P. O. W. (10 page)

The colonel had no way of knowing the impact of what he had said. The last five words in his sentence cut through Woods like
a laser. David’s face turned white. Reggie saw what was happening and moved over to where he could reach up and touch his
friend.

“Dave… Dad doesn’t know about… Spence.” Reggie’s voice was apologetic.

“About who?” The colonel could see that he had touched a sore spot.

Woods blinked back his emotion and looked directly into the colonel’s eyes. “Spencer Barnett was part of our team. When we
got ambushed, he stayed back as a rear guard…” Woods turned his head away from the officer and continued.

“Spence told me to get on the chopper and help Reggie. I-left-him-there-and-he-got-captured-by-the-NVA.” The only way the
last sentence could come out of him was rapidfire, like a verbal machine gun.

“Oh… now I think I understand.” Colonel Sinclair could see the guilt written on Woods’s face. “Let’s go over it again, but
this time
in detail
.”

Reggie looked at his father as if the colonel had gone nuts. The older man gave his son a trust-me-I-know-what-I’m-doing look.
Reggie sighed and leaned back against his double pillows.

“I don’t think I want to do that… sir.” Woods shook his head and bit his bottom lip gently. “Thanks anyway…”

“Nurse?” Colonel Sinclair beckoned to the duty nurse. “Would you lend me one of your clipboards and some paper?”

The nurse sent Jean-Paul over with the requested items. A lead pencil was shoved under the clip.

“All right, David. Draw me a picture of the ambush site.” The colonel held out the clipboard. Woods hesitated for a long time,
but the colonel kept the clipboard in front of him; slowly, Woods took it and began drawing. He felt the colonel’s arm slip
over his shoulder, and a reassuring squeeze told him that it would be all right. Woods started drawing faster.

“Now… put in everyone’s position….”

David marked the spots on the map where he last saw each of the team members, including Fitzpatrick and the two Special Forces
sergeants who had been hit by the Chinese claymore mine.

“Fine… Now let’s go through it again, but this time show me on the map as you talk.”

Reggie could see that Woods was getting into the briefing, and each time Woods would balk, his father would gently prompt
him with a comment about the tactics of the recon team’s withdrawal.

Woods finished and dropped the clipboard and pencil down on the hospital sheet.

“So, David! Why all the guilt?” The blunt statement from the colonel shattered the soldier’s last defensive barrier.

David Woods started crying hard. “Because I promised Spence that I wouldn’t leave him if he was alive…. We had made a deal
that we wouldn’t leave each other on a battlefield alive so the NVA could capture us…. We promised each other that we would
put a bullet through our heads rather than allow the NVA to fuck with us. And I
left Spence
! I broke my promise!”

“Hold it!” Colonel Sinclair’s voice cut through Woods’s self-pity. “Was Barnett wounded?”

Woods shook his head.

“He wasn’t wounded? OK… What was he doing?”

“He was the rear guard when Reg got hit.” The words came out between sobs.

“David! Stop feeling guilty!” The colonel stood and adjusted his gigline. “From what you’ve shown me and from my own personal
experiences as a Ranger during Korea, you guys performed a withdrawal from a well-executed ambush…
perfectly
. Your sergeant should be congratulated for training you so well. As far as leaving Barnett behind goes… that’s bullshit!”
Colonel Sinclair tapped Woods’s chest hard with his finger. “Bullshit! Do you hear? You could have been the rear guard just
as easily, and I would be talking to
Barnett
now instead of you. I’ll tell you what!” He took a deep breath. “I took a leave from the Pentagon to come over here and get
the paperwork pushed through to bring Trung and Jean-Paul back to our home in the States. That has been taken care of, and
I still have a couple of days left.” The colonel paused and touched his chin with his fingers in thought before continuing.
“I know the staff officer down in Saigon who’s in charge of POW recovery. Let me call him on a secure voice radio and find
out what they know about Spencer Barnett, and then we can go from there! How about that? Is that fair enough?”

Woods’s eyes lit up. “Would you do that?”

“Sure!” The colonel grinned. “But only if you promise me that you’ll dump the guilt trip.”

Woods nodded his head in agreement. He could feel the guilt lifting from his heart. “One thing, sir.”

“Name it.”

“If your friend knows where Spence is… I want to be a member of the team that goes in after him.”

Colonel Sinclair stared at Woods for a long time before answering. “Consider it done.”

“Thanks, sir.”

“
Now
, I’ve got to go!” What Colonel Sinclair did next caught Woods by surprise. The senior Army officer leaned over and hugged
his son and then kissed the soldier on his mouth. “Love you, son.”

“Love you too, Dad.” There was no embarrassment in Reggie’s voice.

Colonel Sinclair stopped on his way out and picked up each of the children in his arms and repeated the hug and kiss. The
other occupants of the ward watched the emotional farewell.

“You’ve got one hell of a good dad there….” Woods nodded his head.

“I know.” Reggie Sinclair smiled proudly as his father left the ward.

Sergeant Shaw pulled the canvas cover over the cases of supplies they had loaded up at the Da Nang depot. He had the two-and-a-half-ton
truck loaded all the way to the rear tailgate with boxes of hard-to-get items.

“Simpson! Stay with the truck while I run inside and get the paperwork!” Shaw hiked up his jungle fatigues and hopped up the
three wooden steps to the depot office. He was in a good mood, despite the heat.

A staff sergeant major sat behind a Plexiglas wall in a corner of the long office building, smoking a cigar. Shaw entered
the office without knocking and felt the cool blast from the air conditioner operating at its highest level. “It’s pretty
damn hot out there!”

The senior sergeant ignored the comment. “Well! Are you satisfied?”

“Almost… I sure would like to get a dozen or so of those new CAR-15s….”

“So would everyone else in Vietnam.”

“Keep me in mind.”

“I will.” The sergeant major tapped the edge of his cigar against his desk over a wastepaper basket. “Ahh-hem… Do you have
something for me?”

Shaw reached down in his side pocket and removed a thick brown manila envelope. He tossed the package on the desk. The senior
NCO tore open a corner and peeked inside before pulling open the top drawer of his desk and tossing it in.

“Aren’t you going to count it?”

“I
trust
you.” He inhaled a deep lungful of blue smoke and blew it toward the air conditioner. “When are you returning for another
load?”

“I don’t know… maybe a month.”

“I rotate back to the States in three weeks, but there’ll be someone here to take care of you.”

“Why are you going back?”

“The colonel is
forcing
me to rotate. I think he’s getting a little suspicious, but it’s about time I get back home and check up on some things.
My new house is about done in Petersburg, and my wife says it’ll take two hundred thousand to furnish it….” The sergeant major
shook his head. “Fucking woman spends money like I’ve got a footlocker full of it.”

Shaw raised his eyebrows and smiled.

The senior sergeant laughed and slapped the top of his desk. “If she only knew!”

“What have you told her?”

“
Poker
winnings!” He chuckled. “You know I’m lucky at cards!”

“Yeah… me too.”

Shaw left the office and hurried over to the truck. Simpson was waiting for him, leaning against the shady side of the vehicle
and smoking a machine-rolled marijuana cigarette.

“I told you not to smoke that shit while we’re working!” Shaw was mad at the black soldier.

“
You’re
working, Sarge….” Simpson opened the door to the passenger seat. “When we stop in An Khe,
I’ll
go to work.”

“I don’t know if we’ll have time to make a stop.” Shaw started the engine. He didn’t trust Simpson to drive when the truck
was loaded with his personal supplies.

“You make time, Sarge.”

“We’ll see.”

“We’ll see shit!” Simpson clenched his teeth. “I helped you, you help me now, or one of us is going to get fucking fragged!”

“Stop the bullshit, Simpson. I’m just fucking with you.” Shaw slowed the truck down at the gate and handed the supply depot
guard his paperwork. The guard casually checked the manifest and looked at the covered supplies. He gave the sergeant a knowing
look and handed the papers back to him.

Shaw shifted gears and pulled out onto Highway 1. “If that fucking Woods isn’t waiting out in front of the hospital, we’re
leaving him! I ain’t driving back down to An Khe in the fucking dark, and I don’t give a fuck what they say about the road
being secured!”

Woods sat next to the machine gun bunker at the main entrance to the naval hospital and smoked a Kool. He felt good for the
first time since the ambush. Colonel Sinclair had made a lot of sense; it wasn’t a matter of guilt, but of what they could
do to get Spence back from the NVA POW camp. He felt sorry for Reggie because he had lost a lung from the bullet wound and
then had to stay in the Special Forces camp three days waiting for the weather to clear, but at least Reggie was alive and
he didn’t smoke, so one lung would last him for the rest of his life. Reggie had told him that they were going to try to ship
him home at the same time as they shipped the kids back. David smiled. The two Eurasian kids would find a good home with the
Sinclairs. Reggie was half Korean and so were his sisters. Jean-Paul and Trung would fit right in with their family.

Shaw honked the truck horn. Woods grabbed his CAR-15 and ran across the highway to where the truck idled. “You’re late.”

“Get in!” Shaw nodded for Woods to take a seat on top of the supplies.

David laid his CAR-15 on the canvas and then pulled himself up. A corner of the canvas flipped up, and he could see the pallet
of sundry supplies. “Hey, Sarge… where did you find the sundries?”

“Pull that canvas down!” Shaw was angry. “You didn’t see shit! You hear?”

“Sure, Sarge.” Woods .realized the sundries weren’t for the battalion, but had been bought by Shaw to black-market.

A helicopter passed by, flying low to the ground. Woods had no way of knowing that Master Sergeant McDonald was on board heading
to the Command and Control North compound located next to Marble Mountain. Woods looked up at the chopper and saw the skull
wearing a Green Beret painted on the nose of the aircraft and wondered what Special Forces unit the chopper belonged to. A
puff of black diesel smoke made David turn his head away and slide over to the opposite side of the truck. Shaw shifted gears,
and the overloaded vehicle pulled away from the side of the road.

Simpson turned around on his seat and called back to Woods, “How’s Sinclair doing?”

“Great! He’s being shipped back to the States this week, and they’re going to try and ship Jean-Paul and Trung back at the
same time.” Woods adjusted his CAR-15 in his lap so that the charging handle was off his thigh.

“Is he still fucking around with those half-breeds?” Shaw yelled over his shoulder, keeping his eyes on the road.

Woods paused before answering the sergeant. Shaw was an easy man to hate. “
Colonel
Sinclair flew in from the Pentagon to pull some strings for the kids—”

“Sinclair’s father is a colonel?” Simpson interrupted.

“A full bird colonel.” Woods smiled, knowing Shaw wouldn’t like that at all. “He was at the hospital.”

“Why would a colonel want to fuck with some Vietnamese street kids?” Shaw still couldn’t understand Sinclair’s motivation—and
considering what made Shaw tick, he probably never would.

“Reggie’s an Amerasian….” Woods twisted sideways to light a cigarette.

“A
what
!” Shaw shifted gears and had to yell to be heard over the engine noise.

“Man!
I
know what an Amerasian is!” Simpson felt smart, and the marijuana cigarette he had just finished made him feel talkative.
“That’s half Vietnamese and half American.”

“I still don’t know why a
colonel
would want to have two lice-ridden, snot-nosed brats living with him back in the States…. Unless he needs a houseboy to shine
his shoes.” Shaw smiled, having figured out why the colonel would take the kids back to the States with him.

“I doubt that…. Do you know how Vietnamese treat half-breeds, Sergeant?” Woods didn’t give the NCO a chance to answer. “They
can’t attend school, own land, or hold jobs that full-blooded Vietnamese want. They’re considered the unwanted offspring of
the defeated French. There are even cases where Vietnamese mothers have abandoned their Eurasian offspring so that they wouldn’t
be associated with having had sex with a Frenchman.” Woods looked at the back of Shaw’s head and added, “About the only job
a Eurasian girl can get is as a whore.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Shaw looked at the windshield. “Those are some beautiful women!”

Woods agreed that Eurasians were often beautiful people; they seemed to have taken the best features from both races. “Would
you want
your
daughter to be a whore?” Woods couldn’t resist making the comment.

Shaw turned around on his seat and pointed back at Woods. He held the steering wheel in one hand. “You watch your fucking
mouth!”

“I thought so…” Woods took a deep lungful of smoke and smiled at the corrupt sergeant.

“Watch the fucking road!” Simpson grabbed for the wheel as the truck veered off onto the shoulder of the road and a red cloud
of dust billowed up behind them that covered the windshield of the truck following them.

Woods leaned back against the railing and relaxed for the long drive back to An Khe. He was feeling better than he had felt
in months. The talk with Colonel Sinclair had taken a burden off his shoulders that had been destroying him.