Army Blue

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “I've got a real problem, Top,” said the Colonel.

  “That's what you was sayin’ last night, sir. You were soundin’ pretty low.”

  “It's Matt, Top. Somehow he's been charged with desertion in the face of the enemy. He called me at Benning a couple of days ago, and I got over here as fast as I could. Now I can't even find out where they're keeping him. When he called he said he was under arrest, whatever the hell that means in a combat zone.”

  “They probably got him in LBJ, sir. Up to Long Binh.”

  “I called up there first thing when I got in, and nobody has heard of him. Either they're lying or they've got some pretty sloppy record-keeping, or they've got him stashed someplace else. I don't know. I just don't know. After that, I called his unit up in II Corps and I couldn't get anybody in authority to come to the phone. Not the battalion CO, the brigade CO; I couldn't even get his company commander. I asked one of the clerks I talked to what was going on, and he said, ‘We've been told not to discuss Lieutenant Blue or anything about his unit, sir.’ Can you imagine? They've got lips buttoned up right on down to company clerks.”

  “Damn. I never heard of anything that could shut up a damn clerk. They're as full of nasty bile and bad-ass poop as a damn washerwoman.”

  “I know, Top. That's why I'm worried.”

  “Desertion . . . that's pretty serious stuff, sir. Do you know what happened?”

  “No. All I know is, Matt said he didn't do it. And he said things were crazy. He said I wouldn't believe what was going on.”

  “I don't doubt that one bit, sir. I don't believe the shit that's goin’ on with this war, sir. It's the damnedest thing I ever seen, and I've seen the better part of two wars ‘fore this one. I been three years in ‘Nam now, and I can tell you this: there's some weird shit happenin’ over here, sir. I didn't know nothin’ ‘bout it when we was here with the Battalion because we spent all our time in the boonies down in the Delta, but I sure as hell have been seein’ it and hearin’ ‘bout it this time.”

  “I don't know what I'm going to do, Top. I can't find him. And if I can't find him, I can't talk to him. And if I can't talk to him and determine what happened, I can't help him.”

  “Don't you worry ‘bout that no more, sir. Top's got a handle or two he can still crank when he's got a mind to. We'll find out where they got him by retreat today, sir. That I promise you. Time they lower the flags around here, we'll know where that boy is and we'll know what he done and we'll know what happened to ‘im.”

  “How are we going to do that, Top?” The Colonel sounded tired and exasperated, which he was.

  “I brought my stuff, sir. Like you said. Let's get us a bite to eat and slap back another of these here cheap beers and we'll get my stuff out and see what we can do.”

  “I sure as hell hope we can find him soon, Top. Every day that passes, Matt is one day closer to being court-martialed and facing the death penalty. We've got to get to him quickly. If we don't move fast, it may be too late. I can't let that happen to my son, Sarenmajor. Over the years I know there were times when I wasn't there for him. I can't let him down now.”

  “I know, sir.” The Sergeant Major put his hand on the Colonel's shoulder and squeezed. The old man was trembling. Sergeant Major Theodore Bennett had never seen an officer so upset he was trembling. Not in thirty-three years in the Army. But then, this wasn't the Army. This was something different. This was family.

  “I just hope we can find him before it's too late,” said the Colonel.

  The Colonel tried to smile at the Sergeant Major, an old Cavalry trooper, a man with whom he had literally shared a foxhole and dodged a bullet. He winked.

  There it was again, in Top's eyes . . . vibrating through the Colonel's shoulders. Hope. All he had was the Sergeant Major and his hope. Such a fragile thread from which to hang your dreams, on which to gamble your life and that of your son. He had to hurry before the thread frayed and broke his heart.

  12

  * * *

  * * *

  Danny Jannick was the kind of wiry little guy who gnawed at life like a terrier; once he got hold of something, nothing could make him let go. It had to do with his physical stature, of course. All his life he'd been the little guy: he was the last one picked in gym class for choose-up-sides touch football; they never passed to him in basketball and he never got a shot. As for varsity athletics, forget it. They even laughed at him the day he went out for track, bony arms and skinny legs jutting from his track outfit like cheap golf clubs. In track, your size wasn't supposed to matter. All you had to be was fast, and Danny Jannick was fast, but not in track.

  A little guy had to go at things harder than big guys if he was going to tear off his piece of life, and Danny Jannick started ripping away at life early and never stopped. In his little piece of the world there was a new definition for the term single-minded. Editors at PNS back in Frisco hated to work on his copy. If he took issue with something you'd changed, there was no stopping him. He'd flood you with cables, bury you in phone calls, weigh you down with poison-pen postcards. One editor even got a phone call late one night from a local ham radio operator. On the other end of the line, sailing through the air on short waves, was Danny Jannick. He had talked the local ham into patching the cross-Pacific transmission from the radio to the phone. The ham-radio call was emblematic of the Jannick Method. Once he got on your case, he'd come at you from every angle.

  From the heavens, even.

  When Jannick smelled a good story he was like a rabid dog with a mouthful of fresh blood, and right now he smelled one. Cathy Joice's reaction to the tip about Lieutenant Blue was classically intense, practically wild. He knew she would pursue all of the legitimate, aboveground angles in her distinctive, high-profile way. Thus it was now time for Danny Jannick to disappear.

  Jannick had disappeared into every big story he'd ever gotten. He had learned the trick from a photographer in Washington, D.C., with whom he had worked on a few stories for Rolling Stone. The photog was short, like Jannick, and beyond that, he was baby-faced. He got carded every time the two of them hit the D.C. bar scene. At thirty, he looked seventeen. When he hadn't shaved that day.

  Over the years the photog had learned a trick. He looked so young that he seemed completely unthreatening. He'd walk into a reception in Washington full of important dignitaries, he'd stand around listening to them, and soon he found they were talking to each other as if he weren't there. The thing was, he wasn't there. He had disappeared, turned into a piece of furniture, a lawn decoration, somebody's son, a tousle-headed teenage tourist with a camera around his neck. The dignitaries hardly noticed him. Anybody that young and innocent couldn't understand the importance of what was being said in his presence.

  Jannick watched him pull his disappearing act one afternoon when he accompanied the photog on an assignment from Time magazine to shoot an important political adviser to President Johnson who happened also to be gay. Jannick carried three bags of photographic equipment so he could go along on the assignment. He was little and he was young and he was just a photog's assistant, so he dropped out of sight, too, as soon as they entered the big man's office.

  The photog put the man at ease with a few initial words of banter, then he suggested the adviser go about his business while they set up the photographic equipment. The adviser buzzed his secretary and told her to start putting calls through again. He took one call from a Cabinet secretary—he made sure to mention his complete name before he started first-naming him in every sentence—then he took another from a senator. No name this time. Just “Yes, Senator,” and “No, Senator,” and “I'll get back to you on that, Senator.”

  Two more calls went through while they were adjusting lights. Then the important presidential adviser took a call that didn't appear to have a business purpose. He lapsed into a lisping Southern twang, a cross between Truman Capote and a bird dog. He talked to his friend for a good five minutes before hanging up, and when he did, the photog had to
remind him they were still there, waiting to get the shot.

  Jannick had learned to disappear that afternoon, and it was something he never forgot. All you had to do was go ahead and be the guy everyone had always ignored and shut out, and you were home free.

  It made sense that disappearing within the bowels of Saigon was easier than making yourself scarce in Washington, D.C. Vietnam was a country that in many ways didn't really exist. Every time you turned around and tried to establish that you had indeed seen what you thought you'd just seen, it wasn't there anymore. Something else was in its place. And the place itself had changed. And so had you. When you really sat down and tugged at the doors of the mental filing cabinet, trying to figure out what was going on, Vietnam popped out as the terminal example of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Everything is changed by the exercise of observing it, Heisenberg said.

  Over on the curving coast of Southeast Asia, they didn't need Heisenberg to tell them which way the wind was blowing. In Vietnam, nothing had ever been as it seemed. Neither was Danny Jannick. He seemed to be there, but he wasn't. He was somewhere else, somewhere you can't see him or hear him, but he's okay. So don't worry about him. Just go ahead and do your thing. Let the good times roll. He'll be along when the time is right.

  Now? Nah.

  Then? Maybe.

  When? You got me.

  Danny Jannick didn't play by conventional journalistic rules because he was not a conventional journalist. Thus, when he decided it was time for him to journey north into II Corps and find out what the hell had happened to Lieutenant Matthew Nelson Blue IV, the last thing he thought about doing was going over to the MACV public-relations office and checking in, securing from the clerks and jerks who had the job of packaging the ‘Nam news a pass to whatever theater of combat operations he wanted a ticket to.

  No, life for the slight and self-effacing Danny Jannick was much, much easier than it must have been for Dan Rather or Walter Cronkite or David Halberstam or Homer Bigart or Fox Butterfield. When Danny Jannick wanted to head north or south or east or west, he simply hied himself out to Tan Son Nhut and hung around the maintenance shack until he heard about a recently repaired chopper that was on its way back to whatever “front” it had limped in from. Jannick took his skinny carcass and his skimpy shoulder bag of personal belongings and sat in the chopper until it took off. When it landed, he got out. That was it.

  So when dawn broke, Jannick was already up and padding around his rooms at the Pension Gravois, admiring himself in the mirror. The way not to be noticed when you traveled out of the comparatively safe and unrestricted orbit of the Saigon/Bien Hoa/Tan Son Nhut vicinity was to costume yourself in a manner that distanced you as far as possible from the Epaulet-Shouldered-Khaki-Bush-Jacketed-Foreign-Correspondent-in-an-Exotic-Locale Look. This much Jannick accomplished without even trying. All he did was get up and slip into his jeans, Fillmore East T-shirt, and sneakers. With the addition of his United Airlines shoulder bag, he looked like a student from the Sorbonne who had seriously lost his way and was more to be pitied and helped out than warned away.

  The instinct that Jannick counted on arousing was the same one aroused by whipped puppies.

  There's a good boy. Come on over here and we'll give you something to eat and a warm place to sleep. Ye-e-e-e-s. Good boy. Come to Mama.

  Years of experience had yielded unto Jannick the secret within the secret of the journalism game. Everybody wants to be found out. The only thing is, they don't want to meet the guy who's doing it to them.

  Jannick made a quick call to his pal Specialist Fourth Class Thomas J. Calhoun over at MACV Personnel and got the name of Lieutenant Blue's unit. They were still up in II Corps, over near the Laotian border, searching and destroying, sweeping and mopping up. The Battalion was loggered in at a semipermanent base camp a few kliks north of Dak Sut, along the Ya Krong Bolah River. Jannick knew the Ya Krong. He had been in a chopper that lost power one afternoon and autorotated onto a sandbar on the river. They spent a nervous night on the sandbar waiting for a rescue chopper that came at midmorning the next day. Jannick swore he'd never go back. The Ya Krong was like all the rest of the rivers in Vietnam. It flowed brown and slow and nasty like an open wound to the sea. In its waters lurked a variety of tropical evils. Leeches. Snakes.

  Who could know the mysteries held in the depths of such a river? The way things were looking, Jannick was going to get another shot at the Ya Krong and its myriad evils after all.

  He caught a northbound chopper out of Tan Son Nhut with no problem. It turned out this one had been sent in to be fitted with new passenger seatcovers. The brigade commander wanted his name and unit crest embroidered on the canvas seats. This had been accomplished by employing six elderly Vietnamese women who reported for duty at the air base every day and spent ten hours working their embroidery needles through the thick canvas at a cost to the taxpayer of $100 per seatcover. There were four seats, four hundred dollars’ worth. Jannick reclined against the unit crest and yawned. It was a three-hour flight with two stops for refueling. He might even get in a nap before the chopper put down at Dak To, which was as close to the “front lines” of Dak Sut as he could get by air.

  They stopped at Phuoc Binh and Pleiku and reached Dak To about suppertime. The chopper put down at a forward-area brigade base camp commanded by the colonel who was desirous of helicopter-seat embroidery. By the time the Huey's skids scraped the dirt, Jannick was out the side door and gone into the maze of bunkers and hooches that characterized a base camp of that size. It took him twenty minutes to reach the base-camp perimeter, and with a few words to a bored GI standing guard at the camp gate, he beat it down the dirt road to Dak To.

  He spent the night swilling beer and swapping stories with some American engineers who had been more or less permanently employed for the past year rebuilding the bridges over the Ya Krong that the VC blew up about once a week. Jannick waited until it got light outside and caught a ride in the back of the engineers’ deuce-and-a-half on its way north to Dak Sut. By 9:00 A.M. he was snooping around the Triple Deuce base camp. They were in a stand-down after the sweep that had carried them into Laos.

  He talked to a few guys standing around their tracks drinking coffee. All the while he was looking around, scoping out the base camp. It didn't take Jannick long to locate the weapons platoon. They had been pulled into the battalion perimeter for the stand-down, a time when as many men as possible were removed from the tension of standing twelve-on-twelve-off watches, of living every day and night, if not in the enemy's lap, at least at his dinner table.

  Jannick sauntered over to the little semicircle of tracks that constituted the weapons platoon and struck up a conversation with a sergeant who looked old enough and tired enough to be the platoon sergeant. He was twenty-five, he looked thirty-five, and this was his second tour in Vietnam with a Mech-Infantry Battalion. Last time, he'd been stationed down in the Delta. He was glad as hell to be out of that morass of mud and bugs.

  Jannick oozed the conversation around to questions about the rest of the guys in the platoon, the platoon leader. What were they like? What was he like? Average dudes, the sergeant opined. About like any other collection of male American bodies in Southeast Asia. Some good. Some bad. Some indifferent. Platoon leader was an okay dude. A bit fresh. Other than the new-guy jitters, he was okay.

  This was a new platoon leader he was talking about?

  Yeah, new guy. Outta Salt Lake City. Mormon-type dude.

  What had happened to the old platoon leader?

  Transferred out of the Battalion, out of the brigade, out of the division, way he heard it. Him and the rest of the platoon. All twenty-five of them. Nobody really knew what it was about, and nobody in authority was talking. Something about a mutiny, some kind of revolt they were investigating. Very big deal. Not a man left of ‘em. No, sir.

  Jannick recoiled. Bumping along all this way by chopper and truck, cozying up against the dread Ya Krong once again ... all of it for no
thing? Not only had they removed Lieutenant Blue from the scene, they had managed to do the same with the twenty-four men left under his command? It was almost too fantastic to contemplate.

  Jannick slipped away from the platoon sergeant's track and was heading for the mess tent when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned and stared into a pair of red-rimmed eyes deeply set into a face only a mother could love.

  “I know what happened to the weapons platoon, man,” said the man with red eyes.

  “You do? How?”

  “I was in the weapons platoon, man. Bigger'n shit I was there for more'n a year.”

  “Really? How come you didn't get transferred with the rest of them?” Jannick watched the red-eyed man warily. Something about him looked seriously off-kilter. He looked like he'd been awake for about a week and had spent most of his time eating nails and drinking diesel and snorting gunpowder. He smelled like the inside of an automobile muffler and looked just about as dirty.

  “They missed me,” the man with red eyes said.

  “How did that happen?” asked Jannick. “That they missed you, I mean?”

  “I'm not here.”

  “What?”

  “I don't exist, man. Ain't on no mornin’ report, nothin’. They sent ‘em all away last week, but they missed Repatch, man. Bigger'n shit they missed my ass.”

  “You weren't on the platoon roster?”

  “Not on no platoon roster, not on no company mornin’ report neither.”

  “How did you accomplish that?”

  “Got two names.”

  “And one of them is Repatch.”

  “That's right, man. Other one is Fish.”

  “And Fish is on the morning report.”

  “That's right, man. But he ain't in the weapons platoon, neither. Repatch was in the weapons platoon. Fish works in supply, but they already got them one Fish in supply, and they think he's me.”