Legacy of War

by Ed Marohn

  I tried to divert my eyes from her, trying to be polite and not gawk at her attractiveness. I smiled as she continued staring in my direction, which forced me to look behind to see who she waited for; I couldn’t tell with the large crowd of Vietnamese following me.

  She approached, blocking me from proceeding further into the terminal. “Mr. Moore, I am Agent Hieu. Welcome to Hanoi.” She bowed slightly and then offered her hand.

  Surprised, I extended my hand. “Thank you. It is nice of you to greet me here at the plane.” Her handshake reflected her business manner and seriousness—no smile, no warm greeting.

  “Our retired and senior Communist Party member Colonel Bui Tin instructed me to extend a greeting to you. As our government’s special guest, you are to be given full courtesy.”

  “OK,” I said in awe, staring into her beautiful face. Her expression cracked no emotion; her coolness permeated me.

  Beckoning me to follow her, she turned and quickly began walking toward the exit signs. Over her shoulder, she crisply stated, “Your luggage will be loaded in the car. First, we process you in the VIP area. Please follow quickly.”

  I hustled to stay with her. Her muscular legs stretched her tight jeans as she strode ahead of me, her ponytail swinging, beckoning me—a very good-looking woman to follow. Minutes later, we went through an unmarked door, walked through a narrow hallway, and finally entered a large office occupied by customs agents and police officers, a mix of men and women. She led me to an unoccupied desk and motioned for me to sit down. As I eased into my chair, she plopped her body into a chair across from me.

  “May I have your passport?”

  After I handed it to her, she flipped through to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam visa glued in my passport and began completing a form on top of the desk. A Vietnamese man came over, gave me a stern look, turned to Hieu, and spoke to her, his Vietnamese drawing me further back into my time of war. He kept his left hand behind him, out of my sight. She responded with quick but polite responses, as if he were her senior. As they talked to each other, I noticed that Hieu’s jacket barely covered the nine-millimeter pistol in a shoulder holster under her left arm. The gentleman talking to her wore a tailored black suit, his unbuttoned jacket also revealing a holstered nine-mil pistol under his left arm. My mind, trying to adjust from the jet lag of flying across various time zones and the international dateline, had sensory overload from the agents, customs officials, and weapons. My head felt stuffed with cotton, absorbing the sounds around me, dulling me, blocking and muffling my thinking.

  “This is Major Han, my supervisor,” Hieu said to me.

  I stood up and offered my right hand, giving a slight bow in return to his.

  “Welcome to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Mr. Moore,” he said. Instead of shaking my hand, his left came from behind his back and placed a .45-caliber pistol in my extended right hand; it was my pistol from the States.

  I took it wearily, and the room’s noise suddenly stopped, with everyone staring at me and my .45-caliber pistol. Ignoring the room’s distractions, Agent Hieu stood up and reached over the narrow desk, her hair inches from my face, her head bowed toward the desk drawer to my left. Opening it, she pulled out a leather shoulder holster with the communist red star embossed on the exterior. Straightening up, she took my pistol from me, put it in the holster, and glancing at my upper body several times, adjusted the shoulder straps before finally holding it up for me.

  “Please remove your suit jacket, and I will fit you. I hope this is your pistol?”

  I nodded. Holding my jacket, I allowed her to strap on the holster and adjust it to fit under my left arm. It seemed like everybody here was right-handed. Major Han nodded, content that matters were being handled. He walked away, disappearing through another door.

  Hieu looked at me with serious eyes and then said, “Please, this weapon is only for, as you say, self-defense. Since I will be with you all the time, there should be no need to use it. Here is the official authority for you to carry the weapon.” She handed me the form she had completed, already pre-signed. She reached into her purse and gave me three loaded magazines; the ones I had in Charlotte, which Woodruff retrieved along with my pistol over a week ago. She looked relieved when I took the magazines and placed them in my aluminum briefcase rather than loading my pistol.

  “You are knowledgeable on this pistol?” she asked.

  “Yes.” I didn’t explain my past expert status during the war nor my killing NVA soldiers in battle.

  “It is per Colonel Tin that you have the authority to carry this weapon. Again, please comply with my instructions on its use.”

  Her cell phone rang. Chattering in the quick-paced Vietnamese that once was so familiar to me, she gave sharp commands. Clicking off her cell, she unemotionally said, “We are ready, Mr. Moore. The car and luggage are waiting. We will take you to the Hotel Nikko Hanoi, where you will want to rest and refresh yourself. Tomorrow I will meet you at 0700 hours for breakfast at the hotel, and then we will go to see Colonel Bui Tin. He is most anxious to meet you again.”

  “I wonder,” I mumbled.

  She ignored it. “Yes, that will be discussed tomorrow. Come.” She stood up and retraced Major Han’s steps through the door. I followed.

  Hanoi, January 1, 2003

  The ride from the airport to downtown Hanoi progressed at a fast-paced thirty minutes, barely avoiding mopeds, motorcycles, cars, and scurrying pedestrians. Traffic lights were obeyed but pushed to the limit by all drivers. The ten million people that crowded into Hanoi and the environs all seemed to be in front, back, and to the sides of our black government Mercedes, its official tags earning it some respect from the walking, rushing, or driving masses. The gray winter sky mixed with the air pollution over the crowded city, blocking the blue sky and the sun. A slight drizzle made the late morning chilly and dreary but didn’t slow the population in pursuit of its normal workday. As we sped down one street after another, I spied little shops crammed along the streets and sidewalks with entrepreneurs selling food, household goods, and clothes, always bartering with their customers. The activity blurred by as we continued the drive to the hotel.

  “Mr. Moore, for your information, I am married and have three sons. They wish to go to America and attend a university there, but they are still young, and we can afford only Hanoi University, which I attended,” Hieu said. “Is this your first time visiting Hanoi?”

  “Yes, for Hanoi . . . but I served during the war in South Vietnam, quite close to the former demilitarized zone, the DMZ.” She nodded her acknowledgement of me being here in the war. Silence ensued, probably from the surfaced pain of the war that affected both of us. On the airplane, I had pondered how the Vietnamese would react to me, a former enemy soldier who indirectly or directly had been instrumental in the deaths of some of their countrymen.

  Sitting in the front seat, Hieu occasionally glanced at me with piercing eyes as I slouched in the back seat, forcing myself to stay awake. There was little friendship or warmth between us at the moment.

  Finally, she offered a token of peace. “You will find that many of my generation have not totally accepted the end of the war and the losses to our families. My father died in the war. He fought and defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu, and then fought you Americans in Quang Tri Province, just below the old demilitarized zone. You served in the same area—I believe you called it I Corps.”

  I decided not to respond, since she had obviously read my military records.

  Silence lasted a few minutes and then she said, “My mother and older brothers seldom saw my father as he spent over seven years in the South, fighting Americans and the South Vietnamese.”

  “I’m so sorry for his death,” I said. I meant it.

  My sincerity seemed to catch her off guard. She hesitated and nodded to me but continued to study me with her side-glances. The war wasted so many li
ves, but I alone could not alleviate all the pain, no matter what I said.

  We finally pulled into the hotel turnaround. As a doorman grabbed my luggage, Hieu escorted me to the front desk, where my electronic room key waited for me. I only had to sign the registration form, already typed, complete with my home address and Vietnamese contact information; I noticed Agent Hieu’s name listed on the form, her name highlighted in yellow. Isolation crept in as I knew that my life for the time being belonged to the Vietnamese, and Hieu in particular.

  With a bellman in tow, Hieu escorted me to the elevator. She stopped there and said, “Please rest from the jet lag. We will be very busy from now on. For Colonel Tin, a suit will be very good.”

  I smiled at her guidance. She ignored it. “OK, tomorrow I will be waiting for you in the lobby for breakfast,” I confirmed.

  “Yes, tomorrow. And do not be concerned—you are well-watched for safety purposes.”

  She disappeared as I entered the elevator. The bellman, smiling at me, said in English, “Welcome to Hotel Nikko.”

  “Thank you,” I said, wondering how many police agents were watching me. The swaying elevator rocked me, slowly wearing down my resolve to stay awake.

  I devoured a delicious but light room service lunch: a French baguette, crusty and fresh, filled with a tuna salad, accompanied by a beer. Then I collapsed onto the bed, the dark dreary day contributing to my drowsiness from the long flight. After I woke some four hours later, I showered and put on clean clothes: a pair of jeans and a sweater. I began to feel human again; international travel wears out the mind and body.

  I walked over to my room’s window and stared at the street scene below me, absorbing the noise and activity of a large city winding down as the evening light slowly descended into the dark of night. The traffic I observed from my twelfth-floor room continued to stay busy, and the noise rose up to me as people conducted their lives below. During the war, the US had bombed targets in North Vietnam, specifically Hanoi and the nearby major port, Hai Pong. In the end it did not win the war for us; bombing can’t destroy an agrarian nation with little industrial base. The North Vietnamese burrowed into homemade bomb shelters, moved any industry into the surrounding countryside, and relocated their power plants. The Chinese and Russians provided military aid with supplies crossing over from the China border, something we couldn’t stop without drawing the Chinese or Russians into the war. The US could never destroy North Vietnam’s fighting ability.

  After I returned from Nam, I eventually studied the war, trying to decipher why I fought there. The US used over fourteen million tons of bombs in the Vietnam War, twenty times as much as the bombing in the Korean War, and seven times as much as used in World War II. Over seventy million liters of toxic chemicals were dropped all over Vietnam, which included forty-four million liters of the famous Agent Orange defoliant, toxic and cancer-causing. My own combat operations were in two of the heaviest Agent Orange drop zones: south near Cu Chi in the Mekong Delta, and north near the DMZ and the A Shau Valley, in which existed the road network for supplying the North Vietnamese, famously labeled as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This series of trails, roads, and bridges from China through North Vietnam into Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam fed the military needs of a war-weary country. We tried to destroy the supply network with B-52 bombings, artillery, and combat assaults, but within twenty-four hours, civilian laborers known as coolies would repair the roads or bridges and the supplies continued.

  Now I was in Hanoi as a friend of the government. The past thirty-three years hadn’t faded my memory of the dying soldiers from both sides. I shook my head as I gazed out my room’s window. Ideologies and religions constantly stirred the pot of human emotions, negating rationality, promoting biases and wars and death.

  It was time to check in on the message board to see if Woodruff had any instructions for me. The internet message board served as our agreed-upon method to exchange normal communication in short coded phrases. Only in an emergency could I use the CIA satellite telephone to reach Woodruff. My Palm phone was basically to be used for the internet access. Despite all the preparations for this mission, I served as a free spirit, developing plans as I went based on information from my new contacts in Vietnam. Zang had not offered a better plan for catching Loan or Ramsey; it depended on Hieu, Colonel Tin, and me to solve the riddle, starting with my interrogation of Hung. I still wondered if this even made any sense, but then again, Hung had asked for me personally.

  I clicked onto the message board looking for any message for Puking Buzzard, my code name. Woodruff was Rex I, and Tanner, his assistant, was Rex II. One message existed: Call on S phone.

  Before going to my satellite phone, I typed in the required message to Rex I: Arrived safe and sound. Starting vacation tomorrow. Love, Puking Buzzard.

  As long as I signed off with “love,” Woodruff would know everything was normal and that I wasn’t in danger. Leave off “love” and Woodruff would try to come to my rescue—indirectly, of course. He couldn’t risk clandestine CIA operations in Vietnam.

  Basically, I had been inserted, isolated, in a foreign country, prohibited from dealing with the US Embassy but working for the CIA. How did I agree to this?

  Turning off the Palm phone, I returned it to the CIA briefcase and pulled out the fully charged satellite phone, all the while thinking about eating dinner in the hotel’s restaurant tonight and exploring more of the French influence on Vietnamese cuisine.

  I calculated the time difference from 5:58 p.m., as shown on my watch. Hanoi would be ahead of DC by twelve hours, which meant I would wake Woodruff at 5:58 a.m. on December 31, 2002. That appealed to me, so I dialed. The phone rang for about a minute, then Tanner’s voice came on: “Are you there, John?”

  “Yes. Surprised that Woodruff didn’t answer. I just sent message via the internet board of my safe arrival. Why do you need to talk?”

  “Wanted to convey my thanks for you being there.”

  I held the phone, smiling at his words, which I didn’t completely believe.

  “John, did you hear me?”

  “Yes . . . I heard you. Anything else?” What could I say?

  Tanner’s pause seemed to last forever. “As part of your mission, it’s also essential that you retrieve Ramsey’s files.”

  Confused, I said, “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “We assume he will have them with him. If so, we can’t afford for those embarrassing files to leak out. It will impact someone here . . . very severely.”

  “Again, you won’t tell me who this person is?”

  “No. I can’t.” He hung up.

  I sat for some time pondering this whole operation. I had zero clue on how to find Ramsey or Loan, let alone any mysterious files that Woodruff wanted back. This whole trip began to overwhelm me.

  While I played at being an undercover agent, the woman I cared about would be submerged in total, excruciating grief over her dead father. I had accepted that his death had to be on me, and that Sally could never forgive me. I felt my hate, a desire to kill, to avenge her. I lay back on the bed, too upset to eat. After several hours of tossing and turning, still dressed, I fell asleep, disgusted that I had caused the death of another, again. And that somehow, I would comply with Woodruff’s request to retrieve the files.

  Outside of Hanoi, January 2, 2003

  As Hieu accompanied me, continuously glancing at me, we entered the house; I reflected on my exhaustion from the long flight and the anxiety about my upcoming role in Nam. We said little at breakfast in the hotel, both of us deep in thoughts. She had to think the worst of me, the ugly American syndrome. Brushing off my melancholy, I gave a weak smile to Colonel Tin.

  Retired, in his late eighties, and showing a resiliency common to the Vietnamese, Colonel Tin greeted us in the small living room of his two-story, cement-and-stone house located on the outskirts of Hanoi, the Vietnamese versio
n of suburbia. Tin’s pink house resembled a small villa on a very tiny plot of land bordered on the south by a drainage canal, with rice paddies on the north and west. The house faced east, toward the main highway to Hanoi; similar houses ran parallel or adjacent to his along the same road. Tin had no verdant landscape or elaborate gardens on his property, just bare dirt and a few neatly maintained trees and bushes enclosed by a five-foot stone wall. Growing food for the populace dictated that the fertile farmlands were not wasted for building huge homes or elaborate landscaped properties.

  With our driver waiting outside in the car parked on the narrow driveway, Hieu and I sat down in the living room. A young woman offered us hot tea served in small porcelain cups. As she stared at me, Tin introduced her as one of his great-granddaughters. Eventually, she bowed and returned to the back of the house.

  Left alone and seated near Tin with our holstered pistols—a gesture of his trust, no doubt—Hieu and I listened reverently to an old man recount his tale of entering the military service of the Viet Minh led by Ho Chi Minh in 1950 and ending his service in 1980, five years after the fall of Saigon. It astonished me that he had served in war for almost twenty-five years: first against the French, participating in the famous defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, then against the United States and its South Vietnamese allies. His stark white hair gave him a noble dignity and accented his piercing dark eyes, which were constantly focused on me as he talked. His five-foot-four height was slightly stooped, but the wrinkles on his face still accentuated a rugged handsomeness.