Jungle Rules (61 page)

Brian Pitts cleared his throat and spit on the floor. Then he walked to the cold shelf of steel with a thin mattress laid on it that served as his bed and sat down. Heartsick thoughts of home and Aunt Winnie Russell pressed on his mind at the moment. He didn’t answer his old friend. He just stared out, across the aisle at the wild eyes of the black man clinging to the crosshatched steel of his cell door, flashing a gold front tooth through his trembling lips.

“Snowman, yo!” Harris shouted, pressing his face against the steel front of his cage, trying to see inside the dark cell next door. Then he looked across the narrow passage of concrete floor bordered by red-painted lines on each side. Any prisoner crossing the red line without permission left himself open to a beating or worse.

James Elmore ran to his toilet and pulled out his already urinating penis, sending the stream into the can.

“You see who come?” Harris called to the man he had tormented daily for several weeks now. “We gonna get yo rat ass now, motherfucker. Say your prayers.”

Then Mau Mau pressed his cheek against his cell door and tried to see his silent friend.

“Brian, man, talk to me, my blue-eyed brother,” Harris said, now in a quiet voice. “What happen with you? We still good with that stuff in them seabags? You know what I mean?”

“You are one stupid waste of skin, you know that, Harris?” Pitts finally said, still sitting on his bunk.

“What I do, man?” Mau Mau called back, his feelings hurt.

“Just don’t fucking talk. Okay?” Pitts said, and then laid back on his hard bed, resting his wounded shoulder by laying his arm across his chest.

No matter how hard he tried, Brian Pitts could not shake the vivid flashback of seeing Tommy Joyner suddenly looking up with surprise at his buddy Robert Matthews after a .30-caliber sniper round knocked him to the floor, flat on his back, where he died after a few blinks and a gasp for air that never came. That’s when Huong’s younger brother, Chung, blindly opened fire out the front door of the white stucco plantation house with the red tile roof. A second sniper shot put the middle Nguyen brother on the floor, too, dead with a pencil-size hole in his forehead and a fist-size cavity out the back where the round emptied his pulverized brains.

Horrified at seeing their brother die, Huong and Bao lay in the front windows with Chinese SKS rifles sold to Pitts by the Viet Cong and began to shoot at movement in the tree line. This brought a volley of machine gun fire that swept across the front porch, and wounded Bao in the calf when a .30-caliber bullet slashed through the muscle, laying it open two inches deep.

“We go, now!” Huong said, and made a run for the back door with his brother’s arm over his shoulders, not waiting to see if Pitts and Matthews followed him. When the two Vietnamese cowboys ran toward the trees, only twenty yards away, the machine guns from the Tenth Division company turned after them. Huong and Bao didn’t go down, but there was no way that Brian Pitts could tell if they had survived the gunfire and made it to the series of trenches, rabbit holes, and tunnels that led away from the house and opened near others that networked for miles. He didn’t know for sure that his friends had made it until he overheard the comments of the captain who commanded the company of soldiers that the two gooks had gotten away.

At least Huong and Bao had evaded capture. Turd, the lucky beast, must have sensed it coming. He disappeared from the plantation early that morning, and would likely sit hidden in a tunnel until his troubled feelings passed. He had begun doing that stunt quite often during the past week or so, and it gave Huong fits of anxiety. When the top-hand cowboy couldn’t find the mutt this particular morning, he became more worried than ever, and suggested that everyone should go to the tunnels. At least until these uneasy feelings passed, and Turd returned to his regular spot, resting on the red tile porch by the front door. Then, just before noon, when the three American outlaws talked about grilling some steaks that Brian had purchased in Saigon two evenings earlier, the sniper round caught Tommy Joyner square in the chest.

Seeing Huong and Bao abandon their stand, Robert Matthews gave up, too. He threw his hands in the air and stepped out on the porch. Then, realizing the attackers had the house now fully surrounded, Brian Pitts put his arms above his head and walked outside.

He saw someone stand up, waving his hands and blowing a whistle, but that did not stop Bruce Olsen from letting one go at the Snowman. The only thing that saved Brian Pitts was the movement that he saw, and he turned just as the Phoenix sniper dropped the hammer on him.

“I should have killed you in the hotel bar,” Olsen hissed at Pitts as he stood over the wounded Snowman, who lay on the porch while a Tenth Division medical corpsman did his best to patch the wound. The shot broke both the deserter’s shoulder joint and his collarbone.

“It’ll never heal right,” the doc said as he worked to stop the bleeding and felt the shattered bones crunching under the pressure of his bandage.

“Small price, the fucking traitor!” Olsen snapped, and stomped off the porch.

After ten days under guard in the army hospital in Saigon, two Marine Corps chasers from the Freedom Hill brig watched Brian Pitts get dressed in a fluff-dried green utility uniform with black canvas, high-top Bata Bullet tennis shoes on his feet. They handed him a white laundry bag with another uniform inside it, along with three sets of white skivvies and three pairs of olive-drab woolen socks. Then they hauled him to Da Nang in the belly of a C-130 airplane.

Robert Matthews came to Freedom Hill two weeks ago, and now enjoyed life in the yard with the general population. He caused no trouble, and kept his mouth shut, so First Lieutenant Michael Schuller released him from the block of holding cells and let the kid breathe outdoors. It freed up the space that he needed to keep Brian Pitts locked up.

Given Matthews’ Saigon history with the Snowman, Schuller had wisely decided to not allow the new prisoner contact with any of Pitts’s Da Nang associates, namely Harris and Elmore. So the two men had no clue who the new man was.

“Tell me, Mau Mau, how you making it?” the Snowman finally asked, sitting up on the hard bunk, finally breaking his hour-long silence, and now wishing that he had a cigarette.

 
AUGUST HEAT PUSHED Terry O’Connor’s temper to the edge, so it took very little to cause the Philadelphia Irishman to blow his top. After a short meeting with Major Dickinson, the lawyer walked into his office and kicked his swivel chair across the room.

“Now sit down and spill it,” Jon Kirkwood said, taking the angry captain by the shoulder and pushing him into his seat. “You’ve been stomping around this office for the past two weeks like a cat with a fish bone stuck in his throat. You need to tell me what has got you so pissed off.”

“This morning, it just takes the cake,” O’Connor said, and let out a deep breath in disgust. “First Charlie Heyster cuts a sweet pretrial deal for this character, Sergeant Randal Carnegie, a sack of shit that our troops here in this office call the Chu Lai Hippie, because even they know he’s the biggest doper around I Corps. Then yesterday, Charlie the shyster, with the blessings of Dicky Doo, lets four of this bum’s dope-dealing cohorts walk free.”

Jon Kirkwood shook his head and squinted his eyes shut. Then he looked at his partner with an expression of amazement. He walked to the office door, looked at the crimson placard with yellow lettering on it, and then went back to his desk and sat down.

“The sign on this office’s door says Defense Section,” Kirkwood said, raising both hands in an exaggerated shrug. “You’ll find people down the hall, in the office labeled Prosecution Section, who will readily sympathize with your frustration of defendants finally getting a break.”

“Jon, these guys are guilty as sin,” O’Connor exclaimed, standing up and kicking his chair again. “CID busted these four bums, people from the same unit as Carnegie, his buddies, when the drug dogs alerted on the uniforms that these characters wore. They had Buddha sewn in the sleeves of their shirts and inside the legs of their trousers. Big lumps of reefer!

“So Charlie gets a message from this piece of shit Carnegie that says he sold these four-star citizens his old utility uniforms, because he is getting out of the Marine Corps in a month, when he exits the brig. He claims that he sewed the dope in his clothes and that these guys knew nothing about it being in their sleeves and trouser legs when they bought the used uniforms.

“Tell me how anyone can put on a shirt and pants and not feel pillow-size lumps of dope sewn in them?”

“Hey, it worked and the guys got free,” Kirkwood said and smiled. “Chalk four pluses on the defense section’s tote board.”

“Jon, they’re guilty,” O’Connor said, throwing his head back. “There is something patently wrong when we let guilty people slide. This character Carnegie got only thirty days and no bad time. Thirty days! And it doesn’t even count! None of it will appear in his service record, so he gets out of the Marine Corps with a clean discharge. He had a five-pound loaf of Buddha, and he only got a month in the brig for it, none of it bad time, and he kept his rank! Now, in this latest turn of events, he even gets his buddies off, scot-free!”

“That’s why we have a prosecution section, my friend,” Kirkwood said and walked to the door. “I can see something else boiling under that red Irish head of yours, and I’m going to leave you alone, in peace, until you decide to let me in on what’s really bothering you.”

Terry O’Connor shook his head and slouched in his chair as he watched his buddy walk away. He wanted to tell him about the photographs. That’s what really bothered him. However, he still felt uncomfortable with the idea of showing anyone the pictures. Not even his best friend. Besides, would Kirkwood or anyone else even believe what the images showed?

O’Connor felt certain that Heyster must have a fail-safe plan, just in case Carnegie got busted and sang. Would the pictures showing the exchange of dope, coupled with the later arrest of the Chu Lai Hippie, and Charlie the shyster cutting him a sweet deal, would that be enough to slam shut an iron door on the interim mojo?

“Not yet. I need a better smoking gun than some photographs taken from an unauthorized surveillance,” O’Connor said to himself as he leaned over and twisted the power and volume control knob on his leather-clad, portable AM-FM-shortwave radio that rested against the wall on the side of his desk and had its silver stick antenna extended all the way out. American Forces Vietnam broadcast network played his favorite song, a hit from 1967 written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and performed by Jagger and the Rolling Stones. As the mellow tune drifted from the small speaker, the captain closed his eyes and tried to let his troubled soul take a ride with the sweet melody.

“Still I’m gonna miss you!” the lawyer captain sang in a loud voice that carried down the hallway to the administration office where Staff Sergeant Pride raised his head from a page full of budget numbers he was studying.

 
“GOOD-BYE, RUBY TUESDAY. Who could hang a name on you?” Corporal Nathan L. Todd sang as he walked out of the control center at the Freedom Hill brig, singing with the music that played on the radio in the glass-walled room that ran the switches that locked or released all doors into and out of the central cell block that housed all the high-risk prisoners.

“Why you singing that fag song, butthead?” Sergeant Mike Turner said, heckling the corporal while leaning back in a swivel chair with his feet propped on a desk secured behind a row of bars that overlooked the cells where Celestine Anderson, Brian Pitts, James Harris, Michael Fryer, and James Elmore counted time by the day.

Turner had earned the nickname Iron Balls from both the prisoners and his fellow guards. Seated on a stool at the other end of the hall of cells, Lance Corporal Kenny Brookman sat with his heels hooked over the wooden spindles connected between the legs that braced his seat and held it rigid while he slapped the palm of his hand with a truncheon that he and Iron Balls had drilled down the center and filled with lead. Usually, when a person saw Iron Balls, the sadistic Lance Corporal Brookman, who had picked up the nickname Bad John, wasn’t far behind.

“What makes ‘Ruby Tuesday’ a fag song, Sergeant Turner?” Corporal Todd asked as he stepped through the barred door when Gunnery Sergeant Ted MacMillan released the latch from the control center. “The Rolling Stones fags? Is that it?”