Only the Good Die Young by Josh Pachter

Author:Josh Pachter [Pachter, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime Fiction
Publisher: Untreed Reads
Published: 2021-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Nylon Curtain

Released September 1982

“Allentown”

“Laura”

“Pressure”

“Goodnight Saigon”

“She’s Right on Time”

“A Room of Our Own”

“Surprises”

“Scandinavian Skies”

“Where’s the Orchestra?”

All songs by Billy Joel.

Goodnight Saigon

by Richard Helms

The first person Owen Wheeler met upon walking off the plane into a solid wall of heat and humidity at Bien Hoa Airport was Bud Abraham, a tall, slender black man who escorted him to the divisional barracks. A seasoned veteran, Bud had survived five Long Range Recon Patrols—lurps, for short. A lurp might take four days, sometimes five, during which the patrol’s only link to the relative safety of its base was its radioman. American soldiers weren’t yet combatants in Vietnam. Their primary role was to help prepare and advise Vietnamese soldiers to defend their own country from the PLAF insurgents, but once the black flag rose and the bullets flew, every man in a uniform was fair game. Bud had already seen several patrol buddies go home in plastic bags with numbers stenciled on them.

Wheeler had spent his entire first tour in Germany as part of the eternal occupational force there, soaking up beer and enjoying the company of a seemingly endless procession of Teutonic beauties. Reenlisting had been a mistake. He scoured his memory for any unintentional insult he might have delivered to justify his being relegated to a trivia-question country at the ass end of Indochina.

Never having faced an enemy in combat, Wheeler was petrified. He wasn’t the only one. A guy named Charlie five bunks down whispered prayers for an hour each night before falling into fitful sleep—impassioned pleas to allow him to survive just one more lurp. Wheeler caught another kid, Baker, crying in the shower, scouring his skin, trying to remove imaginary blood. It would be years before Bob Hope would venture into the country with an entourage of Playboy bunnies to cheer up the troops. In 1958, all the terrified soldiers had for solace was each other.

A month later, after four lurps of his own, Wheeler was still alive and becoming familiar with the routine. It didn’t make things easier.

Bud Abraham poked his head around the corner.

“Got a briefing,” he said. He didn’t need to say more.

They were headed back to the jungle.

*

A De Havilland Beaver dropped them in a clearing outside a no-name ville deep in the jungle. Their commander was a first lieutenant named Riley, only a few months older than them. Riley had recently graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in economics, which—in the Army’s obtuse calculus—perfectly suited him for combat command.

Five green ARVN recruits, most of them conscripted from the Vietnamese highlands, waited to be marched in a large circle through the jungle, eventually arriving back at the ville. Along the way, the Americans would demonstrate warcraft and survival skills, so, when the real thing came along, the recruits would be marginally less likely to be slaughtered.

First, Wheeler had to teach the ARVN boys to pack their gear. Packing was always a trade-off. If you couldn’t find vital equipment in a poorly packed ruck when things went south, you died.

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