Served Hot

From “Endgame: The Genocide in South Kingston and BigJohn Moreland” by Greg Munchi.


Part I
Steven

Keep in mind: this is my story and mine alone. From people I’ve talked to, other Hats, other guys that did what I did, my job was not the norm. Everybody was working an angle over there and everybody saw different shit, this just happens to be my shit.

So where was I? Ok, my, our special forces mission work-up was done in Washington and basically communicated directly to the field through a network of recon marines and other special forces guys. So all of us were assigned our own grid. Set of coordinates, mission objectives, friendly presence, enemy activity. They gave me a file on my little corner of Viet Nam, and now I’m expected to build that thing up. More names, more intel, where’s Charlie? So they take you in there, sometimes with a helicopter but usually I just slipped across the wire and started humpin’. I got a compass, a sidearm, a knife, some water…Not much else.

That’s some kind of feeling there. In the dark jungle, like 50 million miles away from your bed, and there’s all sorts of unseemly Viet Nam shit goin’ on around you while you’re trying to get to that spot in the jungle that they want you to work. There’s bugs. There’s snakes. There’s fuckin’ little kids with AK’s, VC patrol, villages, rice paddies. It’s fucking hot and fucking scary. I think what most people don’t realize is that the engagements in Southeast Asia were not these big, set piece battles with generals in OP’s calling the shots that you see in Nam movies. I served two full tours in Viet Nam and worked back and forth between here and there for many years. You know how many live VC I actually saw? Two. That’s more than most. The people living there - the gooks - they know the very earth there, they know the water, they way light plays off the landscape and the weird shadows. Viet Nam was like fighting a guy in his own house, with all the lights off.

Anyways… Typical was to stay out there until you either got shot yourself, or killed somebody important enough to come in and rest for a while. Sometimes, rarely, command could advance my orders through a runner. Usually they used a young girl-gook named Co, or one of her ten million gook sisters, aunts, cousins, whoever. This one family, all of ’em women and girls, ‘far as I could see, sold cold cokes and ice from the coast to damn-near the mountain-tops. They were everywhere. Trusted and trustworthy, and I always worried when directives came from elsewhere. This particular instance, the orders came from elsewhere. A gentleman by the name of Tuk Dan.

Now, I should backtrack a bit. Intel on the battlefield on Southeast Asia was a complete shit show. It’s one of the reasons why we never got our mission objectives together to win anything there. Getting viable, accurate intelligence was all but impossible for both the CIA and Military’s Intel boys. The war was too local. Family loyalties, and village political concerns melded with the Viet Namese blanket-mistrust of Americans, created massive swells of disinformation and lies. I was introduced to the first coca-cola girl by my handler, that was within my first month of operation in-country. After that, all subsequent runners were introduced to me by the previous runner. Usually time was too short for any sort of vetting or background check. You look into a person’s eyes, and you bank on the fact that, if they are selling you out, you can take care of the problem before the problem takes care of you.

When Tuk Dan was introduced to me, I found that type of reassurance difficult. Firstly he was, by far, the biggest Gook I ever laid eyes on. Dan was 6’3” easy. 220 pounds and he was not fat. I saw the way his people looked at him and the vibe made me nervous. Children cleared tidy paths for him wherever he walked, and in Nam that’s miraculous, like Jesus walking out to the fishing boats. Little brats don’t clear unless you shoot one in the head. Adults too, just giving this motherfucker a wide birth. It’s like they were worried he’d explode, ‘way they scattered.

It was another fact of life over there that you could count on only half the truth of any situation. The rest you’d have to sort of draw out from the bullshit. There were guys, and I was one of ’em, who had spent a lot of time learning the language and trying to groove some of the more common vernaculars. The natives though: They’re motherfuckers. I mean they’d start talking and sort of loop you in with some English thrown in, but after a while they’d just drift deeper and deeper into slang and oral tradition that their fuckin’ nip grandparents taught ‘em when they were five years old, and probably working in the same rancid jungle against the French. That shit was like trying to decipher fucking whale song. No chance. No way.

So, without the benefit of a wire to crawl back to, with American food, beer, and nurses. Without air support of any kind and without a rifle, survival sort of reduced itself over time, to articles of faith. Dude looked in my eyes most of the time I spoke with him. Dude gave me info that proved out. Dude got some VC dead with his words. It’s faith. And that’s why shit over there went so sideways. The guys pulling the strings at the pentagon looked at Nam and saw sweet fuck all. It was a mud pit. An open sewer with a population of low-functioning illiterates. For them, the central disconnect was this: we sent a lot of shit, and we keep sending shit, so we expect good reports and we expect big body counts. If your sector wasn’t producing on those fronts, well, you aint getting yer special Nam combat button. You aint getting battlefield-promoted. Your going home just like you left, and that was a cross too heavy. Viet Nam’s perceived weakness as a country, as a people, were just that: a perception. Looking in plain sight for the truth of any situation is a mistake, because the truth is in the context, and context in Viet Nam was systematically denied us by the “dumb” gomers in those filthy hamlets. They called the shots.

So they fuckin’ ran me, and fucked with my orders. They used this fuckin’ scary gook Dan, and by the time I realized it, two Huey gunships were burning in the jungle.

Looking at it now, I didn’t make it hard. My handlers back in Washington were so far out of the game by 1972 because by then, Viet Nam was all fire, and those who stuck around were getting burned. Soldiers were getting slaughtered and morale was burrowing. All the hawks who’d spent the 60’s burning through government contracts suddenly realized the party was over. They fired most of the people at state, and the rest fell on their swords. Plausible deniability became party line at foggy bottom, so people just turned their phones off and tried to act natural. And Charlie was emboldened.

I didn’t even question it. Dan was running me at night, two and three nights a week in these concentric circles. He’s telling me there’s a Cong tunnel network that’s going to open a supply line for the Russians. Supposed to pipe oil and water to the sympathizers in-country. It’s a “bonanza” he says. I didn’t even pick it up then. What kinda’ Nip says the word “bonanza“?

Every other night he’d bring me a new manilla envelope. Coordinates clicked out on aerial-view sat pictures with topography marked and noted. He’s saying: ok, their original plans called for this, but so and so said this, and then this other guy said this, so now yer gonna’ go here. And really, he was just paying me out, higher and higher into the mountains towards the border. I’m one of three observers collecting in this section of town and the guy’s a fuckin’ gook. he rides a fuckin’ gook buffallo to his gook market every weekend. I find out he’s fuckin’ me, Im gonna’ shoot his thighs full of holes and just watch him bleed out. He knows this. And he fears it. Right?

OK John Wayne. Hit the jungle for three days. Now there’s gooks running under American helicopters. Fucking with ops in my valley. Checking on the routes I’m supposed to hold secure. Instead I’m up in the fuckin’ clouds. I'm wearing snow gear and trying to stay focused when the temps at night are freezing like shit. They had a week. They had thirty or forty dudes in there, taking coordinates and rapping in gook about things they now knew for damn sure.

I didn’t know they fucked me. I’d just come in from one of those fucked up goose chases in the mountains and I make the vill. Fuckin’ Dan is waiting. He says there are choppers in the woods nearby. He says Americans on the radio are talking about dead pilots, and live ones maimed and trapped in Indian country. Before he lapses into the deep gypsy-gook speak he tells me that Col. Craig wants a word. I haven’t slept in 3 days. Just come in from being alone in the canopy for three days. Now, in a days time I’m in Saigon, shave and hair-cut, standing tall before the man. But before that, Dan’s sending me to bear witness. Americans on risking more flights through the zone till they have eyes on the ground. So before Tusk thumbs them out of my skull, I’m ordered take my eyes out to the deep rubber, and take a look at the rent tissue resultant from my fucking six week mistake. I had another idea. Later that afternoon, a coke-girl brought me to a field radio stashed in her ice-bags. My brother Scott, working as military council to State and the CIA, not full of compliments.

The thing that turned it was this: The choppers were down in my part of the jungle, parts of which I was supposed to have been securing over the course of my deployment there. Since I hadn’t, and since nobody knew that, I decided my time would be better spent in other, more pressing matters. I told Scotty some other bullshit, and started making preparations for a long night. I had weapons stashed in a foxhole 200 yards beyond the wire so I grabbed them. Also, and I’d forgotten I had this: There was about 20or so bars of C-4. Too much to carry with me out in the rubber, but I saw some good use for it closer to home. I laid up in the pit until after midnight, then I popped up, making back for he village with a two .45 caliber automatics tucked in belt-holsters. The C-4 I’d stuffed into a combat pack, making it fucking inconvenient to hump through the woods with. I knew the boom would be big though, and that night I was lookin’ to set an example.

There was moon, but not much. eye black and dark green fatigues provided near-invisibility in light-starved canopy jungle. I low crawled to about 20 yards, and listened. Ears: Probably the most important thing in the jungle if you were looking to stay alive: Ears. The guys that were good, were the guys that could dig in, stay still, and just hear shit. Listen for a minute, and it just floods in on you. Listen for five minutes, it just get’s worse. You can hear gunfire from other parts of the valley, rats moving through wetlands behind you, a gook family walking up the road to your right trying to make it back to their vill without loosing appendages or a kid, all of it at once. Sit and listen for an hour, two hours, a whole night. The rats aren’t rats, they’re snakes, moving in and out of a den close enough to be a problem. The family isn ‘t coming back to the vill, they’re leaving, going to jump into a tunnel six clicks north. Looking to kill Americans. It reveals itself like everything worthwhile: Slowly, organically, not according to your schedule.

I waited that night until 3:45 am. I once read - a long time ago, before I was a soldier - that 3:45 was the time to move if you needed to sneak up on somebody who might be expecting you. Something about the body’s natural default bio-rhthyms and circadian timing. I’ve tested the theory a number of times and I’ll vouch for it. Even the most vigilant watcher is numb by 3:45. It’s the last possible hour to make a move because at 4:30, in most places, the sky brightens. Even in Southeast Asia. My field Timex read 3:40when I began to the low slog towards the the job at hand.

***

Time was short, once inside the vill I went straight to work. I dug a shallow pit in their cook-fire. Hamlets are small, like campsites really, surrounded by crops and sometimes wetlands or paddies. This one was like all the others. Seven low hoochs surrounding a fire area. Weapons, plans, manuals were never stored inside the vill, but there were always one or two under beds, stashed in blankets to mount a defense while women and children broke for the woods. My purpose that night wasn’t to engage, so I didn’t waste the time to disarm, instead I went right to Dan’s hooch. From there it took about three minutes. I shot him full of morphine from my field pack as he slept, then dragged him out into the cook-fire area. By the time I heard the boom and felt the heat from the C-4, I was heading to the crash sites to rubber stamp the deaths. I didn’t know it at the time but I was also heading for capture and imprisonment, and the most important months of my life…

Part II
Scotty

It was about six minutes before he realized the strident ringing wasn’t in his head, but rather in his room. He shrugged the tiny hooker off his crotch with a sticky “thhhhhp” and started zombie-ing around the room, sweating and kicking at the laundry. A female voice, irritated, from the floor near the bed:

Owww…Majah lookour! Lookour!

Shut the fuck up.

He kicked at the sound of the complaint and on of the hookers, the big one, shut the fuck up. He found the phone then, down by her ass wrapped up in some sketchy Vietnamese undergarment. There was a voice yelling on the other end and he heard it come into audio-focus as the phone came to his ear. It was Brant. Fucking Brant waking him up. He said:

What Brant?

The voice coming back was not fucking Brant. He didn’t know who it was, but he knew it was brass before it told him. Only brass calls at 3am and without apologizing or sounding tired.

Xeno!! Major you get your ass to where I am or, so help me, I’ll have you wiping asses in a mash unit until this fucking war is fucking OVER!

Col. Craig, I wasn’t…

Save it you dirty fucker. Your boy’s slipped the leash again and you better get him back. I’ve got four tons of American steel burning at to separate sights in the greenery that you were supposed to cover. You will get here and get this situation un-fucked before those two nip-whores you’re with are back on the streets. They’ve got a work ethic, those girls do, so you’d better move your ass. If Craig hears about this there’ll be shit-steaks, well done, for everyone involved. I am giving you minutes.

Yes sir, Col. Sir. I’m on my way. Sir.

Why are you still…

(Click)

He fell back on the smelly laundry and listened to the Vietnamese birds start the daily dawn-caucus.

Fucking motherfucker Steven…

…He thought, mustering at least a modicum of hatred for the greenie he was supposedly “handling”.

Black sheep of every family that would claim him. The whores were stirring, dreaming of American money. One said:

Goddamn Mayjah Xeno!! yaw-pahht-min stinky!

He threw on the shirt he was holding, buttoned his BDUs, and left without paying. The whores cursed him in Japanese until weeks later, when they found out what happened to him in the jungle.

Part III
Ning

My people have been at war for 400 years. I think I will ask you, dear reader, to go back a bit, and read that sentence a few times. Ask yourself if yo know what that means. Have you ever seen war? Have you ever lived with your children in a war zone, where bullets are as common as rain and death is constant? My sincere hope, is that you answer all my questions with a grateful “No”

I woke on Sept 6th 1972 expecting, despite all probability to the contrary, to have a normal day. I planeed to drain and harvest two sections of rice-paddy until the mid-day sun became unbearable. I would spend the afternoon reading and writing in the shade of my house, and before night fell I would make rice and onions for my village to eat. An uncomplicated plan for - what I hoped - was an uncomplicated day.

Instead, I walked out of my house into a newer, more fierce, reality than the one I‘d bedded down in. The first thing I saw was Tuk Dan Mok, splayed and murdered, as he was, in the village cook fire pit. He was on his back in the center of the pit not twenty feet from my door. I ran to him, but recoiled at what I found.

Dan San wasn’t dead, not yet, but I wished he was. The American devil, the “Hat”, who came and went from the village at his pleasure, had staked Dan’s arms and legs into the ground with bamboo. He’d driven three stakes into each leg, one above each knee and two each in his upper leg. He’d put smaller stakes - two each - through each of his hands. He’d put a stake through Duk San’s neck. Through the part that wouldn’t kill him, but just hold him down. I was horrified, because the scene was so terrible yes, but even more so because of what I saw had been done to his body. He’d been cut open from the top of his chest to the bottom of his belly and the skin had been layed open. I saw a small fire, blue and probably started with gasoline, burning in his guts. It wasn’t a windy day and the sun wasn’t up. Everybody in the village was soon gathered around our fallen comrade, watching him burn and die, eyes wide, face turgid with agony. He was trying to cry out, to speak with his dying breath. To tell us who’d done this to him. Yet he could not speak. He couldn’t make any sound besides a low, mewling moan taken fast by a swirling morning breeze. His tongue, red and swollen in the heat, had been ripped from his throat, and thrown on the gas-fire searing though his belly.

I saw a woman, an elder, begin to speak and wave her arms, moving toward Dan San. Then I saw nothing. Then I woke in an American hospital wrapped in cloth and tended by nurses. They smiled at me. I thought I’d died then. That I’d been a victim of some terrible violent act, and that these dreams: Tuk Dan, the nurses, all part of some death-throw fever-dream. A last story for me to ponder as I left this earth. I was comforted by that, and I settled in to see how the story might end.


***

Scott Xeno watched the jungle burn and wondered where his brother was. The brass had issued no directive to destroy the vil, but Steven had practically sung a song about the fact that he was going to do so. Scott had thought - at the time - that perhaps that had been another bluff. Looking at the burning hole where the village had been, he was thinking: "I should have known".

I’ll be at the sites by morning sir.

Stevie’d claimed, in the smart-ass tone he always reserved for the rare occasion Scott pulled rank.

The sites are three clicks out Steven. Be there at night. We just need to hear your voice.

And hear it you will…Sir…

Scotty could feel his brother staring into him through the field radio

….In the morning.

And that’s about what he’d expected. The debris and smoke were right on time because Steve would have struck at 4:30 and been on his way to be at the first sight by 5:30. It was 5:27 now, so Scotty was poised at the radio in his tent, waiting for the second sign that his asshole brother was still alive and killing motherfuckers for the US Army.
They heard the explosion at the wire 20 clicks away, and running our of his tent to get a look, he already knew who was responsible and what had happened. A specialist came running up:

It's your brothers post sir. There's nothing left.

He'd left the wire then - armour, explosives, and a fire-team of himself and two others -to find his brother and arrest him before the gooks could.