Red Flags

by Juris Jurjevics

  It was simple. I'd dismantle the rifle, scatter the pieces in the swollen river, and walk away. No South Vietnamese was going to come out after me in the dusk. John would pick me up on the road and I'd spend our last night in Cheo Reo at his place.

  The sights fit him exactly, head to toe. I eased the tip of the sighting post down to the middle of the body mass and slowly exhaled as if blowing away dandelion seeds. Then brought the front blade up to align with his head.

  Epilogue

  THE WINTRY SKY grew lighter. Celeste Bennett sat without speaking, her forehead in her hands. She took a deep breath and sat up straight.

  "Were you ever suspected?" she said.

  "Officially? No. Though my boss in Saigon, Major Jessup, had some choice remarks for me off the record, and the brass were clearly uneasy with the whole situation. I ran into Colonel Blackwell at a supper club in Saigon some months later and he flat-out asked if I'd done it."

  "What did you tell him?"

  "I said entertaining the possible complicity of friendlies in the death of a high-ranking Vietnamese officer and civil official could only undermine our efforts in South Viet Nam, sow discord among allies, and embarrass our governments."

  "What did Blackwell say to that?"

  "Nothing. Just stood me drinks. After the second round he said your dad deserved better. I said as how I agreed."

  Celeste pushed back her hair. "What happened to them all? Miser? Checkman? The others?"

  "Checkman got sent to the Army's language-immersion course at Monterey and went back to Viet Nam as an interpreter. Had two kids with a Vietnamese woman and made the mistake of marrying her five years into their relationship."

  "Mistake?"

  "Sure. Because the instant he did, the Army notified him that she and the kids were henceforth American dependents and couldn't remain in the country. Never mind that they were Vietnamese. The Checkmans left with their kids."

  "Miser?"

  "Miser, last I heard, was running a bar in Bangkok and sponsoring an annual film festival."

  "And your friend Ruchevsky?"

  "Big John was transferred elsewhere in country and distinguished himself. Sometime later he finally got to Eastern Europe, which is what he'd trained for. Once a year I'd get a postcard, never from the same place twice. His work remained covert and unsung but he seemed happy enough doing it. He lives in Boston now, spends part of each year in the old country, visiting his Ukrainian cousins. Took his father's ashes back a few years ago."

  "And Captain Cox?"

  "Cox I ran into in Las Vegas. He was there for a Special Forces reunion. We caught up while his former colleagues rappelled down the side of the hotel, scaring the hell out of unsuspecting guests, then went to one of those swank shooting galleries just off the Strip and fired Soviet assault weapons all night. We were still talking when they got back."

  "Did he stay in the Army?"

  "Cox went home after his Mai Linh tour and was assigned to Special Forces at Fort Bragg as an instructor. After Martin Luther King was killed, they were called out for riot-control duty in Baltimore. An Army colonel ordered them to rip off their shoulder patches and remove their berets, like they were something shameful. The Pentagon didn't want it known that elite troops were being deployed against American citizens. Occupying a U.S. city upset Cox enough. Hiding his beret and Special Forces insignia was the last straw. He resigned his commission. Green Beret alumni help sponsor a community in North Carolina for the few Montagnards who made it out, and he did that for a while. Occasionally they corral some congressman or senator and repatriate a few more from refugee camps in Laos, where Yards sometimes show up."

  I said, "Do you remember Sergeant Sprague, the Special Forces medic at Mai Linh who couldn't leave the A camp to deliver the breech birth?"

  "Vaguely."

  "He left the Army but went back to Viet Nam with USAID, back to Cheo Reo. South Viet Nam started to unravel in March of seventy-five. The NVA went after the Highlands again, built a secret road to Ban Me Thuot—as they'd done at Dien Bien Phu—and seized the town. The South Vietnamese Army fled Pleiku in hundreds of trucks but couldn't continue south on Fourteen because it was blocked at Ban Me Thuot. So they all turned off onto Road Seven. It ran like Broadway, cutting diagonally through the province, through Cheo Reo. The town just exploded as the huge lawless mob hit. The retreat was a rout, civilians and soldiers mixed together, shelled by armor and gunned down by NVA. Sprague sent the Montagnards on a march to the coast and got himself to Saigon, where he said he extracted a promise from the U.S. embassy to send a ship to pick up the tribespeople."

  "So a lot of them got out."

  I shook my head. "They waited and waited. No boat ever came."

  "Not our finest hour."

  "No."

  "What happened to the Montagnards who were left behind?"

  "Nothing good. The North Vietnamese had guaranteed them autonomy after the war."

  "But they never got it."

  "No. Hanoi reneged completely. Vietnamese settlers flooded the Highlands. They're converting the plateaus to rice paddies and fields, cutting down jungle and pushing the Yards aside. The leadership negotiated a ruinous deal with China to let them mine for ore in the Highlands."

  "Not plutonium, I hope."

  "Aluminum. Billions of dollars' worth. Open pit. It will make a few comrades very rich, destroy a lot of lives. The Highlanders are protesting. The Communist government keeps the Yard villages under surveillance, quashes anyone who resists."

  A ray of morning light cut the room and haloed her hair.

  "The Montagnards fought the Communists for another dozen years after Saigon fell. I always pictured them carrying on with Grady's stash and all the equipment they appropriated when ARVN collapsed."

  "And you?" she said.

  "Me? I stayed in for a while. But things went steadily downhill. The war got stupider. Morale plunged. The enlisted men just quit obeying orders, stopped believing. A lot of fed-up career soldiers left the military to avoid getting sent back. Soon it was just hard-core lifers and teenagers going over, officers looking to get their promotion tickets punched and pick up some gongs. Our government got desperate for troops."

  I looked past her at the black silhouette of the mountains.

  "When the secretary of defense ran out of kids to conscript, the Pentagon developed a brilliant hard sell for getting GIs to extend their service commitments. They'd helicopter reenlistment teams to especially bad battlefields right after the action ended, with the ground still smoking, a moment when a lot of guys would've sold their souls to get away from the body bags and the blood—do just anything not to be there. Any soldier who signed on for another three-year hitch was promised specialized training that would put him in the rear. They'd escort the guy straight to their chopper without so much as a goodbye to his friends. They were evil scenes to witness. Men slinking away, humiliated, shaking. I stuck around for a while but my heart wasn't in it. I came home and saw it was a merciless war for some of us and another evening-news story for the rest. They didn't even waste rhetoric on us, much less look to our wounds."

  "You left the Army."

  "I was in Los Angeles on a furlough and went for a walk on Rodeo. Stopped at a store window to look at a female mannequin. It had on a sun helmet with a small red star on the brim, and an olive-colored NVA uniform—shirt buttoned to the throat—belted with a bandoleer of linked seven-point-six-two rounds, polished like gold. I quit the next day."

  "Listen," she said. "I want to thank you for telling me."

  "He was a fine man, Celeste. I hope I haven't tarnished his memory for you."

  "Just the opposite. For the first time I feel like I know him."

  "I'm wondering if you feel you need to share all this with your mother."

  "She died eight years ago."

  "I'm sorry to hear that."

  "Yeah. Me too. She was difficult, but it's a lot bigger, lonelier world without her."

  "Brea
kfast?"

  The picture window looked out over the road up from the valley. The winter sky was backlighting the mountains in the distance. The peaks were hazy and you couldn't see terribly far. But even half hidden, they were beautiful.

  "It's morning," she said, squinting at the window.

  "Yeah."

  "Let me do something." She rose, arms wrapped around herself for warmth.

  "Make some more coffee," I said, "and I'll handle the rest. How do you like your eggs?"

  I was efficient in the kitchen after all these years of involuntary bachelorhood and had rye toast, eggs, and bacon laid out on the dining table in no time. The cooking warmed the room.

  "Tuck in," I urged. She didn't really need the encouragement. As we ate, a red band rimmed the highest ridges, and soon the first rays projected long shadows at us from out of the pine woods below the house.

  Celeste said, "I'm a little surprised she gave up her clinic and left."

  "Dr. Roberta? Yeah. She got the team's new medic to take over the clinic and she worked to raise money for it, but she never went back. Things caught up to her—other responsibilities. She resumed her career, had a child."

  "She found someone. I'm glad."

  "Not exactly. I don't think she ever got over your dad. She never married."

  "You stayed in contact."

  "After a fashion. She's director of public health at a teaching hospital. In San Francisco."

  I went to the trove of framed pictures, took down an old photo, and brought it back to the table.

  "Her daughter, Denise. At six."

  I took a tiny notepad from my shirt pocket, and the small Swiss ballpoint I habitually kept with it. When I finished writing, I tore the page out for her.

  "What's this?"

  "Denise's address. She lives not far from her mom, in Novato. Just north of Frisco."

  Celeste looked puzzled. "Why are you giving me—?"

  "I thought you might look her up, since you're heading south anyway."

  "Why?"

  "You've never met your sister. Maybe it's time."

  I hadn't ever made anyone cry so fast.

  "Sister?" Her voice wavered.

  "Yeah. She has a child herself now. I guess that makes you an aunt."

  She clutched the paper, staring at the address, the name, the fact of it sinking in.

  "That's why Roberta left," she said. "She was pregnant."

  Celeste sat crying quietly. When she'd recovered herself, she said, "Thank you, Erik Rider."

  I drove her back down to her car. The day was starting out pasty, but I knew the weather in the mountains. It would be crisp and sparkling by noon. I gave her a badly folded map of northern California and reminded her to go slow on twisty 36. Once she reached the ocean, the Pacific Coast Highway would take her the rest of the way. She hugged me with that thin body and drove off.

  It was a long haul to Novato. The road along the coast was only two lanes and full of dips and curves. But I had a feeling she'd drive straight through.

  Author's Note

  That there is so little fiction in Red Flags is owed to the generosity of many. I am indebted to the veterans who helped me remember and who offered their own memories of what they experienced and witnessed during their time in country. Most especially Harry Pewterbaugh, George Ruckman (who loved Vietnam and stayed seven years), Jeff Barber (who left his leg there), supermarksman Rick Stolz, Jerry Rowland (who just missed boarding the fateful chopper), and Ellsworth "Little Smitty" Smith. Our local missionary Robert Reed, who devoted thirteen years of his life to the Montagnards, also graciously shared his memories of difficult days and corrected some key details.

  It is Harry's theory that we all started looking for one another once we hit sixty, and I think he's right. The vets' online forums surge with floods of searchers. Three of us met up in California. Soon afterward, we located two more of our brethren and visited by phone. Rick I visited in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, one Fourth of July as his son deployed to the new counterinsurgency wars in the Middle East. The Internet made the reunions possible and also allowed me to connect with Vietnam veterans who served before and after we did. My thanks to them all.

  Augmenting these memories is a cache of more than a thousand volumes of nonfiction and fiction, many declassified documents, maps, downloads from a wide array of archives and websites, learned monographs, and a host of memoirs. Most memorable among them: Hilary Smith's self-published Lighting Candles and Lady Borton's wonderful translation of Dr. Le Cao Dai's The Central Highlands: A North Vietnamese Journal, issued by the Gioi Publishers, Hanoi (2004).

  Thanks too to editor Thomas Bouman of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for his sensitivity to the subject of the Vietnam Conflict; to Beth Burleigh Fuller for coordinating so ably the many steps required to actually produce the book; to Tracy Roe for saving me endless embarrassment with her brilliant copyediting; to publicists Christina Mamangakis and Hannah Harlow for their thoughtful promotional efforts on its behalf; and to Laurie Brown for so capably leading her sales and marketing troops to victory.

  For those still suffering guilt incurred during the Vietnam era, I offer this salve: Donate online to the Vinh Son Montagnard Orphanage in Kontum at friendsofvso.org. Or send a check to Friends of Vinh Son, P.O. Box 9322, Auburn, California 95604.

  Lastly, the civilian called John Ruchevsky in these pages seems to have come in from the cold and resettled in the States. I hope to thank him personally when I drop by with a copy of this story, which he in great part inspired. I would call ahead, but of course his number is unlisted.