by Dale A. Dye
“Goddamn right we did! We got kicked out of three bars the way I heard it!”
“I’ve been away a long time, Pop. Let’s go for four.”
.
.
j
Propping his aching feet on the comer of his desk, the President dug around in a stack of manila folders until he found the one he wanted. It was buried among several reports from Vietnam including planned withdrawal statistics, reports on the Vietnamization Program, the latest body counts and estimates of ARVN capabilities. He perched a pair of reading glasses on the bridge of his nose and began to reacquaint himself with the pertinent details of a case he’d barely noticed before the Medal of Honor ceremony that morning.
The report indicated Salt and Pepper were nothing more than apocryphal battlefield myths. All attempts to confirm or disprove the persistent rumors of two American turncoats had proved futile. In his report, the officer who headed an extensive investigation put it all down to communist scare tactics, a typical propaganda ploy. Such rumors fueled the fire of anti-war sentiments among the troops in Vietnam. The myth had apparently taken on a life of its own among gossipy grunts who longed for something—anything—out of the ordinary to talk about. There was a reference to the way rumors became accepted truth and then legend among early sailors exploring the uncharted waters of the world. The first man on watch sees a large dolphin or a whale and mentions it to his shipmate. By the time the story reaches the fantail, everyone aboard swears they’ve spotted a marauding sea serpent.
The President examined the signature block on the report and closed the folder. If a MACV Intelligence colonel in Saigon said Salt and Pepper were a myth, that was good enough for him. There were more pressing problems at hand.
THE HOMEFRONT
When he surveyed the lobby bar in their expensive downtown hotel, Stosh Pudarski saw nothing but ties, tassels, and tits. He’d admired the well-endowed, clear-eyed women with obvious class and expensive taste. At least there were none of the barefoot, hippie snot-noses with braless breasts like the ones they’d seen in Georgetown on the first leg of their celebratory pub crawl. Now he and his son were back in their suite, half-lit and considering stretching the party down in the lobby bar, but Stosh was concerned about the clientele and their reaction to a rumpled old geezer from Chicago and a buzz-cut younger version who was obviously a serviceman. What worried Stosh were the male patrons he’d seen in the bar panting and pawing around the women. Puny little shits with tassels on their shiny shoes and big wide ties with so many colors and patterns it look like they puked down the front of their shirts. There was lots of long hair, droopy mustaches, and fat sideburns on the brainy bastards who sat home and bullshitted about the war while his son went off and fought it. In that company, the Pudarskis would be about as welcome as a tray full of turds at a tea party.
He heard his son shut off the shower and opened the door to the bathroom. “How about we order us up a jug and a six-pack from room service?”
Willy Pud stood naked in a maze of polished mirrors. A heat lamp in the ceiling of the steamy chamber gave his skin a strange amber glow except where the white pucker of bullet holes and the jagged ridge of shrapnel scars glowed in livid relief. Stosh tried to cut his eyes away from the sight, but everywhere he looked another mirror reflected the toll Vietnam had taken on his only son. He caught his own image over Willy’s shoulder and realized he was staring slack-jawed like some addled rube at a freak show.
“Seems like there’s a lot more scars than there were telegrams, Vilhelm.”
Willy Pud grinned and shrugged, reaching for a clean set of skivvies and his shaving kit. “I knew the stakes when I ante’d up, Pop. What’s the problem? You planning to enter me in a beauty contest?”
Stosh Pudarski grinned into the mirror as Willy began to shave. “I remember when you was little...that time you ran your bike into old man Cheever’s big ’47 Olds and cut your eyebrow open? Your Ma like to had a fuckin’ heart attack. Thought you was gonna be scarred for life, and we’d have to send you to a special school. All kinds of crazy shit over them stitches you got. I told her it don’t hurt for a man to have a few scars and nicks. Makes people think twice about fuckin’ with him.”
“So?” Willy dabbed at a few of his scars with a wet towel. “This shit make you change your mind?”
“I wasn’t talking about no bullet holes and these here...“ Stosh gingerly ran a finger along a rigid welt that ran from the back of Willy’s deltoid to a shoulder blade.
“Shrapnel, Pop. Gook eighty-deuce mortar: Sometimes it gets inside and tears your guts apart. Sometimes its little stuff and they pick it out like buckshot. Marine Corps would have gone broke if I had ’em send you a telegram every time I got some iron in my ass.”
Watching Willy splash the remnants of shaving lather from his cheeks and neck, Stosh Pudarski felt the stirrings of a long dormant emotion. It was the same feeling that washed over him unexpectedly sometimes when he’d watched his wife meticulously iron his work clothes. She knew those old khaki pants and shirts would look like hell after the first hour on the job, but she wanted her husband to start fresh, clean, looking good for his boss and his buddies. No reason for her to do it, except...well, you do stuff like that when you love somebody. It was always the little things she worried about. He tried not to let her stew over the bigger things like when he lost another job and there wasn’t enough money for the rent. He’d borrow from his buddies down at the bar and never let her know. That’s how you say it; that’s how you let someone know. And Wilhelm hadn’t wanted him to worry over the shrapnel wounds.
“How about that room service, son? Them people down in the bar, they all look like they got paper assholes. Probably have to teach the bartender to make a fuckin’ boilermaker.”
Willy Pud tossed his razor into a beat-up green canvas kit and began to brush the thatch of short, thick hair the Marine Corps had allowed him to keep on the top of his head. “Pop, I spent the last three years ducking people trying to kill me. I ain’t about to let no ignorant bastards in my own country force me into a bunker.”
Stosh watched his son struggle into a fresh uniform and shrugged. “I should have brought you some civilian clothes from home.”
“I wouldn’t know bow to wear ’em, Pop. Now let’s get this show on the road.”
j
With a sixth—or maybe seventh—boilermaker churning around inside his stomach, Willy Pud finally felt ready to return some of the frigid stares that swept over his back like Arctic wind in the lobby bar. He straightened up and pulled his elbows off the dark, stained wood where he’d been huddled next to his father. The effort revealed the decorations on the left chest of his uniform blouse to the mirror behind the bar and he noticed with wonder once again that the stack was topped with one pale blue strip sprayed with tiny white stars. He was a Medal of Honor winner…but winner didn’t seem like the right word. It wasn’t a fucking contest. Willy squirmed on his barstool and tried to think through the booze fog.
“Why are you squirming like that, Willy? You gotta piss again?”
Willy Pud ran a finger between chafed flesh and an unyielding uniform collar. “I’ll piss in one of them potted plants before I pass in review again for this gang of assholes.”
They’d been astride adjacent stools for the past two hours, but Willy Pud had made only one reluctant trip to the toilet, a trek that required him to shoulder through a throng of well-dressed drinkers clamoring for the attention of two overwhelmed bartenders. The hotel bar was packed, noisy with travelers’ tales, Washington gossip, and after-work unwinding that made Willy Pud’s sole effort to relieve the pressure on an overburdened and undertrained bladder such an ordeal. Wearing his service uniform, Willy had parted the crowd like a panhandler, pushing a wave of stony silence ahead of him.
As his son swiveled to inspect the crowd in the darkened room with defiant eyes, Stosh was delighted to notice most of the patrons refused to return his steady
gaze or dropped their eyes to the ribbons on his uniform and then quickly looked away. They mumbled into their drinks or stared into space as if there was no other logical place to look. Upending his beer glass, Willy gestured at the gleaming brass fittings that caged the bar’s perimeter.
“I ain’t seen this much brass since boot camp, Pop. You gotta figure it would take a ten-man working party two days and twenty gallons of Brasso to square this place away for inspection.”
Stosh Pudarski swiveled to follow his son’s gaze, but Willy was no longer staring at fixtures. His blue eyes had locked solidly onto a pair of shapely legs that poked out from under one of the free-form mushrooms that served as cocktail tables in the bar. On one end of those legs was a pair of spiky high-heeled shoes. On the other end—above a lavender miniskirt—was a bosomy brunette who tapped her teeth with a polished fingernail and openly appraised both Willy Pud and his uniform.
Stosh handed his son a shot and beer wondering if there was enough money left to buy him another room for the night. “There’s one you wouldn’t want to kick out of bed for eatin’ crackers.” If Willy Pud heard the old bromide, he didn’t react. He was watching the two men who were locked in animated conversation at the same table. The woman didn’t seem interested in the conversation or dispute. She lifted her drink and smiled in the direction of the bar where Willy Pud was openly ogling her. She had a dimple on one side of her mouth and little crinkles around her eyes.
‘ /
‘ /
“Why don’t you send her over a drink, Willy?”
“Looks like she’s got company tonight, Pop.”
“She ain’t payin’ no attention to them assholes—and that’s a lot of woman right there.”
“You know what a grunt would say about a woman like that, Pop?”
“No, but you’re gonna tell me, right?”
“A grunt would say he’d eat a mile of comm wire just to hear that woman fart over a Double-E-8 field phone.” Stosh roared and slapped the bar to signal the bartender for a refill as Willy Pud stood to straighten his uniform. He was just about to leave when he felt a snatch at his elbow. The bartender was jerking a thumb over his shoulder toward a TV set mounted in a corner of the room. It was too noisy to hear the commentary, but Willy discovered his trip to the White House was worth 30 seconds on the nightly news.
He stared at himself on the screen and thought he looked like nothing more impressive than a cornfield scarecrow as the President fussed around behind him and finally got the Medal of Honor hung around his neck. He saw himself grin—grimace was a better description—as various officials crowded around the ceremony to ensure they were within camera view. The short clip ended with him wearing the medal around his neck, standing and smiling, book-ended by his father and the President of the United States.
Stosh could not contain an exultant whoop. He smacked the bar and slid an arm around Willy’s shoulder. “Goddamn! Don’t you know them guys down at Hogan’s and the boys over to the VFW are watching this right now! You and me in the White House and on the goddamn national TV! Ain’t that something?”
“Guess it is, Pop.” Willy had turned away to look at the faces staring up at the TV from other spots in the bar. He didn’t see much interest, awe, or hero worship. If there was any interest at all among the lobby bar patrons in another American being presented the nation’s highest decoration for heroism in combat, he couldn’t detect it. He turned back to the bar ready to order another drink but the bartender beat him to it.
He was an older guy, going bald and fighting back against it with a set of long bushy sideburns. He smiled, shoved a brimming beer glass in Willy’s direction and stuck out a meaty hand to shake. “That’s on me, Sergeant. Semper Fi.”
Willy shook the outstretched hand and said thanks. The bartender waved it off with a smile. “I would have said something sooner but the crowd was busting my ass. I was Bravo One-Nine, The Walking Dead, ’66 and ’67.”
Willy introduced his dad and toasted the bartender. “Never can tell where you’ll run into another Marine—and thank Christ for small favors. I was beginning to feel like a whore in church around here.”
The bartender ignored the signals for service on his side of the bar. “Don’t see many uniforms in the city anymore, Sarge. Even the people stationed here are wearing civilian clothes these days.” He swept his arm toward the crowd in the bar. “These are all lobbyists or cubicle rats sucking off the government tit. Don’t pay any mind to them. They talk a good game but none of them ever played for real. Like we used to say in the Nam: It don’t mean nothing.”
The bartender finally yielded to the clamor for attention down the bar and left. Willy remounted his barstool and sipped at his beer. He felt a little better about their surroundings but not much. A gas bubble rippled up from his stomach and he let it burst in a loud, growling belch. His father swallowed air and echoed the sentiment. Both were delighted to see shocked expressions as a few heads turned in their direction.
“So, Pop. What do you think I ought to do?”
“Now that you got a Marine buddy behind the bar, maybe we ought to stay parked right here. Probably shouldn’t go somewhere where we’ll get tossed out on our ass with you wearing that medal and all.”
“I mean later, Pop. You think I ought to stay in the Marine Corps or what?”
Stosh Pudarski tongued the sticky remnants of peppermint schnapps out of a shot glass and stared into his beer. “It’s hard sayin’, Wilhelm. Your decision, you know. Them sailors at the White House told me you wouldn’t have to go back to Vietnam no more. And you’d be a big wheel in the Marines with that Medal.” Stosh Pudarski hit his beer, drained it and exhaled a kind of warbling sigh.
Willy Pud knew that expression. There was something left unsaid here, something his father either didn’t want to say or didn’t know how. Stosh sighed the same way and wore the same expression when Willy was 14 and the old man tried to have a “man-to-man” talk with him about sex. Embarrassment had led to frustration and ended in anger. Stosh ended it by walking out headed for Hogan’s Bar and shouted at Willy to “keep your dick in your pants and there won’t be no problems!”
“I’m gonna just sit here until you say what’s on your mind, Pop, so might as well come out with it.”
“It’s all them scars, Wilhelm. Everybody’s got odds you know...can’t beat ’em. I 1 knew this sonofabitch on my old tin can…gunner’s mate. He got torpedoed twice, sunk both times but he made it. Then he gets blown clean off the deck when we got hit by one of them fuckin’ kamikazes, but he lived through that OK. This swabbie is convinced by that time that he’s ten feet tall and bulletproof. Then just as we was coming home right at the end of the war, he gets hit by a crane that was off-loading ammo. Killed him deader than shit.”
Willy sipped his beer and shrugged. “You think something like that might happen to me?”
“You been awful lucky, Wilhelm. Can’t say you ain’t. But there’s only one reason for having a Marine Corps and that’s to fight. I seen enough of them poor bastards floating face down out in the South Pacific. You stay in the Marines and you’re gonna have to fight again, sooner or later. And a guy like you would really be pushing them odds.”
“Say what you mean, Pop.”
Stosh Pudarski drained his beer glass, knocked back a shot of schnapps, and turned to face his son. “What I mean to say, Wilhelm, is I love you, boy—and I don’t want to see you hurt no more.”
Willy Pud blinked twice and stared at his father until the old man dropped his head and began to fidget on his bar stool. It was a difficult moment, as if they couldn’t bear to face each other with such an unaccustomed sentiment banging in the air between them.
“OK, Pop.”
“OK what?”
“OK, I’ll get out of the Marine Corps...maybe go to college…they’ll pay for it.”
“Willy, I don’t want you doing nothing you don’t want to do...not for me and not for nob
ody.”
“Ain’t that simple, Pop.”
“Why not?”
“Never thought much about it before, but it turns out I love you too. Maybe we ought to make up a little of that time I spent away at war.”
“So you’re gonna get out and go to school?”
“In a little bit. Right now, I’m gonna go over to that woman at the table and see if I can get laid.”
SAIGON
“It just seems strange, Colonel…a fairly radical departure from SOP for either Linebacker or Freedom Deal strikes.” The Air Force Intelligence officer leaned back and eyed his Army counterpart on General Westmoreland’s joint staff. “It just seems like overkill. You know what I mean?”
The only other man in the airless room beneath the MACV Tactical Operations Center glanced up from his study of a large-scale map and checked his watch: “We’re getting pressed for time, Johnny. And we’ve been through it all before. The target was developed from solid sources. We’ve got Igloo White readings backed up by Humint D-O.”
The Air Force officer wore a pained expression as he shrugged and considered the unusual request for a massive air strike using B-52s from Guam and Thailand bases. Yes, the request was based on sensor data plus human intelligence agents observing from the ground but it was still a lot of expensive assets to commit, a lot of lives to risk this late in the war. He needed to be sure the target was worth all that. He glanced again at his mission assets list. It wasn’t that the BUF crews from U Tapao in Thailand or Anderson on Guam couldn’t handle the saturation strike, but why commit such a huge payload to a single grid square? Why concentrate all that bomb tonnage on one location when there was so much of the enemy’s resupply and replacement pipeline that needed pounding?
“Look at it from a tactical standpoint, Justin. It’s better to do a little damage to a lot of areas than do a lot of damage to one little area. It takes their engineers longer to fix it that way.”
The MACV colonel leaned into the light hanging over the map of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and mashed his finger down on a grid square outlined in bright red. “Surely you’re not trying to tell me your bomber crews can’t hit this one little area as a special mission requirement.”