Red Flags

by Juris Jurjevics

"Sounds like an American raj," Celeste said. "My mom never mentioned that she could have gone with him. I could have been born there." She sat quietly for a minute, absorbing this possibility.

  "Was it exciting?" she said. "Exciting enough to make someone want to go back?"

  "Sure. Boring too. Funny every once in a while." I slathered some ketchup on my burger. "Listen, it was never neat or simple. There wasn't just one war, us against them. There were a bunch of wars all going on at once. You had to sort through them. You weren't always sure which side you were on."

  I took a pull of beer.

  "By the time I served under your dad, two years later, Viet Nam was going through its top bananas like a fruit bat. They were on coup number eight. President Diem ruled for nine years. His successors were lucky to last nine weeks. Every time a regime was taken down, counterinsurgency stopped, the government and army derailed. Then the latest junta generals would replace all the civil and military leaders with their guys and it all started up again."

  Action on the tube elicited a small outburst from the sportsmen gathered at the bar. They high-fived and locked on the screen. I took a healthy swig and felt the alcohol bathe my tensed brain. I had to watch it. She was good at getting people to talk. I needed to back away. I waved to Mrs. Bert for the tally.

  "Where are you heading from here? Who's next on your list?"

  She peered out the window. It was getting late. White flakes threaded the air.

  "I'm not sure I should try that road in the dark and the snow." She looked toward the bar. "Mrs. Bert rents rooms, I hope."

  I shook my head. "It's not a bed-and-breakfast sort of town."

  "Damn." Concern swept over her face. "Might I impose on you, Erik?"

  What was there to say? Outflanked. "Where's your stuff?"

  "Front seat of the rental."

  Mrs. Bert eyed us as we left the bar; the regulars paid no attention. Not minding other people's business was the only town tradition I knew of, other than shooting up Bert's parking lot on New Year's Eve.

  "Your place is beautiful." She sounded surprised. And relieved.

  I'd driven her up in the Bronco. Her rental never would have made the steep grade.

  "Yeah," I agreed. "Hard not to be, with that vista."

  The sun set like a boiling rock, turning the Trinity Alps dark green. Faint remnants of gold from below the horizon rounded the rolling hills.

  The cabin sat on the edge of a steep drop, giving the back porch an enormous view of our valley, nestled in green twists and slopes. There wasn't another house in sight. The faint whiff of wood smoke was the only sign of other human habitation.

  "Do you mind the isolation?"

  "I've come to like it."

  She put her things in the room next to mine and returned to claim the armchair in front of the hearth. It was growing colder as the light outside died.

  I said, "Would you fire up the kindling in the fireplace? It's all set to go. The matches are by the hearth, on the log pile."

  She knelt to ignite the wood shavings and splints, baring a band of skin at the small of her back. The room filled with the aroma of apple wood and sage as the scrap caught. Celeste stood up and paused at the framed photos on the mantelpiece. She spotted her father in a group shot.

  "I don't have this one. Is this Team Thirty-one? I recognize a couple of faces."

  "Yes, some of it."

  "You guys ever get together?"

  I shook my head but she didn't see; she was still examining the photograph. "No," I said. "We don't."

  She looked back, holding my gaze for a moment, weighing something about me. I held up a bottle of fifteen-year-old whiskey. She nodded yes and I got down the cut-crystal glasses, bringing everything over to her. Nothing like kick-ass whiskey in a heavy tumbler. The fragrance alone revived me some. Celeste resettled in the armchair, covering up in a quilt.

  "Why do you think he volunteered to go back?" she said.

  "To get another crack at a field command, maybe. Career officers needed that on their resumés to advance. That and gongs."

  "Gongs?"

  "That's what GIs called medals. You needed gongs and a field command or you'd be out of the running for promotion and eventually out of the Army. The higher you went, the harder it got. It was like musical chairs."

  "So my mother was right. He was as ambitious as the rest of them."

  "General Westmoreland allotted six-month combat commands to as many officers as possible. He rationed them because the fight was going to be over right quick."

  "Did you think it would be done that fast?"

  "No, but they didn't ask me or other ordinary mortals."

  Her cheeks were rosy from the warmth of the fire. I knocked back my drink.

  "Whole regiments of North Vietnamese regulars came streaming across, accompanied by Chinese generals advising them. The local Viet Cong armed up too. No more improvised bombs made out of rice husks and sugar. Forty miles north of Saigon, the South Vietnamese lost three hundred men in one ambush, including four U.S. advisers. Just to make sure they got our attention, the Communists decapitated the Americans."

  "Good God. Why?"

  "Beheading was real popular. The VC decapitated local officials all the time and dumped their heads in the toilet. Burying people alive was big too. Four Americans beheaded, though—the message was clear. We weren't immune. It wasn't going to be a cakewalk if we were truly getting in the fight. The unwritten rules changed as well."

  "What rules?"

  "They'd never gone after American dependents: no attacks on wives or school buses. One afternoon in Saigon, two VC killed the MPs guarding a movie house and then rushed into the theater with a bucket full of arsenic sulfide and potassium chlorate they'd picked up in a pharmacy. The bomb wounded a lot of our civilians, killed an officer."

  I wedged the logs closer together with the poker and stood with my back to the fire. Wrapped in the quilt, she looked tiny.

  "They car-bombed our billets, restaurants, the embassy, set off a bomb at a baseball game out at Pershing Field. It was open season on Americans. Dependents were ordered out, the Marines and combat battalions in—two hundred thousand of us. There was no mistaking what was coming. The intelligence on the North Vietnamese elite clinched it."

  "What intelligence?"

  "That their local officials, their foreign minister, even the mayor of Hanoi—they were all sending their sons and daughters of military age out of the country."

  I banked the fire and unfolded the metal screen. The aroma of the fireplace mingled with her scent. I was wound up, mulling the lost crusade.

  "Well, Communism didn't win either," I said, sounding regretful. "The old corruption is eating the new Communist state alive." I raised my glass in a toast. "To each according to his greed."

  I slumped onto the couch. Even fatigued, she looked pink and delicate, her hazel eyes clear and penetrating, hair luxurious, cheeks perfect. Her teeth were rabbitty though, big, with a gap between the two in front. The imperfection seemed childlike and endearing.

  I asked if she wanted coffee; she said she did. I rose to make it, but she waved me back down. "Let me," she said.

  Celeste braided her hair while she waited for the water to boil. Been squatting in the woods too long, I thought. Horny at the proximity of a girl twenty-five years my junior. Or maybe apprehension was revving the hormones. Either way, my vision sparkled.

  She was efficient. The café filtre press was soon on the coffee table. She poured out our cups.

  "Your tour," she said, "when you served with my dad." She handed me a cup. "What happened in Cheo Reo?"

  I took a sip and didn't say anything.

  "If you're worried about sparing my feelings," she said, "don't."

  Had the time come for her to hear it?

  "I'm aware he was burned. Mom didn't listen to the warning not to open the coffin. My gran said it was two years before my mother slept through the night. What was the slang for it—crispy critt
er?"

  I stared into my coffee. "I'm sorry. Family shouldn't have to—"

  "Yes, we do. We do have to . . . even that." She pushed back her hair. "He was a husband, soon to be a father. How could he have been so cavalier?"

  "He wasn't," I said. "Your mother married a professional soldier. Your dad went back because that's where the war was. If she couldn't live with that . . ." I took a slug of java. "But honestly, I don't think I'm up to talking about—"

  She cut me off. "Out of fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and sixty-three casualties, do you know how many full colonels, like my father, died in Viet Nam?"

  I shook my head.

  "Eight. Pretty damn rare, wouldn't you say?"

  "Very."

  "Did you hurt a lot of people in the war, Erik?"

  "More than I wanted. Why?"

  "Do they haunt?"

  Something had shifted in her tone and my comfort level. Suddenly I felt like a hostile witness.

  "I'm not sure where you're going."

  "Some of your former comrades intimated my father didn't die as officially reported."

  "You mean—not in combat?"

  She froze, realizing what I might have let slip. "Are you suggesting he wasn't killed in action?"

  "Who did this intimating?" I said, evading the question.

  "It's not important. What's germane is they implied you were involved."

  I closed my eyes for a moment, tilting my head back.

  "Were you?" she said.

  "Was I what?"

  "Did you have any part in it?"

  "Not the way you seem to be thinking." I opened my eyes.

  "One person referred to you as Captain Sidney. Said you weren't who you appeared to be."

  "Maybe because I wasn't. Listen—" I held up a hand, stopping her as she was about to press me again. "If I tell you . . . you have to put it away and move on."

  "I'm not sure I can promise that."

  I went to my jacket hanging on the wall rack and slipped my wallet from the inside pocket. I took out the military scrip I'd carried since the sixties and unfolded the mauve and green "funny money" on the coffee table.

  "What's this?" she said, peering at the woman's profile printed in place of George Washington's on the military money.

  "You're a lawyer. It's a retainer."

  She let the peculiar-looking dollar sit on the low table between us.

  "You feel you need a lawyer?"

  "I need attorney-client privilege."

  "Why?"

  "There's no statute of limitations on what you want to know."

  Her face hardened; she was no longer anyone's child. Someday reached out and picked up the bill.

  1

  MISER GOT US rooms at the Five Oceans in Cholon and we went out to get reacquainted with the city. Saigon was still sordid and fabulous. Neither of us had eaten actual food since departing San Francisco so we indulged ourselves, feasting on lobster and salted crab at classy La Miral and then savoring small dishes of unimaginable flavors cooked in modest family restaurants with just a few tables in the yard, sampling morsels of eel grilled on stove carts in the street and unidentifiable meat smoldering on braziers yoked across the cooks' shoulders on chogie poles and lowered to the curb. We strolled on, flirting with all the other food on offer: shrimp from the Saigon River, sparrows roasted in oil and butter, frogs' legs, skewered snake, buffalo-penis soup, steamed mudfish, baked butterfish, shark. We finished at the open-air place near the Old Market that had cobra on the menu and bananas flambé for dessert. Both of us settled for espresso.

  We walked again under the brilliant crimson blossoms of the flamboyante trees, moved through the flower market and avoided clusters of Vietnamese draft dodgers who idled on shady street corners hustling hot watches. At the PX, GIs and the odd American deserter scored reel-to-reel tape recorders and electric fans for locals to resell at inflated prices. Chinese drug dealers scooped coke off sidewalk tables with elongated pinkie nails, and Macanese hoodlums carted bricks of cash to their moneychangers. Outside the British embassy, turbaned Gurkhas guarded the gates while, close by, street urchins hawked one-liter bottles of gasoline. Whatever lit your fire, Saigon had it all.

  Astrologers trading in futures, mama-sans extolling taxidermied civet cats and live bear cubs. Stick-thin men selling U.S. Army–issue rations and assault rifles, flak vests, toilet paper, jackets made from GI ponchos lined with speckled parachute silk. Whether it inflicted pleasure or pain, whatever you desired was yours. Hell, armored personnel carriers and helicopters if you had the cash, a howitzer for four hundred bucks, an M-16 rifle for forty, a woman for ten. Or a tooth yanked out curbside for a dime.

  We ambled past clubs with live bands imitating famous rock groups, and Cholon gangsters taking their leisure in open-sided billiard halls. Near the Central Market, refugees squatted in giant sections of stockpiled sewer pipe. We stepped around night soil and lean-tos on the pavement. Lights burned in MACV SOG and in General Westmoreland's old office on 137, rue Pasteur. The brass was working overtime.

  In the morning we put on our work clothes—civvies—and reported to the Headquarters Support Activity, Saigon (HSAS), office. A dozen of us worked out of the rickety place, not much more than a bunch of desks. We were special agents loaned out to HSAS by our various investigative and counterintelligence agencies—ONI, OSI, CIC, CID. U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, and us—U.S. Army, "El Cid." GI slang for Criminal Investigation Division; "Sidney" behind our backs. The work didn't make us popular with our fellows, who considered us barely better than snitches.

  No investigators were commissioned officers, although we frequently went undercover with officers' ranks. Our mandate was mainly to investigate crimes against U.S. personnel and property. Miser and I had been teamed up for a couple of tours, him an E-7 noncom, me a warrant officer, a rank halfway between the lowliest lieutenant and the highest-ranking sergeant. Early on we investigated the occasional homicide, but mostly we looked into the pilfering of supplies, scams like selling the U.S. military thousands of inedible eggs for thousands of American breakfasts, and the unexplained deaths of dozens of sentry dogs. As terrorist acts began to target U.S. personnel and dependents, the American head count rose steadily, along with our caseloads. We didn't get much support. Our little outfit had to improvise even as we found ourselves investigating suicides, rapes, security violations, even espionage and treason.

  Our boss, Major Jessup, gave us a perfunctory welcome-back and instructed us to trade our civvies for jungle fatigues and fly up to Pleiku to investigate a threat against a company commander who had called in artillery on his own position, earning him a medal for valor and a bounty on his head of eight hundred and seventy dollars. Not from the VC; from his own men, for shelling some of their buddies into hamburger. The brass hats loved their heroic young West Point star. Eighty-seven recent high-school graduates had pledged ten bucks apiece to see him dead.

  "Local talent in Saigon would've done it for fifty," Miser growled. "The kids could've saved their fucking pennies."

  "Never mind that, Sergeant," Jessup snapped.

  The U.S. Army wasn't about to charge nineteen-year-old survivors of horrific combat with mutiny and solicitation of murder. The solution was obvious; Major Jessup strongly suggested we put it into effect the moment we got to Pleiku: "Get his ass out of there!"

  "Yes, sir," we answered.

  The second case Jessup assigned us was out in the boonies and wasn't going to be anywhere near as simple or quick.

  A chunk of our work involved GIs' attempts to smuggle dope home: cannabis and heroin, both extremely high grade and insanely cheap. The purest scag went for a dollar or two a dose, commonly sold roadside by kids. A buck would buy you the quintessential experience of the exotic East: a dozen pipes in an opium den. Fifty dollars got you six pounds of marijuana, though most everyone bought rolled joints, ten for fifty cents, or special cartons of Salems—ten bucks instead of the two you'd pay at the PX. The Salems were pe
rfectly repacked by hand with opiated grass, and the carton artfully resealed so you couldn't tell it had ever been opened.

  All you had to do was step up to the perimeter wire anywhere holding a sprig of anything, and you'd be set upon by vendors of marijuana and heroin. Business indicators were all good. Mainlining GIs were on track to outnumber stateside addicts. Normally the South Vietnamese drug trade was off-limits, untouchable, none of our concern. Saigon was a smuggler's wet dream, as Miser often pointed out. We couldn't even arrest Vietnamese nationals who were stealing from American supply ships and American supply depots, much less the ones smuggling narcotics in and out of their own country. Besides, transporting and refining them was practically a South Vietnamese government enterprise. Which is why the second assignment came as a surprise.

  The major said, "We need you to bust up a drug operation in one of the Highland provinces." Miser and I exchanged glances, wondering if the major was serious. "Half the proceeds turn up like clockwork in the Hong Kong bank account of a Viet Cong front organization. Their cut's way too big to be just a tax or a toll. Which means the VC are in partnership up there—in business with somebody."

  He paused to see if he'd gotten our attention. He had.

  "Since the forties, the Communists have sold captured Lao opium to traffickers in Hanoi to help finance their arms purchases, and even bought quantities to sell. But actually growing dope ... that's new. They denounce the imperialist French for their government-sponsored drug dealing, but evidently the North Vietnamese need an infusion of U.S. dollars to buy supplies, so they've parked their ideology while they stock up on arms and ammo. You with me so far?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Good. The money the VC are banking is major. Ten times their usual five- or ten-grand rake-off. An informant puts this cash crop of theirs somewhere in Phu Bon Province."

  "Sir, do we know what kind of dope they're growing?" I said.

  "No, and I don't particularly care." Jessup assumed his best hands-on-hips command posture and looked us each in the eye. "No way we're going to wipe out their drug trade, that's for sure. The Vietnamese and their neighbors have been at it for five hundred years. Screw the dope. I don't care if they're growing pistachios. The higher highers don't want our guys getting the bang from those bucks. Slow the cash. They don't like their having so much capital. The buying power needs to be contained—at least for a while. Sabotage as much of the money as you can for as long as you can. And then bail."