Lost Soldiers

by Lost Soldiers (retail) (epub)

  ‘Brandon, it’s been great to meet you after all these years. Unfortunately, I have an officers’ wives’ reception that I’m hosting this afternoon, so I need to go.’

  And then it was just him and Duncan sitting at the little table, chewing on fresh-baked cookies and drinking tea. The general was gathering himself, Condley could tell as he watched Duncan take in a deep, preparatory breath. Then he stood, motioning toward the nearby sitting area.

  ‘Come on over here. I’ve got something to show you.’ As Condley moved to the black, soft-leather sofa, the general walked back to the front entrance and retrieved a manila envelope from where he had left it on a table near the door. Then Duncan eased into a leather chair just next to him, plopping the manila envelope onto the coffee table in front of them.

  ‘I’ve been following the message traffic on this – what the hell do you call it? It’s not a body, and I don’t want to just say it’s a skeleton, because that sounds like Halloween. The dead guy you found out in Quang Nam Province.’

  ‘Why don’t we just call him the deserter,’ said Condley acidly.

  ‘Right,’ said the general. ‘How about the dead deserter?’

  ‘How about –’ Condley was going to trump the general with the perfect epithet for the dead scumbag he had found in Ninh Phuoc, but for some reason he lost interest in the middle of a thought. Who cared? ‘Never mind. It was a long time ago. And he’s dead.’

  ‘No,’ said Duncan. ‘Let’s mind. Why don’t we just decide to give a shit for a few minutes here?’ The general leaned toward him and took a deep breath, his eyes going wide and hard. ‘I remember this guy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I remember him.’ Now Duncan reached inside the manila envelope and began pulling out several papers.

  ‘So you’re the reason we didn’t have the file when I was at CILHI this morning.’

  ‘I had them bring it to me first,’ said the general. ‘Your scientist buddy has the whole file now, but I wanted to burn some copies.’

  ‘Isn’t this a little below your pay grade, Skipper? Don’t you have a Marine Corps to run?’

  ‘This is personal,’ said Duncan. He measured Condley as he held the papers in his hand. ‘When I saw the first piece of message traffic it bothered me but I couldn’t understand why. I mean, I kept thinking about it, and every time I thought about it I was pissed off. And then I was getting pissed off at myself for being pissed off. I was waking myself up in the middle of the night and then making myself go back to sleep by saying just what you were saying. That it was a long time ago, and besides, he’s dead. But after a few days a little light turned on in my brain. Sometimes that happens, you know. We’ve got so much data stored up there once we reach our age that it takes longer for the computer between our ears to sift through it. I mean, how many gigabytes of garbage does it have to process before it reaches 1969 and then the Que Son Mountains? But finally I started remembering. It was the name. Deville. You don’t forget a name like that, not after what he did. Because if you pronounce it a little differently it comes out as “devil.”’

  ‘I’m not tracking with you,’ said Condley, mystified by the general’s tirade. ‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘He personally killed two of our Marines. I saw him.’

  The general took an eight-by-ten photograph from the papers and dropped it onto the coffee table. The picture was a standard boot-camp photo from Deville’s service record book that had been enlarged and computer-enhanced. A very young Theodore Deville stared stoically back at them. His eyes were fearless, dark and brooding, daring the camera to hit him with its best shot. This was not someone who had come to the Army from the nurturing bosom of Chevy Chase or Beverly Hills.

  ‘June 24,1969,’ continued Duncan. ‘I remember because it was my mother’s birthday.’

  ‘Salt and Pepper,’ said Condley quietly, mesmerized by the memory and by the photo itself.

  ‘In this case,’ said the general, ‘why don’t we just stick with Salt.’

  Condley sat back in the sofa, stunned into silence. It was washing over him, just as he knew it had chilled General Duncan in the middle of whichever long night the realisation had come to him as well. The betrayal he hadn’t wanted to believe, much less remember. The nightmare that could be avoided only by constant motion or by going to sleep. The place in his mind where even now he didn’t want to go.

  The hot, canopied jungle and the parched eyes of his forty-man platoon as it climbed three thousand feet up the steep, rock-strewn slopes, machete-hacking their way through the canopy with sixty pounds of gear on their backs, trying to link up with another Marine company that had been surrounded for three days in the caves and brittle ridges of the mountain’s crest. The hand grenades suddenly bouncing down the slopes toward them, a cacophony of terror and blood as dozens of them clicked and careened from rock to rock, exploding at their feet and in the air. Cringing in the cleavage of the rocks to avoid the shrapnel, trying to find a target up the slope to shoot back at. Then seeing two men standing behind a boulder on the crest, no more than fifty feet above them, one black, the other white, both wearing jungle utilities and carrying American M-14 rifles. Condley thinking that he might have read the map wrong, so that his platoon had walked into an outpost from the company they were trying to save. A Marine near Condley thinking the same thing, standing and waving at the two, yelling at them to cease fire, only to be shot immediately by both of them. Both of them. From fifty feet away. No mistake. The Marine crumpling over, dead. And then the whole ridgeline above them opening up with steady fire from a North Vietnamese Army ambush.

  A very close, very effective, very bloody ambush.

  And later on writing and then trashing the letter that he knew he could never bring himself to mail. Dear Mrs. Smith. Your son was shot by a white man and a black man who were leading a North Vietnamese unit in an ambush along the crease of two Marine Corps rifle companies in the Que Son Mountains. I am deeply sorry. I don’t know who they were. And I cannot think of a more ironic ending to a more ironic war.

  Salt and Pepper. It had not been the first reported incident. They all had heard of these two men before. Some said they were an eastern European and a Cuban, operating as advisers to their North Vietnamese allies. Others said they were American turncoats. Some said there were several such teams. But one thing had become reasonably certain after the ambush of June 24, 1969. This one, this Salt, was American.

  ‘You’re sure this is the guy?’ asked Condley softly.

  ‘I probably didn’t tell you this before,’ said General Duncan. ‘There was so much going on, I mean, who has the time to focus on last week or even yesterday when you’re getting your ass shot off in combat? But when we rotated out of the mountains back to the regimental rear, the Office of Naval Intelligence sent an investigator out to An Hoa to interview me. I brought in a machine gunner from second platoon who had shot the white guy in the leg from a ridgeline on your right, maybe thirty feet away. We set up a little interview room in the company office. The ONI guy had a book of missing American servicemen. It was all very official. The ONI guy swore the gunner in and interviewed him, and then he walked him through the picture book. When he flipped over the page to where Deville’s picture was, the gunner damn near shit in his mess gear. “Him!” he said. “Are you positive,” says the ONI guy. “This is a very serious charge.” And my guy says, “Positive. I’ll never forget the motherfucker’s face as long as I live.”

  ‘We wrote up a statement.’ General Duncan dropped another paper onto the table. It was a photocopy of a faded hand-typed statement. ‘So when I saw the name in the message traffic the other day, I finally knew for sure that the gunner had been right. I had them pull this out of the ONI archives too, just in case somebody would think I was losing the bubble and fantasizing. It’s the report from An Hoa.’

  Condley quickly read the paper, in which one Corporal Dustin Richards on 1 July, 1969, had identified the whi
te turncoat in the incident of 24 June, 1969, as Specialist Theodore Deville, absent without leave 5 September, 1967, declared a deserter 5 December, 1967, whereabouts unknown.

  ‘So where’s Pepper?’ asked Condley, working to regain his offhand cynicism. ‘I remember him.’

  ‘Let’s just focus on Salt here for a minute,’ said Duncan. ‘How are we going to report finding this guy to the media? We can’t say he was an MIA, because he’s never been on any list of those reported missing. I suppose we could just say he’s a deserter and let it go at that, but then are we doing our duty? On the other hand, if we make the allegation that he was a turncoat, can we really back it up? If we try and then fall on our asses, how stupid will we look? We’ll be accused by the media of being vindictive, opening up an old war wound without justification. And what about his family? And even more important, if we start refighting the war, dwelling on the past, what’s going to happen with the co-operation of the Vietnamese government on future digs?’

  ‘What about the two dead Marines?’

  ‘Well, what about them?’ replied the general. ‘I’ve thought about that. Is it going to do their memories any good by announcing all these years later that they were killed by American deserters? At least now their families can have a clean picture of what it was like for them to die. Fighting the enemy is heroic. Getting shot by a turncoat is sickening. And think of the negative way so many Americans look at the guys who fought in Viet Nam anyway. Great story, huh? Americans shooting other Americans in Viet Nam, as if it wasn’t enough that Americans were rubbing their own soldiers’ faces in shit when they got home.’

  Finally Duncan threw his hands up in the air, leaning back against his chair. ‘Look, I’m not trying to put this all back in a box. If I were, I wouldn’t have asked for the file in the first place. I want to do the right thing. But I just don’t know what the right thing is. We need to think this through. That’s why I had them run you down and bring you here to my house.’

  ‘So what do you want me to do, Skipper?’

  ‘Take that asshole back to Ninh Phuoc and bury him again.’ The general slowly smiled. ‘Just kidding.’

  Duncan stood and began pacing, his hands clasped behind his back and his face lowered in thought. ‘You’re a shit magnet, you know that, Condley? It was the same in combat. Some other platoon commanders could take your same patrol route and come back without a shot being fired. But you, no. You’ve got to go find the assholes, even if it means digging them out of bunkers, rooting them out from whatever rice paddy dike they’ve decided to hide behind, shaking them out of the fucking trees. You find shit, and shit finds you.’

  Condley grinned, deciding to take Duncan’s blustering as a compliment. ‘Actually, sir, I’ve always sort of looked upon myself as the ultimate agent of truth. Kind of like Don Quixote. I was blessed with a natural curiosity. I like to think that I find shit because it’s supposed to be found. If you want to find it, send me in. If you don’t want to find it, send somebody else.’

  ‘Life’s that fucking simple, huh?’ said General Duncan, still pacing. ‘That’s easy for you to say, because you don’t have to make the hard decisions.’

  ‘What’s so hard about this?’

  ‘I doubt you even see the problem.’

  ‘Actually, I don’t see the problem,’ said Condley. ‘We shot the fucker in 1969 but he got away. Somebody else shot him in 1971 and hit the bull’s-eye. A nice, happy ending. All the rest is somebody’s mill drill, except now you’re a fucking general and you’ve had your lobotomy, so you’re thinking like a politician.’

  Duncan stopped pacing and turned on him. His face was growing red with a gathering fury, as if he were going to attack Condley right where he sat. Despite himself, Condley squirmed on the couch. He respected Wayne Duncan more than anyone on earth, and he knew that at some level the feeling was mutual. Fighting Duncan would be interesting, he thought, but also pretty depressing.

  And then the general started to laugh. He walked to the couch and slapped Condley on the shoulder, an act of forgiveness. ‘I needed to hear somebody tell me that,’ he said. ‘That’s why I had them go get you. You’re right. The truth is its own liberation. We tell it straight. Let the bow-ties in the Pentagon sort it out.’

  Condley wasn’t laughing, though. He was thinking about what Duncan had just said about him, because it also was the truth. He’d been a shit magnet for thirty years. He had a nose for it, and it wasn’t ever going to stop.

  ‘So what about Pepper, Skipper?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Do you still give a damn or not?’

  General Duncan stood above him, looking down and shaking his head with a mix of admiration and dread. ‘What’s on your mind, Condley?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘All right,’ said the general. ‘All right, all right. Look, I’m not your boss on this. And running down turncoats isn’t in your job description anyway.’

  ‘It would give me great pleasure to find him, though.’ General Duncan shook his head and smiled. Part of his smile was admiration, and part of it was whimsical, even nostalgic. ‘I think I just created a monster.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Condley. ‘You did that in 1969.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘We have a problem,’ growled a visibly irritated Hanson Muir as Condley walked into his office at the CILHI headquarters.

  Muir’s office reminded Condley of an ill-kept attic in a very old house. The rotund professor sat like a lost child behind a huge oak desk that was covered with a mass of unorganised papers. In fact, his entire office was littered with papers. Professional periodicals were piled like plates in several corners of the room, having been collected over the years but never shelved. Newspaper editions that had run favorite articles were stacked near one chair. The chair itself was littered with copies of other articles. The professor’s shelves were cluttered as well, a disorganized array of fossils, rocks, old pieces of wood, Asian cultural souvenirs, and dozens of pictures, mostly of his family and of himself on various digs.

  And besides that, he was wearing a trippy, multicoloured luau shirt. ‘What tourist from Indiana did you have to mug so you could steal that shirt, Professor?’ asked Condley, taking a seat on top of the copied pages.

  ‘My wife bought it for me. It was an anniversary present.’

  ‘Does she hate you that much?’

  ‘She bought me two. And as a matter of fact she is from Indiana and you know it. So what’s your point?’

  ‘What did you give her, a free ticket to a Don Ho concert?’

  ‘You know, Brandon, I’ve decided that you’re some kind of a low-end elitist. I happen to like Don Ho. And at least I have a wife.’

  Condley threw both of his hands up into the air in mock surrender. ‘Whooee. Low-end elitist, I like that. And no wife to buy me luau shirts. Boy, you’ve got me there.’

  ‘I said we’ve got a problem, Brandon.’

  ‘I know,’ said Condley. ‘I just spent the afternoon with General Duncan. He had your files.’

  ‘I know he had the files. But I have them now. And you don’t know the half of it.’ Muir was fingering an old, thick folder that Condley immediately recognised as someone’s military file.

  ‘I know our boy Deville was more than a deserter,’ said Condley. ‘That he might have been a turncoat.’

  ‘Definitely a turncoat, in my opinion.’ Muir was flipping through the pages of the military folder, looking for a marked page. ‘And a murderer.’ Muir glanced over at Condley. ‘Do you remember when I told you that he was wanted for killing a fellow soldier in Long Binh? The man who was going to testify against him in his court-martial?’ Muir found the page. ‘Well, guess what. After he killed the man he cut off his hand.’

  ‘Pretty sick.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Muir. ‘Pretty sick.’

  ‘And then somebody cut off Deville’s hand,’ said Condley. ‘Were they wearing black raincoats back then? Was this an initiati
on into some secret Gothic society?’

  ‘Actually,’ said Muir, ‘somebody didn’t cut off Deville’s hand.’

  ‘You said he didn’t have a hand.’

  ‘I said the remains we recovered didn’t have a hand.’

  Muir held Condley’s gaze for several seconds as the reality of what he had just said sank in. Finally Condley whistled softly, shaking his head. ‘I guess you’re right. I don’t know shit.’

  ‘You know some information about Specialist Deville,’ corrected the burly professor. ‘But you don’t know very much at all about the remains we recovered in Ninh Phuoc.’

  ‘Are you positive?’

  Muir gave Condley a look of mild exasperation. ‘Brandon, I am a scientist. Certain areas of anthropology are exact. Which is to say that yes, to the extent that medical records are accurate, I am positive. The remains that we have in the lab are not those of Theodore Deville.’

  Muir rose from his swivel chair and picked up the military file from his desk. ‘Let me show you what I mean.’

  In minutes the two were standing in the lab, next to the gurney that held the remains of the body they had brought back from Ninh Phuoc. Muir was coolly clinical now, in his element as he compared the information in Specialist Deville’s medical files with the specimen on the gurney.

  ‘First and foremost, we have the teeth. In a properly matched set of remains, they are as conclusive as fingerprints on a dead body. We are lucky in this case to have a full set of the…’ Muir hesitated for a moment. ‘What are we going to call this man now? We don’t have a name or a circumstance.’

  ‘Try “victim,” Professor.’

  ‘Definitely the victim,’ said Muir. ‘The severed hand indicates that he was very likely murdered. So. We have a full set of the victim’s teeth. And we also have Specialist Deville’s dental file.’

  Muir took out a small metal pointer from his shirt pocket, expanding it like a car antenna, then opened the dental file to where it displayed a chart of Deville’s teeth. As he spoke, he used the pointer to compare the file with the victim’s skull. ‘Deville had fillings on eight teeth. Here, here, here, and all along here. The victim had only three fillings. Look here. And on those teeth, there are no markings in Deville’s dental file. See? End of story. Case closed. The only reason to pursue it further is in the event, by some incredible accident, we have the wrong dental file. Probability, far less than one percent. But just to be sure, I looked at the medical side.’