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.