Unconventional Warfare Read online

  Title Page

  Chapter One: True Tough

  Chapter Two: Triumph

  Chapter Three: Judgment

  Chapter Four: Top of the World

  Chapter Five: My Secret Self

  Chapter Six: Trailwatch

  Chapter Seven: Dang Da Nang

  Chapter Eight: Recon to d-CON

  Chapter Nine: Don’t Chu Lai to Me

  Chapter Ten: The Elephant in the Room

  Chapter Eleven: Eye to Eye

  Chapter Twelve: The Middle of Nowhere

  Chapter Thirteen: Crawlin’ and Bawlin’

  Chapter Fourteen: Like Fathers

  About the Author

  Copyright

  I was beating the tar out of my brother Edgar. And because Edgar was born with an abnormal amount of tar in him, beating it out was nearly a full-time, full-on job.

  I had him by the neck, by the throat, pressed deep into the upholstery of Dad’s big wingback reading chair. There was no question I was winning this fight, just as there was never any question of who was winning our frequent, spirited, intense confrontations. That would be me.

  No question except, I suppose, in the mind of Edgar. That was one place I would never want to go, personally, even to find out how he thought he’d wiggle out of my grip. But his face was helpful enough. Turning plum purple, and with his strength draining so quickly I could feel it running down my arms and torso and onto the floor, he still managed to lay that vile and infuriating toothy leer on me.

  Which, naturally, drove me berserk. As it was intended to.

  I threw my whole life-force into the effort of strangling my brother and breaking his neck and putting him personally into his final resting place directly beneath our house. The chair flew backward, and Edgar flew backward, and I flew forward without ever losing my grip. The thunder-crash as we hit the floor was somehow not quite enough, so I went onward and jackhammered Edgar’s head against the hardwood floor. I just wanted to get that victory expression off his face because, in all fairness, it was all wrong in this instance.

  “Stop it! Stop, Danny, stop!” My other brother, Kent, screamed as he slammed into me from the side, toppling me but failing to break my grip.

  “Idiot, I’m doing this for you!” I screamed back.

  “Well you can stop doing it for me!”

  “No, I can’t. I can’t stop,” I said, pinning Edgar to the floor with my right hand and shoving Kent’s face away with my left.

  A crack of knuckles to the tip of my chin sent my head snapping back. Edgar seized his moment.

  “One hand?” Edgar yelled as he rolled me backward and jumped on me. “You think you can hold me down with one hand, Danny?”

  He wasn’t appalled by many things, my brother, but he was rightly appalled at that. Because while I always beat him, always, I didn’t always beat him easily or by much. It was a brothers thing, where you know one another so well, without even knowing what you know, that you can turn a sure mismatch into a real contest. If you have the guts for it.

  My brothers had the guts for it.

  Even Kent, who looked like he wouldn’t give your average badminton player much trouble, could scrap like a wild dog when he had to. So we had our pecking order in our house. Edgar whomped on Kent, and then I whomped on Edgar for whomping on Kent. I felt like it was my job and my duty, no matter how hard or how fun that job was. And no matter whether Kent appreciated me for it or not.

  With my back flat on the floor and Edgar on my chest, I balled my left fist, zeroed in on his puggy nose … and then Kent lunged. He grabbed my arm before I could let fly.

  “No, Danny, stop!” Kent squawked, though I could barely hear him over Edgar’s howl of delight. He could neither believe his luck nor contain his joy. Edgar thanked Kent by popping me a sharp, snapping left jab, right off of my forehead.

  “Kent!” I bellowed. I wasn’t even much bothered with Edgar anymore, since he was only doing exactly what he should have done in that situation. I’d have been angry if he didn’t punch me with a sweet opportunity like that.

  In one super heave, I blasted Edgar right off of me, sending him crashing into the base of the front door. Then, I went for Kent.

  “You idiot,” I barked as I gave him a hard backhand across his cheek. “You don’t break up a fight by holding one guy’s arm down so the other guy can pound him! How do you not know that? Have you been paying attention at all?” He was paying attention now as I bapped him across the face. Back and forth and back and forth with my right hand, while I held him still with my left.

  “I didn’t want you to kill my brother,” he protested.

  “You didn’t want … I’m your brother! And I was flat on my back!”

  “Yeah, Kent,” Edgar said, enjoying his seat on the floor. “Danny was losing.”

  “I was never losing,” I shouted, turning toward Edgar just as the front door opened and cracked him right in the back.

  “Ha!” I roared, still cuffing Kent casually into submission.

  Then I saw it was Dad coming through the door.

  I immediately felt bad, but there was nothing I could do about it now. I ceased all movement, though, releasing my grip on Kent.

  “Why?” Dad wailed, in that way of his. In just the way I knew he would. He had a low note he would hit at times, when we did stuff that wounded and saddened him. That note wounded and saddened me, too. Then he balled his fists up the best he could, and hit it again. “Why, Daniel? Why can’t you just leave them be?” He looked down, as if yelling at the rug. His hands trembled with the intensity of his anguish. The left fist he threatened the floor with looked like a normal fist. But the right one, the withered one, shook worse.

  I couldn’t look his disappointment straight on. So I had to do the other thing, the crappy, unfunny, unfair thing.

  “I think it’s their hair, Pop.”

  He looked up now, with his fist and his withered hand held unsteady in front of him.

  “You think it’s what?”

  “Oh, not this again, Danny,” Edgar barked.

  “Not again. Not now,” Kent moaned.

  They had offensive, antagonistic hair, both of them. Edgar’s was bunchy and big, like a snow cone of hair. Kent’s was straight and wispy and almost girly long. And it was orange. They both had bright orange punch-me hair. Mine was normal human brown, with a normal side part.

  “Half the guys in school have lined up to fight these two because of their hair. How am I supposed to resist when I have to look at it round the clock?”

  For a second, I convinced myself I was making a pretty good case. But then something happened that I never saw coming. Something I could not possibly have seen coming because it had never happened before. Something that was too unreal to be real and so I didn’t believe it was possible, even as I watched it rolling straight toward me.

  My dad, my sweet-natured, physically-unfit-for-service-in-two-wars-even-though-he-tried-to-sign-up-for-both father, threw himself forward in an effort to attack me.

  “They … are … not … getting … in … fights … because … of … their … hair!” Dad wheezed as he flailed awkwardly, clapping me on the chest and shoulders as I stared in complete shock. My brothers jumped in to restrain him. “They are getting in fights, Daniel, because you are training them to be chippy, combative ruffians! You mold them in your own image, so they’ll fight with anything that moves, for no apparent reason!”

  I had never seen him so upset. I had never felt, inside myself, so upset. Things did not upset me. That was part of my package, part of how this machine worked. But this vision here: My poor old man, enfeebled by polio, then again by post-polio—because life is loaded with great punch lines—who never did anybody an
y harm ever, was trying with everything he had to harm me. And everything he had barely amounted to anything. My poor dad couldn’t even throw me off balance. Not physically, at least.

  But it paralyzed me all the same. My arms hung at my sides as he tried and tried to get at me. Dad’s strength rapidly ran down, and both Edgar and Kent tried to assure him in low voices that everything was all right, but he wasn’t assured in any way. I wanted to tell him I was sorry. But nothing came out of me. When I couldn’t get it out in time, Dad finally started crying. Giving up. He just let my brothers hold him, weeping away.

  I was not going to cry, no, it just wasn’t going to happen because that was not how this machine worked. But all the strength that had to be diverted to holding back my tears made it even more impossible to tell Dad I was sorry and that I would do better.

  He deserved to hear that at least. But no. The machine was in high gear.

  He could cry. How come I couldn’t?

  Finally, I snapped out of my stupor. I blew past all three of them and bolted out the front door.

  “Why do you have to do these things?” he wailed, just before I had time to slam the door between me and his words.

  * * *

  Not that I’d have had an answer for him. I didn’t know why I had to do those things. I just had to, was all.

  Anyway, Edgar and Kent were lucky to have me around, to be honest. It was me making those two sad-sack brothers of mine into hard nuts who could handle anything that came their way. That’s what I figured. No way could Dad have ever taught them the stuff I taught them.

  Although there was one big thing I could never teach them. That was how to be as tough as the toughest guy I ever knew.

  Dad.

  “Daniel!”

  Oh, no, please.

  I was quickstep-walking away from the house and that scene, faster than most people could run. I didn’t lose any pace as I looked back over my shoulder to verify what I already knew.

  “Go home, Dad!” I yelled.

  That was pointless, of course. Once I looked back, he had me hooked, and he knew it.

  I stopped fast-walking, started backward-walking as I watched the old man put every which kind of energy into going not very fast at all. I stopped backward-walking and came to a stop. Dad wore a brace on his left leg that turned every other stride into a small pole-vaulting action. Made no difference to him as he huffed and hobbled down that sidewalk to get to me. His good left arm pumped the way anybody’s arm would when running, only it pumped at about a three-to-one rate compared to his right one.

  To look at his strained face, his frantic body language, you would find no sign that he didn’t believe he’d eventually catch me. Even when I started walking toward him to make the trip just marginally shorter, he didn’t let up one tiny bit on the gas.

  He practically fell into my arms with exhaustion when we finally came together. I held on to him as he struggled to catch his breath. And he held on to me as best he could.

  We hung on like that for a few minutes. Which was good. Without saying anything. Which was even better.

  If this bike didn’t take your breath away then either you never had any breath to begin with, or you didn’t deserve the breath you had.

  It was the exact, approximate model that Steve McQueen rode in The Great Escape. You just knew that every joker in every theater in every country in the world, with the possible exception of Germany—and even that possibility was beyond distant—was watching Steve McQueen in that movie with their jaws planted flat on the sticky, disgusting cinema floor.

  Most folks thought, by the way, that it was a BMW bike Mr. Steve was riding, since BMWs were the chosen bikes of the Nazis. And while being a Nazi bike would have been no fault of the machine’s, Steve McQueen was not riding a BMW in those thrilling scenes. The bike that was made to look like a World War II German BMW was, in fact, a Triumph.

  That event in history was a Triumph, just as the machine was a Triumph. And at this very moment, cruising down the highway at I-don’t-know-how-many miles per hour on a real Steve McQueen replica, I also felt very much like a Triumph.

  I had never felt anything in my life like the sensation of tearing down the midnight road at the controls of this magnificent man-made force of nature. And I knew, pretty much instantly, that I would spend the whole rest of my life in pursuit of exactly this thing I had in my power right now.

  Who wouldn’t?

  * * *

  The only problem, I suppose, was that it wasn’t my motorcycle. Yeah, that was probably a large part of the problem, but there was a lot more to it than that.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Mr. Macias said in that voice of his that could have sounded tired, but seemed to me more like something withheld. A voice restraining itself. “Sure, there was a lot more to it than that. There’s always a lot more to it than that.”

  He was leading me down the hall and out of the police station at about one o’clock on a Monday morning, which rightly still belonged to Sunday night. Mr. Macias was, among other things, my wrestling coach and practically my own personal guidance counselor. Months ago, he’d told me I could call him in the very likely event I found myself in trouble. Those were his very words, and this was that very trouble.

  “But maybe this particular instance,” I continued, “is the accumulation of a whole bunch of other more-to-its. Maybe you should just listen to me if you really want to hear my side of the story!”

  Mr. Macias had pushed through the two hefty glass doors of the police station and marched right down its four granite steps to the sidewalk. He stood, turned crisply on his heel, and addressed me directly.

  “Daniel Manion,” he growled. “Do you honestly mean to question my commitment to you, after you’ve just woken me from the deep depths of sleep? After I came basically running down to the station to make sure you were being treated fairly, do you truly believe I might still be thinking, ‘Surely, the kid couldn’t possibly have anything interesting to say for himself’?”

  I took a deep breath. To compose.

  He spoke lower and slower now, which might have appeared to be a positive sign. I knew it was no such thing. “You actually need time to think about your answer, Danny?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Macias … I mean, no, no, not at all. I was just trying to get the right form of words to match the form of your question. So I wouldn’t get it wrong by accident. Like if somebody asks ‘Have you ever not killed a man in self-defense?’ And you answer—”

  He struck like a sidewinder, his strong hand seizing me by the shirt collar and guiding me down the street in the direction of home. “No,” he said sharply.

  “No?” I chirped my confusion.

  “No, Danny. No. No was your right answer, because no, you would not ever question my commitment to you.”

  “No,” I said, and he released his grip so we could walk along in a more normal side-by-sidewinder fashion. “No, sir, Mr. Macias, I never would question that.”

  And I never, ever would. It really was simply about the form of the words. Because he was equally as committed to being precise and correct in the use of language as he was to being precise and correct about everything else.

  After a generous few silent strides, walking briskly in lockstep, Mr. Macias wasn’t going to wait any longer. “So?” he asked.

  “So?” I asked.

  “So, Daniel, what is the more? ‘More to it than that,’ is what you told me. At the very least, I think I deserve to hear your explanation for why an intelligent and not entirely demented young man would steal and crash a motorcycle, not to mention what possessed you to be out on the street cruising around like a mischief-seeking missile at such a late hour on a school night. I’d say I deserve to hear that, Mr. Manion, wouldn’t you?”

  “I would, sir. I definitely would. But now, since you said all that there, I’m feeling like I’m not going to have quite enough more to it to cover the situation.”

  This was where he could have gotten mean. Thi
s was where he would probably be justified in getting mean, for all the stupidity I was spraying over us both. It wasn’t like I was trying to be stupid. There was nothing that’d fill me with more dread than the possibility of pushing Mr. Roland Macias to anger. Everyone at school felt exactly that way, too.

  He was a force, Mr. Macias was. A power, a mystery, and a legend. Every last student in the whole school would agree that we had one genuine legend on our staff, though no one could really say why we believed it. Nobody really knew anything about the guy, his life outside of school, or his history, beyond the rough outline they gave us when he showed up at the beginning of the year. Recently retired military man, Rhodes scholar, two-time NCAA wrestling champion, and, possibly, Batman.

  He made no effort, as far as I could tell, to suggest anything unusual lurked behind his oversize reading glasses. But that just made the Batman theory all the more plausible.

  Maybe his aura was due to the stare. Come to think of it, yeah, it had to be the stare. I’d have wagered real money that he was capable of starting fires with that stare if he felt like it.

  He was doing it to me right now, eyeing me intently while still pounding the pavement straight ahead.

  “Okay, for starters, Mr. Macias, I didn’t steal that motorcycle. See, I know whose bike it is, and so that part of it is cool.”

  “That’s swell, Dan. That sorts everything out. But you know who else knows whose bike it is? The owner of the bike. Ricky Siber. And the police know who the real owner of the bike is, too, because they were told when Ricky Siber was good enough to phone them up and tell them that you stole his motorcycle.”

  “A misunderstanding, Mr. Macias. I’ll talk to Ricky myself tomorrow and everything will be just—”

  “Oh, right, you’ll talk to him tomorrow? Smooth everything over?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “Uh-huh. Now tell me, was it that smooth talking of yours that landed you and Mr. Siber in the jug for a week of detention after your fight?”

  Oh. People and their memories sometimes.

  “Mr. Macias, come on, you know how it is. Even the best of friends can get in a little scrap or two over time.”