American Desperado (10 page)

8

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They took me to the Manhattan Detention Center on White Street, the “Tombs.” In 1965 the Tombs was made of stone and iron, like a jail in medieval times. The cells had metal shelves on the walls for inmates to sleep on. Two guys had to sleep on the floor. It was overrun with rodents. You’d wake up with a rat tail dragging across your mouth. We slept with our shoes in our hands to fight the rats.

The Tombs exposed me to new things. There were hippies in there who were part of a movement headed by Timothy Leary. He got all these kids to take acid, and they’d trip out on the streets and get arrested. The hippies believed in revolution, but some of them were so blown in their minds, they could hardly put two words together. There were also Black Muslims in jail. I had never been aware of the Muslim situation until then. They weren’t friendly to white people, but they didn’t look to pick fights. They would preach, “You whiteys
are going to get it because it’s all going to come back around. You’re all going to kill yourselves.”

What the Muslims and hippies had in common was they all talked about overthrowing “the man” and the Vietnam War. I had never heard about this war before. A few years earlier I was bored because everybody in America was into the Beach Boys and was squeaky clean. Now it was like the whole country was flipping out.

My legal case got complicated. The bail bondsman decided not to write my bond, and my uncles had somebody beat him up. The attack made the TV news, and the prosecutors decided to come down harder on me.

My family sent a lawyer to see me. He sat me down and said, “You’re dead here. They got you cold. In the State of New York, kidnapping’s a serious offense. You’re also going to get charged with usury. And you had a gun on you. On top of this, you have an outstanding gun charge in New Jersey.
^*
They’re not offering any deals.”

The army sent recruiters to the Tombs every week. They didn’t bother talking to the hippie acid cases. They came to violent guys like me and said, “If you join the army, we’ll erase your criminal record.”

At first I told them to get lost. But I saw that the Black Muslims, even though they hated whitey, they were signing up. I watched twenty of them get on a bus one day to go join the white man’s army. After my talk with my uncle’s lawyer, I had a change of heart.

I told the recruiters I was interested in their offer. A few days later, they did a physical exam right in the jail. Next thing I knew, I was walking out the gate to a bus. They didn’t put chains on us when we got on the bus, and I respected them for that. I’d thought we’d be treated like prisoners. But we were on our way to being soldiers.

• • •

I
DID
my basic training at Fort Benning in Georgia. A military base is like a low-level security prison. There’s fences and people telling you what to do. One guy from the Tombs wound up in my training company. He told me, “I had the perfect crime going when I was outside.”

“It must have been genius for you to end up here,” I told him.

This moron told me he’d robbed a supermarket by walking unarmed into the manager’s office and telling him his partner was holding the manager’s wife and kids hostage. He told the manager if he did not open the safe, he would never see his family again. The only problem was, the manager wasn’t married. The manager beat him up and called the cops. “Next time,” this idiot told me, “I’ll make it work.”

These were the kinds of morons I met in the army. But basic training was a breeze. I was in good shape. At the end of two months they separated us. Some guys they sent to school for trades like truck repair. Some, they said, “You’re going to Vietnam.”

I was in a different group. They told us we could volunteer to go to “advanced school” and get more training. I didn’t see the advantage of it. I wanted to go to Vietnam quick and get it over.

But the night before we had to make up our minds, they let us go out in the town and get drunk. There was a club where you brought carryin booze in paper sacks. I was sitting there with these guys with a few weeks’ training, and I thought, “I’d be stupid to go into a war with these dopes.”

I signed up for advanced school. Only after I signed up did they tell me that advanced school meant jumping out of a plane. I told them, “Are you crazy? I’m from New York. I don’t jump out of airplanes.”

T
HEY MOVED
us to a different area of the base where they had steel towers to practice jumping. My first time jumping, they had to push me off the tower. I did not like heights.

In the offices by our barracks I’d overhear officers talking about how bad Vietnam was. They’d told us this in boot camp, and I’d
assumed they were trying to scare us. I started to wonder if they were telling us the truth. I became serious about training. I’d been focused when I played basketball in school. Now I focused my mind on the army.

They put us in a plane for our first real jump. On the inside it was like a boxcar. When we got in the sky, we formed up along a cable leading to the door and they started pushing us toward it. The guys in front were already jumping out.

Each guy was supposed to jump when a red light by the door blinked, but a guy ahead of me wouldn’t jump. The instructors told him, “Here’s your choice: if you want to be in airborne, we’re throwing you out of the plane. If you don’t want to be in airborne, sit down and you’re done. You’ve failed.”

The guy screamed, “You push me out, I’ll sue you!”

What a moron. Sue the army? That’s like suing the Mafia. They sat that asshole down. When my time got closer, I was shaking. The guy directly in front of me said, “Don’t worry. I’ve jumped before. If you jump immediately after me, I’ll watch you.”

I trusted this guy so much, when he jumped, I rushed after him ahead of the blinking light. An instructor held me back. When they finally let me out, I couldn’t see where the guy was who was watching me, but he made me feel confident. After I hit the ground, I saw the guy. I said, “Thank you.”

He fell over laughing. “I never jumped in my fucking life, man.”

He was fucking with me to build up his own courage. But he gave me the balls to do my first jump. After that I was excited to get in the air. Jumping is euphoric.

They sent us to Kentucky for more training—from living on berries in the woods to knife-throwing. With knife-throwing, I never got consistent results. In Vietnam I worked with a guy who could throw a knife from twenty feet and put it in someone’s chest. I would throw a knife, and the wrong end would hit the guy. I tried once on a Vietnamese. Dinged my knife right off his chest. Luckily, my buddy was able to shoot him.

Through the army training I learned that running around on
the streets of New York hadn’t given me much advantage. I was not as good as I thought I was. The farm boys shot rifles better than me. The only advantage I had was that I was mentally prepared. The people who recruited me knew my history. They knew I hurt people. My emotional responses were different. I could withstand pain better than other people. I could inflict it. That’s something many people can’t do. The army recruiters had been smart about me. When I got to Vietnam, they put me with some guys as bad as me, and God Almighty, we went fucking crazy over there. The sickest part of it was, we enjoyed it.

*
In 1965 Jon was also arrested after an assault in New Jersey and convicted of carrying a concealed weapon. He was on probation for this at the time of his kidnapping arrest in New York.

9

JUNE 2009—HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA (JON’S HOUSE)

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A hard rain falls outside. The windows in the living room thump as raindrops as big as marbles hit them. The surface of the lake out back looks like it’s boiling.

Jon approaches the couch where we do our morning interviews. His hair, normally meticulously combed, is disheveled. He says he barely slept last night. We have the following dialogue:

JON
: Noemi had to leave our bed. Many times she can’t sleep through the night with me. She says I move around and I sweat. It’s very bad some nights.

EVAN
: Do you have any idea why?

JON
: Because I dream. They’re not really dreams. I relive bad things I’ve done. How can I explain it to you?

EVAN
: You say you never had a problem sleeping no matter what you did to people.

JON
: My dreams aren’t like I’m picturing things. I wake up, and my heart pounds. If I could associate it with anything, it’d be the times in Vietnam when I had to hide in the mud to wait for people we were ambushing. I dream of the adrenaline. I don’t dream about specific bad things I did, like “Oh my God, I skinned that guy in Vietnam. I hung him from a tree. I took off his skin and watched him suffer.”

EVAN
: Wait, did you actually skin somebody alive?

JON
: Oh, yeah, bro. Not one person. We used to do it all the time.

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I flew into Danang with a bunch of guys I didn’t know. The way the army ran things was, your platoon was already in Vietnam. It stayed there forever. They brought in replacements like me as other guys in the platoon died or finished their tour. So we all came in as replacements. Our flight landed at a time when they were moving the dead soldiers in body bags onto planes for the trip back home. The military was so coarse and stupid, they had us walk past the body bags. I turned to a soldier waiting to load them and said, “Jesus. Bad day?”

“It’s like this every fucking day,” he said.

After all the training and buildup to the war, they had me wait in a hut by the airport for ten days. We played cards and drank Cokes until one day someone said, “You got five minutes to grab your shit and get on the bird.”

They flew me to Hau Nghia,
^*
a province by the border with Cambodia. It was only fifty miles from Saigon, but in a primitive country fifty miles can take you back a thousand years. There were
paddies and woods everywhere. People said you could see tigers at night, but I never saw one. Since I like cats, I would have liked to see a tiger in Vietnam.

I was put in an LRRPs platoon.
^*
LRRPs didn’t do a normal one-year tour. Guys in my unit were already in their second or third tour. One of them was an E-5 named Steve Corker.
^†
He came up to me and said, “I heard you came from jail. Guess what, bro? Everything you thought you knew don’t mean shit out here. There are Communists out in the trees who want to kill you. You got that, Little Mafioso?”

“Little Mafioso” was what Steve called me. He was a few years older than me and had grown up out in the woods in New Hampshire. Normally I wouldn’t take a person talking to me the way he did, but I’m out in the fucking woods with armed Communists and tigers. Steve obviously knew how to survive.

A Green Beret who was training our unit saw me talking to Steve. He came up to me later on and said, “I’d avoid Steve if I was you.”

“Why?”

“He’s out of his mind. When you see him go into a village, he leaves a trail of bodies.”

My thought process was
I want to be with the person leaving that trail of bodies, because that’s the most evil motherfucker in the woods
. I followed Steve from then on. Steve taught me the basics. We had to patrol through high grass, and they gave us machetes to cut through it. Steve taught me don’t just slash your machete like an idiot. It’s a fine tool. Maintain a razor edge on it. Make it an extension of your hand. Use it to feel the trail as you cut. Most important, always move very slow. Take your time. You can’t hear when you’re moving too fast. The slower you move, the more you see, the more you understand, the better you control the situation.

The other thing Steve taught me was, stay low. You get very sore and uncomfortable crawling on your belly, but you need to be low to see trip wires and one-step snakes. Steve was the one who told me about the one-step snake.

“What the fuck is a one-step?”

“That motherfucker bites you, you take one step, and then you’re history. That’s all you need to know, Little Mafioso.”

Hau Nghia was pretty quiet when I got there. One of the jobs we did in LRRPs was screen regular army companies. When they moved into a village, we would go ahead of them off the main trail and look for enemy—Viet Cong [VC] or North Vietnamese Army [NVA]. The VC were the sneakier ones who wore the black pajamas, and the NVA were like a regular army. We called them all gooks, but that wasn’t a racist term to us. It was like calling Germans krauts. Americans respected gooks—how persistently they fought. I later started to believe the Americans overrated the gooks.

Our patrols lasted a couple days to a week. The first few we did, I didn’t see a single enemy gook. All I saw was mud. Even if there was two inches of water on the ground, we carried reeds to breathe through. That way you didn’t suck mud into your mouth. From being wet all the time, your skin would shrivel up and peel off.

A few months into this, we’re in the slime one day, and I hear
splash splash splash
—footsteps. Steve could count the number of people by listening to the splashes. He holds up his fingers—it’s five to ten gooks. Our tactic was to wait until they moved past—then when they got their backs to us, we would start shooting. That was the plan.