Profane Men (12 page)

“You don't have to prove to me that you have resources or that you're a wealthy man.”

“Wealthy? Wealth is nothing. I'm trying to show you something about information. Data. Facts. Information is the ultimate power trip. Try to understand what I'm showing you here, babe. You're in our computer. I can erase that data.” He does so and the screen blinks out. “Nothing has changed. You're still down cold. You're part of a team. The people I represent would no more let a source of potential damage to the organization leave . . . well, you can surely see the problem. You need to be a little circumspect here. Relax. Show some caution. As soon as it becomes feasible — six, maybe eight weeks down the road — I'll cut you loose myself.”

“What you said about the people you represent, that really sounds threatening, Toby. I'm getting crazy. Really, I just can't live with this.”

“What can I tell you? You bought into this. Now you want out. Fair enough, but it has to be on the company's terms, OK?”

“No, damn it, it's not OK.”

“Well. What can I say?” He glances at his watch.

“I won't take up any more of your time.”

“Just think it over carefully before you do anything. There's a lot of stuff involved you don't know anything about. If you do something hasty, in the heat of your feeling angered at the company, or me, you might put yourself in a position where, you know, uh — I couldn't protect, so to speak, and suddenly you'd find yourself in deep shit, kiddo.”

“I'm in some deep shit now.”

“If you don't want to hear what I'm saying . . . Or if you think I'm conning you, then there's not much I can say.” He sits on the edge of his desk. “Remember this, you have no genuine cause for alarm if you'll just do your job. You are pulling down a fabulous salary. Nice hours. We adore you. And the air stuff you're so concerned about is pure misdirection. It's just the guy in the top hat and the magic wand.” He snaps his fingers.
“Abracadabra!”

As Toby Beals speaks, a PRC-25 leaning up against a banana tree somewhere in I Corps blasts “Code Name Abracadabra” into the ether, and approximately seven seconds later on the other side of the world, COMINCON transfers the word to online terminal subscribers as an incantation in nine languages, a magical charm, an amulet, an epithet, a talisman, an ellipsis, an elongation, a coefficient of the numerical value 365.0, an apocope, and an isosceles triangle.

The heavily scarred young woman with the enticing voice slams out of the building in a heated rage, fighting to regain control of her temper, thinking in Chinese, as she bids herself to present a calm outward facade. She loathes that feeling of being trapped, and it requires all of her powers of concentration to temporarily shake off the crushing sense of it that has followed her down to the street, stalking her like a vulture. She manages to throw it off with a great effort of will as she briskly strides toward her destination a few blocks away.

The byword of a true professional is preparation. When Princess had first arrived in Vietnam, she'd been befriended by a young Vietnamese woman her own age. Somewhat apart in social position their mutual disfigurement had nonetheless forged a bond of at least casual friendship. They saw each other infrequently, but the friendship had lasted and the women had grown remarkably close, each believing herself to be liked and admired better than was actually the case, until the admiration and affection had become genuinely felt.

Princess, who lived only for her career and her preoccupation with the acquisition of material wealth, found herself drawn to her new friend in spite of what she considered to be naive ideologies and alien attitudes. Her friend had a lover, and once she had told Princess a little about him. He was a Viet Cong deserter, only a boy really, who had fled the North when the remaining members of his family had all been killed.

Now he lived eking out a sustenance doing whatever came along. Princess had learned he was proficient in the violent tradecraft of war and that he was willing to perform certain tasks if the rewards justified the danger. She was eleven minutes late when she strode through the doors of Fifi's French Flamboyant and saw the slim, young Viet sitting in the dark next to her friend.

She was a believer in first impressions, and in that instant he appeared to her as competent and perhaps sufficiently resolute for her needs. She always went with her instincts.

Time ticks.

Her friend's lover is not what he appears, but rather a hardened, somewhat obnoxious character whom she finds impolite, insultingly brusque, and implacable. She fights hard to dampen her rage and frustration and eventually, with constant wheedling, intercession, and gentling by her friend, he softens somewhat.

Then he quotes a figure which staggers her momentarily it is so outrageously high. But whereas she would normally haggle with an out-of-work street person, she immediately agrees to the amount.

She will have to give up nearly half of her Swiss nest egg, as this money must be untraceable. But she plows ahead, her resolve bolstered by the heady promise of freedom and the undeniable sweetness of revenge. The next step is hers. She must give her friend certain plans, schematics if possible, an engineering layout. There are other details, which she tries to grasp and assimilate calmly. She leaves fraught with the perilousness and potential joyousness of the supervening events. The parallel lines lengthen.

“You kill many bad men with silver bullets?”

“No, Tonto, I will never shoot to kill — only to wound.”

— origin of
The Lone Ranger
(1949)

No bullshit. Nobody is rapping now. No one wastes the energy to speak when it is all you can do to just keep on keepin' on. One foot in front of the other. We are some miserable, tired, beat mothas. Today has been the worst yet, a real, hundred percent Romeo foxtrot of an unadulterated, certifiable grade A, star-rated, purple-veined ball buster. And if that sonofabitch tells us to spread it out one more goddamn time I'm gonna spread it out his asshole.

Shit, I hate this fucking movie. It's rained on and off all day. Slippery, slimy, sucking, jive-ass mudhole of a country anyway. The rucks are about one-hundred-fifty pounds now, and it's all you can do to breathe. The air is thick, moist, clinging, wet, unbreathable, with the humidity as close as a sucking chest wound.

We slosh down a muddy trail covered in slimy, boot-gobbling footprints. You can hear us coming from about two hundred meters off: rasping, sighing, pissing, moaning, wheezing, gasping, coughing, our respiratory symptoms ranging from asthmatic to emphysemic. Our throats are dry — parched, caked, sore. Lips crack and bleed, coagulate, crack and bleed again. Necks are bleeding and raw. I imagine I feel blood in my socks.

The mud trail steepens for chrissakes and we're grabbing ass down a very steep, suddenly impossible fucking descent covered with this slippery, wet mossy crap anyway. A Cobra gunny and a loach pass low overhead in a loud clatter of whomp-whomp rotor blades and nobody even looks up. We are sliding down this real neat mudslide on our butts and stomachs, grabbing at mossy grass, thinking Oreo thoughts as we crash down this sonofabitch. Big Merle provides the only decent moment of the day when he goes down back-asswards all the way to the bottom, hugging a rotten log full of maggots and termites and leeches and creepy-crawlies. Whatever makes you happy.

Leg muscles cramp, tingle, come back to life, recramp, tingle, and so on in a kind of endless, really painful charley horse. Sweat catches in eyebrows and mustaches, stinging eyes and dripping into open, gasping mouths in salty, dirty rivulets. Brains fog. Helmets weigh forty pounds and become head vises. Flak jackets are a joke. Monster rucks are great, painful crucifixes. Ankles swell dangerously, crotches chafe, bleed to the touch, sting, become so sore they can make a grown man weep. Fucking Vietnam.

We are following the ridge line that cuts through a ravine leading down or up into Tombstone, as the case may be. I'm starting to hallucinate the ground moving under me, and I'm pretty sure I've had a small heart attack today. Nothing serious and certainly nothing to concern myself over unless I would ever decide I'd like the use of the left half of my body again.

Finally we all make it down this bitch, excepting our drag man, whom nobody has seen for a few hours, and everybody picks up the weapons and rucks that were lowered over the last steep part of our route in a hand-to-hand chain. The sun is starting to drop behind the hills as we finally see the CIDG compound in the distance. We rub bug juice on arms; stinging bloody necks and raw faces as the hungry mosquitoes buzz out of the humid air in a never-ending, relentless assault that will increase as the night wears on.

I have an itching bite on my left ear the size of a golf ball. Doc looks at it and proclaims, “Aw, shit, that ain't nothing to sweat, man.”

“Hnn.”

“Naw, that there is probably only a poisonous spider bite.”

I hope the motherfucker dies from it. I hope he gets spider cancer.

“Check this shit out!”

“Uptight!” somebody says. They've nailed together a couple of four-by-eight ply sheets alongside the pathway leading into the camp and a crudely lettered, freshly painted sign reads:

ahoy recon! welcome aboard.

this area has been secured for you

through the courtesy of a-team “tombstone” 2

But the closer we get, the more this sign looks like an optometrist's eye chart. There's all kinds of shit across the bottom in smaller, less legible printing. I can make out the words under the fearless leadershit of —— and a name that looks like Major Thuy. Then a lovely little postscript below that. In smaller letters, a nice little welcoming offer reads eat my cockburger fags, and someone has thoughtfully offered us a precis of the sum total of twentieth-century man's contributions in the area of racial harmony in the heartwarming two-word poem:

fuck chuck.

I take a final hit off my last canteen as I look back up the raggedy-ass mudslide we've just come down. Harold is back up there somewhere. Marching to a different drummer is one thing, but this dude is marching to an entirely different fucking orchestra. Good luck. Fuck. Ahhhh . . . water is the speed freak's high, I think, as I swallow boiling Kool-Aid dregs. No. Water is the wino's high, fucking lime Kool-Aid is the speeder's high. Wonderful. The road into Tombstone is now paved with the best intentions and recharged batteries. I look up and see it is about to open up again, but who the fuck cares — we've made it. No digging tonight. Hot chow. A roof overhead. Not a fucking minute too soon, either.

I suffer a pang of intuition that I could have missed. A tantalizing glimpse up fate's skirt. Uh-oh. Dark shadows up there in the vicinity of the old crotcharoony. I simultaneously wince from a flash of insight I could have easily done without.

I see us as we really are. Violent, crude, profane men of monumental arrogance, naiveté, and stupidity. Blundering, absurd, frighteningly vulnerable. Dopey dopers and poseurs. Pawns. I recoil, as always, from the mirror image.

D'Allesandro: hard-core, streetwise, cool, graceful, bold venturer. Reckless. Jon is my direct obverse. No wonder we hit it off. I am soft-centered, pseudo-intellectual, klutzy, prone to all the cowardly predispositions. Necessitously cautious. Obsessive. Ridiculous.

Yet in this painful look inward, recoiling from the pressures and constrictions, and shocked back to life as it were, my movie speeds ahead on fast forward and I force myself to examine those dark shadows ahead. Yes — I will fly too near the sun. And yes — the wax of my wings will most certainly melt and yes, yes, yes — I
will
plummet headlong into the South China Sea. On the other hand, I will survive this terrible mother raper.

I know I am speeding and I think I may have also just hallucinated the strange looking motherfucker who has just stepped out from behind a berm inside the wire. He is wearing a cammo headband and his face is streaked with nightfighter. He appears to have just done some real bitchin' opium. His eyes have those little roll-up window shades that say out to lunch on them in the cartoons. He is carrying a silenced Swedish K, about nine frags, and all kinds of weird shit. El Tee strolls over to the space cadet and they rap.

“Hey! A right, there. Looking good.”

“Thanks. Glad to be here. Who's in charge now?”

“Um.”

“Again?”

“Say what?”

“Who's in charge here?”

“Ummm. How's that?”

“Who's your commanding officer here?”

“Ummm. Wow. Shit . . . that's a good one. That fucker's dead, best of my knowledge.”

“Who's the ranking officer here?”

“Uhh, damn.” Space cadet scratches his head as if this is the tricky question he stayed up studying for last night. “Oh, wow. Well . . . I guess you are, far as I know.” He smiles dreamily.

“How many troops in the compound?”

“Oh, troops. Well, shit. Not many, man. We really got chewed here other night. You know. Wow. Shit. Lost everybody. Damn.” He has the real stoner opium stare. This ain't gonna get nobody nowhere.

“Who are those men?” El Tee nods in the direction of some shirtless, green beanie types who are sitting outside the compound perimeter under a huge cammoed parachute which has been tied to the surrounding trees.

Our space traveler cranes around to check it out as if he'd never seen any of them before in his life. Their voices carry and we can hear raucous laughter and loud partying sounds. They seem to be creating their own personal mini-smog as a layer of dense yellow smoke surrounds them, caught in the overhead chute and breezeless air. The unmistakable hint of weed wafts across the compound.

“Ummm. Oh! Them. They're snake eaters.” As if that explains it.

Someone has run a skull-and-crossbones pirate flag up the flagpole in the center of the compound and a rebel flag flies below that. Merle Smith, whom we call Little Merle to differentiate from Big Merlin, and who hardly ever says shit, breaks us all up as he looks around and goes, “Fucker's far from STRAC!” Pretty far from Strategic Air Command level.

We leave Tom Corbett, Space Trooper, standing behind the berm watching the road and fondling his K. Why the fuck anybody'd want to eat, sniff, smoke, or shoot opium is beyond me. Heroin, even, you can understand. Smack is a righteous fucking stone, but goddamn O — that shit will kill you slicker'n pee on a doorknob. I never knew anybody doing opium that could stand up to the fucker.

Typical opium conversation:

“What time you got?”

“Oh, wow. L'mmm.”

“Time?”

“Say what?”

“I said, what time is it?”

“Umm. You mean right now?”

“Yeah. What time is it right now?”

“Damn. I . . . Is it that late?”

The name Tombstone pretty much says it. I check out the 'yards in their chewed-up state, the handful of green beanies walking around in cutoffs and Bermudas, all higher than cumulus, and this place looks more than beat. These dudes look fuckin' finished. If a battalion of NVA sappers would hit this camp right now, it could be serious as cancer.

The wall of our plywood hootch carries the graffiti agent orange is nature's way of saying you ain't making a crop.

White shakes his head at me and says, “Is this a motherfuckin' movie or what?”

“No, Whitey, I believe this sonofabitch is real as shit on your finger.”

“Little Merle got it right, man. This fucker is far from STRAC.”

“That's a big rog.”

And that isn't the half of it. Charlie was here, Kilroy, and nobody thinks he's gone for good. Charlie fucking knows. You look at the Montagnards, the scouts, shit, you never know what is what over here. We give the VC a whole gang of R-E-S-P-E-C-T because we know he knows. Nobody can fight a guerrilla war any better than the little man. This is hard-core boonie-rat land, and that's with resupply and high tech. Charlie hasn't got shit but what rice he can hump or steal or take, and a light ruck, with ground mobility like a motha.

There are really two Vietnams, one aboveground, the one we own, and the one below ground. Flash Gordon and the Clay People down there in the subworld. Because at night Charlie comes up from his tunnel complexes to lash out with his brand of hit-and-run warfare. Then back down underground. He has no medevac to speak of. His weapons, ammo, food, quarters, medical centers — it's all down there below the daytime Vietnam. Charlie has a whole counterworld going on down there under the earth. The Prince of Darkness.

If the 1st Air Cav is “airmobile” (folks who drop from birds without chutes, as opposed to airborne, folks who jump out of planes with parachutes) then by God, Charles is damn sure groundmobile. And his intel is first rate. Little fucker always has somebody watching, a scared peasant, a 'yard woodcutter watching a trail, your hootch girl, you just don't know. We hear about a tunnel complex they found in the Central Highlands, sonofabitch had a triage about the size of Walter fucking Reed.

The tunnels are so elaborate that if you never saw one you wouldn't believe it. And they seem impervious to assault. Some of the big ones have been there for centuries. He likes to dig down next to a blue feature and then make a slanting escape tunnel with an entrance/exit below the water-table line. There are tunnels that go down four, six, eight levels underground. Miniature damn NORADs down there with secret passageways you couldn't get a good-sized dog through. We hit 'em with everything from tunnel rats with .45s and flashlights to big, sophisticated machinery that pumps them full of poisonous gas or whatever. We throw grenades, we arc-light 'em, you name it. It don't do squat.

There are some corpses out in the weeds upwind of our hootch, and they are stinking like shit. They probably carry those jivey evil-eye cards that are supposed to scare the crap out of the hardest-core enemy. You just know they do, too. They look like the CBS corporate logo, that goofy-looking eyeball emblem, and Charlie probably thinks they were put out there by Roger Mudd or some such character stumbling around in his Abercrombie Safariland jacket with epaulets and twelve-gauge loops. Fucking Vietnam.

By nightfall we're all dreaming dreams of re-supply, R&R, and the usual fuck fantasies. Ewell is over trying to explain to the Montagnards what Minnesota pussy is like, and El Tee has just come in from checking the defensive positions around the compound. We have clued the Space Patrol in about Harold so they don't panic and blow him away. Wisdom: if you're out in the dark without a radio, don't try to come in. It's a good way to get a free extra asshole.

Everybody will pull a watch tonight, trigger men and trail bosses, ranch hands and ramrods alike. I draw a late shift in a three-man LP out beyond the wire. Meanwhile, Nam noodles are aboil, loaded with peppers and hot sauce and all kinds of surprises, and my nose tries to get into that while I kick back listening to the KILL riffs. The signal keeps getting stronger.

“Protect yourself at all times. Suggest you leave code-o-phone relay system or similar callback mode to Daredevil at 914-238-6600.” Dusty's monster PRC squawks away in our hootch, and next door I can hear John, Paul, George, and Ringo warning everybody about their thirteen-month mystery tour. I wonder what 914 is the area code for. Probably damn planet Mars.