But no one mentioned the draft not only took nice kids.  Its wide ranging reach also recruited scum.  Selective Service put uniforms on men who found a savage joy in dirt and blood and pain.  Ron found himself with a boat load of them.

The six animals assigned to Ron's boat wouldn't call him  "Skipper,"  the customary form of address for a junior officer in charge of a boat.  They called him  "Cap,"  short for captain, always with a sneer in their voices.  They were brutal sadists, all of them on at least their third tour in country.  They no longer fit in what they called  "The World,"  if they ever had belonged there.

His crew hated Ron because he wouldn't share their glee at a growing collection of human ears.  They hated him because he didn't let them fire indiscriminately into civilian huts as they roared through inhabited swamps.  When they brought a thirteen or fourteen year old girl to the boat for what would have been a very rough night, he'd yanked his .45 from its holster, made them release her at gun point.

They really hated him for that.

"Cap?"  the voice called again.

"Who is it?"  Ron called into the blackness, gripping his pistol tighter, the same way he'd held it when he made them let the girl go.

"It's Haynes, Cap,"  the voice answered.  "Haynes and Carson and Jensen."  The Swift's engine stopped suddenly, the humid silence smothering, just as Ron remembered it.

"Those guys are all dead,"  Ron shouted.  The heavy pistol shook as he pointed it toward the sound of the voice.

"Put the artillery down, Cap.  We got to talk."  The fog parted like a curtain, the Swift's blunt green bow slowly emerging from the darkness.  Haynes slouched against the twenty millimeter machine gun, steel helmet pushed to the back of his head.  White teeth split his dark face as he grinned and lifted his hand in a small wave.  Across his chest Ron could see the track where Charlie tracers had burned a monstrous stitching into his skin.

Behind Haynes, Carson clutched the wheel.  Blood dripped from his mangled head.  Ron could hear the drops spatter on the boat's deck, and from the Swift's stern, Jensen raised his hands, spreading his shirt so Ron could see a second, bloody smile across his throat.

Then the fog filled in all the open places, and Ron could see nothing but swirling gray where the Swift had been.  But he could smell death, his nostrils full of the putrefaction of old wounds, old blood.

Ron lowered the pistol.  The three men on the boat were all dead.  Ron had personally seen to it that they died.

Haynes had been manning the forward fifty when Ron turned the wheel a few degrees to starboard so rounds from a Charlie machine gun could find him.  Carson had gone the same way a couple of weeks later.

After that the only people who'd run the fifty were new guys, replacements for the dead men.  None of them got killed.  They were rational men, kids really, scared but lacking the joyous celebration of slaughter that made Haynes and Carson and the others unfit to live, and Ron saw to it all his newbies lived to go home again.

Jensen came at him out of the darkness one night on the Delta, a razor sharp bayonet clutched in his hand.  A split second before he lunged, Ron saw him, caught his wrist and held his own hand over Jensen's mouth, stifling screams while sawing the bayonet's glinting edge across the would be killer's jugular.

It happened so easily Ron half believed Divine Providence helped him,; especially when no one admitted hearing Jensen's body splash over the side.

The same day Jensen's replacement arrived, the last three members of the original crew requested transfers, which Ron quickly approved.  If the rest of his tour had rough spots, at least he didn't hear mad giggles in the middle of the killing, didn't see strings of filthy ears or worse brought onto the boat.

Ron let the weight of the pistol drag his arm down, until another way to use it flashed across his brain.  Putting the barrel in his mouth and dropping the hammer was preferable to becoming a basket case who hallucinated dead men.

Haynes' voice called out of the darkness.  "Don't do nothing radical, Cap.  This ain't no flashback or breakdown, none of that shit.  If you use that pistol, Cap, you'll come over where we are.  Then you'll really  be sorry."

"What this is, Cap, is sort of a reunion,"  Jensen said.

"A what?"  Ron croaked, throat dry as sandpaper.

"A reunion, like the Legion or VFW guys do,"  Carson's voice explained.  "Only this one ain't sea stories and bullshit about old days in the Nam, Cap.  We come back to collect what you owe us."

Ron shouted into the fog, shouting from the part of his mind that had almost managed to forget Haynes' name.  "I don't owe you a goddamned thing!"

Haynes spoke again.  "Sure you do,"  he said patiently.  The engine on the Swift boat revved higher out of its dull idle.  "You owe us some years, Cap.  Watch.  See if you don't remember."

The fog curtain parted again, the open space filled with an image of the Swift, underway, easing through a muddy stream, a thick wake pushed from its hull.  Ron saw himself at the helm, and up front Haynes, grinning a maniacally gleeful rictus at the prospect of more killing, clutched the fifty as though it was a lover.  Dripping sweat made Haynes' face resemble melting wax.  The boat nosed into greenery on a river bank, and troops began to go ashore from her deck.

A barrel eased from low palm fronds on the bank.  Haynes yelled,  "In the trees!"  and swung the fifty, already squeezing the trigger.  From his vantage point on the Cora Sue, Ron looked into the Swift's cockpit and saw the look of triumph on his own face as he spun the wheel, exposing Haynes to the enemy fire.

The machine gun on the river bank shifted its aim slightly.  The little man holding it got off a short burst before he was cut down by a dozen rounds.  Haynes fell, still gripping the fifty, and Ron heard himself laugh.

"That's the debt, Cap,"  Haynes' voice murmured from the fog.  "You hadn't done that, I'd a lived thirty two more years.  You took a lot of time away from me, Cap, from all of us.  On account of you, we missed a lot of fun, man.  We're here to collect."

As the scene on the river bank faded, Ron slumped against Cora Sue's wheel.  "Go away,"  he whimpered into the night.  "Go away and I'll send money to your families, whatever you want.  Just leave me alone."

"Ain't good enough,"  Jensen whispered, his ruined larynx rattling like a reptile.

Haynes laughed again and the sound made Ron want to scream.  "Shit, Cap,  we was through with families a long time before we met you."  He shook his head.  "Families don't mean nothing to us."

The Swift's engine revved a few RPMs higher, the loud vibrations coming closer until the stubby bow emerged from the fog again.  A package wrapped in brown paper lofted out of the dark to land heavily at Ron's feet.  "Look that over, see what you can do, Cap,"  Haynes called.

The rhythm of the big diesels changed as the dark hull backed into the fog, the engine noise moving down river.  A few minutes later the radio crackled to life.  "Big Mother, this is Small Pup Two, coming back on station."

"Small Pup Two, this is Big Mother.  You get that guy straightened out?"

Haynes' voice said,  "Hope so, Big Mother.  Out."  After a silence, the voice added,  "He ain't straight, we'll be back to see him again."

Ron stared at the radio a long time before he picked up the mike.  "Don't come back,"  he whispered after keying the transmit switch.  "I'll do whatever you want, just don't come back."  He bent to retrieve the package on Cora Sue's deck.

He spent two hours with it in the galley, unable to stop looking at the awful pages.

The girls woke Ron,; frying eggs and bacon at the small stove.  He was slumped at the dinette, asleep over the package, bright sunshine streaming through the windows.

"Sorry we couldn't make it back last night,"  one girl chirped.  "We got too wasted to navigate that fog, and there was a party at the marina."  When he didn't say anything, she prodded,  "Ronnie?  You're not mad are you?"

He smiled at her.  She was part of something that had already begun to go away, and he was missing it before it was even gone.  "I'm not mad,"  he told her.

The girls were nervous and only played at eating, looking at Ron curiously when they thought he wasn't watching.  "You okay Ronnie?" one of them asked, when she tried to sit on his lap and he pushed her away.  "You get religion last night, staying out here by yourself?"

Ron shook his head.  "I wouldn't call it religion,"  he said wearily.  "I'm just looking at things a little differently."

He told them he had to go ashore, probably for a long time.  He took them back to the marina after breakfast, and later, he made some telephone calls...
 

Ron gripped the model boat from the window sill so hard he heard the plastic crack.  The pretty toy was just so many ounces of broken junk in his hands.  He cried, the way he'd cried when he knew he had to sell Cora Sue and do what they insisted he do.

The package had contained instructions for starting Homecoming,  as well as the first issue's contents.  Ron had done enough research to learn all the authors' names were engraved on The Wall.

"We was part of a brotherhood,"  Haynes explained in one of his early calls.  "There was lots of guys like us over there Cap.  Lots of them came home, and kept up with what they started over there.  They need a place to talk about it."

Lately some of the things Haynes told him to put in Homecoming weren't about Viet Nam at all.  They used Cleveland, and Denver, Lafayette and Muncie as a setting.  Ron hoped they were just fantasies, but he didn't believe it.

He let the crushed toy boat fall on the floor at his feet, and stared out the window.  If he opened it, threw himself in a long header to the pavement thirty stories below, would it end?  He didn't think so.  Haynes said it couldn't end until he paid back the years he owed them.  All of them.

Haynes would have lived to be sixty two if Ron hadn't moved the wheel.  Carson could have expected sixty more evil years before dying at age eighty seven.  Jensen was a little easier.  Haynes admitted he'd only stolen a dozen years from Jensen.

"You got to pay it back, Cap,"  Haynes liked to remind him.  "You got to pay back every one of those years before we leave you alone."

Ron went back to his desk, picked up the bourbon bottle and drank from it like it was soda pop.  In a few minutes he was drunk enough to go to the lobby and take a cab home.