Profane Men Read Free Page A

peers and I saw ourselves as antiheroes, raised on robbery and born to run. The year was but a hard-rockin’ theme, and life was a drive-in movie.
    Burning rubber as we peeled out on vintage slicks, double-clutching, we drag-raced straight-stick shorts down flatland blacktop to Chucklesberry and Elvis and Little Richard and Jerry Lee, outrageous icons blasting from distant Top Forty stations, as we hurried en masse toward oblivion. Our touchstones were the unhooked bra and the hook shot, the Chantelles and the Shirelles, fast girls and fast cars. Goodness gracious, great balls of fire. Young punks all, roaring through the American night down ten thousand identical white lines.
    Where previous generations saw greasers and preppies, we saw chrome and no chrome. Our perception of society’s established values were those reflected in the gleaming side spears of a 1949 Buick Riviera with its luxury-boat body and do-nothing–style portholes, and we coveted the chopped and channeled Merc coupes shaved of any vestiges of Detroit silver. When I boarded my first government contract flight, I left behind a ’59 Caddy El Dee with the most obscenely phallic pair of chrome tits that ever came off a GM assembly line. So much for self-image, sex, wheels, and Jersey duwop. The point is — times lie.
    A beginning point is 1961. Jack Kennedy’s Hyannis Camelot has ascended, Papa Joe watching from the wings, a line of heirs and assigns attendant. An unheard-of country, still French Indochina in some high school history books, emerges as a slice of singularly worthless real estate called Vietnam, split on paper by a 17th Parallel map grid and in theory by an ongoing North-South civil war.
    Who knew we’d already lost one war there, having subsidized the French in their abortive clash with the communist Viet Minh. Few of us had heard the name Southeast Asia, much less Vietnam, and fewer still had even a remote clue as to what was in store for us in that violent and unyielding land.
    The Republic of Vietnam. Visualize a populated landmass roughly the density of New Mexico, turned on end and squeezed into an
S
shape. Tell everyone in Albuquerque to shit in the street. Paint it green. Plant rice. Bomb the sucker until you run out of bombs or money, whichever comes first. Next, cover the whole thing with Viets and American teenagers. Give them all guns. Don’t tell the Americans where the tunnels are, and you get some rough idea.
    Our official country team had been in place for a decade when JFK’s top advisers convinced the new president of the inevitability of the falling-dominoes fantasy. We would answer the clarion call with a cornucopia of money, and materiel, and — assuredly — men. That was the scary part. Then there would be more money. And helicopters, refrigerators, Conex containers brimming with stateside gear to flood the new black market, air conditioners, generators, mobile homes, pizza parlors, the continuum of U.S. commodities from pretzels to warplanes, more money still, and many, many more warm bodies.
    Suddenly one’s Selective Service classification read like a death sentence.
    Like all young men my age, I had options. I’d become convinced the only way to go was enlist. Army. Navy. Marines? No fucking way. Maybe the Air Corps — the traditional refuge for a candy-assed 1A. My life had been a skate, even through a heavyweight poli-sci major. School, girls, drugs, rock, jobs — all a skate. I was the eternal skater. I would join the elite of the Air Force and skate through this Southeast Asian nonsense.
    But then I heard about a friend of mine who’d lucked onto something choice. Another fellow skater, looking for the groove around the soft edges of life. He’d gone and got himself recruited by one of the big intelligence agencies and, with promises of a cushy foreign-service job, had been ticketed for a quick whisk through basic and the chance to skate through the