Prologue
1967-1968
Most of the Chippewa had been “relocated” to Canada a hundred and thirty years ago, but my father’s clan remained behind. Minnesota was where we’d made our home.
Things were dangerous for the Crow Clan. My father, White Wolf, was madly in love with a white woman. I can tell you she loved him right back. But when a group of armed men came sniffing around their home in warning, Wolf knew it was because of her love. For her people, it wasn’t allowed.
He told her to leave him. He was afraid she would come to harm. But she wouldn’t leave. She was stubborn as hell. It was one of the things he loved most about her.
So Wolf made a decision to save her life. He made the clan push her away. For him, it was an ultimatum of love, done for her own good.
He didn’t know she was pregnant with me at the time.
My red-haired, green-eyed mother knew though. And for me, she gave in and took us both away. But we didn’t go far. Just to the city. I was born there.
It turned out the city wasn’t any better for us. The color of my hair, my last name, and it didn’t matter that my mother was white. But for my eyes, I took after my father. And out of love and respect, my mother took my clan’s name. Knowing her, she probably also did this just to piss him off if he ever found out. She was good at that. It was something else he loved about her.
I know because she told me everything about him. Some women might have wanted to forget. Out of anger, maybe. But my mother wanted to remember. And she wanted me to know my father as well as she did.
In any case, people in the city didn’t want to have much to do with me.
That was until I grew up a little, what my dad would have called “growing into my skins.” Then women wanted to have something to do with me. And that just made things worse.
By the time I was in my early thirties, tensions were so high, I knew I was on the verge of either being on the run or in jail for assault or murder. Then came the Selective Service Act of 1967, expanding the ages of eligible males for military service. Seemingly at once, my ticket was drawn, and I was drafted. My people would have told me that was “the crow” at work, with its tricky fate that always stung a little and laughed a lot in the background.
But it was already for shit at home, so when my mother died earlier that same year, I gladly took my place in the ranks of death. I had an edge the other boys didn’t have in boot camp, and later in the field when we were sent to the lines overseas. That edge? I already knew what it felt like to be surrounded by people who wanted to kill me.
But… it was so bad. Things were so wrong there, every single soldier I’d gotten to know in training was gone within the first five weeks. We were falling like bowling pins, and replaced just as quickly.
In that baptism by fire, I had enough chances to prove my mettle to make it to sergeant by the time the ’68 TET celebration started up in Hue, Vietnam. It was an annual feasting time, fireworks, food, whole shebang. The boys and I were ready for a break from the nightmare. For once we didn’t have to drag our tired asses into the city. We were happy. Well, as happy as someone covered in blood and bad memories can be.
Some of the boys wanted food and rest, others wanted dew or skag. Most of us needed both. “Dew” was marijuana, harmless. “Skag” was heroin. I turned a blind eye to all of it; to each his own, especially in Hell.
The gunfire that night began alongside the fireworks, so it took a bit for us to realize what was going down. When we did, we ran for our weapons only to find that our enemy was in every single home around us, and this time dressed in plain clothes. Our black pyjama rule was no good anymore. “Aim for the black pyjamas….” It had been our basic tenet. It was the closest we could come to identifying the Viet Cong.
But this was different. We were taken completely by surprise.
In the chaos, I ran into one of the homes I’d seen a member of my squad enter earlier in search of skag. All I could think about was rounding up as many of my men as possible to formulate an attack. He was the closest.
But I didn’t find what I’d been expecting.
Hind sight is always twenty-twenty. “Scotch,” as we called him, had already been falling way down. Back home his girl had left him, he’d lost his best friend to Viet Cong traps the week before, and I knew there was an emptiness in him now that used to hold hope. That was why he’d sought relief by coming to this house.
But when I found him, he wasn’t getting drugs. In the heat of the attack, something in Scotch cracked wide open. He was out for some kind of mad revenge, and he was taking it out on the daughter of a screaming Vietnamese couple who couldn’t pull him off her.
I rushed into the hut and grabbed Scotch by the back of his uniform, hauling him off the girl with all I had. She screamed like mad and curled up on her side. Scotch fought like a beast in my grip.
Just after I tossed him to the side, in walked the girl’s grandmother.
Over time, you learned to recognize the ones who could curse you. Not everyone believed in that shit, but I did. I’d been raised to. I understood.
She had it in her eyes. She was Ruc. A Vietnamese witch. And I could just feel it too… she was powerful.
I froze, taking in the site of this tiny, skinny woman who had hard, hateful eyes, and my stomach turned to lead. It was rare as hell for a Ruc to leave the solitude of the mountains of Vietnam and join the rest of society. Must have been the TET that drew her down here to be with her family. I would never know.
When she saw me standing over her sobbing, shaking granddaughter – she pinned that mess on me. She whispered a few words, and an evil breeze blew through the hut, touching my skin like snake fingers.
I didn’t have time to think about it. None of us did. What would later be called the TET Offensive was now in full swing. When I would look back on it in the years to come, I would learn the Battle for Hue was one of the bloodiest of the Vietnam war.
Three days later, the medic said I was finished. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t open my damn eyes or really even move in daylight. He said it was some kind of poisoning, probably Agent Orange. Either way, I was useless. So I was sent home.
Right back to a world that hated me even more now than it had before I’d left for the war.
Now… Well, now I’m different. Like every one of my twelve clan brothers. We were pulled into the club over time, given refuge in a leather jacket, and freedom in a V-twin.
A white patch warns the world who and what we are:
Monsters.