Under the Sabers: The Unwritten Code of Army Wives

by Tanya Biank

  It took forever to get to the kids, but they were fine, just a little shook up. That was just as well, Andrea Lynne thought. Let them see what kind of serious damage several tons of metal can do. A few hours later she talked to Rennie about the children. He had e-mailed Caroline and complimented her for going up to the policeman and talking about the accident, taking matters into her own hands. She was just like her old man, Rennie had written. That was a big change from last summer, when Caroline was pulling typical defiant teenager stuff. Father and daughter were e-mailing more often now, and Rennie was proud of their newfound friendship.

  Rennie was great with Andrea Lynne on the phone, as reassuring as always as he advised her about insurance companies. Thursday morning on Fort Bragg meant Thursday evening in Vietnam, and Rennie, surrounded by his men, was in a jovial mood. There is something about sharing a meal with comrades in a foreign land, especially one that was once an enemy. The Americans were having dinner at their usual table on the top floor of Al Fresco’s. The British owner brought out mugs of beer and fresh-baked bread. The Rolling Stones played in the background, and Rennie joked with his wife long-distance. One of the men yelled hello to Andrea Lynne.

  “I’m taking the guys out for their last supper,” Rennie told her. “You know what we’re having, the usual.” Barbecued ribs, onion rings, and hot wings with mouthwatering French fries, fresh cut and fried to order. In Hanoi, of all places, they had found the best American food ever.

  “We’re going out in the morning. The weather’s finally cleared,” he added. Foggy, rainy weather could roll in quickly in the mountains of Vietnam, and it had delayed a trip to scout MIA crash sites for excavation in May. The Vietnamese government didn’t allow any American planes, even commercial airliners, to fly over Vietnam, so the team had to rely on Russian-built MI-17 helicopters and Vietnamese pilots.

  Rennie had already put off the trip three days because of the weather. Now Andrea Lynne asked him if he felt pressured to get going since he had the new incoming commander, Lieutenant Colonel George “Marty” Martin and a lot of other people there. Martin, a forty-year-old battalion commander in the 10th Mountain Division in New York, was due to replace Rennie in mid-July.

  “I don’t do anything unless it’s under the best conditions; I don’t have to. Why do you think we’re still here?” Rennie said. He was so definitive, he put Andrea Lynne at ease. She knew better anyway. She wasn’t even sure why she asked.

  By Friday night Andrea Lynne was weak, shaky, and emotional, though she couldn’t figure out why. Her blood sugar was normal. She wanted so much to call Rennie again, just to hear the sound of his voice. The conversation in the restaurant still echoed in her head. What is wrong with you? she scolded herself. I need to be strong.

  After work she had gone up to her room and gotten in bed right away. She felt anxious and teary, which were often her symptoms of low blood sugar, so she checked it again. Again it was normal. There is just no reason for me to be like this, she told herself. She lay back and tried to rest, but it was impossible. Finally she slipped over to Rennie’s side of the bed and called her daughter.

  “Caroline! Come upstairs!” Andrea Lynne asked her daughter to stay and watch TV with her. “I feel so strange,” she said.

  “Do you want something to eat?”

  “No, I’m trying to lose a few more pounds before my trip. But something’s wrong. Please stay with me.” She hated to scare the children, but she had been so sick recently.

  Caroline rubbed her mother’s arm. “It’s okay, Mom.”

  Andrea Lynne started to cry. “I miss Daddy,” she told her daughter, as tears filled her eyes. Stop just stop. You can do this. Just rest. It’s almost over. That’s what Rennie had said in his last e-mail. “Hold on,” he wrote. “Just hold on until I can hold you.”

  She had written back that she thought she would never see him again. For months she had been haunted by a huge looming shadow, like a darkness in the corner of her heart. An evil thought floated into her mind: We’ll never be together again. It wasn’t just death she was thinking about. There was simply an absence of “us” in her life.

  Am I getting weaker? she wondered. After being such a pillar of strength all these years am I now insecure? Have I been defeated by the Army, by my disease, by life, after all? Am I being punished for not taking up General McNeill’s offer at the Mardi Gras ball, for sealing Rennie’s fate?

  “I’m afraid,” she wrote her husband. He wrote right back: “It won’t be long until I’m in your arms again in Hawaii. It’ll only be a few weeks. Just hold on until I can hold you.”

  Remembering the e-mail soothed Andrea Lynne, and she nuzzled Rennie’s pillow, comforted also by the warmth of her daughter’s back. You’ll see him soon. Just close your eyes.

  The next morning Andrea Lynne awoke to her alarm buzzer sounding loudly. The clock said seven. She was late. Apparently she had slept through the alarm for an hour. That had never happened in her life. Caroline wasn’t awake yet either.

  There wasn’t time to think about that, though, or even to wash her hair. Andrea Lynne pulled it back in a loose ponytail and quickly threw on some clothes—a denim jean skirt and a T-shirt from Caroline’s alma-mater-to-be, the University of North Carolina. Caroline had just gotten accepted, so Andrea Lynne figured she had bragging rights. She had never worn an outfit like this to work before, and she felt a little underdressed. But it was a Saturday, she was in a hurry, and it was her last day of work. She was taking off for three weeks to prepare for her trip and travel to Hawaii.

  She felt woozy most of the day. Even a coworker noticed, but Saturdays were busy, and there wasn’t much time to rest. By midmorning she felt even worse. Her blood sugar was fine, though, so she fixated on arranging the rows of gold chains. Whenever Andrea Lynne felt overwhelmed, she cleaned or organized. It helped her focus.

  “Oh, the chains will just be a mess by tomorrow,” another coworker told her. But Andrea Lynne toiled away like a robot, methodically moving the jewelry into its proper place. By midafternoon she couldn’t stand up, but she refused to leave. This would be her last day for weeks, and she felt a bit guilty. No one ever got that much time off at Rhudy’s.

  After closing, Andrea Lynne got into Rennie’s truck and drove home in a daze. It seemed to take hours, though she followed the route she always took, down Murchison and then through the Fort Bragg Cemetery. Rennie had showed her the shortcut before he had gone back to Vietnam.

  When she got home around 5:30, it was still light. She parked the truck on the street in front of the house and went inside, leaving the front door open, as she always did. She had told the kids to clean the house, but it was a disaster. Even the living room was messy. With Rennie gone, the kids often got out of hand, but she had been hoping they would have done something. Those little rascals have been avoiding me, she thought.

  She put down her purse and assessed the room. Well, she thought, I have the rest of the weekend. Now maybe I can get my act together for the trip.

  She was surprised to hear little Rennie’s voice coming from the den. “Mom, you got a lot of messages today. I don’t know who they’re from.” She walked toward the kitchen to look at the answering machine.

  “Rennie, did you answer the phone?” she asked in an irritated voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, who was calling me?”

  “I don’t know. They wouldn’t say.”

  “Look,” she said, “if you can’t learn to take a message, then I do not want you answering the phone.”

  There were a lot of messages. Oh, great, probably the PTA, she thought. Just as she was about to check them, little Rennie called out, “Mom, Granddad Cory wants you to call him. He left you two numbers. One of them is a cell phone, and he said to call him right away.”

  Andrea Lynne noticed the numbers on a napkin on the stove, scrawled in her son’s messy handwriting. She had asked him a thousand times not to do that. She picked up the napkin and went to dial
the phone, when little Rennie called out again. This time his voice was different, lower.

  “Mom—there’s been a helicopter crash in Vietnam.”

  Andrea Lynne looked up and flew into the den.

  “Well, what are you doing?” she said curtly, scolding him. “Why don’t you have the news on? Your dad … your dad … he probably knew those people. Have you seen anything?” She was looking for the remote.

  “Mom I have been watching. I’m looking.” She grabbed the remote and frantically searched for CNN or Fox News or the networks, then remembered Rennie’s dad.

  “Rennie! Granddad Cory is worried about Daddy! Let me call him.” She started to hurry back to the kitchen, almost happy to have a mission, but before she found the numbers, she heard Lad bark.

  “Mom, there’s four men in green suits coming up the sidewalk.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  At 2:50 P.M. on Saturday, April 7, Rennie Cory put in his earplugs, fastened his seatbelt, and settled back as the chopper lifted off from Vinh Airfield and headed south along the coast of Vietnam. The dry season was beginning, and the weather had finally cleared after days of rain.

  Since 1992, when the Joint Task Force Full Accounting was formed, the MIA teams had been scouring the coast, the rice paddies, and the mountains looking for the remains of its missing war dead. Of the more than fifty-eight thousand U.S. servicemen who had died in Vietnam, there were nineteen hundred whose bodies were never recovered. The U.S. government had made accounting for the missing its highest priority in opening relations with its former enemy, and, for their part, the communists were happy to assist the Americans—for a hefty price. Washington pumped nearly $6 million a year into the MIA program in Southeast Asia, which covered Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

  Rennie’s team had spent the morning and part of the afternoon surveying a nearby crash site—preliminary work for recovery operations that would begin May 3—and had stopped at the airfield to refuel. While on the ground at Vinh, Rennie had decided to cancel a visit to a second site. Instead they would land at Dong Hoi Airfield, then fly on to Phu Bai Airfield and spend the night in Hue, Vietnam’s ancient capital.

  “We’re turning this bird around and heading back to the hotel to have a beer,” Rennie had radioed back. “We’re calling it a day.” He was decked out in black hiking boots, a large white-gray Timberland T-shirt, blue pants, a black belt, and baseball cap—typical attire for these trips. Wearing BDUs was forbidden. The Vietnamese government didn’t even allow the American flag to be flown at the American compound in Hanoi.

  Rennie had canceled the second visit because he didn’t want to rush through the site, and he knew how the Vietnamese were about flying after a certain time of day. The pilots, who often flew by sight, were superstitious about flying over water or after dark. The MIA team was assigned Vietnam’s best pilots, an experienced VIP detachment with years of experience, an excellent flying record, and a good working relationship with the Americans, but it didn’t change how Rennie felt about the situation.

  This was still a third-world country with treacherous terrain, and flying with Russian-trained Vietnamese on old MI-17 Russian helicopters with internal fuel tanks on board didn’t give the American servicemen a big warm fuzzy feeling. Before Clinton’s visit it took a couple of weeks to get the Vietnamese government to relent and allow two American Black Hawks to transport the first family around. I’ve since wondered why, if the MI-17s weren’t good enough for the president of the United States and his family, were they good enough for American servicemen and -women?

  At 3:18 the Vietnamese pilot radioed to Area Two Flight Management Center: “Twenty kilometers from Deo Ngang, altitude 1,000 meters.” Then ten minutes later, “Passed Deo Ngang, altitude 1,000 meters.” He went on to forecast, “Con Co 1615 hours, Phu Bai 1640 hours.” They’d be landing in a little more than an hour. Noise from the chopper made conversation difficult. On board with Rennie were six other U.S. service members. Sitting next to him was Army Lieutenant Colonel Marty Martin, the easygoing South Carolinian from Hopkins. Also on board were Air Force Major Charles Lewis, of Las Cruces, New Mexico, the deputy commander; Air Force Master sergeant Steven Moser, of San Diego, a Vietnamese linguist; Air Force Technical Sergeant Robert Flynn, of Huntsville, Alabama, also a Vietnamese linguist; Navy Chief Petty Officer Pedro Gonzalez of Buckeye, Arizona, a medic with the Consolidated Divers Unit; and Army Sergeant First Class Tommy Murphy of Dawson, Georgia, a mortuary affairs team sergeant.

  Accompanying them were two members of a Vietnamese agency assisting with recoveries, Nguyen Than Ha, deputy director of the Vietnamese liaison office, and Senior Colonel Tran Van Bien, deputy director for the Vietnamese Office for Seeking Missing Personnel. Bien had been fighting his whole life—first against the French, then the Americans—and he was a hero in his own country. There was no age for retirement in the Vietnamese military, so Bien continued to serve. He always wore a big smile, and during Rennie’s nine months in Vietnam, Bien had come to like and trust the American. And Rennie respected Bien. The two men, former enemies, now sat across from each other.

  The helicopter flew south along the coast at one thousand meters, less than a kilometer out over the water. The weather could change rapidly here, and when fog formed over the sea, the pilot moved inland. They were over the Bo Trach district of the central province of Quang Binh, about 280 miles south of Hanoi. The rice paddies below, snuggled between mountain passes, looked like a patchwork quilt from the sky. This had been the southernmost province of North Vietnam, just north of the former demilitarized zone. During the war it had been heavily bombed, and both sides lost numerous aircraft in these mountains.

  At 3:34 the pilot radioed again as he prepared for a landing at Dong Hoi Airfield, “Request to descend to 500 meters and fly VFR [visual flight rules].”

  “Descend to 500 meters, fly VFR, and report back when you have contact with Phu Bai,” came the reply from the Area Two Flight Management Center.

  The pilots could clearly see the ground, and the plane descended to five hundred meters and switched to VFR. Though the cumulus clouds were not significant, they were enough to impair visibility. What the crew didn’t realize was that below the clouds a layer of thick fog had quickly rolled in and thickened. The pilots, not reading the altimeter, and thinking they were still in clouds, descended too far—to just two hundred meters.

  Belted into their passenger seats, the Americans listened to their Walkmans, some rested their eyes, one read a Maxim magazine, and others scanned the excavation site materials. It had been a long day, and the men looked forward to showering, putting on fresh clothes, and going out for a big meal.

  Rennie was going to call Andrea Lynne that evening. He’d be seeing her in ten days, and he smiled at the thought. In his room at night he often played a Counting Crows CD. He loved the song “Mr. Jones;” the “yellow-haired girl” of the lyrics reminded him of Andrea Lynne. In the briefcase next to his leg were two handcrafted diamond pave earrings he’d had made for her. The jewelry had never left his side since he bought them, and he liked to pull them out before every briefing and tell his men, “Look what I bought my bride.” He planned to give them to her in Hawaii as a birthday present. She had turned forty-one on March 6.

  Meanwhile, in the cockpit, the pilots realized they had been descending for too long without being able to see the ground. They started to pull the chopper up. But it was too late.

  The rear portion of the chopper’s fuselage lightly grazed the peak of the mountain twenty-seven yards from the top, damaging the aircraft’s tail rotor and causing the chopper to spin out of control.

  At 3:39 the helicopter’s engine roared as the chopper crashed into the side of Am Mountain and exploded. A tall column of smoke streamed from the site.

  The crash killed most of the men on impact. One Vietnamese man, missing a leg, survived for forty-five minutes and told farmers he was with a U.S.-Vietnamese MIA team. The wreckage was strewn everywhere, and the bodies�
��most of them badly burned, some decapitated—were discovered by villagers collecting firewood or children tending to their water buffalo farther down the mountain. The Vietnamese took the clothes off the corpses to release their spirits. And as they had during the war years, the villagers scavenged the helicopter, taking the men’s personal belongings along with parts of the chopper. But they never reached Rennie’s body. It had been thrown higher up on the slopes. His skull was cracked, his spinal cord damaged, and his ribs and neck broken.

  A year later I went to Vietnam to cover an MIA team. It was an assignment I had asked for. I wanted to walk the ground and breathe the air where so many young Americans had lost their lives. And I wanted to see the place that had defined Fayetteville and changed our nation. On a personal level I wanted a better understanding of my father, who was a battery commander in Vietnam, and who still can’t talk easily about the war.

  For more than two weeks I walked the streets of Da Nang, Nha Trang, and Hanoi, and I went into the jungles and out on the South China Sea with MIA teams as they searched for remains of men dead thirty years. My own ride with an MIA team on an MI-17 above the mountainous jungles of Vietnam was a harrowing experience, all the more because I could see so clearly the circumstances of Rennie Cory’s death. Even our Vietnamese pilot seemed disoriented, and the Vietnamese on board were yelling at him before he landed at our site on the side of a mountain.

  Mountain excavations were the most dangerous, I was told. Our chopper landed on the steep dirt landing zone, which had been hacked free of bamboo and other tropical vegetation by indigenous mountain people with homemade machetes. As the helicopter touched down and the rotor blades whipped up dust and debris, we jumped out and hit the ground, much, I surmised, like soldiers had done more than a quarter century earlier. The chopper took off, and for the first time in my life I felt my fragility as a human being. I pulled down my straw-brimmed hat and surveyed my surroundings. The jungle was a silent place, its lush green beauty as deceiving as an unfaithful mistress. The sun baked exposed skin in minutes, and the vivid greenery and rich soil hid poisonous snakes, stinging insects, and tarantulas. On another mountain a few hundred miles away, Rennie Cory had perished.