I walked the gloomy backstreets of Ebisu after Tatsu departed, heading toward the Imperial Hotel in Hibiya, where I would stay until this thing was over. For near-suicidal audacity, what I was about to do would rank with any of the missions I had undertaken during my days with SOG, or with those of the mercenary conflicts that came after. I wondered if Tatsu’s bow was some kind of epitaph.
After our rampage in Cambodia, things started going bad for my unit. Up until then the killing had been pretty impersonal. You get into a firefight, you’re just aiming at tracer rounds, you can’t even see the people who are firing back at you. Maybe later you’ll find blood or brains, maybe some bodies. Or we’d hear one of the claymore booby traps we’d laid go off a klik or two away, and know we’d nailed someone. But the thing we did at Cu Lai was different. It affected us.
I knew what we had done was wrong, but I rationalized by saying hey, we’re at war; wrong things happen in wars. Some of the other guys got morose, guilt making them gun-shy. Crazy Jake — Jimmy — went the opposite way. He locked himself even tighter into the war’s embrace.
Crazy Jake was fanatically loyal to his Yards — short for Montagnards — and they responded to that. When a Yard was lost in a firefight, Jake would deliver the bad news personally to the village chief. He eschewed army barracks, preferring to sleep in the Yard quarters. He learned their language and their customs, participated in their ceremonies and rituals. Plus, the Yards believed in magic — the villages had their own sorcerers — and a man with Jake’s killing record walked with a powerful aura.
All this made the brass uncomfortable, because they didn’t command the Yards’ respect. The problem got worse when we were assigned to beef up the fortified hamlets at Bu Dop, on the Cambodian border, because it exposed Crazy Jake to more of the indigenous population.
Frustrated with the rules of engagement set by the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, and with MACV’s inability to root out the mole who was compromising SOG’s operations, Jake started using Bu Dop as a staging ground for independent missions against the Vietcong in Cambodia. The Yards hated the Vietnamese because the Vietnamese had been shitting on them throughout history, and they were happy to follow Crazy Jake on his lethal forays. But SOG was being disbanded, and Vietnamization — that is, turning the war over to the Vietnamese so that America could back out — was the order of the day. MACV told him to shut off the Cambodian ops, but Jake refused — said it was just part of defending his hamlets.
So MACV recalled him to Saigon. Jake ignored them. A detachment was sent in to retrieve him, and never returned. This was even more spooky than if they had been slaughtered, their severed heads run up on pikes. Did they turn and join Crazy Jake? Did he have that much magic? Did he just disappear them into thin air?
So they cut off his supplies. No more weapons, no more materiel. But Jake wouldn’t cease and desist. MACV figured out that he was selling poppy to finance his operation. Jake had become his own universe. He had a self- sustaining, highly effective, fanatically loyal private army.
MACV knew about Jimmy and me; they had the personnel files. They brought me in one day. “You’re going to have to go in there and get him,” they told me. “He’s selling drugs now, he’s going unauthorized into Cambodia, he’s out of control. This is a public-relations fiasco if it gets out.”
“I don’t think I can get him out. He’s not listening to anyone,” I said.
“We didn’t say, ‘get him out.’ We just said, ‘get him,’ ” they told me.
There were three of them. Two MACV, one CIA. I was shaking my head. The guy from the agency spoke up.
“Do what we’re asking, and you’ve got a ticket home.”
“I’ll get home when I get home,” I said, but I wondered.
He shrugged. “We’ve got two choices here. One is, we carpet-bomb every hamlet in Bu Dop. That’s about a thousand friendlies, plus Calhoun. We’ll just emulsify everyone. It’s not a problem.
“Two is, you do what’s right and save all those people, and you’re on a plane the next day. Personally, I don’t give a shit.” He turned and walked out.
I told them I would do it. They were going to grease him anyway. Even if they didn’t, I saw what he had become. I had seen it happen to a lot of guys, although Jimmy was the worst. They went over there, and found out that killing was what they were best at. Do you tell people? Do you put on your resume, “Ninety confirmed kills. Large collection of human ears. Ran private army”? C’mon, you’re never going to fit in the real world again. You’re marked forever, you can’t go back.
I went in, told the Yards that I wanted to see Crazy Jake. I was known from the missions we had run together, so they took me to him. I didn’t have a weapon; it was okay.
“Hey, Jimmy,” I said when I saw him. “Long time no see.”
“John John,” he greeted me. He had always called me that. “You come in here to join me? It’s about time. We’re the only outfit in this fucking war that the V.C. is actually afraid of. We don’t have to fight with one arm tied behind our balls by a bunch of no-load politicians.”
We spent some time catching up. By the time I told him they were going to bomb him it was already night.
“I figured they would, sooner or later,” he said. “I can’t fight that. Yeah, I figured this was coming.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Don’t know. But I can’t make the Yards my hostages. Even if I could, fuckers’d bomb them anyway.”
“Why don’t you just walk out?”
He gave me a sly look. “I don’t fancy going to jail, John John. Not after leading the good life here in the Central Highlands.”
“Well, you’re in a tight spot. I don’t know what to tell you.”
He nodded his head, then said, “You supposed to kill me, man?”
