At The Edge of The War. Part Two

by Randy Chandler

Trench enjoyed the drive through the city of Qui Nhon. Many of the buildings were of French Colonial architecture, painted in tropical green, pink, or blue, and the streets were crowded with civilians on bikes or scooters. American music blared from bars catering to off-duty GIs. The whole scene reminded Trench of spring break in Panama City Beach, Florida, except that there were no babes in bikinis. The babes in Qui Nhon were local prostitutes dressed in mini-skirts and French underwear.

Trench swerved to avoid hitting a cyclo driver, then pulled up in front of the White Mice jailhouse. GIs referred to Vietnamese military policemen as “White Mice” because most of them looked so small and rodent-like in their big white QC helmets. The mouse moniker was just one more sign of the average American soldier's lack of respect for Marvin the ARVN—the typical soldier of the Army of the Republic of` Vietnam.

The mouse in charge handed over the prisoner, a buck sergeant who worked in the motor pool of a transportation outfit. Trench cuffed him and put him in the back seat. The sarge was sober enough to be ashamed that White Mice had busted him, and he sat quietly.

Traffic slowed to a crawl. A civilian truck had hit a scooter, and the scooter's rider was dead on the pavement. Trench stared at the dead boy's broken head. He could see a section of the poor kid's brain. Traffic came to a dead stop. Trench looked away, at an approaching shoeshine boy and immediately tensed. Every GI in 'Nam had been warned of the shoeshine boy who would pull a grenade form his box, pull the pin and ruin your day. Unlike the urban myth of the boom-boom girl with razor blades hidden in her vagina, the shoebox assassin was entirely believable.

The shine boy was coming straight at their Jeep. Trench drew the .45 from his holster. He aimed it at the shine boy.

"What the hell are you doing, Trench?" Lt. Caputo demanded.

"Waste the little fucker," said the detainee sergeant.

The kid was coming abreast of their vehicle. Trench saw that there was something wrong with his face. It was scarred like Razor Face Charlie's.

"Di di mau!" Trench shouted and jabbed the air with his pistol.

The shine boy froze. Trench saw that the kid's face was covered with burn scars, not razor marks.

"Holster your weapon, soldier," Caputo ordered.

The shine boy disappeared into the crowd of gawkers. Trench holstered his .45. "I thought he was gonna frag us, sir," he explained.

"Christ," said the L-T. "Now I know why you're a clerk."

After chow that evening, some of the men gathered in the center of the compound for the outdoor movie. Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily? was showing for the third time that month. Trench passed on the flick and found Prospero in the club with his sketchbook and a small pyramid of empty beer cans.

"I'll give you twenty bucks to draw something for me," Trench told him.

"Draw what?" asked Prospero.

"Me. I want you to turn me into a super-duper commando. Like a comic-book hero. Like somebody who could find Razor Face Charlie and waste his gook ass."

Prospero nodded. He didn't laugh; that was good. "Twenty-five and I'll do it."

Trench gave him the money and a photo of himself in Class-A uniform. Prospero said, "I don't need that. Sit down and I'll do it right now."

An hour later, Trench had his talismanic drawing. He thought he made a hell of a ferocious commando, at least on paper. He stared at the drawing and grinned. Relief washed over him like a soothing balm.

Razor Face Charlie could kiss his Yankee-doodle ass.

* * *

The mojo worked like the charm it was. Charlie no longer infiltrated his dreams.

In October, Trench went on R&R to Taipei, escaping a week of dreary monsoon rain. He engaged the services of a Taiwanese prostitute from the Top Hat Club. He signed a contract, and the government-inspected hooker was his for the week. He returned to his unit, feeling like a changed man. He kept Prospero's drawing tacked to the wall by his bunk.

One night in December, after downing a few beers, he ran into the CO and told him he wanted to volunteer for duty as door gunner on a chopper. The CO, in his wisdom, said, "No." When Trench sobered up, he thought that his mojo might be making him a little overconfident.

Then he discovered a wart on his penis. Afraid that Miss Top Hat had given him a souvenir of his week of debauchery in Taipei, he went to see a medic, who examined him and told him not to worry, that a lot of guys were turning up with those things. "Probably something in the water that causes it," the medic said. "A gook virus."

Trench went away singing, "Got my mojo working, baby."

* * *

On January 31, 1968, Trench's mojo was put to the ultimate test. All over South Vietnam, NVA regulars and Viet Cong guerillas mounted what would come to be known as the Tet Offensive. Trench was jolted from his bunk by a series of explosions. A siren sounded Red Alert. Every swinging dick in the compound spent the rest of the night at the sandbag walls of the company area, ready to fend off an attack. Trench felt an amazing lack of fear. He had his finger on the trigger of his M-14, ready to rock'n'roll. He wanted the enemy to attack. He wanted to "get some," but the attack never came. Viet Cong sappers hit the neighboring transportation company, killing twenty GIs. A small band of Cong on Gia Long Street ambushed a deuce-and-a half full of MPs on their way home to the 66th, killing one MP and seriously wounding another. After the alert was terminated and Trench heard about the casualties, he stopped congratulating himself for outsmarting Razor Face Charlie. The war had grabbed him and slapped him in the face with its uncompromising reality. Men he'd known were dead. His mojo mind-game was over. His juvenile self-indulgence was at end.

"Fuck Razor Face Charlie," he said as he took down the cartoon of himself and stashed it in his footlocker. He didn't look at it again until he was back in the World, and even then, he couldn't stand the sight of his snarling face on the commando with comic-book muscles. It was so childish it embarrassed him. He hid it away in a box in his basement and soon forgot about it.

The wart fell off his penis during his first year back home, and Trench experienced an odd sense of loss.

* * *

Now Trench is a card-carrying member of AARP. He smokes too much and drinks too much coffee, but he feels remarkably young for a man in his mid-fifties. He spends a lot of time at his desk, making up stories or cyber-surfing the Net. He recently contacted some of the men he served with in the 66th MP Company. When one of them signed off his e-mail with, "WELCOME HOME, BROTHER," Trench felt his eyes go wet.

He was thrilled to learn what had become of some of his war brothers. The sergeant wounded in the ambush on Gia Long Street survived and was shipped home as soon as he was well enough to travel. Prospero lived up to expectations and became a well-know comic-book artist; in 1999, he illustrated a deluxe special-edition novel by a best-selling horror writer. He lives with his wife and three cats in Manhattan. He says he can still see the ghostly shadows of the missing World Trade Center Towers and he intends to capture them on his canvas.

Sparks owns a Sports Unlimited franchise in Jacksonville, Florida. A widower, he lives in a modest beach house and spends his free time wandering the shore like a well-dressed beach bum, "looking for something I think I might've lost." He invited Trench down for a visit, but Trench begged off, suspecting that old wartime attachments might be like that penile wart—once they're gone, they're gone.

Trench gave his fellow vets the short version of his life since the war. After working twenty years as a mental health technician in psych hospitals in the Atlanta area, he became a full-time bullshitter, i.e., fiction writer. He spends much of his free time watching movies on DVD, and he swears that if he ever has to watch What's Up, Tiger Lily? again, he'll eat his gun.

Prospero's ink drawing of him as the super-bad commando now hangs on the wall in front of his desk. He dug it out of a box in the basement, framed and put it on the wall during the anthrax scare following the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. His wife thinks it's an amusing artifact of the boyhood he never completely grew out of. He has never told her of that time in his life when he thought he needed its magic to keep Razor Face Charlie away. He doesn't know how to make her understand that the insanity of war can make men think and do crazy things--even if the men are only at the periphery of the war. How could he explain to her the magic of voodoo warfare? He could tell her how war rips off your mask and shows you the face of fear beneath it, but he doesn't think he could adequately explain how a cartoon drawing helped him face that fear. He's not sure he understands it himself.

Today is the first anniversary of September 11, 2001. The television networks are giving it wraparound coverage, but his wife Trish has muted the TV and is playing Bruce Springsteen's lyrical tribute to the heroes and victims of that watershed day. The Office of Homeland Security has issued a Threat Level Orange alert, fearing that the terrorists may have their own nefarious plans for marking the anniversary.

Trish comes to the door of the study with a bottle of wine in one hand and two long-stemmed glasses in the other. Trench looks up from his desk and smiles.

"If you won't come to the party," she says, "the party will come to you."

"I'll come down," he says, standing and stretching.

She comes over to study Prospero's portrait of Trench the Fearless Commando. "You know? I think that thing is starting to grow on me," she says. "It's sort of sexy, really, like those racy covers of romance novels designed to stimulate sexual fantasies."

"Really?" Trench reaches up to straighten the frame. "I suppose it does have a certain magic."

*****

(For Sergio J. Gherardini, killed in action in Qui Nhon, Vietnam, 1968)
Randy Chandler served with the 66th Military Police Company in Qui Nhon, Vietnam, 1967-1968. His novel Duet For The Devil (co-authored by t. Winter-Damon) was nominated for the 2000 Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel. His short stories have appeared in numerous small-press publications and more recently in on-line magazines such as EOTU and Horrorfind. In the Eighties and early Nineties he reviewed books for The Atlanta Journal-Constituion, and interviewed author Robert Stone for The Atlanta Journal. Chandler is marketing his first solo novel, Bad Juju, and is currently working on his next novel. He and his wife of twenty-four years live in Mableton, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. "At The Edge of the War" is his first Vietnam story. "Until recently," Chandler explains, "I'd always thought that the literature of the Vietnam war should be written by combat soldiers, but because most Americans who served there did so to support the warriors, it occurred to me the edge-of-the-war experience might spawn an interesting story or two. The literary canon of the Vietnam war is still growing."