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The day Nick Fury graduated high school, he took off his cap and gown, folded them up on the backseat of his mama’s beat-up Chevy, and marched downtown to the recruitment office. It was June of 1969, he’d been eighteen for three months, and he didn’t see any point in waiting for his number to come up. At least this way he had some kind of choice in the matter, and a guarantee of basic training. That was more than most of the boys he’d grown up with were getting.
In Vietnam, Nick learned how to field-strip an M-16 in ten seconds flat, how to make one pack of M&Ms last three months, how to build a fire in the middle of monsoon rain, and how to give a damn good blow job. The latter was taught to him by a fellow private by the name of Cooper who got himself killed by a Charlie sniper two months after he’d started slipping into Nick’s bed after lights out. Nick had already lost too many friends at that point to cry over somebody he’d barely gotten to know, but he kept Cooper’s picture tucked up in his helmet for the rest of the war, making a point to remember the man who’d helped him confirm something he’d always suspected about himself but never had the balls to admit.
The one and only time Nick did cry during the war was the day he got the letter telling him his mama had passed. It seemed that old Chevy had finally given up the ghost – smack dab in the middle of I-75. Nick knew his sister would take care of the funeral arrangements, like she’d always taken care of everything; Julia was only ten years older, but she was the kind of girl who’d reached the age of forty before she’d made her way through the birth canal. Nick was the one their mama always had to keep an eye on, the one she had to drag away by the ear from playground fights and pick up from the principal’s office when he mouthed off to his teachers for the fifty-seventh time. At least she’d never had to give him a talking-to about chasing girls.
Nick had been good, the past few years. He’d learned to toe the line just enough to graduate high school in the normal amount of time, and he hadn’t disobeyed a single order since he’d joined the army, not even from the captain who liked to drop the n-word even more than he liked dropping grenades. (Nick hadn’t technically been ordered not to screw around with Cooper, and if anybody’d even been awake to notice, they hadn’t said a word about it. Over here, guys got their kicks where they could.) But after Nick got that letter, all that good behavior seemed pretty damn worthless. Who did he have to impress? His daddy had died when he was only four, his sister had a family of her own, and now his mama was gone, too. There wasn’t a soul in the entire state of Tennessee who needed Nick Fury to come home.
It was around that time that Nick met the Howling Commandos. That was what a pair of guys – a redheaded mountain of a man named Dugan, and a skinny black guy named Jones – called themselves. They’d been on leave when Nick joined the unit, so this was the first he’d seen of them, but even the guys who already knew them gave them a wide berth. There was something a little too wild about them, a little too gung-ho. They’d picked up the name “Howling Commandos” from their daddies, who had served together in World War II and claimed (though Nick was skeptical) to have fought alongside Captain America himself. The second generation Dugan and Jones, raised on tales of that legacy, were the type to throw themselves into a firefight even when the smart thing to do was to wait it out, and nobody wanted to follow them into their suicidal madness. Nobody, that is, except Nick Fury.
The three of them were playing cards one night, stripped to their undershirts with wet bandanas tied around their heads to beat the heat, when Nick decided to share a piece of intel he’d picked up the day before. Dugan’s voice was booming with the vulgar jokes he always used to cover up his terrible poker face, and Jones was swatting at mosquitoes with his cards. It was Nick’s turn to call or fold, but instead he leaned forward across the table, looked them both in the eye, and said, “How would y’all feel about taking a little field trip that’s likely to get us blown to bits?”
Dugan and Jones were interested. Nick had known they would be. So he told them about the news he’d gotten wind of, patrolling a village the day before. He was starting to pick up a little Vietnamese – French had been his best subject in high school, so he just figured he had a natural ear for languages – and he’d overheard a couple men talking about a Russian supply drop a few miles away, scheduled for Saturday night. The men’s voices were bitter – what good were the Americans if they couldn’t even stop the VC from getting food and ammo from their Commie buddies? Nick knew his CO would never approve of the mission – too risky, too low-priority – but he was determined to prove the locals wrong. Why the hell else were they here?
Two nights later, Nick, Dugan, and Jones slipped out of their tents hours after lights out, each making like they were just going to take a piss. On the far side of the camp, they gathered up the gear they’d stashed under a pile of reeds, pulled it on, and set off in the direction of the alleged supply drop, using the stars to guide them. When they got to the spot, they found a tall place in the brush to crouch down and wait, breathing quietly in tandem. More than an hour passed, and they were just about ready to give up and admit they’d gotten bad intel when they heard the sound of a chopper’s blades approaching.
The chopper hovered overhead, its lights casting only the dimmest glow over the ground beneath, and lowered a ladder down into the jungle. Russian soldiers came down one by one, each carrying a heavy parcel to set down in a central pile. Nick could feel Dugan on his left shifting his broad body in the dirt, spoiling for a fight, but Nick put a hand on his shoulder to still him. They had to time this just right. Finally, soldiers stopped descending from the helicopter. All but one had gone back up into the belly of the chopper, and the Howling Commandos knew that the man left behind had the duty of protecting the pile of supplies until the Charlies came to pick it up.
The helicopter flew away without shining any brighter lights to sweep the ground for saboteurs, leaving only the pale light of the full moon in its wake. The Soviets were getting cocky, but that suited Nick just fine. “Now,” he whispered, and Dugan tiptoed his way toward the guard, surprisingly light on his feet for a man of his size. He came around from behind, hoping to dispatch the guard before he even knew what hit him. But a guttural shout from the opposite corner of the clearing made all four pairs of eyes swivel in its direction. The VC had arrived.
“Jones, you know what to do,” Nick whispered, and Jones jumped out from his hiding place, firing off a dozen rounds before the enemy could react. Gabriel Jones wielded a gun with the care and precision he usually reserved for playing the trumpet he’d brought with him to ‘Nam. Meanwhile, Dugan, recovering from the distraction of the enemy’s arrival, dropped his own gun and grabbed the Russian soldier instead. Then he reached around to rip away his hostage’s gun, aiming it at the guard’s allies. The Soviet guard fought back, but his struggle was futile; nothing could escape the grip of Timothy Aloysius Cadwallader Dugan, Jr. When the Russian’s gun was spent, Dugan jammed the butt of the weapon into his chin, cracking his jaw and making the guard buckle over in pain. Then he snatched up his own gun and ran, quick as anything, to the safety of the biggest, nearest tree.
All the while, Nick stayed hidden in his spot of grass. He didn’t think the enemy had noticed him yet, and that was just as well; he wanted them to underestimate their opposition. The VC came closer and closer, hunting for Jones and Dugan, who were each weaving their way through the forest, never staying in one spot for more than a few seconds, stopping only to send another barrage of bullets from their own guns. When the Charlies were nearly at the supply pile, Nick knew he wasn’t going to get a better opportunity. He pulled the pin on the grenade in his hands and tossed it into the middle of the supplies. Seconds later, in a hurricane of noise and fire and falling debris, the pile of supplies and all of its protectors were gone.
Back at camp, the Howling Commandos slipped into their bunks without saying a word. But by 0600, the camp was abuzz with the news of the destroyed supply drop. None of the American officers in a ten-mile radius of the drop had given an order to take it out, and no one was quite sure if the perpetrators would be commended or court-martialed. By noon, though, Lieutenant Colonel Chase had the Howling Commandos in his tent, hats in hand.
“I know what you boys did last night,” he said, his yellowed teeth glistening under his dark moustache. His voice left no room for argument, but Nick felt like arguing anyway.
“What would that be? Sir?”
Chase grunted. “Don’t pull that innocent shit. You’ve all got bags under your eyes the size of Lake Michigan, and the big mick over there’s got hands that look as black as yours.”
Dugan looked down at his hands, which were, in fact, covered with gunpowder and soot from the night before. None of them had had the chance to wash up.
“Did I give you an order to take out that supply drop?” Chase demanded.
“No, sir,” said Jones. Dugan shook his head.
Maybe it was the colonel’s casual use of a racial slur, even if for once it wasn’t aimed at Nick himself, or even Jones. Maybe it was indignation at the bureaucratic bullshit that was making them lose this war a little more every day. Maybe he was still wound up from the night’s events. But Nick couldn’t make himself nod along like the other Commandos.
“So we decided to do it on our own,” Nick said. “And now the VC’s got a few less guns on the ground, so I’m thinking everybody wins here. We get a fighting chance at taking them out, and you get to keep being a chickenshit.”
Chase’s eyes blazed, and Dugan took a step forward, ready to intercede if the colonel saw fit to kick Nick’s insubordinate ass. But Nick knew he had the righteousness of truth on his side.
Chase narrowed his eyes, letting his rage deflate into bitter cynicism. “Fine. You want to get yourselves killed? I’ll help you along. From now on, you three boys are getting sent on every dirty job I can find. Now go scrub out the fucking latrines.”
And that was the start of it. In the months that followed, the three original musketeers were joined by a couple of new Commandos – a Jewish kid from Brooklyn named Izzy Cohen and his Sicilian neighbor, Dino Manelli, who wanted to be some kind of pretty-boy actor but had enlisted of his own volition the day Izzy was drafted. Together, they took on all the most dangerous and complicated missions Chase could conjure up, and more than a few that he couldn’t. They blew up more supply drops, rooted out VC spies in peaceable villages, and took out whole platoons with a few well-placed booby traps. After awhile, though he’d never admit it outright, Chase even started to like them. And between missions, when they had a few days leave, the Commandos went carousing, drinking and laughing and flirting with local women. When the other Commandos were fully occupied, Nick usually found a chance to slip away and find a whore who was more his type. As long as the boy was of age, he didn’t have any shame about engaging in a paid transaction.
By the time 1971 rolled around, Nick had moved from private all the way to sergeant, but that was where the promotions stopped. Nick suspected the shuffling of the command structure had installed a few new faces who weren’t as quick to reward a poor brother from Tennessee who liked to lead ambiguously-sanctioned wildcard missions. But Nick couldn’t imagine what else he could possibly be doing with his life, so he signed the reenlistment papers without a second thought and stuck it out until the last choppers pulled him out of Saigon in April of ’75.
Back at base, the Howling Commandos said their goodbyes. Manelli was headed out to Hollywood to try to make it big, and Cohen was following along; it was the least he could do, he said, after Dino had followed him to Vietnam. Dugan was happy to go home to his wife and kids, and Jones had his sights set on OCS and an officer’s commission. In other circumstances Nick would’ve followed Jones, but he’d gotten pretty sour on the Army’s chain of command and he didn’t think anybody in their right mind would make him an officer.
Instead of making a decision right away, Nick decided to stop home in Tennessee to visit his sister and pay his respects at his parents’ grave. And that’s where he was when his whole life changed.
Nick was standing over the marble gravestone, staring down at the freshly-carved letters of his mother’s name next to the softened edges of his father’s, when he heard the unmistakable sound of a helicopter in the sky. The chopper was black, with a stylized eagle logo on the side that Nick had never seen before. It touched down in the empty field behind the freshest graves, and a man with a pencil-thin moustache and an expensive suit threw open the door and climbed down to the grass.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? This here is sacred ground!” Nick yelled over the helicopter’s din. He didn’t care who this asshole was; you didn’t land a chopper in a cemetery without a damn good reason.
The helicopter’s pilot cut the engine, restoring the quiet of the graveyard, and the man in the suit walked over to Nick, sticking out his hand. “My name is Howard Stark, and I’d like to talk to you about the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division.”
“The who in the what now?”
The man grinned. He was obviously the kind of guy who thought his grin would let him get away with anything. “You can just call it SHIELD. Top-level, super-secret intelligence agency. Protecting the world, one covert mission at a time. And we’d love to have you as an agent.”
Nick crossed his arms over his chest. “Never heard of it.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be super-secret if you had, now would it?” Stark was practically bouncing in his expensive Italian shoes. He was old enough to be Nick’s father, but he acted like a man half his age. “Look, we’ve been monitoring you for a couple years now. We know you don’t have any plans for tomorrow, much less next year. And we think you’d make a damn good spy.”
Nick refused to budge. “I ain’t the kind of guy who gets a lot of ‘special opportunities.’ You’ll forgive me if I’m a mite suspicious. And I got no interest in being a token. How many brothers you got in this place?”
Howard waved a hand airily, dismissing Nick’s complaints. “SHIELD was the first American intelligence agency to integrate. We truly don’t care about your background. Or how you want to conduct your personal life,” he added, looking at Nick meaningfully.
Nick wondered just how closely they’d been watching him. It made his skin crawl to think about it. But if he hadn’t noticed they were watching him, it meant their spies were as good as Stark claimed – and maybe Nick could be, too.
He looked down at his parents’ grave. He didn’t have a damn clue what they’d think of all this. He remembered his mama kissing him goodbye before he got on the plane to ‘Nam, telling him to come home safe. He’d kept that promise, at least. But she was gone now, and he was the only one who’d have to pay for his decisions.
“All right,” he said, finally uncrossing his arms. “Where do I sign?”