shook hands, hugged, and he walked into my living room. I choked back some emotion. “Man, it’s good to see you, Doc. How the hell have you been?”
“Okay, Matt. I’ve seen better days.”
“Let’s get some coffee and sit out back.”
We went into the kitchen, and I poured a mug full of the black coffee. “You’re still drinking it black, I suppose.”
He grinned. “Damn right. No cream in the bush, L.T.”
We went to the patio and sat in two wicker chairs with cushioned seats covered in a floral pattern. A light breeze moved across the bay, barely touching the water. Out by my dock, a fish jumped, a mullet probably, running from a predator. The sun was up, hanging a few degrees above the horizon, painting the bay in pastels of orange and ochre and crimson. It was quiet, the only noise coming from the splash of the diving pelicans that lived on nearby Jewfish Key. Doc and I were quiet too, each in his own thoughts, remembering those long ago days when we were young soldiers doing what we thought was right, trying to survive, dreaming of the big PX that was the United States, of going home and living out the rest of our lives. Mine had turned out well. I wondered about Doc’s.
“How did you make your way to my door, Doc?”
“Do you remember my real name?”
“Of course. Charles T. Desmond, aka Chaz. Hometown, Macon, Georgia. Graduate of Willingham High School, class of nineteen seventy. Had a girlfriend named Julie.”
“Damn. You’re good.”
“I remember them all, Doc. Every last one of them. I knew them, their hometowns, their hopes and dreams, the ones who came home and the ones who didn’t. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about you guys.”
“The same thing happens to me, Matt. I’ll be in the middle of something, concentrating on whatever it is, and one or all of you guys will come traipsing across my brain. It’s almost supernatural, but it usually gives me a smile. I get a little warm feeling deep down in my gut, even when I think about the ones who didn’t make it back.”
“They all made it back, Doc. We never left a man.”
“You know what I mean. We got them all back, but some of them were just cold meat. Jimbo Merryman told me about you.”
“Good old Jimbo. I go fishing with him now and then, down on Lake Okeechobee.”
“He told me. He also told me you’d become a lawyer and were living here on Longboat Key.”
“I’m sorry it took us so long to hook up, Doc. Back in Nam, when I got out of the hospital, you were gone. Nobody knew exactly where.”
“You remember what they did to Ronnie Easton.”
“Cut him up like so much fish bait.”
“He was my best friend. I wanted some revenge. More than we got with the napalm that day in the grass. I’d heard about this deep-cover unit that assassinated the VC top dogs. I went down to Saigon and rattled around until some colonel decided to listen to me. He checked out my credentials and the next thing I knew I was part of the secret world. I became part of a group of special-operations types, soldiers, Marines, and CIA people, called Operation Thanatos, after the Greek God of Death. We went after the leaders, and we took them out. It wasn’t bad duty, if you didn’t mind killing up close. I didn’t. I kept thinking about Ronnie Easton and how those bastards butchered him.”
“Did it do any good?”
He smiled ruefully. “No. I still hear Ronnie screaming sometimes in the night when I can’t sleep. When I first got home, I went up to McCormick to visit his grave. It didn’t do anything for me. There was just a slab of concrete with his name on it, sort of lost in a big cemetery behind a church. Some of those graves had been there for over a hundred years.
There were crypts that had fallen in on themselves from lack of maintenance. The inscriptions chiseled into some of the older stones were mostly obliterated by age. Ronnie had a few wilted flowers. Somebody had planted a little American flag at the head of his grave. That was all. I couldn’t feel anything. And I knew that in a few years, in a time after we’re gone, when the memories of Ronnie are lost forever, his grave will be as meaningless as all those others. And maybe the screams will