The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle Read online

  “A mask helps, sir. You can rub in some Vicks, hides the smell.”

  “Not necessary,” I said. “Can you roll him over?”

  Marvak pulled on a fresh set of plastic gloves and tipped the remains sideways. A massive exit wound marred the lower back just above the buttocks. In the tissue, fragments of pink claymore wadding, signature of a point-blank blast. “He came out of the body bag pretty messy, sir. Loose intestines trailing out this hole. The claymore did a job on him.”

  After he’d eased the body to its original flatness, Marvak tapped his palm to an unsounded beat.

  I asked, “Did you attend the autopsy?”

  “Yeah. Hold on, I’ll get the report.”

  On the soles of the dead man’s feet, crevices cut toe to heel. Broken blisters cratered the skin. He must have been limping at the end, I thought. The jungle played hell on unhardened feet.

  Marvak returned holding a form with onion-skin sheets attached. “They opened him on Monday afternoon. Cause of death: trauma associated with overpressure typical of a blast, and multiple high-velocity wounds from claymore pellets. Hit him all over, as you can see. His heart stayed intact. So did his stomach. Minimal contents—he ate five or six hours before he died.”

  “Did you determine what he ate?”

  “Sorry, the stuff was too far digested. I remember a few yellow remnants. Fruit, I’d guess.”

  “What about drugs or alcohol?”

  “The blood tests were negative for chemical substances.”

  So confident was the teenager of his death facts, he made me feel younger than him. “I need a photo,” I said, wishing I’d gone for the Vicks.

  He rolled over a rack-mounted Polaroid and snapped three overhead frames. The photos showed the chin fallen back, exposing the upper teeth. The reflected flashbulb sparked the illusion of awareness into the half-open eyes. The gray skin took on a purple hue, slightly sinister; you might expect to find cobwebs hanging off.

  “You can close it. I’d like to have a look at his effects now.”

  Marvak slid the drawer closed, thumped the freezer door shut behind us. Longing to splash water on my face, wondering why it mattered to show no weakness in front of the kid, I followed him to a room where boxy gym lockers pressed around a bare wood table. He opened one, removed a carton, and dumped out the dead man’s gear. The jungle fatigues—cotton interwoven with rip-stop nylon—were in tatters. No insignia or patches. The fabric bore stains but no human debris; somebody, probably the Vietnamese mop guy, had rinsed it thoroughly. “Did you go through the pockets?”

  “As soon as we cut them off the body. Empty.”

  Methodically I squeezed the shredded garments, from whose spaghetti-tangle scudded the yeasty scents of soil and mildew. There was a small canvas butt pack, also washed. I picked up a plastic canteen half full of water, unscrewed the cap, and sniffed the faint odor of iodine. “Did you find a bottle of iodine tablets?”

  “No sir.”

  Clipped to the web belt were an ammo pouch and two nylon canteen holders. Only one canteen. “What happened to the other one?”

  “This is everything that came in, sir. Except for the map—Colonel Crowley took it with him. Oh, and the weapon—we keep that in our arms room.”

  The ammo pouch contained two twenty-round M16 magazines. I combed through the gear until I came up with a third magazine, badly dented. All empty.

  He said, “The ammunition is with the rifle.”

  “How many rounds?”

  “Twenty-eight 5.56 and one nine millimeter.”

  “One?”

  “Yes sir. A pistol bullet. No pistol to go with it, though.”

  “What about other ordnance, like grenades, flares, or claymores?”

  “Weren’t any.”

  An infantryman would consume twenty-eight rounds in the first minute of a firefight. This man had trudged through the jungle with soft feet and a paltry supply of ammunition. He wasn’t a field soldier.

  From the litter I picked up a standard-issue bevel-ring compass. They’d found it a meter from the unknown’s body. He must have had it in his hand when the claymore went off. Gently I pried up the lid. Underneath clinked the lingering chips of the glass bevel the explosion had shattered. The breakage was unfortunate; if the glass had stayed intact, it might have shown an azimuth via the luminous line used for land navigation at night, and I could have back-plotted his direction of march.

  The rolled-up poncho felt heavy. Something inside. I found the seams and unrolled it, uncovering five D-cell batteries. “Was there a flashlight among the gear?”

  “Like I told you, sir...”

  I lifted a hand to stop him from repeating himself. “Did anyone else uncover these?”

  “No. Colonel Crowley didn’t look at the stuff too closely. Major Vangleman just poked at it, like he didn’t want to pick anything up.”

  “I’d like to examine the rifle and the cartridges.”

  He was back in three minutes. I checked the ammunition first. The headstamps on the rifle cartridges were identical and showed they were of U.S. manufacture, year 1966. The 9mm Parabellum round looked older. Its base bore a letter-number stamp that began with GE, which I knew signified West German manufacture. So much ammunition had glutted into Vietnam over the years from so many sources that tracing a single round was impossible. Nonetheless I made a note of the headstamp data.

  Undamaged but for a cracked hand guard, probably from a claymore pellet, the rifle hadn’t rusted in the jungle for the three years since the 1st Cav had lost it. Before I field-stripped it, I made sure the chamber was empty—I’d lost count of the accidental shootings I’d investigated, caused by men handling weapons they’d not bothered to check. With my fingers I rubbed the bolt carrier and inner wall of the lower receiver, yielding clean oil, no carbon residue. Nobody had fired this rifle recently. I was about to reassemble the components when I noticed the stock screw.

  “Did somebody take off the stock? There are scratch marks on the screw face.”

  “No sir. You’re the only one who’s broken it down.”

  With a screwdriver Marvak supplied, I loosened the stock screw. It turned easily, which was surprising, usually they put up a fight to unfreeze. Separating the stock and the buffer housing wasn’t a standard step in individual rifle maintenance, and Marvak gaped with curiosity at this procedure he’d not witnessed before. Inside the receiver was another, smaller screw. With these out, I tugged off the stock. Sprouting from the well’s interior, a triangle of cellophane. Gently I disgorged a clear plastic bag that curled in my hand like a giant frito.

  “How did you know to look in there, sir?”

  “Dope heads sometimes take their stashes to the field this way. There’s just enough space to hide a gram or two.”

  Carefully I opened the plastic wrap, revealing not a dope stash but a black-and-white photo of a Vietnamese woman. On a stage, she posed in a sequined dress, high-heeled shoes, and stockinged legs, one kicked outward in a dance step. A jeweled tiara crowned her head. The photo was an odd print, not a size that the PX developed for GIs, rather a professional photographer’s marquee pic that Saigon clubs posted outside their doors to showcase the dancers the way restaurants displayed menus.

  “Wow, sir. That is fucking weird.”

  No comment. With all things fucking weird, I had the edge on him. I tucked the photo in an envelope to take with me. Ever efficient, he found a hand-receipt form, slid it onto a clipboard, filled out the top, and passed it to me to sign.

  “How long do you preserve the effects?” I asked.

  “Until the remains move on. Then we burn the stuff in our incinerator. If it’s serviceable, we turn it in to supply.”

  “Keep everything until I tell you otherwise.” I handed him my card, whose validity might not stretch beyond the week. “If I don’t get back to you within ten days or so, call MP investigations. They should be able to give you the case status.”

  “Getting short, sir?”


  “I’m afraid so.”

  He laughed. He couldn’t imagine the reality, that I was afraid to leave Vietnam.

  Outside, sprinklers scattered water over grass still brown from the just-ended dry season. I breathed to clear my nostrils of the morgue’s sweet-rotten scent, the kind that persists long after it should have dissipated. In the jeep, under the creepers of a tree overhanging the parking strip, I wrote down what I’d noticed. Three observations begged to be explained.

  First, the body. It told the tale of a man not inured to his situation. Scantily equipped, pained from his blistered feet, he’d persevered at night over arduous terrain. What had pushed him to keep walking when the smarter choice would have been to hole up until morning? In the light of day, he might have survived his chance encounter with the U.S. Army.

  Second, the paraphernalia: A rifle lost in 1967, a pittance of rifle ammunition, and a single 9mm bullet. The U.S. military did not issue 9mm weapons. He’d had a compass. Five D-cells fitting nothing he’d been carrying. No food. In the one canteen, water purified with iodine. No bottle of iodine tablets. A second canteen was missing. A man so meagerly equipped should not have been deep in the jungle. The collection implied that his sojourn there had been inadvertent.

  Third, the most ethereal of all and the single item that allowed me to glimpse anything personal: a photograph of a pretty showgirl on a stage. He might have carried the photo in his shirt; instead he’d sealed it in the expedient locket of his rifle stock. Whoever she was, she’d been important to him.

  Experience teaches a cop to beware of quick solutions. Yet I couldn’t help thinking of the photo as a gift. Through my friends on the Saigon police, a chance existed to locate this woman. Find what a man loves, and you will find him, right?

  Experience might also have warned me that what I had was an aberration. To act on it was to set in motion an unbalanced thing, a whirling helicopter blade broken off and careening into a crowd.

  * * *

  After I’d signed up for my second tour, the Army granted me a 30-day leave, and I spent it in western Massachusetts among the Tanners. My connections to Vietnam were not only mental but exuded in the odors seeping from my pores. I gazed at the woods sloping to the river, and I could smell the rice paddies. In the cloud-draped nights, I scanned for the flares over the Nha Be marshes below Saigon, only to discern the far-off lights of Hadley town.

  That was June 1968. Because I was home, it was requisite that I attend the funeral of Vaughn Tanner. His wish to be buried in the family plot annoyed no one; on the contrary, the Tanners welcomed him, their Harvard man who no longer could dispute their family legend. In his coffin, Vaughn was as light as a Vietnamese, and bearing him from the church service to the hearse, I thought the incense smelled like the joss sticks that had burned in the Buddhist temples after Tet, and the saints in the gallery above, their alabaster heads bowed, resembled the Buddha statues. In the drizzle-wet graveyard after the ceremony, my father stood silently for a time, until he muttered, “So you decided to go back.”

  “They need people with experience.” The bullshit you told your dad.

  “Experience,” he echoed. Like uncle Frank, he’d served in World War II, and he distrusted the military with his son’s life. “You really think you can make a difference?”

  “A modest one.”

  “You know, folks here have turned against the war. Seems like the country is full of draft dodgers and flower children. They smoke pot and shout and protest.”

  “Let them.”

  “Haven’t you done your part already?”

  He meant that I’d done what my country had asked, instead of finding ways to hide behind a college deferment or to run away to Canada. I measured the situation differently, for I saw things beyond his imagination: the haze on the rice paddies, the fires over Cholon during the Tet Offensive, people squatting on their flattened houses. The images in my head made me as alone in my point of view as Vaughn had been. I’d not changed so much that I couldn’t understand why my family wanted me to stay home. They were the ones whose name I carried, and I did them no favor to get myself killed in an incomprehensible war.

  Staring at Vaughn’s grave, I thought I should do what the Harvard man had suggested the last time we spoke.

  It was a good thing I started my readings after I’d finished my first tour. Captains were not asked to judge the legitimacy of South Vietnam’s government, and it might have disconcerted me to have fought Tet with my head full of dark cognizance. My timing was important in another way too. Earlier in the conflict, American popular reporting had cast South Vietnam as a beacon of hope, its then-President Ngo Dinh Diem as a savior of freedom, the embodiment of the can-do spirit. Now the judgments had flipped, and criticism of the war abounded.

  I read Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, the books of Gerald Hickey and David Halberstam, Time and Life magazines. I paged through Larry Burrows’s evocative color photographs that spanned from 1962 to the present, his frames catching the terror and tedium of the conflict. The Tet Offensive had opened a floodgate of controversy, and the information rushed too voluminous for me to drink. My father boosted my education. Every day, he brought home a book or clipped an article for me to read. He wanted me to change my mind about going back. His reasons were obvious; the news out of Vietnam was so bad as to make serving a second tour seem insane.

  Journalists often referred to the Vietnam War as a quagmire—something you stumbled into and couldn’t extract yourself from—evident once you were stuck. In the years following World War II, clutching to an empire slipping through their fingers, the French portrayed their reclamation of colonial Indochina in the self-serving light of an anticommunist crusade. The United States logistically sustained the French counterinsurgency. In 1954, after suffering a defeat at their mountain outpost of Dien Bien Phu, the French agreed at negotiations in Geneva to relinquish Indochina and to partition Vietnam. According to the agreement, countrywide elections were to have followed in two years to decide whether the partitions—the communist north and the newly post-colonial south—would unite or remain separate. Nobody doubted that Ho Chi Minh’s communists would have won. But neither Washington nor South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem had signed the Geneva Accords, and the elections never happened. We’d lost China to communism only five years before, and we couldn’t give up another Asian domino, according to the theory of the time. So we propped up Diem, a staunch anti-communist and a Catholic in a country overwhelmingly Buddhist. Aloof from the people, he ruled South Vietnam through cronyism and oppression and his influence with us—his nickname became My Diem: the American Diem. In 1963, we gave up on him and abetted a junta of generals that seized power. They proved incompetent, and South Vietnam was on the brink of losing to the communist guerrillas when, in March 1965, the United States stepped in with major combat units. Now here was a new sheriff in town, the world’s best army against a bunch of fucking rag tags.

  Had we really been so naïve? Sure, but that was way back in the middle of the ‘60s. Long time ago.

  My R&R was growing short. I read my books, discussed them with my father, struggled to come to terms with the disquiet we both felt. I tried to explain to him about the flattened houses of Cholon, how they had presented me with unfinished business. “All wars cause suffering,” he said. “How can you change anything?”

  “I’ll do better next time.”

  Occasionally I thought of the woman in the window above the overturned jeep. In my reveries I pictured her, a goddess looking down, benevolent though not without judgment.

  A few days later, I left for four weeks of training and out-processing. In August 1968, I returned to Saigon.

  I hadn’t gone home since.

  * * *

  The reporter who’d written the article on the Tay Ninh incident was preparing a follow-up piece. Clamoring for an interview, he’d beseeched Crowley’s office, and the colonel had arranged for him to meet with me. Talking to a repo
rter was the last thing I wanted to do, but I hadn’t been consulted, merely directed in the late afternoon to wait at the French Fort until he and his Army Public Affairs escort arrived. In the interval, I typed out a standard Memorandum for the Record with two carbon copies. I described my morgue visit and added my comments on items of possible significance. Then I signed the MFR and sent the original to Crowley in a courier envelope. Lopez took the morgue photos and the marquee shot to the investigations support section. Before the Vietnamization reaper scythed them away, the warrant officers in the fully staffed unit had been wizards at crime-scene photography. Today Lopez had to show the kid who remained how to tape the morgue Polaroids to the wall and snap 35mm frames through various filters. Lopez sifted through the negatives, had the clearest ones printed, and brought me a stack.

  I was sliding them into my leather pouch when knuckles rapped the door. In starched khakis stood an officer holding a garrison cap and a vinyl folder with a gilded MACV crest, the kind the PX sold alongside American Soldier stationery. “Good morning, sir. I’m looking for Major George Tanner.”

  “That’s me.”

  “I’m Lieutenant Hazelton from Public Affairs.” He shook my hand robustly and smiled like a salesman. “This is Alton Gribley from the Randolph Press Syndicate.”

  For their Vietnam bureaus, the American news organizations tapped two brands of journalists: seasoned war correspondents and temporary stringers. The former counted among the war’s most informed observers, men and women with years of experience in strife-ridden countries. I judged Gribley to be the latter, an opportunist who knew little about Vietnam or the military and was here purely to notch his reputation. In his late twenties, his blond hair finger combed, he wore black-framed glasses like the ones issued to soldiers. His forehead shone with perspiration and skin oil. Tan slacks and a pleated white shirt gave him the look of a Saigon pigeon, so called because he pecked crumbs from MACV’s daily press briefings at the JUSPAO building downtown. Had he spent time in the field with soldiers, he’d have sweated off the thirty excess pounds rounding his middle.