The Vigilante Life of Scott Mckenzie: A Middle Falls Time Travel Story Read online

  “Isn’t that kind of the luck of the draw, though, if I get picked to be an MP or not?”

  Berkman shook his head. “That’s the advantage of signing up before you get drafted. I can attach a note that says you want to be an MP, and I recommend you for the job. There’s no guarantee, of course. I’m not allowed to promise you that you’ll get it, but my experience is, they listen to us most of the time. I think that if you want to be a cop when you get back, that’s probably your best bet.”

  Scott considered. Don’t know if I can trust this guy. Maybe I should go talk to gramps and come back tomorrow. But, what real choice do I have? This guy is better than what I’ve got going for me now, which is absolutely nothing.

  Berkman leaned back in his chair, as though it didn’t matter what Scott did, one way or the other. After a few moments of silence, he opened a drawer and withdrew a thick sheaf of papers.

  “What do you say? Want to get started on the paperwork?”

  Two hours later, Scott walked out of the recruiting office with his enlistment papers tucked into the back pocket of his jeans. He was the United States Army’s newest recruit.

  In exchange for enlisting, Scott was allowed to stay home through Christmas, but was scheduled to leave for basic training in Fort Dix, New Jersey on December 27.

  Scott didn’t want to leave his grandparents, sister, and girlfriend behind, but it was the only option he could live with. Since the moment his birthday was pulled, the draft felt like a sword hanging over his head. Try as he might, he couldn’t seriously think about running to Canada. He felt like that would be just as bad as enlisting, since he would be away from everyone he loved, and he would be a draft dodger, to boot.

  He and Sherry grew even closer in the weeks leading up to his departure. The night before he got on the bus for basic training, he picked her up from work and they went for burgers at Artie’s Drive-In. The two young lovers sat in Scott’s truck, had hamburgers and chocolate shakes, and listened to KMFR play Fortunate Son by Credence Clearwater Revival, and And When I Die, by Blood, Sweat & Tears. The irony of those songs escaped the young couple. They were busy eating and trying hard to pretend that one of them wasn’t about to leave for a very long time.

  As they pulled out of Artie’s parking lot, the KMFR disc jockey announced, “Be sure to listen to our Top Forty Countdown this Saturday night from eight to midnight, hosted by our own Scott Patrick. I can’t say exactly where, but this song will be on there somewhere.” The opening violins of The Supremes’ Someday We’ll be Together filled the pickup.

  Sherry snuggled closer to Scott and said, “Let’s go somewhere a little more private.”

  Scott kissed the top of her head and said, “You know, I believe this. I believe that someday, we’ll be together.”

  Sherry turned her face upward and her brown eyes had a sparkle in them. She laid a hand against his leg. “Me too.”

  That night, parked under a grove of elm trees, Sherry gave Scott the send-off that women have given their soldiers as they left for battle for thousands of years.

  Later that night, sitting in front of her parents’ house, Scott pulled Sherry close.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t plan this very well. I don’t have a ring. But, Sherry Dickenson, will you marry me?”

  “Oh, Scotty! Of course I will! I can’t wait to tell Mom and Dad!”

  The porchlight flipped off and on, off and on.

  “That’s my signal. I’ve got to go in. Oh, you’ve made me so happy!” Her face grew momentarily serious. “You be careful, wherever they send you. Come back to me.”

  She jumped out of the pickup, then stopped halfway up the walkway to her house. She gifted him with a dazzling smile and blew him a kiss, then bounced inside.

  Scott never saw her again.

  Chapter Four

  Basic training at Fort Dix lasted eight weeks. Those two months went by in a blur of five-mile runs, 5 a.m. reveilles, and his introduction to army food. It did not compare favorably to what his grandmother made.

  Scott’s training was more thorough than he had anticipated. His drill instructors were a little salty, but nothing like what would eventually be portrayed in movies like Full Metal Jacket. Fort Dix was one of the largest training camps in the country. It even had a replica village built to resemble a Vietnamese community. It was designed so that the rawest recruits would not be caught completely unawares when they landed in country, as the veterans called it. Its true effectiveness was debatable, but it did make the young soldiers feel somewhat more equipped for the challenges ahead.

  After his initial eight weeks of training, he went through another two months of AIT, or Advanced Infantry Training. At the beginning of this advanced training, Scott asked his sergeant when he would be eligible to go into training for the Military Police.

  The sergeant, a short, wiry man, took Scott in with a glance. “Recruiting promise you that?”

  Scott shook his head. “He didn’t promise it. He just said it was likely.”

  “Good. I hate to break promises. Now, get your ass out to the rifle range.”

  Scott was smart enough to not mention it again, and no one ever mentioned it to him.

  It turned out that Scott had an excellent eye. After the initial rounds of testing, he was trained to be a sharpshooter. That made his eventual assignment easy. He was an infantryman, destined for the front lines of a country he couldn’t have picked out on a map.

  BACK HOME IN EVANSVILLE, Scott’s grandparents and sister watched Walter Cronkite and the CBS Evening News religiously. Many nights, the news featured a graphic of that day’s reported number of American deaths and wounded. Often, the report included how many North Vietnamese soldiers were reported killed as well—as though if that number was higher than the American number, the U.S. was winning the war.

  The number of those “killed in action” had peaked in 1968 and had fallen substantially by the time Scott first put his boots on the steamy, muddy ground of Southeast Asia. Declining death tolls or not, American soldiers, especially poor and black American soldiers, were still dying there every day.

  Scott had always been a fast learner. Within the first few months in country, he learned that even with the might of the U.S. military behind them, this was a frustrating and nearly impossible war to wage. They were fighting an enemy that appeared then faded back into the jungle at will. He also learned that those above the rank of Sergeant often risked the lives of their men based on orders from those higher up, without asking questions. More than anything, he learned there was a brotherhood with his fellow grunts. They believed they had the guy on their left and the guy on their right, and that was all they needed.

  Each of them had been plucked from their homes and dropped into an unknowable war zone ten thousand miles away. They lived in constantly shifting, temporary conditions, and all knew that they were not guaranteed another sunrise. They had no one but each other to rely on, so that’s what they did.

  In April 1970, just a few weeks after being deployed, Scott was part of an advance patrol, walking along the razor’s edge between rice fields and jungle. All was quiet, which was rarely a good sign. Scott never saw the soldier whose shot hit him just above the right collarbone. He was jerked around by the impact and was hit twice more before he could manage to fall to the ground. His M16 went one way, his helmet another. He crumpled like a string-cut marionette.

  Around him, the chaos of a brief but intense firefight reigned. Scott felt removed from it. He lay mostly on his back, blinked up at gray skies and felt warm drops of rain hit his face. An explosion of pain raced through him and destroyed his ability to think. He gasped for breath, but couldn’t get oxygen into his lungs.

  I thought if I got hit, I would be numb. Goddamn, this hurts.

  He blinked the raindrops away, which were mixing with his own tears.

  I don’t want to die.

  Scott McKenzie laid in the mud and muck and waited to see if he would live.

  The a
mbush ended as quickly as it had begun. After one final burst of smoke and gunfire, quiet settled in. Seconds later, Private First Class Bruce Teller leaned over him.

  Of course. The one guy I had an argument with. Sorry, Teller. I didn’t mean it when I called you an SOB during that card game.

  Teller pulled out his knife and cut Scott’s shirt off. A year earlier, Teller had been driving a forklift in a warehouse, now he was doing field triage.

  He leaned into Scott’s face. “It’s okay, brother. You’re hit, but you’re going to be okay. We’ll get you out of here. Congratulations. You got your ticket out of this shithole.” He pulled two doses of morphine out of his kit and jabbed them into the fleshy part of Scott’s arm.

  Tears leaked from the corners of Scott’s eyes.

  Brother. Thank you, brother. I don’t want to die.

  They were less than a mile from their encampment, so Teller and Jepson stood guard over Scott while Abramson and Sawyer ran back to get a medic and a litter. Two other men in the patrol had been hit, but there was no need to hurry, not for morphine or a medic. They would only need stretchers to return their bodies.

  While Jepson stood watch, Teller pulled the dead men close to Scott. Their race was over and they both looked peaceful in death. One man’s glassy eyes stared straight at Scott.

  The field medic arrived and dusted him with powder designed to keep infection at bay and dosed him again with morphine. At that moment, as shot up and ragged as he was, he felt fine. Ninety minutes later, Scott was back in camp.

  Teller’s words cycled through his brain over and over.

  Congratulations. You got your ticket out of this shithole.

  The moment the bullets tore into and through Scott’s body, he started on a nightmare journey that lasted longer than he could have imagined. In many ways, it was a journey that began in this lifetime and finished in another.

  First lying in the muck, and then later, while being treated back at camp, he focused on the idea that he was done. He had survived. His experience in the Vietnam War had been brief, but the echoes would last for many lifetimes.

  Scott’s journey started on a stretcher, then moved to a small riverboat, which picked up half a dozen other wounded men while they floated downstream to a landing zone. There, he was picked up by a Huey medical evacuation helicopter. Many areas of the U.S. military operated inefficiently in Vietnam. Two areas where it excelled were moving fresh bodies in the front door while dropping the wounded men onto an assembly line out the back door.

  The Huey dropped into a tent hospital in Da Nang, where Scott was finally looked at by a doctor. The surgical team talked about Scott like he wasn’t there. The first doctor who looked at him said, “This one’s not going back out there. Get him into surgery.”

  An unseen hand placed a mask over Scott’s face.

  Mercifully, he was finally out.

  When he came to, many hours later, he was once again on a Huey, this time being flown to rendezvous with the USS Sanctuary. The Sanctuary was a floating hospital, filled with a minimal crew, wounded men, and a medical staff charged with keeping the men alive during the voyage.

  The trip from South Vietnam to the USA took fourteen days. Rough seas added seasickness to the ghastly wounds many men had suffered. Despite the efforts of the staff, blood and vomit pooled underfoot. The smell was so bad that Scott longed for the funk of living in a tent with a dozen unwashed men.

  For fourteen days, Scott told himself that he just had to hang on. As soon as they got to port, he was sure life would be better.

  This showed both Scott’s optimism, which hadn’t been completely beaten out of him yet, and his penchant for being wrong.

  Life would not be better for Scott McKenzie for much longer than the length of the voyage.

  Chapter Five

  While he was still at sea, Scott received his Purple Heart, as did every wounded man on board. It was presented to him, then tucked away with his comb and toothbrush—his few remaining personal possessions.

  The Sanctuary docked in San Francisco on May 1, 1969. It was exactly six months since he had sat in his grandparent’s living room and watched his birthday jump up as the first number called in the draft.

  In San Francisco, he was transferred to a VA hospital. Aside from lacking the constant threat of seasickness, it was not an improvement over conditions on the Sanctuary. The doctors and nurses did their best to treat and rehabilitate the wounded men. It was a case of too many men wounded too badly, and too few medical professionals to properly deal with it all. The overall cleanliness of the hospital was subpar, and although they weren’t professional healers, the orderlies performed many of the medical duties. The orderlies were like any of the guys in the infantry—putting their time in, waiting to get back to their real lives. Of course, serving stateside, they had the advantage of not being shot at on a regular basis.

  Scott was still in terrible condition when he arrived at the hospital. His wounds had become infected on the voyage, despite the best efforts of the nurses and doctors. There was some doubt as to whether he would pull through or not, as well as whether his damaged right leg could be saved. He did and it was, but the infection set his recovery back by six months.

  Once his wounds began to heal, he was tormented every day by physical therapy. He was never going to be the strong young man he had been when he walked into the recruitment center. His goals were more modest now. Push yourself in a wheelchair. Walk with crutches. Walk unaided. Feed yourself.

  There were volunteers from the local community who came to visit and help the wounded vets. Sometimes they snuck food—real food—in. If Scott had thought that army food was bad, and Meals Ready to Eat were even worse, he found the bottom of the culinary scale in the veteran’s hospital. Salt was apparently rationed carefully, because none of it—or any other seasoning—ever seemed to make it into the food.

  Thus, the food brought in by the volunteers—cookies, pastries, real fruit from the Farmer’s Market—were highly prized and the most valuable trading commodity, above even cigarettes. Scott hadn’t taken up smoking like most everyone else in his platoon, but he still collected and traded cigarettes. They were the currency of the day.

  The most popular volunteer was a young man who came in twice a week and wrote letters home for those who were unable to hold a pen themselves, which included most of the patients at one point or another.

  The first week he was there, Scott dictated letters, one to his grandparents and sister, and another to Sherry.

  Scott found it simple to tell the man what to write in the letter to his family. It was much harder to say the words he wanted to say to Sherry out loud.

  The man, who looked to be about twenty, leaned in close and in a soft voice, said, “Pretend I’m not even here. Act like you’re speaking directly to her.”

  Scott tried, but he couldn’t do it. Through long nights in Vietnam, he had thought of nothing but her. How soft her hair was. The smell of her perfume. More than anything, he thought of their last night together before he left for basic training. With the earnest young man sitting in front of him, Scott couldn’t find a way to put his feelings into words. He did the best he could, and the young man, whose name was Kevin, added a bit here and there for him.

  He heard back from his family less than a week later.

  “Oh, Scotty,” the letter began, in his grandmother’s familiar scrawl, “we’ve been so, so worried about you. We found out you’d been wounded, but could never get any information about how badly. We are so thankful that you are alive and will be home soon. Grampa and I have moved into the upstairs bedroom, so you won’t have to go up and down the stairs. Please come home as soon as you can. Doctors are fine, but my chicken soup will fix you right up.”

  Tears filled Scott’s eyes. So typical of them. Almost eighty years old, and they’re the ones doing the stairs every day so that I don’t have to. Cheryl and I lost the lifetime lottery when it came to a father, but they almost make up f
or it all by themselves.

  As happy as he was to get the letter from home, he waited ever more anxiously for some word from Sherry. With help from Kevin, Scott sent her two more letters. Finally, after he had been in the hospital almost four months and had despaired of ever hearing from her again, a small, thin letter arrived.

  It had been sent to the correct APO, or Army Post Office, but the letter had bounced around the globe from there. It had been sent to his unit, but arrived after he had been wounded. It chased him to the hospital in Da Nang, but was by then several weeks behind him. For reasons evident to no one, it had been sent first to Germany, then back to the original APO, before it was finally dispatched correctly to him in the hospital in San Francisco.

  Scott’s right arm was still not functioning, and he found that it was nearly impossible to open an envelope with one hand. He held the envelope tight between sweating fingers for long minutes. Finally, he flagged down a young nurse and asked her if she would read it to him.

  “Of course,” she said with a smile. She looked at the handwriting on the envelope. “Girl back home?”

  Scott nodded. “Fiancée. I hope we can get married as soon as I get home.”

  The nurse, a little on the heavy side and no one’s idea of beautiful, nodded.

  “She’s a lucky girl.” She neatly tore the end of the envelope off and a single page of stationary slipped out. As it did, the smell of Sherry’s perfume wafted toward Scott. He breathed it in.

  “I’m going to want to keep that.”

  “Of course. Okay, let’s see. ‘Dear Scott, I hate to put this in a letter, but I don’t have any other way to reach you. I...’ The nurse stopped and looked at Scott. His smile was frozen, but slowly melting away.