by JA Jance
We left shortly after that because we had a plane waiting and needed to get back to Tucson.
“I went outside to see Jack,” she explained as we settled into the car. “I wondered if he’d come, and he did.”
“Who’s Jack?” Mel asked.
“Doug’s younger brother. He’s troubled. He has a small house outside town, but he lives a vagabondish life. He doesn’t come out in public much, but I was glad to see him. One of their mother’s friends tracked him down and let him know I’d be here. He stopped by to say hello, but he didn’t want to come inside.”
I wondered about Jack but I didn’t say anything. He sounded like someone with serious issues, and I wondered how much of that had to do with losing both his older brothers.
It was dark as we drove back through town. Bonnie asked us to take the main drag rather than the highway. Tombstone Canyon, the road, winds through Tombstone Canyon, the place, through the businesses of downtown Bisbee and the residential areas above that.
Bisbee is built just over the crest of a mountain pass that Bonnie referred to as “the Divide.” When we merged back onto the highway, I watched in the mirror as she turned and stared out the rear window at the lights of the town receding into the distance. Once we entered the Mule Mountain Tunnel, the lights disappeared completely, as though someone had flicked off a switch. It was only when Bonnie turned to face forward again that I noticed she was still cradling the flag.
Bonnie caught my eye in the mirror. “I’m glad you didn’t tell me where we were going,” she said. “I might not have come. It hurt so much when they brought Douglas home to bury him that it eclipsed everything else. I could barely believe it was happening. This hurt, too, but in a different way. The other time they brought Douglas home. This time you brought me home, Beau. You and the people who came reminded me of how much I loved him and of how much he loved me. Thank you.”
That’s when I realized that I had done exactly what Lennie D. had asked of me.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Believe me, it was the least I could do.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Second Watch is a work of fiction. Some of the people in this book are real and their names are used by permission, although many of the events depicted about them are fictitious as well. The one true part of this book is that the names of Bisbee’s Vietnam dead, the ones engraved on the memorial on the Bisbee High School campus, are all too real: Leonard Douglas Davis, Richard Allen Thursby, Leonard Carabeo, Richard Lynn Embrey, Robert Nathan Fiesler, Willard Wesley Lehman, and Calvin Russell Segar.
It is in memory of their lives, their service, and their sacrifice that I dedicate this book.
THE STORY BEHIND SECOND WATCH
Leonard Douglas Davis
1943–1966
Every story has a beginning.
For me, this one started in Mr. Guerra’s Latin 2 class at Bisbee High School, in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1959. I was a sophomore, as were most of the other kids in the class. The one exception to that was an upperclassman named Doug Davis.
I was the scrawny awkward girl, the one with glasses and a fair amount of brains, sitting in the third seat in the row of desks next to the window. Doug sat in the third seat in the middle row. If I was the wallflower, he was the star, literally the big man on campus.
Doug was an outstanding student. He was smart, tall, good-looking, and an excellent all-around athlete. He wore a Letterman’s sweater loaded with all the accompanying paraphernalia—the pins and stripes—that showed which years he had played on varsity teams and in which of several sports. He had a ready smile and an easygoing way about him that was endearing to fellow students and teachers alike.
Doug was a junior then, and why he was in class with a bunch of sophomores remains a mystery to this day. But I remember him arriving in the classroom early every day and then standing beside his desk waiting for the teacher to show up. He moved from foot to foot with certain impatient grace, like a restless, spirited racehorse ready to charge out of the starting gate. As soon as the teacher called the class to order, Doug was on task. His homework was always done and done right. He always knew the answers. He put the entire class on notice that he was there to learn. He wasn’t mean or arrogant about it; he was simply focused.
It turns out that Latin 2 was the only class I shared with Doug. My talents didn’t carry over to the kinds of advanced math and science classes in which he excelled. But in that one class we had in common, Doug was the yardstick by which I measured my own efforts. When Mr. Guerra allowed some of us to do an extra-credit paper to help improve our grades, mine came back with a life-changing notation written on it in bright red pencil: “A+/Research worthy of a college student.” I was a high school sophomore, but that was the first time anyone had ever hinted to me that I might be college material. That was a milestone for me. In case you’re wondering what kind of a grade Doug got on his paper, don’t bother. He already had straight A’s in the class. He didn’t need any extra credit.
I was a bookish young woman, and I know that Doug and I were often the only two students prowling the stacks looking for books after Mrs. Phillippi threw open the school’s library doors before class in the morning. Doug was a voracious reader, and so was I. I mostly read novels. I believe he was one of the only kids in the school who checked out and read all the volumes from Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The guy was a hunk. It’s beyond doubt that I had a crush on him at the time. Since he was clearly out of my league, I simply admired him from afar and let it go at that. When Doug’s class graduated from Bisbee High in 1961, he was the valedictorian. I know I attended the graduation ceremony because I was in the school band, playing endless repetitions of “Pomp and Circumstance” while members of the class marched to their places under the bright field lights shining over the infield in Bisbee’s Warren Ballpark. I’m sure I heard Doug’s valedictory address; unfortunately I don’t recall any of it.
Once Doug graduated, he disappeared from my frame of reference. I had no idea that he had gone on to West Point or that from there, after attending Ranger school in 1965, he had shipped out for Vietnam.
My life went on. I, too, graduated from Bisbee High School. With the help of a scholarship, I became the first person in my family to attend and graduate from a four-year college. I had always wanted to be a writer. In 1964, when I sought admission to the Creative Writing program at the University of Arizona, the professor in charge wouldn’t let me enroll because I was a girl. “Girls become teachers or nurses,” he told me. “Boys become writers.”
That’s why, when I graduated from the U of A in May of 1966, it was with a degree in secondary education with a major in English and a minor in history. By the end of that summer, I was hired as a beginning English teacher at Pueblo High School in Tucson. Sometime early that fall, I received a letter from my mother telling me that Doug Davis had been killed in Vietnam.
This was long before the advent of the Internet or Facebook or Twitter or any of the many other devices that allow us to stay in touch with one another. By the time my mother’s letter arrived, the funeral had already taken place. I was not a close friend of Doug’s. No one thought to notify me in a more timely fashion, and my mother sent the information along as an interesting scrap of news from home the way she always did—in her own sweet time.
Tucson is only a hundred miles from Bisbee. If I had known about the funeral before it happened, I would have made an effort to be there for it. The upshot was, of course, that since I didn’t know, I wasn’t there. I suspect that a shard of guilt over my unwitting absence stayed with me through the years—a splinter in my heart that periodically festered and came to the surface.
The first instance of that occurred in the early eighties, shortly after I moved to Seattle. A cardboard replica of the Vietnam War Memorial came to town and was put on display at Seattle Center. My children and I were living downtown then. One afternoon, I took my two grade-sch
ool-age kids to Seattle Center to see it. Doug’s name was the only one I looked up, shedding tears as I did so, explaining to my puzzled children that Doug was someone I knew from Bisbee, a soldier, who had died in a war. It was only then, in looking up his name, that I learned Douglas was his middle name. His first name was Leonard, but no one in Bisbee ever called him that. Back home he was simply Doug—Doug Davis.
Time passed. Despite the opinion of that Creative Writing professor about girls’ inability to write, I nonetheless managed to do so. I wrote nine Beaumont books as original paperbacks. When my first hardback, Hour of the Hunter, was published, my first publisher-sponsored book tour took me to Washington, DC. One afternoon, between events, I asked my media escort to take me to the Vietnam Memorial. It’s the only “tourist” thing I’ve ever done on a book tour before or since. While I was there, walking past that long expanse of black granite with all those thousands of names carved into it, again there was only one name that I searched out and touched—Doug’s.
More time passed. I wrote more Beaumonts and the first Joanna Brady book, Desert Heat. For years the grand opening signings for my books were held at the Doghouse Restaurant in downtown Seattle. By the time Joanna # 2, Tombstone Courage, went on sale in 1995, the Doghouse had closed, so we had the grand opening at a Doghouse wannabe, a short-lived place called the Puppy Club. I was seated at the signing table when a woman came up to me, introduced herself as Merrilee MacLean, and asked, “Have you ever been to Bisbee, Arizona?”
“I was raised in Bisbee, Arizona,” I told her.
Merrilee followed up with another question. “Did you ever know someone named Doug Davis?”
“Of course I knew Doug Davis!”
For the next several minutes, Merrilee told me about her sister, Bonnie Abney, who at the time was living in Florida. Bonnie had been engaged to marry Doug when he died. According to the sister, Bonnie had been a flight attendant back then. She’d had a bag packed to go to Japan for Doug’s R and R, at which time they planned to be married. Instead, at age twenty-two, he came home to Bisbee in a flag-draped casket. Bonnie was twenty-six when she waited alone, in a car parked by a lonely railroad siding in the middle of the Arizona desert. Nearby, two Davis family friends sat in another parked car. Eventually a speeding freight train hove into view. First it slowed; finally it stopped. The door on one of the cars was rolled open, allowing attendants from Dugan’s Funeral Chapel to unload Doug’s casket from the train and into a waiting hearse.
According to Merrilee, some months before the Tombstone Courage signing, Bonnie had read Desert Heat. In it, a drug cartel’s hit man guns down Joanna’s husband, Andy. In the aftermath of Andy’s death, there’s a moving funeral scene that takes place in Bisbee’s Evergreen Cemetery, the same cemetery in which Doug is buried.
As soon as Bonnie read that scene, she was convinced there had to be some connection between whoever wrote the book and her beloved Douglas. For months afterward she carried that eventually very tattered paperback volume around in her purse because she couldn’t let go of the idea of that connection, and of course, she was absolutely right. There was a very real tie between Doug Davis and the woman who wrote the book—that gangly girl from Mr. Guerra’s Latin 2 class.
Bonnie’s family hailed from Alaska originally, but many of her relatives had settled in the Seattle area. The next time she came to town to visit, she and I got together for lunch. I went armed with my collection of Bisbee High School yearbooks, my Cuprites.
Our meeting was supposed to be lunch only, but we huddled over those books for a good three hours. Bonnie knew some of Doug’s classmates from West Point, but she knew almost nothing about his high school years. The photos from the yearbooks filled in some of those blanks. We saw Doug in his various sports uniforms; Doug as valedictorian of his class; Doug in a toga for the Latin Club’s annual toga party; Doug in the National Honor Society. And as we examined those photos, a lasting friendship was formed. Bonnie Abney and I have been friends ever since.
During lunch she told me a little about how she met Doug on a blind date in Florida in the fall of 1965, after he graduated from West Point and before he went to Ranger school. She told how their short time together was inadvertently extended by the arrival of Hurricane Betsy. She told how lost and alone she had felt after he died. She told me of her marriage to someone else some six years later—a relationship that was not as successful as it had promised to be.
Bonnie’s days with Doug have remained a treasured time in her life. I understand that. As a writer, I saw that happen with Beau in the aftermath of his torrid romance with Anne Corley. She shot through his life like a shooting star and then was gone as suddenly as she came. While after lots of years and many books Beau eventually found happiness with Mel Soames, Anne will always remain an indelible and important part of his life.
After our lunch together, Bonnie and I stayed in touch with Christmas cards and periodic short visits. After a career with the airlines, first as a flight attendant and later as director of training, she went on to write a book on management. Later she opened and ran her own management consulting agency, one that trained executives for major companies all over the globe. A few years ago she left Florida behind and retired to a place in the Pacific Northwest on Whidbey Island.
In the meantime, I was writing books, one after another. It was invisible to me, but between one Beaumont book and the next, a certain period of time would have elapsed both in fiction and in real life. Not only was I getting older, so was J.P. Last summer, as I prepared to write Beaumont #21, my son suggested that since Beau was getting a bit long in the tooth, perhaps it was time for me to consider writing a Beaumont prequel.
People often ask me where I get my ideas. They come from things people say to me and from things I read. According to my husband, ideas come into my head, where they undergo a kind of “Waring blender” transformation. When they come back out, leaking through my fingertips into the keyboard on the computer, the stories are different from how they went in.
The other thing about writing books is that they take more thinking than they do typing—approximately six hundred hours of the former and three hundred hours of the latter.
About six months ago now, I sat in my comfy writing chair in front of a burning gas log, wondering what on earth I was going to put into the next Beau book. In twenty previous books, written over a period of thirty years, Beau had evolved into a somewhat curmudgeonly old cuss, a guy with a pair of chronically bad knees, a somewhat younger wife, and a full panoply of coworkers, friends, and relations. The idea of seeing Beau at a younger age had some appeal, so I went back to Until Proven Guilty, Beaumont #1, and started reviewing his history.
I was halfway through that book, reading about his experiences with his dying mother, when I came upon the word “Vietnam.” It was almost as if someone had flipped a switch in my head. Had Doug Davis lived and had Beaumont been real, the two of them would have been about the same age. They would have served in the same war. What was there to keep me from blending fact and fiction and having the two of them meet in Vietnam?
That very evening I wrote an e-mail to Bonnie Abney, telling her about my idea and asking for her help. She wrote back the next day, signing on for the project. The result of our collaboration is woven into the fabric of Beaumont #21, Second Watch.
Over the course of the next several months, Bonnie was kind enough to share with me the details of her life back then and of her life now. She allowed me access to some of the letters she received after Doug’s death. The sympathy notes came from fellow officers, some of whom had been classmates of Doug’s at West Point, as well as from guys with whom he served in Vietnam. In the process, I began to gain some insight into the young man Doug Davis became after I lost sight of him.
As I first learned in Seattle Center, in the army, his given name, Leonard, held sway. The men he served with knew him not as Doug but as Lennie D. They told stories of his days in the 35th Infantry; about how he spent h
is spare time playing poker, writing letters, and reading. Several of them mentioned that one of his favorite books, one he read over and over from beginning to end, was William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Their notes revealed instances of his innate kindness and of his natural ability to lead his men. He was known for taking raw recruits and molding them into capable soldiers in a platoon that was considered one of the best. He was a smart and dedicated leader who was able to spout off plenty of colorful language when a dressing-down was required. Soldiers who found themselves taking heat from Lennie D. for some infraction or other never made the same mistake twice.
Through that correspondence, I learned about how Doug and three other officers from C Company, while sitting around a card table in their quarters and playing poker one day, heard a news report about how the Vietcong were supposedly a very superstitious lot, especially when it came to seeing the playing card the ace of spades.
The four second lieutenants embarked on a psychological warfare program in which they made a practice of leaving an ace of spades calling card with the body of every dead VC soldier. The problem with that, of course, was that each deck of cards contained only one ace of spades, and when it came to playing poker, fifty-one-card decks didn’t really measure up. Eventually one of the four wrote to the card manufacturing company asking for help. The letter was forwarded to a company executive who had lost a son in World War II. The man was only too happy to oblige.
Within days, C Company had an ever-ready supply of decks of cards containing nothing but aces of spades. At first those special decks were shipped postage paid, only to C Company. As word spread, however, so did the program, as the card company continued to ship decks of aces of spades to other soldiers serving anywhere in the war zone. Remnants of that ace of spades tradition continue in the U.S. military to this day, including the Ace of Spades squadron based at Fairchild Air Force Base.