Excerpt, “Letter from Lena”:  On my early evening return to base camp in Da Nang, I stopped by the Headquarters Hooch to turn in my  paperwork and get a look at the duty roster.  My name wasn’t listed for guard or gate security duty for the next few days since I had been on the road and the First Sergeant obviously didn’t know when I would get back.  That meant I had a couple of days off before work would begin again with a new class of Vietnamese tank crewmen.

I walked down the dirt path to Hooch 12 in the slowly receding heat of the day.  Inside the hooch it was slightly cooler but not by much.  The dark interior reminded me of the opium dens in Saigon, quiet, smoky, a soft cough here and there, the smell of dope in the air.  Henderson and Chicken Man were dead asleep on their cots just inside the hooch door.  The bunks of Justice, Gibson, and Gomez were empty.  Each of the men had built up a protective barrier around his cot, using empty ammunition crates, cardboard beer cases, and odd-sized plywood pieces scrounged from the trash pile.  Camouflage poncho liners and mosquito netting were rigged to give a man some precious space he could call his own.

My closest friend Schaefer was seated on the floor, head thrown back on the bunk next to mine, drifting on a heroin dream.  Drool rolled freely from his open mouth down his chin onto his green undershirt.

Schaefer grew up in the Highland Park neighborhood in Detroit, just off Woodward Avenue.  His dad had been an alcoholic Chrysler assembly plant employee who disappeared from Schaefer’s life in the early sixties.  His mother was too poor or dispirited to leave HP when all the other white people did.  So she and her only son just stayed.  Two white faces in a crumbling slum floating in a sea of black.

  After his eighteenth birthday in 1969 Schaefer walked into the Army Recruitment Office on 12^th Street and asked if he could go to Vietnam.  The recruiter assured him that he could.

Schaefer had used junk on the streets in Detroit before his enlistment.  The nearly pure heroin he quickly found in Vietnam was not like anything he had experienced on the streets of Highland Park.  Schaefer told me once while he was nodding in and out that he was never leaving Vietnam.  He was home. Schaefer kept his promise.  Six months later, when his tour was up and it was time to board the Freedom Bird back to Detroit, he simply disappeared.  Walked away into the hustle of central Da Nang and vanished.

Collins and Blackjack sat on a far cot facing the door sharing a Thai stick, passing it back and forth without effort.  Mechanical, a well-rehearsed routine, economy of effort.  Take a long draw, hold it, pass the stick, exhale, repeat.  The two men were bare chested in the heat, wearing only green boxer shorts and jungle boots.  Blackjack had a necklace of oversized shark’s teeth around his neck.  His sweaty skin glistened like oiled ebony in the stifling heat.

“Hey, R.C., what’s up man?  Looks like you didn’t get killed or nothin’. Want a hit?”, asked Blackjack, using the voice all stoners use when holding it in, reluctant to give up the hit.

“No, man.  I gotta get my shit together.  I gotta go see a man about a girl,” I answered as Jack passed the joint back to Collins, a skinny pimpled blonde tank mechanic from Tennessee.

“No shit?  That’s cool.  Can you get me one while you’re goin’ to all that trouble?”

“Not that kind of girl, Jack.  This lady might be the real deal.  I gotta go ask her daddy if it’s cool to take her out.”