fingers through the lush curls that will decamp from his skull early and en masse. Something is distinctly fucked up in the status quo, and that includes him. He doesn’t want to live in a world where some twenty-year-olds die so that other twenty-year-olds can study psychology and write about fucked-up experiments. He’s perfectly aware that the war is lost. But that changes nothing. The next morning, he’s out in front of the recruiting center on Broadway when they open. Steady work, and honest at last.
TECHNICAL SERGEANT DOUGLAS PAVLICEK flies two hundred–plus trash hauler missions in the years following his enlistment. Loadmaster on a C-130, he balances up planes with tons of barrier material and Class A explosives. He puts ordnance on the turf under mortar fire so thick it froths the air. He fills outbound flights with deuce-and-a-half trucks, APCs, and pallets full of C-rations, loading up return flights with body bags. Anyone paying attention knows that the cause tanked long ago. But in Douglas Pavlicek’s psychic economy, paying attention is nowhere near as important as staying busy. As long as he has work to fill his hours and his crewmates keep the radio on R&B, he doesn’t care how late or soon they lose this pointless war.
His habit of blacking out from dehydration earns him the nickname Faint. He often forgets to drink—in the daytime, anyway. After sundown, in quadruped crawls down Jomsurang Road in Khorat or the sex mazes of Patpong and Petchburi in Bangkok, City of Angels, the rivers of Mekhong and vats full of Singha flow freely enough. The hooch makes him funnier, more honest, less of an asshole, more capable of holding expansive philosophical conversations with samlor drivers about the destiny of life.
“You go home now?”
“Not yet, my man. War’s not over!”
“War over.”
“Not for me it isn’t. Last guy out still has to turn off the lights.”
“Everyone say war over. Nixon. Kissinger.”
“Fuckin’ Kissinger, man. Peace Prize, my flaming ass!”
“Yes. Fuck Le Duc Tho. Everyone go home now.”
Douggie no longer quite knows where that might be.
When not working, he gets high on Thai stick and sits for hours playing bass riffs along with Rare Earth and Three Dog Night. Or he’ll prowl around the ruined temples—Ayutthaya, Phimai. There’s something about the blasted chedis that reassures him. The toppled towers swallowed up by teak and ruined galleries left to crumble into scree. Jungle will get Bangkok, before too long. L.A., one day. And it’s okay. Not his fault. Simple history.
The monster bases with their fleets of carpet bombers are closing down, and the thousand piggyback cottage industries of an addicted economy turn violent. All Thailand knows what’s coming. They’ve been forced into this pact with the White Devil, and now it seems they’ve backed the wrong side. Yet the Thais Douglas meets show nothing but kindness to their destroyer. He’s thinking of staying on when his tour and the endless war are over. He’s been here for the good times, he should stick around and pay back, in the coming bad. He already knows a hundred words of Thai. Dâai. Nít nói. Dee mâak! For now, though, he’s the shortest of short-timers, crewing the most reliable transport ever built. It’s job security, for a few more months, anyway.
He and his crewmates prep the Herky Bird for yet another daily commute to Cambodia. They’ve been running resupply into Pochentong for weeks. Now resupply is turning into evacuation. Another month, maybe two—surely no longer. Cong are overrunning everything, like the summer rains.
He buckles himself into the jump seat and they’re up, routine, above the still lush and verdant world, the patchwork rice terraces and encircling jungle. Four years ago, the route was still green all the way across the rivers to the South China Sea. Then came the shitstorms of rainbow herbicides, the twelve million gallons of that modified plant hormone, Agent Orange.
A few minutes into Rouge Land they’re hit. Impossible; all their instruments had them clear the whole way into Phnom Penh. Flak rips into the cabin and cargo compartment. Forman, the flight engineer, catches shrapnel in the eye. A shell fragment slashes open the flank of the navigator, Neilson, and something warm, moist, and wrong comes spilling out of him.
The whole crew stays eerie-calm. They’ve queued up this particular horror one-reeler in their dreams for a long time, and here it is at last. Disbelief keeps them efficient. They fall in, attending to the wounded and inspecting the damage. Thin twin greasy black smoke trickles out