Jungle Rules (78 page)

“We made a promise to Tommy McKay,” Terry O’Connor said, and looked at all the Marines present, enlisted and officer alike. “July Fourth in Denver! We’ll all be home by then. No excuses! We’re going to meet up at the bar at the Hilton Hotel at five o’clock in the afternoon, Mountain Standard Time. If you’re not there, you’d better have a good excuse! That includes you, Sergeant Pride, and you guys, too, Sergeant Amos, Corporal Farmer and Corporal Pounds. And especially you, Movie Star. Where would we be without you there?”

Wayne Ebberhardt hugged his buddies hard. Then they all hugged Movie Star. Even Michael Carter, who still had not gotten past the event in the barracks. His confession about it with Father Flannigan, the wing Catholic chaplain, had gone badly, so that added to the stick man’s guilt.

“I think that you need to find a new girlfriend, and you should let Rosie Palm rest with her five sisters for a while,” Carter said, and then laughed at his own joke.

“Oh, good one, Mikie!” Ebberhardt said and laughed, wrapping his arm around James Dean and rapping his knuckles on the man’s head.

“They never say no!” Movie Star said with a laugh, and then put on his black-plastic-rimmed Foster Grant sunglasses. “Captain Carter, believe me, when I get home, and back on the beach at Malibu, Rosie Palm will be hard pressed to take me out on a date.”

“You’re one fucked-up individual, you know that, Movie Star?” Archie Gunn said, walking up to the group with Buck Taylor at his side, and Mike Schuller shutting off the engine to the jeep in which he gave the two men a lift when he saw them walking toward the law center.

“Wayne, you and Movie Star know we couldn’t let you two catch that freedom bird without a proper farewell from us flyboys, and, of course, the brig warden, too,” Taylor said with a laugh, and put out his hand for the two Marines to shake.

“Damn, I’m glad you guys came over to say so long,” Ebberhardt said, and then hugged both pilots and the warden.

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Lobo said, and wrapped his arm around Lance Corporal Dean and gave him a hard squeeze. “We’re kind of like family. After all we’ve seen together.”

Mike Schuller looked at Wayne Ebberhardt and smiled.

“I got orders back to the division,” the lieutenant said and then sighed.

“I don’t know if it’s a move up or a step down. I’m getting command of a company, though, so I think it’s probably a move upward.”

“You did good at the brig,” Wayne said. “It’s their loss and the division’s gain. Where’re you going?”

“Up to Ninth Marines, with Lieutenant Colonel Jack Hembee!” Schuller said and then laughed. “I got you good! I am so happy I could bust! Colonel Hembee put in the word to General Davis that he wanted me commanding one of his companies. So I got the blessings from on high!”

“Super news!” Ebberhardt said, and hugged the lieutenant.

“I had to extend my tour for another six months, but shit, I got a company!” Schuller said.

“You know, they didn’t call Jack Hembee Major Danger for nothing,” Terry O’Connor reminded his happy friend.

“Yeah,” Wayne Ebberhardt said. “That’s Colonel Danger now, so you better keep your head down. The incoming rounds will probably get a lot bigger. I’m serious. You watch your ass. You hear me?”

“Loud and clear my friend, loud and clear,” Schuller said, beaming at his friends.

“Hey! How about a picture, guys?” Staff Sergeant Pride shouted, and stepped back with his camera to get a snapshot of his pals.

“College Boy,” O’Connor called to the new driver who sat behind the wheel of the major’s jeep, “do us a favor and shoot the flick for us, so Staff Sergeant Pride gets in it, too. That way we have the whole gang!”

“Okay, you guys,” George Mason said, and then took the twin-lens Roleflex camera from the staff sergeant and hung it around his neck. He looked down into the ground-glass viewfinder and then slowly released the shutter, capturing the faces of Dick Amos, Jerry Farmer, Happy Pounds, James Dean, Derek Pride, Buck Taylor, Archie Gunn, Michael Schuller, Jon Kirkwood, Terry O’Connor, Michael Carter, and Wayne Ebberhardt.

“Just one guy missing from the shot,” Ebberhardt said, thinking about his pal, T.D. McKay.

“Hey, wing photo took that picture of me, Jon, and Tommy when we got our medals last spring. Nice big color print, too,” Terry O’Connor said with a smile. “I’ll get copies made and send one to everybody here. That way we have the whole fucking crew immortalized!”

“Okay, I’ll look for it,” Wayne Ebberhardt said, sitting in the front seat of the jeep while Movie Star piled on top of the baggage in the back. Then as George Mason backed the vehicle from the group and pulled into the street to get his passengers to the freedom bird, the captain shouted to his friends, “Denver, guys! Don’t forget! The Hilton Hotel bar, July Fourth at five o’clock. Be there or you better be dead!”

Terry O’Connor waved as the jeep rolled slowly down the block, and sang with his loudest voice: “Good-bye, Ruby Tuesday. Who could hang a name on you? When you change with every new day. Still I’m gonna miss you!”

Chapter 23

“GOOD-BYE, RUBY TUESDAY
”

A GREEN FERN flowed over the sides of a wicker-covered planter that hung by wires from the ceiling in front of one of three massive plate-glass windows in Terry O’Connor’s corner office on the fifteenth floor of the Third Avenue high-rise business complex owned by the law firm where he now worked as one of its senior partners. In the nearly thirty-seven years since the brig riot, the Philadelphia Irishman had lost a good third of the hair on his head, only to have it replaced by mysterious stray fibers that grew from his back, making him look like the part-human fly monster in the old 1950s horror movie. Now, whatever once rusty-red foliage that had graced his crown in those bygone years had in the recent past turned silvery-white.

He hated looking in a mirror these days, because the youthful kid with dimples and twinkling eyes and magnetic smile now stared back at him with furrows for dimples and sagging jaws where the smile went. The eyes still sparkled, though, when he told his jokes, and his voice sounded much the same. Just a little deeper, and he had to clear his throat quite often these days, too.

“Got to see a doctor about that scratchy feeling down the gullet,” he told himself as he put his fingers between the blinds and looked down at the corner of Fifty-fourth Street and Third Avenue, on Manhattan’s East
Side, where he hoped to see his pals Wayne Ebberhardt and Gwen emerge from a taxi at any minute.

He married Vibeke Ahlquist three months after he got home from Vietnam. He had no job then, nor did he have any prospects of finding one soon. However, Vibeke was happy to live in Philadelphia with Terry’s mom and dad. She and the old man talked politics most evenings and weekends. They had it all figured out. Eliminate state sovereignty and put everything into a centralized federal government that ensured that all people’s needs found equal and sufficient fulfillment. Terry thanked God that he belonged to the Republican Party.

The couple celebrated thirty-six years together on March 17, 2005. That’s right, St. Patrick’s Day. Any good Irishman would do likewise. Terry had surprised himself when he asked her to marry him, Christmas morning, 1968. Just home from the war a few days, and suddenly very much in love with the Swedish girl who tortured his Republican nerves with her left-wing social conscience. He didn’t want to wait for November 10, the Marine Corps birthday, the other date that seemed appropriate. Besides, with Vibeke’s attitude about the American military at the time, St. Patrick’s Day worked best all the way round.

Terrence Otto O’Connor came to live on planet Earth May 28, 1970, and owed his name to each of his grandfathers. Then Jonathan Wayne O’Connor joined his big brother at play on the fourth day of June 1971. After his second son’s birth, Terry loved to joke with people that he was John Wayne’s dad.

Six years later, Christiana Marie O’Connor came to live at their house, and the two boys had to clean up their acts so their baby sister did not grow up a hooligan like them.

Each of Terry’s and Vibeke’s children had two offspring of their own now, and Grandpa, as the little ones now called him, had that to think about as he looked at his gray hair and ever more ruddy, wrinkled complexion.

His dad died in March 2000, well in his eighties. Prostate cancer had claimed him in a heartbreaking battle. Terry promised his pop that he would never neglect seeing the doctor at least once a year, and getting checked. Last October, as the doctor had the third joint of his right hand’s middle finger planted deep in the lawyer’s ass, the joking Irishman asked the physician, “Which is worse, getting it or giving it?”

When the doctor finished and yanked off the rubber glove, he laughed. “Thanks for asking,” he said, tossing the K-Y-drenched surgical mitt in the trash. “Giving the prostate exam is much worse.”

Terry O’Connor laughed, thinking about his friend Doctor Ken Silver-man, who had his office in the medical tower two blocks down the street. Then he saw the taxi stop and three people got out: Wayne, Gwen, and Vibeke. They carried bags from Bloomingdale’s.

“That explains it,” he said to himself as he walked to the sitting area in the corner of his office and picked up his canvas briefcase and checked to be sure he had packed all the folders he needed to keep up with the work he had to complete before the middle of next week.

Corporate contracts had paid him well. It afforded him a spacious Third Avenue condominium six blocks uptown from his office, and a Long Island summer cottage near the beach at Southampton. After he left the Marine Corps, he never defended another criminal case. Contract litigation and negotiations kept him at peace with himself.

“Mister O’Connor,” the voice of Cynthia Marvel, his personal assistant, said on the intercom. “Your wife and friends have just cleared security and should be up in a few minutes.”

“Thanks, Cyn,” he answered, and lay his briefcase on the corner of his desk. “Any word from Mister Gunn or Mister Taylor?”

“Nothing yet,” Cynthia answered, and clicked off the speaker.

Terry sat down in his brown leather swivel chair and swung around toward the black walnut credenza and hutch that stood against the wall behind his desk. He took from the shelf the framed picture of him and his buddies at First MAW Law that George Mason had snapped the day Wayne and Movie Star had flown home from Vietnam, and laid it in his lap. A tear splashed on the glass, and he wiped it away with his thumb.

He did that every time he looked at the photograph now.

A black, compact-disc player sat on the middle shelf, above his Vietnam pictures and memorabilia. He leaned forward in his chair and pushed the center button on the machine. Instantly Mick Jagger’s young voice came flowing through the speakers that sat in all four corners of his office.

“She would never say where she came from,” Terry sang with Mick, setting the group photograph next to the miniature Marine Corps and American flags that stood in the small stand by a shadow box of his medals. Then he picked up the picture of him, Tommy McKay, and Jon Kirkwood that the wing photographer had snapped of the three Marines just after they had pinned on their awards for valor.

“Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone,” he sang, looking at the smiling faces of two of the best men he had ever known in his life.

“While the sun is bright,” Terry sang through a broken voice, and tears came again. “Or in the darkest night. No one knows. She comes and goes.”

“Good-bye, Ruby Tuesday. Who could hang a name on you? When you change with every new day,”
the music drifted from the four speakers.

“Still I’m gonna miss you!” O’Connor choked, and then broke down and sobbed, looking at the two photographs.

He cried because he thought of the empty seats at this year’s reunion. Two new ones because of a tragic plane crash at Aspen this past Christmas.

The first vacant chair that he and his buddies leaned against the table before an undrunk glass of beer belonged to First Lieutenant Michael Schuller. It was their inaugural get-together in Denver on July 4, 1969.

On January 20, 1969, Colonel Robert Barrow launched all three battalions of his Ninth Marine Regiment against the North Vietnamese Army ensconced deep in the A Shau Valley, in the western mountains of northern I Corps, near the combat outpost that Marines knew as Khe Sanh. The Marines called the massive strike Operation Dewey Canyon. It lasted until March 18, 1969, and it exacted a heavy toll on the Ninth Marine Regiment, nearly decimating its First Battalion, nicknamed the Walking Dead.

Midway through the operation, while February snows blew down the streets of Philadelphia, Lieutenant Colonel Hembee led his battalion on a sweep, trying to push the enemy into the other two battalions, which waited in ambush. Mike Schuller, now selected as captain, led his company at the point of the assault.