The Forgiven Read online

  THE

  FORGIVEN

  Mike Shepherd

  THE FORGIVEN

  Copyright © 2017 Mike Shepherd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  ISBN: 978-1-5320-2670-6 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-5320-2671-3 (e)

  iUniverse rev. date: 06/21/2017

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  CHAPTER 1

  One of the earliest memories of my mother and me was when we listened to Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club on the radio in the kitchen together while she made pancakes before sending me off to school after dad had already gone to work.

  In can still see her standing in the doorway, waving goodbye. It always brought me to tears. I hated leaving her. I was a real momma’s boy. But that all changed when she suddenly became an alcoholic. She seemed to change overnight into a Jekyll and Hyde under the influence of a diabolic potion. She went from being a laid back, loving housewife and mother to a drunken maniac. Had she just been bored? Or was there something in her background that would have led to such behavior? I didn’t know. I only knew that she was making the lives of me and my two little sisters miserable. One night in particular the drunken spatting between my parents became so intense I left the house and took refuge in a drainage ditch nearby where I was attacked by a couple of rats that I fended off with a stick. I stayed outside until sunrise then I went back in to get ready for school. Mom and Dad were passed out and my sisters were curled up in bed together sleeping. I woke them, we got dressed and went to school on empty stomachs with very little sleep. It was difficult to concentrate, much less stay awake, after what I’d been through the night before – after what I’d been through many nights before -- and my grades suffered.

  Sometimes in the middle of the night Dad would have to call an ambulance to take Mom to the hospital to have her stomach pumped because she had overdosed on booze and pills. Then he, too, became an alcoholic, and our lives became even more chaotic. Mother’s suicide attempts became more frequent. One night we knocked a tall glass of iodine from her lips, and pulled her head out of the oven whose pilot light wasn’t lit, as gas filled the room. Confirming the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished. Her angry response to my saving her life, was to shower me with dishes from the cabinets. I huddled beneath the kitchen table to avoid being hit on the head. Because of her insane behavior we locked her out. But she smashed her fist through the glass window of the door, while screaming that she was going to light a match and blow the place up with everybody in it. The neighbors in the adjoining apartment heard the commotion and called the police, who took her to the hospital for stitches, then committed her to the psych ward. My paternal grandparents took us in because my dad, overwhelmed by the situation, had a nervous breakdown of his own.

  I vividly recall the first morning I woke up at my grandparents house. The sweet summer sun shone through the breeze-blown lace curtains, and for the first time in a long time I felt secure.

  CHAPTER 2

  Life with grandma and grandpa was as predictable as the band concerts on Main Street every Saturday night, and church every Sunday morning. What we didn’t predict, however, was mother pounding on the door one gloomy, rainy Monday, demanding that my sisters and me be returned to her. She insisted that she was sober now, and capable of caring for us like a mother was supposed to do – not grandparents – so we were forced to go with her because she was our legal guardian.

  We lived with her in an apartment above a tavern, a location not conducive to sobriety, and she soon started drinking again, and carousing with men who she’d bring home to screw . One of them was a big, mean sonofabitch named Dennis, who knocked her around. He didn’t confine his brutality to women. Jealous of Mom’s past relationship with my father, who also lived above a tavern nearby, he wanted her to prove her love for him by convincing her to invite Dad to the tavern downstairs for a drink so Dennis could ambush him, and he did with a ball bat, knocking Dad’s teeth out and splitting his lip up to his eye. It required forty stitches to close.

  After they got out of jail -- Mom was charged with conspiracy – Dennis and Mom jumped bail and left town together, and Dad moved in with us. Later we heard that Dennis robbed a bank in Washington state and was doing time in Walla Walla prison. What became of mom we didn’t know -- and didn’t care.

  Like a dog abused as a puppy, I grew into an angry young man and I took it out on some of my classmates in high school, on the football field. I became a vicious middle linebacker (although I was small), but my grades weren’t good enough to go on to college. After barely graduating, I went to work as a landscaper for a tree nursery. On the weekends I went camping by myself in the woods by a lake on the outskirts of town. After a while I became bored with the same old routine. Although alcoholism had destroyed my childhood, I took some beer and a pint of apricot brandy along, and I got drunk for the first time in my life. I ran wild through a stand of pines, and quickly discovered that human flesh was no match for tree bark. I sustained serious abrasions all over my face. Monday morning one of the girls who worked with herbal plants in the greenhouse smeared aloe vera gel on the wounds and they quickly healed. A relationship between the two of us developed, even though I was a little bitter toward women, because of my mom, I suppose. Conversely, Rose Marie had been deserted by her father and she was a little bitter toward men, I discovered, so the feeling was mutual, especially when we were drinking. But we managed to get along fairly well when we were sober, which was about half of the time.

  Meanwhile the Vietnam War was escalating and guys were getting drafted left and right. Uncle Sam’s fateful finger was pointed directly at me, so to avoid having to go into the infantry I joined the Air Force hoping to avoid combat in ‘Nam. Despite poor grades in high school I scored high in English aptitude on the Air Force entry exam and was invited to attend Armed Forces Journalism School. Upon graduating, out of a cla
ss of 50 I was the only one with orders for Vietnam – my punishment for finishing last in the class. So away I went, along with 200 other shave-tailed nephews of Uncle Sam, soaring off into the wild blue yonder.

  Taking off at sundown in a pink Braniff jet, I glanced back at San Francisco, partially shrouded in blue-gray mist. The Golden Gate Bridge, spanning the city’s skyline, appeared as a crown on the head of a queen watching her knights depart for a distant war. As I turned away, I caught a glimpse of light glowing softly in a tower on a hill. It looked like a tear.

  Settling in for the long flight to Vietnam, I wondered, which of us would not return? The baby-faced kid sitting next to me? The black guy across the aisle? He was smiling with his eyes closed. Maybe he was thinking about a girlfriend, a wife and kids, his mother, or the joke his father told him last night over a farewell beer. Or the loudmouthed jerk behind me who was yakking about how many “slant-eyed gooks” he’d kill. The Asian-American Marine sitting next to him? Me?

  I gazed at my reflection in the window. Mom used to say I looked like Van Johnson, the war movie hero, with my reddish-blond hair, blue eyes and smattering of freckles, but now I thought I looked more like some scared little kid on his way to the dentist. I could see fear in my eyes – fear of the unknown, and of what awaited me on the other side of the big pond.

  We leveled off at 45,000 feet above the Pacific and sped for ‘Nam in a race with the sun in a futile attempt to prolong our last day of innocence. It was a race that we ultimately lost when the sea swallowed the last glint of light. We drifted all night, farther and farther away from home, and for some (perhaps me) there’d be no return.

  While falling asleep, I thought about my girlfriend Rose Marie, who I last saw standing on the porch in the gloomy gray dawn just a day and a half before, waving goodbye. It seemed so long ago, like another lifetime in another world.

  CHAPTER 3

  It didn’t take me long to see action as a radio news correspondent for 7th Air Force Information. I was assigned to cover the siege of Khe Sanh in January of 1968, then my next assignment took me into the hotly-contested A Shau Valley to interview the troops there about the effectiveness of air support.

  It was customary for those of us who worked in Da Nang’s Air Force radio news office to go to the NCO Club for happy hour every night. Sometimes we stayed later, though, on Saturday nights when we didn’t have to work the next day. But this Sunday would be different. I’d be going into the valley on the first plane to land there in some time, which made it worthy of a story. An artery of the Ho Chi Minh Trail ran down the middle of the valley, from around the DMZ through Laos before it branched out into South Vietnam. After fierce fighting with the North Vietnamese Army, the American 1st Cavalry Division took control of it and its airstrip. This is where I’d be landing on a C-130 loaded with ammo -- an easy target for the enemy antiaircraft guns in the hills surrounding the valley. Fearing that I’d be shot down, I continued drinking, thinking each beer could be my last, and I was well on my way to getting drunk. I awoke in the morning with a rip-roaring hangover. After wiping the sleep from my eyes, I glanced at the clock.

  “Oh shit! That plane leaves in twenty minutes!” I was a good twenty minutes from the terminal. I quickly grabbed a tape recorder and tapes, a holster and a .38 pistol, which we were required to carry when flying, and rushed out the door. By the time I got to the terminal, the plane had already taken off, so I went to the office and sat at my desk with hung over head in hands, waiting for my boss to arrive. When he came in and saw me sitting there, the shit hit the fan.

  “You missed that god damn plane, didn’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, Joe”

  “You’re a sorry drunk.” His eyes flared with anger.

  “Out all night drinking, and you overslept, right? Well you blew the assignment. As far as I’m concerned you can….”

  Just then the red phone rang.

  “Jesus Christ Almighty!” Joe said over the phone after a moment of listening. “No, sir, he wasn’t on it. Yes, sir, he missed it. In two hours? Yes, sir, I’ll make sure he’s on it.

  “Well, Mick, you lucked out, big time. The plane you were supposed to have been on was shot down going into the valley. Blown to bits, no survivors. That means the next one going in will still be the first one, and you’ll be on it. It leaves in two hours. Be there early.”

  The time I had to spare gave me more than enough time to think about how close I had come to dying. I had missed the ill-fated flight by a mere ten minutes or so, a relatively small window in time through which I could have lived or died. While waiting for the plane, I drifted off into a state of semi-consciousness, and I had the strangest sensation that I was in a twilight zone, somewhere between life and death.

  “Airman Scott, Airman Scott!”

  “Huh?’

  I looked up. The sergeant behind the counter was calling my name.

  “That plane for A Shau Valley is ready to go,” he said. “Better hurry. It’s that C-130 right our there.”

  After what felt like about half an hour, we began to descend rather abruptly, and the crew chief told me to fasten my seat belt tightly. We were dropping into A Shau Valley quickly, instead of a long low approach, in an attempt to avoid enemy antiaircraft fire.

  Suddenly there was a terrific jolt, and I braced myself as we touched down hard on the tarmac. The pilot reversed the engines and we roared toward the end of the runway. After we came to a stop, the rear cargo door dropped down, and I got off of the plane. The crew began to offload the ammo with a fork lift they’d brought along.

  I looked around for some grunts to talk to about the importance of this re-supply mission, and the significance of the first plane to land in the valley in a while, thanks to their kicking the NVA out of the valley. A 1st Cav lieutenant intercepted me and ordered me to fall in with a group of men standing by. It turned out to be a detail to recover bodies -- or what was left of them – from the strewn wreckage of the plane that had been shot down. Apparently because I was wearing a US military uniform in a war zone I was not exempt from such details even though I was an Air Force newsie.

  “Fan out through the grass and those trees,” he said. “Look for dog tags and wallets, anything that could identify the bodies and body parts.”

  Feeling as if I were still in the twilight zone between life and death that I had imagined at the air terminal, I wandered like a zombie among the smoldering wreckage of the plane. There was a seat attached to a fragment of fuselage hanging in a tree with a badly burned dead man in it. There were pieces of the plane and body parts scattered about for the next hundred yards. As I continued walking, I stumbled over what I first thought was a log. When I looked back I saw that it was the charred torso of a man. It could have been mine if I hadn’t gotten drunk and missed the ill-fated plane.

  My life had been spared long enough to read the Dear John from Rose Marie that was waiting for me when I returned to Da Nang.

  In recognition of the trauma I recently experienced, which included being under fire at Khe Sanh, Joe recommended that I take an R&R, to which I gladly consented. I chose to go to Sydney, Australia. He had been there on his R&R.

  “The people down there love Americans,” he said. “They’re forever grateful for our keeping the Japs off their backs in World War II.”

  Two days later I was flying over the Equator, seven miles above Borneo, and roughly halfway between Saigon and Sydney. It didn’t feel any different than flying over other superficial milestones, like the Continental Divide or the International Dateline. Not the slightest glitch or tinge of turbulence, nor difference in the color of the sky and seas did I detect, as we transcended hemispheres.

  When we landed in Sydney, before disembarking, a US Army Special Services representative came onboard to discuss the social behavior expected of us in Australia. He was a master of euphemisms.

  “Listen up, gentle
men,” he said. “There are plenty of wholesome Australian women here who like to, shall we say, date GIs, so it will not be necessary to contract for professional companionship. However, please be advised, in either case, as a precautionary measure it would be wise to procure prophylactic devices should opportunities to copulate arise.”

  We were then whisked away by a bus to an R&R reception center in downtown Sydney to make reservations for hotels, and to be fitted for civilian clothes if we hadn’t brought our own. Wearing US military uniforms on R&R was not permitted. Apparently the Vietnam War had become unpopular with some in Australia, particularly among the growing hippie population in Sydney. We were advised to keep a low profile to avoid confrontations. Our GI haircuts alone were dead giveaways, which in some cases would be to our advantage, but not always, as I would soon discover.

  After making reservations at a small hotel called the Auburn House, I went to a reception at the Sheraton Hotel where dozens of young Australian women greeted us. They were very friendly and didn’t hesitate to engage us in small talk. Most of us hadn’t been around women for a while (except for those who patronized the bar girls in Vietnam who boozed them up and talked them into having sex for a price). With these Aussie girls, the hustle was a little more subtle. Although there was plenty of booze at the reception, nobody appeared to be talking sex, at least yet.

  A rock’n’roll band played, and people danced. With each drink and song, more GIs and girls formed couples until the last dance, when I found myself to be the last man out. Some things never change: I was still getting my ass kicked at musical chairs, so I arranged for a cab to take me to my hotel, a five storey glass building with balconies on a hill overlooking Bondi Beach. The Pacific Ocean rolled in below, with surfers riding its waves. A strong breeze, laden with the scent of the sea, blew against me as I walked, suitcase in hand, to the front door. I was rather tipsy from the beer I drank at the reception, and I needed to lie down, so I checked in and went to my room, lay down and went to sleep. When I awoke I took a shower and dressed, called a cab and went to the lobby to wait. While waiting, I picked up a brochure from a table and looked it over. On the cover was a panoramic photo of Bondi Beach, stretching to Sydney Harbor in the distance, where the iconic Opera House, framed by the arching Harbor Bridge, resembled a flotilla of sailboats moored on the waterfront. The city’s rising skyline was also visible. It was a breathtaking view that rivaled San Francisco’s.