returning to Dunetown had dredged up from the past.
“Jesus, man, these people really fucked you over!” was his response.
“I?ve never quite admitted that to myself,” I said. “I look at Raines, I think, that could have been me. I
look at Donleavy, I think, if Teddy were still alive, that could be me. Every time I turn around the past
kicks me in the ass.”
“You?re one of the ones that can?t stay disconnected,” he said seriously. “It?s not your nature. But
you?ve been at it so long you can?t break training, you?re afraid to take a chance. Like in Nam, when
you?re afraid to get too close to the guy next to you because you know he may not be around an hour
later. It?s an easy way to avoid the guilt that comes later, being disconnected is.”
“Is that all it is, Stick? Guilt?”
“Like I told you the other day, it?s guilt that gets you in the end. Shit, you?re overloading your circuits
with it. You got guilt over the girl, you got guilt because you want to pin something on her husband,
guilt because you?re losing your sense of objectivity, guilt because of her brother. What is it about
Teddy? You keep circling that issue. You talk about him all the time, but you never pin it down.”
I finally told him the story. It was easy to talk to him; he?d been there, he knew about the madness, he
understood the way of things.
There were days when time dulled the sharp image of that night, but they were rare. A lot of images
were still with me, but that one was the most vivid of all. It was a three-dimensional nightmare, as
persistent as my memories of Doe had been. The truth of it was that Teddy Findley didn?t die in
combat or anywhere near it. He might have. There you have it again, what might have been. Teddy
and I didn?t have a very rough time in Nam until a few weeks before we were scheduled to come back
to the World. Until „Tet, when the whole country blew up under us. Hundreds of guerrilla raids at
once. Pure madness They pulled us out into Indian country and for the next six weeks we found out
what Nam was all about, We got out of it as whole as you can get out of it and finally got back to
Saigon. Teddy was a little screwy. He scored a couple of dozen Thai sticks and stayed stoned for days
on end. He started talking about the black hats and the white hats.
“I got this war all figured out, Junior,” he said one night. “What it is, see, we?ve always been the
white hats before. We?re supposed to be the good guys. But over here, nobody?s figured out what we
are yet. Are we the white hats or the black hats?” He said it the way the good witch in The Wizard of
Oz said, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”
There was this compound in Saigon run by the military. They called it Dodge City because the man in
charge was a major named Dillon. It looked like Dodge City, a hell-raisers? paradise, a place to blow
off steam; a couple of blocks of whorehouses and bars controlled by the military for our protection.
