“Look at the night, and it don’t seem so lonely. We fill it up with only two…” by Neal Diamond interrupted the Christmas music I’d put on, as Pat walked through the door to my office.

“We got tired of Christmas music,” Pat announced, and then looked at the expression on my face, staring at her without comment.

“We’ll change it back,” she said, after a slight delay.

“No, you guys run with what you want,” I replied, finally, as there seemed no point in forcing the Christmas issue. I was a Christmas nut but that did not mean everyone was.

“Take my hand, take my whole life too, for I can’t help falling in love with you…” played from the speakers. I couldn’t argue with Elvis, or the choice of his music, even though it wasn’t really his music. I’d learned, following meeting Elvis personally while in high school at Maryknoll Academy in Hawaii, that the wondrous song was actually from a French folk song called “Plaisir amour,” and went all the way back to the late 1700s.

I relaxed to the music, loving it but not tied into it like the Christmas song of my youth, the only public presentation of my singing voice in my life. Nothing could ever replace that strange, vengeful, but triumphant performance. I waited for the phone call, leaning back in the chair, hoping somewhat, but really knowing it had to come. What had taken place in that empty tent, if Marcinko had indeed dared to enter and face Nguyen and Kingsley, would reach me sooner or later. Had my plan worked? The song called Born to Lose by Ray Charles came on and a faint feeling of possible failure ran through me. Pat appeared at my open door again.

“He’s on for you,” she said, and walked away. I was surprised that I’d been so caught up in the music that I hadn’t noticed the blinking light on the base of the phone.

I picked up the receiver and punched the button. I waited, saying nothing, but only silence met my patience.

“Hello,” I finally asked, looking at the phone to make sure I’d pushed the right button.

“How long were you going to wait?” Herbert asked.

I smiled but said nothing. Although I’d spoken first, the frustration and mild anger in Herbert’s tone told me I’d won, what I’d won I wasn’t sure of, however.

“Marcinko changed his mind, you can call Mack and get the plane, or some plane that will work. The objective to accomplish the mission is approved.”

Herbert hung up the phone without saying more, leaving me holding the receiver with no resolution to the question of how had Marcinko been convinced to give in.

“Sitting on the dock of the Bay” began to play, the sound seeming to sprinkle down from the ceiling speakers like soft foggy rain: “Sitting on the dock of the bay wasting time. Looks like nothing’s going to change, everything still remains the same. I can’t do what ten people tell me to do so I guess I’ll remain the same…”

I pulled myself together and reviewed some of the applications that Pat arranged for my review, knowing that I wasn’t going to get a call about what had happened. Whatever it was didn’t involve an emergency room or a morgue so it could not have gone too badly. Nguyen and Kingsley would be en route back to the office and I’d just have to wait.

The time passed, although not comfortably. Going through the analytical exercise of diligently reading every word of handwritten responses to static rational but boring questions was tedious and seemed to consume my energy well beyond what it should have. I did learn that my make-believe agents were very proficient at getting the apps filled out correctly and also writing legibly. That they weren’t actually licensed agents yet would bother both Bartok and Thorkelson from my earlier days in the business but in reality, who was going to know?

“Now Paul is a real estate novelist who never had time for a wife…” played from over my head as I noted the Rover returning to the lot. I wanted to jump up, run out, and demand to know what happened, but didn’t move. Instead, I breathed in and out deeply, using my wife’s questionable method of relaxing. I’d made an injudicious decision to proceed with a plan wherein I had no real ability to predict the outcome. It was like being back in the valley, creating and executing plans titled to rock and roll lyrics that played in my office as I waited. That those plan back then had come to be pretty successful but my own ability to determine their outcomes had been nonexistent.

I just plunged in out of energy created by contained terror of epic proportions. This time I’d acted out of irritation and my inability to respond coolly and intellectually to aggressive male demonstrations of ridiculous threatening behavior. Deep inside myself, where Junior waited, I knew I would never fear such situations. I would always love them and I hated that in me. I was waiting to let Junior run free and I knew it but that could not be. I had to remain in Oz, on the yellow brick road of life, Mary my Judy Garland, the Cowardly Lion my mentor, guide, and the character I simply had to be in life…or there would be no life.

Cat Stevens played, as I waited, impatiently but not giving any appearance of that. I listened to the lyrics of the song and lived the melodies, like back in the valley when music, like the letters to my wife, were the only threads connecting me to any kind of reality I wanted to return to.
“…oh, baby baby it’s a wild world…it’s hard to get by with just a smile…”

Kingsley and Nguyen walked in, both relaxed and not seeming like they’d come from a charnel house of violence and terror, where both men had been and, like me, sometimes wanted to idiotically return to. It was a wild world, Stevens was right, but not in the way he probably meant when he’d penned the lyrics.

Kingsley led Nguyen through the door. Both men seated themselves in the stiff-backed chairs in front of me.

“Well?” I finally asked, unable to contain myself further.

“He saw the error of his ways,” Kingsley said, shifting in the chair uncomfortably, making me uncomfortable too.

I waited again, wanting to explode at both of them, but there would be no point. Nguyen could not be moved but would move to protect me no matter what.
Kinsley had no such background with me, just a rapidly endearing faith that he was a talkative Indian version of Nguyen.
As I waited for the ABBA song nobody thought was a war song came through the speakers and a shiver ran up and down my back through the first stanza: “Can you hear the drums Fernando? I remember long ago another starry night like this
In the firelight Fernando you were humming to yourself and softly strumming your guitar.
I could hear the distant drums, and sounds of bugle calls were coming from afar.”

I reached quickly for the phone and punched the button to reach Pat. She answered so fast it was like she was waiting for me to call.

“Turn the music off,” I instructed, and then replaced the phone back on the receiver, Inhaling while trying to get the sound of the drums, not the ones in the song, out of my mind.”

“You are here and now with us,” Nguyen suddenly said, speaking for the first time in two days.

The phone began to blink on my desk. I hit the button but said nothing as I expected Tony Herbert to be wanting an explanation for whatever he might have heard about the Masrcinko incident I’d instigated or responded to.

“It’s the man you called a gorilla this time,” Pat said, connecting me before I could remember when I’d referred to Marcinko in that way. It was a valid description but not one I could remember making in front of her.

“You are at what you call your office?” Marcinko said, his tone harsh.

“You are calling the office,” I replied, wanting to add, ‘stupid’ to my reply but didn’t. I waited while he prepared himself to say whatever he was going to say.

“Wait there, this isn’t settled yet,” he said, hanging up in Herbert fashion.

I stood with the receiver in my hand looking at Nguyen first and then over at Kingsley. I put the thing down onto its base slowly and gently as I thought.

“In the Corps, we call it an after-action report,” I began, looking intensely from one to the other. “Would you like to tell me what happened with Marcinko in detail at your little get-together in the tent?” I asked, moving to sit in my executive chair behind the desk.

Both men came together in front of me, both looking slightly guilty.

“He was violent, angry, argumentative, and nasty,” Kingsley finally offered.

I said nothing, clasping my hands before me and putting the joined product on the surface of the wood before me. Since Marcinko appeared unhurt in any major way and was coming to the office there had to be an interesting story to explain why he’d given his permission for the Christmas flight but why and under what circumstance if not the beating I’d hoped Nguyen and Kingsley might deservedly administer.

“Kurkri donated,” Nguyen confessed, although his tone was typical in that there was no revealing intonation of intent at all as he said the words.

“Kurkri,” I repeated, clueless.

“The knives we Gurkha’s carry, Saheb,” Kingsley stated, using the British form of talking to a superior in India. I didn’t know the languages of India but I did know that word meant the same thing as sir in either Hindi or Urdu, the two most popular languages of the country with English way down in about tenth place.

“You gave that dirt bag your Gurkha knife? I said, my voice indicating shock and disbelief. I knew that the curved weapon was the very symbol of what it meant to be a Gurkha soldier.

“I offered him the ceremonial one, as we are given two,” Kingsley replied.

I was totally out of my element to simply stare at the man in question.

“The ceremonial one is smaller and there are no ceremonies for former Gurkha officers in the United States,” Kingsley said, answering the question I didn’t know enough to ask.

“So, you gave the phony a phony knife? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Not in those words,” Kingsley answered, the subject obviously difficult for him. “It seemed a lot better than causing physical damage where none was necessary. The man seemed predisposed to not engaging with us from when he set foot in the tent.”

I laughed out loud at the prospect of somehow being able to let Marcinko know that Kingsley had hoodwinked him but knew the occasion would never likely arise. Marcinko was powerful in his ungoverned and nearly uncontrollable way, much as some might describe my own past since going off to war and never really coming home…or at least not to the same home.

“He is coming here to do you harm,” Kingsley said, changing the subject while raising the level of his delivery. “He is breaking his word.”

“You gave him a fake knife and now he’s breaking his word,” I mused to myself, shaking my head briefly. “Seems there’s some justice there, even though he’s no doubt unaware as to the different sort of Kurkri knives out there in the world, and thank you for doing that, by the way, on my behalf.”

“He’s coming here to do you harm,” Kingsley repeated.

Nguyen moved silently and slowly to stand by the wall next to the open door. I knew what he was doing. Flank security was going out.

I got up from the desk.

“The three of us are getting in the Rover and taking a ride,” I said.

Kingsley smiled, letting out a brief exhalation from his lungs, as if expressing relief.

‘Sun Tzu,’ he whispered with a smile on his face. “He does not understand Sun Tzu: ‘The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.’”

I drove toward the Sandia mountains getting onto the freeway and headed east. The Rover’s V8 was plenty powerful enough to climb up toward Highway 14 that ran straight north, once getting onto the back side of the Sendia’s, all the way to Santa Fe. I knew that some sort of physical confrontation with Marcinko was likely unavoidable. Still, I had to make sure that whatever incident it was likely would be on a battleground I’d designed and prepared for him. Running away, as I had at first run away from combat in the A Shau Valley, was effective in survival during the short term but if the threat remained more permanent, or seemingly more permanent, then turning to fight became inevitable.

We reached the Madrid, where the Mine Shaft Tavern was set into the remains of a command structure that had once led into the still open but no longer operating gaping black cavity of the thing. The great hole set into the side of the bluff next to the bar was imposing, just as the old Western saloon style of the building was.

I’d brought Nguyen and Kingsley to the place for some relaxation and also to discuss what might have to be done to assuage the damaged emotional nightmare that was Marcinko.

As usual, and vaguely uncomfortable to me, was the collection of Harley-Davidson motorcycles parked in a row near the side of the main building.

Nguyen looked over at the entrance to the coal mine as we walked toward the saloon-style double doors of the place.

“Tunnel,” he murmured. “no drums, no horns.”

I knew he was referring to the drums of the valley we’d both experienced in the Nam. The bugles I’d known of from tales told by the Gunny, but I’d never heard them myself. The drums had been bad enough.

I’d brought them to hear Linda Linton, a female singer who sounded eerily like Joan Baez, whose songs she sang to great popularity, but only in the most far out and abandoned entertainment venues of outback New Mexico.

The strains of her clear voice, backed only by strumming acoustic guitar penetrated out through the vented doors as we entered. It was the Baez top-of-the-chart Diamonds and Rust tune Linda had become marginally famous for belting out, the second stanza having more meaning than most of the others, as least to me as our first meeting months back, when I ran from Albuquerque to try to clear my head and try to write: “As I remember your eyes were bluer than robin’s eggs. My poetry was lousy you said, Where are you calling from? A booth in the Midwest…
Ten years ago I bought you some cufflinks. You brought me something. We both know what memories can bring. They bring diamonds and rust.”

There was only one table left in the place, in a back corner furthest from the stage from which Linda sang across the brash and boisterous sounds of the collected Harley drivers drinking and obviously having a good time. The look of them brought my post-Vietnam persona of the cowardly lion right to the forefront of my mind. The bartender, looking like he’d been hauled out of the mine after being used as a sentinel canary, pushed a cloth across a table that gave every appearance of being cleaner before he touched it than after. He stood back, straightening up.

“What’ll it be mates?” he asked, sort of blinking his right eye as he checked out the appearances of Nguyen and Kingsley.

In my reverie, on the way to the place,e I’d not thought to consider that anyone not lily white wasn’t really welcome in certain small enclaves in New Mexico, the opposite of those enclaves populated by the Hidalgo Spanish (those from Spain, not Mexico) with their dislike, if not outright hatred of Caucasians. The man’s use of the word ‘mates’ and his accent identified him as an Aussie.

“G’day,” I replied, using the jargon from his home country. It meant good day, but was colloquial, like ‘geht’s’ was said in Germany instead of the formal Wie geht’s. The geht’s translated to ‘going’ instead of the “how’s it going?” the normal hello form used there.

“Order?” the man asked, reaching up to scratch the half of a left ear he still had attached to his head.

“Lemonade,” I said, looking over at my two companions.

Kingsley nodded but Nguyen ignored me, stealthily staring around at the bikers sitting and entertaining themselves before us. Our entry had been noticed, that much I’d paid attention to, but nothing had been said and there appeared no problems with three such strange-looking men sitting in their midst.

“Three lemonades,” I finally said.
The waiter, or whatever he was, departed immediately, only to reappear in only a few minutes with a tray of glasses filled with a greenish-yellow liquid poured over ice cubes jammed to the top edge of the glass lips.

“You’re a lot quicker than you look,” I said, taking out my money clip and peeling off as twenty.

“Right pilgrim,” the man said, imitating John Wayne in some Western, but with a smile on his battered face. “Just how do I look?”

I wanted no trouble with the man.

“Just keep the change,” I said, also smiling, but not answering his question.

“That was funny, that pilgrim thing,” a deep male voice echoed across the short distance to another table.

That table was occupied by six big bikers, all having the same bad dirty hair look, overweight, and presenting the usual lowland gorilla snarling expression Marcinko liked to wear.

“Where are you pilgrims from, I mean you and whatever else that one is,” he said, pointing at Kingsley because Nguyen was nowhere to be seen. His lemonade sat where the Aussie had placed it with rivulets of water working their way down the outside of its clear glass container.

I looked around to see where he might have gone before understanding that flank security was out there somewhere.

“We don’t want any trouble,” I said, understanding subliminally that just those words might encourage would be predators and fool them into thinking some prey was in front of them.

“Of course, you don’t,” the man said, laughing loudly with his five other companions. “You came to the wrong place, and what happened to the gook you brought in with you?”

I noticed that Linda had not only finished the Baez song but hadn’t continued playing or singing her next song of whatever set she was doing. She stared across the distance from the stage, the room filled with cigarette smoke and loud members of the opposite sex. Far opposite. I also noticed her tip jar, a giant old pickle jar of some sort or maybe one used to store cherries or other fruit for canning. Through the clear glass, I could see that there were no tips inside it unless she had emptied it, but I doubted that.

Suddenly, I stood up and looked down at the biker. I reached back into my front pocket and took out my money clip again, quickly stripping off another twenty.

“You guys want to hear anything?” I asked, replacing the money clip, and giving the table a big innocent smile.

Without waiting, I moved toward the bar and then walked along all the bikers sitting there, hunched over their tankards of beer. I walked up to the edge of the stage, where Linda’s big lovely eyes stared down at me. I waved for her to move the jar closer to me, which she immediately did, after setting the guitar down gently, leaned against a boxy amplifier that wasn’t plugged in.

I put the twenty into the jar and looked back up.

“Play Puff the Magic Dragon,” I said, “By Peter Paul and Mary.” That request I knew she knew how to play and the lyrics as she’d played it for me before.

“Oh my,” she whispered leaning even closer to me. “I don’t think that will work with this crowd.”

I stared straight into her eyes, my own ‘robin’s egg blue’ eyes, like from the Baez song, not blinking, instead driving right into her own.

“Do the song, Linda, just as I requested.”

I pulled back and made my way back to Kingsley, who hadn’t moved, even to take a sip from his lemonade glass.

The big evident ‘leader of the pack’ stood up to confront me before I could reach my seat, his height a good six to seven inches greater than my own five foot nine stature and his weight likely double my own, or even a bit more.

He stepped closer as I had no choice but to stop and wait, slightly angling my body to present the smallest target I could if things continued to go the way they seemed to go. I notice Nguyen appear against the far wall near the corner of the room behind the big biker’s back. I didn’t look at him or make eye contact, to give no warning whatever to the prey in front of me that another deadly predator was closing on his back.

Linda strummed the beginning chords to the song, their notes not truly identifiable as to what would follow.

I stared at the man, meeting his eyes, the same way as I’d done at the stage to force Linda’s actions.

“Nobody has to die here,” I said in a conspiratorial whisper, just loud enough so that I knew he had to hear me.

“Die?” he asked, surprise registering on his facial features.

“Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea and frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee. Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff, and brought him strings, and sealing wax, and other fancy stuff…” the song played and the bikers all began to get to their feet, and then they were singing along. The big biker in front of me looked around in surprise and then I watched his expression change and his body relax. He looked back at me with a small smile crossing his lips.,

“So, who were you with?” he asked.

The bikers sang to Linda’s lyrics and the vastly surprised expression on her face.

“India Company, Three Five, First Mar Div,” I replied not smiling back at him, instead giving a very small shake of my head over the man’s shoulder where I could see Nguyen closing in.

“Where?” the biker asked, his smile growing more genuine.

“The A Shau,” I said, keeping our dialogue as short as possible so as not to lose the laser-focused attention I had to pay to every bit of movement of the man, around him and of the other bikers nearby.

The man stopped smiling but brought his right hand up to make a fist and then thumped the left side of his chest several times. I didn’t return the gesture, instead smiling and nodding my head at him, and working to begin relaxing my body and mind.

I turned to Kingsley behind me.

“We’re done here,” I said, before walking toward the bar, along it, and then crossing the room to pass by the front edge of the stage while Linda finished the rest of the song. Her look told me that I would have to return to tell her what had happened right in front of her.

Once outside I headed to the Rover and got in, Kingsley catching up and getting into the passenger side while Nguyen stood at the open rear door. I knew he was placing himself there in case he needed to go back into action and I wondered if any man ever had better protective cover than I was being given.

I started the Rover as Nguyen jumped in and slammed the rear door.

As I eased the big vehicle out of the slot Kingsley asked the question that I knew had to be coming.

“What was all that?” he said.

“Vietnam,” I replied. “Take a look at all the Harley-Davidsons.”

“What,” he asked, as I stopped the Rover to let him get a good look.

“The stickers on the gas tanks,” I pointed out.

“All military stuff,” Kingsley said, comprehension beginning to dawn on him but not fully.

“Mostly Nam vets in that gang,” I said, pulling away and getting back on Highway 14 to return to Albuquerque. “The song Puff is a Vietnam War song never written to be one. The rotary cannon supply plane rained fire down into the jungle around us to give support at night…the tracers were so close together because of the high rate of fire and yellow. The rotary fire resembled the tongue of a dragon coming down to sweep and kill the enemy wherever it might seek them out and find them. Hence the identification of most Vietnam Vets who ever experienced the phenomena, like me, or even heard about it. Puff, the song, is a Vietnam anthem.”