by Ron Lealos
“The way I see it,” he said, “I really got the choice of leavin’ now. Or waitin’ for the death squad to blow this joint to Cần Thơ. Maybe you’re right. Ain’t got no home left, but that ain’t no reason to commit suicide in this fuck-all place. You neither.”
Donaldson stepped toward an old rucksack under the cot and began to stuff a pile of molding clothes inside.
From over his shoulder, he said, “Can’t refuse a cordial invite like yours. Been meanin’ to see some new country anyways.”
No nostalgic glance around the filthy room. Donaldson obviously had known for months his tour of ’Nam was destined to end in an unmarked mud grave or floating with the dead pigs in the Son Sai Gon if he didn’t run. The risk was that he didn’t care. Like me. But some light still burned in the Zippo of his soul, and he stood, hoisting the pack over his shoulder.
“You first, spook,” he said, nodding toward the door.
At the bottom of the stairs, I heard him softly say, “Peace, brother.” When I turned, I expected to see him standing, two fingers in a V, saluting another lost comrade. But he was gone, melting into the bushes like so many stories in this tortured land.
The Phoenix headquarters stayed open all hours. I laid Donaldson’s and the other guy’s dog tags on Williams’s desk. Earlier, I read the spy’s name was O’Malley and he was a Catholic. There must have been some catastrophe in a land consumed by them or Williams would be throwing back aged Kentucky Bourbon with the elite class who stayed at the Rex. I didn’t say a word, while Williams turned the tags over in his hands.
The long stare was right out of the scene repeated every day all over ’Nam. The one where the cherry lieutenant said something stupid like, “We gotta take that bunker.” Or “Jones, crawl down that hole.” I didn’t know if Williams was planning to shoot me and have my body thrown in the brown water of the Son Sai Gon. But the longer I gazed, the more I knew this man didn’t want to kill me. Might get blood on his chinos. He just gave orders. If I walked out of this room without him calling the guards, I would have a pass, even if I didn’t want it. Seconds went by and, if he made a move for the pistol at his waist, I would break my oath of no more killing. He would be dead before he got the Colt out of its leather holster. Donaldson had probably already vanished into the jungle, and I only wanted to give him a reasonable head start away from Saigon. If Williams tried to give me another mission, it wasn’t gonna happen.
Finally, Williams blinked.
“So, Morgan,” he said. “Where are the bodies?”
The room was brighter than this morning, ceiling lights making every surface glare. Two black phones sat on Williams’s desk, polished like his English. Only two files were left and were stacked neatly in front of him. Pens, a pencil, and an eraser were lined up perfectly beside the documents. He wouldn’t last an hour in the muck of the boonies.
My eyes never left his.
“In the river,” I said. “You can dredge the whole damn thing if you want. You’ll probably find a lot more.”
More stares. He was deciding whether to believe me. But there was a risk. He knew I was a colonel’s son. He knew any hint of killing Americans by Americans would be a major public relations blunder. He knew publicity about an underground railroad was something the news hacks would feast on. He knew it was probably better to forget the doubts and lack of bodies or his long career at Langley would be in jeopardy. Hell, he could always blame somebody else as long as the news was kept quiet.
Now, there was no reason to lie to myself. To live anymore by a creed unwritten by Phoenix, but nonetheless followed like it was a warped Bible of murder. To kill innocents at the command of psychopaths and Stetson-wearing dwarfs. To sneak around in the night, a Hush Puppy my guide to unending dreams of death shots to the forehead. To hear the pphhuupp sound that echoed in my skull. To smell that final shit of my victims, a stink I thought coated my soul. When I left Seattle, I believed I knew who I was. A young man off to war, fulfilling his duty to God, family, and country, a timeless story. Outside an abandoned rubber plantation, rain puddling beside her head and mixing with her blood, I realized I wasn’t a patriot. Evil couldn’t be shrouded by Old Glory. There was something bigger than the misguided slaughter of the guiltless in pursuit of an unwinnable war. The only regret I had was it took so many bodies in their death dance to make me understand, while men like Donaldson showed true bravery. The demons still bombarded, but I only had to get by Williams for them to start retreating.
Tonight, at Phoenix headquarters, there wouldn’t be any heartfelt good-byes. No tears or pats on the back wishing me good cheer and lots of blond pussy. No “atta boy” for being the most lethal assassin off the books. Just like I carried the stench-ridden aura of stone killer throughout my tour, by my last day in country the executioners at Phoenix sensed I was no longer a believer. To a point, I had done what was required. Now, no more would die by the wire on my garrote. No one would twist as the Gerber punctured a lung. Any debts resulting from being born in America to a colonel and his walking-wounded wife were cancelled. And the corpses of those I killed had been honored with the bullets in Comer’s and Ky’s bodies. I was done, and I hoped sleep would someday come like the lazy white clouds over the Delta.
Williams looked down and opened the top file.
“Okay, Morgan,” he said. “Dismissed.”
The last time I felt like this, Comer died. And lots of others. Fucking “dismissed.” But the pledge still lived. No matter how much I wanted to slice his arrogant head from his shoulders with the Gerber, and how another body wouldn’t mean one more day in hell, I was finished. If I didn’t know where the next days would take me, I did know the killing was over. I didn’t move.
“I want on the next flight out of Da Nang stateside,” I said.
Williams closed the file.
“Be back here at oh-seven-hundred hours,” he said. “There’s a chopper leaving then.”
In the morning, a letter was handed to me before I stepped onto the Huey. It was from Mom and the first one I opened in twelve months. The chopper touched off, and I used the Gerber to slit the envelope.
Below, we flew past Armageddon. Smoke rose from cyclos, tanks, burning shit, cook fires, and bomb sites. Women bent over in rice paddies, water buffaloes close by. Lines of jeeps and AVs covered the mud roads, pushing aside the stream of peasants, thatched baskets balanced on their heads. Drooping palm trees struggled to stay alive in the rancid air. Not even the thwop … thwop … thwop of the Huey could drown out the boom of artillery. Beside me, there had been so much blood, the hoses couldn’t wash it away. The stain in the metal looked like the faces of a hundred grunts.
Dearest son,
I haven’t heard from you in a long time. I hope this letter finds you well. I know part of you is punishing me and your father, and I want you to forgive both of us. There are lots of things we didn’t tell you. Your father doesn’t believe in that kind of talk, but he loves you and so do I. We are still in the same house, and your room waits for you to come home, just like me. According to your father, it should be soon. When will we see you?
Love, your mother
The side where the door gunner rode was open. I threw the letter over his shoulder and watched it swirl away in the wind.
The Freedom Bird 727 from Da Nang was crammed with noisy grunts on their way back to The World. Stewardesses walked the aisles, moving quickly by the most drunken soldiers. Survival. A pinch or a grope was the limit these blue-uniformed women risked, while men with 365 days of horror decided if they were lucky or not sitting in the cloth-covered chairs. Or if wading through a rice paddy, mines hungry for a foot to touch the detonator and send a leg airmail to infinity was the reality their lives had become. Buddies in shiny green body bags roasted on the asphalt outside the Plexiglas windows and were not forgotten along with the ghosts who would haunt the returnee’s doubts like pus-filled wounds.
Beer was the drink of choice. Hours jammed together would be filled wit
h false camaraderie and stories, the fear of what awaited more powerful than a squad of NVA on the trail. Budweiser was the escape from the punji stakes of home poised at their hearts.
Many of the returning troops hadn’t bothered to shower after their final days in the boonies, even if they were dressed in parade ground tropical unis ready for the band to greet them when they touched the long-awaited soil of the motherland. Most of their last hours were spent signing rotation papers, too drunk to stand without leaning on the grunt in front of them in the line. The plane smelled like a firebase latrine, even after numerous sprayings with Lysol. Periodically, the chorus of the Country Joe McDonald classic would break out and resonate in the plane “And it’s one, two, three, what’re we fightin’ for? Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, next stop is Vietnam. And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates. Well there ain’t no time to wonder why, we’re all gonna DIE.”
Beside me, a grunt who couldn’t grow a beard if he tried seemed forty years old, and his eyes were the black of a dead water buffalo. When someone clapped, he jumped and ducked, trying to take cover behind the seat back in front of him. If he hadn’t just ended a tour of Southeast Asia, he looked like he’d be finishing up his senior year in high school somewhere in Kansas. Between mortar attacks, he chewed phantom fingernails bleeding from the hundreds of bites that came before.
Since I had never been regular army, I didn’t wear a uni. Along with a few days of growth on my chin, a khaki shirt, pants, and sandals were enough to signal most of the men not to talk to a spook without a name tag on his chest. The old jungle knowing told these hardened troops I was someone they didn’t want joining the nightmares they already had. That wasn’t me. Not anymore. Somewhere between a monsoon night, a green-eyed innocent, and this 727, I found out I wasn’t the ruthless killer Comer and the others created. That conviction didn’t stop me from ordering another cold Bud, but did make it taste better.
Looking around the plane, I didn’t feel kinship with any of these men. We may have come over for relatively similar reasons of duty, honor, and adventure. Or because we were forced to by a system hungry for young meat. But most of these grunts had a home, even if it would have changed to something they couldn’t imagine. Only the soldier beside me seemed too shell-shocked to celebrate.
“You gonna be okay, troop?” I asked the boy a few hours later, his arm beginning to tremble. He had refused anything to drink, and his eyes darted like fireflies around the crowded cabin.
Hearing my words, his gaze settled on a dirt spot scarring the knee of his uni. He wouldn’t look at me. I knew he thought I was the sapper crawling into the hootch of his mind.
“Don’t worry, soldier,” I said. “I’m retired.”
He began to pick at the stain, still not risking a glance, probably believing my eyes might be as vacant and dead as his.
None of us would ever be the same. Our rite of passage had been drowned in the blood of innocents. I could easily pick out the ones who had felt the terror of a night controlled by the VC. Or watched a buddy being loaded on a Huey, never to make the flight home alive. It was in the eyes. It was in the “don’t give a shit” posture. It was in the warped wrinkle of a smile. But none of them had done what I did. Their orders were clear, “Kill or be killed,” while mine were “Kill before they wake up.” I didn’t get where I would end up or who I might become. Only that I wouldn’t be a murderer.
The Bud was dry, and I wasn’t ready to join the grunts who now slept, ignoring the noise. For some, it was the first time out of a poncho in months. The stewardesses had turned down the lights and covered dozens of the men with blankets while they fought off the silly advances of those who wanted to drink their oblivion.
After a time, the party settled down, and the walls closed in. At least with the noise, I was enough distracted to only let the enemy invade the edges of my mind. Now the thoughts were of eyes and bodies and an unknown future. A life I didn’t know if I wanted to live. Or how. Somewhere over Guam, I decided my first stop would be Omaha. Donaldson’s mom needed to learn her son was alive. I owed him. Without his words, I would be a crispy critter in the ashes of the Last Hope.
The soldier alongside me didn’t sleep. He fidgeted in his seat and swiveled his neck at every loud sound, rarely without a fingernail in his mouth.
“Don’t worry, troop,” I said. “The ghosts will fade.”
I was beginning to think Donaldson was right.
I was twenty-three and had a whole life behind me. Don’t mean nuthin’ after all.