Digger 1.0 (8 page)

Punji traps on the next two, and the last
guy drowned.

He ended the account with, “You know how it
is, Sergeant Howard. Typical VC trickiness.” Then, “That gonna be a
problem, Sergeant?”

“We’ll see, sir.”

1982.

Beyond Tucson, out near a place called Gila
Bend where the Ten turns toward Southern California, Jim picked up
a hitchhiker. She wore tight cut-off jeans and a tube top. Her hair
was feathery and blond and she told Jim she was going to be a movie
star.

Like Marilyn
Monroe.

“That’d be nice,” he told her. They drove on
and she talked about Hollywood and how great it was going to be,
and she said nothing about wherever it was she’d come from. Later
when she ran out of dreams, she popped in a cassette tape of some
punk band called
Who Screamed
. Their wailing over the
guitars reminded Jim Howard of the thoughts inside his head when he
tried not to think of the darker parts of ‘Nam. Of ’68.

At nine they reached Santa Ana, California.
It was an old town, quiet and nice. He could smell the oranges from
the groves in the night. The endless groves surrounded everything.
The air was balmy, almost dreamy.

“Where you going from here?” she asked. Her
eyes big. Her lashes long.

“Somewhere else,” he said as they parked on
Main Street.

“It’s late,” she said looking around,
holding herself close as though she feared being cold. Or alone.
Her bare shoulders, tanned, gleamed in the moonlight.

“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

“Probably too late for a bus to Hollywood,”
she whispered.

He got them a room. Her really. He’d planned
to sleep in the back of his car in some orange grove out of the
way. He thought that would’ve been nice. But he could tell she
needed a place to stay.

He had thirty-six thousand dollars, and he
had to be careful with it if his plan was going to have a
chance.

He got the room and picked up a six pack and
they went up. Later, after the sex and beer, she slept and he
watched her eyes flutter in a dream.

A dream about Hollywood, he guessed.

He lay awake next to her, just watching the
ceiling. He popped the last beer and took a long drink.

~~~

Down in the tunnels.

That day at Cu Chi had been one of the
longest. Three days long. When he came out, he wasn’t just some
grunt on his second tour for Sergeant Stripes anymore. That was
something to respect in and of itself. A vet. Hardened. Been there,
done that. Seen things that oughtn’ta been seen. The new guys
thought that was something and they wanted to know everything he
knew so they could get the hell out of ‘Nam in one piece.

No, after Cu Chi, he became
the
Mongoose
.

The animal that hunts in the tunnels.

The snake killer.

Jim Howard wasn’t big. Nor was he a small
man. He was tight, compact, and all muscle. Had to be to bust
horses on a ranch in hard knock Texas. When a horse was mean, it
didn’t give no quarter. Didn’t expect none from you either. A mean
horse would sooner die than let you bust ‘im. So you had to be all
muscle.

You needed every muscle to bust a mean
horse.

Which was all there was room for down in the
tunnels. Muscle. Anything else would get you killed.

That day began with just a square tiny hole
in the ground. New rats, volunteers, they went in hands up because
the holes were so narrow and American shoulders so broad. High over
your head like you were surrendering already.

That’s what Jim Howard thought when he saw
the new Tunnel Rats go that way.

That day, like every day, like every time he
went down into the tunnels and the dark, he went in head first.
Lowered in by a couple of guys holding his feet.

“You want someone with you?” asked Captain
Dasher. Jim Howard merely smirked.

“Yeah, I gotta ask. SOP,” said Captain
Dasher with a guilty smile. And then Jim Howard disappeared into
the darkness, forty-five out, slightly behind the crook neck
flashlight.

He was gone for three days that time.

The truth was he got lost.

The legend was he became a ghost.

The truth was he wandered that maze of pits
and traps and underground cisterns and recovery rooms full of
sleeping VC snipers, and hospitals with wounded and burned dying
men and women, and headquarters and munitions bunkers for three
full days.

He killed some.

He left others and couldn’t have told you
why.

When he thought about it now, he told
himself that back then, he’d thought he was protecting America.
Protecting his dad’s old place back in Texas. That it would be
there when he got home and away from all this. That’s what he told
himself every time he went down into the tunnels.

Three days later, he knew the VC were afraid
he was deep down inside them. Like the parasites and malaria they
all had. Like he’d gotten the first time, last year in Operation
Cedar Falls. By the end of three days, he could see the fear in
their eyes. They’d been telling each other there was a monster down
there in the dark with them. He’d invaded their world of small
little cathedral-shaped passageways, and crawled down into sudden
pits of darkness and water only to find giant rooms, all of it
going for miles and miles. The chatter up above was that the VC
tunnels went for hundreds of miles.

Three days later, thirteen miles away, he
came out covered in blood and sweat. Twice he’d almost been done in
by vipers hanging from their tails in pitch dark rooms. His
flashlight batteries had gone dead and he’d resorted to the VC
candles and little lanterns. And sometimes he just adapted to being
in the black. To not seeing. That’s when he learned how to survive
blind. When he learned not to fear the black, even if it was his
enemy.

He’d spent one night sleeping in an
underground cistern with the body of some poor slob that had been
MIA for over a week. They found that out later, after Jim got back
and turned in the guy’
s dog
tags.

In the years that followed, Jim often
wondered if command had ever sent anyone back in there after that
guy. Brought him home before they blew the whole tunnel complex to
hell.

He often wondered about that. About that
guy. Who he was. If the people who missed him had a grave they
could go and sit near.

He lay awake in the motel room, finishing
the beer and thinking about the war. Later he turned over and went
to sleep, holding the young girl close to him. He was the Mongoose
the snakes couldn’t kill.

~~~

“Well, I gotta split for LA, mister,” she
said in the morning.

He watched her go. Watched her smile once,
briefly, sadly, as she ducked out the door of the little motel
room. Then he sat in the quiet and listened to the silence.
Distantly he heard a vacuum cleaner begin to whine and he knew the
maids were coming.

It took a week to find a card house that
would let him, a white man, play in Little Saigon. He’d spent the
week in a motel in Garden Grove watching the Vietnamese, the
immigrants the US had taken off the embassy roof in Saigon. Already
they had large families. Some even owned stores.

He ate in a restaurant simply called Pho,
the national beef broth-based dish, and the year the immigrant had
come over. This one bragged the number 56. Long before the American
troubles. A badge of honor, Jim guessed.

He was friendly, tipped well, and even hired
some hookers he met in a bar run by a Vietnamese man named only Mr.
Larry. He spent lots of money on the two tiny girls, trying to show
them that he was just some big, rich, dumb Texan driving around in
a Cadillac with loads of money to lose. He took them to a fancy
dinner and bought them clothes for the three days he spent with
them. The two slight girls were incredulous, chirping in their
sing-song bird language. He knew they were telling each other they
couldn’t believe their unbelievable luck at finding such a stupid
rich Texan and his big sky blue Cadillac. They imagined he had
millions.

He was under twenty-five thousand. The money
he’d been saving from the oil rigs to pay off the back taxes on his
dad’s old place.

At the end of their three days he asked,
“You ladies know where I might find a game of cards?”

They both looked at each other.

No, they didn’t know.

But later, one of them suggested that her
cousin Pham knew some boys who liked to play cards, and that she
could ask him because the “big man from Texas so good to her and
her friend”.

Later he dropped them off at a home in a
tract neighborhood in Garden Grove. All the other houses in the
cul-de-sac were post-war Anglo-American families with the children
long gone or growing up. But in one house, the Vietnamese had moved
in. They’d saved and scrimped and cut nails and whored and done
every job no one else would do for a slice of the American dream.
And now they had it. A single story ranchero with a wide front lawn
they’d already planted some palms and bamboo in.

The two party girls led Jim Howard into the
house and introduced him to Cousin Pham.

After a couple of cold beers and the half
speak of a conversation in both Southern and Vietnamese, Cousin
Pham was sure he could find a place where his new “
Texas Best Friend Jim
” could play a
few hands. He would do well, Cousin Pham assured him. Vietnamese
people were notoriously horrible gamblers and very bad at
cards.

It began to rain in the morning. A warm, wet
rain that made Jim think he was back in ‘Nam, as Cousin Pham showed
him the way to the card room, pointing the big sky-blue Cadillac
along the wet rainy streets of Garden Grove.

They reached a bar called The Happy Hour, an
old faux stone front-windowless bar inside a fading strip mall,
nestled amongst an urban sprawl of endless tract homes. Inside,
older Vietnamese gentlemen played American-style poker. No Pai Gow.
Just poker.

For a week he played and lost. He had to
lose, he told himself. Really just a thousand every day, by the end
of the day, on top of the four thousand he’d make on winning hands
each day. That way it looked like a lot. His plan had been simple:
win big at first, then drink a little too much, and yes have a big
bowl of pho and get sleepy, and then start to lose. Finally,
frustrated, throw it all away in front of all those South
Vietnamese ex-colonels and ex-generals, all of them exiles, but not
the ones he was looking for.

That was the part they loved. When he lost
all their money back to them and then some. Mr. Best Friend Texas
Jim. So sorry. Very bad luck. Next time, much better.

On the last day, he was down to that day’s
last thousand, which wasn’t even a thousand because it was
eight-hundred and fifty-six dollars. On that last
lose-another-thousand-dollars day in which Jim Howard was giving up
on ever finding the type of man he needed to find, in walked Mr.
Vo.

He was small. He was thin. His eyes squinted
into slender slits, as though the oppressive glare of the lone
overhead light of the card room in the back was just too much to
bear. He smoked incessantly and coughed quietly.

Maybe, thought Jim Howard. Maybe we have a
winner.

He beat everyone that day and didn’t lose.
He won fifteen thousand dollars and in particular, six thousand of
Mr. Vo’s money. Mr. Vo stared at him without hatred. Without
contempt. Without emotion. Just a vacant-eyed stare. A look Jim had
seen before. Cold. Tired. Some VC tunnel fighter facing him with a
knife or a sharpened punji stick, resigning himself to live just a
little longer, no matter what it took to do so, down in the tunnels
for just another day.

He’d seen that look before.

Jim Howard and Mr. Vo sat across from each
other later that week in one of south Orange County’s only five
star restaurants, Chez Cary’s.

“So, here we are Mr. Texas,” said the small
Vietnamese man. “Duck a l’Orange ordered. Wine poured. All very
French. All very nice.” Mr. Vo leaned back in the ornate chair,
cushioned in crushed red velvet, pulling a cheap silver case from
his jacket and tapping out a cigarette on the table. “All very
nice,” he said to himself.

Jim took a sip of his wine, leaned back and
folded his hands in his lap.

The silver lighter Mr. Vo snapped open with
a sudden eruption of butane disappeared back inside his coat
pocket, and he leaned forward, drawing a heavy glass ashtray on the
dining table toward himself. Then he drew on the cigarette and
exhaled after a brief moment. White smoke spilled across the table
as Mr. Vo fixed Jim with a glare.

“What all this about Mr. Texas?”

Jim smiled to himself.

“You smoke back in ‘Nam?”

Mr. Vo leaned back. No one talked about
Vietnam. Even Mr. Vo’s fellow Vietnamese never talked about
Vietnam. Vietnam never happened.

Then, “Yes. I smoke since I was a boy.”

Jim closed his eyes.

“I never smoked.”

Mr. Vo narrowed his eyes for a fraction of a
second. Then, “Good for you, Mr. Texas.”

“Which was a good thing down in the
tunnels,” continued Jim, watching Mr. Vo’s face and his eyes in
particular, “‘cause you folks could smell that smoke on us. You
guys didn’t smoke at all down there, did you?”

Mr. Vo took a deep drag of his cigarette and
exhaled through his nose. He looked like a tiny angry Asian dragon
sitting in a chair in a fancy French restaurant.

“You assume all Vietnamese VC, Mr. Texas?
You not consider that only Vietnamese in America are losers. Ones
who lost to the VC and the North, Mr. Texas. So if I am in America
now, and not home being victorious winner after long struggle
against tyranny and oppression, how is it that I am VC and not
American friend?”