Lin Chin had never felt fear before like she felt when she got out of the limo. When she closed and locked the door of the car, she felt like she had just left a good friend behind. The solid, almost silent closing of the door, made her feel like she was locked out of a safe place. She was now left standing in a dark alley, holding the keys to safety in her pocket. She thought about getting back in the car and driving around until it was time to pick up Colonel Ho in the morning, but that was only a fleeting thought. She had a duty to report what she had seen, and she knew that duty was paramount if she was to succeed and break the glass ceiling in the organization. She also had a pleasurable duty to perform for herself. She wanted to feel Gunner inside her again. She wanted pleasure for herself. She had tired long ago of indulging old men’s fantasies.
The walk from the car to the rear door was only twenty-five feet, but it looked to her like a football field. She walked lightly on her tiny feet, covering the distance in a few seconds. She took the steps on the back landing two at a time and soon stood under the broken light. She cursed to herself as her nervous hand fumbled for her keys. The light bulb had not been replaced since it was found broken the night of Johnny Hong’s brutal murder.
Lin Chin’s fingers found the right keys and she removed them clumsily from her tight black jeans. The keys broke loose from her pocket and fell to the concrete. As she bent to retrieve them, she felt something besides fear. She felt that she was not alone in the alley. Sweat broke out on Lin Chin’s upper lip and she tasted the salt in her mouth. “Who is there?” she said, as she quickly put her back to the door and prepared to put her martial arts training to the test.
It was so easy when the fear took over. Once that happened, his other self, the one that was driven by voices and hovered above the victims, took over. He was helpless before it. He was not in control anymore. His military training was driven by a new taskmaster, and that taskmaster demanded absolute obedience to his orders. It was the taskmaster of the alley and the stairwell that demanded vengeance. He never quite understood. How can you understand something as complex as extracting vengeance on a single race of people? Maybe somebody like Adolf Hitler could understand, but it was too complex for him. Racial genocide! All he could do was stand his ground and unwillingly become the instrument of the evil force that floated above him, all around him, and inside him.
Her terrified, female voice did not exude the confidence of a trained martial artist. A cat howled deep in the alley as two trash cans fell over, clattering to the concrete and making her flinch reflexively. Her stomach jumped into her throat. She bent to pick up her keys, feeling for them as her eyes darted from side to side. As she reached out her arm was forcefully and roughly grabbed from behind. She was off balance for a counterattack and could do nothing as she was tossed back down the steps onto the damp cement. She was stunned. Her head was bleeding from contact with the rough asphalt of the alley. She rolled over on her back and tried to focus. His large form stood over her like an enormous black shadow, so black that it contrasted sharply with the darkness of the alley. He stood over her dazed body, glaring down at her and basking in the smell of fear coming from her.
She felt the loathing and the hatred. She thought about what her mother had once told her when she was very young. “Even though you are Amerasian, the American GIs will hate you. You look Oriental, and it is for this reason they will hate you. They will never be able to forget the war. Like the French before them, they could not win. They could not break our resolve and they will never forget it. Be careful of the American GIs, Lin Chin.”
As she lay on the pavement looking up, she felt small, insignificant, weak. Her martial arts training was useless to her now. Fear had overshadowed skill. As the blood ran over her forehead and down into her mouth, she tried to think, but thinking about what to do in this situation was dominated by the taste of her own blood. Be a woman, and if that doesn’t work, be a whore. She remembered her mother telling her that GIs liked that. “You GI, American?” she finally said?
The man standing over her wanted to answer, but the taskmaster wouldn’t let him. The taskmaster knew that the victim would do anything to live once the fear had taken over. This was the part he liked. He relished the chase and the subsequent fight, but what he liked most of all was when the realization of the victims’ mortality became their essence of survival.
She reached up and lightly touched his pant leg. “You let me go, I suck you good, GI. I show you a good time. You and me, we get into the back seat of the limo and I fuck you all night. What you say, GI?”
He didn’t need any help answering those questions. He didn’t need any inner voice telling him how he felt about Vietnamese whores. She was just another Saigon whore, and he should know, after all, he’d been with a lot of them during his tours over the pond. As soon as the bitch touched his leg he felt his pecker itch. Not the itch of pleasure, but the itch of remembrance. Even though this was America, he was sure she had the clap. The VC were like that. If they couldn’t kill you in the field with a burst from an AK-47, they’d send their women to do it for them. You couldn’t fight if you had VD. Sure, all the field hospitals had antibiotics that would take care of it eventually, but you were still immobilized for several days, and “a unit not up to full strength was a unit ripe for Charley’s picking.” That’s what Daiwe used to tell them.
Daiwe was a soldier of contrast. On the one hand, he’d give lectures and have Bacsi the medic show Army VD films. On the other hand, he’d provide his soldiers with clean pussy.
It was not long before Tet in January ’68. Ho Chi Minh had passed the word to his troops that they were going to celebrate on the Americans’ runway. Scared the shit out of some American troops. Others just wanted to meet Ho Chi Minh head on and kick his ass. Fifteen thousand men were what the intel people said. Ho had them amassed in hidden bunkers on the Cambodian border. That was just thirty “clicks” from camp. A two-day walk by American standards, one-night forced march by theirs.
Daiwe knew the team members were spoiling for a fight and had nervous energy to burn. The team members who exhibited fear were more in touch with reality. Two weeks before Christmas he sent Bacsi into Kontum on a secret mission. He returned three days later with six local whores that he had personally tested and been found to be free of VD.
Just what the doctor ordered: twelve guys, six girls. Those whores screwed around the clock for six days, and on the seventh day, Daiwe, biblically, told them to rest and sent the women home with a big chunk of change from the team fund. Not one guy came down with a case of “drippy dick” from then until the day they lost the camp.
He began to feel a bit sorry for the girl whose hand clutched so pathetically at his leg. He remembered his good times with the whores of Kontum and was inclined to let her go. But his inner voice had a different agenda, and when it was like this there was no stopping it. He stepped back, letting her hand fall from his pant leg to the pavement. She whimpered, too scared to scream. “Please, please,” she pleaded, “I will do anything you want, just don’t kill me.”
He knew instinctively that fear was now the great cognitive element of her psyche and it messaged her mind, saying, “You’d better do something fast or you’re going to die.” He found that to be true of all of his victims and she, like the others, reeked of fear! Now that he’d stepped away from her advances, she knew her options had been further limited.
She reached out and clutched at his feet. His inner voice told him to take his knife out and humiliate her by cutting off her long black hair. He did as he was told, letting the long strands fall over her head as he chopped and hacked until she had less hair than a cancer patient in the chemo ward.
He rolled her quivering body over, hoping she would fight for her life, but she was resigned to her fate, and just lay there whimpering. He did as he was instructed and stuffed her hair into her mouth. He pressed the signet ring into her forehead until he felt her skull give way under the weight, all the while holdin
g his knife to her throat. “It is time to finish this,” his inner voice instructed.
He floated free of the earth looking down on the alley. What was he doing? He wanted to shout but couldn’t. The scene was turning uglier than a Clive Barker horror film. “Finish this,” it said, and without hesitation, he cut her throat to the bone. Cut her from ear to ear. Sanctioned her with extreme prejudice just as he’d been taught in the military. Before leaving the alley, he cut her right ear off and stuck it into his pocket. As he did, he became one with the part of him that floated away. He became whole again. The voices stopped and so did his headache. He’d just discovered a basic medical truth. He had discovered the cure for his headaches and it wasn’t “Take two aspirins and I’ll see you in the morning.” It was “Kill another slope and your headaches will go away. Cut off their ear and your headaches will evaporate like a drop of water on the floor of Death Valley in the summertime.”
There were just the three of them. The instrument, the voice, and the hovering spirit. They say, “three’s a crowd,” but he’d never been lonelier. He wanted it to stop but it just wouldn’t. Before he left Little Saigon that night, he dialed the familiar phone number and reported the details of what he’d done to the voice on the other end of the line.
His headache was gone for now, but he knew it would return soon. Just as sure as he had night sweats, he knew the headaches would be back. He knew that his flashbacks would leave the jungle at some point and recreate his most recent murder scenes in grisly detail. He expected all of that and more. It was the government. They were at fault. Always had been. They knew the troops that were in heavy contact all the time needed help when they left the service to return to their loved ones—if they had any left. They knew it, but they didn’t do a thing about it. It would have meant that they would be further exposed.
“They already are exposed to the collective anger of a nation of lightweights and do-gooders.” That was how Blaster Adams put it one night in the team house when they were having a few beers.
Blaster was on his second tour at the time. He used to call the second tour “the body bag tour.” He didn’t know at the time how prophetic that statement would become for him.
The team house was where they all got together like one big happy family. They ate dinner there when they weren’t in the field, and chewed the fat with each other at night. The conversation almost always turned to politics at one point or another, and Blaster was always leading it. He was the first one of them to recognize that there was a problem after team members went home. He was the first one to recognize PTSD for what it really was: a threat to the government. Because they felt threatened, the Army did not take proper precautions to treat it before soldiers left Vietnam. Left untreated, a whole generation of returning GIs eventually would become derelicts and hapless drug and alcohol abusers.
Blaster recognized it for what it was and was vocal about his feelings. That’s why he never went any higher than sergeant E-5. The team looked up to him because of his intellect, but command looked down on him as an embarrassment to their Army. Whenever top brass was due at the camp, Blaster was always ordered out into the field. Even if it wasn’t his turn for field rotation, he was sent out anyway.
He lectured his teammates like a visiting professor. One night, they talked until dawn. They were on alert because the camp at Dak To was under attack. He had just finished reading a letter from a former team member by the name of Harrison (Harry) Cole. Cole had been home for over a year and wrote at least once a month to Blaster. The others had heard in his previous letters about his debriefing, which was just that: one day in Kontum answering questions put to him by S-2. It doesn’t get any briefer than that. After all the shit he’d seen and done, they never even overnighted him in a hospital for observation. He came home to the jeering hippies and the smell of burning draft cards. His first letter told of how he went into the men’s room at the airport and changed into civvies so his fellow Americans wouldn’t recognize him as a Vietnam veteran.
Blaster told the others as he read and reread that letter, “Boys, first they train you to be a highly skilled killer. They ingrain it into your psyche so you never question their orders. They drop you into the middle of a jungle war and tell you to train a guerrilla force that will become your army. They feed you intelligence and supply you with ammunition. The lack of support from the top makes us dependent on each other and our guerrilla forces. We are essentially left alone in the jungle for years.”
The hush when Blaster talked to them was the silence of the dead. Nobody moved except to sip their beer. Nobody interrupted. All eyes were on him. Each word fell from his lips and was absorbed like manna from heaven by the collective membership. “We are left alone to fight for our lives and the lives of our small army. Alone with our fears. Alone with our anxiety. Alone with our wits. But I want to make this abundantly clear, if I already haven’t . . . we are completely alone!”
It was like listening to the part of a ghost story, when the monster that is chasing you discovers your hiding place, and while approaching, steps on a dry stick—CRACK! The twig broke, assailing their ears like a bolt of lightning. The soundlessness was erupting in their ears, driving their worst fear, fear itself.
“I can read from Harry’s letters that he is disturbed. He has asked the VA for help with what he considered a war-related disability. They told him, essentially, to fuck off. He did his tours. Came home to an ungrateful country that now tried to strip him of the two things he had left. His dignity and self-esteem.”
Blaster looked around the hushed room that night. He paused and took the time to look at each of them as they sat with downcast eyes. They knew Cole was right, but dared not publicly repeat his accusations.
Blaster looked deep, because that was the kind of guy he was. He ripped the others’ collective souls out through our eyes and then addressed them as they lay naked on the team house floor. “Trust me as a friend when I say to you all . . . They will do the same thing to all of us that survive this nightmare. They will want us to go home and behave like good little boys. Say nothing of the horrors we have been a part of for the cause of mom and apple pie. Forget the dead women and children, no matter who killed them. Forget the carnage and mass destruction directed by the puppeteer politicians and their marionette General William Westmoreland. Forget it all. Take our lumps from the current decade of draft dodgers and commie lovers! Come home and shut up about what we saw and did. In other words, gentlemen, just repress it. Repression and loss of self-worth will lead all of us over the lip of the abyss like the lemmings marching to the sea. And their fate will eventually be ours.”
For all his intellect and insight, Blaster would not live out his “body bag tour.” If he had, he probably would have gone back for a third tour. That tour he used to call “the hail Mary tour.” You might ask, why would a guy that was so insightful and intelligent stay in the Army? If Blaster were alive he would probably tell you, “It’s all that I have left, except for the fear. Not the fear of fighting for my life in this jungle, but fear of what might become of me in the civilian world.”
Willy Beal checked the restaurant several times that night. He never ventured far from his closet hideout. He would go to the kitchen’s double swinging doors and look straight out on Vinh Ho’s table. He never came to the restaurant much, anymore. Willy stopped by the refrigerator and got some cold cuts, a bottle of orange juice, and few slices of bread to tide him over until the next day. His headaches had been getting worse this past week, but he still had a half-full bottle of aspirin that Mondo had given him. They would see him through his misery. The ugly beast of his alcoholism had reared its head several times during his surveillance operation, but he knew he could fight it off until he had completed his mission. Willy slipped into the closet and became invisible for yet another night.
It was only nine a.m. in the morning. Jimmy Tranh, an eighteen-year-old martial arts specialist that had replaced Chou Lai as Vinh Ho’s number one body
guard, approached the apartment building. Jimmy was not sure whether he should wake up Uncle Vinh at such an early hour, especially with the bad news he carried. He knew the old man liked his sleep, but he also feared that if he did not tell him what he discovered in the Los Angeles Times this morning, he would be severely reprimanded.
It was Chou Lai himself that had told Jimmy when he was just a numbers runner, “Information is the lifeblood of this organization. Keep your eyes and ears open and report everything you see and hear to me, no matter how insignificant it may seem at the time.” Jimmy remembered those words as he marched up to the room he knew was occupied by his boss and boldly knocked on the door.
The door opened a crack. Another bodyguard, Nguyen Van Dong, slid the door open just enough to allow Jimmy to slide his slim body in sideways. “What do you want at this hour, Jimmy? You know the boss needs his sleep.”
Jimmy looked at the hulking figure of the much larger man, through glaring eyes. “Move aside, you clumsy oaf. If the boss doesn’t see this newspaper story, he’ll have both our balls.” Jimmy pushed the front page of the paper into Nguyen’s face. Nguyen read it quickly, then stepped aside, his face turning ashen.
Jimmy knocked hard on the inner bedroom door. Vinh was startled awake from his sound sleep. He fumbled with his arthritic fingers across his nightstand, finally finding the lamp switch and turning it on. Almost simultaneously, he found his dark glasses and put them on. At the foot of his bed stood Jimmy Tranh, holding the paper up for Vinh Ho to see. The headline jumped out at him like a coiled king cobra jumping from a snake charmer’s basket. ANOTHER SERIAL MURDER IN LITTLE SAIGON. Under the banner headline the subhead read:
FEMALE VICTIM IDENTIFIED AS LIN CHIN; DRIVER FOR CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE VINH HO
Club Saigon Page 32