To get there from anyplace in Da Nang, just follow the smell.

Rusted tin, cardboard, broken stucco, discarded cars, mud and thatch. All of it pinned, nailed, or wired together by desperate hands of humankind’s abandoned. A patchwork blanket of crap that spreads a square mile. Shacks, hovels, junk piles, hardly any of them providing real shelter, but all of them representing the overcrowded homes for the slum’s wretched inhabitants. Mostly shoved wall against wall, their roofs overlapping, these haphazard dins offer just enough space out front for a bicycle pushed by a skinny person to squeeze past.

Slime-caked trenches carry a constant trickle of sewer water running alongside the narrow, hard-pac pathways that meander through the ramshackle maze. Flowing over or through the decaying body of a dead cat here, a dead rat there, spilling out of the ditch into big puddles that gather at every turn, the pestilent runoff wreaks a foul stench that adds a pronounced flavor to the dank, smoke-enriched air that wafts across Da Nang.

Pigs, chickens, half-naked kids dart about the dark alleys of Dogpatch. A black-toothed old grandma tosses out a pan full of liquid, feeding the putrid trench in front of her home, while inside the dismal little warren where she had emerged, another black-toothed woman squats on the dirt floor by a charcoal fire, stirring with a stick a boiling concoction of catch-as-catch-can stew. Tromping in the shadows, a dog with mangy blotched skin stretched over rib bones, spine, and hips looks warily for a handout. Dusty and sad, he may try to steal a grab-and-run meal while dodging a fate that could land him in a soup kettle. Like everyone else in Dogpatch, luck of the moment is all he has.

Poverty, filth, and disease live in Dogpatch. So does corruption.

Crime bosses stockpile heroin, guns, and black-market booze here, often in the backs of dope-den bordellos that overlook galleries surrounding blood-spattered plyboard arenas where around-the-clock gambling takes place: dog and cock fights, pitched battles between snakes and mongooses, and once in a while a death match between human combatants, kick-boxing to the finish. Whatever the game, here they play for keeps.

In Dogpatch, it’s all for sale. Flesh, lives, homicide, oblivion.

Need a matchbox, lid, or kilo of pot or something stronger? Hash or opium? Something more refined? Pills perhaps? Blues, yellow jackets, reds, uppers, downers? How about some LSD? Perhaps an ounce or two of H? Take your pick, China rock, Burma white, or regular old brown shit, dealers have ample stocks. Little shops with lots of incense burning in their fronts to attract hungry clients, sell the dope both retail and wholesale from under the counter. Out back, the storekeeper may just be finishing bagging out a fresh batch of Buddha, opium-soaked marijuana, a particular favorite among American GIs. A few tokes of a pin joint and the blue bus cruises into Wonderland.

Need a man dead? Hits for hire come cheap in Dogpatch. Just ask one of the cowboys leaning in a shanty door with his opium stare and a gun stuffed in his waistband, under his shirt.

Tucked within the slum, large villa-style houses surrounded by high, concrete walls with razor wire on top lay hidden here and there, obscured from most prying eyes. Quiet little whore farms. Ranches, they call them in Dogpatch-savvy American lingo. Prostitutes raised, trained, and put on the streets from these urban spreads. A steady flow of girl children bought or snatched from hungry, displaced families keeps the flesh trade fueled with a fresh array of new talent, made ready in Dogpatch for the street hustle in Da Nang.

Guarded by a crew of armed cowboys, the rancher, usually a crime boss, dope-dealing, Murder, Inc., pimp, lives here in luxury with his harem. He dictates the rules. He writes the laws. He makes it worthwhile for the local constabulary to leave his territory alone. Not even the Communists bother him.

That’s because people come here to get lost. To avoid. To disappear beneath the putrid tide. They don’t come here to fight anybody’s war. If anything, they come here to escape it.

Dogpatch is the Deadwood of Da Nang. A haven for outlaws, addicts, and misfits desperate to get away.

Before his jeep ride that morning, the ratty-looking Marine lance corporal had managed to grab a shower and a shave with a dull, donated razor, but still wore his same old oil-stained and dirt-encrusted utility trousers, and sleeveless, green T-shirt from the Da Nang Air Base flight line, where two days ago a pair of narcs from CID had stung him in a fake buy. They nailed him dead to rights with three dozen pin joints of Buddha, a couple more loose ounces of the stuff twisted in a plastic bag, a dozen packets of Zig-Zag regulars and big Bambu’ rolling papers, a hash pipe, some roach clips, and a thick pile of cash.

As the undercover narcotics cops hustled him from the flight line, Harris mouthed off to his squadron’s adjutant, a first lieutenant from Freeport, Texas, named Clyde Brazwell, who had sicced the rat dogs from the Criminal Investigation Division of the III Marine Amphibious Force Provost Marshal’s Office on the troublesome Marine. They had wasted no time sending two shaggy-haired dirtbags to make the buy and bust.

Various rumors about Harris peddling dope had surfaced off and on among the senior enlisted and junior officers since he had landed in the squadron. Then this morning, while sipping coffee and gazing out his office window, thoughtlessly watching the flight-line mechanic who idled away most days smearing epoxy goo and paint over minor bullet and shrapnel damage on airplanes parked between sorties just outside the squadron’s hangar, the lieutenant saw two other lowlife dregs take up residence by Harris’s big gray tool chest. There in broad daylight, in plain sight, squatting in the shade of the airplane wing, the trio exchanged a handful of cash for a handful of dope that Harris took from a cigar box he kept stashed inside the big gray chest.

The former Marine sergeant who had fought his way out of the enlisted ranks by going to college at nights and earning a regular officer’s commission, despite the blatant prejudices stacked against men of his color, had never liked the ditty-bopping shit bird in the first place. Nor did he like the man’s bushed-out, Jimi Hendrix-style Afro hair or his insolent, mouthy, big-city attitude. First Lieutenant Clyde Brazwell didn’t even bother going to the squadron commander first. He saw what he saw, and needed no guidance, nor did he need anyone’s permission to finally burn this waste of skin. The middle-aged mustang officer called CID on the spot, then told his boss.

In less than an hour, two shaggy dudes wearing dirty, sleeveless T-shirts, scuffed-up boots, bleached-out, fluff-dried utility trousers, and their long, bare hair blowing in the breeze, ambled to the airplane where James Harris had resumed his piddle, wiping more epoxy goo on a bullet hole. Seeing the likely duo, he jumped down to his toolbox and flipped up the lid. While one dirtbag held out a handful of cash, and Harris thumbed open the cigar box, the other dirtbag snatched the cool lance corporal by the free hand and stepped behind him, twisting his arm like a rag and nearly breaking off his thumb as he doubled his wrist backward. The other dirtbag snatched the cigar box, and took that hand as their new prisoner dropped to his knees. Just like that, the CID narcs had their man, and cuffed him clean. No struggle.

Brazwell stood in the shade of the squadron headquarters hangar, his arms folded and a big smile on his face as the two undercover CID Marines led their prisoner away.

“Fucking Oreo brother motherfucker,” James Harris said to Brazwell, seeing the lieutenant standing there so cool, so smug, and so very satisfied. “You’re black on the outside but white through your middle.”

“That’s disrespect to a commissioned officer,” the senior CID Marine said to Harris, lifting him by his handcuffs, raising him to his tiptoes. “Keep it up, clown, and we’ll write even more charges.”

The jailers took possession of James Harris’s two-inch-long, hand-carved ebony fist that he wore on a leather thong, dangling around his neck, along with his blue bandanna that he kept tied around his head, and his wallet, a pocket knife, and loose change. The cigar box full of dope and cash went into a large brown envelope, marked “evidence,” and he knew he would never see it again. He figured that the narc rats working inside CID would quickly absorb the cash, and smoke all but a few representative joints.

“Fucking wingers with your long hair, sideburns, and big-ass Afro hairdos. What are you trying to be, a Navajo tying that rag around your head? Fucking hippies, all of you air wing shit birds. You get back from your court hearing, and get formally charged, we’re going to have ourselves a party, shaving that nappy scruff off your skull,” a staff sergeant guard said to Harris as they walked him to his cage. “What do you think about that, Slick?”

Harris stared coldly at the white Marine MP, and said nothing as the heavy-gauge expanded-steel-mesh door slammed shut. He vowed to say nothing more to anyone. From here on out, they would have to read his mind. Last time he had stood before a judge, his fast mouth had jumped him onto a new set of tracks that led him to where he was today.

Back then, two years ago, the Chicago magistrate told the young, Blackstone Rangers gang lord from the Windy City’s South Side that he had a choice between going to prison and continuing on a path of personal destruction, or seizing hold of a new beginning by enlisting in the Marine Corps. That day Harris talked way too smart and way too much, he later discovered, playing on the old white man’s sympathies toward the underprivileged black youths of his city. With no lawyer to beat the assault charges, stemming from a street fight, he talked smart enough to get the offer of four years’ military service rather than six months in jail. He felt so wise at the time. Beat the system. Yes, sir! he thought.

James Harris snapped at the chance to avoid hard labor behind bars, but quickly discovered at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina, that dragging chain in Cook County Jail would have been a cakewalk compared to the life into which he fell. Harsh discipline meted out by brutal drill instructors put the fear of God in him for a while. At least until a week after graduation. Then his old, salty self came slowly back to life. His attitude seemed to grow with the thickness of his hair. He smarted his way into airframe mechanics’ school and slid downhill from there.

“White man’s world, white man’s rules, white man’s war,” he had reminded himself as he sat in his cage for two days, waiting for his initial hearing. Then the fat chaser cuffed him extra tight, and threw him in the back of the jeep. While his wrists ached with the pain that the manacles brought, their hard, sharp edges twisting into his flesh, James Harris kept a steely face and told himself that one day he would even the score.

A pothole on a sharp turn sent the handcuffed prisoner airborne. Seizing the opportunity that the slack-minded driver handed him, Harris bailed over the spare tire and hit the street, running like a wide receiver dashing for the goal line. He never looked back.

The chaser slung two full magazines of .45-caliber lead at him but never got close. Fat, lazy, and disheveled, the shit-bird guard was a bad shot, too. In seconds, the fleeing prisoner had ducked through a hedge and disappeared.

Through most of that first night, the Marine provost marshal in Da Nang had his men search the area into which Harris had fled. The MPs even brought in dogs. They sniffed a trail that wound through alleys, across roofs, and then down to the little shit creek that spilled out of Dogpatch. That’s where they stopped.

James Harris managed to get his cuffed hands from behind his back by wriggling them under his butt and stepping through, but he could not work the steel bracelets off either wrist. He spent his first night in Dogpatch sleeping under a slab of concrete, sharing the space with a mangy brown mutt starved to skin and bones. The lumpy mongrel with gaping patches of bare skin across his back followed Harris throughout the next morning as the escaped prisoner searched for more suitable shelter, a hack-saw, a new set of clothes, and something to eat. The filthy dog kept following him even after two cowboys had caught him blind-sided, and led him at gunpoint to the ranch of their boss, a Marine deserter named Brian Thomas Pitts.

“Sing out your fucking name, ass-wipe,” Pitts said, sitting on a green leather sofa chair, sipping a tall glass of iced tea, and looking at the handcuffed bag of rags in front of him, and the tattered dog that crouched, head down, behind the prisoner’s heels.

“Fuck you,” Harris said.

The cowboy standing to Harris’s right slapped the prisoner on the back of his head with the cocked, U.S. government-issue Colt .45-caliber pistol that he had held pointed in the young man’s ear. Just as the blow sent the Marine’s head forward, the cowboy on the left laid a hard backhand across Harris’s mouth.

“No,” Pitts said, taking a sip of tea, “you’re the one who will be fucked if you don’t lose that street nigger attitude in about one heartbeat. My man Huong, standing to your right, will simply put a round in your stupid skull and feed your ass to a pen of hogs we keep out back to dispose of garbage like you.”

The prisoner flashed a bloody smile at Brian T. Pitts and said, “Now that you put it that way, my name’s James Harris. My peas down on the flight line, though, they all call me Mau Mau.”

“What’s your claim to fame, Mau Mau, waltzing into my world with those government irons on your wrists?” Pitts said.

“Got busted selling reefer, and mouthed off to the squadron adjutant,” Harris said. “Coon called CID on my ass. The motherfucker.”

“You obviously live a charmed life,” Pitts said, “to slip their grip and land on my doorstep.”

“And who the fuck are you?” Harris snarled, glaring at his new captor.

“I could be your judge, jury, and executioner,” Pitts retorted, “or your new best friend. It’s pretty much up to you.”

“I’ll be your friend if you get these handcuffs off my wrists,” Harris said, and showed Pitts his most encouraging smile.

“Fuck me to tears!” Kirkwood exclaimed as he took his first step down the ladder from the Flying Tigers Airlines Boeing 707. The middle-aged blond flight attendant who stood on the landing next to the plane’s open hatch, bidding farewell to the departing American servicemen, smiled kindly at the dark-eyed, dark-haired, six-foot-tall, youthful-looking Marine captain and simply shook her head at his comment.

“Watch your fucking mouth, Jon,” O’Connor, a five-foot-ten-inch-tall, reddish-brown-haired, blue-eyed Philadelphia Irishman said, smiling his dimples at the woman, “there’s ladies present.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Kirkwood mumbled in a serious tone. Then he looked at his mischievous, freckle-faced buddy whom he first met at Officer Candidates’ School, sleeping in the rack above him, now more than a year ago, and had been his classmate for six months through the Basic School at Quantico, and his best friend and study partner for ten months through Naval Justice School at Newport, Rhode Island. “Terry, you watch your mouth, too.”

“I hope it’s not like this every day,” O’Connor said, now bounding down the stairs behind a sometimes clumsy Kirkwood. “I get some really serious sinus headaches. The New York City pollution nearly wiped me out while I went to college and law school there. Now the slightest bit of crap in the air makes me crazy.”

“My college and law school days didn’t do my sinuses any favors either. I thought the smog in Los Angeles was the world’s worst until I got here,” Kirkwood said, now holding his handkerchief over his mouth and nose, and squinting at a burly, bald-headed staff sergeant waiting at the bottom of the ladder.

“Captain Kirkwood, Captain O’Connor, my name is Staff Sergeant Derek Pride. Welcome to Da Nang, Republic of South Vietnam,” the robust Marine said cheerfully, snapping a quick salute to both officers. “It’s a pressure inversion, little wind, and what flow we do have is from the east, so it is like a lid on a jar here. All the shit bottled up. Sorry you came on such a bad day, but you’ll get used to it.”

“What is it?” Kirkwood then asked the sergeant. “Is there a paper mill or something nearby to cause such a terrible smell?”

“No, sir,” Pride said, leading the men across the tarmac, “that’s Dogpatch.”

“Dogpatch?” Kirkwood said. “Like from the Lil’ Abner cartoons?”

“Sort of,” Pride said, walking abreast the two captains. “It’s the slum. Bad area. Nobody righteous goes there. At least nobody with any brains. We leave it alone because it’s far enough from any of our forces to not be a factor for them, and frankly, we just don’t need another headache. We have our hands full with Charlie and the NVA, out there on the ridges. Nothing but dopers and deadbeats in Dogpatch anyway. Maybe a few deserters, too, but I’d rather be in jail than that place. Believe me.”

“Where do we go from here?” O’Connor said, pulling his handkerchief over his nose and mouth, too.

“Just inside,” the sergeant said. “Receiving will endorse your orders and get you started on the happy road to check-in. From here, however, we will go directly to billeting, and get you into your quarters.”

“I could use a nap,” Kirkwood said, now ambling a pace behind O’Connor and Staff Sergeant Pride. “Terry, aren’t you tired?”

“A little punchy, Jon, but I’m making it,” O’Connor said.

“If you’re smart, sir, you’ll grab a nap, too,” Pride said, opening the door to the Da Nang Air Base passenger terminal, and then leading the two officers toward a high counter where a round-faced gunnery sergeant sat like a Buddha behind a desk placard that said: Officer and Staff NCO Check-in. “The wing staff judge advocate, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Prunella, always hosts a hail-and-farewell party for the staff on the last Friday of each month, and gentlemen, that’s tonight. While he may not say anything, should you sleep in, the military justice officer, Major Dudley Dickinson, will most certainly. Since both of you gentlemen will be joining the defense team, you’re already on the negative with him.”

“How’s that? He’s never met us,” O’Connor said, stuffing his handkerchief into his trousers pocket and picking up a pen and signing his name on a log sheet latched down on a clipboard overseen by the silent, round-faced gunny who rubber-stamped both officers’ travel orders.

“Yeah,” Kirkwood chimed in, now signing his name, “that’s right. How can he start us on the negative when he knows nothing about us?”

“You’ll find out when you check in with him,” the staff sergeant said, escorting the duo back out the screen door and leading them to a jeep with a red plate emblazoned with the letters S-J-A stenciled in yellow fastened on its front bumper. “First we’ll get you billeted, and then we’ll go meet Major Dickinson. Just don’t let him wear through your skin right off on your first day.”

“Terry?” Kirkwood said, climbing onto the backseat of the jeep, his lanky frame adjusting uncomfortably to the perch.

“Yeah, Jon,” O’Connor said, tossing his seabag on top of Kirkwood’s duffel in the back floorboard, and then sliding himself comfortably onto the front seat.

“I think I know about this Major Dickinson,” Kirkwood said. “They call him Dicky Doo and the Don’ts.”

Staff Sergeant Pride laughed. “That’s him, sir.”

“Remember that good-looking lawyer we met back on Okinawa, at the Officers’ Club at Kadina?” Kirkwood added.

“Manley Tufts,” O’Connor said. “Sure, I recall the guy. Very fit. Good-looking. Like six-foot-two and some couple-hundred pounds. He walked with his arms out so he wouldn’t wrinkle the inside creases on his shirtsleeves. From New Orleans, very aristocratic. Strange fellow.”

“Right,” Kirkwood said as the jeep now dodged between trucks and other traffic, making its way around the flight line and then down a street to a series of Quonset huts and concrete block buildings all painted tan. “His older brother, Stanley, is also a lawyer, both of them Tulane Law graduates. At any rate, Stanley is here as a prosecutor. So that’s how Manley Tufts came to know about Major Dickinson, and his nickname.”

“Yeah,” O’Connor said, stepping out of the jeep. “I can hardly wait to meet the Mojo now. Dicky Doo, and I can only imagine how the Don’ts fit in.”

“Gentlemen,” Staff Sergeant Pride said with a smile, walking to the big red Staff Judge Advocate sign in front of the headquarters, “welcome to First MAW Law.”

Kirkwood looked at the sergeant, flashed him a goofy grin, and began mimicking rocker Jim Morrison, singing a familiar tune by The Doors, “I got my Mojo working! I got my Mojo working!”

At random times through the year, he used the telephone of an expatriate American building contractor in Da Nang who had a taste for young girls, reefer, and high-stakes poker. In return for laying off some of the man’s always increasing gambling debt, along with giving him an attractive smoker’s discount, and free visitation one night each month for a romp at the ranch with a farm-fresh virgin, the contractor let Pitts use his company telephone to call his Aunt Winnie Russell, the matronly older sister of his late mother, back home in Olathe.

Aunt Winnie brought him up to date on family news regarding what little of their kin who now remained aboveground. She tearfully told how they had found his poor father sitting there stone dead in a living room chair, the TV still running and a half-full whiskey bottle on the floor. It was a lovely funeral. An amazing array of flowers surrounded the casket. Nearly all the people at the Calvary Baptist Church came, too. They laid Dad to rest next to Mom, who had died of a brain hemorrhage when Brian was only ten years old. That’s when life got hard for the boy.

His dad, Roy Pitts, drank more and worked less after his beloved wife, Bess, died. Then Brian moved into a room above Aunt Winnie’s garage, which sat behind her house, just off East Cedar Street, near Highway 50, one of the main routes from Olathe into nearby Kansas City, and trouble.

Within a few years, the sweet little boy from the Calvary Baptist Sunday school in Olathe became a street-savvy cynic after a tough curriculum of life’s hard lessons taught to him in late-night Kansas City pool halls and backroom gaming dens. By age sixteen, Brian Pitts had already learned that a hooker with a heart of gold will always rob a John cold, cut his throat, and leave him for dead if she thought she could get away with it. Likewise, gamblers and junkies were no better, but sometimes proved easy pickings with a sucker’s game of eight-ball.

The guys at Robbie’s Pool Hall on the southwestern edge of Kansas City, where Brian spent his time after dropping out of high school, took to calling him Small Change, because he would start a mark off with a two-bit bet on his eight-ball game and let the sucker win. After each loss, he would throw another quarter on the table, and rack again and again, letting the chump build up a large head of superiority. He would pal right up to his prey, asking him for tips on how to shoot a better game. A seemingly innocent boy just learning a seasoned man’s sport.

After dropping a couple of dollars in small change, luring the fish onto his line, Brian would then start to shoot a little better, and rave on and on about what an amazing shot he had just somehow accidentally made. What a streak of luck!

“Thanks for the help with my game. How about a dollar bet?” he would then ask the sucker, who nearly always laughed and confidently threw down a bill.

“Hate to take your money, kid,” the mark often said.

“My dad’s a dentist over in Shawnee,” Brian would then lie. “I get fifty bucks a week allowance, so a dollar is nothing. Don’t sweat the small shit.”

“Make it five bucks then, rich boy,” the sucker would many times follow through.

“How about ten?” Brian would come back with a cocky grin, and throw a Hamilton greenback on the table.

Sometimes the mark backed down, and begged off on a five-dollar bet. Most often, however, the sucker took the ten-dollar bait and played for blood.

Although he could have easily done it, Brian Pitts never ran the table, but barely won each folding-cash game. Just by a hair. Close enough to keep the sucker wanting to get back on his winning streak, and confident that he could play to even money with his next rack. Losers love to bet big, and ironically the more most of the marks lost, the greater each one bet, doubling his stakes as the hole got deeper from ten to twenty dollars, and sometimes even fifty.

With often a hundred dollars or more wadded in his jeans pockets, while letting the mark rack one more last game, Pitts would finally excuse himself to the can, and then duck out the backdoor. He would never let the sucker see him leave. It took only one ass whipping to teach him that rule of pool hustle life.

He learned the hard lesson after a sore loser had followed him out of Robbie’s front door and caught him as he stepped around the corner to where he had parked Aunt Winnie’s car. It took six stitches across his right eyebrow to close the gash after the angry mark had slammed the boy’s head against the front bumper of the 1958 Ford Fairlane coupe.

If Brian ever saw a hustled player again, he would lie a tale of getting sick with the squirts, and heading out the backdoor, embarrassed, because he had accidently crapped his pants. Then with his clean-faced innocent smile, the boyish shark would offer the guy a fresh chance to play him and get even. This time Brian would win a few and lose a few, and leave his victim only a little short, but never quite even, certainly never on the plus side. The youngster the old Kansas City pool hall pros called Small Change always finished out ahead with at least a few newly won bills folded in his front pocket.

In the summer of 1963, Brian Pitts turned eighteen years old, and dutifully registered for the draft with the Johnson County, Kansas, U.S. Selective Service Board. A few weeks later he got his official Selective Service registration card in the mail that had the letters 1-A typed next to classification, just below his name. Three months later, he got a letter from the Johnson County draft board that began “Greetings,” and ordered him to the U.S. Armed Forces Induction Center in Kansas City to take a physical examination to determine his fitness for service in the armed forces of the United 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 for his best customers two nights ago. “The cocksucker would not let up, ever. No matter what I did, he fucked with me. Even in my hooch, on my own time.

“I should have done that,” Harris said, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. “Lifers down on my shit all the time, day in and day out. You were smart ducking out like you done, before they push you into something bad, so they can throw you in the slammer.”

“Sometimes, I wonder if I could have hung on for seven more months and rotated home,” Pitts said, setting the bowl of bones on the floor, by the table, and snapping his fingers for the skinny dog to come help himself to them. “Then I think about that bullethead son of a bitch Gunny Goss, and I know better. He did his best to push me into doing something stupid, to give him an excuse to bust my ass and shit-can me.

“First day I see the guy, he told me he didn’t like my candy ass. He hated me because I knew my job, and all the guys came to me to figure shit out, instead of him. He fucked everything up that he touched. Seriously. Shit, he even had live ordnance hung on the pylons and wired ass-backward to the planes half the time. It’s a wonder he didn’t blow something up and kill a bunch of people.”

“How did he get to be a gunny then?” Harris asked, watching the mangy dog that wouldn’t leave his side chomp on the pork bones.

“Fucking lateral move, that’s how,” Pitts said. “Reenlisted to get an option out of the grunts, because he knew he would die in the bush, sure as shit. Dumbest fucking son of a bitch that ever walked, and they let him reup for aviation ordnance because they needed staff NCOs. I’ll never understand Marine Corps thinking. Why didn’t they just promote some of the sergeants who had their shit together?”

“Fucking crotch, that’s why,” Harris said. “There’s the right way, the wrong way, and the Marine Corps way.”

“So, did you think about what I said?” Pitts asked.

“Fuck, like I have any choice?” Harris answered.

“My man, there’s always a choice. You can join my crew here, or take a shot at life on your own dime, like I did,” Pitts said. “Benny Lam and his cowboys might let you live, but I doubt it. Then I know Major Tran Van Toan, one seriously bad motherfucker with the biggest operation in the northern provinces, would drop you on the spot, and not even say please. However, I managed to get past those two, and survived.”

“You’re a white man, though, and you got lucky,” Harris said, “falling into all this good shit.”

“Lucky my ass!” Pitts said and laughed. “I earned every bit of all this good shit. You’ve got a point about the advantage of my being white, because these guys don’t cotton to any soul brother. Even you staying here, you still have to watch your back. But all this good shit, I didn’t just fall into it. Every damned dope connection I got supplying all you assholes here in Da Nang and down at Chu Lai, I set up myself. The stupid motherfucker I killed to get this house, he didn’t have a clue of what he had at his fingertips, until I appeared on his doorstep, damned near like you showed up on mine, Huong holding his .45 in my ear. Only I wasn’t in cuffs.

“Things with old Tommy Nguyen might have worked out fine, too, if he hadn’t gotten so fucking greedy. I had to kill him. No choice. The whole operation would have collapsed otherwise. All these cowboys knew it, too, and stuck with me. If he’d been straight with the gang, as soon as I drew down on him, right here in the patio, they would have capped my young ass and fed me to the hogs. But he fucked them, too, just like me, and they were glad to see him gone.

“Old Nguyen, the sorry bastard, didn’t have a clue that his cowboys and I had finally turned on his ass. Not until none of the house girls would suck his dick anymore. The fat sack of shit couldn’t get it up, so the girls had to blow him to get him off. Shit, they finally just told him no. Then, when none of the cowboys would enforce his law, he knew it was up. That’s the day I shot him.”

Refilling the two Marines’ glasses with iced tea, playing the polite host, Pitts smiled casually at Harris, who sat staring blankly at his new boss, marveling at the coolness of this young man, so casually describing his bloody ascent to power.

“He had good ties with both the Viet Cong and the Da Nang police, due to our dope business and hookers,” Pitts said, sipping tea and looking at the dog now flopped behind Harris’s chair. “I knew that once he had figured out that he had lost the boys’ and my loyalty, he would have had either the Cong or the cops take us down. They would have shot my ass in either case. So I popped the motherfucker first.”

“Why wouldn’t you think I might take over like that?” Harris asked, and smiled as he said it.

“Because Huong and his two brothers, along with about a dozen other cowboys that they supervise, adore my young ass,” Pitts said. “I gave them the same deal I offered to you. Work for me, and I pay you a share of the profits at year’s end, above all salaries and other benefits. I run it just like a business back in the States, and give the workers a respectable taste of the pie along with damned fine wages. These guys never had it so good, and they damned sure wouldn’t get it this good from anyone else around here in this business, especially not from the likes of Benny Lam and Major Toan. These cowboys know it, too. They would drop you in your tracks the second they smelled any crossways shit coming from you. I’m their golden goose.”

“So what I gotta do?” Harris said.

“First thing, you and that filthy mutt gotta go take a run through the rain closet,” Pitts said. “You’re pretty foul, and that dog, maybe a quart of motor oil after a lye-soap bath would kill that creeping crud on his back.

“Next, you will get a haircut. High and tight, just like mine. I want you looking squared away, like a 5.0 jarhead. That’s a rule. No compromise. We go out in the ville. We’re in uniform. Nobody questions a squared-away Marine who looks like he’s taking care of official business. Come on and I’ll show you something.”

The two men left the table in the villa’s shaded, courtyard patio, and walked back inside the house and into a large master bedroom. Pitts slid open a closet door to reveal a rack of starched and perfectly ironed Marine Corps utility uniforms. Silver first lieutenant bars gleamed on the collars. Then he slid a wallet from his back pocket and pulled out a green, Marine Corps identification card with his picture in the center of it and the name First Lieutenant Joseph A. Russell typed on it, along with Pitts’s appropriate physical description, blood type, and a phony service number.

“Take a look here,” Pitts said, and pulled out a set of dog tags hanging on a chain around his neck. “As far as anyone who checks me is concerned, I am First Lieutenant Joe Russell. That’s really my Uncle Joe. He got the Silver Star on Iwo Jima.”

Then Pitts looked at James Harris and said, “No offense, but we will have to make you a corporal or something. If I put lieutenant bars on your collar, people would notice. Dark green Marine officers are rare. Our objective is to go out in the ville, do our business, and not draw attention. We can maybe let you be a sergeant, but that is pushing it. If you’re with me, it’ll look righteous to anyone.”

Harris smiled. “I wouldn’t even want to fucking pretend to be any candy-ass officer anyway. I got my pride. I like sergeant, though. Where you get all this shit, anyway?”

“Fuck, man,” Pitts said, “this is Vietnam! Shit, they print ID cards easy here. Once laminated, you can’t tell them from the real thing, unless you run the number, and that takes a week at least. These gooners can make uniforms that look way better than any you can buy at cash sales Stateside.

“So what’s the story, if anybody asks while you’re in the ville impersonating an officer?” Harris said.

“Some days I am a public information officer out on a mission for the Da Nang press center,” Pitts said. “Other days I am a staff judge advocate, doing my lawyer thing for First MAW Law. Either way, some hard-charging grunt brass asks a question, he doesn’t go much farther when he thinks he’s talking to some kind of rear-echelon commando who he thinks doesn’t rate to kiss his royal ass.”

“So I take the identity of one of those pogge dudes, too?” Harris asked.

“You got it,” Pitts said. “These two types just seem to be able to roam anywhere they want, and nobody really cares. So it works for what we need to do. Just keep a low profile, avoid crowds, and don’t linger at any one place too long.”

“You sure I gotta cut my hair, though?” Harris said, rubbing his hand on his head, feeling his Afro’s thickness, and thinking about how much trouble he had endured from the officers and senior enlisted Marines who had always harassed him about it.

“No,” Pitts said. “You can leave it like it is, and keep wearing that shit you got on, but you can’t stay here if you do. And you won’t last two days out there if you leave. It’s up to you. If you stay, you play by my rules.”

“That’s cool,” Harris said.

“As for this ragged-ass dog,” Pitts said, “how did you latch on to him?”

“You got that part backward, bro. I never latched on to him. He just started following me and wouldn’t go away,” Harris said, looking at the ugly beast at his feet, wagging its scraggly tail at him.

“Maybe he deserves a break then, too,” Pitts said, considering how he liked most dogs, even ugly ones. “So, Mau Mau, you got a name for the mutt?”

“Yeah, man, I do,” Harris said, and grinned as he spoke. “I call him Turd.”