Strays

  To the dogs, in memoriam.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Good Times

  Chapter 2: The Siege of the Pong

  Chapter 3: Undefeated

  Chapter 4: A Long and Lonely Walk

  Chapter 5: Firefight

  Chapter 6: Digging Holes

  Chapter 7: Our Given Names

  Chapter 8: Home, But Not So Sweet

  Chapter 9: Bad Times

  Chapter 10: A Knight’s Quest

  Chapter 11: Outside the Wire

  Chapter 12: Looking for the Frenchman

  Chapter 13: The Soldiers in the Schoolhouse

  Chapter 14: In Enemy Hands

  Chapter 15: Taking Sides

  Chapter 16: The Warrior’s Code

  Chapter 17: New Companions

  Chapter 18: The Dinosaurs in the Jungle

  Chapter 19: Across the Bridge

  Chapter 20: The Dog Lies

  Epilogue: Written in Stone

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by C. Alexander London

  Copyright

  Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.

  That whining is the connection.

  There are love dogs no one knows the names of.

  Give your life to be one of them.

  — Jalaluddin Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

  It was a good time. Double O was beaten and Billy Beans had lost and Doc Malloy went down in a shutout, twenty-one to nothing. They were all among the losers. Chuck Perkins was unbeatable.

  They called him the King of Ping, the master of the paddle. He sat beneath the shade of a rubber tree beside the ping-pong table, reading a dog-eared paperback of Don Quixote that someone had left behind, and waited for a new challenger. The book was old, but it wasn’t bad, all about a crazy man who had read too many books and convinced himself that he was a knight.

  While he waited, Chuck scratched Ajax behind the ears with his free hand.

  “Good boy,” he murmured to his dog. Ajax was a great big German shepherd with a shiny coat of black-and-brown fur, flecks of white on his snout, and a giant pink tongue hanging out to the left, panting in the sticky afternoon heat. “I wish you could play ping-pong. Maybe you’d be a real challenger. Not like these bozos.”

  He looked around. No one was watching him talk to his dog. Ajax looked up at him with his patient brown eyes, much more at peace with lying around than Chuck was.

  “No takers?” Chuck called out, stretching the boredom out of his limbs. “Don’t be scared! I’ll let you serve the whole time!”

  Ajax cocked his head at his master.

  “What?” said Chuck. “I’ll still win.”

  Ajax scratched his neck with his back paw and settled down onto the ground to snooze the afternoon away in the shade. It was too hot to do much else. They hadn’t had a mission to go out on in a week, hadn’t had contact with the enemy in longer than that, and all the soldiers at the remote jungle outpost were bored. Chuck, at least, had Ajax to keep him entertained. Well, he had Ajax and the old book, and he had ping-pong.

  It was a good time, thought Chuck.

  As far as the war in Vietnam went, it was a pretty good time for sure.

  Chuck went back to his book, still idly petting his dog. Growing up, he had always wanted a dog, but his parents never let him get one. They said he wasn’t responsible enough.

  Well, look at me now, he thought to himself. He was the best army scout-dog handler in Vietnam, responsible for protecting every patrol he went out on from ambushes and booby traps, and responsible for the care of his dog in harsh jungle conditions. In the letters he sent home to his mom and dad, he made sure to rub it in.

  He thought about writing them another letter. They missed him terribly and hoped he’d come home soon. But he didn’t feel like writing right now. He felt like playing ping-pong, and he wished someone would come over for a game.

  The rule on the small base was that whoever won the last game of ping-pong had dibs on the table. Was it his fault that he was better at it than everyone else?

  Chuck believed in the rules.

  He believed in the big rules of the United States military — like following orders and saluting the officers — and he believed in the little rules, the unspoken rules among the men that were known by everybody without ever being told to anybody.

  Like dibs.

  You couldn’t start just ignoring some rules because you didn’t like them. The rules kept society together. Without the rules, the men of the infantry brigades sprinkled across the hills and jungles of Vietnam would be just a bunch of teenagers with guns wandering around a foreign country. The rules made them an army.

  Chuck sighed and went back to his book. The brave knight had spurred his horse on to attack some windmills, which he thought were giants. The scene would have been funny, if it weren’t so hard to get through. Chuck wasn’t the best reader in the world, and the book wasn’t the easiest. But no one came over to challenge him to a game, so he passed the afternoon reading Don Quixote and petting his dog. He couldn’t imagine what else the others were up to that was more fun than ping-pong.

  Across the small infantry outpost, on the other side of the plywood headquarters building, Double O, Billy Beans, and Doc Malloy were crouched behind some sandbags, discussing their ping-pong problem.

  “Chuck’s got to go down,” Double O declared. “He been holding that table all week. What if the brothers want to get a game?”

  “The brothers can just wait their turn,” sneered Billy Beans, who never had a nice word for Double O.

  “If we wait for some farm boy to win a game, we be waiting until the war in Vietnam’s over,” said Double O, laughing. He enjoyed doing what he could to annoy Billy Beans.

  Billy wasn’t one of those real racists, like the drill sergeant back in Georgia who had called Double O every name in the book (and some that hadn’t been written down yet). He was just a country boy from Nowheresville who had never known a black person before he was drafted to fight the war in Vietnam.

  But he was a good soldier — hardworking and loyal — and that’s all that mattered out in the bush. Even if Double O didn’t like him, he trusted Billy Beans when it counted. Also, when Billy got mad, his face turned red as strawberry soda, and Double O loved to make that happen. It passed the time.

  “What we gotta do,” said Double O, “is get Chuck away from that table long enough to take it back from him. Chuck’s short for Charlie, right?”

  “You don’t know that?” Billy Beans was often shocked by what Double O didn’t know. Like when they were out on patrol near that village and they saw a girl milking a water buffalo. Double O just stood and stared at her, his rifle slack at his side.

  “She’s just milking her buffalo,” Billy had said. “You never see an animal get milked before?”

  “Only milk I ever drank came from a case in the back of the corner store,” Double O said. “Not from some hairy giant in the jungle.”

  Billy Beans could only shake his head. He’d been milking cows since he could walk; a water buffalo wasn’t so different. He’d never understand city boys.

  “My point is,” Double O said now, “Chuck is short for Charlie … so we treat Chuck like we treat Charlie. Seize the table like it’s a VC weapons stash.”

  VC stood for Vietcong. Victor-Charlie, sometimes just Charlie. They had so many names for the same thing: the enemy.

  It was Chuck’s bad luck to share the name.

  Stuck on base for over a week with no missions to go out on, no attacks from the Vietcong to repel, the guys were starting to go a little nuts.

  The news back home showed all kinds of picture
s of violence from the war in Vietnam: wounded soldiers and dead Vietnamese stacked like cordwood, bombs raining down on the jungle. In American cities, protesters marched against the war. Some even called the returning soldiers “baby killers” and spat on them in the streets. To hear the news, you’d think that the war was nothing but death and destruction and discord, but the news never said anything about how dull war could be.

  There were rumors that it was almost over. Peace talks were happening in Paris. Old men in suits sat around big tables deciding the fate of all the young men with guns. The president had promised to bring the soldiers home.

  Billy wondered if he’d already missed the war. How could he show his face to his high school buddies back home if he hadn’t been in combat — real combat? All he’d done so far was slog through the jungle, wade through the muck of rice paddies, and search village after village, patting down women, children, and old men. He never saw any young men in the villages. Just the very old and the very young and the very weak and the very tired.

  He still hadn’t seen the enemy. He’d never even fired his gun. The only time they ever got attacked, he was in the middle of the line and all he could do was hit the ground and wait for it to be over, which it was, in minutes. There was shooting and then there wasn’t, and the enemy had vanished again. He couldn’t get a good war story out of that. If the war ended before he got the chance to shoot at something, he’d never be able to convince Nancy Werner to go out with him. He needed to do something brave.

  It wasn’t combat and it wasn’t brave, but a mission to seize the ping-pong table would at least be something to do for now, except that Double O had failed to consider one very important detail.

  “We cannot sneak up on Chuck,” Billy explained in case Double O didn’t know about dogs the same way he didn’t know about water buffalo. “He’s always got Ajax with him, and that dog goes after anyone who even looks at Chuck funny. Did you see when Sergeant Cody came by to yell at Chuck for his hair being too long? Ajax almost ripped off the man’s blond head, sent him scrambling out of the tent on his backside. I’m not about to tangle with Chuck while Ajax is around.”

  “No tangling, Billy.” Double O smiled. He slapped at a mosquito on his arm, leaving a mushy red splotch where it bit him. “You talkin’ to Double O, after all. I’m the James Bond of Brooklyn.” He turned to look at the platoon’s medic, Robert “Doc” Malloy. “And I’ve got a plan.”

  “I don’t like that devious look of yours,” said Doc, holding up his hands, palms out, like he was trying to push Double O’s plan away.

  “You just gonna give the dog a once-over is all,” said Double O. “Urgent medical something or other.”

  “I’m not a veterinarian,” said Doc.

  “You’re not a doctor either,” Double O replied. “You just the guy with the bandages and a few weeks of training.”

  “Still, it’s not right to use my training to ambush a ping-pong table.”

  “You ain’t ambushing nothing,” Double O explained. “You just got to get the dog tied up to check him for … what? Like, fleas or something. And once he’s tied up, we rush the table.”

  “And then me and you do what?” Billy asked. “Tie Chuck up?”

  “You and I,” corrected Double O. “And yes, what you and I do is we tie Chuck up. If he don’t surrender quietly.”

  The three men crouched silently, thinking over their plan, looking for flaws, considering their options. It felt good having a mission to think about.

  “So once we get the table back, who gets the first game?” Billy broke the silence.

  “We play for it,” said Double O. “I win, it’s the brothers’ table. You win, you do what you want.”

  “And what about me?” said Doc. “Where do I fit in?”

  “With Billy, I suppose.”

  “Oh, don’t do that. Just ’cause we’re white, huh?”

  “No, Doc, just ’cause you terrible at ping-pong. You try to play with us, you gonna lose even worse than you lost to Chuck.”

  “What’s worse than losing twenty-one to nothing?” Doc wondered. “You can’t do worse than nothing. Nothing is nothing.”

  Double O just shrugged. It was a deep question — “What was worse than nothing?” — and the day was too hot and too sticky to think about deep questions. If he were back in Brooklyn, it would have been a stoop day, a day to just sit outside on the stoop and watch the girls walk past, a day to maybe open up a fire hydrant to cool off.

  But in Vietnam, there wasn’t any way to cool off, not for the combat infantry grunts of the United States Army. If they weren’t hiking through the stinking jungle on some long patrol, wearing through their boots and their feet, they were sitting bored on some base, sweating through the days and nights until they had to go out into the bush again.

  He wasn’t even sure why they were fighting a war in Vietnam. Nobody was. Something about stopping the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, protecting the free world for democracy and all that. The whys of war didn’t matter so much when you were the guy on the ground fighting it. Double O cared more about the whens of war, like “When do we eat?”, and “When do we fight?”, and most of all, “When do we get to go home?”

  But he couldn’t answer those questions either.

  “So, you good ol’ boys in or what?” Double O wiped his hands on his pants and stood. “Because I want to get a game in before chow time.”

  “I’m in.” Doc Malloy sighed. He didn’t like to abuse his position as the platoon medic, but he also didn’t like being embarrassed at the ping-pong table.

  And anyway, until they got a real combat mission, the Siege of the Pong against Ajax the scout dog and his handler, Chuck, would pass the time.

  In this war, passing the time was the best anyone could do.

  Chuck stopped reading when Ajax let out a low growl. His ears pointed straight up. Chuck could see the four-digit serial number that the army had tattooed on the soft pink flesh inside the scout dog’s ear.

  Chuck had learned to understand the movement of Ajax’s ears and the tone of his growls the way best friends understand each other’s shrugs and sighs. After all this time together, there wasn’t much Ajax could do that Chuck didn’t understand. And right now, Ajax was giving Chuck a warning.

  “What is it, Doc?” Chuck said, without looking up.

  “I, uh … I …” Doc Malloy stumbled, spooked that Chuck knew he was there without even looking up.

  Chuck liked the rest of the platoon to think he and Ajax possessed some kind of mystical power, when really, it was just that he spent more time with his dog than he did with most humans. He rotated in and out of different army units every few weeks, so he never had time to make friends. The only constant companion he had was Ajax.

  Also, it helped that Doc cast an unmistakable shadow. In spite of all the marching and the terrible military food, Doc was round.

  “Relax, Doc,” said Chuck. “Ajax won’t attack … unless I tell him to.”

  Doc nodded, standing on the opposite side of the ping-pong table, frozen in place. Despite Chuck’s assurance, he obviously thought that any sudden movement might alarm the big German shepherd.

  He was probably right, but Ajax had learned the smell of every soldier in the platoon and he knew who was friendly and who wasn’t.

  Of course, even friends could turn on you.

  In the scout-dog handler course Chuck had taken at Fort Benning, Georgia, one of the first lessons they’d learned was to treat their dogs with respect. Dogs were man’s best friends, but they were still animals, and Ajax had enough power in his jaws to tear a man’s arm off. When they’d first met, Chuck had been a little frightened of the muscular German shepherd. Now, he couldn’t imagine a better dog in all the world.

  “So, you come for another game?” Chuck set his book down and stood. He was happy for something else to do. The book was good, but kind of hard to understand. There were a lot of thees and thous and long speeches about roma
nce and honor and heroism. It was very old-fashioned. “I’m glad you’re not embarrassed to try again. No shame in losing to the best, right? Maybe you’ll even score a point this time. Your serve.”

  He tossed Doc the ping-pong ball.

  “I’m not here to, uh, play,” said Doc, setting the ball carefully on the table beneath the paddle. “I …”

  “You look nervous.”

  “Dogs make me nervous.”

  “You know, Ajax can smell fear,” Chuck explained. “If he smells that you’re afraid, he’ll start to think maybe there’s something around here to be afraid of … and we don’t want him getting jumpy, do we?”

  “No, we don’t,” said Doc. “See, I’ve got to check him, for … you know, uh … fleas?”

  “Is that a question?”

  “What?”

  “Were you telling me or asking me?”

  “Telling you. I’ve got to check Ajax for fleas.”

  “You aren’t a veterinarian.”

  “That’s what I told them.”

  “Told who?”

  “What?”

  “Who did you tell you weren’t a veterinarian?”

  “Uh …”

  Chuck didn’t need Ajax’s highly developed senses to know something was wrong. Doc was acting weird. He’d been on patrol with Ajax a half-dozen times without ever getting weird around the dog. So if it wasn’t the dog making him nervous, then it was something new. And “something new” made Chuck suspicious.

  He narrowed his eyes at Doc Malloy. “Fleas, huh?”

  “Yeah, fleas. Gotta tie Ajax up to check him. You know, for safety.”

  “Yeah,” said Chuck, looking at Doc. “Safety.”

  They stared at each other across the ping-pong table. Doc stood as still as a statue, trying to keep his face from betraying him, and Chuck let a slight smirk pull at the corners of his mouth. At Chuck’s side, Ajax had his ears up and was watching Doc Malloy closely.

  “What’s going on?” whispered Billy Beans. He had ducked behind a pile of sandbags and pressed his back against it, like he was taking cover from enemy fire.

  “Doc’s giving up the game,” said Double O, peering over the top of the sandbags. “That dog can smell his fear. Shoot, I can smell it from over here.”