The Chief knew this was a dream, any time he hears 50’s love songs or 60’s bubblegum, its a dream. Rare songs from his childhood he never hears on the radio… its a sure thing he is remembering a softer world where taste of spicy cinnamon or lemon drops were on girls lips. He wonders how he managed to have so many girlfriends when he was too young to do any thing about it. Had a pair of twin sisters named Missy and Kissy who used to let him hide in their barn when he was in trouble in school. He remembers his mother who died young. She had the face of an angel and the voice of a devil. She abandoned him to marry a jazz playing drifter and with in a month she was dead in a river with a needle stuck in her arm.
He remembers his mother always smelled like devil grass and wine. She inherited some money and sent him to a boys home for delinquents because raising kids was cramping her social life. His mother had a really scratchy voice, when she was a runaway she had her throat slit in a park by a man she had robbed. She was so drunk she didn’t even wake up, they found her wrapped in news papers in a park in White Horse. She day she died he was actually relieved, like a curse had been lifted from his soul.
His mother was never shy about saying how much she hated him. Never said i love you except after she had done something so horrible it made the words take on an evil meaning. Like some empty phrase and fake tears were an even trade for destroying any moment of safety and joy he had as a kid. The Chief had no patience for bible school or stern work camps where they sent orphaned Indians, so he ran away. He spent some time down in Yakima, Dallas and Nashville. Stealing cars, breaking into grocery stores and riding freight trains. They were greasers, a gang of hooligans that swept into little towns like a tidal wave of break ins, larceny, drunk / disorderly and take over robbery.
In his travels he met some rough characters during a snow storm in the rail yards of Denver. They formed a gang called “drowned orphans” and terrorized white towns. When it got hot with johnny law, they spent the cold months down in Baja. The leaders were Smiling Jack and Slow Joe, they were at least twice the Chief’s age. From the old generation of hobos from the depression. There were younger guys like Smart Alec, Smoking Sam, Blind Willy, Weird Wallace, Freddy the Fink, Hurtful Harry, Dick the Creep and a black blues player named Devil Johnson on the run for a murder back in Mississippi. They used to meet wealthy girls from private schools and have big parties out in the ghost towns of the south west. The last time, Chief was too drunk to walk they day they said he drove a car in a shootout after a robbery town in the Oklahoma panhandle. Since The Chief was a minor he got to go to Vietnam instead of the electric chair like the rest of his gang.
The War was something else. The music, the hash, the cities were all so cool. The war was bloody and horrifying but his liberty in Saigon and Hue City were the best. A bunch of frisky women who liked to drink and listen to Jimi Hendrix. Unlimited chances to steal booze and weapons from the Army. He made a little side hustle selling VC weapons back home to Hippie radicals. People back in the states always wanted crazy stuff like human skulls, tiger bones, enemy knives and magical stuff from the orient. The Chief liked doing good acid and drinking good whisky. He reenlisted twice and hid a couple serious injuries because he thought the Army had answered all his questions. He would have stayed in for life if it wasn’t for some court martial and suspicion of wrong doing.
They tried to say he fragged an officer. Which he did, more than once but not on this occasion. There was no finks or rats in his squad so the guys all circled the wagons and said the guy was morose and likely did it to himself because they all liked him and tried to cheer him up. None of that was true. They painted the guy as a coward and cross dresser but really he was an A1 asshole, marching them right into a shooting gallery like expendable men in chess. These kind of officers didn’t last. The soldiers weren’t there for patriotism or hate of the Viet Cong, they were drafted. This wasn’t a cushy West Point appointment for them. A high kill rate comes with a 100% casualty rate where every body was guaranteed to lose an eye, a foot the use of their dick when their balls end up blown 500 feet away in a rice patty.
The Chief lost all the best friends he ever had. By 1971 he was just sleeping walking though ambushes, with instincts taking over. Making stalking the VC and hitting the dirt to zero in on the poor bastards like a tiger on the prowl. He could have gotten some special forces wings, but for what? Maybe turning down the Rangers and jump school is why they shit canned him. Maybe it was because he was a leader with out the rank to go with it. He was busted down to private so many times it was a joke. The money was shit, his Vietnamese girlfriend was sleeping around in Saigon. A trip back to his hometown and body full of scar tissue was all he had to look forward to. Night terrors, a life of organized crime back at home. He learned a lot of tricks from some of the connected Italian guys from back east. Telling him how to do high end burglaries and hatchet jobs for the Mob.
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The thing about the war was how addictive the action was. At first you were scared to death. Hiding in the elephant grass, practically dying from wet boots, jungle rot, insects and sores. Then somewhere half way though your tour it gets easy. When you first get to ‘Nam you have no quarrel with the VC. Maybe even empathize with them. Then they try to stab you in the dark, drag your road dog into a tunnel and he is marked MIA and never seen again, they plant leaflets of blood splattered porn on you while sleeping that says. “Next time GI.” The Chief became an expert killing machine. Interrogation, castration, torture, amputation. All things they did first, became part of the language of combat. These were like second nature. Some of the more hard core guys used to boil the skin off bones and drink the broth. He wasn’t that out there. He wasn’t master bating with peeled off women’s faces or keeping breasts and vaginal lips in zip lock bags like some guys.
The Chief was a warrior of the Raven family like his sister and her children. His real name was Xóots-šadaadoogú Xáak, meaning the Bear’s skinless head. He took personal interest in trailing squads of VC back to their strongholds. He was not taking pleasure in skinning men alive, impaling them on kitchen hooks them or setting them on fire with incendiary grenades. He was just giving it back to them in the explicit manner they did to him. He was captured once and an NVA officer ordered his tattoos removed. The Chief sat though it quietly and when he was able to pick the rope they held him with with his fingernails. He left 17 men in that cave with out any faces. Leaving them screaming in the dark with their faced peeled off. Then he blew the entrance to the cave.
Revenge was not a natural response in his people. They were ferocious warriors but the idea of tarnished honor, vengeance and feuds lasting decades was a European invention brought by Russian trappers who invaded their land in the 1700s. There was a famous story of the nearby Haida Chief who was disrespected by an American ship. They whipped him in front of his people, looted his village and stole many of his wives. When the Americans returned they suffered endless raids by Haida warriors who wore ferocious wooden armor like the knights of old. They came with spears and whale bone clubs, overwhelming the American’s muskets and canon. Sending volleys of arrows while the Americas had to fire in waves as it took about half a minute to reload. A skilled archer could let off almost 30 arrows in that time. 25 with deadly aim.
This earned a grudging respect by the foreign invaders. But like all great tribes they were won over with commerce for iron pots, mirrors, glass beads and the same muskets. This started a long standing contractural dispute between the Americans and British who divided up these automatous lands from afar. Not risking the actual manning of forts since the Russians were so cruelly sieged in the Fort that stood where Ostrog Arkhangelsk became modern Sitka. The Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian peoples fell to Small Pox not military domination. They were absorbed into a no mans land between Canada, Russian Empire and later the 1867 American purchase of Alaska. This meant many of their most powerful warriors went into either the Militaries of these foreign powers, or taken away into Indian schools where their culture was beaten out of them. Returning shamed and broken by years of torture / anglo culture. Taught to hate their own brown skin and favor the paler members of the tribe.
What haunted Chief and many young men of the tribe was if time away was making them white. Not that all white people were evil or to be admonished. What he felt was that something inside was lost. Some integral feeling of what it means to be a man of their tribe. Like calling some one a sissy or queer. He wonders if all this mental pollution of marching around in lines, learning cadences and the thought process of the western colonial mind was taking the place of some deep wisdom he was meant to learn. Was there some majestic spirit song lost to time by not being raised among your people? Was there some important piece of Indian logic or story he would never learn under the crushing weight of running away from his oath and duty to the tribe?
He thinks about this now 20 years after to war. The Chief throws his dog tags into the black sea and instantly regrets it. Sitting in a dinghy drunk in blackness, letting the tide pull him and his rolling whiskey bottle out to sea. He looks at the blazing colors of the northern lights far away. All that color and vibrant life somewhere out in space. The thing about the Northern Lights is to see them well you have to travel deep into the frozen tundra, where white bears the size of buses wait for the unwary to start stripping off their clothes as hypothermia makes them feel like they are boiling from the inside. He thinks about making the journey to see the “Aksarnirq” where souls of the dead dance in the Aurora Borealis. The Inuit land of the dead. Where the boneyards of Mammoths and prehistoric Whales lie still among ice castles, where only Eagles dare.