As they pulled up in the twilight the simian shape of her father-in-law, the man from whom Mike had derived his innate strength, if not height, stood silhouetted in the doorway.
“Papa O’Neal?”
“Uhn?” They were sitting in the living room of the farmhouse. It had a bachelor-pad look to it, the feeling that there were no women resident in the house, for all that it was neat as a pin. An oak-wood fire blazed on the hearth against the winter chill while Sharon nursed a glass of white wine that was growing quite warm. She wondered if she dared ask for ice, while Mike Senior nursed a beer gone much the same way. Both of them had been sitting that way since getting Cally off to bed, more unspoken between them than might ever be possible to say.
“I have to ask. It doesn’t have a thing to do with this, with Cally, but it’s important to me.” She paused, wondering how to go on. Wondering if she should. Did she really want to know the answer? “Why’d you leave the Army?”
“Shit,” he said, getting up and going to a sideboard. He threw away the warm beer, pulled out an ice bucket, walked over and plunked two cubes in her glass then walked back over and pulled out a Mason jar. He poured two fingers in a small glass mug, knocked it back with a “pah!” and a grimace, then poured two more and walked back over to his chair carrying the jar.
The chair, with its cowhide cover, complete with coarse hair, had the look of much of the house: rough, dependable, marginally comfortable but not by any means aesthetic. He flumped into it with a sigh and continued, “I just knew you were working up to that.”
“How?” she asked, swirling the wine and ice with her forefinger. She took a sip as it slowly cooled.
“You’d never asked. And I could tell that you’d never asked Mike.”
“I did. He told me to ask you.”
“When?” he asked, pouring another hit of the fiery moonshine.
“Shortly after I first met you. I asked him what was with you, you know, why you were so…”
“Loony?” he asked.
“No, just… well…”
“Eccentric then,” he prompted with a shrug.
“Okay, eccentric. And he told me you’d had an interesting career. And you’ve talked about other stuff, but never that. And hardly at all about Vietnam.” She cocked her head to one side.
“You were born in, what? Seventy-two?” he asked roughly.
“Three,” she corrected.
“Lessee,” he said scratching his chin. The action reminded her so strongly of Mike Junior for a moment that she caught her breath. “In nineteen seventy-three,” he continued, “I was at Bragg, but I went back in seventy-four.”
“I thought we pulled out of Vietnam in seventy-two and three,” she said, puzzled.
“Oh, we did, sure.” He smiled slyly. ”… all except the ‘Studies and Observation Group.’ ”
“The what?”
“The SOG. What was the SOG?” he asked rhetorically. “Well, first of all, we were guys that you absolutely could not introduce to mother, or to Congress, which amounts to the same damn thing. We were a bunch of major bad-ass hard cases for which the war just could not be over. It could not be a loss; therefore, they created a way for us to go back into the jungle.
“SEALs, LRPS, Rangers, Phoenix, SF, Marine Recon, they all contributed. Its purpose was, basically, payback. The brass knew the war was lost. Hell, officially and effectively we had pulled out, but there were some targets that we just felt should not survive the experience, a few situations that needed cleansing in a big way.” He took a pull from the two-hundred-proof liquor and stared at the crackling fire, mind far away in time and space.
“I really didn’t understand the fuckin’ Vietnamese then. I mean, the fuckin’ VC were such absolute stone-cold motherfuckers. They would do things to people I still wake up in a cold sweat over. But some of them, hell, maybe most of them, did it because they were patriots. Maybe some of them got their rocks off, but quite a few of them were as sickened by it as I was. They did it because the mission was to unite Vietnam under communism, and they believed in that with the same hard cold light that I believed it was evil incarnate. It took me damn near fifteen years to come to that conclusion.” He shook his head over old wounds, bone deep.
“Anyway, we were there to arrange permanent solutions for some of the more unpleasant examples of dialectical materialism as manifest on Earth.
“There were two targets that stand out in my mind. It was one of those situations when there was a fine dividing line. There are a lot of situations that are black and white, but most are shades of gray. This was a situation where two people disagreed on what shade one of the targets was. They were both consummate motherfuckers, no disagreement there, but one motherfucker was, officially, on our side and the other motherfucker was, officially, on the other side.
“Well, I finally decided that I was tired of distinctions like that, so I killed them both.”
She looked at the glass clutched in his hand, thick crystal formed into a handleless mug. On it was a legend so chipped and marred as to be illegible, but from a faint outline of a shield and arrow she knew what the inscription would be: De Oppresso Liber, “To Liberate the Oppressed.” It was such a high-minded motto, dropped in the Devil’s cauldron of Southeast Asia, where the oppressed seemed to seek oppression over freedom, where enemies were friends and friends were enemies. For the lesser soldiers it was the moment-to-moment fear of the booby trap, the mine and the sniper. For those who ruled the jungle, it was the fear of betrayal, the knife in the back. Across more than thirty years, the jungle of the mind seemed to reach out and touch the tough old man across from her.
“Anyway, it really pissed off the brass. However, giving the real reason it pissed them off wouldn’t work. But everybody was into something, back then. Some of them were smuggling drugs back to the World, some of them were moving comfort rations out to the front. Whatever.
“Me? I had been moving some equipment back to the World for the last few tours, the kind of equipment guaranteed to not make the ATF very damn happy. Anyway, they put that together with a couple of other things and whomped up a court-martial for smuggling and black market. Twenty years in Leavenworth was the verdict. I got shipped off about when Mike was born. After three years a particular appeal worked and I was out.” He snorted faintly at some remembrance and Sharon realized that the hits of white lightning were finally starting to have some effect.
“Now, I could have, probably should have, come home. But I never was into the story of the prodigal son; if I found myself shoveling pig shit I wasn’t going home until I was chief pig-shit shoveler.
“A buddy clued me that there were positions available for someone with my skills. Positions where I’d probably meet a few old friends. The Feds wouldn’t care for it, but, hell, they don’t like anything they don’t directly control while being spot on any evil they do. So I went back to being a soldier. On my own side.” He shook his head again at the futility of the long war between East and West. It was fought on battlefields throughout the world, most undeclared. And it killed more than bodies.
“But you know, me and my buddies, we sure could win the goddamn battles but we could never win the goddamn wars! It was Vietnam all over again. In Rhodesia, my unit, the RSAS, we had one team rack up the highest kill ratio in history. Five guys wiped out a guerilla regiment, poof! Gone! And we still lost the goddamn war.