Part One
They marched one hundred and ten miles, barefooted among scuttling, slithering death, carrying an assurance of mercy; a promise of leniency had they given up the names and location of Toi Yeu Ban Chang Trai`s, The ‘I Love You Boys’, a guerilla battalion of North Vietnamese sycophants gone tribal and murderous. Our guys, prating on the gooks for days, were so frightfully convicted to their cause that silence hadn’t given way to speech even when faced with the wrench. In the end they were carried off into the jungle. As far as I knew, they weren’t killed. I helped the foreman sweep up fingers and toes all everning.
It was 1963, and the war was a screaming flue of white burnout and murky ozone. Our directive was one of absolute (and consequential) secrecy deferred and known only to Colonel Lyons Bismarck and myself. Through currency of a hot wire, the initiative wasn’t one to be pondered. We were to expeditiously set out to retrieve eight American mercenaries that had been captured by the enemy and forced into killing their own for General Din. To arrest those of our enemies too, though such a notion as this only produced laughter on the behalf of Bismarck.
I chuckled under my breath, and the commander, brigadier general Caprice (pardon the irony) Forster, reprimanded me as Bismark, his subordinate, brazenly tittered on and on without reproach. I must suppose that such an act of impropriety and pridefully disharmonious measure of character to be a exactly that which warranted his anointing of leadership of such an endeavor. Cut from a cloth soaked in blood, plug-ugly as a bat, his azure seablue eyes might be prepossessing on a baby or cherubic adolescent. The anatomy of his face was some inversion of and masquerading as benevolence. Bismarck was as much a mystery to me as the contents inside an oil-smeared bell jar. I’d heard his name and myth which raised from it, but nothing more. Just before we departed, Bismarck lit a cigarette.
As I cadged a pack of Kools from my pocket, the general asked “what should I make of two successive acts of insubordination, captain? Should a stripping of rank suffice, or more pertinently, a dishonorable discharge?”. Bismarck shook his head and hissed out a cloud of blue smoke against the grey morning buttresses dampening the room in a dull morass of light. From there we were dismissed. It was disconcerting to believe a man of such crudeness of manner and amoral character should be so integral as to gain immunity to all acts of disobedience to he of whose auspices our march had been set, but nevertheless, he was.
Colonel Bismarck was a snake hunter of only the most venomous trophy. He wore fangs around his neck, threaded into a string of poison oak, which he was allergic to. His skin would pock and bubble and he would scratch and tear at it until it oozed blood and histamine. I didnt even ask, and he always smirked and winked at me when he did so. His boots were laced with snakeskin. Trimmed with shark teeth. He carried paltry glass jamjars and would squeeze venom into them as souvenirs. I ask him why he does this. Why he endangers his life by an enemy we aren’t even at war with. Why seek them out? His answer was plain, “it reminds me that God does not have my approval until i give it”. He was always a cryptic man, dogged by an ancient, antediluvian calling.