'Come on, Donny. Chicks everywhere. It's over on C, right near the Supreme Court. This guy is a clerk. He knew my big brother at Harvard. More pussy in one place than you ever saw.'
'You should come, Donny,' said one of the boys.
Donny could tell that the hero thing had cut through politics and somehow impressed these war-haters, who just a few years back had been worshiping John Wayne.
'I'm engaged,' Donny said.
'You can look, can't you? She'll let you look, won't she?'
'I suppose,' said Donny.
'But I don't want any Ho Chi Minh shit. Ho Chi Minh tried to kill my ass. He's no hero of mine.'
'It won't be like that,' Crowe promised.
'Trig will like him,' one of the boys said.
'Trig will turn him into a peacenik,' said the other.
'So who's Trig?' said Donny.
It was a short walk and as soon as they were outside, one of the boys pulled out a joint and lit up. The thing was routinely passed around until it came to Donny, who hesitated for a moment, then took a toke, holding it, fighting the fire. He'd had quite the habit for a few months in 'Nam, but had broken it. Now, the familiar sweetness rushed into his lungs, and his head began to buzz. The world seem to come aglow with possibility. He exhaled his lungful.
Enough, he thought. I don't need more of that shit.
Capitol Hill had the sense of a small town in Iowa, under leafy trees that rustled in the night breeze. Then, through a break in the trees, he suddenly saw the Capitol, its huge white dome arc-lit and blazing in the night.
'They sacrifice virgins in there,' one of the boys said, 'to the gods of war. Every night. You can hear them scream.'
Maybe it was the grass, but Donny had to smile. They did sacrifice virgins, but not in there. They sacrificed them ten thousand miles away in buffalo shit-water rice paddies.
'Donny,' said Crowe.
'Can you call in artillery? We have to destroy the place to save it.'
Again, maybe it was the grass.
'
'Ah, Shotgun-Zulu-Three,'
' he improvised, ' I have a fire mission for you, map grid four-niner-six, six-five-four at Alpha seven-oh-two-five, we are hot with beaucoup bad guys, request Hotel Echo, fire for effect, please.''
'Cool,' one of the kids said.
'What's Hotel Echo?'
'High explosive,' said Donny.
'As opposed to frags or white phosphorous.'
'Cool as shit!' the boy responded.
Music announced the site of the party far earlier than any visual confirmation. As at the Hawk and Dove, it blasted out into the night, hard, psychedelic rock beating the dark back and the devil away. He'd heard the same stuff over there, though, that was the funny thing. The young Marines loved the rock. It went everywhere with them, and if their tough noncoms hadn't stayed on their asses, they'd have played it on ambush patrols.
'I wonder if Trig is here,' one of the boys said.
'You never can tell with Trig,' Crowe replied.
'Who's Trig?' Donny asked again.
The party didn't seem at all unlike any other party Donny had attended back at the University of Arizona, except that the hair was longer. Milling people of all sorts.
The bar scene, though crammed into smaller, hotter rooms. The smell of grass, sickly sweet, heavy in the air.
Ho and Che on the walls. In the bathroom, where Donny went to piss, even an NVA flag, though one manufactured in Schenectady, not downtown Haiphong. He had a rogue impulse to burn it, but that would sure blow the gig now.
And really: it was only a flag.
The kids were his own age, some younger, with a few middle-aged men hanging around with that intense, longhaired look that the DC crowd so liked. Judging from the hair, only he and Crowe represented the United States Marines, though Crowe was far from an ambassador. He was telling some people a familiar story of how he almost got out of the draft by playing psycho at his physical.
'I'm nude,' he was saying, 'except for this cowboy hat. I'm very polite and everybody's very polite to me at first. I do everything they ask me to do. I bend and spread, I carry my underwear in a little bag, I smile and call everybody sir. I just won't take off my cowboy hat.
'Uh, son, would you mind taking off that hat?'
