The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle Page 2

  I wondered where Crowley came by his certitude. You needed an inch-thick directory to list the U.S. military and civilian organizations in South Vietnam. Even the Library of Congress had people here. How anybody kept track of them was beyond me.

  “What about allies? The Australians and the New Zealanders?”

  “We asked. They denied he’s one of theirs.”

  “And CORDS?” Responsible for pacification programs, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support had representatives in every province in South Vietnam. CORDS staffed a liaison office at MACV Headquarters.

  “Not theirs either. We contacted all U.S. civilian agencies. Ran fingerprints checks with DoD and FBI. Compared the records of registered MIAs. No hits.”

  “So there’s your answer—he’s not an American.”

  “Correct. But the newspapers don’t give a shit. To them, all that counts is that we don’t know who he is.”

  Flagging a priority case, three red candy stripes treaded the folder. I opened it and picked up the personal effects inventory. The first item listed was a rifle, M16A1, serial number 537629.

  Crowley said, “Records match that serial number to an M16 delivered in 1966 and issued to the 1st Cav Division. The rifle was crossed off the unit’s books in May ‘67 as lost in action.”

  A man comes out of the jungle with a rifle lost three years ago. Weird.

  “The casualty was carrying this map sheet.” He opened the map, scale 1/50,000, under whose acetate-sealed surface ran grid squares a kilometer on each side. The calligraphy of the contour lines was so complex as to appear psychedelic. There were green beards of jungle; blue rivers and tributaries spread like a doctor’s chart of blood vessels; red or black roads zigzagging; the mauve scabs of built-up areas. Puncture holes recurred in the same pattern in multiple sections, from claymore pellets ripping through.

  He poked a swirl of brown lines. “He came out of the rain forest at the base of Hill 71. The area’s unpopulated, a free-fire zone. The best explanation for how he got there is an air crash. The Second Infantry Brigade commander, Colonel Larsen, has mounted aerial searches for wreckage. So far, they haven’t found any. The AO is triple-canopy jungle. If an aircraft went down there, it got swallowed in the trees.”

  “Missing aircraft?”

  “All of ours are accounted for. As for Vietnamese civil and military flights, no reports of crashes, but who the fuck knows?”

  On the map, moss green matted the ovals of Hill 71. Resistive to encroachment, so dense that the Viet Cong and Americans might pass simultaneously under the same tree and not see each other, the rain forest was not the place where a man hiked alone at night. Not even a Viet Cong guerrilla. Rumors had long circulated of Caucasian VCs, though I’d never encountered one or met anybody who had. Most people thought the ‘white cong’ stories were bullshit.

  “Larsen flew down to talk to me. He’s been around long enough to recognize the kind of incident that gets you in trouble. When he found out that his soldiers had blown away a white man, he requested a formal investigation. I’ve authorized one, despite objections from MACV Headquarters. General Cobris is MACV’s program officer for Vietnamization—which puts him in the middle of everything. He insists that the fingerprint checks and the absence of a dental-chart match are sufficient to confirm that the casualty was not an American. He says an investigation merely whets the appetite of the press and incites bullshit speculation like this article.”

  “Sounds about right to me.”

  “We’re got to look like we’re doing something. Until Cobris stops us, which he will soon enough.”

  “So this is all for show?”

  “What do you expect? Cobris hates the case, but Larsen’s a combat commander with admirers in high places, and Cobris can’t shove him around.” His tobacco-stained teeth bared, and he plucked out the cigarette whose smoke fled over the reddened skin of his forehead. What he meant, but didn’t say, was that Cobris could shove him around.

  Too bad. Crowley was MACV’s acting Provost Marshal, and his office, along with the Inspector General’s and the Staff Judge Advocate’s, stood for the integrity of the regulations. The Army’s watchdogs theoretically enjoyed an independent line of dissent that ran all the way to the Chief of Staff. In practice they exercised restraint. Crowley knew it was career suicide to enter the catfight between Cobris and Larsen.

  So many generals roamed the labyrinthine corridors of MACV Headquarters—nicknamed ‘Pentagon East’—that I thought of them like the residents of an insane asylum, not particularly relevant unless you visited the place, to be treated warily if encountered, otherwise to avoid. Brigadier General Kyle Cobris was among the few I’d met personally. Four months ago, he’d presided over an inquiry panel where I’d testified as a witness. He’d just begun his third tour in Vietnam, his first as a general officer, at which level the conventional wisdom about multiple tours no longer applied. His contemporaries had bestowed on him the most esteemed of sobriquets—water walker—implying divine qualities and reserved for those so anointed in success that they seemed inoculated against anything less. After earning an advanced degree from Cal Tech in systems analysis, he’d excelled as a combat commander, then shifted his extraordinary energies to senior staff assignments in Washington. He’d certified his political astuteness by completing a stint as a military liaison officer to the White House. In the sweltering afternoon, as the chugging pedestal fans failed to keep his sweat from slapping onto the précis, his ice-blue eyes had stayed sharp. Afterward I’d heard Cobris described as the most ruthless self-promoter in country. Intolerant of those who lacked the requisite sense of urgency—he referred to them as non-expeditious—he’d reportedly fired a slew of officers from their jobs.

  I asked, “What do you want me to do?”

  “Try to learn the dead man’s identity. Put aside everything else.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “The remains are at the Wister Forensic Facility. See what you can make of his effects. Then, fly up to Second Brigade and interview the soldiers involved. Send me frequent MFRs on your progress. I’ll keep MACV informed.”

  I walked him to the door, where he glanced up at the sky full of the roiling clouds typical of the pre-monsoon season. The jeep spun across the macadam, and he sank into it and sped off as the drops began to whack the roof tiles.

  We were both career officers. The similarities went no further. Crowley would not have lived with a Vietnamese woman in Cholon. He did not befriend Asians, or ‘gooks’ as he called them. He thought it best to deal with the locals from a distance, the way an artilleryman could shell a target he never saw.

  The rain began to avalanche, the drops to ping on the louvers. Lopez, working wonders with the old coffee percolator, had a steaming cup in hand. Staring at the map and the pattern of holes, he said, “The mystery man came from nowhere and was going nowhere, and he managed to get hosed in the process. Sound like someplace familiar?”

  * * *

  My earliest memory was of a day when, three years old, I witnessed the Tanner clan gather on a Massachusetts lawn under the sun-speckled shade of trees. The Tanners’ roots stretched to the American Revolution. A relative reportedly had seen action at Lexington, and a rifle of his had existed until early in this century, when a fire or theft or other misfortune had claimed it. The sorrow of losing the relic rang in the tone of every family member who’d mentioned it to me. Our forefather from the revolution had bequeathed a more lasting memento, a flat-topped hill called Tanner’s Woods on the western shore of the Connecticut River. Almost two centuries later, it retained the name, and I grew up tracing its crest with my finger, following its plunge to the river’s edge. Within sight of its green skirt, I learned that a man’s duty was to pass something to the next generation. Land, community, family—all ran parallel to the Vietnamese custom of ancestor worship, and when I got to Saigon they helped me understand the unraveling this ancient society had suffered.

  The Tanners liv
ed far enough from Boston so that we spoke with no trace of its accent. As with most Mass folks, we had family connections there, the most renowned an uncle who’d studied and later taught at Harvard. In poor health, as thin as his repp-tie, Vaughn Tanner was rarely seen, save for on Christmas Days when he joined the clan for dinner. The Tanner women, the family’s tradition keepers, collaborated to put on a spectacular feast in the modest spaces of my uncle Frank’s white-plank house. Too numerous to sit together at a table, we balanced our heaped plates on trays, the males invariably clustering in the living room while the TV played a program nobody could hear. Vaughn sat in a stuffed chair, tray on his lap, napkin tucked over his tie, smiling with mock charm at the children who occasionally dashed in.

  I was a teenager before I understood that he wasn’t popular with the rest of the family. Alone among them, he questioned the authenticity of our links to the Battle of Lexington. The historical records did not list anyone of our name, he said with a shrug, as if it wasn’t significant either way. Imagine the effect of his comment on the Tanners, their family legend having become grist for a Harvardite’s skepticism.

  The last time we spoke was Christmas 1966, soon after I’d received the notification for my deployment to South Vietnam the following June. True to his dissonance, Vaughn had asked me why I was going. Why? An irrelevant question to ask a soldier, yet he’d stared at me, apparently expecting an answer.

  “To fight communism.” It was a stupid sentiment, but I’d had to say something.

  Vaughn had smiled. “Communism is an economic theory.”

  “It will force a dictatorship on those people.”

  “On the South Vietnamese, you mean. Have you studied the government of South Vietnam?”

  It wasn’t possible to hold a private conversation at a Tanner Christmas dinner—the relatives circled around each other like tree rings, and before I could answer, my uncle Frank joined us. A sportsman, veteran of the Merchant Marine in World War II, he made the legend of our relative at Lexington believable.

  “Now Vaughn, you’re not saying we shouldn’t be fighting communism?” So bulky next to the diminutive Bostonian, Frank might have crumpled him like one of the beer cans he’d put away. And Frank’s words tripped a bit over his tongue, maybe on purpose, to make it obvious that an intellectual debate wasn’t what he had in mind.

  “Not my point,” Vaughn said.

  “Good. ‘Cause it wouldn’t be right. Nobody second-guessed us when we went off to war.”

  Vaughn, in his seventies, his charcoal herringbone jacket mottled with white hairs, his skin pallid from the indoors, nodded once, not an apology, merely an acknowledgment, for he knew, as we all did, that Frank didn’t care one way or the other about politics; ours wasn’t a political family and nobody railed against communism. It was etiquette at stake. None of them wished for me to be going off to war, but they’d honor me for it. Vaughn left the gathering then, or soon after.

  At the time it meant nothing to me.

  A man is taught lessons that don’t stick; he might not even remember the subject matter. Other things he learns incompletely, bearing the knowledge around like fruit still in its skin. My first tour gave me a practitioner’s understanding of Vietnam. Though limited, it counted for more than anyone else in my family possessed or ever would possess, Vaughn included. Yet his question echoed: “Have you studied the government of South Vietnam?”

  * * *

  After phoning ahead, I drove to the forensic mortuary at Bien Hoa. My jeep was a sputtering shit dog, the slowest vehicle on the road; even the trucks with bald tires and welded body patches made of flattened tin cans passed me. Squatting on the landfills above the rice paddies, American-supported industries spread smoke as if from smoldering joss sticks to merge with the hazy air. Sandbagged checkpoints beaded the highway, and between them roved joint South Vietnamese-American military-police patrols in machine-gun jeeps. On the outskirts of Bien Hoa, I spotted a South Vietnamese MP waving his riot baton to halt traffic. On the shoulder hulked a pistachio-green Citroën Deux Chevaux with its front windshield blown out, the shards littering the roadway. Smoke frothed from the driver’s compartment. A second Vietnamese MP approached the car, pulled open the door, and tugged at the driver’s shirt until the limp body flopped onto the pavement.

  Along the roads, you passed cars crumpled, scorched, or partially melted, shoved off to the sides. This was how they accumulated. Welcome to South Vietnam.

  The cops began to direct traffic around the wreck. An American MP about eighteen years old, the soles of his combat boots crunching the broken glass, waved cars forward. When my jeep rolled alongside, I asked him what had happened.

  “The guy was an ARVN deserter, sir. His paperwork looked suspicious. The Viet MPs told him to pull out of traffic, and he popped a grenade on himself.”

  “Christ.”

  “Happens all the time, some gook gets shot, blown up, or run over on this highway. I just don’t want to get hit by flying body parts. One hundred and six days and counting.”

  The Vietnamese MPs dragged the body off the road. Traffic was picking up. “You’d better get a move on, sir.”

  Most American soldiers calculated their chances of survival as the reciprocal of time left in their tours. For the kid MP, the odds were reasonably good. The war’s tempo had slowed since the era sandwiching the Tet Offensive, ‘67 to ‘69, when American combat deaths sometimes had topped a thousand each month. Nowadays, attacks were uncommon around the capital. If you wanted to find the war, you had to head farther out, to places like Tay Ninh Province, where the unknown had died.

  I turned off the highway to enter the Bien Hoa airbase, drove for ten more minutes past warehouses, crates, parked trucks, tanks, and helicopters. There were bowling alleys, swimming pools, and theaters. A movie marquee read, ‘Yellow Submarine—The Beatles.’ On this post in 1959, before American logistics turned the place into what it was today, the Viet Cong had attacked a group of U.S. advisors at a makeshift movie show. Two Americans became the first of our servicemen to die in the war. Somewhere a plaque memorialized their sacrifice. At military installations across South Vietnam, you saw plaques for the Americans who’d lost their lives in Vietnam.

  How many plaques were there?

  Beaucoup.

  I reached a sign that read ‘Wister Forensics Facility, MACV Logistical Command.’ Rolling up to the drop gate, I presented my credentials to the guard. Wister handled special autopsies, its scale diminutive alongside Tan Son Nhut’s Central Mortuary that processed the dead like a factory, and in whose hangar-size spaces forklifts carried the caskets.

  At the reception desk, a black soldier in black-framed glasses lifted his attention from a magazine. “Sir?”

  “Major Tanner. I have an appointment.”

  “Sir, don’t you know you got to be dead to have an appointment here?”

  “Does half-dead count?”

  “Okay, we letcha in this time, only half dead. Go on in, see Spec-four Marvak.”

  I pressed through a set of swinging metal doors marked STAFF ONLY, into a chamber where formaldehyde and disinfectants blunted the odor of decomposition. In the autopsy room, a soldier I presumed to be Marvak leaned over a stainless steel table on which stretched a body, the brain exposed at the crown. Marvak probed the tissue with the angled beak of his forceps, and blood and cerebrospinal fluid dribbled into a gutter that washed to the drains.

  “Hey there, sir.” Marvak was a kid too, no older than nineteen. His job description labeled him a forensic specialist, and he seemed comfortable at his work. If the Army could train teenagers to be machine gunners, it could make them detectives of human remains. “You’re here to see our notorious backwoodsman?”

  “Uh-huh.” You’d have thought, after thirty-two months in Vietnam, the night of a dead man wouldn’t have bothered me.

  Stripping off his rubber gloves, he led me to the next room, past a Vietnamese man who drowsily slicked a blood-stained mop back and fo
rth on the white tiles, painting a mural of crimson arcs. At the far wall, Marvak tugged open an insulated door. Cold air whooshed in, fog billowed across the floor. Striding to a palisade of drawers, he nosed up to the inlaid cards. “Here he is. Killed in action. Unidentified. We haven’t had an unidentified KIA here, at least in my time. Oh sure, we’ve seen some grisly cases, took a while to verify them from the dental charts, but this guy’s in one piece, and nobody knows who he is. Explains why he’s so popular, right?”

  “Popular?”

  “Yesterday Colonel Crowley and Major Vangleman stopped by. Today, you show up. That’s like Hollywood around this place. We don’t get many visitors.”

  “Who is Major Vangleman?”

  “From the MACV staff.” Marvak slid open the drawer, removed the plastic covering, and revealed the death face, eyes slightly open. I noticed thick, wavy hair that the body-tenders had washed so clean it might have starred in a shampoo commercial. Not the face, though. His skin had turned as gray as the monsoon sky. It had taken a long time to get him off Hill 71. Unlike the wounded, who were given the highest priority for evacuation, the dead were a routine logistical errand, and he’d lain body-bagged in the heat for hours before a helicopter came to lift him out. Stepping closer, I saw that a claymore pellet had punched a hole in the lower right cheek.

  “How far does the drawer come out?”

  “All the way.”

  “Open it.”

  He tugged the platform to its full length, and it seemed to levitate above the floor. The autopsy incision ran from the thorax to below the navel. Astride the stitched line, more identical holes peppered the flesh. A larger cavity sank in his lower abdomen, a prominent second navel. The arms changed color at the elbows, a farmer’s tan that ended at fingertips stained black from the post-mortem fingerprinting.