The first time Cookie met George there was a brief getting-to-know-you period that began with Cookie saying to herself, “My, my, now don’t that look just about right. I think maybe I’ll have his babies” and ended less than a minute later with her opening a two-inch gash in his scalp just above his left ear. Things didn’t spiral out of control as much as Cookie simply failed to notice in her moment of distraction how out of control the situation already was.

They were in a side street in the Patpong district of Bangkok just a block off the main road. It was not quite midnight, still warm and it had been raining hard until a half hour before. The street wasn’t well lit but the light from all the bars on the main street reflected off the wet pavement and all the rain-filled pot holes, making it easy to see. Cookie could look back up and see the steady stream of American military uniforms passing by. As usual, there was about a tenth the number of M.P.’s that would be needed to keep them all from mahem.

Two small groups of Marines had gotten into it over no one would ever remember what, one had gotten cold cocked and all the others had run up the side street when Cookie and her partner had happened to turn a corner and see what was happening. They chased for a block but at the first intersection the miscreants split up and ran in different directions and Cookie just stopped. They weren’t going to outrun the jacked up grunts. But her partner, theoretically the senior and more experienced cop, had scented blood and kept going. She lost sight of him and had no idea where he was now. It was a stupid impulse for him to indulge and it pissed Cookie off. There was nothing to do but stay put and wait for him to come back.

Enter George from around the corner, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, shorts and combat boots. A slender six feet three inches with blond hair considerably longer than the military cares to see – a California surfer terribly out of place. He paused in the middle of the intersection, stood up straight just long enough for Cookie to look at him approvingly and think about babies. Then he suddenly lurched hard to port, failing to fall only by a fast series of small side steps. He stopped again, patted his pockets until he found the one with the Marlboros, reached into the box, came out with three, dropped two onto the wet pavement and stumbled wildly to the right, this time recovering by means of a half pirouette. Now Cookie noticed the blood on his shirt and the barked knuckles on his left hand. A moped came blasting through the intersection, then another.

“Yo! American! You’re not gonna last long standing in the middle of the road like that. C’mon over here.”

George looked up at her slowly. If he saw anything odd about a female MP standing on the side of the road, he gave no indication of it: He responded to her just like he would have to one of the guys. “Go fuck y’rself!” he growled, showing her his middle finger. A horn sounded and a car blasted through the intersection, the driver yelling something at George.

Cookie’s reservoir of good will toward asshole drunks had exhausted itself hours ago at the beginning of her duty shift. Still, she saw no reason this particular asshole drunk should get run down in the street in the middle of his week of R and R. So she walked over to him. “Let’s go, amigo. Here ain’t no place to die.”

George was busy trying and failing to light his cigarette with a pack of wet matches. This appeared to occupy his full attention. When she was standing next to him he dragged another damp match across the match book and said, “Fuck you!”

“You can’t afford me,” Cookie laughed. “Besides, you’re striking that wet match on the smooth side of the match book.”

The scraped up knuckles on his left hand might have told her that he was left handed and that if he were to try to hit her, he would probably lead with his right. But she was in helpful mode and not thinking along those lines, so when he took a small shuffle step with his right leg, the right hook she wasn’t looking for came so close to her face that she could feel the small wave of air that the fist created as it missed her nose. The momentum took the barely upright George a step ahead. Cookie stepped to her right as his body came forward and she brought her nightstick down on the left side of his head just above the ear. He went down to his knees but she knew he’d stumbled, not been knocked down, and might not even have registered the blow.

She stepped in front of him. “Stay down!” she ordered. George looked around then felt for the unlit cigarette that was still between his lips. A steady stream of blood was trickling down the side of his head. He rolled onto his hands and knees and started to get up. “Stay down, asshole!” She put her hand on his shoulder and shoved him closer to the ground. He swept his left arm around and caught her on the side of her knee. The spike of pain and the nausea that immediately followed made her catch her breath. She stepped back. Her right hand still gripped the end of the night stick. With her left hand she felt across her waist for her service weapon in its holster. She had no intention of drawing it much less shooting; she just needed to feel that it was there.

She heard soft running footsteps approaching, then nothing. She looked up. A man was standing ten feet from her and the drunk. He was an older man, maybe twenty-eight, built like a running back, holding a small silvered flask in his left hand. A hard man. She recognized the look – combat, no doubt about it, with an MOS of I-Kill-Charley. He stood motionless and looked at her. It was not a friendly look. Cookie thought that was just fine. She herself was not in a friendly mood. “Am I bothering you?” she asked the man in the unfriendliest way she could.

“Matter of fact, you is. That’s my corpsman there. Kinda perfer him in one piece.”

Cookie looked down at George, who was still dripping blood and trying to get up. After a moment she said “Can you control your corpsman?”

“Yes, ma’am, officer Suzy. I believe I can.”

Cookie took a step back. “Then start controlling.” The man seemed to relax a little. He nodded. ”And while you’re at it,” Cookie added, “you might explain to him that it’s not polite to try to punch out a lady.”

“Ol’ Tom here try to deck you, officer Suzy?”

“Well, I hate to be a tattler.”

“’Course not.” “He reached down and put his finger near George’s gash. “Boy’s lucky you limited the damage the way you did.”

“Strict but fair, that’s me.”

He came up behind George, got him to shift into a sitting position, then reached around and grasped his wrists. “C’mon Unc’ Tom. Time to stitch up that chump skull of yours.”

“Fuck you,” slurred George loudly. He snaked out a kick towards Cookie that came about three feet short of contact.

“Witherspoon! Lay chilly! Lady gonna have to lay you open again, you don’t.” He hauled George to his feet and then struggled to keep him vertical while George found his own footing.

“Gotta admit, be a shame to keep laying into a man that pretty,” said Cookie.

“Oh, he is pretty. Maybe the prettiest white boy I know. ‘Course I emphasize ‘white’. Black man’s in a different league, you understand.”

George was as close to vertical as was reasonable to expect. The man grabbed his right arm and Cookie his left and they started some baby steps back down the street toward Cookie’s jeep.

“It’s funny, but I hear that a lot about black men,” said Cookie.

“Good news travel far and wide.”

“Mostly I hear it from black men.”

“Can’t let false modesty obscure the truth, officer Suzy.”

George started to veer off to the left and the man put his hand around the back of George’s neck and gave a firm course correction. “This way, Tom. There’s a nice little bar down this way, remember?”

George smiled for the first time and looked over at the man and laughed. “She-it! Gunny! What it is?”

“What it ain’t, fool. You back with us now?”

George looked at him again, and again seemed surprised and delighted to see him. “Gunny! ‘Sup?” He looked around. “Where we at?”

“We ain’t nowhere. You at the corner of I’m-drunk boulevard and I’m-sleeping-in-the-brig-tonight avenue.”

They steered George the rest of the way down the block and then onto the busy street where the jeep with the white Military Police marker was parked and, given that it had been unattended for almost five minutes, miraculously intact. Gunny wrestled George into the front seat while Cookie broke out the first aid kit and wound some gauze around his head. There was a swale of drying blood than ran along his ear and down the jaw line.

“Yo Gunny! Where a nigger got to go to get a drink round here?”

Gunny laid his hands on the top of George’s head and his shoulder. “Don’t move your head, Unc’ Tom.”

George twisted his head as far around as he could and looked at Cookie. “Who zat?” Then his brain reset in a way very much the same way that George himself would watch Finalist #2’s brain reset a few years later. “C’mon, blood, less get druuuuuunk!”

Gunny jerked George’s head back in position and Cookie finished up the bandaging. “That should last ‘till we get back to base.”

Gunny looked at Cookie. “That really necessary?”

“Needs stitches, and tonight. You know that thing’s gonna turn into a giant pus pot if he doesn’t get sewn up.” Then she understood the question. “Ah! Hey, no harm, no foul. He’ll just get seen to quicker if my partner and I take him in. Assuming my partner decides to come back some time tonight.”

Gunny smiled and took a draw from the flask. “Your partner not exactly a jack rabbit.”

“I suppose you might have been one of the chasees?”

“Too modest to say. Let’s just say I scoped him huffing by from a spot in the shadows. Man determined to effect an arrest.  Give him that much.”

Gunny leaned against the side of the jeep and lit up. Offered one to Cookie and lit hers. “You supposed to smoke on duty?”

“Nope. You supposed to flee from a lawful command to stop?”

Gunny clucked his tongue. “Looks like we got ourselves a slippery slope here. Best keep our wits about us.”

Cookie jerked her thumb in George’s direction. “Did I ring his bell harder than I thought? Or does he always talk like that?”

“Talk like what?”

Cookie ignored this.

“Nothin’ about the way Unc’ Tom talks sound strange to me, officer Suzy.”

Cookie ignored this, too.

Gunny laughed. “‘Oh he is assuredly an unusual lad, is he not? He comes from the hood, don’t you know.”

“The ‘hood’?”

“If it’s white, it’s called a neighborhood. If it’s black, it’s a hood.” he wagged his finger. “Limited vocabulary hold you back in life, officer Suzie.”

“I knew I should have gone to beautician school like my parents wanted. Got myself educated.”

“Unc’ Tom here from the big hood out in California – Inglewood. “Where you from, officer Suzie?”

“Bump-in-the-road, East Texas.”

“Then you likely ain’t heard of the Inglewood. According to Unc’ Tom, it used to be all white, ‘fore all the darkies move in. His family too poor to move anywhere else, so they get left behind when all the other white families skeedaddle. Next thing you know it’s deepest darkest Africa, and Unc’ Tom’s family the only white people far as the eye can see.”

Gunny flicked his smoke toward the side of the wet pavement. He watched the passing parade for a few minutes. A sea of Thais with a whole archipelago of tall Americans rising above the surface. “So ol’ Tom here, he do what most people do when they all alone amongst the foreigners.”

“He adapted.”

“He adopted. Time he’s a young man, he’s all hood, all the time. Walk hood, talk hood, think hood, hang with all the hoods in the hood. Sooner or later he gets his ass in some serious dutch with the legal system. Judge say it’s either the joint or anchors aweigh, young man. So off he goes to the Nam and finds himself in a forward fire team – him, one white looey and a whole bunch of ghet-to negroes shooting the place up, and ol’ Tom here feels like he never left home. The amusing thing about it is, officer Suzy, this tall skinny ol’ white boy with that saggy Beach Boys hair and the blue eyes, this white boy talks such a hardcore Inglewood English, can’t hardly no one understand him. The lou got no clue what he sayin’ ever and the rest of us about half of it and that only because every other word out the boy’s mouth is motherfuckin’ this and motherfuckin’ that. You gotta be up to some foul vernacular to make a bunch of combat-hard jarheads want you to just shut the fuck up.”

Gunny coaxed another cigarette out of the pack, offered one to Cookie, who declined, then casually and without looking lit it from the match book one-handed. Cookie had to exert all the self control she had in her to not just interrupt his story right there and ask him to teach her how to do something that freaking cool.

In the front seat, George was sound asleep, snoring.

Gunny took another swig, saw that it was good, and took another. “We had to teach him how to speak right. First of all, cut out all the foul language. There’s plenty of that for when the time comes, but otherwise, just learn how to express yourself. We just kept working with him. Ruben ‘specially. Our youngest. They’re all young, understand, but Ruben’s the baby. Took Unc’ Tom under his wing.”

“Lot of time to spend on a mean drunk.”

He took a pull from the flask. “He is that, no doubt. But not the meanest, nor the drunkest. There’s others got that trophy in a glass case at home, never gonna give it back. But everybody knows, corpsman may save your ass one day. Good idea to be nice to him ahead of time. Give him a reason to put a little more oomph into the ass-saving.”

Cookie’s partner walked up to the jeep, looked at Gunny, then at George. “Who the fuck’s that?” he asked, pointing at George.

“Drunk. Second I get back here, he comes out of the bar, trips over himself and manages to clock himself on the asphalt. My new best friend here helped me horse him into the vehicle. He’s asleep.”

Her partner looked skeptical. But Cookie’s tale hadn’t been intended to deceive, just to be plausible enough to make dispute more bother than it was worth. Her partner walked over to where George was snoring, thought about it for a minute and said, “Shift’s over in 30. Probably be easier all around to just leave him where he is and dump him at the infirmary when we get back.”

Cookie and Gunny rode in the back. Gunny smoked, looking off into the black all around them for a long time. His hands kept tightening and loosening. Unfamiliar surroundings and no weapon, Cookie realized. He’s not used to that.

“Ruben – despite his tender years – he had some success with Tom. Taught him how to be, how to act. Even, you know, like how he could even take some pride in being white, respect his heritage, if you can believe that. One day we got into it with Charlie. Lot more Charlies than us. Cavalry’s on the way and maybe they get here in time and maybe they don’t. And then the fubar sets in. The medical chopper gets here first, ahead of the cover, so they got to put down in a paddy about a click away. Any closer they get shot up. Still no cavalry. Then Ruben takes two in the gut and two more in the legs. I didn’t see it – I just hear the yelling and see all this blood, and it’s “Medic! Medic!” and Tom’s right there, but I scope the damage and I’m thinking it’s just too much, the man’s gone. And Tom’s seeing the same thing – Ruben’s dying right now. And the next thing I know, Tom’s standing straight up in the middle of this fire fight and he’s holding Ruben upside down. Got him by his ankles. You understand? So that whatever blood’s left feeds down into his brain, see.

And Tom starts walking. He can’t hold the man by the ankles out in front of him for more than a few seconds – too heavy. So he just wraps his arms around Ruben’s calves and holds him against his body, and Ruben’s arms are dragging on the ground. And Tom just starts walking. And everybody’s screaming at him to get down! Get down! But Tom, he just walking – lurching side to side, ‘cause Ruben’s big – and he staring straight ahead in the direction of that chopper a click away, and he gonna carry Ruben right through that rice paddy.”

He stopped, took a drag and looked out into the darkness again. Then he looked at George, slumped over in the front seat. “Don’t know how far he’d a got. Not far. I figured Ruben was dead already and I was about to tackle them both before we had two stiffs ‘stead of one. But just then the cavalry arrive in couple of Hueys, Charlie melts into the woods, the medical chopper takes off from where it had landed and sets down close by, and Unc’ Tom just keeps on walking. Makes it to the chopper. They plug Ruben full of IVs and give him all kind of shit and Tom holds him upside down all the way in.”

“He live?”

“Made it through surgery. Died two days later. ”

“Shit. I’m sorry. Mean drunk but a combat hero.”

Gunny shook his head. “Combat dope. Don’t get me wrong. Earned himself beaucoup respect that day. Guys’d do anything for him. But get himself wasted during a fire fight cause he trying to revive a corpse? What happens when somebody else in the unit get shot and need a medic and ol’ Tom and his favorite dead body are both lying face down in the paddy?”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

“Be glad you don’t have to, officer Suzy.” He flicked his cigarette over his shoulder and leaned forward on the bench.

Cookie would have to write up an incident about taking the injured corpsman to the base hospital, so she took a clipboard from beneath the driver’s seat, then leaned over George and managed to take off his dog tags. “Wait a minute. This is somebody else. George Witherspoon.”

“Witherspoon, George Edward. That’s right. Uncle Tom.”

Cookie gave him a confused look.

“Uncle Tom. You know, on account of how white he act sometimes.” Gunny smiled at her. When she looked blankly at him he said, “That’s irony, officer Suzy. War like the one we in call for a little of that, don’t you think?”