The Land Of White Elephants

The Land Of White Elephants

            I never believed in Purgatory. If I had, then the moment the tail ramp of the C-141 opened when the heat, the humidity, and the vomit-like stench of jet fuel struck every one of my senses. I would have been convinced. The Beast walked down the ramp with his duffle slung over one shoulder. The tarmac beneath him, black and viscous, shimmered like a tar sea rolling in slow motion. A man screamed in my ear to keep moving or drown. I couldn’t see. The Southeast Asian light blinded me.

And all the Man could do this trembling creature I still called “me” was cling to a borrowed line from Dante:

Unlike the frozen despair of Hell, Purgatory is warmed by the light of morning and the promise of becoming. Here, suffering is not punishment but medicine. Each soul endures a labor crafted precisely for the ailment of their vice. The proud, once elevated by ego, are pressed low by heavy stones. The envious, eyes once narrowed with bitterness, walk blind with eyelids sewn shut by iron wire. Each pain instructs. Each burden bends the soul toward grace.

I had my doubts. I carried my shame like a soldier carries his gear. Grief over the smallest things, like failing to honor Susan when she drew her line. And the biggest: burying men in a Dodge Dart. I was owed every punishment tenfold.

This place. This blinding sun, this acrid air was my Purgatory. The scars I hadn’t earned yet but dreamed of loomed in the syrupy heat, thick and unmoving beneath the sun’s gruesome gaze. Everything just a few yards away shimmered like a mirage, unreal, unreachable.

I hungered for a catalogue of wounds, each one as neatly arranged as sweets behind the patisserie’s glass, calling to be consumed. Only now, the ink would be blood. That reality was omnipresent.

Both Beast and Man hesitated. We stood there, half-breathing, unsure of the journey we had already begun. Had we wished for too much? Was being a dilettante enough to scribble out a few books, to play at truth without ever bleeding for it?

It seemed a better idea to imitate experience than to let the hard truths write the book in blood. What was an untrustworthy paragraph buried in the yellowing pages of a cheap novel to the world?

But doubt would have to wait. I was committed.

I was riding in a 60s-vintage VW Bug, weaving through Bangkok’s morning traffic with a madman at the wheel. Would I die before I ever got to put one word on paper? The possibility felt not just real, it felt probable. And that, somehow, was easier to accept than writing the truth.

“My name is Gang! Captain Gang!” he screamed above the blaring horns and invectives tossed about between scooters, cars, and every form of transportation each driver convinced in their right to go first.

“Nice to meet you. Where are we going?” He laughed as if I were playing a trick on him.

Rule one, I thought. Clarity is what you make it, and understanding is fluid, often changing with circumstances. Captain Gang drove me to the Hilton Hotel, which had been leased by the government, creating a massive compound that included the embassy. This was the largest concentration of troops and United States administration outside of Saigon. And Saigon was shrinking rapidly. We entered through the guarded gate. We showed our IDs and parked at the back of the hotel. Captain Gang was a solid, athletic man with a special forces demeanor. He wore a black beret, crisp camouflage fatigues and jungle boots. Kit I hoped to wear myself.

We hurried through a passageway and out into a garden where trailers were set up in a kind of compound oasis. All military buildings have signs designating who and what the buildings are for. These buildings said nothing about as loud as one could say nothing. Important and secret!

“You sleep here for two nights. Make adjustments. Then we go Chiang Mai, where we operate. Colonel Fisher will meet us there. Cafeteria is in hotel. Food free. If you go out wear civilian clothes and stay away from boom boom girls or dick falls off later. Very bad.”

He was gone in a flash. I sat in my trailer realizing for the first time I was alone with air conditioning. I felt as if I raised my head above the syrup and I took a deep cleansing breath.

It was night when I woke up. Bangkok was alive. During my slumber, it rained, and the streets glistened, reflecting streetlights, car lights, and lanterns of every color. The humidity seemed like a soft, misty spray, a sharp contrast to the daytime. I went out onto the street, where street vendors popped up like weeds. Other American soldiers walked with Thai girls with a dreamy look in their eyes as if they had just found love. Intoxicating is a word often used in the Kingdom of Siam. Rivers of perfumes like frangipani, lilac, and honeysuckle flow freely at night.

I found a little café with strings of bare bulbs overhead, giving everyone, even the dark-skinned Thais, a sickly pallor. I sat at a plastic table in a plastic chair, content and calm. I ordered a beer from a boy about twelve. Soon I am eating Pad Kra Pao, Moo Ping, Tom Yum Goong, and Look Chin Ping spicy-sweet grilled meatballs. I was in love. My pallet was alive. No more meat and potatoes, pizza, and spaghetti and meatballs for me. I had found a gastronomic home, and this discovery turned my hesitation from angst into acceptance. My mechanism of adapting came into full harmony. Still, this was just a tiny minor achievement given the unknowns ahead of me. The food gave Man and Beast a mental zone characterized by comfort and safety. This zone hasn’t left me after all these years, making adapting anxiety free.

Captain Gang was banging on my door early the next morning. “We go!”

“You are a day early.”

“You need your kit. We have an appointment. Come now.”

“I want a coffee.” He was shocked when I implied I wasn’t doing anything without coffee, after all I was jet lagged.

“Americans soft. Always need special treatment, not like Thai soldier!”

“No pissing contests until after coffee,” I said as sardonically as possible.

“Me, Captain Gang. You follow orders.” I gave him the look that implied he was wrong and had misjudged me. Maybe I had rank despite my cherub looks. I certainly wasn’t afraid. I didn’t know him except as a tour guide. We weren’t even in the same army.

In the basement of the Hilton down a long cinderblock corridor lit with a series of florescent lights was a green steel door spray painted in a stencil, “Quartermaster” and the motto, “You fight with what I give you. You die with what you forget.” 

Master Sergeant Murry was straight out of central casting. The Quartermaster once handle thousands of mules until the army became mechanized and airborne, Master Sergeant Murry would be the envy of any mule skinner, if there were any alive. I stood in front of him. He sized me up and down in a second. I was holding my coffee cup and was about to set it down on his wide table.

“Don’t do it,” he said, turning away to pull uniforms and equipment from his endless rows of shelves. 

I stepped back. I swallowed the dregs and tossed the Styrofoam cup into trash. 

“Alright, kid. You listen now and you listen good. This ain’t no parade loadout, and it sure as hell ain’t Halloween. You carry what you need to kill, to survive, and maybe, if you’re lucky to come back in one piece, though don’t count on it.

Here. M16A1. She’s lighter than she looks and dirtier than she oughta be. Keep her clean or she’ll jam like a broken jukebox the moment you need her most. Three hundred rounds. Don’t get cocky. You’ll burn through that faster than your last promise to your mother.” He checked the papers on his clipboard doing a double take, paper, me, paper, and me again. 

“Your one of those,” he mumbled under his breath.

“Remington 700. 7.62×51mm Caliber.” He checked the breach and laid the rifle with its shiny walnut stock and Redfield scope in front of me. I instinctively picked it and felt the balance and weight. The Master Sergeant looked at Captain Gang who was leaning against the door. I could see them sharing a serious look.

“Leather flap holster (M1916) for .45 M1911. Seven in the mag, one in the pipe and pray you don’t need nine. You are carrying a lot of firepower. You sure you know how to use it?”

“Time will tell,” I said, checking the pistol and slipping it in and out of the holster to check its smooth release.  

“This poncho is not for rain. It’s for dying in. Keeps the bugs out and your guts in if things go sideways. Learned that from a boy who bled out in a ravine outside Ban Me Thuot. Rain ran red for hours.

Claymores. Two of ‘em. Front toward enemy, but I seen boys place ‘em backward and take their own legs off. Don’t be that boy.

Compass—useless if your heart’s gone blind. Still, it spins. Let it remind you there’s always a direction, even if it’s the wrong one.

Map. Don’t trust it. Terrain changes, trails vanish, people lie. The jungle don’t care about your paperwork.

PRC-77 radio. Weighs like guilt. You’ll hate carrying it until you need it to call angels—or ghosts. Depends on who’s listening that day.

Rations. Cans full of regret. Ham and motherfuckin’ lima beans, again. You’ll trade your soul for peanut butter by week two.

Knife. KA-BAR. Not for show. Cuts vines, bread, throats, and lies. Keep it sharp, like your silence.

Camo paint. Go ahead, smear it on. Pretend it makes you invisible. The jungle still sees you. She always sees.

Canteens. One’s water. Other’s gin. I label ‘em both ‘salvation’ and let God decide.

Mosquito net. Might stop bugs, but not nightmares.

Foot powder. Don’t laugh. Your feet go, you go. Trench rot doesn’t give second chances.

Mirror. Not for shaving. Used to signal birds in the sky. Sometimes they answer. Sometimes they drop hellfire instead.

Zippo. Engraved with what some Marine thought was clever. You’re not here to be clever. You’re here to endure.

Silk map. Soft as sin, stitched with places no longer there. You’ll get lost anyway. That’s the point.

Machete. Not a weapon. A key. Cuts through the green curtain. Opens paths. Closes arguments.

Morphine syrette. For the end. Yours, or someone else’s. I don’t ask.

So, there you go, soldier.” 

I shoved everything fatigues, socks, boots, medical kit, batteries, extra ammo, into my new rucksack. I slipped the rucksack over my shoulders and felt the weight of war for the first time. The weight is a ghost now, but it isn’t any less heavy today.   

I had less than an hour to sort my gear when I bordered a Chinook helicopter. Captain Gang had his gear squared away. We sat together. I watched the tropical jungle country of Thailand pass below us like a green carpet for three hours. We disembarked. The air traffic had a serious tempo and was getting anxious to get started. 

Gang led me into a wooden building two floors with an array of antennas and dishes on the roof. The interior fascinated me and reminded me of Steppenwolf with its solid teak walls, floors, and ceiling. At the top of the stairs, I found the door open. Gang gestured I go inside. Colonel Fisher jumped up from his seat and shook my hand. He thanked Captain Gang, and he left.

“Long journey,” he said with the intonation of a question.

“Yes sir.” He directed me to sit in a leather chair in the corner of the room. He joined me, offered me a drink. I drank a couple of gulps of cold water from a bottle and relaxed. We watched jets, fixed wing aircraft and helicopters land and take off. The Chinook I arrived in was loading a small white elephant. The little guy was in a steel gage and from this distance he was sleeping.

“White elephants are a symbol of this country. When the locals find one they immediately give it to the king. It’s a sign of power more importantly a sign of moral authority. They are treated like living deities.” The colonel was pensive as he lingered on the meaning of the white elephant.

“The elephant is on all their money and symbols,” I added. The extent of my knowledge was limited to this tidbit of info. I also knew that hope was tied up in the symbol, but at this moment in the arc of history hope was seen by the government, protesters, the culture in general as desperately leaning into peace. I was there as an agent of violence. Hope was a faint wish for survival.

“How are you feeling Sam?”

“I’m good sir.” He nodded his head and took a deep breath.

“Sam, you have been a project.” 

I didn’t like the sound of that statement. The Beast bristled under my skin. The Man on the other hand sensed a challenge of immense proportions. 

“You can’t share what I am going to tell you with anyone. No friends, no family.” He waited for me to acknowledge him. I did with eye contact and a nod yes. “General Krusen and I have identified a deeply troubling problem within the CIA and the Army’s Special Forces, including Delta. We recruited you based on the belief in your moral character.” 

I thought I would vomit, and I think I did in my mouth. Two of the most important people in the CIA where trusting the one serious doubt I had in myself, my moral character. I wasn’t understanding. 

Colonel Fisher saw I was aghast at his comment. “Sam we know about the Dodge Dart. Let’s just say it was justice served.” I felt the sweat roll down my spine. “We are going to use it for your cover.”

“Cover?” 

“You will be joining a Long-Range Recon Group shortly. They are on leave. We strongly suspect they have been facilitating the transfer of opium and weapons from a few select warlords. Your mission is to win their confidence and report back to me and me only what you find out. We have carefully cultivated your training, so it appears you are just a replacement. They have what we believe is a network that goes deep into the upper echelons of the CIA.”

“I just do my job and tell you what I see?”

“Yes. I must tell you. These guys are ruthless. Your replacement was shot in the face while on a mission and he was replaced another LRRP who accidentally fell out of a chopper.”

“They were your guys?”

“Yes. They didn’t have your cover or panache for surviving. You can turn it down. No harm.”

My first thought was how do I cheat Colonel Fisher, the team and death at the same time. The Beast and the Man fought on a battleground of the inner self. Now they must stand together and use every strength they possessed to win the battle where the victory was simply life. I recognized the leverage my benefactor had over me. The Dodge Dart, the training cycle, and the simple recognition he and the general could crush me if they wished. I accepted the mission and signed a bunch of forms without reading them. The jungle does give a shit about paperwork. 

“Colonel I have some suggestions.”

“Okay?” He was hesitant to condone any detail that would alter his plan.

“It seems to me that it would be odd if a green soldier like me would join such a seasoned group unless I was there for a special mission. Something outside their normal recon missions.”

“What are you suggesting?” 

“Let me run with Captain Gang for a couple of missions as an advisor. We can devise a plan where we must work together and then it will seem more natural.”

 He thought nodding his head up and down. 

The Man searched for a tactical edge.

“That’s a good idea Sam. Let me send it up the flagpole and see what happens. Gang will take you with his teams. One or two tag along missions shouldn’t hurt.”

“Thank you sir.” 

“Captain Gang!” Gang was inside the office in a flash standing at attention.

“Sir!”

“Sam Douglas is going to run with your team as an advisor.”

“What is his rank?” asked Captain Gang.

“He is a captain like you, but he will defer to your orders under all circumstances. Clear?”

Gang was happy with the order, and I was tickled by the fake promotion. I was still an E-5 for the paymaster.

The meeting was adjourned. I took on last look out of the window and saw the baby white elephant waking up. It lifted its trunk and cried, for its mother. Man, and Beast choked up with emotion. 

Lone Wolf

How I am recounting this is colored by years of experience and the benefit of hindsight. I was lying in the jungle, covered in foliage, listening to the birds chirping, the mosquitoes whining, the sun steaming yesterday’s rain off the giant leaves. The Beast inside me stirred, anxious, coiled with anticipation, bristling with aggression. My heart pounded so loudly I feared it would give me away.

I was the last man in an L-shaped ambush, but the first to see the Pathet Lao patrol pass and the first to close the door behind them. The Man, the thinker within, tried to make sense of my position. He reasoned, observed, reflected. I was alive in that moment, aware of it. The Beast, though, dismissed all such claims. Philosophy held no weight. Duty meant nothing. Loyalty, bonds, rationale—none of it mattered. His only truth lived in the tension of muscle, in breath and blood.

Killing, in that moment, was not a matter of right or wrong. It was the soul’s hall of mirrors. Reaction overtook reason. Reflection came later, when the Man returned to gather the broken pieces with his books and his prayers.

I can only add this observation while sitting in the future, distant from the event. I welcomed the stones and the smoke. Yes, Dante knew it well. I acted not for virtue, but for punishment, and with hope (there is that word again) of the glory of redemption. Maybe it would all amount to nothing but a clever turn of phrase. Maybe I would be so deeply scarred that suicide and death would become my pleasant future.

These thoughts passed through my mind at some point. But lying on the jungle floor, hearing the urgent footsteps of the Pathet Lao racing into our ambush, I was fully present. My thumb inched toward the safety on my M-16. The first man passed. I could smell his sour sweat. Leather sandals padded along the path. Another man passed, glancing over me into the trees. Then another, and another. Finally, an aged man in black pajamas, unarmed and carrying a pack, followed by two more with AK-47s.

Captain Gang and his squad of ten Black Thai Special Forces opened fire in a single, unified burst. Oddly, it caught me off guard. The two trailing men turned toward me, and I fired, dropping them on the muddy path. The jungle muffled the death. Death and decay were a tick in the clock. The old man dropped to his knees and raised his hands.

I stepped out of the bush and approached the two bodies, then took up position facing back up the trail in case a straggler came running. All bonds were broken. Friends lay on the jungle floor. Ants and flies rushed to devour the human blood pooled in the red clay mud.

Captain Gang grabbed the old man, lifting him like a sack of flour. "We go," he said, low and urgent. We slipped back into the jungle.

At the landing zone, we waited with our prisoner. I was less anxious now, wrongly thinking it was over.

Two Hueys rushed in low, churning the treetops. Loose vegetation flew into the air. The contrast between the quiet hum of the jungle and the roar of the rotors disoriented me. Moments passed before I realized we were under fire.

Two of Gang’s men were hit, both in the legs. Gang stood beneath the spinning blades and directed the others into the choppers. I was the last man and the furthest from the landing zone. The door gunners opened fire behind me. I felt the M-60 rounds slicing the air past my ears.

I ran. Stopped. Returned fire. Ran again. The ground was soft, difficult to grip. It felt as if the earth had decided to breathe beneath me.

The injured were loaded. I leapt onto the floor next to the old man and fired two magazines into the green wall. We lifted off sharply, nose down. The helicopter lurched. I slid toward the open door and nearly fell out. Gang caught my rucksack and laughed.

Then we saw the old man. He was dead, shot in the head by his own. We emptied his pockets and pack, then pushed him out the door. He fell three thousand feet and vanished into the jungle.

The Beast relaxed, though its appetite was not satisfied. The Man heard the gavel fall. Court was in session.

We landed in Chiang Mai and offloaded the wounded. They were in good spirits. The other Black Thais patted me on the back and thanked me for joining them. Gang smiled and said, “Good job.”

We debriefed. It was a detailed accounting of actions. No feelings, no opinions, just facts. I stood beside Gang and the intelligence officer who conducted the interviews. I was back to playing a part in a gruesome theater. In the corner of the hangar, I saw the LRRPs sitting in lounge chairs, drinking beer, listening to every word.

From that moment on, I would be marked as a lone wolf. Isolated among the Black Thais by culture and language. Removed from American operations by mission parameters. I might as well have been stationed on the moon. But I was sent to howl at it.

Who are you?

"Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? ‘I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?’ she said aloud. ‘I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think—’" Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll 

"Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward path had been lost." Inferno, Canto I — Dante Alighieri

Is it possible for both entrances to be true in the same event? Is it possible serendipity and playfulness merged with despair and moral blindness? 

“Who are you? Rang in my ears like the clang of a trolley bell. I was sleeping in my hootch when this figure with a flashlight shining on my face woke me with this existential question. I drew my .45 pistol and shot around him. The flash lit his face. A face of gleeful evil turned in an instant to confusion and fear. I could have easily killed him right there. He was only three feet from me. He dropped the flashlight and scrambled out of my hootch. I got up and put my .45 back into my holster. The oil from the pistol turned to smoke and it hung in the air. I picked up the flashlight and threw it outside in the mud.

I sat with Gang the next morning eating breakfast of barbecued chicken and Pad Thai noodles with fresh eggs dropped into the hot broth. We were going out that night with a Forward Observer from the air force. We would provide security while he directed the B-52 bombs on the Ho Chi Minh trail. It would be a long hike with lots of potential conflicts. The jungle is not empty, if fact it is bloody busy. My first impression of the jungle was how few people there were. I was wrong. We had the Pathet Lao running patrols, the North Vietnamese army regulars patrolling not just in squad numbers but in battalion numbers of hundreds of armed to the teeth men. Our job was to navigate this traffic and get our bomber in place and get out of there before being detected. On this mission we would have the benefit of the LRRPs from C company guiding us through the human maze. 

This was the pivot point in our series of missions planned by Colonel Fisher. Gang knew what my mission was, and he was very supportive. I sent all my information through him to Colonel Fisher. Gang and I had become fast friends. We fought together and that bond is hard to break. He taught me how to move through the jungle. How to hunt and survive in the jungle. Stuff that even the grizzled LRRPs didn’t know. He taught me on how to let the jungle in my heart. And as crazy as it sounds coming from a boy from Ohio I bought into it like one buy into religion. 

I ditched the jungle fatigues for cut-off jean shorts and pantyhose. It kept leeches off your legs and ass. We wore home-made sandals. The tread was cut from old car tires that way our tracks would look the same as the enemy’s. We changed weapons taking the AK-47 instead of the M-16. The enemy couldn’t pinpoint us because of our weapon’s sound. I did carry my Remington adding a suppressor to the muzzle. I wore camo paint constantly and a Boonie hat. I crushed Lemongrass on my skin to keep the mosquitoes at bay.  I learned to literally run silently through the jungle with great speed. The LRRPs could creep silently. We ran like a track team up and down mountains. Gang called us mountain spirits. 

Once while running up a mountain stream with large boulders, we ran past a Pathet Lao patrol going down so fast that it was sometime before we realized we were clicks apart in the opposite direction. The NVA were not operating like guerillas but like an army, mostly slow and ponderous. We would engage and flee, but always toward our objective. 

We managed to drag this poor out of shape FO into position on a mountain top overlooking a small valley where thousands of men and women and equipment funneled in to South Vietnam. The site was scouted by the LRRP team. 

“Something doesn’t feel right,” I said to Gang. He grimaced. 

“We move back,” he said, flashing his toothy smile.

The FO complained that this was a perfect position. We had an hour before the planes dropped their load. “We can do a lot of damage,” he repeated.

Gang and I didn’t feel comfortable. We were exposed. The LRRPs were back down the slope guarding our six. I didn’t feel comfortable about them either. War is like that; vibes and it felt like the Hare had the stopwatch running and time was short. 

“Let’s set a retreat,” I suggested to Gang. 

“We go south?”

“Let’s go north and double back,” I traced the route on the map. We agreed and sent off his guys to set up Claymores on our respective egresses. 

The radio crackled and the FO read out the coordinates to a bombardier thousands of feet above our position. On the southern egress two Claymores exploded. Gang’s men came running back to tell us NVA were coming in platoon force. The egress to the north was marred by more explosions and automatic gunfire. The bombs landed and I thought the mountain would crumble. The shock took my breath away and cracked my ears from the pressure and we were miles away! 

We ran down hill toward our rear guard of LRRPs. They were nowhere to be found. We were now being chased, and we couldn’t outrun a radio.    

We had five clicks to go to the LZ through some of the toughest terrain in Laos. The path was so dense with vegetation, rocks and slippery slopes of red mud it would have taken hours to traverse the ground. Not today. Gang and his men fought a rear action retreat while I hustled the FO forward. He was exhausted and ready to give up. There was plenty of gunfire. Just bullets whizzing though the jungle sapping into broad palm leaves like enthusiastic bugs. 

The LRRPs were waiting for us at the LZ. They seemed to be chuckling over our mad dash off the mountain. The choppers were waiting for us, having been summoned by the LRRPs in advance. I loaded the FO onto the first chopper. I ran back into the jungle and took up a position with some visibility. Long distance snippering isn’t a thing here because you can’t see a thing except vegetation. I covered Gang and his men’s retreat. They climbed into the first chopper, and I joined the LRRPs in the second. 

 We took off. The LRRPs seemed to find the whole affair funny, which made it feel staged, as if we’d played the fools in someone else’s slapstick opera. The door gunner stitched the jungle with tracer fire. I sat on the floor with my legs over the skids, tasting cordite and adrenaline, the smell of oil thick on my skin.

I was thinking of nothing and everything. My father’s voice. Susan’s touch. 

Then it came. Spiraling, uncertain, like a drunken dragonfly of death. An RPG streaked from the trees, its path erratic but decisive. It came for me. Not the pilot, not the gunner. Me. I ducked, too late to matter. The cockpit burst like a dropped lantern. The shock wave lifted me off the deck and threw me forwards into the air. As if someone had kicked me in the back launching me into space some thirty meters above earth.

There was no scream. Only the long uncoiling silence between seconds. Man, and Beast recalled our airborne training, feet first, knees flexed, hit, tuck, and roll. I could hear the drill sergeant screaming, “Tuck and roll!” 

Down, down, down, Alice whispered. I must be nearing the center of the earth.

And then the world arrived all at once. I landed face-first in a half-drained rice paddy with a sickening splat, a sound like a thought being erased. Something cracked. My vision lit up white, then everything folded in.

I was unconscious for two and half days. My watch was taken off me wrist. My sandals disappeared altogether, my weapons and my rucksack were gone and tragic I joked to myself my pantyhose were ripped. The top of my head was caked with dry blood. Maggots had started to feast. My right knee moved in circles like a Gumby figurine, and my right hand was swollen to the size of a catcher’s mitt. I rolled over in the mud and slowly sat up. I was alone. There was no one in the field. Where I was lying was just below a dike berm where a passerby couldn’t see me. 

When I came to, time was no longer running forward. It pooled around me like the mud I lay in—thick, indifferent, ancient.

I couldn’t move. My face was pressed into something warm and wet. Rice stalks tickled my cheek. My head throbbed with a violence all its own. The air stank of rot, of old war, of wet metal and piss. I tried to breathe. The pain in my chest caught fire.

Two snakes slid away from me, slow, silent sentinels. I watched them like a man watches fate leave the room. I had not drowned, broken my back, or been shot. I had not died of snakebite. A sad sense of relief surfaced, then ebbed away like a memory I hadn’t earned.

I was a puppet on a shelf, bleeding from everywhere. Wheezing. My ribs felt shattered. My right knee moved in a circle like a cheap toy’s hinge. My hand had swollen into a grotesque parody of a catcher’s mitt. The top of my head was crusted with dried blood. When I lifted a trembling finger to touch it, something soft wriggled and fell. Maggots. They plopped into the mud with quiet, obscene indifference.

And yet, amid the pain, I felt a strange clarity, even euphoria. Not joy, but the odd serenity of having nothing left to lose.

“Who are you?” still rang in my skull like a Buddhist temple bell.

I waited. Gang would come. The LRRPs were out there. Somewhere. The Man whispered this logic while the Beast licked its wounds. They were both me, now. And neither.

When the sun sets in the jungle, darkness doesn’t fall. It detonates.

I crawled onto the dyke, dragging my broken body like some mythic wretch returned from Hades. I looked out over the paddies from my knees. The blackness was absolute, so rich it seemed space itself had stooped to kiss the earth.

A bat dove at my head. I flailed like a scarecrow caught in a storm. My arms sliced the air in wild arcs, an opera of futility. I brushed more maggots from my scalp. One clung to my eyebrow like it knew me. I laughed, and my ribs screamed.

Rising from the dead, it turns out, includes maggots and spiders. Not angels. Not even ghosts. Only the small, persistent things.

Dracula came to mind. Absurdly. I wondered: did he have bug problems? What happens to a mosquito when it bites a vampire? The Man supplied these questions like riddles from a cracked oracle, just to give the Beast something to chew on besides pain.

I stood, hands on knees, bent at the waist. My legs trembled. The rice waved at me, light green stalks like children in a parade I hadn’t been invited to. My bare feet sank into the muck and whispered back, heal me, heal me, but my nerves were numb. The path forward was unclear, but it was still a path.

I limped. Slowly. Toward something. Not rescue. Not meaning. Just forward

I followed a trail maybe a mile until I came to a log bridge that crossed a mountain stream. I pondered should I get in the water and wash myself of the blood and critters and risk leeches attaching themselves to my bruised and bloodied skin. I didn’t realize I had deep cuts on my arms and back along with a bloody skull. I opted to keep moving. Maybe I would be found soon, and my rescuers could take a picture of me to send to my father or maybe Bay High School yearbook? I laughed out loud startling the bats who raced across the sky. I winced. 

“Darkness is my friend,” I whispered to myself. The more I walked the stronger I felt. I was hungry and thirsty. I recognized those desires as positives and every positive kept me going. 

By dawn I had covered five miles. I was somewhere near Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand. I was hundreds of miles from Chaing Mai. I was walking on the same path as the Ho Chin Minh Trail. This was a sudden realization, so I turned west. Was I walking in circles? 

Then suddenly a clearing.

The jungle opened like a wound, and there, absurd and miraculous, was the downed Huey. Smoldering. Hollowed. Stripped of parts. Like a carcass picked clean. Radios gone. Guns gone. No bodies. Not even a dirty rag used to check the oil. 

Only silence and ash.

I stood for a long moment, tracing my own bare foot prints in the dirt, American boots. The cavalry had come and gone.

A peculiar disappointment bloomed in my chest, not grief, not even betrayal, just the lonely confirmation that survival is a private event. No photographs. No rescue. No witness. Just bananas.

Yes. Bananas. A grove of them ripening in the wild beside a field of poppies. Yellow against green. I fell to my knees and ate like a starving child. They tasted like sugar and guilt.

Even now, after all these years, bananas bring me back to that place. Not the hunger. The abandonment. They remind me of being almost saved.

I curled under heavy underbrush, bloodied and buzzing with fatigue. The sky above hinted at dawn, a pale bruise forming over the mountains. I told myself: wait for light. Wait for another chance to move.

I did not yet know what country I was in. But I knew I was no longer a soldier. Not really. Just a man stitched together by breath, bruises, and half-formed prayers.

I hid under heavy underbrush a cave of sorts until dusk when I would try under the cover of darkness to reach Thailand. 

The Monk

I have never been anxious about dreams. Sleep comes to me with a kind of joy, and I embark willingly eager for whatever unconscious mischief my mind might create. I am, or hope to be, a paperback writer.

Over the past months, the child pickpockets of Rome wandered in and out of the fragmented narratives of my sleep. In waking life, their future would likely be marked by ruthless stealing, their pockets of innocence emptied until there was nothing left. But in my dreams, I let them live better lives.

Monica drifted into this landscape like a siren. Her smooth brown skin, gentle curves, and the sparkle in her eyes stirred the Beast. Was this dream about to turn erotic? I hoped so.

The Man screamed at me, “This is no time for sex dreams! Wake up! Survival first!”

The Man is always ignored when it comes to sex. It’s a lesson that fluctuates in its usefulness because the Beast, wounded and on the edge of death, controls the hunger now.

This time, I opened one eye the other was swollen shut. My nose was broken. But I could still see the small boy in the yellow robe, smiling at me.

He was a novice monk, an apprentice of some order. He took my hand in his and, without speaking, urged me outside.

I followed.

Pain was constant, but strangely irrelevant. Crawling out from the brush and rising upright, I found that movement itself had become liturgy. We walked together, hand in hand. The pickpocket boys trailed behind us, laughing, darting through the bushes like ghosts playing tag.

Monica appeared again, slipping her arm under my arm to steady me.

“We should sail around the world,” she whispered into my ear.

“I’d like that,” I said. “We can bring the boys.”

“Can I be naked on the boat?”

“Yes,” I replied, giddy. “What about the boys?”

The Man ever practical, ever tactical, interrupted again and popped the dream like a chewing gum bubble.

I woke, or perhaps rose, as from water. I was standing in the middle of a poppy field. A figure ran toward me.

The enemy?

Would they kill me? Capture me? I was helpless, standing there, unable to act.

The boy monk still held my hand. He patted it, smiled.

I must have whispered thank you for the dream.

Then I looked up and saw Gang catching me as I fell. The monk vanished.

Above us, the stars lit the field of poppies. I was back from Purgatory.

Queening

Red Queen: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll.

Tubes fed into my veins. “Straight from the poppy fields,” I joked. Gang sat beside my bed and spoke gently, even though I couldn’t reply without effort. A plastic mask fed oxygen into my lungs. I’d lift it off to answer, then replace it like a veil between two worlds. Everything felt like a dream with a punchline I’d forgotten. The morphine kept me softly folded in its arms.

The inventory of damage was absurd: four cracked ribs, a collapsed lung, broken nose, fractured cheekbone, and a skull fractured in places I didn’t want to think about. Shrapnel embedded in my scalp. Some of it is still there today. Sixteen bones shattered in my right wrist. That ended my dreams of baseball. My right knee had been rebuilt. Rashes, bites, open sores. My body was a map of small and great betrayals, all dulled by the poppy’s mercy.

“You are lucky,” Gang said. “The mountain spirits look after you.” He smiled to himself, as if my survival proved that ancient things still walked among us.

“Tell me what happened,” I asked, lifting the mask briefly.

“The rain came. Visibility dropped to nothing. We landed and waited. Waited through the storm. When it cleared, search and rescue began. We found the wreck right away. Pilot and co-pilot dead. Three of the LRRPs dead. One survived. He’s in the next room. Not doing well. We searched for you. Where the hell were you?”

I lifted the mask again. “Someone shoved me out of the chopper just before an RPG hit. I landed five clicks from the crash site.”

“Then your plan didn’t work,” Gang said, diagnosing it like a failed machine.

“I was the first to the birds. The LRRPs were going to leave us behind. That mountain was an NVA observation post. They wanted us to be found. Or dead. Or both.” I pulled the mask back over my mouth and took a long breath.

“You get better. Colonel Fisher comes tonight.”

“Thanks for coming to get me.”

“I knew you’d survive. The mountain spirits like you.” He stood to leave. I reached out and caught his wrist.

“A boy monk in a saffron robe woke me. He guided me to you. Did you see him?” I paused. “I want to thank him.”

Gang shook his head. “No boy. No monk. Just the spirits, taking shape so they could help you. Don’t think too hard about it. It’s just how the world is. Always has been.”

He left without another word.

I drifted into a kind of blankness. Thoughts dashed forward from the morphed blankness, whizzing past. I couldn’t recognize one thought. The Man struggled to construct a narrative of the visions, like one reading a new book in a foreign language you are only slightly familiar with.

Panic. I didn’t understand. Where, I asked, was the Beast, that protector of all with his claws of arrogance and shield of youthful invincibility?

My immaturity was ground into dust in battle. I am weary. I am angry my intentions came true. I had those scars I desired so much of my gentil life and prostate, with my leg suspended in a rig to elevate it, bandages, oxygen pumping into my collapsed lung. The journey was much different than I dreamed.

There was no actual time. The sweet poppy fixed its own distortion, fixing the clock hands in a singular time while the second swept like waves from the ocean pounded the beach. Somewhere in this dazzling universe, the Man snatched an image like one would catch a fly from the air. I settled on this tiny pinhead to build a rational world. A place I could think. A sanctuary of complete sentences and well-constructed paragraphs. A place where the paperback writer could scribble and organize his understanding. An island in the turbulent river of nothingness. A bulwark of manhood.  

“Who betrayed me?” I heard myself repeat the phrase. I opened my eye, the other still swollen shut like a boxer after a vicious fight, and Colonel Fisher was leaning over my broken body, whispering into a distorted mind.

I lifted my oxygen mask and said, “I don’t know, but they tried to kill me and all my guys. It was a setup.”

“Why do you say that?” I could see Colonel Fisher thinking. He drew the intellect out of me. The Man now without the burden of youth, tested his new posture as if he had found a new sense of strength. However, it was the Beast shaking his wooly coat, anger mixed with revenge, that spoke first.

“I’m going to kill that motherfucker who survived. They shoved me out of the chopper, hoping I would die.”

“You will do no such thing. If you want vengeance, it will have to wait. You will be put in the room with Sergeant Cravner and become his friend. This is how you will find the right person who betrayed you and your team.”

I could taste the seething anger mixing with the steady flow of clean, tasteless oxygen. I lifted my mask and said, “Are you the Mad Hatter?” He laughed.

“I just may be. Sam, you have exceeded our expectations. You’ve impressed everyone, especially Captain Gang, and I can tell you that is a hard thing to do. Look, you are still in the rabbit hole, but I have you. Get to know Cravner. Join the team and find out who is behind this organization.”

An orderly came into my room and wheeled my bed out into the hall and into Sergeant Cravner’s room. He was in a coma and had more tubes than me. I saw his arm bandaged and knew straight away he was the intruder with the flashlight and existential question. “Who am I?” The Man and Beast roared together. “I am your worst nightmare!” 

Dante’s Gambit

What was Dante up to? Harry Haller, the Steppenwolf, would be deeply mistrustful of the direction Dante took. They traveled in opposite tracks across their souls. I played with this thought experiment while Gary Cravner clung to life with both hands.

The machine beside his bed thumped rhythmically, driving his breathing. Low tones marked his heart rate with metrical precision. I just listened and ate pudding.

My eye had returned to some semblance of normalcy. The cast on my knee, bent at a right angle, rested on a stack of pillows the nurses fluffed them from time to time. I was spending more hours in a wheelchair. The maneuverability gave me a private joy. I was healing fast, and Cravner was not. He remained still, unchanged. I wanted him to wake so I could extract his treason and kill him while he was still conscious, just so he would know who won. I was angry he tried to kill me.

I kept two books beside me during that time: Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, and a small, leather-bound volume of Dante’s works, translated by John Ciardi. I had found them in a used bookstore next to the Cleveland Free Clinic. I loved Hesse first for the content. He spoke directly to my angry, alienated core of my younger self.

Dante arrived through the beauty of the book itself. Blue leather, onion skin pages, ink drawings of an organized cosmos—everything about it felt intentional, constructed to guide a broken man toward clarity. If I were a library shelf, those two books side by side would be Sam Douglas.

My new appetite for extreme violence waited like a cat in the tall grass. It was poised, confident, undeterred by injury or ethics. All meant to remind me of the fluidness of my identity.

Dante wore his sins like insignia. He only had to look at them, not turn away. If he could endure that gaze, Hell would yield to Paradise. Ignorance would give way to understanding. That was the wager. That was the grace.

Meter and rhyme. Arrogance and clarity. But what was he really up to?

Harry Haller would have scoffed at such a journey. Suspicious of bourgeois beauty and high metaphysical systems, he would have circled around Dante’s ascent like a wolf pacing outside a cathedral.

I tried to make Dante my model, but I could not. I leaned instead toward Hesse’s fractured pilgrim. And still, I persisted. Their books were written, their conclusions passed on as a kind of wisdom written in fancy script. My life was being typed on a Royal typewriter with carbon paper between the sheets of plain white.

After a month, my knee was wrapped in an ace bandage. The open wounds had scabbed over, and the dry skin fallen away. I wore a Boonie hat to keep the flies off my healing head wounds. I walked with a cane. Colonel Fisher was worried I was getting better too fast. He had another Mad Hatter idea that maybe I should fake pain.

Cravner had been taken off the respirator. He was breathing on his own. His pulse beat a little faster, a little stronger, according to the doctors. One night, in the dark room lit only by the quiet shimmer of machines, I heard him speak. His voice was garbled, his throat dry.

“Where am I?”

I was suddenly furious. Would this man force me to do something I desired but could not face?

“You are in Bangkok.”

He looked at me, and recognition slowly surfaced.

“You.”

“Why did you shove me out of the chopper?”

Funny how a man who has just emerged from a coma can lie before he even recalls the truth.

“I didn’t push you out.”

“Who did, Gary?”

His mind was still foggy. I slapped him across the face.

“You are going to jail. The other guys confessed. You were the ringleader. You killed two decent men. For what? Money? Heroin?”

“It wasn’t my idea.”

Tears spilled down his cheeks.

“Your wife and kids will be told you were a traitor who went missing. You will be disgraced. But you won’t have to endure the shame. You are not leaving this room alive.”

“We thought you were an assassin sent to kill us. I guess we were right.”

“Who told you?”

“I can’t say.”

“It’s going to be hard for you in Purgatory. A lot of pain. A lot of time. Your kids will forget you, like the rotten man you are. And Jody (The man back home, the one who steals your girl, drives your car, spends your paycheck, and sleeps in your bed while you're crawling through mud or dodging bullets.) He will have his way with your wife. Over and over again. Hell, if she has any of your dirty money, she can go to jail too.”

I let him stew in that. Let the reality settle into his bones.

“I’m just confirming what the others already said. You got hurt and couldn’t defend yourself. Last man always takes the fall.” I laughed.

“What if I confess to everything? Can I get a deal?”

“I’m not a lawyer. I am your executioner.”

Something inside twisted as I said it. I feared the words would sound false.

“Please. Listen. I’ll tell you everything. Just let me live.”

I picked up the phone and dialed Colonel Fisher.

“Hello?”

“Sir, Sam Douglas here. Cravner is ready for a full confession.”

“I’ll be right there.”

I stayed with him until Fisher arrived. The Cravner said something to me that startled me. I gave him ice for his throat. Nurses scurried around, checking vitals, adjusting lines. When they cleared the room, he spoke again.

“The heroin was just for expenses.”

“Expenses for what?”

“Weapons.”

“Weapons? That’s a lot of money for a few guns.”

“No. Thousands of rifles. Ammunition. You name it. We’re stocking entire armies.”

“Who is we?”

“A combination of entrepreneurs and the CIA.”

“Will we catch the leaders of this business adventure?”

“I doubt it. They’re very well protected.”

Two military police officers entered the room, followed by two lawyers and Colonel Fisher. I gathered my books and left.

I limped over to my favorite restaurant. It was closed, but the owners warmed some noodles and brought me a couple of cold beers. We watched the sun rise. I sensed they knew I was liked and helped by the mountain spirits. They knew it in their bones and that made me apart of this place no matter how fleeting.

I was at ease with my selves, Harry and Dante, the Man and the Beast. Restraint and patience had been rewarded. I was not yet aware how deeply Americans defined themselves by their jobs, but I accepted it as an American. A kind of indelible truth, I thought. Espionage, for better or worse, seemed to fit me like a cheap Hong Kong suit.