Excellent Mr Green Secrets In The Wind : Secrets In The Wind Part V by Delahay

Jim, Viet Nam vet with PTSD is having an identity crisis. He is having dreams and memories about an alter ego who is in a dangerous career. While stationed in Viet Nam he was approached by an representative for a clandestine government agency about working for Air America, the C.I.A.'s air support in Southeast Asia. Every story starts somewhere, or it should. I'm not quite sure about this one. I was in 'Nam, my wife, who I call Patience, was in the States. I had grown sick of the lies and death of this micro-managed war where we could not take out a SAM (surface to air missile) site we could see being built because there may be a Russian adviser in the way, and we wouldn't want to bring the Russians in on this mess. In a week it would be taking down our fighters, bombers, and anything else they could fire on. I couldn't understand the logic. If we took out a Russian adviser, wouldn't the Russians have to explain what he was doing there if they were going to make something of the incident? It was situations like this that made me decide to take Mr. Green up on his offer. Mr. Green was the name the government suit gave me when he approached me with his offer to work for Air America. I just had to put in a year with them and I'd be back home with an early discharge from the military. What is that they say about if something is too good to be true? It probably is. There is another saying about the devil being in the details, such as the ones I didn't pay attention to at the time. Like, who exactly were the good guys in this scenario? Another little detail that was left out, would I really be a free agent when I got home? Would I be free from any further obligations to Mr. Green and his friends? It was ten years ago that I was approached by Mr. Green with his offer. I would have done just about anything at that point if it got me home any sooner. I spent the next year in Laos and Cambodia, two countries our government swore we never sent any of our people to. Maybe I should have read that non disclosure letter a little closer before I signed on. I was no longer wearing a uniform, plausible deniability being a government phrase I would become all too familiar with, but it meant that if I was captured I could be immediately executed as a spy. Even assuming anyone was playing by Geneva Convention rules. During that year I spent much of my time as a forward observer, emplacing laser designators for guiding payloads for bombers. The bombers we never flew over Cambodia or Laos. Our bombs are a lot smarter now and don't need as much guidance as they once did. Too bad for me to have been in the wrong war. There was this one day I will remember for the rest of my life. I had gone back to our base to get some equipment I needed and left my friend Randy out in the field setting up the laser. As I started over a hill I heard the gunfire. I dropped down and crept forward to see what was going on. I got to the top just in time to see about forty V.C. coming over the next hill toward the spot I had last seen Randy. As I watched, one of them put a bullet right through his head. I never realized before then that a round from an AK47 could take someone's head right off. I wish I had never found out that little piece of information. I don't know how I managed to get out of there in one piece. I don't remember much about the next two days. That's how long it took me to get back to friendly real estate, only to find out that I was the only survivor of a twelve man patrol. Little things like that can change a person. I don't know exactly at what point I stopped being the person that went to Viet Nam and became the person that came home. Mr. Green did keep his promise. I was sent home after only another year in country, with an honorable discharge, with a DD-214 that looked like a public copy of the Warren Commission's report on the Kennedy Assassination. It was mostly made up of black lines with an occasional "and" or "the" or maybe a verb thrown in here or there. It certainly didn't take long to read. I discovered soon enough, though, that I had indeed made a deal with the devil. My life and soul were no longer my own. I just didn't know it yet. When I told Patience what I had done to get sent home early I was surprised at her reaction. She was not exactly happy and encouraging about the deal. I don't know where she may have learned anything about Air America or the people who ran it, but she seemed to have an idea that I had made a bad choice. I began to have doubts myself the next time I tried to contact my friend Mr. Green. The number he gave me had been disconnected with no explanation or information forthcoming. I started thinking about Robert Johnson and the deal he made. I started thinking back and wondering if there had been a crossroad nearby when I had first met Mr. Green Author Notes In Viet Nam we were not allowed to fire on SAM sites as they were being built. This really was because we knew that there were Russian military advisers on site and we didn't want the cold war to heat up. It always seemed to me that if they were there, and the Russians claimed they weren't, then they couldn't get too upset if their non existent people were killed. A DD-214 I a record of what a person did while they were in the military. It should have details about all the training the person had gone through and all the missions they took part in. Mine did indeed look just as described here. It was thoroughly redacted, also know as edited, but with a black magic marker, until it said precisely nothing. This was done, "For the good of the service". I could have been anything from military police, to a doctor, or a pilot, with the information that was in my records. No one could have disputed my version of what I did because no one, including me, could get a copy of my records. Despite these tidbits this is not an autobiography. I"m just adding in parts that I can relate to.

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