The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle Read online

  The Man Who Walked

  Out of the Jungle

  By the same author:

  Rapidan (Summer 2017)

  The Man Who Walked

  Out of the Jungle

  Jeff Wallace

  To Nan

  for her friendship

  2017, Jeff Wallace

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States.

  No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any part or by any means,

  electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,

  or any information storage or retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  Historical suspense fiction /detective fiction / thrillers / Vietnam War / Saigon

  The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle / Jeff Wallace

  (a version of this novel was published previously as ‘ The Known Outcome’)

  ISBN

  978-0-9983291-4-7

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, facilities, organizations, and military units are imaginary, and any resemblance they may bear to real individuals or entities is entirely coincidental. Situations and dialog are invented. To the extent that famous events, figures, installations, organizations, and military units are depicted, they represent the historical setting, and any role they play in the story is fictitious.

  Day 1

  __________

  In Tuyet’s apartment, the sunrise flared against the rust streaks in the window screen. Outside revved scooters; leaves rustled; a clothesline pulley creaked. A moth fluttered onto my arm. Listlessly I flicked it away. The numbness of sleep clung, and I didn’t wish to dislodge it.

  Tuy was awake. Her hair made a silky starburst on the pillow. With her fingers she gathered the strands, and I noticed around her nails half moons of white from Ivory soap, a present from me. Our bed was a straw mat on which we threw sheets and pillows. To rise seemed a long way. She did so now, a rice stalk springing up after a windstorm.

  I twisted to sit cross-legged. Zippoed a cigarette. She called this my Buddha statue, and maybe I resembled one. She’d taught me about Buddhism. It stood for the rectification of suffering. Noble truths. Paths toward a virtuous life.

  Toward me, she wasn’t above mockery.

  I pondered the problem that had awakened with me for so many weeks it had become like the sounds of Saigon. Today, Friday, 24 April 1970, marked my thirty-second month in South Vietnam. Finishing my first one-year tour, I’d opted for a second, at whose conclusion I’d added six months. Now I clung week to week. Before I left, I had to talk her into going back with me to America—the so-called World. The topic always netted her stubborn silence. I knew why. She couldn’t imagine herself in the United States, or anywhere other than in this city where she’d grown up, where her mother resided. I couldn’t convince her to go, and I couldn’t stay. My thinking resembled the intractable American conundrum in Vietnam: I wanted to shape the outcome, but my partner wouldn’t conform to my notions.

  This morning she didn’t concern herself with my preoccupations. Her mood was airy. Often, despite my usual inability to answer, she asked me whether I was coming home tonight. Now she asked, “What did you dream about?”

  “How do you know I dreamed?”

  No reply. I was to take it she simply knew such things. An educated, sophisticated woman, she tended dreams like a soothsayer.

  And the dream? Already it had faded, but I knew it had been about death. Yesterday I’d read an incident report of an unidentified man killed by a claymore fragmentation mine in the rain forests of Tay Ninh Province, 100 kilometers north of Saigon. The man had walked up on an American infantry outpost at night, an act so dangerous as to be unsurvivable. I’d perused the report with my usual callous eye, death being the commonest event, though sometimes it tracked me into my sleep.

  “A war dream,” I told her.

  “You should dream of better things.”

  Through the window wafted the cacophony of horns, bicycle bells, and river-barge gongs; the musty incense of the river and its canals where the gray house boats pronged like a betel-nut chewer’s teeth. In the street below, a scooter snarled, and its smoke blended with the other smells.

  I looked at Tuy and knew she’d accompany my every thought or memory of Vietnam for the rest of my life. Which was why she had to go with me.

  After coffee, in front of her hanging mirror, I straightened my uniform. The humidity had blemished the brass insignia on my cap, and I buffed it with the rag I kept on the high sill. Tuy had retrieved the delivered morning newspapers and was opening them to read. Leaning down, I kissed her. “I’ll try to be home early tonight.”

  * * *

  I saw her for the first time in the spring of 1968, late in my first tour. She’d leaned from the open window of her second-floor landing, calmly regarding a jeep overturned in the street below. Capping the window, a decorative Roman frieze, an architectural nuance not surprising in a city that imitated Paris that in turn mimicked ancient Rome. I’d noticed the frieze before; it was what had caused me to glance up.

  The inverted vehicle belonged to the Vietnamese military police company I advised then. No act of war here, just common carelessness, and I stopped to make sure nobody was hurt. Scraped but otherwise unharmed, the driver and two occupants were righting the chassis, and as I had nothing to do but watch, I said, “I hope we didn’t wake you.”

  “You did. I was in the middle of a dream.” Her English was pristine.

  “A pleasant one, I hope.”

  “Yes. Of peace and beauty. And you turned over a jeep on it.”

  I tried to think of a reply, but she’d receded inside.

  On the map, Saigon looked like a ravenous, steep-finned fish eating an egg. The city was built on a marsh, and the streets would have flooded but for the drainage canals. The canals and the river ushered the water toward the South China Sea, while everything else rushed in: a glut of dollars; imports that had turned the city into a vast shopping mart; and foreigners, the Americans currently preeminent.

  Only six kilometers separated Tuy’s door from the gate at Tan Son Nhut airbase, yet to move this distance I traversed four cultures. She lived in the district called Cholon, among the ethnic Chinese merchants who spoke a dialect of Cantonese and kept themselves politically aloof from the Vietnamese. Few Americans ventured into Cholon’s narrow side streets; you could get lost under the hanging bird cages and flax awnings. When I told Americans how to reach me in an emergency, I used the address of a grocery store on the main shopping street Dong Khanh. The proprietor was an old friend of Tuy’s family and knew where she lived.

  On the Lambretta scooter cab’s back pad, gripping the chrome rail, the sole purchase save for the driver himself, I saw the neighborhood go by in blurs. The tires cut bubbly wash streams, knocked aside chunks of ice littered from the ice-truck deliveries. In bins ruckused chickens, monkeys, iguanas—the bigger lizards suspended upside down by their tails, their claws tied as if they were prisoners about to be executed. The motorbike’s sputter joined the medley of voices, the clank of chains, the percussions of crates crowbarred open. Headed fish sizzled on grills. Thick-calved drivers pedaled their bicycle cabs called cyclos. Each block disgorged its peculiar wares: washtubs of porcelain and stainless steel; televisions under the headachy geometry of TV aerials; pyramids of cooking oil and dry beans—American aid products—meant to be distributed free, but of course the people sold them. The practice vexed visiting U.S. congressmen, who asked why something was not done, as if anyone could regulate this labyrinth.

  On Nguyen Trai we coasted into central Saigon. Colonnaded buil
dings and balustraded houses recalled the city’s history as a dominion of the French empire. Gliding under the trees of a lush park, we skirted Le Cercle Sportif, or sports club, a social locus then and now. Nearby were the Presidential Palace, churches, embassies, monuments. In their long stay, the French had styled Saigon to remind them of Paris, a city I didn’t know, and I wondered if someday Paris might summon Saigon for me.

  Even if thousands of French remained, they were no longer the masters. The famous battle of Dien Bien Phu in May of 1954 had felled their empire. The columns might be thought of as its blanched skeleton. Journalists wrote that the Vietnamese saw the Americans as its conjurors. We propped up the bones, peeked out through the skull’s eyes, breathed through the lipless teeth. Was it true? After thirty-two months in country, I should have known the answer.

  The driver zigzagged through the downtown streets to hook left at Cong Ly. Dodging cyclos, buses, and the petite blue and yellow Renault taxis, we reached a camp of cardboard and cloth houses fringing the Thi Nghe canal. Sometimes the land flooded, and the cardboard walls floated up sideways, bumping into their former inhabitants who posed like high-water markers. The camp was in Saigon but not of it. The dwellers were refugees from evacuated or obliterated villages, and the slum was no more Saigon than it was Da Nang or Nha Trang or another city where the displaced crowded. The statistics said there were millions of them.

  The French would say beaucoup.

  A flight roared overhead, and the gray exhaust trail widened until it blended with the low overcast. At the traffic signal by the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital, I licked my lips and tasted the chemical blow of Saigon’s air.

  I should be gone from here. Gone like the receding airplane, its smoke a ribbon of doubt about what might have happened with Tuy. How long could I stay, hoping she’d change her mind and leave with me? So far my arguments had failed; to argue with Tuy was like remonstrating with the Mekong River. I could only wait, as time slipped. Repeatedly postponed, the day was coming when they’d put me on a flight home. With luck, I might get twenty-four hours notice.

  * * *

  The driver dropped me off at the triangular plaza by the gate, and I entered the joint American-Vietnamese military airbase known as Tan Son Nhut. In the cantonment, the buildings squared on parallel streets; traffic moved in orderly files. The edifices spread from the bunker-fronted, bone-white headquarters of the U.S. Military Assistance Command—MACV.

  Wheeling a jeep out of the motor pool, I peered over the hood through steam wisping from the overnight condensation. At the corner the airfield panned into view. In the hazy distance squatted a DC-8 Freedom Bird, the smog obscuring the troops who filed on board. President Nixon’s Vietnamization and troop-withdrawal plan had begun to rake out our soldiers in large numbers. My unit of investigators had been among the first to go, leaving me behind, a unit unto myself, because I’d volunteered to stay. Last year, when U.S. troop strength had topped 530,000, I couldn’t have ordered, bribed, or coerced a spare jeep from the motor pool. Now jeeps were served from a long row like candies from a Pez dispenser—one with a dragon’s head, I mused. In its daily press briefings, MACV’s spokesmen uttered withdrawal figures with the prideful tone once heard in their body counts. MACV was a stat machine, and to listen was to get an earful.

  I swerved toward a compound of three stucco buildings, more reminders of the French empire, the dead one we’d resuscitated. The old wall was long gone, the name survived—the French Fort. Over the red tile roofs, tamarind branches brushed, parrots fluoresced, iguanas turreted their eyes. If Tan Son Nhut stood for military orderliness, the French Fort softened its edges. The closest reminder of U.S. military regimentation was a facility for replacements two hundred meters away. They were still coming in, paradoxically, and in the right wind you might smell their fresh canvas duffel bags and hear their cadence calls. This morning the calls didn’t carry, and the French Fort barely stirred when I arrived at the civilized hour of zero seven fifteen.

  My assistant was Staff Sergeant Javier Lopez. The veteran of two combat tours, he’d seen more gunfights than Emiliano Zapata, his historical idol. Now he carried no weapon, and his simple fatigues featured none of his decorations. His placid eyes gave the impression he was staring into an Arizonan dusk. Stepping with a slight limp, his old wounds having left him unfit for line duty, he typed, filed investigative reports, and answered the phone in his Mexican accent that seemed to insinuate irony into his phrases. I didn’t understand why Lopez had come back for a third tour, and being himself, he didn’t explain except in sardonic one-liners: “Hell, why not?” We got along because both of us reveled in our contradictions. He was almost prissy in his personal hygiene habits, yet he loved scatological metaphors. Relating one of these, he’d edged on why he’d returned: “When I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about ‘Nam, and it was like taking a shit knowing that a big bug was running around in the crapper. I kept telling myself that the bug wasn’t gonna bite me on the ass, but all the time, I just couldn’t get comfortable.”

  “Must have been a scary bug,” I’d said.

  “I think so. Never got a good look at it.”

  Sagacious non-commissioned officers always had been hard to come by. Now, try to find one, and you might as well be looking for snow in Saigon. It surprised me every week when his name escaped the departure-transfer list.

  He said, “Colonel Crowley phoned. He’s headed over to talk about the report he sent yesterday.”

  “The claymore KIA?”

  “Yeah. Fucker walks up on a rifle company at night and gets blown away. What did you think was gonna happen?”

  “Did Crowley say why he wanted to talk about it?”

  “Only that it was urgent.”

  “To him, everything is urgent.” I thought for a minute. “When was the last time he was here?”

  “Never, far as I know.”

  I unlocked the drawer of my desk, removed the report, and leaned back in my chair. Before the drawdown, there had been three desks in this room. Now, a single desk, three metal-framed chairs, and a pedestal fan whose fluttering manila tag was stamped March 1965, the month when the first major U.S. combat units deployed to South Vietnam. The walls tapered to a vaulted peak and an inert ceiling fan. Louvered glass strips, randomly clear or opaque, looked out on the tamarinds, a few stubby palm trees, and a garden that bled the odor of dung. Which wasn’t in short supply.

  I reread the case that had tracked me into my dreams last night and grabbed the attention of my commanding officer. Attached were copies of statements from two infantrymen, Captain David Ulrich and Sergeant Henry Joshua. Almost a week ago, their company had occupied a hilltop in eastern Tay Ninh Province, and late at night, soldiers manning an outpost had detonated a claymore on a figure walking out of the rain forest. The dead man turned out to have been a Caucasian outfitted in U.S. military gear. No insignia or unit patches. Nobody had a clue to his identity.

  The scrape of tires. Lopez shouted the area to attention, and the sun glared off Colonel Crowley’s close-cropped head. He wore polished jump boots—the footwear of a garrison officer—and crisp khakis not yet drooping in the humidity. Less display-worthy was the man himself. His face was sunburned, and his arms stuck out of the starched sleeve hoops like pencils from tin cans. His chin stuck out too—the chin of self importance. I saw his lips moving and realized that he was talking: “See that Freedom Bird on the airfield this morning? I put five investigators on it. The troop withdrawal is bleeding me dry. Nobody cares that I have cases to assign. At least you’re still around. I can run one competent investigation.”

  No doubt, given a chance, Crowley would have booked himself on the next Freedom Bird. His one-year stint in Vietnam was nearly finished. He wouldn’t extend. In the war’s hopeful early years, multiple combat tours had spit-shined an ambitious officer’s career. Now, one was enough. He wanted to punch his ticket and get out. No surprise.

  You didn’t need a calendar to know that t
he sixties were over.

  He stepped to the window and gazed at the garden and the parking space where his driver lounged. “How fast can you chase up those friends of yours downtown?”

  “Friends?”

  “Your gook cop buddies.”

  “I don’t know. How fast is necessary?”

  “Today.”

  Of course today. Why had I asked?

  “You’ve read the Tay Ninh report?” He lit a cigarette, and the smoke snaked through the louvers. The wind had awakened outside; branches swished, herringbone-patterned leaves fluttered to the tilled soil. My dream came back to me, of the claymore shattering the night’s stillness.

  “Yes sir.”

  On my desk he slapped down three items: A newspaper, a manila folder, and a map. The newspaper was the New York Times folded to an article under the headline, ‘TAY NINH KIA MAY BE UNKNOWN SOLDIER.’

  “The press is claiming that the casualty is a GI we can’t identify.” He traced the print with his nicotine-stained fingertip and read: “‘Unlike prior wars, Vietnam has produced no so-called unknown soldier. Speedy evacuation and sophisticated forensics all but preclude an American serviceman who dies in this war from becoming one, according to experts. Yet, despite these advances, the identity of the Caucasian killed early Sunday morning at the base of Hill 71 in Tay Ninh Province remains a mystery.’”

  “He died Sunday,” I remarked. “That was only five days ago. Why didn’t the reporter just wait for an official statement?”

  “Hell, the press will print anything negative it digs up about the military—the more sensational the better. It’s how they sell newspapers. When the reporter learned we had a casualty we couldn’t identify, he asked MACV for our statement, and when we couldn’t give it to him quick enough to meet his deadline, he ran the story. But we’re going to have the last word, because the identification procedures are reliable, and the chances are fucking zero that the KIA was a U.S. serviceman or anybody else working for the U.S. government.”