by Bob Mayer
“Just keep me busy,” Riley said. He looked over his shoulder one last time. “Just keep me busy.”
Chapter 2
NATIONAL PERSONNEL RECORDS CENTER
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, 22 NOVEMBER 1996
The National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis consists of seventeen acres of paper hidden underground with an eight-story office building housing other federal agencies above it. Papers tucked away in the building range from old social security records to the original plans for Fat Man, the first nuclear bomb. The U.S. government runs on paper, and the National Personnel Records Center is the temporary storage place and clearinghouse for every imaginable type of government record.
Unclassified records are in folders placed inside cardboard boxes, which are stacked on rows and rows of shelves. The secure “vault” contains all the classified records. Every scrap of paper produced by the numerous organizations, and every piece of paper relating to any person who ever worked for the government, are kept in the Records Center. Personnel records are normally kept for fifty-six years, organizational records for twenty-five unless marked for longer keeping. Once that time limit is up, files marked as permanent records are moved to final storage in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Nonpermanent records are held until the time limit stamped on them, at which time they are reviewed for either destruction or movement to the Archives.
At the moment, it was organizational records that held the attention of Sammy Pintella. Actually, it would be fairer to say they occupied the time but not the interest of Sammy. Her tall, slender form was perched on the edge of a metal folding chair next to a line of rollers. She sported short red hair, cut almost punk style, and a freckled complexion. Her expression betrayed supreme boredom with her job.
A cardboard box of army unit histories would come rolling down to her every thirty seconds. She would look in and quickly scan the contents under the bright glare of the fluorescent lights overhead, making sure the material matched the computer printout she had taped to the edge of the platform. She had a good memory and referred to the printout only every dozen or so cartons. Satisfied that the box held what the printout said, she’d send the box on its way to the other end of the conveyer, where a pimply faced college freshman would remove the box and place it on a pallet. Once the pallet was full, it would be taken by forklift to the loading dock. When enough pallets accumulated, a tractor trailer would be filled and sent to the National Archives.
Sammy had been at it for almost two hours now and had finished six cart loads. She enjoyed working alone and she didn’t talk to the men who brought the carts or took away the pallets. The Records Center was a giant library of tempting unknowns to her. She could get lost in the stacks for hours on end, looking through various files, reading the stories of people and organizations that the tides of time had swept away or carried on to different places. The assembly line work bored her but had to be gotten out of the way so she could disappear back into the stacks tomorrow.
Two divorces, no children, and thirty-six years on the planet gave Sammy a different attitude from the college students who worked part-time in the unclassified stacks. This job was her sole means of support, and she was glad to do it in a place where she could be alone most of the time. Getting paid to deal with the records of people she’d never meet and places she’d never go suited her just fine.
She flipped open the lid on the next box and was so benumbed by the endless, bland file folders that she almost pushed it on to oblivion. But in the back she spotted the edges of some black and white photos stuffed into one of the folders. That was unusual: typically the histories were dry recitations of the barest facts—just enough to satisfy the army regulation requirements. Curious, Sammy reached in to pull the file. That brief halt caused the first disruption of the afternoon as the next box crashed into the one in front of her.
“Hold it!” Sammy yelled down to the front end worker. “Take a break.”
The slider shrugged, sat down on the edge of his cart, and pulled out a dog-eared paperback to read. The man on the other end took the time to restack his boxes, preparing the pallet for the forklift.
Sammy opened the folder and laid out the photos on the conveyer belt. The twelve photos showed a desolate winter landscape and bundled-up men working on some sort of structure dug into the snow. Several photos obviously had been posed seriously; in others the men were goofing off for the camera.
Sammy picked up one photo. About forty men were gathered around a crude sign drawn on cardboard: B COMPANY ETERNITY BASE. Behind the men, all that could be seen rising above the snow was a metal shaft with a door in the center. Farther in the background, three massive mountains rose from the ice-covered landscape, blotting out most of the horizon.
Sammy flipped the picture over. The date was printed on the bottom edge: 17 NOVEMBER 1971. She retrieved the folder and looked at the faded label: 67TH ENGINEERS. UNIT HISTORY 1971. LT. FREELY, HISTORIAN.
She turned it back to the front. Eternity Base. Sammy frowned. She’d never heard of such a place. After working here for eighteen years, ever since graduating high school, she thought she’d seen just about every type of army record that existed and was more familiar with army terms, units, and bases than most generals. She checked the rest of the folders in the box, but they were just the normal histories of other army units in 1971, none of them appearing particularly interesting or containing pictures. Sammy put the folder to the side.
“All right. Let’s finish this off.” She slid the box down the line.
As the second hand hit twelve, aligning with the minute hand, the workers at the Records Center broke from the chains of the job. They moved for the stairs, to spread out into the city of St. Louis until eight the next morning when they’d be drawn back by the siren call of the time clock. Sammy stayed behind. She had nowhere in particular to go other than her apartment to stare into the aquarium sitting on a stand beside her bed. She figured the fish would be all right for a while without her. She often stayed late, thumbing through interesting files and finishing the tasks that never seemed to get done in the required eight-hour workday.
Her supervisor, Brad Tollander, a history Ph.D. who ran this section of the Records Center, stopped by her desk as he headed out. “What are you working on, Sam?”
Sammy and Brad were the two old-timers of the Center. They’d come in together just after the famous fire that had badly damaged the top floor of the building. They’d been here when many of the eighteen wheelers filled with records had driven up to the loading dock. They’d helped unload carton after carton, year after year. Between the two of them they knew where almost every record was.
Despite the recent valiant attempt to list everything on a computer database, there was no substitute for the years of knowledge in their two heads. Sammy often wondered what would happen when they both retired. There would be records sitting in boxes that no one knew were in the stacks. Computers were fine, but some things just couldn’t be quantified into the little sections on the database.
Sammy shrugged. “Just going through some of the unit histories we cleared today. A few looked kind of interesting.”
Brad nodded. Reading files was one of the perks of the job. “All right. I’ll see you in the morning.” He trudged up the stairs.
Sammy turned back to the computer screen. As soon as the door swished shut behind her supervisor, she punched into the unclassified database, accessing armed forces installations. She started with the army. It took her ten minutes to determine that there was no listing for Eternity Base. She moved on to the air force and then the navy, with similar results. On the off chance the marines might not have told its mother branch, she checked the corps records too. Nothing. That meant that this one file folder of photos was the only mention in the entire Records Center of such an installation. Or at least in the unclassified records, she reminded herself.
Sammy had put the photos in time sequence earlier, and she noticed that the dates on the
back had spanned four months—from late August through December 1971. Judging from the pictures, Eternity Base was some sort of structure constructed under the snow cover in a cold-weather area. That led Sammy to her second avenue of investigation. She accessed the database on Alaska and tried cross-referencing. Again she drew a blank.
She wondered if Eternity Base might be part of the Defense Early Warning (DEW) line constructed across northern Canada—maybe even in Greenland. Her fingers flitted over the keys of the computer as she checked that, but no cross-reference showed up there either.
Sammy then took a different route. She turned off the computer and moved into the stacks. She went directly to the section that held army organizational records—every army unit’s record, from battalion level on up. Finding the section that held the engineer units, Sammy followed the number of the battalions as they went up. She pulled the cardboard box labeled 67TH ENGINEERS, 1970-1974.
Kneeling on the floor, she tugged out the thick folder for 1971. It was bulging with copies of orders, promotions, citations, operations plans, and the various other forms of paperwork that army units churned out in the course of business. Sammy slowly peeled through the pages and stopped at a stamped set of orders. The orders deployed the 67th Engineer Battalion (Heavy Construction) from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, to Vietnam on 20 June 1971.
It didn’t take a Ph.D. to know that Eternity Base wasn’t in Vietnam. She continued through the rest of the folder, looking for a set of orders detaching B Company from the battalion for the Eternity Base operation. Such orders would list the destination, but there were none to be found. As far as she could tell, the 67th Engineers had been attached to the III Corps Tactical Zone, doing various construction jobs throughout the area until redeployment to the United States on 18 May 1972. The unit had been disbanded in early 1974 during the big drawdown in forces after the war.
Sammy ran a hand through her short hair as she considered the puzzle. She knew the army paperwork system very well, and it was unheard of for an entire company to disappear for four months and not leave a paper trail. Why was Eternity Base so important that it could pull an engineer company out of a war zone for four months?
After another thirty minutes of going over the 67th’s records for 1971 in more detail, Sammy still could find no hint of where B Company had gone. All references to that unit simply ended in August and reappeared at the end of December. Another person might have been frustrated, but Sammy was intrigued. This was a challenge. She slid the folder back into the box and replaced it on the shelf. Then she wandered out among the twelve-foot stacks, slowly making her way to her next destination, on the far side: the TDY records.
TDY is military jargon for Temporary Duty, and every time any army element—from the individual on up—was assigned away from the parent unit, a set of TDY orders had to be cut authorizing it. Since B Company had obviously been separated from the 67th Engineer Battalion, Sammy felt reasonably confident that a set of orders would be there, listing where the unit had gone.
She narrowed her search to the folder containing all TDY orders for III Corps, Vietnam, July-August 1971. Finally she found a mention of the phantom company. A single sheet of wrinkled paper—Department of Defense Form 1610—detached B Company, 67th Engineer Battalion, from III Corps, effective 18 August 1971, to the operational control (OPCON) of MACV-SOG.
Sammy’s eyebrows raised at the last term, and her pulse rate quickened. She knew very well that MACV-SOG stood for Military Assistance Command Vietnam—Studies and Observation Group. What had MACV-SOG wanted with an engineer battalion? Despite the innocuous name, Sammy knew that SOG had run Special Forces cross-border missions throughout the war, along with many other classified operations. Some of the records for that unit were in the vault, requiring a top secret Q clearance to even take a look.
Checking SOG records was out of the question. Sammy looked at the rest of the orders. There was no termination date in the appropriate block. It just read: UNTIL MISSION COMPLETION. Destination was listed as CHI LANG, VIETNAM.
Sammy shook her head. She didn’t care what the orders said; those pictures had not been taken in Vietnam. So where had B Company really gone? She replaced the orders, put the box back on the shelf, and headed for her desk. Her mind was clicking along, sorting all the data she had sifted through today, as she pulled on her leather jacket and headed up the stairs. She used her access card to open the door and stepped out into the lobby.
The guard casually looked her up and down as she left. His interest was not sexual. Not only were there numerous classified documents in the vault, but the personnel records were not for public dissemination. Nothing came in or out that wasn’t authorized. The previous year, one of the part-timers had been fired for trying to take Elvis’s army medical chest X-rays. Sammy wondered how American taxpayers would feel if they knew that Elvis’s X-rays were now locked in a classified vault along with the original plans for the first atomic bomb.
She swung open the glass door and walked across the parking lot. Straddling a Yamaha motorcycle, Sammy put on her helmet. The engine roared to life and she cruised out of the lot, the cool fall air knifing into her despite the leather jacket. She cut through the back streets of St. Louis, eventually arriving home. She rented an apartment on the top floor of a garage behind a family house; it was small and cheap and, most importantly for her, it was quiet. She’d lived there for four years now. Sammy parked the bike and bounced up the stairs.
The first sight to greet her eyes as she locked the door behind her was the flashing red light on the answering machine. Sammy turned on the small electric heater and stood next to it for a few seconds, trying to get the chill out of her bones. She reached over and tapped the message button on the machine.
“Hey, big sister, it’s me. I’ve got the late shift tonight—midnight to four A.M. Turn me on if you’re still up. Gotta go. Bye.”
The double beep sounded, indicating no more messages. Sammy put a pot of water on the stove and turned the heat on high. While waiting for it to boil, she stepped over to one of the many bookcases that lined the walls of her one-room apartment. This particular bookcase held row upon row of nonfiction—everything Sammy could find or order about the war in Vietnam. The book she wanted sat in the center at eye level: Green Berets at War by Shelby Stanton.
She checked the index. There were five references to Chi Lang. The last one was what she was looking for. Chi Lang had been a post on the Vietnamese-Cambodian border where Special Forces troops had launched classified reconnaissance missions. According to Stanton’s research, the post had been shut down on 23 September 1971 due to extreme Vietcong pressure.
Had B Company been used to close out Chi Lang? Sammy immediately dismissed that thought. There was no snow at Chi Lang, and it certainly wasn’t Eternity Base. So why then the orders? For the first time that day, Sammy felt a tremor of unease. More than twenty-five years ago, someone had gone through quite a bit of trouble to hide the whereabouts of B Company, 67th Engineers, for four months. If it hadn’t been for some lieutenant with a camera and one roll of film, there would have been no anomalies in the unit history and the whole thing would have disappeared into the Archives in Washington, most likely never to surface again.
Before returning the book to the shelf, Sammy turned to a well- marked place in the back. Appendix A was titled SPECIAL FORCES PERSONNEL MISSING IN ACTION. Eighty-one names were listed in alphabetical order along with a one-paragraph description of the circumstances surrounding each incident. The entries weren’t numbered; Sammy knew there were eighty-one because she had counted them one day and the number had stayed in her mind. Thirteen pages in from the first name she stopped. She knew the words by heart, but still she read:
Samuel Robert Pintella, Staff Sergeant, reconnaissance patrol member, Command & Control, MACV-SOG. Born 6 April 1941 in St. Louis, Missouri. Entered service on 23 July 1961 at St. Louis, Missouri.
Missing in action since 6 January 1972, when patrol inserted
4 miles inside Laos west of the DMZ; past initial radio contact, no further contact was ever made.
Sammy slowly put down the book and blinked the sudden tears out of her eyes. She looked up to the next higher shelf. A photo of a grinning young man astride an old Harley-Davidson motorcycle sat next to a photo of the same man wearing tiger-striped fatigues and sporting a green beret.
Sammy shifted her gaze to the clock. It was almost seven. Five hours until her sister, Conner, came on the TV as anchorperson for the Satellite News Network (SSN). Sammy decided to set her alarm so she could wake up and catch the first hour of Conner’s broadcast. Her sister had moved up to the front desk only last week, and Sammy had watched her twice so far. It was strange for Sammy to see Conner on national satellite TV, even if it was the graveyard shift. Conner certainly was on a different life track, but Sammy felt no jealousy for her sister. Sammy believed that experiences shaped your life, and her experiences had been much different from Conner’s.
She thought of a line she had once read: “It’s not the sins of the father but rather the grief of the mother that is so damaging.” Sammy disliked the word damaging because of its implications, but she did agree that their mother had been greatly affected by their father’s actions and even more by his disappearance.
Their dad had wanted sons and had accepted the births of his daughters with a certain resignation. Their mother had initially acquiesced to his attempts to defeminize Samantha and Constance, the most immediate result being the adoption of the nicknames Sammy and Conner.
As the elder, Sammy had spent more time with their father, and her idolization had found an outlet in dungarees and tree climbing. She’d shied away from their mother’s desire to slow her down and clean her up; as a consequence, their mother’s hopes for a ladylike daughter had fallen on Conner.