Profane Men

by Rex Miller

  I had originally expressed some interest in Europe. I spoke French, not fluently, but I knew I could skate through that part. But it was suggested that I reconsider. My talents could best be put to use by the Plans people. I had made the terrible mistake of showing a willingness to do secret work. I envisioned skulking around the Saint Germain and taking notes on dissident students, or seducing some ambassador’s wife in Paris — those kinds of spy fantasies. They requested me to volunteer for DDP(CS)P, Paramilitary Staff, an operational arm of the Clandestine Services organization of the Plans Division. It was the vocational equivalent of the dean asking you to change your major on registration day.

  Within the week the Training people had me out at the Farm in Virginia (cryptonym: isolation), and my meticulously camouflaged romance with the image of intelligence officer quickly went a-flushing down the old tubes. I was a JOT for all of two weeks. I was first in my class. First, that is, to wash out. An unmitigated, embarrassingly inept, hopeless disaster of an abject failure. Flunked, as they say, flung, and fucked.

  I can’t get over my naiveté at the way they made contact. Had I put two and two together I could have easily seen that the man I’d met under the most casual of circumstances could have been part of a carefully contrived situation. But it is only training and experience that teaches you to face each situation with professional paranoia, and unfortunately I had neither. At the time, I remember I was out of work, humiliated, afraid, confused, the draft staring me in the face, broke, and grateful when I was offered a way out.

  An obscure outfit working under the intelligence umbrella was recruiting a few good men for “highly sensitive” work. The pay was good. I was very interested. I was hired without further preamble. We were told our employer was the first of the secret sanction groups and the most clandestine in origin, evolving in the pages of a National Security Action Memorandum classified in the murky shadows beyond Ultra Top Secret Literally Your Eyes Only. Naive, grateful, and feeling lucky, I didn’t stop to reflect on the irony of a supposedly elite group of pros plucked as it were from every imaginable career rubbish heap. The specialty of the house was to be counterinsurgency warfare.

  It was the beginning of many signings — secrecy oaths, pacts not to talk, pacts not to sue, pacts not to violate other pacts. Signatures on dotted lines. Witnesseth. Signed, sealed, and delivered. One warm body coming up. Sign here. The big hook was the time of service. Thirteen months and my entire military service would be fulfilled, I recall the man telling me, “responsibility-wise.” For a certified, lifelong, dedicated skater, thirteen months sounded beautiful. When you’re that age, you think you could do thirteen months in hell.

  We would be neither military nor paramilitary. Our unique conglomerate of civilian and service personnel would operate within a sphere of freelance contractual “consultants,” liaisoning under and with the military but only as cover. Deniability was our raison d’être. We existed to perform “sensitive” work. This work would take place in (sigh) Southeast Asia.

  In the quaint jargon of the day, our prime mission was “covert elimination of infrastructure targeted for termination upon access with extreme prejudice.” This syntactical contortion simply meant we were a secret unit. Primary function: assassination. I asked myself, as I would many times before it was all over, what in the hell am I doing here? What the hell does a hit squad need with an intelligence officer? Hey, I told myself, can’t you take a joke?

  Officially, we had no name. Unofficially, we were referred to as a spike team. The covert spike team was to small-unit warfare what the disposable, single-shot 66-mm LAW was to the military arsenal — an effective and cost-effective throwaway. Like the LAWs, loaches, and largesse, all of which funneled down through the burgeoning black market, we were considered eminently expendable in a war where sudden death was imminently obtainable.

  We observed neither convention nor accords. We wore no flashes or insignia. Followed no proscribed rules of engagement. Studied no carefully drafted and stylized memoranda from MACV. We carried only one piece of identification, and even that was fictitious. A small card with our picture and blood group proclaimed that we were not to be detained, that we were authorized to wear, carry, or transport civilian clothing, “unusual personal weapons and prohibited items,” that we could pass into restricted areas and requisition any damned thing in sight. The ID was unlaminated and edible for security purposes. (They’ve given you a number and made you eat your name.)

  A few of us survived the tour. Only the good die young.

  Chapter 3

  “For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested.”

  — Mark 4:22

  The shock of Vietnam was sudden and hammering. One day you were back in the world and the next day you might be deplaning at Tan Son Nhut with the rest of the raw meat from stateside. The shock waves would hit you like the Vietnamese heat, drenching you in fear sweat, rolling over you in suffocating waves of impending doom and crushing hopelessness. For the first time it was easy to understand how so few Nazis could make so many Jews board those cattle cars. The herd in shock will follow almost any leader.

  We arrived not as a team but as bits and pieces, assembled in secret and field-tested. While you were still cherry, an FNG (fucking new guy), life was a series of disasters and dangerous mistakes. If you survived them in the field, you were a warrior. It was about a yearlong job, to learn how to wage war effectively. And so, of course, the moment you became good at your job, you were shipped out. Lewis Carroll could not have written Vietnam.

  We did many things badly. We had little or no rapport with the Vietnamese, although there were wonderful exceptions. In an ancient cultural melting pot of Viets, Tais, Montagnards, Tays, Nung, and Muong, many of us steadfastly refused to learn more than one or two words of “slope.” In a family culture where three-quarters of the labor force works harvesting such crops as rice and sugar cane, or fishing and cutting wood, the land holds a sacred place of honor in the scheme of things. Our battle attitude was “fuck your land, gook!”

  Roughly half the spike team had arrived in-country around the same time. The other half apparently came from regimental military already in place — vets, cherries, elitist spear carriers, skaters, heads, straights. All stirred together for “plausible deniability.” It took a firefight to start putting some serious sweat to those fatigues. It took some boonie humping to bleach those boots. But from the git-go we knew there was an implicit death warrant attached to a high fuck-up score on this deal. Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.

  We were still riding high. And I do mean high. Talk about your cross-sections of society: D’Allesandro a Noo Yawk street kid, self-educated and slickly confident. Me — nobody from nowhere.

  “We got to sort these cherries out,” he said.

  “Uh-huh. That’s a definite rog.”

  “See who smokes. Shit like that.” He winked. D’Allesandro looked as un-Italian as you can get. None of the old Goombah Pete, rancid olive-oil shine. None of the full, handsome, strongly delineated features that always engender the phrase “beat-up looking” in Italian women after they round thirty.

  He has a long, somewhat satanic-looking face. High cheekbones and a sharp, aquiline nose centered in a cadaverous head. A killer’s eyes stare into his.

  “Whatcha think about it, Laidlaw?” he says to the killer, who looks like he could be fourteen, fifteen tops.

  The kid, a southern boy, scrunches up his face and says with considerable seriousness and concern, “Sure a lotta niggers.”

  The spike team was like the whole war machine in microcosm. Leadership seriously flawed. (For every sharp enlisted man, every great kid out there in the bush, somewhere at a desk a lifer was plotting another costly, ill-conceived, life-threatening misadventure.) A handful of lives (or fifty thousand) to hurl into the teeth of the monsoon season. Rock ’n’ rollers getting weaned on genius Jimi, tuned-out Do
ors, Procol Harum, Frank Zappa’s Mothers, clairvoyant Beatles, the simplest lyrics becoming ironic epitaphs.

  We gotta get outta this place. Too many niggers. Too many honkies. Too many slopes. Too many dinks. Too many gooks. Too many zipper heads.

  The military structure is totally inappropriate for the kind of rabba-zabba that should be waged, but rather than adapt to it we decide to fight a hoo-hah that matches the structure, and we lose at nearly every turn. So we write sit-reps that make the losses look like numerical victories. (Abie, the customer wants a green suit. So, nu? Turn on the green light.) Except for the few victories. Those we wrote up as losses. Even the journalists and the highest levels of the administration misperceived Tet as a loss. We did it all that way, upside down. The official Vietnam War historian should have been Professor Backwards.

  I am summoned before the throne. Alone in the lair of the snake, staring into the orbs of our intrepid head honcho. They are bluer than your average eyeball. Movie-star blue. And they have a pronounced distention, almost a frog-eyed look. But more serpentine than amphibian. The blue-eyed cobra, I call him, so I can deal with it.

  He stares. I stare. It is a game. He stares. I stare back, but unfocused, seeing two channels that tube around his head, fixed on flags and maps behind him. As a mental exercise I count my blessings. One . . . two . . . three . . .

  You’re my edge, he says. Really.

  “You’re my razor blade.”

  “Sir,” I respond. This is good that we can communicate like this.

  “Sharp. Deadly.” He gives me more doublespeak apparently spun from the metaphorical operation code name. There is lots more but I tune out, hung up on the razor business, wondering if he realizes that a double-edged blade cuts both ways.

  The briefing limps to a close and I follow the cobra and his bodyguard across the compound to a Quonset hootch. I take a seat. The hooded cobra with the blues addresses this group. He gives us the general mission profile. Cryptonym: Toledo Blade. A rough-looking Marine master sergeant is working a pointer over some DMZ and Northern I Corps real estate that covers the back wall of the hootch in a color-coded topographical display

  The crusty E-8 stands at ease with his pointer behind him, and the snake reads aloud in a voice that could freeze its own ice cubes should the need arise, “Number two-seven-three makes clear the resolve of the president as commander-in-chief to ensure victory over the externally directed and supported communist insurgency. In order to achieve such a victory, ComUSMACV and the JCS are of the considered opinion that the United States must be prepared to put aside many of the self-imposed restrictions which now limit our efforts and” — he looks up with those cold blue snake eyes to emphasize his words — “to undertake bolder actions which may embody greater risks, unquote. That is our authorization from the top, chapter and verse from Memorandum 46-64, NON-SKID JACKS.”

  I parlez the wondrous spook jargon and know that National Security Council Director-related Joint Chiefs of Staff memos are NSCDJCS, which one pronounces NON-SKID JACKS, in the best spirit of M*A*S*H, CINCPAC, COMSEC. NINCOMPOOP.

  Vietnam is a country of very thin people. The natives are diminutive, and often one could say emaciated. The only fat people in country are our cooks and clerks and newbies and assorted REMF pogues. A two-hundred-pounder is a rarity. There are no fat warriors. Nobody in combat who is grossly heavy. But skinny is one thing. In the back of the room there is a shadow. A rail. It moves and a bone that is the anorexia death remnant of a human arm stabs upward.

  “We go take some fuckin’ ears?” he says pleasantly. The hooded cobra smiles thinly as I sit blasted out of my skull, watching his blue snake eyes as he examines this human thermometer. A smothered giggle or two, but nobody laughs out loud. We’ve all been told about Harold. Nobody will ever laugh at weird Harold. Not to his face. Because long, tall, lean, mean Harold Grein is one deadly piece of work.

  We are an assassination unit of the combined military-intelligence powers. A supposedly elite sanction group whose mandate is to perform sensitive wee work will, of course, recruit assassins among its personnel. D’Allesandro, for example, is not a stranger to the job. A couple of the others — the kid from Texas, Bobby Price, the burly biker-type — they come with track records. But we have been told about Harold. HOG, named for his proclivities, is more than just a killer. Harold O. Grein is an ice-cold murderer and if you rile him, he will, in one-syllable words, put hair on the walls.

  There are mercs among us who have joined for the action. Contact. But with this pole-thin man it is not quite the same. Harold has agreed to participate because he has a hobby that has become an obsession. The obsession is bloodshed. He loves to spill blood. And the one thing you must never do, brothers — we are told — you must never, ever fuck around with Harold.

  Price and the biker, these boys were connected to wiseguy deals. So we hear and believe. D’Allesandro and some of the others have the mercenary mind. The child assassin Laidlaw, these are clearly trigger-pullers. But Harold O. Grein comes with a frightening pedigree. He has done awful things, it is rumored, and this human string bean has been captured, negotiated with, brought here among us to be turned loose. And his taste for it goes beyond the job’s profile. HOG! Just one more thing to have to worry about — a fucking psychotic human taxidermist.

  As we leave the briefing hootch I overhear two of the monster-size brothers rapping.

  “Hey, mo-fuck, lemme ax you sumpin, man,” one says.

  “Say what?” But he doesn’t ax him a thing. They just look at each other and some ancient and inexplicable communication system clicks on and they laugh. I can see I’m right at home with the rest of these stoned brain surgeons.

  Aretha rocks into the soggy air from a transplanted ghetto blaster. Are we gonna take some fuckin’ ears, I think. Was Ike a Republican? Is fat meat greasy?

  As if he read my mind, the biggest, blackest one says, “We gonna be down with this chilly shit.”

  Chapter 4

  “Then began the deadly conflict,

  Hand to hand among the mountains.”

  — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Inside the production room the voice prepares to speak the word. Pursed lips now draw back from white teeth and a hissing ess sound begins the word, the tongue almost flat against the floor of the mouth. If there is a roof, then there must be a floor and that is where the tongue is when the voice speaks the word:

  “Serai,” the voice hisses, sibilant and resonant and professional, the brain seeing the word groups:

  “Se-rī / n. (Turkish) 1: caravansary, 2: seraglio,” pronouncing the long ī as it intones the syllable just so, the sound liquid, golden. The voice of the outlaw.

  “Donna offers special services to those clients who require the finest in a beautiful and stern young dominatrix. You can rely on Donna’s total discretion. Leave your name and phone number with Donna’s answering service at the Far West Bar in Cholon. Remember, you can’t beat Donna’s service, but she can beat you! You heard it right here on KILL, and keep listening for our new phone-in number coming up soon.”

  The right index finger keys a cough switch simultaneously pressing the intercom down and whispering —

  “What bullshit,” continuing in the same breath as a bald engineer across the thick, double-paned glass smiles in cynical appreciation, the voice never missing a beat as it continues.

  “News agency desires an experienced photojournalist to be based in the Mekong Delta. We want a real quote boonie-rat unquote. Write PC-two, that’s Papa Charlie Two, Monte Carlo. Or phone us at Zero-zero-three-three-niner-zero . . . and you’ve got KILL with a new number on the half hour!”

  Master control auditing, clocking, taping, calibrating, measuring, filtering, changing this distinctive voice. The tone rich and improbably perfect, the voice so smooth and liquid, cryptic and camouflaged.

  The tape timed by automatic hot
clock, second-specific, handed then to courier and transported to secret signal base, mysterious megamulch of enigmatic emanations from transcendent transmitters; bypass bop that slithers impossibly down the lines, Pre-ACD VRUs touch-toning in the baffled harmonics, text-to-speech synthesizers programming interactive voice response boards, triggering block-boxed superplexers that twist, augment, conceal, reinvent and launch each deliciously clandestine word out into the ultra-mazed overflow doodah, doodah.

  Hand-cupped back of the ear, OTR-style, the vox of the outlaw populi plays to a bald, bored audience of one.

  “Operators, why wear a headset ever again? Move up to PermaEar, the state-of-the-art from Implantronics,” and the man changing the tape smiles a lopsided grin of acknowledgment as he absentmindedly threads leader past warm Ampex heads. The announcer and engineer both chuckle to themselves, but the laughs are quick and shallow here, inside the dark and secret heart of the target.

  Chapter 5

  “And the Lord said to Satan, ‘Whence have you come?’”

  — Job 2:2

  Training. On-the-job training. Training is a long, twisted umbilical that can be traced back through Bragg, Camp Peary, a secret site in New Mexico, Fort George Meade, Paris Island — depending on who is doing the tracing. Each of us has our own fucked-up story to tell. The southern boy Laidlaw made an immediate impression. Willie Lee Laidlaw says he’s eighteen, he looks fifteen until you scope in on the eyes, which sting with that bold quality defensive coaches like to euphemistically call “desire.”