by Rex Miller
D’Allesandro hears his name and says, “Willie Lee. Shit. I thought they were talking about one of the shvatzas.”
“Nah,” the E-7 says, “he’s a white boy.”
Later on we’ll find out just how white the boy really is, and that will be what we call him, but for a less obvious reason. We’ll call him White from then on. White Laidlaw. This boy will go down any trail and he will insist that he goes first. Always.
White is a young redneck peckerwood cracker from some tiny turd-in-the-road Ole Miss pit stop. White is what we call him because it is the abbreviation for white phosphorous WP rounds, as in the saying “Don’t get ’em on ya, or Willie Peter (WP) he’ll make ya a believer!” When he freezes you can believe that, too, and you’d best work behind it. He had already “hunted out all the woods” by the time he was ten. He is a born hunter, and if he sniffs a sign you’d best lay chilly till the evil goes away.
White and Bobby Price are flip sides of the same coin: our child killers. White is a poor boy, rural, disinclined to make conversation. Bobby Price, our other kid assassin, is nineteen, but he’s another one who could be in junior high. No death-squad fervor glows in his eves. Price is urban, slick, a rich Texas boy who — we are led to believe — has killed for money. He is our sniper. He is un-fucking-believable with a weapon. We call him Shooter.
A medical officer joins the team. This brings us to fourteen men. El Tee at the top. He has a typical asshole named Ewell for a right arm.
D’Allesandro dismisses the E-7 after a few seconds of overheard conversation with a whispered, “Another fuckin’ lifer.”
El Tee and Ewell will run this top-heavy squad as if it was at platoon strength. We’ve got five fucking machine gunners — Laidlaw, D’Allesandro, The Dutchman, Hedgepath, and our drag man, weird Harold. Each one deadlier than the last.
Shooter Price. Washington. Smith. Nice guys. No personalities emerge yet. Warren. Funny how fast assholes assert themselves. Warren, a cocky poseur of a gangbanger, speaks about three words and everybody clocks him for an idiot. All these mothers with demo and special weapons capabilities. Doc. Me. And all of us, with the exception of Spangler and his RTO, a dude named Brown, all of us are carrying extra ammo.
It is approaching blade zero. All systems are go, with the possible exception of my central nervous system. We are in Saigon and waiting to lock and load. Wound tight as steel spring. Coiled. Cocked. Sanitized. Expendable. Waiting to be aimed and fired in the direction of the bad guys.
I go in for another pep talk from the colonel. My thoughts are far from cobras and this venomous world. I’m thinking about a Vietnamese girl I’ve met. I force her image out of my mind and enter.
He stares at me. I stare back. The cobra has the art of silence. He fixes on me with those reptilian, impassive eyes on lock and load. He has a look of unyielding competency. Obdurate. Hard. He stares with the eyes of someone who believes he can see beyond surface facade. I’m semi-wasted and yield quickly. Apparently satisfied with what he saw or what he didn’t see, he asks, “Do you believe the end justifies the means?”
I start to answer that I didn’t know the questions were going to be so tough, but I edit myself and convincingly stammer, “Uh — I’m not sure, sir.” The colonel smiles his hooded cobra smile. He reaches into his desk drawer and withdraws a bottle in a purple cloth sack. He pours a couple of ounces of warm Crown Royal into two cut-glass tumblers and slides one across the desk, nodding for me to help myself and lifting his glass. He swirls the amber liquid and raises his baby blues in my direction. I keep thinking of blue-eyed poisonous snakes.
“Cheers.” He downs it neat. I take a cautious sip of the whisky. It is warm, but it is Crown Royal.
“Mind if I ask a question, sir?”
“Shoot.”
“I can understand the mission OK, the importance of it. But an op like this — you got civilians, you got this, you got that. I mean, who the hell are we really working for anyway? CIA? DIA? Or — ”
The cobra leans forward on his desk and swirls the dregs of his booze. He focuses on me, and in the chilly silence the hooded snake smiles his thin smile.
He dismisses me shortly thereafter and we leave each other as we found one another. Stunned. The jeep is still there when I go outside, miraculously. That’s something, anyway. I pat myself down to see if the colonel has picked my pocket too.
No, everything is intact. All he has taken is my self-esteem, manhood, ethics, and any shot I ever had at collecting any Social Security money. I can just kiss all that shit good-bye right now. Oh well, fuck it. If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t hang around rank. I kick the jeep back to life and drive out of the wire-enclosed compound past the double guard posts. It is measurably easier getting out than it was getting in. I’d like to just keep on going till I hit water.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe in the colonel and in the mission and in the American flag and to the republic for which. I am definitely a believer. I believe in miracles, for instance. I believe there is a right side and a wrong side, and that if we don’t stop the threat of communism on the Plain of Reeds, we will see our grandchildren reading Marx. Wait a damn minute — the little bastards are reading Marx now. So what the fuck does it all mean? I ask myself as I roar through the warm Saigon night scattering old men and street thieves, pointed in the general direction of Saigon’s Chinese section, and thinking my anti-grenade thoughts.
Cynicism is the easy reflex of the unthinking. The Dutchman, Frank Vandervoort, so straight he makes the colonel look like a raving pinko, says I shouldn’t be so cynical. The Dutchman carries an old Ace paperback in his ruck that he’s humped all over Africa, Asia, carrying it everywhere like a kind of Bible. Spine’s loose, pages spilling out, cover looks like heinie wipe. Men at War. He digs the stuff where ole Papa says he who dies this day is quit for mañana. Who’s to say he’s wrong?
“Everybody dies,” as my dear aunt Ruth so eloquently used to put it. “Everybody dies,” she’d say. It’s just the when and how of it that differs. So what’s the big deal whether you die at eighty-five ravaged by cancer, or at nineteen from an acute case of AK-47 lead poisoning. You only live once, that we know, but if you do it right, maybe once is enough.
Since I’d washed out in my two-week vacation at “the farm,” I’d been down one or two funky roads, but this one was a killer right here. A long, bumpy road, aimed due north by the look of it. Traveling in some strange company: a dirty work force with ostensible connections to the big Intel shops and a couple of MACV’s less publicized subsidiaries. What does it matter who it is anyway? Nothing is ever quite what it appears to be. All you can do is pray you’re on the right side of it when the lights go out. In the dark it all smells like tuna fish — right?
You picture a spook a certain way in your mind. It’s from the book and movie images, of course. Total bullshit. In reality a young spook is a smiling, unsullied preppy. Old spooks tend to look like nondescript, wimpy homos. It’s a look a lot of them wear like an old school tie. Of the few known exceptions, the colonel is appreciated as he restores one’s faith in stereotypes. You sign up with a dude like that, you can figure to spend some time out on the cutting edge.
Just as there were number-ten AOs, the worst areas of responsibility, for grunts, like the la Drang and A Shau, there were stone-number-one spook centers dotted across the Nam. Places like Danang and Hue, where a cool fool could lay down a monster power base and scarf up those perks and bennies for miles. With two covert airlines among the perquisites and benefits, and the old national-security gambit at your fingertips, the marketplace took on a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland glow.
It became a mad feast of temptations for some, ranging from black market to dope market to money market to arms market to the biggest market of all — people! Any swag from boocoo loads of Thai weed to stagger the most jaded DEA narc, dusted with anything from angel to opium, to viper-fast mon
ey scams in any conceivable aspect of the international currency exchange.
There were spooks out there who could help you succumb to the temptations for a price. Get you a little Chinese boy or ship your souvenir SKS home for you (a couple of generals even had trouble with that one), or make some fast money magic so remarkably complex that the sophistication of the math and the labyrinthine pathways of the paper laundry would leave you blinkin’ and winkin’ and counting your fingers.
Everybody had heard the wild stories about the dude up in Can Tho who had taken his first month’s cut out of some Black Luigi–grade action and paid cash for a Lear back home. It had reputedly filled two Samsonite suitcases with big bills. Part of his world-class action bought him a ticket into the Euro-Asian dope-deals-on-wheels club. X-dollars, or for that matter any kind of Monopoly money from MPC to piasters, could buy you the keys to a new Mercedes loaded with all the options including power steering, fancy wheels, luxury interior, and about fifty kilos of unstepped-on pharmacy flake tucked away under the spot welds.
The Mercedes was delivered dockside, FOB New York or the Coast, and the keys and the car they started were yours to keep. The other keys, the kilos of flake — that was the vigorish on the import duty. Lots of dudes bought a new Mercedes overseas just that way — never doubt it.
D’Allesandro was right at home in all this shit. He probably had a new car loaded with fifteen years worth of girl stashed in some Big Apple parking lot. He was a street-smart, Queens-born mercenary who looked like anything but what he was — a New York wop.
Who can explain what makes you tight in such situations? We had buddied up from the first day, laughing together in a flurry of rubber-tipped insults and we’d become instantly close. Trust was a given, the way it sometimes is in such friendships. We realized we now had somebody who would watch our back like it was his own. That’s a rare and comforting thing. Over there it was everything.
He had a certain grace, almost an elegance of movement, an organic poise that made everything work for him. D. gave off this aura of self-confidence too. The whole thing came together to make his physical presence seem more than what it was. He had a careless, somehow theatrical way of implying status and privilege, and it could lead the unwary observer into fatally underestimating his limitless capacity for violence.
Just about the time you had him figured — whoops! — another surprise.
I had seen D’Allesandro in the boonies, where he could draw Viet kids like a magnet. I’d watched when he was so tired he wanted to drop bone-beat, but he’d take time to talk to the children and give them goodies out of his ruck. I’d seen this happen in a certain hamlet once and watched him shoot an old mama-san not five minutes later. We had gone in searching for Charlie and the usual signs of caches of weapons, food, medical supplies. Tunnels, all the rest. A withered old crone who looked about a hundred comes out of this one hootch and he goes, “Where VC?”
“No.”
“Where VC?”
“No VC.”
“Where VC? Talk!”
“No!” She shakes her wrinkled puss. “No VC!”
“Where VC, goddammit!”
“No VC!”
“YOU VC!”
“NO VC!”
“You goddamn VC bitch!”
“No VC! VC numma ten!” They were always number ten and we were number one.
“V-goddamn-C motherfuckin’ lyin’ bitch!”
“No VC! NO VC! VC nummah ten! VC nummah ten!”
“Yeah, you ole bitch,” he says, gritting his teeth, the eyes going flat and icy, “an’ tonight VC will be nummah-fuckin’-one and we’ll be nummah ten. Now where the fuck are the VC goddamn you to hell!” He’s locked and loaded.
“NO VC! NO VC! NO VC! NO VC!”
She screams, and he just lights her right up. She drops in a wet bundle of dirty rags. Somebody’s grandmother. Wow, man. Sin loi, granny. Payback is a motherfucker.
Chapter 6
“Over here you learn to live with death.”
— in-country wisdom
I wheel the jeep through a miniature version of Soul Alley, what Chi and I call Seoul Alley in Little Chinatown, scattering bicycles and b-girls, dodging axle-busting chunks of blacktopped road and tire-eating potholes, wheeling the battered four-wheel drive through the cycles and the street shit. Tu Do it ain’t.
Ramshackle hootches, shanties, and corrugated tin roofs begin to thin out. I hang a hard right into a nearly invisible and improbably narrow side street that ends abruptly in a dark cul-de-sac between a pair of vendor’s sleaze-stalls and a bar called, not without wit, Crazy Horse.
I abandon my jeep again with a Hail Mary and hit the bar. Nodding to a couple of the regulars and bar girls, I cut through the interior and go straight out the back door. Crossing a small courtyard about the size of three trashcans, I enter a plain, unmarked wooden door and climb the first flight of stairs, going up real loud and doing it so everybody knows I know they know. I have some real nervous neighbors here and there.
One of the brothers is always singing this song about how his papa is a Mau Mau, and I sing this lovely lyric as I hit the stairs, singing at the top of my voice so no one will suspect I am out of breath.
I open the door, and when I see her it happens as it always happens. My world just changes, brightens, then softens. Whatever load I’m carrying I leave back on those steps. It all lifts off me the moment I look at her.
Chi is about as far from the Western sex goddess image as you can get, though I always think of her as lovely. Tiny-boned and reed-slim, she has a body almost without curve. Even in her work clothes, slit cheongsams and miniskirts, tottering on three-inch high heels, her legs are just too thin to be spectacular.
Her ass is just a small rear end, functional but nothing too decorative. Walking away from you, she evokes few lustful thoughts. Even by Asian standards, her thin body is so flat-chested that at first glance the nipples appear to be nearly as large as the breasts themselves. Taken by itself, Chi has the body of a small, well-developed but relatively unattractive child.
Nor is her face particularly beautiful or even striking. The skin is pliant, almost rubbery to the touch, smooth and resilient over her whole body. From the physical aspect, her most noteworthy attributes are her gorgeous eyes and sleek, long hair that falls to her ass in a straight, shiny cascade of black silkiness. I love to feel that mane of hair, to cup my hand behind her neck and hold that sweet head in my hand.
She had learned early on to compensate for any physical endowments that she might have lacked. It was in her attitude that she dazzled and charmed. She had a personality so feminine that just her presence in a room could open me up like a tropical flower. I wasn’t alone. Within a few minutes she’d have most men falling all over themselves trying to please her. And since her job was to please me, she was very, very popular.
“Hi, baby,” she said in that soft, hoarse whisper that I loved, coming to me and arching up on her tiptoes as I bent down to kiss her. God, it was so good to be home. We barely had to speak.
“Hello, love.”
“Ummmmm.”
“So tired.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you stay tonight?”
“Oh, yeah.” We kissed again and she went to get me a beer. Even a year ago, had someone told me that this would be happening to me, the notion would have been so alien that I would have been unable to respond.
“ — and you’re going to fall in love with an Oriental prostitute . . .” (Say what?) Steeped as I was in the usual machismo, heritage, and social custom, the prideful baggage of vanity and ego that most American males lift as soon as they can reason, I would have been an unlikely candidate for Chi.
But as I learned more about who she was, who she really was, the things that had once seemed so important lost their relevance over here. And what had begun as pay sex h
ad evolved into something quite dear. I’d learned to see traits, values, and skills once overlooked as inconsequential as coveted, rare gifts. I treasured her sweetness, wisdom, serenity, and the sweet-sour soulfulness of her tough vulnerability. I valued Chi’s attentiveness, for example, the way I’d once valued big tits in a low-cut dress.
I was still enough of an asshole that I wanted the big tits just as much as ever. And the girls downstairs who had silicone jobs always got my attention right away. But Chi had become a helluva lot more than sex for me. I tried to think about a future for us, but nothing ever came to mind. Maybe I didn’t really believe I had a future. To Chi’s credit, there were no requests, no demands, only the good sweetness between us.
Prostitution carries no onus of immorality in the lower-class Vietnamese family as it would back home. The exigent needs of survival are sufficiently obvious to the pragmatic Asian mind that it is simply viewed as obtainable work for a certain demographic percentage of the female population. No more stigma attaches to it than might to certain coal miners in Appalachia, foundry, factory, or mill workers in Indiana, or similarly throughout the American blue-collar substrata. You take what work there is. The work carried few imputations of rightness or ethical posture. In any event, the act of sex was perceived as more of a biological and less of a metaphysical phenomenon.
“Mercy boo-coo, Madame Gazelle,” I tell her in my redneck-impression voice as she sets the beer in front of me. Fractured French knocks her out for some reason. She holds a cool, damp cloth to the back of my neck, and I can feel her tiny, gentle fingers ever so lightly massaging my eyelids.
“Sic my butterflies on ya, woman,” I say, fluttering my eyelashes against her small, soft hand as she giggles. We have our small delights.
Chapter 7
“How do you handle an elephant with three balls?”
— latrine set-up line
“You walk him and pitch to the hippo.”
— latrine punch line