Page 45 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

H e sat on wet earth, leaning against a towering conifer, warm rain dripping from the forest canopy and collecting in the overturned helmet beside him, concealed in a half-ass manner by surrounding shrubs and stunted palms. Rainwater also dripped onto his bare head and down his neck into his sodden, sweat-stained fatigues.

As the sun lowered, A.J. studied a gecko eyeing ants that marched around and over his canvas boots.

The occasional earthworm or snake slithered by; at times an errant partridge would perch in a nearby laurel tree.

Yet despite the welcome cloud cover, ample water supply, and summery temperatures, his situation was, in military parlance, FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Repair.

Nonetheless, he had no choice but to repair it. Either that or likely die.

Here was a real-life opportunity to put to good use his extensive exfiltration training, that is, his tactical knowhow on removing an intelligence agent (in this case, Marine Special Operations Sergeant A.J. Nowak) from the enemy’s midst.

He wondered how he got there. Not in the logistical sense.

That he knew quite well. With the collusion of Cambodian ruler Prince Norodom Sihanouk (at the behest of the People’s Republic of China), the Viet Cong and the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) were moving men and materiel through eastern Cambodia to oppose South Vietnamese forces across the border.

To discover the extent, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson had endorsed covert cross-border reconnaissance operations by the Secret Studies and Observation Group, with whom A.J.

had been deployed. Then in the dark of night (and the fog of war) he had been cut off from his team and left behind in the claustrophobic, hilly rainforest, surrounded by scores of PAVN troops.

Fortunately, they were unaware of his presence.

Unfortunately, they seemed in no hurry to move on.

This would be his second night sleeping with the enemy.

However, he did wonder what psychological and sociological forces—what demons in his nature and what misguided directives in his nurture—had compelled him to become a solider who went blithely off trotting about the globe abetting dubious cross-national ventures about which he did not really give a damn.

Up to now his work as a Marine had been playing soldier.

Just as he and the Sullivan boys, all five of them along with their tomboy sister, had done at Long Lake during the Korean War, when Inchon, Pusan, and the 38th Parallel dominated the news.

More recently he had trained Cuban exiles in amphibious landing tactics, worked with Guatemalan Special Forces on anticipating and neutralizing guerrilla actions, played Caribbean war games with the British Commando Brigade, and taught ARVN Special Forces recruits hand-to-hand combat techniques (while they in turn schooled him in Mahayana Buddhism).

None of which involved actual enemy combatants who might actually kill you. This, however, was different.

Though not per se a combatant attempting to harry the PAVN and Viet Cong, he was in fact a spy gathering critical information on their efforts to resupply forces fighting in South Vietnam.

In other words, someone destined for enhanced interrogation and summary execution if captured—something that never ever happened in allied war games.

Further, he was on his own. It being a covert operation violating various U.S. and international laws, he could expect no forthcoming Hollywood cavalry charge to rescue him. He would somehow have to exfiltrate his own sorry ass, personally.

As a longtime loner and maverick, he had some experience relying on his own resources to solve his problems. Nonetheless this was a new breed of solitude and a new, exalted level of problem-solving difficulty.

He had pondered his dilemma at length without finding a plausible solution.

Further, despite passing endless hours studying the rainforest flora and fauna and picturing the placid wheat fields of his youth, all in hopes that by forgoing a direct intellectual assault on his predicament an answer might arise from his subconscious mind, none did.

He was stumped. As a result, he could not hold down the taste of fear in his throat, bile rising as if he were eating his own liver, as the phrase went.

There you go, Nowak. Just what you’d bargained for: danger and adrenaline.

A.J. tried his damnedest to stay in the moment as the Buddha counseled and not think about what the Cong might do to him with bamboo wedges if captured.

“There is no fear for one whose mind is not filled with desire.” Easy for old Gautama to say, sitting peacefully in his lotus position munching jackfruit.

A.J.’s mind, however, overflowed with desire—the desire to stay alive somehow and return home someday soon.

Sooner than he might have desired just a few days earlier.

No way could he allow himself to be captured, face torture, and become a PAVN propaganda poster boy.

His well-meaning (though some would argue self-interested) handlers had provided him a painless encapsulated way to end it all and thus avoid such agony and ignominy.

So perhaps it would in fact end here, halfway around the globe in an alien land never on his must-see list, for no good purpose as far as he could in fact see.

This was what he was born for? This was his destiny, a self-inflicted cyanide exit in Southeast Asia hinterlands?

A sad and fruitless farewell indeed, Mother Earth.

Which led him off on reminiscences of his youth on Long Lake.

Among them, of course, the day Western Union came calling with news of his father’s death, and the morning he discovered his beautiful mother frozen rigid in the Long Lake ice.

But those two days were anomalies, human failure (of one sort or another), overridden by countless enriching days embedded in him by the steady hand of nature.

Endless hours running the fields with the Sullivans in search of rabbit or quail or imaginary villains as children had done for eons.

Passing hot summer afternoons lying on the cool, fresh-smelling grass under towering sycamores as marshmallow clouds floated in from the Southwest, eyeing them for lurking monsters or cream-colored puppies running aloft.

Then fashioning a necklace of white clover flowers for his mother.

And the games with the other lake children—Indian Ball, Mother May I, Hide-and-Seek, Statues, Marbles, Red Rover, and Tag.

Cops and Robbers, GI’s and Nazis, and Cowboys and Indians, whose presence vibrated from the earth and the burial mounds lining the lake.

But always drawn to the lake, as were his mound-building predecessors.

In winter skating and chaotic hockey, with tree branches in lieu of actual hockey sticks and a tin-can puck.

In warm months urging fish and crawdads from the lake and rowing over its shimmering surface at a summer sunset, the air alive with the chirp of insects and the scents of the mossy water and fertile fields.

And longing for that freedom and the sustenance of nature on rainy days (or school days) spent inside.

Those days often lived in the guise of make-believe personas vanquishing tyrants and rescuing maidens, just like in the movies.

Or with pencil and paper sketching battles scenes or Sioux camps.

And later with books on Americana—the explorers, frontiersmen, soldiers, statesmen, and tribesmen—biographies he would devour at one sitting.

But how was all that preparation for this? Or did it all argue against it?

But back to the Buddha and his corollary admonition to employ Right Thinking.

Get your head straight, Nowak, or you will be dead meat for sure.

DO NOT become a fuckup at this crucial juncture and pave an autobahn to your own oblivion.

Now was the time to kick it into FOM: Full Orphan Mode.

And if not to morph into Tarzan or Superman, at least somehow to now become the hero of your own life and not die pointlessly in this Godforsaken land for a botched reconnaissance mission of dubious provenance, to say the least.

Thoughts of Superman flying over Metropolis and Tarzan swinging from vine to vine made him look aloft at the green rainforest canopy.

That’s where he belonged, where he might see a way out, instead of trembling here on the ground like a worm, waiting for someone to step on him. Yes, he needed to rise above it all.