by Terry Irving
Even as a teenager, it had been clear to Rick that there were many advantages to having a second identity, so he’d applied for a Social Security card when he started both his first and second jobs and taken his driving test at two locations. "Jack" Putnam had already run up so many points that there were bench warrants out for his arrest, but Vietnam veteran "Rick" Putnam was an upstanding citizen without a single black mark on his record.
Deciding that being a bit late getting back was preferable to running into that jerk in the black Chevy, he took the back exit from the airport and danced his way back to the bureau through dark Pentagon parking lots, past the brightly lit Iwo Jima Monument, and over Key Bridge.
He rode with his usual caution and concentration regarding other drivers, but with most of his mind turning over the same question.
Why would anyone be out to get him?
CHAPTER 8
Still warmed by the peppery combination of kimchee and Korean beef, Rick barely felt the chill as he drove up North Carolina Avenue onto Capitol Hill. As usual, he was struck by how nice a place Washington was to live in – almost a guilty secret, considering that many of the amenities, the parks, the museums, the open public spaces came from the lavish use of other people’s taxes.
On Capitol Hill, the tidy row houses were divided evenly between brick that had been left in its original colors and brick that had been painted in blues, whites, and some surprising yellows and pinks. Tall trees lined the road and provided shade that was a blessed relief in the hot and humid summer months. It was a quiet neighborhood – much like a small town even though it was only three blocks from the Capitol; Rick could almost imagine the government clerks of post–Civil War Washington in their Homburgs and spats as they walked with their wives, holding parasols, and admired their new homes.
Of course, there were some pretty awful housing projects just a few blocks to the south. He could feel the smoldering resentment every time he crossed the invisible line that separated white from black. Even so, projects were unusual in DC – an error made by well-meaning liberals in the sixties. Most of the poorest areas were still quiet streets of small houses – far different from the cramped industrial ghettos of northern cities like Philadelphia and New York.
He pulled up to a brick house on the corner of North Carolina and 3rd Street SE. It was a surprisingly roomy two-story place, which had been home for at least three sets of housemates that Rick knew of, and there may have been more. What he did know was that whoever had actually signed the lease to the Foreign Service couple who owned it now was long gone. Apparently, so long as the cashier’s checks were deposited in the house bank account and no one burned the place down, the owners weren’t about to change things.
He jumped off the BMW, leaving it in first gear. Feathering the clutch, he ran alongside as the engine ran the heavy machine over the curb and up the board placed on the side of the three steps up to the backyard. He jockeyed the bike over to the back of the small rear courtyard – just a concrete patio, really – put the front wheel up against a solid metal drainpipe, and secured it with the chunky padlock on a heavy chain looped around the pipe. Yanking on the chain to be certain it was secure, he took off his helmet and went up the wooden steps to the kitchen.
Corey Gravelin – one of his housemates – sat at the kitchen table, eating Special K and reading The Wall Street Journal. He was tall and slim with chiseled features, hair just this side of too long, with a neatly trimmed mustache. Corey wore his usual after-work outfit, which in his case simply meant that he had removed the jacket from his blue three-piece suit, carefully folded back his French cuffs, and fractionally loosened his tie. He was one of those men whose good looks made other men wonder if he was gay.
Rick would have been entirely sure Corey was gay if not for the fact that he worked for an extremely conservative Republican congressman and was always accompanied by a stunning woman when he attended events like a Kennedy Center gala or a charity dinner. In either case, Corey’s sexual orientation didn’t concern Rick. There had been a few guys in the Seventh Cavalry who Rick had been fairly sure swung that way, but they could be counted on in a firefight, and that was all that mattered.
Corey looked up. "How’s it going, Rick?"
"Not bad. Anything new in the world?"
"Well, the last guys to walk on the moon are heading home; the President has stopped being Mr Nice Guy to the North Vietnamese. He’s got B-52s going all the way to downtown Hanoi this time and…" He paused to look at the paper. "Yeah, the White House is going to take away the Post’s TV stations if they don’t cut out their bullshit crusade over Watergate." He sat back in his chair. "That whole thing is just overblown, don’t you think?"
Rick smiled, and then stuck his head in the refrigerator to see what was there. "Man, you know I don’t do politics."
"Yeah, but you were in Vietnam. You must see how the left wing is making it easier for the communists with all this crap?"
Rick grabbed an apple and turned around, leaning back against the counter. He took a bite and chewed for a moment.
"I’ll tell you, the main thing Vietnam taught me was ignorance. I went in thinking I knew what I was doing, and that the President and the Pentagon knew what they were doing, and I came out pretty sure that no one had a clue."
Corey turned back to the paper. "Well, I’m glad my boss is on Banking, and I won’t have to deal with the circus they’re setting up in the Senate. Sam Ervin is a grandstanding fool – ‘simple country lawyer’, my ass."
"Hey, a nice scandal will mean longer hours and more dough for me, so I guess" – Rick’s voice took on a stentorian tone like a politician on the stump – "they should follow the trail wherever it leads."
His voice back to normal, he said, "Let’s go from the sublime to the ridiculous. What are the Three Musketeers up to?"
The Three Musketeers were the other housemates, computer programmers who kept the mainframes running at places like General Electric, Westinghouse, and Riggs Bank. At least that’s what they claimed. Rick was pretty sure from their conversations that they spent most of their time playing Spacewar! on the powerful machines.
"Who knows? I haven’t seen them, and I can’t figure out what they’re doing when I can see them."
Still eating his apple, Rick wandered out into the living room. It was empty, but he could hear excited voices coming from the half-finished basement downstairs.
The three computer techs were sitting around a wobbly folding table, fiddling with what looked like a typewriter in a small suitcase. Steve Lord, a slow-speaking South Carolinian with a full beard, was wearing a T-shirt from a Sly Stone concert, cut-off jeans, and sandals. Rick knew that this was what he usually wore to work and had once asked if that was the way most people at GE dressed.
Steve said that his bosses hated his clothes but knew their computers would go down in a week if he wasn’t there.
Neither of the other men had Steve’s self-confidence, or much of any self-confidence at all. Zeke Pickell was a short, hyperactive kid from Oregon with bushy red hair and a tendency to wear patterned sweaters. He was known as "Eps", which Rick gathered had something to do with "Epsilon" being computer-guy code for something small.
The last of the trio, Scott Shaw, had been commanded to "Beam me up!" so often that he’d good-naturedly taken the Star Trek engineer’s nickname as his own and would occasionally refer to "dilithium crystals" in a thick Scottish burr. With his buzz-cut hair, short-sleeved white shirts, and pocket protector, he looked older and perhaps a bit more deliberate than his friends. Rick knew Scotty was probably the brightest of them all – he’d graduated from MIT in only three years at the age of eighteen.
"What’s going on?" Rick said. "And what the hell is that?"
"This is so cool. It just came out, and we got one of the first off the assembly line. This" – Eps swept his hand towards it like a model on a game show showing off a Cadillac convertible – "is a Digi-Log Remote Interactive CRT. With this, we
can use a phone to go right into the computers at work."
"Why in God’s name would you want to?"
Steve replied, "Mostly so we don’t have to drive all the way to Bethesda every time the PDPs go down and everyone starts running around with their hair on fire." He turned back to the table. "See, it’s got a full keyboard, a monitor. Everything you need."
Rick pointed at the odd rubber cups at the back. "What are those for?"
Scotty, who was peering deeply into the tiny green letters on the tiny green monitor, silently shook his head at this display of ignorance.
Eps piped up. "Those are for the phone. You call up the computer and stick the phone right in there."
"Computers have phone numbers?"
"Sure." Steve grinned. "And we’ve got their phone book. That’s really what we’re doing – seeing what other computers we can get into."
"Again. Why?"
"It’s fun. Hell, it’s a game. We programmed most of the systems in town and friends of ours set up the rest. Consequently, we know most of the backdoors and system hacks."
Rick held up a hand. "Stop. ‘Backdoor’ almost makes sense, but what is a ‘system hack’?"
Scotty didn’t even look up. "One system hack is putting in a backdoor."
Rick stared at him for a moment in mock anger. "OK, don’t explain it to me." He turned back to Steve. "So, what are these games?"
"They try to protect their systems, and we try to break in."
"What do you get when you break in? Military secrets? Unlimited checking?"
Scotty finally sat back from his intense scrutiny of the monitor. "No, we just go in and look around. See if the other guys have any cool new tricks. Maybe leave them a note."
"It doesn’t sound like fun to me, but what do I know? I think a good time is riding motorcycles way too fast." Rick headed back upstairs. "Good night, guys."
In his bedroom, Rick stripped, put on a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt, and began the long ritual of going to sleep. Sleep, especially dreamless sleep, was a hard target. Memories were the enemy and exercises were the weapons of battle.
Except for his bed, which he still made with military precision, the only furniture in the room was a weight bench with carefully laid-out bars, collars, and plates. He began with some stretching, concentrating on his right arm and side, where scar tissue tended to tighten up during the day.
Then he began the hour-long workout he had developed and specifically structured for strength, speed, and power rather than muscle bulk. The VA doctors had been pleasantly surprised when he regained the use of his right arm and hand. After one of his regular exams, a doctor had told him that his body was held together by a web of muscles that had grown stronger to take up the work of all the cartilage and tendon lost in battle and the long series of surgeries that had followed. The doctor predicted that Rick would end up a cripple anyway – explaining that, over time, most people lost interest, stopped working the muscles, and lost the use of the limbs they’d regained with such difficulty.
Rick thought that since military doctors became officers the moment they signed up, the chances were good that he could prove this guy wrong – just like any other officer. Vietnam hadn’t left him with a high opinion of military leadership and judgment.
He’d been working out steadily since he got out of rehab, weights at night and his little pink rubber ball all day. Not only had he retained the use of his arm, but he was also pleased to find that he was now surprisingly strong. The other day, one of the secretaries had asked him to move a typewriter from one side of her desk to the other. He’d stood on one side, reached over, grabbed the typewriter and the typing table together, lifted both straight up and over the desk, and then gently lowered them to the floor in front of her. He hadn’t missed the looks that almost everyone in the newsroom had given him for that stunt.
Time passed, and he fell into the calm mental state that came with steady exercise. He went back over the incidents on 18th Street and at the airport. If they were connected, who was the driver, and why would anyone want to hit him? It was serious enough in regular city traffic, where the drivers acted as if he didn’t exist, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that this time he was a target.
Eventually, the exercise took over his mind completely, and he stopped thinking about anything. When he finished, he took a bath – one of the few failings of this house was a single bathroom and no shower – got into bed, and fell asleep immediately.
It’s full night, and he’s lying on his back on damp ground. Around him, the soft sounds of others trying to hide under the fragile cover of darkness. Suddenly, someone yells in Vietnamese and then there are screams.
The fucking Cong have found another wounded grunt. The screaming is going on and on, and then a burst of gunfire and silence. They’ve taken to firing directly into the poor bastards’ wounds after jabbing a bayonet or the barrel of an AK-47 deep inside.
Another American starts begging, "No. No. Please don’t." The voice ascends into wordless screams, and then gunfire.
Trying not to make a sound, he reaches around him, searching with his fingers, but his rifle is gone. Lost.
Where the fuck did he lose his rifle?
Slowly, he moves over to his left. Sergeant Cook had used his .45 to blow the back of his head out a couple of hours ago. It should still be here.
The searching fingers hit metal.
The .45 feels sticky but solid. He hopes the blood and brain matter haven’t jammed the mechanism.
There is a rustling in the grass. A boot touches his leg.
They have AKs. The .45 is useless.
He tries to hold his breath, stop his heart, and freeze the blood pounding through his veins.
Then the boot hits him in the right arm and drives the shrapnel deep…
Rick woke with his throat locked, straining to hold back the scream. His heart was pounding and the bed was soaked in sweat. The yellow sodium light from the streetlights outside filled the room. He’d taken down the curtains when he first moved in – their moving shadows were too lifelike. He needed his environment to be fixed, solid, and without nuance.
He looked at the clock on the windowsill.
Three hours.
Not bad. Three hours would get him through the next day.
That’s all he could expect. Most days, it was the best he could do.
Gradually, his heartbeat slowed, the screams in his throat retreating to wherever they went in the sane times.
He swung his legs off the bed and sat, rubbing his face with his hands. Then he got up and paced, taking slow, deep breaths and shaking the tension out of his arms and back.
Eventually, he stripped and remade the bed with the clean sheets he’d left neatly folded on the closet shelf. Then he dressed – making sure that he put on all the insulating layers he owned.
It was time to dance.
First, the sharp twists and blind turns up Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park and then a slash run back through the early morning traffic on Reno Road. That should work.
It was still a couple of hours until dawn. He could still be on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in time – right when the sun came up.
Rick moved quietly, so as not to disturb his housemates, and headed downstairs and out the back door.
His housemates heard the back door lock click and relaxed in their beds knowing that now they could finally sleep without sharing the tortured agony of Rick’s war.
CHAPTER 9
Wednesday, December 20, 1972
After the battle in the Ia Drang Valley, after the long, painful journey through aid stations to MASH units to hospitals in Japan and, finally, VA centers in the United States – after he took off the uniform and folded it away in a box at his father’s house – Rick had gone to college.
He didn’t wear his old GI jacket, didn’t write letters to newspapers, didn’t march in protests or counterprotests, didn’t throw his medals away – in fact, he didn’t look at them a
t all. His classmates knew he was older, quieter; he asked a lot of questions in class, but they were real questions, not opinions disguised as questions. He didn’t make many choices, like a career or even a major. He just took whatever classes seemed appealing.
The image of a career – or marriage or a future of any kind – had been erased in the battle that had wiped out so many of his friends. He almost didn’t graduate, but a professor whose son was never coming back from the war approved him for a general studies degree, saying with a note of sadness that Rick would have lots of time to figure out what he really wanted to do with his life.
He spent a year living in a dorm before he rented his own apartment. The young guys who lived on his hall learned not to make loud noises – his response to the idiot who had set off an M-80 firecracker right outside his window had been particularly impressive.
He had to explain to Andy, his roommate, why he should simply tell him that the dining hall was about to close. Shaking him awake triggered automatic battle reflexes. He had to buy the poor guy a nice tie to cover the finger-shaped bruises around his neck. Andy said everything was fine, but for the rest of the semester, Rick noticed that his roommate would only speak to him from the safety of the doorway. After that, he made sure to live in places where he could at least sleep alone.
He was adrift, looking for a new life where the sun shone and there were fewer terrors in the shadows. Living within the memories of Vietnam was too painful, so he tried desperately to be normal – much like his dad in 1946 – just someone trying to get on with an interrupted life. The people around him caught the request implicit in his silence and did not ask to share his thoughts or try to ease his burden.