Free Koko by Peter Straub

an army base many times larger than Camp Crandall. All around the camp, twenty
     or thirty kilometers beyond the barbed-wire perimeter, stood hills once thickly covered
     by trees, now so perfectly bombed and burned and defoliated that only charred sticks
     protruded upwards from powdery brown earth. He walked past a row of empty tents and
     at last heard the silence of the camp—he was alone. The camp had been abandoned, and
     he had been left behind. A flagless flagpole stood before the company headquarters.
     He trudged past the deserted building into a stretch of empty land and smelled burning
     shit. Then he knew that this was no dream, he really was in Vietnam—the
rest
of his life was the dream. Poole never smelled things in his dreams. He didn’t think
     he even dreamed in color most of the time. Poole turned around and saw an old Vietnamese
     woman looking at him expressionlessly from beside an oil drum filled with burning
     kerosene-soaked excrement. Dense black smoke boiled up from the drum and smudged the
     sky. His despair was flat and unsurprising.
    Wait a second, he thought, if this is reality it’s no later than 1969. He opened
The Dead Zone
to the page of publishing information. Deep in his chest, his heart deflated like
     a punctured balloon. The copyright date was 1965. He had never left Vietnam. Everything
     since had been only a nineteen-year-old’s wishful dream.

1
    Poole awoke with a fading memory of smoke and noise, of artillery fire and uniformed
     men running in a cartoonish lockstep through a burning village. He pushed this vision
     into forgetfulness with unconscious expertise. His first real thought was that he
     would stop off at Walden Books in Westerholm and buy a book for a twelve-year-old
     patient named Stacy Talbot before visiting her in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Then
     he remembered that he was in Washington. His second fully formed thought was to wonder
     if Tim Underhill was really still alive. He had a brief vision of himself standing
     in a neat graveyard in Singapore, looking down with both loss and relief at Underhill’s
     headstone.
    Or was Underhill simmering in craziness, still back in the war?
    Conor Linklater seemed to have vanished and left behind a crushed pillow and a wildly
     wrinkled counterpane. Poole crawled across the bed and peered over the far edge. Curled
     up into himselflike a cabbage leaf, his mouth lax and his eyelids stretched unmoving across his eyes,
     Conor lay asleep on the floor.
    Michael pushed himself back across the bed and went quietly into the bathroom to shower.
    “Jeez,” Conor said when Michael came out of the bathroom. He was sitting in one of
     the chairs and holding his head in both hands. “What time is it, anyhow?”
    “About ten-thirty.” Poole took underwear and socks from his bag and began dressing.
    “Blackout, man,” Conor said. “Total hangover.” He peeked out through his fingers at
     Poole. “How’d I end up here, anyhow?”
    “I sort of assisted you.”
    “Thanks, man,” Linklater groaned. His head sank again into his hands. “I gotta turn
     over a new lease on life. I been partying too much lately, getting old, gotta slow
     down.
Whoo.
” He straightened up and looked around the room as if he were lost. “Where’s my clothes?”
    “Pumo’s room,” Michael said, buttoning his shirt.
    “Well, I don’t know. I left all my shit up there. I sure wish he’d come along with
     us, man, don’t you? Pumo the Puma. He oughta come along. Hey, Mikey, can I use your
     bathroom and your shower before I go back upstairs?”
    “Oh dear,” Poole said. “I just got it all cleaned up for the maid.”
    Conor left the couch and moved across the room in a fashion that Poole associated
     with recovering stroke victims in geriatric wards. When Conor got to the bathroom
     he leaned on the doorknob and coughed. His hair was standing up in little orange spikes.
     “Am I crazy, or did Beans say he’d loan me a couple