Billy Palmer

by Ronald Zastre

  “It’s a powerful picture, isn’t it?”

  “It’s just a picture of a beautiful woman and her daughter, why does it pull at me so?”

  “I means that Billy had his good times, even after we shunned his friendship. He went on his way and found happiness without us.”

  “Is that it? Do you really think so Manny? Here we are working on this massive guilt trip, and it turns out it wasn’t necessary? Here’s proof that Billy probably just got tired of us and our silliness and went his way. I sort of got the same feeling as I read that story of his. He didn’t need us or our silly shit. We didn’t deal him a crappy hand that mattered. We just didn’t realize the depth of Billy, and we’re the ones that lost?”

  “My god Cassey, do you think we might be approaching maturity?”

  “Manny, if that happens, who will we associate with?” Cassey laughed. “What did the Senator say?”

  “He wants confirmation. Says if he gets it, our man Crane will be looking for work.”

  “He’s a bad man Manny, I just can’t get past that thought.”

  “There’s no way he can find us,” Manny stated, but he was uncomfortable with the statement.

  *

  On the radio the weather forecaster was saying, “It looked like the central portion of Minnesota can expect a balmy day.

  Balmy, balmy for late December in Minnesota, what a smuck. Poor dumb asses that get stuck here all winter might go for it.”

  “Partly sunny with highs in the mid-thirties, but look out for tomorrow ladies and gents,” the cheerful voice on the radio continued, “it’s back to the winter we’re all accustomed too. A cold front is moving down from our neighbor to the North and we can expect snow and cold by tomorrow.”

  Now that’s more like it.” Manny was in the kitchen getting coffee. It was still dark outside, but he was up, his mind on overdrive.

  “It looks like we will have that customary white, white Christmas,” ended the weatherman, Christmas music replacing him.

  “No shit, Sherlock! The white, white is piled higher than my ass out there,” Manny said, looking out the kitchen window. He could see the first light of morning through the bare trees at the end of the yard. The ringing phone made him turn away.

  “Hello, North Pole, if you’re looking for Santa, he quit and went to Florida,” Manny answered.

  “Are you still a smart ass in the summer, or are there other things to occupy that troubled mind?” the voice on the other end replied.

  “Always troubled, but busier, less focused. This sounds like a publisher I know. What’s your excuse for getting me out of bed?”

  “It must be warm in there, what are you complaining about?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it Tainer, high of thirty-five on the glacier today.”

  “Well, there you go, you’ve got nothing to bitch about.”

  “Cold and snow tomorrow, what’s up?”

  “Your wife called me yesterday, but I was sorry to inform her that I haven’t really had the time to get into the book you sent me. One of my readers said that there might be something there, but these things take time. We need to be realistic, tell her that, will you.”

  “Cassey can be a determined bugger when she gets into something and it can be hard to head her off.”

  “Just tell her to be patient, give me a little time, okay. Look, I’m calling to invite you to New York, on my dime.”

  “When we talking about? I just got back from California and Arizona.”

  “Tomorrow, if possible. I know with the holidays coming up it might be squeezing things, but I really would like to sit down with you and talk about Billy.”

  “I thought you were too busy to work on Billy’s things?”

  “I want to talk about Palmer, not his writing, can you make it?”

  “I guess, but it should only be a day or two. I have to look like I’m trying to enjoy the holidays and I have to be close to home to pull that off.”

  “I understand. You come in tomorrow and out the next day, how’s that?”

  “I guess I can get away with it.”

  “Good, Minneapolis, Northwest tomorrow evening, flight 213, 7:45 P.M., can you pull that off.

  “Yeah, it’s about three hours from here to the airport, so no problemo.”

  *

  “Jesus Manny,” Cassey whined. “Another trip? You just got back. Where to now?”

  “Just a short trip to New York, some business to take care of before the holidays. I’m going and coming, short trip, I promise.”

  “Well, it better be short because I’ve got a ton of things to do. You know this is the first family Christmas in three years. Both the boys will be here, and I don’t know when that will happen again.”

  “Cassey, I promise, I’ll be back Thursday night. There is no way I’m staying any longer than a day.

  “You going to see Mark Tainer?”

  “I don’t know.” He was uncertain why he had to lie about his real reason. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, but he didn’t want Cassey getting mad, accusing him about being obsessed with Billy Palmer after her dressing him down about Crane. “I might give him a call.”

  “Well, tell him to poop or get off the pot.”

  “Now Cassey, he’s a busy man. I’m sure when he’s ready, or has something, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “I talked to Caroline Jennings, her daughter had that book published, remember?” Cassey didn’t continue.

  “And?” Manny knew his cue.

  “And Mattie said we might be able to talk to her publisher, after the holidays.”

  “Hey, do what you want, you’re the one that’s done all the work.”

  Chapter 22

  New York City’s weather didn’t look much better than what he left in Minnesota, Manny decided, looking out the window of Mark Tainer's office.

  “I’m sorry about not having anything to tell Cassey about the book, I hope you understand that it takes time,” Mark was saying.

  “No, don’t worry, I understand. Cassey isn’t business minded. She can get impatient, and like I said, it can be hard to distract her sometimes. She’s contacting some other publishers.”

  “What?” Tainer exclaimed, obviously excited. “Don’t do that, I want this material!”

  “Well, I just figured that being as busy as you say, you wouldn’t mind.”

  “I don’t like people playing politics with me,” Tainer stated, obviously angry.

  “I don’t understand what you mean by playing politics?”

  “Using pressure on me.”

  “What pressure? Geez man, Cassey just figured; if you’re so busy she would take a load off you by talking to someone else.”

  “When did she do this?” Tainer asked quickly.

  “She hasn’t done anything yet.” Manny held his hands up trying to calm Tainer. “We just talked about it, and with the holidays around the corner it was something she was going to get to after the first of the year, but I am curious; If you haven’t read Billy’s stuff, why the excitement about it going somewhere else?”

  “Manny, I know it’s good, my reader verified that, but it takes a long time. Billy was my buddy and I better than anyone should do this. I’m very interested with doing something about Billy. I’ve always wanted to write the great story, but never had the time, or until now, the material.”

  “But you’ve always known the story, you were there with him.”

  “Manny, the total story of Billy. That’s why I invited you here, to pick your brain on Palmer, to piece his life together.”

  “Oh, the whole thing. I get it now. That’s why you want funny stuff I remembered about Billy.”

  “Yes, Billy was a verifiable hero, but war stories about heroes tell so little about how that hero came to be and what happened after. I want to do a complete story.”

  “Ahhhh, well let me think. There was so much it’s hard to—”

  “Just off the top of your head?”

  Ma
nny thought for a moment. “One time we were in a restaurant down at the lake. It was Sunday morning and the place was full of people coming from church. We had been at the lake water skiing and went to get something to eat. It was Billy, Cassey, and my girlfriend at the time. We were waiting in line, and for some reason I decided to play a joke on Billy. I pulled his swimming trunks down right there in the restaurant. I figured he’d just pull them up quickly and that we’d get a good laugh. Anyway, Billy just stood there, looking at me with this smirk on his face, bare assed naked. I didn’t know what to do because he just stood there, swim trunks down around his knees, everyone in the restaurant gawking or gasping. Cassey finally pulled his trunks back up. One of the waitresses had seen me do it, and the manager came over and threw me out. I was hungrier than hell, and it was the only place open in that whole damn town. I can remember sitting in the car all by myself, feeling like some little boy that was being punished. When did you get to know Palmer?”

  “I went through boot camp with Billy, but I didn’t really associate with him then. We had mostly Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas boys in our platoon, and Billy was a northerner. He was kind of a loner type, but he got along okay. I think the only attitude toward him was, he was smart. He got quite a bit of attention from one of the DI’s. This wiry little DI was always fucking with Billy, trying to get him to laugh, then he’d end up doing squat thrusts. We all thought Billy was backwoods, being from some small hick town in Minnesota. I remember he was fast as hell and really tough. One night some of the down home boys tried to give him a blanket party, and he knocked a couple of them around pretty good. After, I asked him if he did much fighting back home, and he said he had been playing hockey since he was four. I didn’t put two and two together until I watched a hockey game a couple of years later.”

  “After boot camp we went home for a month, and then one month of ITR training before Vietnam. Billy and I were in the same group in ITR. Most of my friends from boot camp went somewhere else, so Palmer was kind of a familiar face. He also had some cousins that lived in the LA. area, just up the highway from Camp Pendleton where we were. There were five of them, all good looking girls and they would come and get Billy for the weekends, so naturally he was a good choice for a buddy, if you know what I mean?”

  “I definitely hung around with him after our survival training. He could figure out things; he knew the ropes. At the end of the training they had this exercise where they stuck us on this road, about fifty of us. The object was to go from this road, into the brush, and make it to another road about ten miles away. There was nothing between the two, but thick brush, trees, gullies, ravines and all kinds of nasty shit. There were aggressor teams all throughout the route, and if you got captured, you spent the weekend in their stockade where they could interrogate you. I heard that was really fun. All they gave you were two canteens full of water and a K-bar, that’s a big ass knife. If and when you got to the other road, if you did, you could get a ride back to the camp and check out for liberty for the weekend. This started Thursday morning, so you might end up spending the night out there if you didn’t make the second road the first day.”

  “The rules said that if you captured a rattlesnake it was a free pass, you just brought it to the first observer and you were out of there, gone for the entire weekend. We knew about this and Billy had done his homework. He found a guy that hunted snakes in that area.”

  “We get the go ahead and everybody heads into the trees, but Billy goes about twenty feet, stops and cuts a branch, takes a coil of thin rope out of his pocket and makes a hoop contraption. Then he makes a fork thing with another branch, finds the kind of spot this guy told him to look for, and ten minutes later, viola, he’s got two rattlesnakes. We must have dug about ten of them out of this bank, and ten minutes later we are back on the road with our go-to-fun passes. This thing started at seven in the morning and by ten, Billy and I are heading off base for a long weekend. Almost half the guys didn’t get back until Sunday night after the aggressors let them go. I guess it was no picnic. I decided right there to stick close to Billy.”

  “I was wondering how Billy got wounded, you were there?” Manny asked.

  “Yeah, all three times,” Tainer said. “I never did get hit myself, can’t figure out why I was so lucky. I guess Billy exposed himself more, and I was more of a chicken, but extremely lucky for sure. One of the older guys in the section, he was there before us, told me that he had smelled a bullet go by. I said, “Yeah, right,” and passed it off as BS. One day a round went just under my nose, the snap got my attention and I could smell the cordite.”

  “I wish Hollywood could get that part right,” Tainer continued. “There are two things that piss me off about the way they make movies. One is the actors are always cocking their guns, you know, to let the audience know something is going to happen. The Macho-man move. That’s such bullshit! Any idiot that walks around without a bullet in the chamber is not going to last very long. And two, when a high powered round passes, it doesn’t whine, or buzz, it snaps. The bullet is traveling faster than the speed of sound and the sonic boom is real evident. When somebody shoots at you, the first thing you hear is the snap, right where the bullet passes and then the boom from the gun because the bullet gets to you before the sound from the gun.”

  “The first time Billy got wounded, it was kind of my fault. We were with a platoon, like five days after they had shipped us up to Con Tien. It used to be this old French Fort sitting on top of a plateau overlooking the river to North Viet Nam. We had been out in the bush for three days, kind of scouting the area. We were heading back in and ran into this platoon also going back in. We hooked up with them and damn if they weren’t told to stop and spend the night a couple of clicks short of the base. We didn’t want to try getting back in at night because the crazy fuckers on the line would shoot at anything after it got dark. Seeing we didn’t carry radios, it was always the best to go in with units that did. So we started to dig in, but the ground was harder than hell. Billy dug out about two feet, and then I took over. I got lazy and figured it was enough. The VC hit us with mortars that night, and I got in the hole first, but it wasn’t deep enough and a piece of shrapnel caught Billy in the back of the neck. He wasn’t hurt too bad or anything, just bleeding like hell. They called in choppers to get the two KIA’s and four wounded. He was gone for about four days, came back with a big bandage on his neck and a purple heart.”

  “He never said anything to me, but it was a big screw up on my part. From that time on, I never took anything for granted. I could have gotten him killed just by being lazy.”

  “That place Con Tien, like I said, was an old French Fort. When we got there it was really pretty, this old stone fort all broken down, but covered with vines and moss. After we left three months later it was nothing but a pile of mud. Between us and our bunkers and trenches, and the NVA pounding the place with mortars and artillery it was kind of sad looking.”

  “The second time was just a nasty cut on his hand. We spotted an ambush developing, the Walsh one, and after it was over Billy’s hand was bloody. He didn’t even know he was hit. The corpsman fixed it right there.”

  “The third time was a beaut, a cluster fuck from the word go. We’re on this landing strip, a whole battalion, four companies of Marines waiting to be loaded on choppers for a big operation. It was hotter than hell, and we sat there from eight in the morning, and by noon, half the Marines were sick from the heat or being scared. The original plan was to start dropping the first elements in first thing in the morning. That way they could get the whole battalion in by dark. At noon, nobody had even seen a chopper. Billy’s saying, ‘Boy this is going to be fun, great bunch of warriors we have here.’ We knew where we were going, it was a bad, bad place, Billy and I, and a couple of the other teams had gone in there. We had scoped it out. It was not a good place for large operations, a narrow valley, one way in, one way out. We had found bunkers on both sides of the valley, and worst of all, only one
LZ.”

  “Finally, at almost twelve thirty the Chinooks show up, they’re the big twin rotor choppers. A big, big target. The first group loads up at one, six Chinooks, with fifteen Marines apiece. The first group is dropped in the LZ at one thirty, and it’s hotter than hell. The guys put on the ground have more than half their water gone already. Within half an hour, fifty percent of the people on the ground are down with heat stroke.”

  “We go in the second group. Billy and I loaded in the rear of the chopper right next to the ramp, on purpose. Billy and I both know the supposed LZ and are wondering what’s up when the choppers go right over it and continue up the valley, dropping altitude. As the bird flares, it starts taking hits, shit flying around inside, then a big fireball above our heads, up in the turbines. Billy goes out the door, and I follow, a long jump of about thirty feet into a flooded rice paddy. We start the day totally covered in stinking mud. The Chinook pilot did a hell of a job and kept the wounded bird upright, smashing hard into the edge of the paddy.”

  “We didn’t know the extent of the casualties because Billy and I headed to the other side of the paddy to set up a perimeter. The rest of day is spent getting the heat stroke and combat casualties out, and a few supplies in. The NVA didn’t harass us at all the rest of the day and that night, but Billy and I, and one other team had moved up into the high ground and spotted a lot of activity. Nothing major, but we got glimpses of small NVA units moving all around us. It was obvious that we were surrounded so we refrained from shooting.”

  “What had happened; was the geniuses planning the operation had changed the LZ at the last moment, moving it father up the valley. They didn’t realize that the low clouds didn’t burn off until later in the day, the farther up the valley they went. That was the reason for the big delay. So here we sit, less than a fourth of the planned number on the ground, and a whole night for the North Vietnamese to plan a big reception for the next day.

  “And get this, they still planned on bringing in the rest of the battalion at day break. They couldn’t put two and two together and figure out that the next day was going to be the same, socked in until at least noon.”