Profane Men Read Free

inside my head. Vivid. Painful. Even now, fighting the onslaught of senility and midlife memory lapses, the mission burns on, having carved itself in stone up there in the gray matter.
    Nobody would ever forget the team. Once you’ve met HOG, Harold O. Grein, he’s yours for keeps. Savage nightmare avengers like Merle stay with you. Icy mercs like Jon D., stoners like Shooter, terrier-tough El Tee with his teeth sunk into a dying career, Oreo, Doc, The Hooded Cobra — jeezus — they all stayed with me.
    Another survivor of the operation tagged Blade, the inimitable Shooter Price, and I had a brief reunion of sorts up in Canada some eleven years back, and for me it was as if no time had passed in the intervening decade. The indelible pictures were burnt into the brain plates.
    There is no forgetting the mission. Blade took a whole team of us straight into the teeth of something so completely unexpected and merciless that it could still educe night sweats, blurred vision, faulty judgment, and spastic reflexes. One of those kinds of ops. No slack.
    If you live through one or two of those, you’re on your way to winning a thousand-yard stare, which is awarded just like a heart. It’s delivered to you personally while you sleep, and the sandman takes it out of his velvet-lined presentation case and slides it down under the eyelids. Next time you open your peepers you’re nearing it. A well-earned thousand-yard stare will make an eighteen-year-old look forty-seven in the face. The trick is living long enough to get one.
    The passage of time has had the curious effect of allowing me to reconstruct Blade in my mind, from recruitment to termination, as a kind of doper’s warped dream. Without too much trouble I can manage to convince myself that my own minor but painful role was hallucinated, an unreal or surreal distortion of events shaped by time and changes and too much acid. Yet every detail retains a clear impression. It won’t go away.
    Time, reflection, history, and the luxury of twenty/twenty hindsight have let me look at the mission profile with a bit of objectivity. I still don’t see the overview, but at least I’ve come to grips with the fact that one existed. I can project myself back in time and look up, and imagine that here and there I’ll see the shadows of the strings pulled by the hidden puppeteers.
    For the truth is that the mission was in fact more than one mission. There was the one we knew about: a covert op with a fairly understandable goal, to silence a shadow-funded, outlaw radio station. But then there was a larger picture. A loftier overview where the puppeteers could see the parallel mission lines ribboning away into the distant jungle horizon, pointing north toward the DMZ. And the illusion was of the lines coming together in the distance, merging in the shape of a spike. And I would be one of the ones out there on that sharp chisel edge when the vectors finally crossed.
    That is the moment that remains the most vivid. I have only to let it touch the edge of my mind and the memories wash back over me in that last, unforgettable noise, the pounding of deadly force against cold steel, the air churning in the whipsong of high-tech combat, the terrorizing symphony of explosions and screaming still haunting my memory.
    And twenty years later I feel the heat and the vibrations of the black Huey slick descending down through the canopy like some noisy, metallic bat about to disgorge its load just as we hear the first ominous crump of distant artillery. But that is long ago and far away. And for every ending there must be a beginning. I’m not so sure about that part.
    I had survived the Fifties, a stereotypical product of my times and culture. Born, like androgynous Mr. Jagger, in a crossfire hurricane. Full of myself and rock ’n’ roll and cars and the exciting promise of dope without end. Sexually postpubescent and fighting innocence at every turn, my