In the Year of the Rabbit: A Novel

Book 2: The Big Buddha Trilogy

by Terence Harkin

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; War & Military

Synopsis

Cameraman Brendan Leary survived the ambush of the Big Buddha Bicycle Race—but Tukada, his star-crossed lover, did not. Leary returns to combat, flying night operations over the mountains of Laos, too numb to notice that Pawnsiri, one of his adult-school students, is courting him. When his gunship is shot down, he survives again, hiking out of the jungle with Harley Baker, the guitar-playing door gunner he loves and hates. Leary is discharged but remains in Thailand, ordaining as a Buddhist monk and embarking on a pilgrimage through the wastelands of Laos, haunted by what Thais call pii tai hong—the restless, unhappy ghosts of his doomed crewmates.

In the Year of the Rabbit, a story of healing and redemption, honors three groups missing from accounts of the Vietnam War—the air commandos who risked death flying night after night over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the active-duty airmen who risked prison by joining the GI antiwar movement, and the people of neutral Laos, whose lives and country were devastated.

About the Author

Terence A. Harkin was awarded the 2020 Silver Medal in Literary Fiction from the Military Writers Society of America for his debut novel, The Big Buddha Bicycle Race. During the Vietnam War he served with the “Rat Pack,” the USAF photo unit operating out of Ubon, Thailand, before going on to a long career as a Hollywood cameraman (M*A*S*H, From Here to Eternity, Seinfeld). He has returned often to Thailand and Laos.

What others are saying

“Terence Harkin's novel brings the reader into the hidden world of Buddhist monastic life with such skill that you get to live it....The wisdom, kindness, and compassion of the Thai forest monks permeate this book, as does the healing power of meditation.” —Jason Siff, author of Unlearning Meditation and Seeking Nibbana in Sri Lanka.

“In the Year of the Rabbit captures the soul of an American Combat Cameraman...whose life is overtaken by the most controversial war in America's history. Must reading.” —Colonel Frank A. Titus (USAF, ret.), former Instructor of International Humanitarian Law with the United Nations-New York

“In the Year of the Rabbit deftly manages to deal with a number of disparate issues with power and precision....An odyssey involving the brutal violence of conflict, the pain and guilt of lost love, and the tranquility of life as lived by a Buddhist monk. Highly recommended.” —Dean Barrett, author of Memoir of a Bangkok Warrior and Kingdom of Make Believe

“Vividly portrays the cost emotionally, physically and morally to any of us who experience war—whether or not a direct participant—and points out so well that what we tell ourselves about events in our lives effects our response as much as what actually happens to us, (how we) need to come to terms with that, (and how) despite the challenges we face or endure we are ultimately designed to survive.” —Nellie Harness Coakley, RN, 7th Surgical Hospital, Vietnam, 1968-1969; Head Orthopedics Nurse, Walter Reed, 1969; Trauma Counselor, 1982–2010; Technical Advisor, China Beach, 1988-91

“Counter cultures continually clash in Terence Harkin's novel, In the Year of the Rabbit...during the late stages of the Vietnam War. His insight into the contradictory values and desires of Easterners and Westerners teaches lessons in humanity to a depth beyond that normally found in books about that time and place. Harkin (also) covers a lot of ground about Spectre gunship action, of which I was a part, and gets it right.” —Henry Zeybel, Lt. Col. USAF (ret.), author of Gunship and Along for the Ride;veteran of 158 combat missions over the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Read more

Release date: September 14, 2021

Print pages: 316

Sample

It was a bad sitting—

fly on my nose, butterflies

in my gut, sweat

forming on my forehead,

armpits, itching film

on my chest and arms and legs.

“Just observe,” said Ajahn Po,

the venerable one, grandfather, uncle,

Master.

I fell out of my dream, out

of my book, into my movie

that was this lifetime and my past

life and the next, my comfort

torn away like a baby blanket

when the wind blew, the bough broke,

the cradle listing to starboard,

sinking fast,

my sails torn in the seas that wanted

to swallow me as much as Asia

when she parted her lips

and kissed me forever.

Swallowed forever into the pomegranate,

spit from the pages I had filled

with words written in my own hand.

Torn inside out to join the universal

consciousness? Or to die like an amoeba

in the primordial ooze, die before I ever

existed, die like a spent meteor reduced

to cosmic dust before its flames

can turn lush jungle into glass,

gone in the time a Bedouin blinks?

What is this life? What was this suffering?

What suffering did I inflict that earned

this fate? Why am I so certain I was once

an outlaw privateer, laughing lustily

at the plundering of burning ships

and the defilement of young virgins?

Why do I call myself an anthropologist,

an explorer, a linguist, a teacher

when I have lived in a cloud of purple haze,

failed as a soldier, failed as peacemaker,

failed as a lover, failed as a monk?

Why do I resist my destiny

as God’s cannon fodder?

Why do I know my kamma sends me

to the Himalayas?

Why do I want to lead a Mongol horde

across the steppes of Asia?

What makes me want to sack Vienna?

How did Asia swallow me with a single kiss?

20–27 February 1972

Valium

 

n blackness I begin to hear the sounds of an AC-130 gunship mission over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. “Thirty…thirty,” from Colonel Strbik as the plane banks to the angle needed for the miniguns, the M-61 Vulcans, and the 40-mm Bofors.

“This is so cool!” I exclaim. “They told me you had been shipped to Nakhon Phanom, Colonel!”

The dream seems almost familiar, almost real, and like another bloated body rising to the surface of a murky lake, little pieces of the scene begin to break loose once again from my memory and float into my distorted vision: flairs going off below…the image of a truck appearing on the infrared sensor and then the NOD…Pigpen Sachs feeding 40-mm ammo into his gun.

“This is way cool! Sachs, I thought you were ambushed!”

Stepping up to my Nod-cam to start filming just as his gun gives off a deafening blast—

“Triple-A—accurate—break left!” shouts a garbled, scratchy intercom voice.

The plane lurches, tracers flashing through the cloud we just vacated, throwing faint red light on Lieutenant Liscomb who is looking confused trying to get his parachute snap to work, and I am hurled against the 20-mm gun mounts. The roar of the outboard engines dies and I feel my face contort. “Shit, we’re gonna crash!”

My brain felt like a soggy dishrag, my skull a helmet of pain as I slowly opened my eyes at the base hospital Sunday morning, the day after the Big Buddha Bicycle Race ended in a river of blood. I wanted to check out. I wanted to go home to my bed at Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng, but Dr. Lioci was calm and persuasive when he told me he wanted his team to keep me under observation. For one thing, he said, they had not yet determined the severity of my head trauma. I could barely follow. His voice sounded like it was coming through an echo chamber when he told me something about preliminary X-rays coming back negative but how he wasn’t going to rule out a hairline fracture until he had seen some follow-up images after the swelling had gone down. There was no doubt, he said in his echoey voice, that I was showing symptoms of a severe concussion—headaches, nausea, and blurred vision. I wanted to tell him he was full of shit, but I was experiencing headaches, nausea, and blurred vision. I wanted to tell him he was full of shit when he said I might still be in shock, but he got my attention when he said shock can be fatal, that it was something he needed the nurses and medics to keep an eye on. I surrendered.

No sooner had he left than Nurse Wozniak arrived with my medications, little pills that were being popped into my mouth every few hours to keep me pleasantly zonked. Given that she was the girlfriend of Major Horney, my favorite fire-control officer at the 16th Special Operations Squadron, I was confident she was taking good care of me. Sure enough, the drugs kicked in

and, instead of feeling trapped in my hospital bed, I didn’t want to leave at all. Alas, it was in the middle of that groggy high that First Sergeant Link decided to pay me a visit.

“The patient isn’t to be disturbed,” the duty nurse tried to tell him.

Link pushed by her. “Leary can rest later. We got an investigation going on.”

“Dr. Lioci and Major Wozniak are going to hear about this,” the nurse grumbled as she disappeared into the hallway.

Link didn’t care. “I’m gonna ask you again, Leary—what do you know about Sergeant Prasert, the asshole who shot you?”

My lips felt rubbery and moved in slow motion. “You oughta get your facts straight, Sarge. He shot my camera.”

Link was fuming. “All right, the asshole who shot your camera—and almost took your fuckin’ head off.”

“Like I told you—he was a student who never talked politics. I used to see him around Ubon—sometimes with his druggie sister—but I hadn’t seen either of them in a month. Thought they were long gone.”

“Then why didn’t you tell us you saw him near the governor’s mansion the day of the assassination attempt?”

“Who fed you that line of shit?”

“Your buddy Wheeler. He slipped up when we questioned him alone.”

“I wouldn’t rely on Wheeler if I were you, Sarge. Wheeler’s got a drug problem of his own. Like the bumper sticker says, he brakes for hallucinations.”

“Listen, you punk, I was warned about you before you arrived at Norton Air Force Base. I don’t know how the hell you hung on to your friggin’ security clearance. As far as I’m concerned, your anti-war bullshit back at DODCOCS should have been enough to get it yanked before you left D.C. And then you had the nerve to pull that GIs for Peace shit out in California—under my watch.”

“Sarge, get it straight. I never did anything but exercise my First Amendment rights.”

“Forget all that ‘rights’ shit, Leary. This is wartime. A lot of blood was spilled yesterday. The Thai National Police, the Thai and U.S. Air Police, and the OSI are running a joint investigation, and you can bet your sweet ass they’re going to get to the bottom of the security breaches that caused it. I don’t know if you did it intentionally or you’re just a fuck-up, but if we can prove you aided or abetted the Issan Liberation Front in any way, I promise you’ll be doing some hard time.

Now for the last time, why didn’t you ID Sergeant Prasert?”

“I’ll say it again—he was somebody I barely knew who turned up in my class unexpectedly. He never talked politics.”

“This isn’t the last you’ve seen of me, Leary.” And with that, Link took his leave.

The young nurse we tried to interview at the first aid station during the bicycle race poked her head in, a little more sympathetic this time. “Sounds like he’s blaming you for Intelligence screwing up.”

I smiled wearily. “Sergeant Link blames me for a lot of things. Once in a while he’s even right.”

“Here,” she said, giving me an extra pill. “This ought to help you sleep through the afternoon.”

Before I could say thanks, I dozed off. I was talking to her again when I started waking up, telling her how she was beautiful, how she really should come out to L.A. after the war, but it was Jack Wu sitting across from me when I opened my eyes. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I wanted to check up on you. And tell you that I feel responsible for the way things turned out. I’ve been around, I’m not a greenhorn like most of you guys. I did police work when I was in the Army. I shouldn’t have let my guard down. But when I did ask around, all I kept hearing was that the Thai police and Thai intelligence insisted there was no problem. Now we know they’ve got a big problem—only they don’t want to talk to Americans about it.”

“What’s Link’s problem? He was grilling me before you stopped by. Aren’t I supposed to be on bed rest?”

“Don’t sweat Link,” Wu responded. “Some serious stuff has come up. He doesn’t know about it yet, and it doesn’t involve you, but yesterday, right after the shootout, some Thai and American Air Police apprehended a motorbike taxi driver heading toward town along a dirt road that came from the ambush site. After a little questioning, he admitted driving your friend Tukada out there and took them back to where he dropped her off—at a stolen Air Force jeep parked just off the road. They found ammo and a field radio inside. The Thai National Police are still questioning him.”

Link didn’t come back that day, thank God. Instead, I had a more welcome group of visitors, even if it was all a little blurred from my tranquilizer high. Lutz, the sound man, was apparently on his way back to Tan Son Nhut when he stopped by with Wheeler and Zelinsky, my housemates at Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng; Shahbazian, Detachment 3’s iffy camera technician; and Moonbeam Liscomb, my hipster Deputy Chief of Combat Documentation. Zelinsky and Shahbazian looked a lot better now that the nicks on their faces had been patched up. The only thing that had hit them was safety glass from the shattered windshield on Shahbazian’s Fiat Spyder convertible. We said a quick 

 hello and then avoided each other’s eyes in the awkward silence that followed. It was Liscomb who finally spoke, saying wistfully, “I guess we’ll be putting that location shoot at Pattaya Beach on hold for a while, but we’re going to get there.”

“If they ever let me out of this dump,” I replied.

All Shahbazian said when he looked at me was, “Damn.”

Wheeler wasn’t much better, muttering, “Man, what a bummer.”

“We brought a little something for you,” said Lutz, pulling out a cold bottle of San Miguel dark from one of the cargo pockets in his jungle fatigues. He had trouble popping the top off with the church key that hung around his neck, which got me thinking that he might have started his drinking a little early that day.

“Thanks,” I said, taking a swig and immediately feeling my Valium haze intensify. “Just tell me this isn’t the stuff you brought over for Lieutenant Hill from Tan Son Nhut.”

Zelinsky had the old wicked gleam back in his eye. “He won’t miss it. We only opened one case.”

Lutz studied the bandages covering the right side of my face. “It’s funny how we were half-expecting this back in San Bernardino on People’s Independence Day.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “but back along the real Route 66 the bullet holes in the road signs gave you fair warning you were in redneck territory.”

“Nobody’s fighting fair over here,” Liscomb said quietly. “We’re guilty of overkill somehow, even though the Bad Guys keep sneaking around without showing their faces.”

“Thank God Nixon’s wrapping all this up with Chairman Mao,” said Wheeler. Nobody replied. We didn’t know what the hell Nixon was doing in China.

“I hope he hasn’t been so busy wining and dining he’s forgotten there’s a goddamn war going on,” said Liscomb.

“How are things for you back at the 601st?” I asked him. “Flying nothing but unarmed reconnaissance missions and being kept under house arrest—for leading one stinking peace march back in August? We both got reamed.”

“That may be the only good thing to come out of the bicycle race fiasco,” he answered. “After flying around on that Jolly Green rescue helicopter, taking hostile fire, and then helping to snuff it out, it looks like the brass is putting me on a slightly longer leash.”

“Here’s to longer leashes,” I toasted, taking a swig of the San Miguel and passing it around. “To longer leashes,” the guys repeated, and before I knew it the bottle was empty, I was alone, and Lutz was on a plane headed for Tan Son Nhut.

eing trapped in bed, hooked to a bunch of tubes and wires. When I asked about checking out, nobody seemed too happy about it, and before I knew it, Nurse Wozniak had shown up and was pretty much ordering me to wait till Dr. Lioci made his rounds.

When he arrived, he took a quick look at my chart and hung the clipboard back at the foot of my bed. “How are the headaches?” he asked.

“They come and go.”

“And the nausea?”

“It comes and goes.”

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Two—or three—or is it two?”

“How are you going to focus a camera?”

“I’m not,” I confessed.

“We need to keep monitoring those symptoms, Sergeant Leary, and we’re still waiting for the swelling and bruising on your face and head to go down so we can get some better X-rays. I also want the nurses to keep an eye on the stitches when they change your dressings. Do you understand there’s a heightened risk of infection in the tropics?”

“I do. I give up. I’ll stick around.” I winced and settled in for what promised to be another week of hospital food, which I detested even when I could keep it down, and four doses a day of sedatives, painkillers, and Valium, which I grew rather fond of.

The drawback in the Valium department was that when I tried to write to my girlfriend Danielle and to my parents about the bicycle race, I had a hell of a time getting started, getting my thoughts organized, getting anything down on paper. Finally, I finished a pair of short notes saying that if they had seen anything in the papers or on TV about a terrorist attack in Ubon Province, not to worry—I was okay.

Only I was not okay. My physical wounds were healing, but deep inside, in my heart and soul, I ached. Prasert was dead. How was it possible that at the start of the year he had been a promising student and the caring brother of a woman I was beginning to love? How was it possible that, just days ago, I had held his sister Tukada in my arms, conjoined in blood but unable to keep her alive? The Thai fighter pilots were being cremated, and Murray, the pothead clerk-typist; Spitzer, my fellow cameraman; and Sachs, the door gunner, were being shipped home in body bags because of my misguided mixture of greed and good intentions. And there was no getting around it—I was responsible. The prescribed intake of sedatives soon stopped putting me to sleep. I tossed and turned in a cold sweat, and every time I closed my eyes I saw Tukada staring at me helplessly.

Mid-morning on Monday, Chaplain Kirkgartner stopped by. A tan, lean former college basketball player, he towered above my bed. “I’m sorry I can only stay a minute,” he said. “Colonel Grimsley and the Thai base commander want an interfaith memorial service at noon.”

“I understand,” I replied. “Just do me a favor and save the theology and comforting words for the service. I’m not feeling very religious right now.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“There is. Can you make sure someone has notified Tukada’s kin?”

“I’ll get right on it.”

“And please don’t give up on tracking down her daughter and her slimeball husband.”

“What would you do if we found them?”

“If he’s in jail, I’ll adopt Pranee myself.”

Jamal Washington, my fellow cameraman, and Lonnie Price, one of the technicians at the photo lab, stopped by later that afternoon. They had just come from the memorial service for Sachs, Spitzer, Murray, three other GIs I didn’t know, and the three Thai fighter pilots who had been riding the lead bicycles. Lonnie, whom I had first met back in the States working underground late at night editing the sNorton Bird for the Norton GIs for Peace, brought me a copper chain bracelet he had made at the base hobby shop, conferring me with “Honorary Brother” status. I felt a mixture of relief and regret to have missed the service. Just thinking about it was making me groggy. I wanted to go back to sleep, still hoping that when I woke up, the race and its aftermath would all turn out to have been a bad dream.

Link barged back in at the crack of dawn Tuesday. “Like I told you before, Leary, forget about your girlfriend’s husband. He’s already been discharged, shipped back to the States. I guarantee you Grimsley’s gonna want to see your sorry ass over at the Little Pentagon when you’re released from sick bay. He’s especially gonna want to know what your girlfriend told you about her husband.”

“Like I told you before, Sarge, she didn’t even tell me she had a husband until a month ago.”

“Maybe our Air Police captain can jog your memory, if you know what I mean.” And he was gone.

I was sleeping restlessly when Nurse Wozniak knocked and

 Jack Wu and Major Horney reported in. Colonel Grimsley, the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing Commander, had confiscated all proceeds from the race since there had been no winner and there would be no rematch. “He’s ordered Legal to distribute it to the families of the deceased,” said Horney. “He also ordered Indian Joe and Sagittarius Smith to refund all the side bets.”

“They weren’t too cheerful about it,” said Wu, “but I wouldn’t worry about those two. They’re the kind who always manage to land on their feet.” I was sure Jack was right.

“Is Major Wozniak taking good care of you?” Horney asked.

“Excellent,” I replied. “Is she still taking good care of you, Major?”

“She’s putting in the paperwork to join me at Hurlburt Field in Florida when our tours are over.” He winked and excused himself.

Wu stuck around. “There’s an interesting development on the stolen jeep front. My friends at OSI tell me their investigation led them to Tukada’s husband. It’s possible he stole it and fenced it to finance a heroin deal. And now, thanks to his being discharged, their investigation’s shot to hell. What makes this especially interesting is that our friend Indian Joe might have been the fence. Now they’ll never know. Case closed.”

“Have the papers said anything about the race?”

“That’s maybe the strangest thing of all. The New York Times, the Bangkok Post, and the Pacific Stars and Stripes have been running front-page stories all week about Nixon in China. But the race? There’s a single paragraph on page thirty-two of yesterday’s Times. It did make page two of the Bangkok Post. But the Stars and Stripes? Nothing. A total blackout.”

Over the next couple of days, Captain English, Lieutenant Hill, and Homer Harwell, my lead cameraman, popped in at various times to give me the same pep talk about how much they needed me back at the 601st. English told me he had put in the paperwork for a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. The Valium must have been working because I had no idea what he was talking about but said thanks just the same. I had one welcome, unexpected visit when Harley Baker stopped by with Jim Scott, his Peace Corps buddy who also ran the American University Alumni Association’s evening English-language school in Ubon. He cheered me up with the news he was personally covering the AUA class I’d been teaching. It was a bittersweet occasion, however, because Jim had just finished helping Harley move Sachs’s personal effects back on base from their compound downtown so they could be shipped home.

Harley came back a day later with Sugie Bear and

 Ackerman, my former bandmates from the Band of Brothers, and a far more upbeat Woody Shahbazian, my Merle Haggard-loving friend and tormentor since our Norton Air Force Base days back in California, who led a chorus taken up by Harley and Sugie Bear about how we needed to get a new band together. It was a pleasant thought, but I noticed nobody was making any definite plans. Ackerman, the non-bullshitter, smiled his cool New Orleans smile and stayed in the background.

“Guys, I’m too drugged up right now to even get out of bed, but maybe you’re on to something. Maybe it’ll be a good idea to keep ourselves busy. That’s what my mom told the wife of one of my dad’s pilot friends after the unspeakable happened and he’d been killed in a plane crash. Only I can’t imagine pasting on a stage smile and performing anytime soon. Maybe when my ears stop ringing and my head stops throbbing, we could ease back in by rehearsing quietly at the chapel annex.”

Late in the week, I had a couple more surprise visitors, none of whom, thankfully, was First Sergeant Link. Liscomb came in a little before lunchtime with the first group: the Air Police captain and the pilot and door gunner from Liscomb’s Jolly Green rescue bird. “We just had to get this off our chest, how sorry we are about your girlfriend,” said the Air Police officer.

“We were in radio contact,” said the pilot. “We were so damned proud of locating you and your friend with the handgun and figuring out you were friendlies and keeping you out of harm’s way…”

“Except we had no idea that a non-combatant was mixed in with the guerrillas,” said the door gunner. “If we’d known, maybe we could have held fire and given the police sharpshooters more time. But it was happening fast.”

“We were taking bullet hit after bullet hit,” said Liscomb.

“If they had hit us with one of their rocket-propelled grenades, we would have gone down with no time to autorotate,” said the pilot.

“Thanks for doing the best you could,” I told them. “We almost made it. We almost got her to triage.” I didn’t know what else to say. My mind flashed for a moment with the memory of Tukada dying in my arms. A sickening feeling of helplessness lingered. “Thanks for doing the best you could, and thanks for coming in,” I said. And with that, I dropped back to sleep.

That afternoon, Chaplain Kirkgartner brought in two more guests. I thought they were children at first, dwarfed as they were by the chaplain, neither of them standing much over five feet tall, but they were too soft-spoken and polite to be kids. “Tukada’s mother and

father have come to see you,” said Kirkgartner.

Her mother spoke in rapid Issan dialect and her father translated. “We want to thank you both for trying to help our daughter. She have problem with drug for many year.”

The mother spoke again to her husband. “My wife talk to her on phone while she in rehab, and she sound very hopeful. None of us can know that her hus-band will take baby. None of us can know what that do to Tukada. So thank you for get her here for treatment. Even before, when she see me at Sattahip for American New Year, she tell me you both are trying to help. We will take her ashes home to Ban Ang Hin. And when we spread them on the River Mun, we will pray for her and remember your caring.”

I thought I heard “Prasert” when Dah’s mother spoke again to her husband. “My son have hard life,” he said. “His mother die when he very young, and he go live with grandmother in Uttaradit. She will spread his ashes in the mountain there. As a child, always he sad. He very smart at school but no have frien’, only like going off alone in the mountain. Later, when we send him to wat for Rain Retreat, we hope being novice monk make him happy, but he quit before he stay a week. Say he cannot be monk—he like to hunt too much. We worry about him a lot, but when he join Army, he seem happy for first time. When I talk to his comman-der, he say Prasert a good soldier. An’ now dis. We don’ understand what happen to him. I afraid maybe when young, he meet Thai Communi’t insurgent in the mountain, train wit’ them, not really hunt, before he join Thai Army. We can never know.”

My head was spinning. “Prasert a trained insurgent infiltrating the Thai Army? I guess I don’t understand either. I guess he had me completely fooled. I liked him, and I thought he liked me and my friends. I admired him for looking after Dah and her baby.”

Dah’s mother and father glanced at each other. “That what we come to ask about,” said the father. His wife, a sad look in her eyes, spoke softly into her husband’s ear. “When you two go back Sa-tates,” he asked, “can you look for our granddaughter? We think she stay with father and grandmother in San Fran.”

“I’ll try,” I said. “My old base is in Southern California, and I plan to stay in California when I leave the Air Force. I promise I’ll look for her.”

“In the meantime, I’ll keep trying from here,” said the chaplain.

Dah’s parents seemed to have aged in the short time they stood there, and when they followed Kirkgartner out, they shuffled along like very old people.

I think I was glad to see all of my visitors, even Link, in the same way I was glad to see the nurses and medics—to confirm that I was still alive, that there was hope I 

 might pull myself out of the bottomless pit I had fallen into. But I didn’t have it in me to sweet-talk the nurses, not even the one from the first aid station who turned out in the end to be pretty nice. And I could barely remember how to small-talk with my friends. I seemed to be chopped in pieces. My heart felt happy when I had people around, but my eyes were tired, always on the verge of tears, and my mind was shot, zonked by drugs, a condition I might have fought had I been struggling for lucidity. I had been struggling long and hard for lucidity since conflicting reports about the Vietnam War started coming in while I was still in college. A lot of angry old patriots told me when I was a civilian and later, when I was still stationed Stateside, that you had to experience the war directly to understand it, that if you hadn’t “been there,” you had no right to talk about it. Well, now that I had “been there,” now that I’d seen action and had a bitter taste of the death and destruction in the Thailand-Laos-Cambodia branch of the war, I knew I would never understand it. I needed to accept madness and confusion instead. Lucidity was no longer an option.

I was deep in another doctor-induced haze of sedatives and tranquilizers when Tom Wheeler and Mole, Dave Murray’s old housemate, showed up late Saturday afternoon with a baggie holding the last of Murray’s Laotian grass-opium blend, neatly rolled in Zig-Zag papers. “We think Dave would have liked you to have this,” said Tom.

“Smoke it up for auld lang syne,” waxed Mole.

I tucked the baggie under my pillow and looked skyward. “Thank you, Dave, wherever you are.”

After a moment of respectful silence, Tom asked, “How you been doing?”

“I’m afraid I’m depressed as hell. At least my body’s healing.”

“I’ve been feeling pretty down, myself,” Tom replied. “I may follow Dave’s footsteps yet and go into drug rehab. Doing red rock heroin is starting to get to me. I don’t get a rush, and I’m having to do more and more just to maintain.”

“The same thing’s happening to me with my sleeping pills.”

“Man, the whole base seems down,” said Mole. “Hell, the whole town has been gloomy. This has been mai sanuk big time. I think we would have taken it better if one of our planes had been shot down. We expect that. But a fuckin’ bicycle race? Gimme a break.”

Late that night I lit up, expecting orgasms in my lungs like the last time I had smoked Murray’s personal stash. Instead, I slipped into a deep sleep that might have been a coma and got to live through the Big Buddha massacre one more time, distorted in new and fascinating

 fascinating ways.

Time becomes slippery, stretching like an unraveling Ace bandage. The world winds down, runs in slow motion like an old spring-driven alarm clock that gives off a few ponderous tock…tocks before expending itself completely. The finality of eternal silence is broken by the distant POP-POPs of AK-47 and M-16 gunfire, soon drowned out by the crunching gears of my Arri St. I pan left—Washington is down. Instinctively I pan right, going for the source, the heart of the action. A blur turns into one, two, four, eight frames, 1/3 of a second, enough time to register Prasert.

I charge, adrenaline high, fast as Lieutenant Asshole and his killer F-4. I’m small, a fast mover. Ain’t no triple-A gonna take me down. Evasive action time, even looking through the eyepiece of my Arri.

Prasert fires. The lens shatters. The impact blinds me, sends me reeling backwards cursing Prasert and Ron Cooper, the conniving son of a bitch who got me into this mess, flipping camera circuits and brain circuits, snapping me into rage mode, autopilot. The barrel of Washington’s M-16 burns my hand when I pick it up. He’s still breathing… “Easy, Jamal. It’ll all be over in a minute.”

My right eye fills with fluid, milky, dim. Reptile mode. Prasert is the unchained tiger that charges me at the Bangkok Zoo. He’s dog meat. He’s history. He won’t die. I shoot his face. Again. Again. Again. Pineapple that Lek won’t need to slice. Scattered to oblivion. The torso stands a moment, a steaming cloud of dust and blood vapor where a head should be, then falls. I pull open his shirt: the SOB wears Pigpen Sachs’s flak jacket…

I woke up disoriented in the dark room, thinking I was back at Ruam Chon Sawng, not understanding why tubes were poking into my arms. Even after I regained my orientation, I tossed and turned long into the night, shaken by the realization that I enjoyed shooting at Prasert, killing him ruthlessly. Some pacifist, I thought. And I wondered about a strange aftertaste, a bitter certainty that Indian Joe had sold Prasert the flak jacket. It was only a dream, I tried to tell myself, but the rage I felt for Ron Cooper—working on an air-conditioned sound stage back in San Bernardino—was real and deep.

Tom Wheeler and Harley Baker paid me a visit that morning on their way back from breakfast. “That grass you gave me yesterday turned out to be nasty,” I told Tom. “I dreamed that I picked up an M-16 and smoked Prasert—big time, total overkill.”

“Funny,” Tom replied. “Mole and I smoked the same shit and it didn’t affect us at all. Nada.”

“Maybe you’re a warrior after all,” said Harley. “Revenge can be sweet.”

“Except I think it was more than anger at Prasert. I think a

lot of it was rage at myself. For cutting him slack, for letting my feelings for Tukada… Damn, I was crazy about her. I thought he and I were trying to get her straightened out. Who was he, anyway? And who the hell is the Issan Liberation Front? Things look pretty free around here to me, even with a war going on. What do they need to be liberated from?”

“I thought we learned to stay out of Thai politics,” said Tom. “You know that nobody talks here. Nobody wants to show his hand.”

“I already briefed you,” Harley reminded me. “Stay here as long as you want, you’ll never really know what side your best friend’s on if he’s Asian. He might be on both sides—covering his ass till it’s over. It’s enough to make you like the NVA for putting on uniforms and fighting fair and square, mano a mano.”

Before Tom and Harley left I fell back into a fitful sleep, except now it was worse: my troubled mind began rerunning an old dream of my youngest sister. Wreaking revenge on Prasert made some kind of sense. Stabbing my sister, even in a dream, filled me with dread that deep inside I was a monster capable at any time of uncontrolled violence. I was damn glad when, an hour later, Moonbeam Liscomb stepped into the room. I told him about the dreams, and the lieutenant smiled compassionately. “We’ve all got that in us, brother. Why hate yourself for being human, why not accept it?”

“Obviously, you weren’t raised Catholic.”

“It doesn’t matter what you were raised, everybody has violent thoughts and impulses some time or another. The question is: do we act on those impulses or learn to let go of them?”

“After having that dream, I’m afraid the feelings locked inside me are beyond my control. Not only can’t I control them, I’m afraid they control me. How the hell do you just let go of violent impulses?”

“Meditation helps. But I also think you’ve stumbled onto what my Zen teacher back in L.A. called ‘the interconnectedness of all things.’ You’re filled with rage at Prasert because he betrayed you, violating your trust in the worst possible way, ...