Randy White: The Mangrove Coast

Her eyes were welling up. “Ford, please tell me you’re okay. What is it?”

I said, “I’m fine. In fact… this is the best I’ve felt in a while. But give me a minute, okay?”

There was a typed, unsigned note attached to the photograph.

I read: The guy you know as Matt Davidson told me what I never doubted: You can be trusted. Over here we still operate on a need-to-know basis and here’s what I think you need to know. After what you did, my friend, it’s what you deserve to know, too. There are about forty of us still living here. Not because we have to but because we’re all so screwed up we figured the only thing we could do back in the World is join the circus, maybe work as freaks. The POW camp my team was searching for? What it turned out to be was a collection of good guys who had too much pride to be a burden to their families. No one’s really sure how it got started, but there wasn’t any doubt in my mind that’s where I wanted to go once I realized that mortar round had turned me into a monster. MIA guys who didn’t want to return. That’s something we never figured on, huh? It’s hard to find men who don’t want to be found. For the first six months, I thought I’d die. For the next year I hoped I would. Lots of us did. Those of us who didn’t, realized something: We still had our brains and we had some of the best training in the world. I’m now a rich man, Doc. Rich beyond imagination. Every gay in our little company has made a bundle. Intelligence, weapons, brokered information to the CIA, NSA, Mossad, the big-money boys. We are the perfect middlemen because freaks are like clowns: we’re invisible behind our masks and we don’t show pain. We’ve also started buying petroleum leases throughout Asia and investing in politicians. In terms of income, we are our own small country now. It’s all we think about It’s all we do. Once a year I come to Florida. I always stay in a little town called Gibsonton-I won’t say why. It’s too embarrassing. In previous years I always came with the hope of getting a couple of glimpses of my girls. I’d do it quick, from cab windows. Or late at night outside their house. I just wanted to make sure they were happy, didn’t need anything. Once, when Amanda was seven and alone in the backyard, she smiled at me. She actually said a few words to me. I didn’t scare her. It is one of the treasured moments of my life. It means even more now that she’s gone. And I thought I was beyond tears! When I heard that Gail was in trouble, I was a step or two ahead of you. At first, anyway. Then I was always a step or two behind. Frankie Calloway’s death was an accident He panicked when he realized who I was and what I wanted. I sometimes forget how truly frightening I am. Unfortunately, there is no way that either of us could have seen what was coming. And that’s what this letter is about Remember that idea we messed around with in the jungle, what we called the Perfect Law? In case you forgot, here it is: In any conflict, the boundaries of behavior are defined by the party which cares least about morality. Merlot chose the boundaries. Check out the enclosed photo. He ended up with a whole different viewpoint, huh? I thought you might enjoy this other picture, too. For the first time in many years, Doc, I am at peace.

It was another glossy photo and, in ways it was more shocking than the first. The extraordinarily handsome and vain man that I knew as Commander Bobby Richardson no longer existed. I wouldn’t have recognized him. Ever.

He was so changed by his wounds and by the years, that I prefer not to describe the half-man in that photo, so I will not. What I noticed-and what I prefer to remember-is that he looked happy.

Bobby was smiling. Smiling a big, crooked country-boy grin as he posed with a tiny woman in Asian dress and black equatorial hair… a woman who could have passed for a Vietnamese burned, perhaps in a napalm attack. Yet there was a lovely expression of grace and acceptance on her ruined face; an expression elevated to devotion by the glow of her eyes as she looked at the man she loved: one eye the powder blue of turquoise, the other a deep jungle green.

She had drawn a heart on the photograph and signed it: THE TWELFTH OF NEVER!