Abandoned: MIA in Vietnam

by Bill Yancey

  Ignoring the questions, the agent said, “When you joined the armed services, you were made aware that you might have to die for your country, were you not?”

  Wolfe laughed. He said, “Part of the reason I joined the navy was so that wouldn’t happen. If I wanted to die for my country, I might have joined the marines. But, yes. The navy made us all very conscious that servicemen, including sailors, sometimes gave their lives for their country. That fact was impressed upon me several times during my time in the service. Shipmates died in accidents. Men died in the Forrestal fire. Why do you ask?”

  “There are over 1600 MIAs that served in Vietnam. We are sure a majority died in combat or air operations,” Jaskolski said. “Some,” he faltered, then continued, “Some have had to give their lives over a prolonged period of time as POWs. Long, slow deaths for their country, if you know what I mean?”

  Suddenly angry, Wolfe shook his head. “No. I don’t know what you mean,” he said. Almost immediately he had an epiphany, “The POWs came home in 1973. Unless you mean there are still men in captivity, and the way they are giving their lives for their country is by continuing to be slaves, or worse to their captors. Is that what you mean? Are there still POWs in Southeast Asia, who are alive and abandoned by our government?”

  “You’re a quick study, Doctor,” Jaskolski said. “James T. may be dead. We don’t know for certain. Probably, he is. What we do know is that we don’t want you stirring up an international incident, because you recently found out that he died. It’s the price some servicemen have to pay. Like it, or not. Do I make myself clear? The United States Government doesn’t want you to remind the public of these sacrifices. Not with the possibility of MIAs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Not to mention a dozen other countries, or the men who went missing during the Cold War. Understand?”

  Stunned, Wolfe stared at the CIA agent. The man returned his gaze, unblinking. Wolfe said, “You mean there is a chance that some of these 1600 MIAs are still alive in Vietnam, Cambodia, wherever, and the government isn’t trying to find them, or recover them? And it has no intention of trying? I’m not certain I can ignore that. What happens to me if I somehow cause an incident that brings this state of affairs to the rest of America’s attention?”

  The CIA agent chuckled. “Well,” he said, “first of all, more than likely no one will believe you except possibly some conspiracy theorists. If, however, it appears that you are on track to embarrass your government, you might find out that you, too, can give your life for your country.”

  Shocked, Wolfe asked, “You’d have me killed?”

  “Possibly,” Jaskolski said, “More than likely you’d end up in prison for a long time, for tax evasion or some other crime. You might find the After Hours billing scam laid in your lap, for instance. You’re sixty-nine years-old now. A fifteen-year sentence for Medicare fraud would be comparable to a life sentence. And who listens to prisoners when they maintain their innocence, or blame their predicament on a government conspiracy?” Jaskolski stood. He pushed the chair under the table. After taking a swig of water from the bottle, he tilted it in a toast to Wolfe. “Think about your family and your reputation, Doctor. Is the suffering you might cause worth finding out additional info about your friend?”

  The CIA agent walked to the door of the hotel room and opened it. Wolfe remained silent as he followed the man to the door. “Good-bye, Dr. Wolfe,” Jaskolski said and closed the door behind him.

  “Good-bye, asshole,” Wolfe said, after the door shut. “It may not have been worth the effort before, but it certainly is now.” Looking toward the ceiling, imagining his friend looking down from his personal heaven, Wolfe thought, We’ll find you Jimmy, whether the government wants us to or not. Promise.

  CHAPTER 23

  Tamiko Kimura sat in the waiting room of the Alexandria Hospital ICU. Wolfe sat next to her, his hand on hers. “When did she have the stroke?” he asked.

  “Right after you left for Blacksburg. The ambulance brought her here. They say the blockage is on the right side of her brain,” Kimura stared into her lap, tears dripping onto her clothing. “They say there is nothing they can do now except wait it out. They tried the clot dissolving medication. If her blood pressure goes up, they’ll have to operate.”

  Wolfe nodded. If Mrs. Byrnes started to bleed inside her head, the blood would compress her brain, also requiring surgery. At her age, she had experienced some cerebral atrophy. That meant a little more space for blood inside her skull, a blessing and a curse. More space meant room for bleeding without damage to the brain itself. The smaller brain meant any damage would have a more serious effect. “Has she been awake?” he asked.

  “She moans occasionally, but we haven’t had a conversation yet,” Kimura said. “The doctor believes she might wake up today.” A taller, thinner, younger version of Kimura left the ICU and sat next to Kimura. “Dr. Wolfe, this is my younger sister, Yasuko Barnes. Yaz, Dr. Wolfe.”

  “Addison, or just Addy,” Wolfe said, standing and offering his right hand to the woman.

  She looked up at him momentarily and held his hand briefly, loosely, limply, and then dropped it. She spoke in a flat tone, not looking in his direction. “A pleasure,” she said. “Mom’s awake, Tammy. She wants to talk with you.”

  Kimura stood. “Excuse me Addy, I’m sure our time is limited, so I’ll go right in.”

  “Of course,” Wolfe said. After Kimura left, he sat next to Barnes. “Is she coherent?”

  She ignored the question and examined Wolfe closely before asking, “You knew Jim?”

  “In the navy.”

  Using a disdainful tone, Barnes said, “So, why did you visit my mother and sister? Did you not suppose that your visit might stress my mother? Might bring on a heart attack or a stroke?” Her frown and stare blamed Wolfe for her mother’s condition.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Barnes. I didn’t know your mother was in fragile health, or I would have taken that into consideration,” Wolfe said. “I apologize if my presence adversely affected your mother’s wellbeing. The reason I came was to offer my condolences to your family over your brother’s death. He was a good friend. I didn’t know he had died until last week.”

  “Real close friend,” Barnes said. The bitterness in her voice astonished Wolfe. “Kept in close touch all these years. I suppose – ”

  “Addy! Addy!” Kimura waved at him from the door to the ICU. “Come quickly. You stay there, Yaz. Only two visitors at a time, remember?” The younger sister sat down.

  Wolfe walked over to Kimura who grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him into the ICU. The door closed quietly behind them. Wolfe found himself standing at the nurses’ station, surrounded by ten ICU beds, each in its own glass cubical. Every cubical except one had a patient in it. All the patients had multiple electronic devices attached. Intravenous bags hung on poles in every room. Monitors beeped quietly, keeping electronic watch over their charges.

  Kimura pulled him into the third glass room and closed the door behind him. “Your sister is certain I caused your mom to have a stroke,” Wolfe said.

  “My sister is not rational,” Kimura said. “To her, if two things happen close together, then they are related. And the one that came first caused the second. No matter how bizarre the connection.”

  “Your mother’s better?”

  “You tell me,” Kimura said. “Mother, Dr. Wolfe stopped in to say hello.”

  Emiko Byrnes’s eyes opened and swept the room in front of her. A crooked smile appeared on her face, asymmetrical because the left side of her face barely moved. “Addison,” she said. “So nice of you to come by. My Jimmy like you very much. You go see him. Okay?”

  Startled by her words, but convinced she was confused after the stroke, Wolfe smiled and said, “Yes, ma’am.” He looked at Kimura and wrinkled his brow.

  “Yes,” Kimura said, “I think she’s a little befuddled, too. But did you notice? She spoke in English for the first time in six months.”

 
; “Oh, pshah,” Mrs. Byrnes said. She waved her right hand at her daughter as if to dismiss her. Her left arm and hand remained motionless. Then she closed her eyes and appeared to drift off.

  Wolfe and Kimura backed out of the room quietly. A nurse entered as they left. She brought a pan of water, washcloth, and towel. “Bath time,” Kimura said. The nurse nodded.

  Kimura and Wolfe spoke briefly with Barnes and decided to return to the Byrnes’s residence. Barnes chose to remain in the waiting room in case her mother could see visitors again later. “Come get me in a couple hours,” Kimura said, handing her car keys to her sister. “Dr. Wolfe and I will be at home.” Barnes’s head bobbed. She glared at Wolfe.

  After reaching his rental car, Wolfe said, “Your sister seems to be furious with me.”

  “She’s been irate for twenty some years. Since my father died,” Kimura said. “He was a good man. She doesn’t feel God should have taken him at such a young age.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Seventy. He died of prostate cancer in 1991.”

  “Sorry. So your mom must be pushing ninety?”

  “Ninety-four next week. God willing. Dad would have been ninety-five this year,” Kimura said.

  Inside the Byrnes’s house, they sat at dining room table, side by side. Wolfe placed the yearbooks on the table, next to the binder. It held the letters from Jimmy Byrnes’s friends. He pulled out his notebook and opened it to where he had written down the names of Byrnes’s assumed friends. “Do you know any of these people?” he asked. “There are some pictures missing from your brother’s high school yearbook, too. Do you know about them?”

  Kimura turned the notebook to get a better view of the names. She smiled. “My mother removed the pictures. They were of a girl Jim dated and liked a lot. Emily Rose. His first and only steady girlfriend. She liked him, too. They broke up when he left Annapolis. My mother didn’t want Jim’s future wife to worry about competing with an ex-high school sweetheart. While he was away in the navy, she cut out the pictures. Burned them, too. We only found out about it after the navy told us he was missing.”

  “Very considerate of your mother,” Wolfe said, laughing. “Is that a Japanese thing?”

  “No. A future mother-in-law thing,” Kimura said. “She so badly wanted grandchildren with the last name Byrnes. My sister and I both thought about marrying almost any man named Byrnes to make her happy.”

  “Why did your brother and his girlfriend break up?” Wolfe asked.

  “Her father was a marine colonel. A real hero. He was on a battleship at Pearl Harbor, and stormed the beaches in Okinawa as a lieutenant in World War Two. In Korea, he held a position against the onslaught of a Chinese battalion with only a company of men. Jim’s girlfriend was pushing him to be a marine when he finished at Annapolis. He wanted to fly like my dad. When he quit, she apparently decided he was a loser. Found another midshipman, who did become a marine. And paid for it in Vietnam.”

  “A lot of that going around back then,” Wolfe said. He pointed to the list of names, again. “Recognize some of these people?”

  “How long will you be in northern Virginia?” Kimura asked.

  “I have to go back to Florida this evening,” Wolfe said. “In fact, I have to return the rental and get to TSA in the next hour or so. I can come back again in a couple weeks. Why?”

  “It’s probably not necessary for you to come back. Some of these people still live in the D.C. area,” she said, and circled some names. “I’ll get their phone numbers and email addresses together. If you give me your email address, I’ll forward that information to you later this week. Okay?”

  “That would be great,” Wolfe said. He started to stand, pulling his cell phone from his pocket to check the time.

  “You can’t go yet,” Kimura said. “I found something that might interest you.” He sat again. She pulled the large binder closer to her and opened it. A piece of paper marked one of the slots. From that slot she pulled a long envelope. Inside the envelope was a yellow piece of paper from a legal pad. “Read this,” she said, handing the paper to Wolfe.

  Wolfe pulled his reading glasses from his shirt pocket. He unfolded the yellow lined page and read the marginally legible script. “The navy should do a more thorough investigation into your brother’s death,” it read. “He DID NOT commit suicide. And his disappearance was NO ACCIDENT!” Wolfe turned the page over. The backside was blank. There was no date. No signature. He scanned the envelope. There was no return address. “Who sent this, and when?”

  Kimura pointed to the postmark cancellation over the stamp. “It was mailed on May 1, 1968, so I guess we got it soon after that,” she said. “We never found out who sent it. The navy refused to re-open the investigation when we showed the legal affairs people the letter.”

  “Not much help then, is it?” Wolfe said.

  “Except this,” Kimura said. She pointed to the cancellation again. “The zip code is 32223. That’s in Jacksonville, Florida, isn’t it?”

  Wolfe pulled his cell phone out and tapped on it quickly. He stared at the map that appeared on the phone. “32223. Mandarin. Southwest Duval County. Jacksonville, Florida. May I take a copy of that with me?”

  Kimura handed him copies of the letter and the envelope that she had already made.

  CHAPTER 24

  “A little over six years,” Byrnes said to the guard, Ngo Ty, who unlocked the bamboo cage. The guard had asked him how long he had been a prisoner after telling Byrnes the date, February 2, 1973. The smile on the North Vietnamese soldier’s face made Byrnes apprehensive. In the past, anything that made an NVA soldier happy usually meant trouble for him. “Why do you ask?” Byrnes’s spoke Vietnamese like a native, a native with a northerner’s accent after six years as prisoner of the North Vietnamese Army in South Vietnam.

  “The war is over for you Americans, Con co,” the guard said. “Tet will be a grand celebration this year.”

  “What do you mean?” Byrnes asked. Only recently had the beatings stopped. NVA soldiers had poked him with sticks through the cage, thrown burning cigarettes at him, and punched him at every opportunity. Eventually, they had tired of abusing him when they realized he was no threat and could not strike back.

  “In the Paris peace discussions, your country has agreed to leave Vietnam to its people,” the guard said. He escorted Byrnes to the small pool in a stream where the NVA allowed him to bathe and wash his clothing once every two weeks. “We will still have to deal with the traitorous southerners, of course.”

  “No ceasefire?” Byrnes asked. He had heard similar claims in the past.

  “Ceasefire, yes. But we do not have to leave the south. We will re-arm and restock, and finish the unification of Vietnam,” Ngo said.

  Byrnes looked at the guard, almost as emaciated as he was. “How long have you been in the south, Ty?”

  “Corporal Ty, to you, American,” the soldier responded.

  “Sorry, Corporal Ty. How many years have you been a soldier?” Byrnes asked.

  “Ten glorious years,” Ngo said, standing taller and throwing out his chest as he walked. Byrnes saw the soldier’s ribs behind the loose-fitting, unbuttoned and open, faded, light-green shirt.

  “You have seen a lot of action, then? You believe what the cadre tells you?” Byrnes said. He made conversation, more to pass the time and practice his Vietnamese language skills than to learn anything tactical or strategic.

  Ngo sat behind the naked Byrnes on a rock. He put his AK-47 down beside him and constructed a cigarette from the tissue paper and tobacco he had in his shirt pocket. Byrnes washed with a rag. Having no soap, Byrnes used sand from the bottom of the stream to rub off dirt.

  Ngo stared into the trees and blew smoke from his nostrils. Byrnes suspected his mind drifted to battles in which he had participated, bunkers in which he had hunkered down, and long marches which he had joined. As Byrnes knew, the strain had been almost more than humans could endure.

  Ngo sounded wistfu
l when he spoke. “We soldiers don’t listen to the cadre,” he told Byrnes. “They are old men, deluded men left over from the Viet Minh and the war with France. They no longer fight. We do not respect them. The communists were the only people who would help us escape from French colonial slavery. It was a convenient marriage. When this war is over, the cadre will disappear. Ho Chi Minh himself would disband them after the war ends, if he were still alive. United Vietnam will chart its own future. Not the Chinese or the Soviets.”

  “Are there many soldiers who feel this way?” Byrnes asked.

  “All the younger men and most of the older ones,” Ngo said. “Everyone except the older communists and their cadre. The generals will take care of the cadre after the war is over.”

  Byrnes began to wash his shirt, alternately rinsing in the dirty water and wringing it out after slapping it on a large rock. He pulled the rope belt from the loops of his cotton pants. He had braided the belt from parachute cord a soldier had given him. The parachute had dropped an American magnesium flare during a night battle. The NVA soldiers had found dozens of parachutes the next day.

  Byrnes flung the belt onto shore near Ngo. Then he washed his light green faded trousers. Leaving the stream, he hung his clothing on some bushes to dry and squatted in the dry sand near Ngo and the belt. He dripped dry slowly in the sultry heat of the jungle, unable to tell sweat from pond water. The smell of rotting undergrowth filled his nostrils.

  Ngo continued. “I left my village when I was eighteen, ten years ago. Five other boys from my village and I joined with a hundred others from the surrounding villages. We had all turned eighteen the year before. There was a great celebration. The whole village turned out to see us march away. The party had been going on for two days when we left. A few of the boys had drunk too much wine. They suffered in the march to the transportation rendezvous area.

  “At a larger village we climbed on to four old French lorries. It took two days to get to our training site packed in those lorries, standing the whole time. At our basic training camp, they issued us our uniforms. Along with the hated political indoctrination, we trained for combat for three months, first with wooden weapons, then real weapons. Learning to kill with a shovel, bayonet, grenades, and this AK-47 took a long time. I spent more time digging trenches, foxholes, and tunnels, though. We also spent many days marching, learning to move undetected at night, and to hide from reconnaissance aircraft during the day. All of us who trained together formed a new battalion.