Red Flags

by Juris Jurjevics

  The light was white, the sky gray. A monsoon rain burst as I drove to her clinic. She wasn't there. The Bahnar head nurse looked stricken. She said I might find her at the sun hut by the river, and I drove on alone through the warm rain.

  Roberta wasn't under the eaves. I spotted her below, sitting at the river's edge. Mist rose from the large drops pummeling the ground and the water. The river boiled from the blows.

  I slid down the steep embankment and walked out to her through the tepid downpour. Rivulets snaked past her into the monsoon current. She might have been weeping. I sat down alongside and drew her against me. We sat like that for a long time.

  21

  RUCHEVSKY STOOD UNDER the overhang of the concrete walkway outside our room, pondering.

  "You know," he said, "it wouldn't have occurred to us to suspect anything if they'd just left them for dead."

  "You're probably right," I agreed. "Casualties on the battlefield. Who would have questioned anything?" I stared at his ankle boots. "I should have gone with him, should have had his back."

  "Yeah," Ruchevsky said, "if you had I wouldn't have to listen to this bullshit. Had his back... Get real. They were done for when they shut down their engine."

  "They were done the minute I tried to strong-arm Chinh with those bank figures of his wife's cousin."

  "Information I supplied you, if you're looking for someone to pin it on." Ruchevsky got to his feet. "We almost had him."

  "John. I'm sorry."

  He just nodded.

  As John had predicted, with the loss of Little John and the death of Tri, his web of informants was compromised beyond repair. He rolled up his operation and made ready to leave. Miser expected us to be recalled to Saigon at any moment. The daily routine went on, but the compound remained subdued after Bennett's death. Cohesion was done—over. Everyone withdrew into his own countdown of days left in country.

  Major Gidding escorted the colonel's body home. He stayed for the funeral at the request of COMUSMACV, meaning Westmoreland himself. In Washington, D.C., an immaculate Class A uniform was prepared, insignia perfectly placed, two different unit patches sewn on the shoulders, combat stripes on the sleeve, every badge and citation and medal ribbon assembled and exactly pinned, including his posthumous Silver Star. But the body was too badly burned to wear it. Instead the uniform was placed in the casket atop the bagged remains that bore an admonition against viewing. Gidding accompanied the widow to the cemetery at West Point. An honor guard fired three volleys at the graveside and folded the flag in the prescribed triangle. The commandant presented it to the widow with the thanks of a grateful nation.

  Miser was tired of doing all the gump work and started agitating for us to leave. Our work was done, he argued. The local VC commissar was dead and doing no business of any sort; at least part of the Viet Cong money supply had been pinched off for a while. And he was right. Whatever damage we could do to the drug business had been done. Chinh wasn't going to let us disrupt the works any further. John had called it: the VC account in Hong Kong disappeared. That window on their operation shut. Mrs. Chinh's cousin's account mysteriously closed too, no doubt converted to bullion—or emeralds. She'd left Taiwan and shown up in Vancouver, British Columbia, with a brand-new Canadian passport. Even if Chinh couldn't clean up that trail entirely, he'd come close. Whalen Lund went on an overnight trip to Nhatrang and never came back.

  We were in disarray. Outmaneuvered, out of commission, outta luck. Expertly picked off. At the bar one night Joe Parks and I tried to work out how to bring some justice down on Chinh's ass.

  "MACV headquarters in Pleiku seems a possible back door," Parks said.

  "Yeah, but we're not Colonel Bennett. We can't go right to the top. And that's what it would take."

  "No, we haven't the time to work our way up the chain of command. But we can present the situation in Cheo Reo like a security breach, go to the head of the intelligence section in Pleiku and tell him our story."

  I was beginning to get it. "And he'll sound the alarm that'll let us jump the queue."

  "Uh-huh. Just don't ever own up to it."

  We got a ride on the courier flight. Checkman saw us off and wished us luck. Visibility seemed unlimited in the unearthly light beneath a black front rolling in. At Pleiku we were met by an old pal of mine from the 5008 OSI detachment who loaned us a jeep. We presented ourselves at the MACV intel shop and were shown in to the major in charge. The major listened attentively, soon losing his relaxed demeanor.

  "Jesus H. Christ," he exclaimed when we'd finished, and he hurriedly called higher headquarters to get us in to see the MACV commander. He synopsized our story to an aide and we got penciled in. At ten of ten we sat in the anteroom, waiting for the general to come free. Out of his office strode a rotund Vietnamese general officer, starched and polished and looking imperial.

  "Chinh's boss," Joe whispered, "Major General Vinh Loc."

  The general swaggered past, trailing an entourage that grew as he crossed the room. He swept up aides like iron filings and exited with more than half a dozen in tow.

  "Coincidence, you think?" Joe said, sarcastically.

  A sergeant escorted us into the raw, unfinished office of the general's adjutant, a Lieutenant Colonel Blackwell. We reported and were waved into seats facing a teak slab laid across a pair of sawhorses: the man's desk. Overhead, beams and joists were exposed, as were the studs and two-by-fours in the walls. A nail driven into the wood in back of the colonel held his pistol belt, holstered sidearm, and canteen. A major wearing the JAG insignia of an Army lawyer straddled a chair backward.

  By now, Joe and I had the story of Chinh's treason down and we recounted it in record time.

  "Why amn't I hearing this from your acting CO?" Colonel Blackwell said.

  I said, "Major Gidding accompanied Colonel Bennett home and stayed for the funeral at General Westmoreland's behest. He's in transit now, sir, on the way back."

  "I see." Blackwell shook his head, looking displeased. "And the chief evidence supporting this ... murder allegation against Colonel Chinh is classified material found among captured enemy documents that point to treasonous actions on his part."

  "Yes, sir," I said.

  "They'd have to be produced," the JAG lawyer put in, "if you're going to try to convince anyone of the veracity of this story."

  "How's that going to happen?" Blackwell said. "They're classified. Their intelligence value trumps any other consideration."

  "Colonel—" the lawyer started.

  "There's no way the captured documents will be shared with our esteemed allies."

  Blackwell watched the statement slap us and waited for an outburst. Joe and I sat silent.

  The lawyer looked at us sympathetically. "You do realize everything you've put forth is conjecture and suspicion or circumstantial in nature."

  Blackwell sighed audibly. "Accusing friendlies of complicity in the death of a high-ranking American officer would undermine the U.S. effort in South Viet Nam, sow discord among allies, and embarrass our government and the government of South Viet Nam—not to mention pissing off General Loc."

  "The man's a prince," the JAG major said in a sardonic tone.

  Blackwell glanced over at the attorney. "He means that literally. He's cousin to the last emperor to rule Viet Nam, who's presently enduring the rigors of exile on the French Riviera with his many wives and concubines."

  Blackwell propped a foot on a wooden box and leaned back to stare at us, antsy and dissatisfied. We hadn't made his day.

  "General Loc's the commander, for Christ sake," Blackwell said. "We can't just accuse one of his top people of murdering an American officer and betraying his country. Though you've made me wish the son of a bitch dead."

  I said, "Are you ordering us to desist, sir?"

  "Captain, last week I had a report in here that two sergeants advising an ARVN company were killed in the field. No one else got so much as a scratch. ARVN called in a helicopter to come collect our
bodies and strolled home. The wounds on the Americans were ... suspicious. Single shots, close range. The ARVN didn't look like they'd even been in a fight. I like this situation even less."

  Blackwell's spit-shined combat boot came off the box as he sat up, hands flat on the slab. "No accusation of murder will be leveled against Colonel Chinh. Treason either. God help us, you will not discuss your suspicions or communicate them to your families or the press. You're officially gagged. Is that understood?"

  "Yes, sir," I said. Blackwell turned to Joe.

  "Sergeant?"

  "Understood, sir."

  "Incidentally," Blackwell said, and slid a single sheet of paper across to us. "The Vietnamese interpreter who worked for Colonel Bennett—name of Cho?—was tried for espionage at the sector headquarters in Cheo Reo and summarily executed this morning."

  Chinh had played us and won. Sunk us like pool balls, one after another. We'd pursued him like he was a corrupt official instead of a lethal foe, and he had had his way with us. Run the table. The NVA trails and base areas remained open for business, and so did he. We had done some temporary damage but surely the Chinhs would adapt, rebound. Already the housecleaning was well under way.

  Joe and I started at the Air Force compound bar because it opened early for the night shift coming off duty. We worked our way back toward the MACV bar, staggering in there in the middle of the afternoon. My OSI pal decided we needed food. He drove us all into Pleiku for a French-Vietnamese meal at a typical rundown establishment built on the Chinese design: restaurant fronting the dirt street, panels folded open, patrons propped on tiny stools, kitchen in the rear, alley beyond that, family quarters on the floor above. We sat right by the door and were treated to a sumptuous meal, complete with a magnificent French wine. All for eight bucks each. As sundown neared, we hit the road for the base: Joe curled up in back, my pal at the wheel, me next to him. Doing thirty miles an hour along the oil-treated roadway in an open jeep felt like racing. A solid front rolled toward us across the volcanic plain that looked like Nevada: the earth orange, the dark sky enormous. The odd light made everything ominous and eerily clear.

  "What's that noise?" Joe said. "I think your jeep's crapping out."

  "What noise?" my friend said, but Joe didn't respond. He mentioned it again as we drove up the side of the dormant volcano toward the MACV compound. We hit a pothole and I heard the clunk too.

  "Stop!" Joe yelled. We skidded to a halt—"Out! Out!"—and all three of us bailed.

  As we dove for the ditch, the spare gasoline can strapped to the back went up and took the gas tank with it. The gasoline in the jerry can had eaten through the adhesive of the tape holding down the arming spoon on the grenade, its disintegration expertly timed to get us before we reached the base. We had escaped its killing range, but the wire that was wound around the charge pitted Joe's back with razor-sharp fragments, leaving countless tiny black punctures that wept blood.

  The jeep was done for but the gate guards rolled out to help and we had Joe in the 71st Evacuation Hospital in minutes. Joe sat on a gurney clutching the one field dressing from his web-belt pouch, too dazed to decide which of the many punctures he needed to cover. It took hours to extract the bits of metal, and the docs couldn't even get them all. They'd join other such souvenirs floating around in his well-traveled hide and work their way out over time.

  "Joe," I said, still tipsy, "you're a living metaphor."

  By morning he was stabilized, by afternoon he was halfway to Tokyo, and I stood alone on a square metal landing pad on the barren slope well outside the perimeter wire, waiting for a chopper ride to Cheo Reo. I couldn't imagine a lonelier spot on the planet.

  Miser met me when I landed. Major Gidding was back and wasn't happy with what Joe and I had done in his absence, correctly concluding that we'd gone over his head, since we had correctly concluded he wasn't going to do anything except try to make his temporary command permanent. A shiny new lieutenant arrived the next day and took over my intel duties. I was relegated to the signal detachment.

  The following morning there was a funeral for Dr. Roberta. I attended the ceremony with her. We didn't speak much. She had announced she was going home, and the Montagnards threw the funeral for her to commemorate the bond they felt—and the loss. They built her a burial hut, interred a wooden egret in an elaborate ritual, and presented her with its twin. Best as I could make out, when she passed away sometime in the future, that second egret would carry her spirit back to her grave and she would remain among them forever.

  Toward the end she bent her head and trembled. "'We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep,'" she recited. "'We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.'" Then, barely audible, she mumbled, "Fuck."

  "Chia buon," the chief said to us. I share your sorrow. She left for Da Nang and the States a day later.

  Captain Cox sold Sergeant Grady's watch for four grand while on R and R and added the greenbacks to the Montagnards' cash box, their hedge against future catastrophes. The snake eaters hosted a Special Forces party out at Mai Linh in Grady's honor, an appropriately rowdy wake. One of the team celebrated his late comrade by sailing through the sky, fifty feet up, towed in a sling beneath a chopper, arms outstretched like Peter Pan, something Grady always liked to do on his birthday. Major Hopp did a flyby in his Cessna, trailing red and blue smoke canisters. Afterward the Berets kept their distance from MACV. They'd pick up their mail and supplies at the Cheo Reo airstrip but rarely came into the compound. The rains soon made the road pretty much impassable and we hardly saw them at all.

  Big John Ruchevsky announced that he was manifested on an Air America flight out in a week's time. I asked him to get me and Miser on the bird too. Neither John nor I was hungry that night so we retired to the bar. When we were good and drunk, and toasting the colonel and Little John and Tri, he confessed his rage at Chinh. The only satisfaction he'd been allowed was a quiet message to the National Police, one service to another.

  "Remember the white mice who came to town looking to arrest Little John?"

  "Sure. The guy with the gold Parker pen top and his little pal with the gold tooth."

  "They never made it back to Saigon."

  The day before John Ruchevsky and I were to leave, the two of us and Captain Cox met at the sun hut by the river one last time. We drew cards. I'm not sure if I won or lost, but I had the high card and set about my task. I'd already prepared ... in case. Back at the compound, I gathered up my stuff, and Miser and I donned ponchos and slipped out during the afternoon's downpour. He dropped me outside town and drove away.

  Draped and hooded, I made my way to a bare knoll, armed with a snub CAR-15 and carrying, in pieces, all twelve blessed pounds of the heavy rifle I had first fired in the Army. It was considered obsolete, inferior to the M-16 invented for us to employ in the jungle. Ridiculously touchy and easily jammed, the 16 fired a small-caliber bullet at an enormous velocity that carried it on a flat trajectory, straight, with no arc. The barrel was designed to give it a particular rotation that caused the round to tumble when it struck its target. Penetrating flesh, it somersaulted, building up tremendous pressure. When it exited it took a great deal of the person with it, leaving a devastating wound. The intent wasn't so much to kill as to injure, horribly, perhaps to circumvent international prohibitions against dumdum bullets, perhaps to make its American inventor a millionaire with his own private plane. It had managed both.

  Unlike the enemy's ammo, the M-16's bullet was light and easily deflected by so much as a stalk of tall grass in the jungle terrain. The round also lost velocity after two hundred yards. I needed it to carry farther, and I wasn't looking to wing or maim.

  So I had procured a rusted American M-14 no one would miss. I took it apart and cleaned and oiled and tested it. The M-14 fired a hefty .30-caliber cartridge, roughly the same as an AK and the Belgian FAL .50 that Ruchevsky had offered me. But the old American rifle delivered the round far more accurately than
the Kalashnikov, which got iffy after fifty yards, and the sights were better than the Belgian field piece—simple and easily zeroed in. The M-14 had an old-fashioned wooden stock and kicked like a mule, but it could put a bullet through an engine block.

  The rain stopped. I spent the late afternoon concealed at the base of the knoll, assembling the weapon, wiping and oiling the new ammunition. Though I'd only get one shot and wouldn't need a magazine, I loaded one anyway to make the rifle feel more familiar. I could smell the sheen on the cartridges and firing mechanism when I raised the stock to my cheek, testing.

  I had once mounted the guard at a serious military prison. The Sergeant of the Guard threatened that if a prisoner escaped, we would serve out the prisoner's time until he was recaptured. We were to shoot anyone who attempted flight. No warning shots. If we wounded or killed the man, our court-martial and a finding of guilty were automatic. As was the penalty: eleven cents. The cost of the bullet. Legally, no further charges could be filed.

  I felt serene, my hands steady. The waiting didn't make me impatient or anxious. It reminded me of the happy hours I'd spent sitting with my dad in that rickety blind in the back pasture, watching him reassemble a target rifle a piece at a time. I thought about my distant life in the States, from which I now felt as divorced as I did from my wife, and about the profession of arms that also seemed to be slipping away. I wondered why on my last leave I'd been afraid to cross bridges, and what I would do with myself if I ever made it home.

  I took a bit of a chance not using a scope, but I didn't really want to see his face. My one regret was that he'd never hear the shot, never know it was coming.

  It rained again. Afterward the sky grew opaque with indeterminate cloud cover the color of rusting iron: a light yellowish orange tinged with red. The odd light exaggerated everything. Colonel Chinh normally took his evening coffee on his private porch at the back of the wooden French-era building he occupied with his officers. He came out at his habitual time, dressed in his usual khaki, and hung up his caged songbird. Chinh stood enjoying a demitasse after his dinner, taking in the dramatic sky and the bird's song. No wind, no impediments of terrain, three hundred meters distant. His posture unmistakable.