The Jake Fonko Series: Books 1, 2 & 3

By B. Hesse Pflingger

This special collection includes three full length novels - hundreds of pages of well-researched adventures and thrills - for less than the price of two individual volumes. Fans of George MacDonald Fraser, Ian Fleming and John D. MacDonald will enjoy former Army Ranger turned covert agent Jake Fonko's globe-spanning adventures.

Book 1: Jake Fonko M.I.A (Vietnam/Cambodia 1975)

Book 2: Fonko on the Carpet (Iran 1978 - 1979)

Book 3: Fonko's Errand Go Boom (Northern Ireland 1982)

Jake Fonko M.I.A. – Saigon, 1975. Ex-surfer Jake Fonko's latest mission - locate a former CIA asset gone missing in Cambodia - has his Army Ranger instincts on full alert. He might be handsome, fit and a decorated warrior, but he's certainly no international spy. But Jake, ever the good soldier, agrees to the CIA's directive, trudging over the border to Phnom Penh. But relying on his training, keen observations and ironic sense of humor might not be enough to save Jake, as one surprise after another pops up on his way to the wild truth.

Maybe that asset was never really missing at all.

Fonko on the Carpet – Tehran, 1978. Running low on cash, ex-surfer and former Army Ranger Jake Fonko receives a freelance referral from an unlikely source: a certain Shah requires a capable bodyguard. The splintering Iranian factions have been growing restless, and the Shah's popularity is beginning to wane. But when the country falls, Jake soon discovers that friends of the Shah are no longer welcome—and he'll have to rely on his extensive training, capable tongue and ironic wit if he wants to survive Tehran and escape in one piece.

Fonko's Errand Go Boom – Belfast, 1982. When an old surfing buddy refers ex-Army Ranger turned soldier of fortune Jake Fonko to a cutting-edge car manufacturer in need of his unique skill set, Jake ships off to Belfast. But with Northern Ireland embroiled in the Troubles, Jake's attempts to protect the factory from impending civil war soon turn into a much more basic struggle to survive the escalating conflict. In order to get out alive, Jake must become a double-agent for both sides—a tricky situation that'll require all his skills, satirical wit and training if he wants to get out alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: B. Hesse Pflingger
• Release date: Aug 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386295853

Book preview

The Jake Fonko Series: Books 1, 2, & 3

Jake Fonko M.I.A., Fonko on the Carpet, & Fonko’s Errand Go Boom

B. Hesse Pflingger

Copyright © 2013 - 2014 G. Ray Funkhouser. All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Similarities to actual events, places, persons or other entities is coincidental.

The Jake Fonko Series: Books 1, 2, & 3/B. Hesse Pflingger. – 1st ed.

Contact: [e-mail]

Contents

The Jake Fonko Series

Jake Fonko M.I.A.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Editor’s Afterword

Fonko on the Carpet

Foreword

1. Malibu

2. Beverly Hills

3. Tehran

4. Bazaar

5. Little America

6. Kish

7. Isfahan

8. Still in Tehran

9. Switzerland

10. Gasr Prison

11. Paradise Island

12. Back to Malibu

Editor’s Afterword

Fonko’s Errand Go Boom

1. The Bait

2. The Hook

3. The Line

4. The Sinker

5. The Catch

Editor’s Afterword

Fonko in the Sun (Book 4)

The Jake Fonko Series

Jake Fonko M.I.A.

Fonko on the Carpet

Fonko’s Errand Go Boom

Fonko in the Sun

Fonko Bolo

The Mother of All Fonkos

Fonko Go Home

To Russia With Fonko

The Fonko Connection

The Jake Fonko Series: 1, 2 & 3 Box Set

The Jake Fonko Series: 4, 5 & 6 Box Set

The Jake Fonko Series: 7, 8 & 9 Box Set

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The Jake Fonko series is now available at all major online booksellers.

Jake Fonko M.I.A.

Vietnam/Cambodia 1975 (Book 1)

Chapter One

It’s key, explained Todd Sonarr, my CIA boss. Tom Polgar, the station chief, has penetrated the Hungarian mission. Now, granted he’s a native-born Hunkie himself, so that gives him a leg up. But that’s just one bunch of Commies, and the Poles are another. I figure, if he can penetrate one, we ought to be able to take care of the other, make a good impression on him. You’re fresh in town, so the Polskis are bound to swallow your Embassy cover. They’ve got to be pretty dumb. You’ve heard all those Polack jokes. Must be something to them.

Sonarr was career CIA, a Company lifer. In his mid-thirties, he stood a shade over six feet tall, and was beefy, broad-shouldered, close-cropped and sharp-featured. He’d played a bit of offensive tackle at Notre Dame, and while he’d never exactly made All-American, you could tell he’d put time in practice scrimmages. That’s probably where he’d gotten his nose broken. He was a bit too intense for my money. I wouldn’t have wanted him along on a night operation because he’d have glowed in the dark.

Shouldn’t I get some training for penetrating a foreign mission? And what the hell kind of mission is it, anyway? Why are there two Commie missions in Saigon? I thought this was our turf.

It is, but the treaty we signed in Paris in ‘73 stipulated that the Poles and the Hunkies would monitor our compliance with the terms. Bunch of bullshit, of course—everybody was in violation before the ink on it was dry.

Todd, I’ve been in town less than a week. Penetrating a foreign mission seems like a heavy assignment for a guy fresh off the boat with no CIA experience. At least let me get jet lag behind me.

Piece of cake, Jake, he assured me. Shit, I’ve done it a thousand times. You start off schmoozing with them, and then we play it by ear as things develop.

I actually believed him, and there began my problems.

Ve Get Too Zoon Oldt Und Too Late Schmardt. Of all the tourist garbage I saw during that do-the-Forty-Eight-in-three-weeks-straight trip Dad shanghaied me on at age thirteen, that one item sticks in my mind to this day. It was a sampler-style wall-hanging in a Pennsylvania Dutch trinket shop amongst platters, hex signs and coffee mugs quaintly painted in primary colors; the weirdest candy I’d ever seen; and jars of a hundred varieties of pickled vegetables.

Dad (my real one, not Evanston, my step-dad) always tried to cram maximum meaningful activity into the visitations he could wheedle out of Mom. A marathon circumnavigation of the contiguous US followed right in character. Aside from realizing what a humongous chunk of real estate America takes up, I can’t say I got much out of the trip—my mind strayed back to the gang at the beach most of the time. But even now, more than thirty years later, I still flash on that Pennsylvania Dutch motto every so often, invariably after the fact. Funny thing, for some reason it never occurs to me at times when it might serve as useful guidance in dealing with Life’s Little Problems. I only wish it had stuck in my mind in March 1975 when Todd Sonarr sent me into the Cambodian killing fields on that mission that went from hare-brained to horrific in one short week. I won’t say it would’ve saved my life, because obviously here I am to relate the whole sordid saga. But the grief it might have deflected…

 I’d returned to Nam on loan to the CIA. My first Nam tour in 1970 was as a Ranger in the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols—the Lurps. Following that I’d gone through OCS, done some instructing in field methods at the Army intelligence school at Fort Holabird and the CIA campus at Langley, then transferred to a staff slot at the Pentagon.

That tour was out-of-the-blue terminated by this new assignment. Without warning, I found myself whisked off to Saigon on the CIA payroll, mission specifics to be given on arrival. I joined the several thousand American civilians supporting the gear and logistics we still supplied to the South Vietnamese. Our side, so we fancied, stood a chance of holding out against the Commies, if only the US Congress would keep the money coming, if only the Thieu government would tone down their corruption, if only the ARVN troops would develop more will to fight…some heroically big if onlys there.

Why me, there, then? Why the strange assignments? Why my sudden departure into the unknown? Well, why not, I thought at the time, I’m Jake Fonko, a decorated, hot-shot captain in US Army Intelligence, destined for bigger and better things. Whereas, if my motto had come to mind, I might have been searching for answers to a few puzzling questions. Like, with all the CIA staff in Saigon, why did they pick me to penetrate the Polish mission? 

Thus it was I found myself chatting up Mikhail (Mickey Mouse, we’d codenamed him) in the terrace bar atop the Majestic Hotel. Sonarr introduced us at a party the Embassy put on. Like myself he’d been in town only a short time. He seemed eager to strike up a friendship, so we arranged to get together for drinks of a Sunday evening. Our table stood by the low stone wall bordering the edge of the terrace, overlooking the languid Saigon River six floors below. Up above the heat and bustle of the street, the terrace caught enough river breeze to create a soft, caressing ambiance that suggested the notion of nirvana must have originated somewhere close by. Sitting on a padded, white wrought iron chair in one of those vine-covered, canopied mini-gazebos, you could easily delude yourself that you hadn’t a care in the world. No doubt that explained why Saigon’s elite hung out there.

Mikhail had a broad, flat face that projected an undertone of middle-European angst. On the slim side of stocky, he had straw-colored hair and the kind of pasty white complexion best kept out of the tropical sun. With his plain features, you’d never notice him on the streets of any Western city. I estimated him at a year or two older than me. He was a records clerk at the Polish mission, and as far as he knew, I was Phil, a computer systems analyst working in the US Embassy. Fortunately, our conversation never touched on computers, but instead soon got around to my hometown, Los Angeles, and American movies, a topic with which I had more than passing familiarity, and for which Mikhail had a surprising enthusiasm.

This is how fantastic, Phil! he exclaimed. "Really boffo, if that is proper cool slang! To think you are one time a movie star of the big silver screen! Your Hollywood is practically speaking a shrine to those of us other sidewise to that abominable border, those of us whose appreciate is good entertainment values, I mean, not that we see so much American cinemas, new ones, I mean, difficult to smuggle them in, I suppose, bulky maybe and for all I know our projection machines isn’t handle it to the first place, the technology must being miles ahead in the States. They let us see some of your old classic blacks and whites—but after careful selected, you know what I’m getting to. Grapes of Wrath they showed us, Steinbeck being a well-respected author in the East. Terrible how they persecuted those Okras, simply shameful."

He shook his head sadly as if to register solidarity with the downtrodden American masses.

I wasn’t exactly a star, I explained. Not even an actor, really, just what they call an extra. When a script called for a mob scene or a bunch of people in the background, they hired guys like me for a few bucks an hour to fill up the space.

But surely you must have some mighty talent elevating you above average George Q. Public, he gushed. They can’t just any Tim, Dick and Henry cast into the cinema, not and deliver that slick Hollywood look, believe in that! Even in Poland the directors achieve to certain standards, well, they must, our Andrez Wadja, you know, he’s world class.

Actually, I did have a talent, as I’d discovered in 1967—a changling face. Lon Chaney, The Man of a Thousand Faces, had one too, I’ve heard. With minimum makeup I could blend into any crowd outside of sub-Saharan Africa. It helped that I stood an inch below average American height and although muscular, was small-boned. Straight dark hair, olive complexion and dark brown eyes like mine will play most places on Earth. My football neck, tapering up from a base wider than my head, was a give-away, but under a collar most people wouldn’t take notice of it.

I’d discovered my chameleon qualities courtesy of my surfing buddy, Eddie The Flying Bagel Lipschitz. His nickname came from his amazing ability to drop his trunks and broadcast the brown eye, all the while maintaining positive control of a moving surfboard. Eddie was the favorite nephew of an uncle who ran a casting agency. Eddie convinced himself that the producers of Hawaii Five-O were in dire need of our assistance, and he badgered his uncle into taking a look at the bunch of us—him, me, D.D. and Wild Blue Under.

Jack Lord and Danno had sufficient surfers, it turned out, but at that moment the Valley of the Dolls set desperately needed bodies to fill out some last-minute party scene re-takes. The studio had the pressure on Eddie’s uncle to deliver, but not enough of his regulars were available just then. Through such happenstances are great cinematic careers like mine launched.

I was just a face in the crowd, and I worked cheap, that’s all. A high school kid couldn’t ask for a better part-time job. But I never had any prospect of being a genuine movie star.

But surely you must have been hobnobbed by the real stars, cruising the scene as you were, how could one not, the opportunities must being a millionfold? Jane Fonda, for instance, we hear so much about her, and such a zaftig chick she is, you better bet. Tell me, Mikhail asked conspiratorially, just between two red-blooded guys, what is she like, in the flesh, so to speak, really?

True star quality, I told him. The one encounter I’d had with Hanoi Jane, I showed up late for a shoot and in desperation for a parking space left my Mustang in her designated spot. She arrived later, boxed me in, and, when I tooted my horn, pounced out with fire in her eye. She gave me a shrill lecture on the dangers of invading her space, parking or otherwise. I slunk away from there just grateful to have both my balls still attached in their proper locations. An experience no man could ever forget, I added with a leer.

In which films were you starring? he persisted. "I can’t… I mean, who would believe I am lifting elbows, so to speak, with a genuine American cinema star from the glamourish of Hollywood. This is simply fantastic!"

I wondered if he’d next untuck his linen napkin from his shirt front and ask me to autograph it. "Let’s see, I look sort of Greek, so they had me in backgrounds in The Magus…in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid I was one of those soldiers waiting for Redford and Newman when they came bursting out of their hideout at the end. They used me in off-location street scenes in Bullitt, that’s a cop-and-robber flick with a lot of car chases. They had me prancing around in an ape suit in the opening scenes of 2001…party scenes in Valley of the Dolls and I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, two of the worst movies ever shot. A couple of scenes in Rosemary’s Baby…oh yeah, and Midnight Cowboy. Once in a great while I’d wind up on TV—Gomer Pyle, Star Trek, The Mod Squad, Hogan’s Heroes, Bonanza, I Dream of Jeannie…but those titles wouldn’t mean anything to you. How could you have heard of them in Poland? Anyhow, it was just a sometimes thing. After college started I hardly did it at all."

Mikhail was fingering the latch on his briefcase, which he’d set across from me on the marble tabletop. He caught me eyeballing him and remarked, apologetically, Phil, you must excuse me, this country makes me nervous. I’m, um…is to say, you know, these third world peoples, turn your backside, they’ll steal the socks right inside out from your shoes, you don’t keep your eyes peeled on them. In briefcase is papers for a meeting later, would be up in the river if anything happened on them. With no paddle, is the expression, no? So I keep up here, plain sightwise, you know, just in case.

Sure, don’t blame you, a man can’t be too careful in a place like this, I assured him diplomatically (after all, I was working at the Embassy). But I doubted there was any danger of a snatch thief breezing by and running off with it, here on the rooftop terrace of Saigon’s poshest hotel.

One thing struck me odd, though. His grammar was flawless when he first realized I was staring at his finger on the briefcase latch. Then he caught himself and lapsed back into broken English. Had my motto been in mind, that would have raised warning flags. Where would a nebbish Polish records clerk acquire such fluency? And why would he try to cover it up? Being a typical American I don’t know foreign language beyond what’s necessary wherever I am to order food, ask what price and find a bathroom. So back then I naturally assumed that foreigners everywhere would speak accented, ungrammatical English. After all, in Hollywood movies, don’t all the foreigners do that? And so do the folks Americans typically deal with overseas—the hotel desk clerks, shopkeepers, bartenders, waiters, drug dealers, pimps, whores and tour guides who service the tourist circuit. Then why not a records clerk in the Polish Saigon mission? And what difference if he wavers between fluent and broken English?

He glanced at his wristwatch. My golly, is not the time flying when one enjoys fun! That meeting soon is beginning, making me sad to must be leaving you. What a one fantastic evening! To think I am having the incredible fortunate to make acquaintance to such a famous celebrity, here in Saigon, of all place! What a strange world it is, with no doubtful on that one! I look forward to talking with you next meeting of us. I’m sure I’ll have many more questions over your Hollywood career. He eased up out of his seat with a surprising athletic grace and, despite the several straight vodkas he’d downed, smoothly threaded his way toward the lifts through the tables, canopies, potted shrubs and white-shirted, bow-tied Vietnamese waiters, leaving me to cover the drinks. But what the hell, I was just one more rich Yank, making my contribution to inflating the Saigon economy. And besides, it went on the CIA tab.

Our evening meetings were to become a regular activity, and drinking free Heineken, even with a turkey like Mikhail, I could hardly call hard duty. Being at an age where I was prone to be impressed with myself and the exciting life I fancied I’d led, it never dawned on me that Mikhail might be on duty also. I used to wonder, while plying Mickey Mouse with tumblers of vodka, what I was doing, sitting there expounding on American movies to a nerdish Polack paper-shuffler. Had my motto been with me, I’d have been pondering a different question: What was Mikhail doing, sitting there talking to me?

After he left the table I sat watching the soft tropical sky fade from orange to grey-purple. I had nothing else on for that evening. In town barely long enough to get past jet lag, I hadn’t yet gotten a social life going. Most nights there were gatherings of Embassy staffers, but I’d hardly call them parties. More like circling the wagons, or huddling together as the jungle drums throbbed louder, and certainly not my idea of fun. Goddamn civilians, especially bureaucrats, had no idea how to have a good time. I put it down to jockeying for position in the scramble up the ladder—probably afraid that if someone caught them cutting loose a little, it might be the black mark that canned their careers.

In any case, it quickly came clear that the foreign service types had stamped me Outsider. I hadn’t paid my dues, I had no worthwhile in-house gossip to peddle, and not only was I CIA, but most unforgivably, I was military. Though invitations were supposedly open, after the first couple get-togethers it was clear I was always going to be a mute and barely tolerated spectator to the same faces, jokes and gripes that pervaded the office. The Vietnamese girls that worked around the Embassy paid me plenty of fond attention, but it had more to do with my American passport than with my irresistible charm. I was a potential ticket out of a hopeless situation and therefore a priceless catch for any local lady lucky or wily enough to land me.

I gazed out at the harbor, sipping my beer and tracking the lights of the bustling barges, ferries and sampans. A pair of little pink lizards pursued their version of cops-and-robbers over the grey stone planters alongside my table. Well, the Majestic terrace was fine for meeting people, but no place to hang around alone. I settled the tab, took the lift down to the lobby, strolled out to the river’s edge for a look, then reversed course and started up Tu Do Street.

Little bunches of Vietnamese men in dingy singlets and brown cotton shorts squatted along the curbside smoking and chatting, their butts nearly brushing the grimy pavement behind their frayed sandals. Slender women in white aidos flowing down over their black trousers squatted by the shop fronts passing gossip, scanning for customers and snarfing rice with their chopsticks, bowls cupped close to their mouths. No place to get rich selling tables and chairs.

The street-level perfume of spicy food fragrances triggered my hunger, so I stopped in a soup shop for a big bowl of pho, a Vietnamese concoction of noodles, sprouts, meat and assorted bits of probably-better-I-didn’t-know-what. One of my life’s blessings is my cast-iron stomach: I don’t get sick even traveling on the cheap in Mexico. I’d developed a taste for the local cooking during my first Nam tour, one of the few things I’d missed about the place during my four years stateside.

I wandered up the tree-lined street, dodging my way through the press of cigarette peddlers, beggars, whores, pickpockets and porters, to the Hotel Catinat. I took a seat in the Pink Night Club against the wall, where I nursed a beer and peered through thick cigarette smoke, checking out incoming faces for possibilities. The rock band was ear-splitting, and the pert little mini-skirted singer gave an aerobic performance, gyrating a bump or a grind per beat, more or less, her silky black hair thrashing to and fro. But it wasn’t the same. Though things had started to wind down by ‘70 when I arrived the first time, Nam still hosted a few hundred thousand GIs. For guys who didn’t mind being there, it could be a fun war back in those days. The occasional firefight kept your adrenaline flowing, and off-base leave meant girls, beer, R&R trips with the nurses at China Beach and those other gals in Bangkok, surfing down at Vung Tau when I could swing it, and a hundred other amusements you’d have a hard time getting away with back home.

Maybe I’d better amend that last statement. When Professor Pflingger offered to take down my story, I promised him I’d be as accurate as possible. So here’s the straight truth: Genuine firefights with the jungle full of concealed Charlies blazing away were no fun at all—scared the dogshit out of me, if you really want to know. It wasn’t until afterward, back at base with all vital organs accounted for, that I could pop open a beer, sit back, swap lies with the guys and relish the rush in retrospect.

But that happened only a couple times. In my unit firefights were the last thing we looked for. I’d been in the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols—LRRPs, the men with the painted faces, the Army’s 75th Rangers. Most of the action I saw involved sneaking into an area with a team or two, slipping through the jungle as unobtrusively as possible, and scouting out the location and strength of the enemy.

As often as not, we’d be out a week or more with no contact, which was useful because knowing where the enemy wasn’t was as valuable as knowing where he was. When we did sight Cong we might leave quietly and report on it, or we might call in an artillery or air strike as we were extracted by chopper, then watch the fireworks from back a safe distance. Or we might set up an ambush—our units racked up the highest body-counts, man for man, of any in Nam. Tromping around out in the trees and occasionally shooting up enemy that had no chance to shoot back was thrilling, no denying. The times they did shoot back, well, I can hardly claim we weren’t out there asking for it. If we’d done our job right, Charlie never would have caught us in a position like that. Most of the time we covered our tracks so well that they never even knew we’d come calling.

By ‘75 Americans in Nam numbered only a couple thousand, most of them bona fide civilians, and Saigon teemed with an extra million refugees who’d flocked in from the countryside as the Viet Cong stepped up their attacks in January. With barely enough rice to fill a bowl, the refugees naturally weren’t spreading money around on whores and overpriced drinks. That task was left to the dwindling band of foreigners, American hardcases, drug lords, black marketeers, gangsters and South Vietnamese politicos (those last four categories more or less the same guys).

It was a far cry from the good old days of neon overkill, throbbing rock music and the girls at the San Francisco, the Wild West and MiMi’s. The little action remaining seemed wistful, even desperate, the fun of it, along with hopes of victory, long since deflated. It was like waiting out the fourth quarter in the home-side grandstand after the visiting team had sewed the game up, watching the clock slowly tick along while the other side whomped on the scrubs who’d been sent in for seasoning. Of course I was four years older, and an officer, not a non-com, and maybe that made a difference too. Young buck soldiers fresh from the jungle and out on the town can have a whale of a time—but officially there hadn’t been an American soldier in Nam for nearly two years.

No familiar faces wandered into the Pink Night Club; I’d run into nobody familiar since my arrival in Saigon. The folks I’d known here previously were either back stateside, dead or off pursuing bigger hustles.

A little before the 10 o’clock curfew the bar closed down, I settled with the barmaid, shot farewell smiles at the disappointed whores and B-girls who I’d shooed away earlier, and strolled back out into the evening air. It felt heavy, hot and sticky now that I was blocks away from the riverfront. The curfew kept the night streets virtually devoid of traffic except for military convoys, a sharp contrast to the daytime tangle of bicycles, scooters and cyclo-rickshaws.

I started towards the Brinks Hotel, where they’d housed me along with a lot of Embassy personnel. It was a definite improvement over my quarters last time around, when we sweated out the heat, the mosquitos and the monsoon rains in plywood hooches. I appreciated the upgrade. Now that our part in the shooting was behind us, I didn’t feel even slightly embarrassed to be a REMF.

Night walking through depopulated downtown Saigon wasn’t unpleasant. The city had remained virtually unscarred through a dozen years of war, remarkable when you consider how thoroughly we’d trashed the rest of the country. The urge for sleep hadn’t hit me yet, but I couldn’t face a staff gathering, so I passed the Brinks and ambled the few blocks over to where Sarge stayed. As I neared his building, I could see him lounging on his screened balcony. Like myself, he was on loan to a civilian outfit, but standard-issue US government housing would have cramped his style. He liked his privacy and wanted to be close to his customers, so he rented his own flat, price no object.

I trudged up a flight of stairs and knocked on his door. A heap of muddy fatigues lay out on the landing beside it. Sarge answered my knock, all freshly scrubbed in shower thongs and brand new silk skivvies. He had the physique of a Coke vending machine. Jake, my man! he exclaimed with a delighted grin. Come in, come in! How ‘bout a cold one for this hot night? Through the doorway I heard Diana Ross softly singing Touch Me In The Morning.

Took the words right out of my mouth, I replied, more out of sociability than thirst. I’d had plenty already, but no sense turning down hospitality. Looks like you spent some time out in the boonies, I remarked, indicating the laundryman’s nightmare outside.

One hell of a thing, he sighed as he reached a beer out of the cooler. His flat seemed more spacious than it was, thanks to its spartan, Traditional BOQ decor. Little graced the living room beyond a shelf of books, a teak desk, a top-quality Japanese sound system, some solid furniture fashioned of wood, leather and rattan, and an assortment of family and service photographs hung on otherwise bare walls. Straw mats lined up along the floor edges precisely.

Took a team down to that Delta, clearing up another mess, he continued as he brought the beer out to me. Them M113 personnel carriers can run on solid ground, and they can run in plain water, but why do these local cowboys have to run ‘em into waist-deep mud? It’s enough to make a grown man cry, ‘specially when it’s his job to get ‘em back out. A pause, then: "It’s a funny feeling out there right now, Jake, a real funny feeling. They say just before an earthquake or before a volcano blows up, all the animals, they get nervous and strange-like. Same way out there. Can’t exactly describe it, but the folks just real edgy right now, acting like something bad’s about to happen. Same kind of feelin’ as just before Tet. We best be keepin’ our eyes open and one of ‘em on our backtrail."

When Sarge Wallace rendered an opinion on such matters, you’d be a fool not to listen. A master sergeant since forever, he invariably knew every who, what, where, when and why, usually even before who knew what, where and why. He’d finagled staying in Nam, on loan to a civilian contractor, partly because he liked the place but mostly to keep his current business going. He brought gold in from Macau or Singapore, where duties were low, and sold it for US dollars on the black market to locals, who figured that gold might be more negotiable than greenbacks in some of the scenarios that seemed more and more possible with each passing day.

Not that Sarge was any kind of crook. He was 110% soldier and would never do anything in the least way contrary to the Army’s best interests. He just dabbled in small-time smuggling, like most everybody else in Saigon. His various side businesses, his kid bro Henry had told me, usually netted on the high side of five hundred bucks a week, and Sarge kept to a strict rule never to exceed a thousand. Get too greedy and you bother the big boys, Sarge had explained to him, "and in most places that means you messin’ with the government, the police or the army. No amount of money’s worth that kind of trouble."

As with his Army duties, Sarge in business dealt fair but tough. Pay up, or pay otherwise, was said to be his motto. If he got the idea he was being juked around, his easygoing smile morphed into something suitable for Mount Rushmore. Henry said nobody had ever pushed Sarge far enough to find out what otherwise meant.

Henry had alerted Sarge that I was en route to Saigon, so I was in tight with him from the moment I arrived. Sarge took a special interest in me because Henry thought I’d saved his life. Well, maybe, but what else should I have done?

Our teams had been sent to investigate some new VC tunneling reported by a village informant. As a rule, non-coms led LRRP patrols, but we’d brought a new officer, Lieutenant Hanna, along for the experience. A routine mission, we rappelled out of our choppers into the zone with the objective of locating the tunnels and reporting on enemy strength in the area.

Of course, as expert as we LRRPs were at staying out of sight, the Charlies could match us. They probably observed us too, as often as not, but usually they didn’t give away their positions. By 1970 they’d sensed we Americans would eventually be departing, so they’d taken to biding their time and playing it cautious. Their style was to stay out of sight, then mass at the site of an attack, hit, and fade back into the jungle before the defenders could get organized. Picking unnecessary fights with us could only deplete their strength and mess up their overall strategy.

That mission had been a quiet one. We knew we were in Indian country, but we’d already walked around for a week with no enemy sightings to show for it. We were about ready to fold the mission and call in a couple Hueys to extract us and return us to base with another report on where the enemy wasn’t.

We were walking a trail through broken woods. A steep embankment came down on our left, and to our right ten or so meters of more gradual bank covered with scrub and tall grass sloped down to a stream. Henry’s team, along with the lieutenant, were spread out ahead. My team followed, me at the point, a couple dozen yards back. I came around a bend to see Henry and Lieutenant Hanna standing together in a small clearing, checking out our position on a topo map. The other guys had halted also, strung out along the trail and taking their ease. It was sloppy procedure, but after all we’d seen no sign of enemy for a whole week.

In Vietnam, combat could be there and gone before you realized it. I happened to be looking over at the embankment to the left just as, no more than twenty yards away, the brush parted and two gun barrels poked out and opened up. Apparently I was out of their line of sight, maybe obscured until that instant by the brush on the hillside. Whatever, I whipped my weapon—an M16 with underslung grenade launcher—up to my shoulder and fired the grenade at the hole, then snapped off a burst on full automatic and hit the dirt behind some brush.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Hanna and Henry went down. The other men scrambled down the creek bank. They were met with loud bangs—landmines! I heard a muffled explosion from the hillside. I saw Henry dazedly crawling toward the stream, heading for what he thought was safety. I scrambled to my feet and made straight for Henry, falling on him just as he started down the bank. Then it dawned on me that we were sprawled out there in the open, point blank in front of that tunnel opening. I rolled over to get my pack between me and it, then clenched my teeth and waited to be shot to pieces.

It didn’t happen. Except for the groaning of the men who’d been hit, the stillness of disturbed jungle once again prevailed. Damn if my grenade hadn’t gone right into the tunnel and taken out two skedaddling Charlies.

Well, if you ever get a chance to choose one thing to be, choose lucky. I sure had more luck that day than some of the others. Lieutenant Hanna got hit pretty bad. One of the fellows who’d found the mines had bought the farm—not much we could do for him but retrieve the body. The other one had lost half a leg and was bleeding like crazy. Henry was more stunned than anything, as the pack on his back had taken most of the rounds. He’d been spun around and knocked down, but otherwise just grazed. The other guys down the stream bank retraced their steps very carefully.

It was a neatly arranged ambush, I had to admit. When shooting starts you instinctively dive for cover away from the fire. The gooks must have been keeping track of us, had figured we’d pass this point and had laid a trap, mining the brush and high grass down the stream bank. Why they hadn’t waited for the rest of us to arrive I can’t say, and the two Charlies were in no shape to enlighten me. Maybe nailing a LRRP officer was an irresistible temptation. Had I been anywhere else at that precise moment than where I was, they’d have gotten away with it, and maybe even gotten me. As they say, timing is everything.

Now the only effective team leader, I assumed command, and our next move was obvious—haul ass out of there. No telling what else Charlie might be up to in that sector, and we’d already had enough contact for one day. We’d passed a spot a couple of klicks back on the trail that would be easier to secure as a landing zone. We patched up the wounded, got ourselves together and booby-trapped the bodies in the tunnel with grenades. As we pulled outI radioed the coordinates for an airstrike. Even before we reached our LZ we could hear the jets plastering it.

I’d called ahead for the pickup and medevac, timing it so we wouldn’t have to sweat it out waiting for them—good thinking, as the VC’s weren’t about to let us leave in peace. As the choppers arrived, so did incoming mortar. I clambered aboard, the last man in, and took a few fragments in the legs from the shell that finally found the range. Otherwise we got away clean. Henry was okay, and Lieutenant Hanna eventually recovered. Later recon determined that we’d been ambushed at a branch of a new tunnel network intended to be a staging area for an upcoming offensive. Air strikes never did permanent damage to VC tunneling, but at least we’d located it and given them something to think about. Mission accomplished.

Headquarters must have been short of their hero quota that month, because for the afternoon’s work I wound up with a Distinguished Service Cross, also a Purple Heart. And it may have had something to do with my recommendation for OCS at the end of my tour. What I remember most vividly about the episode was lying there on top of Henry waiting to be riddled by AK-47 slugs. Not the easiest way to make a living.

We’d been sipping at our beers and passing small talk. Sarge was stretched out, amply filling his rattan and leather planter’s chair. How’d you wind up enlisted anyhow, Jake? he asked. Henry says you were a good soldier. But you just don’t seem like no grunt. Why weren’t you an officer right from the get go?

Just lucky, I guess, I answered.

No kind of luck I’d ever wish on a man, he quipped, but he was plainly proud of being Army. Weren’t you some kind of football player in college, where was it Henry said, that UCLA?

Tailback on the frosh squad, benchwarmer thereafter. Dropped out of school midway into my sophomore year.

Now, why would a man drop out of college, with the draft facin’ him? Turn on, tune in, drop out, like the feller said? You weren’t doing no drugs, were you?

I could see why Sarge knew everything going on worth knowing. He was the kind of guy you just couldn’t help talking to. It wasn’t exactly that I dropped out. Seems the dean gave me the boot, thanks to a little incident.

Come on, Jake, they wasn’t expelling nobody from college back in those days. All those kinds of hell the students was raising, and did anything ever happen to any of ‘em?

We’re treading on sensitive ground here, Sarge, I protested. But what the hell, I knew whatever I said would stop at Sarge’s lips. I’d never told anybody the whole story, and maybe it was about time. It had to do with this girl I was going with, I began.

Nothin’ new since Old Man Adam, he reflected with a knowing smile.

My girlfriend, Dana Wehrli (Whirlybird, the surfing gang called her), had decided to go respectable. No future in running with surf rats, she’d calculated, and time was slipping away from her, she being all of nineteen years old. So she up and transmuted from Gidget-gone-ballistic to Miss Junior Leaguer, and she had the looks, and her family had the money, to carry it off. She even managed to get herself engaged to a medical student.

This happened during our sophomore year, about the same time it became clear that Tony Gilliam, not me, was destined to be starting tailback. To be honest, I never would have been. Everybody was getting bigger but me. Tony transferred in from junior college. He had that extra step, that slightly sharper angle cutting inside the defensive end, that instinct for anticipating the flow, and most importantly, the Desire. As for me, I enjoyed playing football, but I was more into surfing, so I spent more time in the water than on the grass. Of course I realized all that much later. At the time, what with one thing and another, I was feeling pissed off as hell.

Then I heard about the wedding shower that Dana’s sorority sisters had planned for her. I decided the moment had arrived for my personal statement on the matter. Streaking that shower would show the world what I thought of Miss Dana Wehrli and her diddley-ass medical student.

It took place on the patio of the Bel Air home of Dana’s sorority big sister on a crisp and sunny Sunday afternoon in late October. The property sat inside a jug handle curve. Our plan had D.D. and me stopping my Mustang along the fence at one side of the yard, and Bagel and Wild Blue Under would have the van parked by the fence at the other side, back doors wide open and motor running. The fence was 1 x 12 redwood planks, tightly spaced, about five feet high. I’d vault over it, sprint through the astonished throng, shoot over the fence on the other side (maybe pausing at the apex to moon the whole sorry lot of them) and be gone before they knew what hit them. From what we could see, peering through a crack in the fence, it looked like no problem.

I shucked off all my clothes, took a deep breath and went over the top. Unforeseen problems emerged immediately. First problem: we’d overlooked that directly on the other side of the fence sat a low arrangement of rose and pyracantha bushes. My shriek of pain took away the element of surprise. I wrenched myself out of the thorns, panic fortunately dulling the agony. Freed, I started my sprint. Second problem: it wasn’t a straight shot after all. I’d have to skirt around a swimming pool that we hadn’t factored into my flight plan. Third problem: at the point where I changed direction, an invisible puddle of water sat on the flagstone deck.

My bare feet hit that spot and went right out from under me. A buffet table had been set up poolside. The hostess and her mother were standing behind it, fussing over the punch bowl and petit fours. They stood there, transfixed with horror, as my stark naked, scratched and bleeding carcass came hurtling across the patio and body-blocked the whole shebang into the deep end (it was a damn dumb place to put a buffet table, if you ask me).

In my own defense, I must point out that I did save the mother from drowning. She was thrashing around, rendered helpless by hysteria, and it seemed only decent to grab her by the frock and steer her over to the ladder. Once she had a firm grip on it I stammered an apology, though I don’t remember exactly for what, lunged up out of the water and hightailed over the fence with a single, frantic bound.

My getaway team had been tracking my progress through cracks and were so convulsed with laughter as to be completely useless. I slipped into the extra sweatshirt and Levi’s I’d brought and jumped into the driver’s seat still barefooted and soaking wet. They tumbled into the back, and we peeled out. Even before the police were called we were far, far away.

The worst was yet to come, and it came posthaste. It seems the hostess’s father was a prominent Hollywood surgeon, a graduate of the UCLA Medical School, and one of its major contributors. Her mother spearheaded fundraising activities for a variety of organizations, UCLA not the least of them. When my escapade came to the dean’s attention, what choice did he have? I was hardly an honors student. Now that Gilliam was on the squad, the football coach wasn’t going out on any limb for me. My family included no wealthy UCLA alumni. I was 100% expendable. In the circumstances, what would you have done with me?

Dad was supportive, if dubious. Aside from him, I was Public Enemy Number One. For a bunch of rowdies who routinely ignored all known rules and regulations regarding drinking, hazing, vandalism and public decency, the sudden conversion of my frat brothers to law-abiding model citizens suggested divine intervention. They understood, they’d like to help, the president assured me. But seeing as how I’d been expelled, I was technically ineligible for active membership. So sorry. Be sure and turn in your keys, and oh yes, there’s a little matter of dues still owed…

Mom kept looking at me like I’d climbed out from under some rock. Her main priorities being image, status and appearances, my recent exploit clearly posed a problem. On the few occasions when she couldn’t avoid speaking to me, her voice sounded as though somebody was tightening a tourniquet on her throat.

My stepfather, Evanston, was volubly thankful he hadn’t adopted me, as our surnames were still different; therefore, people who didn’t know the family well wouldn’t connect us. He more than once made it clear that he considered me to be representative of some subhuman species. We lived in a nice place in Pacific Palisades, some might even call it a mansion, but it had ceased being home for me. As an expelled college student, certified sexual deviate and laughingstock of Westwood, my welcome had worn thin enough to watch TV through.

What to do next? Putting a shotgun barrel in my mouth and pulling the trigger would have made a lot of people happy. It was late 1968 then, and the war was drawing in more and more guys. I’d blown my student deferral, so the draft was only a matter of time. Rather than embarrass everybody with my presence while I waited to be called, I drove straight to the nearest Army recruiting station and signed up.

I had a lot to prove to myself just then, so I threw myself into boot camp. So much so that my D.I. suggested I volunteer for Ranger training. My performance in the Ranger course at the Fort Benning School for Boys, and the Airborne School at Fort Bragg, convinced the Army I had NCO potential, so I got some additional training for that. Arriving in Nam as a buck sergeant, I let myself be talked into joining the LRRPs and went through LRRP training at the Special Forces Recondo School at Nha Trang airfield and that’s how I wound up dodging gook rounds in the steaming jungles of Viet Nam, I concluded.

Sarge lay there on his back, eyes drowsy and hands folded across his massive chest, doing that deep, rhythmic, growling chuckle of his. If I’d accomplished nothing else so far on this tour, at least I’d brought a little amusement to a beleaguered outpost. So whatever happened to that Dana and her medical student? he asked.

She got bored with being respectable and decided to become a movie star instead. So she dumped the guy and changed her major from Existentialism to Theater Arts. Hey, we didn’t call her ‘Whirlybird’ for nothing. She later told me that my little performance at her shower was more fun than she’d had in years. We still keep in touch.

Sarge shook his head with wonder. Man, the things that happens to people… maybe you can explain a puzzle to me. Why is it that white folks is always takin’ their clothes off? You never hear about black guys streakin’, or Chinese guys, or Mexican guys—only white guys. Same with topless. Always the white chicks, never them others. Why do you ‘spose that is?

I’d never thought about it, but he was on to something there. I told him it was a mystery to me, which it was.

Maybe it’s like when I was checkin’ out that Adam Smith a while back, the one that wrote up about wealth of nations and such, Sarge said. "He was a smart old dude. One thing he wrote was how rich folks and workin’ folks is different. A rich man can get down, cut loose, get wasted, and it’s okay because he knows he got money behind him. Workin’ folks can’t risk it, because if they get in trouble, or if they wake up Monday with the big head and don’t show up to work, then they lose their job, then they’re up shit creek. What I figured out about white folks is, somebody must have gone and convinced ‘em they’re all rich folks, ‘stead of workin’ folks. Because you look at them college kids and them professors and them ones doin’ drugs and acting like jiveass niggers and all, and you have to figure they ain’t keeping their minds on their future. Well, I don’t know about them, but Jake, my man, you got one mighty tale behind you. Can’t say I ever heard the like of it."

Come to think of it, neither had I. But what the hell, had things turned out so badly? I’d wound up in the Army, which suited me just fine. It was something I genuinely excelled at. Then I noticed the time. Sarge looked like a good night’s sleep would benefit him, and I was preventing it. Heeding his tale about the rich folks and the working folks, I drained my beer, said good night and headed for home. It was way after curfew now, and the streets were empty. But it was dark, plenty of shadows to stay in as I strolled the few blocks toward home. And I felt pretty safe. I had my diplomatic papers and, more to the point, enough American money to calm down any constabulary who might stop me to question my business.

A block from the Brinks Hotel I passed an alleyway when POP!—a pistol shot startled me. I jumped clear of the opening, froze against the wall and, tensed for action, waited and listened. The sound of a body toppling. A groan. Stealthy footsteps receding into the distance. I flattened on the deck and peeped around the corner into the narrow, cluttered space, but I couldn’t make out anything in those shadowy depths. So what now? Go in there, unarmed, and see what’s what? Shout for the police? And then explain what I’m doing out on the streets after curfew? Why ask for trouble? Better to leave it for the locals to sort out.

Apparently, it hadn’t been anybody coming after me…still, I reflected that maybe Sarge’s advice about keeping my eyes open and one of them on my backtrail was well-taken. I wore civvies and shuffled memos and reports around a desktop at risk of severe paper cuts, true enough, but a lot of other folks in Vietnam still waged serious war. Many among the hordes of desperate peasants filling Saigon sided with the Cong, and worse things could happen than being shaken down for a few bucks, even to Ranger-trained Americans with combat decorations. Back home I wouldn’t be lollygagging alone around the D. C. slums at midnight, after all. What made me think I could safely do it in a foreign city brimming with hostiles? Had I just been shown a timely omen? Embassy staff were constantly ordered, warned, cajoled and pleaded with, to be careful out in public. My co-workers holed up after dark, traveling in packs when they ventured out for entertainment. Who was I trying to impress? I resolved to stop being stupid and stay away from dangerous situations.

Fat chance.

Chapter Two

Showing up to work the next morning, March 10, I found more excitement awaiting us than on your usual Monday. During the night the Charlies launched a major attack on the lower Central Highlands provincial capital of Ban Me Thuot without warning. Somehow, unbeknownst to us, they managed to roll in what appeared to be three divisions, with tanks, and had laid siege to the southern section of the city. Pandemonium ruled the CIA Station. Office strategy gurus compared the scope and execution of it to the assault against the French in Dien Bien Phu back in ‘54. The CIA face sported a juicy load of egg—our job description specified that developments of that sort were not to surprise us. What’s an intelligence agency for, after all?

Even worse, coupling the Ban Me Thuot attack with the fighting that had broken out on the northern coast near Hue, the 1975 offensive looked more serious than we’d thought. I’d seen Ban Me Thout once on my first tour, passing through the Special Forces headquarters there. Only 200 miles of Highway 14 separated it from Saigon, hardly a whoop and a holler. Those big if onlys on which we pinned our hopes for victory were fast losing ground to the pace of events.

The office buzz centered around speculation on how long the ARVN would hold out. If any local optimist believed we’d celebrate Christmas in Saigon, he kept it to himself. My experience out in the field with the ARVN and the Cong placed me firmly with the pessimists. I wasn’t going to run straight back to the Brinks Hotel and pack my bags, but neither was I going to pay cash down on a summer vacation at China Beach. I never bet against my own side, but that’s where the smart money lay.

The news from Ban Me Thout grew rapidly worse. It seems that the Cong (well, let’s be accurate—North Vietnamese Army regulars did most of the fighting by then) had come up with a new tactic. They bypassed the outer defense posts and went straight at the heart of town. The ARVN, meanwhile, had stuck to its usual pattern of letting the troops live with their wives and children, on the theory that they’d fight harder to protect them. Maybe it worked in the past, but it sure didn’t work in Ban Me Thout. As the families fled east, soldiers deserted their posts to help them, shedding their uniforms and changing to civvies (however, hanging onto their weapons), and joining the press of refugees that clogged the roads.

By midday Tuesday the NVA, for all practical purposes, controlled Ban Me Thout, though we didn’t get an official confirm on that until Friday. Reports came in of vast military stores left behind as soldiers pushed aside mothers and babies, stole bicycles, looted shops, raped girls and shook down fleeing civilians for their goods and money. Every man for himself, and Ban Me Thout marked only the beginning of the avalanche. Abandoned supplies and weapons fell by the ton into the enemy’s eager hands. The further they advanced, the more of our best stuff they gathered up to use against our side.

CIA reports, endorsed by Director William Colby himself, had predicted 1976 to be the year of the Cong’s general offensive and uprising to liberate the south. But their success at Ban Me Thout exceeded what anyone, perhaps even the VCs themselves, had imagined. Then we got word that Pleiku and Kontum, further to the north, had come under attack, and terrified refugees mobbed Highways 14 and 7B, pressing toward hoped-for safety on the coast. A correction soon came in: there’d been shelling, but no attack. General Phu, commander of forces there, had secretly hauled his own ass out of there, and when that word got out, the troops no longer felt any compunction to stand and fight. The stampede was on. Military Zone II faced complete collapse. Sarge sure called it right.

Meanwhile, my duties made less sense than ever. They’d installed me in a small, windowless corner office on the fourth floor of the Embassy building that came equipped with the world’s loudest air conditioner. It must have previously been a storage area, because combination-locked file cabinets lined one entire wall. I adjoined a bullpen area full of communications equipment and rows of desks where CIA staff read cables, answered telephones, shuffled papers and scurried to and fro with frenzied determination. Every few minutes some eager beaver clerk bustled into my office, closed the door, and, ignoring me, unlocked one of the drawers and either put some papers into it or took some papers out.

But I never had anything to do with any of them: Sonarr kept me at my desk. What with the sudden onslaught of heavy enemy attacks, everybody in the Embassy, CIA or legitimate State Department staff operated in berserk mode. However, my own work schedule still consisted mostly of orientation and background briefings—a couple times each day staff from either the CIA or the Embassy came in and solemnly filled me in on matters that I could have learned more about from the office secretaries. I could barely make their words out over the air conditioner racket. Todd Sonarr gave me a few reports coming in from the field to analyze and comment on from a military perspective. My occasional after-hours tete-a-tetes with Mickey Mouse continued. But then Todd Sonarr started sending me out on some really strange assignments.

Sonarr and I got on so-so—at least we could talk sports. Or military. He’d served his hitch in the Marines, and he knew a trick or two. He seemed fascinated by the LRRPs—couldn’t figure us out. Some of our guys tried to co-ordinate with them out in the field, he told me once. You know, work up some joint operations where they gather intelligence for the CIA as well as the Army. Just couldn’t make it go. Nothing personal, but they told me the LRRP guys were a bunch of cocky, arrogant, disrespectful sonsabitches. Wouldn’t take directions, couldn’t grasp the big picture—too independent-minded.

That’s a funny coincidence, I said. Some guys in my unit one time tried to co-ordinate with some guys from the CIA. Just couldn’t make it go. Nothing personal, but they told me the CIA guys were a bunch of fuzzy-minded jerks who kept trying to get them involved in harebrained schemes and half-assed operations, when all they wanted to do was put greasepaint on their faces and go out in the jungle and kill gooks. I can’t imagine where your buddies ever got that impression of the LRRPs. You’re sure they weren’t talking about the Green Berets?

Sonarr savored conspiracies: he could figure out the connections among any five events you gave him, not only pinpointing the sinister forces guiding events from behind the scenes, but with a complete rundown on tactics, operations and logistics. JFK’s assassination was the only exception. Sonarr staunchly insisted that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone.

He claimed to be a protegé of an agent named Bill Harvey, a name well-known around the station as the quintessential Company cowboy. The things that guy did, Sonarr once marvelled to me. He ran an operation through a tunnel between East and West Berlin, dug half the tunnel with his own hands. He was the first guy to finger that Brit spy, Philby. I swear, there isn’t a tougher man in the outfit. But if he admired Bill Harvey, he positively worshipped James Jesus Angleton, an OSS original who up until recently had been the CIA counter-intelligence chief. Sonarr’s voice positively choked whenever he spoke of Angleton.

His dedication to The Cause was one side of him. He had another. Several months ago parties unknown had posted his picture, captioned Would You Buy a Used Car From This Man? on an office bulletin board. It referred, a cute Vietnamese file clerk from the third floor explained to me during an afternoon tea break, to his practice of having shipped in, at government expense, American luxury cars for personal use, which disappeared—stolen—shortly thereafter. A slick scheme to peddle cars to locals at highly profitable prices, not to mention possible insurance scams? So some suspected. Such suspicions gained support, she went on, from the fact that Sonarr used a CIA car and driver right along, and never seemed especially upset about his periodic victimization. The only conclusion anyone could draw about the picture was that it couldn’t have been an inside job, as it had