Second Watch (32 page)
Authors: JA Jance
Over the course of the next several months, Bonnie was kind enough to share with me the details of her life back then and of her life now. She allowed me access to some of the letters she received after Doug’s death. The sympathy notes came from fellow officers, some of whom had been classmates of Doug’s at West Point, as well as from guys with whom he served in Vietnam. In the process, I began to gain some insight into the young man Doug Davis became after I lost sight of him.
As I first learned in Seattle Center, in the army, his given name, Leonard, held sway. The men he served with knew him not as Doug but as Lennie D. They told stories of his days in the 35th Infantry; about how he spent his spare time playing poker, writing letters, and reading. Several of them mentioned that one of his favorite books, one he read over and over from beginning to end, was William Shirer’s
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Their notes revealed instances of his innate kindness and of his natural ability to lead his men. He was known for taking raw recruits and molding them into capable soldiers in a platoon that was considered one of the best. He was a smart and dedicated leader who was able to spout off plenty of colorful language when a dressing-down was required. Soldiers who found themselves taking heat from Lennie D. for some infraction or other never made the same mistake twice.
Through that correspondence, I learned about how Doug and three other officers from C Company, while sitting around a card table in their quarters and playing poker one day, heard a news report about how the Vietcong were supposedly a very superstitious lot, especially when it came to seeing the playing card the ace of spades.
The four second lieutenants embarked on a psychological warfare program in which they made a practice of leaving an ace of spades calling card with the body of every dead VC soldier. The problem with that, of course, was that each deck of cards contained only one ace of spades, and when it came to playing poker, fifty-one-card decks didn’t really measure up. Eventually one of the four wrote to the card manufacturing company asking for help. The letter was forwarded to a company executive who had lost a son in World War II. The man was only too happy to oblige.
Within days, C Company had an ever-ready supply of decks of cards containing nothing
but
aces of spades. At first those special decks were shipped postage paid, only to C Company. As word spread, however, so did the program, as the card company continued to ship decks of aces of spades to other soldiers serving anywhere in the war zone. Remnants of that ace of spades tradition continue in the U.S. military to this day, including the Ace of Spades squadron based at Fairchild Air Force Base.
Doing research is the easy part of creating a book. Writing it means work.
Eventually, with all the Doug Davis material pulled into a master file, it was time for me to start the actual writing. In
Second Watch
we first meet Beau and his wife, Mel, as they head for Swedish Orthopedic Institute in Seattle, where Beau is scheduled to have dual knee-replacement surgery. While in the hospital and under the influence of powerful narcotics, he encounters a whole series of dreams that offer glimpses of his past. Through the dreams, Beau encounters and reviews former cases.
One of those, the first case he handled after his promotion to the homicide squad at Seattle PD, deals with the still-unsolved murder of a young girl, a University of Washington coed who was murdered in 1973. While Beau is under the influence of postsurgical medications, Monica Wellington, the long-dead victim, wanders through a series of vivid dreams intent on giving him a piece of her mind. Monica may be dead, but she’s disappointed with the fact that J. P. Beaumont failed to keep the promise he made to her mother long ago to bring the killer to justice. Jarred by his dream-prompted recollections and still laid up in the hospital, Beau determines to revisit Monica’s case in hopes that new forensic technology may provide new answers.
By the end of August, the writing process for me was well under way. Eighty or so pages into the manuscript, in another drug-fueled dream sequence, a guy in Vietnam War vintage fatigues walks into Beau’s hospital room, pulls out a deck of cards, and lays four aces of spades out on the bedside table.
The dreamscape Lennie D. is Doug Davis as Beau remembers him from their initial encounters in the latter part of July of 1966 when Beau first arrived in Vietnam and only days before the August 2 firefight that took Doug’s life and earned him a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. I could remember Doug’s engaging grin and his slouching stance from Mr. Guerra’s classroom, but the other details that I wrote into the scene were drawn from my correspondence with Bonnie and with Lennie D.’s friends and fellow officers. I knew from Bonnie that he had chipped a front tooth in an automobile accident in Texas three weeks before his deployment, and that he had planned on having the tooth fixed once he was back home in the States.
The hospital scene finds Beau and Doug chatting together as though only days rather than nearly half a century had passed between meetings. As I wrote the dialogue, I found myself shedding real tears for the Doug Davis I had known and lost so very long ago. When the apparition Doug charges Beau with finding the unnamed woman to whom Doug was engaged at the time of his death, someone Beau knew nothing about, it struck me as an unlikely mission to be assigned to an ailing homicide cop so many years after the fact.
One of the things that puzzled me as the story continued was Beau’s reticence to discuss the situation with anyone else, including his wife, Mel; his boss, Ross Connors; his son, Scott; or his best friend, Ron Peters. I couldn’t understand why he was so closed-mouthed about it.
Sometimes, when I don’t understand something that’s going on with one of my characters, the only way for me to find answers is to keep writing, and that’s what I did. During Beau’s second encounter with his commanding officer in Vietnam, Lennie D. lends Beau a book to read, a sixteen-hundred-page copy of
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Not only does he lend Beau the book, he also urges him to read it, with a grinning warning that there will be a pop quiz once he finishes.
Days later, during the lethal firefight in which Lennie D. is killed, J. P. Beaumont’s life is spared because the pages of that book, carried inside his shirt, were between him and the three pieces of shrapnel that would otherwise have taken his life. Beau credits the fact that he is still alive to Lennie D.’s kindness in lending him that book.
So why wasn’t he talking about it? I still didn’t understand.
By then it was early September and time for Bill and me to make our annual pilgrimage down to Ashland, Oregon, to see the plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. On the way back, I had agreed to do a book-signing event at the library in Lincoln City.
After the presentation, when most of the signing crowd had disappeared, a young Marine made his way over to my table and sat down in front of me. He told me his name was Rhys and explained that he had just come back from a three-mile run on the sandy beach as part of his rehab while he recovered from dual knee-replacement surgery. Having just written about Beau’s dual knee replacement, I saw this as quite a coincidence, but when I looked at Rhys, he struck me as being far too young to need two new knees. That was before he told me about them.
I’m not sure if the incident occurred in Afghanistan or Iraq, but when Rhys was caught in a firefight, a copy of my book
Devil’s Claw,
the first book of mine he ever read, happened to be between his knees and the bullets. The pages of the book absorbed enough of the impact that doctors were able to replace his knees rather than having to amputate both legs.
The story was so much like the scenario with Beau in my fictional work that it was jaw-dropping! I have yet to see the actual bullet-ridden book, but Rhys tells me he still has it and that when he locates it, he intends to show it to me.
Fueled by that story, I came home from Lincoln City determined to finish the book. As I continued writing and as Beau embarked on his mission for Lennie D., that of finding Doug’s missing fiancée, what was going on became increasingly clear to me. Beau was walking around carrying a burden of guilt due to the fact that after he came home from the war, he had made no effort to reach out to Bonnie—to find her and comfort her in her loss.
Obviously that’s not the whole story of
Second Watch,
but it’s an integral part of it. As first Doug and then Bonnie came to life on the pages of the manuscript, I realized that I was living their love story with them, not as part of it, but as a caring observer, as someone who understood what they had shared and what they had lost. It was inspiring to see that all these years later, Bonnie is as true to her Douglas—she’s the only one who calls him that—as she was on the day they met in the fall of 1965.
It’s a heartbreaking story. It’s a loving story. It’s a story I’m honored to tell.
I wanted the world to know about Doug, the guy his army pals called Lennie D. I wanted people to know that he was one of the many unsung heroes of that terrible war, a guy who earned his Silver Star and his Purple Heart trying to save others. He was only one of the 58,000 who died. After Doug was gone, his younger brother, Blaine, who was my age, signed up and served in Vietnam as well. Blaine came home from the war as one of the walking wounded. The price their mother, Bena Cook, paid for her two brave sons is incalculable. The tragedy, of course, is that there are so many other families out there who paid similar prices with their own terrible losses, ones that often went ignored and have been swept under our country’s carpet of forgetfulness.
In the process of honoring Doug and Bonnie, I ended up honoring the other six boys from Bisbee as well. All seven of their names are on a bronze plaque affixed to a slab of granite in front of Bisbee High School. They’re the ones from our small town who went away to war and didn’t make it home alive.
Bonnie and I worked together to get every snippet of Lennie D.’s subplot story straight. Last week we finished the manuscript, and I sent it to my editor in New York. This past weekend, one of the guys who was deployed to Vietnam with Doug, but who served in a different unit, sent an e-mail to Bonnie having heard of our efforts through another vet. He shared his memories of Doug and his sense of guilt for not reaching out to the family or to Bonnie in all these years.
This colleague’s way of dealing with the tragedy of Doug’s loss is almost a mirror image of J. P. Beaumont’s. I was struck by the validation of Beau’s feelings and actions, feelings and actions that puzzled me when I was writing them weeks earlier. Along with his e-mail, he sent a photo of Doug, one taken on July 31, 1966, only two days before he died. That photo is the one you see at the top of this story. The guy in the photo was the one I knew, all right, the antsy student standing in the center row of the Latin 2 class waiting for the bell to ring. I knew about the chipped tooth, but it was only in the photo that I saw it for the first time.
Through our efforts, we learned that Doug’s West Point sword, once thought lost, was bequeathed by Doug’s brother to the son of one of Doug’s good friends, because that son is Doug’s namesake.
I hope
Second Watch
does justice to Doug’s memory and honors Bonnie for her enduring love as well as for her terrible loss. My readers are the ones who will make that final determination, and I’m sure they’ll let me know. I hope that my personal gratitude for all those men and women who served, the ones who came back as well as the ones who didn’t, shines through this story. I hope it encourages some of them to talk about their own wartime experiences and bring out their own medals. They were heroes. We should have a chance to say thank you. And if they neglected to reach out to someone in the past, it is not too late. That goes for the guys from the Vietnam War, and for the ones from more recent wars as well, Rhys Emery included.
It is my fondest hope that sometime in the next few months, some veteran reading this book, somebody around Beau’s age, maybe, or perhaps someone much younger, will realize that he, too, failed to reach out in a timely fashion to grieving loved ones who lost someone. I hope Beau’s story will resonate with him enough that he will pick up his courage and find his way to their doorsteps or to their telephones or to their e-mail accounts and let them know that he is sorry for their loss. Even though it may seem like a long time ago to the rest of the world, I know that those fathers and mothers, sweethearts and wives and children are still grieving. They are still mourning their losses, and it helps to know that they are not alone and not forgotten.
Because it turns out, it’s never too late to say you’re sorry.
Take another look at the photo. That grinning young man you see there is the guy from Bisbee, the one from my Latin 2 Class—Doug Davis, aka Lennie D., aka Douglas. He was and is all of those people. This is the photo that was taken in the Pleiku Highlands more than forty years ago. It came to Bonnie from out of the blue all this time later, just this past weekend, as a direct result of our collaboration on this book. I can tell you for certain that she regards being given that photo as a real blessing.
And so do I.
J. A. J
ANCE
is the New York Times bestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, the Ali Reynolds series, and four interrelated thrillers about the Walker family. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle and Tucson.
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Joanna Brady Mysteries
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Left for Dead
Deadly Stakes