This is, as I said, officially a park, but it’s also where everyone wants to erect something important; monuments, museums, memorials, and statues, and if this marble mania keeps up, the Mall will someday resemble the Roman Forum, packed full of temples to this and that. I’m not being judgmental — important people and events need a memorial or a monument. I’ve got my memorial: the Wall. It’s a very good memorial because it doesn’t have my name on it.
The sun was lower, the shadows were longer, and it was very still and quiet, except for the snow crunching under my feet.
I glanced at my watch and saw it was ten minutes to the appointed hour. Herr Hellmann, like many of his ethnic group, is fanatical about punctuality. I mean, I don’t like to generalize about races, religions, and all that, but the Irish and the Germans don’t share the same concept of time.
I picked up my pace and headed north around the reflecting pool. My butt was starting to drag, and the cold air was making my lungs ache.
As I crossed the landscape of Constitution Gardens, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial statues came into view: three nurses clad in jungle fatigues, around some wounded guy I couldn’t yet see.
About a hundred yards farther toward the Wall was the statue of the three servicemen — three bronze guys in jungle fatigues near a flagstaff.
Beyond the two groupings of bronze statues was the black wall itself, highly contrasted against the white snow.
The Wall is probably the most visited monument in Washington, but there weren’t many people around on this cold weekday. As I got closer, I had the sense that the people who were there, staring hard at the Wall, were people who needed to be there.
A solitary man stood out from the sparse crowd; it was Colonel Karl Hellmann, dressed in a civilian trench coat, wearing a snap-brim hat, and, of course, looking at his watch, probably mumbling to himself in his slightly accented English, “Vhere is dis guy?”
I slowed my pace so as not to alarm my former boss with the sight of me running full tilt toward him, and when I was on the path that runs parallel to the Wall, about twenty yards from Herr Hellmann, a church bell chimed somewhere, then a second chime, and a third. I slowed to a walk and came up behind Karl Gustav Hellmann, just as the fourth bell chimed the hour.
He sensed my presence, or perhaps saw me in the reflection of the black wall, and without turning, he said, “Hello, Paul.”
He seemed delighted to see me — or sense me — though you couldn’t tell how thrilled he was. If nothing else, I was right on time, and this puts him in a good mood.
I didn’t reply to his greeting, and we both stood, side by side, looking at the Wall. I really wanted to walk off the run, but I remained standing, trying to catch my breath, clouds of fog coming out of my nostrils like a horse, and the sweat starting to get cold on my face.
So, we stood there, silently getting to know each other again after a six-month separation, sort of like dogs sniffing each other to see who’s top dog.
I noticed that the section of the Wall before which we were standing was marked 1968. This is the largest expanse of the Wall, 1968 being the unhappy year of the highest American casualties: the Tet Offensive, the Siege of Khe Sanh, the Battle of the A Shau Valley, and other lesser-known but no less terrifying engagements. Karl Hellmann, like me, was there in 1968, and he knew of some of these places and events firsthand.
The homefront wasn’t so terrific in 1968 either: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the campus riots, the urban riots, and so forth. Bad year all around. I understood why Hellmann had put himself in front of 1968, though I didn’t understand why we were here in the first place. But, old army guy that I am, I never speak to a superior officer until spoken to. Sometimes not even after I’m spoken to, like now. For all I gave a shit, we could stand there in complete silence until midnight.
Finally, Karl said, “Thank you for coming.”
I replied, “It sounded like an order.”
“But you’re retired.”
“Actually, I resigned.”
“I don’t care what you did. I made it a retirement. That’s much more pleasant for everyone.”
“I really wanted to resign.”
“Then we couldn’t have had that nice party — the one where you read your letter of reprimand to everyone.”
“You asked me to say a few words.”
Hellmann didn’t respond, but said, “So, you look very fit.”
“I should. I’ve been jogging all over Washington, meeting people at monuments. You’re the third today.”
Hellmann lit a cigarette and observed, “Your sarcasm and bad sense of humor haven’t changed.”
“Good. So, if I may ask, what’s up?”
“First, we need to exchange pleasantries and news. How have you been?”
“Terrific. Catching up on a lot of reading. Hey, do you read Danielle Steel?”
“Who?”
“I’m going to send you a book. You like chili?”
Hellmann drew on his cigarette, probably wondering what possessed him to contact me.
“Let me ask you, Paul, do you think you’ve been unfairly treated by the army?”
“No more so than a few million other guys, Colonel.”
“I think the pleasantries are finished.”
“Good.”
“Two administrative things. First, your letter of reprimand. This can be removed from your file. Second, your retirement pay. This can be computed differently, which could be a considerable amount of money over your expected life span.”
“Actually, my expected life span got longer when I left the army, so the smaller amount works out okay.”
“Do you want to know more about these two items?”
“No. I smell trouble.”
So, we both stood there in the cold, sniffing the air, thinking five or six moves ahead. I’m good at this, but Karl is better. He’s not quite as bright as I am, certainly not as glib, but he thinks deep and long.
I actually like the guy. I really do. In fact, to be honest, I was a little hurt when I never heard from him. Maybe he was annoyed over my silliness at the retirement party. I’d had a couple, but I vaguely remember doing an impression of a Prussian field marshal named, I think, von Hellmann.
Finally, Karl said, “There is a name on this wall of a man who was not killed in action. A man, who was, in fact, murdered.”
I did not reply to that startling statement.
Karl asked me, “How many men do you know on this wall?”
I stayed silent for a moment, then replied, “Too many.” I asked him, “How many guys do you know here?”
“The same. You had two tours of duty in Vietnam. Correct?”
“Correct. The ’68 tour, then again in ’72, but by that time, I was an MP, and most of my fighting was with drunken soldiers outside Bien Hoa Airbase.”
“But the first time… you were a frontline infantryman… You saw a good deal of combat. Did you enjoy it?”
This is the kind of question that only combat veterans could understand. It occurred to me that in all the years I’ve known Karl, we never spoke much about our combat experiences. This is not unusual. I looked at him and said, “It was the ultimate high. The first few times. Then… I became used to it, accepted it as the norm… then, in the last few months before I went home, I got very paranoid, like they were trying to kill me personally, like they weren’t going to let me go home. I don’t think I slept the last two months in-country.” We made eye contact.
Karl nodded. “That was my experience as well.” He stepped closer to the Wall, focusing on individual names. “We were young then, Paul. These men are forever young.” He touched one of the names. “I knew this man.”
Hellmann seemed unusually pensive, almost morose. I guess it had something to do with where we were, the season, the twilight and all that. I wasn’t particularly chipper myself.
He took out a gold cigarette case and matching lighter. “Would you like one?�
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“No, thanks. You just had one.”
He ignored me, the way smokers do, and lit up another.
Karl Gustav Hellmann. I didn’t know much about his personal life, but I knew that he grew up in the ruins of postwar Germany. I’ve known a few other German-American soldiers over the years, and they were mostly officers, and mostly retired by now. The usual biography of these galvanized Yankees was that they were fatherless or orphaned, and they did chores for the American Army of Occupation to survive. At eighteen, they enlisted in the U.S. Army at some military post in Germany, as a way out of the squalor of the defeated nation. There were a good number of such men in the army once, and Karl was probably one of the last.
I wasn’t sure how much of this specific biography applied to Karl Hellmann, but he must be very close to mandatory retirement, unless there was a general’s star in his immediate future, in which case he could stay on. I had the thought that this meeting had something to do with that.
He said to me, or maybe to himself, “It’s been a long time. Yet sometimes it seems like yesterday.” He looked at the Wall, then at me. “Do you agree?”
“Yes, 1968 is as clear as a slide show, a progression of bright silent images, frozen in time…” We looked at each other, and he nodded.
So, where was this headed?
It helps to know where it started. As I mentioned, I’m Boston Irish, South, which means working-class. My father was a World War II vet, like everybody else’s father in that place and time. He did three years in the army infantry, came home, married, had three sons, and worked thirty years for the City of Boston, maintaining municipal buses. He once admitted to me that this job was not as exciting as the Normandy invasion, but the hours were better.
Not too long after my eighteenth birthday, I received my draft notice. I called Harvard regarding a spot in their freshman class, and a student deferment, but they pointed out, rightly, that I’d never applied. Same with Boston University, and even Boston College, where a lot of my coreligionists had found asylum from the draft.
So, I packed an overnight bag, Dad shook my hand, my younger brothers thought I was cool, Mom cried, and off I went by troop train to Fort Hadley, Georgia, for Basic Training and Advanced Infantry Training. For some idiotic reason, I applied for and was accepted to Airborne School — that’s parachute training — at Fort Benning, also in Georgia. To complete my higher education in the field of killing, I applied for Special Forces Training, thinking maybe the war would run out before I ran out of crazy schools, but the army said, “Enough. You’re good to go, boy.” And soon after Airborne School, I found myself in a frontline infantry company in a place called Bong Son, which is not in California.
I glanced at Karl, knowing that we’d been over there at about the same time, having traveled very different roads to that war. But maybe not so different after all.
Karl said, “I thought it would be good if we met here.”
I didn’t reply.
After Vietnam, we both remained in the army, I think because the army wanted us, and no one else probably did. I became an MP and served a partial second tour in Vietnam. Over the years, I took advantage of the army college extension program and received a B.S. in Criminal Justice, then got into the Criminal Investigation Division, mostly because they wore civilian clothes.
I became what’s known as a warrant officer: a quasi-officer with no command responsibility, but with an important job, in this case, a homicide detective.
Karl took a slightly different and more genteel route, and went to a real college full-time on the army’s nickel, getting some half-assed degree in philosophy while taking four years of Reserve Officers Training, then re-entering active duty as a lieutenant.
At some point, our lives nearly touched in Vietnam, then converged at Falls Church. And here we were now, literally and figuratively in the twilight, no longer warriors, but middle-aged men looking at the dead of our generation spread out in front of us; 58,000 names carved into the black stone, and I suddenly saw these men as kids, carefully carving their names into trees, into school desks, into wooden fences. I realized that for every name in the granite, there was a matching name still carved somewhere in America. And these names, too, were carved in the hearts of their families, and in the heart of the nation.
We began walking, Karl and I, along the Wall, our breaths misting in the cold air. At the base of the wall were flowers, left by friends and family, and I recalled that the last time I’d been here, many years ago, someone had left a baseball glove, and when I saw it, before I knew what was happening, tears were rolling down my face.
In the early years of the memorial, there had been a lot of such things left at the Wall: photos, hats, toys, even favorite foods, like a box of Nabisco graham crackers, which I saw that time. Today, I noticed, there weren’t any personal items, just flowers, and a few folded notes stuck in the seams of the Wall.
The years have passed, the parents die, the wives move on, the brothers and sisters don’t forget, but they’ve already been here and don’t need to return. The dead, young as they were for the most part, didn’t leave many children, but the last time I was here, I met a daughter, a lady in her early twenties, who never knew her father. I never knew a daughter, so for about ten minutes, we filled a little of the emptiness in each other, the missing parts, then we went our separate ways.
For some reason, this made me think of Cynthia, of marriage, children, home and hearth, and all sorts of warm and fuzzy things. If Cynthia were here, I might have proposed marriage, but she wasn’t here, and I knew I’d be myself again by morning.
Karl, who had probably been thinking similar thoughts about war and peace, mortality and immortality, said, “I try to come here once a year, on August 17, the anniversary of a battle I was in.” He stayed silent a while, then continued, “The battle of Highway 13… Eleventh Armored Cavalry, the Michelin rubber plantation. You may have heard of it. A lot of people around me were dying. So, I come here on August 17, and say a prayer for them, and a prayer of thanks for myself. It’s the only time I pray.”
“I thought you used to go to church every Sunday.”
“One goes to church with the wife and children.”
He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask. We turned and walked back the way we came.
He said, in a different tone of voice, “So, are you curious about the man who was murdered?”
“I may be curious. But I really don’t want to know.”
“If that were the case, you’d leave.”
“I’m being polite, Colonel.”
“I would have enjoyed that politeness when you worked for me. But as long as you’re being polite, hear me out.”
“If I listen, I can be subpoenaed at some future judicial proceeding. Says so in the manual.”
“Believe me, this meeting and this conversation never took place. That’s why we’re here, not in Falls Church.”
“I already figured that out.”
“May I begin?”
I was on solid ground now; the next step was a greased slope. There was not a single good reason in the world that I could think of for me to listen to this man. But I wasn’t thinking hard enough. Cynthia. Get a job, get a life, or whatever she said.
Karl asked, “May I begin?”
“Can I stop you anytime I want?”
“No. If I begin, you listen, I end.”
“Is this a criminal case?”
“I believe homicide is criminal, yes. Do you have any other stupid questions?”
I smiled, not because of the insult, but because I was getting on his nerves. “You know what? To prove how stupid I really am, I’ll listen.”
“Thank you.”
Karl had walked away from the Wall toward the Women’s Memorial, and I walked with him. He said, “It has come to the attention of the CID that a young lieutenant, who is listed as killed, or perhaps missing in action, was in fact murdered in the city of Quang Tri, on 7 February 1968, during
the Tet Offensive battle for that city.” He added, “I believe you were in Quang Tri Province at that time.”
“Yes, but I have an alibi for that day.”
“I only mention that as a coincidence. In fact, your unit was some kilometers away from the provincial capital of Quang Tri City on that day. But you can appreciate the background, and visualize the time and place.”
“You bet. I also appreciate you checking my service records.”
Hellmann ignored this and continued, “I was, as I said, with the Eleventh Armored Cavalry, stationed at Xuan Loc, but operating around Cu Chi at about that time. I don’t remember that particular day, but that whole month during the Tet Offensive was unpleasant.”
“It sucked.”
“Yes, it sucked.” He stopped walking and looked at me. “Regarding this American lieutenant, we have evidence that he was murdered by an American army captain.”
Karl let that sink in, but I didn’t react. Now, I’d heard what I didn’t want to hear, and now I was in possession of a Secret. Details to follow.
We stared at the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, the three nurses, one tending to the wounded guy lying on sandbags, one kneeling close by, and the other looking up at the sky for the medevac chopper. The four figures were in light clothing, and I felt cold just looking at them.
I said to Karl, “These statues should be closer to the Wall. The last person a lot of those guys over there saw or talked to before they died was a military nurse.”
“Yes, but perhaps that juxtaposition would be too morbid. This man here looks to me as though he will live.”
“Yeah… he’s going to make it.”
So we stayed silent awhile, lost in our thoughts. I mean, these are statues, but they bring the whole thing back again.
Karl broke the silence, and continued, “We don’t know the name of the alleged murderer, nor do we know the alleged murder victim. We know only that this captain murdered this lieutenant in cold blood. We have no corpse — or I should say, we have many corpses, all killed by the enemy, except the one in question. We do know that the murder victim was killed by a single pistol shot to the forehead, and that may narrow down the name of the victim based on battlefield death certificates issued at that time. Unless, of course, the body was never found, and the victim is listed as missing in action. Are you following me?”
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