Crazyhead [antikvár]

PROLOGUE HIS NAME WAS HALLER, DENNIS HALLER. U.S. ARMY. SPE- cialist Fifth Class. We all called him "Mad Denny." That's not his real name, but it's close enough that he'11 smile when he reads this, somewhere in another part of the world. I met him in the early 560s, and thought he wouldn't last six months in the army, much less in a war zone. He was wild, emotional, impulsive, irrational. He carried the curse of his youth like a silk scarf around his shoulders, and he had a big mouth that always seemed to blow off at the wrong time. I was young myself then, though three or four years older than he, and having my own troubles 6 'coping with the military" . . . and so we soon became fast friends. In spite of all my apprehensions, he did stick it out to "fulfill his military obligation," which was the nice way of saying he didn't go AWOL and did eventually receive his honorable discharge. In fact, once we got overseas, he thrived in the chaos and madness that was Saigon at that time. He outlasted me—I came back in '65, and he was still over there several years later. The things that happened in his life that I am about to relate to you took place in 1967, and though Fd had hints and snatches in letters over an eighteen-month period, he nar-rated it to me cover-to-cover during a weekend in San Francisco. When ''all the fun began," as he put it with that wry, distant smile of his, he was only twenty-one and had already 1