Tag: bob

Return of the trout

I talked to Bob on the phone today. He’s moving back here. The cultural challenges of the South were too much for him. He’s currently trying to get his crap into a trailer and get out and back to Paradise.

The quote of the conversation occurred while he was explaining that he only got along with the black folk in North Carolina because the white people were so horrible. Once in a while they’d let slip something about “white guys” and then rush to reassure him that they thought he was an okay guy. As he said, “I guess I’m just as black as Bill Clinton.”

So, we’ll see him when he manages to get loose.

joyfulagitator I think he either lost or screwed up your phone number somehow.

sweet home tendinitis

Got a call from Trout. He’s going to be here visiting soon, probably, because a mutual friend is ill. Bad news but it will be good to see him.

I wish to entirely blame the visiting eyeteeth for the fact that John Parr’s horrible “St. Elmo’s Fire/Man in Motion” is stuck in my head. Won’t you just strap a mullet on me and shoot me.

lasagnese always wins

Naval Security, South of Da Nang

Talked to Trout at length last night. He showed me some of his photos from Vietnam, including him looking 40 at age 18, various sandbags and weapons, and the view of the landscape south of Da Nang that he looked at from his guard post.

Bob's FaceI also saw the “welcome back” letter from Reuters giving him his job in Manhattan again, in March 1969. That didn’t last.

Bob saw a lot of stuff that stays, even now. Mostly kids. “Those little black-haired kids, I still see them.” He told me about an orphanage he and his partner went by a lot, run by a convent. They’d bring food over for the kids every time, huge quantities of stuff from the base. The French nuns would whack them on the head for looking at the teenaged girls, and everyone was delighted at the stolen food they brought.

One time they came by and everyone was dead and dismembered. The VC had made a point, as their guerrilla manual told them to. There were a lot of points like that made, and a lot of dismembered kids. After 30 years and lately, some happy pills Bob can tell that particular story without crying now.

Bob is LoveLater on he and his buddy were sent into the jungle, heavily armed but not uniformed, to “fuck shit up” within certain map quadrants. They were dropped by helicopter near some people who needed to be blown up, or by boat near some people who needed to find out how well our new night sniper scope worked. A lot of “heavy shit went down”, as they said.

But it’s the kids he still sees. When he got back to New York he didn’t last too long at Reuters. He got a job working construction because he’s a big strong guy who doesn’t mind picking up joists all day. And he drank for 30 years, and other things. By the time he came out west in ’75, Bob was in full swing as a PTSD poster boy. A lot of other “heavy shit went down” in those years.

Bob has some advice for guys coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. “Paxil,” he says, “therapy. Happy pills and talking. Don’t drink, don’t smoke. It’s hard to really enjoy cocaine and heroin without a drink and a smoke. Mostly don’t drink. I spent thirty years drinking and denying, but the kids didn’t go away.”

Bob’s house up in the hills has roses and razor wire around it real tight.

Another slice of Bob Trout

I get this ambulance ride to Hoag, because my back just fucking exploded. Yeah, you remember. About six years ago. Anyway, flash back to the old days. I was running with this… …thief, drunk, maniac. He and I had a great fuckin’ time together. And I was constantly drunk, big mule of a guy, poster boy for post-traumatic stress disorder. This guy Pat, he was a Harbor High football star from the sixties. complete degenerate. One time we installed a hot tub in the place for a doctor at Hoag, fourth floor place down on the Bay, bring the girls up in groups and fuck ’em. I remembered the guy’s name, he was an E.R. doc.

So then, right, my back goes. Fine since then, I take my drugs and I know the woman can’t be on top unless I got a good mattress. But this time they had a bodybuilder pick me up like I was a feather and toss me in the ambulance and I got to the Hoag E.R. I’m lying there and the orderly is saying well Mr. Trout we’re going to transfer you to the VA, and I say yeah, that’s right. And then I said to him “Does Dr. S. still work here?” “Why yes, he’s in charge of the E.R.” I said “Well tell him that Pat C. is dead, and the bastard owed me $200 and owed him $900.” Orderly looked at me kinda funny and left. He comes back a few later and wipes my ass with alcohol, sticks a needle in there and gives me a huge shot of morphine. Says “Dr. S. says that’s for you, and you can spend the night here.” He always knew I was the one doing the work and Pat was an asshole.

—

This is how we did it. You know, there was nothing but killing. No strategy, just kill. I was a fucking war criminal. And we killed a lot, a tremendous number of people. Be standing in a big clearing just piled with bodies and say well, let’s call this a hundred for the records.

We’d fly in on Pierre’s helicopter and he’d drop us about over by Hoag, in the weeds. And our target was maybe over there, by the YMCA. We took a week to get there and get ready, and we told Pierre we’d be right back at the same spot at this time and date. Thank God we had good pilots, they always fucking found us. I mean, if they didn’t, that was that. So we’d go into the Viet Cong training camp or whatever at night, and load the place up to the fucking treetops with mines. Claymores everywhere, interlocking blast fields. We’d back off and fire one shot and they’d all come running out of their tents. Boom! Claymores means chunks of metal flying around in every space there’s air. These guys are fucking lasagne. Almost all of them dead or dying. But we knew we didn’t get the instructors. And those guys would tend to some wounded and then come looking for us. And they knew how to kill and how to run in the jungle, and so did we.

But Pierre would be there, every time, waiting for us just when we said. God bless him he never missed the spot and you know you couldn’t fucking see it from up there, he just had to know. No electronic shit. Mark Tork, from Manhattan Kansas. I remembered the name, that’s something.

You don’t know these weapons until you see them. Like if you shot a water can over there on top of the bricks, one shot from an M-16. You’d expect maybe the can would go to pieces, water everywhere, but no. It flies straight up 20 yards in the air. What the fuck?

War is just the worst fuckin’ thing.