Robert Jones - Blood Tide

W. Cuddy, now you have good attitude. Now you do for camp! (He smiles beneath that ratty cookie-duster . WIMPY’S got his hamburger at last.)

That night Olive Oyl dropped by Culdee’s cell, armed with a Flit gun. He slunk around, spraying delicately, casting fervid, sidelong glances at the prisoner. He smiled gently. He checked that the guards weren’t watching and then reached into his pocket. He handed Culdee a piece of fudge. The fudge had lint on it, and what looked like a curl of pubic hair.

“You are good man, Cuddy,” he whispered as he left. “Tomorrow you get roommate.”

When the cell door closed, Culdee dropped the piece of fudge into his honey bucket. It sank out of sight in the day’s excrement.

FIVE

He was moved to a new cell the following morning. Compared with the Chain Locker it was spacious—ten paces wide by five deep. It had a big, iron-barred window that opened onto the beach. There were sou trees outside and a few tattered palms, and beyond them he could see the blue water of the Tonkin Gulf. The breeze tasted sweet after his long confinement. The window even had a screen in it to keep out mosquitoes.

There were no leg irons at the foot of the long, wide bunks that stood one over the other on the starboard bulkhead. The bunks were built of hardwood, well joined and smoothly sanded. In the lower bunk lay his new roommate. A blond guy, tall but not cadaverous, and freshly shaved. He grinned and got up with an outstretched hand.

“Hi, Chief. I’m Tim Turner.”

Culdee took his hand. No fat fingers on Turner, all fingernails present and accounted for. He had a strong grip for a POW.

“Culdee,” he said. “Chief boatswain.” He looked around the cell in wonder. “Where’s the complimentary basket of fruit and wine?”

Turner laughed. “Hey!” he said. “As a matter of fact I do have something for you.” He rummaged in his gear, folded neatly at the foot of the lower bunk, and came up with a square of fudge. For a moment Culdee wondered if it was the same piece he’d shit-canned the previous night. He took it anyway.

“What’s your rate and rating?” he asked.

“Gunner’s mate second,” Turner said. “Off the Hancock . We were out on Yankee Station when the chaplain got word my mother was sick. I pulled compassionate leave. The plane that was taking me down to Quang Tri splashed—engines crapped out.”

“Tough,” Culdee said.

“Could be worse,” Turner said. “I’m the only one got out of the plane. I guess I’m lucky. A fishing boat spotted me.”

Turner had only been in the Dune for a couple of weeks. The Hancock had just arrived in the area from Stateside, so he was full of news. Things were bad back there—anti-war protests, sit-ins, draft-card burnings, hippies all over the place. It didn’t sound like the same country to Culdee. Bobby Kennedy was dead, shot by some Arab. Martin Luther King, too, by a redneck. LBJ wasn’t running again. It looked like Nixon would be the next president. He was making noises about ending the war.

Oddly, the news left Culdee unmoved. It all sounded unreal, as if it were happening in Oz. But then, a few weeks later, Turner said something that stirred him up for the first time since he’d reached the Dune.

“There’s PT boats in the basin just south of the cellblock,” Turner reported. “I saw them today when I was on work detail. Russian PA-3 types. Old but fast. Forty knots or better. They’ve got ’em hidden under camo netting, lightly guarded.”

Culdee passed the word by tap code to the senior officer, a SEAL lieutenant named Mr. Thomas. Slowly but surely, at Culdee’s urging, the escape plan took shape. Turner reported that it was no more than two hundred meters from the southern side of the compound to the boat basin. A low seawall offered cover most of the way. Only a fence of concertina wire lay between the cells and the seawall, maybe some razor wire as well—Turner couldn’t be sure. Guards walked the wire day and night with AKs, but they didn’t appear especially alert, and there was a ten-minute cycle to their appearance at any given point on the perimeter. The monsoon season was fast approaching—wind, rain, darkness. . . . It looked eminently workable.

Culdee was not picked for the escape party. His shoulder wound, where the gaff had pierced him, had suddenly flared up again—some sort of deep-seated infection. Neither was Turner. He was too junior—there were men in the Dune who had been POWs for five years. Culdee himself had been in only two. Turner lamented more about Culdee’s not going than about his own disqualification.

“It’s not right,” he said angrily the night before the breakout. “You know these waters better than those SEALs. You ran a Swift boat, you’re a boat handler from way back. I don’t see why they can’t take you along if only to guide them through the channel.”

“I’m not a SEAL,” Culdee said. “They stick together.”

“Well, it’s not right.”

“They ought to take you,” Culdee said. “You’re the one who spotted the PTs in the first place. You’re the one who mapped out the escape route.”

“Well, not really,” Turner said. “It was a fluke. Anyone who’d been on that detail would have seen the possibilities. And anyway, you’re the one who passed it on to Mr. Thomas.”

It almost seemed to Culdee that Turner didn’t want to go. For a moment, suspicion flared: could this be some kind of setup? But he dismissed the thought as just another episode of POW paranoia. Turner was a good sailor. He couldn’t be slimy. And yet there was something about him. . . . Then it came back strong for a moment. Turner had too much vitality. He moved with a certain snap. His eyes were bright, his tongue uncoated. He smiled too much—not bitterly or ironically, but with a kind of contentment that might almost be mistaken for pride in duty well done. And Turner’s wrists were unscarred. No Hanoi bracelets, as if he’d never been handcuffed. How had he remained so healthy, so unscarred if he weren’t slimy?

In POW lingo, a man who was slimy was a collaborator.

He stared at Turner long and hard. When Turner caught his eye, he looked away.

The following morning Culdee was haled to Wimpy’s office. Bluto and Swee’pea cuffed his hands, bone-tight, behind his back. Wimpy smiled.

“Cuddy,” he said, “you have bad attitude.” He slapped Culdee hard across the mouth. Culdee tasted blood. “I think you spend some time alone for now. Ponder your sins. Then maybe you get good attitude.”

So it was back to the Chain Locker for Culdee, but not without a preliminary massage and manicure from Bluto and the Pea. That night it rained hard, the monsoon winds howling eerily through the bars of the other cells so that they resonated like harp strings, the music reaching even his sealed compartment. The breakout was set for two in the morning. Culdee remained awake all night, listening. Then, during a lull in the storm, he heard it: the slow, hollow chugging of the AKs as they cut down Mr. Thomas, Chief Wysocki, and the three SEAL ratings who went with them.

Later he learned that they hadn’t even made it to the seawall. What’s more, there never had been any Russian PT boats in the basin. And Turner—cheerful, happy-go-lucky Turner, Culdee’s good buddy and roommate, the man who’d looked up to him with such respect—Turner had been released to an American peace delegation in Hanoi a week after the breakout failed.

He’d been slimy all along.

It was another five years before Culdee learned the extent of Turner’s betrayal. By then the war was over, at least the American part of it. Culdee returned to the world on the first Starlifter flight of American POWs from Gia Lam Aiport in Hanoi to Clark Field in the Philippines. Each returning POW was met on the hardstand by an officer or enlisted man of equivalent rank or rate, whose job it was to “escort” the returnee through the trauma of reentry. Culdee was met by a lieutenant from the judge advocate general’s office and two Marine Corps guards. They hustled him into a small office, and the lieutenant began reading something from a handbook.