Grace in the Wilderness: A Family's Story of Love, Loss and Redemption...

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Grace In The Wilderness The contents of this book may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the authors, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

© 2013 by Scott Riley, Hasha Riley & Libra Riley

All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

ISBN-13: 978-1489595645

ISBN-10: 1489595643

eISBN: 9781483507170

CONTACT THE AUTHORS

For more information about Grace In The Wilderness, individual orders; discounts for bulk-quantity purchases; audio and DVD products; information on speaking/seminars; booking the authors to speak at your next event, please contact them at their website:

www.GraceInTheWildernessBook.com

DEDICATION

To our loved ones who kept the porch

light on so a father and his daughters

could find their way home!

Barbara Jones (Mom), Elizabeth Jones (Nana),

Clarence and Betty Riley (Grandma and Papa),

and Eloise (Ella) and George Shelton

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

SCOTT RILEY

In memory of my Mom and Dad and Grandparents who waited, for Ella and George who believed, and for the wives and kids who can finally sleep at night.

HASHA RILEY

I must first thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for all He has done for me and my loved ones in getting us to this amazing place in our lives. It wouldn’t have been possible without Him.

I also want to thank my mother for the unconditional love she has given me throughout my life, and for helping me to become the woman I am today. Thank you to my brother Kory. You are one of my best friends, spiritual advisor, and my biggest supporter. You always see my talents and encourage me to shoot for the stars! I love you and can’t imagine life without you.

To my sister, Maya, I love you more than words can say, and I pray for your happiness.

To all of my friends who encouraged me through all stages of this work, you know who you are. Thank you!

To my family, thank you for keeping the porch light on so Dad would see it and come back into our lives. You welcomed him with open arms and that’s what true love is.

Lastly, thank you to my writing partners, Libra and Dad. We did it! I’m thankful that we let the Holy Spirit speak to us, stopped waiting for the approval of others, and turned No into Next Opportunity!

LIBRA RILEY

For the better part of my adult life, I have become more and more aware of the presence of God. He is my counselor, provider and protector. I have learned to stand on His word, knowing His word can never return void. So, I wish to start by thanking my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for ... providing a way in the wilderness and rivers and in the desert. (Isaiah 43: 19) I have no doubt that it is by His grace, that I am here and we are a family recovered.

To my mother, thank you for loving me beyond measure and for insisting that I must learn to pray for myself. You are a phenomenal woman.

To my brother Kory, I have been so blessed to be your little sister. Thank you for always protecting and guiding me. I love you. To my sister Maya, know I love you.

To my son, Arthur (Sonny), becoming your mother was the best decision I ever made! Please know I pray for you God’s Proverbs 18:16 promise that, Your gifts will make room for you and bring you in the presence of great men.

To my extended family, the Joneses, the Rileys, the Levisters and a host of wonderful friends — thank you for encouraging us to tell our story for the countless families struggling to get to the other side and need to know redemption is possible.

To my prayer warriors and sister-friends for life, Deirdre Coleman and Demetra Hutchinson, you are my trusted advisors. I am so blessed to know you and love you.

And finally, to all of the sons and daughters in my family please know we did so that you can — love you!

Acclaim for Grace In The Wilderness

The three authors of Grace in the Wilderness: A Family’s Story of Love, Loss and Redemption are Scott Riley and his twin daughters, Hasha and Libra. Scott Riley survived, both the ground war in Vietnam, and the drug war, at home in America.

Scott Riley calls Vietnam, This thing, this war, this country... my great adventure. He goes on to tell an incredible outlaw tale of heavy drug use, thievery and murder, most of it taking place in the back alleys and flimsy dwellings of Qui Nhon, a coastal city in central Vietnam.

The great strength of this memoir is its emotional honesty on every page. There are not a lot of African-American Vietnam War memoirs. Few, if any, contain a detailed description of what it was like to be in the Long Binh Jail during a protracted riot. Scott Riley gives us all that and more.

We learn the details of his life going native and living with his wife, a Khmer drug dealer. There are enough details about various forms of drug use to serve as a user’s manual on how to shoot up and how to cover tracks after a multiple drug murder. There also are harrowing accounts of Scott Riley’s struggles with drug overdoses and malarial fever.

This book is a powerful narrative of the world of a black soldier who did not get with the Army program, and went on to live off the Army map, going native in every way he could get away with in that time and place. Riley says straight out that he didn’t give a shit about the American War effort.

Later, we learn that Riley came from a middle class family in Westchester County, N.Y., was a latch key child, an only child, and spent a lot of time by himself. He tells us of his reading: The Iliad and The Odyssey, El Cid, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone.

He makes passionate references to films, including the classic John Wayne western, The Angel and the Bad Man, to illustrate his own situation as an outlaw. He also trapped muskrats, rafted and fished, and built forts and tree houses. Then his family moved to Mamaroneck, N.Y., where he left behind the idyllic Huckleberry Finn life and was forced to become a cool kid. He started saving his money to buy cool clothes. He felt a deep hollow inside; he filled it with drugs.

The most moving part of the book—and the part that benefits most from the three authors’ contrasting points of view—is a visit to The Wall in Washington and the search for the names of Scott’s fallen comrades. I shed a few tears reading that section. I’ve read many accounts of families visiting that Wall, and this is easily the most moving.

I’ve read many accounts of families riven by the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and I was much impressed that Scott is now clean and sober and has been working for years in Manhattan as a chef/food coordinator and that his two daughters are both successful, college-educated professionals.

I highly recommend this fine memoir that tells a violent, drug-filled tale of how a tall, beautiful, smart, talented young man from a staunch Bible-toting family took the road from high school to art school where he learned to be a fine illustrator, to being drafted into the Army at the height of the Vietnam War and being dropped into the Central Highlands with no real preparation.

Scott Riley survived all the Army threw at him and he survived all the horrors that he brought down on himself by the bad choices he made. Read this powerful story of a relentless survivor.

—David Willson

Vietnam Veterans of America Books in Review II

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

PART I

Green Door on the Right

Shadow Warriors of the Night

Khmer Tears

Malaria Dance

Wings

I Can’t Believe They’d Pay Men

Just to Hunt Me Down

Taking a Chance on Love

Riot

Hauntings

Pipe Dreams

Blood

Caught In the Crossfire

PART II

My Name Is Barbara

Postscript to an Obituary

Cocaine Rain

IT

Product Control

Are You Still In The Bathroom Scott?

Head Wounds

PART III

The Piano

The Reunion

Visiting Dad

The Camel’s Back

— Photo Album —

PART IV

A Letter to Dad 4/5/1996

And The Call Came Through

A Letter from Dad 5/28/1996

A Letter from Dad 6/19/1996

Detox

The Wall

My Walls Are Crumbling

Homelessness

Tears

Dirty Urine

Track Lines

Why?

PART V

Letters to Dad – Su Casa 1999

EPILOGUE

Esteemable Acts

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

PART I

Those who survived the sword found

grace in the wilderness ...

Jeremiah 31:2

THE GREEN DOOR

ON THE RIGHT

I could feel it. The humid air around us was charged with pulsating throbs of unsaid secrets. Ba sits up and stares at me as though she’s transferring thoughts to me through the warm night air. Her face is absolutely blank, expressionless, so there’s no way I could read what she’s about to tell me. Now I figured this was finally the big discussion about my going back to America and leaving her. That’s what I was ready for.

She tucks her leg underneath her own body; a habit she had when she put on her no-nonsense attitude when she’d finished cooking pipes for a customer, was closing a deal or needed to get her point across to me.

Scotty, she says to me in a hushed tone, I’m gonna have a baby. Yeah, just like that, and then I see the tiniest smile crack at the side of her deadpan facial expression as if, well now, the ball’s in your court. Whatcha gonna do now?

I know. I lied, trying to act as though I actually had an idea of what was going on. I’d already worked it in my mind that Ba hadn’t tried to take her life because of me and me alone. I mean this was a strong woman who’d existed before she’d met me, and I figured she’d do fine even if I wasn’t around, which I hadn’t been a lot lately. At that time, I thought that she had probably overrated me. I was good at hiding my outer feelings from mostly everyone, but I guess I’d completely forgotten that I’d learned a lot of this technique from the woman sitting in front of me.

I was actually all screwed up inside, trying to pin down an actual feeling and at the same time attempting to maintain face. One part of me is doin’ back-flips. Hey, my wife’s pregnant! Another part of me sits there looking at her in mortal terror, realizing the complete insanity of bringing a child into the world in a war zone. Part of me acknowledged the fact that we were two drug addicts and that I was on the run from the authorities. Lastly, the question of my going home or staying in Asia now really smacked me in the face.

Now all of this was a lot to consider in the couple of minutes I sat looking dumbfounded by staring at her. I still haven’t uttered a word. I don’t know what to say. I can hear the crickets chirping outside the shuttered window in the night. I hear the sounds of someone out in the courtyard connecting the buildings taking a cold shower, water splashing on the pavement. I can hear the sound of a chopper making its approach to the helipad somewhere in the night. I can hear my heart and my mind racing and Ba’s pounding in her chest.

I’ve got to break the silence, and yet I can’t seem to bring myself to speak. I need to do somethin’ here. What I mean is reassure her, be manly and say, Yeah, baby, okay, I’ll take care of everything, but those words don’t come out of my mouth. And my mind tells me, Hey, you’re a warrior, able to take and give life. This is part of the plan of your life, a life that has no plan. Don’t be afraid now. You can handle this, yeah! Bullshit! I think I’m thinkin’ like a man, but I’m sure my face gives me away because at that moment, I was just a boy.

Ba of course says nothing, but she now shifts her position on the palette, and she’s kneeling, sitting on her crossed feet, directly before me. She takes my hand and places it directly on her breast, holding it there with both hands. I can feel her heart beating just beyond my out-stretched fingers. I sit here dumbfounded by the power of love, and my mind turns back in upon itself. The room was absolutely silent, and I could feel the mirror image of this moment between us long ago.

Almost a year earlier, after getting wounded, I was medevaced out of Bong Song and treated in the field hospital in Qui Nhon. When released, I ran smack into Valentine. Now Valentine was from my sister Company B, 1/5 Cav. He was a tall, light-skinned black guy who spoke with a slow drawling laconic accent, and he was originally from Washington, D.C. Valentine had been in country probably about two years when I got there but couldn’t seem to get out of country due to the trouble he was constantly in, and the bad time that built up from court marshals and Article 15s. He was one of the original bad boys I met over there who openly didn’t give a shit about the American war effort and would in no uncertain terms let everyone know about it. He’d go AWOL in a minute and come back when he felt like it. He was about making and amassing as much money as he could lay his hands on at the Army’s expense. Of course, all the gung-ho guys considered him a pariah, but to me, Val was the man. Val was experienced in and out of the field, and he warned me not to let those muthafuckas get me killed. I heeded his warnings.

So when Val sees me walkin’ down that hot dusty tarmac of a road that morning in Qui Nhon with a bandaged face, he laughs at me, patting me on my shoulder, asks what happened to me and tells me I’m stupid for puttin’ my black ass on the line instead of just goin’ to jail. He’s telling me this with his fatigue cap on sideways and with a big beaming smile on his face, gold teeth flashing.

So where the fuck you goin’ now? he asks me. Well, I felt stupid saying I’m going back to the Company knowing that they’d give me a few days to heal up, and then send me right back to the field so I say, with you motherfucker. Then, we’re off on our way into the heart of downtown Qui Nhon. We make our obligatory run of the soul bars so that I can grab a girl and get laid, and then it’s time to get high. Now, I was used to smoking all the best marijuana Southeast Asia had to offer and dropping some of the more exotic pharmaceuticals, but I’d never smoked any opium. Val takes me through a myriad of alleyways into the back room of some mamasan’s joint. She brings us some liquid opium, and Val paints it onto a joint then rolls another piece of rolling paper around the whole affair. We light up. The old mamasan is laughing and smiling through blackened, beetlenut-stained teeth.

I’m sitting with Val in a small room, and I’m pullin’ on this joint, and the smoke is curling upwards toward the high ceiling in a lazy stream. We’ve smoked almost half the joint, and although I can clearly feel the grass, I don’t think I feel the opium. Of course, I’m the cherry boy here. I really don’t have any idea just what I’m supposed to be looking for. I can’t seem to get it out of my mind, a cartoon from a stateside magazine showing a couple of guys smokin’ a joint, and one asks the other, When does this stuff take effect? Of course, as he’s asking the question, he’s sitting upside down on the ceiling. Then, after a few minutes, that’s about how I felt, until the opium seemed to explode in my head. It was the first time in my life that I’d ever come into contact with anything that powerful in the form of a drug. Smokin’ that opium painted joint that late morning with Valentine opened up my world way past all possibilities that I’d ever been exposed to. Now as fucked up as I knew I was, Val just laughed and said that this mamasan’s shit was garbage and that we needed to find Ba.

What the fuck’s a Ba? I asked in my dazed stupor with a joint burnin’ my fingers. Ba’s a Cambodian mamasan, Val told me, ...and fuck, paintin’ the shit on a joint, well, she’s got the pipe. Let’s go. So, Valentine and I slowly trudged out into the afternoon sun, grab a cyclo and head through the maze of streets and alleyways on our way to this woman’s house named Ba. Now I’m already fucked up, laying back in the open cyclo, a three-wheeled pedaled vehicle that bumps its way along the road. I’ve got my Purple Heart Medal for my wound in the back pocket of my jungle fatigues, and the box is poking me in the butt. The driver seems to know exactly where he’s peddling to even though Val only seemed to say a couple of words in Vietnamese to him. The hot sun is directly overhead, but there is a refreshing breeze coming in off the beautiful South China Sea. As we head deeper into the bowels of this large city, rounding corners and turns, the sea seems to kiss the sky. The sun spills its cosmic rays over the buildings like a landscape painter adding highlights to his masterpiece.

Val’s talkin’ a mile a minute, and I’m sittin’ there wondering if he’s takin’ me to another old beetlenut-chewin’ mamasan. I’m tellin’ myself that I’m as high as I’ll ever be, and maybe I ought to be thinking about getting back up the road to An Khe as the cyclo driver comes to an abrupt halt. We pour out of it and head through an arbor into a small alley leading to a spacious courtyard. It’s filled with trees and blooming flowers. It reminds me of the south of France; one of Monet’s later paintings of gardens and flowers in riotous, delicious colors. There are a couple of women, Vietnamese, who laugh and wave at Val. He seems to know everyone. He knocks on a green door, waits for an answer, when I notice that the front windows are shuttered and closed in the afternoon heat.

She opens the door and stands there, the darkened room behind her, sunlight washing over her features. She is about five feet tall and dressed from head to toe in white silk. The first thing that I notice is her color. Her skin is a golden honey brown, and in the sunlight it seems to take on an almost translucent sheen. Her eyes are hooded and slanted and although she regards Val with a quick smile, I notice she looks at me, questioningly. Her cheekbones are pronounced, caught by the sun, accentuating the hollows beneath.

She steps back into the room allowing us to enter, as she turns her back to us, I can see that her long hair’s tied up at her neck. I can’t tell her age, but why do I care? Is she a girl or a woman? I do know that she’s young though, and I wonder how and why someone her age would be called a mamasan.

She slowly walks over to a small portable stove and begins to make some tea. We sit down on straw mats on the floor while Valentine’s talkin’ to her. She has a very slow quiet manner about the way she does things, especially with her hands. I’m reminded of the temple dancers of Angkor Thom slowly swaying to the music, making sensuous gestures with their hands while dancing in the skylight. She’s very beautiful, and I can’t seem to take my eyes off her.

Ba, this is my boy, Scotty. He’s from the Cav; took some shrapnel in the face; stupid bastard, Val laughs that easy laugh of his, and I realize that it’s the bandage on my jaw that she’s questioningly lookin’ at. She comes over to us with two cups of tea. She gives Val his and very slowly gives one to me. It felt like my whole face exploded and went numb from the explosion, blood and gore oozing out. I thought my whole face had been torn apart. I’d put my hand up to my face and I could feel nothing. I realized that I was not dead, but I also saw myself as being ugly and deformed when I got home to the states. Well, they flew me out on a chopper that night along with the bodies, ponchos flapping over their dead faces in the moonlight. I was flown to a Qui Nhon’s field hospital where they removed the pieces of shrapnel and closed the wound and stitched me up. They gave me the Purple Heart Medal which I now sit on. It was pokin’ me in the butt, now. In the hospital, they made me get off the hospital bed, and stand at attention to receive it from some gung-ho General.

Let me see, she says to me, uttering the first words since I arrived. I pull off the bandage. She looks even more closely at my stitched wound and then gets up and quietly goes over to a shelf by the window. Val was busy smokin’, and I thought he wasn’t really watching what was going on. Hey, she knows what she’s doin’. You leave that shit all bandaged up, and you’ll have jungle rot and shit hangin’ off your face!

Ba comes back, and I’m feasting my eyes at the way the silk caresses every curve of her body. She squats before me with a small container of some godforsaken Vietnamese medication in her tiny hand. She gingerly opens it with the touch of a demolition expert diffusing a thermo nuclear device, and rubs a little on the wound.

Well, now that she’s healed me, Ba proceeds to get me fucked up. She gestures for me to lie down on the mat, and she brings out another lacquered tray with a small oil lamp on it. There’s also a bottle of black liquid opium, some dross and a stylus, but what really caught my eye, besides this woman herself, was the ornately carved but old opium pipe. Not only was it carved the entire way up its two-foot stem with dark curling dragons intertwined in one another, but also it was inlaid with small worked pieces of ivory. It was beautiful! I told her that I was an artist, and I thought it was gorgeous. She remarked that it had been her mother’s. Val was lost across the room in his own reverie, and I’m left here with this golden vixen. I’ve no idea just how much English she speaks because a lot of what Valentine said to her was in Vietnamese.

She lays down now with a cup of tea, placing it on the floor between us and begins to prepare the first pipe. I’m watchin’ her, and she’s watchin’ me as her hands and fingers work. Then she raises her pinky finger and extends the one next to it as well, and continues to work slowly and sensuously through the preparation of the first pipe.

I smoke, you watch me she says as she finishes the prep, holding the inverted bowl of the pipe about a half-inch from the flame of the lamp and literally breathes in the drug. She holds the smoke with seemingly no effort only allowing it to exhale very slowly in bursts through her nose when she already starts to prepare the next pipe.

This one is for me, and she holds the long stem as I suck at the mouthpiece. I smoke one, emulating her procedure, and she smokes the next. There’s some kind of communion goin’ on here, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I get to my third pipe, and the drug has permeated some translucent membrane connecting my body with my soul. I am in a state of flux, my body is at rest, but my mind is free to wander unimpeded across the universe. There is peace here in the midst of this war zone. There is life after death, and I’ve found it lyin’ here, across from this golden girl in this room on this day. My mind is alive, and I’m noticin’ the tiniest and the most overwhelming things. I’m watching the particles of dust flowing in the sunlight coming in through the un-shuttered back window. It looks like a tiny universe in its own right, and I question if I am not but a speck of dust in some parallel scene somewhere eons away from here. My throat is parched and at the moment I’m thinking this, Ba kindly hands me a cool teacup. Wow! What the fuck’s happenin’ here? Wasn’t that cup steaming hot when she put it down on the floor between us, just a few minutes ago? How long have I been layin’ here?

I lay back on the pillow that she’d placed there for my head, and my mind’s racing along, thinkin’ all kinds of thoughts. Damn, I’ve been fighting and killing these people here in Southeast Asia for upwards of a year and yet I don’t know them. The women, young whores and bar girls that I’ve encountered, in the villages and hamlets are like another species of beings next to this young woman lying across from me who’s quietly cooking for her pipe. This woman has a quiet dignity about her, and yet she feels indomitable. I’m willing to bet that no one could even make her do anything that she didn’t want to do. Shit, I lay there slyly glancing at the facial planes of her face as the shadows of the room and oil lamp flickers throwing pulses of warmth upon that flawless skin. She wears small Asian yellow gold earrings and one matching soft yellow gold bracelet, which picks up splotches of the light and carelessly tosses it around the room as she moves her arm cooking the opium. She has both the presence of Garbo and the hardness of Dietrich, all rolled into one.

Are you okay, Scotty? She’d caught me starring at her when I hoarsely mumble some bullshit. Now, I understand how someone this young can be called mamasan. She’s got the beauty, the poise, the brains and the balls to be, (as Valentine told me earlier) — a player in the Qui Nhon opium game.

Well, Goddamnit! I want this woman like I’ve wanted no other, but she’s no whore and no bar girl. I have nothing to offer her and I know in my heart of hearts that she’d eat me alive and spit me out if I even casually suggested such a thing. Now, the only reason I’m here and she’s being so accommodating towards me is because I’m Val’s friend. I