| General Fiction posted January 2, 2022 | Chapters: |
...8 9 -10- 11... 
|
  |
What Lee see's is what Lee gets.
A chapter in the book Concertina
Lee ventures inside the bunker.
by Yardier
The author has placed a warning on this post for language.
| Background Lee Morason is a Vietnam veteran with the aftereffects of combat clouding his view of life. He avoids the symptoms and denies he is heading to a psychological and spiritual break down. |
The rain fell lightly on the windshield as the shuttle driver expertly wove his way in and out of Cyclo and Pedi-Cab traffic on Tan Duc Thang, the main street that paralleled the Saigon River. The new Toyota van's spotless interior smelled rich with new fabric and a hint of a sweet air freshener hanging lightly in the air. The tinted windows offered Lee a secure view of the changed and still changing Ho Chi Minh City as the van stereo softly played Vietnamese music. He sat back while a collage of eclectic architecture from one-hundred-year-old Pagodas, Colonial French Villas, plywood, and plastic-covered lean-tos and small bland stucco storefronts with bright neon lights passed his view. He squinted his eyes at the brightly lit billboards towering above the busy street, hawking everything from Tide soap to a new riverfront condominium project.
Lee felt that the city's disjointed image was vaguely familiar and associated it with a long weekend getaway to San Diego and neighboring Tijuana with his wife. While the visual images were similar, the underlying sense of foreboding and confusion was not. What...what is it? Lee thought as the driver quickly pulled off the busy street and parked next to other shuttle vans from the Saigon Marriott, Hotel Majestic, and Hotel Continental. The driver got out and darted around to the side of the van and opened the sliding door for Lee. Immediately the loud, deep sounds of a rock band's bass guitar thumping from inside the Bunker overwhelmed the van's pleasing Vietnamese music. The driver, distant but professionally friendly, handed Lee a business card with the hotel's desk number and said, "Call when you're ready."
He sprinted around the van and hopped in out of the rain. He beeped the horn a few times as he pulled into traffic, then blended seamlessly into the steady stream of fading taillights.
Lee, too, sprinted out of the rain toward the front of the Bunker and joined other middle-aged veterans struggling to make it through the heavy steel security gate. The rusty gate had been constructed from three 105 Howitzer artillery barrels, two vertical and one horizontal. The horizontal barrel stabilized two opposing vertical barrels, which provided the hinge points for the double-hung security gates. Trying to avoid becoming stained from the wet rust, the veterans crowded to the center of the opening, chanting various cadence calls. Lee was pushed from one side to the other by bulldozing veterans as they made their way through the gate. Jostled, he slipped to the ground stained with rust as veterans stepped around him. Some laughed, some cheered, and some taunted, "Give me fifty, private."
A Vietnamese security guard intervened and helped Lee to his feet, and pulled him to one side. The security guard apologized for the veterans' unruly behavior and turned Lee around to brush the mud and rust off his clothes with a small hand broom. Lee was a little more than pissed at being pushed to the ground, but the Security guard did everything he could to make things right.
It was hard for Lee to be angry with him, especially when he smiled. His eyes sparkled with life. Who was he?
Perhaps he had been a small boy back in the war. Maybe they had met. As soon as the security guard was satisfied he had brushed as much rust off Lee as he could, he stepped through the gate into the parking lot to calm a group of aggravated veterans. Concerned, Lee watched as the security guard disappeared into the crowd. He was unarmed, unafraid, yet a servant who cleaned and calmed others.
Lee stood for a moment staring at the backside of the gate, wondering from where the security Guard learned such duty and kindness? Then, slowly, his vision focused on faded wording that resisted the onslaught of rust homesteading the neglected gate. It read, BRAIN HOUSING GROUP.
"What, a leftover MACV security gate repurposed?" Lee turned to the entrance of the Bunker and, with other thirsty veterans, forced his way into the crowded bar.
~~~~
The Vietnamese band at the rear of the long smoky bar was deafening. However, what they lacked with lyrical accuracy, they made up with amplification. They played American and British Rock beyond loud, and it was just fine with everybody.
As Lee pushed his way to the bar through a forest of old faded camouflaged uniform shirts, Boonie hats, and newer pastel polo shirts with military unit logos neatly embroidered above the breast pocket, someone shouted, "AIRBORNE!"
Another yelled back, "STAND UP AND HOOK UP!" And then, in one loud, raucous voice that drowned out the band, the crowd shouted, "SHUFFLE TO THE DOOR MAGGOTS!"
Lee elbowed his way to the bar, ordered a bottle of Tiger beer from the American bartender, and noticed, along with the obvious returning vets, there were quite a few young persons that were just as loud and rowdy as the vets.
"Surfers," a leathered face next to Lee exclaimed with a tired stream of cigarette smoke curling out of his varicose vein-covered nose. "There's a contest up at Da Nang. They hang out here before and after the meet." He paused for a moment. "Djew remember what you were doing when you were that age?"
Lee looked at a couple of sediment grains at the bottom of his beer bottle and admitted to himself he had not really forgotten all that much. He clearly remembered what he had been doing at their age, and it wasn't carrying a surfboard. He gave the surfers the once over; some wore earrings, some had bleached spiked hair, and some had shaved heads, and some wore odd-looking goatees.They weren't much different from the mall rats or MTV video pukes back home, but now he was unsure if he resented or envied them.
"First time back?"
Lee took a swig of beer. "Yep."
"Well, welcome home, brother." The man offered his hand to Lee and said, "I'm Joe, Joe Zepar. Back in the day, they called me Zip, short for Zippo, not Zep, Zip, got it?"
"Eh, sure." Lee shook his hand and said, "Lee Morason, they just called me Lee. Why not Zep?"
"M-2 flamethrower, that's why. Burn the Ville down and fry those slopes like bacon, great job if you can stand the heat."
"PBR coxswain," Lee said.
"Oh, a Navy River Rat. That's some crazy stuff you guys did. Not me, brother. I like to keep my boots on the ground. Not on some plastic boat on some river in the middle of the jungle gonna take you to who knows where."
"No, Army," Lee said.
"Army River Rat, that's even worse. MACV probably didn't even know the Army had boats."
"We didn't care. That's the way we liked it. Out of sight, out of mind. We pretty much existed on what we stole from the Navy anyway."
"Pirates, huh?"
"Pretty much, this your first time back?" Lee asked.
Zip stubbed out his cigarette. "Never left." Zip leaned forward and held up his empty glass and called out to the bartender over the din of the crowd, "Rudy, another double Red Label and Tiger Piss for a returning war hero."
"War hero?" a couple of voices chimed together. "WAR HERO?" More voices joined in mock credulity. Then someone yelled, "Here's to the WARRR." More of the crowd joined in. "HEE-ROES!"
Lee thought he distinctly heard a sullen whispered voice from the surfers. "More like zero's..."
Zip continued. "Believe it or not, in '74, I was assigned to the embassy and could come and go as I pleased. Met a Vietnamese gal and, well, I'm sure you know the rest of the story. I extended my tour and was trying to figure out a way to get her home to have the baby when the shit hit the fan."
Lee's head filled with images of Saigon under siege. "I thought you humped an M-2?"
"Burned one too many huts, I guess. The Green Machine pulled in all the equipment, and by the stroke of Colonel Culverin's pen, we became newly minted 11B's. But you know how it goes. I had a friend back at Long Binh who waved his magic wand, and as quick as you could Flic-a-Bic, I was an instant Clerk Typist."
"You can type?" Lee asked.
"Not very good," Zip smirked. "But good enough to ride a desk behind embassy walls.
When the NVA tanks rolled into the city, I lost track of her in the confusion. I think I could have gotten her aboard one of the helicopters, but I couldn't find her. So I had to make a decision, I knew she couldn't get a ride out on one of those birds without me, but at the same time, I knew what it meant if I stayed behind."
Rudy slid the drinks in front of Zip and looked at Lee. "This one's on the house."
Lee watched Zip's reflection in the smoke-stained bar mirror. "And so..."
"Yep, ten years...right here. Snuck into Bangkok once, but, other than that, I've been livin' in this rat hole."
Zip tilted his head back and gulped his drink down.
"Did you...she...?" Lee hesitated in digging up too much of Zip's past, but if Zip knew which government agency could help him find Annie, it was worth the inquiry.
"Nope, not yet anyway," Zip said. "My hope is she made it out with one of the groups of boat people. If she didn't, she's probably not alive because we would have found each other. I don't go as often as I used to, but I'd wander around these streets and back alleys looking for her for years. For a while, there wasn't a day that I didn't walk through the Zoo and Botanical Gardens, hoping to see her in her white Ao Dai tossing green bananas to the Sun Bears.
We had some unfinished business before us. I mean, we were a team, a force of love to be reckoned with. And there's something else I can tell ya 'bout her; she was so beautiful she could charm the pants off a hundred men." Zip chuckled and smiled. "I'll bet you if she's alive, she probably owns a chain of jewelry stores in Southern California."
Zip paused as his smile slowly turned upside down into a frown of fatigue. He sighed as he looked into his empty glass. "Damn war."
"Why don't you go home?" Lee asked carefully.
Zip snapped at Lee through clenched teeth as he lit a cigarette, "Why don't you go home? He took a deep drag, "Sorry...got a big U.S. Court Martial waiting for me back CONUS. They don't take too kindly to deserters. Besides, even though I'm persona-non-grata here, this kinda feels like home, now." his voice trailed off. "The commies leave me alone, mostly. I help Rudy with the bar and mingle with brothers like you from all over the states. What more could a guy want, eh?"
Concerned, Lee asked, "What do you mean, mostly?"
Zip looked down the length of the bar past Rudy, who was busy slinging drinks to a group of well-lubricated vets singing old cadence songs. "See him?"
"Rudy?"
"No, through the window; pink shirt, across the street, eating a bowl of Pho."
Lee peered down the bar through the smoky window and tried to see the pink shirt between passing taxis and cyclos. "Him... by the woman with the pole across her shoulders and buckets on the ends?" he asked.
"Ya, that's Agent Chien; he's a member of the Communist Cadre that orchestrates campaigns against corrupting foreign influences. He's the big dog, numba one boss man here. That's why his nickname is Le Chien. He relishes keeping social evils under his control," Zip said with a hint of envy kept in check by an appropriate amount of fear… real fear.
Lee looked around the bar and saw what he remembered as 'Tea Girls' sitting on the laps of sweaty-faced vets and other mini-skirted women gyrating wildly with surfers on the dance floor.
Apparently, the Cadre hadn't come in for a while, Lee thought.
"There's usually a half dozen or so of those commies working Dong Khoi at any one time. You can usually tell them by the long-tailed pastel shirts they wear to conceal their pistols, usually pink, light blue, and yellow, that sort of thing. They all know Kung Fu too." Zip rubbed the back of his neck. "They're mean as pit bulls and are deadly serious about National Reunification. Zip saw Lee looking at the working girls and said, "They don't care about that...they raid all of these joints about every nine months or so to make it look good.
Rudy turns the music down, kicks the whores out for a while, and then in a couple of weeks, it slowly starts up again. What the Cadre is looking for are returning Vets. They're paranoid as hell about spooks: CIA plants." Zip turned and faced Lee. "And solo flying vets."
"What...?"
"Ya, anytime a guy shows up, and he's not with a guided tour group, you know, old unit reunion kind of thing, they take a hard look."
"They'd be wasting their time with me." Lee looked around for the pesky doctor and his MIA investigative group and was relieved when he didn't see him. He didn't want to answer any more stupid questions about the 'Nam.
"Maybe, maybe not, but they'll look you over anyway. By the time you get back to the states, your visa info will be in a different file and, they'll have their agents CONUS checkin' on you too." Zip saw that Lee had become tense as he picked at a piece of the gouged-out bar top.
He tried to redirect Lee's anxiety, "They mostly want to know if you've got your hand in any subversive activities...like passing or receiving information from U.S. gooks and the home crew.
They'll keep an eye on any Viet you spend more than one minute with; I guarantee you that."
Lee looked down at the bar top and saw where someone had taken a knife and gouged out an old grunt saying, 'The only good gook is a dead gook.' "What a hassle, he thought as he burned an image into his mind of Agent Chien slurping noodles. "Better not get too close to me, Victor Charles..."
~~~~
Glossary
11 B – Army code for infantry solider.
Brain Housing Group – Military slang for everything inside the skull.
CONUS – Continental United States
Coxswain - Operator of PBR.
Gook – Pejorative for Vietnamese, intended for Viet Cong.
M-2 – Flame thrower.
NVA – North Vietnamese Army
PBR - Fast attack patrol boat.
Pho – Soup consisting of broth, rice noodles, herbs, and meat.
Lee felt that the city's disjointed image was vaguely familiar and associated it with a long weekend getaway to San Diego and neighboring Tijuana with his wife. While the visual images were similar, the underlying sense of foreboding and confusion was not. What...what is it? Lee thought as the driver quickly pulled off the busy street and parked next to other shuttle vans from the Saigon Marriott, Hotel Majestic, and Hotel Continental. The driver got out and darted around to the side of the van and opened the sliding door for Lee. Immediately the loud, deep sounds of a rock band's bass guitar thumping from inside the Bunker overwhelmed the van's pleasing Vietnamese music. The driver, distant but professionally friendly, handed Lee a business card with the hotel's desk number and said, "Call when you're ready."
He sprinted around the van and hopped in out of the rain. He beeped the horn a few times as he pulled into traffic, then blended seamlessly into the steady stream of fading taillights.
Lee, too, sprinted out of the rain toward the front of the Bunker and joined other middle-aged veterans struggling to make it through the heavy steel security gate. The rusty gate had been constructed from three 105 Howitzer artillery barrels, two vertical and one horizontal. The horizontal barrel stabilized two opposing vertical barrels, which provided the hinge points for the double-hung security gates. Trying to avoid becoming stained from the wet rust, the veterans crowded to the center of the opening, chanting various cadence calls. Lee was pushed from one side to the other by bulldozing veterans as they made their way through the gate. Jostled, he slipped to the ground stained with rust as veterans stepped around him. Some laughed, some cheered, and some taunted, "Give me fifty, private."
A Vietnamese security guard intervened and helped Lee to his feet, and pulled him to one side. The security guard apologized for the veterans' unruly behavior and turned Lee around to brush the mud and rust off his clothes with a small hand broom. Lee was a little more than pissed at being pushed to the ground, but the Security guard did everything he could to make things right.
It was hard for Lee to be angry with him, especially when he smiled. His eyes sparkled with life. Who was he?
Perhaps he had been a small boy back in the war. Maybe they had met. As soon as the security guard was satisfied he had brushed as much rust off Lee as he could, he stepped through the gate into the parking lot to calm a group of aggravated veterans. Concerned, Lee watched as the security guard disappeared into the crowd. He was unarmed, unafraid, yet a servant who cleaned and calmed others.
Lee stood for a moment staring at the backside of the gate, wondering from where the security Guard learned such duty and kindness? Then, slowly, his vision focused on faded wording that resisted the onslaught of rust homesteading the neglected gate. It read, BRAIN HOUSING GROUP.
"What, a leftover MACV security gate repurposed?" Lee turned to the entrance of the Bunker and, with other thirsty veterans, forced his way into the crowded bar.
~~~~
The Vietnamese band at the rear of the long smoky bar was deafening. However, what they lacked with lyrical accuracy, they made up with amplification. They played American and British Rock beyond loud, and it was just fine with everybody.
As Lee pushed his way to the bar through a forest of old faded camouflaged uniform shirts, Boonie hats, and newer pastel polo shirts with military unit logos neatly embroidered above the breast pocket, someone shouted, "AIRBORNE!"
Another yelled back, "STAND UP AND HOOK UP!" And then, in one loud, raucous voice that drowned out the band, the crowd shouted, "SHUFFLE TO THE DOOR MAGGOTS!"
Lee elbowed his way to the bar, ordered a bottle of Tiger beer from the American bartender, and noticed, along with the obvious returning vets, there were quite a few young persons that were just as loud and rowdy as the vets.
"Surfers," a leathered face next to Lee exclaimed with a tired stream of cigarette smoke curling out of his varicose vein-covered nose. "There's a contest up at Da Nang. They hang out here before and after the meet." He paused for a moment. "Djew remember what you were doing when you were that age?"
Lee looked at a couple of sediment grains at the bottom of his beer bottle and admitted to himself he had not really forgotten all that much. He clearly remembered what he had been doing at their age, and it wasn't carrying a surfboard. He gave the surfers the once over; some wore earrings, some had bleached spiked hair, and some had shaved heads, and some wore odd-looking goatees.They weren't much different from the mall rats or MTV video pukes back home, but now he was unsure if he resented or envied them.
"First time back?"
Lee took a swig of beer. "Yep."
"Well, welcome home, brother." The man offered his hand to Lee and said, "I'm Joe, Joe Zepar. Back in the day, they called me Zip, short for Zippo, not Zep, Zip, got it?"
"Eh, sure." Lee shook his hand and said, "Lee Morason, they just called me Lee. Why not Zep?"
"M-2 flamethrower, that's why. Burn the Ville down and fry those slopes like bacon, great job if you can stand the heat."
"PBR coxswain," Lee said.
"Oh, a Navy River Rat. That's some crazy stuff you guys did. Not me, brother. I like to keep my boots on the ground. Not on some plastic boat on some river in the middle of the jungle gonna take you to who knows where."
"No, Army," Lee said.
"Army River Rat, that's even worse. MACV probably didn't even know the Army had boats."
"We didn't care. That's the way we liked it. Out of sight, out of mind. We pretty much existed on what we stole from the Navy anyway."
"Pirates, huh?"
"Pretty much, this your first time back?" Lee asked.
Zip stubbed out his cigarette. "Never left." Zip leaned forward and held up his empty glass and called out to the bartender over the din of the crowd, "Rudy, another double Red Label and Tiger Piss for a returning war hero."
"War hero?" a couple of voices chimed together. "WAR HERO?" More voices joined in mock credulity. Then someone yelled, "Here's to the WARRR." More of the crowd joined in. "HEE-ROES!"
Lee thought he distinctly heard a sullen whispered voice from the surfers. "More like zero's..."
Zip continued. "Believe it or not, in '74, I was assigned to the embassy and could come and go as I pleased. Met a Vietnamese gal and, well, I'm sure you know the rest of the story. I extended my tour and was trying to figure out a way to get her home to have the baby when the shit hit the fan."
Lee's head filled with images of Saigon under siege. "I thought you humped an M-2?"
"Burned one too many huts, I guess. The Green Machine pulled in all the equipment, and by the stroke of Colonel Culverin's pen, we became newly minted 11B's. But you know how it goes. I had a friend back at Long Binh who waved his magic wand, and as quick as you could Flic-a-Bic, I was an instant Clerk Typist."
"You can type?" Lee asked.
"Not very good," Zip smirked. "But good enough to ride a desk behind embassy walls.
When the NVA tanks rolled into the city, I lost track of her in the confusion. I think I could have gotten her aboard one of the helicopters, but I couldn't find her. So I had to make a decision, I knew she couldn't get a ride out on one of those birds without me, but at the same time, I knew what it meant if I stayed behind."
Rudy slid the drinks in front of Zip and looked at Lee. "This one's on the house."
Lee watched Zip's reflection in the smoke-stained bar mirror. "And so..."
"Yep, ten years...right here. Snuck into Bangkok once, but, other than that, I've been livin' in this rat hole."
Zip tilted his head back and gulped his drink down.
"Did you...she...?" Lee hesitated in digging up too much of Zip's past, but if Zip knew which government agency could help him find Annie, it was worth the inquiry.
"Nope, not yet anyway," Zip said. "My hope is she made it out with one of the groups of boat people. If she didn't, she's probably not alive because we would have found each other. I don't go as often as I used to, but I'd wander around these streets and back alleys looking for her for years. For a while, there wasn't a day that I didn't walk through the Zoo and Botanical Gardens, hoping to see her in her white Ao Dai tossing green bananas to the Sun Bears.
We had some unfinished business before us. I mean, we were a team, a force of love to be reckoned with. And there's something else I can tell ya 'bout her; she was so beautiful she could charm the pants off a hundred men." Zip chuckled and smiled. "I'll bet you if she's alive, she probably owns a chain of jewelry stores in Southern California."
Zip paused as his smile slowly turned upside down into a frown of fatigue. He sighed as he looked into his empty glass. "Damn war."
"Why don't you go home?" Lee asked carefully.
Zip snapped at Lee through clenched teeth as he lit a cigarette, "Why don't you go home? He took a deep drag, "Sorry...got a big U.S. Court Martial waiting for me back CONUS. They don't take too kindly to deserters. Besides, even though I'm persona-non-grata here, this kinda feels like home, now." his voice trailed off. "The commies leave me alone, mostly. I help Rudy with the bar and mingle with brothers like you from all over the states. What more could a guy want, eh?"
Concerned, Lee asked, "What do you mean, mostly?"
Zip looked down the length of the bar past Rudy, who was busy slinging drinks to a group of well-lubricated vets singing old cadence songs. "See him?"
"Rudy?"
"No, through the window; pink shirt, across the street, eating a bowl of Pho."
Lee peered down the bar through the smoky window and tried to see the pink shirt between passing taxis and cyclos. "Him... by the woman with the pole across her shoulders and buckets on the ends?" he asked.
"Ya, that's Agent Chien; he's a member of the Communist Cadre that orchestrates campaigns against corrupting foreign influences. He's the big dog, numba one boss man here. That's why his nickname is Le Chien. He relishes keeping social evils under his control," Zip said with a hint of envy kept in check by an appropriate amount of fear… real fear.
Lee looked around the bar and saw what he remembered as 'Tea Girls' sitting on the laps of sweaty-faced vets and other mini-skirted women gyrating wildly with surfers on the dance floor.
Apparently, the Cadre hadn't come in for a while, Lee thought.
"There's usually a half dozen or so of those commies working Dong Khoi at any one time. You can usually tell them by the long-tailed pastel shirts they wear to conceal their pistols, usually pink, light blue, and yellow, that sort of thing. They all know Kung Fu too." Zip rubbed the back of his neck. "They're mean as pit bulls and are deadly serious about National Reunification. Zip saw Lee looking at the working girls and said, "They don't care about that...they raid all of these joints about every nine months or so to make it look good.
Rudy turns the music down, kicks the whores out for a while, and then in a couple of weeks, it slowly starts up again. What the Cadre is looking for are returning Vets. They're paranoid as hell about spooks: CIA plants." Zip turned and faced Lee. "And solo flying vets."
"What...?"
"Ya, anytime a guy shows up, and he's not with a guided tour group, you know, old unit reunion kind of thing, they take a hard look."
"They'd be wasting their time with me." Lee looked around for the pesky doctor and his MIA investigative group and was relieved when he didn't see him. He didn't want to answer any more stupid questions about the 'Nam.
"Maybe, maybe not, but they'll look you over anyway. By the time you get back to the states, your visa info will be in a different file and, they'll have their agents CONUS checkin' on you too." Zip saw that Lee had become tense as he picked at a piece of the gouged-out bar top.
He tried to redirect Lee's anxiety, "They mostly want to know if you've got your hand in any subversive activities...like passing or receiving information from U.S. gooks and the home crew.
They'll keep an eye on any Viet you spend more than one minute with; I guarantee you that."
Lee looked down at the bar top and saw where someone had taken a knife and gouged out an old grunt saying, 'The only good gook is a dead gook.' "What a hassle, he thought as he burned an image into his mind of Agent Chien slurping noodles. "Better not get too close to me, Victor Charles..."
~~~~
Glossary
11 B – Army code for infantry solider.
Brain Housing Group – Military slang for everything inside the skull.
CONUS – Continental United States
Coxswain - Operator of PBR.
Gook – Pejorative for Vietnamese, intended for Viet Cong.
M-2 – Flame thrower.
NVA – North Vietnamese Army
PBR - Fast attack patrol boat.
Pho – Soup consisting of broth, rice noodles, herbs, and meat.
Book of the Month contest entry
The title Concertina refers to razor wire used to secure a combat perimeter. It is also used on prison walls. It is designed with barbs and razor type hooks intended to snag a person from entering or attempting to escape a secure area.
Concertina, in the context of this novella refers to psychological and spiritual entanglement. Specifically, it refers to a Vietnam combat veteran who is ensnared by the deepest and darkest fetters of torment and denial. Those fetters consist of alcohol abuse, guilt, and resentment.
Pays
one point
and 2 member cents. Concertina, in the context of this novella refers to psychological and spiritual entanglement. Specifically, it refers to a Vietnam combat veteran who is ensnared by the deepest and darkest fetters of torment and denial. Those fetters consist of alcohol abuse, guilt, and resentment.
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