Page 54 of Theo of Golden

By slow degrees, he was being transported to a realm of thatched roofs, rice paddies, and palm trees. The rasping hum of insects and the gummy heat of the tropical forest began to fill his sotted thoughts. Muddy fatigues on bug-bitten skin. The scent of napalm. Ominous stares of villagers squatting on their haunches. Torn limbs and pained faces of wounded comrades. It all began to surface like smoky visions from a crystal ball.

“That fellow and I served at Ben Suc together. You ever heard of that?”

Theo shook his head.

“Not many folks know about it. But it was a pretty hot area, near a place called the Iron Triangle. We’d been out in the jungle on a mission for weeks, up to our asses in blood and pus and bugs, and soon as we got back to base, they told us we had to go on a big surprise mission the very next day, to this little village called Ben Suc. It was on the Saigon River.

“From the air, it was actually a pretty little place, at least until the war. There were lots of VC there — the bad guys — and it had been a thorn in our side, so the big bosses finally decided to deal with it once and for all. The mission was real hush-hush, didn’t even tell the South Vietnam army about it until the day it happened. We just woke up that morning and dropped hell on their heads.”

Theo listened without moving.

“The plan was simple. Attack, and capture or kill the bad guys, then evacuate the women and kids and old people, and then totally demolish the place. Bomb it, burn it, bulldoze it, just make it disappear. It wasn’t much of a fight, really. We went in on sixty helicopters. It only took fifteen minutes to land and offload every one of them. Pretty damn impressive. Most of the enemy ran when they realized what was happening, and when we landed there were mostly just women and children in the village, lots of ‘em. We were still on high alert ‘cause they had tunnels all over the place, but we didn’t have to do much shooting.”

Tony swigged his brandy.

“I even made a friend, sort of, with this little kid on the first day we were there. Kids are amazing. At first, whenever we went into a village, even if we blew the place to hell, after a while the little kids would come out, and they’d start looking for things to play with — empty shell casings, plastic pipe, tarps — anything. We were their toy store. Can you imagine?

“Well, this one little kid, maybe five or six years old, was at a hut while his mother was packing her stuff to evacuate. We were going to airlift all of ‘em out over the next few days and relocate them. Well, I’m walking by and this little boy looks at me, and I sort of smile, which was not really like me, especially over there, but damn if he doesn’t smile back, and a little while later I notice he’s following me around. And the whole time I could hear bombing and shooting in the distance and sometimes close by, and it was a pretty chaotic situation. And this little kid just keeps following me around. I wasn’t paying him much attention; I was too damn busy, but I kept an eye on him. Even kids could hurt you over there, and we were always on edge around them. But all he had on was a little raggedy-ass pair of shorts and no shirt, so I could see there weren’t any bombs or weapons strapped to him.”

Another swig.

“Late that first day, the little kid brought me an egg, like a sign of friendship or something. Just a plain old chicken egg, but that was kind of a big deal. I wanted to give him something, but I didn’t have any candy, and I couldn’t give him a knife or anything like that, so, Theo, get this: I gave him my good luck charm. It was all I had.”

Theo asked the obvious. “What was your good luck charm?”

“Don’t laugh. It was a golf ball. When I was in high school, I was on the golf team, and one day at practice, I hit a hole in one. Hole number twelve, Golden Country Club. Big deal, right? But I kept that ball with me all the time. I got teased about it a lot. Go to prom with a golf ball in your tuxedo pocket, and you’re setting yourself up to get ragged on. Like I said, I was a bit of a weird kid.

“But I had that same golf ball with me in Vietnam, in the pocket of my fatigues. And I thought, well, if anybody needs some good luck over here, it’s probably that little kid. So, I gave him the golf ball. You’d have thought I just gave him the Hope diamond. I didn’t see him anymore that day. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of villagers that had to be evacuated, and there were people and farm animals and troops all mixed in together. It was dangerous as hell, and we knew there were still VCs in the area. It took three days to complete the evacuation. We were exhausted and we’d given the enemy plenty of time to organize an attack if they wanted to come after us. We were all on edge. Mad and jittery, that’s a dangerous combination.”

Tony paused, massaged his forehead, rubbed his eyes with a thumb and middle finger again, took a gulp of brandy, and trained his eyes on the air in front of him. “I’m talking too much.”

Theo sat in priestly stillness, struggling for something to say. Before he could conjure up anything, Tony resumed his story.

His words had become hesitant and sloppy. There were long, dense pauses as his memory imported every emotion he had felt in the jungle near Ben Suc that day: exhaustion, terror, hatred, a tense anticipation bordering on nausea.

He was in a world far removed from Golden. The calm stillness of the Verbivore was a figment. Vietnam was his reality.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, took a deep breath, exhaled slowly through distended cheeks, then straightened his spine and sat back in his chair.

He gazed into his glass, eyes tightening and then opening widely, as if dragons were swimming in the brandy.

He was looking through the core of the earth to a rice paddy nine thousand miles and five decades away. Abruptly, he gasped like a man seeing a ghost.

“Oh my god, no, stop.”

His hand, trembling slightly, squeezed the glass of brandy. Theo feared it might crack under the pressure.

The final scene from Ben Suc had begun to unfold in Tony’s mind. It was a scene from which he had fled all his adult life. He never knew when or how the “play” button would be triggered. Sometimes it was a nightmare. Sometimes a photograph or a line in something he read. The vision had struck on one occasion in a grocery store, when his cart had nearly bumped into a child on the bakery aisle.

Now, with brandy dilating his veins and narrowing his thoughts, he heard the faint flutter of that awful film spooling through his mind. He shivered and took another hard pull from his glass, hoping to drown the vision.

It had the opposite effect.

Tony resumed speaking. He never looked toward Theo.

“The next day, we were getting ready to load up the civilians and fly them away. Some of the women were bitching at us, and we were trying to help them carry their pots and their shovels and their stinkin’ pigs and trying to stay alert in case some gook showed up out of nowhere to throw a grenade at us.

“We got the last of the villagers lined up to leave. There were two or three hundred of them. There were two lines of them, about twenty yards apart, and a few of us walking between ‘em. It was still tense as hell, and we were exhausted. Soon as we got everybody out, we were going to burn the place to the ground and return to base.”