by Ron Lealos
“He holes up in an old villa at the abandoned rubber plantation outside Vin Khe. His office is downtown. It’s about twenty klicks southeast. He’s got a squad of ARVN Rangers protecting him. Uses the wine cellar to torture the locals. I heard he’s even better than you with a knife.”
The soft jacket bullet went into Viper’s head between the eyes and sloshed around in his brain, ripping pieces into stew. Behind Viper’s mangled head, a scorpion dashed for a new hidey-hole.
No one saw me go into the hootch. No one saw me leave. Barry McGuire sang “Eve of Destruction” as I went out the door and blended into the jungle, Viper’s ring finger in my pocket. That night, I visited Colonel Hoang.
The slit in the bargirl’s short skirt ran from above her knee to her purple panties. A brown and black bruise tattooed her thigh. Breasts the size of M26 grenades peeked from the scoop of her yellow-and-green flowered dress. Pink makeup failed to cover the mortar craters that pocked the bargirl’s face and stained the tips of the black hair that hung to her bare shoulders. The dark-red lipstick on her mouth was thick and smeared.
“Good ruck to you, GI,” the bargirl whispered in my ear for the hundredth time in the last hour. Her name was Dom. “Drink.” Dom raised her glass and looked across the Formica tables at the bartender.
On the stage, a woman in a black leotard and a white T-shirt jammed with three Vietnamese men in jeans. They were practicing for the night’s stage show. If I closed my eyes, the band could be the Beatles. “Ruv, ruv me do, you know I ruv you.” The woman’s pageboy haircut and voice was pure Paul McCartney.
The sign above the thatched canopy outside the front door read HOLLEYWOOD. Across the busy street, shirtless men in shorts patched the walls of an old French building that used to be headquarters for the local colonialist government. Vin Khe had been shelled for three days during the Tet Offensive, and the building had craters that gaped above the surrounding banana trees. The three-story building was the daytime home to Colonel Hoang.
This afternoon, the biggest danger to me was the MPs. Phoenix agents didn’t carry military ID or dog tags. Dom was on my lap and I sat on a vinyl chair against the wall in the shadows of Holleywood. If the military police walked in, I hoped I looked like any other horny bush rat in from the boonies, hunting for beer and pussy.
At least my fatigues were clean. After the ambush, it took five piasters in a village two klicks outside Vin Khe, and a toothless mama-san washed my uniform and gave me a bath. The Hush Puppy and the fighting knife sat next to a bar of soap a foot from my hand while she scrubbed my back. Greasepaint and mud made the bathwater black. The red tint came from the leech wounds and gook sores that dotted my legs.
From the chair, I had a clear view of Hoang’s home and office. Two ARVN soldiers stood at attention alongside a wrought-iron gate, M16s across their chests. Jeeps carried uniformed soldiers, both Vietnamese and American, into the compound after a brief ID check. Sandbags were piled twenty high against the parts of the wall without mortar holes.
The street between Holleywood and the building was busy with smoking motorcycles, peasants in pajamas, bicycles, young women in colorful ao dais, and merchants hawking chickens and snakes. Kids chased each other through the crowd. Carts, pulled by oxen or water buffaloes, fought for a place on the road with Citroens, trucks, and jeeps, while the motorcycles zipped through the traffic with mechanical whines. A thirty-foot red billboard stood to the right of Hoang’s building. COCA-COLA was written in English and Vietnamese in white letters. Exhaust fumes mixed with the smell of overripe fruit and meat, sewage, and piles of steaming garbage. Honking horns, motorcycles without mufflers, and people cursing echoed through Holleywood’s open doors.
“You rike fucky-suck?” Dom asked, her tongue in my ear. Dom rolled her hips and put my hand in her crotch. “Dom make number one boom boom with GI sodjer.”
“Maybe later, Dom,” I said. It had been at least thirty seconds since my last refusal. The Smith & Wesson Mark 9mm in my left pocket rubbed against a leech bite. I moved the pistol so the muzzle pointed toward the silver ball chandelier that hung from the ceiling. The six-inch-long silencer was stuffed in the breast pocket of my fatigues next to the garrote.
“You ba de? Nancy boy?” Dom asked. Dom jerked away. I might be infectious.
“No, Dom,” I said. “Just a little tired. Here’s a hundred p. Go get that drink you ordered.”
Dom took the money and kissed me on the cheek. “Cam on, sodjer,” she said. Her black stiletto heels tapped on the broken linoleum as she swayed toward the bar.
A staff jeep flying Democratic Republic of Vietnam flags from the antennas pulled to the gate of Colonel Hoang’s headquarters. The two guards saluted and opened the gates without inspecting IDs. In the back of the jeep, an ARVN general with braids on both shoulders stared straight ahead through his gold-framed sunglasses.
My jacket was assassin. Killer on command. Didn’t think about whose head got the specially designed Super Val subsonic cartridge blasted into their skull. It didn’t matter. The enemy was behind every bush, in every hootch, and riding every bicycle in ’Nam. Even the South Vietnamese couldn’t sort it out. The head of the Saigon government, Nguyen Cao Ky, thought the commander of I Corps, General Thi, was plotting a coup. Ky sent troops to Da Nang to liberate the city from the Viet Cong. While US Marines fought the VC outside Da Nang on Hill 327, dying to save the country from godless Communism, Ky’s fighter planes strafed the city in an attempt to kill Thi and his loyal ARVN troops. The South Vietnamese soldiers fought each other more effectively than they did the Viet Cong. Warlords after a bigger piece of the turf. Da Nang wasn’t the only place. My gut told me that Colonel Hoang was somehow doing the same and Liem was one of the victims.
Dom sat a Tiger beer on the table in front of me and sipped her Coke masquerading as bourbon. If all the booze I paid for had been real, Dom would be shooting her fish ball lunch on the linoleum. Instead, she twirled the little red umbrella that floated in her glass.
The beer washed down two more Dexedrine tablets from my pocket. One morning, after coming back to base still high from a handful of Dex and a successful op, I looked into my reflection next to the field shower. The mirror was a pie plate nailed to a bamboo post. My dull, blue eyes were covered in a sheet of glass that stared back at me. A tic threatened to pop out my bulging eyeballs. Cheeks writhed like they were full of baby snakes. I looked down a tunnel filled with a kaleidoscope of black-haired heads. A hollow thousand-yard stare. At my hootch, I used the fighting knife to shave a ball of opium. Shaking hands made it hard to light the pipe. It took two bowls to come down.
The uppers made the scabs on my legs itch. I used the handle of the Gerber fighting knife strapped to my calf to scratch.
“Why you watch gia loc?” Dom asked. House. “You no rike Dom?” She put her arm around my back.
“Looking for buddies,” I said. “Sure, I like you.” I glanced at Dom and played with the bone ring from Viper’s finger in my pocket.
“Good ruck to you, GI,” Dom said. She raised her Coke in a toast. A blob of eyeliner made the lashes on her right eye form a tar ball of black hair. One of her front teeth was brown, and steel glittered from her molars.
Two drunk marines stumbled into Holleywood, arms draped on the other’s shoulders. A table and chair crashed to the floor as they made their way to the bar.
“Semper fi, comrade,” one of the marines said to the bartender. He saluted without his hand getting anywhere near his forehead. “Gimme one a’ them fuckin’ bottles of piss you gooks call beer.” He slapped his hand on the wooden bar.
“Make that two buffalo pisses, Uncle Ho. Ricky-ticky,” the other marine said. He leaned both elbows on the bar, legs wobbling like he had run a marathon.
Time to di di mau. I came into Holleywood for the view and the quiet. Two rowdy jarheads and the MPs wouldn’t be far behind. I couldn’t risk it. I handed Dom another 100 p and stood to leave.
“No reave, sodjer,” Dom
said. “Go back room good boom boom.” She pulled on the sleeve of my fatigues.
“Gotta split,” I said. “Take the money and buy yourself another drink.” I patted the back of Dom’s hand and started toward the door.
“Hey, Cummings,” one of the marines said. His finger was pointed in my direction. “Lookee over there. A boonie rat turnin’ down pussy. Now ain’t that just like them army girls. What unit you with, young lady, the asshole First? The bend-over Butt-allion?” He slapped his greens with his palm.
“Naw, Barbosa,” the other marine said. “When real fightin’ men come around, he’s gotta turn tail and run home to Mommy.” He drained the Tiger in one long swallow and put it gently on the bar. “Uh-oh, Cummings. I think he’s gettin’ a blue veiner looking at two of America’s proud and brave.”
Dom strolled across the pitted floor to the marines, hands pushing up her breasts. The Beatles sang, “She ruvs me, yaa, yaa, yaa.”
“Now here’s a gook gash with good taste,” Cummings said. He pulled Dom to his chest and nuzzled her hair, not her mouth. Barbosa ordered another beer and threw me a kiss. “Bye, sweetie,” he said.
Didn’t matter if the bars were named Holleywood, Sin City, or Pussey Galores, they were all the same. Drunken, horny grunts trying to forget, even for a second as short as it took to leave their buddy’s white brain matter on their filthy fatigues. Ready to fight the evil blooming in their chests.
A bar in Cần Thơ. Three boonie rats just in from the bush. “Jenkins was the best,” one grunt said. “The best LT we ever had. Not sayin’ much with all the other baby fuckheads we got before.”
Another said, “Aw, fuck. Just one more a’ them West Point faggots. Thought his spit-shine shit didn’t stink till that sniper tore off the back a’ his head. Beggin’ for someone named Claire. Fuckin’ asshole.”
A few minutes of arguing and toasting the lost friends before the fight. From across the room, I watched the first marine break his beer glass on the counter and try to rip out the eyes of his buddy. Seconds and the view in the bar was of flying chairs and fists. The way we honored our dead. Before the MPs arrived to stop the wake, I di di’ed.
Outside, the street was still alive with traffic and people. I had another few hours to kill before dark and no seconds to waste teaching drunk marines good manners. Time to do a walk-around of Hoang’s place.
On the hard-packed street, two small boys ran by. Flip-flop sandals slapped the clay. Smudges of dirt covered their skin and torn shorts. One of the boys stopped and turned back to me, a bamboo stick in his hand. He pointed it at my head and shot. I raised my finger and shot back. The boy fell to the ground laughing. I helped him up and gave him a 25 p coin. “Cam on, buddy boy,” the boy said.
Behind the building, a grove of scarred palm trees and poinsettia bushes hid my recon. The French shutters on the walls of the building were open, and ceiling fans pushed the dense air around. A parade of US and ARVN soldiers, along with a few businessmen, passed the windows. Sun-faded bullet holes made the walls look like saltine crackers.
Mosquitoes rose from puddles below the palm trees and bit my face. Another way ’Nam sucked my blood. In-country. The World. Once I heard a raggedy-ass, two-tour grunt returning from a week-long bush patrol say he “couldn’t find The World on any fuckin’ map” he’d seen lately. Besides, he’d “been in-country all day.” ’Nam was the reality. The military ordered the troops to bring in body counts. If it used to walk or breathe and was Vietnamese, it was VC. Count ’em. My talent was to sneak up on VC and jumble their brains, a useful skill when I got back to The World. The CIA could collect on their training by sending me to other places where our way of life was threatened. Maybe sail to Cuba for another shot at Fidel. Or his wife.
A Vietnamese man with one arm and one leg used a bamboo crutch to walk down the alley behind Hoang’s building. A pair of khaki shorts went to the thigh and a ripped tank top hung past his waist. He kicked off the sandal on his remaining foot and sat in the shade of the wall facing me. The man started to count the change in a dented metal cup in his left hand. It wouldn’t be long before he spotted me.
I didn’t want to grease him. I moved further into the bushes.
The man took a package of Tip Top tobacco out of his pocket. With his one hand, he rolled a smoke and lit it, leaning back against the wall and closing his eyes. Could be he lost his limbs to a “Bouncing Betty” land mine. The VC ones that sent shrapnel flying upward and made you a few legs lighter. Bouncing Betties littered the trails and roads of the Delta. Or maybe he stepped on a coconut shell loaded with gunpowder and holding live cartridges that ripped off his leg and severed his arm. Hell, it could have been a thousand ways. Innocent wasn’t in the vocabulary of ’Nam. Bloody limbs were a mainstay in the diet of a Vietnamese rat.
The rain started. Not the drizzle I saw in my hometown of Seattle. Real fucking rain. The kind that drove you into the ground like a tent peg. The kind that didn’t make a little pitter-patter noise, but roared like you were standing inside Snoqualmie Falls. There were no drops. Just a million rivers that made it impossible to see if the one-legged man was still against the wall across the alley. I di di maued from my hiding spot to a restaurant I had seen on A Do Road.
During my carp and rice dinner, I kept Colonel Hoang’s face in my mind. The afternoon’s recon had provided a picture of a stocky man with a mustache and shaved sidewalls who smoked a cigar and constantly scratched his jaw. A streak of pink skin showed through his black hair where a bullet had grazed his skull. Hoang smiled with teeth so perfect they had to be false. His visitors treated him like the conquering warlord he was, bowing in and out of his office. I had to blend in for the next four or five hours and hope Hoang stayed at the office during the monsoon.
* * *
The ARVN guards at the back of Hoang’s building were huddled out of the rain under the porch by a louvered door. I had jumped the wall an hour ago and watched them smoke and laugh. I crouched behind a cement and marble fountain that must have once held a cherub spouting water. Now the cherub was headless and pitted with bullet holes, a bent copper pipe sticking six inches above the shoulders of the statue.
Lights flickered through the slats of the windows. Brief shadows made me guess that Hoang was somewhere on the third floor, in bed at 2 a.m. I made a final check of the Hush Puppy, knife, and garrote and crawled through the mud to a corner window. The Gerber easily popped the latch. Any sound was muffled by the rain that had long ago soaked through to my skin.
A formal dining room had everything but chairs to sit in around the twenty-five-foot-long table. The tricolors of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam covered the wall on the left, and across the buckling mahogany tiles, an open double door led to a hallway lit by wall lamps. The minutes passed, and I got used to the dim light. Framed oil portraits of Vietnamese in military uniform appeared between the windows. The smell of wet, soggy clay and mildew filled the building. In the corner, steady drops from a leak spattered onto the floor.
At the double door, I watched as a guard made his rounds, disappearing up the winding staircase. He carried an M16. A Colt semiautomatic hung from the guard’s polished leather holster. I followed him, making sure my boots didn’t squish on the marble stairs, Hush Puppy in my right hand.
The guard went down the second-floor hall. I climbed the stairs to the third. A long tapestry ran the length of the hall. Yellowed bell shades covered the few lights that burned. Alcoves held gold-painted Buddhas, candles, and small flower vases.
The handle on the third door to the left turned without a click. I stepped inside the room that I figured held the sleeping Hoang.
In the corner, a table lamp with a flowered shade gave muted light to the bedroom. Next to a window cracked open a few inches, a man slept in a canopied bed. The mosquito netting was curled in a ball high on the frame, not draped over the four-poster. A gold-plated Beretta dangled from the back of a wooden chair by a holster filled with 9mm caliber ammo, and a colonel�
��s uniform was hung over a mannequin that stood on a metal leg. On the bedside table, a mug with a pair of dentures sat next to a stack of files and reading glasses.
I slid across the room and pinched Hoang’s nose. When he opened his mouth, I shoved in one of his freshly cleaned black socks from beside his polished brogues, grabbed the Hush Puppy, and shot him in the hand. My arm barely felt the buck of the pistol. The bullet went through the flesh and lodged in his satin pillow with a phhffupp.
Colonel Hoang opened his eyes and tried to sit up, but the Hush Puppy pressed to his forehead wouldn’t let him. Grunting sounds came from his mouth. He tried to grab the bleeding hand that flopped on the red-stained pillow.
“Do you understand that I’m serious, Colonel?” I asked, my lips six inches from his ear. “Nod your head yes and quit squirming, or the next slug goes into your brain.”
Maybe it was the Dexedrine, but everything in the room was crystal clear. No chatter cluttered my head. No bodies mocked me from behind my eyelids. No doubts leeched my soul. I was a professional trained to “terminate with extreme prejudice.” Another night at the office, but I didn’t want Hoang to know he only had a few minutes to live.
Hoang nodded his head up and down. His eyelids were opened wide enough to disappear into his skull. The bleeding hand laid still, a dime-size hole in the middle of the palm.
“A few days ago, outside Vinh Doc, I had to shoot a dog,” I said. “Felt bad. But it only lasted a few heartbeats. Do you think I’ll feel any worse after I grease you?” I moved the Hush Puppy from his forehead to his balls and shoved hard. “Answer me.” The end of the pistol’s barrel stopped at Hoang’s tailbone. First rule of interrogation. Make ’em know who’s in charge.
Hoang bobbed his head side-to-side and moaned.
“Im lang,” I said. Quiet.
Hoang’s legs and good arm were pinned to the bed by the weight of my body on the thin blanket. I took out the Gerber fighting knife and held it in front of his eyes. The light from the lamp reflected off the sharpened blade, and the knife at Hoang’s ear nicked a lobe so Hoang would feel the blood drip.