A Clean Kill in Tokyo

about it.
    I told Deirdre before we left that I was going to marry her when I got back. She told me she’d be waiting. “Watch out for Jimmy, okay?” she asked me. “He’s got too much to prove.”
    Jimmy and I had told the recruiter we wanted to serve together, and the guy said he would make it happen. I don’t know if he had anything to do with it, in fact he was probably lying, but it worked out the way we’d asked. Jimmy and I did Special Forces training together at Fort Bragg, then wound up in a joint military-CIA program called the Studies and Observation Group, or SOG. The Studies and Observation moniker was a joke, some idiot bureaucrat’s attempt to give the organization a low profile. You might as well name a pit bull Pansy.
    SOG’s mission was clandestine reconnaissance and sabotage missions into Cambodia and Laos, sometimes even into North Vietnam. The teams were comprised of LRRPs—an acronym for men specializing in long-range reconnaissance patrols. Three Americans and nine Civilian Irregular Defense Group personnel, or CIDGs. The CIDGs were usually Khmer mercenaries recruited by the CIA, sometimes Montagnards. Three men would go into the bush for one, two, three weeks at a time, living off the land, no contact with MACV, the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.
    We were the elite of the elite, small and mobile, slipping like silent ghosts through the jungle. All the moving parts on the weapons were taped down for noise suppression. We operated so much at night that we could see in the dark. We didn’t even use bug repellent because the Viet Cong could smell it. We were that serious.
    We were operating in Cambodia at the same time Nixon was publicly pledging respect for Cambodia’s neutrality. If our activities got out, Nixon would have had to admit he’d been lying not just to the public, but to Congress, as well. So our activities weren’t just clandestine, they were outright denied, all the way to the top. For some of our missions we had to travel stripped, with no U.S.-issued weapons or other matériel. Other times we couldn’t even get air support for fear a pilot would be shot down and captured. When we lost a man, his family would get a telegram saying he had been killed “west of Dak To” or “near the border” or some other vague description like that.
    We started out all right. Before we went, we talked about what we would and wouldn’t do. We’d heard the stories. Everyone knew about My Lai. We were going to keep cool heads, stay professional. Keep our innocence, really. I can almost laugh, when I think about it now.
    Jimmy became known as Crazy Jake because he fell asleep in the middle of our first firefight. Tracer rounds were coming at us from beyond the tree line, everyone was hunkered down, firing back at people we couldn’t see, and it went on for hours because we couldn’t call in air support due to our illegal location. Jimmy said “Fuck it” in the middle of things and took a nap. Everyone thought that was pretty cool, and while they were saying, “You’re crazy man, you’re crazy,” Jimmy said, “Well, I knew everything was jake.” So after that he was Crazy Jake. Outside the two of us, I don’t think anyone ever knew his real name.
    Jimmy didn’t just act crazy; he also looked the part. A teenage motorcycle accident had almost cost him an eye, and although the doctors got it back in, they couldn’t get it to align properly, so while he was talking to you Jimmy always looked as though he was watching something off to the side. “Omnidirectional,” he liked to say, with a smile, when he would catch someone trying to steal a glance at his wayward eye.
    Jimmy had been social enough in high school but got quiet in Vietnam, training constantly, serious about his work. People were afraid of him. Once an MP with a German shepherd confronted Jimmy about some unruly behavior in a bar. Jimmy didn’t look at him, acted like he wasn’t even there. Instead he stared at the dog. Something passed between them, some animal thing, and the dog whimpered and backed away. The MP got spooked and wisely decided to let the whole thing go, and the incident became part of the growing legend of Crazy Jake, that even guard dogs were afraid of him.
    But there was nobody better in the woods. He was like an animal you could talk to. He made people uncomfortable with his omnidirectional eye, his long silences. But when the sound of the insert helicopters receded into