Legacy of War

by Ed Marohn

  “Why didn’t you arrest him for murder?” I asked.

  Ignoring the question, Woodruff responded, his tone reserved. “My agent boarded the shuttle bus after him and followed him off the bus at the terminal. He confirmed that Loan boarded the flight to Washington Dulles Airport with a connection to LA and the final destination to Phnom Penh.”

  “Hell, why didn’t your guy detain him?” I said, exasperated, mad.

  “We can’t legally detain a US citizen, and we are assuming he did the shooting. We have no proof. In any case, he is falling into the trap, allowing the Vietnamese to deal with him. Besides, he’s on board the flight to DC. It took off five minutes ago. We’ll watch and ensure he continues to LA and Cambodia.”

  “Christ,” I said. I looked at Jim, who shook his head in bewilderment.

  “OK, John, you keep preparing for Vietnam,” Woodruff instructed, curtly.

  “James, it’s very risky what you’re doing. Endangering John,” Jim said, looking at me with concern.

  “Shit, it all worked out, OK. Colonel Tin wants Moore in Vietnam, and we had to oblige—all for the good of our two nations. We need to secure the Socialist Republic of Vietnam as a buffer ally against China in the Far East. And Tin wants Loan for war crimes, and we are obliging. They can capture the fucker in Phnom Penh.

  “And I don’t fucking believe for a minute that Moore is in danger. And shit, there probably won’t be a trial. Once Loan is captured, the Vietnamese agents will kill him, I assume. There’s something afoot, but I can’t put my finger on it. Tin is shrewd—I met him last year on that security pact negotiation. Tin needs Moore for something. But I don’t know what that is.”

  I glared at the kitchen table as Woodruff hung up, confirming our meeting for tomorrow, the twenty-seventh.

  Once again, Jim and Kim did the gracious hosts bit, putting me up and consoling my bad mood. I wanted to call Sally, but I couldn’t. I was officially dead, so I wouldn’t endanger her any further. Besides, I knew it was over. She would not talk to me ever again. Stuck with self-pity for a holiday companion, I had to move forward.

  Jim got me another coffee as we sat in his kitchen. He reflected on my sour attitude. “Come on, man. When this is over, you’ll get her back.”

  “No, I don’t believe Sally will ever accept me back. DuPee Catton is dead thanks to me.” I took a sip of coffee. “Sally won’t forgive that.”

  “For now, clear your head and focus on this trip. I still worry about the whole goddamn thing, but you are a good soldier, so do your best with the mission. Everything else is secondary at this point.”

  “You’re right.” I sat staring at my cup. “Nothing else matters but my revenge and the mission—right?” My sarcasm showed.

  “That’s right—just like in Nam. The mission is all,” Jim retorted, allying with me. “Any idea when you fly to Nam for this bullshit?”

  “No, I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow when Woodruff comes over. Glad you can put up with these people dictating meetings, in your home no less.”

  “It’s OK, John. I want to be by your side; I don’t completely trust the CIA despite the business they give my firm. I trust Zang more. Ain’t that a kick—our former enemy I trust more than Woodruff?” He took a deep swallow of his coffee.

  “I don’t understand Woodruff. He’s hiding something. Maybe it’s per Zang’s instructions?” I mused and took another sip of coffee. “Remember, he mentioned that Ramsey had some embarrassing files on someone.”

  “Yeah, he did.”

  “And he refused to reveal the name or what that was all about,” I said.

  “Who knows? Anyway, watch yourself over there. You certain you don’t want me to tag along?”

  “No. Woodruff made it clear that the communist officials only wanted me—no other Americans. And I can’t endanger you too.”

  “Well then, we’ll get drunk later today. You’re stuck here, so make the best of it.” Kim placed some breakfast rolls on the table. Her presence helped calm me.

  “Just enjoy, John, you’ll be busy soon enough,” she said.

  I smiled weakly, my mind churning over the upcoming trip. Thinking about Sally, I hoped that after Woodruff briefed her and gave her my documents, the keys to my condo and my car, she would willingly run the firm in my absence and keep an eye on my apartment. Deep down I knew it was over between us and that she would do as the CIA asked, but nothing more.

  Despite Jim sharing his home, I felt alone. Would I ever feel a woman’s love again? I wondered. My life became more complicated as danger faced me upon my return to the country where I killed. Would I kill again in its dark jungles?

  South East Asia, January 1, 2003

  Sitting in business class on China Air, I glanced out at the night sky as the big bird winged its way from LAX via Taipei to Hanoi and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. I was reading Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam by Morley Safer of 60 Minutes fame and his own description of returning to Nam after the war. His writing impacted me with lucidity: Safer felt that everyone who served in the war had his own conflicting truths and memories that tied us to that country and that time. As a Vietnam War correspondent, Safer had been drawn back to that place. And now I headed back as well. Nam was a part of me, like the blood flowing in my body. I realized that now, after all these years. Somehow, I knew that I would take my feelings and pain to the grave without complete cleansing of mind and soul. The war became an unforgiving partner the day I landed in Saigon so many years ago, forever a part of me.

  Putting the book on my seat tray, I reflected on my final instructions from Woodruff as he and Tanner escorted me through security to the departure gate for my flight to LAX. Woodruff also updated me about his meeting with Sally at her Outer Banks house on the weekend following Christmas. Sally swore to keep my trip a secret and would manage the firm. Woodruff felt that she showed some concern, but she didn’t ask about me. It confirmed to me that we were finished.

  I closed my eyes and thought of the hectic activity of the last few days, snowballing on its own. The closer the aircraft drew to Vietnam, the more my memories of the war came back. Could I emotionally survive this return? I had very little confidence of that.

  Ramsey had to be damaged goods from the war, probably with PTSD. He too headed back to Nam, where all his war demons were born. How would this end for him—imprisoned or killed by former NVA officers, as Woodruff expected? Would it be the same for Colonel Loan?

  Woodruff worried about Ramsey’s CIA connection and what information or files he held that could be used to tarnish and bring down someone at the CIA. Who was this person? And then there was Loan, who would not be wanted back in the US ever again. The Vietnamese agreed to do the dirty work for Woodruff and make Loan disappear once he was captured in-country, but then they wanted him in a bad way. And I had to avenge the shooting of DuPee Catton by assisting in the capture of Ramsey and Loan. Catton didn’t deserve that death.

  From my window of the descending Vietnam Airlines Airbus A321, I looked down at the city of Hanoi, partially covered by gray winter clouds. Three hours earlier, at 5:30 a.m. on January 1, I had landed in Taipei, Taiwan, after a fourteen-hour flight from Los Angeles. The two-hour and fifteen-minute flight from Taipei was reminiscent of a flight I took thirty-plus years ago. My destination at that time was Saigon and Ben Hoa Airfield, Vietnam, as I flew from Tokyo.

  In 1969, I was a young US Army captain on board a chartered United Airlines jet dropping from thirty thousand feet with a full plane carrying 167 US Army personnel in sweat-stained khakis, exhausted from the long, twenty-one-hour, multistop flight from the States, from Oakland to Anchorage, Anchorage to Guam, Guam to Tokyo, and finally Tokyo to Saigon. Our apprehension about going to war showed in our disheveled appearance and the smell of perspiration. When we finally landed with a hard bump and quickly taxied to the open-air bunker terminal at Ben Hoa, it was midnig
ht on June 1, 1969, and we were welcomed by the pungent smells of Southeast Asia’s hot humid air.

  Now, on January 1, 2003, I returned to Vietnam as a civilian, descending into Hanoi’s Noi Bai Airport at 9:00 a.m., dressed in my dark blue business suit, sitting among mostly Vietnamese who were returning home for Tet celebrations, outnumbering me and the few Australians and French onboard. Vietnam had developed into an inexpensive tourist attraction for Europeans, mostly French, Germans, and Austrians, but especially the Aussies, due to Australia’s close proximity. Modern Vietnam thrived on tourism and needed the steady influx of visitors to help support the economy. Even American tourists were welcome, despite the devastation that the US inflicted during the American Indochina War.

  Just like thirty years ago, my armpits were wet and my hands clammy as we made the final approach to Hanoi. The mission to capture Loan and Ramsey would be as dangerous as my combat in that war, and I began to have second thoughts about my return to this country where I had left so many dead—both Americans and North Vietnamese—their blood now absorbed in the reddish clay soil.

  As Vietnam drew closer, I began daydreaming of Saigon in 1969 and the meeting with the French reporter who told me I could be related to Roger Mongin, a French colonel who fought at Dien Ben Phu during the French Indochina War in 1954. No one except my wife knew that my mother, while I served in Nam, had confirmed that Mongin was my biological father. She had given Katy letters and photos explaining the romantic affair that conceived me. Katy promised to share those items with me after I returned from war. Both of them were concerned that I would lose focus on surviving the war otherwise.

  It seemed my legacy stemmed from World War II and its concentration camps, where Mongin and my mother were imprisoned as slave laborers; to my birth at the end of the war in a US Army field hospital; to the French Indochina War, where my real father, a French Foreign Legion airborne captain, was defeated and captured at Dien Ben Phu; to the American Vietnam War, where I served as a US Army captain, also airborne qualified. That legacy drove me to locate him in 1976, to confront him about abandoning my mother—and me! To look him in his eyes to understand his betrayal of my mother.

  Troyes, France, July 1976

  Assigned to duties as US Army NATO liaison for the Netherlands Army, I arrived in Paris two days early in July 1976, to attend a five-day NATO conference. My family quarters in ‘t Harde, Holland, were scheduled to be ready in a month, when Katy would arrive from the US. Since I currently lived in Bachelor Officer Quarters (BOQ) or hotels, I used the two days before the conference to go to Troyes, France, to see my father’s birthplace and maybe even meet him, if he still lived.

  My mother had told the truth to Katy, who was sworn to keep it from me until I returned from Nam: I had been conceived out of wedlock toward the end of World War II. My real father, Roger Mongin, was an officer in the French Foreign Legion who had been imprisoned by the Vichy government in the same Polish concentration camp in which my mother had been incarcerated. She loved him deeply, but when the Nazis abandoned the concentration camps as the Russian Army approached, they became separated. Her heart had been broken that he never looked for her, and the shame of being an unwed mother forced her to accept another life once she immigrated to the United States. So, the French reporter in Saigon, Jacques de Mont, had been correct. Not only did I resemble the French colonel that he wrote a book about, but he was indeed my father.

  Arriving by train, I checked into a hotel near the Café de Troyes. Afterward, in my army dress greens, I walked to the café, where the young French hostess seemed pleased to wait on an American—maybe her first—and guided me to a window table.

  Soon the café’s sixty-year-old proprietor came over. “And monsieur, what wine do you wish?” He paused and stared at me, intrigued.

  I finished looking at the wine list and said, “A Beaujolais, please.”

  “Oui, I will bring you my best.” He continued to stare, remaining confused, standing by the table, uncertain of what to say.

  I assumed he wanted my order. “OK. And I’ll have the petit filet with green beans for dinner. Maybe an espresso afterward,” I said, giving a smile that startled him further.

  He retreated, glancing back several times. Shortly, a woman came out of the kitchen with him. They both stared at me and whispered to each other. Then they disappeared into the kitchen. My waitress, all smiles, soon served my dinner.

  I ate with relish; their French cooking certainly didn’t disappoint. After finishing, I skipped the espresso for another glass of wine and intentionally laid my copy of de Mont’s book, La Mort de Indochina Française, in front of me, facedown. The title expressing Death of French Indochina certainly had direct bearing on me serving in that war. If the French participation in Vietnam had been successful, then there would have been no American Indochina War.

  The photo of Colonel Mongin on the back of the dust cover stared at me and the proprietor when he appeared once more. I used the picture to question him on whether Colonel Mongin had morning espresso and croissants at the café every morning, as the book stated.

  “Oui, monsieur. He is a part of this place, as are the tables.” He smiled, pleased that someone asked about the town’s celebrity.

  He wanted to ask me something, but I continued to sip my wine as I browsed the book, intentionally avoiding further talk. He left the bill on the small tray as he returned to the kitchen, struggling with his thoughts. I paid my bill with francs, stood up, and departed for my hotel before the owner could return.

  The next morning, I stood by the corner newsstand across from the Café de Troyes, browsing the English edition of the Herald Tribune and watching as an old hunched man with a cane walked to an outside table at the café. He gingerly eased himself into a chair and waited. Soon an attractive waitress appeared with a cup of espresso and a basket of pastries. I heard them talk, the French language flowing melodiously, enchanting me. The waitress patted the old man on his head, and he reciprocated by placing his hand on her hip, an old man’s flirtations. She casually removed his hand, playfully scolding him, and returned inside.

  I watched, glancing between the newspaper and the old man. My dead mother’s old photo of Roger Mongin, held on top of the daily newspaper, matched him.

  “Monsieur, do you wish the paper?” asked a voice from behind.

  Startled from my reverie, I nodded, reached into the back pocket of my military trousers, and pulled out my wallet. I found some francs and paid the proprietor, who gave a thorough once-over of my dress green uniform and garrison cap with the airborne patch. He examined the rows of ribbons, focusing on one award.

  “Monsieur, I recognize the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry—my father served in French Indochina in the 50s.”

  “We seem to have a war legacy, you and me, with Indochina,” I said.

  Confused, he still nodded. “Oui . . . I am thirty and have no memory of him. I was born while he served and died. C’est la vie.” He shrugged and returned to another customer waiting to pay, not fully grasping my legacy comment.

  I returned to staring at the seated Mongin; finally, I took several steps to the curb and toward the café. A truck suddenly careened by, halting me abruptly and momentarily blocking my view. When the truck, spewing a cloud of diesel smoke passed, I saw Mongin stand up. I stepped off the curb but stopped in the gutter, now undecided, watching the old man slowly walk, relying heavily on the cane, bent over, probably headed home. As he reached the corner, he slowly turned and looked at me. We stared at each other for what seemed an eternity, neither of us moving, our eyes locked. I sensed recognition in his eyes. Slowly the old man switched his cane from his right to his left hand. He gradually raised his right hand to a salute and waited.

  In those moments, memories of my youth flashed in my mind, a kaleidoscope of images: my mother dying from cancer after a lonely life, still pining for Roger Mongin, the lover who abandoned her; m
y alcoholic stepfather, who gave me my legal name and the chance for American citizenship, and the miserable life he created for me; the father I never knew, now standing across the street, who abandoned me as well, leaving me a legacy, disjointed and cruel—perpetuated by years of war in Europe and Indochina, its killing and inhumanity. He had provided the seed for my birth, but others made me who I am.

  Finally grasping what to do, I stepped backward onto the curb. Turning, I walked away from Mongin in the morning sun, leaving the darkness of my past behind. I cared little about this man Mongin, a total stranger to me. I never returned his salute.

  The pilot’s voice blaring through the speaker system woke me from my reverie, forcing French Foreign Legion Colonel Mongin to return to my subconscious. We were descending on final approach to Hanoi.

  Noi Bai Airport, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, January 1, 2003

  Colonel Zang had told me that National Police Agent Hieu would meet me at the Hanoi Airport. Assuming that he would be waiting for me outside with my name placard after I cleared immigration and retrieved my luggage, I walked off the jet and headed down the ramp to the main terminal, looking for the baggage and customs direction signs. I carried the CIA aluminum briefcase in my left hand.

  Wearing faded blue jeans and a black sweater, over which she wore a leather bombardier jacket, stood an attractive Vietnamese woman, who looked at me from her position by the gate check-in counter. About forty years old, she had lustrous black hair tied into a ponytail and a firm five-foot-five figure with slightly larger breasts than are typical for Vietnamese women. Her brown skin complemented her already beautiful face, and her black eyes were enticing, mysterious with the seductiveness of a French woman. I assumed she was Eurasian.