Black Market

Later that same morning, as he slalomed through the deep slush of Jane Street in the West Village, Colonel David Hudson thought he might be seeing apparitions. He leaned his head out of the half-rolled window of the Vets taxi. His green eyes sparkled intensely against the street's murky gray.

He shouted ahead into the cold driving rain, the dripping winds ripping and grabbing at his face. “You're going to rust out there, Sergeant. Get your pitiful ass inside.”

Harry Stemkowsky was perched solidly on his familiar, battered aluminum wheelchair. He was huddled zombielike in the drowning rain, right in front of the entrance of the Vets garage.

It was an incredibly moving sight, probably more sad than weird, Hudson thought. A true retrospective on what was ultimately accomplished in Vietnam. There was Harry Stemkowsky, as poignant as any journalist's picture taken of the wounded in the Southeast Asia combat zone. Hudson could feel his jaw muscles tighten and the begi

Stemkowsky was gri

But he was begi

“I-I wha-wanted to be ri-right he-here. When, when you got in. That-that-that's all it was, Cah-Cah-Colonel.”

Hudson 's voice softened. “Yeah, I know, I know. It's real good to see you again, Sergeant. You're still an asshole, though.” With an audible sigh, Colonel David Hudson bent low and easily scooped up the hundred-and-thirty-seven-pound bundle of Harry Stemkowsky with his powerful right arm.

Since the spring offensive of 1971, Stemkowsky had been a helpless cripple. He had also been a violent, totally incurable stutterer ever since he'd been splattered with seventeen rounds from a Soviet SKS automatic rifle. A pitiful wreck, right up until a few months ago, anyway.

As he pushed his way to the top of the cramped, musty stairway inside Vets, Hudson decided not to think about Vietnam anymore. This was supposed to be an R &R party. Green Band was a rousing operational success so far. George Thorogood and the Destroyers' “Bad to the Bone” blared loudly from the room above. Good tune. Good choice.

“It's the colonel himself!”

As he stalked inside a large, drab yellow room on the second floor, David Hudson heard shrill hollers and shouts all around him. For a moment he was embarrassed by the clamor. Then he thought about the fact that he'd given these twenty-six veterans another lease on their lives, a purpose that transcended the bitterness they had brought back from Vietnam.

“The colonel's here! Colonel Hudson's here. Hide the girls.”

“Well, shit. Hide the good Joh

“How the hell are you, Bona

“Sir… we goddamn did it, didn't we!”

“Yes, we did. So far, anyway.”

“Sir! It's great to see you. Went just like you said it would.”

“Yeah. The easy part did.”

The twenty-six men continued to cheer. Hudson shielded his eyes as he stared around at the dingy room where they'd been plotting together for almost a year and a half. He sca

Finally he offered a wry, conspiratorial smile. “It's good to see you all again. Carry on with your party. That's an order.”

He ambled on, gripping hands, greeting the rest of the Vets group: Jimmy Cassio, Harold Freedman, Mahoney, Keresty, McMahon, Martinez -all men who hadn't been able to fit back into American society after Vietnam, all men he'd recruited for Green Band during the past sixteen months.

As he walked, he thought deeply about his men, his final combat command-the final mission.

The twenty-six Vets were antisocial, chronically unemployable; they were dramatic losers by the standard American measurements of success and accomplishments. At least half of them still suffered some form of PTSD, the post traumatic stress disorder so common among war veterans, an illness that, startlingly, had tripled after Vietnam. PTSD involved constantly reexperiencing combat trauma in an endless series of flashbacks, nightmares, extremely intrusive memories. Among other things, PTSD seemed to cause emotional numbing, a kind of paranoid-schizy withdrawal, from the external environment, sometimes compounded with the guilt of having survived.

David Hudson knew this from personal experience: he still suffered from PTSD himself. He suffered more pain than anyone would ever be permitted to know.

The twenty-six men packed into the cabdrivers' locker room had performed spectacularly in Vietnam and Cambodia. Every one of them had served under Hudson at one time or another. Each man was a highly trained technical specialist; each had a unique skill no one other than Hudson seemed to want or need in civilian society. Steve “the Horse” Glick-man and Paul “Mr. Blue” Melindez were the finest rifleman-sniper team Hudson had ever commanded in the field.

Michael Demu

Ma

Davey Hale had an encyclopedic knowledge of just about everything, including the Wall Street Stock Market.

Campbell, Bowen, Kamerer, and Generalli were high-caliber professional soldiers and mercenaries. Since Vietnam they'd soldiered for pay in Angola, in San Salvador, even in the streets of Miami. The combat group was particularly lethal at close-quarter, hand-to-hand urban street fighting. That single fact would be their key advantage entering the second stage of the Green Band mission.

“All right, gentlemen. We have to do some homework now,” Hudson said. “This is the last time we'll have the chance to review these details and any of our final operating schedules. If this sounds like a formal military briefing, that's because it damn well is.”

David Hudson paused and methodically took in the circle of assembled faces. Each was turned toward him with intense concentration. There was a bond in this intimate war room, he knew, that went beyond Green Band. It was a bond of blood and hopefulness, forged out of a shared, tragic history.

“Personal anecdote, gentlemen… At the highly-thought of JFK Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, they repeatedly told us that ‘genius is in the details.’ When the truth of that finally sank in, it held like nothing I've ever learned before or since.

“So I want to go over the final details one last time. Maybe two last times with all of you. Details, gentlemen… if we master the details, we win. If the details master us, we lose. Just like in ' Nam.”

Vets I had purposely modeled his presentation after the concise and always very technical Special Forces field briefings. He wanted these men to vividly remember Vietnam now. He wanted them to remember precisely how they'd acted-with daring and courage, with dedication to the United States, with honor at all times.