IN THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

I hated my best friend, Chaz! Yeah, I know that sounds crazy, but I sure felt that way. We grew up best buds and fiercest competitors. We were more friends than competitors until we discovered girls. Through some twisted sense of humor of the Gods it seemed that we always fell for the same girls.

I guess it started when we were juniors in high school. Chaz went to East High and I went to North. My name was Deal Edwards and Chaz was Charles Theron. Deal sounds like a funny name, but my dad won money for his honeymoon with mom by playing poker. My real name was John Thomas Edwards, but because of dad everyone called me Deal.

Chaz's dad was from Bordeaux and his mom was from main line Philadelphia. Sure, they had all that money and a big house on College Hill in Wichita. Me, I grew up on a small farm in Pleasant Valley just north of the Big Ditch, off 37th. We didn't have money and we had a small house. My mom stayed at home for my three younger sisters and me. Dad was a draftsman for Beech. Chaz's dad was the senior partner for one of the big eight accounting firm's office in Sedgwick County.

The families got to know each other because our moms were on the board of one of the big charities and they became fast friends. Mom was on the board because her grandfather left all his money to the charity with the stipulation she would be a permanent board member. That led to having barbeques, picnics and dinners together more frequently than I would like.

We were both athletic. I was spot on six foot with a stocky toughness and great coordination. Chaz was tall and rangy — about six inches taller than me but only twenty pounds heavier.

He was a quarterback on the football team. I was a linebacker. I was point guard on the basketball team — Chaz was a forward but had the ball handling and shooting skills of a guard. We were both all state as sophomores and juniors. I had been dating this girl, Patty that went to Southeast. She was every high school boy's wet dream. She was sultry before either Chaz or I had any idea what the word meant.

We had dated four or five times and we had arrived at the light petting stage. I was deeply in love! That year, both East and North had the junior prom on the same weekend. I was going to ask Patty to the prom at North, but waited 'til the last minute ... I don't know why. When I finally got around to it, she let me know that Chaz had already asked her. Damn — I didn't even know Chaz knew her. I was pissed but there wasn't much I could do.

A couple of weeks after the prom, we were at Chaz's folks house for dinner. Chaz and I walked over to College Hill Park, a couple blocks away. This was East High's cross-country training place and we were throwing the football around. I won't go into a lot of detail but he told me he popped Patty's cherry. I took a wild swing at him, which he ducked and caught me with a fierce short left jab on the point of my chin that dropped me like a stone. He left me lying there and went back to his house. I showed up twenty minutes later in a fearsome pout.

We danced around each other for the next year, sometimes friends, sometimes hating each other. During the football homecoming game at North the next fall we quit being friends. Chaz was being recruited by a number of division one schools and he was leaning towards Oklahoma. I'd already been accepted at Annapolis — surprisingly more on my grades that my athletic skills.

North was ahead with thirty seconds left and East was fourth and long around mid-field. I was supposed to cover the wide receiver but I dropped off and edged towards the line of scrimmage. When their center snapped the ball I rushed around the defensive end, remembering Patty. I was going all out for Chaz when I saw him throw the ball I was still three strides away. I threw myself at him anyway, knowing I was late, but I didn't give a shit. He fell on his throwing arm and broke both bones in his forearm.

I got called for a late hit but it didn't matter. The pass was complete and the game was over. It took Chaz two years to completely heal and he hated me after that. He lost his scholarship offers and wound up at the University of Wichita studying accounting and doing the ROTC thing. I went off to Annapolis and our families didn't get together anymore.

After I graduated I chose the marines and went home for a month's leave before shipping off to 'Nam. I called one the girls I had dated on and off and we went to a dance at the Moose Lodge on East Kellogg. I was outside having a cigarette and saw Chaz. I nodded at him, but didn't go over. He was in uniform with the gold bars of a second lieutenant with a paratroop badge and an 82^nd airborne patch. I was in my dress blues and looked pretty sharp.

Chaz was there with a girl I hadn't seen before, a tall red head with a white blouse and a black mini/micro skirt. She was really hot and I heard several people call her Ruby. It never would have gone anywhere, but I heard Chaz say something about 'candy ass marines!' I guess he was remembering how quickly he put me down at the park years ago. Well, I had learned a few things. I humiliated him in front of his date and while he was on the ground I asked Ruby to dance with me.

I didn't see Chaz again for several years. I saw a lot of Ruby before I had to ship out. I mean I didn't see her that many times but I saw all there was to see. By the time I left we were engaged. I thought I was going straight overseas, but they changed my orders and I wound up at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey studying Vietnamese.

Ruby flew out and we drove to Reno and got married. She lived off post in Carmel (her dad was a Senior VP at Boeing and gave her anything she wanted) and it was great having a regular squeeze whenever I had time off. Ruby was very sexual — it was a natural thing with her and it seemed she couldn't get enough no matter how frequently we made love. If I was older I guess I would have been worried about her being alone while I was gone, but hell, I was young and I gave her all she could handle. When I finished my training she went back to stay with her folks and I went to the war.

KHE SANH

"Khe Sanh ... is still a fearsome place of exploding shells and death."
- Douglas Robinson, New York Times

The strange thing about Viet Nam was the sheer difference, the absolute change in everything. In two days I went from living in a near paradise on Monterey Bay and sleeping (sometimes) with a woman that exuded sexuality to this... foreign place! Everything was different: the very air had an alien smell and the heat and humidity was oppressing.

It was in February of '68 and I was being sent to the Khe Sanh Combat Base a few miles south of the DMZ, in the Quang Tri province. The area was remote, sparsely populated ... and the main focal point for the war at that time. A series of Marine and Vietnamese bases had been constructed south of the demilitarized zone to protect communications and population centers along the coast.

I heard from my mom that Chaz was with the 503^rd Airborne operating around the Central Highlands. Mom didn't know anything about the animosity that had developed between Chaz and I. Meeting with him was the last thing I wanted to do but I told my mom I'd try to meet up with him. I just didn't want to get into it with her.

The Khe Sanh base had been closed the previous fall for restoration and expansion and had reopened several months before I got there. Engineers from the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) built a dirt runway in 1962 which had been doubled in length and some taxi strips added a couple of years later by the Seabees and covered with interlocking aluminum matting. By the time I arrived it was a heavily fortified base. As the chopper bringing in replacements landed I got a sense of things to come as we passed over the still smoking remains of a KC130 at the end of the runway.

The base was about two square miles averaging about 2500 yards long and 400 wide. The runway actually extended about 150 yards beyond the perimeter. This narrow opening was heavily covered by machine guns, claymores and several Ontos anti-tank vehicles. The only source of water for the base was a stream outside the north perimeter. Water was pumped up the hill and stored in rubber reservoirs.

I was assigned to the battalion S2, the Major in charge of intelligence. My job was to translate documents found on captured or dead enemy combatants as quickly as possible. This meant that instead of waiting for the documents to come to me I had to frequently go to them. It was a hard job because the documents were usually in poor condition and we were getting more and more stuff from the NVA. What we trained on at Monterrey was mostly documents from the VC.

About two weeks into my stay I was at a forward position and one of the guys asked if I wanted a picture of me with the "snake." I asked what they were talking about and they took out a snake they had killed the day before. It took four of the men to carry it. Later, after I was back in the real world I would look at that picture and remember what a fucked up war that was. It was a small comfort to the hell my life had turned into.

I did pay attention to the guys with experience and I learned to survive. About six months into my time at Khe Sanh I was being sent to Tan Son Nhot airbase outside of Saigon for a meeting with some of the other translators to try to get more consistency in the translations and suggestions to look for trends in the data we gathered so we could be more productive in the questions we asked. On the trip back the helicopter I was on sat down on the LZ just as a mortar attack took place. I started running as fast as I could for cover and just short I felt a sharp pain in my back followed by the shocking sound and intense air pressure from the explosion of a mortar round.

At the hospital I got the bad news. The doctor called it a transsection of the spinal cord in the epidural space. What he meant was that I was dead from about the navel down. More specifically, I was impotent and incontinent, or as the doctor said, urinary and fecal incontinence.

I would be better off totally dead. This was my first thought after the doctor left. It was a theme I became obsessed with. As I started therapy and started talking to my fellow victims of having their lives ruined because of a war no one really supported I learned to keep my thoughts to myself. It seemed that those with recurring suicidal thoughts were sent to some VA Hospital and forgotten.

I learned to smile and sound optimistic all the while making plan after plan on how I would put myself out of the constant pain and humiliation I was going through. One of the plans started working almost immediately. I was drowsing one afternoon — actually I slept most of the time because of the narcotics I was taking for the pain — when Chaz came waltzing in. He had an eye patch on; he had lost an eye during a VC ambush. The dumb shit actually looked even more handsome with the eye patch than without it.