Brian Pitts cleared his throat and spit on the floor. Then he walked to the cold shelf of steel with a thin mattress laid on it that served as his bed and sat down. Heartsick thoughts of home and Aunt Winnie Russell pressed on his mind at the moment. He didn’t answer his old friend. He just stared out, across the aisle at the wild eyes of the black man clinging to the crosshatched steel of his cell door, flashing a gold front tooth through his trembling lips.

“Snowman, yo!” Harris shouted, pressing his face against the steel front of his cage, trying to see inside the dark cell next door. Then he looked across the narrow passage of concrete floor bordered by red-painted lines on each side. Any prisoner crossing the red line without permission left himself open to a beating or worse.

James Elmore ran to his toilet and pulled out his already urinating penis, sending the stream into the can.

“You see who come?” Harris called to the man he had tormented daily for several weeks now. “We gonna get yo rat ass now, motherfucker. Say your prayers.”

Then Mau Mau pressed his cheek against his cell door and tried to see his silent friend.

“Brian, man, talk to me, my blue-eyed brother,” Harris said, now in a quiet voice. “What happen with you? We still good with that stuff in them seabags? You know what I mean?”

“You are one stupid waste of skin, you know that, Harris?” Pitts finally said, still sitting on his bunk.

“What I do, man?” Mau Mau called back, his feelings hurt.

“Just don’t fucking talk. Okay?” Pitts said, and then laid back on his hard bed, resting his wounded shoulder by laying his arm across his chest.

No matter how hard he tried, Brian Pitts could not shake the vivid flashback of seeing Tommy Joyner suddenly looking up with surprise at his buddy Robert Matthews after a .30-caliber sniper round knocked him to the floor, flat on his back, where he died after a few blinks and a gasp for air that never came. That’s when Huong’s younger brother, Chung, blindly opened fire out the front door of the white stucco plantation house with the red tile roof. A second sniper shot put the middle Nguyen brother on the floor, too, dead with a pencil-size hole in his forehead and a fist-size cavity out the back where the round emptied his pulverized brains.

Horrified at seeing their brother die, Huong and Bao lay in the front windows with Chinese SKS rifles sold to Pitts by the Viet Cong and began to shoot at movement in the tree line. This brought a volley of machine gun fire that swept across the front porch, and wounded Bao in the calf when a .30-caliber bullet slashed through the muscle, laying it open two inches deep.

“We go, now!” Huong said, and made a run for the back door with his brother’s arm over his shoulders, not waiting to see if Pitts and Matthews followed him. When the two Vietnamese cowboys ran toward the trees, only twenty yards away, the machine guns from the Tenth Division company turned after them. Huong and Bao didn’t go down, but there was no way that Brian Pitts could tell if they had survived the gunfire and made it to the series of trenches, rabbit holes, and tunnels that led away from the house and opened near others that networked for miles. He didn’t know for sure that his friends had made it until he overheard the comments of the captain who commanded the company of soldiers that the two gooks had gotten away.

At least Huong and Bao had evaded capture. Turd, the lucky beast, must have sensed it coming. He disappeared from the plantation early that morning, and would likely sit hidden in a tunnel until his troubled feelings passed. He had begun doing that stunt quite often during the past week or so, and it gave Huong fits of anxiety. When the top-hand cowboy couldn’t find the mutt this particular morning, he became more worried than ever, and suggested that everyone should go to the tunnels. At least until these uneasy feelings passed, and Turd returned to his regular spot, resting on the red tile porch by the front door. Then, just before noon, when the three American outlaws talked about grilling some steaks that Brian had purchased in Saigon two evenings earlier, the sniper round caught Tommy Joyner square in the chest.

Seeing Huong and Bao abandon their stand, Robert Matthews gave up, too. He threw his hands in the air and stepped out on the porch. Then, realizing the attackers had the house now fully surrounded, Brian Pitts put his arms above his head and walked outside.

He saw someone stand up, waving his hands and blowing a whistle, but that did not stop Bruce Olsen from letting one go at the Snowman. The only thing that saved Brian Pitts was the movement that he saw, and he turned just as the Phoenix sniper dropped the hammer on him.

“I should have killed you in the hotel bar,” Olsen hissed at Pitts as he stood over the wounded Snowman, who lay on the porch while a Tenth Division medical corpsman did his best to patch the wound. The shot broke both the deserter’s shoulder joint and his collarbone.

“It’ll never heal right,” the doc said as he worked to stop the bleeding and felt the shattered bones crunching under the pressure of his bandage.

“Small price, the fucking traitor!” Olsen snapped, and stomped off the porch.

After ten days under guard in the army hospital in Saigon, two Marine Corps chasers from the Freedom Hill brig watched Brian Pitts get dressed in a fluff-dried green utility uniform with black canvas, high-top Bata Bullet tennis shoes on his feet. They handed him a white laundry bag with another uniform inside it, along with three sets of white skivvies and three pairs of olive-drab woolen socks. Then they hauled him to Da Nang in the belly of a C-130 airplane.

Robert Matthews came to Freedom Hill two weeks ago, and now enjoyed life in the yard with the general population. He caused no trouble, and kept his mouth shut, so First Lieutenant Michael Schuller released him from the block of holding cells and let the kid breathe outdoors. It freed up the space that he needed to keep Brian Pitts locked up.

Given Matthews’ Saigon history with the Snowman, Schuller had wisely decided to not allow the new prisoner contact with any of Pitts’s Da Nang associates, namely Harris and Elmore. So the two men had no clue who the new man was.

“Tell me, Mau Mau, how you making it?” the Snowman finally asked, sitting up on the hard bunk, finally breaking his hour-long silence, and now wishing that he had a cigarette.

“Now sit down and spill it,” Jon Kirkwood said, taking the angry captain by the shoulder and pushing him into his seat. “You’ve been stomping around this office for the past two weeks like a cat with a fish bone stuck in his throat. You need to tell me what has got you so pissed off.”

“This morning, it just takes the cake,” O’Connor said, and let out a deep breath in disgust. “First Charlie Heyster cuts a sweet pretrial deal for this character, Sergeant Randal Carnegie, a sack of shit that our troops here in this office call the Chu Lai Hippie, because even they know he’s the biggest doper around I Corps. Then yesterday, Charlie the shyster, with the blessings of Dicky Doo, lets four of this bum’s dope-dealing cohorts walk free.”

Jon Kirkwood shook his head and squinted his eyes shut. Then he looked at his partner with an expression of amazement. He walked to the office door, looked at the crimson placard with yellow lettering on it, and then went back to his desk and sat down.

“The sign on this office’s door says Defense Section,” Kirkwood said, raising both hands in an exaggerated shrug. “You’ll find people down the hall, in the office labeled Prosecution Section, who will readily sympathize with your frustration of defendants finally getting a break.”

“Jon, these guys are guilty as sin,” O’Connor exclaimed, standing up and kicking his chair again. “CID busted these four bums, people from the same unit as Carnegie, his buddies, when the drug dogs alerted on the uniforms that these characters wore. They had Buddha sewn in the sleeves of their shirts and inside the legs of their trousers. Big lumps of reefer!

“So Charlie gets a message from this piece of shit Carnegie that says he sold these four-star citizens his old utility uniforms, because he is getting out of the Marine Corps in a month, when he exits the brig. He claims that he sewed the dope in his clothes and that these guys knew nothing about it being in their sleeves and trouser legs when they bought the used uniforms.

“Tell me how anyone can put on a shirt and pants and not feel pillow-size lumps of dope sewn in them?”

“Hey, it worked and the guys got free,” Kirkwood said and smiled. “Chalk four pluses on the defense section’s tote board.”

“Jon, they’re guilty,” O’Connor said, throwing his head back. “There is something patently wrong when we let guilty people slide. This character Carnegie got only thirty days and no bad time. Thirty days! And it doesn’t even count! None of it will appear in his service record, so he gets out of the Marine Corps with a clean discharge. He had a five-pound loaf of Buddha, and he only got a month in the brig for it, none of it bad time, and he kept his rank! Now, in this latest turn of events, he even gets his buddies off, scot-free!”

“That’s why we have a prosecution section, my friend,” Kirkwood said and walked to the door. “I can see something else boiling under that red Irish head of yours, and I’m going to leave you alone, in peace, until you decide to let me in on what’s really bothering you.”

Terry O’Connor shook his head and slouched in his chair as he watched his buddy walk away. He wanted to tell him about the photographs. That’s what really bothered him. However, he still felt uncomfortable with the idea of showing anyone the pictures. Not even his best friend. Besides, would Kirkwood or anyone else even believe what the images showed?

O’Connor felt certain that Heyster must have a fail-safe plan, just in case Carnegie got busted and sang. Would the pictures showing the exchange of dope, coupled with the later arrest of the Chu Lai Hippie, and Charlie the shyster cutting him a sweet deal, would that be enough to slam shut an iron door on the interim mojo?

“Not yet. I need a better smoking gun than some photographs taken from an unauthorized surveillance,” O’Connor said to himself as he leaned over and twisted the power and volume control knob on his leather-clad, portable AM-FM-shortwave radio that rested against the wall on the side of his desk and had its silver stick antenna extended all the way out. American Forces Vietnam broadcast network played his favorite song, a hit from 1967 written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and performed by Jagger and the Rolling Stones. As the mellow tune drifted from the small speaker, the captain closed his eyes and tried to let his troubled soul take a ride with the sweet melody.

“Still I’m gonna miss you!” the lawyer captain sang in a loud voice that carried down the hallway to the administration office where Staff Sergeant Pride raised his head from a page full of budget numbers he was studying.

“Why you singing that fag song, butthead?” Sergeant Mike Turner said, heckling the corporal while leaning back in a swivel chair with his feet propped on a desk secured behind a row of bars that overlooked the cells where Celestine Anderson, Brian Pitts, James Harris, Michael Fryer, and James Elmore counted time by the day.

Turner had earned the nickname Iron Balls from both the prisoners and his fellow guards. Seated on a stool at the other end of the hall of cells, Lance Corporal Kenny Brookman sat with his heels hooked over the wooden spindles connected between the legs that braced his seat and held it rigid while he slapped the palm of his hand with a truncheon that he and Iron Balls had drilled down the center and filled with lead. Usually, when a person saw Iron Balls, the sadistic Lance Corporal Brookman, who had picked up the nickname Bad John, wasn’t far behind.

“What makes ‘Ruby Tuesday’ a fag song, Sergeant Turner?” Corporal Todd asked as he stepped through the barred door when Gunnery Sergeant Ted MacMillan released the latch from the control center. “The Rolling Stones fags? Is that it?”

“Yeah,” Iron Balls said and laughed. “They’re from England, and that makes them queer. The whole fucking country’s full of fruitcakes. The men all wear lace, and the women smoke cigars.”

Todd said nothing back, but kept humming the song as he walked down the rows of cells, checking each inmate and making a corresponding note on a clipboard he carried. Then he walked back to the port where Iron Balls now stood, his nightstick withdrawn from the silver ring on his Sam Browne belt, and spinning it like a yo-yo with the leather thong on its handle. The corporal gave the gunny a thumbs-up signal, and he pulled a handle that released all cell doors and slid them open.

“Stand up and step out!” Corporal Todd ordered. “Put your toes on the red line and come to the position of attention. Prisoner Elmore, you will remain in your cell.”

All fourteen prisoners on the row stepped to the red line except for James Elmore, who stood in the back of his small space, glad to remain behind.

“Right face!” Todd shouted at the two lines of inmates from the center of the hallway. “Forward march!”

Iron Balls used to herd the prisoners to their meals and the recreation yard until two days ago, when he and Bad John got relieved for cause by Chief Warrant Officer Frank Holden, the deputy brig officer under First Lieutenant Schuller. While in the recreation yard, Mau Mau Harris and Ax Man Anderson, along with several other members of the secretly organized Freedom Hill chapter of the Black Stone Rangers, had cornered Iron Balls and Bad John and laid hands on the two guards, triggering a full lockdown of the entire brig.

When Holden questioned Harris and his yahoo buddies, they lied and said that Turner and Brookman had gotten into a card game with the inmates, and when they lost they refused to pay up. In retaliation, the wronged prisoners turned on the two Marines.

While Nathan Todd and Gunny MacMillan both stood up for their two fellow guards, claiming that the prisoners flat-out lied, and that in no way had Turner and Brookman played cards or in any other way fraternized with the inmates, the deputy brig officer relieved the pair anyway. It staved off trouble.

Seeing the two men relieved of their principal duties of handling prisoners and reduced to watching the hallways put Mau Mau Harris and his right-hand man, Ax Man Anderson, at the top of the food chain in the hierarchy of who’s who inside Freedom Hill.

“So they let us out every day like this?” Brian Pitts asked James Harris as the two men set their meal trays on a long bench table and sat down. Mau Mau had faithfully carried his wounded friend’s drink with his own and helped the one-handed Snowman get seated without spilling anything. Celestine Anderson glared at the white man from the other side of the seating arrangement until Harris frowned at him.

“Yeah, man. We get lunch and then three, four hours rec time in the yard,” Harris said, and then gave Anderson a hard look. “Yo, Ax Man, this my blue-eyed soul brother. Call the dude Snowman. He cool, so lighten up. He one of us, bro. A ranger.”

“Ain’t no white dude no Black Stone Ranger,” Anderson grumbled, digging his spoon in a pile of mashed potatoes.

“I say what go and what don’t go,” Harris barked back at the insolent gang brother. “In Chicago, we got white dudes not in just the rangers, but Black Panthers, too. Pitts and me, we go way back. He one smart motherfucker. You hang with him, life get good. I know. We have it good, right, brother?”

James Harris put his arm around Brian Pitts’s neck and gave him a good squeeze.

“We play it cool and smart, my men, and we can have it good once again, too,” Brian Pitts said with a smile, looking cold at Celestine Anderson, and with his good arm giving James Harris a hug back.

“So, my man the Snowman, he one of us,” Harris said, spooning meat-loaf and potatoes in his mouth. “I got two more white dudes we need in our brotherhood. Word come around that this Chu Lai Hippie he have people on the outside that can get shit done. So he’s in.”

“Fucking Randy Carnegie? You talking about him? He’s in here?” Brian Pitts said, surprised and smiling.

“You know the dude?” Harris said, smiling at Pitts.

“I know of him,” the Snowman answered and shrugged. “He bought shit from me, but I could never get him into my regular program. He was always sort of a maverick. Independent. He’s okay, though. If he’s got somebody hooked up outside, he’s worthwhile having in the club.”

“Glad you approve, ’cause I already sent word to tell him he’s a ranger,” Harris said, stuffing his mouth while talking.

“Who this other cracker motherfucker you want with us?” Anderson said, wiping up gravy with a slice of bread.

“Dude named Watts, Kevin Watts,” Harris said, drinking red Kool-Aid from a paper cup. “He got three years for trying to hijack a plane to fly him out of ’Nam.”

All three prisoners laughed.

“I ain’t totally sure about the dude, but I say okay when Jones and Martin tell me about him,” Harris said and shrugged. “Only thing I don’t like about this turd, he ain’t never told the truth in his life. He always trying to say shit just happen, and he fall in it.”

The three prisoners laughed again.

“We need a fall guy, then he’s our man,” Pitts said, and smiled at Anderson, who simply glared back at him. Then he looked around and watched the guards talking with each other, relaxing.

“So tell me, Mau Mau,” Pitts said in a low voice, looking at his food as he spoke, “when we go in the yard, after we eat, we can just mingle?”

“We ain’t supposed to, but we do,” Harris said, looking back at Pitts. “Guards is cool for the most part except for Iron Balls and Bad John. They two genuine pieces of shit. When me and the Ax Man do the job on that rat-shit motherfucker Elmore, we figure we take down Turner and Brookman, too. We go down, we gonna do it all. They write about our black struggle back home when we do it.”

“Do what?” Pitts asked, frowning.

“Bust up this place, man,” Harris said with a smile, eating his black-eyed peas and the last of his bread.

“We gonna take it down, man,” Celestine Anderson offered and then smiled, thinking about the day he could lash out in open rebellion.

“Whoa,” Brian Pitts said and raised his eyebrows. “Taking the place down might work for the short term, but in the end we got to have an objective. Not just a bunch of newspaper headlines, but something that will pay us a few dividends, for our old age.”

He smiled at Harris and winked, and then shook his head that Mau Mau should say nothing more.

“I got another man I want to recommend for our brotherhood, if I may,” Pitts said to Harris and then looked at Celestine Anderson.

“Hey, fuck you,” Anderson snapped at Pitts.

“Man, we gonna get along,” Harris commanded with clenched teeth, and scowled at his lieutenant, the Ax Man. Then he looked at Pitts. “Who you want in the rangers?”

“Guy I had working with me in Saigon,” Pitts said, and smiled at Anderson, who glared back at him. “Dude named Matthews. He’s here someplace. His buddy, Tom Joyner, got whacked when they took us down. Mau Mau, he’s one of our brothers and we’re gonna take care of him.”

“Anything you say, man,” Harris said, wiping his mouth and getting his tray in his hands. He looked up and nodded at Nathan Todd, who nodded back at him, giving him approval to stand and take his dirty dishes to the brig scullery. “I’ll pass the word to Martin and Jones. They working back there washing trays and shit.”

When Mau Mau returned to the table, Pitts and Anderson followed suit, turning in their dirty trays and dumping their paper trash. Once the prisoners had finished their meals, Todd blew a whistle and then marched them into the prison yard for their daily afternoon recreation.

“We’ve got some formal complaints to issue, Mike, and I hate doing it,” Kirkwood began, shaking his head as he laid the written objections on the lieutenant’s desk.

“Why do you have my client James Elmore locked in a cell directly across the aisle from the man who tried to kill him?” O’Connor said, setting his coffee on the table and frowning at the lieutenant. “Now I hear that the man who probably orchestrated the attempted murder, and the key person against whom my client has agreed to testify, also resides across the aisle from Elmore.”

“I’ve got no choice,” Schuller said, leaning back in his chair. “I can release Pitts and Harris into the main population, or I keep them where they sit now, in our highest-security cell block. We can trust them to live in the hooches with the general population, or we can keep them under lock and key. You tell me.”

“You mix them most of the day anyway, what difference does it make where they sleep?” Kirkwood said, sipping coffee. “That leads me to my complaint. You already know what it is.”

“Your client Wilson?” Schuller asked, raising his eyebrows.

“Yes, my client Wilson,” Kirkwood said. “He has not yet gone to trial and he is with the general population. Mixed with convicted felons. Also, written in those formal complaints, we have concerns about two new clients here awaiting trial, and you have them both working in the kitchen like convicts, too.”

“They’re all three low-risk confinees, so we keep them in the low-risk area with other low-risk people,” Schuller said and sighed. “Like I told you at Colonel Prunella’s party, I wish we had better facilities. Appropriate facilities. We don’t, and both the wing and the two divisions keep shipping more prisoners in here every day.

“Now, what I am about to say, you did not hear it from anyone in this brig. Do I have your words?”

Both Kirkwood and O’Connor nodded their agreement.

“We not only have prisoners who await trial mixed with convicted inmates,” Schuller said, and then leaned over his desk and whispered, “we have Marines locked in this brig who have not even been formally charged with a crime! At least a dozen of them right now, and more coming each day. One or two at a time. They pissed off a captain, major, or colonel, and he ships them to Freedom Hill, using our prison facility like a correctional custody platoon or motivation squad in boot camp. No charge sheet. At his discretion, the commander just locks them in jail. They may have mouthed off, embarrassed the command, or failed to show up for chow on time. Maybe they just pissed in the wrong shitter. Who knows?

“These no-trial Marines get slammed in jail for the flimsiest of reasons, and then their units move on without them. They send no one to visit these men. No one to counsel them, or see if they need anything. No one to offer them any sense of hope. The troops call it getting shit-canned.

“In my opinion, these are innocent men inappropriately incarcerated at this level, and abandoned. They were basically branded as shitbirds by their units, and got dumped here because most of our line officers have the decency not to poison anyone else’s unit with what they consider human waste. All I can do is turn the key and try to keep them warehoused until they get flushed on down the pipe. Yeah, I have convicts mixed with pretrial confinees. I also have no-trial confinees mixed with them, too. What about these men? You going to stand up for them?”

“Eventually they have to get a charge sheet,” Kirkwood started to say and then Schuller stopped him in midsentence.

“I have a Marine private first class here who we’ve had locked in general population for more than six months,” Schuller said and slammed his hand on his desk. “He’s due to rotate! He’s supposed to go home and get out of the Marine Corps in a couple of weeks. He’s never been charged! His unit forgot him.”

“What are you going to do?” O’Connor asked, narrowing his eyebrows and feeling his heart pound as anger surged in his chest.

“I’m going to let him out, and ship him over to headquarters battalion at Third Marine Division with a letter signed by my boss, Lieutenant Colonel Webster, stating that the Marine has finished his tour in Vietnam and is due to go home and be released from active duty,” Schuller said, and then blew out a deep breath.

“Think it will work? Shouldn’t he have some kind of orders?” Kirkwood asked, now feeling a sense of the frustration that Schuller lived with daily.

“He’s a nonrate Marine,” Schuller shrugged, and took a drink of coffee. “Lucky for him the battalion can cut orders to Pendleton for the kid and assign him to RELAD. They’ll have to fish out his service record book, if they can find it, or just rebuild a new one once he gets to Pendleton. I think the officer who sent him here long ago rotated. The poor kid will wind up in limbo at RELAD until the personnel division at headquarters Marine Corps ferrets out some paperwork on him and documents his release date. But that’s a damned sight better than rotting in this brig.”

“How can this happen?” O’Connor sighed, and slouched down in his chair.

“The freewheeling way commanders can arbitrarily toss these kids around, with little to no accountability to higher authority,” Schuller said, leaning his elbows on his desk. “Field commanders do what works, bend the rules, break them, make them up as they go along. We’re at war, and units do what they have to do to succeed with their missions. I understand it, but I don’t like it. It’s a throwback to the almighty ship’s captain, when we operated on the rocks and shoals system. Still alive and well. Like a jungle rules basketball game. Only we gamble with lives and play for keeps.”