Support Troops

By Brian Nicol

More that 2.5 million Americans served in Vietnam, the vast majority in supporting roles. Yet just because they were behind the lines didn’t mean they were shielded from the chaos and the craziness, from the pain and the suffering. In fact, there were no front lines in Vietnam. The war was here, there and everywhere. And that’s just fine with Specialist Alan Lacey, the narrative voice of the novel. A 22-year-old Army draftee from Michigan, he’s smart, cocky, funny, arrogant. Which to the lifers—the career soldiers—means he’s an asshole. But he’s a powerful asshole. He’s chief clerk of a Saigon headquarters company. He knows how to get things done; he knows how to keep things from getting done. He wheels and deals; he plays and parties. He doesn’t like Saigon and he’s disgusted with the war effort, yet he gladly takes advantage of the whole situation as he counts off his 365 days. But Vietnam and the war that has engulfed it have taken the measure of many a smart-ass clerk over the years. Lacey will be no exception. He finds himself forced to take a stand, to seek revenge, to confront the enemy—even when that enemy’s uniform is the same as his.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Nicol
• Release date: May 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476259932

Brian Nicol

Brian Nicol’s writing, editing and publishing career spans more than 30 years, most of them in Hawaii, Oregon and Nebraska. He was editor of Honolulu, the city and regional magazine of Hawaii, from 1982 until 1990. For a little more than two years, he was editorial director of Aster Publishing Corp. in Eugene, Oregon. From 1992 until 2007, he was CEO of Home & Away Publishing, a AAA-owned media company that produces travel magazines with combined circulation of more than 5.5 million. Nicol’s academic background includes a bachelor of arts in mathematics, a bachelor of science in mathematics education and a master of arts in U. S. history. He is a Vietnam veteran. Over the years, he has been honored with numerous writing, editing and publishing awards. His book projects include work for Time-Life Books, BenBella Books of Dallas and Alouette Verlag of Germany. He and his wife, Colleen, recently co-wrote and published Senior Days, a book based on Colleen’s experiences in eldercare. In his “spare” time, Nicol writes screenplays; several of his scripts have won national awards. The Nicols have two children, Kevin, 30, and Daniel, 28.

Book preview

Support Troops

If Vietnam is the only war you’ve got,

you might as well get out and enjoy it

A Novel by Brian Nicol

Copyright © 2018 Brian Nicol

Smashwords Edition

Cover illustration by Daniel Nicol

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Part 1: FNG

• Chapter 1: TWO SIXTY-THREE AND I’LL BE FREE

• Chapter 2: TWO THIRTY-NINE AND I’LL BE FINE

• Chapter 3: TWO-OH-EIGHT AND I WON’T BE LATE

• Chapter 4: ONE-NINETY-ONE AND I’M BACK TO THE FUN

• Chapter 5: ONE-SIXTY-FOUR AND I’M OUT THE DOOR

• Chapter 6: ONE-FORTY-FIVE AND THAT’S NO JIVE

• Chapter 7: ONE-FORY-TWO AND I’LL BE THROUGH

• Part 2: LUV

• Chapter 8: ONE TWENTY-ONE AND I’LL FOLLOW THE SUN

• Chapter 9: ONE-SEVENTEEN AND MY LIGHT TURNS GREEN

• Chapter 10: ONE-FIFTEEN AND I EXIT THIS SCENE

• Chapter 11: NINETY-EIGHT AND I WON’T HESITATE

• Chapter 12: EIGHTY-THREE AND YOU WON’T SEE ME

• Chapter 13: SEVENTY-EIGHT AND EVERYTHING’S GREAT

• Chapter 14: SEVENTY-SIX AND BACK TO MY OLD TRICKS

• Chapter 15: SIXTY-NINE AND MY LIFE IS MINE

• Chapter 16: FORTY-TWO AND I’LL BE THROUGH

• Part 3: KIA

• Chapter 17: FORTY-ONE AND I’LL FOLLOW THE SUN

• Chapter 18: ONLY FORTY SO CALL ME SHORTY

• Chapter 19: THIRTY-NINE AND MY LIFE IS MINE

• Chapter 20: THIRTY-SIX AND I’M AWAY FROM THESE DICKS

• Chapter 21: TWENTY-EIGHT AND OPEN THAT GATE

• Chapter 22: TWENTY-FOUR AND SHOW ME THE DOOR

• Epilogue: 1983

• Acknowledgements

• About the Author

To my wife, Colleen, who got through it all with me back then, and continues to do so today

PART 1:

FNG

Chapter 1

TWO SIXTY-THREE AND I’LL BE FREE

No excuses. No one to blame. Dig it, we’d all heard the stories. Some sadsacks will swear they’ve even seen the pictures. Bullhead clap. Penile implosion. Venereal diseases that leave a guy’s prick purple and swollen like an eggplant. Diseases that eat it clean away. Huge running sores that won’t heal but instead spread all over the body. Unheard of strains that make the scientists and doctors shake their heads in fear.

Yet here we sit.

There must be about a hundred other guys here today, all in their combat fatigues, all with sorry looks on their faces, all enlisted men. I’m sure the officers have a clean, well-lighted place to get their Double Shot. We have the MACV infirmary, and it’s almost 0800 and we’re waiting for someone to come out and wait on us. I look around at those sorry faces and I can tell this isn’t a room full of flu cases or runny noses. These guys have runny dicks.

Actually, I don’t remember much about the fuck. Just your standard hop on board, in and out, slam-bammer. But then a week or so later, the dreaded drip. And the pain. Like pissing fire. Or maybe razor blades. Staff Sergeant Novak, the lifer in charge of the supply room, gave me half a bottle of tetracycline to try to kill the thing, and I gobbled ‘em all in about two days’ time. But it wouldn’t die. And it still hasn’t died. There’s only one cure and it’s found only at the infirmary: the Double Shot.

We’d heard the stories as early as basic training. Hundreds, maybe thousands of soldiers had gone to the Nam, fucked the wrong whore and ended up with one of the mystery VDs. And because the diseases are so weird and so deadly and so contagious, those hundreds and thousands of poor souls can never go home again. They’ll never be allowed to return to decent society—how can they be? And so they’re locked in special sanitariums outside Saigon, with special nurses and doctors to treat their running sores, with special shrinks to help them accept their fate. Makes you want to put a muzzle in your mouth and do the deed.

And so when it’s my turn to put a little of the ooze from the end of my prick onto a microscope slide, I’m understandably nervous. Just like the rest who went in before me and just like the bunch that’s still waiting.

Within a few minutes I have the answer. Infection due to the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae—in other words, gonorrhea, the clap. Routine. Nothing fancy, nothing unknown. A slight sigh of relief, but that’s all I have time for. A nurse tells me to drop my pants and grab my ankles and then she gives it to me—the Double Shot. One in each cheek with syringes the size of Janitor in a Drum and needles as big around as pine trees. I’ll never sit down again.

After the Double Shot I hitch a ride back to the compound and flop (face down) on my bunk for an hour or so. But it’s too hot and the gook maids are too noisy. So I walk across the parking lot to the EM club, hoping to find a familiar face, sure I’ll find a cold beer. I could go back to work, of course, and shuffle some paper for a few more hours, but I’m not stupid. Or gung ho. Sick call is an all-day affair, even if it isn’t. And will the Green Machine really miss me? Unlikely. I owe it to myself.

Anyway, I pull open the club’s heavy black door and step inside. For about 20 seconds I’m a blind man. From Saigon’s bright afternoon sun to the club’s dark side of the moon is a stop-in-your-tracks transition for the eyeballs.

I adjust and then take a seat at the bar. It’s 2:30—1430 military—and the place is practically empty. Two lifers at a corner booth and another guy three stools down from me. At lunch you can’t get a seat in this joint and after work, from about 6 ‘til closing at 10, it’s the same. Happy hour days, Tuesdays and Fridays, even worse: beer prices drop from 10 cents a can to 5 cents a can and the lifers crowd in here like someone is offering them a credit line at a whorehouse. They’ll save a nickel a can. Big goddamn deal. Although the way some of those juicers drink, a nickel a can quickly adds up to significant piaster.

And on Wednesdays and Saturdays, there’s a live band—start time 7:30, go figure. This place gets like Yellowstone Park in July. Some of us slip away from our desks early on band days and are comfortably slammin’ beers in this air-conditioned cave by 5 o’clock—1700 hours.

But right now there’s almost no one. I order a Schlitz from Nancy, the Vietnamese woman who works as a day bartender and night waitress. She smiles as always and asks in her broken English how I am. I smile back and say fine, not bothering to mention the Double Shot. In fact, I’m sitting rather awkwardly on the bar stool. I hope the beer will distract me from my butt.

I turn and look at the guy three stools down. Fresh off the plane. Fatigues still dark green, stiff. But wrinkled like he’s been sleeping in ‘em. And he certainly has. He’s probably been in country less than three days. FNG—Fucking New Guy.

You a stranger in these parts? I ask with just a touch of my John Wayne shtick.

He looks at me and says, Yup, sounding a touch like Gary Cooper, although I’m sure he didn’t mean to.

We begin one of those kill-some-time conversations. The kind of dialogue that always happens when two soldiers meet—at any bar, at any fort, at any airport, in any war. A status report. A fact sheet out loud: I find out he’s from Minnesota—Minneapolis, in fact. I’m from Michigan, so that makes us neighbors, and brothers in the Big Ten. I move over to the stool next to him and order us both another cold one.

I find out he’s assigned to HMD—Housing Management Division. He’ll be one of the three clerks in that office, making sure all 510 officers and enlisted men of USAHAC—the United States Army Headquarters Area Command—have roofs over their heads and sheets on their beds. Duty, honor, country. About 400 of those 510 live in hotels sprinkled around Saigon; some work in motor pools; some in clubs and commissaries; some in offices. The rest of the 510, including the two of us, live here on the company compound.

I tell him I’m USAHAC’s company clerk—in fact, chief clerk of an orderly room that includes two other clerks (my Indians), a training NCO, the first sergeant and last, but certainly least, Maj. Johnny McDowell. I’d have been the one checking him in this morning, I point out, if I hadn’t been feeling under the weather and had to report to sick call.

I find out he’s 21 and was drafted in June ’69 and sent to basic at Leonard Wood. I tell him I’m 22 and was drafted in February ’69 and sent to basic at Fort Knox—school of hard knox. Kentucky. Ridge runner land. Shit land.

And, of course, he tells me his name: Randall Duffy, a PFC who’s been in country only three days. People have always called him Duff. I tell him my name, Alan Lacey. People call me anything they want to. He mentions a few Minnesota Laceys I might be related to. But I’ve never been to Minnesota and probably never will.

Duff has what chicks call bedroom eyes. Like James Dean or Montgomery Clift. Big, sad, puppy dog eyes that seem on the verge of crying—even when the rest of his face is smiling. Duff’s eyes are green and he must subconsciously realize their power and charm because he constantly makes eye contact, he stares right at you. When I notice his eye contact, I abandon mine and start popping a dent in my beer can.

Unlike Dean and Clift, he’s got a light brown mustache that is creeping ever so close to the corners of his mouth. If it goes over the line, if it ever curves downward past the corners, then it will be non-regulation. Subversive. Immoral. Un-American. And its bearer will be subject to an Article 15 and other not-so-formal military bullshit. Sure you can have a ‘stache, says the Army, just don’t let it grow unchecked, untrimmed. Better to look like Hitler than Sonny Bono. Not at all like Fu Man Chu. Not at all like General Custer.

And sideburns. Ah, sideburns. Permitted, up to a point. The point being the middle of the ear. If they creep down past that halfway mark, then it’s Article 15. The Army will not tolerate an Elvis. Or General Burnside.

Duff and I both have the mustache and the sideburns—all barely legal. My hair is darker and more curly and—dare I admit—receding. As far as I know, I do not have bedroom eyes.

We finish the Schlitz and he heads for the White House—the two-story dorm building across the compound, the home-away-from-home for those of us who live on campus. He wants to get some sleep. I walk over to the dayroom to watch TV and kill some time before chow. Sick days move slowly.

256

Rocket attack again last night. Not in our neighborhood though. This time it was on the north edge of the city, near the last bridge out of town to Long Binh. A few deaths—all civilians—and lots of fires. Hell from on high.

We’ve been getting a lot of shit in this metropolis lately. Last week one of our security guards at the Brinks blew away two gooks who were trying to sneak in at the delivery ramp. They were carrying two suitcases packed with explosives, so he’s covered. No war crimes charges this time. He’s lucky the TNT didn’t go boom when he blew them away. I hear he emptied an entire magazine on ‘em—19 or 20 rounds. Lifted ‘em right off the ground and plopped ‘em back down. A dead VC is a good VC.

Before that—about three or four days, I guess—it was the hand grenade in the Rebel Bar on Tu Do Street. Three MPs from the 716th had just gone in the joint and were checking GI IDs—looking for deserters—when someone tossed a grenade in the front door. The place went poof and eight people were dead, including two MPs and a smattering of Americans and Vietnamese. Purple hearts all around. There it is.

Before that, it was the satchel charge at the Third Field Hospital. And the American Seabee who freaked out and knifed a cyclo driver. An M60 on the back of an MP jeep cut him in half with a quick burst. And the two choppers that collided at Tan Son Nhut, under mysterious circumstances. All but one crewman KIA, deader than dipsticks.

Sometimes it goes like this. Saigon, the Pearl of the Orient, has become a real pisser these days.

247

Today the mess hall and the club both flooded, even though the bottoms of their doors are raised several inches above the ground, like passageways on a ship. In fact, you walk up a little ramp when you go inside any of the buildings on the compound.

But it’s early monsoon season, and several inches and a little ramp won’t always cut it. This afternoon the water is as least a foot deep everywhere in the compound. Vehicles have to creep along so they don’t kick up water into their engines and stall. When we walk from building to building, the water is above the tops of our combat boots. We’re moving through a lake.

And the water just keeps coming down. Straight down. And hard. It can knock a man to his knees. Seems God’s throwing it at us like he’s pissed at this whole nasty business.

The first sergeant and I have brought a couple of folding chairs out onto the orderly room porch so we can sit and watch the rain. We can see the gook KPs working feverishly to push the flood back out of the mess hall. Over at the club, Sgt. Whitlow and two of his gook waitresses are using cases of beer to make a dam at the front door. It seems to be working.

Reminds me of the rain in ’66, at Ben Cat, says the first sergeant. The downpour is deafening and he’s nearly shouting. Two of our boys drown.

He pauses, waiting for a reaction from me. The downpour’s got me in kind of a gloomy mood, but not so gloomy I don’t want to hear one of Top’s war stories.

So how’d they drown? I ask.

Simple, he says. It was two new guys sleeping in an old foxhole. The water weakened the sides and an avalanche of mud and sandbags toppled over on ‘em. Then the whole thing just filled up with water. When the sergeant of the guard came by later that night, all he could see was one white hand sticking out of the mess. How do you explain that to their mamas?

DIA, I guess. Drowned In Action.

Top doesn’t laugh.

KIA is what we called it, he says in a voice that tells me there’s nothing funny in his story. Killed In Action. And that’s what they were, just as sure as if it’d been an AK-47 round or a mortar round or a—

Top stops his litany. We’re both staring out into the courtyard. Some GI numb nuts is paddling across the compound parking lot on an Army-issue, olive drab inflatable mattress. He’s lying on his stomach and stroking with his arms like the raft is a surfboard. His combat fatigues are dark green and soaked onto his skin. His cap is still on his head but flattened wet. He’s heading for the club.

"Who the hell . . .? asks Top.

Before I can venture a guess, the paddler looks over at us and waves. The first sergeant and I both wave back, and the paddler changes course and starts toward us. We’re still not sure who it is.

Finally, when he’s about 20 yards from our porch, he stops stroking and takes off his cap. It’s Pfc. Duffy, the new guy in HMD. He tries to sit up on the air mattress and the water gushes in on him and he almost rolls off. He puts one foot down into the water and onto the pavement to steady himself. The flood is about a foot and a half deep where he’s stopped. He looks at us and smiles, then hollers above the monsoon roar: If this rain keeps up, it won’t come down!

Then without another word, he slaps his soaked fatigue cap back on his head, turns and continues his journey.

Who the hell is that? asks Top, finishing that question he’d started.

Duffy, I answer, directly into the first sergeant’s ear. A new guy in HMD. From Minnesota.

And that was Minnesota humor? asks Top.

Apparently, I answer.

Duffy has made it to the club. He climbs over the beer case dam and on inside. The air mattress drifts slowly away from the door, out into the middle of the lake. The pounding rain spins it slowly in circles.

Where’s Gene Fucking Kelly when you need him?

Chapter 2

TWO THIRTY-NINE AND I’LL BE FINE

I haven’t seen him for a week or two. Or even thought about him. He’s a new guy, after all, and a new guy’s idea of a wild time is a movie in the flick hootch or a foosball game in the dayroom. I’ve already done four months and have established a real life, a city life, a life way beyond these compound walls. A life far from the Machine. Out there there’s booze to drink, dope to smoke and women to fuck. The compound is the place I work and sometimes sleep—but not the place I live.

Tonight I am sleeping on the compound, however. Major Asshole is planning a surprise middle-of-the-night inspection at the White House, so