Dragon Lady
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Presents
DRAGON LADY
a novel
by
Gary Alexander
Copyright 2011 Gary Alexander
Published by Istoria Books
License Notes
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***
About Dragon Lady
In 1965 Saigon, a young draftee named Joe becomes obsessed with a Vietnam girl named Mai, his own "Dragon Lady" from his beloved Terry and the Pirates cartoon strips that his mother still sends him. As he pursues a relationship with her, Saigon churns with intrigue and rumors--will the U.S. become more involved with the Vietnamese struggle? What's going on with a special unit that's bringing in all sorts of (for the time) high tech equipment? Will the U.S. make Vietnam the 51st state and bomb aggressors to oblivion? But for Joe, the big question is--does Mai love him or will she betray more than just his heart? Gary Alexander’s intelligent voice, filled with dry wit, and his own experiences give this story a sharp sense of truth, recounting the horror and absurdity of war. Reminiscent of books such as Catch-22, Dragon Lady serves up equal measures of outrageous humor and poignant remembrance. Gary served in Vietnam in ’65. When he arrived, he joined 17,000 GIs. When he left, 75,000 were in country.
PRAISE FOR DRAGON LADY:
“…a refreshing book… Dragon Lady is a highly entertaining book that I heartily recommend…It’s one of those books that grabs you and doesn't let you go and leaves you thinking about it even when you are finished. So run, don't walk, and try this author out, see if Dragon Lady grabs you like it grabbed me.” Crystal Fulcher, My Reading Room blog
“Positioning the narrator in the afterlife gives Dragon Lady a third dimension that elevates it above a simple boy-meets-girl story... But his love-sick pursuit of his impossible dream is entertaining.” Bill Furlow, Great Books Under $5 blog
“Take one part M*A*S*H, add one part The Quiet American, throw in an offbeat love story, fold in some screwball characters, and top it off with an out of this world (and I mean out of this world) narrator, and you get the zaniest war novel since Catch 22. Alexander delivers a jeep-load of laughs in Dragon Lady as well as unflinchingly candid insights into the Vietnam War.” Ron Cooper, author of Purple Jesus and Hume’s Fork
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
About the Author
About Istoria Books
Other Istoria Releases
Our numbers have increased in Vietnam because the
aggression of others has increased in Vietnam. There
is not, and there will not be a mindless escalation.
Lyndon B. Johnson
We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The 803rd Liaison Detachment did not exist. Anybody who served in Vietnam knows that it could have.
1.
IN SEATTLE, Washington, on Thanksgiving, November 25, 2010 at 5:12 AM, I died peacefully in my sleep, my loving fifth wife at my side.
Happy Fucking Turkey Day.
Medical science, bless their collective hearts, takes death personally. They kept me clinging a bit too long. I was quite ready to check out.
Months earlier, as they prepared to roll me into the MRI that found the thing causing the headaches, the thing that was to kill me, they asked two questions I’d expected:
1. Are you claustrophobic?
2. Do you have medical insurance?
They asked one I hadn’t:
Do you have any metal in your body? A steel plate in your cranium, a pin in a hip?
I had to think. It’d been years.
Decades.
Yeah, as a matter of fact there was. Pointing at a half-inch-long indented scar in my left forearm, I told them about a chunk of iron in there, the size of a grain of rice, compliments of a Vietcong satchel charge.
In 1965, when I’d awakened from the anesthesia at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, the surgeon had told me they’d removed all the foreign material but that fragment. They’d left it alone because it rested beside a major blood vessel. It wasn’t worth the risk of going after, the risk of nicking the vessel. They’d warned that it could shift. In almost a half century, I hadn’t felt it.
The MRI folk reminded me that the M in MRI stood for magnetic. They said the shrapnel might be attracted. They said I might feel a slight tug.
Sure enough, I did.
When they rolled me out of the machine and its blaring electrical hum, I couldn’t stop jabbering about that old war. I couldn’t. They’d heard of Vietnam from their fathers and grandfathers, who’d either participated in it or dodged it. No, I said before I went any further, don’t get the wrong impression. I am not a war hero. I am anything but. I was a shirker, a malingering goof-off slacker extraordinaire.
I was assigned in Saigon, I babbled on, far from the paddies and the jungles and snipers and shit-smeared punji sticks. I was attached to a bizarre outfit of paper shufflers whose mission is classified to this day.
The shrapnel was a result of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I was a helluva lot luckier than my best buddy. I came home vertically. He didn’t. He had a junkyard’s worth of metal in him, I continued babbling and then was bawling like a baby.
They patted my arm, as if I were a live explosive, saying, “Now, now, it’s all right. It’ll be fine.”
But it wasn’t all right. It would not be fine. Two days later, I received a call to come back in. As soon as possible. Please.
A neurologist showed me the bad news, a series of photographic slices of my gray matter. Even I could distinguish the growth that didn’t belong. It looked like a golf ball. The neurologist went on to explain in layman’s terms why there was nothing that could be done. My golf ball had roots he could see but I couldn’t.
I went home to die.
Always a voracious reader, I dove into Vietnam, a subject I’d avoided for years. I read and read. The numbers staggered me. The consensus for U.S. dead in the Vietnam War (1960-1975) was 58,199. When I began my Vietnam tour in 1964, there were half that many live GIs in-country.
Sally, my bride of less than a yea
r, was incredibly supportive. She was one of the two great loves of my life. Sally was a tall, graying blonde, the antithesis of my other, my Vietnamese Dragon Lady.
Sally and I took what we thought was going to be one last trip together. We went to Washington, D.C. and visited the Vietnam War Memorial. The Memorial doesn’t look like much from a distance. It’s long and black and low and shiny and V-shaped. The power is up close and personal, when you see it gridlocked with names of 58,249 (am not gonna quibble over a difference of 50 names) dead, when you see older men taking rubbings of a buddy’s name, tears streaming. These were big burly guys with beards and white hair. These were guys who would not whimper if you had their private parts in a vise.
Back home, I read and read and read. They say my year in country, 1965, was a pivotal year. Politically and militarily, we could’ve gone either way. We could have declared victory over counterinsurgency and the godless communists, saying that we’d won their hearts and minds to boot, and packed our bags. We could have done what we did--that is, “stayed the course” to the tune of 500,000-plus troops, 58,000-plus of them needing only one-way tickets.
A historian wrote that Vietnam was our first war with “amorphous” battlefronts. In previous wars, the lines were clear-cut. When I was a kid during Korea, growing up in the Pacific Northwest, the newspapers had maps and dotted lines, the good guys on one side, the bad guys on the other.
But in those papers, the comic section was the front section to me. My passion for adventure comics developed at a young age. I couldn’t wait for Sunday’s, four entire pages in color.
Tarzan and Buck Rogers and Joe Palooka and The Lone Ranger were okay, but the niftiest by a mile was Terry and the Pirates. There was a crackling sexual tension between Terry Lee and his nemesis/femme fatale, the Dragon Lady. I instinctively knew this before I knew what sexual was.
My flesh-and-blood Dragon Lady and the Dragon Lady in print represented a lifetime of tingling fantasies and wet dreams and masturbation and erotic memories. One drunken night, I confessed my kinky obsession to Charlotte, who shortly thereafter became my second ex-wife. My Dragon Lady hang-up was also instrumental in costing me Lea, spouse number one, and Marcia, number four.
Mum had been the word with Sally till a week after my diagnosis. I told her that she ran second, a very close second, to my Dragon Lady. Why I told her, I’m still unsure. It was needless and cruel. I guess I didn’t want to take anything with me.
Sally handled it well. No tears, no silent treatment, no hissy fit. An advantage of being terminal is that your indiscretions are taken in stride. You are easily forgiven.
That magnetic tug in my arm tugged at me to put down what follows. In The Land of the Living, I was not introspective. My nature was to lead with my mouth or a fist rather than with my brain.
These days, I am on my best behavior.
And I have all the time in the netherworld to write.
Cordially,
Joseph Josiah Joe IV
SAIGON
1965
2.
“LOOKIE, JOEY. A gift from God,” said Ziggy, a man of almost no words and an atheist to boot.
These days you’d call it a crime of opportunity, but then it was a miracle. Strapped onto a United States Air Force flatbed truck stalled in the other direction was a GE air conditioner for home and office, brand-spanking-new in its box, a sacred offering on a pedestal.
That air conditioner was a perfect chance for Ziggy and I to score brownie points with the captain. Just in the nick of time. As usual, we’d been in the doghouse, skating on thin ice, stepping on our own peckers whenever we laid a foot down. We were duds. We were malingerers. We were serial screwups. We had not subscribed to can-do. We had not gotten with the program.
Saigon was a steam bath. It had two seasons. We were in the blue-sky humid-hot season. The other was the monsoon humid-hot season.
The netherworld I referred to, where I am nowadays, formally designated as The Great Beyond, is a stunning contrast. We have the invariable climate of a suburban shopping mall, with elevator music playing every lounge-lizard classic imaginable, day and night, presumably for all eternity. There are times that I yearn for Saigon climes, for any uncomfortable extreme. Typhoons, blizzards, flash floods, hailstorms, you name it.
Anything that kept you cool was scarce in 1965 Saigon. Window air conditioners were scarcer than scarce. What was available on the black market was third-hand garbage that had been passed along like a cheap whore.
Traffic wasn’t budging. Bicycles, cars, wagons, trucks, cyclos, armored personnel carriers, scooters―nothing was moving. Heat waves and tailpipe smoke boiled up, mixing with the odors of incense, food, flowers, sewage and intrigue. There was a throbbing, noxious din of sputtering exhaust, shouting and horn-honking. Whoever had named this town the Paris of the Orient had done so long, long ago.
Ziggy squeezed out of our taxicab, lumbered to the flatbed, and proceeded to undo the buckles securing the a.c. unit. The airman driver opened his door and began raising a ruckus. I hopped out of the taxi and kicked his door shut.
I shook my head as kindly as I could and said, “Don’t do something you’ll be sorry for. I am sincere about this.”
Wide-eyed, he said, “What the hell is this shit?”
He was an airman second class, a two-striper, nearly as low on the totem pole as us.
“It is what it is.”
“You can’t.”
“We are.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“Believe,” I said. “I am sorry.”
“Fuck you.”
“I really am sorry.”
“My ass’ll be grass.”
“No, it won’t. In this traffic, you have ample time to think up a story. Tell them we were Vietnamese gangsters, masked and armed.”
The poor bastard sized me up, then Ziggy through his mirror. I’m no ninety-seven pound weakling. Kick sand in my face and one of us will be hurting. But when you look at Ziggy, the first thing you wanna do is fork over your lunch money.
Ziggy went six-four, six-five and was cone-shaped. I hadn’t an inkling what he tipped the scales at. If he was of a mind to shave his chest and back, he’d need a lawnmower.
Ziggy looked as if he should have become extinct during the last Ice Age. And Ziggy was the most brilliant person I would ever know, before and after my dying day.
The Sunday funnies out of a stateside newspaper were on the seat beside the airman.
“You have your folks send them to you, too?”
He nodded morosely, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.
“What’s your favorite?”
No reply.
“C’mon.”
He sighed. “Dick Tracy.”
“Yeah, Tracy. Pruneface, Rhodent, Tess Trueheart, all his supporting characters, they’re good too. My all-time favorite’s Terry and the Pirates.”
He shrugged.
“All it’d take in Vietnam is ten Terry Lees. Parachute them in and we can all go home in a month,” I said, laughing.
The airman did not laugh. He did not answer. I didn’t think he and I were going to have much of a conversation. Which was just as well. I couldn’t confide in him that Terry and the Pirates was my favorite comic strip because of the Dragon Lady, and my obsession with her and with her flesh-and-blood counterpart.
I’d had an average number of girlfriends, some serious, some not. Some dumped me, some I dumped. I had never truly been in love, not until my real-life Dragon Lady, whom I knew existed but had not yet met.
Ziggy lifted the air conditioner onto the top of his head and walked off as if the carton was empty. The airman glared straight ahead. This was a scared kid wearing a wedding ring. He was drawing three hundred dollars per month, including family allowances. Smart kid, too. No way was he gonna sacrifice life and limb for a piece of government property, which he also was.
We heard a terrible shuddering ka-boom. Everything and everybody froze for a
second, as if there’d been film breakage in a movie projector. Even the automotive fumes seemed to hang in midair globs.
The Vietnamese stuck in the tie-up looked knowingly at each other, as did Ziggy and I. One of two things had happened. General Curtis LeMay had dropped a nuke on Hanoi, as he was itching to do. But the ka-boom came from downtown, so it was the other.
We knew the Vietcong had bombed the U.S. Embassy. Rumors in Saigon spread faster than the clap. The word had been out for at least a week. Everyone and his brother had heard the stories, except, apparently, the people in charge of preventing it.
Another lively rumor was that secret negotiations were underway to admit South Vietnam to the Union as our fifty-first state. Absurd as it seemed to me, this rumor was gathering momentum, gathering it quickly.
Nineteen-sixty-five was early in the war, prior to Uncle Sam shipping over any young male able to fog a mirror to prop up the Vietnam domino. It was ten years before North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon, before Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City.
In 1965, crewcuts and madras shirts reigned. Now, in The Great Beyond, aided by the perspective of time and an undemanding regimen, I look at 1965 as a Bohemian Vacuum between beatniks and hippies.
It was the Year of the Nonconformist Void.
It was the year that Joe Namath signed a gigantic four hundred thousand dollar contract with the New York Jets. It was the year that Spaghetti Os and Slurpees hit the marketplace. It was the year that young guys emulated the Beach Boys. It was the year of Selma and Watts. Churchill died and Malcolm X was assassinated.
Gas cost thirty-four and a half cents a gallon. The Dow Jones was under 1000. The year 1965 was two-thirds of the way to 2000 A.D., when we thought we’d be getting around like the Jetsons.
How innocent 1965 was. It preceded the Tet Offensive, My Lai, Vietnamization, light at the end of the tunnel, Kent State, Watergate, unindicted coconspirators, Patty Hearst, emission controls, the Silent Majority, the Moral Majority, Chernobyl, The Falklands War, Iran-Contra, AIDS, SARS, the World Wide Web, the dot.com craze, Y2K, hanging chads, 9/11, Enron, Paris Hilton, Sarah Palin, and the proliferation of consultants.