Profane Men Read online

  Q: Do you believe in the possible existence of a spirit world? Answer yes or no.

  A: No.

  Q: Do you believe in reincarnation? Answer yes or no.

  A: No.

  Q: Have you taken any drugs or medication of any kind prior to this polygraph examination? Answer yes or no.

  A: No er uh — yes. (Well, shit, that’s five out of eight.)

  — Questions from actual recruitment test

  The parent organization (no longer can I say “Company” lightly) who fathered the spike team concept, a unit of elite har-har-har killers, went the way of the featherless pterodactyl, a creaking, obsolescent, broken-winged anachronism long before any of us had heard the word “detente.” I was part of that team. The team. Shot out of the air (literally) by the bureaucratic commitment. Phased out, as in phaser, long before the search-and-destroy years, we were a fast-burning phoenix who never rose. Our ashes were hauled by the stinging red winds of war.

  All that the casual observer would remember would prove to be untraceable. There were those who would retain ghostly images, and the odd, unattributable fantasy. (I Corps grunts recalled our unmarked black skinships, thinking them to be Viet Cong.)

  But no one who was a part of it and survived would forget. A nudge to the corner of the mind and it’s all back inside my head. Vivid. Painful. Even now, fighting the onslaught of senility and midlife memory lapses, the mission burns on, having carved itself in stone up there in the gray matter.

  Nobody would ever forget the team. Once you’ve met HOG, Harold O. Grein, he’s yours for keeps. Savage nightmare avengers like Merle stay with you. Icy mercs like Jon D., stoners like Shooter, terrier-tough El Tee with his teeth sunk into a dying career, Oreo, Doc, The Hooded Cobra — jeezus — they all stayed with me.

  Another survivor of the operation tagged Blade, the inimitable Shooter Price, and I had a brief reunion of sorts up in Canada some eleven years back, and for me it was as if no time had passed in the intervening decade. The indelible pictures were burnt into the brain plates.

  There is no forgetting the mission. Blade took a whole team of us straight into the teeth of something so completely unexpected and merciless that it could still educe night sweats, blurred vision, faulty judgment, and spastic reflexes. One of those kinds of ops. No slack.

  If you live through one or two of those, you’re on your way to winning a thousand-yard stare, which is awarded just like a heart. It’s delivered to you personally while you sleep, and the sandman takes it out of his velvet-lined presentation case and slides it down under the eyelids. Next time you open your peepers you’re nearing it. A well-earned thousand-yard stare will make an eighteen-year-old look forty-seven in the face. The trick is living long enough to get one.

  The passage of time has had the curious effect of allowing me to reconstruct Blade in my mind, from recruitment to termination, as a kind of doper’s warped dream. Without too much trouble I can manage to convince myself that my own minor but painful role was hallucinated, an unreal or surreal distortion of events shaped by time and changes and too much acid. Yet every detail retains a clear impression. It won’t go away.

  Time, reflection, history, and the luxury of twenty/twenty hindsight have let me look at the mission profile with a bit of objectivity. I still don’t see the overview, but at least I’ve come to grips with the fact that one existed. I can project myself back in time and look up, and imagine that here and there I’ll see the shadows of the strings pulled by the hidden puppeteers.

  For the truth is that the mission was in fact more than one mission. There was the one we knew about: a covert op with a fairly understandable goal, to silence a shadow-funded, outlaw radio station. But then there was a larger picture. A loftier overview where the puppeteers could see the parallel mission lines ribboning away into the distant jungle horizon, pointing north toward the DMZ. And the illusion was of the lines coming together in the distance, merging in the shape of a spike. And I would be one of the ones out there on that sharp chisel edge when the vectors finally crossed.

  That is the moment that remains the most vivid. I have only to let it touch the edge of my mind and the memories wash back over me in that last, unforgettable noise, the pounding of deadly force against cold steel, the air churning in the whipsong of high-tech combat, the terrorizing symphony of explosions and screaming still haunting my memory.

  And twenty years later I feel the heat and the vibrations of the black Huey slick descending down through the canopy like some noisy, metallic bat about to disgorge its load just as we hear the first ominous crump of distant artillery. But that is long ago and far away. And for every ending there must be a beginning. I’m not so sure about that part.

  I had survived the Fifties, a stereotypical product of my times and culture. Born, like androgynous Mr. Jagger, in a crossfire hurricane. Full of myself and rock ’n’ roll and cars and the exciting promise of dope without end. Sexually postpubescent and fighting innocence at every turn, my peers and I saw ourselves as antiheroes, raised on robbery and born to run. The year was but a hard-rockin’ theme, and life was a drive-in movie.

  Burning rubber as we peeled out on vintage slicks, double-clutching, we drag-raced straight-stick shorts down flatland blacktop to Chucklesberry and Elvis and Little Richard and Jerry Lee, outrageous icons blasting from distant Top Forty stations, as we hurried en masse toward oblivion. Our touchstones were the unhooked bra and the hook shot, the Chantelles and the Shirelles, fast girls and fast cars. Goodness gracious, great balls of fire. Young punks all, roaring through the American night down ten thousand identical white lines.

  Where previous generations saw greasers and preppies, we saw chrome and no chrome. Our perception of society’s established values were those reflected in the gleaming side spears of a 1949 Buick Riviera with its luxury-boat body and do-nothing–style portholes, and we coveted the chopped and channeled Merc coupes shaved of any vestiges of Detroit silver. When I boarded my first government contract flight, I left behind a ’59 Caddy El Dee with the most obscenely phallic pair of chrome tits that ever came off a GM assembly line. So much for self-image, sex, wheels, and Jersey duwop. The point is — times lie.

  A beginning point is 1961. Jack Kennedy’s Hyannis Camelot has ascended, Papa Joe watching from the wings, a line of heirs and assigns attendant. An unheard-of country, still French Indochina in some high school history books, emerges as a slice of singularly worthless real estate called Vietnam, split on paper by a 17th Parallel map grid and in theory by an ongoing North-South civil war.

  Who knew we’d already lost one war there, having subsidized the French in their abortive clash with the communist Viet Minh. Few of us had heard the name Southeast Asia, much less Vietnam, and fewer still had even a remote clue as to what was in store for us in that violent and unyielding land.

  The Republic of Vietnam. Visualize a populated landmass roughly the density of New Mexico, turned on end and squeezed into an S shape. Tell everyone in Albuquerque to shit in the street. Paint it green. Plant rice. Bomb the sucker until you run out of bombs or money, whichever comes first. Next, cover the whole thing with Viets and American teenagers. Give them all guns. Don’t tell the Americans where the tunnels are, and you get some rough idea.

  Our official country team had been in place for a decade when JFK’s top advisers convinced the new president of the inevitability of the falling-dominoes fantasy. We would answer the clarion call with a cornucopia of money, and materiel, and — assuredly — men. That was the scary part. Then there would be more money. And helicopters, refrigerators, Conex containers brimming with stateside gear to flood the new black market, air conditioners, generators, mobile homes, pizza parlors, the continuum of U.S. commodities from pretzels to warplanes, more money still, and many, many more warm bodies.

  Suddenly one’s Selective Service classification read like a death sentence.

  Like all you
ng men my age, I had options. I’d become convinced the only way to go was enlist. Army. Navy. Marines? No fucking way. Maybe the Air Corps — the traditional refuge for a candy-assed 1A. My life had been a skate, even through a heavyweight poli-sci major. School, girls, drugs, rock, jobs — all a skate. I was the eternal skater. I would join the elite of the Air Force and skate through this Southeast Asian nonsense.

  But then I heard about a friend of mine who’d lucked onto something choice. Another fellow skater, looking for the groove around the soft edges of life. He’d gone and got himself recruited by one of the big intelligence agencies and, with promises of a cushy foreign-service job, had been ticketed for a quick whisk through basic and the chance to skate through the war in Europe. The job he’d described was nothing if not sexy.

  I was on the way in the radio business. From a dollars standpoint I was already “making my age” in yearly wages, and I was a hot young name in the disc jockey business, an unbelievably small world where you wear your latest ratings like a billboard. I was able to “get numbers,” supposedly, which will always be enough to keep a guy in beer and beans. I had a skate. The idea of giving that up for years of stupid Army life, years wasted in some do-nothing infantry shuck, marching around like an idiot for eighty, ninety bucks a month. I couldn’t believe it.

  The only thing that stopped me from running to Canada was I loved my country. Where else but America, bastion of the free-enterprise system, could a skater like me glide through life so pleasantly? No. I was, in my own self-aggrandizing, chickenshit way, something of a modest patriot. I believed that if your country called you, you should serve. But not in some mindless, chump job. I was too good for that shit. I would “get into intelligence,” I decided. (Sigh.)

  Within the week I was lodged in a nearby motel in suburban D.C., with an appointment to talk with “Mitchell Stevens” of agency recruitment. I was relaxed. Assured. For the first time in weeks I had some realistic goal that I could live with. Intelligence.

  The heady rush of that first visit to the huge intelligence monolith. A secretary coming up and — I remember it as if it was yesterday — pinning a laminated Visitor’s ID to my new olive-green summer suit. Being shown into the sanctum sanctorum of my first contact inside the Agency. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and all those fantasies.

  Mitchell Stevens was occupied elsewhere. I drew a steely-eyed no-nonsense type wearing a tweed jacket and an old school tie, who introduced himself as Mr. Thomas and began asking me what seemed like thousands of questions about myself. Since I love to talk about myself, and with my condescending attitude about offering my unique gifts to the agency, I replied with smooth confidence. He didn’t seem to be that impressed.

  Mr. Thomas kept hammering on why — why I was suddenly so interested in joining the ranks of the intelligence elite. I wisely opted for a scenario close to the truth. I was sure to be drafted “any day now” and I’d been putting off a permanent career choice until now. But I no longer had the option of time. I wanted the coming years of service to count for something, rather than be wasted in a “lesser” situation. He kept on it.

  He wanted to know all about where I stood with respect to my military service, my philosophy on the war. All kinds of irrelevant stuff like a deep discussion of my years in high school R.O.T.C. An introduction to the military that was at best undistinguished — I’d been a squad leader. Then something in my records caught his eye and the interview took an upturn.

  My senior speech teacher, my favorite high school teacher whom I also had a crush on, had convinced me to enter the national contest sponsored by the American Legion, in which high school students gave extemporaneous speeches on any aspect of the Constitution of the United States. It is a difficult contest, because you must create and memorize speeches that relate to dozens of possible subjects. As always I found it to be a skate and won easily. Mr. Thomas asked me all about my participation in that event as if it had happened last week. His eyes took on a strange glow as we discussed the beautiful complexity of the Constitution.

  When I saw my opening, I played to it. I explained that I was not one of those who found the agency’s image a romantic one (a lie) or that I saw it as easy money (the truth), and was already working in the so-called glamour industries of ancillary show biz for more dough than the GS — whatever starting salary would pay me — but that I believed in national service. And I skated through a plausible and semitruthful account of the whys and the wherefores. He finally had heard and seen enough of me, and I was told they’d be in touch soon.

  I was very nervous by the time I finally called them again, almost five weeks later, telling Mr. Thomas I just couldn’t wait any longer. I wanted to know if I had a shot. He told me to return to D.C. My security clearance would be the next step. If my background check came through OK, I’d be admitted to the Junior Officer Training Program. Congratulations, he said. (What if I’d never called, I always wondered.)

  Then I was back in suburbia in another motel. Still on my nickel, by the way. Still waiting. Calling Mr. Thomas daily. Calling Mr. Stevens. The only call that came in to me was from my aunt back in my hometown to tell me that some men had been around to see her, asking questions about me. She told them good things and they went away. I had already started bragging to a couple of buddies how I was “in” the agency. I was partying, hanging out with people I knew around D.C. Shuttling back and forth to Baltimore to see a couple of girls I knew. Spending money like there was no tomorrow. One day I came back to the motel and was given a phone message. Call Mr. Thomas at this number.

  I called. He was gone for the day. A sleepless night. I called at early morning’s light. Not in. I called back. Sorry, Mr. Thomas is in a meeting. I left the number and fell asleep for thirty minutes, snoring like a chainsaw. The phone rang.

  “Hello.”

  “Sorry I missed you. Personnel needs to see you ASAP. Can you be down here by 1300 hours?” It was Mr. Thomas. My brain was in neutral. I was still asleep.

  “Sure,” I told him, having no fucking idea in the world what 1300 hours was.

  “OK. Report to Personnel,” he said, giving me a building name and an office number. “ID’ll be waiting for you at the gate.” I thanked him and went immediately back to sleep.

  Suddenly I sat up, heart pounding, wide awake, looking at the clock. It said 12:15. Was that noon 12:15? What the hell was 1300? Was that one o’clock? I had forty-five minutes to shave, shower, shit, and drive to the agency, which was forty-five minutes away in moderate traffic, find a certain building. What was it called? What was that office number? Kee-rist. I hadn’t written anything down.

  I was at the Personnel office building fifty-five minutes later, face bleeding nice little red dots onto my shirt collar, shaking from the wild D.C. traffic, and sweating like a pig. I was told to sit and wait. I sat. I waited nineteen minutes. A man came out and introduced himself.

  “Hi. Sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Al Charles. We’re going to fill out a few forms,” he told me. A few forms. This was about one-thirty in the afternoon. At four-thirty he told me we’d just about finished. I couldn’t believe the paperwork. I was making up stuff right and left. Trying to remember the name of a family doctor who treated me for scarlatina when I was nine. What was the name of the business where my scoutmaster worked? Who is buried in the tomb of the Unknown Soldier? That sort of thing.

  I was to report next to the medical officer, given another building name and office number in the maze of offices, and my badge was taken away from me again. (They’ve given you a number, and taken away your badge.) Anyway, the next blur of days was spent in constant testing. Personality and vocational assessment. General evaluation. Physical history and condition. Emotional stability. Mental fitness or lack of it. Metabolism. Career direction. You name it, they checked it and tested it.

  Now a week at the Junior Officer Training Headquarters at Quarters Eye, and exhaustive testing and interview
s without end. The Office of the Program Director, to remind me of my radio career. The effect of all the testing was as if you were asked to fill out an application for a job a hundred different times in a hundred different ways. How many people were going to ask me why I had chosen a career in foreign affairs? How many times were they going to ask me if I had ever belonged to any subversive organizations? I soon got the answer. Many, many more times. I was summoned back to the monolith, and a very anonymous-looking building where, secret fears realized, I would begin the series of “Pollys” that are the threads that hold your track record together.

  Everyone from director down gets Pollied, not just initially but forever — quite understandably — as long as you remain in the classified arms of the agency. But if I thought the JOT program testing had been rigorous, I had another think coming. The Polly was something else. It is employed primarily as a tool of investigation and analysis by the Office of Security: investigation of possible agency penetration efforts, and analysis of potential security risks. And despite the fact that it has proven to be all but worthless in both categories, it remains in use, the high-tech corollary of the Peter Principle.

  When an individual attempts to deceive, the theory goes, their circulatory and respiratory systems show marked physiological change. Electrodermally, the psychogalvanic reflexes and the galvanic skin responses induced by sweat-gland changes can also be measured. Blood pressure, pulse, respiratory, and electrodermal readings are monitored.

  The Polly employs a standard blood-pressure cuff, a pneumograph tube which crosses the chest (especially beloved by female applicants), and your basic Dr. Frankenstein electrodes. The applicant or subject, having been appropriately prepped by the examiner, control norms and lie patterns obtained, is seated in a windowless, featureless, colorless room and hooked up to the dreaded machine. Concealed microphones and cameras and a one-way observation mirror are hidden touches one hears about from his peers.

  Polly and I did not get along. I hated the dirty bitch’s filthy, malevolent, prying, shit-eating guts. I did not do well with Polly. But miraculously, after days had passed, I was notified to report to the JOT program office at Quarters Eye. Notification arrived in a plain white envelope sans stamp or postage-meter application, agency-franked, rubber-stamped privileged medical information for some bizarre reason. I reported.