was brought for him by one of her many granddaughters. She didnât try to entice him with one since she loved her own too much to wish him onto even the most troublesome.
As they shared a small silence, J.D. realized he had missed a detail. The fatigues were dirty; his fingernails too clean. Scratching at the dirt, he casually asked, âDo you know anything about the stories of the Ghost Soldier, the Boogeyman?â
Her hand shook just a small ripple. She spat a bloody stream of betel juice. âNot story. Real.â She said the word for demon in Vietnamese, â Con Quý . Truly Con Quý . Stay away.â
J.D. didnât want to show disrespect and laugh inappropriately but the urge was there. The irony of it all was just too much. He had spent the better part of his thirty-two years trying to escape the nightmare of a momentâs insanity, only to get railroaded into a psych ward. Now Grandmother was trying to warn him away with the very nickname she had given him years agoâonly there was a big difference between a fond âyou little devilâ and some supernatural overtones no Asian would ignore.
When Grandmother wasnât more forthcoming than another âBad. Very bad. Con quy ,â he asked, âIs An still selling the good stuff?â
A nod, a bow, and J.D. moved down the alley to buy three packs of mj from An. He then walked another short distance, passed a sign announcing 8th Field Hospital, deliberately avoided the 99KOâs self-contained building and headed for the hoochâa screened-in, long, wood framed military dwelling where the enlisted men of the 99th resided.
J.D. opened the hooch door. As he had hoped, at the far end a group of the mostly too young enlisted men were gathered, listening to music, drinking beer, and hiding joints behind their backs as though the clouds of dope smoke were somehow invisible.
J.D. flashed a peace sign and dopily moved forward, smiling stupidly. In his blond wig and mustache and aviator specs and raggedy Tiger fatigues, he could pass for any other burnt out grunt.
âPeace, brothers,â he called out, a fellow pilgrim. âI smelled something good and liked the sounds.â
The guys were a little wary, but pretty stoned and when they saw he had the packs of nicely rolled Js things warmed up quickly, and then he pulled out a brand new cassette of Creedence. Soon they were passing the new Js around and he was able to move from guy to guy, rapping and gossiping and joking. Just like anywhere it was the guys on the ground who knew the dirt, and it didnât take long before J.D. knew some things the âtake your pickâ files hadnât dished up. Like a certain psychiatrist named Peck who had quite the reputation for some off-the-record Jeckle/Hyde behavior, so Major Donald Peck went to the top of his âWatch Himâ list.
Once J.D. got all the stuff floating around about the Ghost Soldier who was apparently doing a kick ass job of heightening their collective paranoia, he disappeared himself with the stealth of. . . . Well, took one to find one.
*
And now here it was a day, make it three, late and a dollar short as those yanks liked to say. They certainly paid him well enough, not that money was his only incentive, as the Ambassador knew. They had a history and J.D. had a past that had been as carefully obscured as the joy he took in shitting on his fatherâs grave.
No doubt his two new recruits, Kelly and Moskowitz, would have a field day with that. He sort of liked them anyway. And that wasnât good.
Guys like him couldnât afford to have friends. He was as much a potential liability to them as they were to him. And if the liability should become too much to risk. . .
Bang, bang.
J.D. flipped out of his hammock and landed on all foursâonly to realize the culprit was the alarm on his Jaeger-LeCoultre watch, and good thing he had set it. Presuming the 8th Field Hospital was still
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