Abandoned: MIA in Vietnam (25 page)

CHAPTER 40

“So, Mr. Wolfe, you are not familiar with Mr. Fulton?” the court appointed psychiatrist asked Wolfe.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Nichols,” Wolfe said, looking across the desk at the pretty, slight, black woman. A whiff of perfume wafted across the desk and dissipated quickly. “I knew Chief Fulton a long time ago when he was a third-class petty officer in the navy. He worked in disbursing on one of the ships on which I served. The only time I saw him was when payday rolled around and we were headed into port. Otherwise I left my pay in the bank.”

“He’s convinced you want him dead. I’m trying to determine if he is delusional, paranoid, or some other type of mentally ill,” Nichols said. “You understand?”

“Of course,” Wolfe said. “I did shoot him, but only to keep him from stabbing my daughter. He broke into my house and threatened to shoot me. I’m a retired physician, by the way.”

“Sorry. I knew that. Would you prefer I call you Dr. Wolfe?”

Wolfe smiled. He wondered if Dr. Nichols were psychoanalyzing him. “Addison, Addy, or even Doc – that’s what the kids at the elementary school call me – is good. Doctor, rather than Mister, if you want to be extra professional, though.”

Nichols grinned. “Touché, Doc,” she said.

“How seriously did I wound him?” Wolfe asked.

Nichols leafed through Fulton’s medical chart, stopping on a yellow page. She said, “He got a chest tube for about a week. Surgeon took the slug out of his right lung. He has healed. No physical complications are expected.”

“Did Fulton shoot the court reporter? Was she seriously injured?” Wolfe asked.

“They took the bullet out of her thigh. She’s walking with crutches. They did ballistics on the bullet. We’re not positive who shot her, yet. Fulton denies it. The same weapon you used to shoot Fulton was used to wound the reporter, though. I don’t understand why he would have shot the court reporter, if he did. Or who did it, if it wasn’t Fulton. The reporter didn’t see who fired through her sliding glass kitchen door.”

“Have you done a physical work-up on the Chief? Any lab or scans to check him for the other things that might make him hallucinate, like thyroid abnormalities, drug use, brain tumor, or whatever else is pertinent?”

“All negative,” Nichols said, nodding. “His story about the fight and throwing a man overboard is consistent, however. Do you know how true that is?”

“Maurice Noble was a second-class petty officer at the time who is also a retired chief now. He was on the same ship with Fulton and me. He told me Jimmy Byrnes did disappear from the ship during its last deployment. I wasn’t on the ship then. The navy wrote the incident off as a suicide. I met with Jimmy’s sister recently, and an ex-POW. They say Jimmy survived the push or fall from the ship and ended up in South Vietnam as a POW.”

“So there’s a chance he wasn’t thrown overboard, but jumped or fell.” Nichols said.

“At this point I don’t think all the evidence is in,” Wolfe said. “Losing sailors over the side of a ship is a constant worry. That’s why they conduct
man overboard
drills. As a psychiatrist, you know there is a subset of people who are depressed and attempt suicide. And what better way to remove a witness to a crime or an enemy than to toss him overboard when no one is looking?”

“Man overboard drill?”

“It’s even more common on carriers than other ships. Pilots and planes sometimes go into the ocean,” Wolfe said, nodding.

“Mr. Fulton mentioned trying to yell, ‘Man overboard,’” Nichols said. She stood and pulled off the jacket to her gray pantsuit, revealing a frilly pink blouse. She rounded the desk. Hanging the jacket on a hook on the back of her office door, she walked to a filing cabinet and opened the top drawer. After fingering through the filed psychiatric dictations, she pulled one out and took it to the desk. Sitting, she turned the pages of the chart over the top of the manila folder until she found the passage for which she searched. “We record our sessions,” she said. “This is a typed transcript. Saves me from having to remember every detail. Fulton said, ‘I yelled man overboard. The ship is a noisy place, especially the hangar and flight decks. No one heard me. Then Deke, that’s Deke Jameson, grabbed me by the face. He threatened to throw me overboard, too, unless I shut up. He would have, too. He was a huge man. And angry. Byrnes had made him really furious, by getting him tossed into the brig and costing him his stripes.’ Does that sound possible, Dr. Wolfe? Could Byrnes truly have been beat up and thrown off the ship?”

“I knew Deke Jameson. Obliquely,” Wolfe said. “We weren’t friends. He was a bully, an arrogant SOB. And large. If Fulton is correct about there being a smuggling ring within the Supply Division, and Byrnes had cost them a lot of money by testifying against Deke when he stole some laundry, then yeah. That’s not only possible; I’d say it’s likely. It would not have been easy, though. Jimmy knew some martial arts. I’ve seen him deck guys with a single punch, but only someone who had attacked him first. He was no bully. I expect it would have taken several guys to incapacitate him.”

“That, too, is consistent with Chief Fulton’s account,” Nichols said. “Byrnes survived the fall and was later a POW?”

“Yes,” Wolfe said.

“Can we get him to verify this chain of events? It would go a long way toward having Fulton declared mentally incompetent. I think his break with reality might have been the result of years of dealing with the guilt of not being able to save Byrnes. He’s certain Byrnes died.”

Wolfe shook his head. He said, “Jimmy didn’t die from the fall from the ship, or drown. But he can’t testify. The air force pilot who spent time with him as a POW says he was killed in a USAF bombing raid.”

The psychiatrist wrote herself a brief note and placed it in Chief Fulton’s chart. After a minute of staring at the note, while Wolfe wondered if the interview were over, she said, “Do you know anything about the men Fulton claims Byrnes killed? Obviously that’s not possible if the man died in Vietnam, right?”

“You mean the members of Jameson’s gang, the guys who were stealing from Supply?” Wolfe asked.

“Yes. The men in Fulton’s scrapbook. Why would he feel they were murdered?”

Wolfe thought for a minute. He said, “I think you could probably explain that better than Chief Fulton or I can, Dr. Nichols. I suppose the responsibility the Chief felt for Byrnes’s assumed death might make him wish they had died at Byrnes’s hand. That would mean Byrnes wasn’t really dead. Or, maybe Fulton killed them himself, or arranged their deaths?”

Nichols pulled her upper lip under her lower lip, contemplating as she jotted notes. She said, “You know, at one point he claimed you were trying to kill him. And you may have killed those other men.”

“I did shoot him,” Wolfe said. “Until three weeks ago, I had no idea that Jimmy was dead or that they had tried to kill him. Otherwise, I might have done precisely that.”

“Okay,” Nichols said. She lay the dictation on her desk. “I believe that’s all I have for you now. Would you mind coming back if I need more information?”

“Not at all, if I’m available,” Wolfe said. “Sometime this summer I will be attending Mrs. Byrnes’s funeral. The date isn’t set yet, and that can take a while at Arlington National Cemetery.”

“Okay, thanks, Doc,” Nichols said. “Looks like I’ll send a deputy to Chief Fulton’s home, to see if there are any receipts for plane trips on the dates of these men’s deaths.” She stood and shook Wolfe’s hand. “Thanks for coming in.”

“My pleasure, Dr. Nichols.”

CHAPTER 41

Wolfe sat in a folding chair in the large living room of the brick colonial house in Alexandria. All the furniture that had been in the room on his last visit had been removed and replaced with Mrs. Byrnes’s casket, several stands of flowers, and an altar draped in white paper. Tammy Kimura told Wolfe the altar was a Shinto shrine and the paper was meant to ward off evil spirits.

After all the visitors had viewed Mrs. Byrnes’s body, a Buddhist priest conducted the wake ceremony. Kimura and her sister had dressed the dead woman in a white kimono, her wooden geta sandals, and white socks with the gap between the first and second toes. They had placed six coins, pictures of family members including Jimmy and his father, and a package of her favorite chocolate candy in the coffin.

The casket sat obliquely in the corner with Mrs. Byrnes’s head pointed toward the back window and feet toward the side window. “She was specific about having her head point north for the wake,” Kimura said to Wolfe. “The coins are for her to pay to cross the Sanzu River, the Buddhist equivalent to the Greek mythological River Styx.”

Wolfe sat through the Buddhist ceremony, understanding none of what the priest said in Japanese. The smell of incense and flowers drove him outside after the ceremony. Many of the guests stood on the broad lawn. Almost all the men, except Wolfe, wore black suits with white shirts and black ties. Wolfe’s only suit was a dark navy blue.

“I’m so glad you could come to the wake on short notice, Addison,” Kimura said as she approached him with a shorter Asian man in tow. “Buddhists prefer the wake to be held on the 3rd, 7th, 49th, or 100th day after death. Not knowing when the funeral will be scheduled, we chose the seventh day.”

“Still no date from Arlington National Cemetery?” Wolfe asked. He glanced at the white-haired gentleman. Someone had tucked the right sleeve of the man’s coat into his right armpit after folding it. Two large safety pins kept it neatly pressed to his side.

“They say in late August. Yasuko calls every day. She suspects the calendar varies with the number of boys coming back from Syria through Dover, Delaware. They promised a firm date by the end of next week.” Kimura turned to the man standing next to her. “I want you to meet Mr. Roh So-dong. I told you about him earlier over the phone. He works in the Korean embassy.”

The man with one arm bowed slightly toward Wolfe. He held his left hand out. Wolfe shook it with his left hand. “Mr. So-dong,” Wolfe said. “A pleasure to meet you. Oh, I’m sorry, that’s your first name isn’t it? I forgot that the Koreans, like the Vietnamese, place their surname first. Mr. Roh, correct?.”

Roh shook Wolfe’s hand. “Correct. James told me much about you, Dr. Wolfe. Tammy has praised you, also,” Roh said, surprising Wolfe.

“Mr. Roh was in Vietnam with Jim,” Kimura said. “He told us about their time together. After reading about my mother’s death in the
Washington Post
obituaries, he contacted us. He spent a long time on the telephone with Colonel Rhodes, too. The colonel couldn’t make it today.”

“You knew Jimmy in Vietnam?” Wolfe asked, surprised. “As a POW? With Rhodes?”

“Not with Colonel Rhodes,” Roh said.

Kimura interrupted. “You two have a lot to talk about,” she said. “I have to see to the guests. Please excuse me. Talk with me before you go, please.” She patted both men’s shoulders and left them together. Wolfe saw tears in her eyes.

In the spacious front yard, Roh and Wolfe wandered in silence between guests until they arrived at a sparsely populated, small Japanese rock garden to the left of the house, between the front entrance and the basement garages. Once out of earshot of the others, Wolfe said, “You work in the South Korean embassy?”

Roh nodded. “I’m the ROK, that is Republic of Korea, Civilian Intelligence Attaché.”

“And you read obituaries as part of your job?”

“I read every word of the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, every day they are published,” Roh said, laughing. “You’d be surprised what you can learn about the military in this country by reading obituaries. Admiral J.T. Byrnes, Jr., was a hero in the war against Japan. An ace, in fact. When I saw the name of Mrs. Byrnes’s predeceased, I knew I had found James’s family.”

Wolfe nodded. He asked, “How did you meet Jimmy?”

Roh told Wolfe about the NVA capturing him, forcing him to be a conscripted porter, the ARVN freeing them, the shock of the surrender of Saigon, and their attempted escape from the city two days later. “Obviously he survived the B-52 strike,” Wolfe said.

“And a lot more,” Roh said. “The patrol boats towed our sampan to land. Including Mr. Dang, the machinegun fire from the patrol craft killed three people. The NVA separated the men from the women and children. We never saw the women again, but it’s safe to say they lost all their possessions. The NVA probably sent them to a New Economic Zone for punishment. Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese died in the NEZs and re-education camps, starved or beaten to death, or executed. I guess they could have ended up in the new collective farms in the south, but the collectives were a failure. Even the northerners admitted to that eventually.”

“And you and Jimmy? How did you lose your arm?” Wolfe asked.

“The NVA considered young, healthy men without papers to have been in the military, ARVN. They treated all ex-military to re-education – hard labor, starvation, and communist propaganda. They initially thought James and I were Vietnamese. After they learned our real identities – it took a long time for them to believe us – they also sent us to a re-education camp in the north. Older men, obviously wealthy exploiters of the masses, suffered worse fates.

“Immediately after we reached shore and in front of their families and us, the NVA executed some men from the boat. They thought we were lowly crewman, or, at worst, smugglers. Since we were healthy, they tied us together and packed us onto captured American army trucks or Russian Molotova army trucks and shipped us north. We held on to the sides of the trucks and each other to keep from being bounced out of the vehicles. NVA tanks had destroyed the roads as they moved south for the invasion of South Vietnam. Tied together at the wrists, fifty men stood in the back of a truck, exposed to the elements, unfed, for three days until we reached the first re-education camp.”

“First camp?”

Roh nodded. He said, “Do you mind if I smoke? Nicotine calms my nerves. It’s not easy re-living these memories. They moved us frequently, to discourage escapes.”

“Of course,” Wolfe said. He watched as the one-armed Korean pulled a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket with his left hand, shook the pack until a cigarette popped up, stuck it in his mouth, replaced the pack, and lit the cigarette with a Zippo lighter.

Roh showed the lighter to Wolfe. On one side, Wolfe saw the insignia of a Korean infantry battalion; on the other the map of South Vietnam. “A gift from my battalion when I returned to Korea in 1979.”

“That’s a long time to have been in Vietnam,” Wolfe said. Smoke from Roh’s cigarette wafted upward in the warm summer afternoon breeze.

“I was lucky to leave alive. For four years they alternately starved us or forced us to do hard labor. I suppose we were in six or seven labor camps. They moved us around to keep us confused about our location. All that time we received communist indoctrination as well. They released some prisoners after six months. Many more died of malnutrition, or beatings and executions. Some, I’m sure, are still held captive. We harvested rice from paddies, planted potatoes, constructed buildings, paved roads, chopped wood, whatever, until the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia to throw out the Khmer Rouge.”

“Did they make you carry ammunition for that war, too?”

“Worse. The Chinese communists thought the Vietnamese acted under the direction of the Soviets and were trying to expand their influence in Southeast Asia. The Chinese invaded northern Vietnam and occupied part of it for several months. When the Chinese declared victory, they pulled out in March, 1979, leaving behind large mine fields.”

Wolfe had already figured out how Roh lost his arm. “You guys had to disarm the mines?”

Roh nodded. “I made a mistake with one. James was nearby. He put a tourniquet on the stump. The Vietnamese thought I was going to die. They had minimal medical facilities. Rather than waste time and medicine on me, they contacted the Korean Embassy and turned me over to them. The embassy doctor had to amputate what remained of my arm in order to remove an infection and save my life. I survived. Obviously.”

“What about Jimmy?”

“The last I saw him, he was headed back to the minefield to disarm more mines. I think about him every day. I tried for years to get my government to ask the Soviet government to coerce the Vietnamese to release him. To no avail. Even your government seemed less than interested.”

“Yeah,” Wolfe said. “I believe I know why. I had an unintentional meeting with the CIA. They are in no hurry to rescue MIAs. Did you tell his sisters about Jimmy?”

“They were delighted to hear he had not been killed by the B-52s, but devastated to think he could still be a prisoner,” Roh said.

“Do you think he could still be alive? That’s a pretty harsh environment. He was born in late 1946. He’ll be seventy years-old later this year if he is still with us,” Wolfe said.

Roh shook his head. He said, “James didn’t have many friends among the Vietnamese. Of all the prisoners, he had the most to gain by pretending to believe the Marxist-Leninist nonsense they spouted in the re-education courses. He never did. I saw no signs that he ever would give them the satisfaction of even thinking that he had changed his allegiance. I have to believe he is dead by now.”