by John Hart
“You find whatever this is, Mikel, and he—or, they—disappear. Personally I think it is the goddamn Russians. It stinks like them. Either way if it is one of theirs, a damned Chinaman or some psycho of our own, this cannot ever have happened. Understood?”
“Of course. But strategically speaking, there are over 500,000 troops here, not to mention the contractors, the civilians. If you want this on the fast track then I at least need a ground zero to start looking on the inside and more than this so-called report. Sure, it says he’s insane, but who isn’t some kind of crazy around here?”
“Maybe the shrinks who treat the crazies?” Claymore’s jowls lifted like he had just pulled an ace out of his ass. He shoved a thicker file J.D.’s way. “Take your pick.”
J.D. ignored the file, took a sip of his tea. Nothing special. He preferred a Longjing, just as he preferred to work alone. Especially if it involved some academic eggheads he didn’t have the time to babysit. The fact they were mental specialists didn’t particularly agree with him either. They probably tried to psycho-analyze everyone they came into contact with and he didn’t want anyone snooping under his hood.
“What if they talk while I still need them?”
“They can’t because of that oath they have to take. As for once they’ve served their purpose and are no longer required. . . .” Claymore shrugged, opened his hands. “If the good of the many has to take precedence over the good of the few that is the sacrifice all soldiers may have to make. They’re no different.”
J.D. didn’t bother to say “understood” because such things were always understood when people were merely tools for some higher good—or not such higher good. “Anything else?”
“Happy hunting.”
“It’s time to go.” The Ambassador nodded to J.D.
J.D. tossed back the tea. He decided he didn’t like it any more than the files he picked up as they left.
“I have something I would ask you to do for me personally while you’re in Nha Trang,” the Ambassador confided en route.
Speaking in conspiratorial tones they retraced their steps in reverse. Shiny shoes then flip-flops, escorted by two pair of green combat boots, footfalls echoing down the gleaming corridor. Suit into the limousine. J.D. in black pajamas back into the jeep, where he checked his watch, tic-tic-ticking.
*
Twelve hours later and two hundred miles swept north of Saigon, it was just getting dark in Nha Trang. Considering his present objectives in a city he knew better than the back of his neck, J.D. dressed accordingly before making his way down an alley to pass the open doorways of a long line of shacks where preparations went on for the evening ahead.
The smells of the street vendors’ spicy offerings flavored the humid air as Vietnamese music competed with the sounds of Jimi Hendrix. The air smelled, tasted, sounded like home. At least as much of a home as he or any other Boogeyman who frightened grown men might claim.
Stopping just outside a familiar back door, in fluent Vietnamese he respectfully greeted the elderly woman known to all as “Grandmother” sitting on the stoop, silently chewing and enjoying the betel quid stuffed in her cheek. J.D. knew the psychoactive buzz in the leaf, nut and lime substance was a comfort to her and her old body. She looked up at him, frowning. Then she saw through the cleverly done disguise: The burnt out, drug-addled GI with dirty faded Tiger fatigues and booney hat and peace signs and beads around his neck was a friend.
Her bloody red smile and blackened teeth greeted him with a pleasurable laugh of recognition. “Ah! Ma Quý!”
J.D. crouched down Asian style and engaged her in their typical conversation regarding the weather, her businesses along the alley; catching up on the activities in the neighborhood. A cup of tea was brought for him by one of her many granddaughters. She didn’t try to entice him with one since she loved her own too much to wish him onto even the most troublesome.
As they shared a small silence, J.D. realized he had missed a detail. The fatigues were dirty; his fingernails too clean. Scratching at the dirt, he casually asked, “Do you know anything about the stories of the Ghost Soldier, the Boogeyman?”
Her hand shook just a small ripple. She spat a bloody stream of betel juice. “Not story. Real.” She said the word for demon in Vietnamese, “Con Quý. Truly Con Quý. Stay away.”
J.D. didn’t want to show disrespect and laugh inappropriately but the urge was there. The irony of it all was just too much. He had spent the better part of his thirty-two years trying to escape the nightmare of a moment’s insanity, only to get railroaded into a psych ward. Now Grandmother was trying to warn him away with the very nickname she had given him years ago—only there was a big difference between a fond “you little devil” and some supernatural overtones no Asian would ignore.
When Grandmother wasn’t more forthcoming than another “Bad. Very bad. Con quy,” he asked, “Is An still selling the good stuff?”
A nod, a bow, and J.D. moved down the alley to buy three packs of mj from An. He then walked another short distance, passed a sign announcing 8th Field Hospital, deliberately avoided the 99KO’s self-contained building and headed for the hooch—a screened-in, long, wood framed military dwelling where the enlisted men of the 99th resided.
J.D. opened the hooch door. As he had hoped, at the far end a group of the mostly too young enlisted men were gathered, listening to music, drinking beer, and hiding joints behind their backs as though the clouds of dope smoke were somehow invisible.
J.D. flashed a peace sign and dopily moved forward, smiling stupidly. In his blond wig and mustache and aviator specs and raggedy Tiger fatigues, he could pass for any other burnt out grunt.
“Peace, brothers,” he called out, a fellow pilgrim. “I smelled something good and liked the sounds.”
The guys were a little wary, but pretty stoned and when they saw he had the packs of nicely rolled Js things warmed up quickly, and then he pulled out a brand new cassette of Creedence. Soon they were passing the new Js around and he was able to move from guy to guy, rapping and gossiping and joking. Just like anywhere it was the guys on the ground who knew the dirt, and it didn’t take long before J.D. knew some things the “take your pick” files hadn’t dished up. Like a certain psychiatrist named Peck who had quite the reputation for some off-the-record Jeckle/Hyde behavior, so Major Donald Peck went to the top of his “Watch Him” list.
Once J.D. got all the stuff floating around about the Ghost Soldier who was apparently doing a kick ass job of heightening their collective paranoia, he disappeared himself with the stealth of. . . . Well, took one to find one.
*
And now here it was a day, make it three, late and a dollar short as those yanks liked to say. They certainly paid him well enough, not that money was his only incentive, as the Ambassador knew. They had a history and J.D. had a past that had been as carefully obscured as the joy he took in shitting on his father’s grave.
No doubt his two new recruits, Kelly and Moskowitz, would have a field day with that. He sort of liked them anyway. And that wasn’t good.
Guys like him couldn’t afford to have friends. He was as much a potential liability to them as they were to him. And if the liability should become too much to risk. . .
Bang, bang.
J.D. flipped out of his hammock and landed on all fours—only to realize the culprit was the alarm on his Jaeger-LeCoultre watch, and good thing he had set it. Presuming the 8th Field Hospital was still standing and the 99KO hadn’t been blown to bits with the freaked out head cases strapped to their beds, what the shrinks called “morning rounds” would be over before he could get there.
Fine, he’d rather avoid the psych unit anyway, see what they had going at the Camp McDermott clinic instead. And, if Kelly and Moskowitz weren’t there due to some early deployment in body bags, compliments of last night’s fireworks from the VC?
Such was the way of the Tao. Death, like life, was the natural order of the universe.
And, even if he discounted the ancient Chinese philosophy he’d studied for years in confines fit for a priest, The Byrds said as much in the lyrics they lifted from a biblical passage that his mother had read to him once.
J.D. let himself remember her for a moment. Then he let her go, free as the owls they had hooted back at one hot summer night.
Turn. Turn. Turn.
That’s how it worked no matter where you came from, no matter when you went.
6
The sun threw glitter off the crystal blue sea and the asphalt shimmied up heat waves as Gregg steered the jeep down Highway One towards the out-patient clinic at Camp McDermott.
Izzy glanced over at Gregg. “You doing okay?”
“Hanging in there, thanks. How about you?”
“I ate breakfast and didn’t throw it up.”
“That’s good, Izzy. Real good.”
“So was not seeing J.D. this morning. Maybe he decided he didn’t need us.”
“That would be even better than waking up between Raquel Welch and Ann Margret.”
“Throw all the Bond girls in there, too.”
The normalcy of their conversation seemed so bizarre after the horrors of the past twenty-four hours Izzy wondered if they were both having some kind of delayed reaction to trauma.
Even if delayed, he would take it. Besides keeping breakfast down his hands had only acted up once all morning, and that was owed to a certain head nurse—the stunning Captain Margie Kennedy—who had made it her business to take him aside before morning rounds. Her quick visual inspection felt like a strip search and her voice slid over him like hot honey saying, “Don’t bullshit me, I’ll know if you do. I heard what happened at HQ yesterday. Are you all right?”
Despite near perfect recall, he didn’t specifically remember what he said to Margie, mostly because his attention was on the sensory domino fall from her palms to his shoulders to south of that, but his response made her smile, and her smile—just this beautiful, transcendent smile she had—made him think of sex and thinking about sex made him feel better about life in general. At least until he thought of Rachel and her precious letters, and then the guilt kicked in. He probably should have felt even guiltier but he was just so damn grateful to still be alive with all his essential body parts intact and a hard-on to prove it.
It went away soon enough, though. All it took was a single introduction to Major Donald Peck, the other psychiatrist Gregg had warned him about.
Gregg turned the wheel and what must be Camp McDermott came into sight down the road.
“You said that Nikki is Margie’s roommate, and Peck is seeing Nikki?” Izzy just wanted the Nikki-Peck thing confirmed again. Uh-huh.
“Yeah, who needs General Hospital back home when we have our own soap here?”
“We had plenty of drama going on behind the scenes at Columbia, too. Peck actually reminds me of one of the doctors on the Board of Directors.” Izzy never thought he would miss that prima donna bastard but. . . nah, he still didn’t. “Really nice guy,” he deadpanned.
“A paragon of compassion, just like our dear Doctor Peck, huh?”
“Oh, absolutely, though I have to say today was the first time I ever saw a doctor try not to snicker while a patient was being strapped down. What is he, some kind of sadist?”
“Passive-aggressive for sure. But a sadist, like textbook?” Gregg shook his head. “Let’s hope not. At least for Nikki’s sake.”
An ugly sprawling mishmash of every kind of military building imaginable signaled their arrival at Camp McDermott. The jeep wound through the base that was spread out over the coastal plain and sand like an instant military strip town. But instead of 7-Elevens and KFCs, there were artillery and communications companies, fuel dumps and motor pools and company headquarters and mess halls and PXs—all of which remained unscathed, unlike the 8th Field Hospital grounds that had taken a pretty hard hit.
Except for the 99KO. Like their villa, it looked like some patron saint of mental health decided the damage inside was bad enough.
Gregg pulled up to the back of the outpatient clinic, a generic, low-rise wood frame building with about four feet of concrete rising from the ground and GI green sandbags stacked against the concrete to meet the fly screen walls that supported a steel sheet roof.
“Nice.” Izzy’s assessment came out with the kind of New Yorker sarcasm he had never wanted to acquire and considering how fortunate he was to still be breathing, he wasn’t starting now. “Sorry, I mean—”
“Just wait until you see the inside. You’ll wonder why you ever wanted that Park Avenue office instead.”
Izzy followed as Gregg led the way through the back door. The two clinic techs that had beat them there—Specialists Hertz and Bayer—were going about their everyday tasks of opening the clinic, making coffee, getting the waiting room in order. Highly efficient, even cheerful, it made Izzy wonder if mortar attacks and flying body parts were considered part of the daily grind.
As if reading his mind, Gregg confirmed, “Yep, the worse things get out there, the better business is for us in here. C’mon, let me show you to your office.”
The new office basically consisted of four walls, a desk and three chairs, no couch.
“And now here we are at the Mayo Clinic of South East Asia,” Gregg announced. “This plush setting will be yours. It is just as nice as mine except you get some nicer afternoon sun through that window, which means you can keep cozy and warm—say, about 130 degrees—so turn on your fan.”
Izzy plopped into the regulation chair behind the regulation desk and promptly put his face mere inches from the fan generated air that began to evaporate the beading sweat on his brow. For a moment he drifted away, imagined he was below ground waiting for a subway where the heat couldn’t completely reach—
Then he blinked. Shook the image out of his head and silently recited the one thing he could not forget as long as he was here: Wake the fuck up.
“We mostly have walk-ins during the morning,” Gregg continued. “Sometimes they’re brought in because their units or buddies are worried about them, or it could be they had an incident and got sent here to be checked out. We see other guys on a regular outpatient basis just to medicate and help them get through. Hertz and Bayer will be screening the walk-ins for us, do the basic work-ups with a mental status exam and a psycho-social interview, before passing them on to us. They’ve both been in-country over six months and have good training, absolutely know their stuff, so you can ask them what is up if there’s anything you need to know.” Gregg paused. “Also, be sure to ask one of them to sit in if anybody looks dicey.”
“Dicey?”
“Yeah, it is a very special diagnostic category here. Remember a lot of these guys’ jobs is full time killing and they are good at it and they are usually carrying some kind of weapon. If someone looks like they could go off on you, you know a bit agitated—”
“Like Derek.”
“Oh man, he was beyond that, even before. . . ”
They shared a moment that filled in the blank of their silence: They had a job to do and patients to see and unless Derek got out of the room and out of their heads they would lose even more men. They needed to save the ones they could, and that included themselves.
“Listen,” Gregg told him, “even if you only have a creepy or bad feeling, get one of us. Guys can freak on all different levels without much warning, and when it happens, you do not want to be all alone. We watch each other’s backs. If you hear one of us yelling just drop whatever you’re doing and run to help. Same with you; you need help, just yell and we will be there. I’m not trying to scare you, just letting you know how it works.”
“Scare me?” Izzy wasn’t sure if he should laugh at the preposterousness of anything ever frightening him again, or duck under the desk with his fan and hide for the remainder of his tour because he was in a per
petual state of terror. Instead he settled for the reminder of what just might keep him alive long enough to get home, and he didn’t care who heard him say, “Wake the fuck up.”
“Did you just say—?”
“It’s my new mantra.”
“Can I borrow it?”
“Fine with me, but you may want to ask J.D. since he gave it to me.”
As if on cue, the bad news with the good advice was standing in the doorway.
“Hey, you guys left without me this morning. After all the bonding we did yesterday, my feelings are hurt.”
The awkward, momentary silence was bridged by Gregg’s easy-going smile and that voice that would suit a minister or rabbi if he wasn’t a shrink—or, maybe belonged on stage, given his smooth lie.
“Sorry, J.D. When you weren’t at rounds this morning we thought something important must have come up—at least that’s what we told everyone else when they asked why you weren’t there. Good to see you. Care for some coffee?” Gregg hitchhiked his thumb in its aromatic direction. “We have all the bells and whistles so you can even have it Vietnamese-style.”
“Then all is forgiven and now I don’t have to blow out your kneecaps.”
J.D. chuckled at their frozen reactions. Izzy felt that sense of detaching again but didn’t much care for the view. What he saw were two well-educated civilians in uniform who were way out of their league. He and Gregg stood a better chance of taking on an entire gang in Little Italy than this enigma who could drop a room full of wise guys over their pasta before jetting to the Casino Royale for a dry martini.
A switchblade stashed inside a tuxedo. First impressions counted and Izzy’s gut check insisted he’d gotten this one right. No matter J.D.’s assurance, “Oh c’mon, guys, I’m just pulling your chains. Now where’s that coffee?”
As everyone gathered around the coffee pot, the powerful, dark roasted aroma hung in the air while Gregg showed Izzy how the French and Vietnamese did it up right with a generous portion of the super-sweet condensed milk over ice, followed by the extra strong brew, then the nice clatter of ice to glass as he stirred it up with a long spoon.