It was Greg who responded to Z this time. “Thanks,” he said from somewhere inside his sleeping bag. We must have woken him up.
“And all that business you kids were talking about in the car,” Z continued. “Sounded like some hard stuff. Wasn’t anything I heard about before, but things happen in war like your uncle said — things that aren’t supposed to happen but they do, and you can’t always know the reasons. That doesn’t mean everybody ought to get away with doing whatever they want. I’m not saying that. Criminal stuff like what happened at My Lai, you can’t let that sort of thing go. You have to hold people accountable, you know? But you have to forgive people, too. At least some. And you have to forgive yourself for some of the things you have to do. That’s all I’m saying.”
We were all quiet for a minute until I said, “Yes, sir. I mean, yes, Sergeant.”
Greg asked another question. “Is there anything else you can remember, since we found out who you are and all? I mean, like where you happened to end up being missing in the war.”
“Yeah,” I joined in. “And were you married or anything like that?”
“And who’s Fish?” Greg added.
“Not so fast,” Z said, waving his hands — and his unlit cigar with the chewed-up end. “And yeah, actually there is something.”
He paused, like he was collecting his thoughts together, and then he let out what sounded like a deep breath, though I guess ghosts don’t exactly breathe.
“There was Philomena,” he said. “And the nugget. When I saw my name there on The Wall, and then where I was from, it got me thinking about what else was back there — or rather who else. And so it came to me — their names and all.”
“Philomena?” Greg asked.
“The nugget?” I asked.
“Right,” he said. “My wife. And last I knew, she was pregnant. In our letters we took to calling the baby ‘the nugget’ since we didn’t know if it was a girl or boy yet.”
“Which one was it?” I asked. “I mean, once it was born.”
“Never got to find out,” Z said. “Philomena was probably about seven months along when I, well, you know.”
Z’s voice had picked up a sad echo, and it was already fading out, too, getting fainter with each word so I had to strain to hear the last thing he said. I was pretty sure I’d heard him right, though — about Philomena and the nugget and all.
“We’ll find her for you,” Greg said, as the rest of Z faded out, too. “I promise.”
And then Z was gone.
“Greg!” I said. “You can’t promise something like that. I mean, we can try, but there are a lot of people out there, and all we know is where Z was from, but not his wife and stuff.”
“Yeah, but how many Philomenas can there be in the world?” Greg asked.
Hundreds, as it turned out, thanks to a quick Internet search, the last thing we did before both Greg and I collapsed into sleep that night.
But only one Philomena Miller who lived in Barstow, California.
Julie came over early the next morning. I’m not sure where she got the idea to do it, but there she was all of a sudden, tapping on my bedroom window to wake us up. It was Sunday morning, and we were totally zonked out from staying up so late the night before talking to Z and then looking up Philomena Miller.
Fortunately, she brought donuts, so we let her in.
“I stayed up practically all night,” she said as Greg and I scarfed down a couple of glazed donuts each before we said a word.
“Hold on,” I said, or mumbled, through a mouth full of donut. “Gotta get some milk.”
I ran out of my bedroom and down the hall to the kitchen. Mom and Dad were sitting at the table, drinking coffee and reading the paper.
“Are you feeling better, Mom?” I asked, though I didn’t slow down on my way to the refrigerator. I grabbed a gallon jug of milk and some cups and swung back around.
“Yes, sweetie,” she said. “Where are you going with that milk?”
“Julie brought donuts,” I said as I swept back out of the kitchen. “Gotta go.”
“Wait!” Dad yelled after me. “How did she get in?”
“Window!” I yelled back, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. With Greg I guess it was, and Mom and Dad were used to that. So probably that explained why all they said about Julie coming in that way, too, was “Oh. Well, tell her we said hi.”
Back in my room, I poured us each a cup of milk. Greg and I, acting like we were totally starving, speared more donuts, though I did manage to ask Julie what she was doing up all night before I took another giant bite of mine.
“Almost all night,” she corrected me. “And please will you eat with your mouth closed? Anyway, I was on the Internet, of course. Doing research.”
“What did you find out?” Greg asked. “ ’Cause we did some research, too, and we found out a bunch of things. Like Z’s wife’s name was —”
“Philomena!” Julie interrupted. “It was Philomena. And he had a son, too. And the son also has an unusual name.”
“What?” I asked. I had parked yet another donut on my index finger and was taking bites around the outside, working my way in to the middle.
“Nugent,” Julie said. “Nugent Miller.”
“You mean Nugget,” Greg corrected her.
“No, no,” said Julie. “Not Nugget. Nugent.”
Greg and I cracked up laughing. “That’s too funny,” I said. “Z told us last night that when his wife was pregnant they didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl so they just called it the nugget. Z went missing before the baby was born. His wife must have found a real name that was closest to that — to nugget — and given that name to the baby.”
“So, Nugget, Nugent,” Julie said, shaking her head. “How strange.”
“You mean how perfect!” Greg said, still laughing.
“Nugent, huh?” said another voice in the room. “Gonna take some time to get used to that one, but I think I like it, too.”
We all turned to look at Z, in his usual place on the floor at the end of my bed, his back to the wall, contemplating that cigar. I was glad to see him back so soon.
“Uh, congratulations?” said Greg.
“Yeah, uh, congratulations,” I echoed. “It’s a boy!”
Z shook his head. “Well, what do you know about that?” he asked nobody in particular. “So I’m a dad. Or I was a dad. Or I could have been a dad. Or whatever.”
I turned back to Julie. “How did you find out?” I asked.
She waved her hand as if to say it was no big deal. “Online records,” she said, adding, “Also, I have a phone number that we can call once it gets a little later in California.”
I didn’t tell her that we had found that out, too, and neither did Greg. Best to let her think all that work she’d done, and staying up most of the night, was worth it.
But there was more.
“Sergeant Miller,” she said to Z, who was still shaking his head over the news about Nugent, and pretty obviously wishing he could light up his cigar for real — this time to celebrate. “I also found out where you went missing, and it was one of the places that Anderson’s uncle mentioned yesterday in the car.”
Z looked up, his face a big question mark.
“Khe Sanh,” she said.
Z’s expression didn’t change, not right away. He still had that quizzical look on his face, staring at Julie as if waiting for her to say more, and then he seemed to be gazing at something else a long ways away, even though he was still just sitting there on the floor in my bedroom at the end of my bed.
“What is going on?” Julie whispered to Greg and me.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe it’s what you told him about having a son. Or maybe it’s about Khe Sanh. Or maybe it’s both.”
“It’s the thousand-yard stare,” Greg said.
“What’s that?” Julie asked.
“It’s this thing my mom explained to me,” Greg said. “I’ve seen my
dad do it and I asked her about it one time. She said she guessed it had something to do with being in combat and stuff. People who have been there, like my dad, they just kind of space out sometimes and get that look on their faces like they’re staring at something a thousand yards away, only they’re not really staring at anything the rest of us can see. She said in the war guys got that way a lot, too, because of what they’d seen and had to do, and also how exhausted they were from the patrols they had to go on and how stressful all that was. Sometimes Dad would stay like that for a long time, even when you were trying to talk to him and ask him questions. It used to be really hard for my mom to handle things like that about my dad.”
I’d never heard Greg say so much about his family, definitely not all in one breath like that. I didn’t know what to say to him, and we all just sat in silence for a minute. But Julie knew what to do. She was really kind and all and patted him on the shoulder, which was this thing she always did instead of maybe hugging somebody when she wanted to make them feel better.
“So maybe he is remembering stuff,” I said hopefully, turning the conversation back to Z. “About Khe Sanh and all.”
“It was a terrible battle,” Julie said. “I read a lot about it already. It was really a siege.”
“Which is what exactly?” I asked. “Like when knights of old laid siege to a castle?”
“You mean surrounded it?” Greg asked. “And they would raise the drawbridge so the knights couldn’t get across, and they had moats and stuff like that?”
“Yes,” Julie said. “Except there wasn’t a castle. And instead of a moat, they had concertina wire, which is like barbed wire, surrounding the camp at Khe Sanh. It was a marine base, near a village called Khe Sanh, very near the border to North Vietnam.”
“The DMZ?” Greg asked.
“Yes,” said Julie. “Just south of the DMZ. And it was a narrow part of Vietnam so very near the border with the country of Laos to the west, as well, and very near the ocean to the east. There were mountains. Or hills, anyway. The Central Highlands.”
“So who sieged who?” Greg asked.
Julie rolled her eyes. Her sympathy for Greg didn’t last too long, I guess. “That’s not a word. And also it’s ‘whom,’ not ‘who.’ ”
“Huh?” Greg said.
Julie sighed this time. “What you should have said was ‘Who laid siege to whom?’ ”
“Okay,” Greg said, as sarcastically as he could.
Julie did not like that at all. “Fine, then,” she said. “Look it up for yourselves. And I’ll take my donuts back, too.”
I looked at the empty donut box. “Uh, yeah, maybe not,” I said. “We sort of already ate them all. And Greg’s sorry. He didn’t mean anything. Right, Greg?”
Greg apologized, too, which was enough for Julie. She started to tell us more about the Battle of Khe Sanh or the Siege of Khe Sanh or whatever it was supposed to be called, when we realized that Z wasn’t there anymore. I had no idea when he’d vanished this time.
“All that thousand-yard staring must have worn him out,” Greg said.
“Perhaps,” said Julie. “Is that happening more often? That he doesn’t stay for very long when he is here, when he shows himself and speaks to you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”
“I was afraid of that,” she said.
I was afraid of it, too.
We had to split up to go to church since it was Sunday and since we all went to different ones. Mom, Dad, and I usually attended the Methodist church, Greg went to a Presbyterian church where his dad dropped him off but didn’t stay himself, and Julie was a half Buddhist, half Catholic, so she went to a Unitarian Universalist church where she said you could believe anything you wanted. I couldn’t see that there was much difference between Methodist and Presbyterian, from what Greg told me.
Just before she left, Julie told us we had to meet her at the downtown library right after church so we could do more research.
“I thought we were going to call Z’s wife,” Greg said.
“Yes,” said Julie. “We will call Z’s wife. But you guys should know at least something about Khe Sanh, since that’s where he went missing.”
“Okay,” I said. “The library first. But what are we going to tell Mrs. Miller when we call? And who’s calling this time? I did it last time.”
“I think Julie should do it,” Greg said.
“Fine,” Julie said with a shake of her head.
“So what do we tell her?” I asked again. “If she even answers the phone.”
Julie bit on her lip for a second, then had an idea. “We tell her we’re in middle school and we’re working on a project about The Wall and we wanted to look up family members and other people who knew someone whose name we found on The Wall. And we found Zorn Miller’s name and that’s why we’re calling — to see if she’d be willing to talk to us about him.”
“You mean like what exactly happened to him in the war?” I asked. “Or do you mean like who was he and all before he went to the war?”
“Both,” Julie said. “If she knows both.”
We were too late for Sunday school, and Mom wasn’t feeling well again anyway, so it was just me and Dad who went to church after Julie and Greg left. Dad was an usher so he was busy greeting and helping to seat people. Which meant I got to sit by myself for a while, until after the ushers took up the offering.
We sang a couple of hymns, which I always like since I actually do like singing — I was just still not so sure about being the singer for the Ghosts of War. And then I pulled out my iPhone and hid it between pages of the hymnal so I could look up Khe Sanh. I didn’t want to have to wait to get to the library to get started. Wikipedia seemed as good a place to start as anywhere. Not that Julie had to know that.
One thing I found out was that the marines knew for months that the North Vietnamese Army was planning something big at Khe Sanh, and they were pretty sure it was going to be a massive attack on the base. They had all kinds of intelligence sources that told them stuff, and the marine patrols in that area also could tell that something was going on.
The crazy thing was that the U.S. generals weren’t even sure they needed a marine base at Khe Sanh, and most of them talked about just abandoning it rather than defending it.
There were a bunch of NVA divisions moving into the Central Highlands — NVA stood for North Vietnamese Army — and they were mostly hiding out just over the border in Laos, where the Americans weren’t allowed to go because the U.S. Congress didn’t want the war to get any bigger and more spread out than it already was just in Vietnam. Another reason for that was because the war was getting more and more unpopular as the U.S. and South Vietnam kept not winning, but U.S. military guys kept getting wounded and killed.
So anyway, everybody knew the NVA was getting ready to attack, they just didn’t know when, until this one marine patrol caught an NVA soldier and he told them it was going to be near the end of January 1968. It was late in 1967 when they found this out, so there was still plenty of time to just shut down the base and leave. No real good reason to keep it open, especially since it would be difficult to bring in reinforcements, plus the base was pretty much a big zero in terms of keeping the NVA from slipping into South Vietnam or sending supplies and weapons to the Viet Cong, their guerilla fighters down in the south. The North Vietnamese guys just stayed on the Laos side of the border and brought guns and everything down this big hidden dirt highway called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was named after the leader of North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh.
But General William Westmoreland, who was the commander of all the U.S. military in Vietnam, ordered Khe Sanh to stay open, kind of because he didn’t believe in backing down from a fight, or something like that, which meant that the marines were just sitting ducks. There were six thousand of them stuck on the base with nowhere to go. They were surrounded by thirty thousand North Vietnamese troops, all dug in, with lots and lots of artillery.
That
was as far as I got before Dad came and joined me at my pew, a little while after the ushers took up the offering and brought it back to the church office. I had to quickly shut down my phone, but I knew I wasn’t quick enough because of the stern look Dad gave me when he sat down.
“So what was that you were doing on your phone during church today?” Dad asked as we were driving home.
“Oh,” I said. “Nothing. Just, you know, something Julie said I should read.”
“Love letter?” Dad asked.
I nearly jumped out of my seat. “No!” I shouted. “I mean, no way! Julie’s not my girlfriend or anything. She’s just in the band.”
Dad laughed. “Take it easy there,” he said. “But whatever it was, next time let’s pay attention during the service. Got it?”
“Yes, Dad,” I said. “Sorry. It was just — it was kind of important. That’s all.”
Dad patted me on the shoulder. “I’m sure it was,” he said, in that kind of voice grown-ups use when what they mean is that because you’re a kid, how important could it really be?
Boy, did I ever wish I could tell him.
Julie, Greg, and I met up at the library later that afternoon. Actually, Julie was already there — no surprise — and she had a stack of books out for us to read. Fortunately for Greg, who wasn’t a great reader, one of them was a giant book of photographs from the war, with a whole section on the Siege of Khe Sanh.
“You’re late,” Julie said before either of us even got a chance to say hello.
“We got here as soon as we could, Your Majesty,” Greg said.
I thought Julie would get crabby at the way he said that, but instead she just made this sort of royal hand gesture at us, like we were her subjects, and said, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”
Then she smiled and said, “Shakespeare.”
Lost at Khe Sanh Page 7
