by Don D’Ammassa
We all have to try to understand our surroundings—usually with too little information.
A lot of young men discovered who they really were during the Vietnam war, whether they were drafted or enlisted, fled to Canada or fled to the National Guard and other exemptions. When I disembarked in Cam Ranh Bay in June of 1969, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of myself and others, but my education was just getting started. And sometimes knowing the truth—or part of it anyway—has its drawbacks. When you stand in a crowd and realize that some of the people around you might not actually be people, it changes everything.
During most of my tour, I was more afraid of my fellow Americans than of the Viet Cong. Four members of my battalion were killed in fights among themselves, while the Vietnamese only managed to slightly wound one tail gunner during those same eleven months. Boredom was one of the main problems; there wasn’t much to do in Phu Hiep except sit around and drink or smoke pot. Boredom, booze, and automatic weapons are not a good combination in three-digit heat. You could tell who had which vice by walking between rows of hooches—the unfinished rooms in which we slept—after darkness fell and most of us were off duty. The drinkers were loud; the smokers were silent.
I shared my hooch with two other guys: Chapman, who wanted to be a marine biologist, and Russell, the chaplain’s assistant. We had smokers on our south side so we rarely heard a peep from them after dark, but unfortunately Elmer Colby was just beyond the north wall. Elmer was a hulking thug who’d joined the army to stay out of jail after one too many bar fights back in West Virginia. He was a heavy drinker and a nasty one. No one was willing to share quarters with him and even the officers avoided him.
One night the three of us were sitting around talking. I had broken down my M-16 and was cleaning it—this section of the coastline was all sand and dust and M-16s tended to malfunction if they weren’t pristine. Someone was fumbling around on the other side of the north partition. We didn’t have walls, just eight-foot-high barriers separating each hooch from the next. We heard a sudden scratching sound and a moment later were reeling from the latest onslaught of Iron Butterfly played at maximum volume.
I don’t have anything against Iron Butterfly. After I got back to the States and a decent interval had passed, I picked up my own copy of In-a-Gadda-da-Vida and I still play it occasionally. But Colby had bought himself a cheap turntable and speakers by mail order and he only owned two albums, the other being Abbey Road by the Beatles. I like them even better, but when you hear the same two albums played over and over again, day after day, with the volume turned all the way up, even good music gets old very quickly.
Russell sighed and stood up. “Guess I’ll go over to the chapel and catch up on my paperwork.”
Chapman was a short-timer, due to go home in another two weeks. Not much bothered him anymore, but he swore under his breath and started for the door. “I’ll be back in a while.”
I would probably have followed except that I had a disassembled weapon spread all over my bunk. Doggedly, I finished cleaning the components as the album ended. There was a brief moment of blessed silence, then the Beatles began exhorting us to “come together.” I winced and began reassembling my weapon.
All might still have been well if Colby hadn’t been so thoroughly drunk. I had just locked a magazine into the M-16 and was putting my cleaning supplies away when a half-empty can of beer arced up over the partition and came down, with a splash, in the middle of my bunk. Why Colby would throw away a nearly full can of beer was never clear to me. Maybe it was too warm, or had gone flat, or he was just being more ornery than usual. In any case, it was very hot and humid, I had been on guard duty the night before and hadn’t slept well, and I snapped. I picked the can up, rotated my body, and tossed it back where it had come.
There was the brittle sound of impact and the music died. With deadly if inadvertent accuracy, I had scored a direct hit on Abbey Road, right in the middle of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” There was sudden, palpable silence from Colby’s hooch.
I was, frankly, befuddled. I had acted without thinking, and now my mind refused to consider the potential repercussions. I was still a bit dazed when Colby appeared at the door.
“Kramer, I’m going to rip you a new asshole.” No matter how much he drank, Colby never slurred his words, and always seemed calm and unemotional. He could be falling down, semi-conscious, threatening to kill someone, but he would still speak clearly and without heat. And he didn’t make idle threats.
My M-16 was lying on the bunk and I picked it up. “Take one step inside that door and I’ll shoot you through the kneecap.”
I know he heard me because his eyes blinked and his mouth tightened. He raised one foot and placed it deliberately on the threshold. “You ain’t got the balls.”
I looked into his face and knew I wasn’t going to be able to talk myself out of this. What I didn’t discover until later was that not only had my return volley broken the record, but the still half full beer can had splashed down inside the turntable and shorted it out. “Try me,” I said, hoping that I sounded more sincere than I felt.
Colby stepped through the doorway. Without hesitation, I turned the weapon in his direction and pulled the trigger. The round passed him at hip level and buried itself in the sandbagged bunker just beyond.
Colby froze where he was. “You’re lucky I’m a bad shot,” I said quietly, pleased that my voice remained level. “But I probably won’t miss the next time.”
The only way to frighten off a madman is to act like you’re madder than he is. Colby’s face registered doubt for the first time and he stayed where he was. “You’d better watch your back, Kramer, because I’m not going to forget this.”
Somehow I managed not to shake visibly. We stared at each other for a few more seconds, and then he was gone. I was so relieved that I nearly passed out.
* * * *
There was a good chance that Colby would have forgotten the entire incident once he’d sobered up if it hadn’t been for the broken record and turntable. I figured, rightly, that he’d be watching for a chance to get even. Or better than even. So I had to be circumspect. He wasn’t due to rotate out of our battalion for almost six months, so that was no solution. I might have requested a transfer, but I had a comparatively soft job in a helicopter support unit, well away from combat, shielded from attack by a large Korean contingent whose encampment surrounded our base. I alternated between being clerking for the colonel and for the battalion intelligence officer, typing and filing rather than sweating in the field or helping to maintain the aircraft or dodging bullets. I liked it where I was.
The alternative was to stay out of Colby’s reach, at least when there weren’t other people around, preferably an NCO or an officer. Colby was nuts, but not completely nuts. He wouldn’t assault me if it would clearly result in disciplinary action. He could be patient when necessary, and I knew he was sly as well as violent.
For the next couple of days I spent a lot of time in my two offices, “catching up” after everyone else was off duty. Actually, I always smuggled in paperbacks and read until late in the evening, then made my way circumspectly back to my hooch, lurking long enough to be certain Colby wasn’t lying in wait. Several days passed in this fashion before I realized this couldn’t go on. Sooner or later he’d outsmart me, or I’d be careless, or coincidence would put us together without witnesses. I could have gone to one of my superiors to complain, or maybe the chaplain, but they weren’t likely to do anything except yell at Colby and make the situation worse. Apologizing and offering to pay for the turntable was not really an option. It would only have told Colby how much I feared retribution.
If I wasn’t going to leave, then Colby would have to go, and I’d have to help him along.
Like I said, I did the clerical work for the S2 office. S2 was intelligence, of which we had very little—of the military kind anyway. Most of the documents in our files concerned members of the battalion rather than the Vietnamese. We had information on their criminal records while in the military, disciplinary histories, and other things you’d expect to find. We also had information I wasn’t supposed to talk about. There were presently mail covers on half a dozen of our personnel. A mail cover is when they keep track of how much mail you get and record all the return addresses, but don’t actually open anything. We also had a few pieces of actual correspondence that had been discarded and later retrieved. They were pretty much what you’d suspect, letters criticizing the war or President Johnson or the military authorities. There were typed reports from officers and enlisted men who had witnessed, or professed to have witnessed, disloyal or dubious acts. A lot of the smokers had notes about their drug use, although I noticed that no one bothered to report the heavy drinkers. There were also summaries of rumors, observations, even unsubstantiated opinions. I’d read all of them, and had yet to find a credible account suggesting disloyalty. Nevertheless, these files were reviewed on a regular basis and personnel were reassigned based on their contents.
Clearly it would not do to add suggestions that Colby was a communist sympathizer, an anti-war activist, or anything similar. No one would believe it. So I had to be more subtle. I checked the activity log and confirmed that Colby’s file had not been reviewed since Captain Wescott became our new S2 Officer, so I could add as much as I liked without raising suspicion. I could also alter the schedule so that it would be on his desk anytime I wanted. But what could I add to his file—currently empty of prejudicial material except for notes about three Article 15 disciplinary actions for missing roll call?
I would have to become creative. Using his service record to make sure I had times and places recorded correctly, I composed observations by completely imaginary officers who suggested that Colby was selling government property on the black market, that he’d assaulted an officer under cover of darkness, and a couple of similar peccadilloes while stationed at Fort Dix and Fort Lee. Colby had briefly been assigned to a unit in Nha Trang before coming to Phu Hiep, and I wrote an official sounding report advising against charging Colby with selling a box of hand grenades to suspected enemy agents because there was insufficient evidence. “Subject should be closely watched, however, in view of the severity of the situation should the charges be accurate.” As an afterthought, I included a handwritten note to the effect that the two witnesses to this imaginary transaction had both been seriously beaten by an unknown assailant and had recanted their original testimony.
Our previous company commander had finished his tour, so I used his name to append a note to his most recent evaluation. “There are persistent rumors that Private Colby has been seen fraternizing with the locals in unsupervised situations. Recommend that the situation be monitored.” A few other, more subtle alterations were designed to suggest that Colby would sell equipment, ammunition, even information without a second thought, which was probably true, although I didn’t think he was bright enough to actually do any of the things I ascribed to him. It was enough to mark him as potential trouble, and support group commands like ours routinely provided involuntary reinforcements to the grunts in the field, or in this case, jungle.
I also looked at his personnel jacket and noted his hometown, Walnut Falls, West Virginia. We had a form letter we used to request background information from civilian authorities and I ran one into the typewriter and filled in Colby’s name. It wouldn’t hurt to have something genuine in the file and Colby made no secret of the fact that he’d enlisted to avoid jail. I forged Wescott’s signature and put it in the mail.
Nothing happened for several days and I started to relax. Then I was careless one night and went out for a smoke without checking the lay of the land. Colby seemed to materialize out of nowhere and I was about to bolt when First Sergeant Grimes showed up, staggering drunk. I took his arm and offered to help him back to his quarters. Colby never said a word, but even his silence was eloquent.
Two days later my request for background information came back. No such zip code, no such town. The information in Colby’s jacket was wrong. I wasn’t about to be defeated that easily, however. I faxed a request up the chain of command for a corrected jacket. Someone was on the ball for a change because a return fax was waiting for me when I got to the office the following morning. To my dismay, it also listed Walnut Falls as his hometown. But then I read the rest and my day brightened. Upon arriving in Cam Ranh Bay, Private Elmer Colby had been assigned to the 312th Support Company based in Tuy Hoa. Not only was Tuy Hoa not far away, but I knew Brian, their company clerk. I rang him up on the field phone.
“Hey, Brian, I think I found a glitch. One of your guys got sent over here somehow.”
Since the support groups were always undermanned, Brian was immediately enthusiastic. At least, he was enthusiastic until I told him the name.
“Nuts! It’s got to be two different guys with the same name. We’ve got our Elmer Colby and frankly, we’d all be happier without him.”
My spirits plummeted. “Yeah, I was kind of hoping to get rid of ours. He’s nothing but trouble.”
“They must be related. Ours is an ugly drunk and a troublemaker. Sorry, can’t help you.”
I rang off and turned back to the paperwork. I was just about to file it all away when I noticed something. Our Elmer Colby’s service number was RA52903257. The one assigned to the 312th was RA52903258. Probably one or the other was a typo, but it was still a pretty big coincidence. So I read further. They both had the same date of birth, both enlisted on the same day, and their social security numbers were only two digits apart. That was stretching coincidence, or bad typing, beyond the limits of probability.
It bothered me so badly that the next day I hitched a chopper ride up to Tuy Hoa. In addition to my two main jobs, I was also the PIO clerk. That’s Public Information Office, which was supposedly an internal news service run by the Army but which was actually designed to produce puff pieces, human interest stories, and mostly profiles of soldiers that could be sent back to their home town newspapers. I was supposed to turn in one story a week, and the officer in charge—a second lieutenant who got stuck with all of the annoying little jobs—gave me a free hand so long as I kept him out of trouble. So I told him I was running up to Tuy Hoa to do a couple of stories about how units in the field were supplied and he nodded and approved my request without even listening to it.
* * * *
The Huey that brought me was going to return in about four hours, so that’s all the time I had. I stopped to see Brian, told him my cover story, and asked for suggestions. He gave me some names.
“What about that Colby guy you were telling me about?” I tried to sound casual.
“Him? Trust me, you don’t want to interview him. He’s a jerk.” Brian expanded on the subject, and mentioned that his Colby helped maintain their fleet of trucks.
I had to ask someone else for directions to the motor pool, a sprawling area behind a low hill nestled up against the corner of the local minefield. There were a dozen or so mechanics at work, but I didn’t have to worry about identifying which one was Colby. He looked just like mine. I figured that was the explanation. They were identical twins and had the same birth date. Of course their social security numbers would be almost consecutive, and if they enlisted at the same time, their service numbers would also be close.
I returned to my own unit, resigned to the fact that coincidence had been playing with me, but coincidence wasn’t quite done. One of my duties was to process service awards and in the batch that arrived the following day was an Army Commendation Medal for Elmer Colby. Except it wasn’t my Elmer Colby, nor was it the one working at the 312th. This one’s service number was RA52903255, and his social security number was only a couple of digits away from the two Colbies I already knew about. I called my contact at awards distribution, gave him the RA number, and he apologized.
“Sorry, some kind of mix-up. Colby is with the 14th Armored Brigade. Just send it back to us and we’ll forward it.”
Up until now I’d been doing my utmost to avoid Elmer Colby. My Elmer Colby, that is. Suddenly my attitude changed. I was so curious about him—and his alter egos—that I decided to investigate. I didn’t throw caution to the winds, exactly, but I did let the breeze push it around a little. I sat near him in the mess hall, trying to eavesdrop on his conversation. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much conversation to overhear. My Colby worked as a menial in helicopter maintenance, so I asked some of his co-workers about him. They didn’t know much more than I did. “He’s okay, I guess. I never really talk to him.” “Colby? I try to stay out of his way. He’s got an ugly temper.” He had no close friends, drank alone, had no obvious hobbies or interests, never went to the enlisted men’s club. I also found out that he had never once received mail since joining our unit.
Then I got careless. I spotted Colby from a distance one evening, walking along the company road from the PX toward Hooch country. Curious, I decided to follow him. This part of the compound was generally deserted in the early evening; the last seating was still underway in the mess hall, the enlisted men’s club had just opened, and tonight’s sentries had already been trucked out to the guard towers along the perimeter. Most of the time it was clear at night, but there’d been a storm that day and the clouds were still pretty thick overhead. Thick shadows washed over the buildings, barely retreating before the handful of subdued and very widely spaced lights strung from our generators.
I looked away at just the wrong moment and Colby was gone. I was stupefied for a second or two; it was as if he’d melted into a shadow himself. I quickened my pace and closed to where I’d last seen him.
Colby stepped out of the darkness. “Thought that was you, Kramer. You and I have unfinished business.”
The worst part was that there was absolutely no emotion in his voice.
Now this might have been a very bad few minutes for me, but I got lucky, though at someone else’s expense. Down at the end of the unpaved road, another uniformed figure stepped out into the dim light, an M-16 held at his side, muzzle pointing toward the ground. I didn’t recognize him, but there was something about his stance that set off alarms in my head. Involuntarily I turned and looked behind me. Another figure, similarly equipped, stood at the opposite end of the street.
I was smack in the middle of an imminent gunfight. Like I said, more of us were killed by fellow GIs than by the Vietnamese. I was facing Colby and I started in his direction. Better a beating than a bullet. Colby smiled and stepped forward. Much of what happened then I only reconstructed later. The two strangers were PFC Manuel Cristobal and Specialist Fourth Class Arthur Rand. Rand didn’t like Hispanics, words had been exchanged on several occasions, and something had triggered this confrontation. No one ever did find out exactly what. All I know is that I heard both weapons start up simultaneously, the chatter of semi-automatic fire, and I ducked and ran for cover. Colby smiled and reached for me.
Several rounds hit him, walking up his chest, making a small, dark hole in the center of his forehead. I guess it must have been Rand’s errant fire, because Cristobal’s burst castrated the hulking Spec 4 and sent him flying backwards, screaming in agony. Cristobal himself was never touched.
Colby staggered back a step, looking vaguely surprised, then collapsed without making a sound. I passed him in a running crouch and kept right on going. There were shouts all over the encampment and I knew the MPs would be there within seconds. I had no intention of letting them find me. Witnesses to fights inside the compound often had “accidents” if they talked too much.
I hid in my hooch and pretended to have slept through the whole thing.
Cristobal was shipped off to Long Binh Jail the following morning. Rand had been medevacced out during the night. No one said anything about Colby and I was afraid to ask directly, so at lunch I wandered over to the maintenance hangar to see what I could find out. Colby was there, lugging boxes into one of the storage sheds. He looked just as he always did.
I requested a transfer that afternoon and left Phu Hiep two days later.
No, I didn’t say anything to anyone. Look, I was nineteen years old, working with people I didn’t like and who didn’t like me, surrounded by others who spoke a foreign language and wanted to kill me. I’d been taught by experience to avoid officers whenever possible, and senior NCOs as well, and never to volunteer. All I wanted to do was forget all about Elmer Colby. I ended up at a small Signal Corp outfit in Da Lat. They had no one on the roster named Elmer Colby; no Colbies at all in fact. I spent the rest of my tour with them, then a year at Fort Sill winding up my enlistment. I thought about Colby at times, sure. I wondered if it was some kind of secret government project; robots maybe, or if they’d cloned a whole bunch of him and had replacements stockpiled somewhere. But who and how and why weren’t any of my business.
* * * *
About twenty years later, I was living in Wallingford, Connecticut. My neighbor was a really nice guy named Romeo Bolduc. We had almost nothing in common but somehow we managed to enjoy each other’s company. Romeo worked in a foundry and spent most of his leisure time hunting, fishing, and playing cards. The only time I went out into the wilderness was with paint, canvas, and easel, and I wasn’t sure if a straight flush beat a full house. Romeo had never married, which was probably just as well.
He invited me over one day to take some of the venison out of his freezer. “I’ll never eat half of it and I hate to have it go to waste.” I knocked on the screen door and heard him yell a welcome from somewhere in the basement. I walked downstairs and found him painting wooden ducks. Well, they looked a little bit like ducks anyway. They were roughly duck-shaped and duck-sized and even pretty close to duck-colored.
“I didn’t know you were into art,” I joked.
“Yeah, I’m the Picasso of duck decoys.”
I squinted my eyes. “I guess if the duck was really nearsighted and wasn’t paying attention, he might think this was another duck.”
Romeo kept a second fridge in the basement. He opened the door, extracted a beer, and tossed it to me. “Danny, my boy, you look too close at things, that’s your problem. Most of us, we don’t sweat the details, and that includes ducks.” He picked up the nearest, smearing still wet paint all over his hand. “See, I float a string of these babies out on some likely piece of water and sit back and wait. Now from way up above, they look like they might be ducks, and if they’re safe, then it’s safe to come down and join them. But maybe we have ourselves a really careful duck. It circles a little lower. The shape is right, the color is right. It doesn’t have to walk like a duck and talk like a duck to be a duck, at least not to other ducks it doesn’t.”
“So it settles down in the water, but it doesn’t get too close to my ducks, because that would be rude. Maybe it does notice that these really aren’t exactly ducks, but whatever the hell they are, they aren’t getting shot at. So the duck relaxes and I stand up and POW! Fresh honker for supper.”
I shook my head and drank some of the beer. “I guess ducks just aren’t long on brains.”
Romeo laughed. “Oh? You think you’re so much smarter than a duck? Let me tell you something, Danny. People are just the same. They don’t look close at the people they follow, and sometimes they follow them into some pretty nasty scrapes. That’s how most wars get started, you know?”
I hadn’t thought about Elmer Colby for years and I didn’t think about him in Romeo’s basement, but I did think about him about two months later, and Romeo’s little lecture rolled back into my mind about the same time.
Politics bore me, frankly. I vote in the general elections most of the time, but I’ve never bothered with the primaries and I’m not a member of any party. I’ve always thought they were all pretty much the same, when I thought about it at all. But I was waiting for a football game one Sunday and I turned on the television early because Doreen was visiting her family for the weekend and I was feeling lazy. I sat on the couch, drinking fresh brewed coffee, and watched as one of the talking heads introduced their next guest. I wasn’t really paying attention until I heard the name. It was Elmer Colby, senior senator from West Virginia and one of the leading candidates for his party’s nomination as President of the United States.
I sat up and the coffee grew cold in my cup. The commercial break seemed to stretch on forever and then they were back and a man about my age was sitting at the table and it wasn’t hard to recognize my old nemesis. He rarely smiled and answered in short sentences. At times he seemed almost angry. He wasn’t a candidate, he insisted, but if he decided that he should be, it would be because he felt an obligation to help lead the people of the United States into a new future.
I couldn’t help wondering just what kind of future he had in mind, and who or what might be sitting out there waiting for us to come into range.