“What are you doing in Da Nang?” Lieutenant Biggs said while the gunny dumped the contents of the shopping bag on the sidewalk.
“I’m on flight crew this week,” Carnegie said, lying spread-eagled on the sidewalk with his cheek against the concrete. “We broke down at the air base, so I slipped in the ville to buy my buds back at the mountain some T-shirts and shit.”
“Well, Lieutenant, looks like he’s telling the truth,” Gunny Jackson smiled, holding in one hand a wad of tie-died T-shirts with various designs printed on their fronts, and in the other hand a bread-loaf-size package wrapped in brown paper. “Here’s all those T-shirts he bought, and here’s the shit he mentioned.”
“What’s wrapped in this package, asshole?” Lieutenant Biggs growled, pushing his hand against the side of Carnegie’s head, pressing it against the pavement.
“Ow, man! That hurts!” the Chu Lai Hippie whined.
“Let me guess,” Gunny Jackson said, tearing the paper off the loaf. “Your mama sent you a fruitcake, or is it a loaf of banana nut bread?”
“Oops!” Lieutenant Biggs said, lifting the loaf of opiated marijuana from the torn paper and cardboard. “This looks like shit, all right! Ain’t that what you hippies call it? Shit? Some real good shit, I’ll bet.”
“Looks like you just wasted what, a thousand dollars? That’s at least what a five-pound brick of Buddha goes for wholesale these days, isn’t it, fuckwad? Got your ass busted, too,” Gunny Jackson laughed, and pulled the hippie to his feet.
“Funny how we just run into your ass on the street like this,” Lieutenant Biggs said, taking handcuffs off his belt and snapping them on Randal Carnegie’s wrists. “Damn! We are getting awfully lucky these days, Jack.”
“I’d say so, sir,” Gunny Jackson said, leading the Chu Lai Hippie to the white panel truck they had parked on the side street when they happened to spot the infamous Randal Carnegie wandering down the boulevard with the big shopping bag in his hands. “Funny though, sir. This loaf of Buddha looks just like some of that load of stuff we confiscated off of dipshit James Elmore six months ago.”
“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Biggs said, turning the brick of opiated marijuana over in his hands. “Hell, anymore it all looks alike. That stuff from the Elmore bust should have got burned at least three months back.”
A GENTLE SEA breeze blew off the South China Sea and helped clear away the afternoon heat as the sun set and Privates Clarence Jones and Samuel Martin stood the road guard duty on a perimeter trail along the fence at Chu Lai. They heard the sound of the jeep before it rounded the turn, and stepped off the roadway to avoid getting hit.
Private Martin put out his hand and waved his flashlight to signal the jeep to slow down. As the vehicle passed the two Marines they heard a voice shout at them.
“Don’t you soldiers know how to salute?” army captain Charles Edwards bellowed at the two black Marines from the front passenger seat. He and two of his subordinate officers, First Lieutenant Philip Ziegler and Second Lieutenant Franklin Webster, had spent the afternoon at an Americal Division field meet and beach party. The three company-grade soldiers, their bellies full of grog and barbecue and their heads swimming from too much booze, now headed toward the visiting officers’ quarters at the infantry compound and air facility.
The trio had come to Chu Lai a week ago to answer questions about a mishap that had occurred in March at a Vietnamese hamlet they nicknamed Pinkville. They called it Pinkville because of the Communist presence there, and the constant trouble they encountered with its nearly one thousand inhabitants, more than half of whom had now disappeared.
Investigations of such matters happened now and then, usually after some newspaper reporter wrote a pack of lies about American soldiers and brutality on the innocent civilian populace. Innocent? They’ve got to be kidding. These people are the Cong. They shoot a man in the dark and kiss his hand in the daylight. However, the army has to appease the concerned citizens back home. Back in the world, where few have the stomach for this war, or any war, given what crap the news media use to poison their minds. Throw them a bone, and a head if you can lob one off. That’ll shut the bastards up for a while.
“We ain’t soldiers, asshole!” Clarence Jones shouted back as the jeep blew past them in the dim evening light, blowing dust in his and Sam Martin’s faces.
Frank Webster, the junior man aboard the vehicle, drove the jeep, and hit the brakes when he heard the smart retort coming from the two enlisted bodies at the roadside they had just passed. He ground the gears to reverse and tromped the gas, nearly losing control of the open-top car.
“You smart-mouth motherfuckers, which one of you called me an asshole?!” Captain Edwards screamed, leaping from the jeep and confronting Sam Martin, getting his mouth six inches from the Marine’s nose. Then the officer shoved the road guard backward. “I’ll teach your black ass not to salute when an officer passes you!”
One problem that had always caused Sam Martin no end to grief, one reason he had remained a career private, he possessed a very bad temper. Growing up in St. Louis, just him and his dad, who drove a truck for a brewery, Sam had learned at a very early age to stand up for himself in order to survive on the tough streets of the Gateway City. He didn’t take shit off anybody.
“You’ll teach my black ass nothing, you son of a bitch,” Private Martin exploded, and gave the captain a hard shove back.
“Wait, wait, sir,” Clarence Jones shouted, jumping between his buddy and the Americal captain. “First of all, I’m the one that said ‘We ain’t soldiers, asshole!’ ” We didn’t see you was officers. Second of all, they taught us not to salute in the field. Some Viet Cong sniper might take you out, sir, we salute you.”
“That man pushed me!” Captain Edwards yelled, trying to step around Private Jones and get at Sam Martin.
When the Marine shoved the captain, Phil Ziegler bailed out the back of the jeep and ran to aid his company commander, with Frank Webster hot on his heels. Just as Clarence Jones moved to hold the angry Charles Edwards at bay, the first lieutenant jumped past them both with his Colt .45 pistol drawn and slapped it against the side of Sam Martin’s face. Frank Webster then grabbed Private Jones and hit him, too.
Corporal Jimmy Seals of Seymour, Texas, Jones’s and Martin’s security patrol leader, saw the scuffle erupt. Reacting to the emergency and intent on rescuing his two men, Seals launched his squad of a dozen Marines into action. When the fight broke out, the squad lay resting in an ambush formation, two men at a time taking one-hour turns at road guard duty. Seals’ radioman called for help, and the military police rolled two units.
“Get off my Marines!” the angry corporal yelled as he leaped on Phil Ziegler, knocking the first lieutenant backward. Then the squad leader laid a full roundhouse right hook square against the officer’s jaw and sent him tumbling.
The sight of Seals pummeling the lieutenant who had slapped their pal with his pistol essentially popped a green star cluster for the squad to assault the remaining two soldiers.
With fifteen Marines swarming them, in seconds the three army officers lay flat on the ground. That’s when Corporal Seals realized that the three men they had accosted wore brass on their collars.
“Get the fuck out of here, now!” he ordered his Marines, who ran back to their security ambush site, and waited in the dark as the military police swarmed the scene.
ON FRIDAY MORNING Terry O’Connor met Russ Sherman in the enlisted men’s barracks and looked at the photographs. The lance corporal handed him a dozen beautifully exposed prints clearly showing Charlie Heyster extracting the package from his laundry bag in the backseat of the jeep and then handing it to the Chu Lai Hippie. The series of pictures also showed Randal Carnegie handing the prosecutor a white envelope that the captain folded and put in his trousers pocket. The last two photos showed the hippie stuffing tie-died T-shirts in the shopping bag, along with the package that Heyster had given to him.
Revisiting each scene with such vivid black-and-white detail put Terry O’Connor’s stomach in a knot. He told Movie Star, Bruce Dobbs, and Russ Sherman that until he advised them otherwise they would not breathe a word to anyone about the pictures or what they had all seen Charlie Heyster do.
“We don’t know what he gave this guy. It could all be legal,” the captain reminded the three lance corporals.
“Right, sir,” Movie Star scoffed, “and I believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, too. That’s the Chu Lai Hippie; he deals more shit than anyone these days. Why would our good Captain Shithead even be talking to this piece of crap? He may be the prosecutor, but even I know he ain’t any cop. So this isn’t a case of him working a snitch. He’s dealing, sir. Face it.”
“You heard what I said, Corporal Dean,” O’Connor snapped. “It’s important. You say nothing. None of you three. You got that?”
“I got it, sir,” Movie Star grumbled. “Meanwhile, Major Dicky Dick-head is dead in our shit, thinking we got that grass. What about that, sir?”
“Like you said yesterday,” O’Connor reminded the lance corporal, “Dicky Doo is dead in all our shit anyway. So fuck him.”
The three lance corporals laughed with the captain’s comment.
Instead of taking the photographs to the office, Terry O’Connor made a side trip to the barracks and put the pictures on the top shelf of his wall locker, under his hats and shaving gear. Then he reported to work.
“You’re late,” Jon Kirkwood said as Captain O’Connor slipped through the side door that led into the defense section.
“I had a little something to attend to, nothing important,” O’Connor said, and sat at his desk and began looking at a folder that Major-Select Charles Heyster, the interim military justice officer, had left for him ten minutes earlier.
“I got one just like it,” Kirkwood said, looking up from the military police incident report and charge sheets. “I talked to this army officer, Captain Charles Edwards, this morning and he’s going to drop the charges against Corporal Seals, since he agrees that the Marine only acted when he saw his men in danger, and he did not realize that Edwards and these other two jamokes were officers.”
“So we split a pair of privates, I take it,” O’Connor said, reading the charge sheet and police report. “Good of this captain to let the corporal go.”
“He admitted that he and his two lieutenants were drinking, going to the Q after an Americal field meet, beer bust, and barbecue,” Kirkwood said, closing his folder. “However, he claims that none of his men or himself were drunk. He says that the blacker of the two privates, which I take is Samuel Martin, hit him first, and he struck back.”
“Of course, it’s the word of three officers against that of two privates,” O’Connor said and laughed. “These guys are bacon sizzling on the grill.”
“Our clients, God help them, both claim that Edwards started the fight by pushing Martin, and Private Clarence Jones tried to stop the fight,” Kirkwood said, leaning back in his chair and lacing his hands behind his head. “This is where it gets interesting. Both Jones and Martin say that First Lieutenant Philip Ziegler slapped Private Martin on the side of the head with his pistol.”
“The lieutenant had a pistol drawn?” O’Connor said, now flipping through the pages of statements. “Then he hits our guy with it? That’s assault with a deadly weapon!”
“Good luck getting that to fly,” Kirkwood said, getting up from his chair and grabbing his and O’Connor’s cups and heading for the enlisted coffee mess.
“Look at this, our two Marines whipped the holy shit out of three Americal infantry officers. They beat them to a pulp,” O’Connor said, reading the report of the medical examination on the three soldiers and two Marines. “Corporal Seals didn’t have a scratch. Private Jones, a few bumps and some busted knuckles. Private Martin, severe bruising to the side of his head, and a broken tooth? Wait a minute, Jon—this supports getting pistol-whipped.”
“Hey, Terry, I believe our guys,” Kirkwood said, walking down the hallway toward the table that held the coffeepot for the general public and enlisted Marines.
“Why can’t we file a complaint? We can charge this jerk Ziegler with assault with a deadly weapon,” O’Connor said, trailing after his partner.
“Heyster, Dicky Doo, nobody in the command, including General Anderson and General Cushman, will let it fly,” Kirkwood shrugged, stopping at the pot and handing O’Connor his cup. “Something’s funky about these three Americal bums, and they have the command anxious to make this incident go away with as few ripples as possible.”
“I still don’t understand,” O’Connor said, filling his mug.
“Me either,” Kirkwood said, taking a sip and heading back to the defense section. “Dickinson let me call the chief of staff about it, and I got told in no uncertain terms that we would not have an incident where a drunken army officer pistol-whipped any Marine on road guard duty. Walter Cronkite would have that one on the evening news. I happen to agree. It would make a headline or two.”
“So these doggies lie, say they only went back to correct the misconduct of our Marines, and that our guys jumped them out of the blue, and they’re going to get away with it,” O’Connor said, slamming his chair against the wall and sitting down.
“It was dark, our clients didn’t know these guys were officers, and considering that the motive for jumping these soldiers is thin at best, I think we have a shot,” Kirkwood said, sitting at his desk and drinking coffee.
“Meanwhile, our Marines rot in the brig for defending themselves,” O’Connor grumbled, and set his coffee mug down hard, causing it to slosh over the sides. “No wonder our enlisted people have attitudes.”
Chapter 16
THE GATHERING
“YO, SNOWMAN! THAT you, man?” Mau Mau Harris called from his cell when he saw the brig guards escort Brian Pitts to the cage next to his. “Hey, you got your wing in a sling, man. They clip you?”