by Pat Bertram
She searched the take-out containers. “There’s a couple pieces of bacon left, you interested?”
He shook his head. Even if he wanted to speak, he didn’t think he could. There was something surreal about hearing this particular story from her lips, and it stripped him of all capacities and desires except to hear more.
Kerry ate the bacon, then settled back against her pillow. “One of the people who noticed Noone was a war correspondent named John Tyler. Tyler was a big, hearty man who usually wore a gauzy white suit. Since Tyler also moved from NCO club to NCO club, doing research for articles, he often hitched a ride with Noone, and the two became friends.
“Noone learned to recognize many of the people involved in the Khaki Mafia and reported his findings when he and Tate met.”
“Did Harrison say what happened to the sergeant majors?”
A frown flashed across her face. “Nothing happened to them.”
“What to you mean nothing? They were thieves on a grand scale. They were traitors. They sold out their country, pocketing tens and tens of millions of dollars, and left the American taxpayers to foot the bill.”
“According to the book, very few criminal charges were ever filed and those charges were against the guys on the low end of the organization. Most of the others retained their jobs, some retired with full pensions. They even got to keep their ill-gotten gains.”
Bob slumped forward, burying his face in his hands.
“There was more to the book than the Khaki Mafia,” Kerry said. “After Tate terminated the surveillance of the NCO clubs, he sent Noone to Bangkok to spy on the CIA and NSA.”
Bob’s head jerked up. “Harrison knew? Did he say why Tate sent Noone to Thailand?”
“Something about the government needing to find out what the Chinese did to help the North Vietnamese. The NSA erected communication towers in Thailand to intercept military transmissions from China, and got college students and recent graduates who scored high on language aptitude tests to work there. A lot of those kids went to whorehouses and some talked about their work. The CIA owned the whorehouses, and a couple of their contract workers sold the information they heard to the communists. Tate wanted Noone to hang out at the whorehouses and try to find out who did the talking and who did the selling.”
Bob shook his head.
Kerry put her hands on her hips. “That’s what Harrison wrote.”
“I believe you. I just don’t understand how he knew about that. I never told him, and I doubt the man from the State Department did either.”
Chapter 13
Kerry blinked. “What do you mean—you never told him?” Her eyes grew round. “Are you saying you’re Bob Noone?”
“Apparently.”
“William Henry Harrison, the author who’s been on the bestsellers list every week for fifteen years, wrote a novel about you?” She threw a pillow at Bob. “How could you not tell me something like that?”
“I didn’t know. I haven’t read all of his books, and he seldom talked about them.”
Kerry gaped at him. “I don’t believe this. It’s like I stepped into a different universe.”
Bob nodded stiffly, trying to smile. “Welcome to my world. Tate, as Harrison called him, swore me to secrecy. I’ve spent the past sixteen years guarding my tongue, and now I find I’ve been protecting a secret the whole world knows.”
“So, before when you said you knew Harrison, you meant you knew him personally?”
“Yes. We’ve been friends since Vietnam, like it says in the book. He’s John Tyler.”
“Weirder and weirder.”
“Not really. He worked as a war correspondent when we met. He didn’t become internationally famous until later. Back then, only us grunts knew him. Many American soldiers in Vietnam weren’t too sure who General William C. Westmoreland was—”
“Who?” Kerry said.
“Exactly. But we all knew of William Henry Harrison, the one journalist who wrote stories that made us feel like heroes, as if perhaps we really were fighting for truth and justice, as if perhaps our presence meant something after all. The funny thing—” He stopped and shook his head. “See? Around you I always seem to be letting things slip.”
“But you didn’t,” Kerry pointed out. “Besides, you can’t stop there. What were you going to say?”
He regarded her for a moment, then shrugged. “He revealed me to the world. I guess I can reveal him to you. Some of the stories he wrote in Vietnam weren’t true.”
Laughter sparkled in her eyes. “You’re kid-ding.”
“No. He told me once the press hung out together and came to a consensus on what happened so all their stories had the same bias. Like the Tet offensive. The rest of the press corps wrote articles calling it a great psychological victory for the NVA, but Harrison saw it as a rallying point for the South Vietnamese. Before Tet, the war hadn’t greatly affected the lives of the city dwellers, and they didn’t care who won, but once their cities became war zones, on the most sacred day of the year, no less, they grew outraged. Harrison wrote that if the allied forces pushed their advantage, they would soon win. Instead of printing this story, his editor sent him a message telling him if he didn’t stop writing his anticommunist bullshit and stick to the facts, he would be fired.”
“But Harrison was right, wasn’t he?”
Bob nodded. “His editor refused to print the article. He also rejected Harrison’s story about the VC forcing whores to stuff glass up their privates before copulating with American GIs. And he rejected the one about toddlers being sent into bars with live grenades strapped to their bodies and getting blown up along with everyone else. The editor called these articles anticommunist propaganda.”
“So those things did happen?” Kerry said in a small voice. “I’d read about them, but didn’t know what to think.”
Bob shifted position. “It was not a pretty war.”
She crossed her arms at her waist. “I’m glad you got to play secret agent instead of having to fight.”
“I didn’t play secret agent.” He smiled at her. “I know this because secret agents have ingenious gadgets, fast cars, and gorgeous girls. I had a jeep and Harrison.”
She chuckled. “Well, now you have the girl. What happened with Harrison?”
“He decided to prove his editor could not discern the difference between fact and fiction, so he sat at his typewriter and banged out an imaginary story. To make it as obvious as possible that he fabricated his story, he wrote that the hero’s name was John Kane but his buddies called him Big Jake. He described Big Jake as a hellfighter with true grit.”
“I remember that story,” Kerry said. “We had to read it in school. The VC captured one of Big Jake’s friends after an ambush. The sergeant refused to authorize a rescue mission, so Big Jake went off on his own and tracked the VC to a small compound where several Americans were being held. Big Jake picked the VC off one by one and rescued all the prisoners. When he led them back to base camp, his sergeant con-gratulated him and told him he was a real horse soldier who rode tall in the saddle.”
“The story catapulted Harrison to fame. He decided if that’s what people wanted, he’d give it to them. He told me, ‘We’re living in a strange new world where what people think is true means more than what really is, where fallacy is more powerful than fact. The illusion of John Wayne as the quintessential American war hero is much more real than the fact that he never went to war, never even enlisted in the military.’ Years later, when Harrison got a contract for the definitive novel of the Vietnam era, he found he couldn’t write fiction, even though he’d been doing it all along, so he wrote the truth.”
Kerry laughed. “You’re telling me his non-fiction was fiction, and his fiction was non-fiction?”
“Yes. He researched and wrote his novels as if they were nonfiction, then he added dialogue.”
She gave him a sheepish look. “I guess I made a mistake before when I said your friends did all the talking. If h
e knew enough about you to put you in a book, he must have listened while you talked.”
“You weren’t wrong. I never told him anything about myself—that’s what’s so strange. Of course, he saw me in Vietnam, but the rest had to have been guesswork. He once mentioned that after I left Vietnam he heard talk of a secret government agency infiltrating the CIA-owned brothels in Thailand, but he never indicated he knew my part in the investigation.”
Bob slowly shook his head. “I still can’t believe he wrote a book about me, or that anyone bothered to read it. It was all so boring. Endless hours of listening to inane conversations and watching people drink, gamble, or play pool. I don’t know how I’d have survived without Harrison’s stories. He believed the ability to tell stories is the one thing separating humans from animals, and he always had a story.”
“What kind of stories? No, wait a second.” Kerry gathered the empty Styrofoam containers, threw them in the trash, then retrieved her pillow. She took Bob by the hand and led him over to the bed where they’d slept. When they had curled up together, she said, “Now you can tell me one of his stories.”
Bob touched her shoulder-length hair, letting it slide through his fingers. The sunlight shafting through the window made it glow like smoldering charcoal.
“You can begin anytime,” she said.
“You’ll fall asleep like you did when I told you Hsiang-li’s story.”
“So? I can use the rest. You kept me awake most of the night.”
“Sure. Blame it on me.”
“Well, it is your fault. Pete’s Porches always finished in ten minutes and fell asleep a minute later.”
Bob trailed a hand down her arm, then back up again. “You didn’t mention how you two met.”
“At a party. Boring. End of story. Now your turn. Tell me about you and Harrison.”
“I was lounging in one of the NCO clubs when he came to me and said, ‘If I could have been assured of a duty like yours, moving from base to base, drinking beer, I would happily have joined the army.’”
“I know,” Kerry murmured. “I read it in the book.”
“Shush. Who’s telling the story, me or you?”
She snuggled closer, her breath warm on his neck. “You are.”
“‘I’ve been watching you,’ Harrison told me. ‘You’re good at making yourself invisible, but some guys are so great at it, they seem supernatural. I heard about a guy they call The Sweeper.’”
Kerry let out a gentle snore, then lifted her head and grinned at him. “Just kidding.”
Bob couldn’t help returning her smile. All of a sudden he felt good, too good to be telling an unsettling story like The Sweeper’s. “How about if I tell you about the Prince of Darkness instead? He made sure that during the day not the tiniest bit of light hit his eyes. Over a period of time, his visual purple built up, giving him an advantage when he went out on patrol with his unit.”
“I’d rather hear the other story,” Kerry said. “Tyler told Noone about the Prince of Darkness, but he never told him about The Sweeper.”
“Harrison probably left it out since he planned to write a separate book about him. It was one of the many legends that came out of the war, but it seemed to capture his imagination more than the others. I heard it so many times over the years, I know it by memory.”
“Don’t you mean ‘by heart’?”
“No. I know you by heart. I know the story by memory.”
Kerry got very still, then let out a small sigh that spoke of contentment.
Bob drew her closer and kissed her. Her lips parted under his. His whole body seemed to hum with electricity as if he were a robot and she his power source. After a minute, she pulled away and looked at him with dancing eyes.
“You’re not getting off that easy.”
He smiled at her. “It was worth a try.”
She raised her brows expectantly.
“All right,” he said. “I’ve always found this to be a disquieting story, but if you want to hear it . . .” He paused to gather his scattered thoughts. “Up country where the Laos and Cambodia borders meet and abut South Vietnam, a large base camp had been set up in a bowl surrounded by jungled mountains. The troops might have appreciated the beauty if not for the Viet Cong snipers swarming over those dark green hills. Some of the snipers shot so poorly they were a joke. Others were deadly accurate.
“While most of the U.S. soldiers at the camp went about their duty of patrolling the borders, trying to control the VC and NVA infiltration into South Viet-nam, The Sweeper went up into the hills to eliminate the accurate snipers. He was told to leave the rest alone since they were more of a nuisance than anything else, and if they got killed, they might be replaced by snipers who could hit what they aimed at.
“By all accounts, The Sweeper wasn’t anything special, a typical grunt who got by the best he could, but he had one talent—an ability to blend. Because he melted into the jungle and became the jungle, he could go anywhere without detection.”
“Like a chameleon,” Kerry said.
“To a certain extent, all soldiers are chameleons. That’s the whole purpose of camouflage. Harrison said this particular soldier seemed more like a shadow or a ghost mist. Supposedly The Sweeper could fade into the background so completely that sometimes those standing right next to him were unable to see him . . .”
“Bob? Bob?”
Bob gave his head a shake and looked into Kerry’s concerned eyes. “What?”
“You drifted away.”
“Oh . . . I was thinking about The Sweeper slipping into the jungle, hunting and eliminating his quarry. Harrison always wondered what it would have been like for the sniper. One minute he’s going about his business picking off U.S. soldiers, and the next minute the jungle itself reaches out and kills him. But I was wondering what it would have been like for The Sweeper. A shadow, lost in the darker shadows of the jungle, he must have felt terribly alone.”
Kerry reached out and touched his cheek. He tilted his head toward her hand, welcoming the warmth.
“No one knows how The Sweeper did his job,” he said. “Rifle? Bayonet? K-bar? Garrote? They weren’t even sure how many he took out since he refused to bring back trophies—ears, fingers, what-ever—as proof of his kills. They did know he eliminated the snipers because they’d stop taking fire from a quadrant for a while. It would start again when a replacement arrived.
“One day an extraordinarily good sniper came to take the place of one who had been eradicated. This new guy was not VC but NVA, which were well-trained, well-equipped professionals. Normally, of course, a man of his caliber would have been reserved for much more important targets than those American GIs. Apparently, the North Vietnamese officers didn’t like their snipers getting killed instead of the U.S. soldiers and had dispatched one of their master snipers to rectify the situation.
“The Sweeper set out to get rid of the NVA sniper, but the sniper continued to do his work. At first, no one realized something had happened to The Sweeper. He often stayed in the jungle for days at a time. All good snipers shoot once or twice then move on, and The Sweeper had to track them, following a subtle but noticeable trail deeper and deeper into the jungle.”
Bob fell silent, the fecund stench of the jungle in his nostrils.
“What happened to him?” Kerry asked.
Bob inhaled her clean scent. “Supposedly he triggered a booby trap—possibly some kind of grenade, or perhaps shrapnel embedded in plastique—that had been set by the NVA sniper. Despite grievous wounds and a tremendous loss of blood, he did not die. He had a little water but no food, and since no one would ever find him so deep in the jungle, he had to save himself.
“Unable to walk, he began the long, desperate crawl back to base camp. It must have taken days. Can you imagine? Every insect in the place would have converged on him. They’d get in his eyes, his nose, his ears. Even his privates. They’d sting and nibble and drink his blood, and they’d never shut up. Leeches would cover his
body. And then there’d be the jungle rats, bit as cats.”
Kerry sucked in a breath. “Jeez, Bob.”
He gave her a sad smile. “I told you I found this to be a disquieting story.”
“I can see why.”
“Do you want me to stop?
“No. You’d better finish it, or I’ll have night-mares for a week.”
“There’s no real ending. The Sweeper was found by a graves detail dispatched to collect the bodies of a patrol that had been ambushed the previous night by the Viet Cong. They assumed he was dead, but when they heard him groan, they sent for the doc.
“The Sweeper lay on his belly. Except for scratches, abrasions, leeches, insect and rat bites, there appeared to be no major damage, but when they turned him over onto his back, the doc, an experienced medic who thought he had seen everything, almost lost his breakfast—The Sweeper looked like one pulsating mass of bloated maggots.
“He was medevaced to Qui Nhon, where he died, some say. Others say he survived and is living in a stateside mental hospital. An orderly at the hospital in Qui Nhon told Harrison he thought he heard that The Sweeper had been flown to Okinawa or some other place with a major army hospital where they managed to save him.
“If so, the maggots saved him by eating his putrefying flesh and keeping his wound from becoming gangrenous.”
Kerry wrinkled her nose. “I hope you’re not expecting sex any time soon. This story didn’t exactly put me in a romantic mood.”
He gave her a lazy smile. “Let me see what I can do about that.”
***
Bob sat propped against the headboard, squeezing the pink rubber ball, first with one hand and then the other. In the dim light filtering through the closed drapes, he could see Kerry asleep next to him, her black hair fanned out on the pillowcase. At least ten inches separated them, but he felt their bodies touching. He listened to the slow rhythm of her breathing and wondered how she could have become so dear to him. He’d never felt this way about anyone; in truth, he hadn’t known he could.
