Only the

Indian tailor, his black-purple skin, his tape measurer

wrapped around his neck, his big teeth, his prayerful

hands, only he seems to recall our faces. He limps and

whistles and nods at us.

“Someday,” Snuff says, “ I’ll have him make a suit for

me. He’s supposed to be very cheap. I want to go home

looking good. None of that uniform shit for me. I want to

be dressed like a fucking movie star.”

“What are you going to do? Pretend you were on a

vacation?’

“I just want to look good. Better than going home

looking like a bag of bones. I want to arrive in style!”

A boy with one leg hobbles on crutches. An old woman

squats in a doorway. A man with one eye stuffed with cotton

bicycles by with dead chickens tied to his waist. A bald

Buddhist in an orange robe smiles at his bowl of rice.

Leather faces. Pimps. Soldiers. Wire-rimmed glasses.

Trimmed fingernails. The dilapidated hotels cramped with

officers and sergeants and privates. We want to shout

“We’re going to Gummers” but they won’t hear us. They sit

in their rooms where the VC can’t find them. Colonel

Pearson. Sergeant Rodriguez. Sit there and read books about

the Civil War or hunting magazines. Colonel Pearson wishes

he had been born a hundred years earlier. He believes he

was at the battle of Gettysburg , even believes the picture

he saw of a Union soldier standing next to a row of

Confederate corpses was him, his soul time traveled or was

always living through one war or another. This war -

Vietnam - he leads no real soldiers, finds no glorious

death, honorable death. His death is the death of pushing

papers from one part of his desk to another, morning

meetings about ammo deliveries and rotten food on ships

that lost refrigeration, or some young punk throwing a

grenade at a soldier on his way to the mess hall down the

street, or the death of sending Shea to Nha Be rather than

court-martial him like Sergeant Rodriguez wants. The

colonel doesn’t want a court martial on his record.

So he reads and reads and reads, hears the muffled

explosions in the distance and when he looks out the window

of his 6th floor room he sees white flashes like beacons

that call him to a battle he’ll never fight. Never fight.

After this tour he’ll go home, retire to his family and

backyard barbeques, VFW dinners and talk about the war, the
terrible war, the one they could have won if the

politicians had just left everything alone. Win what?

Doesn’t matter. We could have won. Bombed them back to the

stone age, seared them, burned them, crushed them, every

single fucking one of them, not one slope body left.

Bulldoze them into their stinking muddy ditches along with

their water buffalo and mosquitoes. Instead, he’ll read

more books about other wars and know that he was in all of

them but this one was a soul’s mistake, a war where he led

phony men, draftees, conscientious objectors and

hyperactive sergeants like Sergeant Rodriguez who demands

and demands that they court-martial Shea who isn’t a real

soldier but a sham!

Sergeant Rodriguez flips through the pages of Argosy

and also wishes he was in the jungle but not with the VC,

he saw enough of them, but in the Amazon searching for

exotic animals to kill and stuff and hang in his study with

brown paneling and a leather chair. Yet, at the same time,

in the front of his mind is Shea, coming and going when he

pleases, living with whores in off-limit rooms, ignoring

every order he’s given, disappearing, appearing,

disappearing, here today, gone tomorrow. How many times had

the company wasted time looking for him in some whore house

or alley shack? Yes! It’s about time the company stopped

putting up with such insubordination.

And then there is Snuff, refusing a medal, telling

him that medals don’t mean shit in this war. Sergeant

Rodriguez wanted to strangle him for that, instead, he

ordered him to see Captain Jeans who really didn’t know

what to do about Snuff or Shea or, for that matter, anyone

who didn’t want to follow an order. Everyone had the same

reply: “What are you going to do, send me to Vietnam?”

***

Snuff didn’t want the medal because he thought it was

stupid. He hadn’t done anything for a medal except sit in a

communication tower and teletype messages to other

companies who in turn teletyped messages back to him and

then he typed back to them and them back to him and so on

and so on. “What kind of medal do you get for that?” Snuff

wanted to know. “I should probably get a medal for getting

the clap so many times.”

Nevertheless, Snuff was ordered to appear in front of

Captain Jeans who sat in his tiny office, the fan spinning

above his greasy hair, and Sergeant Rodriguez sweating U

rings under is armpits.

“I don’t understand you men,” Captain Jeans said,

shaking his head. “ I really don’t. Here we are giving you

an award for being in this hell hole and you don’t want it.”
 “That’s right, sir.”

“I don’t get it.”

“There’s nothing to get, sir. I just don’t want a

medal. I didn’t kill anyone or save anyone’s life. I just

send messages.”

“But the army appreciates your work and they want you

to know that.”

“But a medal? Write a letter to my mother. Maybe

she‘ll appreciate it more than me.”

“We had a ceremony ready and everything.”

“I’m sorry sir. They’ll be others at the ceremony. You

don’t need me”

“But everyone will know that you don’t want the medal.

That’s embarrassing enough. “

“No one cares, sir. I mean no one.”

“Your wrong about that soldier. I care. The colonel

cares. Sergeant Rodriguez cares. This isn’t just any award.

It’s means loyalty. Accomplishment. Respect from your

countrymen. Don’t you want respect?”

Asking Snuff if he wants respect is like asking Snuff

if he wants another dose of clap!

“Sir, I lost my respect in high school,” Snuff

replied.

“What are you saying, soldier?”

 “When I was in the eleventh grade I was sleeping in

the back of my English class, drooling all over my self and

dreaming about sex. I was woken up by the guy sitting next

to me because the teacher had called me to the board to

diagram a sentence. One, I didn’t know what the hell a

diagramed sentence was and two, I had a hard-on a big as a

banana. She knew it, too. I know she knew it because she

said I either got up to diagram the sentence or got up and

go to the dean’s office. I got up and went to the board and

everyone looked at my hard on and I knew they were laughing

and I said to myself, ‘I don’t give a shit!’ I probably

lost more respect because I didn’t even know where to start

the diagram.”

“That’s quite a story, soldier, but what does that

have to do with now. Just take the medal. It’ll do you

good.”

“No sir.”

“Is that your final decision.”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, I don’t like this happening in my company, and

neither will the colonel. But if you don’t want the award,

we won’t give it to you. Sergeant, erase him from the

ceremony.”

“Yes sir,” Sergeant Rodriguez said. “ I would like to

add one thing, sir.”

“And what’s that?”

“I’d like to say that this man doesn’t understand

freedom. He should live in Cuba for a year, and then maybe

he would understand what this war is all about. I am upset

by his decision, sir, but I will erase him from the

ceremony.”

Captain Jeans agreed with the sergeant and they

dismissed Snuff who decided to teletype a message to all

the units in-country. It read: “God bless America, but

don’t let the Cubans know.”

***

Sergeant Rodriguez notices an advertisement in the

back of the magazine for a Caribbean cruise on an old

sailing boat. St. Croix. St. Thomas. San Juan. Islands

without slaves. Not like Cuba with that bastard Castro who

lied when he said he was bringing freedom from tyranny and

jobs for everyone. Everyone except Sergeant Rodriguez’

uncle who was jailed and had to smuggle out poems in pen

holders. Or his father who owned a furniture company one

day and nothing the next. Sergeant Rodriguez wanted to kill

Castro and sometimes, he had to admit, he wanted to kill

Shea for his disobedience and Snuff for his indifference.

***
 Snuff and I walk by their hotel barracks sticking our

middle fingers in the air and wishing Pearson and Rodriguez

bad luck. Snuff tells me “Sing your song about Gummer.”

“I’m tired of it.”

“I’m not. Come on, sing it.”

The song: with dry throat, dry tongue, dry lips, off

key.

Broom Broom Broom Broom

Broom Broom Broom Broom
Gummer gives a hummer
of a blow-job to the boys,
picks them out and stuns them
with the vibration of her voice.
Broom Broom Broom Broom
Broom Broom Broom Broom
Spits them out one by one
whenever her mouth fills with cum
she’s an angel to the deaf and dumb
and in Vietnam that’s everyone
Broom Broom Broom Broom
Broom Broom Broom Broom

***

“Gummer” isn’t her real name. None of us know her real

name. Destroys the fantasy. The story goes that when the

war was young and there were fewer Americans and more

competition, Gummer developed the extraordinary gift of

sucking cock so smoothly it felt better than a pussy. She

never bit, nipped, or nibbled the tip, and she could suck a

cock right down to the bone of the crotch. Some customers

insisted she had no teeth, while others insisted her teeth

were so small they allowed her lips to easily slip up and

done. In the dark it’s hard to tell, but, whatever the

truth, she became so popular she opened what amounted to a

blow-job clinic. In one large room she has four beds

divided by calico curtains with O rings that noisily open

and close. The minute she finishes with one bed, she spits

their sperm in a bucket and goes to the other bed and the

other bed and then the other bed and then back to the first

bed whish is always immediately occupied.

Her “steam bath” house is next to the MP and QC

stations, so it’s a good bet that she gives a cut of her

money to Madame Nhu. She is tiny, small boned, and her hair

hangs don to her lower back. She never takes off her

clothes and always wears a white shirt, pajama pants, and

sandals that make a scraping noise as she shuffles from one

bed to the other. She talks very little, perhaps because

she instinctively knows that talking will get in the way of

our erotic fantasies. Like:

--GINA LOLABRIDGIDA STRIPPING OFF A SEQUINED TRAPEZE

LEOTARD BEHIND A FOLDING SCREEN

or

--SOPHIA LOREN ERUPTING OUT OF THE SEA WITH WET

NIPPLES AS LARGE AS THUMBS

or
 --JAYNE MANSFIELD STRUTTING DOWN A NEW YORK STREET

WITH TITS AS LARGE AS ARTILLERY SHELLS

or

--SANDRA DEE, CUTE AND SKINNY, SURFING IN FRONT OF A

PHONY OCEAN WITH IMMENSE WAVES

or

--SUSIE WOOTEN, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, SMELLING SWEET AND

STEAMING UNDER THE PALMS OF THE HANDS

and, all the while, the unsmiling Gummer slurping as the

steam bath fills with a mist the odor of mint, clouds of

mist until Gummer fades away and there is

--JUDY MORGAN, PLUMP AND BIG BREASTED, AND I AM

SNEAKING INTO HER BEDROOM AS HER PARENTS SLEEP IN THE NEXT

ROOM, AND OH! SHE FELT SO GOOD AND FLESHY AND

Gummer sucks and squeezes my balls and

--ESTHER WILLIAMS DIVES NAKED INTO A SWIMMING POOL AND

SPREADS HER LEGS AND INVITES ME TO WALLOW INSIDE HER

steam hisses and Gummer kisses my swollen cock and Snuff

calls from the bed behind the curtain “Hey Sig, you there?”
 “Don’t bother me now.”

“Sorry man.”

And there is a flicker of her tongue and a long vibrating

hum and an earthy eruption. Gummer’s mouth is muffled and

full. She turns to her bucket, spits me out, rinses her

mouth at the sink, then slashes open the curtain where

Snuff is waiting. She grins as she wipes her hand with a

little towel. The dim, overhead light halos her smooth

hair. Her face is all in shadow. She approaches Snuff and

recognizes him.

“Ahhh, GI! You like. You come back!”

And without saying anything more she unbuckles his

pants as he lies like a patient on a hospital gurney.

“Hey Sig, you got anymore smoke?” he asks, but before

I can answer she closes the curtain and turns him on his

stomach. She knows he likes his back rubbed before getting

a blow-job. It makes it easier for him to cum. She pulls

the skin along his spine and brushes her hair over his

back. She blows lightly on his ass.

“Hey Sig,” Snuff says, “you have any extra money if I

need it.”

“Don’t worry. It’s slow tonight. She’ll do you for

five.”

She turns Snuff back over and shakes baby powder on

his chest and stomach. She scratches his pubic hair and

whistles over his balls. But Snuff is having trouble

getting hard.

“No get hard, GI?”

“”More,” he moans. She licks him and licks him until

her tongue begins to make him hard.

She tickles his cock with a teasing lick then holds

out her hand and says “Ten dolla.”

“Five dolla,” Snuff says.

“No, five dolla. Ten dolla.”

Gummer has been known to go as low as four dollars

since she has a business logic that says volume is more

important than price. She probably averages seven dollars a

blow job which, in the course of one night, could mean

close to three hundred dollars or, in Vietnamese money,

close to nine hundred dollars. Pay offs to police and pimps

and Madame Nhu and she most likely comes close to making

half that, which, in Vietnam, is still very decent money.

So her inclination is to accept whatever a regular customer

gives provided its not insultingly low.

“Five dolla, no more,” Snuff tells her.

“Five dolla hand job,” Gummer says trying one last

time to make a bargain.

“Hand job numba ten,” Snuff tells her. “Five dolla

blow job.”

He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a crumpled pile

of pink military script and hands it to Gummer.

“No American dolla?”

“Not tonight.”

“Ok. I gib blow-job,” she says, abruptly.

She lies him back down on the table and her feathery

tongue licks the base of his cock. Her body rises and

falls, up and down, she squeezes his penis, rolls it

between her thumb and forefingers. “GI cum?”

“I’ll try, just don’t stop.”

Gummer is determined to make it quick. Something worth

fiver dollars. Up and down. Up and down. She drags her

fingers over his buttocks and lightly touches his asshole.

It’s a maneuver she knows always works. She pushes his

penis deep in her mouth and hums. Snuff can’t resist the

vibration and dissolves into spasms of orgasm.

Gummer’s mouth puffs up with sperm and when her mouth

is full she spits it into the aluminum basin on the floor,

leans over a small sink and gargles with water.

River water. Grey. Dirty. Tasting of oil and floating

bodies and sewage and history.

The water splashes out of the sink and Gummer turns

off the spigot, fixes her pants and hands Snuff his pants.
 “GI, numba one.”

“Co numba one.”

She pinches his thigh and opens the next calico

curtain. Steam pipes rattle inside the damp walls as if to

say there is more money to be made.

“Hey Snuff, isn’t she the best!”

It’s Hiel, potato plump, smiling on the table in his

briefs and tank top.

“The best,” Snuff says as he buckles his belt and

tries for a quick exit. He looks at Hiel’s hairy arms and

shoulders and thighs and wonders how anyone could touch

him. Gummer must be a machine, he thinks, how else could

she touch such an ugly creature.

“Say, did you hear what happened to Shea?” Hiel asks.

“No, what happened now?”

“The fuckers gone. He really got screwed this time”

“I thought they were sending him to Nha Be?”

“Oh, he’s in Nha Be, alright, but they’re sending him

to a special hospital in the Phillipines. Or at least

that’s what I heard.”

“Who told you that?”

“Rodriguez.”

“That mother fucker. Was it heroin?”

“No, it was something real fucked up. Something bit

him on the face and his head and eye swelled up like a

fucking balloon. He couldn’t even see out of his right eye.

Rodriguez said the eye was swollen shut and oozing out a

green pus.”

”Rodriguez did something to him. I know it. He hated

Shea.”

“Whatever it was it got in his blood and when they

sent him to a hospital here they didn’t know what to do.

They popped the eye and more shit came oozing out, but the

next day the eye was just as swollen. So there must be a

hospital in the Phillipines that knows how to deal with

that kind of shit.”

“Rodriguez probably set the whole thing up.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Hiel says. “He’s out to

get you next.”

“What the fuck you talking about?”

“He and Captain Jeans are pissed you won’t take their

award. Even the fucking colonel is pissed.”

“Fuck them all.”

“ That’s what I say, but expect the colonel to be

pissed at you. I know he’s going to call you in.”

“Who gives a shit?”

“You’re right, who gives a shit? The only thing I give

a shit about now is a blow-job.”

 And with that Gummer closes the curtain and Snuff

hears Hiel tell Gummer “Suck the shit out of me you fucking

whore. I love you.”

***

Captain Jeans and Sergeant Rodriguez were so upset

that Snuff didn’t want their award, they told the colonel

who pretended to care but really didn’t care because this

was no longer the army his father told him about or the

army his grandfather told him about or the army he joined

all those years back in Korea where the snow and the cold

and the smell of fish were so overwhelmingly gross he

decided he’d go to Officer Candidate School and become a

higher up instead of some NCO like Rodriguez who he

couldn’t really stand because of his Latin accent more

than anything else. So when Jean and Rodriguez dragged

Snuff to the colonel’s office, the colonel’s head had

already been filled with Jeans saying “Sir, you can’t let

some insignificant specialist get away with this because

the rest of the company may do the same, and then, then

what do we do?” And Rodriguez with, “Sir, after Evans left

it took me months to shape up this company, we can’t let

this happen.”

Now Colonel Pearson wasn’t an idiot. He knew that

Rodriguez was a pile of Cuban shit that liked to make

himself more important than anyone else. He was really a

coward, Pearson thought. Maybe because of running away from

Cuba and feeling guilty that he sat on his ass in Miami

pretending he would go back to Cuba and fight when really

he wouldn’t. Pearson would have stayed and fought. Dug

underground, lived in tunnels, constructed booby traps and

riled the entire population until Castro and his band of

baloney bullshiters were sent back to the hills to pick

bananas and cut sugar cane.

So he listened to Jeans and Rodriguez with a grain of

salt and asked them “What do you want me to do about it? I

can do something or I can do nothing. I can give him hell

or tell him he’s done a good job and I don’t care if he

doesn’t want the award we still want to give it to him.”

“But sir,” Rodriguez replied, stewing, his almost

chocolate face reddening, “ this soldier can’t get away

with saying no.”

“Why?” asked the colonel. “It’s only an award. And you

shouldn’t have recommended him for one in the first place.”

“But there‘s no turning back now, sir,” Rodriguez told

him. “Give in to him now and we‘ll have to give in to

other‘s later.”

“Give in to him. Who cares? I don’t. He’ll be out of

here soon and another soldier will replace him and if he’s
smart you can give him the award.”

“But we want to give it to him,” Captain Jeans

insisted.

“Leave it on his teletype table.” The colonel was

tired of the issue already. “ He’ll take it. Just don’t

hand it to him.”

“I can’t do that, colonel,” Rodriguez said.

“What did you say, sergeant? No? Isn’t that what

you’re bothered by with this solider?”

“It‘s different, sir.”

“I can see that you won’t let this dog lie dead or

even get up and run.,” the colonel said. “If you think my

talking to him will solve anything, then I‘ll talk to him.,

But understand this, I‘m not going to force him to take the

medal, or even try to convince him it’s the right thing to

do. You got that?”

Captain Jeans and Sergeant Rodriguez immediately

agreed to the conditions and went up stairs to the

communication room and ordered Snuff to report to the

colonel’s office.

Colonel Pearson sat in front of an open window with a

small fan blowing in his face. Outside the noises of

Saigon: motorbikes and taxis and ship horns and steel

clanging and thuds very far away, tremors from B-52

bombings around the city. It was hot and muggy and the

colonel was sweating under his arms and across his chest.

Sergeant Rodriguez sat in a chair at one end of the desk

and Captain Jeans sat in a chair at the other end of the

desk. The colonel was uncomfortable with their presence,

felt they were watching what he said. If he could he would

have dismissed them altogether, throw them out the window

or lock them in the ammo room where it was dark and dank.

He hated being put into meaningless situations.

Snuff stood in front of the colonel’s desk, absolutely

calm, absolutely indifferent, absolutely looking beyond the

colonel at the street beyond where a small funeral was

marching toward a graveyard.

“I guess you know why you’re here, specialist?” the

colonel asked.

“Not really, sir,” Snuff said to him, knowing really

why he was there but not wanting to give Jeans or Rodriguez

any satisfaction.

“The captain and the sergeant tell me you don’t want

the medal they want to give you.”

“Oh that sir. I forgot all about it.”

“Forgot is to not remember, but they remember and you

should remember. You’re in the military, son. it’s not

often the military wants to give someone a medal for

sitting at a teletype.”

“That’s what I said, sir,” Snuff replied. “That’s

exactly what I said. It’s not like I shot anyone or saved

someone. I just sit there sending and receiving messages.”

“ Then they must think you’re pretty good at it if

they want to give you a medal.”

“They give everyone medals. Except Shea.”

Rodriguez seemed to squirm when Snuff mentioned Shea’s

name. Smirk. Pleasure himself. The colonel noticed and

Snuff noticed but Captaion Jeans was busy trying to rub a

spot out of his shirt with spit.

The colonel looked at his hands as if a list of

questions were posted on the palms.

“Where you from., Specialist.”

“Elmira, sir. New York.”

“I know where Elmira is. I’m from Dallas, by the way.

Ever been there. Hot as hell in the summer, but not as hot

as this place. I was there when Kennedy was killed. I was

two blocks from Dealy Plaza. Can’t say I was that upset. I

thought Kennedy was a disaster. If he had played his cards

right we could have been out of this place by in ‘62.

Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What was I saying? Oh, yes,

you’re from Elmira. Never been there. Never want to go

there. But don’t you think the people of Elmira would be

proud to see you brought back medals from the war. Wouldn’t

your parents?”

“Not really, sir. I don’t know many people in Elmira

and my parents are against the war. They think it’s

stupid.” Snuff paused knowing that what he said next would

disable Sergeant Rodriguez’s hostility. “They think that if

we want to fight the commies we should invade Cuba. After

all, Cuba is only 90 miles from our country. And it’s

probably not so hot as this hell hole!”

Snuff could almost feel Sergeant Rodriguez’s approval

glowing from his face. The colonel was unmoved and Captain

Jeans wrestled with his stain.

“You could be right, and then you could be wrong. Cuba

isn’t Vietnam and Vietnam isn’t Cuba. The cat runs away

from the dog but he still respects the right of the dog to

chase him. There is really nothing I can do about this,

specialist. If you don’t want the award then you don’t have

to take it. I probably don’t respect you for your decision,

but I do respect you for making a decision. Anything you

want to add Captain Jeans?”

Captain Jeans stopped rubbing his stain and looked at

Rodriguez who pinched his lips together as if he were

swallowing the entire Star Spangled Banner and shook his

head no.
 “I do want to add one thing, specialist. I want you to

remember this moment when you’re my age. You may regret

your decision. You‘ll have kids. They‘ll want to know what

you did in the war. And what are you going to say. ‘I sat

on my ass and did nothing!’ This medal would redeem you.

You understand? Redeem you.”

Snuff remained passive and Colonel Pearson smirked and

said, You‘re dismissed.”

When Snuff left the colonel’s office, Captain Jeans

and Rodriguez were silent for a moment. The three of them

were uncomfortable. Rodriguez rose first, shook his head

back and forth but then told the colonel, “Sir, I hated

Kennedy, too. If it weren’t for him, Castro would be dead

now and I would be in my home in Mayaguez.”

***

I wait outside the steam bath house, smoking and

pushing little children away. They beg for money and

cigarettes. They’re in dirty underwear. Skinny ribs. Skinny

arms. Skinny legs and large heads that make them misshapen.

When Snuff comes out, they run to him and he throws them a

handful of coins.

“You made it,” I say. “I thought you were going to be

in there all night!”

“I would have if Gummer hadn’t used her magic finger.

My asshole still feels it.”

“You’ll be sorry in the morning.”

“It’ll be worth it.

A cyclo pulls up and we jump into the basket. “Dainam”

Snuff tells the driver, and we cut through the side streets

and alleys for the short ride back to the hotel. It is

almost curfew. The streets are nearly empty except for MPs

and armored trucks growling toward the outskirts of the

city where the noise of explosions can be heard.

The wheels of the cyclo slide against the curb in

front of the hotel. Outside the concrete guard-post a

cluster of dwarf whores are dancing for the MP standing

guard inside the bunker. Tiny gnomes who survive on blow

jobs and petty thefts. The MP jokes with one of the girls:

“My dick will bust your mouth open.” and she laughs because

she really doesn’t understand what he says.

When they see us they circle around us and start a

strange and awkward dance.

“Fuck this shit!” Snuffs says, and bolts into the

hotel, but the dwarves manage to hold me in their circle,

squawk, squeal, and clump on one foot and clump on the

others and stomp their feet in a rhythm-less dance. They

gurgle and swirl with me in the center, and they yank my

shirt and pull my hands. One of them, the smallest, jumps

on a concrete barrel, opens her blouse and shows off a

plump breast filled with milk. She massages the nipple

until white droplets appear, and laughs as one of the other

dwarves pinches her nipple and makes it squirt. They push

me toward her tit but I manage to force my way through the

circle and join Snuff who is sitting on the stairway that

leads to our room.

“Weird little fuckers,” he says. “Did you see the tits

on that little one?”

“Huge! The MP says she gives a damned good blow-job,

too. She doesn’t even have to kneel!”

“No ones better than Gummer.”

“No one”

***

Snuff closes the door to our room and plays with the

light switch.

CLICK!

A pale green room.

CLICK!

A poster of Bob Dylan

CLICK!

Metal bunk beds that are about to rattle apart.

CLICK!

A beaten up bureau with colognes and a jar of coins.

 CLICK!

A hot plate!

CLICK!

“Leave the fucking lights on,” I tell him.

He laughs and touches all the Playboy posters. Each

month for good luck. Miss August hides her pubic hair. Miss

September bends over with a tangled scarf. Miss November

coils out her ass. Miss December squashes her tits against

a mirror. Every month glued to the wall. Naked reminders of

how long we’ve been in-country.

Snuff has taped to the back of the door a photograph

of a Chinese whore. It is the size of a playing card and

the girl straddles a man on a pin-striped mattress, sucks

another standing on the mattress in front of her and

masturbates two others standing by her side. Snuff likes it

because it annoys the little mamasan who comes to clean

the laundry. Hiel believes the picture symbolizes a woman’s

tyranny over a man.

“Let’s smoke one last joint” Snuff says, already

stripped to his snot-green underwear. He lights the joint,

drags in a ball of smoke and blows it out like a jet of

steam. “You think we’ll smoke this much when we get back to

the world?”

“If we don’t, we’re crazy,” I tell him. “We’ll make

sure someone sends us a pound a month. I don’t want to go

back and live straight. Fuck no! Not in a world that sent

me here!”

“I may try some other things,” says Snuff. “Maybe some

heroin.”

“Fuck! Shooting heroin is just like killing yourself.”

“Killing myself doesn’t bother me.”

“It bothers me!”

“You’ve never thought of killing yourself?”

“Not really.”

“Well I have,” he says. “I like to think of different

ways to kill myself. Poison. Hitler did it. Killed him in

seconds. Or a shotgun to my mouth. I have a friend who’s a

cop and he said he saw a guy who had shot himself in the

mouth with a shotgun. He was sitting in a chair and blew

the top of his head right off. His brain was dripping from

the ceiling.”

“Must have been a crazy fucker.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think you have to be crazy to

kill yourself. You never asked to be here, so why not fuck

it all up by making your own exit. The way I would do it is

get on a motorcycle, naked as a new born baby, take it up

to 120 miles per hour and smash into a concrete wall.

Splat! Like stepping on a fucking cockroach!”

 “I think I’d rather just stay high.“

“Maybe you’re right. Getting high changed a lot of

things for me. I don’t give a shit about much anymore.

Except getting out of here.”

“I think that’s why I don’t feel right going back to

the world. Everyone I know is straight, or at least was.

My family won’t know who I am. They’ll think, ‘Oh look,

he’s back. Isn’t he a good boy. Serving our country. He

always did the right thing.’ Fuck them!”

I sit on the floor, cross my legs, and play my cheap

guitar. The strings lightly ping as I sing

True love, true love,

Don’t lie to me,
Tell me where did you sleep last night.
I slept in the pines
Where the sun never shines
And I shivered when the cold wind blows.

“You think you’ll ever try acid?” Snuff asks.

I pluck the bass string. Brummmmm. “If marijuana gets

me this high, imagine what acid will do.”

Snuff stretches out on his squeaky bed. “I knew a guy

who took acid 42 times. Once he spent an entire day sitting

in his backyard holding on to the ground like it was a bed

sheet. He said he could feel the earth breathing and trying

to throw him off into space.”

“I’ll stick to marijuana,” I tell him. The bass string

vibrating against my huddled chest.

“Sing your history song,” Snuff asks. “I want to take

a trip.”

***

SIG’S HISTORY SONG in the key of G

I was born at the end of World War II

My body as big as my father’s shoe
The atom bomb fell out of the sky
and for three weeks my mother cried
That’s the way of the world, boy
That’s the way of the world

I saw my uncle come back from Korea

Without an arm and paranoia
He told me it was a wonderful war
fought for the rich, fought by the poor
That’s the way of the world, boy.
That’s the way of the world.

By the time I was ten I was pretty obscene

jacking off after drinking the polio vaccine
In a smelly old school I ducked under desks
but I got the chance to look under Grace Moran’s dress
That’s the way of the world, boy,
That’s the way of the world.

I loved Little Richard and the Moonglows, too,

but the Beatles arrived and they were through.
I cried the day Kennedy was shot,
But it was only the beginning of the entire lot.
That’s the way of the world, boy,
That’s the way of the world.

And now I’m in Vietnam

I hope I never loose my arms
But when I get home I’ll tell them all
They can take this war and go to hell.
That’s the way of the world, boy,
That’s the way of the world!

***
 “I like that song best,” Snuff says, pulling the bed

sheet over his body.

“It’s stupid!”

“You kidding me? It makes me think of being a kid. A

small kid. I remembering worrying about Sputnik. Remember

Sputnik? Everyone thought the Russians were going to be

able to destroy us from outer space.”

I have a crazy uncle, Uncle Joe. Whenever he talks his

eyes always look up in another direction. He’s a meat

packer and always smells like raw steak. Anyway, he says

that when they shot up Sputnik, he could sit on his back

porch and see it traveling across the sky.”

“The fucking thing was no bigger than a basketball.!”

“No shit! But Uncle Joe swore he saw it and that it

was shooting x-ray beams to earth. But then he also thinks

that Hitler never killed himself, just moved to Russia and

now runs Russia.”

“He’s the kind of guy who believes aliens are out

there to get us, too, I suppose?”

“Worse. He thinks my cousin Joyce, his step-daughter,

is an alien.”

“You’ve got to be kidding?”

“No shit! He thinks she came from a planet behind

Pluto and that she was on earth conducting experiments on

his brain.”

“What does she say about that?”

“For all I know she is conducting experiments on his

brain. If you saw her you’d think she was an alien. She and

her mother, my aunt Flo, moved out on Joe when he started

that shit.”

“What happened to Joe?“ Snuff asks, indifferently.

“He’s still a meat packer. Tell you what, though, he

used to bring home the best steaks I’ve ever had. Thick and

juicy. The kind you only get in a restaurant.”

“Shit, you’re giving me the munchies.”

“We got anything to eat?”

“Do I have something to eat,“ he says, cheerfully. He

drops out of bed and crawls half way under his bunk.

“You’re going to love this!”

He groans and squirms and drags out a shoe box wrapped

in aluminum foil with a red, white and blue ribbon wrapped

around the edges. “I got this from Brickel who owes me for

covering his ass hundreds of times.”

He rips off the aluminum foil and shakes off the

cardboard top. Inside is a bulging assortment of cookies

and candies, some homemade, some store bought. “Tell me

this isn’t a gold mine,” Snuff says.

 On top of the mail box is a letter written on pink

paper. Snuff shakes it. “ It’s from the Pink Berets,” he

says. ”You want to hear it?”

“Why not,” I say as I bite into a soft, buttery cookie

that tastes like vanilla.

Snuff reads:

Dear Serviceman,

This package has been sent to you with love and

concern from the Pink Berets of Butte, Montana. It is our
way of saying thanks to you all and reminding you that we
here back home admire the job you’re doing. We know how
hard it is to be away from home, and we know it takes great
courage to serve our country.
We love you and respect you, no matter what any one
else says or does. So from us to you: KEEP UP THE GOOD
WORK!!!

GOD BLESS AMERICA!

Sincerely,

THE PICK BERETS

P.S. If you know anyone who doesn’t get packages from

home, please let us know.
We’ll be honored to send one.

Snuff smirks and stuffs a chocolate cookie into his

mouth. Then another and another. Crumbs drop all over the

floor.

“You want to write them back and thank them?” I ask.

“What if they’re a bunch of old ladies who sit in a

church basement with nothing else to do in their lives

except let their sons go to war.”

“They can’t help that.”

“Bullshit! Bunch of hypocrites who go to their son’s

funeral and cry the rest of their lives when they could

have done something to stop it”

“What could they have done? They’re just old ladies.”

“Stand outside the White House or the Pentagon or

anywhere and throw rocks at the assholes who sent us here.

Piles of rocks. Like a good old rock fight when we were

kids.”

“Sure!”

“What, sure! Slap their husbands and cut of their

cocks when they’re sleeping. A few cocks cut off and see

how fast we get out of here. But they don’t really give a

shit! They comfort themselves with sending cookies and

candies and pretending they care.”

He bites into a Snickers bar and the chocolate sticks

to his mouth. “I say,” he mumbles, ”that we write them a

letter in return. A real letter.”

“Saying what? Thanks for the munchies, we really enjoy

them when we’re stones.”

“Absolutely. Why let them kid themselves? “

He goes to his footlocker and takes out a pad of

yellow paper and a pencil. “You write. You have better

handwriting than me.”

“I don’t want to write. Fuck, I can hardly open my

mouth to eat.”

“Come on,” he says and hands me the pad and pencil. I

reluctantly write down his dictation.

“Dear Pink Berets,

Thank you for the goodies. Every night while the

cannons thunder and the bullets fly, we pray we’ll make it
home to the good people like you who think of us during
these hard times. With your support we can honestly
say......”

“Help me out here,” Snuff asks,. “I’m stuck.”

“Say whatever comes to your mind. I have nothing to

say.”

“Alright fucker.” Snuff says, “ . ...we can

honestly say that this war isn’t worth a fuck! And although
your cookies are good, you must be a bunch of assholes for
putting up with this war and letting your sons die fighting
it. Maybe you all will get off your fat asses and instead
of making cookies go blow up the White House to show those
dumb fucks you don’t want your sons to die. Meanwhile, your
cookies are terrific, especially when we’re stoned out of
our minds. Next time, send some brownies!!”

How’s that for a letter?”

“Oh they’ll love it. Just love it.”

***

And so I climb spider-like, skinny from a spit of

dysentery, food and drink in-one-end-and-out-the-other,

climb to the creaking top bunk and the thin mattress I

stole from a room downstairs because the other was thin as

paper and smelled like someone pissed on it over and over,

climb for an uncounted time as if I really belong in this

bed. (This is home. This is forever.) Climb and clap on

white stereo headphones as large as ear muffs, smoke the

last of the joint and melt into a liquid sleep where only

my dreams scare me and the music is loud:

You need coolin', baby, I'm not foolin'

I'm gonna send ya back to schoolin'
Way down inside, a-honey, you need it
I'm gonna give you my love
I'm gonna give you my love, oh

and the music shimmers my skin, vibrates high velocity,

connects my head to my body, heals my hemorrhoids and

stomach pains, my raw throat from too many cigarettes and

the oily white smoke from engine exhausts

Wanna whole lotta love

Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love

and the singer orgasms, his mouth wide open sending sex

into the center of my body, and out jumps a woman who

promises to eat my heart and suck out my soul if I don’t

paint a picture of her on a ceiling where centuries will

admire her, but only centuries

You've been learnin'

And baby, I been learnin'
All them good times
Baby, baby, I've been discernin'-a
 A-way, way down inside
A-honey, you need-a
I'm gonna give you my love, ah
I'm gonna give you my love, ah

I can’t take my mind out of my body and I can’t take my

body out of my mind. I travel back to an attic room where I

coiled around myself crying for protection. The attic room

in the wooden house along the Miami River, a tiny church

with pine beams and a cathedral window, the only spot for

outside light to enter, and the ceiling was so low I

thought it would squash me flat, and I could hear in the

lightless corners scorpions and lizards scurrying after

cockroaches, and mice running across the floor, and I told

my father I wanted to sleep in my sisters’ room, and he was

so enraged “You’re twelve. Your sisters and 14 and 16. What

are you? A pussy?” He locked me in the attic room to ensure

I wouldn’t sneak down to my sisters’ room, but then, thank

God, he deserted our family four months later and although

my mother seemed to miss him, my sisters and I were happy

and they let me sleep by their bed on the floor where I

could hear termites eating the floorboards, but it was

still the only time I felt safe.

Oh, whole lotta love

Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
I don't want more
The headphones smother me with music, the room is a thick

haze of marijuana. I can feel Snuff jostle on the bottom

bunk, he can fall asleep at the drop of a dime. There is a

muffled BROOOOOOM and the walls of the room seem to

vibrate, probably another B-52 bombing on the outskirts of

the city, or a rocket landing somewhere nearby. It happens

all the time and there’s nothing you can do abut it, so the

BROOOOOOM doesn’t mean anything, besides, there’s the music

You've got to bleed on me, yeah

Ah, ah, ah, ah
Ah, hah, hah
Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah
ah, ah, ah,ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah
No, no, no, no, ah
Love, love, low-ow-ow-ow-ove
Oh, babe, oh

but the door violently opens and I can see an MP screaming

but I can’t hear what he’s saying because of the music. All

I can think is ‘I’m busted!’ and by tomorrow morning I’ll

be locked in some cage out at Long Binh, coiled on the floor

in my underwear, pissed off at myself, pissed off at pot,

waiting for a court martial and a sentence that will keep

me in Vietnam for who-knows-how-long, and the MP raps his

night stick against the door against the door frame and

Snuff is jumping out of bed and grabbing my headphones,

You've been coolin'

And baby, I've been droolin'
All the good times, baby, I've been misusin'-a (Oh)
 A-way, way down inside
I'm gonna give ya my love (Ah)
I'm gonna give ya every inch of my love (Ah)
I'm gonna give you my love (Ah)
Yes, alright, let's go (Ah)

and he is yelling something but I won’t let go of the

headphones because I don’t want to hear I’m busted but

Snuff yanks the headphones off as the MP disapears and Led

Zepellin fades into tiny voices

Wanna whole lotta love

Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love

and Snuff is yelling “They bombed the hotel. They bombed

the fucking hotel! We got to get out of here!”

I can see men in t-shirts and underwear running in the

direction of the main staircase, and the hall is a haze of

smoke and everyone, everyone seems to be shrieking,

shouting, calling the VC “Mother fuckers!!!” and Snuff is

putting his boots on without socks and shouts “Get off

your fucking ass!” I jump to the floor, jab my feet into

straw sandals, and look around for something to take with

me, a book, a letter, but the haze whitens and there is the

stink of metal so Snuff and I join the herd running to the

stairs, moo cows and pigs and ducks - the entire goddamn

farm,!!! - and we rapidly run through the lobby where MPs

are waving their hands toward the street and someone is

yelling that one of the rooms is on fire, Clement and

Gardener’s, and I wonder if the bomb got them, but I spot

the two of them by the main guard post, their faces smudged

from smoke and ash, and I wonder if they’re thinking about

all the stuff they stole when Fitzmaurice went crazy, and

the firemen point their fire hoses like rifles, and once we

find a safe place across the street, we can easily see the

hoses spraying the outside walls of the hotel and the movie

theater a foot away next door. The water’s mist sprays us

all, and the fire feasts on the wall joints and window

sills and a janitor who cleans the theater late at night,

but tonight is bad luck for him, and someone says that

Charlie snuck a satchel charge into the movie theater,

probably hoping the wall would crumble and we’d all fall

down, bit it’s mostly fire and all I can think of are the

crowds that won’t see any more samurai movies from Hong

Kong, and they’ll be no more pretty girls carrying mesh

bags of fruit and candy, and no more soldiers sitting on

top of the concrete filled barrels flirting with the young

girls who sneer and look like they hate us.

“I didn’t even hear it,” Snuff says. “I must sleep

like a dead man.”

“I thought we were being busted.”

 “Shit! They’d have to bust most everyone in the hotel.”

And the firemen fiddle around as if they were

invisible. Who’s in control? One man runs into the smoking

moving theater and quickly runs back out. Smoke oozes out

of the theater lobby and settles like fog on the street.

Sneezing. Coughing. Choking. The air is immovable. Snuff

wheezes, “This is the third movie theater they’ve hit since

I’ve been in-country. Soon they’ll be no more left.”

A tiny woman with elephantitis brushes by us. The

right side of her face is swollen and looks like a clump of

purple grapes. She says something in Vietnamese, laughs and

fades into the fog and smoke, but who-knows-how a soft

breeze from who-knows-where quietly sweeps away the smoke

and the theater no longer pours out smoke, just some short

gasps and puffs, and it isn’t long before the MPs are

yelling that the hotel is secure except for a couple of

rooms on the first floor, and we are ordered back to our

rooms without questions of protests, and back in our room

there is haze and the window opens only half way so we flap

our green towels until Snuff gets tired and says “Fuck it!

I need to smoke something better,” and we light up and sit

there, numb, stupid, still, wondering what the hell just

happened, and Snuff says, “Fucking VC assholes! All they do

is kill their own people!” And I say, “If they keep it up

they’ll have an empty country once we leave.” And Snuff

says “Maybe it’ll be better that way,” and we seem to make

sense although our eyes are burning slits, and I laugh at

how silly we look, crunched on the floor in sweaty t-shirts

and underwear, and just as Snuff says “When I get back to

the world I’ll never be for war again!” And just as I

slouch against the edge of the bunk and start to disagree

with him

BROOOOOOOOOOM!!!!

and then another

BROOOOOOOOOOM!!!!

And Snuff shakes ”What the fuck?” and the floor sways and

the door opens on its own and this time the hallway is

white with smoke and vague shapes rush by and scream “The

fucking place is going to collapse!!!” and “”I don’t want

to die!!!” and “I lost my glasses. Where are my glasses?”

Snuff grabs my t-short and yells “We’ve got to get out of

here!!” and we swim our way into the hallway, but this time

everyone is moving towards the back stairs, sightless,

blind, groping the metal hand rail, all of us looking like

ghosts, a clutter of panic rushing to the back alley and

wondering why the building isn’t falling on us.

The alley is a mess of trash and large oil trucks

filled with potable water the odor of chlorine, and we

skinny past the garbage and reach the front of the hotel.

There are firemen in t-shirts spraying directly into the

lobby of the movie theater. They too thought there was only

one bomb, but someone says “There were two more bombs

inside. They must have been on timers.“ and someone else

says, “Fuck if I’m going back to my room!”

*****

Oh, a storm is threat'ning

My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away

*****

We sit on the curb across from the hotel, 60 or

70 of us,. The damp night and the fire hose spray chills

us, and the midget whores bring us thin blankets and small

pillows and rub our backs and heads. “GI, numba one, no

numba ten,” and a truck of MPs, heavily armed, pulls up to

the hotel, and they jump out ready to shoot at someone, but

there is no one to shoot, only smoke, and one of the midget

whores stands behind Snuff and tells him he can spend the

rest of the night with her, but Snuff shivers her off his

back, but she doesn’t care. She gives him a cushion to sit

on, then sits next to him and leans against his arm because
she is kind. I tell him he should go to her room and he

tells me to let it go. He’ll spend the night right where he

is, and if the hotel collapses, he’ll be there to see it

all. But then he wonders what he’ll do if all his shit is

buried under rubble. I tell him there’s nothing I want, not

even the stereo from Japan, my M-14, the pile of porno

pictures and letters from home; and he agrees, except for

the porno pictures. A shoeshine boy offers us a pack of

marijuana and Snuff says “We should sit right here and

smoke all night,” but MPs are everywhere and there’s no way

we want to go to jail.”

******

It’s five in the morning, the fire is unending, the

movie theater is turning to embers. The smoke is a ghost

now, crawling in windows, as Snuff and I return to the

roof. The midget whores have departed. They’re back in

their rooms with the stink of burnt wood and concrete that

smolders. And we are shadows covered in ashes, too tired to

talk and too tired to sleep. We smoke marijuana until we

are floating, and Snuff wants a song to put him to sleep.

My tongue is swollen, dry and like chalk, my words are like

matchsticks without any flame. But I rasp out a song

without much off a tune.

 THE TUNELESS SONG

We stare across the Saigon River

a powder of dust seething with mold
a music of sweat melting our skin.
I can not breathe. I can not breathe.
Our rifles are rusted, dead from murder,
the hoods of our jeeps steam when it rains.
Ten thousand miles away from home!
The enemy lives to cut off our hands
and steal our rings to bring to their wives.
They leave our bones on the sides of the roads
so we build walls of barbed wire and concrete barrels
to keep everyone out except ourselves.
And the people watch our formations,
hanging our weapons on limbs of the trees.
We wipe clean out bayonets, stick them in sandbags
while our leaders don’t know what to do.
They walk by the river cursing the war,
they hate those who talk but are always silent.
So no one, no one comes to our rescue,
no one cares if we live or die.
Yes, we stare across the Saigon River,
where there isn’t one light on.
not one light at all.

*****

“What kind of shit is that?” Snuff asks.

“The best I can do. I’m pretty fucking tired.”

“If I were you I’d never sing it again. It’s real

shit!”

“Fuck you! You sing something then.”

“You know I can’t sing. I sound like a goat.”

“Then take what your get.”

“Just give me something to fall asleep to.”

“How can you fall asleep sitting up?”

 “Watch me! When I was in basic I learned to fall

asleep standing up. So sitting is easy.“

“All I’ve got is my knife song.”

“Sounds better than what you just sang - or tried to

sing.”

“Fucker!”

*****

“IF” - THE KNIFE SONG

If you eat when a man is sharpening his knife,

your throat will be slit in the middle of the night.
If a bloody knife is tossed into a fire,
a wounded man is sure to expire.
If you touch a knife then whisper a lie
within a week you’re guaranteed to die.
If you throw a knife into the wind
a witch will die because of her sins.
If you sharpen a knife after someone is dead,
their soul will be severed from their burial bed.
If you point a knife up at the sky
you’ll cut God’s face and an angel’s eye.
If you drop a knife and then you curse,
your soul will no longer be attached to earth.
If you go to war without a knife,
you can bet, my friend, you’ll loose your life.

*****

Snuff is asleep now. His shoulders hunch over. His

chin’s on his chest, he snorts and he snores. The morning

is misty, gray and ungracious, the sun is invisible and

hard to see. I can hear the cranking of motors, jeeps and

trucks growl in the streets. Motorbikes and cars whirr like

small children as a tank creaks pass the hotels and alleys.

In the court yard below the old lady is curled on a

blanket, her dog nestled against her. They both look dead.

Off in the distance, on the edge of the city, a B-52 drops

a shudder of bombs. Far away, two Hueys glide over

rooftops. One of them has the Red Cross on its side. A hell

of a way to leave Vietnam. Often I wonder if I’ll ever go

home. I think of my body walking through the neighborhood

where I was a boy who felt everything: the neighbors with

worries, the friends without love, the stars, the sky, the

red leaves falling in gutters. I’ll be a stranger to them

now. I’ll buy back ambition, look for achievement, marry

someone who won’t know that I’m lost. I’ll take summer

vacations to parks that amuse me, buy comfortable cars and

a house I’ll never own. But it’ll only be my body carrying

a brain, while in the middle of the night, the house in

darkness, I’ll sit on a sofa and know that my soul - my

self - is still sitting on this rooftop looking at the

sunless horizon where only the ghosts are real.

*****
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we're born
Into this world we're thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out alone
Riders on the storm