Abandoned: MIA in Vietnam

by Bill Yancey

  “I don’t believe that question would upset the Sheriff, or HIPAA,” Wolfe said, prodding the resident.

  “Oh, Sorry,” Gadhavi said. “I agree. I was replaying my initial history and physical with the patient in my head. He was a retired chief in the navy. Supply services, if I remember. He did spend time on an aircraft carrier in Vietnam. Enlisted in 1953, right after the Korean War, I believe. From southern Georgia. Stationed several times out of Mayport. After retiring from the navy, he took a job with a boat building company, Luhrs, in St. Augustine. Retired from that months before the great recession.”

  Amazed, Wolfe said, “Do you know all your patients’ background histories that well?”

  Gadhavi shrugged. “I guess,” he said.

  “I don’t suppose you remember the name of the aircraft carrier?” Wolfe asked. “I can give you a list of names to choose from.”

  “I remember he said it came back to the States for a complete overhaul after a serious fire.” Gadhavi slowed and cut across three lanes of traffic to exit from I-95 at 8th Street in Jacksonville.

  “That narrows it down. Only three aircraft carriers had major fires during Vietnam: Oriskany, Forrestal, and Enterprise,” Wolfe explained. “Forrestal came back to the Newport News shipyard in Virginia. Oriskany went to Alameda, California. And I would guess Enterprise went to Pearl Harbor, since her fire happened off Hawaii. Do you know if he went to the East Coast?”

  “Definitely not,” Gadhavi said. “He told me all about taking part in the sexual revolution in San Francisco during the overhaul. Humping the hippies, he called it.”

  Stunned, Wolfe sat back in his seat, silent. The Jimmy Byrnes I knew may have known this man. But how were they related? And what did the note mean? Gadhavi pulled his Audi into the Shands parking deck and into an empty space. “We’re here,” he said. “Sorry, Dr. Wolfe, but I have to rush along.”

  Wolfe climbed out of the vehicle, reached across the convertible top and shook the young man’s hand. He said, “Call me Addy, short for Addison. I’ll be in touch later after the police release his name. I’ll want you to contact the family for me to see if they’ll talk to me.”

  “Sure thing,” Gadhavi said. He turned and walked briskly to the nearest hospital entrance.

  Wolfe trundled slowly behind him, hands in pockets, mind in 1967.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Hey Wolfe, wake up.” Wolfe opened his eyes. A chunky sailor in dungarees and chambray shirt stood at the foot of his hospital bed. Next to him stood a mop-haired civilian, Robert Martin, a grin on his face. With his hair in his eyes, Martin reminded Wolfe of John Lennon.

  “Oh, Crespi,” Wolfe said, peering through swollen eyelids. The words were difficult for Martin and Crespi to understand. Wolfe’s face was so edematous he found it hard to breathe at times. He looked at his hands. They were still bright red and about twice-normal size. “What’s up, Mike? Hey, Bobby,” Wolfe acknowledged the civilian. The steady drumbeat of rain on the window drew Wolfe’s gaze from his friends.

  “Yeah,” Crespi said, “monsoon again. They say there will be four more months of this stuff. I’ve never seen rain like this. You guys?”

  “Yeah. It was like this last year, too,” Martin said. “Every year from May until October it pours. I think the navy base averages a hundred inches of rain per year.” Days before Martin had finished his freshman year in college at Washington State University. His father, a civilian, ran the Subic Naval Station engineering division. During World War II, the elder Martin had served as an enlisted driver with Patton’s 3rd Army in Europe. He and two other men had driven the general’s jeep all over France and Germany in the last year of the war. After the war ended, Martin found a pretty French woman to be his war bride and brought her home with him. Once home, he returned to college and earned an electrical engineering degree. He wanted Bobby to study engineering, but the younger Martin wanted to teach, like his mother.

  Crespi scanned Wolfe’s face, then his hands. “We got orders, Addy. And we got an east coast carrier, buddy. One cruise and we return to Norfolk. Maybe a Med cruise after that,” he said, excitedly. Crespi grinned, white teeth in sharp contrast to his dark, Middle Eastern skin, made shades darker by working in the Philippine sun the previous two weeks. His orthodox Jewish ancestors had left Palestine in the 1920s and settled in Maryland.

  Crespi had met Wolfe in the US Navy transit barracks on Bolling AFB, in Washington, DC. An unemployed reservist, married with a baby on the way, he had volunteered to go on active duty to keep his family fed. He had suspected the navy would send him to Vietnam, since he had no extra navy apprentice schooling. Although his wife cried torrents when he left, he promised to be home before the baby was born. He also explained to her that nothing bad ever happened to sailors. They didn’t participate in combat, as far as he knew. In two years of reserve service, he had managed to finish basic training and earn a promotion to E-3, airman. He outranked Wolfe, who was still an airman apprentice, E-2. The only reason Crespi was an airman was the navy had a reserve squadron of aircraft stationed on Bolling AFB close to his home in suburban Maryland. Otherwise, he would have been a seaman.

  Wolfe, on the other hand, had chosen to be an airman in boot camp. He had an uncle who flew fighters in the air force. With his eyesight, Wolfe would never fly as pilot-in-command, but he could be near the jets he loved to watch. Maybe, if the navy sent him to electronics school, he could work on aircraft one day or be a crewman. His uncle’s death from cancer led to meeting Crespi. The navy allowed Wolfe to go home on bereavement leave at the end of boot camp. After the funeral, he found himself in the transit barracks, along with Crespi and two hundred other sailors, including Maryland Lt. Governor Raphael Pisenecki’s son, Raymond.

  “Hey, Pisenecki,” Wolfe shouted one day while they toiled on a work detail. The navy wanted the transients to earn their keep. That morning they spit-polished the Chiefs’ Club. Wolfe ran the buffer, while third-class petty officer Pisenecki sat in a chair supervising. “Are you really related to the lieutenant governor?”

  “How many Piseneckis do you know?” the sailor shot back.

  “Okay,” Wolfe granted, “not many. So why are you here? Couldn’t your father get you out of active duty?”

  “Yeah. He probably could have,” Pisenecki admitted, “but I wanted to be here. Actually, I want to serve in Vietnam, kill some commie gooks.”

  “Will you get to do that as a Seabee?”

  “Probably,” Pisenecki said. He went back to reading the paper he had pulled from the trash can, feet on the desk.

  Crespi, Wolfe, and a hundred other sailors left the transit barracks in a bus. The bus took them to National Airport, where they boarded a passenger jet to San Francisco. The two-hour layover at SFO turned into an eighteen-hour delay while mechanics swapped out an engine on the jetliner. Crespi and Wolfe sat on either side of Martin on the long flight from San Francisco to Clark AFB. Unable to leave the terminal during the repair, and unable to sleep sitting upright on the jet, the three had had minimal sleep over the previous 36 hours by the time they arrived. The punch-drunk trio were best buddies.

  Crespi and Wolfe rode in the navy bus from Clark to Subic Bay Naval Station. The 42 mile ride took three hours. On display all along the so-called highway, Wolfe saw some of the most abject poverty the world knew. Peasants lived in plywood and corrugated plastic-roofed houses covered with nylon sheeting, no windows. The smell of raw sewage wafted through the windows. The bus had no air conditioning.

  Adult and child Filipinos climbed over the piles of trash discarded from the colossal American bases at Clark AFB and the US Naval Base at Subic Bay, searching for food and other treasures. Naked kids stood at the side of the road begging for anything the sailors might discard.

  Having a friend in Subic meant that Crespi and Wolfe had someone to visit when not participating in work details at the transit barracks. There were so many sailors awaiting ships their overseers had a hard time dreaming up work to keep the m
en occupied.

  After a short workday, many men, especially the old salts, put on their whites and headed to Olongapo City, the whore-infested bar-crammed camp outside the gates of Subic. Drunk, bloody, injured sailors returned nightly to the barracks to wallow in their own vomit and piss. The Tijuana of the Philippines sounded more and more like a Wild West cesspool to Wolfe. Crespi refused to go to Olongapo on liberty, having promised his wife he wouldn’t drink or chase women. Wolfe never felt an urge to explore the local environment, happy to pal around with Crespi, Bobby, and his family, even if Mr. Martin force-fed them on the need to get an education after their enlistments ended. The Martins kept the two sailors fed and entertained for two weeks while they awaited their assigned ship.

  Then the navy sent Wolfe and Crespi on a gardening detail: mow the lawn and trim the hedges around the BOQ, Bachelor Officers Quarters. That would have been an easy six-hour workday. The two had made plans to walk to the Martins and escort Bobby to the station theater. For A Few Dollars More, the spaghetti western with Clint Eastwood, had arrived at Clark and Subic on the same plane as the sailors. Fifty cents got a sailor, a dependent, or a civilian contractor, a ticket, a small Coke, and a medium sized bag of popcorn.

  The sudden burning in Wolfe’s right hand stopped him from trimming the hedges. Within minutes he had a shooting pain that ran to his right shoulder. Before he could yell for help, he found it difficult to breathe. If Crespi hadn’t been close by, he would have died from the anaphylactic reaction to an insect sting. The chunky airman called for help on the BOQ telephone. An ambulance from the dispensary arrived and a corpsman injected Wolfe with Benadryl and epinephrine.

  Lifting his head from the pillow, Wolfe asked Crespi, “So, what ship did we get?”

  “USS Forrestal. The first supercarrier,” Crespi said.

  Wolfe had never heard of the ship. “I thought the navy christened ships after famous battles, or famous ships. I never heard of a battle named Forrestal.”

  “Navy heroes, too. He was Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of Defense,” Crespi said. “He fought for the funds for the navy to buy the supercarriers. Committed suicide at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Won the battle, lost the war.”

  “Oh,” Wolfe said, properly chastised for not knowing his navy history. “When do we leave?”

  “I sign on tonight. They said you will be better in the morning. Ship goes on line in three days.”

  Martin’s smile never diminished. “We’re going to miss you guys,” he said. “But, the carriers return to port every month or so. Frequently they come back to Subic. Occasionally they go to Japan or Hong Kong. In fact, my parents and I are going to Hong Kong in August, before I go back to college. Maybe I’ll see you guys there.”

  Wolfe never made it onboard Forrestal. The navy didn’t clear him for duty for another two weeks. By then, Forrestal was on Yankee Station, in the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin. USN aircraft pounded the North Vietnamese so severely that the carriers had run out of the 1000-pound bombs favored for the A-4 Skyhawks. Someone thought it would be a good idea to use up the old 1000-pound bombs stored in the Philippines. These weapons were of an older design and at least ten years-old. They had been improperly stored in Okinawa and Subic Bay and exposed to salt spray. The formulation of explosive in these 1000-pound bombs could not withstand the heat of a fire as well as the newer explosives could. When the USS Diamond Head unloaded its cargo of older bombs onto the Forrestal, the stage was set for a tragedy.

  CHAPTER 8

  “I hated the guy,” Sluggo Maxwell said over the telephone. Chief Noble had called Maxwell and given him Wolfe’s cell phone number after Wolfe’s visit. No less irritating than he had been as a sailor, Maxwell managed to annoy Wolfe by calling him at 10:00 p.m. He woke Wolfe from a sound sleep. In Maxwell’s defense, he lived on the West Coast where it was only 7:00 p.m.

  “Why was that?” Wolfe asked, sitting in bed with his cell phone and the pad of paper and pen he kept next to the bed. He frequently awoke in the middle of the night with a brainstorm, chore, or list of things to buy. Rather than allow the thoughts to keep him awake, he jotted them down and returned to sleep. His worst problem was trying to interpret his handwriting after he got up in the morning. Writing in the dark, to keep from waking his wife, did not improve his penmanship.

  “I thought he was arrogant,” Maxwell said. “For instance, he never went out for a beer with the crew. I never saw him blasted, except that one time you and he went over in Sasebo. He drank with you.”

  “Not exactly,” Wolfe said.

  “And he didn’t pitch in with a donation when we ordered that sex book,” Maxwell continued without listening to Wolfe. “We each contributed five bucks. Farrell ordered the book from some publisher in Australia.”

  “I heard about that,” Wolfe said. “Was that the photographic Kamasutra book, supposed to have color photos of at least fifty different sex positions?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I think I remember Byrnes laughing at you guys. He said most of the V-3 Division had spent a lot of money and the publisher had ripped you off. Can’t remember what the con was, though,” Wolfe said, trying to retrieve the memory.

  “The people in the photographs were dressed,” Maxwell said, voice angry. “A hundred bucks worth of false advertising. We were bummed.”

  Wolfe chuckled. Byrnes and he had laughed belly laughs when Byrnes had related the yarn about the previous cruise. Dumbass squids, Byrnes had called his comrades at the time.

  “Some of the guys thought he couldn’t cross his legs because he had such big balls, but I thought he was egotistical,” Maxwell said. “A real friend would have hung out with his crew and buddies. He was always doing stuff no one else did, like jogging on the flight deck. Who the hell runs three miles, half of it against a thirty knot wind, while at sea? He had to be some kind of health nut. Or just plain nuts.”

  “I remember him doing pull-ups on the ladder rungs welded to the sponson near the forward elevator while waiting for the flight deck to drop recovered birds,” Wolfe admitted. “Never before knew a guy who could do twenty-five pull-ups. I remember he did a hundred push-ups one night, too.”

  “See what I mean,” Maxwell said. “An arrogant, asshole show-off.”

  “So what did you do after getting out of the navy, Sluggo?”

  “I don’t answer to Sluggo any more,” Maxwell said. “I went to law school. My clients call me Marlow Millard Maxwell, Esquire.”

  “That’s a mouthful,” Wolfe said. “What do your friends call you now?”

  “I said I went to law school, Boot. I don’t have friends,” Maxwell said, laughing. “Actually, most of my friends call me Max.”

  “That is better than Sluggo,” Wolfe said. “And you can call me Doctor Boot from now on. Do you ever get to the East Coast?”

  “On occasion I have participated in class action suits and have had to spend time in Chicago or New York,” Maxwell said. “But my primary practice is in personal injury law and it’s busy. I don’t leave California often.”

  “Still using your boxing skills?” Wolfe asked. Maxwell had earned his nickname. He had been the last man standing during a shipboard Smoker. Thirty sailors duked it out in a boxing ring on the hangar deck while on the way to port after an extensive line period. The rest of the ship’s company watched, and made bets. Each participant had one hand tied behind his back and a blindfold over his eyes. If a sailor fell down, that eliminated him from winning the prize – two free nights in a hotel, all expenses paid, in Japan. Maxwell earned the title Sluggo and the prize when he accidentally hit the second-to-last man with an elbow while winding up to punch him. He had had no idea the other sailor stood directly behind him. Maxwell’s elbow caught the man in the back and pushed him forward so fast he tripped and fell to the canvas.

  “Don’t do martial arts any more,” Maxwell said. “I have an ex-cop on payroll for the heavy work. You did some boxing, too, if I remember.”

  Wolfe
thought for a minute. “Yeah. I suspect it was right after I joined the ship. You guys were practicing and I went a round or two with Saulson.”

  “Gave him a black eye, too,” Maxwell said.

  “That was an accident,” Wolfe said. “He didn’t block an easy jab. My being left-handed gave him fits.”

  “Didn’t you have a fight with Grender, too?”

  Again, Wolfe had to pause and search his memory. He chuckled when he remembered the brief altercation. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Grender was mouthing off on the sponson while we were in port. He was supposed to be working. I told him to shut up. He swung at me and missed. I hit him in the jaw with a left and he went down to the deck. From there he kicked at me like a baby while he screamed in pain. Byrnes told him to get up and go sweep the hangar deck. But he never mouthed off at me again.”

  “I remember,” Maxwell said.

  “Can you tell me anything else about Jimmy that took place before I joined Oriskany in P.I., Max?” Wolfe almost called his ex-shipmate Sluggo.

  “To be honest, Boot, er, Doc, I never think about the man. After he committed suicide, I spent a long time asking myself if the friction between us had contributed to his state of mind. Still can’t say. The memories are painful, so I avoid them. Didn’t like him, but he obviously had some deep psychological problems. No one should commit suicide, not even an asshole like him.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “Doc! Doc!” Wolfe heard the high-pitched squeal of a little girl’s voice behind him. Turning his head, he spotted a tiny tow-headed kindergartener racing down the frozen food aisle toward him, arms open wide. When she reached him, she wrapped her arms around his leg. Barely as tall as the middle of his thigh she shrieked again, “Doc!”

  “Lillian, Lillian!” an older woman spouted, as she chased after the child. “Sorry,” she said when she reached Wolfe. “I don’t know what got into my granddaughter. Say you’re sorry to the man, Lillian. We have shopping to do.”