Jungle Rules (69 page)

“Yo, man, those guards they only tryin’ to scare us back,” Harris said, breathing hard as he fell against the head wall next to where Brian and Bobby waited for him. “We climb through the wire, they ain’t gonna shoot us.”

“I think they would love to shoot us all right now,” Brian Pitts said, and smiled, shrugging his shoulders at the ever-optimistic Harris. “Let’s go back and sit under a picnic table and figure out what we want to do now.”

 
ORANGE FLAMES FROM the two rows of burning prison hooches lit up the night sky, and the west winds carried the pall of smoke down Freedom Hill and into Da Nang. At the air base, Wayne Ebberhardt had laid out a pineapple and pig spread for all hands on the Officers’ Club back lawn, nearly as elaborate as the best of those organized by Lieutenant Colonel Prunella. He even included live dance music by Yamaguchi Ritter and his Angeles City Cowboys, and paid the extra money for the quartet of Filipino LBFM go-go girls, who tonight wore glittering gold bikinis with tassels whirling on their breast cups and fringe bouncing on their butts.

Lobo Gunn had downed a six-pack of beer before sunset and now finished his second one when he smelled the smoke and noticed the glow coming off Hill 327.

“Looks like Charlie rocketed the brig tonight,” he casually mumbled to his pal Buck Taylor, who had worked halfway through his second six-pack of Budweiser.

“Someone needs to grab Mike Schuller and tell him his house is on fire!” Taylor shouted through the crowd at a table where Terry O’Connor and Jon Kirkwood had the brig officer cornered, talking shop.

“Fire?” Schuller said and stood up. Then he saw the infernal glow rising on the brig side of the mountain. He quickly shifted his eyes across the gathering, searching for Lieutenant Colonel Webster, who had given him a lift from the provost marshal’s office, but the PMO had already gone. Then he looked at Kirkwood and O’Connor. “Hey, guys, you’ve got to get me up to the brig. Colonel Webster must have gotten word and left already; he probably couldn’t find me because we were sitting back here, out of sight.”

“Grab your hat and let’s fly,” O’Connor said, looking to see Wayne Ebberhardt, who came running to them.

“Colonel Webster just left with the chief of staff,” the newly promoted captain said. “We’ll take the office jeep.”

“What about me?” Michael Carter asked, hurrying behind Ebberhardt, Kirkwood, O’Connor, and Schuller. “I don’t think we can fit five in the jeep.”

“Mikie,” Jon Kirkwood said, stopping and taking the captain by the shoulders, “you need to find Movie Star and have him take you and Major Dickinson up to the brig. They will need the staff judge advocate there, and you can ride with him.”

“What about Major-Select Heyster and the others?” Carter asked, looking at the group of prosecutors standing in their usual small circle, Charlie with his pipe clenched in this teeth.

“They don’t have any clients in the brig, so they would just become curious onlookers, and would most likely get in the way,” Kirkwood said, turning Carter back toward him. “Don’t worry about those guys. Go get Movie Star and the other jeep.”

“Well, where is Lance Corporal Dean, anyway?” Carter asked, wringing his hands and turning again to look in all directions. “I saw Lance Corporal Pounds with Sergeant Amos and Corporal Farmer all talking to Staff Sergeant Pride just a moment ago, but Dean disappeared right after he ate dinner. I haven’t seen him for quite a long time. Not in the past hour, anyway.”

“Use your head, Skipper,” O’Connor said, pointing at his temple and tapping it. “It’s Friday night. Bet our horny lance corporal has a date with Rosy Palm back in the barracks. Take a look there.”

“Well, he’ll just have to send her back to her quarters on her own then,” Carter said, putting his nose in the air. “We have an emergency, and no time to spare for running prom dates home. I am sure that Major Dickinson won’t even want to know about Movie Star’s date. Is she a nurse? The name doesn’t sound Vietnamese.”

“No, Mike, but she is an American,” O’Connor said, and then laughed. “You be nice to her.”

“Of course!” Captain Carter huffed, and then took off running toward the enlisted quarters, where Lance Corporal Dean lived in a cubicle wallpapered with centerfold pinups from the past dozen issues of
Penthouse
magazine.

“You asshole!” Wayne Ebberhardt said, laughing as he jogged alongside Terry O’Connor. “Only Michael Carter would not know the true identity of Rosy Palm and her five sisters who never say no. It’s almost worth going back to watch!”

Jon Kirkwood had already sat down behind the steering wheel, and Mike Schuller occupied the front passenger seat, leaving the back bench for Ebberhardt and O’Connor. When the two captains jumped aboard, Kirkwood popped the clutch and raced toward the air base main gate.

AN IRRITATING TAPPING sound outside his wall lockers stirred James Dean from his lust-driven daze. He had a red lightbulb screwed in his desk lamp, providing a certain sultry ambience to his cubicle, and a fifteen-watt reading light mounted on the pipe frame of his bunk, focused on the spread-open centerfold of the August issue of his favorite American publication.

“Don’t fuck with me right now, man, I’m almost there,” Movie Star called out, not taking his eyes off the pair of large breasts and nearly hairless pubic triangle in the centerfold photo that he held up with his left hand while his right worked frantically at his crotch and had his libido racing at ultrahigh speed. His blurring vision shifted continuously from the pinup’s muff to her breasts, to her bright-red lips, then back to her muff.

When he reached his slippery right hand toward the night table where he had a large plastic bottle of creamy-pink baby lotion with a handy pump top, trying to quickly reload his palm with the sweet-smelling lubricant and get his sloppy fist back into action, he heard a high-pitched scream that for an instant he thought came from a woman. The lance corporal sat up only to see Captain Michael Carter standing in the cubicle entrance, twittering with his hands over his eyes and vibrating on his toes.

“Oh, my God!” Carter cried, glancing down to see the naked, fully erect Marine. Then he covered his eyes and twittered again like a young, inexperienced girl getting her first look at pornography.

“Holy shit, sir, I’m almost there, can’t you give me just about thirty seconds?” Movie Star whined, and then went back to work on his masturbation with furious intensity.

“Oh, I’ve got to get some air!” Carter squealed, and staggered back into the center aisle of the barracks, holding his hands across his chest and gasping for breath. “Corporal, you have no shame! Oh, my God! Captain O’Connor said you had a girl here with you, a person named Rose something or other.”

“Yeah, sir, Rosy Palm, she’s right here,” Dean called back and began groaning. “Oh, that’s it, baby. Take it all. Yeah, ride it hard. Let your daddy come home. Oh, yeah, baby.”

“Oh, my God!” Carter gasped, stepping back into the lance corporal’s doorway, looking to see if a girl was there and considering that he might not have noticed her at his first glance. However, when he took his second look, he only saw the driver with his hand stroking away and a stream of semen suddenly gushing over the top of his fist.

“Damn, sir,” Movie Star said, catching his breath and wiping himself with a towel that he had lain by his side, “what’s so fucking important?”

“You’ve got to drive me and the colonel, or rather the major, to the brig,” Carter said in a rapid-fire staccato. “We think that the Viet Cong have attacked it and overrun the place. It’s on fire! You can see it burning from down here.”

“Why the fuck would Charlie want to rocket the brig?” Dean said, pulling on his utility trousers without putting on any underwear, and then slipping on his blouse without a T-shirt under it. Then he flopped on the side of his bunk, yanked up his socks, stabbed his feet down in his boots, and laced them before Michael Carter could think of a reason why anyone would want to rocket a jail.

“You know, I cannot imagine how I can explain what just happened in your cubicle when I go to confession to the chaplain tomorrow,” Carter said, completely flustered and walking with a hurried step alongside the driver as they headed toward the jeep where Major Dudley Dickinson sat in the passenger seat, waiting and trying to make a two-way radio work that Staff Sergeant Pride had given to him so he could communicate with the PMO if needed.

“What do you have to confess, sir?” Dean said, jumping in the driver’s seat while Carter climbed over the side and fell onto the back bench.

“Why, your masturbation, of course,” Carter replied, straightening himself up.

Dudley Dickinson looked at Lance Corporal Dean and then glanced over his shoulder at Carter.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Dickinson growled at the captain.

“I saw the lance corporal, sir,” Carter stammered, and then blushed so badly that he could not wrestle his voice from his throat.

“What? You walked in on this shitbird jacking off?” Dickinson asked, and then laughed so hard he lost his breath.

“Yes, sir,” Carter answered, and took a hard swallow. “Some of the men told me that Movie Star had a date accompany him to his barracks, a girl named Rose or something. So I wandered in, and I did knock, by the way. I fully expected to see him having a nice conversation with a young woman, but what I encountered! Well, sir! Like I tried to tell Lance Corporal Dean, I just have no idea how I will explain it to the chaplain when I go to confession tomorrow.”

“You fucking moron, Rosy Palm! Your damned hand! Haven’t you ever?” Dickinson shouted, and then laughed as the jeep rolled past the air base’s main gate and headed for the brig. “No, I take it back, you probably have never whacked your noodle, have you.”

“If you mean masturbation, sir,” Carter said, blushing uncontrollably, “I do not make that a practice in my life. I pray about it when I feel my loins aroused. I certainly do not discuss the matter with anyone.”

“Whoever left your cage door unlocked back there in Boston should get the death penalty,” Dickinson growled while Movie Star smiled as he drove, holding in his laughter.

Chapter 20

AS JON KIRKWOOD steered his jeep around the final turn approaching the Freedom Hill brig, two CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters launched from the clearing across the road from the prisoner of war compound next door and downwind from the military prison. Several canvas-topped Marine Corps six-by trucks sat with their diesel engines idling in front of a cluster of hooches across the parking lot from the blockhouse.

Nearly ninety inmates who had earned base-parolee status lived in these quarters. A panel of officers who included the provost marshal and brig warden and three members of the general staff, assigned on a rotating basis, reviewed the case of each man proposed for the parolee program. Envisioned by the provost marshal and Lieutenant Schuller, it served as a halfway house for inmates who neared the end of their sentences and demonstrated potential to return to the operating forces, serving to transition them back to Marine Corps units rather than the men getting shit-canned out of the service with an administrative discharge under less than honorable conditions. It offered Marines a second chance to finish their military obligation and obtain a general discharge under honorable conditions, which also warranted them receiving the full package of veterans’ benefits they would have otherwise lost. Putting the men back in the operating units also helped the Marine
Amphibious Force with its manpower shortfalls, which had become an increasing concern.

Staff Sergeant Abduleses had organized the base parolees into working parties that now helped the guard staff erect floodlights all around the brig’s perimeter. They had used the trucks to transport the Marines and equipment around the fence line and to tow generator trailers in place.

One by one as the workers started the generators’ engines, the banks of floodlights came on and fully illuminated the brig’s surroundings as well as the recreation yard and burning hooches.

“My God!” Jon Kirkwood exclaimed as he pulled the jeep in front of the administration building and Mike Schuller leaped out before he had a chance to stop. “This wasn’t a rocket attack. It’s a riot.”

“You think they killed anybody?” O’Connor said, looking at the many fires and seeing the prisoners inside the fence running aimlessly or hiding under the several rows of picnic tables that flanked the basketball court and served as movie seating on Friday nights.

“I’m afraid to even consider it,” Kirkwood answered, pausing to take in the view and trying to absorb what had happened.

Michael Schuller had run ahead of the three lawyers and quickly found Staff Sergeant Abduleses talking to Lieutenant Colonel Webster, the MAF chief of staff, and several other officers standing in a group on the walkway between the parking lot and the blockhouse. As the trio of lawyers approached the group, they recognized the familiar face of an old friend.