Up Country by Nelson DeMille

victorious Communist troops approached the airport; the MACV guys, among the last American soldiers in Vietnam, blew up their headquarters and flew off on Air America planes. I had seen it on TV, and now I saw some rubble that might have been the old MACV Headquarters, known then as Pentagon East.
    As we approached the runway, I saw that the civilian terminal, too, was the same old piece of crap I remembered. I had this weird feeling that I’d passed through the Twilight Zone, and I was going back for my third tour. Actually, I was .
    We came down on the wet runway with barely a bounce, so the round-eye was flying. The tarmac, however, must still have had shell holes in it or something because the rollout was a mile of bad road.
    The aircraft turned onto a taxiway and for some reason stopped. On
the approach, I hadn’t seen a single aircraft around, so it wasn’t like we were backed up waiting for a gate at this nowhere airport. When the Americans ran it during the war, Tan Son Nhat was the third busiest airport in the world, and it ran fine. But that’s another story. I knew I needed to get my head into the reality of this time and place, and I tried. But as we waited on the taxiway, my mind kept pulling me back to 1972, and the events that led up to my second visit to this place.
     

     
    I was stationed at Fort Hadley, where I had re-enlisted after my first tour, after Peggy Walsh and I had stopped writing to each other, or I had stopped writing to her, to be more honest.
    After about six months at Hadley, for some reason known only to God and Sigmund Freud, I married a local Midland girl named Patty.
    Patty was very pretty, had a cute Georgia accent, didn’t hate Yankees, loved sex and bourbon, was poorer than me, and always wanted to marry a soldier, though I never found out why. We had absolutely nothing in common and never would, but getting married young and for no good reason seemed to be part of the local culture. I really don’t know what I was thinking.
    Housing for married people was tight during the war, and there was nothing available on the fort, so we lived in this squalid trailer park called Whispering Pines, along with hundreds of other soldiers, their wives, and kids.
    We watched guys go off to war and some of them came back, some didn’t, and worse, some came back to the army base hospital, missing parts. We drank too much, there was too much fooling around with spouses not one’s own, and the war dragged on with no end in sight.
    So, there I was, a kid from Boston living in a trailer park with a wife whose accent and outlook made her incomprehensible half the time, and I had a few years to go in the army, and guys around me were getting their second and even third sets of orders for ’Nam. Don’t think I didn’t miss Peggy and Boston, and my friends and family. Especially when Patty would turn on the country western station, and I had to listen to songs titled “Get Your Tongue Outta My Mouth ’Cause I’m Kissing You Goodbye.” Or “How Can I Miss You if You Won’t Go Away?”
    Mom and Pop and my brothers had not yet had the pleasure of
meeting the new Mrs. Brenner; I kept avoiding a trip north, or them coming south.
    I never thought I’d see Whispering Pines Trailer Park again, but I did, last summer, when I was on undercover assignment at Fort Hadley investigating the arms deal case that turned into the case of the general’s daughter. I could have lived anywhere while undercover, but I chose Whispering Pines, which by that time was nearly deserted and filled with ghosts.
    As I get older, I’m starting to make weird choices and decisions, and it seems that consciously or unconsciously I’m revisiting things and places from long ago. Like now, sitting on the taxiway at Tan Son Nhat Airport. I need to talk to a mental health professional.
    But back to 1971, Fort Hadley, Georgia. By this time, I was a four-stripe sergeant—we made rank fast in those days—and as a combat veteran, I