Chapter Twenty

December 1972

Even the ride out of Cam Ranh on the freedom bird wasn't anything he could look back on with any fondness, tainted as it was with his ongoing concern that the chopper could be turned around at any time, could divert only slightly from its flight path to Saigon and he'd be right back in the middle of the war.

The rumors had circulated for a couple of months and he'd just about stuck his fingers in his ears so he wouldn't have to hear them anymore. Wouldn't have been fair to keep the guys in his squadron from speculating and dreaming, just like Ackley and Horn had done during his first days in the jungle, but he hadn't wanted to listen to it so he'd put some distance between himself and the words.

Even when the six of them got recalled from a mission and stationed at base for a few days, he steadfastly refused to pay any attention to the gossip that circulated about the Vietnamization of the war and how recon boys just weren't needed anymore. As far as he would let himself think, he still had almost two months left of his thirteen month tour here, and that was assuming he didn't opt for a second one so he could make his way to being a civilian that much quicker. Besides, the way he had it figured, this stay at Cam Ranh was for the sole purpose of giving Marcek a few days to try to wear down his resistance and nag him about getting back in the ring. Daily summonses to the man's office and at least if it had been summer he might have appreciated the air conditioning. By now his body had adjusted enough to the South Asian climate that he felt the slight coolness and the dry edge to the December air and wondered how it had been that less that a year ago he'd found January to be sweltering.

"Sergeant Duke," was the Lance Corporal sent to fetch him. "Lieutenant Marcek wants to see you, sir." He could set his watch by the kid's flushed face showing up each day to find him in his barracks or digging trenches or running laps around the perimeter.

Might have been the fourth or fifth time he reported to his superior that the unvarying entreaty to fight "just one more time" got preempted just long enough for some papers to be handed over to him.

"That's good news there," he got told. "Good enough that maybe you'll reconsider that inter-service match. You could take Davidson with one hand behind your back." And if that was supposed to be encouragement, Marcek hadn't learned a single dang lesson from what had happened last month with Sinclair.

"I ain't interested in fighting," and if the papers that were in his hand represented some sort of a bribe, then maybe he'd have himself a bit of leverage. Because he kept expecting to be brought up on insubordination charges for refusing to box, but with any luck he wouldn't be alone in the brig, not when his superior officer's attempts at bribery got brought to light.

"Duke, I'm not going to pretend to understand you. But, just your luck, I'm not going to hold it against you, either." Silence, the two of them facing off without a word passing between them. "Aren't you going to look at your orders?"

Not if he didn't have to. "Soon as I get back to the barracks," he promised.

"Suit yourself," was just the officer calling him a fool.

And he had been, because as soon as he'd found a deserted corner of the compound and squinted his eyes against the glare to read what had been handed to him, he crumpled the papers back up and jammed them into his pocket, then took to running laps around the camp. Sure, what he'd seen were his orders to go back stateside and immediately report to Camp LeJeune for further assignment, but printed orders were nothing to believe in. Heck, he'd read several-hundred-page textbooks dedicated to war – his favorite had always been the Civil War, of course, but he'd studied all of them from the time of the revolution – and not a one of them stated facts as they really were. War was a world of sneakiness and trickery, where the most trustworthy things were the bullets, mortars, grenades and mines that would unerringly blow a man to bits. Yes, he had papers that said he could go back to The World, but he believed in them even less than he believed in Santa Claus.

He'd packed up the ratty clothes he had left anyway, and two days later he was on that chopper, the one that he kept expecting to arc to starboard and take him back to the depths of the jungle. After that he transferred to a propeller plane that he reckoned might take him to Cambodia instead of Tokyo, and when he landed safely in Japan and got transferred to a jumbo jet that struck out east over the Pacific, he finally figured that this might just be real.

The letter-writing had started then, and stretched on through the night that followed. Cramped into a small seat while everyone around him quieted then closed their eyes to dream their hopeful dreams, leaving him without enough elbow room to fill the paper he was writing on all the way out to the margins, so he wrote narrow letters full of wide promises. Miracles and marvels that he swore he'd perform if only he made it all the way home to Hazzard; livestock he'd raise and sell, crops he'd plant, grow and harvest all by himself, a lumber mill that he'd build on the south quadrant of the Duke property that would earn them thousands of dollars each month. On weekends he'd take the orphans out to the fair and repair the crumbling houses of widow ladies; he'd be eternally patient with his younger cousins and work so hard that his uncle would never have to lift a finger again.

Each letter got written, folded, stuffed into an envelope to be addressed later, because he wasn't even sure who they were for, not yet. Bo, Uncle Jesse, the Deacon, God?

Last letter he planned to write, because he could feel the initial descent as the flight swept gently toward its next layover.

"Dear Candy," it began—then stuttered, stumbled, stalled right there. He knew what he'd meant to write; while all those other letters had been tripping off of his fingers without any effort at all, he'd been thinking about this one. The one that told the girl he'd left behind, the one who had turned some of his emptiest days into nights full of love, that he was on his way back and hoped she'd be willing to forgive his foolishness in sneaking off like a coward. It was to be bursting with promises that he'd never do it again, that now that the war was over for him he'd be an ideal boyfriend, and if she'd have him, husband…

The one that would have been full of lies.

He'd left her because she couldn't stand to watch him get hit in the face, worried too hard over bruises and bumps, fussed over a split lip. The man she'd wanted was one untouched by violence, an innocent fellow who hadn't been shot at nor shot back, who hadn't leveled another man with his fist or killed someone, either through negligence or deliberation. The person she'd loved was no more than a boy, country raised and – moonshining aside – fresh and innocent as dew glowing in the morning sunrise.

He was none of those things, not anymore. And wouldn't ever be again.

His head dropped then, eyes closed so he wouldn't have to see the greeting he'd written on the yellow pad balanced on his knee. Hands scrubbing through his hair grown long and unruly again, and he didn't cry, but his body shook with the violence of the realization about promises he shouldn't make because they simply amounted to deceit. While all the people around him were coming to life with the recognition that they were about to land on home soil, Luke folded into himself and didn't move though the jolt of wheels on runway, the bumpy ride over asphalt, stayed still until the captain announced they'd arrived at their destination and everyone had to disembark now.

When he finally found his feet, retrieved his duffel from the overhead compartment and made his way to the terminal, he threw the entire wad of paper that represented his whole night's work into the first trash can he could find, finding a grim satisfaction in noticing that the gray-suited man behind him dumped what was left of his coffee in right after them. Nothing left but a smeared mess, and that described Luke Duke perfectly.

"You want to rethink that, boy?"

There was no right answer to that. Yes he did or no he didn't – those incredulous blue eyes were going to go popping out of his uncle's hotly flushed face either way. Followed by the yelling, the finger sending him backing toward a corner, the threat of the whipping that he was too old for a couple of months ago when he was still seventeen, but might be paradoxically just the right age for now. If the rigid posture of the man advancing on him was any indication.

"Uncle Jesse," he reasoned, or started to anyway.

"Don't you Uncle Jesse me," got spat right back at him. Which was going to make explaining his point of view particularly difficult, considering that he couldn't call his uncle by name. "Now I don't want to hear no more about it."

"Uncle Jesse, that ain't fair." Oh, those words might hasten the whip in its progress toward his backside, but they also spoke the truth and he'd been both nursed and weaned on honesty. "You ain't letting me talk."

"I let you talk already, boy. You didn't say one single word that made sense." Or one single word that his uncle liked was more like it. And that was only because he hadn't been allowed to finish. "Talking about dropping out of school, and you don't even know how lucky you are to get the chance to go all the way through high school. Used to be—"

Yeah, he knew all about the used-to-bes, though apparently he was going to be treated to a list of them again. Used to be Hazzard's school system stopped at eighth grade because there wasn't any money for a qualified teacher at the secondary level. Used to be that kids with the means could get an education by catching a bus down to Capitol City or a train to Atlanta. Long hours of travel each day because school was just that important, but Dukes could never afford that kind of luxury anyway. Uncle Jesse didn't have any choice in the matter; by fourteen he was in the farm's fields on a full time basis because there was nothing else he could be doing, and it wasn't until five years later that government funding ensured that every Hazzard child had the opportunity to get a full education. Bo's daddy had been in one of the earliest graduating classes and he'd be turning over in his grave if he knew—

"Uncle Jesse." It wasn't polite to interrupt, and all the education he had ever needed to learn that little fact came when he was a small boy sprawled over the knee of the man in front of him. But invoking the name of his daddy when Jesse hadn't even heard his whole pitch, well that just led down entirely the wrong path. The sort that ended in a whole lot of hollering without the tiniest modicum of communication. "I ain't walking away from an education, just school. I'm still gonna learn stuff, but it'll be better, more useful stuff. And I'll get paid to do it."

Skeptical look on the old man's face, mixing in with the anger that'd been there all along. Daisy, smart girl, had retreated to her room when she saw this little thundercloud building. It started over nothing of any importance, at least that was Bo's opinion on the matter. Just a temporary memory lapse about how he was meant to pick his girl cousin up from where she was helping Mrs. Byrne in the library that afternoon, and somehow or other instead of Bo, it had been Cooter Davenport that brought her home at the end of the day. Wasn't entirely Bo's fault, not when he'd been sent out to deliver hay bales to the Parkers up the lane anyway, then gotten distracted by Harley, who'd wanted to show him the new foal. He would have remembered that he had someplace else to be eventually, but before he could, there was that frustrated voice booming over the CB airwaves loud enough to wake the dead (or make it from where the pickup was parked in the Parkers' drive all the way into the confines of their barn) calling him back to the farm, this minute.

Daisy was home, perfectly safe, and not even upset. "I got finished early and Cooter was heading out in this direction anyways," she'd explained, but it wasn't enough. Not when this thunderhead had been building between the two Duke men ever since that day he'd come home dizzy after leaving Luke's Falcon in a heap, or maybe it went back to that morning in Principal Parnell's office. Then again, it might have been brewing since that graduation party of Daisy's, when he'd been driven back to the farm covered in dirt and bruises, or it might even have started close to a year and a half ago, when the old man had found him demolishing the half-built dog pen. Regardless of its origins, it was inevitable that the rain would pour down punctuated by rumbles and crashes, and in the middle of it all uncontrolled electricity would be flying in every direction. Best that his sweet cousin sought the shelter of her room before all of that could reach a dangerous pitch. But he could hear her in there, noisily banging into the furniture, or maybe she was dropping books onto her floor. Didn't matter how she was accomplishing it, the girl was just nonverbally reminding the both of them that they weren't alone, that they were kin, and that this kind of fussing was hurting her ears and her heart.

Not that either of them could do a thing about it now, not when one set of words had piled up on some others until what they had created between them was a top-heavy jumble that had no alternative but to come crumbling down of its own weight.

"What exactly was you planning on doing, boy?" And there it was, his uncle finally asking the question he'd been trying to answer all along. Too bad the tone of it all but accused him of being crazy.

"Getting a real-life education." Deep breath, shoulders high, chest out. There was no going back now, not when he'd already blurted out the first half of it. "Like Luke is."

Yep, there came that finger, poking into his chest until he took a step back, followed by another one. Shouldn't work anymore, not now that he'd reached eighteen and adulthood, not now that he'd grown tall enough to look down to see every silver hair on the man's head. Daisy was right about that part, their uncle wasn't getting any younger. And Bo was only trying to help.

"Young man—"

"Now Uncle Jesse, listen." Words tumbling out in a rain-swollen waterfall. No going back, so he might as well barrel forward at full speed. "It would be a good thing, really. You know how hard it's been for Daisy to find any kind of a job that she can hold onto around the farm's schedule," bang from the girl's room at that one, "and you ain't getting no younger. This way, won't neither of you have to work, because me and Luke will both be earning money to send home. You could retire." If the old man lived that long. Right about now the stripe of scarlet across his cheeks was pretty convincing evidence of an imminent heart attack. After, that was, he commenced to kill Bo.

"Oh, so you reckon it ain't enough that you wrecked Luke's car?" Totaled it, actually. Cooter had been mighty accurate in his initial assessment that it was beyond repair. As far as Bo knew it was now just a twisted hulk sitting in the junkyard, though it might have gotten crushed in the meantime. Just one more reason he needed to be earning money: to replace the Falcon, preferably with something sexier than Cooter's Challenger. "You got to break his heart, too?"

Those last words just didn't make any sense. Not when what he was planning to do would bring the Duke boys closer together. But it was hard to say anything of intelligence, particularly when he was being backed around the kitchen table. Eyes darting over his shoulder to gauge where the obstacles were, then back up because he was a man, making a man's decision, and that meant he had to look his uncle in the eye. "I ain't got no plans on hurting Luke, Uncle Jesse. I'd just be following in his footsteps."

"His footsteps," got parroted back at him in that tone of voice that called him a fool without ever actually saying the word. "You think that would make your cousin happy? You just think again, boy." And just like the conversation was going in circles, so were he, his uncle, and that wide finger that had never stopped boring into his chest. Might just leave a mark if his uncle kept it up though it had never quite come to that before. Maybe because most times he'd seen the man this put out, there had been Luke's chest, standing in front of his, ready to take more than half the punishment. Could the old man really blame him for wanting to find his way closer to his cousin? "Do you have the first idea why he went into the service in the first place?"

"He got drafted." They all knew that, there wasn't any two ways about it. "He went because he had to."

"That's right." And everything froze right there. Good thing, too, because he didn't suppose a man his age ought to be caught doing backwards laps around the kitchen under the threat of being poked. "He went because he figured he had to. Oh, he could have tried for a deferment. He talked about that. But he didn't do it, and you know why?"

No, he didn't know. As far as his cousin had made clear, there had never been any alternative to him becoming a member of the armed services. Bo had gotten sorely disappointed after he spent the better part of the spring of 1971 waiting for the conniver to figure a way to get out of it, and now Jesse was announcing that Luke had considered some sort of an escape plan after all.

"Because if he didn't fight it, if he let Uncle Sam have him without a struggle, then he knew there was no way you could get drafted." Head spinning now, as if those slow laps around the table had just caught up with him. Fuzzy logic or a dizzy brain, and he couldn't quite grasp what his uncle was trying to tell him. "See, it takes at least two men to run this here farm. And if Luke was in the service, you'd get an automatic II-C deferment. They'd turn you around at the first medical exam and send you straight home. Luke went so's you wouldn't have to, boy."

"But," he wanted to be angry, he really did. That Luke would go off thinking his kid cousin wasn't up to serving his country. "Why—" He wanted to hate those same protective ways that had made Luke look after him all his life.

"Because, you dang fool, he didn't want you to get hurt. He didn't want to take the risk of you getting killed, or maybe even worse, killing someone. You really think it's that easy to go to war? You figure that all Luke does is them things he writes home to you about? Like skydiving, and boxing," his uncle's voice took on a rhythmic quality, and that finger that had been in his chest was now being used to tick off each activity on the fingers of his opposite hand. "Marching up and down the mountains, and putting bugs down his buddies' shirts, then going off to Taiwan for a week," it was almost soothing, like being sung to. Like Aunt Lavinia used to do when he'd been young enough to get away with crawling into her lap after he'd been punished for sassing or cussing or just plain disobeying. He'd get hollered at, his chin would dip and his ears would burn a hot red as the tears started to drip, rolling down his nose to splash on the floor. His uncle would name his punishment, then give him five minutes to report for it and walk out the front door. Bo was free then, to tug himself up onto his aunt's knee, to let her put her arms around him and explain that the most important lessons were hard and sometimes painful to learn. After that she'd pull his head onto her shoulder and sing him the old mountain songs until his breathing settled down to normal and his eyes closed.

"Those is just the things he's willing to tell you, boy." Uncle Jesse, bringing him back to the here and now. "I know you seen the pictures in the papers, and probably even seen some of the war on that infernal television down to the garage where your friend Cooter lets it run all day. You really figure them boys over there carry them guns to shoot deer? You think all them rounds strapped across their chests is for decoration? It's a war, boy. Even if you got lucky enough never to actually kill no one, you reckon it's easy to point a gun at another man and know you're the one thing that could separate him from his life, his future, whatever family he might have? Even if a man is your enemy, it ain't no kind of pleasure to go killing him."

Sometimes after a tirade he'd even fall asleep in Lavinia's arms, and somehow it would be all right that he showed up late for the extra chores he'd been assigned because he'd get led there by the hand of his aunt. He was wrung out, she'd say, and Jesse would just nod and hand over whatever tool Bo was meant to use. He'd put himself to work and after a few minutes his uncle's wide hand would pat him in the middle of that blonde halo on his head. You understand what you did wrong, don't you boy? he'd ask and Bo would nod. You ain't gonna do it again now, are you? and he'd shake his head – no, sir. Then before long, Luke would get assigned to help him finish the task so it'd get done before dark.

"Luke reckoned you didn't need to go through that, so he didn't even try to get himself a deferment. You go joining the service, and what will his last year and a half have been for, huh, boy? You just think about that."

Aunt Lavinia had been gone now for more years of his life than she was here, and even if she hadn't he was far too old to go crawling into her lap, despite the fact that his head was dropping, his ears were burning red, and tears were threatening to drip out of his eyes. He was a man now, he had his pride and just about nothing else, and he didn't want anyone to see him cry. He reckoned the best thing he could do for himself would be to turn on his heel and run right on out of here, across the soft dirt of the farmyard and the fields and into the woods where the tangled roots and jutting stones would try to trip him up, and beyond that until he got to the creek. From there he could turn north and jog until trail ran to brambles, and wouldn't anyone follow him there. He could be alone until he ran out of tears, and then he'd come back home, chin up, and face whatever Jesse wanted to dish out at him like a man.

"Easy now." Except it was too late for all of that, because he was already tangled up in warm arms, his tears falling on the soft shoulder of the man who had raised him, wide hand weaving through his blonde curls, his body being rocked like he was no more than a little tyke. "It'll be all right, boy. It'll be just fine."

"You're a boxer." Not asked, stated. Not that the Captain could be blamed for that. He was just reading Luke's record and taking it for the gospel truth. Just the facts, that was all the Marine Corps had bothered to document about him and he supposed that was for the best. Too much pride to turn down a promotion that he didn't deserve and unwilling to aim his weapon directly at the enemy was the sort of information that the man in front of him didn't need to know right now.

But, "Not any more, sir," was. He had no plans on getting back in the ring, no matter which side of the Pacific he was on.

Which was for now, the right side. Cardinal directions were hard to make sense of when east became west somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and if he'd been just about as far east as a man could get when he was in Asia, here he was, east again. On the coast of North Carolina, where the air was miserably dank, and he loved it because it was cold. Goose bumps on his arms like old and long-absent friends, his breath aglow in the morning light as visible proof that against all the odds, he'd kept on living.

Only a day here so far, just long enough to embrace the brackish smell of seawater that had taunted him last fall when he'd spent endless hours trying to swim through it without swallowing more than a few mouthfuls. A day to love the bickering of seabirds cresting over a bed of foamy water, to listen and look and feel without concern about what might come dropping out of the sky or blasting out of the earth at him, a day to perform mundane but heavy work for the sole purpose of exercising his muscles and pleasing his superiors. A day so close to the way he'd been raised that he could almost hear the livestock shifting restlessly in the farmyard and smell the wood smoke wafting out of the chimney because Daisy's thin frame was always cold no matter how many sweaters she wore.

One day only, sandwiched by two nights in which he'd slept on what amounted to a pad tossed over a narrow metal frame with supports that poked at his shoulders, hips and knees with every movement, but he'd rarely shifted at all. It was dark here, the kind that wrapped a man up in her folds and cradled him safely until the sun saw fit to rise again, the kind that could be trusted not to erupt into blasts and detonations and the ghostly drifting light of illumination rounds streaked through with tracers.

"Aced Jumpmaster School."

"Yes, sir," he had, and his Pathfinder course, too. But a jumper was only as good as his chute, and if not for a better man, Luke would have been nothing more than flesh and bone scattered throughout the thick jungle undergrowth. His record, of course, didn't reflect that either.

"Good endurance, quick runner. Lousy swimmer." Nice of Captain Blevins to remind him of every last one of his qualities. "Stubborn. Resistant. Looks like you had a rough boot camp, Sergeant."

A snort, couldn't hold it back though he'd halfway tried, escaped from his nose. Yeah, it had been a nightmare. Light sleep, little food, short showers, no privacy, Staff Sergeants hollering in his ears and then there were those epic extracurricular battles between him and Lewis. Rough enough that he'd been broken over a few pushups in the cold surf and some carefully chosen words about his mother. Oh, it had been just awful – and he'd been a prideful fool, thinking it was so important to assert his independence from the Corps and from a superior officer.

But that was before his free fall through the sucking air over a half-burned jungle had been stayed by one man with superior rank, and before another one had let himself be taken by bullet so that the younger guys in his care would survive. Before he'd achieved commanding rank himself, and saved and lost some men of his own. When he'd had a youth's luxury of foolish vanity.

"It wasn't much of nothing." It had only been the front half of boot camp anyway, before Lewis had gone and really sucker punched him by challenging him into becoming a big, bad, brave recon man. "Just a misunderstanding."

"Three pages worth," the smirking Captain informed him as he flipped through the file.

Good old Staff Sergeant Lewis was nothing if not thorough. Probably wrote down in excruciating detail how he'd rode that smart-mouthed Hazzard kid until he'd been nothing but a crying mess lying in the sand while the waves washed over him.

"You got any hidden talents we ain't found yet, Duke?"

Well, there was the moonshining, but seeing as the man in front of him worked for the government, it didn't seem his wisest course of action to go confessing to anything.

"I'm a hell of a driver," was a much more appropriate admission. "Ain't never lost a back-road pick-up race yet." Whether it was against the fools he called his friends or the ones that carried badges.

Earned himself another smirk from the man in front of him who looked more like a school principal than a Marine. Made Luke wonder how long it had been since the Captain had seen action, or whether he ever had. Maybe he was one of those guys who'd come in as a commissioned officer by virtue of a college degree, who'd never had to earn his rank by humping over mountains and sleeping in muddy bunkers. No scars anywhere on him and he'd probably never had a succinct little telegram sent home informing his kin that he'd sustained an injury, minor or otherwise.

"You got any interest in becoming a career man?" That would earn rank by sitting behind a desk? Here in LeJeune or down on Parris Island, or if things got really exotic, out in San Diego, pushing papers instead of being back in Hazzard pushing dirt around?

"Not much."

"Duke, I'm not going to lie to you." But it didn't matter how the man had earned those bars on his shoulder, the tips of his fingers still held the strings that controlled Luke's next move. "There's not a lot of good assignments that I can give to you recon guys. I could send you over to West Germany with a peacekeeping mission," which didn't sound too bad, really, "but you're overqualified. Or I could put you on the track to becoming a Platoon Leader or Staff Sergeant, but you're awfully young and you're not interested in being a career man. I've got no good use for you."

"Yes, sir." One day here and if he'd embraced the sunrise, lit with familiar pinks and oranges, if he'd breathed deeply the air that was sweet and cool, he'd still wasted it. Enough time that he could have found himself an hour to write a letter telling his family that he was out of harm's way now, to replace the manic words he'd written during his overseas flight then dumped in the filthy trash can of an otherwise near-immaculate airport terminal half a world away. Maybe something simple like my squadron's been ordered to stand down out of the war zone. I'll be in the States waiting for my next orders. Don't know how long I'll be here, but if I can get a few days liberty, I might be able to come down and see you all.

But he hadn't because hopes and wishes were heartbreaks waiting to happen, and he needed to wait until they were that much closer to becoming plans before he shared them. Still, he'd have to figure out something to write to his kin by the end of the day, because it sounded like he might not be in the United States for very long.

"You are one lucky bastard, Duke," the Captain was saying, bringing his attention back from where it had wandered. "At least for now. I'm putting you on inactive reserves."

His attempts at speaking came out closer to choking coughs of disbelief.

"Don't go getting too attached to it, though. Things heat up – in 'Nam or Cambodia or anywhere else in the world, and you'll be one of the first guys called back to active duty because you've got special skills, you hear me?"

Throat still knotted around words that wouldn't come, he nodded.

"You can stand down on Wednesday, after you help lead the current Infantry Training class through their basic pathfinding skills."

Three days from now and he'd be done with the Marines, if not forever, at least for the time being. "Yes, sir."

"And Duke," came the command. "Before you leave these premises, I want you to get a proper haircut. No one leaves LeJeune looking like anything but a fine specimen of a Marine."

Figured. There was no way to walk away from the service without carrying its mark with him.