Pray? Ask a God who would do such a thing for something?
“Get out of here, Padre,” he said, his voice low and venomous. “Before I hurt you.”
Days later, as he worked his way from one bar to another, hoping to find someone who would still serve him, he saw a familiar face.
“Damn, Jimmy,” Al Dougherty said. “You tryin’ to drink up all the booze in Virginia?”
Jim took a swing at him, and when Al dodged his fist, fell flat on his face.
When he woke up he was somewhat sober, terribly hung over, and Al was still there, feeding him coffee.
“You were supposed to take care of her,” he said, and with that broke down into racking sobs. No, I was the one who was supposed to take care of her. And I failed. I left her, alone. She died.
Why can’t I?
Al told him later about the last days, how she had reported to the dispensary at Bad Tölz, bleeding badly, too sick to be shipped to the hospital in Munich. How Doctor Beau Huckaby had made light of the problems, told her that it wasn’t any big thing, that she could have the baby right there and he’d take care of her.
And how he’d panicked when the bleeding had become a flood. And had made the decision that had taken her life. The baby or the mother.
Now he was back. He knew where Huckaby slept.
In his rational moments, more and more rare these days, he knew that there was plenty of blame to go around. He knew that Beau Huckaby had made a mistake, but hadn’t everyone?
Including himself, but his mind shied from the idea. To go that way was to invite madness.
Maybe he was already crazy. Did the insane know they were insane?
No matter.
He walked the streets up to the old Kaserne.
Author’s Notes
Though the events described in this novel are, obviously, fictional, certain details are not.
For many years the survivors of Studies and Observations Group (SOG) were convinced that their own organization had been penetrated by hostile intelligence. There was no other way to explain why the teams crossing the borders of Laos and Cambodia in the highly classified recon missions they conducted were being shot out of every landing zone. Losses were so high among both the recon teams and the helicopter crews who flew them that in desperation SOG turned to infiltration by High-Altitude Low-Opening (HALO) parachute drops, but even these were, apparently, compromised.
At one point operations were shut down for an extended period of time while everyone with any knowledge at all of the operations underwent polygraph testing. Everyone came up clean.
Many years later the Walker spy ring was exposed. John Walker was a Navy communications expert who sold the codes to the naval communications system to the Soviets, who in turn passed on the information to their socialist brethren in North Vietnam. Soviet “trawlers,” bristling with communications intercept equipment, plied the coasts of South Vietnam, snatching from the very air the messages sent from higher headquarters in Vietnam to the next command, CINCPAC, in Hawaii.
Most SOG veterans are now convinced that these traitors caused the deaths of dozens of recon men, helicopter crewmen, and others during the conflict.
The Montagnards
The hill people collectively known as the Montagnards were the Special Forces soldiers’ most fervent allies during the Vietnam War. They served in A Camp Strike Forces, as Mike Force soldiers, and as team members on the highly classified and incredibly dangerous missions conducted by SOG. Unflinching in their loyalty, they are the reason many SF men got to come home alive.
They were, as the novel indicates, abandoned after the war by the United States. Some, like the fictional Y Buon Sarpa, resisted by force of arms and were inevitably whittled down. The last of them straggled across the border into Thailand, where they were immediately put into refugee camps whose conditions were little better than those in the “re-education camps” the victorious North Vietnamese were running back in their home country. It took years of fighting the bureaucracy by a handful of dedicated former Special Forces soldiers before these allies were allowed to emigrate to the United States, where they have set up their own community in the mountains of North Carolina and are living in unaccustomed freedom.
The ones who remained in Vietnam are being oppressed to this day. For a full account of how the Vietnamese are essentially waging a campaign of extermination against these people, contact Amnesty International.
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