Fire in the Night & Other Stories

By Dick Morgan

Fire in the Night is a novella-length tale of four National Guardsmen, lost, soaked, and freezing, who stumble upon an abandoned cabin in the middle of nowhere-- a sanctuary which fulfills their every need. Parker, the reluctant leader who is suffering from PTSD, discovers the cabin’s owner is a recently killed street preacher named John J. Monk. Parker soon realizes Monk’s death in front of hundreds of witnesses sparked the civil rebellion that has engulfed him. Parker investigates Monk’s death by examining the cabin and probing the memories of his fellow soldiers. He can almost feel Monk’s presence. That night, Monk’s spirit invades his dreams and fills him with memories not his own. Parker experiences an epiphany which changes him forever.
May Eleventh is a memoir about returning from Vietnam during the height of that war, and finding a society as divided and dangerous as the war itself.
In between these two stories are memoirs, fables, and fantasies which attempt to reveal the universal truths and powerful magic hidden in our everyday lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665532716

Dick Morgan

Award winning author Dick Morgan has been writing and publishing stories for over 50 years. He was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in 1982. He won first place in the Kay Snow (Willamette Writers) writing contest in 1983. His first short story collection, Sailing Away, was published in 2000. His non-fiction book, Warrior Mind: Strategy and Philosophy from the Martial Arts, was published in 2009. His children’s Christmas fantasy, The Archangel’s Gift, was first published in 2012, and re-published in 2022. His second collection of stories, Fire in the Night & Other Stories, was published in 2021. He lives with his wife Lonnie in Portland, Oregon.

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© 2021 Dick Morgan. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse  10/12/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3273-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3272-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3271-6 (e)

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For Lonnie,

my pole star

CONTENTS

May Eleventh

Vido’s Stone

Before the Rains Come

The Sound Garden

Moonsong for Bernardo

Sport, Fishing

Dead Fred

Fire in the Night

Before the Rains Come published in Willow Springs Review, Eastern Washington University, January, 2002.

MAY ELEVENTH

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On May 11, 1970, a protest of the Vietnam War took place in the Park Blocks adjacent to Portland State University. It became the bloodiest confrontation between the Portland Police and- civilian demonstrators in the city of Portland’s history. I was there. Sort of.

It was a little more than a month after my active duty discharge from the Navy. How can I describe my life then? It was damaged. I had just brushed against the edge of the war in Vietnam during my service, but it had changed me nonetheless. I’d been made to feel insignificant, and at the same time, complicit in a huge effort that defied justification. I wanted free of those toxic thoughts, but they kept returning unresolved.

I’d gone back to being a student at Portland State University, and the new Veteran’s benefits paid for it. Hell, I figured they owed me. They’d taken something from me. I didn’t have a word for it yet. Innocence, maybe. Not to mention two years gone. And that wasn’t all. I was trying to climb back into the academic life I’d had before, but I had no feeling for where that life had been headed. Consequently, I wasn’t moving toward anything definable in my life just then; I was mostly still moving away from things. There really wasn’t any forward. Fortunately, due to heavy drinking and some righteous weed I’d brought back from Vietnam, this had not been much of a problem until then.

I was just taking it easy, hanging out at the University trying not to accidently graduate, so I could suck my full Veteran’s Benefits out of the system. I didn’t really have a plan, except to collect the money. It was enough to get by if I seriously tightened my belt. I took the bare minimum of classes I thought might be easy-- mostly literature classes, writing classes and education classes, preparing me to be a Professor of English Literature just like my English Major friends. But those people were serious, already chatting up strategies and planning career specialties. Such ambitious thinking about the future was not my forté. One day I finally said it out loud for the first time: I don’t want to be a frigging teacher!

It was a day on which a protest march was held to oppose the Vietnam War, and in protest of the shootings of four students at Kent State by the National Guard exactly one week earlier. The demonstrators were almost entirely students from Portland State.

I’d gone on the march around noon. I went because this girl I was trying to date wanted to. I had an intense but confusing mix of feelings about the Vietnam War. Thinking about it made me want to take a shower. I didn’t want to talk about how tiny my part was in it. I didn’t even want people around me to know I was there. I’d seen how other vets who’d been outed were treated. Some people called them Killers right up in their faces. So I shuffled along, not thinking about the war, trying to talk the girl up, happy not to be in Literary Criticism class. The girl was so quiet I couldn’t get her to talk about herself, except to say, recent break-up. And also, frigging Vietnam war, said in a self-righteous tone that told me she only knew the headlines. But she had nice firm breasts, which negated any logic I might have used on myself to not get involved. I was trying the understanding, companionable guy approach, a strategy that had never worked for me but which did not require boldness.

We marched with a couple of thousand others down to the City Hall, where we listened as Parks Commissioner Frank Ivancie told us what disrespectful citizens we were. Then most of us wandered back to the Park Blocks where a First Aid tent was set up. The tent soon became the temple in a throng of rebellious fervor. The girl wanted to go to the rally starting up there. I could see people standing shoulder to shoulder, completely filling the Park Blocks adjacent to the University. Several guys took turns shouting into a megaphone. Everybody else was just hanging out, working up into a big unfocused anti-war snit. The police had begun arriving, abandoning their patrol cars at odd angles in the street.

This did not appeal to me. I disliked crowds of disgruntled people, and I had a new distrust of those who try to direct the energy of large groups. I made my offer of dinner and wine to the girl, but she refused. Maybe it was a corn-dog and beer, I don’t know, but she walked away and never looked back. I needed a drink. I headed to the Cheerful Tortoise Tavern, trying not to think about Vietnam anymore. I wanted that drink, and her corn-dog money was ready to jump out of my pocket.

Even though I had just come home from Vietnam, I didn’t have any fresh insights on the quagmire there. It certainly looked like it needed fixing to me. I didn’t see any good come out of anything I did there, and felt an embarrassment that my part had been so easy. Other people had died. People I knew. So I still carried that around with me I guess. I was still processing all that I had experienced. Oh, there were parts I savored more than others. I can still smell the foul odors and in-your-lap raunch of Olongapo; such experiences permanently damage your nose. But even brightly colored boardwalks and lurid adventures are less attractive when you have to watch your back. I never felt more like a target than I did in Olongapo. Except maybe Danang. Especially Danang. All in all though, I’d been lucky. I had completed two tours in the hot zone, and I never encountered the enemy face to face. Hell, I was never even close to the front lines of the war. Except for one day.

I remember that day. January 13, 1969. I remember being afraid.

My ship, the USS Seminole, was an Amphibious Assault cargo ship. I was assigned to an amphibious landing craft, a Mike boat, hitting the sands with 40 Marines on the enemy shores of Vietnam during Operation Bold Mariner, the largest amphibious assault landing since the Korean War. None of us knew what to expect, or whether some of us might even be dead in a few minutes. I was a signalman; I wasn’t a back -up driver, nor a lever man, or engine tinkerer. I had absolutely no function and didn’t really know why I was there. I was like the red-shirt guys on Star Trek who always accentuated the danger by getting killed. This did not add to my enjoyment of the moment. I didn’t understand how my choices had gotten me smack in the middle of a bunch of angry people with automatic weapons.

The Mike boat plowed up onto the sandy shoal, as close to the beach as it could go. The ramp descended, and the Marines charged off with many splashes and shouts. I was terrified, my chest pounding, my stomach queasy. I squatted down on the floor of the Mike boat, thinking to shrink my target area. As I knelt down, I could smell several trapped odors I’d not noticed higher up in the salt air. Rust added a certain metallic tang, and hot engine oil stuffed up my nose. But there was also a stink of fresh piss after the Marines charged off. I imagine the distraction of having to pee as you rushed out onto a hostile beach would have been most unwelcome, and a few of them must have pissed in the back of the Mike Boat before the ramp dropped. I could smell cigarette smoke and piss, saltwater and the foul sweat that fear produces. The sweat might have been my own.

Marine piss soaked into the knee of my dungarees while I ruminated on the sharp irony of having consistently chosen the easiest path for myself, which had led me to where I was. The irony would have been hilarious, if I hadn’t half-expected to be shot soon. The Marines didn’t seem to care. They milled around in bunches, pointing here and there, slowly advancing up the beach.

I could see tall bushes and jungle trees about fifty yards straight ahead. I didn’t know what was behind them, but imagined heavily armed Viet Cong about to fire at us. Any moment, gunfire. With the ramp down and the cargo deck empty, I felt like a duck in a shooting gallery. I started to say a silent prayer, but stopped. God had put me there, so why would he listen to me bitching about it? I resigned myself to it. Any moment, gunfire...

As I walked away from the protest march, the angry sounds faded away, replaced by traffic noise, and music from somewhere. Shoulder-to-shoulder people in the park had reminded me of being stuffed into a Mike boat of keyed-up Marines, and I was glad to be away from there. I could feel myself starting to un-tighten. I headed for the Cheerful Tortoise. It was my tavern of habit because it was dark, near campus, and many of my English Major friends hung out there. Sometimes classes were even held there. A few of the published poets had gotten teaching gigs, and all of us writing wannabe’s signed up for the guaranteed A, reading our work to each other around pitchers of beer. Some of the poets I’d met were almost good. All of them stank of literary airs though, whether they were good or not. "Have you read this? You really should. He is quite Dylan-esque." I could never keep up with the subject of those conversations and often felt I was the dumbest one at the table. So I drank. I believe that was my Chenin Blanc period.

The Tortoise was ablaze with small neon-lit beer advertisements, and candles like campfires on the tables where people sat. The air smelled of beer and sun-tan oil. Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction blared out of the wall speakers.

"The Eastern world, it is explodin’,

Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’..."

My favorite table was surrounded by people, but they graciously made room for me. I snagged an empty chair and ordered a Ste Michelle Chenin Blanc, trying to be cool. Across the table sat Christopher a poet newly bearded after military discharge himself. He was slightly turned, facing toward a girl I saw him with frequently, a poet groupie. She gave me a glance and a dismissive smile as I sat down, then turned back toward Christopher. I was undoubtably not a real enough poet. Two other bearded guys I knew sat on each side of Christopher and the girl.

Christopher gave me a slight chin rise, a substitute for actually saying hello.

I didn’t see you in class.

Had a place to be.

You’re skipping out too much. You’re going to cause yourself trouble.

Trouble. I knew exactly when it started, and it was my fault. It was the Buddhist beads incident.

The Seminole had visited San Francisco, and tied up at Treasure Island. I drew liberty. In downtown San Franciso I was accosted by two Buddhist monks and ended up going with them to a group chant. I returned to the ship with new Buddhist prayer beads, enthusiastic about becoming a Buddhist.

On our long Pacific crossing to join the Seventh Fleet, I became adept at the tasks of being a quartermaster. I was the best position locator, and was learning celestial navigation. I had perhaps become somewhat cocky. I’d seen several sailors wearing tiny silver crosses with their uniforms. And I thought, well, that was a religious symbol. So I wore my Buddhist prayer beads around my neck in my dungarees. I was ordered to take them off. I refused. I got Captain’s Mast for insubordination. I remember having been recently promoted to 2nd class Petty Officer, but had not sewed on my new patches yet. So I packed the back of one of the shoulder insignias with double-sided tape, and pressed it onto my shoulder. When I showed up for Captain’s Mast, I had that uniform on. And when the Captain pronounced his decision-- strike one pay-grade in rank-- I just peeled off the second-class insignia and handed it to him. I remember him turning deep red, and a dangerous look appeared on his face that sent a chill up my spine. After a long pause, he said, I’ll remember that. He did. It was bad strategy on my part to cause the most powerful man on the ship to remember me. Do not stand out to those in power.

You gotta stop skipping class, man. You need this one for your degree.

I don’t think so. I talked to an advisor. I have enough credits to graduate now, if I’m not careful.

"I meant your teaching degree, man."

"I don’t want to be a frigging teacher!" I shouted. Then Damn, after the sudden realization of what I’d just blurted out. Hell, I hadn’t been to any classes all day. I hadn’t really considered until then that I didn’t actually want to become an English teacher. I wasn’t self-assured enough to stand up in front of dozens of people and tell them I understood a piece of literature better than they did. Unless it were Tarzan and the City of Gold, or Marvel Comic’s The Origin of Batman. I liked reading easier stuff. English teachers required more high-concept literary material, which by the fourth year bored me to the point of nausea. The conclusion was inescapable. I’d spent the last six years preparing for a profession I would never have. It was an anti-epiphany-- the sudden realization that I didn’t know anything, and there was a big hole in my life. My future had winked out. Damn, I said again.

Foop, the crazy bald-headed guy with a top-knot in back sitting next to me said. His name was Ron, a friend of Christopher’s, the only other English major I knew who didn’t want to become a teacher. I liked that about him, but others thought it was because he was halfway nuts. He thought sort of sideways, as though one foot were planted in some other dimension. Sometimes it was entertaining. Sometimes it was creepy. His professors never knew if he had completed his assignments because they could never figure out what he was writing about.

What’s that mean, man?

"Boom is the sound of an explosion," Ron said. "Foop is the sound of an implosion. It’s the sound of your teaching career going away."

"Kind of why I said Damn."

Why are you here then? he asked.

Veteran’s Benefits pay me to be here.

Ron laughed. Why, you’re just a little whore, aren’t you?

"Yes. Yes I am. So why the hell are you here?"

I’m a whore too, he said around the neck of a beer bottle. "I’m writing the next Sometimes a Great Notion, looking for a publisher. Hell, we’re all whores here, just looking for our Sugar Daddy. Woo hoo!" He puckered his bearded lips, the ugliest thing I’d ever seen.

Christopher upended his bottle. Seek and you shall find, you know. He burped with his mouth closed, just a teeny jerk of the neck. The girl frowned anyway.

I’m seeking just like everybody else.

What are you looking for?

I’m going for an MFA. Christopher nodded, and kept on nodding, like it was an epiphany. Easier to get tenure.

Yeah, I know. Everybody knows. And you’ll be a damn fine teacher somewhere. But I’ll get my B.A. in English and then get off the race-track.

A degree in English literature. Wow, man. Another bus driver. Christopher smirked.

I could be a carpenter. A cement worker maybe.

You’ll be waiter in a sleazy restaurant while you write the great American novel, which you will never finish. Christopher took a long swig from his Guinness bottle, and then burped with a loud, sibilant breath toward the girl’s face. You want fries with that? She frowned and looked away.

You’ve got a mean streak, Christopher. Maybe I’ll be a firefighter like my old man, I said. I just don’t frigging know. That’s why I said, ‘Damn,’ back then.

Chris paused, seeming to take in a big thought and slow-roast it in his mind. You missed class because you marched, didn’t you?

Yeah.

Chris looked at me silently. A recent veteran himself, he understood my usual apathy toward political causes. Power systems were implacable. Justice was intermittent. Volunteering for center stage seemed foolhardy. Why? he finally said, as though checking an awkward phrase in a poem.

This girl I know was marching.

"Ahh. He nodded. The missing puzzle piece. Where is she?"

She went to the rally in the Park Blocks.

Why aren’t you there?

I shrugged, not really sure myself. Students were protesting the war, and also the killings at Kent State. Good causes. But those at Kent State had been protesting the Vietnam War too. The war was dangerous. Protesting it was dangerous too. I never understood the point of either one, considering the risk. But it was clear to me that people in positions of power did not have my best interests in mind when they made their decisions. The gathering in the Park Blocks didn’t feel much different. Angry guys with megaphones, I answered.

More than one?

Yeah, actually. I got my wine and paid for it.

What exactly do they want?

One guy wants a war-free world. The other guy wants everybody to go home.

Who were they?

I don’t know. The anti-war guy was Frank Giese, my old French teacher. Another guy was Dean Wolfe I think. Or maybe someone with the police. Authorities all look alike to me. But there were cop cars all around.

Think something’ll happen?

Maybe. Someone with a flat-bed truck just blocked Park Avenue so the police couldn’t close off the street between Smith Center and the Park Blocks. There’s a guy on the flat-bed with another megaphone.

Megaphone wars, said a thin, pasty guy named James, another wannabe poet with the seemingly requisite scraggly beard. A sure road to peace, he added, frowning.

Damn. My bus stop’s on the other side of that, Christopher said.

We got time. Nobody’s organized. Everybody’s just milling around, looking righteously indignant. I told him.

About what?

The usual stuff. Vietnam. Kent State. Being ugly and not having a date.

You’re ugly, and you don’t have a date. Why aren’t you there?

I told you. Too much negative energy. Reminded me of the Navy.

Really? I had a fine time in the Navy.

You were sailing around in Europe. Nobody was shooting at you.

Nobody was shooting at you either.

He was right. Nobody shot at me. I was never in any danger. But I didn’t know that at the time. I was the last guy on the information chain; I didn’t know anything.

In January, 1969, I had become a signalman then, not by choice. I was trained and working as a quartermaster navigator. But one day the Operations chief asked at morning muster if any of us knew Morse Code. Still green with newbie naiveté, I raised my hand and told him I’d learned some in the Boy Scouts, but I was pretty rusty. He answered, Congratulations, you’re our new signalman.

My new duties included signaling other ships with the giant searchlight all Navy ships carry, with a spring-loaded lever you push down and which followed your hand upwards and shut off when you released it. After a bit of practice, I’d gotten good enough at operating it that the chief complimented me, saying, The rest of the Navy doesn’t think you’re a retard now. Then he promptly assigned me to a Mike boat, a landing craft with a treaded ramp at the bow end. I was told each Mike boat needed a crew of two: a cox’n, who piloted the craft, and a signalman with a hand-held signal light. I was the signalman in Mike Boat Six as the 26th Marine Division landed on Batangan Peninsula, sixty miles south of Danang, Vietnam on 13 January, 1969 at the onset of Operation Bold Mariner. Batangan Peninsula was part of Quang Ngai Province, a volatile area full of Viet Cong. Heavy resistance was expected.

I was lucky, I said. The only time I was ever on the front line, there was nobody there."

So you didn’t get to kill anybody. Chris’s friend Susan, chided me, as though I’d been a child playing Cowboys and Indians.

I looked right at her. I knew she was baiting me, but I also knew she didn’t know anything about the actual war. But then, neither did I. I really don’t know, I replied.

It was possible I had.

A couple of days before the beginning of Operation Bold Mariner, the Seminole was moored in Danang Harbor loading 500 marines and their gear. I was on watch, along with an ensign I don’t remember. From the quarterdeck, I watched the hillside north of the Harbor explode into the swath of fire and billowing black smoke from a napalm drop. I remember thinking surely people had died right then. I thought of the cargo we had just unloaded: white phosphorous, one of the main ingredients of napalm. I thought of the tin-and-cardboard shanty-town that hugged the harbor’s edge, and how the people there must hate us. We all had to be on guard.

I noticed a log in the center of a seaweed tangle was floating not far from the ship. I kept my eye on it every few minutes, as we had been told about enemy swimmers using such debris as camouflage to approach U.S. ships and place explosives on their hulls. The log seemed to be getting closer, even though the tide was changing. I talked it over with the ensign, and we agreed to grenade the log, which was only about twenty feet from the ship. The ensign gave me the grenade and told me to throw it. Grenades are heavy; my toss didn’t fly as far as I had intended. It dropped between the log and the ship’s hull, about midship. The explosion reverberated against the side of the ship with such force that two enginemen below decks sustained micro-concussions, and reported to sick bay. The ensign said it had been my idea, and that I’d thrown the grenade. I received an X.O.’s mast and a reprimand.

I never knew if there was a swimmer on the other side of the log. There was no blood in the water. Only a lot of bubbles. But an old, grizzled deck chief told me if the grenade fragments had punctured a swimmer’s chest, all the air would leak out of him and he’d immediately sink. I don’t know if I killed someone that day. But I hated the possibility that I had. I hated the war then, for people having to think in ways that created such possibilities. And I hated the nickname Sparky which I endured the rest of my time on the Seminole.

You kill any babies? James asked, leaning over the candle on the table.

I immediately disliked him. Hard to tell, I said. Their parents usually throw themselves over them, so when you shoot them all, you can’t see their little faces.

That’s really sick, Susan said.

I was joking.

It wasn’t funny. James scowled, tight-lipped.

That’s exactly my point, I said, and finished my drink. I raised my hand; I needed another. Anyway, my job didn’t expose me to any of that.

What was your job then? I knew Susan was baiting me again.

I was a quartermaster. And for a short time, I was also a signalman.

What do they do?

They signal other ships when the radio can’t be used, I said. Or can, but shouldn’t, I added. A lucid memory flooded my mind then.

I remember the captain coming onto the signal deck late at night. I was on duty, and thankfully, standing by the signal light on the gunwale instead of sleeping.

Nice night, he said, just like we weren’t a couple of miles off-shore of the most unsubdued province in Vietnam. How’s it going, Sparky?

Fine, Sir.

Full moon, he said. He lit up a cigarette, shielding the lighter flame.

Yes Sir.

"You seen the sampans?

Yes Sir. They’re cool. I’d love to sail on one.

You know they’d kill you, don’t you?

Well, not one of those. Maybe the ones in Hong Kong. It’d be a cool adventure.

The Captain was silent a moment,