The paunchy, jowly man just stared at Milo for a long minute. Despite the air conditioning, sweat gleamed on his balding head; his short, pudgy fingers trembled and his dark, beady eyes blinked incessantly behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. All through their several meetings, his color had alternated between a pasty white and a glowing beet red. His thin lips fluttered, and Milo suspected that the anus bunkered up between those porcine haunches must be spasming wildly.
At last, the most uncivil civil servant burst out, repeating himself for the umpteenth time, “But but you simply cannot be Lieutenant Colonel Milo Moray. I don’t know who or what you are, but you absolutely cannot be him! It’s impossible, do you hear me? The doctors at Walter Reed say that you have the physical constitution of a twenty-five-year-old man, did you know that, whoever you are? And Lieutenant Colonel Milo Moray is almost sixty-five years old, and you … you don’t look one day over thirty-five years old, if that! So who are you? What are you? When did you assume Moray’s identity and why?
“Yes, your prints match the records … but that can only mean that someone, sometime, somewhere, has doctored them, and that’s a job for the CID, I think.”
“Then why don’t you ring CID up, Mr. Henshaw?” Milo said disgustedly. “And while you and they are playing your games, just let me get back to ’Nam, to do what I do best.”
Pale once more, Henshaw again stared at Milo. “You must be a raving lunatic, whatever else you are. You want to go back to that filthy, bloodsoaked hellhole? Anyone with any sense or the moral fiber to recognize that what we are doing, have done, there is wrong is doing everything possible, pulling every string pullable, to get out, get reassigned to almost anywhere. It’s a no-win situation, and the plug will certainly be pulled on the whole stinking imperialistic mess just as soon as Senator McGovern is elected president and that warmongering Nixon is out of Washington.”
Milo smiled coldly. “Mr. Henshaw, were I you, I would not make the error of holding my breath until the senator becomes president. Despite everything that you believe, disbelieve and opine, I am a good bit older than you, I’ve been around America and Americans some longer, and I can tell you that they are a proud people, a people accustomed to winning, and very damned few of them are thus likely to vote for a man whose plan is to crawl on his knees to Hanoi, to plead abjectly for peace with a savage, barbaric enemy, a catspaw of international Communism.
“But whether we eventually surrender to the type of people that McGovern represents, run out on our friends or not, so long as we’re still fighting, I want to be there; so either retire me from the army or cut me orders back to ’Nam. I’m tired of farting around here with left-liberal defeatists—‘Lose the world without killing anybody’—like you, too many members of Congress, most of the media and the unwashed, unshorn packs of young Marxists who seem to show up at the sight of a television crew, with their beads and flowers and narcotics and not enough brains inside their craniums to tan the hide of a pygmy shrew.
“Yes this war has ground on for far too long, our citizens are getting tired of it all, tired of getting young men back in coffins, tired of living with the gut knowledge that once more, just as in the Korean War, American arms and aims have been stymied, stabbed in the back, betrayed, by a rotten combination of hubris, fuzzy thinking and cowardice—if not outright treason!—on the parts of their elected leaders, legislators and appointees.
“I don’t like to think that perhaps my onetime commander in chief was a willing pawn of the Communists, a man with no strength of convictions dimwitted or just a pitiful coward, so I often in my own mind attribute Harry Truman’s successful efforts to see the Korean War lost to his preoccupation with things he no doubt felt were more important to him, the nation and the world, things such as coming up with choice gems of barrackroom filth and invective to sling at anyone who failed to appreciate as exalted art the caterwauling his daughter called singing.
“Hard on the heels of his disgraceful display of gutlessness, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in Cuba, John Kennedy proceeded to commit us, to plunge us arse-deep into propping up the Diem regime in Saigon. French shilly-shallying, on-again-off-again governmental support of their hard-fighting troops in Indochina had already resulted in a humiliating defeat and loss of the north to Ho Chi Minh and his cadre of Marxist stooges, the splitting up of the country and the turning over of the non-Communist south to Diem and his criminal family with their hordes of equally criminal sycophants.
“Now, true, Mr. Henshaw, John Kennedy had had nothing whatsoever to do with the installation of Diem; that had been done by the French colonials and their figurehead-puppet emperor. But if our then commander in chief had had the intestinal fortitude to—even as late as ’sixty-two, when he had heard General Taylor’s report—insist that as part of the price for an increased American presence and aid commitment, either Diem do things our way or be replaced by someone who would, he might have lived long enough to see a victory in Vietnam; and even if not, he at the very least would’ve seen more real possibility of victory than there was when he was assassinated barely three weeks after his coreligionist, Diem, had been deposed and shot.
“As before, Mr. Henshaw, as with Truman, I dislike having to think that Kennedy and Johnson after him were tools of international Communism, despite the clear indications of either that or such degrees of naiveté and stupidity as to boggle the mind. Therefore, in their particular cases, I usually assume that they both were sufficiently preoccupied with active domestic socialization of this once-great nation of ours as to not really care to devote much of their personal time to Southeast Asia and to just allow the Pentagon whiz kids to run their costly, bloody and unforgivable little games with the lives of thousands! to drag the war out for needless years and so devastate much of what had been some of the richest, most productive land anywhere upon the Euro-Asian landmass that they now have to import food of every sort.”
Henshaw’s lips were become a thin, compressed line and there was now depthless hostility in his eyes. “Moray, what you’ve said here in the last few minutes smacks to me of nothing less than flagrant insubordination if not outright treason! I now can see and thoroughly understand why your records show such flattering notes and commendations from that fascist, reactionary, Russian-baiting, right-wing radical fool Barstow. You’re just like him. Joe McCarthy would have loved you with your groundless accusations against three of your avowed commanders in chief!”
A smile flitted briefly across Milo’s face. “Why thank you, Mr. Henshaw, thank you very much.”
Henshaw sat for a moment with his mouth agape, his face a very picture of puzzlement. “For what, Moray?”
Milo bedded the hook with secret delight. “Why, for those compliments, of course, Mr. Henshaw, those completely unexpected but still deeply appreciated compliments.”
Henshaw’s face went from red to ashen once more, and a hint of fear came into his eyes. “Moray … colonel, are … are you quite well?”
Milo chuckled. “If anyone should know, it’s you, sir. If you’re in doubt, why not read through Walter Reed’s report on me again? Or you could ring them up, for that matter. If what you are actually questioning is my mental and emotional condition, then, no, I am not mad … but consider this; even if I were and knew it, I’d be expected to give you that same answer. Right?
“As to why I thanked you, what I found complimentary was your comparison of me to Eustace Barstow.”
“But … but … how … what … ?” spluttered Henshaw, his pale face and hairless head slowly edging again from pink to pinker. “That man is certifiable! How he’s retained so much power for as long as he has is simply beyond me or any other rational person. He’s—”