Dragon Lady (3 page)

Anyway, why were we commanded by a brigadier general and a bird colonel when we were few, doing little?

The 803rd’s Annex across the street was the key.
Had to be.

Our personnel jackets were on Captain Papersmith’s desk. He knew exactly what he had in us. I was a draftee who’d get out the same way as I came in--as a slick-sleeved private. There was a drinking-on-duty incident and an altercation with a sergeant. My military downfall was my temper and my big mouth. In the army, insubordination was worse than being an atomic spy.

My parents summed me up pretty well as a misfit with alcoholic tendencies who didn’t want to be anything when he grew up, should that miracle occur. I was a college boy, a professional student. In the space of six and a half years, I’d earned fewer than two years of college credits in any specific discipline. I changed majors like I changed underwear. The Selective Service System had finally lost patience with my academic buffet and invited me to take my draft physical.

I was the diametric opposite of my brother, Jack, who had flown through undergrad work and was a doctoral candidate in aerodynamics and fluid mechanics. I suffered mightily in comparison. In addition, my mother and stepfather taught mathematics and English, respectively, at a junior college. My family had the three Rs covered. To call me a black sheep was to insult the species.

It’s sad that I can’t return from The Great Beyond to counsel myself. I sure as hell could’ve used my wisdom.

Ziggy had more than his share of problems, too. He was a high school dropout and an enlistee who’d been on the ragged edge of a Section Eight from the day he’d raised his right hand. He’d been promoted to PFC and demoted to private more times than Carter had pills. He should’ve had zippers on his sleeves.

Ziggy had been hauled before a judge for some offense or another. The judge had let him pick between the jailhouse and the recruiting station. It was routinely done in those days. In 1965, there was more of that flavor of patriotic zeal filling the ranks than the Pentagon cared to admit.

Ziggy and I had one thing in common. Nobody wanted us. My original MOS was cook. Ziggy was an ammo loader. The army had sent me to cook’s school, where we prepared pots of greasy stews that reminded me of witchcraft and cauldrons. They’d taught us to cook spaghetti that was crisp and bacon that was not. Ziggy had no formal education in ammo loading.

Neither of us had found our assignments vocationally appealing. This must have showed. They had us pegged as jack-offs who could get you killed, either poisoned or blown to smithereens before Victor Charles had an opportunity to take a lick. We’d bounced from here to there, winding up at this puzzling organization, most likely at random.

As the 803rd’s duty soldiers, we cleaned the latrine and mopped floors. In our supply room duties, we humped tons of mimeograph paper and file folders and carbon paper and adding machine tape and punch cards and correspondence to the door of the mysterious Annex. The punch cards arrived in bricklike packages. If they’d been actual bricks, we’d handled enough of them to build a medieval cathedral, flying buttresses and all.

“If you typed, I could assign you duties less menial,” the captain went on.

I could hunt and peck, but Ziggy didn’t know which side of a Remington was up. Biting the hook, I quickly lied, “We do know how to type, sir. Fifty words a minute, though we’re a little rusty.”

“I wasn’t aware,” the captain said.

Ziggy piped up, “Sir, I don’t know how to type.”

I gave Ziggy an elbow. You never knew when that prodigious brain would jump out of gear.

The only instance in which you ever ever ever volunteered in this man’s army is if they asked if you typed. Typists were scarce, and if you said you could, truthfully or not, they invariably sat you in front of a typewriter in a warm, dry place.

Volunteering for anything else, forget it. I’d learned that the hard way in a morning formation during basic training at Fort Ord, California when a sergeant with a clipboard had asked if anyone had a driver’s license. Several suckers,
me
included, thinking ahead to an easy day behind the wheel, had raised our hands and spent the rest of that easy day driving a push lawnmower on the parade grounds.

“As you were, Zbitgysz,” Captain Papersmith said. “I say you’re typists, you’re typists. They’re Specialist-4 E-4 slots, men. The sky’s the limit if you behave and apply yourselves.”

We were private E-2s, so the captain’s limitless sky had a fairly low ceiling, but I remembered when I used to be a PFC E-3.
 
It had been a nice two weeks. Then I’d coldcocked that sergeant.

“Yes sir. Thank you, sir. What Private Zbitgysz meant was that we’ll be outstanding typists after we knock off that rust and limber up our fingers.”

“As you men are aware, the enemy is escalating the war. Consequently, because of our rapid buildup to counter communist aggression, various
matériel
and equipment is in short supply.”

Saying “the enemy” as if he’d been in hand-to-hand with Victor Charles.

“Yes sir.”

“
Senior
officers require transportation when they require it,” Captain Papersmith went on.
“Colonel Lanyard, for instance.
A man of his rank has to submit a request days in advance for the use of a motor pool Jeep. That’s outrageous.”

The captain reported directly to Colonel Lanyard, the one person in the 803rd who wore a uniform. Colonel Lanyard nominally reported to the commanding officer, Brigadier General Whipple, a reservist and a research botanist prior to being called up. General Whipple rarely ventured from his office, which resembled an arboretum. He himself joked that it wasn’t an office, it was a terrarium.

We were on
Hong Thap Tu Street
, a few blocks from MACV (Military Assistance Command,
Vietnam
) Headquarters, in a hand-me-down building from the French. The stucco came off in gooey slabs, the floorboards creaked, and the red tile roof was scuzzy green from mold. The 803rd Liaison Detachment smelled like the Foreign Legion had garrisoned in it.

Outside Captain Papersmith’s window, I could see our Annex building, which dwarfed us. It was an old warehouse, with windows painted black. Construction was going on inside. You could hear the sawing and hammering. Whatever they were doing in there, it hungrily gobbled electricity. Unreliable local power was routed in by wiring that looked like a tangle of black noodles. Auxiliary generators hummed day and night.

The Annex was totally off-limits to us. Colonel Jake Lanyard had told us this the day we’d reported in, under threat of court-martial and reassignment to an infantry unit in the Delta, where we’d be up to our chests in malarial water and vipers and guerrillas.

“This is not an order,” he’d said solemnly. “It is a promise.”

I saw an army bus stop in front. Annex personnel began filing aboard. They were bussed in every morning, bussed out for lunch, bussed back in, and bussed out in the evenings, often late, to and from Tan Son Nhat Air Base where they were billeted in secured quarters.

The Annex was peopled by oddballs. That much we knew. These days you’d call them nerds or geeks, but then they were oddballs. They wore wrinkled civvies that didn’t fit right. They were clumsy. They had bad haircuts and big asses. Their glasses were as thick as telescope lenses. The oddballs were said to hold the rank of warrant officer.

We had oddballs in high school. They belonged to the radio club and didn’t play sports. The jocks picked on them and called them homos. I don’t think they were queer. I don’t think they disliked girls. They simply didn’t notice them or know how to approach them if they did.

The 803rd Liaison Detachment oddballs were good-spirited as they got on and off their buses. Whatever the hell they were doing, they seemed tickled pink to be in the army, in the middle of what was shaping up to be a bona fide war.

I had to again wonder: As you got smarter and smarter and smarter in college, did you go around full circle and start over as the village idiot? I wondered that out loud once to my mother, stepfather and Jack. I’d directed it at Jack, who’d skipped three grades but couldn’t tie his shoelaces until age nine. My family was not amused.

Our oddballs were sent paperwork as thick as phone books. It came from
DoD
and DA, and CINCPAC and USARV and USOM and HEDSUPPACT and USIS and COMUSMACV and USMACV and MACV. The papers were sealed inside envelopes marked TOP SECRET CRYPTO.

Whoever came to the Annex door and signed for the stuff was careful not to give us a peek within. The oddballs were off-limits to us, too. Even to say hello to. But I knew that someday my curiosity would get the better of me.

“Private Joe, get your eyes off the Annex personnel and listen to me. As I was saying, a full colonel has to submit―”

“Yes sir, outrageous.”

“Requisition of a Jeep outside channels, is that feasible?” Captain Papersmith asked.

We were apparently finished on the subject of typing, clerk-typist status having been dangled as bait.

“Sir, does the colonel require a Jeep now?”

“By the ingenuity you men displayed today, it strikes me that you have alternative matériel sources.”

The captain was correct about Jeeps being in short supply. The buildup was accelerating beyond the ability to support it. From econ classes, I recalled the supply and demand curve. In 1965
Saigon
, the curve was bent sharply toward demand.

If the captain wanted us to steal a Jeep for the colonel, though, I wish he’d spit it out. But Captain Papersmith wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful.

“Alternative matériel sources, sir?” I asked.

Digging at his chewed fingernails, the captain said, “Outside of official channels.
Unofficially speaking.”

“Is this what you mean by ‘more responsibility,’ sir?”

“Are you being smart with me, soldier?”

“Sir, no sir.
Just want to confirm the facts.”

“There are no facts. We aren’t having this conversation.”

“What conversation, sir?”

Ziggy laughed and Captain Papersmith flinched. Ziggy’s laugh sounded like a truck backfiring.

Red as a beet, Captain Papersmith said, “That’ll be all.
Dismissed.”

We whipped salutes on him and headed out to follow orders we hadn’t been given.

4.

“THE CAPTAIN, he acts like boosting a Jeep is
im
-fucking-possible,”
Ziggy
said contemptuously as we climbed into a taxi. “Joey, they’re the easiest rigs anywheres to hot-wire. A monkey with a
screwdriver’d
be taillights down the road in sixty seconds flat.”

I had no basis to disagree. Although I lacked Ziggy’s criminal background, I felt at home as a member of the Alternative Matériel Source Team. I was in the Zigster’s good hands.

Ziggy, incidentally, was the only person to call me Joey, a diminutive I didn’t recollect hearing from family or friends even as a small child. I was not one to whom warm and fuzzy nicknames came naturally. Inevitably, four of my five wives came to refer to me with other four-letter names.

Ziggy and I
were
an odd couple before
The Odd Couple.
We’d bonded before “male bonding” came into usage. Our bond was our mutual alienation from most people and institutions. Call it unhealthy if you like, but it worked for us.

Me? Who am I?

While we’re in the taxicab, slaloming in the maniacal traffic, it’s high time we get an autobiographical brief out of the way.

I am the late Joseph Josiah Joe IV, last of the Joe line.

My family tree is rather peculiar, an asymmetrical arrangement of dead limbs.

We can trace the Joes back as far as the Civil War, to
Gettysburg
, where Josiah Joseph Joe Senior was felled by dysentery or some other shit-borne disease. In the Spanish-American War, charging up
San Juan Hill
with Teddy, Josiah Joseph Joe Junior was sliced in two by a cannonball. During World War I, the first Joseph Josiah Joe was cut down by machine-gun fire when he lifted himself out of a trench to fetch coffee. Joseph Josiah Joe II bought it at Guadalcanal, courtesy of a Jap sharpshooter hidden in a palm tree. When I was nine years old, my father, Joseph Josiah Joe III stepped on a mine at Inchon.

Are we seeing a pattern?

My family and I sure as hell were. My predecessors were awarded posthumous Purple Hearts. No heroics, just atrocious luck. Accordingly, my
Vietnam
going-away party was grim. I regarded it as a retroactive wake and said so, suggesting that we should’ve had an ice- and beer- filled coffin with a Purple Heart dangling from it. An aunt and a female cousin cried. My stepfather gazed at the ceiling and shook his head, not for the first time. My mother glared at me and my gallows humor.

In bleary bravado, in a vain attempt to undo, I said, hey gang, no sweat. I have no intention of carrying on the tradition. I was confident that I was returning home in one piece, as the sole surviving Joe J. Joe.

As you’ll see if you have the patience to continue reading, I was almost wrong.

The taxi let Ziggy and me out at Tan Son Nhat Air Base’s main gate. The war had transformed Tan Son Nhat from a drowsy tropical airstrip to a tent city and perhaps the world’s busiest airport. Jets flew in and out, day and night, shuttling troops to and from home, predominantly from. We scouted the USARV compound for Jeeps. The pick of the litter was parked next to a mess tent, behind a metal storage container. It had decent tires and not too many dents.

The container had such a dinky padlock that Ziggy said they were asking for it. He snapped off the lock with a rock. There was a lot of crap in it, but we found a case of Spam and a dusty M-14 rifle with five full clips.

Headed downtown, I drove the Jeep while Ziggy read one of the sci-fi magazines he was never without. The cover of this issue featured Troy Donahue’s twin. Troy was in a tin spacesuit, firing his ray gun at a seven-hundred-pound side order of potato salad with claws. I was a voracious reader, but sci-fi passed a light year over my head.

To continue on me.
In life I was a nondescript white Caucasian of middling height and weight, average in all mental and physical respects except for scar tissue and the number of times my nose had been set.

The fisticuffs started in the second grade with wordplay on my name: Jo
Jo
with the underarm digging and call of Tarzan’s Cheetah. I was not one to take a joke when I was it.
  

I matured from playground skirmishes to saloon brawls, where I quickly learned that when you’re hit over the head with a barstool, it didn’t bust into kindling like they did in the movies. And when you’re thrown through a window, you came out the other side bleeding. In my twenty-four years as of 1965, I had given and received a banquet of knuckle sandwiches.

Years later, Janelle, Wife Number Three, encouraged me to enroll in anger management classes.

“Why?” I’d flippantly responded, on my sixth or eighth or thirteenth beer. “I already know how to get pissed off.”

Janelle had not been amused. I eventually grew up in my 40s, finally admitting to myself that my carload of insecurities made me such a hothead. I gave up the sauce, too, but by then Janelle was long gone.

In the realm of identifying features, complemented by injuries from the Battlefields of Stupidity, I sported an unsolved mystery on my body. At Fort Ord, where I’d attended Basic Training, I’d also matriculated in AIT (Advanced Individual Training)--which, for me, was cooking school. A week prior to graduation, on a dark and stormy payday night, I went out and had a drink or ten or twenty.

I remembered two things that occurred that lost evening. I remembered barhopping in
San Francisco
. I remembered wanting a Piet Mondrian tattoo on my arm.

My last college major had been art appreciation. I’d fallen hard for Piet Mondrian’s intersecting perpendicular lines and primary colors. A Mondrian was a happy marriage of beauty and simplicity. A classic Mondrian was the order absent in my life. His
Composition 1921
was my druthers.

I was not and am not wearing a Mondrian. Instead, I’ve got a map of Montana on my left biceps. It is an outline of the state and an X marked in the southeastern portion, approximately at Billings, Montana’s largest city. I’d awakened in an alley with a sore arm and there it was.

I had neither a recollection of the tattooing, nor did I know why Montana was on my arm rather than
Composition 1921
. I’d never been to
Montana
and was fairly certain that Mondrian had not in his illustrious career painted a map of
Montana
. People frequently asked if X was my hometown. I did not shame easily, but I often dressed in long sleeves, even on warm days.

I always enjoyed the drive into downtown Saigon, a little breeze always welcome at 10.45
degrees
 
north
latitude. The city was flat, and the nicer parts were leafy. Tamarind trees arched out to provide shade. The French had built wide boulevards to remind them of Gay Paree. We were bound for
Saigon
’s toniest and fleshiest district, toward the cathedral, the opera house, and expensive hotels, including the historic
Continental
Palace
and the ten-story Hotel Caravelle, toward glitzy
Tu Do Street
, where goods and services offered by shops, bars and whores sold at a premium.

I glanced at street names on the signs: Truong Minh Giang, Cach Mang, Cong Ly,
Nguyen
Hue. To facilitate translation of the Bible, French missionaries had
Romanized
the Vietnamese language, all the better to flog the love of Jesus into the savages. I was as fond of missionaries as I was of a colostomy, but I had to admit that their work had made it a helluva lot simpler for us to get around when we didn’t need to deal with Chinese-like calligraphy. Chicken scratchings, if you will.

Zealots have an extremely difficult time adjusting to my new homeland, The Great Beyond. Missionaries where I am twiddle their thumbs, frustrated to the extreme. They had smugly presumed absolutes--paradise for themselves and eternal damnation for us heathen sinners. Since we’ve already checked out of The Land of the Living, they have nothing to promise their sales prospects. The televangelists, the 1-800-SENDMONEY types, are in a constant frenzy. Their cash flow has stopped flowing. We do not have money in The Great Beyond, nor need money, but that is no consolation to those old boys.

We passed a theater with a poster of Sabu on it. We passed a cathedral that wouldn’t be out of place in any occidental city. We were passed by a massive 1956 Buick crammed with Vietnamese teenagers.

We came to the American Embassy. It was smack-dab in the heart of town, on narrow, crowded streets.
Big building, big target, a nightmare to protect.
It was a hollowed-out ghost. There wasn’t an unbroken pane of glass.

The attack happened on March 30, 1965, so early in the war that to most it didn’t seem like a war at all. It was a different story if you were standing here looking at what we were.
 

We’d heard that the people who’d followed procedure and hit the deck at the first sound of trouble―gunshots by guards in this instance―had survived. Those who’d instinctively gone to the windows to see what was going on had received the brunt of the explosion. They’d been pierced by glass shards, as if clawed by tigers. Charlie had double-parked a Citroën packed with a couple hundred pounds of
plastique
.

The area remained sealed off, crawling with trigger-happy ARVN troops and American MPs. We didn’t stick around.

Our destination, Bombay Tailors, was on Tu Do, Vietnamese for “freedom.” It was Rue
Catinat
under the French. In the unified communist
Vietnam
now, it is Dong Khoi, or Street of Simultaneous Uprisings, also known as the Street of Simultaneous Erections. Some things never change.

Mr. Singh,
Bombay
’s proprietor, was in.

“Gentlemen, it has been too long.”

Mr. Singh was the hue of milk chocolate. He had jittery eyes and a blinding smile. He was immaculate in blue slacks and a shirt as white as his teeth. He spoke clipped colonial English and could sew you a suit that fell apart in the second cleaning. His expertise was in money-changing and black-marketeering.

Nobody but nobody, from the top brass on down, changed money at the legal rate of seventy-three Vietnamese piasters per U.S. dollar.
Nobody.
MACV generals sent their drivers out with their many dollars.

You changed downtown for 120 to 130, depending on how close to payday it was, the higher number the day before, the lower the day after. The East Indians ran that show, and Mr. Singh’s rates were as competitive as anybody’s.

“Got goodies you’re gonna love,” I told him.

“I anticipate eagerly,” Mr. Singh said, peeking under the blanket we’d laid over the back seat.

Though he wasn’t too thrilled about the lunchmeat, he swooned at the rifle and ammo.

Yeah, I was a goldbrick and a dud. I would have been voted Soldier of the Month when the Mekong River froze over. But I was no traitor. No one hated commies more than I did. In the hands of a real soldier, the M-14 was a solid, reliable weapon, but we were phasing out the 14s in favor of the M-16. The VeeCee and NVA used the AK-47 the Russkis gave them, a weapon some claimed was superior to the 14 and 16 combined.

Mr. Singh wouldn’t be selling this junk gun to the Reds, who’d laugh in his face while slitting his throat. It was destined to wind up in the hands of a wealthy Saigonese who wanted firepower around the house, and who could blame him?

“Mr. Joseph, I have a special treat in store for you.”

Which meant Singh had decided how he was gonna screw us. He led us through a bead curtain to a back room. He reached inside a lacquered table and said, “Mr. Joseph, I recall that you expressed concerns regarding personal security for yourself, did you not?”

I’d once mentioned to Singh that I felt naked without any protection. I hinted that a stiletto would feel comfortable in my pocket in case I had to do close-order drill with a VC sapper or an angry bar girl.

“Is there anything you don’t recall?”

Mr. Singh
smiled,
his hand still in the drawer.
 

I played it cool, saying, “Ziggy and I figured on booze and cash.
Fifty bucks minimum and a gallon of Johnny Walker Black Label, our favorite flavor of Scotch.
Whatever else is icing on the cake.”

I looked at Ziggy, who nodded, his neck creaking.

Mr. Singh pulled out a tiny little Browning .25 caliber automatic pistol. It was as cute as a button. In its holster, it would be no more noticeable in my pants pocket than a wadded-up hankie.

He commenced negotiations by making a face at the Spam. “This is a pork substance. As you gentlemen are two of my dearest friends, I shall endeavor not to take offense.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the peashooter. As I was the principal negotiator and weakened beyond repair by desire, Singh knew he had us by the short hairs. I settled for the popgun, a half-gallon of Johnny Walker Red Label--a lesser brand than Black--and a fat wad of piasters that added up to the grand sum of seven bucks.
 

On the way back to the 803rd, we stopped at an Esso station and slipped the pump jockey those piasters to paint over the Jeep’s old markings and stencil on 803 LD. If Ziggy was pissed about me giving away the farm to Singh, selfishly caving in because of the .25, he didn’t say so.