Profane Men (13 page)

“Jet likes it kinky and stinky. I am twenty-four and considered beautiful. I am bisexual, bilingual, biracial, and bicoastal. Seeking bent gents who give it the Greek way, who like to quote give good enemas, golden showers, and nipple torture receiving unquote. I like it kinky, stinky, and especially from generous GIs. Let's have a kink party next time you R&R China Beach way. Leave a message for Jet at the Pussycat Parlor in Danang. This is KILL, the most popular box in the land. New message number up soon!”

I scratch at a place on my leg where a couple of ants had decided to have a picnic. I hoped they wouldn't be a lot worse out in the grass because the hootch was crawling with them. Black ones, not quite as ferocious as their red cousins, but one more ass-kicker about in-country living that sort of made it all really worthwhile. I take a big swallow of Black Jack and it burns its way down my parched gullet.

“Tee Jay in the Delta, are you still looking for an H&K? Call your pal Big Gunny. I have just what you need and can get it home too. Tee Jay, call Big Gunny if you still want that H&K. And KILL has what you need right now.

“Code Name Savant. Professional who has deep field experience in quote termination with extreme prejudice unquote available for high-risk, non-domestic tasks. Fee must include an up-front compensation, which will be forfeitable if mission aborts. Special areas of competency include intelligence, small arms, demo, and related tradecraft. First consideration given to contract sanctions. Sierra-Alpha-Victor-Alpha-November-Tango . . . Savant, Box 100, Manor Hill Station, Southwick, Brighton, West Sussex, BN4 4NL, England.” The announcer repeats the address, and I can't imagine who'd be writing the shit down, but somebody somewhere will fall for anything.

“Exhibitionist housewife will give some lucky pen pal sincere letters with lots of creamy, clear, color pics. Catch a look at my quote moist panties unquote says Angel, who will raise her skirt for you, pose nude or any way you say for that special pen pal. Write a sincere letter with all information to Angel at this address: Business Mail Forwarding Services, c/o Remails, P.O. Box 7-474, Taipei, Taiwan 108.

“Personal to Funseeker, I know you're dreaming of a white Christmas, but I cannot get back to see you as soon as I thought. Do not, repeat, do not try to call me. I will contact you later, I promise. Personal to Funseeker on Outlaw Radio, broadcasting a new KILL phone number soon.

“Jack Royale offers you the finest B&D films in the world. New titles include
Cherry Mary
, a luscious thirteen-year-old suck slave in garter belt, stockings, and high heels performs as you've never seen before. Watch this quote little bitch act when her smooth, silky ass is the target of painful spankings, unquote. This is a real, not a posed film session. You'll see this little bitch beg and cry for mercy. Rush eighty-nine dollars U.S. funds or Swiss franc equivalent to Jack Royale Films, Unterfedstrasse 7, CH-5312 Dottingen, Switzerland.”

“Hey,” Dusty asks, “how do you spell Underwearstresser?”

“Personal to Lawrence. I need help, Lawrence. The cell took me to location four and put me in the punishment jacket so I have quote some broken ribs unquote. I am OK but being watched by both sides. Get me out of you-know-where as soon as you can. This is from Code Name Dawn Arroyo to Lawrence. If you want to send anything, you can use the Hamilton Bermuda drop. And you can send anything by phone here at KILL, with a new number on the hour and half hour!”

This weird bull has a lulling effect after a while. All the fucking perverts and phony hit men and bullshit artists right out front with all their nasty doings. Get down witcha bad self, Lawrence, and cut old Dawn a bit of slack with those ribs. Busted ribs in a punishment jacket. I have busted balls from this punishing motherfucker, that's for goddamn sure. I have to stop listening to dildo radio and sipping Black Jack, and sniffing those hot beanies and wienies, and noodle with poodle, and get ready to hit it.

I drag ass to my feet and open my eyes, and it has turned darker than a coke dealer's nostrils outside. Fucking bugs are biting like sharks out there, and I smear some of the shit we laughingly call insect repellent on face, ears, neck, and wherever else skin shows. The mosquitoes love the shit. It probably tastes like 1953 Möet et Chandon White Seal to the little cunts. But I can go for anything that helps cut the stink in my nose. The corpses let us know they're out there every time the wind moves the air around a little. Wish they'd buried the bastards.

When you waste somebody, depending on means, method, and mess, there's a peculiar, particularly biting smell that rises up through the stench of the gunpowder, or cordite blast in the case of a gunshot death, and hits you with a distinctly metallic, vaguely copperish-smelling stink of freshly spilled, hot blood. It tastes in the mouth as you smell it, like DMSO kill pills.

One of the R&D guys came up with a way to mix a diemethylsulfoxide penetrant compound with a toxic agent such as nicotine or cyanide, that can be introduced into the bloodstream, the advantage of the kill method being that it leaves no extrinsic indication of cause of death. You taste garlic in your mouth, but you smell bitter almonds. You're dead in about thirty seconds to two weeks depending on how righteous the mix was. (It's an inexact science, sports fans!) A coroner or M.E. will call it coronary arrest. The classic soft blow-off, as the jargon has it.

After a corpse has lain around in the Southeast Asian blast furnace heat for a day or two, it starts to stink first, then bloat and emit gases, and at that point the odor is so disgusting it'll take the blue off a gun barrel. There is no other smell like death. It is guaran-fucking-teed to catch you a ticket on the Barf City Express, bringing that rush of bile and cookies up in heaving, shuddering whoosh of lost lunch. Once smelled, death is never forgotten. In fact, we're all starting to get a little funky around the edges.

“You ready?” Little Merle says, pulling his sack of crap up.

“Yo.”

“Let's do it.”

Me, Little Merle Smith, Doc McAllen, are LP Green. We are loaded down with claymore, wire, frags, a radio. We head out and a pair of the space rangers drag rolls of concertina across the pathway, sealing off our line of retreat. Where is the “small REACT” they said was coming? Cocksuck lying fucks. Supposedly we are now to get a slope scout along with the FO and his radioman. All of this when the reinforcements and resupply birds get here in the morning.

Whenever you go out like this beyond the safety of your perimeter, particularly in a hot area where Charlie operates, a little voice invariably talks to you inside. This is the tiny voice that whispered to Custer at Little Big Horn, to Napoleon at Waterloo, to Nixon when he didn't burn the tapes, all them cats. The message is always the same. The little voice bends close, and in whispered tones guaranteed to nail a couple of icicles to the roof of your soul says, “Pssst! This is wrong. You'll be
sorry!
”

Steps seem so much louder at night. Every twig and branch snaps, crackles, and pops like a motherfucker. Every cough carries like a scream. We break up as we tippy-toe along, and a blast of radio feedback rips the night open from somewhere back in the darkened compound.

SSSCCCEEEERRRREEECHHHHEEEERREEEE

I'm walking drag, which is hairy as point at night. I am carrying water. Black Jack Daniels, Sweet Alice, speed, ludes, K-Bar, autographed picture of Duke in
Back to Bataan,
edible blood chit, toilet paper, ammo, frags, a smoke grenade, Darvon, bug juice, cigarettes, but no matches or lighter, no poncho, no steel pot. Wisdom: no smokes for the same reason you don't want to fire your weapons; Charlie homes in on the flashes. Wisdom: no helmet; you can't hear Charlie if it rains on a hard cover. No poncho, same reason; Charlie can hear it raining on you.

Staying close to the bottom of the knoll, already heavily mined farther out, we position our claymores out around the base of the little rise where we set our listening post. Tombstone is a maze of trip wires, mines, pits, flares, all kinds of ways to say “Sorry, Charlie.” LP Green is all systems go . . . almost.

First I have to scope up some night vision. Have to get my darktown strutter's mojo working. I pop two black beauties and I pop four quarter-grain Dex, gobbling the whole handful and washing it all down with a long pull of hot Black Jack. Shit will cut a trait now.

“Don't change your jock for me . . .”

My mind sings “My Funny Valentine” to itself, bopping with the chord changes in a nice, grooved bossa nova. Hot damn, Sam, I am jam. Know what I mean? I flash on a hide-and-seek game played back in a world of long ago, age ten in my cousin Woodson's backyard. I can see a faint ghost of the phantom jungle moon again. It is a sliver, a hangnail, a slice of the old yellow devil pie.

“Is your beak . . . a little weak,” my brain serenades itself. I feel the night with my fingertips. I can reach out and catch the darkness with my greased-lightning snatch-and-grab. I have the fastest hands in the league. I am getting on top of this shit now. I feel the texture of the Vietnamese night. It is made of wispy silk. It turns misty, the moon fading amber in the black, a quarter moon dropping back inside the jungle clouds, the spooky yellow all but gone as the moon vanishes inside the silken, blackened womb.

I remember a chick I used to go with. She was light brown, with flawless skin like honey, and a long, hot tongue, and a high, perfect ass. She always smelled faintly of Noxema. I remember her long, sleek, racehorse legs, perfectly sculpted model's or showgirl's legs, with a hot little Brillo pad of a cat. We'd smoke nickel bags and ball listening to Sonny Stilt, early Geez, old Charlie Parker museum bop. I remember you, bitch. Ten thousand miles away, looking out and touching a night that is blacker than nigger pussy.

Now the mist thickens, drips, settles: a wet, clinging blanket that drops over the night like a fallen shroud. The frogs and mosquitoes are all going apeshit. The night air smells of bloated cadavers and stale tuna. Fucking country sucks stagnant paddy water.

I think about Chi and fantasize that I can smell her sweetness here in the dark. The faint stirrings of an erection begin to throb. Wisdom: you don't ever want to jack off on an LP. Here I stand, cock in my hand, stiff, blind, and lonely. But time is on my side.

“Here I sit, broken-hearted — ”

— unfinished latrine graffiti

I look straight ahead without seeing. I know if I had the eyes I could see the jungle and Charlie coming, the quarter moon that's out there somewhere hiding behind the blackness, fields, tree lines, horizon, river, and beyond. Somewhere out there is the “Demilitarized” Zone and KILL Outlaw Radio, and North Vietnam and the world. I look up at the stars and realize all those planets are orbiting around up there, and beyond them is more of the same, and beyond that, out into a space that pitiful man couldn't begin to fathom. How can it be that of all those stars and suns and moons and galaxies and solar systems that we're the only place where there is a recognizable life form? God! Life should be sacred. Human life should be revered. It is the ultimate cosmic miracle. Instead, what do we want to do? We want to kill it. Is that fucked up or what?

I see it all so clearly through my black beauty sleep, through my Dexamil night eyes. And now my night vision has come, and I can see every tree, every rib on every leaf, each blade of grass, every twig, stone, clod of earth, as clearly as if my eyes were twin starlight scopes. I see the beads of moisture in the air, the molecules, the atoms. My eyes pierce the black night like superlasers, invisible headlight high beams slashing out at the dark.

Before the light there was only darkness. The night was black, a near total absence of light prevailed. That is to say, an achromatic object color of minimal lightness content, dig it, which is characteristically perceived to neither transmit, absorb, retain, nor reflect what you call your basic light, was visible to the — you'll pardon the expression — naked eye.

On an ambush or deep in Charlie country on a night LP, I do my night vision trick. It is more than uppers and Jack Daniels. The opaque contractile diaphragm, pardon me girls, perforated by the pupils and forming that which is the colored portion of the eye, admits a visual perception to the sensory membranes that pick up and receive the image formed by the eyeball's lenses, and they transmit those suckers along the optic nerve to the Vision Center of the brain. Fortunately, as luck would have it, the Vision Center was having a sale and I was able to cop a pair of soft contact lenses for only $89.95. Now, if only we'll just have some soft contact.

I suddenly realize that in my oneness with the night I have amazingly remembered all the words to “Black Is Black” by Los Bravos, the ever popular “Paint It Black,” and all the words to a poem by Vachel Lindsay that begins “Fat black bucks in a wine barrel room,” and I will blackball any black-hearted blackmailer who blacklists Black Jack on my black market blackboard made in Black Rock. Something slithers by, but it is only a harmless black snake. I am on the verge of blacking out.

In the blackness that prevails, there is umbra, and of course, as you know only too well, what you call your basic penumbra. My eyes scan the penumbra, squinting sideways, with my lids hanging half closed, my eyes taking mini-Polaroids with my mental SX-70. I scan the shapeless mass beyond the knoll that borders the jungle and beyond, focusing my vision slightly off center to allow my night vision to do its trick. The reflected images do not, therefore, hit the sighting point of the eye.

Dig it: as I scan the black, the off-centered focus on the darkest shadows lets the newly acquired night vision reflect images on a fresh group of rod cells instead of the eyeball's tired sight point. The process is self-regenerating as long as I keep scanning and focusing slightly off center. This is how one is able to see in pitch-black darkness.

The fragmented hangnail of Asian man-in-the-moon-pie slips down out of the jungle clouds again. It is a spooky killer's moon, casting shadows of sawgrass and sandbags and berm. A shape amid the jungle silhouette appears and vanishes.

The tiny voice that whispered to us earlier comes back and talks to me again. Just as my mind registers that I saw movement, the little voice whispers one word in my ear.

“See?”

Time freezes. I think of the Jean Shepherd line about swamp gators. Something about alligators eating their way through time. I have one hand on my radio handset and the other on my clacker. I scan a movement, or worse, I sense one. It is something that was not there a moment before. I carefully click the handset three times.

Click . . . Click . . . Click!
Each click sounds like someone hammering a nail into a coffin.

Click.
A lone drop of perspiration gathers and drops down the small of my back. A shape that will not be denied to fresh scanning cells of the night eye now materializes, freezes, vanishes.

Time starts again.

Click.
Damn. They already acknowledged, so what the hell was that for? my subconscious asks. Always whining about something.

Something or someone is moving out there in the darkness. I want to glance over toward Doc, but I realize the second click didn't come from my handset.

Jelly belly time. LP Green. Viet fucking Nam. I die a small death. I tighten. My sphincter contracts. It knows. Charlie, vas you dere. Cholly? I run out of breath and gulp oxygen, not realizing that I have forgotten to breathe in for some time now, and I gasp a shallow intake of air, not taking time to wipe my sweaty hands on my fatigues. I ease the pin out of a frag, and gripping the spoon in a death vise with my right hand, my left hand (poised by the clacker to detonate the claymores) asks my brain what to do, and it tells the hand to pick up Sweet Alice and it obeys promptly, with no thanks to the rest of the body thank you very much. All of this happening in a quarter of a second as my speed-freak mind sorts this out in its megaplexing unit, and as I hear the radio keyed I hurl a frag out into the darkness, hearing the spoon fly off as a harsh stage whisper crackles out of the handset hoarsely:

“LP —
sssshhhpppppttttt
— ment in the wire,
movement in the wire!”
And Alice is there as I see the dark shape now to my left and — damn — not five meters away as I start blowing it away and feeling the tick against my jacket and hearing the loud cracks and whistles as I take a close one and a couple of near misses, turning as I make dog meat out of the other shape and really popping caps and then reaching over, detonating the claymores, trip wires going off as a satchel charge goes off way to our left. Slamming another mag up Sweet Alice, I feel her boogie and buck and spit out empty brass and gunsmoke stink as she takes some slopes' names.

It is deafening as my hearing is concussed by the satchel charges going off all around the perimeter, an 81-mm tube at work behind us. AK-47s and M-16s, frags and smokes and chi corns, trip flares, claymores, and all kinds of shit blasting, exploding, detonating in a wild-ass cacophony of M-60s and carbines and shotguns and blocker thump guns, and my ears ask my brain if they
have permission to leave the room. The noise is so up close and sudden and intense that it all blurs together in one roaring freight train of noise that comes tearing out of the darkness to overrun your silly ass.

I somehow sort out sounds within the overall sound, which is a wall of exploding noise, and I hear Little Merle's belt-fed 5.56s blasting out of his Stoner machine gun and McAllen busting caps to my right and Sweet Alice spitting out hot lead and Teflon and the whole mad minute of guns and garbage that makes hearing impossible yet your brain registers the sounds.

I hear a whistle. A crump. A popping noise. A whomp. A huge explosion. A whoosh. A scream. Another scream. A bang. A trio of instruments playing a medley of fast fire. A yell. An M-60 burning its barrel out somewhere to our rear. M-79s thumping to the right and left of our position.

A satchel charge blowing wire and steel and shrapnel every which way but loose, BLAM!

Green star clusters. Tracers in three colors. Asian moon and jungle. Moving black shapes. My hands pitching frags and blowing mines. Yells. Hollers. Whispers. Shouts. Crashes. Screams. Moans. Ewell's blocker again.

“Incoming, incoming!”

“Sappers in the wire.”

Massacre at Tombstone Corral. A blaze of gunfire and exploding charges. Red. Green. Yellow. White-hot streaks. Flashes of fire and smoke blasting through the night. D'Allesandro's MAC/10 sounding inanely like a typewriter underwater as it spits streams of hot death. AK-47s laying down heavy fire with their unmistakable sound, IPs blasting and popping away with everything imaginable from .38s to shotguns to Garands to, for all I know, a damn blunderbuss.

Suddenly you realize there are only a handful of greenies behind you and a dozen or two dozen 'yards who may or may not stay bought. We've all heard ten horror stories about the A-camps and CIDG ops where the 'yard mercs have turned back around on the teams. Sometimes turning again, turning back around on Mr. Charlie, and then turning around again if the money is sweet enough. And that's what's at your back here in the black night full of noise.

But the noise is over as soon as it begins. The mad minute. That awful nagging fear that
this
was the night goes away to crawl back under its damp rock. The suspicion and paranoia that the black creepies throwing the satchel charges are just the cutting edge of a battalion of crack sappers from one of Ho's top elite divisions about to overrun Tombstone in a tidal wave of unstoppable, fiery death and screaming terror doesn't fade completely yet, but at least it sits down and waits.

Click.

Crunch.

“Say what?” my brain asks itself. I hear the click again.

“LP Green, Six. Status, over?”

“Green. Wait one.”

Crunch.

A low, animal moaning comes from the darkness beyond.

“Merle?”

Fucking zip.

“Doc?” I am whispering.

“McAllen?”

“Yo. It's Little Merle, man.” I hear him crawling over. I can barely make out his outline in the pitch black.

“Shit, man, it's Little Merle. Shit, forget about it. He's fuckin' chewed, man.”

“Green, Six. One down.”

“Who?”

“Little Merle. Doc says he's chewed. All fucked up.”

“How bad?” Can't you fucking hear?

“Roger that,” I turn the radio off.

Fuck the sonofabitch. It don't mean shit.

I crawl over toward Doc and Merle.

I feel Merle before I get to him, as I crawl across the wet ground. I know before I touch him that it's a mistake.

“You OK?” I hear Doc McAllen ask.

“Yo,” I say.

LP Red and LP Blue, the other sides of the triangular perimeter, have made it OK. One of the Montagnards is KIA, and there are some wounded inside the compound. Two lit up on our side. Got to be a mess of fucked-up VCs out there, but it is too dark yet. They'll write this one up as being — what's the phrase? — an acceptable kill ratio or some loony shit.

Quiet and close. Damn, it is the loudest quiet you've ever heard. Cartoon quiet.

Silence.

It hangs there about ten times louder than the noise, as me and McAllen sit in the dark, back to back at about a forty-five-degree angle, Little Merle Smith a few meters away. Guns still up, listening, scanning. It hasn't really hit yet.

The loud, staccato chatter of the MGs, the bang of the explosive charges, the shock waves of concussion, the pounding vibration of full auto suddenly hits in an aftermath, echoing and reverberating like car-crash post-trauma.

Little Merle! Sonofabitch, it just gets me. And my face feels wet from the heavy humidity in the air. Wisdom: there is nothing like survival to make the bitter pill of losing someone just a tad easier to swallow.
Your
survival I'm talking about. It sure does have a way of easing the shock a little. Heady stuff, that survival.

At some point in the evolution of time, everybody has to take a look in the mirror. Some of us finite folks don't like what we see when we look in there at the moment of truth. Payback is a motherfucker, even when it only comes out of a mirror. At the moment I ain't too crazy about what I see in there.

My finger gets my attention as I feel a real nice blood blister taking shape. Sweet Alice has gone and given me a hickey, the bitch. Wisdom: you know you are prematurely aging when you fantasize about violence instead of sex.

I grab a bunch of shit out of my pocket and eat it all, downers, uppers, black beauties, reds, ludes, sliders, grounders — I don't give a rat fuck what, just get me out of here. I swallow it dry.

“Searchin' for the outlaw station . . . fuckin' up my concentra . . . shunnnnn — ”

So until we meet again, good night and goooooood luck from all of us who work the late shift here on Operation Toledo Blade, from LP Green, just a stone's throw from the heart of A Camp Tombstone Two, Golf Sector, Quang Tri Province, I Corps Tactical Zone, Republic of (South) Vietnam. Planet Earth. Good fucking luck.