Earlier that afternoon, the warden and his deputy, Chief Warrant Officer Holden, had drawn high card to see who stood the Friday night duty and who could go have fun at the Da Nang Officers’ Club, where First Lieutenant Wayne Ebberhardt threw a wetting-down party in celebration of his promotion to captain that day. The gunner had drawn the trey of clubs while the lieutenant pulled out the nine of diamonds. Even winning, Schuller still offered to stand the watch and let Holden go to the party, to which the chief warrant officer put up his hands like a good sport, refusing the offer, and urged the lieutenant to go have fun with his friends. He reassured Mike Schuller that all would go well tonight in his absence.

Normally, the warden would watch the regular weekly film seated in a lawn chair on the blockhouse back porch, with other members of his staff, directly behind the minimum-risk prisoners, who made up the vast majority of the men who resided inside the brig. These less-dangerous confinees lived in two lines of tin-roofed, screen-walled, wooden hooches that surrounded the recreation yard and main cell block, a two-story concrete building that housed the high-risk inmates, the library, and the chow hall. The rows of hooches sat between the cell block and the prison’s twelve-foot-tall security fence. Spaced among every few hooches, engineers had erected sea-hut-style shower and toilet facilities for the low-risk inmates. Water came from a small, silver-painted tower built next to the blockhouse, which controlled its flow into the brig, as well as the main circuit for the prison’s electrical power.

Tonight, Chief Warrant Officer Holden, still concerned about the potential of the “one black motherfucker” remark setting off trouble, decided to spend the evening in the cell block’s control center with Gunnery Sergeant MacMillan. To him it seemed a more entertaining choice than suffering through Eight on the Lam, a year-old comedy about a bank teller played by Bob Hope with seven children and a crazy housekeeper, Phyllis Diller, who finds a sackful of loot, gets accused by his employer of embezzlement, and goes on the lam with the money, his kids, and their nanny while a nitwit police detective played by Jonathan Winters pursues them. Since he had liked last week’s movie choice, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the prisoners seemed dulled to boredom by the Kubrick blockbuster, he felt confident that tonight’s weak comedy more appropriately addressed the intellects of most inmates.

While the recreation yard bustled with confinees yammering and grabassing, waiting for the sky to finally go dark so that the projectionist could spread the Technicolor entertainment across the main cell block’s white concrete wall, kicking things off with a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, Celestine Anderson took his seat at the end of the picnic bench closest to the sidewalk that led to the sally port where Bad John and Iron Balls stood duty.

Brian Pitts took a seat at the opposite end of the bench next to James Harris while Randal Carnegie, Sam Martin, and Clarence Jones sat between him and the Ax Man. Robert Matthews and five other Black Stone Rangers sat on the bench across the table.

“As soon as you pop open the gates, up in control, I want you to beat feet back down here,” Pitts reminded Harris, whispering so that no one could overhear their conversation. “All hell’s gonna break loose, so I don’t want you getting caught up in the confusion and other bullshit. Me and Bobby Matthews will shoot the gap down to that head, right over there by the fence. He grabbed a pair of diagonal cutters in the tool shop yesterday, and stuck them in his mattress. He has them in his pocket tonight. We’ll start chopping through the wire as soon as we get down to the fence, whether you’re with us or not. Once shit starts happening, we won’t have but a few minutes to bust out before the guards start lighting up the fences and putting out the dogs. So you better cut a trail as soon as you pull those handles.”

Harris nodded and then laughed with excitement, pounding his right fist in his left palm. “We gonna bring down this motherfucker! Rangers gonna put it to the man! First thing we gotta do, we kill that piece of shit Elmore!”

“You ain’t heard shit I just said!” Pitts snapped, grabbing Harris by the sleeve. “Fuck Elmore, man. We got two million in cash and fifty million dollars worth of dope tucked in a tunnel out west of Saigon. Focus on that, motherfucker!”

“Shit, man,” Harris said, “I thought we kill Elmore, then go. It take me no time to waste that rat-bag pile of dogshit.”

“Mau Mau,” Pitts said, and then turned the man’s face with his hand so he could see his eyes and his seriousness, “forget Elmore. We kill him, they come after us for murder. They’d have us dead to rights. Us murdering Elmore now would be stupid. My lawyer, Lieutenant Ebberhardt, told me that Elmore’s statement got burned up a few weeks ago, and now he ain’t talkin’. So CID’s out of luck. That’s why they stuck him in the cell across from us. So we’d scare him into cooperating. Right now all they got on me is desertion, and they’re trying to say I collaborated with the enemy because my cowboys opened fire on them. They ain’t got shit.”

“My lawyer, some cracker look like a zombie with white hair and pasty skin, Captain Carter,” Harris said, and laughed. “Man, the dude got breath that peel paint off the shithouse wall. He feedin’ me that same line, too. Say all they got on me is dope and sellin’ the shit, but they lost the evidence now. So they ain’t got much more than desertion and escape. That captain say I probably walk out here with six-six and a kick. ’Course, that don’t mean shit, ’cause tonight we gonna bring this motherfucker down.”

“Yeah, that’s about what Ebberhardt told me, and that’s what Matthew’s lawyer told him, too. I think six-six and a kick’s a standard package for turds like us,” Pitts nodded. Then again he took Harris by the chin. “We’re getting out of here tonight, though. Six-six and a kick doesn’t cut much against two million in cash and fifty million in dope.”

“No shit, man,” Harris agreed, now locking eyes with Pitts.

“So you need to get all this riot nonsense out of your head. Don’t get sidetracked in it, and don’t fuck with Elmore,” Pitts said, narrowing his eyes so that Harris understood him. “We leave him alone, he keeps his mouth shut. Since they ain’t got squat on us, nobody will really care that we escaped. They might look a little while up here, but they won’t look that hard for us. With this war, the Marine Corps got more important fish to fry. We just quietly disappear, and slip on down to Saigon. We pull out the cash and the stash, close the deals to get our dope on the market, then shoot on over to Cambodia, where my man with Bird Airways will haul us out to Bangkok. When we get there, we’ll start living a life so rich you can wipe your ass on hundred-dollar bills if that’s what tickles your fancy. So don’t fuck up, Mau Mau! You do, and you’ll stay here while me and Bobby go south. You might have a few kicks bringing down this motherfucker, but you’ll always be poor.”

“I ain’t fuckin’ up, man,” Harris said, and pulled Brian Pitts’s hand off his chin.

“Okay, then,” Pitts said and stood up. “Let’s do it.”

Lance Corporal Kenny Brookman and Sergeant Mike Turner had just walked to the edge of the prison yard so they could watch the movie. When Brian Pitts stood up and James Harris began yelling obscenities at him, the two men backed away and let Corporal Nathan L. Todd and Lance Corporal Paul Fletcher take charge of the disturbance.

“Fuck getting my head bashed in,” Iron Balls said to his sidekick. “The Chief and Fletch need a few lumps, after what you and me got the other day.”

“What if they get a hoorah going?” Bad John asked, watching Paul Fletcher, a twenty-year-old kid who stood six-foot-three and tipped the scales at 219 pounds, all muscle.

The lance corporal whom fellow guards and prisoners alike called Fletch had grown up in Ardmore, Oklahoma, where he played high school football and spent his summers harvesting wheat from North Texas to Canada, working seven days a week from the day after school let out in May until the end of August, just before Labor Day weekend and the beginning of a new school year. Most boys didn’t last the summer. Fletch did it every year since junior high, when his mother relented and let her thirteen-year-old child travel that long, hard road with his big brother, sixteen-year-old Raymond.

Then, right in the middle of the 1966 wheat harvest, six weeks after Paul had graduated from high school, the dutiful lad called home on a Sunday night and his mother told him that he had a letter from the draft board waiting in the mailbox. The next day, in North Platt, Nebraska, he found a Marine Corps recruiter and joined up, rather than landing as a draftee in the army and taking the same kind of abuse his drafted brother had endured. After boot camp and a tour in Vietnam, Ray Fletcher told Paul to join the air force or run to Canada, but don’t get drafted. It ain’t worth it.

Not one to take advice well, Paul enlisted in the Marines and then told his brother, fresh out of the army, who howled laughing.

“You’d been better off getting drafted!” Ray said on the telephone after the lad had told his mother the news.

However, Paul Fletcher breezed through recruit training and graduated as platoon guide and meritorious private first class. He drew the occupational specialty of 5800, military policeman, and out of boot camp went to the U.S. Army Military Police and Criminal Investigation schools at Fort Gordon, Georgia. When he got to Da Nang, four months ago, he volunteered to work in the brig. He told Lieutenant Colonel Webster that he hoped to become an officer and a provost marshal, and that working in corrections would round him out. The colonel agreed. He needed good men in the brig, especially an intimidating, muscled hulk with a brain.

Seeing Paul Fletcher come at him and then clamp a death grip on the nape of his neck made Mau Mau Harris immediately cooperative.

“Yo, Fletch, man, hey, I’m cool, man,” Harris whined, dancing on his tiptoes as the lance corporal led him from the table.

Then Corporal Todd got in Mau Mau’s face.

“What is your major malfunction, Mister Harris?” Todd growled while Fletch still held the prisoner dangling like a marionette.

“That motherfucker, Pitts, he pinch my ass while I waitin’ to see the flick, man,” Harris said, pointing at Brian Pitts, who smiled innocently. “Piss me the fuck off, man.”

“Keep you hands to yourself, Mister Pitts,” Todd called to the prisoner seated at the picnic table.

“Hey, Chief, I ain’t done nothing,” Pitts said, shrugging and smiling at the corporal the inmates and guards alike called Chief because of his Cheyenne heritage.

“You two will sit down, and keep your hands and your remarks to yourselves, or you will go to your cells. Clear?” Todd said in a strong voice.

“I ain’t sittin’ by that motherfucker,” Harris said, crossing his arms and shaking his head after Fletch had let him go. “I want to see Gunny MacMillan, let him straighten that cracker motherfucker Pitts out, since you won’t. You white boys be stickin’ together, I know.”

“Fletch, haul Mister Harris up to control and let the gunny talk to him, and then lock him in his cell,” Todd said, and cast a menacing look at Brian Pitts.

“What?” Pitts retorted, holding his hands up in innocence. “I ain’t done shit. Harris just fucking with you, Chief.”

“He’s gone, Mister Pitts. One more word from you and I will take you to your cell as well,” Todd said, walking back to his post at the front of the recreation yard, standing among the left bank of picnic tables filled with prisoners. Lance Corporal Fletcher would watch the right grouping of tables once he returned from upstairs.

Brian Pitts smiled and slouched back against the table, watching the empty wall, waiting for the cartoon to begin, and the fight that would set off the riot.

Celestine Anderson kept smiling more and more as the sky darkened. He knew that as soon as Bad John and Iron Balls stepped to their usual spots where they could see the cartoon projected on the wall, he could attack them. The Ax Man relished the idea of putting the hurt on Iron Balls, a guard he had hated more than others since the day Turner arrived last December.

His partner, Bad John, came on the scene in May, but had served in Vietnam since February. One day in April he dumped a peasant woman on her can who had stopped to pee on the side of the road, right next to the spot where Lance Corporal Brookman stood sentry duty at the main entrance of Three-MAF headquarters compound. The woman, squatting low and pissing down her splayed fingers, sending the yellow stream out her rolled-up pants leg, fell in the puddle of urine when the Marine shoved her on her shoulders and told her to get the fuck out of the area.

A Vietnamese policeman saw the incident, and took offense at the belligerent lance corporal’s assault on some poor old lady whose only crime was to stop and take a leak in front of the Marine headquarters gate. The cop complained to his boss, who shared in the patrolman’s anger and sent the incident up the flagpole. The local constabulary demanded that the offending military policeman should get run up the target carriage and disked.

In turn, Colonel Webster received a call from the Three-MAF chief of staff, who angrily advised him that the commanding general did not want Bad John any longer standing sentry duty at anybody’s gate. So the provost marshal shit-canned Brookman to brig duty.

Iron Balls got dumped on Freedom Hill after continually loafing at all his other military police assignments, and soon no staff NCO in the provost marshal’s office wanted him working in his duty section.

“Look at that splib smiling at me like I might suck his dick,” Iron Balls said, and nodded toward Celestine Anderson, who grinned even more now.

“Think he might want to start a hoorah?” Bad John said nervously, seeing the excited look that the Ax Man had in his eyes.

“Just let him try,” Iron Balls said, grinning back at the prisoner. “I passed word to the guys up in the watch posts on top of the blockhouse and at the fence corners that anybody start a hoorah, they needed to open fire in the air.”

“Fuck nuts Holden or the gunny buy that?” Brookman said, raising his eyebrows and blinking at the sergeant.

“No. You think I’m gonna tell those two pansy-asses something like that?” Turner sneered. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them. Meantime, any of these knuckleheads go to throw down on me or you, and my boys in the towers gonna start shooting.”

“In the air, though,” Bad John affirmed, wanting reassurance that he would not get connected to any incident that led to bloodshed.

“Fuck, yeah,” Iron Balls said, and wrinkled his lip. “Be nice, though, if somebody slipped up and shot that Looney Tunes spook over there that keeps smiling at me like a queer in a boys’ camp.”

Brian Pitts had wanted to wait until Paul Fletcher had returned to his post in the recreation yard before he sent Celestine Anderson after Iron Balls and Bad John, but he had overheard Corporal Todd’s instruction to lock Harris in his cell once he had talked to Gunny MacMillan. Mau Mau couldn’t pull the control center’s handles from his cell. So the Snowman had to improvise, and estimate that his partner had time enough to get upstairs, but not enough time to finish his informal request mast with the gunny.

“Go ahead, Ax Man,” Pitts said, taking a chance based on his instincts, and then nudged Sam Martin to give Anderson a hand.

Celestine Anderson let out a war cry and sprang to his feet, bouncing on his toes as he dashed toward the sally port where Bad John and Iron Balls stood outside, far enough to see the movie and too far from the cubicle to take advantage of its iron-barred shelter. Both Martin and Jones joined the Ax Man in his pursuit of the two guards, who had now turned and tried to run to the reinforced concrete booth where they had truncheons and tear-gas grenades, and where, despite orders against weapons in the yard, Sergeant Turner had stashed a Remington model 870 folding-stock shotgun loaded with ought-two man-killers.

When the Ax Man and his two accomplices started at the pair of loafing guards, all fifty-seven members of the Freedom Hill Chapter of Black Stone Rangers jumped to their feet and began shouting, “That’s one black motherfucker!”

Raising their fists and chanting, the rangers spread among the three hundred other prisoners, encouraging them to join the harangue. If an inmate did not voluntarily get up and start participating in the hoorah, they yanked him to his feet and slapped him around until he changed his mind.

Despite the threats and abuse, several prisoners who had too much to lose by rioting, getting months added to a sentence that might end in days, slipped under the picnic tables. Others, such as Donald T. Wilson and Michael Fryer, tough and intimidating even to a crowd of rioting inmates, openly defied the rangers’ orders and remained seated. The two men sat quietly, watching and daring anyone to try something with either man.

Kenny Brookman screamed when he saw the three black men running at him. He tried to wave to the Marines in the towers to open fire, but Ax Man Anderson took him down with an outstretched right arm, as he ran past the guard, clotheslining Bad John across the throat, lifting him off his feet, and slamming him to the ground, flat on his back. As Brookman rolled on his stomach and tried to get back to his feet, Sam Martin kicked his size twelve, extra-wide Bata Bullet tennis shoe hard into the downed lance corporal’s ribs, knocking the air out of the crumpled man’s lungs.

“Call me one black motherfucker, motherfucker!” Martin yelled as he kicked Bad John again. “Say it, motherfucker. I want to hear how tough you get now with my boot in your ass!”

Clarence Jones looked over his shoulder and noticed a Marine standing on the catwalk outside the guard tower overhead the blockhouse and saw the man raising a rifle to his shoulder.

“He gonna shoot!” Jones yelled and grabbed Martin by the back of his shirt collar and pulled him to the ground with him.

Suddenly several gunshots cracked overhead, and Brian Pitts jumped under the picnic table with Randal Carnegie and Bobby Matthews. All three men looked toward the sally port and saw Celestine Anderson on top of Iron Balls Mike Turner, beating his head against the hard-packed ground.

More than a dozen single-shot reports of the tower guards’ rifles echoed across the prison yard, and rapidly sent the hoorah into full-blown chaos. While some men ran for cover, many others, angered by the shooting, rose in rebellion, and now sought to destroy everything in sight. Prior to the shooting, the company of guards rallying in the blockhouse had a chance at regaining control of the inmates, but not now. Not after the shooting had served to ratchet up so many prisoners’ emotions to such a high frenzy that they now vented their anger with unbridled outrage and showed no thoughts about danger or consequence.

“That sounded like gunfire!” Chief Warrant Officer Frank Holden exclaimed, and then dashed into the upstairs hallway of the main cell block when a second volley echoed through the brig. “We’ve got big trouble outside!”

James Harris casually stepped to the side of Gunny Ted MacMillan’s desk, where he had begun telling the watch commander a bullshit story about Brian Pitts organizing a gang of white supremacists, and that was why he had lost his temper with the man. While he spun his yarn, Mau Mau spied the gunny’s infamous Babe Ruth signature model Louisville Slugger baseball bat leaned in the corner of the control unit, behind the senior guard’s desk.

“Sit your ass on the floor, now!” MacMillan ordered Harris, and then looked at Paul Fletcher. “You stay in here with this maggot while I go out to the sally port with the gunner and check this shit out.”

Holden had already started down the stairs when MacMillan ran after him.

“Ten to one they got into it with Turner and Brookman again,” the gunny said, running after the chief warrant officer as the two men hurried down the concrete steps to the lower deck.

“What’s going on, man?” Harris said, sitting on the floor, easing his feet underneath his body so he could spring for the bat before Fletcher realized he made his move.

“Prisoner Harris, keep your mouth shut and remain on the floor,” Fletcher said, and took the nightstick from the silver ring on his Sam Browne belt.

“Why you be down on me, man? I ain’t done shit,” Harris said, putting his hands over the top of his head so Fletcher would realize that the prisoner meant him no harm.

Staff Sergeant Orlando Abduleses, a dark-skinned Marine from Sacramento, California, whom everyone had nicknamed Abdul the Butcher, had charge of the guards in the exterior posts and in the blockhouse. When the fight began, he immediately sent six men rushing toward the trouble. They made it only halfway through the crowd of inmates before scores of prisoners took them down, and sent the Marines running back to the administration building. Then the tide of excited prisoners turned toward the cell block and pushed forward, surrounding Celestine Anderson, Sam Martin, and Clarence Jones as they pummeled Bad John Brookman and Iron Balls Turner.

“Control! Control! Blockhouse, over,” Staff Sergeant Abduleses shouted over his handheld walkie-talkie and squawked through the radio speaker of the unit resting in its battery charger on Gunny MacMillan’s desk.

“Stay put,” Lance Corporal Fletcher said, and walked to the gunny’s desk and picked up the radio. “Staff Sergeant Abdul, Lance Corporal Fletcher here. The gunny’s gone down in the yard with the deputy warden. Anything I can—”

Mau Mau Harris cut the lance corporal’s sentence short with Gunny MacMillan’s Louisville Slugger.

When the guard turned to answer the radio, Harris had quietly slid across the slick-waxed tile floor, grabbed the baseball bat, and sprang to his feet with a roundhouse swing, catching the lance corporal behind the ear and sending him tumbling over the desk, unconscious and badly injured but still breathing.

“You big-ass motherfucker,” Harris said, looking at the crumpled Marine and then taking another swing through the air with the yard-long, flame-treated ash wood club. He wiped a spot of blood off the bat against his trousers leg and then yanked down all the handles in the control unit.

Mau Mau danced into the hallway and started to jog downstairs, but then looked at the bat once again, and turned toward the gate that led into the maximum-security section of the cell block.

“Yo, Elmore,” Harris said with laugh. “Maybe you be wondering why your cell door just slide open. Elmo! Here I come, baby!”

When the doors to the sally port sprang open, Celestine Anderson led a wave of prisoners inside and met Chief Warrant Officer Holden and Gunnery Sergeant MacMillan head-on. Other prisoners had surrounded and taken down Nathan L. Todd, and now sat with him trapped under a picnic table.

“Bobby, I think Harris has fucked up,” Brian Pitts said to Robert Matthews, looking around him and realizing that Mau Mau had already spent more than enough time to get down to the yard once the interior gates had sprung open, and he still had not emerged from the building. “He’s gone after Elmore, that dumb sack of shit. We’ve wasted way too much time waiting on that fucked-up asshole. Let’s run on down to the fence before the guards get their floodlights set up and put a reaction team in here. I guess Harris would rather be stupid and poor.”

Just as the two conspirators headed across the chaotic prison yard where some inmates crouched under picnic tables, trying to avoid injury from the crowd of several hundred men gone wild, now trying to destroy everything in sight, James Harris called to them, clutching James Elmore by the back of his shirt while the terrified man wiggled and danced in urine-soaked pants. When his captive would not move fast enough to suit him, Mau Mau gave him a rap across the legs with the bat, causing the snitch to let go a harsh scream.

“I told you not to fuck with that piece of shit!” Brian Pitts bellowed when he saw James Elmore and the crazy, smiling Mau Mau Harris.

“Shit, Snowman, I thought you like to see what this motherfucker do when I shove this bat up his ass,” Harris said, laughing. “Come on, man, don’t you want to watch me fuck this bitch with Gunny MacMillan’s big stick?”

“Were you born this stupid or did you have to work at it?” Pitts said to Mau Mau Harris while looking at the pitiful James Elmore with his pissed pants and gold front tooth.

“He killed Wild Thing, so he ought to pay somethin’ for it,” Harris said, shaking the frightened bag of wet rags as he spoke.

“No, he ratted us out!” Pitts argued, looking at Harris and realizing that it was useless trying to reason with the man. Then he shook his head and turned his back on Mau Mau, heading toward the fence. “Come on, Bobby, this stupid motherfucker wants to get us all hung out to dry with him.”

James Harris released Elmore, and the scared man dashed toward the cell block, hoping to find a good hiding place.

“Look, I let him go!” Harris said, following Pitts and Matthews.

“Huong and Bao killed Wild Thing and some other people, too,” Pitts snarled at Mau Mau. “You watched. Blaming that poor, stupid bastard. Fucking Elmore. That’s why you and guys like you end up in places like this, or dead. You have no balls to take responsibility. We all killed Wild Thing, damn you!”

Then Brian Pitts broke into a run toward the toilet facility and the fence line that now lay obscured in the darkness. Bobby Matthews and Mau Mau Harris double-timed close behind him.

“Get those cutters going, man,” Pitts said to Bobby Matthews, breathing hard and looking to see if anyone watched them.

Matthews began working the sharp blades of the ten-inch-long diagonal cutters into the fence wire one link at a time, using both hands to snap the pliers’ jaws together. His weak grip frustrated James Harris, who tossed the baseball bat aside and then yanked the tool from the man’s hands and went to snipping a hole with one hand and pulling apart the chain-link fabric with the other.

“Help me push this shit apart so we can get out this motherfucker,” Harris grumbled, struggling with the fence, trying to pry open a hole big enough for the three of them to climb through.

While Pitts and Matthews strained to enlarge the hole, Harris snipped against the heavy-mesh steel fencing and slowly spread open a widening gap. However, beyond the fence, Lieutenant Schuller had engineers lay down three rows of German tape stacked as an additional barrier outside the twelve-foot-high fence, after the two inmates had escaped the prior week.

Harris looked at the coiled wire with the razorlike barbs on it and then glanced back at Pitts.

“We ain’t cuttin’ through that shit,” he said, still snipping at the chain-link, but now thinking about the next barrier.

“Low crawl under it, just like in boot camp. It ain’t tied down,” Pitts said, looking at the coils and noticing that the engineers had not yet driven stakes to hold the wire in place against the ground. “We’ll get a few cuts, and rip our clothes to shit, but we can slide under it. Just take a little time.”

“What the fuck, man, you leaving without saying good-bye?” Randal Carnegie said, coughing after running across the prison yard when he noticed in the low light cast from the end lamps on the nearby hooches the three men cutting the fence.

“Who that flaky-Jake with you, Randy?” Harris said, looking over his shoulder as he worked on the fence and seeing the Chu Lai Hippie accompanied by the slimeball Kevin Watts.

“My bunkmate, he’s cool,” Carnegie said, putting his arm around the dark-haired and pale-skinned Watts.

Brian Pitts looked at the unwelcome company. Neither man comprehended even the basic notion of loyalty. The Hippie had allegiance only to himself, and Watts would be a turncoat in a heartbeat and lie with a straight face. While he didn’t like James Elmore one bit, Brian Pitts thought even that sorry bag of worms had more redeeming qualities than Kevin Watts.

“That lawyer friend of yours you keep bragging about,” Pitts said to Carnegie. “You think he would help us once we get out?”

“I don’t know, man,” Carnegie said, and looked at the growing hole that Harris managed to get cut in the fence. “I ain’t leavin’. I only got two more weeks left and I’m gone home and out of the crotch. Watts here got three years to do, so he might want to tag along with you guys.”

“He’s welcome to run with us,” Pitts said, smiling at the intruder and considering that the skinny, out-of-shape Watts wouldn’t put up much of a fight when the time came to dump his scaly ass. They could easily leave him dead in a ditch once they had put a little distance between them and the brig.

Suddenly a flickering yellow glow began to illuminate the fence line where Pitts and his cohorts worked to escape from the brig before the guards got organized, and the inevitable infantry reaction platoon could arrive and secure the surrounding area.

“The dumb motherfuckers are burning the hooches!” Pitts shouted at Harris. “Come on, let’s try to get through the fence before the guards see us. It’s going to look like broad daylight here once these cracker boxes start flamin’ up.”

“Fuck, yeah!” Harris yelled, and raised his fist in the air after seeing the rows of prisoner quarters starting to lick flames through their windows and roofs. “Burn this motherfucker down!”

He had no more than shouted when the five prisoners heard the unmistakable chop of an M60, .30-caliber machine gun opening fire toward them. Outside the fence they saw the splashes of dirt leaping from the ground as the bullets struck twenty feet from them and began to close in their direction, warning the escaping inmates to turn back.

Brian Pitts fell hard against the head wall, gasping for breath, a dozen feet back inside the fence and shouted to Harris, who now worked more frantically than ever trying to open the hole so they could still escape.

“Look at him,” he said to Bobby Matthews. “That’s what I loved about that guy. He has never considered impossibility. We’re fucked, but that dumb bastard thinks that he can still get through this fence, and those bullets will just bounce off his hard head.”

“Hey, bro, me and Kev, we’re gonna head on back to the picnic tables,” the Chu Lai Hippie said, patting Brian Pitts on the shoulder. “Better luck next time.”

Pitts said nothing, but just leaned against the side of the head, its opposite wall now starting to burn. He stayed there, watching Mau Mau Harris desperately fighting the fence wire while the guards fired their machine guns down the outer perimeter of the fence until the man finally looked over his shoulder and saw the Snowman shaking his head and motioning to him to give up.

“Yo, man, those guards they only tryin’ to scare us back,” Harris said, breathing hard as he fell against the head wall next to where Brian and Bobby waited for him. “We climb through the wire, they ain’t gonna shoot us.”

“I think they would love to shoot us all right now,” Brian Pitts said, and smiled, shrugging his shoulders at the ever-optimistic Harris. “Let’s go back and sit under a picnic table and figure out what we want to do now.”

Lobo Gunn had downed a six-pack of beer before sunset and now finished his second one when he smelled the smoke and noticed the glow coming off Hill 327.

“Looks like Charlie rocketed the brig tonight,” he casually mumbled to his pal Buck Taylor, who had worked halfway through his second six-pack of Budweiser.

“Someone needs to grab Mike Schuller and tell him his house is on fire!” Taylor shouted through the crowd at a table where Terry O’Connor and Jon Kirkwood had the brig officer cornered, talking shop.

“Fire?” Schuller said and stood up. Then he saw the infernal glow rising on the brig side of the mountain. He quickly shifted his eyes across the gathering, searching for Lieutenant Colonel Webster, who had given him a lift from the provost marshal’s office, but the PMO had already gone. Then he looked at Kirkwood and O’Connor. “Hey, guys, you’ve got to get me up to the brig. Colonel Webster must have gotten word and left already; he probably couldn’t find me because we were sitting back here, out of sight.”

“Grab your hat and let’s fly,” O’Connor said, looking to see Wayne Ebberhardt, who came running to them.

“Colonel Webster just left with the chief of staff,” the newly promoted captain said. “We’ll take the office jeep.”

“What about me?” Michael Carter asked, hurrying behind Ebberhardt, Kirkwood, O’Connor, and Schuller. “I don’t think we can fit five in the jeep.”

“Mikie,” Jon Kirkwood said, stopping and taking the captain by the shoulders, “you need to find Movie Star and have him take you and Major Dickinson up to the brig. They will need the staff judge advocate there, and you can ride with him.”

“What about Major-Select Heyster and the others?” Carter asked, looking at the group of prosecutors standing in their usual small circle, Charlie with his pipe clenched in this teeth.

“They don’t have any clients in the brig, so they would just become curious onlookers, and would most likely get in the way,” Kirkwood said, turning Carter back toward him. “Don’t worry about those guys. Go get Movie Star and the other jeep.”

“Well, where is Lance Corporal Dean, anyway?” Carter asked, wringing his hands and turning again to look in all directions. “I saw Lance Corporal Pounds with Sergeant Amos and Corporal Farmer all talking to Staff Sergeant Pride just a moment ago, but Dean disappeared right after he ate dinner. I haven’t seen him for quite a long time. Not in the past hour, anyway.”

“Use your head, Skipper,” O’Connor said, pointing at his temple and tapping it. “It’s Friday night. Bet our horny lance corporal has a date with Rosy Palm back in the barracks. Take a look there.”

“Well, he’ll just have to send her back to her quarters on her own then,” Carter said, putting his nose in the air. “We have an emergency, and no time to spare for running prom dates home. I am sure that Major Dickinson won’t even want to know about Movie Star’s date. Is she a nurse? The name doesn’t sound Vietnamese.”

“No, Mike, but she is an American,” O’Connor said, and then laughed. “You be nice to her.”

“Of course!” Captain Carter huffed, and then took off running toward the enlisted quarters, where Lance Corporal Dean lived in a cubicle wallpapered with centerfold pinups from the past dozen issues of Penthouse magazine.

“You asshole!” Wayne Ebberhardt said, laughing as he jogged alongside Terry O’Connor. “Only Michael Carter would not know the true identity of Rosy Palm and her five sisters who never say no. It’s almost worth going back to watch!”

Jon Kirkwood had already sat down behind the steering wheel, and Mike Schuller occupied the front passenger seat, leaving the back bench for Ebberhardt and O’Connor. When the two captains jumped aboard, Kirkwood popped the clutch and raced toward the air base main gate.

“Don’t fuck with me right now, man, I’m almost there,” Movie Star called out, not taking his eyes off the pair of large breasts and nearly hairless pubic triangle in the centerfold photo that he held up with his left hand while his right worked frantically at his crotch and had his libido racing at ultrahigh speed. His blurring vision shifted continuously from the pinup’s muff to her breasts, to her bright-red lips, then back to her muff.

When he reached his slippery right hand toward the night table where he had a large plastic bottle of creamy-pink baby lotion with a handy pump top, trying to quickly reload his palm with the sweet-smelling lubricant and get his sloppy fist back into action, he heard a high-pitched scream that for an instant he thought came from a woman. The lance corporal sat up only to see Captain Michael Carter standing in the cubicle entrance, twittering with his hands over his eyes and vibrating on his toes.

“Oh, my God!” Carter cried, glancing down to see the naked, fully erect Marine. Then he covered his eyes and twittered again like a young, inexperienced girl getting her first look at pornography.

“Holy shit, sir, I’m almost there, can’t you give me just about thirty seconds?” Movie Star whined, and then went back to work on his masturbation with furious intensity.

“Oh, I’ve got to get some air!” Carter squealed, and staggered back into the center aisle of the barracks, holding his hands across his chest and gasping for breath. “Corporal, you have no shame! Oh, my God! Captain O’Connor said you had a girl here with you, a person named Rose something or other.”

“Yeah, sir, Rosy Palm, she’s right here,” Dean called back and began groaning. “Oh, that’s it, baby. Take it all. Yeah, ride it hard. Let your daddy come home. Oh, yeah, baby.”

“Oh, my God!” Carter gasped, stepping back into the lance corporal’s doorway, looking to see if a girl was there and considering that he might not have noticed her at his first glance. However, when he took his second look, he only saw the driver with his hand stroking away and a stream of semen suddenly gushing over the top of his fist.

“Damn, sir,” Movie Star said, catching his breath and wiping himself with a towel that he had lain by his side, “what’s so fucking important?”

“You’ve got to drive me and the colonel, or rather the major, to the brig,” Carter said in a rapid-fire staccato. “We think that the Viet Cong have attacked it and overrun the place. It’s on fire! You can see it burning from down here.”

“Why the fuck would Charlie want to rocket the brig?” Dean said, pulling on his utility trousers without putting on any underwear, and then slipping on his blouse without a T-shirt under it. Then he flopped on the side of his bunk, yanked up his socks, stabbed his feet down in his boots, and laced them before Michael Carter could think of a reason why anyone would want to rocket a jail.

“You know, I cannot imagine how I can explain what just happened in your cubicle when I go to confession to the chaplain tomorrow,” Carter said, completely flustered and walking with a hurried step alongside the driver as they headed toward the jeep where Major Dudley Dickinson sat in the passenger seat, waiting and trying to make a two-way radio work that Staff Sergeant Pride had given to him so he could communicate with the PMO if needed.

“What do you have to confess, sir?” Dean said, jumping in the driver’s seat while Carter climbed over the side and fell onto the back bench.

“Why, your masturbation, of course,” Carter replied, straightening himself up.

Dudley Dickinson looked at Lance Corporal Dean and then glanced over his shoulder at Carter.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Dickinson growled at the captain.

“I saw the lance corporal, sir,” Carter stammered, and then blushed so badly that he could not wrestle his voice from his throat.

“What? You walked in on this shitbird jacking off?” Dickinson asked, and then laughed so hard he lost his breath.

“Yes, sir,” Carter answered, and took a hard swallow. “Some of the men told me that Movie Star had a date accompany him to his barracks, a girl named Rose or something. So I wandered in, and I did knock, by the way. I fully expected to see him having a nice conversation with a young woman, but what I encountered! Well, sir! Like I tried to tell Lance Corporal Dean, I just have no idea how I will explain it to the chaplain when I go to confession tomorrow.”

“You fucking moron, Rosy Palm! Your damned hand! Haven’t you ever?” Dickinson shouted, and then laughed as the jeep rolled past the air base’s main gate and headed for the brig. “No, I take it back, you probably have never whacked your noodle, have you.”

“If you mean masturbation, sir,” Carter said, blushing uncontrollably, “I do not make that a practice in my life. I pray about it when I feel my loins aroused. I certainly do not discuss the matter with anyone.”

“Whoever left your cage door unlocked back there in Boston should get the death penalty,” Dickinson growled while Movie Star smiled as he drove, holding in his laughter.