The World Played Chess

by Robert Dugoni

wasn’t like World War II, where the Germans had invaded countries. We’d gone in to stop the spread of communism by the Soviet Union and China, which I guess was a big deal.

figured if the Vietnamese wanted to live in a backward society and be told what to do and how to do it, let them. It didn’t impact me.

In my squad you do not talk about home when you’re in-country. You don’t even think about it. It’s bad luck. Comprende?”

You don’t discuss how much time you have left in-country.” “Okay,” I said

‘Red on yellow kills a fellow. Red on black, venom lack.’ This one was red on yellow.”

I kept telling myself I was in a John Wayne movie. Victor Cruz put that

William had told me the only difference between him and all those young men who died in Vietnam was bad luck.

My grandparents are alive. I’ve never lost an aunt or an uncle. Never lost a cousin. I’ve never lost a friend. Never really contemplated death. Never had to. I was going to live forever. Aren’t we all at eighteen?

“Growing old is a privilege, not a right, Shutter. You learn that quickly here in Nam, and the sooner the better. What happened today is over. You’re here. You still got a job to do. Comprende?”

He and Maureen had gone out, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized William’s story wasn’t my story to share. I didn’t have the right to tell it—not to Mike and not to my friends.

Vietnam was the war everyone wanted to forget. So did he, apparently.

“Most likely VC, not NVA,” meaning the Viet Cong guerilla army which first formed to fight the French, and not the North Vietnamese Army.

No. It stopped shaking when I no longer cared whether I lived or died.” William stared at me with such intensity I was certain he could see right through me and was looking all the way back to Vietnam. “And that,” William said, “is when you really should be scared.”

“What good is talking about home going to do? You’re here. You’re in Nam. This is your home. This is where you live. We are your family. You keep your mind here and you keep your body here. You let your mind go home . . . and your body goes home. You don’t think about it. Don’t talk about it. Comprende, homie?”

Handing me a beer in front of my friends was his way of telling me he no longer thought of me as a child, but also that he would hold me to a higher standard and expect me to live up to that standard.

“Never take anything that doesn’t belong to you or that you haven’t earned,” he said, sliding into the car. “You never know who you’re stealing from, and what that money means to them.”

“Do you guys realize we’re the first generation this century that hasn’t had a war hanging over our heads?” I asked.

“Vietnam is a war of nerves, each side waiting for the other to blink first,” Cruz said one night in our bunker. “The difference is, we’re all waiting to blink and go home. For Charlie, this is home. He can wait forever.”

I thought of William’s statement to me that the difference between living and dying was nothing more than dumb luck. Was he right? Had dumb luck saved Beau’s life and cost Chris his? Or

Sometimes you make your own luck; I had learned this from William.

“Regret is so much harder to live with than failure,” William said. “You got a chance to be somebody and to do something. Man, I envy you.”

Why was I supposed to care about a war in a country halfway around the world? How did it impact me? The government couldn’t give us an intelligent reason why we were dying over there. They kept saying we were stopping the spread of communism.” He frowned. “What does an eighteen-year-old care about the spread of communism?”

questioned God. Why didn’t you listen to them? Why did they die?

Create memories, I heard Elizabeth say.

I became a parent thinking of all the things I would teach my son and my daughter. I never realized how much I would learn from them.

“Don’t,” Beau said softly. “Don’t tell me God has a reason for everything; there’s no reason for someone so young to die. Chris was only eighteen. He had his whole life ahead of him.”

“But I do believe. You know why?” “Why?” “Because I was there that moment you were born, and the moment your sister was born. So I know, firsthand, there has to be a God to make something so beautiful as you and your sister, to give me and your mother such incredibly precious gifts.” I paused to let that sink in. “Every time someone so young dies, Beau, like Chris, it’s a shock because it’s not just a loss of life, it’s a loss of potential—what that life could have been. The death of someone so young shatters the illusion we all have at eighteen—the illusion that we’re immortal, that we’re never going to grow old, that we’re never going to die.”

‘Well, the alternative to growing old is a lot worse, so count your blessings that you’re old enough to have worn out a knee or a hip or a shoulder.’ Growing old is a privilege,

But Chris will not have died for nothing if you learn just one thing from his death, if you learn that life is fragile at any age, and that every day is a gift. His death won’t be for nothing if you learn to celebrate each morning that you wake, take a breath, and realize you’re still alive and the day is filled with endless potential.”

And it was time for Elizabeth and me to let him go.

The world is playing chess and you’re playing checkers. It’s going to piss all over you.”

“You’ll have to decide if you’ll have a relationship with God, and what that relationship will be. I hope you do.”

was going to tell him the rest of his life is both a long time and the blink of an eye, but Beau knew that also, from harsh experience. Instead, I said, “What you choose to do with your life is now up to you. Find your passion. Then find a way to make a living at it. Do so, and you’ll never work a day in your life. Most of all, remember that it takes a lifetime to build a reputation, but only a moment to destroy it.”

A boy whose humanity, values, and sense of himself as a moral, righteous person had all been compromised.

We didn’t know then that PTSD symptoms can remain dormant for years, until triggered by an event. I don’t know what triggered mine.

Everyone’s past contains things we are not proud of, skeletons in our closets that we do not share, not with strangers and not with those we love and who love us. We fear that to do so will change their perception of us, and their belief in who we are.

I didn’t get drafted. I volunteered at seventeen to get out of there, and I reupped ’cause there’s no place for me to go. There is no home. This is home now. The marines are my home.”

“I can’t go home, Shutter. If I go home, the gangs will kill me. I’ll be unemployed. I’ll have to deal drugs and I’ll end up in prison like my father, if not a grave.”

was not thinking, This is an innocent woman. I was thinking we shouldn’t waste ammunition.

“Tule fog is a thick ground fog, like driving through pea soup.

Sometimes bad luck is really dumb actions or inaction. You can make your own luck by making smart decisions.”

They seemed to live day to day, like they no longer trusted the promise of a future.

The racial slurs were part of the psychological warfare the military used to dehumanize the enemy so soldiers could kill other soldiers and not consider the reality of their actions. This, unfortunately, is

What I have attempted to capture and re-create in The World Played Chess is one fictional marine’s experience based upon the stories two veterans told to me during the summer of 1979 and thereafter and all the firsthand accounts documented in the books, articles, treatises, and military papers on the marine experience in Vietnam, as well as movies and documentaries.

Dan Brookes and Bob Hillerby, Shooting Vietnam: The War by Its Military Photographers, Pen & Sword, 2019.

Tracy Crosswhite police series, which is set in Seattle and has sold more than seven million books worldwide. He is also the author of the Charles Jenkins espionage series and the David Sloane series of legal thrillers. He has also written several stand-alone books, including the novels The 7th Canon and Damage Control; the literary novel The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, Suspense Magazine’s 2018 Book of the Year, for which Dugoni won an AudioFile Earphones Award for narration; and the nonfiction exposé The Cyanide Canary, a Washington Post best book of the year.