Red Flags (4 page)

"No. Nobody. And keep it that way."

A month earlier, an American general had been court-martialed for dealing American arms to God knows who. The shock was still reverberating around Saigon and the Pentagon. If Major Jessup had hung his personal motto on the wall, it would have read
TRUST NO ONE
. Beginning with him.

"The less they know, the better," Jessup said.

Which was perfectly okay with Miser and me. The rank and file didn't exactly love us, and this little chore wasn't going to be quick or easy. Still, law-and-order work for the Army was way more interesting than coaching the South Vietnamese on how to wage war. Miser and I had both done our time as advisers before signing up for the Army's agent training course; he a former Pittsburgh cop, me the brat of a widowed Wisconsin county sheriff with my own cell to sleep in on the nights he pulled the graveyard shift.

Jessup tossed me some captain's bars. "Congratulations. You're a captain—for the duration."

"Yes, sir," I said.

"I want 'em back when you're done."

"What about me, sir?" Miser said.

"You're perfect the way you are, Sergeant."

I said, "Can we talk to the informant who linked the Hong Kong account to this Phu Bon Province?"

"Try holding a séance."

We left. Outside, I said to Miser, "Have you ever heard of the Communists growing dope?"

"Fucking never. The Viet Cong tax the smuggling and retailing and will traffic the shit to finance their war effort, but they don't produce it."

I turned to Miser. "Sending us is odd, don't you think? Viets with police power and fluency in the language would make more sense. Unless our masters don't trust the Vietnamese to get to the bottom of it."

"Now, Mr. Rider, why ever the fuck would you say such a thing?"

U
P IN PLEIKU
, we extricated the company commander with the bull's-eye on his back and saw him safely off to Nha Trang. After which the two of us rostered to fly out on the only regular flight that made a stop in the province capital of Cheo Reo. The six-seat, single-engine de Havilland Otter was an oversize Canadian bush plane, totally reliable, totally slow. The nose housed its one enormous motor and the shaft on which spun the single propeller in a blur in front of the windshield. The landing gear didn't even retract. Crossing Pleiku at two thousand feet, we passed over the city's fifty thousand souls napping through the worst of the midday heat. Below us, across the red laterite prairie, stretched the long runways of the air base, Titty Mountain, the evacuation hospital, Camp Holloway, the MACV compound, and the billboard antennas on Tropo Hill, big as apartment houses.

The plane droned across the cloudless Asian sky on a long circuit of stops, carrying the two of us passengers and a large heap of courier pouches containing classified paper. The one saving grace was the instant relief altitude brought as the air turned dry and cold. It was better than sex.

The pilots, in gray jump suits, lounged at the controls, unfazed. They sported shoulder holsters and yellow-lensed, aviator-style shooting glasses, like they were spoiling for a dogfight over goddamn Darmstadt. This in a courier plane with no armament and one lousy engine. The pair of them sat in the elevated cockpit, with us in the well of the fuselage behind them. It was too dark to read by the light of the dirty porthole window, so I rubbed the pane with my elbow and gazed out at the vast green growth that ran to teal toward the mountains. Behind me, Sergeant Miser snored.

Why had I come back?

On my leave a year before, I'd eloped with the girl I'd loved since high school. Months later, that tour finished, I headed stateside, my Army hitch done. Twelve hours after landing in Tacoma I mustered out, a newlywed, although technically we'd been married half a year. She was in graduate school in New York. I was barely in the door, she said I smelled different and that we were history. I stopped. I was standing on a land mine. She'd withdrawn to a safe distance, entered the future alone. I was still thirteen time zones away, my night her tomorrow.

"How could you do this if you love me?" I said.

She gave me a tender look. "I couldn't."

Not sure what to do, I walked along Broadway, diagonally down the island, carrying my life in a valise like a refugee, one foot following the next along miles of insect-free concrete. People stared at my uniform but no one came near me. Increasingly I felt unlike my contemporaries—a stranger in my own life. I had a month-long going-away party by myself in a series of bars and then re-upped. Volunteered for another go-round in Southeast Asia. I went back on the levy and ran into Staff Sergeant Miser at Fort Dix.

As he often did when inebriated, Miser started crooning a pop song in a rich baritone: "‘Cross the ocean in a silver plane, see the jungle when it's wet with rain ...'" He was coming off leave and nursing a pint. Miser hummed a couple more verses, then abruptly stopped to complain.

"I haven't a fucking prayer of living on fucking Army pay stateside," he said. "Every leave, I bunk in cheap-ass bachelors' quarters on base, shop only at the dippy PX, eat shitty mess-hall grub on the government, drink cheap at the NCO club, even fucking bowl on the freakin' base, and I still come up short at the end of the motherfucking month." He shook his head. "Overseas is the only place for assholes like us. No taxes. Extra pay for hazardous duty. Food allotments ..."

Miser liked intimidating officers with his foul mouth and swagger. The only thing he liked better was boasting about his contacts and overseas investments. He owned shares of massage parlors in Qui Nhon, a truck wash in Long Binh, two laundries in Saigon, a bar in Kontum, and a piece of a saloon and a film-production shop in Bangkok. I didn't want to know what kind of films.

Nam, he argued boozily, was wide open and free in ways only a besieged society could be. Regulations were lax. Hell, everything was available, removable, salable. Nobody sweated the small stuff, he said, and launched into a pitch on how he could get noncoms going on Riot and Recreation to smuggle gemstones back for him. He said it was nuts to risk our butts for the kick alone and the simple thanks of a grateful nation. We were entitled to bennies from all the sweat and risk.

"Back in loosey-goosey Nam," Miser said, "the whole fucking thing is to make it work for you."

 

The Otter whined across the sky. I yawned and said, "Can you find out where the hell this windmill is going next? We're cranking east. Cheo Reo's south."

Miser talked to the crew chief, the two shouting over the engine, then came back to me. "We're going to the freakin' coast," he said. "Qui Nhon. Gotta pick up some priority stud."

The VIP passenger was a full-bull colonel, a beet-red newbie just arrived. He loaded on and we climbed over the azure ocean before turning back inland high above the several hundred thousand citizens of Qui Nhon City toiling in the heat. A hundred supply ships stretched across the horizon, waiting their turns to unload. Some would wait months. I knew how they felt. The Otter wasn't taking us anywhere soon either.

The crew chief beckoned us over. Cheo Reo, he promised, was next. For sure. Half an hour. Miser gave me a cynical glance. I occupied myself lightening my load of new issue. I jettisoned my shelter half, abandoned the tent stakes, tent cord, collapsed air mattress, and carrier, my gas mask and its pouch, the poncho, and six pairs of olive-drab underpants. Cutting the plates out of my flak jacket, I reduced it from nearly seven pounds to three, thought on it, and threw the flak vest away too, dumping everything into a wooden trash box in the back.

Columns of red dust rose behind long convoys of trucks and armor; the pilots spotted a wide dirt road off the major route and followed it south. No plumes. Aside from a lone bus or rickety truck, nothing. Everything bound for Cheo Reo arrived—like us—on a military air transport or helicopter, whether it was cases of Coke, grenades, or help in the event of an attack. Volcanic plains floated by, green jungles, and dry scrub. We followed the road and the lazy coils of a river looping across the flat land toward its junction with the larger Ea Pa and the province capital.

Cheo Reo. Finally. We landed and deplaned. The crew chief threw a bag of mail out after us. A spec-4 idled in a small truck. Farther on, a Vietnamese sentry box stood empty, its barrier pole vertical and unattended. No air-control tower, no other planes, no buildings, not so much as a forklift. Only a lone walk-in cargo container.

"You think that's the f-ing arrivals terminal?" Miser said, jutting his little knob of a chin at the CONEX. "What do you think we did in a former life that Buddha sent us to this shit hole?"

The light was a stiletto after the plane's dark innards. I made my way across the perforated steel planks that were latched together to make the runway. The sixty-five-pound planking was patched and worn, some of it blasted and jagged, the target of heavy bombardment.

"Well," Miser said, "at least somebody thought enough of the place to shell the shit out of it."

"Pilots must hate this strip," I said, grateful we hadn't blown a tire. A new asphalt runway was under construction, and dirt fill was being trucked in. A grader and backhoe belched diesel smoke as they worked.

A jeep sped toward us, churning dust, its windshield lying flat on the hood. The driver, red-haired and hatless, jumped out and greeted us with a genial smile without saluting. He had on threadbare stateside fatigues, no nametag or rank insignia. Freckles and golden-red stubble speckled his cheeks.

"Sir," he said, gesturing for me to get in while he signed for a courier pouch and handed the clipboard back up to the crew chief.

Miser said, "Good day ... Private, is it?"

"Yes, Sergeant. PFC Checkman. I clerk for the CO, Colonel Bennett."

He hefted the mailbag and our duffels, threw them into the jeep, and slid behind the wheel as the Otter taxied away. Miser stepped up into the back, I took the front passenger seat, and we drove off at a leisurely pace.

"Which way should I look for the skyline?" Miser said.

Checkman's forehead furrowed. "I can make a quick loop and show you."

We passed by the Vietnamese guard post and rolled down a straight dirt strip, flat and wide. Across the airfield were the outskirts of the town: a scattering of tin-roofed shacks and two-story stucco buildings.

Miser scanned the horizon.

"Jesus H. Christ," he said. "Who the fucking hell lives out here?"

"Montagnards," Checkman replied. "Thousands of 'em. Jarai especially. Cheo Reo is the Jarai heartland."

"It's strange," Miser said. "I never even heard of Phu Bon Province."

Checkman beeped a goat out of the way. "It didn't exist until recently. It was just Montagnard territory. Saigon decided it wanted a stronger government presence and made Cheo Reo a provincial capital."

We turned left, past the MACV compound, and entered the metropolis.

"Cheo Reo's a Montagnard clan name," Checkman explained as we slowed. "The government forced them to rename it Hau Bon. Changed all the Yard names of villages and rivers to Vietnamese. But everyone still calls it Cheo Reo."

The so-called capital was a shantytown. "The whole place is maybe six thousand Vietnamese," Checkman said, stopping the vehicle. He slipped out from behind the wheel, courier pouch in hand. Kids immediately made a playground of the jeep as we walked away. Each child was immaculate, wearing clean if worn clothes. Unlike urban waifs, not one propositioned us for candy or cigarettes or tried to rent us his sister.

Nothing was paved. A hard-dirt street led to the market square, an open area circled with canvas-roofed stalls, goods spread on the shaded platforms beneath them. One dais held produce; another, stacks of dried fish. An old woman squatted beside a pyramid of rice. A butcher displayed the heads of monkeys and a small black deer the size of a Labrador. Two slaughtered ducks and a chicken hung upside down beside a goat and a couple of bats. A man bicycled past, holding an umbrella against the sun, and called out a melodic greeting to Checkman. Checkman answered in Vietnamese.

Nearby, a few barefoot women in sarongs and black shirts sat on their haunches beside carrier baskets in which they'd brought modest piles of tomatoes, onions, and peppers.

"Yards," Checkman said. "Jarai. Don't often see them in town. The Viets won't let them hang around long."

A small truck lumbered into the market area, a gorgeous dead tiger draped across its hood. A crowd gathered.

"Catch this," Miser said. "Commercial opportunities in Cheo Reo."

"You picturing clients on safari?" I said.

We went to touch the beast's fur and huge teeth. A GI, passing on the other side of the road, shouted to Checkman: "Hey, Private Muff Diver! Careful that slope pussy don't eat you." He ducked away fast when he saw my captain's bars.

Checkman interviewed the hunters and turned back to us. "They're saying it walked into an ambush last night. I don't know. Militias haven't gone out patrolling at night in months, and it's not all shot up. The pelt's near perfect." He ran a hand over the rich coat. "Must be worth a lot."

Miser said, "Its choppers and guts are worth even more."

"Right, right," Checkman said, "local healers. I'll show you the neighborhood pharmacy," and he took us to a stall where a bear's full hide, including the head, lay draped over one wooden barrel. A large preserved iguana was curled up on another. Glass jars on a plank held potent-looking elixirs with bees and less identifiable things floating in them. Checkman pointed out the bat's-blood-and-rice-wine cocktail for tuberculosis beside jars of land leeches beckoning like miniature fingers.

A few stalls offered modest black-market booty, mostly stacks of green c-ration cans and field gear. Nothing like Saigon's extravagant contraband. Along one end of the hard-packed square stood shops filled with cheap wares, a café, a photographer displaying large framed samples of hand-tinted portraits, the town barbershop, and an open-sided billiard hall. Pigpens and slop troughs immediately behind it gave off an acrid stench.