The Second Biggest Nothing by Colin Cotterill

Author:Colin Cotterill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2019-06-20T00:38:46+00:00

Chapter Ten

Hanoi, 1972

I remember the night of Hanoi Jane very clearly because it followed the first afternoon of Hanoi Hilton Henry. Both of these events, in their own way, made me think about misperception. I’d been without Boua for seven years already, but being without her was very much the same as being with her during those final years. She’d taken on the burden of hammering communism into the heads of the peasantry. She’d begun to show the signs of addiction. She’d never taken drugs, but she was so high on righteousness she could no longer listen to those of us who were witnessing her mental decline. She was untreatable. She was a total fool for a hopeless cause. Her suicide was not the most tragic event in her life.

The war we thought we’d already won raged on. But now the enemy no longer shouted insults in French from the trenches. Overnight the Tricolor had rearranged its colors, and we awoke to the sounds of Janice Joplin and The Doors. And the weapons were grander and more efficient, the budget ballooned and the motive for killing us was no longer merely to pillage. They were here to stop us reds from taking over the world. We all knew, of course, that if our new American minders hadn’t stepped up to the plate, we would have flooded the planet with failed cooperatives and incompetent officials. But we had a weapon more effective than the B-52s, which could level a village in tenths of a second, and more slick than Agent Orange, which could strip a hillside and anyone standing on it, and more cunning than the bombies that burrowed into the soil and would blow the legs off buffalo and inquisitive children for decades to come.

We had heroin.

Boua wasn’t the only one in Vietnam who’d lost all sense of right and wrong. My surgeon friend in Paris had been right. By late ’71 there were already 560,000 heroin addicts in the US. Most of the product came via the Golden Triangle of Burma, Laos and Thailand. Seventy-five percent of urban crime was fueled by this addiction, and Nixon had called for a war on drugs. The CIA Indochinese opium policy had found its way back home.

A quarter of American troops in Vietnam were using heroin. Thousands were addicted, and the bad news for the gentlemen in Congress and the generals in their Saigon offices was that heroin made more sense to the reluctant soldiers than they did. It was a universally available brain tranquilizer. Any soldier could buy it on the roadside near the bases where young boys sold it along with snacks and soft drinks and cigarettes. The Vietnamese army was shipping and distributing it so nobody was afraid of getting caught. We in the north were being bombed to hell and back, but we were defeating the enemy one brain cell at a time.

That didn’t make much of a difference to us on the ground in those days. I don’t know how many young men and women I’d put back together as best I could.

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