Table of Contents
Title Page
Preface
PART 1
1 • Not the Beginning Yet
2 • Hong Kong Hilton No Women in Room
PART 2
3 • The War Begins - (Cue War Drums)
4 • The President Rallies the Troops - (or Tallies the Roops, for Those Reading While Drunk)
5 • Mission lmporkable
6 • Gettin’ Out of Dodge
7 • Over the Bounding Sea
8 • Asia Ahoy
PART 3
9 • War at Last
10 • The Leaping, the Gaping, and the Flaming
11 • Viet Nam or Vietnam (We Were Never Sure)
12 • Roll Out the Barrel, We’ll Have a Barrel of British Spy
13 • Heaven Is an H-34 in Vietland
14 • South Vietnam Adieu
15 • Vietnam at Escape Speed in My Rearview Mirror (in G)
16 • Feet Wet—North Vietnam
17 • North Vietnam in Your Undies
18 • Hanoi—Torture Lite
19 • Hanoi Hoche the Perfect Host
20 • Going Dutch in Hanoi
21 • The Blue Daisy Summit and Beer Bust
22 • N. VN Minh-e Fini
23 • Sucker-punched by the Pres
PART 4
24 • Dénouement, Certainement Excrêtement
Epilogue
Los Angeles Times Top Ten Books of 2005
Afterword: Heroes
GOODBYE MEXICO
About the Author
Copyright Page
for
Captain Wayne H. Gentry,
USMC; Air America, Inc.
1944-1970
and
Clinton I. Smullyan, Jr.,
friend extraordinaire
And for all those who proudly served.
And serve.
Preface
I have been blessed throughout my life. It is to my wonderment that I continue to be so. At present it comes in the form of my Very Lovely Agent, Deborah Grosvenor. She did not want me as a client, as novelists are notoriously hard to feed and comfort, and she had already edited and promoted novelists who wrote international mega-bestsellers. Fortunately she had the grace to admit that she laughed out loud when she read Nam-A-Rama, and then dedicated enormous effort to finding the right publisher. Thank you.
My editor most likely laughed more frequently before he became my editor. The ineffable Moshe Feder at Forge has at times been almost effable. He made Nam-A-Rama a better book. What more can a writer ask? He is a great intellect and a very nice guy who is not working for the Mossad. I have his word on it.
Also a blessing is a tolerant family, Deborah, Jason, Alison, and Coleman (I love them all), who ignored the sight of a man in boxer shorts, flak vest, cartridge belt, flight helmet, and bayonet, ranting about the domicile and trying to call in air strikes on the worthless family animals (one evil dog and two communistic cats) all in the name of research. I will now admit that the slit trench latrine in the backyard was a bad idea.
So much help comes into my life that it is hard to not list name after name, but two excellent writers, Jack Butler and Stewart O’Nan, gave such extraordinary encouragement at the beginning of Nam-A-Rama that I have to give them hearty thanks. Bail money is always available, guys. Valerie Vogrin, the world’s best writing coach, you were both foundation and muse.
I must thank humankind for its continuing penchant for eschewing common sense and simple decency. Without wars and protracted bloody skirmishes, this book could not have been written. Our pursuit of peace through obliteration seems unabated by our experiences, and the folly is surprisingly easy to satirize. Thank you, civilization.
Not that wars should never be fought. As a Marine (once a Marine, always a Marine), I enjoy a good slaughtering as well as the next man. My discourse, in Nam-A-Rama, concerns why, when, and how. I am afraid that “if” is not applicable for the foreseeable future. Somewhere, along with crass cynicism and disconsolate despair, however, there must be a descriptive end to bitterness and grief, anger and shame. Laughter, after all, may in fact be the best medicine.
Vietnam was undoubtedly a searing experience. Would that we had cooked it through and through; we might have saved ourselves the decades-long indigestion. But probably not. Americans do not like coitus interruptus, particularly of the militaristic variety. We want to roll over and light a cigarette after a definitive end to things—the vanquished at our feet, or up making us a sandwich.
The Vietnam War seemed to have a venal goofiness unseen since Tennyson’s Crimea, or the 3rd Light Horse Turkish shoot at Gallipoli. Festive camaraderie and adrenaline addiction, with weapons and lots of ammo, leads to no good. Those other civilizations—surely they are out there—must be hoping that Earth grows out of adolescence before we shoot our collective eye out.
As presidents and kings and the pretenders to those thrones debate the merits of armed invasion on distant shores, I would pray that they, and we, take the diatribes seriously. My suggestion—that the U.S. commander in chief be constitutionally required to garb him- or herself in full battle dress, replete with facial camouflage and florafestooned helmet, whilst any U.S. troops are engaged in combat—will most likely not be adopted. Perhaps the requirement that a squad of rabid men run through the Oval Office once a day spraying AK-47 fire above the President’s head would add urgency to any settlement talks, but admittedly could play hell with the furniture and visiting potentates.
Contrary to book blurbs or citations for service in Vietnam and Laos, I was not a hero. I belonged instead to that band of brothers more afraid of being a coward than of checking into the Pinewood Hotel. Better dead than look bad, as the Marines would say.
To all the infantry grunts, aviators, doctors, corpsmen, nurses, supply sergeants, and support troops, be they U.S. Marine, Navy, Air Force, Army, or Coast Guard, who served honorably in the theater of Southeast Asia, I offer this book. You were—and are—golden. May God bless you.
PART 1
In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.
—Napoleon
War must be made as intense and awful as possible in order to make it short, and thus to diminish its horrors.
—Napoleon
Them as die will be the lucky ones.
—Long John Silver
1 • Not the Beginning Yet
Gearheardt and I were having lunch next to a pile of dead Laotians when he came up with his scheme to redeem ourselves with the Marine Corps and settle the score with the Cubans. The sincerity in his baloney-muffled voice made me listen when I knew that I shouldn’t. Listening to my best friend had always led to disaster, if not for us then for a number of innocent and perhaps not so innocent bystanders. Gearheardt was one of those people who never looked in the rearview mirror. Causing the Tet Offensive, prolonging the Vietnam War, and getting the President fixed up with the girl who showered in her underpants in Olongopo were hijinks quickly forgotten by the boyish pilot who sat alongside the dusty Laotian airstrip listening to the small-arms fire and distant thump of artillery.
Gearheardt threw the crust of his sandwich away and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Jack,” he said, “this plan will at least get us killed in a real war. Do you want to end up in a pile of dead Laotians?” He gestured toward the pungent stack and grimaced.
“Is that my only choice, Gearheardt?” I asked.
Gearheardt turned toward me, adjusting his shoulder holster and then licking the mayonnaise from the butt of his pistol. His thin blond hair was smashed wetly against his forehead, creases from his flight helmet still visible.
“I’m not kidding, Jack. This is the poorest damned excuse for a war
imaginable, and you know it. Look at those poor bastards in that pile. Waiting for us to haul their raggedy asses back to Vientiane so their raggedy-assed families can wail and piss until the government gives them fifty bucks or something. I’m embarrassed to be in this sonofabitch.”
“You’d rather be sitting next to a pile of Vietnamese?”
“Wouldn’t you?” He was serious.
A mortar round hit the embankment across the runway, blowing dust and grit over us and causing the stack of Laotians to shift and settle. Gearheardt and I ducked and shielded our eyes.
“Jack, this scheme will get us back into Vietnam. I’m sick of this pussy-footing around. We’re Marines, damn it. I didn’t become a Marine to haul dead Laotians up and down the countryside.”
“It’s live up, dead back.”
“Very funny, Jack. What about my scheme? Are you up for it?”
“You don’t have a scheme, Gearheardt. You have an idea,” I said.
A second mortar hit in front of us and Gearheardt stood up and peered at the hills to the east. “Isn’t anybody going to take that bastard out?” he asked rhetorically, pointing to the hill from which the mortar rounds seemed to be coming.
“A scheme is when there are elements of a plan,” I continued. “Like some details of how things are going to get done, you know. That’s always your problem. You confuse an idea with a plan.” I slid lower against the wall of the shallow ditch. Gearheardt dropped back down beside me. “And technically we’re not Marines anymore. I think we belong to the CIA.”
He looked at me. “Okay. We take an airplane to Hong Kong. We find that numbnuts Cuban that screwed us around in Hanoi. We shoot him until he’s dead. Then we take an airplane to Danang, march our asses up to wing headquarters, and get our commissions back. Those are details.”
“You’re a planning genius, Gearheardt.”
Gearheardt bit his lip and squinted at me, pissed.
“Your sarcasm is wearing pretty thin, Jack. Will you ever get off my ass about Hanoi? I’m carrying that to my grave, aren’t I? We had the Barbonella plan. Sure it was missing a few details, but if you hadn’t lost the damn thing out of the window …”
“You lost the plan out of the window, jackass. You were supposed to be flying us to Hanoi, not grabassing all over the cockpit trying to eyeball the paperwork.”
A volley of mortar rounds hit the bunkers along the opposite side of the airstrip and I heard the CIA officer who ran the war in this part of Laos bellow from within.
“Would somebody please call some fire in on that frigging mortar position?”
Moments later the 105 howitzer, almost hidden in its heavily sandbagged slot behind the command bunker, fired a series of rounds. I watched the jungle near the suspected enemy mortar tube explode and fill the air above it with dirt and then black smoke. My ears rang. Gearheardt shook his head as if he were trying to dislodge something from his ear. The Laotian artillery crew climbed atop the sandbags and began shoving sticky rice balls into their mouths. The little artillery sergeant gazed toward the still smoking hillside and began to pick his nose.
From inside the command bunker the voice of the CIA officer sang, “Thank you.”
I looked behind where we were sitting and saw the flight mechanics resume refueling the helicopters that Gearheardt and I piloted. Serafico, my flight mechanic, looked my way and gave the thumbs up signal to indicate that we were ready to go. I rose by putting my hand on Gearheardt’s shoulder. Standing, I brushed the dust and debris from my trousers and turned to him. He was still staring, unfocused, at the smoke drifting along the hillside. Without looking up at me he spoke.
“Do you ever wonder about the little sonsabitches on the other end of those 105 rounds, Jack? One minute they’re finishing a baloney sandwich, and the next they’re just meat decorating the trees.”
Before I responded about the lack of baloney sandwiches in the North Vietnamese diet, Gearheardt went on. “War is weird shit, isn’t it, Jack?” He grinned at me as he stood up.
“Where are you heading, Gearheardt?” I asked him as we walked to the aircraft.
“I’m hauling ammo to that outpost by the old Site 85. You?”
“The customer asked me to take a look over by 110 and see if I could spot signs of survivors.” Site 110, near the North Vietnamese border with Laos, had been thoroughly shellacked by the North Vietnamese two nights before, and the troops that escaped were expected to be trying to make their way to Site 36. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was between them and relative safety, and no one expected many to actually survive. But it felt good to look for them.
Gearheardt grabbed my arm and stopped me, holding my elbow.
“Look, I know you think I’m a screaming asshole sometimes …”
“Yes.”
“ … and I know you think I’m nuts …”
“Absolutely.”
“ … but we gotta get back to the Marine Corps and to our squadron. I miss those guys. I miss the real war. And before that, we gotta find that stinking Cuban and kill him. Air America is okay, but we can’t have guns—officially.”
Some might think that a silly reason not to like flying for the CIA. But I knew Gearheardt. He had thought through the concept of not having official guns in northern Laos, and his statement was solid.
“It wasn’t the Cuban that screwed up our mission to Hanoi, Gearheardt. And it wasn’t Barbonella, or Whiffenpoof, or that goofy Englishman in Hong Kong. Our ‘mission’ was doomed—”
Gearheardt jerked his hand away from my elbow.
“Jack, if you say it was because we didn’t have a goddam plan again, I’ll kill you. I’ll shoot you right damn now. We had orders! From the President of the United States!”
“—before we even cranked up. Someone had a good idea, and we tried to execute our orders without the foggiest notion of what the hell we were doing or how to figure out if we had done it after we did it.”
After a moment Gearheardt turned and walked straight-backed to his aircraft.
Centeno, his flight mechanic, smiled and said loud enough for me to hear, “You and Captain Jack discussing your Hanoi plan again, Captain?”
“Shut up, Centeno,” Gearheardt snapped.
He began climbing into the cockpit. As he strapped in he looked over at me and keyed his mike. “You all set over there, Jack?”
I clicked my radio, then turned and gave him thumbs up.
“This war in Laos is no place to win medals. The North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao are kicking the shit out of these guys, and we’re just dicking around while they do. Come on, Jack. Let’s get back in it.” I heard him on the radio and could see his mouth moving under the dark green Plexiglas eye shield on his helmet.
Gearheardt and I had been best friends since flight school. He was a great pilot and a wonderful friend except for his habit of getting us into situations where people were trying to kill us. Besides flying, he loved drinking and whores.
“People think whores are mean, Jack. These girls don’t have a mean bone in their bodies, ”he said.
I sat looking over at him in his cockpit. I felt protected by him, and protective of him. I knew he would give his life to save mine. There were times when I hated him for it.
“When we go to Hong Kong, we can talk about it, Gearheardt. If the Cuban is in Hong Kong, we’ll see what we can do. That’s the best I can promise.”
“You’re a champ, Jack. A champ. Wait until you hear the rest of my plan.”
I saw the dirt begin to swirl around his helicopter, and he slowly rose, swung the nose of the aircraft around into the wind, then lifted rapidly out of the refueling pits and was gone.
This war was sad. The “war junior,” Gearheardt called it. A “back fire” to the Vietnam War, fattening up the local populace so that we could feed them to the forty or fifty thousand North Vietnamese troops pushing south through the territory. If we won the war in Vietnam, this place-holding action would deliver a free Laos to the survivors. If we didn’t, w
ell, as Gearheardt put it, “They’re fucked.”
I lifted off and banked low over the command bunker so the customer would know that I was back hard at work even if he wasn’t monitoring the radio traffic. I climbed into the cool, fresh sky, circling twice above the airstrip so that I wouldn’t pass over the jungle at an altitude tempting for the North Vietnamese machine gunners. A gorgeous day, and the miles of green jungle, punctured by rocky karsts and etched with muddy rivers, stretched languidly in all directions. Full of people ready to shoot me.
At five thousand feet, I could see over into North Vietnam. It seemed crazy that not long before, I had been there.
2 • Hong Kong Hilton No Women in Room
Gearheardt and I made it to Hong Kong. A good thing about flying for Air America was that you only had to dash recklessly around Laos for a couple of weeks a month and then you could go just about any place you wanted if you were still alive. Even Gearheardt grudgingly admitted that was a better deal than the Marine Corps gave us.
On the way over to Hong Kong on Thai Airlines, Gearheardt told me his plan to find an Englishman and through him find Juanton, the murdering bastard Cuban we met in Hanoi who worked for a British beer company.
“I hate to point out to you, Gearheardt, that Hong Kong is full of Englishmen.”
“That should make it easy to find one, Jack. You always look at the negative side of things.”
“Not all of them are turncoat British agents though.”
“Who says?”
Beneath us the hills of Vietnam were full of death, fighting, and skull-cracking boredom. In the first-class cabin the men in suits dozed or ordered refills of their scotch and waters. Ahead of the wing the coast of Vietnam was visible as the Thai Air crew overflew the Danang, South Vietnam TACAN and turned slightly more northeast toward Hong Kong. Far below and just behind us, in the stumpy hills west of Danang, the sun caught the wing of an aircraft climbing out of a bombing run, and I saw the black and brown cloud rise up behind him. Gearheardt was entertaining the little Thai stewardess by having her guess how much his Air America gold bracelet cost. When she left to refill his beer glass, Gearheardt spoke.
Nam-A-Rama Page 1
