“But I hadn’t learned that yet. So, there we were over the border, moving west and north along this ridgeline to some mysterious fucking rendezvous when we got hit. We had one of the little people at point and he got his shit blown away.” Skibicki looked Boomer in the eyes.
“You ever been on the receiving end in an ambush?”
Boomer shook his head, remembering the screams of the wounded near the bus.
“But you been shot at right?”
“Yeah, I’ve been shot at.”
“Well,” Skibicki continued, “you know it isn’t like in the movies. It was confusing as crap. Your dad was screaming for us to break contact and move down ridge Not the preferred direction, but we didn’t have much choice since they already had the high ground. Of course the spook didn’t know our immediate actions drills, but he knew enough to get out of the way and run. We broke contact, leaving behind two of our little people dead and the rest of us all hit somewhere. I had shrapnel wounds all along my left side from a grenade, but fear can be a mighty motivator.
We beat feet, leapfrogging. Two men laying down a base of fire, two running, then alternating. The spook helped some, he had a Swedish K and he emptied a magazine now and then over our heads.
“To make a long story short, we ran until we hit the first piece of open ground we could find. The spook got on the radio and called in for extraction from his people. Then we got hit on the edge of the PZ.
Those son-of-a-bitches. whoever the fuck they were, wanted us bad. The spook got hit right at the start — caught a round through the chest. We lost the last two Montagnards and your dad took a round through his thigh. I was bandaging up the spook, trying to seal off his sucking chest wound, when I opened up the small ruck he was carrying, looking for anything I could use to block off the air coming out of the hole in his lung.
“There was gold in there. Four fucking bars of gold.”
Skibicki laughed bitterly.
“Of course that shit wasn’t very useful at the moment. That’s when I got hit again.” He tapped the side of his head.
“Lucky I got a thick skull.”
Skibicki fell silent and Boomer waited for a few seconds.
“Then what happened?” he finally asked.
“The black Cobra gunships came in. Your dad directed their fire using the spook’s radio. Jesus, he was great, Boomer.” Skibicki shook his head wonderingly at that day so long ago. “A true fucking professional. I was half out of it. I couldn’t see a damn thing; my eyes were full of blood, and I had a hell of a headache,” he said.
“I just kept firing in the general direction of the bad guys which wasn’t hard to do since we were surrounded.
“Your dad carried me out to the slick that came in. He threw me on board and he went back to get the spook. That was a big mistake. He was carrying the spook back when they got cut down. The bad guys must have brought up a heavy machine gun by that time and they opened up from the treeline. We got the bodies on board and the pilots got us the hell out of there in a hurry. The bird took a lot of hits on the way out but it got back in one piece.” Skibicki looked at Boomer.
“Your dad and the spook were KIA.”
“But that’s not what his citation read,” Boomer said. He knew a bit about classified operations and he was confused.
“How did my dad get a Medal of Honor for a cross-border mission? I thought all that stuff got buried deep. Hell, there’s guys who got wounded on some of those cross border missions who still can’t get VA treatment since their wounds aren’t recorded anywhere because they weren’t legally supposed to be where they were when they got hit.
The citation said he was killed defending an A Camp in South Vietnam, not across the border.”.
Skibicki gave a wicked grin.
“I did that. Me and the Special Operations Commander in-country. Colonel Rison. I was in the hospital recovering when Rison came to ask me what had happened. When I told him, he wrote up the award just as you saw it. The CIA backed the story. It was a trade-off. I kept silent about what really happened and your dad got the CMH. It was the least we could do for him.”
“What did happen?” Boomer asked. “What was that guy carrying gold for?”
“You know what CIA stands for, don’t you?” Skibicki didn’t bother to wait for an answer.
“Cocaine in America. Those guys were running a whole’nother show over there. Still probably are.”
“It was a drug operation?” Boomer asked, not as shocked as he probably should have been; his years in Delta had shown him a thing or two about the real world.
Skibicki shrugged.
“I don’t know that for sure, but what the hell else would that guy be carrying gold bars into the jungle for? He might have been paying some mercenary groups that were in the Cia’s employ. At least that was what the spooks briefed me afterwards, but I think that’s a bullshit cover story. If we were going in to pay off mercenaries, why didn’t we just land at the mercenaries’ camp.
If we were paying them, they should have been friendly, right?”
Skibicki shook his head.
“No, I heard enough and seen enough over there to know. It was a drug op. Gold for drugs, which they could turn a big profit on back here in the states. How the hell do you think they can fund all their bullshit? And those people who were after us wanted us a hell of a lot more than the VC and NVA usually did. They wanted us real bad to absorb the casualties they took.”
“But what about the Army?” Boomer asked.
“Didn’t the Special Ops commander — this Colonel Rison — do anything about his people getting caught up in that?”
“Listen, Boomer. I don’t know what the hell you’ve been doing, but let me tell you a few things I’ve learned in my time. One is that you don’t fuck with the CIA. And the other is that the CIA and the top ranks of the Army are wired in tight. It’s us guys wearing the green beanies who are on the outside. Everyone always thinks the CIA is some world unto its own, but you just need to look at its history to see that it was formed right out of the Army at the end of the Second World War. And its aims and the Army’s have never been very far apart. Hell, Boomer, whenever you give someone a whole lot of power, then cloak it in secrecy in the name of national security, you got the ingredients for some bad shit to happen.
“Hell, that whole fucking war was just like a big game for some of them people. Think about it. What the fuck were we doing? We didn’t fight it to win, and we didn’t fight it to lose. We just sort of dicked around until the damn civilians had enough of it and made us come home.”
Boomer had heard it all before from other veterans. He was surprised, though, when Skibicki leaned forward and grabbed his arm.
“You went to West Point, didn’t you? I heard you took the Presidential from your dad’s medal.”
“Yeah,” Boomer said, extracting his arm from the other man’s fierce grip.
“That’s pretty ironic,” Skibicki growled, “considering how it was West Pointers that got your dad killed.”
“What do you mean? You said it was the CIA.”
“Colonel Rison was a West Pointer. He told me about some of the shit that was going on. Hell, they tried to courtmartial him about six months after your dad got killed.”
“What happened to him?” Boomer asked.
Skibicki shook his head.
“He ran into the establishment and they broke him. And he was one of them too, a West Pointer, but they busted his ass. We damn near had the closest thing to a revolt that the U.S. Army ever saw when they arrested Rison at group headquarters in Nha Trang. A camps all over the country were locking and loading and ready to fight it out with the regular Army. Hell, all us guys in SOG were ready to fly into Saigon and waste those regular motherfuckers at MACV headquarters.”