T H E L O S E R S
Prologue
Da Nang
23:39
12/24/1967Drunken GI’s and Vietnamese were spilled out onto the dirt roads of Da Nang as midnight and Christmas Day rapidly approached. MP’s and RVNP’s patrolled and kept a handle on it from getting too crazy, but one serviceman dressed as Santa was busy puking his guts out as Roque passed by without a second look.
A group of six Marines were singing “Little Drummer Boy” very poorly as two Vietnamese prostitutes did their best to sing along in the pidgin English they spoke. One soldier laid against the wall of a building and drooled on his clothes. His head would sway forward and he would almost fall over, only to snap back upright and start the process all over again. It was a familiar sight in Saigon and it was making its way all over the country. The Dope Fiend Lean they called it.
Roque glided through the chaos without running into trouble. That was generally the case for him. He was always given a wide berth even in the wild west atmosphere of South Vietnam. It was the scar, Roque figured. It ran vertical down his face, starting at the forehead and going through his right eyebrow and eye before ending on his right cheek. A reminder from a few years ago that even being in the Navy was no guarantee that you could get out of Vietnam unscathed.
The lights of the Carousel Club were green and red in honor of the holiday. Someone had hung up a paper Santa on the doors. A wiseass had drawn a cock on his mouth, someone else had scribbled a word bubble on the door beside Santa that said “Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh is a cocksucker!” Roque pushed through the doors and entered an even more hectic party than the one outside.
The Carousel Club was the kind of place that gave Vietnamese dive bars a bad name. GIs downed drinks while “Susie Q” by CCR pounded from the speakers and half-naked Vietnamese women go-go danced on makeshift stages around the room. Even more scantily clad women walked through the room and flirted with GIs. Of course they reminded them that for a small price they were all theirs. Roque knew somewhere in the back room was the hourly donkey show featuring Donkey Dom and Madame Nguyen.
Roque pulled out a cigarette and lit it as he walked through the raucous crowd. His field jacket was a navy one, but it was still the same dull green the rest of the soldiers wore regardless of branch of service. Unlike theirs his jacket carried no nameplate stitched on the breast. He wondered if anyone would remember his scarred face, but it was obvious the second he stepped into the bar he was overthinking it. The men here were more focused on having a good time with the drinks and girls and not looking at yet another soldier.
He walked through the bar and found the stairwell down into the basement. The stench of opium and piss hit him like a brick as he stepped down into the dimly lit cellar. Soldiers were laid out on cots, some actually smoking opium while plenty more had medical tubes tied around their arms and hypodermic needles by their side. This was where The Dope Fiend Lean got its start. The junkies of the future started as the soldiers just needing something, anything, to escape this fucked up war for just a little while.
"You looking for something?"
A small Vietnamese man was at Roque’s elbow. He flashed two rows of yellow teeth.
"I Uncle Ace, and I fuck you up for right price."
Hoang Tich Phan, aka Uncle Ace Phan, was the owner of the Carousel Club. According to the government intelligence apparatus he was also a Communist sympathizer who used his club to gather blackmail and intel for the NVA.
"I'm here for you," Roque said as he pulled out a pistol with a suppressor on it.
Uncle Ace's eyes got wide as Roque fired two shots into his head. The junkies around him stayed in outer space as Uncle Ace flopped to the floor and twitched away his last few moments of life. Roque tucked the gun back into his jacket and flicked the butt of his cigarette on Ace’s body before he calmly walked back upstairs to join the party.
Saigon
14:00
01/03/1968Clay sat at a patio table and watched the steady flow of traffic down the avenue. Pasteur Street ran through the heart of Saigon, and as such it was one of the busiest streets in all of Southeast Asia. Large trucks shared the same road with cars, mopeds, and the bike rickshaws the Vietnamese called cyclos. Clay observed most of the traffic was Vietnamese. Only a few westerners would be out and about this time of day, and most of those would be soldiers on leave.
He tried to remember the last time he’d taken leave. ‘66? Or maybe ‘67? The last time he’d left the country was ‘66 for sure. He’d flown to Hawaii for a month of vacation without bothering to head further east back home. There was nothing there for him except a wife who hadn’t gotten around to divorcing him yet, and parents who hadn’t gotten around to dying yet. Clay was among the group of “advisors” Kennedy sent in ‘63 to try to help ARVN get a handle on the situation. Going on five years, thought Clay. That meant he’d lived in Vietnam more than any other place in his adult life.He wondered if he would recognize America when he eventually went back? He’d spent years overseas as a Green Beret and came back home to find the country pretty much the same. But the things he’d seen and heard on the news and from other soldiers in-country made him wonder.
“Captain,” Max said as he took a seat at the table
He didn’t look like anyone’s definition of a CIA agent. With his Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts and sports coat, and a pair of tortoise shell sunglasses, he looked like a tourist more than anything else. Which Clay knew he was. To him Vietnam was a fun lark. Guys like Max were above battlefields. They treated troops like Clay and the Losers as pawns to move across the board. Max and his kind talked a lot about “collateral damage” and the need to “break a few eggs” to make omelets, because that’s how they talked. They couldn’t accept those eggs had families back in America, to think of the collateral damage as people.
“Good work on that job in Da Nang,” said Max.
Roque put a VC agent down on Christmas Eve with two headshots. Max wouldn’t mention those details. To him, Uncle Ace had been a problem that needed to be solved. And the Losers had solved it.
“Pretty straightforward,” Clay shrugged.
“We like straightforward solutions,” Max said with a smile. “My bosses are talking about you, Clay. They like what you and the Losers are doing.”
To Clay that wasn’t a good thing. The whole point of a black op unit was to stay off the radar. If senior Agency members or -- worse -- politicians got wind of what they were doing, it would only mean more headaches for Clay and his unit.
“I keep waiting to see if we’ll get the Congressional Medal of Honor,” Clay said dryly. “But it seems like we’ll always be a bridesmaid -- never a bride.”
Max lit a cigarette and shrugged. “At Langely we give out covert service medals. We call them jockstrap awards. Never meant to be worn or shown in public.”
“I hear these days it’s not exactly safe to wear regular medals out in public stateside,” said Clay. He’d seen a newspaper report about a returning GI getting spit on by protestors at the Detroit airport.
“Bunch of fucking savages,” said Max. “When we beat the Nazis they threw us ticker tape parades. And now they’re disrespecting our servicemen, calling them baby killers. It’s a goddamn shame.”
Clay leaned forward on his elbows and waved cigarette smoke from his face. “You haven’t spent much time in the bush, Max, but I know for a fact that a ew of them have earned that baby killer label.”
“That’s just–”
“Collateral damage,” Clay replied. “Yeah I know.”
Clay saw Max bristle. He took a long drag off his cigarette before exhaling smoke. Without another word he reached into the breast pocket of his coat and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
“Last night, our friends at the RVNP received a letter, we assume ARVN and CIO got copies as well. It’s a ransom letter for Lê Chiêu Dương, her father is Hoàng Minh Dương. Colonel Dương oversees counter intelligence for South Vietnam.”
“Or at least he oversees what the CIA tells him to oversee,” Clay said as Max passed him the folded paper.
He unfolded it and found what looked to be a copy of a grainy photo of a young Vietnamese woman staring bleary eyed at a camera. Underneath the photo was some writing in Vietnamese. Clay had a basic grasp on the written language. Someone was asking for money to see the girl back safe and had forty-eight hours to get it all.
“Doesn’t seem like a VC play,” said Clay. “They would want prisoner exchanges or weapons for it.”
“We believe the perpetrators are criminals unaffiliated with the ongoing… conflict.”
Everyone is affiliated with the “conflict”, thought Clay. To live in Vietnam was to be part of the war.
“Why isn’t RVNP working this?” He asked.
“They are, but the Vietnamese Police couldn’t investigate their way out of a goddamn paper bag. Plus they’re so corrupt I wouldn’t be shocked if a few of their officers are involved in this. On top of that Colonel Dương is a bit paranoid. He thinks maybe someone in ARVN is behind this. He doesn't trust his own government to do the job, so he's calling in CIA for a favor. Your squad has managed to establish a few underground contacts. Work them and see if you can get a line on her before the deadline is up.”
Clay looked at the picture of the kidnapped girl and put her age at around 12, meaning she was born in ‘56. All she had ever really known her whole life was war and chaos in her country at the hands of foreigners.
“You know there’s a good chance they already killed her,” said Clay.
“That’s the most likely outcome,” Max said with a nod. “If that’s the case I want you and your team to track down each and every person involved in the kidnapping and wipe them out.”
“That’s more our style,” said Clay.
Enarr
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