Nam-A-Rama

by Phillip Jennings

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “These may be tough times to poke fun at the military. But Vietnam vet Phillip Jennings, a former pilot and CIA man, follows in the tradition of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H with Nam-A-Rama, which includes a naked starlet parachuting into Hanoi. It all begins in the White House where President Larry Bob Jones hatches the Vietnam War over pizza.”

  —New York Post

  “This highly entertaining, provocative lampooning of the Vietnam War is reminiscent of Catch-22 and David Mamet’s Wag the Dog. In this wonderfully irreverent novel, evocative of vintage Max Shulman, hearty belly laughs contrast with chilling insights into high-level political machinations.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Just when you thought it was safe to stop reading novels about the Vietnam War, along comes Phillip Jennings with Nam-A-Rama … a wild, original, and often hilarious ride.”

  —Christopher Buckley

  “Set during a pivotal time in U.S. history and populated by a bizarre cast of characters, Phillip Jennings’s zany novel is cynical, fast-paced, irreverent, thought-provoking, and thoroughly entertaining.”

  —Bob Kerrey, President, New School University

  “Jennings has dared to go where few writers have gone before and returned a hero. With a wit as savage and devastating as napalm, he’s barbecued the sacred cows grazing on the White House lawn.”

  —Jim Taylor, Oscar-winning co-scriptwriter of Sideways

  O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with un- availing grief … . For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore be- set and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

  —Mark Twain

  War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice—is often the means of their regeneration.

  —John Stuart Mill

  In war there is no substitute for victory.

  —Doughs MacArthur

  Afterword: Heroes

  The term has become almost valueless in today’s media. That speaks more to an American desire to admire courage and the willingness to sacrifice for the good of others, than it does to denigrate the term or the individual. We want to believe that men and women will place loyalty, honor, and doing the right thing above their own well-being.

  The most indelible memory I have of Vietnam is witnessing heroism and courage on a daily basis.

  The infantrymen were magnificent. I still cannot imagine the amount of courage it took to head into the hell of the jungles and rice paddies knowing that mortal danger could come from any direction, at any time.

  I worked a great deal with Army helicopters. Searching for a word that tops “fearless” has been fruitless, but it must be there somewhere. Their air crews were superb.

  Navy pilots, the best fighter pilots in the world, took off in danger and landed in peril. What happened in between was all in a day’s work. No one else was as arrogant as the carrier pilot, and maybe no one else had the right to be.

  My personal description of Air Force pilots in Vietnam can be summed up in a single name—General Robbie Risner. If you can lead your men into a game of death and have them love you, you will be honored above all fighting men. As a fighter/bomber pilot and a POW, Robbie was the epitome of the greatest fighting machine history has ever known. (A-1 pilots are saints, by the way.)

  A special word for the medics and corpsmen—your place in heaven is secure.

  And for my beloved Marines, you don’t need my accolades; you’re the best of them all. Every day in the uniform of a United States Marine is a gift from God. You embrace duty. You seek challenge. You are faithful—to each other, to your country, and to the Corps.

  In the end, a hero is a common man who performs an act of heroism. Nothing more. Nothing less. The strength and beauty of our Vietnam commitment was the common man doing what his country asked.

  God Bless America.

  Turn the page for a preview of

  GOODBYE MEXICO

  (0-765-31661-7)

  PHILLIP JENNINGS

  Available in Hardcover in April 2007

  Chapter Uno

  South of the Border, But North of Panama

  Gearheardt looked damned good for a dead man. Same silly grin. Same low slouch in the chair. His left foot, sockless in his penny loafer, rested on the corner of my desk and balanced him as he leaned on the two back legs of the government issue, standard low-level embassy employee furniture. His cigarette ash landed lightly on my inexpensive carpet, a gift from one of my Mexican assets, as he waved his arms demonstratively with his story.

  “So the Nungs dragged me out, probably so they could eat freshcooked meat, but unfortunately for them I was alive.” Gearheardt spread his arms, illustrating the point that he was living.

  He had walked into my office in the embassy, pulled a chair up to my desk and said, “Jack, you look like a damn bureaucrat. Never thought I’d see the day.”

  I have to admit that after the shock I shed tears of joy, whooping and disturbing the embassy folks, most of whom already did not like me. (No one in the embassy liked the guys who were spooks, assuming that the CIA was busily working against the very programs the State Department was pushing. They were mostly right.) But Gearheardt—alive! It was a miracle. Unless you knew Gearheardt.

  My first reaction was to call my mother back in Kansas. She had always loved Gearheardt (did that put her in the class of bar-women around the world who also loved Gearheardt?). She had the completely unrealistic notion that Gearheardt “protected” me as my best friend. But I knew that she would be thrilled. When I left home after a visit, departing to the hell-spots the Marines sent me, she would say “I just hope that Gearheardt will protect you. Bless his soul.”

  He had last been seen, or so I thought, in the middle of a pile of flaming helicopter in the Laotian jungle near the Mu Gia pass. His Air America mission had been to pick up a group of Chinese mercenaries, Nungs, who had been causing mischief on our behalf along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Letting down into the zone, Gearheardt had taken a dead-on burst from a fifty caliber and cartwheeled in flames. The Nungs on the ground radioed there were no survivors. Three days later I held his memorial in the White Rose, our favorite Vientiane nightclub, slept with his girlfriend to comfort us both, and, not long after, left Southeast Asia. That was 1969. Now it was 1973 and the dead man was sitting in front of me. My best friend alive and all in one piece. “You survived that fireball without a scratch?”

  “Actually if you look close, these aren’t my ears. I’ll tell you about that later. I’m thirsty, Jack. Let’s hit a cantina.”

  Gearheardt left the embassy the way he left most places when I had known him before: as if the entire staff was already mourning his departure. He spoke to all of the secretaries and the people who appeared from their offices—although he couldn’t have known any of them.

  Gearheardt had been presumed dead for years. After I left Asia, I had hounded the CIA to let me join the Agency partly, in some way, to continue working with his memory. They had only reluctantly let me join their ranks (The ‘cover’ that Air America was an independent airline might have been breached if I
left it and immediately showed up as an agent, they thought). After brief training and a rapid language course, I ended up in Mexico.

  The Marine at the front desk jumped to attention as we approached the exit.

  “Sign Mr. Armstrong and me out, corporal,” Gearheardt said, brightly. “And tell Gunnery Sergeant Wolfe I’ll take him up on his offer next time.” He winked at the grinning Marine and strode out into the afternoon Mexican sunlight.

  I caught up with him after checking to see that the Marine actually signed the two of us out. Gearheardt’s name was not on the log. Only a Pepe Woozley had signed in for admission to my floor.

  “Gearheardt,” I said, “You just got here this afternoon. What’s all this with the Gunny? And who in the hell is Woozley?”

  “The guy I thought I was when I was in Angola, Jack.” He paused to let me exit the embassy gate before him. “You ask a lot of questions for a spook.” He joined me and we began walking down the street: The passing Mexicans smiled at Gearheardt, who smiled back. They had always ignored me.

  “Knock off the spook stuff, Gearheardt. I’m here as the embassy’s economic development officer.” I put my arm around his shoulders as we walked down the crowded avenue. I was so damn glad to see him. “You are one rotten bastard, you know,” I said to him. “I had no idea you were alive.”

  Gearheardt laughed. “When the Company disappears you, Jack, no one is supposed to know you’re alive. I’ve had to convince my mother I was writing her from beyond the grave. She was easier to fool than the IRS, by the way. But that’s the price we pay for eternal virginitis, Jack. We’re spooks for our country.”

  “What the hell is virginitis, Gearheardt?” I asked before I remembered he always threw in nonsense words to take your mind off of the fact that the rest of his explanation made no sense. It had worked on me again. But I didn’t care. I was glad to see him. We had almost stopped the Vietnam War together and you get close to a guy when that kind of pressure is on you. We would have stopped the Vietnam War too, except we’d had no idea of what we were doing.

  We turned into a cantina. A small, bright, and cool place where I knew the proprietor was discreet (since he was on my payroll) and the beer and tortillas were cold and hot. Gearheardt headed to the back to use the cuarto de baño, and I ordered beer for us both. I was almost school-girlishly excited at seeing my old friend. My sidekick through the thick and thin of the Vietnam War and Air America in Laos. Although there was a part of me shouting Alert! Alert! Gearheardt in the area! since I had never been with him more than five minutes that he didn’t get us both in scalding water.

  “Vaya con perros, señoritas,” Gearheardt was saying to the two young Mexican women he had managed to meet and get to know in the ten yards between the restroom and our table. He plopped down in the seat opposite me, raised his beer glass in a salute and drained it. “Dos mas, por favor,” he yelled to the bartender. Then he leaned toward me and lowered his voice.

  “I need your help, Jack. I’m taking over Mexico.”

  My heart sank. I knew the grinning bastard was dead serious.

  Chapter the Dos

  Exploding Chihuahuas

  Gearheardt was well into the beer before he was half through bringing me up to date on his adventures since he narrowly escaped being a “pork roast” on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Beer was such a natural element for Gearheardt that I assumed he bathed and did his laundry in it. That’s how he got along with beer. He never seemed to get slowly drunk. There would come a time when the next beer or the next became a catalyst and he would go from Gearheardt to raving madman; usually signaled by his taking a pistol from his shoulder holster and scaring the crap out of anyone nearby.

  I watched for that signal now, but he was calm, almost mellow, in his description of his duty for the CIA in Africa. Angola to be exact.

  “They slapped a gallon of Unguentine on me, Jack, and packed me off to help the folks in Angola whip the Cubans. I was the chief helicopter flight instructor for the Angolan air force.” He signaled for more beer, but his hand didn’t move toward the shoulder holster I could see beneath his sport coat.

  “You taught helicopter flying to the Angolans?”

  “I would have except they didn’t have any helicopters. In fact, as far as I could tell they didn’t have an air force. Typical damn CIA screwup. You would think that somebody in Washington would check these things out. How hard could it be to send someone to the airport and see if anything lands or takes off?”

  “So what did you do?” I was genuinely curious. Gearheardt was not known for his veracity in the Agency, but his stories were almost always based in truth.

  “I hung around the capital. Pretty boring to tell the truth. The Portuguese are obviously not going to be able to hang on. It’s their last colony I think. Those guys couldn’t administer a hanging in a one rope town. But guess who I ran into.”

  “Gearheardt, I know no one who has been to Angola, is going to Angola, or who wants to go to Angola. Just tell me who you saw.” I was anxious to get him back on the subject of taking over Mexico.

  “The dreaded Gon Norea.”

  “You’re kidding. The Cuban American British Russian spy? That Gon Norea? The one the Koreans put in a barrel and ruined his back?”

  “That’s the man. Good guy too. We chased women around Luanda til we ran out of the CIA’s living allowance. That guy is a tail hound, Jack. One night we had these three—”

  “Gearheardt, could you just tell me the bare bones of what the hell you were doing in Angola and what it has to do with taking over Mexico? Which, by the way, I am not sure is in the U.S. plans for Mexico. But maybe I missed the memo.”

  The cantina was rocking. A number of the embassy people had stopped in and were using the happy hour prices to drink tequila and bitch about their miserable lives as embassy people. Behind the bar Mr. Chávez caught my eye, pointed to his chest and raised his eyebrows. “You need me for work?” he mouthed.

  I shook my head slightly and he went back to bartending. Mr. Chávez was a reliable source of information on the Halcones (the Mexican Secret Police) and various other Mexican government officials. He owned bars and restaurants near most large embassies and across the street from the government offices. Not only did he pick up information coming from the Mexicans and others, but if I wanted to plant information in the government or other embassies, I stationed an agent at a table with a bottle and let him talk to his agent companion. The next morning, the information he was “whispering” was sure to be diffused throughout the various institutions. Mr. Chávez didn’t need the small amount of money I paid him for information and an occasional small favor. He said he was happy to help the Americans because his money was all in American stocks.

  Gearheardt laughed when I told him.

  “You know, Jack, it’s getting harder to find an honest man. The Company had me set up a shop in Luanda selling South African passports—forged of course—so that we could get guys across the border to train with UNITA. Half the damn checks I took in bounced.”

  I looked into Gearheardt’s eyes to see if there was a twinkle of irony, pushing aside the image of African Bushmen writing checks for fake passports. There wasn’t. “That is a sad state of affairs, Gearheardt.” I moved my chair closer to the beer-bottle-covered table. “Gearheardt, you mentioned something about taking over Mexico. What the hell is that all about? Were you just pulling my chain? You do know that I am acting station chief in Mexico City, don’t you?”

  “Congratulations, Jack. Head of the Agency’s men in Mexico and you just a poor economic development officer. My, my, what has the Agency come to?”

  I stared at him. He sat, unperturbed, lightly tapping his finger against the beer bottle. He wouldn’t look at me, and that worried me. I trusted Gearheardt implicitly. On the other hand, I had trusted my first dog, Roughhouse, implicitly and he had eaten my sister’s rabbit. Dog’s do what dog’s do. And Gearheardt …

  “You know what I like about Mexico, Ja
ck,” he finally began, “it’s those Chihuahuas you fill with candy and then beat with a stick until they blow open and the candy goes everywhere. That’s good clean fun, Jack.”

  “Piñatas, Gearheardt. Chihuahuas are little dogs.”

  Gearheardt didn’t look up from the table, but he smiled. Then he said, “Jack, I need to tell you some things. But when I tell you, then you’ll have to make some tough choices. You and I have always been honest with each other—”

  “No we haven’t. You have lied about every damn thing you’ve talked me into. Just tell me what this taking over Mexico is all about. If it’s a joke, let’s forget it and go get some tacos and margaritas.”

  Gearheardt got up from the table and pulled a wad of money from his pocket. “Let’s take a walk,” he said, dropping the pesos on the table without counting them.

  I nodded at Mr. Chávez and followed Gearheardt out the door. The street was crowded and loud. The Zona Rosa was nearby and I suggested to Gearheardt that we head there for dinner.

  “Let’s walk down to the park, Jack. Chapultepec Park is one of the great strolling parks in the world.” He took off down the street, smiling at the Mexicans scurrying along the crowded sidewalk.

  I caught up with him. “How do you know about Chapultepec Park? I thought you said you had never been to Mexico City before.”

  “I told you I had just arrived in Mexico City. I meant this time.”

  “So you’ve been coming here and not getting in contact with me. What an asshole you are, Gearheardt. Didn’t you know I was at the embassy?”