It' a funny thing what hate can do to a man. Hate is an emotion which can lead you in so many directions. It can eat your guts out and turn you into a shell of a man who is useless or it can goad you into doing things which you swear you were never capable of accomplishing.
Cory Harmon started hating one person a lot of years back and it sent him over the edge into that place where you become a shell. He struggled with it and himself for four or five years, building walls around himself which not one person on earth could penetrate. He was a loner who needed nothing nor anybody. In fact he swore never to allow anyone to get close to him ever again. Cory did a lot of drinking in that period but he could never get drunk enough to make the feelings of hatred go away. Then Shirl came along and slipped up on him. She got inside his head and his heart. He married her and let the walls close back in and he kept his world small. Just Shirl and the boys, and Johnny and Martha, Shirl's folks.
His country was at war then and Cory was in the military. He let his hatred be channeled toward the enemy and those blood thirsty bastards he worked for turned him loose. He soon became a cold blooded killer. Looking back Cory thanked God, if there is a God, that he was in a war zone. He would have hated to have done the things he did in any civilized place. There is one thing for sure, he would have ended up in the electric chair instead of being honored with a lot of medals . The military loves to give out medals for "Gallantry in Action," or "Bravery above and Beyond the Call of Duty." Cory got a little more than his share of medals, not because he was so brave, but because he was just mean. Actually vicious is a better word. They trained him well....too well. Now they can't turn him loose because it would be a crime in itself to turn an animal like him loose on the population of the gentle land of his birth. So here he stays, in a special prison that holds several hundred of the kind of men that Cory is. There are quite a few Navy Seals there, a bunch of Green Berets, the SOG types, and a fair number of men who were trained as Cory was.
The guards are not mean, the food is excellent and the living conditions are probably better than most of the of his relatives have back home. Cory won't...actually, can't mention the name of the facility as it doesn't exist as far as the government is concerned.. He has no idea where it is located, except it must be in the South. It is so hot and humid and those slash pines don't grow in a lot of other places. It's just called a Military Reservation, with fifteen foot, electrified, barbed wire fences around it's perimeter. There are six buildings in the middle of thirty five thousand acres of forest. The buildings themselves are thoroughly camoflauged and unless you know exactly where you are going, you can't see it from the air, or from ground level as you can't get within ten miles of the facility itself. There's one road in...and none out, not for them anyway.
After Viet Nam was officially over, they left Cory and his team in Nam for nearly two years. They had remained in place---in situ---as the miltary called it, continuing to take out both military and civilian targets. Grady was the executive officer and Cory was nominally in command of ten of the most vicious sons-a-bitches on the face of this earth. After being left behind for over eighteen months, Cory and Grady began to realize that the bastards in Washington had abandoned them and Cory decided they had to get the fuck of Viet Nam. They had to try like hell to work their way across Laos and into Thailand so they could at least go home. It took Cory nearly a week to convince the rest of the team to go with him, because most of the men had found themselves a hot broad to shack up with and they really had no desire to go home. They all knew they had been listed as MIA/KIA so there wasn't anybody looking for them back in the dear old U.S. of A. Cory promised them that if they came out with him and the shit hit the fan when they got to Thailand, they could disappear and come back to their little hooches and their slant eyed dollies. It didn't quite work out that way.
When they moved out, Cory was actually surprised to see them form up into the formation they had perfected way back when they were first out in the bush. "Gator Bair" Thibodeaux took the point and they all spread out behind him in an arrowhead type of formation. They hadn't forgot their training and they moved through the jungle like a group of cats. You couldn't hear a sound, not one fucking sound. Just the usual jungle racket of birds and those noisy god-damned monkeys. They had every intention of making it to Thailand so they made a total of about ten miles that first day. After that they made sometimes as much as fifteen and sometimes less than five. It was all according to what was going on around them.
About the fifteenth day out, Cory saw 'Gator' freeze and drop. Everybody else did the same, wriggling around to get their weapons trained on the same bearing. That day a whole platoon of Vietnamese Soldiers passed through their formation. The Dinks never saw them.....Shit the team coulda' wiped out the lot of them but that wasn't what they were trying to do. When it came to a fire fight, the team were murderous and when it came to keeping outa' sight, they were masters at that too.
The team spent almost five weeks working their way across Viet Nam, Laos and into Thailand. Grady and Cory bluffed their way into the country, claiming they had been sent into Laos and were just now returning. They had even doctored up some orders to that effect before they left Nam. The rest of the team infiltrated past the border guards, not less than five hundred feet from the border post, just to prove that they could still do it. Cory had the men go into hiding while he and Grady when to the God-damned U.S. Embassy and reported themselves repatriated. Two of Cory's team were Asiatics, he called them his south Mississippi Chinks, and they watched the Embassy from the time the two officers walked in the front door, until the CIA hauled their asses out in a couple of black surburbans. Cory spotted Gary Lee in the crowd of people who surged against the two vehicles as they got to an intersection. He held up his cuffed hands for Gary to see. That was his signal for the men to DiDi, (get the hell out of there) back to the rest of the guys and get the hell outa Thialand. Cory was sure the dumb shits would go back to their women in Nam or make out up-country somewhere in Thailand. But NOOOO- they came after Cory and Grady. It took the team five years to find them.
The fuckin' CIA had grabbed Cory and Grady right off and began to debrief them in a safe house somewhere in Bangkok. As soon as they were sure the two officers were who they said they were, things changed a lot. The cuffs came off, they got to shower, shave and get into some clean uniforms. Clean clothes may seem like a small pleasure but when you've been in the same set of Cami's for five weeks, clean clothes becomes almost orgasmic. The CIA clowns proceeded with a heavy debriefing. Cory told Grady that there was no reason to hide who they were or what they had been doing, so they supplied them with all the information they could, except where the rest of the team was). Cory heard later that it amounted to over twelve thousand pages of Top Secret documents.
Cory was a Major at the time they came out and he found out that the had been promoted twice while he was in country. He was a full, fuckin', bull Colonel and as such, he was expected to turn in his men and go home.
"Well fuck you Jake!" is what he told them. The dirty bastard that was in charge of those traitorous bastards from the CIA informed Cory, in that fuckin' Boston, jaw clenching accent, that if he didn't betray his men, he would go to jail. Cory went to jail.
Cory didn't know where the boys had got to but Grady and he are there in that place. They've been there for five long years. Cory got a hold of a list of the names on the Wall and it sure gave him a shock when he read his own name, that of Grady and every last one of the team.
"Jesus Christ," he thought, "is there anything the Government of this Country can't get away with? I'm dead! I'm walking around this "Prison" but I'm dead to the rest of the world."
Cory knows he wants to tell his story, but doesn't know how he is going to get the story out of the prison. He can't write any letters, he can't tell his wife and sons that he is still alive. He can't make any phone calls---there aren't any phones there anyway. Grady and Cory don't talk much anymore. Cory doesn't know any of the other inmates, at least he doesn't trust any of them, they might be plants. Does anybody see how paranoid you become when your are in a place like that.
