Red Flags (41 page)

Big John Ruchevsky announced that he was manifested on an Air America flight out in a week's time. I asked him to get me and Miser on the bird too. Neither John nor I was hungry that night so we retired to the bar. When we were good and drunk, and toasting the colonel and Little John and Tri, he confessed his rage at Chinh. The only satisfaction he'd been allowed was a quiet message to the National Police, one service to another.

"Remember the white mice who came to town looking to arrest Little John?"

"Sure. The guy with the gold Parker pen top and his little pal with the gold tooth."

"They never made it back to Saigon."

The day before John Ruchevsky and I were to leave, the two of us and Captain Cox met at the sun hut by the river one last time. We drew cards. I'm not sure if I won or lost, but I had the high card and set about my task. I'd already prepared ... in case. Back at the compound, I gathered up my stuff, and Miser and I donned ponchos and slipped out during the afternoon's downpour. He dropped me outside town and drove away.

Draped and hooded, I made my way to a bare knoll, armed with a snub CAR-15 and carrying, in pieces, all twelve blessed pounds of the heavy rifle I had first fired in the Army. It was considered obsolete, inferior to the M-16 invented for us to employ in the jungle. Ridiculously touchy and easily jammed, the 16 fired a small-caliber bullet at an enormous velocity that carried it on a flat trajectory, straight, with no arc. The barrel was designed to give it a particular rotation that caused the round to tumble when it struck its target. Penetrating flesh, it somersaulted, building up tremendous pressure. When it exited it took a great deal of the person with it, leaving a devastating wound. The intent wasn't so much to kill as to injure, horribly, perhaps to circumvent international prohibitions against dumdum bullets, perhaps to make its American inventor a millionaire with his own private plane. It had managed both.

Unlike the enemy's ammo, the M-16's bullet was light and easily deflected by so much as a stalk of tall grass in the jungle terrain. The round also lost velocity after two hundred yards. I needed it to carry farther, and I wasn't looking to wing or maim.

So I had procured a rusted American M-14 no one would miss. I took it apart and cleaned and oiled and tested it. The M-14 fired a hefty .30-caliber cartridge, roughly the same as an AK and the Belgian FAL .50 that Ruchevsky had offered me. But the old American rifle delivered the round far more accurately than the Kalashnikov, which got iffy after fifty yards, and the sights were better than the Belgian field piece—simple and easily zeroed in. The M-14 had an old-fashioned wooden stock and kicked like a mule, but it could put a bullet through an engine block.

The rain stopped. I spent the late afternoon concealed at the base of the knoll, assembling the weapon, wiping and oiling the new ammunition. Though I'd only get one shot and wouldn't need a magazine, I loaded one anyway to make the rifle feel more familiar. I could smell the sheen on the cartridges and firing mechanism when I raised the stock to my cheek, testing.

I had once mounted the guard at a serious military prison. The Sergeant of the Guard threatened that if a prisoner escaped, we would serve out the prisoner's time until he was recaptured. We were to shoot anyone who attempted flight. No warning shots. If we wounded or killed the man, our court-martial and a finding of guilty were automatic. As was the penalty: eleven cents. The cost of the bullet. Legally, no further charges could be filed.

I felt serene, my hands steady. The waiting didn't make me impatient or anxious. It reminded me of the happy hours I'd spent sitting with my dad in that rickety blind in the back pasture, watching him reassemble a target rifle a piece at a time. I thought about my distant life in the States, from which I now felt as divorced as I did from my wife, and about the profession of arms that also seemed to be slipping away. I wondered why on my last leave I'd been afraid to cross bridges, and what I would do with myself if I ever made it home.

I took a bit of a chance not using a scope, but I didn't really want to see his face. My one regret was that he'd never hear the shot, never know it was coming.

It rained again. Afterward the sky grew opaque with indeterminate cloud cover the color of rusting iron: a light yellowish orange tinged with red. The odd light exaggerated everything. Colonel Chinh normally took his evening coffee on his private porch at the back of the wooden French-era building he occupied with his officers. He came out at his habitual time, dressed in his usual khaki, and hung up his caged songbird. Chinh stood enjoying a demitasse after his dinner, taking in the dramatic sky and the bird's song. No wind, no impediments of terrain, three hundred meters distant. His posture unmistakable.

It was simple. I'd dismantle the rifle, scatter the pieces in the swollen river, and walk away. No South Vietnamese was going to come out after me in the dusk. John would pick me up on the road and I'd spend our last night in Cheo Reo at his place.

The sights fit him exactly, head to toe. I eased the tip of the sighting post down to the middle of the body mass and slowly exhaled as if blowing away dandelion seeds. Then brought the front blade up to align with his head.

T
HE WINTRY SKY
grew lighter. Celeste Bennett sat without speaking, her forehead in her hands. She took a deep breath and sat up straight.

"Were you ever suspected?" she said.

"Officially? No. Though my boss in Saigon, Major Jessup, had some choice remarks for me off the record, and the brass were clearly uneasy with the whole situation. I ran into Colonel Blackwell at a supper club in Saigon some months later and he flat-out asked if I'd done it."

"What did you tell him?"

"I said entertaining the possible complicity of friendlies in the death of a high-ranking Vietnamese officer and civil official could only undermine our efforts in South Viet Nam, sow discord among allies, and embarrass our governments."

"What did Blackwell say to that?"

"Nothing. Just stood me drinks. After the second round he said your dad deserved better. I said as how I agreed."

Celeste pushed back her hair. "What happened to them all? Miser? Checkman? The others?"

"Checkman got sent to the Army's language-immersion course at Monterey and went back to Viet Nam as an interpreter. Had two kids with a Vietnamese woman and made the mistake of marrying her five years into their relationship."

"Mistake?"

"Sure. Because the instant he did, the Army notified him that she and the kids were henceforth American dependents and couldn't remain in the country. Never mind that they were Vietnamese. The Checkmans left with their kids."

"Miser?"

"Miser, last I heard, was running a bar in Bangkok and sponsoring an annual film festival."

"And your friend Ruchevsky?"

"Big John was transferred elsewhere in country and distinguished himself. Sometime later he finally got to Eastern Europe, which is what he'd trained for. Once a year I'd get a postcard, never from the same place twice. His work remained covert and unsung but he seemed happy enough doing it. He lives in Boston now, spends part of each year in the old country, visiting his Ukrainian cousins. Took his father's ashes back a few years ago."

"And Captain Cox?"

"Cox I ran into in Las Vegas. He was there for a Special Forces reunion. We caught up while his former colleagues rappelled down the side of the hotel, scaring the hell out of unsuspecting guests, then went to one of those swank shooting galleries just off the Strip and fired Soviet assault weapons all night. We were still talking when they got back."

"Did he stay in the Army?"

"Cox went home after his Mai Linh tour and was assigned to Special Forces at Fort Bragg as an instructor. After Martin Luther King was killed, they were called out for riot-control duty in Baltimore. An Army colonel ordered them to rip off their shoulder patches and remove their berets, like they were something shameful. The Pentagon didn't want it known that elite troops were being deployed against American citizens. Occupying a U.S. city upset Cox enough. Hiding his beret and Special Forces insignia was the last straw. He resigned his commission. Green Beret alumni help sponsor a community in North Carolina for the few Montagnards who made it out, and he did that for a while. Occasionally they corral some congressman or senator and repatriate a few more from refugee camps in Laos, where Yards sometimes show up."

I said, "Do you remember Sergeant Sprague, the Special Forces medic at Mai Linh who couldn't leave the A camp to deliver the breech birth?"

"Vaguely."

"He left the Army but went back to Viet Nam with USAID, back to Cheo Reo. South Viet Nam started to unravel in March of seventy-five. The NVA went after the Highlands again, built a secret road to Ban Me Thuot—as they'd done at Dien Bien Phu—and seized the town. The South Vietnamese Army fled Pleiku in hundreds of trucks but couldn't continue south on Fourteen because it was blocked at Ban Me Thuot. So they all turned off onto Road Seven. It ran like Broadway, cutting diagonally through the province, through Cheo Reo. The town just exploded as the huge lawless mob hit. The retreat was a rout, civilians and soldiers mixed together, shelled by armor and gunned down by NVA. Sprague sent the Montagnards on a march to the coast and got himself to Saigon, where he said he extracted a promise from the U.S. embassy to send a ship to pick up the tribespeople."

"So a lot of them got out."

I shook my head. "They waited and waited. No boat ever came."

"Not our finest hour."

"No."

"What happened to the Montagnards who were left behind?"

"Nothing good. The North Vietnamese had guaranteed them autonomy after the war."

"But they never got it."

"No. Hanoi reneged completely. Vietnamese settlers flooded the Highlands. They're converting the plateaus to rice paddies and fields, cutting down jungle and pushing the Yards aside. The leadership negotiated a ruinous deal with China to let them mine for ore in the Highlands."

"Not plutonium, I hope."

"Aluminum. Billions of dollars' worth. Open pit. It will make a few comrades very rich, destroy a lot of lives. The Highlanders are protesting. The Communist government keeps the Yard villages under surveillance, quashes anyone who resists."

A ray of morning light cut the room and haloed her hair.

"The Montagnards fought the Communists for another dozen years after Saigon fell. I always pictured them carrying on with Grady's stash and all the equipment they appropriated when ARVN collapsed."

"And you?" she said.

"Me? I stayed in for a while. But things went steadily downhill. The war got stupider. Morale plunged. The enlisted men just quit obeying orders, stopped believing. A lot of fed-up career soldiers left the military to avoid getting sent back. Soon it was just hard-core lifers and teenagers going over, officers looking to get their promotion tickets punched and pick up some gongs. Our government got desperate for troops."

I looked past her at the black silhouette of the mountains.

"When the secretary of defense ran out of kids to conscript, the Pentagon developed a brilliant hard sell for getting GIs to extend their service commitments. They'd helicopter reenlistment teams to especially bad battlefields right after the action ended, with the ground still smoking, a moment when a lot of guys would've sold their souls to get away from the body bags and the blood—do just anything not to be there. Any soldier who signed on for another three-year hitch was promised specialized training that would put him in the rear. They'd escort the guy straight to their chopper without so much as a goodbye to his friends. They were evil scenes to witness. Men slinking away, humiliated, shaking. I stuck around for a while but my heart wasn't in it. I came home and saw it was a merciless war for some of us and another evening-news story for the rest. They didn't even waste rhetoric on us, much less look to our wounds."

"You left the Army."

"I was in Los Angeles on a furlough and went for a walk on Rodeo. Stopped at a store window to look at a female mannequin. It had on a sun helmet with a small red star on the brim, and an olive-colored NVA uniform—shirt buttoned to the throat—belted with a bandoleer of linked seven-point-six-two rounds, polished like gold. I quit the next day."

"Listen," she said. "I want to thank you for telling me."

"He was a fine man, Celeste. I hope I haven't tarnished his memory for you."

"Just the opposite. For the first time I feel like I know him."

"I'm wondering if you feel you need to share all this with your mother."

"She died eight years ago."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Yeah. Me too. She was difficult, but it's a lot bigger, lonelier world without her."

"Breakfast?"

The picture window looked out over the road up from the valley. The winter sky was backlighting the mountains in the distance. The peaks were hazy and you couldn't see terribly far. But even half hidden, they were beautiful.

"It's morning," she said, squinting at the window.

"Yeah."

"Let me do something." She rose, arms wrapped around herself for warmth.

"Make some more coffee," I said, "and I'll handle the rest. How do you like your eggs?"

I was efficient in the kitchen after all these years of involuntary bachelorhood and had rye toast, eggs, and bacon laid out on the dining table in no time. The cooking warmed the room.

"Tuck in," I urged. She didn't really need the encouragement. As we ate, a red band rimmed the highest ridges, and soon the first rays projected long shadows at us from out of the pine woods below the house.

Celeste said, "I'm a little surprised she gave up her clinic and left."

"Dr. Roberta? Yeah. She got the team's new medic to take over the clinic and she worked to raise money for it, but she never went back. Things caught up to her—other responsibilities. She resumed her career, had a child."

"She found someone. I'm glad."

"Not exactly. I don't think she ever got over your dad. She never married."