Nam-A-Rama - Hardcover

Jennings, Phillip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765311208 ISBN 13: 9780765311207

Verlag: St Martin's Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Join Marines Jack Armstrong and his unpredictable buddy Gearheardt as the war is cooked up at a White House pizza party. Then President Larry Bob Jones is forced to send the boys on a secret mission with anti-war movie star Barbonella to stop a war that has quickly gotten out of hand. Their trip to Hanoi takes them through deadly combat in South Vietnam and wild misadventures that propel their story forward in a boisterous satiric rush. Not since Catch-22 has there been such a laugh-out-loud anti-epic that captures so brilliantly the absurdity of modern war.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Phillip Jennings left the Marines as a captain and subsequently flew for Air America in Laos. He won the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society short fiction award in 1998. He has a degree in business administration and is the CEO of Mayfair Capital Partners. He was recently proud and honored to swear his youngest son into the USMC. He lives in Kirkland, WA.

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PART 1

In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.

—Napoleon

War must be made as intense and awful as possible in order to make it short, and thus to diminish its horrors.

—Napoleon

Them as die will be the lucky ones.

—Long John Silver

1 • Not the Beginning Yet

Gearheardt and I were having lunch next to a pile of dead Laotians when he came up with his scheme to redeem ourselves with the Marine Corps and settle the score with the Cubans. The sincerity in his baloney-muffled voice made me listen when I knew that I shouldn’t. Listening to my best friend had always led to disaster, if not for us then for a number of innocent and perhaps not so innocent bystanders. Gearheardt was one of those people who never looked in the rearview mirror. Causing the Tet Offensive, prolonging the Vietnam War, and getting the President fixed up with the girl who showered in her underpants in Olongopo were hijinks quickly forgotten by the boyish pilot who sat alongside the dusty Laotian airstrip listening to the small-arms fire and distant thump of artillery.

Gearheardt threw the crust of his sandwich away and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Jack,” he said, “this plan will at least get us killed in a real war. Do you want to end up in a pile of dead Laotians?” He gestured toward the pungent stack and grimaced.

“Is that my only choice, Gearheardt?” I asked.

Gearheardt turned toward me, adjusting his shoulder holster and then licking the mayonnaise from the butt of his pistol. His thin blond hair was smashed wetly against his forehead, creases from his flight helmet still visible.

“I’m not kidding, Jack. This is the poorest damned excuse for a war imaginable, and you know it. Look at those poor bastards in that pile. Waiting for us to haul their raggedy asses back to Vientiane so their raggedy-assed families can wail and piss until the government gives them fifty bucks or something. I’m embarrassed to be in this sonofabitch.”

“You’d rather be sitting next to a pile of Vietnamese?”

“Wouldn’t you?” He was serious.

A mortar round hit the embankment across the runway, blowing dust and grit over us and causing the stack of Laotians to shift and settle. Gearheardt and I ducked and shielded our eyes.

“Jack, this scheme will get us back into Vietnam. I’m sick of this pussy-footing around. We’re Marines, damn it. I didn’t become a Marine to haul dead Laotians up and down the countryside.”

“It’s live up, dead back.”

“Very funny, Jack. What about my scheme? Are you up for it?”

“You don’t have a scheme, Gearheardt. You have an idea,” I said.

A second mortar hit in front of us and Gearheardt stood up and peered at the hills to the east. “Isn’t anybody going to take that bastard out?” he asked rhetorically, pointing to the hill from which the mortar rounds seemed to be coming.

“A scheme is when there are elements of a plan,” I continued. “Like some details of how things are going to get done, you know. That’s always your problem. You confuse an idea with a plan.” I slid lower against the wall of the shallow ditch. Gearheardt dropped back down beside me. “And technically we’re not Marines anymore. I think we belong to the CIA.”

He looked at me. “Okay. We take an airplane to Hong Kong. We find that numbnuts Cuban that screwed us around in Hanoi. We shoot him until he’s dead. Then we take an airplane to Danang, march our asses up to wing headquarters, and get our commissions back. Those are details.”

“You’re a planning genius, Gearheardt.”

Gearheardt bit his lip and squinted at me, pissed.

“Your sarcasm is wearing pretty thin, Jack. Will you ever get off my ass about Hanoi? I’m carrying that to my grave, aren’t I? We had the Barbonella plan. Sure it was missing a few details, but if you hadn’t lost the damn thing out of the window …”

“You lost the plan out of the window, jackass. You were supposed to be flying us to Hanoi, not grabassing all over the cockpit trying to eyeball the paperwork.”

A volley of mortar rounds hit the bunkers along the opposite side of the airstrip and I heard the CIA officer who ran the war in this part of Laos bellow from within.

“Would somebody please call some fire in on that frigging mortar position?”

Moments later the 105 howitzer, almost hidden in its heavily sandbagged slot behind the command bunker, fired a series of rounds. I watched the jungle near the suspected enemy mortar tube explode and fill the air above it with dirt and then black smoke. My ears rang. Gearheardt shook his head as if he were trying to dislodge something from his ear. The Laotian artillery crew climbed atop the sandbags and began shoving sticky rice balls into their mouths. The little artillery sergeant gazed toward the still smoking hillside and began to pick his nose.

From inside the command bunker the voice of the CIA officer sang, “Thank you.”

I looked behind where we were sitting and saw the flight mechanics resume refueling the helicopters that Gearheardt and I piloted. Serafico, my flight mechanic, looked my way and gave the thumbs up signal to indicate that we were ready to go. I rose by putting my hand on Gearheardt’s shoulder. Standing, I brushed the dust and debris from my trousers and turned to him. He was still staring, unfocused, at the smoke drifting along the hillside. Without looking up at me he spoke.

“Do you ever wonder about the little sonsabitches on the other end of those 105 rounds, Jack? One minute they’re finishing a baloney sandwich, and the next they’re just meat decorating the trees.”

Before I responded about the lack of baloney sandwiches in the North Vietnamese diet, Gearheardt went on. “War is weird shit, isn’t it, Jack?” He grinned at me as he stood up.

“Where are you heading, Gearheardt?” I asked him as we walked to the aircraft.

“I’m hauling ammo to that outpost by the old Site 85. You?”

“The customer asked me to take a look over by 110 and see if I could spot signs of survivors.” Site 110, near the North Vietnamese border with Laos, had been thoroughly shellacked by the North Vietnamese two nights before, and the troops that escaped were expected to be trying to make their way to Site 36. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was between them and relative safety, and no one expected many to actually survive. But it felt good to look for them.

Gearheardt grabbed my arm and stopped me, holding my elbow.

“Look, I know you think I’m a screaming asshole sometimes …”

“Yes.”

“ … and I know you think I’m nuts …”

“Absolutely.”

“ … but we gotta get back to the Marine Corps and to our squadron. I miss those guys. I miss the real war. And before that, we gotta find that stinking Cuban and kill him. Air America is okay, but we can’t have guns—officially.”

Some might think that a silly reason not to like flying for the CIA. But I knew Gearheardt. He had thought through the concept of not having official guns in northern Laos, and his statement was...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St Martin's Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0765311208
• ISBN 13: 9780765311207
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar