The Mogul by R.G. Belsky

“All things truly wicked begin with an innocence.”
~ Ernest Hemingway

When I was a young man, I killed someone for the first time.
It was no big deal really.

This happened a long time ago, when I was in Vietnam. With an Army combat engineer unit stationed near Pleiku in the mountains of the Central Highlands. I’d been drafted just eight months earlier. Not much time for training as a soldier, but enough for me to know how to pull the trigger of an M-16.

Until then, the war hadn’t seemed very real to me.

I worked in an intelligence office in the base camp at Pleiku, far from the front lines of battle. My job was to monitor enemy troop strength, movements and casualties. Each morning I posted these on a large wall map for an intelligence briefing to the commanding officer. There were red pins to represent the enemy, blue pins for U.S.-controlled areas and yellow pins for the ones we weren’t sure about. It was sort of like playing a big board game. I’ve got Boardwalk, you’ve got Marvin Gardens – who’s going to land on the B&O Railroad first? Years later – when my son was growing up – I sometimes played a video game with him based on the Vietnam War. Holding the controller in my hand, wiping out soldiers and entire units with the flick of a button…well, it brought back memories of working in the intelligence office in Pleiku.

But everything changed on a hot, muggy night.

A Viet Cong sapper unit hit our camp – they hit us hard – a little after midnight. Broke through the north end of the security perimeter, cutting the throats of two guards there. The next security post was manned by a kid from Texas named Russell Dotson. Dotson had two weeks left in country before his tour was over. I’d been drinking with him in an enlisted men’s bar a few days earlier. He told me all about the girl back home in Texas that he was going to marry and the restaurant business his mother and father ran that he would take over someday. One of the Viet Cong soldiers took him out with a grenade fired close-range from an M-69 launcher that hit him point-blank in the face. There was barely enough of him left to send home to his fiancé and his parents.

By the time the sirens went off warning us we were under attack, they’d already infiltrated the base. Of course, I didn’t realize that yet. I rolled out of bed, grabbed my M-16 rifle – which I’d never fired, by the way – and headed for one of the underground bunkers where we were supposed to go in this kind of situation.

I was almost there when I saw him. A Viet Cong soldier. Our eyes met for just a second or two. He was a teenaged Vietnamese boy, dark hair and dark eyes, his face covered with sweat. He was scared, I could see fear in those eyes. I pointed my rifle at him. He turned and started to run. I screamed for him to stop. He didn’t. Instead, he turned around with his weapon – a Chinese-made AK47 – in his hands rather than surrender. Before he could pull the trigger, I shot and killed him.

Later, I found out that his name was Le Van Trang, and he was 17 years old. His father was a colonel in the North Vietnamese Army. His sister had been captured trying to bomb the American air base in Saigon. Three of his brothers were with Viet Cong units, just like him.

Everyone hailed me as a hero. “You did the right thing, Nick,” they all said. The Army even gave me a medal for it, the Bronze Star for bravery in helping to defend our base camp against the enemy attack. There was no question whatsoever I made the right decision when I pulled that trigger.
It was – to use the police parlance I would one day learn so well as a journalist – a “clean shoot.”

It is 2003 now – the beginning of a new century – and, over the years, my decisions have gotten more complicated. Sure, some of the people who have died as a result of my actions since that long ago time in Vietnam definitely deserved it. I really had no choice. These were black-and-white, absolutely clear cut decisions too.
More “clean shoots” for anyone keeping score on Nick Marston.

Other deaths fall into more of a gray area. These are the ones that I convinced myself at the time were justified and necessary and even – as strange as this may sound – morally acceptable. But sometimes now, as I replay them over in my mind, I detect flaws in my decision-making process that I didn’t see before. Did these people have to die? Could I have done something to save them? I don’t know the answer. All I know is that I’m not certain anymore.

And then there are the actions that there can be no doubt about. No grey area or wiggle room for me here, I’m afraid. These are things that I have done that I know now I will have to answer for, both in this world and to whatever higher power awaits me when I leave it.

And I think again about the night in Pleiku when I shot and killed that Viet Cong teenager. I think about it a lot these days.

You see, I lied about something before.

When I said killing him was no big deal.

It wasn’t at the time. But it is now. Le Van Trang, whose life I ended at the age of 17, is with me all the time now.

The thing I remember most is his eyes. The moment our eyes met. Like I said, it was only a few seconds – but it seemed like an eternity. There was something in his eyes that I didn’t recognize at the time. But I do now. He knew he was going to die. And that I was going to be the one to kill him, the last person who would be there to share his final breath on earth with him. What I saw in Le Van Trang’s eyes was recognition of his own moment of death – and exactly how it would happen. Some people don’t experience that moment until they’re in their 80s or 90s. But – unless we die in our sleep – it is a moment we all face when our time on this earth is over.

They say that taking the life of another person is the ultimate sin. That it is the most heinous crime a person can commit. The one act we can never take back. Or apologize for in any meaningful way. Or try to do better the next time. Murder – for the right reasons or the wrong reasons – is the type of deed that haunts us for the rest of our lives.

But I have also heard that once someone takes another person’s life, it all changes. The taboo of murder is gone. Suddenly this once-forbidden act doesn’t seem so difficult or shocking or unthinkable anymore. In other words, once we’ve killed, it becomes easier to kill again. The first time is the hardest.

I suppose that’s why I think so much about Le Van Trang these days.
Because who knows what those few seconds – in a long ago war in a far off land when I still had my entire life in front of me – might have set in motion?

Maybe if I hadn’t pulled the trigger of my M-16 that night, a lot of other people wouldn’t have died over the years either.

Maybe the Carrie Anne Cody story would have turned out differently than the way it did.

Maybe my whole life would have been different.

—–The above is part of sworn testimony given by Nicholas Marston at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office on Dec. 29, 2003. All information here is for confidential use only.

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Excerpt from The Mogul by R.G. Belsky. Copyright 2026 by R.G. Belsky. Reproduced with permission from R.G. Belsky. All rights reserved.