When I was with Tao in the jungle, I promised myself that if I made it home alive, I would never ever eat another fucking snake for dinner, I would never again sleep in a tree, I’d never walk around for weeks in wet rotting boots, and I’d never take shit off of any man because I was an underling, if I could help it. Great motivation for making money here in America, let me tell you. Motivation is what enables you to do what other men will not. My competition in the banking world had never killed anyone, let alone had their mental endurance tested by the little pricks in Vietnam. When you have watched your friends die in your arms, felt the flesh rot off your feet, and gone nose to nose with pure evil, going the extra mile with an investor—laughing at his dumb jokes, having that extra late-night drink when you’d much rather be home with your family, and sniping the in-house competition by inserting the right word at the right time into the boss’s ear—is like R&R in Hawaii compared to day-to-day wartime Vietnam. I used to just laugh when my fellow bankers complained about their imaginary stress. I was the apex predator in any jungle or boardroom, and I made sure everyone was damn sure aware of that fact. Since I was bringing in big-time money, my superiors looked the other way whenever some pussy colleague complained about me. People in power take care of the apex predator. Always. Doesn’t matter if we are wearing suits or camouflage. The rules are the same.
When I returned home, after some crazy time in a military loony bin in Kansas, which I’ll talk about later, I used the GI Bill to take the Temple challenge, which meant that I enrolled at Temple University in Philadelphia. Previously, I had been thinking I would be an engineer, but I ended up studying business and economics, which, it turns out, is a lot like war. Like I just said, if you are smarter and tougher and more ruthless than everyone else, you can win the money game and usually do. So I wasn’t getting stoned and drunk back then. I was studying my ass off and working two jobs, one at a bank and another as a carpenter on the weekends.
Even still, I tried to keep in touch with my Vietnam veteran friends, if only to check up on them and try to encourage them to make something of whatever life they had left, which was a lot harder than it sounds to people who have never been to war in some shithole country.
The vets of today coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq have it pretty fucking bad, and many who would have been killed in Vietnam come home maimed these days because of advancements in medicine, which means worse rehab and harder handicapped lives. But I’d still say that coming home a veteran in the sixties was much, much worse than coming home a veteran now. We honor the troops everywhere these days with ribbons and patriotic beer commercials and hometown hero announcements at sporting events where they put veterans in uniforms up on the big screens and everyone claps. All good. Better than being spit on. But I don’t mean to say it’s easy coming home from war today, because it fucking isn’t. Not by a long shot.
Back in the late sixties, whenever I stopped by Roger Dodger’s, there were at least a dozen teenage girls high out of their little minds. Some of these girls were only fourteen or fifteen. A lot of guys got a taste for that in the whorehouses in Vietnam. I knew that wasn’t good stateside. I didn’t want to tell my friends what they could or couldn’t do, but these girls had never left suburbia and therefore had no idea what killers they were partying with. I’m not saying that all Vietnam veterans were dangerous when they came home, but Roger and Brian were definitely taking advantage of these underage girls, impressing them with war stories and then getting them high so that they could get laid on a regular basis, all while taking money off them too. And the girls didn’t know that they were playing with live rounds, sticking loaded guns in their mouths, and other orifices too. I was on a hair trigger myself, but at least I was sober most days. Drugs can be calming, but sometimes they aren’t.
I’d have a beer with Roger when all these kids were there, and I’d say, “What the fuck are you doing, man?”
He’d laugh and say, “I’m enjoying the fruits of America!”
I’d try to talk to him about the GI Bill and maybe having a future, but his setup was too good. All the drugs he wanted, a free place to live, and an inexhaustible supply of teenage poontang gyrating to the Doors or the Stones or whatever the fuck else we were listening to back then.
I’d been to Roger’s place dozens of times without having to fight anyone, back before I met Jessica, so the following story doesn’t represent a typical day in the civilian life of David Granger.
It was a Saturday in the dead of winter. Too much snow on the ground for carpentry work. I had the day off, so I went to check up on Roger and try to talk his ass into putting down the weed pipe and taking the Temple challenge, although I can’t remember if they called it the Temple challenge back then. Maybe Bill Cosby started all that later, but before we found out that he was a serial pervert in addition to being Temple’s best-known alumnus. But I remember Roger’s Dodge Charger was covered in several inches of ice and snow. The driveway hadn’t been cleared, or the sidewalk, but there were all of these footprints frozen in the snow. All of them about the size of teenage-girl feet.
I could hear the music blasting as I approached. I remember it was “Friday on My Mind” by the Easybeats because that was a dumb fucking song to play on a Saturday, or at least that’s what I thought when I was standing there freezing my ass off, waiting for someone to open the door. When no one did, I turned the knob and let myself in.
The pot smoke was so thick, it looked like the house was on fire.
“Close the fucking door!” someone yelled. “Keep the smoke in!”
I saw a few young girls completely naked and passed out on the floor, so I started looking for Roger before I got a contact high myself. I could usually get him to sit with me in the kitchen, where no one else really partied. Everywhere I looked, there were drugs and teenage flesh. I couldn’t find Roger, and no one was responding to any of my questions because of the drugs and also the music was so fucking loud so I went upstairs.
At the top of the stairs I heard a young woman screaming for help, only it was hard to hear over the music, so no one was helping her. The bedroom door was locked, so I kicked it in.
Brian was standing there naked, holding a revolver with one hand and stroking his little erect dick with the other, all while saying crude things like he was going to “widen her” and “make her evil” and other perverted ideas I won’t repeat here because they are just too fucked up for the average ear. And if something is too fucked up for me to repeat, you know it is really nasty. He was so high he didn’t even turn to face me.
I kept my eye on the gun, which was pointed at the floor, but could easily have been pointed at my face within seconds. I don’t take chances with armed men tripping on acid and weed and alcohol and whatever else they had scored. So I simply coldcocked Brian. My right fist hit the right side of his skull, and then his face hit the floor. Only he pulled the trigger as he fell, shooting a bullet through the wood boards below him.
I quickly kicked the gun out of his hand, made sure he was out cold, and then ran downstairs to see if anyone had been shot. Miraculously, the bullet passed through without hitting any of the dozen people partying on the first floor. The music was so loud and everyone was so wasted that no one even knew that a gun had been fired. That’s how fucked up these people were. With everyone out of harm’s way, I went back upstairs to check on the young girl Brian had sexually assaulted.
She was crumpled up in the corner, shaking and crying. When I touched her shoulder, she jumped and then screamed, but then she threw herself at me, so I put my arms around her in an attempt to calm her down.
After a minute or so, she looked at me and said, “Who are you?”