Loon

by Jack McLean

  For others, it was a rite of passage that let flow again the teenage bravado as the stories of the week’s liaisons were validated. I recall the sight of Sal Martucci coming back down from the doc’s bunker after his shot in the ass. He was struggling to pull up his pants with his left hand while stabbing his right fist jubilantly at the sky. A rite of passage indeed. Those fortunate enough to escape the clap in all likelihood contracted crabs or some other discomfort that would have them scratching their groin area for the balance of their tour. It didn’t seem a big price to pay.

  “Once again, gentlemen, be careful.”

  I was to stay at the Shangri-La Hotel and had been well prepared by my buddies. I had carefully positioned myself near the front of the bus to be the first off and, thereby, the first in the check-in line. When I arrived at the counter, I requested a specific suite, signed the register, was handed a key, and hustled over to the men’s shop before the last person was off the bus.

  Beach Boys music was being piped into the lobby.

  Beach Boys music!

  War? What war?

  Having acquired five days’ worth of presentable civilian attire, I headed for the elevators and the twenty-second floor. Once inside my room, I stripped off my sticky uniform, turned on the air conditioner, ran a bath, and sat down on the toilet.

  Alone.

  After six months of competing for crowded outhouses, rash-inducing bark covered logs, and other makeshift sanitary contrivances, there was an unspeakable joy to sitting alone on a real flush toilet. I closed the bathroom door because I could.

  Nearly an hour later I stepped out of the tub, slowly turned to the full-length mirror behind the door, and viewed my whole body for the first time since Camp Pendleton. I was a sinewy sight, built in a manner that was unfamiliar to my eyes. My chest, shoulders, and legs were white. My arms and neck were black. My ribs were all visible. I stared, first in disbelief and then with growing recognition, at the boy before me. Once certain that it really was me, I opened the door, walked across to the bed, pulled down the covers, and flung myself diagonally across the crisp white sheets.

  I fell asleep immediately.

  When I awoke two hours later, the sinking sun was spreading an orangey golden glow across the floor and the far wall of the room. Where was I? My flak jacket. I felt naked without my flak jacket. Wait. Okay. Yes. This is okay. How did I get here? Don’t I have to be somewhere? It’s getting dark.

  What time is my watch set to?

  Quiet.

  It’s so quiet.

  Realizing where I was, I sprang up, donned my new civvies, and headed down to the hotel bar. It was nearly empty. The mama-san was gathering up her things and heading out the door.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked incredulously. “Am I in the right place?”

  “Yes,” the woman replied. “This is place. You late. All my girls go with GIs. You come tomorrow early and I give you number one girl.”

  Tomorrow?

  While I had been upstairs taking a bath and napping, my fellow R&Rers had beat it directly to the bar and were now upstairs fucking their brains out. God damn it. Without delay, I headed to the taxi stand, bribed the driver well, and in less than an hour was back at the Shangri-La with—while not exactly Miss Right, she would have to do. There wasn’t time to inquire about her shot card. By early morning, we had had enough of each other. She thought I was a crazy insatiable madman (wait until I tell the boys in the squad!), and with the dawning light I was finding her gold tooth to be a distraction.

  My first full day of R & R was heaven. I walked all over Singapore, guidebook in hand, saw the sights, and went to museums. By midafternoon, I found my way to Raffles Hotel, a vestige of the British colonial rule, and had a Singapore Sling at the very bar where it was first served.

  Conscious of the time, I headed back to the hotel, went directly to the bar, and had the pick of the litter. My gorgeous selection could not have been in sharper contrast to that of the previous evening. As we exited, I settled with the mama-san for the balance of the week and headed upstairs. As with most of my comrades before and after, I fell in love and swore that I would return to Singapore to claim my prize after my discharge from the Marine Corps.

  The following days were a blur. We toured, ate in wonderful restaurants, and listened to the explosion of new music from back home—the Hollies, the Doors, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Jimi Hendrix.

  It was heaven on earth.

  On the morning of my fourth day on R & R, while I was in the hotel newsstand to buy cigarettes, a photograph on the front page of the International Herald Tribune stopped me cold. It was a picture of the campus of Columbia University. Shown was the stoic statue of Alma Mater in front of the Low Memorial Library, the very symbol of the university. Hundreds of students were protesting on the Campus Walk. Several bearded, longhaired banner wavers were perched upon Alma Mater herself. One of them was giving the finger to the camera.

  I was jostled by several of my buddies who pushed their way into the small hotel newsstand. We took a moment to recount the activities of the previous evening and to lay out our plans for the day. They were headed to the pool to nurse hangovers and suggested that I meet them there after breakfast.

  I bought the paper and walked to the dining room. While being served a cup of coffee, I spread the paper out and looked again at the photograph. My Andover classmate Jim Kunen would be finishing his sophomore year at Columbia and, like many of my former classmates at colleges across the country, was certainly immersed in the antiwar activities that were beginning to explode across America’s college campuses.

  While I was deep into the Shangri-La of R & R, Kunen and others on the Morningside Heights campus were engaged in the unlawful occupation of five university buildings—the result of a demonstration against the university’s involvement with the Institute for Defense Analyses. It had morphed into a protest over a new gymnasium. Seven days later, police stormed the buildings and violently removed the students, Kunen included.

  It had nothing to do with Vietnam.

  It had everything to do with Vietnam.

  Bloating battalions of baby boomers were bursting the seams of every college in the United States. Here would manifest the ultimate expression of the generation gap that was becoming systemic throughout the country. A million boys and girls were in search of a means of expression—a way to be heard. Increasingly, that way took the form of opposition to the parent-created war in Vietnam.

  Sitting in a hotel coffee shop twelve thousand miles away, remembering my own forgettable experience at the Columbia University admissions office months before, I was silently hoping that Jim Kunen was burning the place down. Well, not really, but I did feel validated to see that others viewed the university administration with the same jaundiced eye that I had acquired during my interview.

  Kunen did not burn the place down, at least not with fire. The following year he published a chronology of those April 1968 hours in a book called The Strawberry Statement. It subsequently was made into a movie. Both did quite well. He was dubbed “a radical with a sense of humor.” These were serious times. The mass market was thirsty for anyone with a sense of humor.

  There was little humor, however, among most of the boys of Charlie Company when viewing the students involved in the uprisings that were beginning to take place.

  They referred to them as “long-haired, privileged little shit-fuck draft-dodging motherfuckers.”

  None of us could believe them or understand them.

  On the morning of the fifth day of my R & R, I donned my Marine Corps uniform, bade farewell to my companion, and headed for the bus.

  It was the pits.

  I was headed back into the shit, and it was getting hot.

  Two days later, I returned to the Washout to find myself embraced by a welcoming throng of squad mates.

  “Where did you stay?”

  “Who did you fuck?”

  “What di
d you buy?”

  “Did you get some music for the tape player?”

  My bunker mates couldn’t get enough of every pearl that I had gleaned. As I started to tell them about the trauma of my first evening, I was immediately interrupted by Ed Finnegan.

  “You asshole, McLean. Don’t you ever listen to me? Didn’t you hear me? I told you to get to the bar early. I told you that. Jesus.”

  Each brief story received similar interruptions. They could not get enough and they couldn’t editorialize enough. It was, after all, their R & R as well. No detail, no matter how salacious, was too small or insignificant to be included.

  The music and the tape player that I brought back became our constant evening companion for the next six weeks. We’d light the candles, fire up a joint, and lose ourselves in the new music of home.

  Shortly after returning, I was promoted to the rank of corporal—my final promotion in the Marine Corps—and made a squad leader. I would now be either killed or discharged as a noncommissioned officer infantry squad leader.

  Very cool.

  I was every ounce a United States Marine.

  The highlight of my return to Charlie Company from R & R was a rare letter waiting from Sid MacLeod. I knew that his unit had seen a great deal of action since the Tet Offensive, so I was relieved to hear that he was well and in seemingly good spirits. Like me, he had just been promoted to corporal and named section leader of his mortar squad. Having left an aimless college career to enlist in the Marine Corps, he wrote that he had now decided to attend the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., the following fall to become a Methodist minister. For the first time since I’d known him, he was excited about getting on with his life. As with me, late spring of 1968 was a time of burgeoning optimism for Sid MacLeod.

  I wrote Sid back on May 7 and congratulated him on his good news. I went on to detail some of the more salacious experiences of my R & R, told him the Harvard news, and brought him up to date on our many friends that I had seen or heard of during my two passes through Da Nang.

  I closed by writing: “I’ve got eighty days left, and you’re close behind, I know. Stay cool, buddy, and keep the fuck down—we’re over two thirds of the way home now.”

  The letter came back to me two weeks later stamped received MAY 14 and UNCLAIMED, RETURN TO SENDER.

  I sent it out again on the afternoon chopper. It was again returned a week later.

  Then I understood.

  Sid was dead.

  Had he been wounded, the letter would have found its way to him. The Marine Corps was very good about mail. No, he had to be dead. There was no way to officially know, except to write our mutual friends in the hope that someone might have heard. Weeks later it was confirmed.

  Sid MacLeod was killed in action from hostile enemy fire on May 9, 1968.

  Sid was dead.

  Dammit.

  20

  IN MAY 1968, 810 MARINES WERE KILLED IN VIETNAM and another 3,812 were wounded in action. It was the bloodiest month of the war for the Marine Corps. Of these casualties, none was from Charlie Company. Since the sixth of December 1967, we had been among the most fortunate marine infantry units in all of Vietnam.

  It was under this veil that Captain William P. Negron re-entered Vietnam to begin the second of what would become his three tours of duty. As with all marines entering Vietnam in 1968, he flew into Da Nang and reported to the 4th Marine regimental headquarters in Dong Ha. From there he boarded a jeep with a driver and headed fifteen miles northwest over dusty dirt roads to the 1st Battalion headquarters in Con Thien.

  Shortly before arriving at Con Thien, the jeep came to a rise that was covered with red earth only—no vegetation. All the land to the north, for as far as one could see, had been completely defoliated with Agent Orange. Beyond the rise was a bridge that forded a nearly dry stream. Surrounding the bridge was the motliest encampment Negron had ever seen. There was a wooden watchtower and a conglomerate of shacks, bunkers, and trench lines that looked like a squatters’ camp. He was incredulous to see evidence that it was, in fact, a Marine Corps outpost. Few of the resident marines that he saw were wearing helmets, flak jackets, or even shirts.

  There was little sign of military discipline.

  “What unit is that?” Negron inquired of his driver as they motored across the bridge.

  “Charlie Company, Captain.” The driver responded over the gasping engine. “That would be Charlie Company.”

  It was Negron’s first look at the Washout.

  He and his driver continued through the compound and then traversed the two thousand remaining meters north to Con Thien.

  Within a week, Captain William P. Negron would return down the dusty road to become the commanding officer of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division. Once again, Charlie Company was to become among the most fortunate marine infantry units in all of Vietnam. Without Negron’s leadership, I doubt that a single one of us would have survived the coming weeks.

  Bill Negron was an experienced marine whose previous life was unimaginable to most of us. Of Puerto Rican parents, Negron was born in the Bronx, New York, on November 10, 1937—the 162nd birthday of the United States Marine Corps. His mother was a sweatshop seamstress and his father a security guard. A scrappy Golden Gloves boxing champion, Negron graduated from the Perth Amboy, New Jersey, high school at age eighteen as the school’s only Hispanic student.

  The following fall, he entered Miami University in Ohio on a football scholarship. He was dismissed after only a semester. Returning to the New York area, he began a short-lived professional boxing career that concluded after his third fight in Madison Square Garden. He emerged victorious with a split decision, a concussion, a broken jaw, three cracked ribs, and a fractured right hand.

  Six weeks later, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and took the train to Parris Island, South Carolina.

  At the conclusion of his enlistment three years later, Negron felt that he was ready to return to college. Miami agreed. He graduated in the spring of 1961 with a BA degree in English.

  Now, seven years later, Negron had attained the rank of captain. Negron’s life had been filled with several unique experiences. His boxing career was only one of them. His first combat occurred not with the United States Marine Corps but with the United States Central Intelligence Agency during his senior year in college.

  While home on Christmas vacation, Negron received a call from Frank Wright, his former Marine Corps platoon commander on Okinawa, who wanted to meet for dinner in New York that evening. Negron had high respect for Wright and had a particular memory of a comment he’d made one evening back on Okinawa.

  “You know, Negron, there are at least twenty-three wars going on right now, and as long as we wear this uniform, we’ll never have a part in any of them.” The mood among the marines at the time was that the United States trained the best military, but refused to send them into war. Indeed, they had not been in real sustained combat since the Korean Conflict a decade earlier. Wright had been a lieutenant and Negron a sergeant. Other than that one encounter, they had not known each other well.

  The two men met at La Guardia Airport.

  Wright was now working covertly in some capacity and was recruiting people for a special project. He began the conversation by asking Negron what he thought about the increasing Russian military presence in Cuba.

  “Well,” Negron began, “if what they say about Russia planning worldwide domination is true, and Cuba is a threat to this hemisphere, what the fuck can we do about it?”

  From that moment on, Wright did all the talking. He expressed two reasons why he was interested in Negron. First, he recalled that Negron had been an outstanding mortar forward observer. Second, Negron was fluent in Spanish. When they parted, Wright left Negron a card with a name and number on it, asking that he call whenever he was ready.

  Two days later, as he was preparing to return to college, Negron nervously picke
d up a phone and dialed the number.

  “Good morning. White Oak Investments. How may I help you?”

  “Good morning. I’d like to speak with White Elk. This is a friend of his.”

  “Who may I say is calling?” The woman’s voice was distinctly Latin.

  “Just tell White Elk that Jersey Maid is calling and accepts his offer.”

  “Very well, Jersey Maid. White Elk will be calling you within the hour.”

  Minutes later the phone rang. It was Wright. He told Negron to return to school. He would be contacted and briefed there.

  Negron completed the first semester of his senior year that February and made the honor roll for the first time. He then requested the following semester off to tend to “personal matters.”

  Two months later, on April 21, 1961, Bill Negron found himself shivering in chest-deep water off the coast of Cuba in an area that became known as the Bay of Pigs. He’d seen his first combat death the day before, and by morning had known that the American attack on Cuba would fail. The brave Cuban expatriates who formed the 406th Brigade were dead, dying, or being hauled away like animals.

  Throughout the night, Negron had been screaming into his radio handset for the promised air support.

  The response was silence.

  He tried to contact the ship offshore that had dropped them off.

  More silence.

  Mortar rounds were landing all around, and machine gun fire was everywhere.

  All of it incoming.

  “Where is your fucking air support? Where are your naval guns? Where the fuck are you Americans?” Raul Sanchez, one of the Cuban emigres who made up most of the invasion force, was livid and frustrated beyond all imagination. Suddenly, he raced out of the water and across a field toward a group of Cuban soldiers who were dragging members of the brigade to a waiting truck. He was firing his carbine from the hip and screaming. He was immediately shot and fell to the ground. Two Cuban soldiers walked over, one with a carbine and the other with a Russian AK-47. While Negron watched in horror, the one with the carbine shot Sanchez twice in the head and walked calmly back to the truck.