Deros Vietnam Read Online Free PDF

have been stupid enough to answer his call, but goddamned if the whole fucking crew wasn’t there—sleepy-eyed, hung over, and mostly dressed in their skivvies. Before I knew it, we were all drinking Bloody Marys—hair of the dog—and toking up. It was like yesterday’s party had never ended.
    I’m not sure we ever actually said goodbye to Ward, because the next thing we knew, Lt. Col. Fraser’s Vietnamese chauffeur, Mr. Trung, arrived with orders to drive us all to the office. It was past 9 a.m. and we were all two hours late for work! Mr. Trung waited outside the hooch while we laughed ourselves silly. Conroy, wearing only his boxers, walked out to the car and gave the driver the word.
    â€œ Dites mon Colonel, ” Conroy slobbered in his best high school French, “que nous ne travaillons pas ce jour.”
    I doubt if Mr. Trung understood a word, but he caught the drift and drove the empty car back to the office.
    By early afternoon the dope was starting to wear off, we were out of booze and it was hot as hell, so we decided to wander by the office and cool off in its AC. We dressed, hopped a base shuttle bus, and headed in.
    We must have looked a sight. Conroy had shaving cream in his hair, even though all of us were unshaved and wearing yesterday’s dirty fatigues. Every one of us needed a haircut. Only Murphy appeared fit for duty, but he wasn’t talking much.
    The second we staggered into the office, Sgt. Baker ordered us across the hall. Fraser shouted at us to stand tall, but Baker did most of the talking. Speaking in his sweet South Carolinian accent, he informed us that we were a bunch of hippy jerk-off scumbags. His ass chewing was still in high gear when Fraser burst in and escalated the verbal war. He zeroed in on Murphy, shouting into his face.
    â€œNever in my twenty-three years in the military have I met such a sorry bunch of mother-fuckers. You’re a disgrace to your uniforms. You’re not fit to be called soldiers. You’re not fit to be members of Uncle Sam’s team. You’re not worthy of being wasted by the goddamn gooks! You’re a sorry bunch of spoiled, pampered, goldbricking mama’s boys. You make me want to puke. I’m going to see to it personally that every last one of you hand-jobs is court-martialed and fined for this morning’s insubordination!”
    Before the color in Fraser’s cheeks had faded, Murphy began to speak quietly. His voice had a poetic rhythm to it, rising and falling as he introduced each point with a punctuated “with all due respect, sir.” At first, Baker and Fraser just stood there. We shared their confusion. No one had ever heard Murphy talk this way.
    â€œWith all due respect, sir, it was you who embarked on a sustained program of harassment through petty discipline like haircuts and shoe shinings.
    â€œWith all due respect, sir, you have never once set foot across the hall to …” Murphy’s mouth kept moving but we couldn’t hear the words because Fraser had grabbed him by his dog tags and was choking him. We could make out a couple more “with all due respect sirs” but we were all stunned by the intensity of Fraser’s visible hatred. If he’d directed that venom at Sir Charles, we could have ended the war in a heartbeat.
    The longer Murphy kept trying to talk, the madder Fraser got. He shoved his face right into Murphy’s and pulled him even harder by the dog tags, accusing him of everything up to, and including, fornication with the base canine population. Murphy simply smiled.
    For some reason, Sgt. Baker didn’t say a goddamn thing. He knew, like the rest of us, that Murphy had whipped the Lt. Col.’s ass, had spoken the truth about what separated us enlisted men from the brass. As we were leaving Baker’s office, he mumbled something almost apologetic about not thanking us for all our hard work.
    Before long, Fraser stepped up