Jungle Rules Read Online Free PDF Page A

States.
    Since he didn’t have flat feet or wear a dress, he knew that his life of nights at Robbie’s Pool Hall and days relaxing in his room above Aunt Winnie’s garage had ended. Considering that he had always liked the look of the Marine uniform over any of the other services’ outfits, and that he had also heard that the Corps would get a guy in good shape and teach him some useful hand-to-hand combat skills, too, rather than punching a two-year draft ticket in the army, Brian joined the Marines for double the time.
    Standing six feet tall and a trim 175 pounds, the Kansas cowboy had little trouble adapting to the physical stress that the Marines demanded of him. His sandy hair cut in a flattop flattered his golden face. Ruggedly attractive, he looked like a poster model in his uniform.
    Aunt Winnie kept his dress-blues photograph in a large frame on the mantel, next to the portrait of her late husband, Joe, who in 1956 had driven his pipe truck off a cliff on Raton Pass rather than crash head-on into a carload of Trinidad, Colorado, teens, boozed out of their brains after a Friday night football game. With no children of her own, Winnie Russell regarded Brian as more her son than a nephew. He had her sister’s pale blue eyes and dimpled smile, and his father’s easy-to-like personality. She boasted about her Marine often, and kept her friends thoroughly briefed on his weekly letters.
    When Brian came home on leave, several of the old widow’s church friends brought their daughters to meet the handsome young man. The girls and their mothers all swooned at the sight of him looking so tall, fit, and dashing in his well-tailored green serge uniform. He fully enjoyed and took every advantage of the attention and fringe benefits that his good looks now bought.
    Back at Marine Corps Air Station, El Toro, California, the young Marine could always count on two or three letters from admiring Olathe debutantes in each day’s mail call. He laughed with his buddies, letting them sniff the perfume on many of the envelopes. Dutifully, he replied to each letter, too, and kept the mail flowing his way. Brian felt good about himself and liked his job. He even finished high school, taking off-duty courses, and planned next to enroll in a nearby Orange County community college.
    Then in March 1965, President Johnson announced that he was sending in the Marines to end the Viet Cong rebellion in South Vietnam. Corporal Brian Pitts, assigned as an aviation ordnance technician to the First Marine Aircraft Wing, soon joined that first bunch of Vietnam veterans in country, racking bombs under the wings of F-4 Phantom jets at Da Nang.
    Until the day that Corporal Pitts arrived in South Vietnam, he had kept his nose clean, except for a minor skirmish in the barracks at El Toro, where he paid penance by washing windows on Saturdays, but got no page 11 entry in his Service Record Book. His pro-con marks, with a possible top rating of 5.0, ran from a 4.9 high in proficiency to a 4.3 low in conduct. Overall, a good Marine. Yet three months into his combat tour, something finally snapped.
    Gunnery Sergeant Clifford Goss headed the aviation ordnance section where Pitts now worked, arming the growing number of Marine attack planes based at Da Nang Air Base. Built like a bullet with legs, Goss had the mentality of a rock. By what measure he failed to know about his job or leadership he made up with loud profanity, doing his best to intimidate his Marines into conforming to his warped ideas of discipline and submissive respect. Like oil and water, Cliff Goss and Brian Pitts did not mix at all.
    “That concrete-for-brains son of a bitch finally sent me over the edge,” the deserter turned crime lord said to James Harris as he gnawed the last bit of meat off a barbecued pork rib and tossed the bone into a growing pile in a big bowl set between the two fugitives, who now feasted on what remained of a roast pig from a whorehouse luau Pitts had hosted