by John Hart
I got sent to juvie for a year. It was OK, and there were not any killers there but me. Nobody touched me. Nobody even looked at me. When I got out I went back to high school, but for awhile I kept expecting to wake up and be in juvie again.
4
The night of the same day in downtown Nha Trang, Izzy kept wondering when he would wake up. Soaked in sweat, his nerves like bees inside his body, he hadn’t wanted to come here, but Gregg and Robert David and Mikel had insisted. They didn’t want him staying at the villa alone and Izzy didn’t make them ask twice.
He was too afraid to be alone. Even now he wanted to hold onto their hands like a child. If they left him, he would collapse right here, enveloped in the soft warmth of a tropical night that saturated his nostrils with the scents of flowers, spices, food, shit, beer, and marijuana. His vision felt assaulted by neon and a moving carnival of cars, jeeps, and bicycles. Vespas and three-wheeled cycles swirled amidst constant honking while Magical Mystery Tour blared in the background. The streets were full of GIs in jungle fatigues and men in gaudy aloha shirts openly soliciting baby girl prostitutes dressed in barely anything.
“Nha Trang is where the troops and contractors come to avail themselves of some in-country R&R, Izzy.” Robert David was talking to him now, acting as tour guide and his cultured Southern accent, with the way his R&R came out soft like “Aah” and “Aah,” seemed even more preposterous than it had during rounds before the world fell apart and Top got murdered and Mikel killed Derek before Derek could kill him and Gregg.
He should be dead right now, his first day in Vietnam. He should be in a body bag while his fiancé sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and lit candles. If it wasn’t for Mikel, his blood would be all over the floor instead of the vomit that got cleaned up with Top’s brains and—
Izzy lurched to the side and started dry heaving into the street. There was nothing left to throw up. He hadn’t been able to eat all day. He didn’t think he could ever eat again.
“C’mon.” It was Mikel, his hand on Izzy’s shoulder. “Let’s get you drunk.”
“I don’t think. . .Agent Mikel, I don’t think—”
“That’s a very good idea. Don’t. Think.” Then next to Izzy’s ear he whispered sharply, “And for Chrissakes, don’t call me `Agent’ again and make me regret getting in the way of that gun. It’s J.D., okay? Just J.D.” A slap on the back and Just J.D. announced to Gregg and Robert David, “I say we could all use a drink.”
“I concur,” announced Robert David as he grabbed Izzy by one arm and Gregg took the other, moving him out of the flow of traffic and with a quick turn, down a back alley street. That’s when Izzy noticed that Gregg’s hand was trembling, and so was his go-easy voice, as he picked up with the travelogue.
“Troops come in from all over and try to forget where they are and what they are going back to out there. You can buy anything and anyone you want on this street, and it’s what, five minutes from our quarters?”
The street was packed on both sides with small shacks made of tin cans and cardboard and plywood. Izzy numbly watched a couple of men who could have been at a stateside barbeque with their tropical Hawaiian shirts stretched across big bellies and big gold watches that yelled Jersey, held up on each side by two little Vietnamese girls. Even made up like whores with little pushed up breasts and tiny skirts they couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve years old.
“This is a nightmare.” Izzy closed his eyes tight, willing the grotesque vision to go away. It did, only to be replaced by the sight of a little boy, also made up to look pretty, leading another fat middle-aged pleasure seeker past a shack’s door. They disappeared, to do only God knew what.
God could know. Izzy didn’t want to know. And then J.D. apparently thought a little history lesson was in order, as if that put it all into some kind of perspective.
“This old alley has existed since the Indochina War when the French were here. The visitors that look like they should be roasting on a spit are mostly civilian contractors behaving badly away from their own homes. Money is precious. They have it. The families do what they must to survive.”
“I want that drink,” Izzy told J.D., told them all. He honestly didn’t give a rat’s ass if he threw it up immediately as long as it bought him even a moment’s respite from this. . . this. . .
He couldn’t even give this a name.
The bar they entered was full of drunken soldiers and more prostitutes. Izzy never thought he’d be grateful to see girls who were closer to twenty than ten selling themselves on a very open market. “B girls,” J.D. explained, as if that explained anything about the inflated cheap boob jobs that made Izzy wish he could do a lobotomy on the plastic surgeons responsible—though he’d lay dollars to every Red Cross Dolly Donut not one board certified plastic surgeon had performed a single one of the surgeries.
A terrible really loud band played “Proud Mary,” and that’s when Izzy was jostled by some drunks, got turned around, and was suddenly lost in the smoke and neon.
Frantically he scanned the room for J.D., Gregg, Robert David. No luck. Everyone around him was in the same green uniform or garish aloha shirt and he didn’t recognize even one face from the hospital. His nausea, momentarily forgotten, courtesy of the “Scotch rocks, make it a triple, and make it your best” J.D. had ordered for him, returned with a vengeance. And it wasn’t from the few sips consumed. Homesick, that’s what he was; literally physically sick with his longing for home. He would easily give up all the years of his later life just to be home right now. No wonder everyone was obsessed with counting the days.
“Three hundred and sixty-four days and a wake up,” Izzy said aloud, wondering if crazy people talked to themselves because it made their alternate realities more real. Perhaps this would make a nice clinical trial test at the end of the impossible tunnel of days where reality glittered so wonderful and precious Izzy could not believe he ever took it for granted as he muttered the first of ten thousand small prayers to whatever, or whoever to just let him live, make it home, and he would do anything in gratitude.
The bodies pressing all around him took on the substance of quicksand, and then the quicksand became like fluctuating concrete that jostled Izzy one way then another. The bass of the band thundered into his brain until he found himself standing in front of a ridiculously big and very drunken warrant officer, shouting at him.
“What, what? I beg your pardon,” Izzy shouted back above the din. “I’m lost. Did you say you could help me find my friends?”
“I said Welcome to the Nam, you fuckin idiot new guy!”
And then J.D. was dragging the fuckin idiot new guy away, shouting, “Try not to antagonize the animals,” as he plowed a path to the relative safety of a back exit door.
Outside it was hot but thankfully quieter and Izzy wanted to apologize, though for what he didn’t know. “I wasn’t, wasn’t, I did not say. . .”
J.D. silenced him with a glare that had the effect of a double slap.
“Listen up and listen up good because I need you and you are no good to me dead,” he said bluntly. “Wake up, quit whining and feeling sorry for yourself. Nobody here gives a shit where you come from, or where you are going. Nobody. What will get you killed faster than anything is pretending you are still what and who you were in the world. You are not in the world anymore. You are not anywhere near where there are rules you can still live by. So I am telling you: Wake the fuck up. Are you with me so far?”
Izzy managed a creaky up and down movement of his head.
“Now, the second most dangerous thing besides the danger you pose to yourself are the other fucking idiots who were sent over here. If you were not a shrink and an officer, if you were just some grunt in the field, your own guys might have shot you already because your head is so far up your ass it’s still in New York and that makes you too dangerous to be around. If you don’t wake up soon, one of ours is far more likely to kill you than
Charlie. Just about every third guy here is ready to snap, lose it, go psycho. You got a real life introduction to it this afternoon. This is one giant insane asylum, the whole place. Take note, Dr. Moskowitz, because this is your first, last, and only reality orientation that just might keep you alive long enough to help me out and get you home.” J.D. gave him a little thumb to forefinger ping on the bridge of his black horn rims. The ones J.D. had fished out of the blood and brains and puke, then cleaned off with his shirt before perching back on Izzy’s nose. “Now tell me, Doc: What’s The Big Message?”
“Wake the fuck up.”
“That’s right. Now follow me.”
J.D. took off down the alley, no backward glance. Izzy followed as instructed, muttering robotically, “Wake the fuck up, wake the fuck up. . .” while he tried to wake the fuck back up in New York City where everything and everyone he’d ever cared about existed on some alternate plane.
But they still hadn’t materialized as the officer’s quarters came into view. Or even by the time he laid in bed listening to the fan turning overhead, the sounds of a Vietnamese family sitting on the porch of their house in back of the villa. He imagined their voices belonging to his mother and father, aunt and uncle, and grandparents; imagined them all sitting together on the porch at their summer cottage while he and Rachel snuck away to make out under the stars, and he imagined all that gloriousness until he fell asleep.
Suddenly the sensation of some invisible hand yanking the sheet out from under him and throwing him to the floor jarred him awake. There were shadows of racing feet in the hallway, accompanied by shouts of “INCOMING! INCOMING!”
Before Izzy could pick himself up another concussive blast sounded, followed by screams outside the villa, then another explosion even closer that coincided with a loud bang as his door flew open and Gregg raced inside.
“Come on, get out!” Gregg was hauling him to his feet before the command could register, then together they scrambled down the stairs and out the front door, just in time to see another mortar blast hit. They both dropped to the ground, next to another young man Izzy didn’t recognize.
“C’mon, c’mon!” he urged them, “Get up! We need to get to the bunker!”
Gregg grabbed Izzy’s arm to go, but Izzy couldn’t move. He was paralyzed. Something warm and wet drizzled down his leg. His muscles were like water, his eyes felt like they were spinning in their sockets. He was dizzy, hyperventilating, and he couldn’t stop it, couldn’t even control his own bladder while Gregg shouted:
“Let’s go, let’s go!” Gregg and the other man were up and running. Even if his own life depended on it, Izzy could not follow. All he could do was look at Gregg’s back—which suddenly stopped its retreat as Gregg glanced over his shoulder, saw Izzy still down on the ground where they had left him.
“Izzy!” Gregg raced back to help him up and had him halfway to his feet when the high pitch of another mortar shrilly screamed and they both dove back to the ground, and watched the burning, white phosphorous mortar hit almost directly in front of where they were going to run for the safety of the bunker.
Their companion, the one who had urged them to run with him, turned into a gory cartoon character. For a moment, his legs seemed to be moving from his severed upper body and Izzy could smell seared flesh. He wasn’t cognizant of crying, but it felt like hot tears were racing down his cheeks while he tried not to choke on his own vomit as some important part of him, a part of his self since boyhood that had been raised on Disney movies and Cub Scout meetings departed, never to return again.
Covered in every conceivable bodily fluid except blood, Izzy knew a terrible truth that would forever haunt him: what saved his life that day was that he was not brave; he was too scared to move. The brave man, the man doing the smart thing of getting to the safety of the bunker, was cut down by a random and malicious darkness of fate that cared not a whit for right or wrong. And if right or wrong didn’t matter, what did?
Survival.
Gregg’s chest was shaking from holding in his silent sobs. Izzy would have offered him a tissue if he’d had one handy like shrinks always did back in the world. But they were no longer in the world and he was no longer the Israel Moskowitz who had arrived in Vietnam just that morning. Izzy really didn’t know who he was anymore and he had no idea who or what he might become. He only knew that if he was going to survive and get the hell out of this hell-hole, he had to be smarter than the smartest guy he’d once been in the Columbia University med school.
“Wake the fuck up,” Izzy whispered as he wiped the snot from his nose with the end of a military-issue tee that smelled like piss and stomach juices minus any solid bits from breakfast, lunch or dinner. In order to survive you had to eat and so he would eat in the morning whether he was hungry or not. He had to eat and he had to remember his first, last, and only orientation, which defined this new reality that came down to four simple words.
Izzy said them once more, only this time like he meant it:
“Wake the fuck up.”
The Nightbird takes flight to distance itself from the piercing whistle of mortars. The feathers of the bird make no sound as it swiftly moves through the sultry evening towards the jungle, then lights in the branches of a tree and watches.
The LRRP team moves quickly and efficiently. Several of them are new but they are highly trained and this is what they do well.
Their leader is confident.
“OK, let’s hump it out there, one more click. Set up a perimeter, get ready to ambush and hurt some people. Move it! It’s getting dark soon.”
And soon it is dark and quiet.
The men are spread out just the way they have been trained to do. They wait in the gathering silence. It is in the silence of the night that the predator kills, moving with the soft silence of the panther, the quiet slither of the cobra.
The Nightbird watches one man sitting in his place just before the day dawns.
“Hey, hey, where are you guys, where are you?”
As the light comes up and he can finally see, he begins to shriek.
All the men are sitting around him and have their bloody cut off heads sitting in their laps.
5
It was nearing dawn and J.D. Mikel had yet to sleep. He didn’t require a lot, which was fortunate, because he had been summoned to the MACV headquarters in Saigon, three days earlier. As his spine settled into the hammock where no one would find him—god, he hoped not—he ran through the details again that had called him from the jungle and literally landed him in a nut ward.
When the summons came he had been dressed in black silk pajamas, Vietnamese Highlands style, and flip-flop sandals, just as he was now. And just as now the sky was still and shadowed—only then he had been sitting in the back of a jeep, driven by a Special Forces Officer.
As they rolled up to the entrance of the sprawling fortress in Saigon known as Pentagon East, they were joined almost immediately by a black late 60s Cadillac limousine. Another Special Forces Officer opened the door, then out stepped a man in an elegant English cut suit and highly polished shoes.
He greeted J.D. with their customary exchange, “And how are you, my young friend?”
The man’s voice, high and a bit squeaky, in no way matched his attire or his bearing, or the worldly position such attire and bearing would dictate. J.D. bowed his customary bow.
“Not as young as I once was, Mr. Ambassador.”
“And thank goodness for that.” A beat. “J.D.”
They laughed as they always did at their private little joke, then slipped into the professional faces they were there to put on.
Flanked by the two Special Forces Officers, their shiny shoes, flip-flops and green nylon combat boots echoed down a long, gleaming corridor until the officers opened a pair of French doors, revealing a tasteful office where a much decorated general rose quickly from his desk.
“Good evening, Mr. Ambassador.” General Glen Claymo
re gave a sharp salute. He had bulldog jowls, BB pellet eyeballs, and a Yul Brenner globe you could spin on its axis. “It’s a long flight from Paris. Please, have a seat, and may I offer either of you coffee, tea?”
The Ambassador, a title he retained despite the less than diplomatic purposes he now served, gave a dismissive wave and didn’t bother to sit. J.D. flip-flopped over to the silver service before settling into the chair facing Claymore’s desk where he placed the tea cup to steep.
“Agent Mikel, we have a dark one. I would not have brought you out of the current operation, but this is urgent.”
Claymore slid a file across the desk. J.D. briskly thumbed through the surprisingly thin stack of pages while Claymore filled them in. He wound up his briefing with a fist to desk thump, growling, “We need this thing stopped now. Before the press catches so much as a whiff of this garbage. Sentiments back home are bad enough as it is.”
Sentiments “back home” were not J.D.’s problem. He was a US citizen by birth but any real sense of affiliation didn’t extend much beyond his employer. “You have confirmed kills?”
“We have bodies, yes. Dismembered in such a way that. . .” Claymore shot a look of distaste at the file. “We think this may have happened before.”
“Explain.”
More briefing, more desk thumping, then, “For all we know the crazy who escaped the nut ward at Madigan General is dead or doing his killing in some Iowa cornfield, but we can’t discount the possibility that he’s managed to pick up where he left off on the front lines.” Claymore glanced uneasily at the Ambassador. “This is, of course, the worst case scenario from a public relations position and purely speculation on our part.”
At yet another mention of public relations, J.D.’s annoyance rose to the level of flicking lint off a dark suit. The suit in the room, however, parked a well-tailored hip against the desk, got down to the nasty end of the stick.