Profane Men

by Rex Miller

  “Now, listen” — he lets a stream of air out and his chiseled features tighten — “when I said we have to cut our losses if something goes wrong, let me spell it out so we have a clear understanding. If you are captured alive, the kind of interrogation you’d be subjected to might place your country in a compromising position it could ill afford. That means you’ll be expected to take those measures we’ve discussed with you. Now I know that each of you have had this run by you again and again, but it is imperative you fully grasp both our position and yours. We will maintain complete, unilateral, nonnegotiable deniability with regard to your existence or to that of the mission. Officially you will have ceased to exist.

  “You’ve met Lieutenant Spangler, and this is as good a time as any to let your team leader say a few words. Roy, do you have any comments you want to add to what I’ve said?”

  A wiry young Marine butter bar stands. “Yes, sir. Some of the men may understand the critical seriousness of the mission, but they might find it difficult to believe that an out-and-out covert radio station would dare to operate this far south, or even in the Z. We’re used to associating this kind of a black radio op with the more traditional propaganda voice coming out of a satellite country such as East Germany.” He looks at the cobra.

  “The fact is, we operate several broadcast stations like this ourselves: Voice of Freedom in Hue, Radio Vietnam, which we set up with dissident North Vietnamese, many more. Psy-ops has several things running from piston-propeller craft in conjunction with CIA/DIA operations. There are all types of black radio ops on both sides. But this one” — he looks at the colonel and shakes his head — “we gotta hit it.”

  The hooded cobra is impassive, a master of the burning, bridge-of-the-nose stare. Every brush-cut hair is chiseled from gray granite. The face is hard-core, deeply tanned, lined with payback. “Any further questions at this point? . . . Yes?”

  Somebody in the back of the room has a question. A man clears his throat as he carefully frames his inquiry and we turn to look.

  It is Harold, of course, smiling pleasantly. Or his approximation of a death’s head smile.

  “Uh, you know, like uh — ” he begins quietly, “if we, uh, souvenir us some gook stuff ’n’ that. Lak, kin we mail stuff home?”

  There is a sudden fit of loud coughing, many of the coughs sounding strangely like stifled giggles.

  What would Harold’s home be? I wonder. What family waits for the odd package from sonny? Does an old granny still rock back and forth on the porch, waiting for the return of their prodigal killer? Will her eyes grow misty as she opens the crudely lettered container, government franked and drop-shipped. (Look, Jethro, they wusn’t no stamps onnit.) And will she smile and shake her head as she opens the horrid box with a plastic bag full of . . . gook stuff that he has “souvenired” her, and chuckle, “Oh, that Harold’ll be the death of me!” Will Harold be the death of me? Or will he follow me all the days of my life, helping me to fear no evil as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, knowing that our tail-end Charlie is the baddest motherfucker in the valley?

  Chapter 9

  “Burnt offering and sin offering thou hast not required.”

  — Psalms 40:6

  0811. Operation Toledo Blade is running. Cranked, radiating poisoned karma and fear, I’m doing what every grunt hates. Humping the boonies. I can cut it, however, because I am high on life. On line:

  White Laidlaw, a custom-made point man so long as he lives to tell about it. White Laidlaw, teenage assassin.

  Smith. Quiet little fucker. Seems like a good man.

  Washington. Tough. Sharp, solid splib.

  El Tee, the lieutenant.

  Dutchman.

  Doc, the corpsman.

  Hedgepath. Bad news.

  Price. The shooter.

  Warren.

  Ewell.

  Harold already falling back, dragging along at his own pace. Happy as a fucking clam like it was a walk in the park. Me and Jon D’Allesandro up front. All of us oblivious to the strings of our puppet masters just as Harold O. Grein is oblivious to us, HOG, some of us will call him. The only human, surely, for whom the Nam is a hobby.

  Jon, walking the point man’s slack, sums it all up for me as he turns and mutters to nobody in particular, “This green motherfucker is kicking my ass awready.”

  And I say comfortingly, “Hey.”

  “Eh?”

  “This ain’t even jump street yet, pops.”

  “Say?”

  “We just think this is gonna get bad. We don’t know what bad is yet. They’re gonna show us some heavy-duty hurt before this Asian vacation is over.”

  “Just don’t fall down and go boom,” he says, eyeing Sweet Alice, my piece.

  “Never happen,” I assure him, but that was exactly what I was thinking.

  I’m not that nuts about us walking in single file. Why can’t we take the bus or somethin’? Bunch of guys with weapons. I flash on a nightmare image.

  I’m about thirteen and we’d gone our coon hunting. Me and my uncle Arthur and this friend of his. I don’t even remember the old dude’s name now. And he’d had a couple of snorts. It was a bad scene. We almost bought it that night.

  If it had been up to Arthur, it never would have happened, but this old guy had to be Mr. Sportsman. He knew everything about it. And he led us into some bad-ass swamp. You hunt coon at night. He was the point. I was in the middle. He stepped right into quicksand. I almost went down, too, but my uncle got me out in time. The old dude kept going down and you don’t fight and thrash around in quicksand, you try to freeze; the more you thrash, the deeper it takes you and suddenly the dude was up to his waist and going fast and he had us grab his gun and we almost had him outta there when he got a finger over a trigger and the .22 long-rifle shot went right by my ear there in the darkened swamp. I screamed and cried like a little baby. I was never so scared in my life. I never hunted much after that incident.

  Just shows you the kind of thing happens to people who don’t leave the little coons alone. They didn’t do anything. Just sitting around in trees doing whatever coons do, ya know? I mean, go fuck around with Mother Nature and see what happens.

  And here I am still making the same mistakes. Walking in a line behind guys with guns. Messing with coons and shit. Never learn. What if the point kid would walk into quicksand? What if somebody falls down and goes boom? You have to think about these things.

  Everyone is gathering around the lieutenant and his RTO, the radioman, a splib called Dusty who gets to hump the big radio, which is called, appropriately, a “prick.” The lieutenant has his map out and is taking a compass check. He came up through the ranks and could be worse as lifers go. But he’s got a real can of worms to deal with, a mixed bag of mercs, military and civilian oddballs, and God knows what. This is not the kind of a lash-up where you can make mistakes. He’d better be damn good with those maps.

  This sector of The Badlands resembles a huge letter H lying on its side. We are at the lower left of the recumbent H, with the top bar of the H being the blue feature. The middle bar is a trail or red ball that runs from the blue feature to where we are clustered now. We are moving parallel to the red ball through some abandoned rice fields to get to the tree line that borders the blue at its narrowest point. The tree line is a perfect ambush point if our intelligence has any chops whatsoever.

  “Whatcha got, Dusty?” the lieutenant asks his radioman.

  “I got something up on the high band, El Tee, listen to this.” It is a strong transmission, a silky voice without accent, and at first I think he’s picked up a dee-jay on AFVN.

  “Risk taker wants short-term special job. Perfect if your situation requires fully trained female op. Her specialty areas: infiltration, intelligence gathering, and 35-mm photography. Prefer European assignment. Have also worked quote straight blackmail
honey traps unquote. Female op is excellent with limited-access targets. Contact Occupant, Box 301, Kingsbury 2089, Victoria, Australia. And this is KILL Outlaw Radio!

  “Young and well-built Vietnamese stud eager to please and promises to give full satisfaction. I am available for any action and I am bilingual, bisexual, and multiracial. Check me out with Frankie at the Vegas Bar. I swing quote like Tarzan unquote. And KILL swings just for you, with free commercials you won’t hear on tame Armed Forces Radio!”

  “You got a fix on this sonofabitch?” our young lieutenant asks.

  “Negative, sir.”

  “Personal to Ed the Head — phone Lotus right away at work . . . Ed the Head — phone Lotus right away at work.

  “Code Name Abracadabra asks: are you a top terrorist bounty hunter? Do you have at least ninety days’ field experience? Are you quote short unquote? We pay high hazard money offering per-job contracts with maximum cash fees and comp. Will deposit your Swiss bank or other in advance based on checkable private reference sources. We are the ultimate in discretion. We offer full in-country tactical support and intelligence gathering. All details of access and infiltration handled with dispatch. If you are the best at your craft, we can use you. Are you willing to quote whack out unquote a high hazard target if the money is right? You must assure all parties you will not go shy with personal leverage provided to principals. Cash is six figures, sanitized, and the comp is triple-a number one. We want professionals only; no Walter Mitty types, cowboys, or lunatic fringe wanted. If you can fill the bill contact ABRACADABRA, Alpha-Bravo-Romeo-Alpha, Box six-six-niner-one, APO, New York 09669. This is KILL Outlaw Radio!”

  KILL and Vietnam were perfect for each other. To be Viet meant many things, but when one generalized about the people, the by-product of a tribal melting pot of ancient traits, one conjured up the image of a diminutive, tough, strongly featured, proud, hardened, cunning race capable of gross crudities or the delicately subtle. War-torn and weather-beaten, the yin and yang met within their collective character to form a well-spring of national ambiguities: great strength and a fondness for deception, intestinal fortitude, and acquiescence to monumental greed and corruption. The clash of ambiguities puzzled the Western mentality. KILL belonged here in the Vietnamese Badlands, apotheosis of the gritty little outlaw. And this is why we were here. To silence the outlaw at all costs.

  Domestic experts in telecommunications from Bell Systems to Western Electric were imported. In-country pros like CIA ELINT, utilizing the vast resources of COMSEC on one hand to COMINCON on the other, were all uniformly unsuccessful in thwarting the highly sophisticated message-drop system. The landlines were utilized by means of what was described as “a kind of gigantic black box in reverse, as operated by genius computer hackers.”

  A caller would pick up a handset in, say, Saigon and dial the telephone number of the hour. Numbers were changed constantly. Faraway the complex system activated. Many kilometers from the caller’s city circuitry concerted the electrical signals into sound, and high-voltage bug killers began to sizzle. Multiline locators found their special “pair.” Touch tones bleeped their pleasant-sounding obbligato.

  Frequencies met, introduced, harmonized, were married. Out beyond the terminal, another device scrambled the circuitry as the call cooked along the tandems. An interface connected out along the long lines and an answering service relay interlocked, keying in a pre-record back into an infinity transmitter.

  The system was described as a “small miracle.” One senior official called it “ten thousand times more efficient” than the local service. (“Working, operator, working goddammit!”) Miraculous and unjammable.

  “There ya go, El Tee! Got that booger.”

  “Outstanding,” he said, picking up the mike. “Phu Bai T&R, this is Toledo Six Actual, over.”

  Awwwwkkkkkk — “over?”

  “Phu Bai, Toledo Six requesting triangulation on the following coordinates. Wait one, over.”

  Using their own long-distance relay system, the radio research unit would instantly begin triangulating on the latest KILL signal by means of the latest satellite technology. The ultimate in search equipment would lock in on the broad-beamed signal and an airborne triangulation unit would correlate the data as it was down-linked back to Phu Bai radio research.

  At 1330 we are at the edge of a bleached boneyard of drift beside the blue feature, a pile of white litter that lies strewn like a discarded ribbon alongside the riverbank. The load of quarter-mil Dexis, tepid Kool-Aid, and the fun of humping a ninety-pound ruck in this heat has really combined to start kicking my ass. I step forward into the deep drift, shifting my weight carefully and watching for trip wires and mines and things that go bump. I feel my boot crunch down through the dry driftwood, and hallucinate for a fraction of a second as I flash on a chunk of white wood the size and shape of a skull.

  My mind speeds through a blurred 16-mm print of Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Long John Silver, Blackboard, Jolly Roger, Terry and the Pirates, The Phantom. DWI driver’s ed films of skulls peeled open, decapitation in Cambodia, skull images. My boot crunches down through the fragile wood with a sound of pulverizing bone that totally bums me out. The last thing I need right now is to start hallucinating skulls.

  Parallel to the top of the H on its side, there is an overgrown, hardball trail that runs alongside the ribbon of drift as we continue to walk up river. Floating tree limbs leave amber stripes in the dirty water like small boats leaving a little brown wake. A wisp of smoke from some distant fire hangs above the green tree line in the distance. The RTO, who is walking my slack, says for no reason, “Wham, bam! Pineapple jam.”

  “Say what,” I mutter sotto voce without turning.

  “Huh?” D’Allesandro asks, and the guy in front of him turns and asks him,

  “D’jew say somethin’?”

  “Jam,” I mutter.

  “Jam it?” D’Allesandro says.

  “You jam it,” the dude in front of him says.

  We continue through the afternoon heat and the endless day. Already a day two days long. We move parallel to the blue and slightly off the trail that is almost certain to be booby-trapped, inching next to the tree line. We are at the edge of paddies, which are bisected by a series of muddy dikes. The tendril of smoke can now be seen curling from a dogpatch village at the far end of the next field.

  Remember Dogpatch in the comic strips? That dogpatch looked like Richbitch City compared to the dogpatches here, impoverished hamlets begging to be Zippoed. A sickening stench hangs in the stifling, breezeless air around the hootches as we cautiously make our way toward the dogpatch, edging alongside the trail. We can hear a rooster crowing in the distance, crowing in Vietnamese in the heat of the day as we move into this all-penetrating pocket of smell. The lieutenant and Ewell continue their ceaseless call-and-response litany. “Spread it out . . . Don’t bunch up . . . Spread it out there . . .” which they alternate, repeating it over and over all day, every day. It is their joint — so to speak — rosary which they say in the classic manner, first the El Tee, then the Sarge.

  “Spread it out.”

  “C’mon, let’s spread it out there, now.”

  The bishop speaks, then the altar boy repeats the litany. He jams on the bishop’s chord changes, and so a simple request to “Spread it out” can be repeated.

  “Spread it out there, goddammit — how many times we gotta tell ya?”

  “Hey, Gunny, we’re spread, for fuck’s sake, Jeezus.”

  “Mortar shell take half you right out there, girls, spread it out. I done tole ya five hunnert times awready.” Sergeant Andy Ewell, MOS: ass-kicker. M-70 blocker, blooper, thump-gun, 40-mm grenade-launcher man, grenadier, tube man, like that there. Just another friendly E-7 asshole trying to get it done. Cut and dried. The lifer mentality.

  He looks the part. You can see a general saying to him on cam
era, “Where you from, son?” I’m from Audiemurphyville in the American Heartland, sir.

  “Edina, Minnesota,” he says. But only one thing is in Ewell’s head:

  “Come on, come on,” let me show ya, um hmm.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace . . .” the name of the game is.

  “Spread it out, dammit.” Jody was home when ya left, you’re right.

  “Don’t bunch up — keep it spread out there, people, don’t ya ladies know nothin’ fer crissakes! Come on, goddammit!” Blessed art thou among women.

  “Slop that goddamn bunchin’ up how many fuckin’ times — ”

  The Lost Patrol. Victor McLaglen, Boris Karloff, and Wallace Ford.

  “ — Do I gotta’ tell ya! Kee-rist on a fuckin’ crutch!” Yeah. Right. Gotcha. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

  Chapter 10

  “You are all fair, my love; there is no flaw in you.”

  — Song of Solomon 4:7

  Bare of any flirtation, their original relationship had simply been a coming together of like souls, the kind of march that seldom results in a true bond of closeness, each of them too much like the other so that the self-revealing aspect heightens into an uncomfortable self-criticism. But such was not the case with Princess and her new friend.

  In several nights spent in the other’s company, they had only made love three times, and that had been in their first weeks of acquaintance. Her friend was in love with someone else to begin with.