The girl sat on his lap and put her arms around his neck. "No charge," she said. "I like GIs."
"I bet you do," Andy told her, picking up his can and tapping it against mine. "Here's to…what's your name, honey?"
"Mai," said the girl. "It mean ‘cherry blossom.'"
"Of course it does," I said, taking a long sip from my beer in anticipation of what I felt certain was going to be a long night. "You like cherry?" she asked.
"We love cherry," Andy said, and Mai laughed.
I drank my beer and watched while Mai flirted. I found it interesting that no girl came to talk to me, but was secretly relieved to be left alone. I didn't know what Andy expected me to do. He knew I wasn't looking for that kind of fun. Or did he? It occurred to me that maybe he thought I only had sex with him because it was easy. But he'd known about me and Jack. Had he forgotten already? I couldn't imagine he had, but watching him get more and more cozy with Mai, I began to suspect he had. Three beers later, Mai got down to business. "You want to go upstairs?" she asked. She was still sitting on Andy's lap. His hand was on her thigh, and she was pressing her breasts against him.
"I don't know," Andy said, clearly toying with her. "Will you make it worth my time?" "Sure, sure," Mai said. "We do everything." She looked over at me.
"Your friend, too. If you want."
Half drunk as I was, I now understood why I'd been left alone. It was all part of the marketing plan. If Mai could get both of us to go with her, it doubled her profit and freed up another girl. It seemed that even when it came to sex, the Vietnamese were shrewd businesspeople. "What do you say, friend?" Andy asked, looking at me over Mai's shoulder as she kissed his neck.
"You want?" No, I didn't want, at least not with Mai. But I also didn't want Andy to be alone with her while I waited downstairs thinking about what they were doing and probably being stuck with a hefty tab after drinking the bar's beer and not paying for a girl. If I couldn't have him to myself, I figured I'd take the next best thing.
"Why not?" I said, draining my beer for every drop of courage I could get. Mai got up and led us through a doorway and up a flight of stairs that smelled like disinfectant and some overly flowery air freshener. At the top, we passed a shrine with a statue of Buddha, three oranges and a burning stick of incense resting at his feet. The hallway we were in was carpeted, the same bright pink as the rest of the place, and the doors were painted red. Mai stopped at one halfway down the hall and opened it.
Inside was a small bedroom, filled almost wall-to-wall by the bed, which was covered, I was surprised to see, not in pink, but white sheets. A cheap paper lantern covered the lone light bulb hanging from the ceiling, and a noisy fan whirred from its place on top of a battered dresser. Next to it was a framed photograph of an old woman standing awkwardly in front of a nondescript house of the sort seen all over the Vietnamese countryside, her hands folded in front of her. As we filed in and Mai shut the door behind us, I found myself wondering if she actually lived there, and if the woman in the photograph was her mother.
When I turned around, she was already naked. Without her negligee, she looked much younger. He skin was taut over her ribs and hip bones, and her small breasts sat high on her chest. A thin patch of dark hair peeked from between her legs.
"Okay," she said as she sat on the edge of the bed. "Who goes first?"
"How about we go together?" said Andy, already removing his shirt.
"No problem," said Mai as she slid backwards and stretched her arms over her head.
Trying not to think, I stripped down to my boxers. Andy was naked, his cock half hard and rising up from his body as he got on the bed. I looked at Mai, who was gazing toward the window, and realized that I'd never been naked in front of a woman before. Suddenly shy, I hesitated in taking off my shorts. Andy was kneeling on the bed and Mai had drawn herself up and taken the head of his dick between her lips. She held it there while her hand pumped Andy's shaft, getting him hard. She did it with all the sensuality of someone inflating a bicycle tire, although every few seconds she let out the slightest of moans, as if she had to remind herself to do it.
Andy looked back at me and cocked his head, motioning me onto the bed next to him. Steeling myself, I shucked my boxers off and crawled across the mattress until I was beside him on my knees. Almost immediately, Mai's free hand gripped my penis and began to tug me in time with her other one. Then her mouth was on me, hot and wet, and her tongue flicked against my skin.
"Oh, yeah," Andy said, looking down at Mai. I closed my eyes, unable to watch. I concentrated on the feeling, trying to forget that it was Mai whose mouth I was in and not Andy's. Unsure of what to do with my hands, I tentatively put one around his shoulders. He moved next to me and placed one of his on my ass, squeezing tightly.
Mai alternated between us, sucking first one and then the other. I stayed hard mainly by concentrating on Andy's hand on my ass. I wanted badly to kiss him, but was afraid of his reaction if I went any further. So I waited for him to do something.
Apparently deciding it was time for a change, Mai stopped and got onto her hands and knees. "Fuck me," she said. "One at each end." Andy moved behind the girl while Mai indicated that I should face her. I felt her take me in her mouth again as Andy slid himself into her. I kept my eyes on his face as he began to pump in and out. Again, I felt awkward with my hands just hanging at my sides, so I tentatively put them on Mai's head. Her hair was unexpectedly soft.
Each time Andy's stomach slapped against Mai's ass, she was driven into me. Through her, I felt the power of his thrusts, and I imagined that it was me he was fucking. I never looked down, never at the girl whose mouth was the substitute for Andy and what I really wanted, which was to be her. I looked only at Andy's face, which was a mask of lust. I wanted him to desire me the way he seemed to desire Mai, not just as a source of release, but as something he couldn't resist. I was surprised when I came. I hadn't expected to, or even been thinking about it. At the first spasm, I felt Mai pull away. My eruption spattered against the sheets. Across from me, Andy let out a loud groan and held himself still, his body tensing several times before he leaned back and Mai rolled over, sitting on the side of the bed and reaching for her discarded clothing. She paid no attention to us as we clambered off the bed and got dressed.
"You good fuckers," she said when we were ready to go, running her fingers through her hair and applying new lipstick in a cracked mirror. "Twenty bucks."
Andy handed her two bills, which she folded and secreted somewhere on her person. "Each," she said, looking at me. I paid her and we left, going down the stairs and out the front door, where we were immediately accosted by more girls offering us their number-one cherries. We ignored them and walked the few blocks to our hotel. Back in our room, Andy threw himself onto his bed and laughed. "Man, that was something else," he said. "I just hope my dick doesn't turn yellow. You don't think she had anything, do you?"
"I don't know," I said. "Probably not."
"Yeah," Andy said, yawning. "Probably not."
We got into our separate beds and Andy turned out the light. Within minutes, he was snoring. I waited until I was sure he was fast asleep. Then I went into the bathroom and took a shower, running the water as hot as I could bear it and scrubbing my skin until it was raw.
CHAPTER 29
"The following program is in living color, and has been rated X by the Vietnam Academy of Magic." The female voice coming from the radio sitting on the table in the GR building was Midwestern in its flatness, although the woman it belonged to called herself "Nguyen." It was early evening on a Wednesday in March 1971, about six weeks after Andy and I returned from our week in Vung Tao. Digger and I were working on some boys who had been brought in that afternoon after their supply truck was ambushed by NVA soldiers on Thunder Road. Such attacks were common, but had been more frequent in recent weeks. The attackers left the men dead on the road, but took the truck and its cargo of medical supplies.
"This is Radio First
Termer," Nguyen continued. "The purpose of this program is to bring vital news, information, and hard acid-rock music to the first termers and non-reenlistees in the Republic of Vietnam. Radio First Termer operates under no air force regulations or manuals. In the event of a vice squad raid, this program will automatically self-destruct. Your host tonight is Dave Rabbit."
"Do you think they'll ever catch him?" Digger asked me as he finished closing the wound on the corpse he was cleaning up. "I hope not," I answered as I cataloged the dead soldier's belongings. His VC killers had taken almost everything off him, leaving only a St. Christopher medal around his neck and, tucked into his boot, a condom in a well-worn wrapper suggesting it had been there for some time. "Rabbit keeps a lot of these guys going."
Dave Rabbit was, and still is, one of the lasting mysteries of Vietnam. Allegedly a sergeant in the air force, he took to the airwaves every night from twenty hundred to thirteen hundred hours, broadcasting his show from a pirate station somewhere in the south of the country. A staunch opponent of the war, he specialized in taunting the lifers, the military men who made the armed forces their home, and who Rabbit blamed for dragging the war on for far too long. His irreverent message of sex, drugs, and rock and roll infuriated the brass and made him a hero with enlisted men.
To this day, Rabbit's real identity is unknown. Various guesses have pointed to everyone from government conspiracy theorist and radio commentator Art Bell to Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak, who during the time Rabbit's Radio First Termer aired was one of the military's in-country DJs. But no one has ever claimed responsibility for being the voice of Dave Rabbit, and except for some scratchy recordings of his shows, nothing else is known about him or his sidekicks, Pete Sadler and Nguyen.
Digger and I had been listening to Rabbit for several months. His anti-military tirades and crude but spot-on humor often had us laughing while we performed our grim work, and the music he played was first rate. He specialized in acid rock, which he encouraged us to listen to while getting high. Occasionally, we accommodated him, lighting up and getting into the Hendrix and Creedence Clearwater Revival tunes he sent our way.
"During the night," Rabbit informed us, "we're going to be reading some of the things we've found written on latrine walls across the Republic of Vietnam. Here's one. ‘While I'm home, my wife is my right hand. While I'm here, my right hand is my wife.'"
Digger howled. "Ain't that the truth," he said. "I've whacked off so much since I got here, I've got calluses the size of cowpeas." I chuckled. Digger rarely spoke about sex, a rarity for a grunt. It's one of the things I liked about him, especially since sex was a sore point for me. I hadn't quite forgiven Andy—or myself—for what had happened in Vung Tau. This didn't stop me from continuing to let him fuck me whenever he wanted, however, and that only added to my feelings of anger and guilt.
"Here's another quickie from the latrine walls," Rabbit continued. "This joker writes, ‘Eighteen days until I can go home to picket and protest this fucking waste of human lives that lifers and the government call a war.'" "Sounds like me," remarked Digger.
"How many days is it now?" I asked him.
"Twelve," he said, then looked at his watch. "Actually, eleven days, thirteen hours, and forty-five minutes." Digger's second year in-country was just about up, as were his three years of service to the U.S. Army. Disillusioned by what he'd seen during the previous twelve months, he'd decided against re-upping, and would be heading back to Louisiana and his family's funeral home. That would leave me as the primary GR guy, but not for long. My own year was up in June, and then there would be a new crew coming in to handle the bodies. Unless I decided to do a second tour. I'd been thinking about that recently, but had yet to come to a decision.
There was certainly enough work to keep me busy if I did decide to stay. A year earlier, in April of 1970, reportedly after viewing the film Patton the night before, President Richard Nixon ordered U.S. troops into Cambodia, which up to that point had been considered a neutral country and therefore off limits to military forces fighting in Vietnam. The basis for his decision was assumed to be the need for intervention in the civil war raging in that country, a result of the overthrow in March of Cambodian Crown Prince Sihanouk's government while the prince was in Moscow receiving treatment for cancer. Angered by what they saw as the prince's capitulation to North Vietnamese forces who had invaded both Cambodia and Laos in February, the National Assembly voted to oust Sihanouk, replacing him with the country's former defense minister and acting prime minister, Lon Nol. Nol, an American ally, now found himself involved in a bloody fight against pro-Sihanouk forces led by the Khmer Rouge. The day after Nixon's televised announcement of the invasion (made four days after troops had already crossed the border), opponents of the war staged protests across the United States. At Ohio's Kent State University, a four-day clash between students and police ended with the shooting deaths of four young people by the National Guard. To a populace already weary of the prolonged war and sickened by the recent revelation of the massacre of five hundred Vietnamese villagers by a U.S. Army company at My Lai, the Kent State shootings were further proof that things were going horribly wrong. What they didn't yet know was that Nixon had ordered secret bombing raids on Cambodia beginning in early 1969 in an attempt at halting North Vietnamese use of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was the main supply route for the NVA. Quan Loi, located only ten miles from the Cambodian border, had long been used as a base of operations for these unofficial missions. With the official launch of attacks on NVA forces in Cambodia, we became even busier, so that by early 1971, most of the choppers flying out were headed west.
On February 8, South Vietnamese forces, aided by U.S. soldiers, invaded Laos and made another attempt to close down the Ho Chi Minh Trail for good. The attempt failed, and back home, Nixon's repeated assertions that the army of South Vietnam had been sufficiently trained so as to make the withdrawal of American troops imminent were met with disbelief and increased demands to bring an end to the war.
Those of us actually in Vietnam didn't know what to make of our situation. The number of bodies that Digger and I processed was steadily increasing. Making it worse, the soldiers who were coming in to take over for the dead and those of us at the end of our year-long tours seemed to resent not only the war itself, but the men they were replacing. They sometimes made us feel as if the fact that we weren't winning the war was our fault, that they were in Vietnam only because we couldn't take care of business. In many places, morale was low and tempers short.
Still, part of me loved Vietnam and the men I served with there. Although getting out seemed like it would be a relief, part of me was afraid that I would feel lost without the war. I'd joined the army to find myself, and what I'd discovered was that I still wasn't entirely sure who I was. Being a soldier gave me an identity, one that I was proud of, that made me something. Going back would mean giving it up, at least in part, and I wasn't certain I was ready to do that.
I worried, too, about Andy. Now that he was flying into Cambodia, his missions were becoming riskier. Twice his chopper had sustained damage from NVA rockets, once just making it back to Quan Loi. So far he and his team had managed to avoid serious injury, and they'd developed an attitude of invincibility because of it, an attitude I was certain would get them all killed one of these days. I knew I couldn't keep him safe by staying in Vietnam, but at least I would be there to know how he was.
"Here's a dedication to the new troops who have just recently come into the Republic of Vietnam and every day sit and watch those Freedom Birds fly back to the world again." Rabbit's voice interrupted my thoughts as he began playing Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker."
"You gotta come see me down south when you get home," said Digger. "We'll hit New Orleans. Listen to some jazz. Drink some beers. You ever had Jax?" He began singing before I could tell him I hadn't.
"Hello, mellow Ja-ax, little darlin'. You're the beer for me. Yesireee."
"It's a date," I told him as w
e each took an end of the corpse he'd just finished and carried him to the cooler. "But you're buying." A few hours later, I sank wearily onto my cot, looking forward to sleep. I hoped we wouldn't get any incoming casualties the next day, and not just because I didn't want to see any more soldiers killed. The sad truth was, I was getting used to death. Too used to it. I counted it a good day when "only" two or three bodies came in. Although I still treated each soldier with as much care as I could, I'd stopped grieving for every man who passed through the GR. Like so many military men before me, I'd begun to see the loss of life as the price of winning.
I fell asleep, but only moments later it seemed I was awakened by the sound of someone yelling outside the hootch. Groggy and half asleep, I staggered to the door, afraid maybe we were being attacked. When I looked out, I saw medics running toward the airstrip.
"What's going on?" I called out.
"Some of our guys got hit on a border run," a medic yelled back. "We've got wounded."
I turned and went back to my bed. Wounded men weren't my problem. I hoped none of them died, but if they did, someone would come let me know. I pulled the blanket up and started to go back to sleep, when suddenly a thought hit me like ice water: The wounded men had been on a mission to Cambodia. What if one of them was Andy?
I was up again in a moment, pulling my fatigues on and stumbling over my boots. Cursing, I managed to get them on and tie them, although my fingers refused to work properly and I fought to make a simple bow knot. Finally I was dressed, then out the door and headed for the airfield. Unless you're intimately familiar with them, it's difficult to tell one chopper from another. To make it easier, crews often painted names and images on their birds to distinguish them from the other ones in the fleet. Andy's team had dubbed themselves the "War Cocks," a childish but appropriate name for a group of men who prided themselves not only on being the best, but also on being the rowdiest while doing it. Their logo, naturally, was a rooster whose oversized comb and impressive beak looked down menacingly on the enemy below.