Thai Horse

little short-sticker and I took his stick and I rammed it where the sun don’t shine and then I broke it off and I whipped the shit out of him with the rest of it. I whipped that sorry bastard till he looked like a bowl of ravioli. I was gonna shoot his ass off, but I didn’t. I just whacked him. Then I called the provost marshal and they put me under house arrest and that’s the whole story.’

‘That’s all you have to say?’ the colonel asked.

‘What else is there?’ Riker answered_

‘You have no remorse?’ the colonel said with surprise.

‘Remorse?’ Riker said after a moment’s thought. ‘Yeah, I got remorse. I think now I should have killed that worthless shit. God knows how many body bags he filled.’

The colonel looked up at him for the first time. He looked angry. ‘I’m recommending that you be arraigned for criminal assault,’ he said. ‘You’ll be assigned an attorney. You’ll also be returned to Saigon for incarceration.’

‘So what else is new,’ Riker said with a shrug.

The colonel flipped the file folder shut and meticulously arranged things in his case and stood up and brushed some lint off his sharply creased trousers.

‘You have a bad attitude problem,’ the colonel snapped.

‘No, Colonel, what I got is a bad maintenance officer.’

The colonel stalked out of the barracks.

Riker watched him priss across the yard and get in his jeep and drive off. He stood there and he thought, What the hell, this is a waste. The hottest slick pilot in Nam and I’m playing solitaire in a fuckin’ Quonset hut and kids are out there dyin’. So he walked out and grabbed a chopper that was warming up and went back to work.

Gallagher sat next, the man who walked with this funny hitch like limping with both legs, as if his feet hurt all the time. That was because they did. A land mine had driven the floor of his jeep up to his armpits. And beside him was Johnny Prophett, who had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but he stayed in Nam too long. Burned out at twenty-five, he had turned to heroin to ease the pain of losing his golden touch.

Prophett was sitting beside the road, scratching out some notes on a legal pad he kept stuffed in his canvas shoulder bag. His back hurt and his throat was choked with dust. It hadn’t rained for days, and the roads were brick-hard and beginning to crack into jagged seams. He had lost the war two days before, twenty or so miles away, awakening in the morning after a night of white-powder hallucinations to find the outfit he had tied up with gone. Nothing left behind but the usual:

empty cans and shell casings; asked remnants of fires; tattered socks and tank tops too worn out to bother with. It was always the same when they moved out, like a gypsy carnival that had packed up in the night and moved to another town.

He had run out of horse and was already beginning to feel the agonies of withdrawal. The stomach pains, the itching, the headache, the dry mouth. His hand was shaking so badly he could hardly write. Besides, it all sounded the same. He hardly heard the jeep until it was almost on top of him, and he jumped, startled, and then scrambled to his feel and stuck out his thumb. It reminded him of the day he had hitchhiked to Woodstock, or tried to. By the time he got there the music was a memory.

The dust-coated jeep whizzed by, then skidded to a stop, throwing out pounds of dirt and dust.

‘You oughta be careful,’ Gallagher said, a Cincinnati-flat accent, ‘I almost creamed ya.’

Prophet limped over to the shotgun seat. ‘How about a ride?’

‘Sure, hop in,’ said Gallagher, grinding the gears into low. ‘Where you headed?’

‘I lost track of the war,’ said Prophett, rubbing his arms.

‘Shit, you’re goin’ in the wrong direction. Action’s back there,’ Gallagher said, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder.

‘Where you headed?’

‘Thought I’d jog cross-country to Camranh,’ Gallagher said.

‘What’s your gig?’ asked Prophett.