In 1965 - a year and a half before joining the special forces selection program - Ortega went on leave during his first and only tour of duty in Vietnam.
He came home and landed at Leavenworth airport.
After six months of fighting in Vietnam he was finally back in the States, even if for just a short break.
It was then that Manuel Ortega - twenty one years old at the time - had his first sexual experience.
His girlfriend Helen decided to make love to him when she understood how many Americans Ortega had seen dying with his own eyes, right in front of him.
In less than a year spent in Vietnam, Ortega had had to take care of thirty-five American corpses. Ten of them had slowly died in his arms, and he couldn't do anything about it.
Even if he had never been assigned to the front line, and had never seen any actual combat, he had become familiar with situations like that and watching people die.
*
Ortega had always been the first to get out of the air ambulance and the last one to get back in.
His role, working as an armed escort for medical personnel, was one of the most dangerous but despite this simple truth, that had never been enough for him, because for each and every one of the guys he saw dying, Ortega felt that he had done something wrong.
At the moment of their deaths they would let out a long sigh, and their eyes would move more slowly and finally just stare.
Then the pupils dilated and Ortega knew at that very moment that it was over for them.
On so many occasions he could do nothing more than hold the hand of a young - or not so young - man, telling him that he wouldn't feel a thing, that nothing would happen, everything would simply shut down and it would just be over.
Because at a certain point, Ortega stopped lying to those that couldn't be saved.
He changed his attitude and he always told the truth to everyone no matter what, because in his opinion sooner or later they would have realized it anyway, and he felt that those lies everybody told dying people only made everything worse than it already was.
And when it was all over, Ortega always found something that he or his team could have done better, faster, or making sure the wounded would feel less pain.
In his mind, every time somebody died they had always arrived too late, or they lacked the right equipment or they had been in the wrong place.
With the kind of attitude he had he was one of the best people in the job.
However, this also made him suffer like hell.
Ortega had never been on the front line but all the same he knew very well what war was all about. He had seen very clearly what the consequences are. And during that period of leave in the United States, his memories were certainly not fading. On the contrary, he thought about the conflict and his experiences so much. Those memories were far from fading away. On the contrary, he had all of them really clear in his mind.
It was also a war in which people were killed where apparently there was no war going on at all. People would die even at a great distance from the front line, and that included civilians living in the cities.
Most of all, Ortega had to deal with wounds inflicted by mines or traps of various kinds and only to a lesser degree with combat-related injuries.
The Viet Cong - or 'Charlie' as they were often called - were not really into conventional warfare. They would leave land mines here and there or kill groups of Americans using snipers and then retreat as quickly as possible.
They would occasionally carry out terrorist attacks against civilians, planting bombs inside markets or bars.
When this kind of thing happened, Ortega would often assist wounded American soldiers in the midst of groups of Vietnamese men, women and children who were dying all around him ... and this was something he never really accepted.
As far as Ortega was concerned, the life of an American citizen could not be considered more important than the life of a Vietnamese citizen, but the top brass used to say that too many American deaths would bring an end to the US effort in the war, and, with the Communists left free to take over, the result would be genocide.
So Ortega did as they said.
On one occasion he assisted a small party of thirty-year-old officers who happened to be with a group of teenage prostitutes who had been ripped to pieces.
He once had to assist a few American entrepreneurs surrounded by Vietnamese kids wounded by shrapnel and bullets.
Even if Ortega's job was to help after that what had to happen had already happened, he was constantly surrounded by danger and more than once he came close to death by inadvertently walking past a few hidden land mines.
He had seen one of his colleagues blown to pieces by one of them.
Once he even responded to Viet Cong terrorist fire
*
His girlfriend decided to make love when she understood that Ortega had risked dying a virgin in Vietnam, and that that period of leave might be the last time she would see him alive.
So, that afternoon, they made love for the first time.
That noon was intense; it was as if for a moment they had become one and their souls had become joined. She enjoyed it so much she cried with emotion afterwards.
So much happened that day that he felt as if he had traveled a million miles, had just made love for the very first time in his life and he was now having dinner with his family whom he hadn't seen for what felt like a lifetime … and the sun hadn't set yet.
It had been a forty-hour day and he was suffering from jet-lag.
He was both physically and psychologically exhausted.
A terrible day, and it wasn't over yet.
After a quick shower, Ortega was now having dinner with his parents and he was acting as if nothing had ever happened between him and Helen.
This made him feel uncomfortable.
He also thought they could smell the scent of sex on himself. It was like wearing the wrong clothing, and in the wrong place. Though, obviously it would have been impossible for them to ‘smell’ what he’d been up to.
He had a shower, used eau de cologne and changed his clothes. However, he was still afraid his family would be able to smell what he had just done, or that they might read it in his face somehow.
He felt uncomfortable and not only that.
He didn't want to eat with them.
His only desire was to remain alone with his thoughts about his ‘first time’ with Helen. But he had been away from home for so long, and so many things had happened in the meantime that if he didn't have dinner with his family they would never forgive him.
So the evening started and there were so many toasts, pats on the back and so on, and everything was going fine, until Ortega said:
“Hey, shit, ma ... this chicken is fuckin' awesome.”
As soon as he uttered these words the whole room suddenly became silent.
Ortega immediately said that he was sorry, almost laughing. He said that having spent so much time with 'the guys in Vietnam' he had become a little rude.
“Really, I am sorry, ma.”
“It doesn't matter, son. God only knows with what kind of bad people you had to deal with.”
Anyway, a cold atmosphere lingered on for a while.
Ortega noticed tension in their expressions and gestures, a certain distance in his parents and relations, who might be thinking that he was no longer the boy he used to be.
However, everyone soon returned to the light-hearted banter, but during the pleasant moments with his family and the laughter, Ortega retained a sense of guilt because of what he had said and his coarse manners. It continued like this until they started asking him about the war.
It was bound to happen.
They had just hedged around the topic throughout dinner.
They really did everything they could to resist the temptation to ask him a lot of questions about his experiences, but in the end it was inevitable.
Ortega never replied for real.
He just said:
“I saw a lot of people dying, dad. There were so many of them.”
And the discussion ended there.
Manuel Ortega had a stepbrother, Richard, the son from his father's first marriage, who was sitting right beside him.
His father's first wife died before Manuel was born, so Richard was his elder brother. They had the same father, but different mothers.
They were very fond of each other, but during his first leave from Vietnam it was clear that for his stepbrother Ortega had become an overbearing figure.
The combat ribbon that Manuel had earned in Vietnam was an award that his stepbrother would never be able to equal no matter how much he studied at university.
Ortega had not yet joined the special forces but his dress uniform was covered in badges, ribbons, awards and so on. All he needed now was a Purple Heart for combat wounds, and then he would really be a war hero.
His stepbrother was a medical student, and a fairly mediocre one. Would Richard ever become a physician? He might become a male nurse, but probably never a real doctor. In any case that would be better than serving in a bar or sweeping the roads but it would be nothing much compared to the 'almost-war-hero' his younger brother had already become.
There were no ill feelings between the two of them, but Richard tended to feel overwhelmed and dismayed in realizing he had been outdone by his younger stepbrother.
Later that evening, while Richard was brooding over his sense of mediocrity, Manuel found it difficult to get to sleep.
He hadn’t spent a night in a real bed for about six months and he felt uncomfortable with the perfectly folded sheets and blankets.
The feel and the softness of the lightly perfumed bedding irritated him.
He was also perturbed by the silence and cleanliness of the house.
For a little less than one year he had slept in sleeping bags or on camp beds that smelled of sweat and in the midst of the never-ending activities of a military base. Even during the night, no-one could ever really relax in the outposts or camps where he had been stationed.
He was also tense on account of what had happened between him and his girlfriend.
He felt restless.
The shadows that appeared across the walls of his bedroom reminded him of the branches of trees in the jungle.
As they did, he suddenly jumped up, with his eyes wide open.
He was back in his room again, the room he had used throughout his early childhood and teenage years, but that night it wasn't as comforting as he previously remembered it.
It was cold, and everything was still.
It was dark and barely lit by the very little light that came in through the window.
It was as if he had just become a kid again, and he was afraid of the dark.
He was more scared in his own home than he might ever be in Vietnam.
He couldn't live a civilian life any more.
It was as if he had fallen into some kind of trap and well beyond the point of no return.
He had seen so many people dying in Vietnam that a human corpse would not have much more effect on him than a crushed, dead cat lying at the roadside.
And even so, that night he was afraid of the dark.
“When your own home scares the hell out of you, it means you’ve gone too far.” One of the guys in Bravo company had said that to him shortly before Ortega saw him die.
What was his name?
Ortega couldn't remember it, but he had to be someone with guts. He recalled that he was in his mid thirties and almost ‘old’ as far as Ortega was concerned. Before he died he once said that he had been in Vietnam for years, ever since the time only the French were fighting against the Communists. He had probably gone to Vietnam with the very first American military advisors. Maybe he had even worked for the secret services.
While he was trying to remember his name, Manuel fell asleep.
That night he dreamed about Boswell, a guy who had been killed by a bomb. When they found him he was lying in his own excrement in a pool of mud with his trousers torn to pieces.
When a person dies, their muscles relax.
A lot of people think it’s out of fear but it’s not like that; the muscles simply become entirely
relaxed when the brain stops controlling everything,
Sometimes it can happen because of fear, but the case that Ortega saw that day had nothing to do with fear.
The guy had simply died.
When they shoot someone and it's a serious wound, and you cut their pants away to assist them, you might see it happen.
That happened to Ortega.
You can tell the exact moment a guy dies in front of you when he suddenly starts shitting or pissing himself. The brain stops controlling the body and life simply slips away.
Other people present some kind of contraction, like an orgasm.
That day he’d had sex for the first time in his life, Ortega dreamed of a corpse lying on a bed that was screwing something above it.
The corpse was gray and naked, its mouth was open and a white tongue was hanging out of it.
Its feet were bare and contracted and its facial expression denoted something between extreme physical effort and pain, as if it were trying to bite something on top of it.
Ortega woke up again, but this time he woke up to sit on his bed, his eyes staring at the shadows, and he took a pause to reflect.
Maybe, after the end of his tour of duty, he could join the army and try the special forces selection program.
He would work with the special forces at least a couple of years and then he would continue his career in an easier role.
It could be a solution.
There was no more civilian life for someone like him.
Not anymore.
Civilian life made him think too much.