Word of Honor

by Nelson DeMille

  “But now I have to work hard.”

  “Yes. I had to work hard.”

  “Fair enough.” She sat back in her chair.

  Tyson looked at her in the dim light of the lamp. He had the sudden impression that she was more obsessed with this thing than she ought to be. It occurred to him that if he could understand the source of her obsession he could outflank her and the Army.

  Like every good interrogator, she had made a sudden switch from inquisitor to confessor. That often worked with the smug patriot or religious fanatic, happy in their martyrdom, or with the mentally deficient who didn’t understand the consequences of confession. But since he didn’t fit any of these types, he saw no reason to offer a confession. And it wasn’t the truth they wanted anyway. The truth reflected more unfavorably on them, on the system, than it did on him. What they wanted was a final offering to Mars, a last scrap of flesh, because 57,939 sacrifices weren’t enough, and the soothsayers had somehow divined that 57,940 was what was required to put the war to rest for all time. But, Tyson thought, since he didn’t recall having started the war, he saw no good reason for sacrificing himself to end it. Marcy, he realized, would be pleased with that reasoning.

  He said aloud but not to Karen Harper, “I made it home. I’m standing on home base. You can’t tag me out now. What is the statute of limitations on being tagged out?”

  Karen Harper stood and moved to the large picture window. She looked up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the lighted White House. She said, “There in that mansion lives a man who knows your name, who has memos on his desk with your name on them.”

  Tyson looked at her dark profile against the window.

  She continued, “That man deals with issues of global importance and national survival every day. From time to time, because of the structure of our laws, he must personally deal with the cases of individual citizens. He is Commander in Chief of the armed forces, your boss and mine. He can grant clemency, immunity, and pardons. He can commission you into the armed forces, and he can rescind your commission. Somewhere along the line, he will have to make a decision regarding you—before, during, or after a court-martial.” She turned her head toward Tyson. “Soon, in the next few days, he is scheduled to hold a press conference. Your name will come up. He, or his aides, have prepared a brief statement regarding your case.” She added, “I strongly suspect that he wishes he’d never heard your name and hopes he never hears it again after that press conference.”

  “That would make two of us.”

  “The nation, Mr. Tyson, wishes they’d never heard your name.”

  “Then that makes all of us.” He asked, “How about you?”

  “I’m glad I met you. You are a remarkable man. . . .” She added self-consciously, “A man by whom I will probably judge other men.”

  He stared at her for a moment, then remarked, “Having said that, you probably want to leave.”

  “Should I?”

  He rubbed his lip contemplatively, then replied, “No. I don’t think we will speak again like this, alone and without witnesses or counsel. We may as well both get the most out of it.”

  “Yes, there are certain dynamics that take place when only two people are present. . . . It gets complicated and phony when there is even one more person. We couldn’t speak like this.”

  Tyson put his right leg on the cocktail table and abruptly pulled his trouser leg up, revealing his shin and knee. “Come here. Look at this.”

  There was something of the infantry officer in his voice that compelled her to respond quickly and automatically.

  “Look. This is something I wouldn’t do at a formal hearing. Closer.”

  She stepped closer and looked down at the thick, curving purple scar.

  “Not much as far as wounds go, Major. But when it happens to you, your stomach heaves and your skin goes all clammy.”

  She kept staring at the old wound as if studying it for some meaning.

  Tyson said, “A shrink once spent two hours telling me about the synergistic effect of a physical scar on a mental scar. The great truth he revealed was this: The disfigurement and pain is a daily reminder of the traumatic episode.” Tyson pulled the trouser leg down. “Well, no kidding.”

  She looked up and said, “A shrink?”

  Tyson realized he should not have revealed that information. He replied, “A friend. Cocktail party chatter.”

  She nodded, but he saw she didn’t believe that. She asked, “Did Brandt treat you?”

  Tyson glanced up at her but didn’t reply.

  “Did Brandt treat you?”

  “No.” Tyson stood. He paced to the center of the room, turned, and faced her.

  “Why not? He was your platoon medic.”

  Tyson did not reply.

  “Was he there at the time you were wounded?”

  “Ask him.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Ask him!”

  She was momentarily startled, then said, “All right, I will.” At length she said, “In addition to the chapter in Picard’s book that deals with the Miséricorde Hospital incident, Picard mentions you in two other chapters.”

  She stooped down and retrieved Picard’s book from her briefcase, placing it under the light of the hanging lamp over the cocktail table. She said, “You are mentioned in an early chapter—the firefight at Phu Lai on the first day of the Tet Offensive. Then you are mentioned at the end of the book, the aftermath of the battle of Hue.”

  She opened the book to a marked place and, still kneeling, read:

  The battle was officially declared over on 26 February, and military communiqués spoke of “mopping-up operations.” But the battle was not over just because the American military declared it to be. For the Marines and Army personnel still engaged in shooting matches with communist troops in and around the city, there was precious little difference between battle and “mopping up.”

  Ironically, one of the last American casualties at Hue was the man whose platoon had made one of the first contacts of the Tet Offensive, Lieutenant Benjamin Tyson.

  Tyson’s platoon, badly mauled in the market square at Phu Lai on 30 January, had gone on to Miséricorde Hospital on 15 February, then was helicoptered to a secure beach area for a few days of rest and refitting. But the battle of Hue raged on, and the barely fit platoon was helicoptered with the rest of Alpha Company, Fifth Battalion, Seventh Cavalry, to an area two kilometers north of Hue. The company, still under the command of Captain Roy Browder, patrolled south toward the city.

  On 21 February, Alpha Company found themselves on the north bank of the Perfume River. Across the river was the Gia Hoi quarter of Hue, a triangle-shaped point of land nestled in a sharp bend of the river. Most of the Gia Hoi suburb was still under communist control.

  Captain Browder, apparently on his own initiative, commandeered a number of flimsy watercraft from the local villagers and crossed the river at dusk. After they reached the opposite bank, the company came into contact with an enemy unit dug into the high ground above the riverbank. The two groups exchanged fire in the growing darkness. Several men of Alpha Company were wounded, and two men of Tyson’s first platoon, Peter Santos and John Manelli, were killed. Also killed was Captain Browder.

  At daybreak, Tyson, the last officer in the company, received radio orders making him Alpha Company’s commander. The enemy had disappeared during the night, and Tyson moved Alpha Company away from the river into an area known as the Strawberry Patch. This was a semirural section of the Gia Hoi suburb of Hue, a place we would describe today as a gentrified exurb. There, in the Strawberry Patch, Alpha Company encountered thousands of wretched refugees. And there they also discovered the first of the mass graves that held the approximately three thousand citizens of Hue massacred by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese.

  Meanwhile, a South Vietnamese ranger battalion had also crossed the river and was making its way south. On 26 February, this unit, with supporting fire from Alpha Company, stormed the la
st stronghold in Gia Hoi, the Cambodian Pagoda across the street from the high school. It was then that Gia Hoi was considered clear, and the battle of Hue was declared over. But this was premature. Whether by design or circumstances, hundreds of enemy troops remained in Hue’s main suburb of Gia Hoi.

  On 29 February, Alpha Company was engaged in aiding refugees and searching for Viet Cong hiding among the masses of displaced civilians. Tyson had set up checkpoints on a road that led to the east gate of the Citadel wall. His men examined civilian ID cards, handed out C rations, and set up a medical aid station. Suddenly rockets streaked out of a nearby grove of fruit trees. Several soldiers and civilians were hit by flying shrapnel, and Lieutenant Tyson suffered a wound to the knee. As the refugees scattered, the enemy began firing automatic weapons at the Americans who had taken cover in a drainage ditch and were firing back. After ten or fifteen minutes, the enemy broke contact.

  The wounded of Alpha Company, including its last officer, Benjamin Tyson, were medevaced to a hospital ship in the South China Sea.

  Another irony of this tale is that Lieutenant Tyson, whose platoon had acted so inhumanely at Miséricorde Hospital, was wounded while on a mission of mercy. Alpha Company itself, now without a single officer and with over half its men killed or wounded, was finally ordered to stand down. They were helicoptered to Camp Evans, the First Air Cavalry Forward Base Camp, and given two weeks of relatively safe perimeter guard duty. Replacements of officers, sergeants, and enlisted men filled the ranks of the decimated company, as the original men found increasingly ingenious ways of removing themselves from that ill-fated unit.

  Hue, that smoking, burning cauldron where so many had died, was peaceful on the morning of March the first. The birds had returned, and no gunfire could be heard for the first time in over a month. But the proud city, often described as the most precious piece of Vietnam, lay devastated, its inhabitants totally demoralized, their once legendary spirit crushed for all time.

  And yet the killing was not quite over. There was still the matter of revenge. This writer personally observed the National Police “Black Squads” rounding up hundreds of men, women, and students accused by their neighbors of having aided the occupying communist invaders. These unfortunate people were taken to various places in and around the city and presumably executed since they were never heard from again.

  As a young Marine officer, standing on a tower of the Citadel, I watched the endless funeral processions winding through the rubble-strewn streets. Hue, which had thumbed its nose at the war, would never be the same again, and neither would the American soldiers who fought there.

  Vietnam’s most celebrated songwriter at the time, a young man named Trihn Cong Son, was living in Hue during the battle. In March, with the Vietnamese spring in full bloom, he wrote a ballad, a stanza of which is translated here:

  When I went to the Strawberry Patch

  I sang on top of corpses

  I saw, I saw, I saw on the road

  An old father hugging the corpse of his

  Frost-cold child.

  When I went to the Strawberry Patch of an afternoon

  I saw, I saw, I saw pits and trenches filled with

  The corpses of my brothers and my sisters.

  Karen Harper closed the book and looked up at Tyson. The room was still, and neither spoke.

  Finally Tyson said, “I just realized that it must have been as unsettling for Picard to write that book as it was for me to read it. He smelled the same evil smell that I did.”

  Karen Harper nodded. She said, “I’d like to know what happened to you during that ten or fifteen minutes of the firefight.”

  “I bled.”

  “Yes, of course you did. And you were in pain. And a medic should have gotten to you. But . . .” She stood. “Well, you said there was no bad blood between you and Brandt, but I strongly suspect there was.”

  Tyson sat on the edge of the bed. He said, “If you suspect that Brandt did not tell Picard everything that happened at the Strawberry Patch, why would you believe Brandt’s selective perceptions of the events at Miséricorde Hospital?”

  “I never said I did. What did Brandt do or fail to do at the Strawberry Patch?”

  “You find out. Then you tell me. Then I’ll tell you if you’re right.”

  “All right.” She paused, then said, “Picard lives in Sag Harbor on Long Island. Did you know that?”

  “That was on the book jacket.”

  “Yes . . . and it’s an odd coincidence that you and your family are summering there.”

  Tyson rose from the bed and crossed to the cocktail table. He picked up his drink. “Partly coincidence, partly fate. Partly . . . reading that on the jacket reminded me of the place. We used to go out there . . . long ago.”

  She said, “You may run into him out there.”

  “Right.” He reflected a moment, then said, “People out there have these neat mailboxes by the side of the road with their last names on them.” He glanced at her. “I guess you know about rural mailboxes. Anyway, you read all sorts of famous names. But there is an unwritten rule of privacy. Well, I used to see the name Picard, but I never associated it with Andrew Picard the novelist, probably because I never heard of him. Anyway, down the road from a house I rented some years ago was a mailbox with the name Algren. I found out it was Nelson Algren, the guy who wrote The Man with the Golden Arm. I loved that book, and I had a copy of it. I wanted to knock on his door and ask him to autograph it. But I didn’t want to violate that rule of privacy. Then some months later I read that he died. So my book is unsigned. But I have this other book, by Andrew Picard, and I think I’d like his autograph, before something happens to him.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Don’t do anything . . . that will get you into trouble.”

  Tyson sat on the arm of the upholstered chair and stared out the window.

  She said abruptly, “Are you separated?”

  He was taken aback by the question, but answered, “Yes.”

  “Is there any chance of a reconciliation?”

  “I suppose . . . I don’t think it’s . . . I mean I think we’re just separated for the duration. Not legally. Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Are you?” Tyson lit a cigarette.

  Karen Harper said, “I’m sorry. I mean about your marriage. And your job.”

  “Well, that’s life though. You can’t be suspected of mass murder without there being a few inconveniences attached.”

  “It’s easy to be bitter—”

  Tyson suddenly jumped to his feet. He felt tired, angry, sick of the subject of murder. “Oh, Christ, Major, I don’t need any more damned sympathy. I’ve had enough of that today.”

  “Sorry—”

  “If I’m a mass murderer, then I don’t deserve the sympathy. If I’m not, I’ll sue the pants off everyone and retire to Switzerland.” Tyson continued, “Do you know where else I was today? I went to the memorial. . . . I could stand here all fucking night and tell you what passed through my mind in ten minutes there. But it’s all been said. I mean it’s all there in that great big black fucking wall. Do me a favor. Go there. Look at yourself in the wall. Take your goddamned list of Alpha Company and find them in the wall. Listen, I don’t care about myself. But how in the name of God can the government bring further discredit on those poor bastards? Go there, Major, and talk to the dead and explain your course of action to them.”

  She nodded slowly. “I will go there.”

  Tyson suddenly felt fatigued and slumped back into his chair. He closed his eyes.

  Karen Harper walked to the window and stared out of it. Finally she turned from the window and said, “Can I make you a drink?”

  He looked at her in the dim light and nodded.

  She crossed to the bar and made him a Scotch and soda, then carried it back and handed it to him. She said, “I’m not feeling very well. Can we continue this another time?”

  “No. Finish it up.”


  “Are you sure . . . ?”

  “Finish it. Tonight.”

  She nodded and sat on the couch across from him. “I’m not feeling sorry for you. I’m feeling sorry for myself.”

  “Good. Press on, Major.”

  Karen Harper looked across the cocktail table at Benjamin Tyson, then drew a typed sheet of paper from her briefcase and glanced at it. She said, “Based on Picard’s book and on Army records and on the statements of Brandt, Farley, Sadowski, and Scorello, I’ve compiled this list of five additional men who were present at the hospital and who we believe are alive today.” Harper read, “Dan Kelly, Hernando Beltran, Lee Walker, Harold Simcox, and Louis Kalane.” She handed the list to Tyson and said, “Could you add any names to this list?”

  Tyson took the list and scanned the names. “No . . . well, yes. Holzman and Moody.”

  She replied, “Kurt Holzman was killed in a motorcycle accident fifteen years ago. Robert Moody died of cancer two years ago. That’s why they’re not on the list.”

  “I see. . . .” He put the paper on the cocktail table. Picard had mentioned the names of most of the platoon members in his book but had not included the usual appendix of “Where They Are Now.” Picard obviously did not know where they were, or he’d have contacted them as he’d contacted Brandt and Farley and had tried to interview Tyson himself. Picard, though, when he’d had his photograph done at the wall, could have taken the trouble to look at the names behind him. Tyson said, “I just learned today that Brontman and Selig were killed in action after I left Vietnam.”

  “Yes, they were. How did you learn that?”

  “I saw their names.”

  She nodded. “Yes, of course.” She inquired, “By the way, did you find your personal journal, or platoon log, or whatever you kept?”

  “I didn’t keep a log.”

  Her eyebrows rose to indicate incredulity. “I was told all officers kept some sort of logbook or journal. How could you remember radio frequencies, platoon rosters, promotions, guard duty, grid coordinates, and all that, without written entries in some sort of book?”

  Tyson sat back and stared thoughtfully at a point above Karen Harper’s head. In a steamer trunk in his basement, that held much of his war memorabilia, he’d found his tattered, water-stained log, bound in furry gray hide, which according to the itinerant Chinese stationer who’d sold it to him was elephant hide, though Tyson suspected the deceased animal to be a rat. The daily entries were written in GI-issue blue ballpoint pen, now turned light violet. The paper was yellowed and water-stained, and the writing was barely legible. It was, however, legible enough to spark his memory, and as he’d flipped the pages, names, places, and incidents returned to him in a way that Picard’s book was not able to conjure up for him.