By the time Coletta got to the Saigon airport it was half way through the night.
He was on a small plane, one of those charter flights with a maximum capacity of fifty passengers certainly not more. Someone on the base had found the flight for Coletta at the last minute.
The whole thing was so incredibly last minute that when the young Baker Team soldier crossed the runway, making a dash for the boarding stairs, big bag in hand, that the aircraft engine was already running.
There was hardly anyone on the small plane with Coletta, who was the last passenger to make the boarding call.
He was glad to be on that flight alone since he was in no mood to talk to anybody.
For some reason, the idea of going home albeit only for a few days, made him uncomfortable. After he pondered it further, he realized it actually scared him.
As the plane made its way to the runway, he could feel his heart pounding. Yet, it wasn’t only because Rambo and Jorgenson had disappeared. No, that was only part of the reason,
Things like that happened all the time when you were at war.
There was more to it than just that going on in his head.
He had this heavy burden on his shoulders.
Yeah, that’s what it was, a burden, and it was making hard for him to breathe.
When the plane was in position on the runway, it began its acceleration procedure.
As it sped up slowly, Coletta couldn’t help but notice how differently it picked up speed compared to the planes he was used to being on.
For a split second at lift off, Coletta got a feeling of weightlessness.
That’s it – he said to himself.
He was leaving Vietnam.
Yet, it was far from being over.
Quite the contrary however.
This was nothing more than a short leave, and he knew it.
Be that as it may, what it did give him was an opportunity to forget.
He had an entire week to forget about Vietnam, or how dangerous the work he did there actually was, not to mention how lucky he was to be still alive as well. Thus, he was going to make that feeling last as long as he could despite knowing it couldn’t.
He could hardly wait to see his mother and father again as well.
He had written to them a few times during the months he’d spent at Fort Bragg, but once in Vietnam, he’d kept in touch much less.
As he sat there, he tried, although he wasn’t sure why, to recall each one of those letters and in part he somewhat did. He had a much harder time remembering the ones he’d sent or received either before or after his ‘Point Of No Return’ mission.
Any of the memories in, or around that time, seemed to be in a cloud of confusion. Missions of that magnitude turned his mother and father into figments of his imagination and he worried they would come to terms with just how unreal everything had become for him since he’d joined SOG. No matter how bad it sounded, no other catchphrase fit the reality of it all more than that: when you were in Vietnam, the rest of the world didn’t exist.
In fact once you’d been there a while, the very idea that regular, every-day life could exist on the other side of the world as well, sounded absolutely ridiculous too.
Nevertheless, Coletta was on his way back to that very kind of life, even if it was only for a few days.
Coletta gazed out of his window and sighed.
Who knew if he would still enjoy hunting in the mountains with his father despite everything he had seen in Vietnam.
***
The door opened and Coletta hugged his father immediately while his mother, who was not more than a step away, began to cry.
“Son,” she whispered to him, hugging him tightly as she did.
That’s when the smell of home suddenly came back and hit him.
A succession of scents lingered in the air with lavender being the most prominent as his mother absolutely adored it. Yet, there was much more than that. There was the smell of the wood from the furniture itself and the ashes in the fireplace, which are exactly the kind of smells you expected to find in any mountain house.
“Son,” said his father looking him in the eyes.
“I really missed you, you know that? And so did your mother. You should try to write more often to her though.”
“I know, dad.”
“Come on, let's eat. Come on son, you know the way.”
Coletta managed to avoid any mention of Point of No Return, be it directly or indirectly, and he certainly wasn’t planning on discussing it either. Not then, not ever. Not in his lifetime, at least.
He still had a lot of signs on his body from that mission and more likely than not, his parents would have enjoyed hearing the way their son had freed some American POWs. Nevertheless, it wasn’t something he could talk about freely, due to military protocol regarding that sort of thing and because, honestly speaking, he really didn’t feel like discussing it.
One of the main reasons being he didn’t want to live those moments again. What he especially didn’t feel like detailing however was the exact nature of what they did to get those POWs back.
Consequently, Coletta talked to his parents for a while about the war in general, the kind of atmosphere cities like Dak To and Saigon had and about the sort of terrorist attacks those cities were used to having. Just regular every-day things like that.
His father was particularly interested in hearing what the way of life was over there and whether they felt the Americans close to their cause or not. That, and much more obviously.
Coletta politely replied that the orient and the US would never be alike, and that they probably would never grow to love each other either.
There was one thing however, that the orient did understand, and that was freedom. Not 'our' kind of freedom mind you – which, in those parts was seen as downright anarchy -, but freedom from oppression. It may have been a slightly different kind of freedom, but it was freedom just the same.
In effect, there were a great number of people fighting for freedom back in Vietnam.
The problem was that some of them believed that struggling for freedom in Vietnam meant fighting the US too. That ended up being a huge problem, for them as a people.
Of course many of them were fighting for the sake of power outright, which was, in itself another matter. Not all of them were though.
There were Vietnamese heroes too, and Coletta had met some of them when he was training the ARVN.
“What’s working with them like, Ricardo?”
“What are they really like?”
Training the Vietnamese was odd.
Especially since not a single member on the Baker Team considered himself a teacher, particularly the kind you’d find seated at a desk. That wasn’t the main reason though. It was quite the contrary: teaching after all of the shit they had been through whether in recruitment or boot camp actually felt good so that wasn't an issue. The strangest thing was getting to know the Vietnamese more and more every day. It gave the whole conflict thing a new spin and you started seeing it in an entirely different light.
You came to realize they were smart and deep too.
They had an extremely ancient culture, like the kind Italians had and every so often, you could see it. You could also feel a strong sense of spirituality now and then that would take you by surprise. That, together with the idea that there had to be something more to life than just eating, sleeping and struggling to survive day in and day out.
They really deserved their freedom if anyone did.
In effect Coletta wasn’t surprised that many of them believed there was something 'higher' in communism. They used to think that because they were naturally 'pushed' forward towards a superior cause, no matter what.
Coletta knew therefore, without a doubt whether Vietnam wanted to be free or not.
The real problem was that most Vietnamese, who were not unlike many other populations, preferred living as a slave to dying free.
Sound familiar? Heard it somewhere before? Well, of course you have. It was a joke, and probably the one US soldiers used the most when they talked about the Vietnamese – Vietcong relationship. Whoever said it usually had a smirk on his face, because it was hard to admit things never would change. The Vietcong and the cruelty they bestowed scared the Vietnamese a lot more than the Americans ever could. That was the truth, nothing more and nothing less, period.
Nevertheless, for Ricardo Coletta, even talking politics was better than 'Point of No Return' that night. At a certain point however, Coletta couldn’t help thinking about Rambo and Jorgenson.
While the team was on leave, Trautman and many others had stayed behind to coordinate search efforts or even personally run some of them. As crazy as the Colonel may be, despite his importance, he was well grounded and did whatever had to be done if deemed necessary.
Sometimes, when you were with Trautman, he made you feel like his equal whether you actually were or not. You obviously weren’t, not by a long shot. That was however, the kind of bond he had developed with his men.
Fundamentally, that was the very nature of, and the reason for war, to bond. Creating bonds not unlike those Trautman and his 'creatures' had, or the one the Baker Team shared with the South Vietnamese. It was not the kind of bond two colleagues, friends or relatives could form in regular, civilian life however.
Coletta was referring to an entirely different kind of bond.
Another thing Coletta had accidentally discovered just before leaving was, that both Baker Teams A and B had been granted leave at the very same time.
He found that to be, from a military stand point, absolute nonsense.
As such, only two possible scenarios could explain that type of occurrence. Either the Baker Project needed a break to lick its wounds, or it had been forced into taking one giving some bigwig time to think.
In all actuality, there was a third possibility, and that was suspension. When it had to do with bigwigs, you could pretty much expect almost anything. You could never say.
Coletta had heard that Point Of No Return had been viewed favourably by the brass heads, but there was continuously somebody working against you.
That was the way the world worked and the competition was ruthless
Coletta had dinner together with his parents and once they’d finished, he joined his father on the veranda for an after-dinner cigar.
*
When his mom finished her tea, she announced her plans to retire for the night whereas both Coletta and his father agreed to stay up a while longer.
For the first time in their lives, Coletta senior had decided to get plastered together with his son.
A little while later, exactly as Coletta had expected, came the inevitable and never forgotten query. The one “question” every soldier in those times had to bear: What was it like to fight? Which was then immediately followed by “And, how about the killing someone part?” Asking as though every single person sent down there had shot someone in the head at a close range. That actually almost never happened.
Everybody knew that when you were at war, about ninety percent of your shooting time, was actually just shooting at everything and anything that even remotely resembled the enemy, in the direction you thought the enemy was in. Maybe then, and only then, and it was at best still just a “maybe” you actually hit someone.
Everybody knew that. Well, everybody who had been to war that is. The number of people who had no fucking idea however tallied up to almost every other stinking person in the US of A.
If Coletta was truly dead-set against answering “the question,” he, could have easily made up some bogus story about pretending to fight alongside a conventional unit. As for shadow statistics, he really had no idea whether he hit the shadows or not.
Generally speaking, that’s how he’d handled questions like that up until now. This case scenario was however, completely different and unlike anything, he had side tracked before. Here we were talking about his father. What that meant was Ricardo Coletta could neither avoid the question nor lie about it.
Coletta hesitated before giving his answer.
There were green and black ghosts flashing before his eyes, the same ones in his night vision device and during operation Black Spot. They were the ghosts of those enemies whose heads he had literally blown off with his M14’s 7.62 bullets.
Those ghosts were subsequently followed by the heads of other ghosts being blown off but this time in the light of day.
Unlike the others, these flashbacks were sponsored by 'Point Of No Return', and he remembered them just as clearly. All of them for fuck’s sake. Every single last one of them.
When he'd gathered the necessary strength to respond, he ended his long pause and got back to his father’s question.
“It's just like shooting a bear, dad,” he said.