It was a long thirty or so hours on the bus, and I mostly sweated profusely and smoked Marlboro Reds. Everyone else on the bus was twitchy too. There were some guys who tried to make jokes at first, just to keep things light, but they didn’t find a large enough audience, I guess, because the jokes stopped an hour into the drive.
My orders were to report to Fort Riley, which is exactly what I did. When we finally drove onto the base, my worst fear came true. My veins became thick with adrenaline. My heart nearly exploded. That tall-ass Fire Bear was off in the distance, smoking a cigarette and just staring at our bus, waiting for us to exit. Before I could get a really good look or figure out what the fuck to do, I was thrown onto a smaller bus with a bunch of guys who looked even more jungle than me, and we were taken to another place that was more like a hospital. Just as soon as I arrived, I understood that this was where all of the really insane vets got sent. It was a total loony bin, with guys staring at the walls and drooling and pacing and shaking uncontrollably for no reason at all except for the nightmares playing on the insides of their skulls. Walking into that secret medical facility was a real wake-up call. I wanted out just as soon as I was in, and I made that perfectly clear, so much that they had to restrain me the first night. That took four big black guys. Maybe even five, but they hit me with a chemical restraint, and then it was lights out.
When I woke up, I immediately realized my mistake. When I met with one of the headshrinkers that day in his office, I let him know that I had decided to make something of my life—that I wanted to study business and I didn’t want any more drugs in my system. All I needed was my honorable discharge, I told him, and I’d be on my way.
The shrink in charge of my file was an older man who had served in World War II, so I told him about my father, and that seemed to hold weight with him. I remember he gave me a cigar. It was almost impossible to get cigars in Vietnam, so this was a big treat, and this old man knew it too. As we sat in his office, smoking the cigars, he got me to tell him about my adventures in Vietnam, which eventually led to my talking about Tao.
Over the course of several meetings and dozens of cigars, there was much debate over whether Tao was real or my mind had invented him as a sort of alter ego, like I said before. My military shrink tried to convince me that I wanted a partner in crime, someone to share the blame for all I had done in the jungle. He argued that Tao was an innocent whose homeland had been invaded and whose family had been raped and killed. Tao had a legitimate and concrete reason for killing Vietcong, unlike me whose government sent him halfway around the world and then said kill the yellow faces just because. The old shrink, whose name I can’t recall now, was very convincing. He seemed to like me and my future plans to take the Temple challenge and make a lot of money, like all good Americans should.
In spite of that first night when the brothers had to restrain me, it was obvious that I was by far the sanest man in this little secret hospital. Everyone knew it. The staff even let me outside at night to smoke cigarettes with them under the stars, which they never would have done if they thought I was crazy as all the rest.
On my last night in that place, I woke up, and there was this other absolutely fucking nuts Vietnam veteran sucking my dick. At first I thought I was dreaming and tried to wake myself up, but then I realized I was truly awake.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I screamed, and then kneed that motherfucker in the stomach hard, knocking him to the ground. He came at me again with his mouth open, so I leaped out of bed and beat the shit out of him. Once I had him on the floor, I just kept pounding away on his face. I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. Instinct took over, and I did what I was trained to do by my government. It must have taken fifteen orderlies to get me off that crazy dick-sucking motherfucker, but not before I had blinded him in both eyes.
Since it was self-defense and I was a sexual assault victim and only members of the military would be able to truly understand all of this objectively, the old man who was in charge of my file moved swiftly and had me tried in a military court of law. He testified on my behalf. I was convicted and ordered to pay a two-dollar fine. They gave me two cartons of cigarettes and sent me on my way with an honorable discharge. The old shrink said he pushed for me to be tried in a military court ASAP because, once convicted, I could never be tried in a civilian court for the same crime. I realized he had done me a solid and thanked him for it.
I sometimes feel bad about blinding one of my fellow veteran brothers. He didn’t choose to sexually assault me. War had driven him out of his mind, robbing him of the ability to make healthy choices. He was like a drunk stumbling around barefoot in the desert. But rattlesnakes don’t give a shit if you’re blackout drunk when you step on them—they just strike and pump your ankle full of venom. And horrific violence also happens when you try to suck a sleeping combat-tested US veteran’s dick. Like I said before, I had been trained to terminate anything that woke me up in the middle of the night, even when it wasn’t related to my dick being sucked by another man. So it was what it was.
I never told anyone about this shit before, of course, but I would think about what happened from time to time, even though—as you might imagine—I tried to avoid thinking about it as much as humanly possible. But I have sometimes also wondered if this was why I was so quick to coldcock Brian, and also why I fell for Jessica so hard at first sight.
I don’t even know the name of the man I blinded. I wonder if he ever regained his sanity and made it out of the loony bin. Did they even tell him my name? Would he have been sane enough to remember what happened? Would he come after me?