Charlie Huston - Sleepless

“Come back when things settle down. I’ll do my best to get you in the clear.”

Beenie shook his head.

“‘When things settle down.’ You’re an interesting guy, Park.”

“No. I’m not.”

Beenie shrugged, stood up on his pedals.

“Take care of the family.”

Park raised a hand.

“Travel safe.”

He didn’t watch Beenie ride away, turning instead toward the brewing fight, wading in, pulling the girls apart, stopping them before they could go too far.

I WAS REMEMBERING Texas.

This was odd, as I had endeavored for oh so many years never to remember Texas. Nonetheless, there it was, as if in front of me, the endless brown plain. Scrubby little Odessa. Youth recaptured.

Specifically, I was having visions of high school. The final month of my senior year, my eighteenth birthday, walking into the army recruiting office with my father and signing the papers, saluting the recruiting officer as I had been taught, turning heel-toe and saluting my father, holding it until he returned it. I was so happy that day.

I was even happier at Fort Bragg. I wouldn’t be qualified to apply to the Special Forces Recruiting Detachment until after I had finished basic and done a tour, but I could see the soldiers on Smoke Bomb Hill, going after their green berets. Rarely are the dreams of childhood so close and so tangible. Even the drill sergeants couldn’t ruin my mood at Bragg. Brutal and unfair, they were only slightly more abusive than the coaches on my high school football team.

None of it really prepared me for First Air Cavalry. Pure joy. Jumping in and out of Cobras. Patrols between Da Nang and Quang Ngai. Stringing jungle paths with claymore snares.

The message stamped on the business end of a claymore mine still strikes me with both its clarity and wisdom: FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.

Returning after my first tour, the two weeks spent in Odessa were the most difficult. Far more trying than Special Forces Assessment and Selection, more brutal than the six-month Special Forces Qualification course MOS 18B SF Weapons Sergeant. That had been second nature. But trying to hang out with my buddies from the football team after a year in-country had been akin to torture.

Ah, torture.

That was why I was reminiscing so vividly.

Yes, those callow youths. Chasing tail. Trying to tear off a piece. Guzzling Lone Star. Asking me how many gooks I’d killed over there.

The most troubling aspect wasn’t the tedium, it was the aching desire I felt almost every moment I was with those friends of mine to kill. It would have been quite easy. There was no lack of firearms. Virtually every day of my leave included some form of drunken blasting at small animals or the endless supply of empty beer cans we produced.

After five days of it I refused their invitations. Preferring to stay at home with my father, sitting on the patio of what had once been the family horse ranch, staring at the horizon beyond the small stone that marked the place where he had buried my mother. We spoke little enough to each other. I knew that he had been with Darby’s Rangers and scaled the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc on D-Day And he knew that I had seen action myself. What could we possibly say to each other?

Returning with my beret, assigned to the Fifth Army group at Nha Trang, I walked back into the jungle, only my excellent training and self-discipline keeping a bounce from my step.

Remembering the jungle made more sense than remembering Texas. If, during torture, you are going to attempt to cast your mind to another time and place, the best strategy is to choose a time and place where you were happy.

Though it is imprecise to say that I was happy in the jungle, more accurate that I was most myself there. Nowhere else, at no other time, has my nature been so nurtured and rewarded by an environment. By simply relaxing all restraints on my impulses, I thrived. No choking jungle vine flourished as did I.

Truly, I didn’t wish to come home.

In fact, it’s hard to say that I did come home. I most definitely did not return to Texas. Nor did I return to the name I had been given at birth. From the great distance I had traveled since then, it was hard to see what connection or relation I could possibly have with the rawboned, sunburned youth grappling at the line of scrimmage on a playing field that was mostly dirt and rock.

Except perhaps a certain hunger for it to be over.

That boy’s desire that he could magically turn eighteen right away and begin service. My own desire that the man with the soldering iron could suffer a sudden embolism and die.

Both of us forced to endure.

Coming to that conclusion seemed to exhaust the pool of memory, leaving me again in the present, doing my best not to look at the long parallel lines of seared dermis running up my inner right thigh. But that was a fool’s errand. I looked. And I screamed. Shrieked, really. Pain always becomes less bearable and more horrifying when one can see the effect it is having on one’s body. Container for the immortal, or mere meat, the body is what we have to work with. Having it ripped into, sliced, or burned in a manner that leaves no doubt as to the hideous nature of the scars that will mar that flesh if one is lucky enough to survive, brings out the craven.

It did so in me.

The battle-scarred man was in the middle of his script at that moment.

“Are you working with the cop?”

I cannot honestly say that I had reached my absolute threshold at that point. I feel, in retrospect, that I had endured worse before. It is therefore difficult to explain why I broke at that moment. Why I embraced the sudden soothing wave of relief that came over me when I succumbed to my collapse of will. I was prepared in that instant to answer any and all questions without any hidden agenda. Happy in the knowledge that the soldering iron would be put to the side once I began to speak.

Accepting the fact that this course led inevitably to my death, I spoke.

“No, I am not working with the cop.”

Used to hearing only my panting and rasping breath or my cries of pain, the men all started slightly at the sound of my voice. The man with the soldering iron drew back and looked over his shoulder at the questioner. He, in turn, consulted his script, flipped forward a page, flipped back, and nodded. At which point the man with the soldering iron placed the tool directly against my left kneecap.

The script, apparently, did not allow for that answer. Caught unprepared, I didn’t scream this time, but rather hissed, a sound very much like the one coming from my knee.

Then the lights went out.

And in the dark, with no one to see, I was free to be myself again. At last.

7/10/10

HIS TEXT TOLD me to come to the XF-11 house. I texted him that I didn’t know what he was talking about. I could almost hear the sigh in his next text when he told me to Google it.

805 North Linden Drive. The house where Howard Hughes crashed when test-flying a spy plane he’d designed for the Army.

Venice Beach to Beverly Hills. Before SLP broke out and things started getting bad, it would have been the kind of a drive that people groan about. In the last year these would have been some of the worst hours to try to drive it. But the streets are as close to empty now as I have ever seen them.

National Guard trucks. A motorcade escorted by Thousand Storks contractors. LAPD and LACS cars. Marine airships flown up from San Diego. I hit my first checkpoint at Rose Avenue on my way north. Sheriff’s deputies. Mostly trying to steer people away from Santa Monica. Things are still under control there, I couldn’t see any fires anyway, so they don’t want any more people coming in. The deputies didn’t care about my badge. LAPD has no jurisdiction in SM, but they let me cross.