“Get out of my Marine Corps!” he bellowed. “Sergeant,” he yelled through the door, “get these traitors”—that hurt—“out of my sight. Chase them off the base!”
Gearheardt and I left the Marine Corps by running down the dusty road behind wing headquarters with the military police throwing rocks at us and the small children of the whores who operated just outside the base running alongside us, laughing gleefully and calling “Geelhot, Geelhot,” “You give me money number one.”
It was not the separation from the Marine Corps that I had hoped for.
PART 4
We go to gain a little patch of ground that hath in it no profit but the name.
—William Shakespeare
War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peacetime.
—Ian Hay
Eat your crusts so the soldier boys won’t go hungry.
—Grandma
24 • Dénouement, Certainement Excrêtement
After our journey to Hong Kong, where we didn’t find the British spies, settle with the Cubans, or get our commissions in the Marine Corps back, Gearheardt and I settled into the routine of flying in Laos for Air America. Live up, dead back. Lots of resupply. The occasional infill or extraction of mercenaries that lined our pocketbooks and took years from our lives. And the squandering of seed and lucre in various Asian capitals. One of which was where I searched for Gearheardt after he finished flying for the week and went ahead to get the “lay of the land.”
I found him in Max’s Club on Pat Pong Road in Bangkok, apparently unconcerned that we all were curious as to why he wore only a red kimono and had a naked girl riding him piggyback. He was arguing with Max, the proprietor, about the official diameter of baseball bats.
“Who is that on your back, Gearheardt?” I asked him.
“I lost her clothes. I’m taking her to get new ones.”
The few days that followed, bars and baths, added to the desultory aura that Gearheardt had assumed. I was hoping that he would snap out of it. War without Gearheardt’s craziness was making me seriously consider knocking the crap out of him.
But one evening he changed to the old Gearheardt.
“I have had a vision,” he said over a late night meal of fried rice at the Montien coffee shop. “We’re pissing away our resources in Vietnam, and God wants me to move on to better opportunities.”
“I guess I didn’t realize you were having these conversations with God,” I said. “Did He mention what He might want me to be doing?”
Gearheardt ignored my skepticism.
“He spoke to me through Max. That’s when—”
“You mean Max the guy who owns Max’s Club, right?”
“Max was throwing me out for wearing his wife’s clothes, Jack. When he threw my clothes out after me he said, ‘Maybe you need to find new place, Geelhot.’”
Gearheardt looked at me and I couldn’t detect any madman’s drool dripping down his chin.
“So this is your new vision?”
“Clear as a fucking bell.”
The next morning Gearheardt and I headed back to Udorn Thani, our Air America base in northern Thailand, in time for me to pick up an aircraft and leave for a mission in Luang Prabang, the sleepy royal capital of Laos on the Mekong.
“I’ll see you in Vientiane in a couple of days, Jack. I promised the chief pilot I would meet with him tomorrow. Take care of yourself.”
I hopped in the little Air America shuttle bus and left for the base. He had never said that to me before. He never worried about either of us.
After flying a couple of days in the Sam Nuea area, I headed to Vientiane and that evening met up with Gearheardt at the White Rose.
Gary, the Operations Genius—everyone assumed he gave himself that nickname—came in the bar, waving a fistful of papers.
“Hey, naked night. No one told me,” he whined.
“No one likes you, Gary,” Gearheardt said from his booth, without looking up.
“Gearheardt, just who I was looking for. We need you to extract some Nungs from the trail. Tomorrow night. You up for it? Special pay.”
“Yeah, I’ll do it.”
“Gearheardt, if we take a team of Nungs in there, we get our asses shot off. There are fifty thousand North Vietnamese trucks coming down the trail. What are these guys going to do? Let the air out of their tires? It’s crazy.”
“The Nungs are already in there, Jack. This is the extraction.”
“Oh, crap. That’s even worse. They’ll have guys chasing them all pissed off.”
Gary broke in. “No wingman, Gearheardt. We just need the one bird. Picking up two guys.”
“Yeah, okay,” Gearheardt said absently, not looking at me. He motioned for Gary to get lost.
“What the hell is that all about?” I asked. “We never do extractions with one aircraft. Who’s your SAR?”
Gearheardt said nothing until after Gary left. He kept his eyes on the table in front of him.
“I can make five grand tomorrow night, Jack. Five grand. I’m going to buy every whore out of the White Rose and send them back to their villages rich women.”
He looked up at me and I shrugged, smiling at the thought of the girls in the villages.
“Can I go with you?” Peter asked.
He was a reporter that Gearheardt and I had been hauling around the mountains of Laos, at great danger from the enemy and the U.S. ambassador to Laos, not necessarily in that order. We had hoped that he would make us famous.
“Not this time, Peter,” Gearheardt said. “This is crash and dash at night. Believe me, you don’t want to go pick up a bunch of smelly Chinese mercenaries.”
Peter started to protest, but Gearheardt cut him off. He laughed and slammed the table with his palms, spilling Peter’s beer and causing the naked ladies to look.
“No story this time, you hack,” Gearheardt said. “You won’t be riding my coattails to publisher.” He laughed as Peter got up and began bugging Bald Fred to take him to the PDJ, a high plains area in the center of Laos, the next morning.
Gearheardt ordered another beer and motioned me to a booth in a dark corner of the bar. He looked different. I wasn’t sure why, but he seemed almost subdued, resigned.
“What’s up, Gearheardt? By this time you’re normally arranging the bar women in the Gearheardt pyramid you call the Hanging Wall of Tits. You worrying about the trail mission?” Knowing that he wasn’t.
He looked at me and smiled. “They’re going to disappear me, Jack.”
I swallowed hard, knowing what he meant and not wanting to believe it. Without Gearheardt, the war in Laos wouldn’t be bearable.
“Have they told you or are you just surmising?”
Gearheardt looked at me closely, the slight smile still on his face. His eyes caught the glare of the flashlight the pilots were using to examine God knew what on the women. The eyes twinkled but looked slightly distant.
“They wanted me to take you, Jack. Bongo Congo. I told them to go screw themselves.”
I wasn’t sure what to say, but started to protest. “Wait a minute—”
“You need a real life, Jackie,” he said. “Don’t fuck it up.”
He rose and joined the pilots at the bar who were chanting, “Give us spoons. Give us spoons.”
“Disappear me” meant that the Company would make Gearheardt not exist. Every record and trace would be erased and replaced. Bongo Congo meant Africa, where a new Gearheardt would appear and be his amazing self for a different but exactly the same cause, real or imagined.
And he had never called me “Jackie.” I felt a chill. I saw Gearheardt walk to the door of the White Rose, his arms around the shoulders of two Lao women. He looked up in the mirror, saw me watching him, and winked.
I sat alone in the booth, stunned. I sipped my beer slowly, feeling sorry for myself without a sure sense of why.
Murdock (so named by Gearheardt because the real Murdock, a pilot in the A
rmy, was a pussy, he said) stopped by my table to show me her new breast implants, the latest thing among bar girls who could save the money to make it to Bangkok. She was disappointed that I didn’t feel like rubbing them for good luck.
“Go have Bald Fred rub them, Murdock. I’m trying to get drunk. They’re very nice, though.” I went back to being morose.
“Hey, Jack, you still mooning over Gorilla Girl?”
It was Gearheardt, grinning as he slapped my shoulder.
I shuddered involuntarily at the thought of Gorilla Girl, looked up at Gearheardt, and started to tell him that I was going to insist that Gary schedule me to fly his wing on the extraction.
But Gearheardt squeezed my shoulder and said, “Do you have a bundle of kip you could spot me? These girls won’t take a check on an out-of-town bank.”
He laughed. Later I would remember that none of the White Rose girls ever charged Gearheardt for anything.
“You’re a heckofa guy, Jackson. We were golden.” He patted my shoulder again, grabbed the kip I had in my hand, and left, stopping to give a good luck rub to Murdock’s new breasts.
As I watched him leave the White Rose, I felt my stomach knotting. The other way the Company “disappeared” people had occurred to me. Giving someone an assignment that was impossible. Like a single helicopter extracting mercenaries from the Ho Chi Minh Trail at night.
If Gearheardt were being sent to Africa, surely he would have taken me with him.
Back in Udorn the next morning, I opened the door to the chief pilot’s office without knocking. He looked up from a mountain of paperwork.
“This better be good, Armstrong, or I’ll kill you.”
“Where’s Gearheardt?” I asked firmly.
The Chief Pilot stared blankly at me. He took a cigarette from the carved wooden box on his desk and lit it deliberately.
“Who in the hell are you talking about?”
I didn’t need to hear anything else.
“I’m going to Bangkok this afternoon,” I said, turning for the door.
“Try to get sane while you’re there, would you?” He took a document from the top of his desk and leaned back in his chair. “And don’t ever, ever come in here again without knocking. What I have you do up there is confidential.”
I had my hand on the doorknob. “So even we can’t know about it while we’re doing it?”
“Exactly. Now close the goddamned door.”
In Bangkok I found Gearheardt’s girlfriend, Dow. We talked about Gearheardt, drinking wine and then Mekong, the local whiskey, until she fell asleep in her chair. At Max’s I bought drinks and tried to hold a memorial service for Gearheardt, complete with my drunken toasts, but everyone acted like I was crazy.
I wandered back to Dow’s apartment and drank the rest of the Mekong, then climbed into bed with her. “Jack friend Geelhot,” she said, putting her arms around my neck. I knew that in the morning she would ask me for money.
“That’s the story, Dr. Boon,” I said, exhausted on the couch, my shirt wet against the almost-leather couch. “Sometimes I’m pissing in my pants just thinking about all the fun we had. And sometimes I want to just put a gun to my head and pull the trigger.”
“Is ho’se for Loy Loge’s, chi mai?”
“Is holse for … You mean horse for Roy Rogers? Shit, doc, haven’t you been listening?”
“I know story, Jack. I hear Gearheardt. He same same you.”
I seemed to have offended his professional standards. I sat up. Ms. Boon was sleeping on a mat beside the couch.
“Gearheardt is not same same me, Doc. Gearheardt is mok mok brave, chi mai? He isn’t in here pissing and moaning about the price of tea in China.” I looked up at him.
“Did Gearheardt tell you this same story, Doctor Boon?” I asked.
The good doctor smiled and patted me on the shoulder.
“Gearheardt, he—”
“Yeah, I know. Gearheardt he same same me.” I was getting tired of that.
“You good man, Jack. Number one. I shitty Doctor tell you Vietnam you fault. Not you fault you fuckup.” He began to cry, a habit that was beginning to irritate me. I lay back, feeling the patterns tooled into the almost-leather couch, waiting for Dr. Boon to continue. Mrs. Boon awoke and began rubbing my stockinged feet. After a long while, during which the good doctor sobbed and the massage parlor/bar beneath the office filled with loud gaiety, I patted his knee.
“I would like Mrs. Boon to finish my bath now, Doctor,” I said.
The doctor didn’t remove his hands from his eyes.
“Yes, that would be good idea,” he said, not sounding as if he knew that was why I continued to visit his office even after he confessed that he had never gone to medical school and had been paid by Gearheardt to hang out his shingle. I wanted to be near people that had been close to Gearheardt, and I still suspected that the lovely Mrs. Boon was one of them.
I forgave Dr. Boon for confirming that I had indeed probably prolonged the war in Vietnam, caused countless deaths, and ruined the President’s chances for reelection.
“Thank you, Jack. Maybe you feel better McWatt too.” He fumbled through his bookcase and pulled out a well-worn book. After thumbing through it for a few moments he found what he had been looking for, on page 333.
“McWatt say, ‘Oh, well, what the hell.’ You say too, Jack. Oh well, what hell.”
I stood and took off my clothes, my watch, gold Air America bracelet, everything, and let Mrs. Boon lead me to the tub. The water was hot and rose up around my chin when Doctor Boon’s wife joined me.
I closed my eyes and the war went on without me.
Epilogue
South of the airstrip, one of the longest in Laos, the jungle city of Luang Prabang dozes in the Asian sun. The Mekong River runs brown and powerful along one side, and to the east the mountains that eat pilots in the rainy season are green and tempting. A temple sits on a single knob near the center of the town where during the day the North Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao come in to visit the markets. In the evenings the American pilots drink beer and eat Vietnamese noodle soup on the lawn of the lovely French-owned Laing Xaing Hotel. The King of Laos, Savang Vatthana, lives in Luang Prabang, and one day I had tea with him. I was in my Air America uniform, walking in the town after a short day in the air. When I asked the guard if I could see the King, I was just being another American wiseass. I didn’t expect to meet him, thinking kings must stay pretty busy.
But I found myself on a quiet, tree-shaded terrace on the Mekong side of the palace. Tea was served and the servants retired. The late sun hit the river and almost made the brown monster pretty. Across the river the jungle running up the hills was wild. It was pleasant with a late afternoon coolness to the light breeze flowing over the patio. The old man must have known that if we failed to hold the North Vietnamese back, he would be the last king of Laos.
“You friend Gearheardt?” he asked. His smile almost made me think he knew something that I didn’t.
“Yes,” I said. “I friend Gearheardt.”
We sat watching the sun disappear behind the hills across the darkening river. Behind us, the rooms in the modest palace grew dark, and in the courtyard, candles were being lit. The servants moved quietly in the dark rooms, wearing soft slippers and whispering silken gowns. Cooking fires tainted the air with Asian spices. Faintly, I could hear a television.
After tea the King dozed, his head bobbing and then settling to his chest. He looked older than his years. In the twilight, the Mekong noise seemed louder. I had always feared fast water at night. The pilots’ and the CIA advisors’ voices occasionally carried from the veranda of the Laing Xaing Hotel, down the road south of the palace. Certainly the loud laughter was clear. When I rose, the King awoke and clapped his hands gently, bringing a bowing servant bearing a small silver drum, about seven inches in diameter and ten inches high, a replica of the Kao drums of northern Laos. The King lifted and offered it to me. The small frogs decorating the top and
sides were powerful symbols in the kingdom, the King explained in broken but competent English.
“When they get hungry, they eat moon. America gives many guns to us to frighten the frogs trying to eat moon,” he said.
Unkindly, I thought how ridiculous it was for a nation’s leader to believe that firing a few guns would keep a flying frog from eating the moon. But I took the drum.
The soldier at the gate demanded money for letting me in to see the King. I tried to brush by him but he stepped in front of me and stuck his carbine into my nostril. He wanted seven hundred million kip, but was happy as a pig when I gave him ten dollars. The intricately etched silver drum was just the size to wear on my head, so I put it on and walked down the dark, pungent street to join the laughter at the Laing Xaing. Hoping I might find Gearheardt.
Los Angeles Times Top Ten Books of 2005
Military Book Club Editor’s Choice
“The story rips up and down like zippers in a Saigon whorehouse … . His lampoons … are miraculously funny. But what moved me to outrage and heartbreak were the pages in which he goes beyond satirizing venal leaders and to write fiercely and humanely as a man who was there.”
—The Washington Post
“Has enough surprises, manic laughter, and grisly just-born newness in it to earn comparison to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and … to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Marries searing satire with bone-on-bone despair. It’s hard to tell the difference between madness and truth here, and perhaps that’s the most memorable aspect of the book: It is born from chaos and never attempts to moralize the horror or the hilarity.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Accomplished with madcap grace … refreshingly irreverent … Jennings limns his japes with a tribute to the men who fought in Vietnam, especially to the Marines, in words so beautiful they brought tears to my eyes. Rarely does a novelist storm the emotional ramparts so decisively.”
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