Never Left Behind

By Jim Miller

The Navy SEAL ethos of never leaving a shipmate behind is stretched to the limit through two generations of SEALS. Randall Jenkins has never given up on his BUD/s teammate, but due to failing health, he must recruit his son to carry on the search for Edgar Allan Jollar. The search takes place on three continents. Decades have gone by, and D. D. Jenkins takes up the search with very little hope of finding his fathers shipmate. While Jenkins carries on the search for Jollar, Phung Tu, an NVA soldier, has carried on his fight against the Americans until they are driven out of his country. He never has forgotten the American blonde giant who frightened him so much as a boy and created the humiliation of having soiled himself in fear that night in the Mekong. His hatred of all things Western has driven him for all his years fighting for his country. Now middle age has found both Tu and Jollar; their lives have settled into a routine that has left the war behind. But unbeknownst to either man, they lives would continue to enmesh in ways neither man could fathom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
• Release date: Apr 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781489701732

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Copyright © 2014 Jim Miller.

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ISBN: 978-1-4897-0171-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-0172-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-0173-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014906277

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 4/11/14

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Prologue

1 Mekong Delta, Spring ‘70

2 Sports Book, Bellagio Hotel And Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada. Present Day

3 Mekong Delta, Republic Of South Vietnam

4 Cuu Long River

5 Indianapolis International Airport

6 Mekong Delta

7 The Village Of Trang To

8 Ho Chi Minh Trail, 1972

9 Ho Chi Minh City, 1985

10 Gaithersburg, Maryland

11 Ho Chi Minh City

12 Mekong Delta

13 John Cochran Veterans Administration Hospital, St. Louis, Missouri

14 Near Bien Hoa 1975

15 Trang To

16 Las Vegas, Nevada

17 Fifteen Kilometers South And West Of Hanoi. Present Day.

18 Ho Chi Minh City, Present Day

19 Ho Chi Minh City

20 Saigon River

21 Near The Home Of Doctor Marcel Gironde

22 Ho Chi Minh City

23 St. Louis, Missouri

24 Ho Chi Minh City

25 Near The Cambodian Border

26 Southeast Of Hanoi

27 Ho Chi Minh City

28 Tel Aviv, Israel

29 Cambodia

30 Mekong Delta

31 Ho Chi Minh City

32 Phnom Penh, Cambodia

33 Hanoi

34 Trang To

35 Ho Chi Minh City

36 Gaithersburg, Maryland

37 Paris, France

38 Ho Chi Minh City

39 Trang To

40 Paris

41 St. Louis, Missouri

42 Ho Chi Minh City

43 Paris, France

44 Paris, France

45 Paris, France

46 Paris, France

47 Tel Aviv, Israel

48 St. Louis, Missouri

49 Sourasky Medical Center, Tel Aviv, Israel

50 Tel Aviv, Israel

51 Ben Gurion International Airport

52 Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

53 Trang To, Vietnam

54 Cuu Long River

Epilogue

For Gina who lives in our hearts and reminds us of how wonderful our lives are that we had the privilege of her company.

For you too Richie, my skinny buddy from south St. Louis who was far too young for Vietnam to take.

My heroes are Navy SEALs. For Senior Chief Billy Blair and all the Team Ten and Four guys who have made the ultimate sacrifice for us. For Adam Olin Smith who gave his life in Afghanistan. Words are pitifully lacking in expressing my gratitude for these brave men.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Vietnam officially ended as it had begun and as it continued through all those years and all those young men and women, half-done. It ended for me personally just before Christmas of nineteen sixty-seven, but then again, I suppose, it never really did. I was pretty happy about coming home in one piece, but home didn’t closely resemble anything I could recall. When I left, men and women in uniform were still heroes. I couldn’t pay for a beer in any tavern near my dad’s house and I was only eighteen. When I returned things were changing, people were changing. Everyone seemed angry at everyone else. I came home angry too. I couldn’t hear the name Jane Fonda without foaming at the mouth. I’d lost my good friend Richie and seen other grammar school buddies come home maimed. I’d seen my share of death in Vietnam, but I had never seen what it did to the people who were left to grieve. I grew up in my dad’s neighborhood, could tell you who lived behind each door for blocks in any direction, knew them all by name and they knew me. Now, wearing my uniform to midnight mass, surrounded by those same people, turned out to be a really bad idea. It was still early in the national turmoil that the end of the sixties brought, but showing up at my parent’s front door felt like arriving from Mars.

I’m no one’s hero. My time in Vietnam was too historically unremarkable to bother with and I’ve never been a man who required ‘closure’, however when this book finished itself and it most certainly did, it was finally over.

Who knows, perhaps one day I’ll go back. If I do, I’ll be going to a place, not a war.

This is a work of fiction. The characters herein are either vestiges of my memory or products of my imagination. There are a number of characters that are named after or patterned after good friends, they had no real part in the story I’ve tried to tell. I hope they enjoy their alter egos. Part of fiction is adding or making up things to make a story line simply work better. An example of that is, and as any SEAL who has ever been to Danny’s Bar and Grill knows, there is no picture window.

All the mistakes are mine. All accounts of former Vietnamese officials have either been reported in the media or I have become aware of as a function of my position while in Vietnam and after. Many of the places described in the story are a figment of my imagination. (A map won’t help.) I apologize for any of the Vietnamese language that I have misspelled or mangled inadvertently.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book, like everything else in my life since Halloween nineteen seventy-eight, would not have been possible without my wife, Marilyn. She loves me, which some days I still don’t get. She tells me all the things I need to know, whether I want to know them or not. All the good changes and really terrific ideas in this story are hers. I’m not ashamed to admit that I stole them fair and square.

My daughters, Andrea and Kaitlyn are even tougher editor’s than my wife. Neither have any qualms about telling me where the junk in the story lies. This book and the last one are only as good as my willingness to listen to what they have to say.

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full measure of joy, you must have someone to divide it with…

Mark Twain

PROLOGUE

I grew up on Iowa street, four blocks from the St. Thomas Aquinas church. I went to the parish grammar school at St. Thomas. I was an altar boy, and if Father Sullivan didn’t finish the altar wine, my buddy Jim and I drank it on the way back to the rectory.

We sang in the choir. I sounded like a seal in heat and Jimmie’s voice was so high he sounded like a girl. But being in the choir got us out of a class a bunch and that was really okay. We played any sport that involved a ball ands some that didn’t. I was what most folks called a regular kid. The epitome of the son of a South St. Louis Dutchman.

My mother named me Edgar Allan after some distant relative of a distant relative from Baltimore that supposedly was kin to the poet. My sister Lenore, who got her name the same way I did, was the only person other than my best buddy Jim who could call me Eddie and get away with it. I hated that name. Made me feel like a baby when my smelly aunt Shirley would pinch my cheek and ask me how her little Eddie was doing.

First of all I’ve never been little and gratefully my father’s sister only came around when there was free food to be had. I weighed over fourteen pounds when I was born and was always a head taller than kids my age.

I guess some people would feel self-conscious about being big. Not me. It kept the older, neighborhood tough guys thinking twice before messing with me or my side kick Jim. One time, six or seventh grade, I think, I had to prove that point to a Polish kid named Krupski who was my sister’s age. He ragged on me one too many times, so I invited him up to the park across from St. Thomas and whipped his Pollack behind. His cousin Jan thought he’d jump in when I was giving Mikel the business, but my buddy Jim showed up and it turned into a real free-for-all. Last time I had to make that point.

My dad always told us kids that is was the nail that stuck out that got hammered first. He didn’t truck with swelled heads or being too big for your britches. So it came pretty natural to me to figure that I was nothing special-just another kid in a neighborhood full of them.

I spent most of my life in the last row of school pictures or bending over to dance with Angie Caruso. I was nuts about her. She had big brown, Italian eyes and the biggest dimples. We wrote our initials inside hearts on the brick walls around school and I carved them in the Sycamore by her house. When we were in eighth grade, I told her I loved her. She laughed so hard see nearly peed herself. I never made that mistake again.

My single serious adolescent problem wasn’t zits or being too tall. None of that really mattered. My problem was being cursed with a shock of banana colored hair that stuck out all over my head as if I had stuck my finger in an electric socket. Let it grow long, keep it cut short, didn’t matter.

My buddies all slicked their hair back with Brylcream or Vitalis and combed their hair into a duck’s butt in the back to look cool like Marlon Brandon in the Wild One. Didn’t matter how much of that stuff I put on my hair, I still looked like the mad hatter on a really bad hair day. I finally just gave it up and started wearing a hat everywhere I went. First reason I hated going to school was because the nuns made me take my hat off. My buddies cracked on me all the time about my darned hair and the girls giggled behind my back whenever I had to take my hat off.

I promised myself that when I got older I’d shave my head and would do what I wanted, regardless of what anybody else had to say. My folks always told me that life was too short to give any of it away and that sounded just about right to me. Lots of folks said I was a really stubborn kid, but I just knew what I wanted and didn’t see the point of changing my mind cause someone said I should.

Baseball cards or marbles or other stuff kids my age collected and traded or whatever, never made a lot of sense to me. I was always more interested in things like why birds could fly and I couldn’t or how something I was seeing for the first time worked. Most stuff like that just seemed to make sense.

Grammar school and high school bored me silly. It was like a book you’d already read a bunch of times. The only class I really liked and worked at a little was the Latin the nuns though was so cool. Even that became dull after a little while. I mean, once you know it, where’s the challenge? Wasn’t like us kids were gonna sit around the schoolyard giving each other the amo, amas, amat jazz. When the other kids in my class puzzled over conjugating Latin verbs, I stared out the window, wishing I was anywhere else.

I never brought books home from school. The homework was way too simple and I did it quick at school and got it over. Besides, as soon as I got home and got out of the monkey suit the nuns made us wear, I was out the door to shoot baskets, play catch or find a pick-up football game. I’d brought home a book, my mom would have strapped me to a chair ‘till it was done. Not this boy, huh, uh. Once the bell rang, school could’ve been on Mars. I wished it was.

I hated going to school. I hated everything about being told how to walk, how to talk, being quiet in the hallways and having the nun’s version of God jammed down my throat. It was like I imagined being locked up in prison would be. The worst part was the sitting still. I got whacked with a ruler or the back of the teacher’s hand more times than I can remember for fidgeting in my desk.

My parents taught me manners and I learned early that being polite made being around grown up’s a whole bunch easier. It wasn’t like I was an angel or anything. I got my ears boxed by the old man when I got out of line just like all the kids I knew.

I just could not stand the idea of being cooped up in a room with twenty-five other bored stiff kids. The drone never changed, it was same, day in and day out. I learned more from my mom’s encyclopedia or my sister Lenore’s school books than I ever did in class. I read about a guy who got convicted of something and went to jail for a bunch of years before they figured out he didn’t do it and cut him loose. That is exactly how school felt to me.

The nuns were so nuts about sin and us kids going steady, that it was like being locked up with a bear with a belly ache. I swear they told the girls never to walk across a puddle to keep the boys from looking up their skirts. I swear. I hadn’t even thought about something like that until they made such a big deal about it. I couldn’t look at a puddle for years without thinking about it. Angie Caruso use to take a big long stride across one and then laugh like there was no tomorrow. Nuns?

The only fun I had in class was driving the nuns nuts when they caught me staring out the window and figured I didn’t know where they were in some brain dead reading or what the answer was to some do-it-in-your-head arithmetic. It made the deaf old seventh grade nun so mad when she couldn’t catch me goofing off that she whacked me with the big old ruler even when I knew the answer.

In third grade I snitched my older brother Tom’s copy of The Count of Monte Cristo and after reading it, I couldn’t think of anything but escaping.

After third grade, my parents were given the option of me skipping fourth grade. It was assumed fourth grade would be redundant and a waste of my time—which was true. My folks, of course, thought it was a marvelous idea. My dad never finished high school and was real sensitive about his kids being educated.

Your sister and brother both skipped fourth grade and look at them. Why don’t you want to get finished a little earlier? He reasoned.

I’m not Tom or Lenore, dad. I’m me. I just don’t want to leave my friends behind, I replied, stubbornly.

By golly, young man, you will do what your mother tells you.

My dad’s strong suit was never patience. He told you once, then if you were still not doing what he wanted, you had a whipping coming. I didn’t care. I wasn’t leaving my friends.

That was one awful summer. My dad continuously banged on my ears about missed opportunities and my mother—while much more subtle—kept the pressure turned up high.

All I could think about was missing my friends and being in class with the older kids who would have treated me like a freak. Had Jimmie been offered the same skip, I’d have done it, but he didn’t, so I wasn’t.

The real fights started in July when I told my mom and dad at the dinner table that there was no way I was skipping fourth grade. Mom laid the guilt trips on hot and heavy, she pulled all the mom tricks she had always found successful in getting her hard headed kids to mind. Dad just threatened mayhem; like always. Lenore and Tom just said I was stupid to pass up the chance. I just did not care. My mind was made up and come hell or high water, I was not leaving my best friend behind.

It’s not like that skinny little runt, Jimmie, is going to disappear, Tom said.

Wouldn’t be the same and it don’t matter. I won’t go, I said. I’ll run away from school every day.

You’ll wind up in Boonville boys farm with all those marijuana smoking beatniks, my pops said, true to form.

That’d be better than going to school with kids I don’t know.

By August you could cut the tension at home with a knife. My dad just growled at me when ever I was in ear-shot. My mom carried a little flowery hanky in her apron and whenever I was around her, she’d give me the puppy dog look and dab at her eyes. What a summer!

However, by the Tuesday after Labor Day, I had cut up a bunch of my mom’s old brown paper shopping bags from the A&P. I’d covered my fourth grade books, walked the four blocks to St. Thomas and took my seat next to my only real friend. We breezed through fourth grade like it was a picnic in July.

You are the hardest headed Dutchman ever lived, Jimmie said that first day of fourth grade. My old man would have nailed my butt to the chair.

I don’t figure my dad is ever going to get over it, but I wasn’t skippin’ fourth grade if you weren’t.

The feud over school wasn’t over by a long shot, because my dad and Jim’s folks wanted us to follow our older brother’s and our father’s to St. Mary’s High.

I mean, Yogi Berra went there for Crissakes my dad said, as if that mattered somehow. I was privately down on the Catholics by then and remembered the stories my brother Tom told us about the Christian Brothers.

He said that they were mean as hell and handed out discipline with a punch you didn’t see coming or a striping with the thick belt they wore. Me and Jim wanted to go to a public school not far from home, but that wouldn’t fly.

Good Catholic boys like us going to school with heathens? I knew the old man hadn’t forgotten about fourth grade. So instead of walking to school with out girl friends, we were exiled to the tiny parish high school, Saint Francis de Sales. Forty minutes on a bus, each way, into a neighborhood where we knew exactly zero kids.

More nuns, more drone, more whacks with a ruler. We played all the sports they had and I just continued staring out windows and wishing I was any place else.

I knew that I was done with school the last morning of my Junior year when I watched the the grammar school kids race around at recess having a ball. They could keep their senior prom and wearing the stupid cap and gown. I couldn’t take it anymore and I had other plans.

I couldn’t swim a stroke when I was kid, nearly drowned a couple of times at the local city park swimming pool. I never quit trying however. Whenever my buddy Jimmie stood on the stoop and hollered for me to go with him to Marquette to swim in the huge old concrete pool, I’d roll my trunks in a towel and away we’d go.

It was the summer of sixty-three and the only one who knew what I was planning was Jim. It was August and you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. I had just made it from the wall to the dive tower in the middle of the deep end of the pool. I was feeling mighty good about myself and figured somebody ought to know what I was going to do.

Jimmie, I’m not going back to school. I fixed up my brother’s driver’s license and I joined the Navy."

Holy shit, Eddie, Jim said. What’d your mom and pops say?

Haven’t told anybody but you.

Jeez, Eddie, your mom’s gonna blow a gasket. I don’t even want to think what your old man is gonna do. Maybe you should run off and join the circus, might be better for your health.

Nope. I’m all joined up and all I gotta do is show up, they’ll do the rest.

Edgar you can’t even swim. Shoot, that’s the first time you made it all the way out and back without half drownin’. What the hell you joinin’ the Navy for?

I read a book, I said, stubbornly. They got a program teaches anybody how to swim. I’m gonna do it.

I just can’t see you ridin’ around on some big old boat all the time. You can’t sit still for two seconds. How you gonna be on a battleship or whatever for months at a time? Them Navy guys got disciple makes the nuns look like your grandma. How you gonna put up with all that ‘yes sir, no sir, aye aye, sir?

My uncle Jack was a frogman in World War II, he told me all about it and that’s what I’m gonna be. Look here, I said proudly, as I rolled up my shirt sleeve. Under a huge band aid was a tattoo of a seal wearing a sailor cap toting a machinegun and a bomb. The seal had a cigar clamped between large teeth and below the seal the letters ‘UDT’, were written in block script. It took me all summer to save up; cutting grass and fetching the neighbor’s groceries. But, by golly, it was all mine and I could not be prouder.

I copied this off the one my Uncle Jack has, I told Jimmie, proudly.

Didn’t it hurt?

Nah. I had to bite on my belt to keep from blubbering like a baby the whole time the guy was sticking me, but Jim didn’t need to know.

Jim stared at the tattoo a moment then switched tactics.

Aw, c’mon, Ed, he pleaded. Just one more year and, hell, I’ll join up with you.

Can’t do it, I can’t stand one more day in that school.

Jeezo Pete, Eddie, what about soccer, Jim pleaded. We got a shot at state champs this year. Who’s gonna play goalie?

Clay can do it and besides, like I said, I already signed up and everything, the Navy’s expectin’ me. I’m leavin’ three weeks from next Tuesday.

Already? Shoot, I oughta rat your dumb ass out to your mom. She’d lock you in the damned closet ‘til you was eighty-two.

I gave my buddy my best ‘sure you will’ smile. I knew he wouldn’t tell a soul.

That Tuesday came around a lot faster than I thought and when I told my folks, all hell broke loose. My mom started into to cryin’ and wackin’ me on my head. Swearing she’d fix it so I wouldn’t have to go. Then she started kissin’ me and cryin’ all over my shirt. My pops never said a word. He just stood like a stone by the front door.

The ride downtown to the train station was like bein’ in a deep freeze. My pops never said a word or looked in my direction. He must have smoked a pack of Camel’s on the ride and I was scared to death that he was gonna start knockin’ me around and then dump my ungrateful butt into the street. He didn’t. When we got to the Union Station he just turned to me and gave me a look I had never seen before.

Promise me that you will finish school one day. It will kill your mother if you don’t.

Pop, I…

"I’m not finished. Anything happens to you, I will beat my brother Jack and his big goddamned mouth to within an inch of his life.

Son, your mother and I raised you kids to stand on your own two feet, and I know that arguing with you when you’ve made up your mind is a waste of breath. I’m not going to try to talk you out of it this time. If the Navy wants you…well, while I think this is the dumbest damned thing I ever heard, I’ll make it right with your mom somehow. Write your mother, but don’t tell her the truth about what you are doing. She’d just worry herself to death.

Edgar, I know you can take care of yourself. Come home in one piece."

I near bit through my lip trying to keep from bawling in front of the old man.

I appreciate the lift, Pops, I’ll write, I promise and don’t worry about me, I’ll be okay.

My dad shook my hand and leaned across and opened my door. He turned and stared out the wind shield until I was out standing on the curb. He didn’t wave or look back as he pulled into traffic on Market street. I didn’t wave either. Turns out, it was the one great regret in my life.

map.psd

1

MEKONG DELTA, SPRING ‘70

Saddle up ladies, Lieutenant J. G., Meyer (Gator) Haney barked to my team of 3rd SOG SEALS. Haney played safety for the Florida University Gators and graduated ROTC before joining up with the SEALs. He was in the same BUD/s class with that wrestler who later on became governor someplace. Haney and the rest of the guys got on pretty okay—that is until someone got out of line. Then he could be the meanest son of a bitch to come down the pike.

Our first tour, we had this new guy, just out of BUD/s. Guillen was his name. Real smart ass know-it-all. He was from somewhere up north in California. First night out on patrol, he pulls one of his dumb assed stunts, damned near got the bunch of us wasted. Haney was so mad, he tied Guillen to a tree outside our perimeter and made him stay there all night. Promised to shoot him himself if he heard so much as a peep out of him. Haney was a little guy compared to Jenkins and me, but he took that Gator stuff serious and neither of us would mess with him on a bet.

Randall Jenkins, call sign, ‘Big Jenks’ and me went through BUD/s together when we were teenagers and in a month or so we’d be finishing our third tour in Uncle Ho’s commie paradise. The entire team was scheduled to rotate back to Coronado to re-fit and re-train. Me and the Big Jenks tried to get Gator to pull some strings so we could stay in-country with the new team—but regs wouldn’t allow it. However, bein’ the good egg he was, Haney had cashed in a favor and got us a soft billet on Coronado bein’ BUD/s instructors."

How ‘bout we go AWOL for a bit and then just show up at 3rd SOG, Jenks said. What would they do, send us to Vietnam?

More likely shoot your dumb asses or throw you into Long Binh jail until you had beards long enough to cover your tiny peckers, Haney said. What’s the matter with goin’ home?

Can’t shoot the gooks there, Jenkins responded. I blow somethin’ up I either gotta fix it or pay for it. Ain’t no fun.

You sure we can’t extend for bit, Gator, I asked. Them Army pukes can stay ninety days after their regular DEROS.

I been to the mat for you two screw-ups at 3rd SOG as many times as I’m gonna. You’ll get on that plane with me or I’ll shoot you myself.

SOG euphemistically stood for ‘Studies and Observation Group’. In the real world, it was a secret group of special operators who were funded by the CIA and pulled all sorts of clandestine ops. Haney and our bunch did our black ops in the Mekong Delta. We had one hell of a time sneakin’ up on Sir Charles when he thought he had an ambush all set for a bunch of dumb-as-dirt ground pounders. Never forget the look on their little gook faces when we snuck up behind them and blew their asses up.

Okay with you two hero’s if we talk a little business? Haney said putting and end to the conversation. Major load of small arms and ammo coming out of Cambodia so we’re going on a boat ride about 30 klicks west, throw a wet blanket on the party, he said.

I get to shoot anybody special, I asked. Haney just shrugged his shoulders and made the face my old man would make when I said something particularly stupid. I can’t tell you why, but I’m dead certain that this kind of thing was exactly what the Good Lord had in mind for me, sort of a reward for puttin’ up with all those nuns and all that drone.

The Navy and especially the SEALS were just exactly what I wanted from life. The military chicken shit state side was tolerable and over here was a whole other story. As long as you were getting the job done, nobody busted your hump about shavin’ or keepin’ your hair cut. I usually kept my hair short to keep the critters out, but