“Sir, with all due respect, Sweden is a friendly power to the United States,” O’Connor fumed. “Applying your logic would make Canada our enemy, too.”
“I didn’t say ‘enemy,’ Captain,” Dickinson said, tossing O’Connor’s OQR on his desk. “Sympathetic. Just like Canada.”
“Canada is one of America’s closest allies, sir!” O’Connor said. “I cannot believe you would regard them as anything less than a friendly nation.”
“They allow draft dodgers to run there; they give them refuge and refuse to honor our requests for extradition. That is not the conduct of an ally,” Dickinson huffed.
“Sweden is a social democracy, much like Canada. They are our friends. Just like us, they fear the Russians. They simply have a long-held tradition of neutrality,” O’Connor said. “My girlfriend, a Swede, writes for a Communist newspaper from time to time, big deal. She’s no Bolshevik!”
“Captain, I just pointed out that I was aware of the issue,” Dickinson said, now trying to defuse the young lawyer’s tirade.
“Major, sir, I happen to be a Republican. I cast the first presidential vote of my lifetime for Senator Barry M. Goldwater, for Pete sake!” O’Connor said. “If you look closer at my background check, you will also see notes regarding my stormy and often verbally combative relationship with Miss Ahlquist. All of our conflicts specifically centered on our divergent political perspectives. Although my father is a Marine veteran of World War II and recipient of the Navy Cross, he is today a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and a very liberal-thinking Democrat. He nearly always agrees with Vibeke in our political arguments. Does that make him a Communist, too?”
“Relax, Captain O’Connor,” Dickinson said. “Nobody has called you a Communist.”
“Agreed, sir,” O’Connor said, taking hold of his temper and now trying to extinguish the flames of his anger.
“Captain Kirkwood,” Dickinson said, looking at the quiet officer who had taken several steps toward the wall and busily read the posterboard sign attached to it.
“Yes, sir,” Kirkwood responded, wheeling on his toes and striding quickly back to the major’s desk.
“I see your wife has gotten herself a job teaching junior high social studies at the Department of Defense School System on Okinawa,” Dickinson said, looking at a yellow note paper-clipped to the manila cover of Kirkwood’s Officer Qualification Record.
“Correct, sir,” Kirkwood said. “Her father knew some people with the DOD school system, and they made some arrangements for her to work there. Hopefully, occasions will arise where I may have cases that take me to Okinawa, and might afford us the opportunity to be together for a day or two during my thirteen months here in ’Nam. Just a hope, sir. You know.”
“Any Okinawa junkets are plums that I award to only our stellar performers, Captain,” Dickinson said. “Defense section has yet to show me any stellar performances, so you will have a precedent to set if you hope to get to Okinawa anytime soon.”
“I think I understand, sir,” Kirkwood said, choosing to keep any potential for argument to himself while trying not to show his stirring emotions and his immediate dislike for the major.
“Like I said,” Dickinson said, and faked a laugh, “I get paid to be the asshole at this office.”
“I understand, sir,” Kirkwood repeated.
“Your father-in-law is quite the man, isn’t he, Captain Kirkwood?” Dickinson said, running his finger down the note and then looking up at the flush-faced captain.
“Sir?” Kirkwood said carefully.
“Political power broker in California, Captain,” Dickinson bellowed. “He and Governor Pat Brown are like Frank and Jesse James. They run the California Democrat machine. Bernice Layne Brown, the state’s first lady, is your wife’s godmother. Don’t play so coy with me, Captain, you’re quite well connected.”
“Sir,” Kirkwood said, “as you obviously know, Governor Ronald Reagan, a Republican, succeeded Edmund G. Brown this very year. So that California Democrat machine does not appear to have as great a head of steam as you might regard. Besides, if I have such clout, what am I doing in Vietnam?”
“Good question, Captain,” Dickinson said. “I’m all ears.”
“Sir, I got drafted,” Kirkwood began to explain. “Rather than face two years as a private in the army, I opted to join the Marine Corps.”
“Right, right, right,” Major Dickinson said, waving his hand as he looked back at the folder, turning off what might develop into a long-winded explanation that he cared nothing to hear. Then the major rocked back on his chair and looked up from his desk at both captains. “Gentlemen, to get along here I ask only that you keep out of trouble, and abide by my rules, posted on yon wall.”
“Your infamous list of Don’ts,” O’Connor said.
“Correct, Captain,” Dickinson said in a hot voice, “the infamous Don’ts. Read them, make notes of them, learn to recite them by heart if needed, but above all, abide by them. I’m not here to get you to like me, and I am not your buddy. Ever. Don’t make the mistake of believing something otherwise.”
“You don’t have to worry about that, sir,” Kirkwood said, now grabbing the opportunity to mouth off before O’Connor took it.
“Don’t leave our offices without first checking out,” Dickinson said. “Rule number one. Don’t use the overseas telephone without obtaining a chit from me first. That’s rule number two. Most importantly, don’t ever, and I mean ever, take the colonel’s jeep. Colonel Prunella’s vehicle and his driver are exclusively off-limits to all hands. We have a staff jeep. Use the staff jeep. No exceptions. No excuses. Period!”
“What if it’s out and we have an emergency?” O’Connor said.
“Nothing in our profession requires that kind of urgency, Captain,” Dickinson snubbed. “If the staff jeep is out, then call the command taxi service or request a vehicle and driver from the motor pool. However, and another rule: Don’t request a vehicle without getting my authorization first.”
“How about a do?” O’Connor said smartly. “You have any of those? A do this or a do that?”
Yes, I have a do for you, Captain O’Connor,” Dickinson said wryly. “Do not piss me off!”
“Sir, ah, that’s not a do,” Kirkwood said, gesturing with his index finger raised, trying to appear innocent but feeling good with adding his smart, two cents’ worth. “You see, don’t is simply a contraction of do not. That’s another don’t, sir.”
“You just pissed me off!” Dickinson said, standing from his six-wheeled swivel chair and sending it banging into the government-gray steel credenza behind him. “Smart-ass behavior like that will only buy you beaucoup trouble around here, bub. Given your attitudes, you two clowns ought to fit in very nicely with the rest of the misfits in the defense section.”
“No serious swimmers, then, I take it, sir, in the defense pool?” O’Connor said, smiling, seeing the major’s anger and reaching for a fresh nerve to grate raw.
“Not a one, Captain,” Dickinson hissed through his clenched teeth. “Not a one.”
THE AFTERNOON SUN blazed across the steel matting, concrete, and hard-packed dirt at the infantry base and air facility at Chu Lai. The bustling aviation and ground complex occupied by the U.S. Army’s Twenty-third Infantry “Americal” Division headquarters along with other elements of Task Force Oregon, and Marine Corps aviation and ground units of the First Wing and First Division sat smack in the middle of a stretch of nasty sand hills and hamlets that teamed with Viet Cong, just an hour’s drive south of Da Nang on Highway One. While the South China Sea washed its clear blue tide along Chu Lai’s east-side beaches, hostile rice paddies, canals, and thickly forested hedgerows, broken by a hillock here or a streambed there, stretched north, south, and west from the American forces’ compound. Farther west, the dangerous lands that the grunts had come to call Indian country, places such as Happy Valley, Dodge City, and Charlie Ridge, lay in the mountains and steep terrain that overlooked the Chu Lai rice flats. Closer by, equally enemy rich haunts such as the Riviera and Que Son Hills loomed just outside Chu Lai’s fences.
Celestine Anderson had spent the past nine days pounding holes in his boots, walking patrol in those dangerous suburbs with catchy names. Now, as his chopper descended onto home turf, he couldn’t remember the last time he had closed his eyes and really slept. Slept with a good dream ending. Slept like a Saturday night cold beer and hot steak dinner.
Chu Lai looked awfully good to him as his tired eyes gazed out the back hatchway of the long, green grasshopper-shaped twin-rotor CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter when it finally set down at the Marines’ base, letting off his bedraggled security platoon. He thought of how satisfying a real meal would taste as he bounded down the rear ramp. So instead of going straight to his hooch and crashing for a long and badly needed sleep, he ambled up the dusty jeep road that led to the headquarters complex’s dining facility.
He had stood listening post duty the last night on patrol, so he hadn’t even gotten to shut his eyes in two days. As the afternoon sun baked his shaved head and bare arms, he kept his face turned down, following the tracks in the road, shielding his bloodshot, sandpaper-feeling eyes. Just something warm in his stomach. Something to make him sleep good. That’s all he needed now.
“Yo, bro,” a familiar voice called from ahead. Celestine cupped his hands along his forehead, shading his eyes, and squinted to see which of his few friends shouted at him.
“Hey, blood,” Celestine called back when he saw the Marine, a buddy named Wendell Carter, from Houston, his own hometown. He hadn’t known the guy there, but knew of his neighborhood. Just a bit south on Jensen Drive from Celestine’s own set of blocks. Since they lived so close to each other back there, both on Houston’s rough North Side, they called each other “homey.”
Carter stood in a cluster with two other Marines whom Celestine also knew well. The four of them worked at the wing’s communications section, a unit in Marine Wing Support Group 17.
Although fully trained at coordinating air and ground communications, and performing basic maintenance and repair on a variety of radio and telephone equipment, Anderson and these three other air wing Marines of African heritage had found themselves mostly relegated out to security patrols, humping the backache PRC-25 radios and carrying rifles.
“Celestine, my man,” Wendell called to his pal, and put out his right fist.
Anderson put out his right fist, too, and rapped it first on the top of Carter’s, then he tapped the bottom, and after that knocked each side, and finished the greeting by butting his knuckles against those of his friend. To complete the ritual, each man then took his clenched fist and struck it across his own heart, and lastly raised it defiantly above his head.
Dapping, they called it. Its meaning mimicked that of the African Masai warriors’ ritual greeting of his fellow Moran, and symbolized that neither man held status above or below the other, that both were equal, side by side, brothers in spirit and in blood. For Celestine, the greeting represented solidarity among his cohorts who shared his African roots, and his heritage of slavery in America from which his people still struggled to emerge today, even though the chains had been legally broken now for 102 years.
“Look at those fucking niggers,” a skinny, darkly tanned Marine named Leonard Cross said to three of his buddies standing with him in a small circle near the chow hall. The surly crew of four had spent the better part of the day filling sandbags and burning shitters downwind from Chu Lai’s population.
Laddie, as Cross preferred that his friends call him, wore no shirt, and had on scuffed-white combat boots and a pair of filthy utility trousers with the seat ripped out, but showed a failed attempt at a ragged patch job on the pants ass-end and at both knees. As he spoke, he let fly a stream of tobacco-brown spit that landed between his feet, making a small, dark lump in the dust.
“Fucking niggers,” two other shirtless grunts wearing similarly ragged, dirty trousers and scuffed-white boots mumbled in agreement with him.
Harold Rein, the fourth man in the group, who also dressed in the same filthy, disheveled fashion, said nothing, but visibly fumed, staring hotly at the quartet of dark green Marines dapping a dozen yards away from him, also waiting for the chow hall to open for early supper.
Although his mother in Dothan, Alabama, had named him Harold, after her father, nobody here called him by that handle. If they did, he generally let the offender quickly know his dislike for it in verbally harsh and sometimes physically brutal terms. Officers and senior enlisted he let slide, but still set them straight with some strongly worded slurs between “sirs.” People who didn’t want a hard kick in the nuts from Private Rein, or at the very least an earful of profanity, called him Buster.
The nineteen-year-old, already twice promoted to private first class, and likewise twice demoted back to buck private, sported a cartoon bulldog wearing a Marine campaign hat tilted over his eyes and then under-struck in a crescent below the bulldog’s jowls the letters USMC tattooed on his right forearm. On his left shoulder he had a rebel flag tattooed above a poker hand that held three aces and two eights.
Like his father, Buster Rein’s skin didn’t tan. It just burned. Then it mostly freckled and peeled. Constantly peeled. Even his scalp pealed beneath his brush-cut red hair.
Rein sported a brawler’s knuckles—dry and hard and heavily calloused. Black grease filled the many cracks that laced over his hands’ thick skin, and embedded deeply under and around the fingernails on both of his meaty, pink, and freckled paws.
“Who the fuck do those porch monkeys think they are, standing there all high and fucking mighty, beating their nigger fists and shoving their black power, Mau Mau bullshit down my throat?” Buster finally bellowed, making sure his voice carried to the group that offended him.
“Fuck you niggers, you motherfuckers,” Laddie Cross then called to them, not to have Buster outdo his racist zeal.