What was left of the sun threw black lines from the mini-blinds across the room like the bars of a cage and Mickey ran his fingers through his hair, rubbed his chin, eyes darting at the file cabinet in the corner of the room. He knew he would look, so why not get it over with? Mickey got up, opened the bottom drawer, and took out the framed certificate and the flat blue box that went with it.
His mother had the certificate framed and sent to him after she found it in the bottom drawer of a dresser in the basement of the old house in Oxnard. He remembered her calling, I can’t believe you left this here. Why wouldn’t you want this? But she was remembering World War II, and her own childhood, and times when talk of war and honor and country and God were taken more seriously, seemed to have more meaning, were spoken without cynicism. They’d gotten in an argument about it and he hung up on her. Then he felt bad about hanging up on his mother, who was only trying to be nice, but who would never understand the way he felt about what had happened. The way a few long days, years before, had ruined him.
The next Christmas the certificate came in the mail, newly framed. That had been nearly twenty years ago and Mickey still wasn’t able to hang it up; he doubted he ever would. But some nights, when the scotch or the memories ran too thick in his blood, he would take it out and set it on his desk and read it through.
He hadn’t been drinking any scotch, but the memories were there. Mickey settled back in his chair with a sigh, set the citation on his lap, and opened the little box. He ran his fingers over the eagle perched atop the word “valor” and rubbed his thumb across the five-point star. The blue ribbon with the thirteen white stars on it was folded haphazardly, left untouched from the first and only time he’d ever worn it. He snapped the lid closed and stared back at the citation, then he read it through, just as he had a hundred times before:
Rank and organization: Staff Sergeant, U.S. Marine Corps, Company B, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marines, 1st Marine Division. Place and Date: Kontum Province, Republic of Vietnam, 21 April 1970. Entered service at: Los Angeles, Ca. Born: 21 September 1946, Ventura, Ca. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life far above and beyond the call of duty while serving as a Staff Sergeant and leader of his reconnaissance platoon in Kontum Province, Republic of Vietnam, throughout the duration of an enemy capture and torture. Acting under orders to gather intelligence in a previously unexplored region of Kontum Province, SSgt. Mickey O’Reilly led his platoon through thick jungle toward an enemy encampment. When one member of the platoon tripped a grenade trap, a fierce firefight ensued, resulting in the deaths of two platoon members and the capture of SSgt. O’Reilly and the remainder of his men. For three days, SSgt. O’Reilly and his men were held in an exposed bamboo cage and made to watch as the bodies of their two fallen platoon members were desecrated by the enemy (Viet Cong). On the third day, a member of the platoon was selected at random from the survivors, hung by his feet just beyond the reach of the platoon, tortured until dead, and left hanging, to be fed upon by wild dogs. Realizing that he and his men must escape or be killed, SSgt. O’Reilly engaged one of the enemy when they entered the cage, wrestled a weapon from him, and proceeded to orchestrate an escape of all of his men. Against great odds, SSgt. O’Reilly displayed tactical skill of the highest order in dispersing and commanding his already fatigued men as they rapidly overtook their captors, seized their weapons, and engaged the enemy in a full-scale firefight. SSgt. O’Reilly’s platoon, consisting of only fourteen men, held off over one hundred enemy combatants while retreating into the jungle. SSgt. O’Reilly managed to seize a short wave radio from the enemy and, while in full retreat, contacted his own battalion and ordered in air strikes to destroy the enemy encampment. After the air strikes were ordered, SSgt. O’Reilly instructed his men to dig into positions along a ridge and to hold the enemy near the encampment until the air strikes arrived. Then, acting from his own selfless devotion to his troops, SSgt. O’Reilly flanked the enemy, through dense jungle, and returned to the encampment to retrieve the body of the tortured soldier. As the air strikes began pounding the area, SSgt. O’Reilly crawled some five hundred yards, through the enemy’s line of fire, carrying the body of his fellow Marine, to return to his men. SSgt. O’Reilly suffered severe injuries in the course of retrieving his fallen soldier, but he lost not a single man in the fighting. The encampment destroyed by the air strikes was of vital strategic significance to the enemy and struck a major blow to the Viet Cong’s reconnaissance efforts. SSgt. O’Reilly’s tenacious devotion to his troops; his supreme confidence and composure in the face of overwhelming hostility; and his unsurpassed leadership, command, and valiant fighting spirit were in keeping with, and in fact enhanced and sustained, the highest traditions of the United States Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service.
Mickey read it through a second time. Because the citation was part of the Congressional record, the names of the desecrated soldiers were suppressed, but Mickey remembered them. How could he forget? Bobby Nelson and Franklin Wright had been killed by the grenades and were later hacked to pieces with kukri knives and strewn about the cage where the rest of them were kept. Vincent Paoli—Skinny Vinnie—had spent three days with them in the cage and was grabbed at random from the group, stripped of his clothes, hung by one foot and beaten like a piñata with a long bamboo cane for several hours.
When Vinnie’s face was completely covered in blood and dirt, one of the cackling slopes would piss on his head to clean it off. They all thought it was good fun and stood around him in a circle, passing the cane back and forth. Mickey watched it all, despite the fact that most of the men sat with their backs to the scene, staring off into space and trying to block out the wet smack of the bamboo cane and Vincent’s ever weakening screams. Gradually, the slopes lost interest in beating him until one of them came over with a wide, curved knife, grabbed Vinnie’s cock and balls and hacked them off with one clean whack. Vinnie shrieked and folded his body upward, clutching at the bloody gap between his legs with a confused look in his eyes, but the slope just stood above him, shaking the bloody mess in his face and kicking his head back down, laughing hysterically the entire time. Mickey kept watching, staring, vowing to kill the cruel son of a bitch any way he could.
Two hours later, he got his chance. The careless motherfucker came over to the cage by himself and opened the door, ordering Mickey out, apparently as the next victim, but it wasn’t going to happen like that. Mickey stood up and walked toward the smiling, toothless bastard and, in one swift motion, lunged forward and grabbed the gun with one hand and the slope’s skull with the other, ramming his thumb through the little fucker’s left eye like he was puncturing an egg. Mickey could still remember the warmth of the fluid from the bursting eye and the feeling of the loose brain matter as he dug his thumb deeper into the skull. And then he was firing the AK-47 and the men were rushing out and he could hear screams and explosions and feel the blur of chaos all around him. But what he remembered most was giving the orders, and getting the men to move tactically through the village and out into the jungle, as though it were just another training mission. He remembered the smell of smoke and looking back over his shoulder to see a dog tugging at Vinnie’s head, tearing something loose, and seeing the body sway back and forth like the hidden pendulum on the Doomsday Clock.
Then he remembered crawling through the brush, cutting Vinnie’s body loose and crawling back the way he’d come. He remembered hearing the planes and knowing he was too late. Then there were blinding flashes of light, and fire, and a sound like the end of the world had come. Then he remembered the helicopter ride, and the ambulance ride, and the medic looking into his face, screaming at him to hang on for just another minute.
He also remembered feeling silly when the general came to see him in the hospital in Da Nang, to tell him that he would be recommended for the medal, to tell him about duty and honor and God and country and how everyone was proud of him for what he’d done. He remembe
red laying there staring up at the starched uniform and the four shiny stars on each shoulder, looking at the gray hair around the general’s temples and wondering what in the hell he was talking about. Wondering if the general himself even knew. He remembered how the hospital ward had gone silent when the general walked in and how everyone listened and how the General spoke loudly so everyone could hear.
Then there were the three weeks in Honolulu. He’d been there before, but that time there wasn’t anything fun about it. The streets along Waikiki were still crammed with soldiers and women and the smells of coconut oil and roasting pig in the evenings, just like always. It was a nonstop party as the men came in on the transports from the west and the women came in on the tourist packages from the east—departing from Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Seattle—to watch the young men with their crew cuts, testosterone, and tattoos trying to impress them with war stories, fistfights, and all manner of bravado and bullshit.
Mickey had been there, in the thick of it, three other times. Once on the way over for his first tour, once on forced R&R, and once between tours when he finally snapped and realized he enjoyed the madness and wanted to reup. His colonel wasn’t keen on it at first—Corporal O’Reilly, you’ve done your duty, go home before it’s too late—strange words for a Marine Corps colonel ass-deep in a war that was going south all around him. Back home they were drafting scared kids, dragging them to Saigon and making them fight, and here was a guy who’d already been hardened by the jungle, who wasn’t afraid to kill, who in fact had demonstrated an aptitude for it, who was begging to stay. So why the reluctance? Why the discouragement? Mickey O’Reilly was exactly the guy they needed. Mickey had laughed about it at the time. It was Groucho Marx. That old line: never join a club that would have you as a member. The Marines had discovered that Mickey O’Reilly liked war. He was good at it. And that scared the Marines almost as much as it scared Mickey.
So there he was, sitting in the outside bar of the Hale Koa hotel listening to the fake luau, sipping Singapore slings, waiting for his date with Richard Nixon and for the last pink vestiges of his shrapnel wounds to heal and all he could think about was Lance Corporal Vincent Paoli. Only a few years younger than Mickey, the poor kid had long since been sent home in a standard issue coffin, given the standard issue funeral, the Marine Corps band and the twenty-one gun salute—taps, the flag from the coffin folded and given to a weeping mother, the box with the Purple Heart in it, a handwritten note from a general in Washington—but it was a closed casket funeral, so no one saw Vinnie in his dress blues, and no one ever really saw his torn face, up close, as Mickey had, crawling through the muck of Vietnam. And every time Mickey thought about it, he wondered if there wasn’t something he could have done. Why hadn’t he attacked when they came to get Vinnie? Why did he wait until they came for him? Was he weak? Indecisive? Couldn’t he have stopped it?
But what good did thinking about it do? The world went on. The boys still terrorized Honolulu on Friday nights. The Hale Koa still made great drinks. Mickey had gotten up that morning and taken a shit and a shower and put his clothes on, just as he would for years to come. Vinnie Paoli was still dead from torture Mickey did nothing to stop and no goddamned Medal of Honor was ever going to change that. And after more than thirty years, wasn’t that the truth of all truths? There was no reason for anything. Everyone did what they did. There was no justice in the world, there was no honor, no duty, no glory, no nothing. There was only day after endless day of living and trying to forget the truly awful parts.
But you wouldn’t have known that if you’d been in the Capitol on that miserably hot day in August, 1970. There were five of them there—guys he’d never seen before and would never see again—and they stood in the massive Congressional chamber as the citations were read. Richard Nixon went down the row with Melvin Laird trailing behind him, opening the boxes and handing the medals to the president. It lasted only thirty seconds or so, Nixon taking the medal and draping it over Mickey’s head, shaking his hand, telling Mickey that the country would forever be indebted to him. Mickey recalled nodding along as he focused on the heavy stubble on Nixon’s cheeks and thought that the president smelled a little like fried chicken. And then it was over, and he was mingling with congressmen at a brief reception, eating miniature toasts with meat on them and noticing the looks in the congressmen’s eyes, seeing that they felt as awkward as he did.
Then everything fizzled out. He was near the end of his second tour and the Marine Corps discharged him without really asking—not that he wanted to stay that time anyway—and he found himself sitting in his mother’s house in Oxnard, or driving down to Zuma beach to watch the sun set over the ocean while he drank steel cans of Budweiser and wondered what the hell he was going to do with his life. There didn’t seem to be much of a point to anything. Eventually, his mother started harassing him about getting his shit together, and how could a Medal of Honor winner just sit on his ass all day, and what would his father think if he were alive to see it, and whatever else she came up with.
So he took a job with the LAPD. He could still remember the lieutenant flipping through his file and stopping suddenly, raising an eyebrow and looking across the desk—Medal of Honor winner?—like people who won the damned thing didn’t still need to earn a living. But yeah, then everyone knew, and he spent eight years trying to live up to the reputation it got him for being crazy. A real bad ass. He spent the 1970s earning a philosophy degree at UCLA at night and concluding that there really wasn’t anything like justice or law or even uniform rules—setting aside the laws of physics—that operated with any consistency at all anywhere in the universe, let alone the part of it he inhabited.
Life was just a series of judgment calls from one moment to the next—each one discrete and meaningless. Sometimes he pulled a car over for speeding, sometimes he didn’t; sometimes he chased a guy, sometimes he didn’t; sometimes he made a kid dump out a baggie of pot he found in the glove box, sometimes he took the kid to jail, sometimes he just took the weed for himself and sent the kid on his way; sometimes he just parked his squad car on Mulholland Drive and stared at the lights of the city, wondering what everyone else’s life was like while he drank a fifth of whatever he’d just taken from the last car he stopped.
Sometimes he won the Medal of Honor and got to shake the president’s hand, but mostly he just collected his paycheck, took it to the bar, and numbed his brain into submission so he could get up and do it all over again the next day without dwelling on too many of the hard questions. Sure, he could go home at night and try to convince himself that there was some consistency to the actions, some underlying meaning or system or function at work, but that was all just bullshit. That was the kind of mental masturbation other people engaged in to make themselves feel better about the pointlessness of their own lives. But Mickey didn’t need to feel better, in fact, he didn’t need to feel anything at all.
What he needed was peace and quiet and space and distance enough to forget about himself, and let everyone else forget about him too. And then, one day, he heard about a small town in the middle of nowhere looking for a sheriff. No one qualified wanted to move out there. The ad appeared twice in the bulletin before Mickey got in his truck one day and drove out to Nickelback and never returned. That was 1980.
By the time he put the certificate and the medal back in the bottom file drawer, it was completely dark. Mickey turned the desk lamp on and watched the darkness disappear, hoping it would take the memories with it. He thought about Sam Cannon, and who had killed him and tried to imagine the ways the kid might have ended up out in the middle of nowhere. But the images of the buzzard picking at him only reminded him again of Vinnie Paoli and the dog and all the rest of it. It was a vicious cycle of thought, always wrapping itself around to the beginning like a snake eating its tail, so that there really was no beginning at all. Everything circled back, as though the whole of his life were merely a single theme repeating itself. A fugue of futility. He open
ed the desk drawer to stop the music and looked inside. No scotch.
Then he started thinking about the surveyor with the bad luck to run into the coyote with the leg and total his car. What were the odds of that? Sam Cannon would have been just another guy who disappeared if it hadn’t been for the surveyor crossing that particular stretch of deserted highway at that very moment. All of the events of the lives of the coyote and the surveyor had added up to that single instant. Some would find meaning in that—Sam Cannon was meant to be found—but Mickey O’Reilly knew better. Wringing meaningful connections from random events was just a silly logic game played by needy people who could not accept a universe without some power controlling everything. Logic doesn’t exist in the world, it only exists in people’s heads.
Mickey used to ask people like that why they needed to live in a universe that made sense, what would be the point, how would it change the fact that they still had to get up the next day and sell a chunk of their lives for food and shelter? But he stopped engaging in conversations like that about the time he moved to Nickelback. People thought what they thought and created what they needed to fill in the gaps. Mickey was probably no different, and he knew it.
Mickey wondered what the surveyor had thought after he found the coyote with the leg in his front seat. How did you fit something like that into your world view? Then he thought about helping the poor guy pack up his big pile of gear from the side of the road and carting it into his motel room. Surveyors sure had a lot of gadgets, all kinds of shit that didn’t seem to have any obvious use. And all of this guy’s stuff was ruined.
Then Mickey sat up straight and thought about it again, trying to be precise. It was probably just him. His attention had been focused on the leg and not the surveyor, but it did seem odd.
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