Fatal Vision (22 page)

A lot of guys gave out a tremendous whoop as we were heading on down towards the earth. The sky was full of new paratroopers and you could hear the yells of exhilaration up and down, guys giving Geronimos and war whoops and "I made it!" and, you know, even picking up on some of the yells that the instructors had us screaming while we were running all through airborne school about going to kill some Charlie Cong. I'll never forget that exhilaration.

The day after my Airborne graduation I flew out of Fort Benning. I believe I had a couple of days and I flew to New York and I remember how neat it was to get off the plane at JFK and have jump wings on my dress Army greens. Still had a regular Army hat—officer-style hat—but I had jump wings now. And the casual Army hat, the soft Army hat, had a different patch on it now because I was Airborne. And I remember how neat I felt.

Now, arriving at Fort Bragg—it was actually the best time of the year for weather. The fall at Fort Bragg is clear and pretty, the sky is blue and the pine trees are all nice and there's a lot of green grass that still hasn't turned brown for the winter. And Fort Bragg was the home of the Airborne— the 18th Airborne Corps and the 82nd Airborne—as well as the JFK Center for Special Warfare—the Green Berets. So it was, you know, an elite base with a lot of elite troops, the 82nd Airborne being better than most of the ground troops and the Green Berets being allegedly the best of all.

In addition, fairly soon after I got there I was able to arrange for the housing at 544 Castle Drive and Freddy drove Colette and the kids down and we moved into the house.

Moving in, you know—moving, I think, is always traumatic—but it went very well. Colette was happy to have had some time with Freddy, I think, and the kids were—it was gonna be a super setup for us because the school was on post and was good and we would have no trouble getting babysitters and we had an income and a reasonable-sized house . . . each of the kids had their own bedroom, we had our own bedroom, it
was
officer's quarters, and to us it was great.

Also, being together again. You know, despite the bachelor atmosphere at Fort Sam Houston and a little bit in Fort Benning, it was really nice to be back with Colette and the kids.

My job seemed relatively easy and lots of fun. I was getting in a lot of jumps and learning some neat things. I was able to get my workouts in—right after Thanksgiving I started working out with the boxing team—and still have this great time to be with the kids and Colette. Also, I was not on orders for Vietnam and Colette was very relieved about that.

Once we were settled, though, I went to see my commanding officer, Colonel Kingston, and told him that I didn't mind going to Vietnam and that, as a matter of fact, I kind of wanted to go.

Bob Kingston was the guy who was in charge of the Third Special Forces when I first got to Fort Bragg and he made me his group surgeon one or two weeks after I arrived. In other words, I was the main doctor under Colonel Kingston.

I had heard all the legends about him. He's a guy who was behind the lines in North Korea, he was a Raider and he was behind the lines, apparently, for like thirteen months, which is really awesome when you think about it: he was probably five or six inches taller and thirty or forty pounds heavier than every other normal male in North Korea and yet he was behind enemy lines for thirteen months.

He also captured a pirate North Korean junk during the Korean War, on which he found a couple million dollars' worth of gold bullion. He was on special assignment to the CIA at the time, and he brought back his couple million dollars' worth of gold bullion and turned it over to the CIA and I'll never forget, his wife never forgave him for not shaving off a little piece. He had a lovely wife, British wife, Jo Kingston, and a gorgeous daughter, Leslie.

Kingston was the kind of guy that you would jump on a helicopter with or jump out of a helicopter with, or go into battle with. You sort of implicitly gave him your, you know, your life to hold for a while. And he gloried in it, to be honest. He was a real soldier. I mean a soldier who got his hands dirty. He was a man's man, no question about it.

And it was at this time—when I told him I would like to serve in Vietnam—that Colonel Kingston told me that he really liked my style, that I was his type of doc, and that if and when he went back to Vietnam, which he felt would be within a year, he was fully planning on taking me with him as his group surgeon, and of course I jumped at that.

I remember leaving his second-story, second-floor office flushed with pride that this hard-core Green Beret who later became a general who ran the Green Berets, and, much later, who was named the first commander of the new Rapid Deployment Force, had given me such high praise.

And I remember going home and telling Colette how pleased I was with this evaluation from Colonel Kingston, and she was enthralled—or, actually, not enthralled, but she was proud.

Her eyes always sparkled this beautiful luminous brown when I got excited, especially if it was something that, you know, I had done or accomplished. Sometimes I know she felt it was a little silly or boyish or mannish or whatever that such a thing would excite a grown man. But I remember coming back from this and her being—or appearing to be—very proud about the fact that Colonel Kingston found me such a good officer.

I remember another time I took Colette to a retreat one Saturday morning early in our experience at Fort Bragg. I had just been given my Green Beret that I could wear with a training patch but couldn't yet wear with full insignia because I hadn't finished my Green Beret training, but I was proud of being able to wear my Green Beret, I remember, and I went to this retreat in my Green Beret and jump boots, and dress uniform and it was one of those really impact moments that stand out and I'll never forget it and Colette never forgot it either.

It was like in late September or early October and we went to this retreat and we were standing in this clearing near the JFK Center for Special Warfare, having the review, and the flags, you know, were held by the troops and the troops were lined up smartly in their jump boots and Green Berets and Colonel Kingston gave about a five- or six-minute speech and it was one of those things that really did give you chills.

He, ah, there was fog rolling in and you could hardly see the end of the little parade grounds and he used a couple of anecdotes to remind us that he had been other times, other places, where the fog was rolling in and he'd had good troops with him and he'd lost most of those troops and that some of those men now had Medals of Honor and Silver, you know, Stars, or whatever the hell they are, and that we were, you know, we were Green Berets and we were to do our best.

It was a time of a lot of upheaval on Fort Bragg, of course. The beginnings of the antiwar movement were beginning and Jane Fonda was, within months, to descend on Fort Bragg, but Colonel Kingston gave this six- or seven-minute talk that was really sort of chilling in its beauty and its patriotism and I never forgot that and Colette was there and she was stunned by it also.

And I remember when we went back to the house that we both talked about it a little bit and how impressive a guy he was, and I repeated to her at that time some of the legends about Bob Kingston.

I went on one really exciting training exercise, down on Vieques, an island off Puerto Rico. There was Navy involvement. SEAL [Sea, Air And Land personnel of the Navy] involvement, submarine warfare expert involvement, and the Green Berets.

We had large scenarios written up in which we were gonna go into cities in Puerto Rico and set up these sort of dummy teams that would be watching students' revolts— student, you know, student-fomented demonstrations—and pick out the leaders and prepare scenarios on how they would be assassinated if it was in the best interest of, allegedly, their country and our country to do so.

And that's what we were doing down in the Caribbean: a mixture of Green Beret and SEAL teams, and of course they were in tremendous competition with each other, the Green Berets thinking the SEALs were dead on land and the SEALs thinking the Green Berets were pansies in the water. In fact, they were both good at both. They were both incredible sort of warrior-type people.

My job was chief medical officer for Kingston and part of my duties, of course, involved checking out local prostitutes in Puerto Rico near our base, and that's where the famous episode occurred where I was sitting at a bar with a master sergeant and he picked up one of the girls in the bar and then there was this horrendous battle and these paper-thin walls and the door was flying off and the walls were smashing down and it turned out that the girl he had picked up wasn't a girl at all but a guy in drag.

It was a female impersonator and he had been making out with this person for like ten minutes until he finally reached down between her legs and felt a hard-on, and went just crazy, he almost killed this person. I had to help pull the sergeant off this guy and then of course hush up the whole incident for the good of the Army . . .

The sad thing, of course, that happened on that trip was that I got called to go help Jay. Everything was hunky-dory, or so I thought. I was down being a Green Beret and Colette was back at Fort Bragg, reasonably happily ensconced there, waiting for me, beginning the schooling that she was so proud to get back to each time, and the kids were in good schools—Kristy was in, like, a sort of a, basically a babysitting school, and Kimmy was, I believe, 1 guess, in kindergarten at the time. Yeah, she must have been in kindergarten. So we thought everything was fine and I got this telegram, the TWX, on the island of Vieques, that there was a family emergency.

So I remember still being in battle fatigues, and, you know, jungle gear, and getting onto an Army transport and Colette had been warned by the Army that I was on my way and she had a bag packed for me, and I changed into my dress Army uniform—I was wearing, you know, the Green Beret and paratrooper boots at this time and took, I believe, a commercial flight to JFK and that's the time when this priest who was sitting next to me began telling me how much he admired men in uniform and the next thing I know he's got his hand on my thigh.

Anyway, to make a long story short, that's the time Jay flipped out. He had this apparently psychotic break. It turns out later he admitted to being on amphetamines for a period of weeks, if not months.

He
had been tending bar in Greenw
ich Village and had just moved out of one apartment and was living with a merchant seaman, I believe, and apparently the stress of tending bar, drinking too much, taking amphetamines to stay up all night and party and then taking some LSD flipped him out, and he had this raging psychotic break including breaking away from my mother—inadvertently, apparently, knocking her down one time—policemen finally getting ahold of him and there being a struggle with the police, straitjacket, handcuffs, brought to the state mental hospital on Long Island and tried to dive through a window from the second story. This really horrendous episode. Finally sedated with Thorazine. And, now, several days later, I was arriving on emergency leave.

I went to this mental hospital with my mom, you know, this incredibly depressing place with the raging psychotics in their zombie-like Thorazine trances, and found my brother overweight, disheveled, with a psychotic thought process, and was, you know, absolutely stunned by the whole thing.

I could understand taking some amphetamines. After all, they weren't so bad, just stay up a little bit and party. But I couldn't understand the LSD, and Jay, of course, assured me that it was given to him unknown to himself. All the rest of the people around him were the bad guys and that if only I could get him out of the hospital he would be fine.

Well, he clearly wasn't fine. There's no question he had been sort of a fringe Mafia player for a while. All the people he was dealing with were those fringe types that go on junkets to Las Vegas—they all have businesses that are legitimate in New York, but they all go to the track and they bet a lot of money and they gamble with bookies, and— some of the businesses are not quite so legitimate, like Jerry the Drug Man, a guy who apparently buys up drug samples from drug salesmen and then wholesales them illegally to pharmacies.

And Jay would run up gambling debts on some of these Las Vegas junkets apparently, when he was taking amphetamines and feeling good, sort of in a manic phase, and he ended up at one time owing about $15,000 and my Mom had to cough up when some people came to visit her. She called me in Fort Bragg asking me what to do, and I said, "Well, if you have the money you're gonna have to pay 'em," because I didn't know what else to do. I certainly didn't want my mother's arms and legs broken, so there was a major amount of money that she took out of, I think, the life insurance policy from my Dad's death, that was used to pay off some loan sharks.

So when he had this schizophrenic break, ah, his main focus was on this Mafia-type personality. There was a lot of element of realism here, but when he had the psychotic break of course it became totally unreal, and
The Godfather
became sort of his Bible, he would walk around holding it, believing that he was a character in the book or that the book had become real and that people were really out to get him.