THE GATES OF HELL
Spoiler: This is a very dark tale about Starsky's time in Vietnam. There is graphic violence dealing with scenes of torture and abuse in a POW Camp.
Author's Note: This is the Sequel to "A Mother's Love" There will be a third story in this series called "In My Father's Footsteps"
CHAPTER 1
David closed his eyes and tried to rest. He was exhausted. But sleep was out of the question. The sound of gunfire in the distance, a sound he should be used to after almost eighteen months in Vietnam, was keeping him awake. Not that he really slept in this god forsaken place anyway. He hadn't had a decent night's sleep in all the months that he had been in country. But in a few more weeks, his personal hell would be over and he would be going home. His enlistment was finally up.
He had been scared when he got his draft notice and had to leave Bay City for boot camp. But that hadn't been anything compared to the absolute terror he'd felt when he got his orders to ship out for Vietnam. He knew that the odds were against him ever coming back home again. He could still remember those first few weeks in country vividly. It was a different world over here and you quickly learned to live by a different set of rules if you wanted to survive. And David had learned his lessons well.
He had learned to control his fear, to shove it deep inside of himself where it couldn't interfere with the job he had to do. He had learned to watch his friends get blown apart by landmines and not bat an eye. He had learned to kill and he was good at it. He could live off the land if he had too for weeks at a time and he could slip through the jungle like a shadow, never seen and never heard by his intended target. Whatever innocence he still had before coming to this place, he had quickly lost. He had gone from an eighteen year old boy to a product of Uncle Sam's army almost overnight.
With a heavy sigh, David finally gave up trying to sleep and sat up on his bedroll. Slapping at one of the endless insects that seemed to fill the air, he barely noticed the sharp sting on his arm when it bit him. Opening his knapsack, he dug out the tiny snapshot of him with Rose, Al and Ma at his high school graduation. A bitter smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. It felt as if that picture had been taken a lifetime ago.
God, he missed them so much. It was even worse than when he had to leave New York at 13 and start a new life in Bay City, three thousand miles away from his mother, his brother and his friends. With a scowl, he put the picture back in his knapsack for safe keeping. Things had a way of getting lost or stolen over here, so he had quickly learned not to keep anything valuable around. His father's rings were still worn snugly on the pinky finger on his left hand. The only other jewelry he wore was a battered wristwatch on his left arm and his dog tags hanging around his neck.
Shoving himself to his feet, he shuffled over to the campfire and joined two other men from his unit who were sitting there. David poured himself a bitter cup of coffee and sat down beside one of his friends, Charlie Jones. Charlie was only a year younger than David (who had just turned twenty two weeks ago) He hailed from Tennessee and despite the differences in their backgrounds, he and David had become good friends. The other young man sitting on the other side of David was relatively new to the unit. Still green, his eyes darted around anxiously, jumping at every unfamiliar noise that came from the jungle that surrounded them. He had only been with their unit for three weeks and he was only eighteen, one of the youngest soldiers there.
His name was Mark Hendricks and he had been born and raised in Mesa, Arizona. David had talked to him a few times, offering him advice on how to stay alive in this awful place. It was a lesson every new recruit had to learn pretty quickly if they wanted to stay alive. One mistake in this jungle could cost you and your fellow soldiers their lives. The men who had been there for awhile were leery and cautious of any new recruit. If a man didn't shape up quick enough, his own bunkmates could turn their backs on him in the middle of a battle.
"Where you from, Dave?" Mark asked. He knew from Dave's accent that it was probably from somewhere back east.
"Bay City, California." David told him, tossing out the remainder of his coffee. Sometimes he volunteered the information that he was originally from New York and sometimes he didn't. This time he chose not to.
"You got a girl back home?"
"No….nobody special." David said with a thin smile. Back home he'd been popular with the girls and never had to worry about a date. With his killer smile, rugged good looks and a lean muscular build from helping out in his Uncle's garage, the girls all thought he was one of the hottest guys around.
"I got me a girl." Mark said proudly with a huge grin. He pulled a small snapshot out of his uniform pocket and showed it to David. It showed Mark with his arm around a pretty little brunette with big brown eyes. He carefully slipped the photo back into his pocket "Her name's Mindy Anne and I'm gonna ask her to marry me when I get back home."
"Good for you." David told him with a warm smile "She looks like a real nice girl."
"She's the best." Mark said with a quick nod of his head. "We've been together since the eighth grade."
"Hey, Dave…." Charlie said, as he took a crumbled pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one up. "You get a letter from home this morning?"
"Yeah. I got one from Aunt Rosie."
"How's she doing? She gonna send ya anymore of them cookies anytime soon?" Charlie grinned. Rosie regularly sent David care packages from home complete with socks, cookies and other goodies. David was more than willing to share with his less fortunate friends.
"She's doing great. Uncle Al is thinking about expanding the garage." David told him. David sighed heavily. Letters from home were always welcome but they made him remember how much he missed Bay City. It was so lonely in this place so far away from the states. Even with twenty other men in his unit, David still felt so alone.
Charlie started to say something else when suddenly there was a loud whistling sound in the air and then a terrible explosion right in the center of their camp site. The three men sitting around the fire jumped to their feet and threw themselves down behind the relative safety of the sandbags piled up around the perimeter of the camp. The sounds of shouts and gunfire filled the air. Suddenly, there seemed to be Viet Cong soldiers everywhere. Somehow, in the confusion and excitement of the fight, David got separated from Mark and Charlie.
A second explosion went off, so close to where David was hiding that it stunned him momentarily and made his ears ring so badly he couldn't even think straight for a minute. As he slowly regained his senses, two Viet Cong soldiers suddenly grabbed his arms and a hood of some kind was pulled down over his head. He tried to struggle against the rough hands holding him captive and received a vicious punch in the stomach for his defiance that took his breath away and sent him to his knees. He felt more than one pair of hands jerking his arms in front of him and then tying his hands together so tightly that the braided rope cut painfully into his wrists. He was jerked roughly to his feet and then hands were tying a rope around his ankles just as tightly but with enough slack between his legs so that he could still walk. David felt his heart pounding frantically in his chest as he realized that their camp had just been overtaken and that he had just been taken prisoner by the enemy.
Hands shoved him from behind, forcing him to walk forward into the unknown. He could hear voices all around him, speaking in both Vietnamese and English but in the confusion, he couldn't make out more than a few words here and there. He felt the barrel of a rifle in the middle of his back, nudging him to keep him moving forward. Blinded by the hood over his head, David stumbled on the uneven terrain as the Viet Cong and their prisoners began the march back towards the Viet Cong camp. When David stumbled because he could not see what lay in front of him, he was roughly pulled back to his feet by the unseen hands of the men who had taken him prisoner. They walked for hours without stopping. When David fell once because he was too exhausted to stand, someone grabbed the ropes around his wrists and drug him across the uneven ground until he finally managed to stumble back to his feet.
David knew that as a prisoner of war, he had not rights, not to the Viet Cong Army, and they were notorious for their torture and abuse of their prisoners. David had been in numerous battles, had men die in his arms, had seen things no man should ever have to see, but being captured by the enemy frightened him more than anything else ever had. He knew it was unlikely that he would survive the ordeal that lay ahead of him. When the time came, he silently prayed that he would have the courage to die like a man with honor and with pride.
The physical torment had already begun since none of the prisoners had been given anything to eat or drink for hours and they hadn't been allowed to rest. Under the blazing sun all the prisoners were soon panting for breath beneath the heavy hoods that covered their heads, their mouths parched and dry. Suddenly, David was jerked to a stop. From somewhere beside him, he heard a scream and then a gunshot. It was so close that for a minute, he thought he was the one who had been shot. He heard the sound of a bullet entering a body and then a thump as the body hit the ground. The man who had been shot whimpered and cried out in pain when he realized that the bullet hadn't killed him. That was when David recognized the man's voice. It was Mark, the young eighteen year old recruit. There was so much pain evident in his voice that David felt his own fear paralyzing him. A second shot ran out and then there was silence. A silence so heavy that David could hear his heart pounding in his chest.
Then he heard Charlie's voice as he yelled at their captors to take off his blindfold, followed by a string of curses in both English and Vietnamese. There was the sound of flesh hitting flesh and then Charlie shut up. David felt hands shoving him from behind forcing him to start walking again. He stumbled forward, the sounds of the fighting in the distance slowly fading away until the only sound he heard was the ragged breathing of the men around him and the buzzing of the insects in the air.