Another Man's Moccasins

“That’s why the old pervert’s asleep on the floor; he’s gathering his strength for another assault.” I nodded and took a sip of my own coffee; Dorothy refilled my mug as it touched the counter.

The proprietor of the café put the pot back on the warmer and parked herself within easy ear reach. “Michael make it in okay?”

I nodded. “Yep. Cady picked him up last night, and I haven’t heard from them since.”

She studied me, then Vic, and then changed the subject. “Any word from up on the Rez?”

Dorothy generally knew more of what was going on in the county than I did, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have her in on this part of the conversation. “Henry left a message that he and Brandon White Buffalo would be back from South Dakota this morning with a special guest.”

They both looked at me, but Vic was the first to respond. “A what?”

“A special guest.” I shrugged. “It’s Henry.”

Vic slipped her hair behind an ear and palmed her chin; evidently, it was a good hair day. "And...?”

“And what?”

My deputy spoke through her muffling hand, the only filter she had. “You said you read the report at the VA over in Sheridan. So, what’s the story on the jolly red giant? ”

I glanced up at the chief cook and bottle washer. “How’s the usual coming?”

She glanced at the manila envelope resting on the counter between Vic and me and then studied my face. “Does this mean you’re dismissing me?”

I sighed. “I’m just not so sure that you’re going to want to hear all of this.”

She nodded and smiled. “Well, it’s good enough for me that you’d rather I didn’t.” She picked up both coffee pots, decaf and regular, from the warmers and retreated toward the tourists. “How are you folks doing?”

I took a deep breath and turned to my undersheriff. “You want the whole dog-and-pony show?” I pushed my elbows on the counter and looked out the doorway toward Clear Creek. Dorothy had the glass door propped open, and I was enjoying the cool from the screen door at my back before the heat of the day. “Virgil was misdiagnosed as mentally deficient by Big Horn County Health because of a speech impediment, but he graduated from Lodge Grass High School in ’68 anyway and got culled into Project 100,000.”

“What was that?”

“It was supposedly a program for social uplift. Every year, a percentage that scored at the bottom of the military aptitude test were inducted and then shipped off to Vietnam. Some uplift.”

I held my mug there, a little away from my mouth. I thought about the file and tried to remember the details. “He showed an aptitude for the art of war and got transferred to the 101st Airborne Division’s reconnaissance patrol. They were up in the central highlands north of Dak To looking for VC alongside this river, and they found them. . . .” I sipped my coffee. “About two regiments of ’em.”

I placed my mug down and looked at her. “Small-arms fire pinned them down for about eight hours, thirteen dead and twenty-three wounded. Air support finally arrived, and they started driving the North Vietnamese back enough for them to medevac the wounded out with a T-bar.” She started to raise her hand like she was in school. “It’s a harness and winch system dropped about a hundred feet from a helicopter.”

I leaned in, studying the collection of porcelain, plastic, glass, and wooden bees along the shelf above the range hood. “The VC saw that everybody’s concentrating on getting the wounded out, so they mounted a counteroffensive. The rest of the platoon hugged dirt and prayed for more support and suddenly this giant came up out of the ditch beside the road and started moving up and down the line firing his 16 in single shots, moving from the high spots to the low, each shot taking out a hostile as he went, firing with absolute purpose and never saying a word.”

“Fuck me.”

“The report says he went through three clips.” I took a breath and continued. “There were less than twenty men left in the platoon, but the battalion commander, safe in one of the helicopters, radioed back for them to attack again and believe it or not, they did. This Lieutenant Shields raised his rifle arm up like he’s in some bad Audie Murphy movie and screamed, ‘Follow me.’ The whole platoon, including Virgil, broke rank and followed this lieutenant straight into an ambush, where six seconds later, twelve more were dead, three were critically wounded, and they’re left with only three effectives. . . .”

“One of them being Virgil White Buffalo.”

I nodded at the marbled surface of the Formica counter. “The wounded were stuck in this gully, where Virgil made all three trips and dragged each one of them back to the original landing zone, including the lieutenant, who got on the horn and called for extraction but was told by this colonel in the helicopter that they needed to charge this machine gun nest to their right instead.”

She ran her fingers through her hair and looked at me in disbelief. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“This lieutenant started to get up.”

“No way.”