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unit,the Comancheros.
    But Holder lasted just three months at Phu Bai. He had mistakenly assumed that accepting another tour would exempt him from the demotion that had been part of his sentence for marijuana possession. Upon learning that he had been knocked down to the lowly E-2 pay grade, he angrily confronted a colonel whom he held responsible for giving him the shaft. The colonel took exception to Holder’s profane tirade, which he considered a sign that the twenty-year-old crew chief had become too psychologically unwound to remain in Vietnam. He ordered that Holder be shipped home immediately to finish his six-month commitment atFort Hood, Texas.
    Holder’s long journey back to the United States began on January 30, 1970. He caught a flight to Yokota Air Base outside Tokyo, where he was supposed to switch to a plane bound for Hawaii. But instead of making the connection, he took a taxi into the heart of the city and checked into a luxury hotel that he could scarcely afford. He spent the night knocking back a bottle of whiskey and surveying Tokyo’s neon glow, deep in thought about his years at war. Self-pity, rage, and regret all boiled inside his liquor-addled mind.
    When he finally reached Fort Hood a few days later, Holder knew his Army days were over. Having become accustomed to the frantic pace of Vietnam, he couldn’t handle the drudgery of fixing engines in Texas. Nor did he feel like dedicating any more of his life to an organization that he felt had treated him with blatant disrespect. So after three weeks at Fort Hood, he walked off the base one morning, never to return. He pawned his wedding band in San Antonio and bought a one-way Greyhound ticket to San Diego, where his parents had recently relocated with his twin daughters in tow. He told hismother and father that he had received an honorable discharge; the Army, meanwhile, listed him as AWOL, though it couldn’t spare the resources totrack him down.
    Holder had a difficult time readjusting to civilian life. His father got him a job working in the kitchen at the Port Hueneme Naval Base north of Los Angeles, but he didn’t last long; after flying Hueys in Vietnam, chopping onions for minimum wage struck him as demeaning. He quit and moved back to San Diego, where he used a fake Social Security number to obtain a driver’s license in the name of Linton Charles White—an alias to help him avoid detection by the Army. He used the license to open up a checking account at Southern California First National Bank; the bank also loaned him the money to buy his yellow Pontiac Firebird. When Holder started a job at Spin Physics, a manufacturer of magnetic tape recorder heads, he did somasquerading as White.
    When he wasn’t soldering wires on the assembly line, Holder devoted the bulk of his energy to making up for lost time with the ladies. Having been cuckolded while at war, he exacted a strange measure of revenge by seducing the wives of men still serving in Vietnam. He would find them at lounges near Point Loma, nursing daiquiris and looking forlorn. He became skilled at convincing them that he understood their loneliness, and at sweet-talking them into giving him loans that he never repaid. The racket made him feel dirty, though not enough to stop.
    Holder also had to deal with a more searing form of guilt. He was haunted by visions of the carnage that he had witnessed in Vietnam: his M113 crewmate’s brains seeping into the grass, the bullet-riddled corpses of Vietcong contorted into unnatural shapes. Seeking to liberate his mind from these memories, Holder experimented with LSD; he spent long hours driving up and down Interstate 5 while enraptured by hallucinations ofdancing Hueys.
    In August 1971 Spin Physics laid Holder off. Rather than look for new work, he decided to make ends meet by writing bad checks in thename of Linton Charles White. In a four-month span, he bounced eighty-eight checks worth $1,801 as he whiled away the days at Ocean Beach,