Jungle Rules (3 page)

A pothole on a sharp turn sent the handcuffed prisoner airborne. Seizing the opportunity that the slack-minded driver handed him, Harris bailed over the spare tire and hit the street, running like a wide receiver dashing for the goal line. He never looked back.

The chaser slung two full magazines of .45-caliber lead at him but never got close. Fat, lazy, and disheveled, the shit-bird guard was a bad shot, too. In seconds, the fleeing prisoner had ducked through a hedge and disappeared.

Through most of that first night, the Marine provost marshal in Da Nang had his men search the area into which Harris had fled. The MPs even brought in dogs. They sniffed a trail that wound through alleys, across roofs, and then down to the little shit creek that spilled out of Dogpatch. That’s where they stopped.

James Harris managed to get his cuffed hands from behind his back by wriggling them under his butt and stepping through, but he could not work the steel bracelets off either wrist. He spent his first night in Dogpatch sleeping under a slab of concrete, sharing the space with a mangy brown mutt starved to skin and bones. The lumpy mongrel with gaping patches of bare skin across his back followed Harris throughout the next morning as the escaped prisoner searched for more suitable shelter, a hack-saw, a new set of clothes, and something to eat. The filthy dog kept following him even after two cowboys had caught him blind-sided, and led him at gunpoint to the ranch of their boss, a Marine deserter named Brian Thomas Pitts.

“Sing out your fucking name, ass-wipe,” Pitts said, sitting on a green leather sofa chair, sipping a tall glass of iced tea, and looking at the handcuffed bag of rags in front of him, and the tattered dog that crouched, head down, behind the prisoner’s heels.

“Fuck you,” Harris said.

The cowboy standing to Harris’s right slapped the prisoner on the back of his head with the cocked, U.S. government-issue Colt .45-caliber pistol that he had held pointed in the young man’s ear. Just as the blow sent the Marine’s head forward, the cowboy on the left laid a hard backhand across Harris’s mouth.

“No,” Pitts said, taking a sip of tea, “you’re the one who will be fucked if you don’t lose that street nigger attitude in about one heartbeat. My man Huong, standing to your right, will simply put a round in your stupid skull and feed your ass to a pen of hogs we keep out back to dispose of garbage like you.”

The prisoner flashed a bloody smile at Brian T. Pitts and said, “Now that you put it that way, my name’s James Harris. My peas down on the flight line, though, they all call me Mau Mau.”

“What’s your claim to fame, Mau Mau, waltzing into my world with those government irons on your wrists?” Pitts said.

“Got busted selling reefer, and mouthed off to the squadron adjutant,” Harris said. “Coon called CID on my ass. The motherfucker.”

“You obviously live a charmed life,” Pitts said, “to slip their grip and land on my doorstep.”

“And who the fuck are you?” Harris snarled, glaring at his new captor.

“I could be your judge, jury, and executioner,” Pitts retorted, “or your new best friend. It’s pretty much up to you.”

“I’ll be your friend if you get these handcuffs off my wrists,” Harris said, and showed Pitts his most encouraging smile.

 
THE MOST MEMORABLE thing that greeted Captains Jonathan Charles Kirkwood and Terence Boyd O’Connor when they landed in Da Nang was the stink. Nearly inescapable. The wretched, rotten air smothered and choked them and made their eyes burn. When the wind is right, even a tough guy fights back a gag reflex as he steps down the ladder off the freedom bird and samples his first taste of South Vietnam. For the two new First Marine Aircraft Wing lawyers, the dank, smoky, rotten-egg-smelling air left an indelible imprint in both their minds.

“Fuck me to tears!” Kirkwood exclaimed as he took his first step down the ladder from the Flying Tigers Airlines Boeing 707. The middle-aged blond flight attendant who stood on the landing next to the plane’s open hatch, bidding farewell to the departing American servicemen, smiled kindly at the dark-eyed, dark-haired, six-foot-tall, youthful-looking Marine captain and simply shook her head at his comment.

“Watch your fucking mouth, Jon,” O’Connor, a five-foot-ten-inch-tall, reddish-brown-haired, blue-eyed Philadelphia Irishman said, smiling his dimples at the woman, “there’s ladies present.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Kirkwood mumbled in a serious tone. Then he looked at his mischievous, freckle-faced buddy whom he first met at Officer Candidates’ School, sleeping in the rack above him, now more than a year ago, and had been his classmate for six months through the Basic School at Quantico, and his best friend and study partner for ten months through Naval Justice School at Newport, Rhode Island. “Terry, you watch your mouth, too.”

“I hope it’s not like this every day,” O’Connor said, now bounding down the stairs behind a sometimes clumsy Kirkwood. “I get some really serious sinus headaches. The New York City pollution nearly wiped me out while I went to college and law school there. Now the slightest bit of crap in the air makes me crazy.”

“My college and law school days didn’t do my sinuses any favors either. I thought the smog in Los Angeles was the world’s worst until I got here,” Kirkwood said, now holding his handkerchief over his mouth and nose, and squinting at a burly, bald-headed staff sergeant waiting at the bottom of the ladder.

“Captain Kirkwood, Captain O’Connor, my name is Staff Sergeant Derek Pride. Welcome to Da Nang, Republic of South Vietnam,” the robust Marine said cheerfully, snapping a quick salute to both officers. “It’s a pressure inversion, little wind, and what flow we do have is from the east, so it is like a lid on a jar here. All the shit bottled up. Sorry you came on such a bad day, but you’ll get used to it.”

“What is it?” Kirkwood then asked the sergeant. “Is there a paper mill or something nearby to cause such a terrible smell?”

“No, sir,” Pride said, leading the men across the tarmac, “that’s Dogpatch.”

“Dogpatch?” Kirkwood said. “Like from the Lil’ Abner cartoons?”

“Sort of,” Pride said, walking abreast the two captains. “It’s the slum. Bad area. Nobody righteous goes there. At least nobody with any brains. We leave it alone because it’s far enough from any of our forces to not be a factor for them, and frankly, we just don’t need another headache. We have our hands full with Charlie and the NVA, out there on the ridges. Nothing but dopers and deadbeats in Dogpatch anyway. Maybe a few deserters, too, but I’d rather be in jail than that place. Believe me.”

“Where do we go from here?” O’Connor said, pulling his handkerchief over his nose and mouth, too.

“Just inside,” the sergeant said. “Receiving will endorse your orders and get you started on the happy road to check-in. From here, however, we will go directly to billeting, and get you into your quarters.”

“I could use a nap,” Kirkwood said, now ambling a pace behind O’Connor and Staff Sergeant Pride. “Terry, aren’t you tired?”

“A little punchy, Jon, but I’m making it,” O’Connor said.

“If you’re smart, sir, you’ll grab a nap, too,” Pride said, opening the door to the Da Nang Air Base passenger terminal, and then leading the two officers toward a high counter where a round-faced gunnery sergeant sat like a Buddha behind a desk placard that said:
Officer and Staff NCO Check-in
. “The wing staff judge advocate, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Prunella, always hosts a hail-and-farewell party for the staff on the last Friday of each month, and gentlemen, that’s tonight. While he may not say anything, should you sleep in, the military justice officer, Major Dudley Dickinson, will most certainly. Since both of you gentlemen will be joining the defense team, you’re already on the negative with him.”

“How’s that? He’s never met us,” O’Connor said, stuffing his handkerchief into his trousers pocket and picking up a pen and signing his name on a log sheet latched down on a clipboard overseen by the silent, round-faced gunny who rubber-stamped both officers’ travel orders.

“Yeah,” Kirkwood chimed in, now signing his name, “that’s right. How can he start us on the negative when he knows nothing about us?”

“You’ll find out when you check in with him,” the staff sergeant said, escorting the duo back out the screen door and leading them to a jeep with a red plate emblazoned with the letters S-J-A stenciled in yellow fastened on its front bumper. “First we’ll get you billeted, and then we’ll go meet Major Dickinson. Just don’t let him wear through your skin right off on your first day.”

“Terry?” Kirkwood said, climbing onto the backseat of the jeep, his lanky frame adjusting uncomfortably to the perch.

“Yeah, Jon,” O’Connor said, tossing his seabag on top of Kirkwood’s duffel in the back floorboard, and then sliding himself comfortably onto the front seat.

“I think I know about this Major Dickinson,” Kirkwood said. “They call him Dicky Doo and the Don’ts.”

Staff Sergeant Pride laughed. “That’s him, sir.”

“Remember that good-looking lawyer we met back on Okinawa, at the Officers’ Club at Kadina?” Kirkwood added.

“Manley Tufts,” O’Connor said. “Sure, I recall the guy. Very fit. Good-looking. Like six-foot-two and some couple-hundred pounds. He walked with his arms out so he wouldn’t wrinkle the inside creases on his shirtsleeves. From New Orleans, very aristocratic. Strange fellow.”

“Right,” Kirkwood said as the jeep now dodged between trucks and other traffic, making its way around the flight line and then down a street to a series of Quonset huts and concrete block buildings all painted tan. “His older brother, Stanley, is also a lawyer, both of them Tulane Law graduates. At any rate, Stanley is here as a prosecutor. So that’s how Manley Tufts came to know about Major Dickinson, and his nickname.”

“Yeah,” O’Connor said, stepping out of the jeep. “I can hardly wait to meet the Mojo now. Dicky Doo, and I can only imagine how the Don’ts fit in.”

“Gentlemen,” Staff Sergeant Pride said with a smile, walking to the big red Staff Judge Advocate sign in front of the headquarters, “welcome to First MAW Law.”

Kirkwood looked at the sergeant, flashed him a goofy grin, and began mimicking rocker Jim Morrison, singing a familiar tune by The Doors, “I got my Mojo working! I got my Mojo working!”

 
HAD BRIAN THOMAS Pitts not gone native six months into his tour, he might have gotten to attend his father’s funeral a year ago. By now he would have long since left South Vietnam and have gotten an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps, too. Going on his third season in country, the sandy-haired cowboy from Olathe, Kansas, had come to dismiss nearly any chance of ever seeing home again.

At random times through the year, he used the telephone of an expatriate American building contractor in Da Nang who had a taste for young girls, reefer, and high-stakes poker. In return for laying off some of the man’s always increasing gambling debt, along with giving him an attractive smoker’s discount, and free visitation one night each month for a romp at the ranch with a farm-fresh virgin, the contractor let Pitts use his company telephone to call his Aunt Winnie Russell, the matronly older sister of his late mother, back home in Olathe.

Aunt Winnie brought him up to date on family news regarding what little of their kin who now remained aboveground. She tearfully told how they had found his poor father sitting there stone dead in a living room chair, the TV still running and a half-full whiskey bottle on the floor. It was a lovely funeral. An amazing array of flowers surrounded the casket. Nearly all the people at the Calvary Baptist Church came, too. They laid Dad to rest next to Mom, who had died of a brain hemorrhage when Brian was only ten years old. That’s when life got hard for the boy.

His dad, Roy Pitts, drank more and worked less after his beloved wife, Bess, died. Then Brian moved into a room above Aunt Winnie’s garage, which sat behind her house, just off East Cedar Street, near Highway 50, one of the main routes from Olathe into nearby Kansas City, and trouble.

Within a few years, the sweet little boy from the Calvary Baptist Sunday school in Olathe became a street-savvy cynic after a tough curriculum of life’s hard lessons taught to him in late-night Kansas City pool halls and backroom gaming dens. By age sixteen, Brian Pitts had already learned that a hooker with a heart of gold will always rob a John cold, cut his throat, and leave him for dead if she thought she could get away with it. Likewise, gamblers and junkies were no better, but sometimes proved easy pickings with a sucker’s game of eight-ball.

The guys at Robbie’s Pool Hall on the southwestern edge of Kansas City, where Brian spent his time after dropping out of high school, took to calling him Small Change, because he would start a mark off with a two-bit bet on his eight-ball game and let the sucker win. After each loss, he would throw another quarter on the table, and rack again and again, letting the chump build up a large head of superiority. He would pal right up to his prey, asking him for tips on how to shoot a better game. A seemingly innocent boy just learning a seasoned man’s sport.

After dropping a couple of dollars in small change, luring the fish onto his line, Brian would then start to shoot a little better, and rave on and on about what an amazing shot he had just somehow accidentally made. What a streak of luck!

“Thanks for the help with my game. How about a dollar bet?” he would then ask the sucker, who nearly always laughed and confidently threw down a bill.

“Hate to take your money, kid,” the mark often said.

“My dad’s a dentist over in Shawnee,” Brian would then lie. “I get fifty bucks a week allowance, so a dollar is nothing. Don’t sweat the small shit.”

“Make it five bucks then, rich boy,” the sucker would many times follow through.

“How about ten?” Brian would come back with a cocky grin, and throw a Hamilton greenback on the table.

Sometimes the mark backed down, and begged off on a five-dollar bet. Most often, however, the sucker took the ten-dollar bait and played for blood.