Dragon Lady
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Presents
DRAGON LADY
a
novel
by
Gary Alexander
Copyright 2011 Gary Alexander
Published by Istoria Books
License Notes
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ebook
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***
About Dragon Lady
In 1965 Saigon, a young draftee named Joe becomes obsessed with a Vietnam girl named Mai, his own "Dragon Lady" from his beloved
Terry and the Pirates
cartoon strips that his mother still sends him. As he pursues a relationship with her, Saigon churns with intrigue and rumors--will the U.S. become more involved with the Vietnamese struggle? What's going on with a special unit that's bringing in all sorts of (for the time) high tech equipment? Will the U.S. make Vietnam the
51st
state and bomb aggressors to oblivion? But for Joe, the big question is--does Mai love him or will she betray more than just his heart? Gary Alexander’s intelligent voice, filled with dry wit, and his own experiences give this story a sharp sense of truth, recounting the horror and absurdity of war. Reminiscent of books such as
Catch-22
,
Dragon Lady
serves up equal measures of outrageous humor and poignant remembrance. Gary served in Vietnam in ’65. When he arrived, he joined 17,000 GIs. When he left, 75,000 were in country.
PRAISE FOR DRAGON LADY:
“…a refreshing book… Dragon Lady is a highly entertaining book that I heartily recommend…It’s one of those books that grabs you and doesn't let you go and leaves you thinking about it even when you are finished. So run, don't walk, and try this author out, see if Dragon Lady grabs you like it grabbed me.”
Crystal
Fulcher
, My Reading Room blog
“Positioning the narrator in the afterlife gives Dragon Lady a third dimension that elevates it above a simple boy-meets-girl story... But his love-sick pursuit of his impossible dream is entertaining.”
Bill
Furlow
, Great Books Under $5 blog
“Take one part M*A*S*H, add one part The Quiet American, throw in an offbeat love story, fold in some screwball characters, and top it off with an out of this world (and I mean out of this world) narrator, and you get the zaniest war novel since Catch 22. Alexander delivers a jeep-load of laughs in Dragon Lady as well as unflinchingly candid insights into the Vietnam War.”
Ron Cooper, author of Purple Jesus
and
Hume’s Fork
Our numbers have increased in Vietnam because the
aggression
of others has increased in Vietnam. There
is
not, and there will not be a mindless escalation.
Lyndon B. Johnson
We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The 803rd Liaison Detachment did not exist. Anybody who served in Vietnam knows that it could have.
IN SEATTLE, Washington, on Thanksgiving, November 25, 2010 at 5:12 AM, I died peacefully in my sleep, my loving fifth wife at my side.
Happy Fucking Turkey Day.
Medical science, bless their collective hearts, takes death personally. They kept me
clinging
a bit too long. I was quite ready to check out.
Months earlier, as they prepared to roll me into the MRI that found the thing causing the headaches, the thing that was to kill me, they asked two questions I’d expected:
1. Are you claustrophobic?
2. Do you have medical insurance?
They asked one I hadn’t:
Do you have any metal in your body?
A steel plate in your cranium, a pin in a hip?
I had to think. It’d been years.
Decades.
Yeah, as a matter of fact there was. Pointing at a half-inch-long indented scar in my left forearm, I told them about a chunk of iron in there, the size of a grain of rice, compliments of a Vietcong satchel charge.
In 1965, when I’d awakened from the anesthesia at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, the surgeon had told me they’d removed all the foreign material but that fragment. They’d left it alone because it rested beside a major blood vessel. It wasn’t worth the risk of going after, the risk of nicking the vessel. They’d warned that it could shift. In almost a half century, I hadn’t felt it.
The MRI folk reminded me that the M in MRI stood for magnetic. They said the shrapnel might be attracted. They said I might feel a slight tug.
Sure enough, I did.
When they rolled me out of the machine and its blaring electrical hum, I couldn’t stop jabbering about that old war. I couldn’t. They’d heard of
Vietnam
from their fathers and grandfathers, who’d
either
participated in it or dodged it. No, I said before I went any further, don’t get the wrong impression. I am not a war hero. I am anything but. I was a shirker, a malingering goof-off slacker extraordinaire.
I was assigned in
Saigon
, I babbled on, far from the paddies and the jungles and snipers and shit-smeared punji sticks. I was attached to a bizarre outfit of paper shufflers whose mission is classified to this day.
The shrapnel was a result of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I was a helluva lot luckier than my best buddy. I came home vertically. He didn’t. He had a junkyard’s worth of metal in
him,
I continued babbling and then was bawling like a baby.
They patted my arm, as if I were a live explosive, saying, “Now, now, it’s all right. It’ll be fine.”
But it wasn’t all right. It would not be fine. Two days later, I received a call to come back in.
As soon as possible.
Please.
A neurologist showed me the bad news, a series of photographic slices of my gray matter. Even I could distinguish the growth that didn’t belong. It looked like a golf ball. The neurologist went on to explain in layman’s terms why there was nothing that could be done. My golf ball had roots he could see but I couldn’t.
I went home to die.
Always a voracious reader, I dove into
Vietnam
, a subject I’d avoided for years. I read and read. The numbers staggered me. The consensus for
U.S.
dead in the Vietnam War (1960-1975) was 58,199. When I began my
Vietnam
tour in 1964, there were half that many
live
GIs in-country.
Sally, my bride of less than a year, was incredibly supportive. She was one of the two great loves of my life. Sally was a tall, graying blonde, the antithesis of my other, my Vietnamese Dragon Lady.
Sally and I took what we thought was going to be one last trip together. We went to
Washington
,
D.C.
and visited the Vietnam War Memorial. The Memorial doesn’t look like much from a distance. It’s long and black and low and shiny and V-shaped. The power is up close and personal, when you see it gridlocked with names of 58,249 (am not gonna quibble over a difference of 50 names) dead, when you see older men taking rubbings of a buddy’s name, tears streaming. These were big burly guys with beards and white hair. These were guys who would not whimper if you had their private parts in a vise.
Back home, I read and read and read. They say my year in country, 1965, was a pivotal year. Politically and militarily, we could’ve gone either way. We could have declared victory over counterinsurgency and the godless communists, saying that we’d won their hearts and minds to boot, and packed our bags. We could have done what we did--that is, “stayed the course” to the tune of 500,000-plus troops, 58,000-plus of them needing only one-way tickets.
A historian wrote that
Vietnam
was our first war with “amorphous” battlefronts. In previous wars, the lines were clear-cut. When I was a kid during
Korea
, growing up in the
Pacific Northwest
, the newspapers had maps and dotted lines, the good guys on one side, the bad guys on the other.
But in those papers, the comic section was the front section to me. My passion for adventure comics developed at a young age. I couldn’t wait for Sunday’s, four entire pages in color.
Tarzan
and
Buck Rogers
and
Joe Palooka
and
The Lone Ranger
were okay, but the niftiest by a mile was
Terry and the Pirates
. There was a crackling sexual tension between Terry Lee and his nemesis/femme fatale, the Dragon Lady. I instinctively knew this before I knew what sexual was.
My flesh-and-blood Dragon Lady and the Dragon Lady in print represented a lifetime of tingling fantasies and wet dreams and masturbation and erotic memories. One drunken night, I confessed my kinky obsession to Charlotte, who shortly thereafter became my second ex-wife. My Dragon Lady hang-up was also instrumental in costing me Lea, spouse number one, and Marcia, number four.
Mum had been the word with Sally till a week after my diagnosis. I told her that she ran second, a very close second, to my Dragon Lady. Why I told her, I’m still unsure. It was needless and cruel. I guess I didn’t want to take anything with me.
Sally handled it well. No tears, no silent treatment, no hissy fit. An advantage of being terminal is that your indiscretions are taken in stride. You are easily forgiven.
That magnetic tug in my arm tugged at me to put down what follows. In The Land of the Living, I was not introspective. My nature was to lead with my mouth or a fist rather than with my brain.
These days, I am on my best behavior.
And I have all the time in the netherworld to write.
Cordially,
Joseph Josiah Joe IV