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This felt similar to the time some of his so-called teen friends in Chicago robbed a liquor store, and he happened to be sleeping in the getaway car. No one in the gang would say he had nothing to do with it. The judge found Ethan guilty and sentenced him to five to ten years in prison, or to join the Marines for a six-year hitch.
He chose the Marines and never answered any of his mother's letters, because she had not believed him either. His father might have been an alcoholic and a gambler, but he would have stood by Ethan if he had still been alive.
Now the nightmare was starting again, but this time a man named Victor Ortega was at the center of it.
Ethan didn't know what to do. Warn Tuyen? How?
Ortega was guilty, and Ethan was getting the blame. He couldn't sit still and let Ortega destroy his life and the life of the woman he loved.
The dark line of bunkers and barbed wire that marked the perimeter of the camp beckoned. He walked to the nearest bunker and silently climbed to its top. Inside the bunker, someone was smoking pot and the oily, cloying stench was nauseating. He sat and hugged his knees to his chest while an armada of mosquitoes assaulted him trying to drain his body of blood, and he wondered what Gunny would have done in this situation.
He stared toward the night-shrouded rainforest of the Southern Annamite Mountains—the land of the Montagnard, the mountain dwellers, that straddled the border of Vietnam and Laos. It was an isolated region with steep mountains and narrow river valleys where one could easily get lost or vanish on purpose. The typical elevation was 1,600 feet. The highest mountains towered about 8,500 feet, and he'd been there on several missions. He'd been trained to survive in such terrain.
Sweat ran down his chest from the oppressive humidity. One of the ARVN inside the bunker moved, and Ethan heard him sigh.
A sniper round snapped past his left ear, so close that Ethan felt the disturbance it made passing through the air. In an instant, he found himself sprawled prone on the ground behind the bunker listening to his adrenaline-powered heart pounding like a trip hammer. He didn't remember leaving the spot where he had been sitting less than an inch from death. He dug his hands into the dirt and knew that he could not die or go to prison. He had to stay free and alive to save Tuyen and prove his innocence.
The nightly mortar attack arrived on time, and the air filled with the harsh sounds of explosions and the hill trembled. He should have found shelter, but he wanted to believe that he couldn't die so he stayed in the open beside that bunker full of ARVN rangers and dared fate to prove him wrong and kill him.
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§ “Running with the Enemy” was awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction at the 2103 San Francisco Book Festival
§ Discover a new world of Publishing–-the 2013 San Francisco Book Festival Event held on May 18 at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in SF.
