by Bill Yancey
“At my age, I’m expendable. And I have a lot of experience that comes in handy occasionally. If you change your mind, let me know,” Crouch said. “Tammy said you were on a mission to learn more about J.T. She said you and he were buddies on the carrier. Oriskany, right? Never flew off her. Oldest one I was on was Midway. Anyway, since I live close by in Ponte Vedra I thought I’d stop by. Why are you worried about assassins? Tammy didn’t mention that.”
Wolfe told him about having to shoot Chief Fulton, and the black sedan earlier in the day. He laughed, “Some poor lost Japanese tourist, afraid to eat the local food. My paranoia, I guess.”
Crouch sipped his Pepsi and then said, “So Fulton said these guys threw J.T. overboard? That’s disturbing, even more disturbing than the navy believing he had committed suicide. And Colonel Rhodes shared captivity with him for about two years? Crap. What a way to go. Bombed by your own countrymen.”
“He seems to have survived in places most of us would have died,” Wolfe said. “Any inkling of that ability as a plebe?”
“I don’t know about the rest of plebe year, because we were no longer roommates or in the same company. He showed real resilience first and second sets during Plebe Summer. He had Reef Points memorized before the rest of us. All the famous quotes by presidents, naval heroes, and others. So much trivia. He knew the phonetic alphabet and Morse code before we did, too. Being a military brat may have given him a head start on some of it. Either way, he was a smart guy. Resourceful. You wanted him as friend. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for you then. You didn’t want him as an enemy, either.”
“Why?” Wolfe asked.
Shifting his weight in the chair, Crouch said, “I saw him steal food from meals and take it to friends who were being harassed by upper classmen in the mess hall and had no time to eat. I also suspect him as being the guy who sabotaged some upperclassmen, got them demerits for being late to formation, rooms out of order, etc. He could break into any room. He set traps for them, too. Water balloons. Burning bags of dog crap. All sorts of stuff. And never got caught.”
“Anything else?”
Crouch laughed and said, “He could pass for a Filipino mess boy, and frequently did. I know of two occasions when he left the academy and went downtown Annapolis dressed as a civilian. I guess that’s where he found the balloons.”
“Pete Aikens said they called him Cato, after Peter Sellers’s sidekick in the movie Pink Panther.”
“You only did that once,” Crouch said. “He never forgot an insult. He never showed his feelings, either. Sometimes you didn’t know you had slighted him until he paid you back. And although you couldn’t prove it, you knew it when he retaliated.” Briefly, Crouch admired the granddaughter of one of the Cascades residents as she walked past their table. He continued, “A friend of mine, also a high school classmate from Columbia, South Carolina, was a bigot. Couldn’t stand blacks or foreigners. They were in the same company during the academic year. One day he insulted J.T. Starting the next day, none of his computer programs ever ran correctly on the IBM 360 on which they taught us Fortran. That was back when we used punch cards. Every time this guy ran a program, the computer would go into an infinite loop and spit out his punch cards. Even the professors couldn’t figure it out. They finally had to give him a pseudo ID. I know J.T. did that.”
“He admitted to it?”
“Never,” Crouch said.
“Sounds like he thrived during Plebe Summer,” Wolfe said.
“He made some mistakes, and paid for them, too.” Crouch said. “One of the upperclassmen happened to pop into a plebe’s room late one night. J.T. was in the room without authorization, helping the guy polish his shoes. He heard the firstie open the door and slipped into the closet. The upperclassman started to harass the other plebe about failing inspection that morning because he hadn’t folded his underwear correctly. He flung open the closet door to see if the plebe had remedied the deficiency and found J.T. standing there.” Crouch grinned. “I can still see the smirk on the upperclassman’s face when he told us about it later. They fried him, of course. Gave him a shitload of demerits. He marched them off with his M-1. J.T. had looked at the firstie innocently and said, ‘Going down, sir?’”
“That’s funny,” Wolfe said.
“Yeah, it was,” Crouch said. “You know the academy is a perverse place. A common saying is IHTFP, I Hate This Fucking Place. And most of us stayed because we were afraid to quit and face our family or our peers. Some of us feel J.T. had more balls than we did, because he went home to face his dad, a Captain in the navy at the time. I certainly would not have.”
“Don’t know that I see your point, but I’ll take your word for it,” Wolfe said.
“I guess it’s similar to combat,” Crouch said. “Sometimes you do things more because you worry about what other people think than you worry about the consequences. Maybe marriage is like that, too.” He chuckled. Thinking about his own marriage, Wolfe laughed. “So what’s next, Doc?”
Wolfe told Crouch about the CIA and their prohibition on his travel to Vietnam. “Their attitude makes me even more tempted to find my way to Southeast Asia. I know the odds are long that he could have survived, or that I’ll find him if he did. Just the same, I feel obligated to try. I have led a comfortable life since I left the navy. Maybe not as luxurious as some would assume since I was a doctor, but very pleasant compared to his existence. I wouldn’t want to miss the chance to help him if I can. Do you suppose there was a chance Jimmy could have become a traitor? It’s one of the possibilities the CIA mentioned.”
“One of the more famous quotes we memorized plebe year at Annapolis was: non sibi, sed patriae. The class of 1869 inscribed that on the chapel doors. J.T. personified those words.”
“What does it mean?” Wolfe asked.
“Not self, country,” Crouch said.
“Yeah, I don’t believe he’d turn his back on his country, either.”
Crouch stood. “I’ve got to go, Doc. Have to preflight an F-5 and test fly it. You let me know if you need transportation or a retired navy fighter pilot for some reason, even sneaking into Vietnamese airspace. I know my way around the sky in what used to be North and South Vietnam, also Cambodia and Laos.”
“I will,” Wolfe said.
CHAPTER 38
About two hundred yards from the apartment they had appropriated, Roh put his hand in front of Byrnes, stopping him on the sidewalk near a parking lot full of bicycles and mopeds. A single 1940s vintage, black, Citroen taxicab sat in the lot, without a driver. Standing next to his three-wheeled pedal cab parked at the curb, a cyclo driver leaned on his vehicle and smoked a cigarette. The street and sidewalks glistened with puddles of water, the monsoon season having started days before. It had poured while they ate dinner. Stars shone in a clear sky. “Did you leave the lights on in the apartment?” Roh asked.
“No. I turned them all off,” Byrnes said, looking at the three-story brick building a half block in front of them. He saw lights in the second floor windows. “Are you sure that’s ours? Both those buildings look alike.”
“I’m certain. I used to live in the second one, the one with the giant antenna on the roof.” Roh turned to the pedal cab driver who had taken his seat on the cyclo. “How far will 1000 Piasters take us, father?” he asked the older man.
The old man with sinewy arms and legs grinned, revealing only six to eight teeth. “Half as far as it would have yesterday, about six blocks. The new curfew takes effect in twenty minutes. Where do you want to go?”
“Four blocks straight up this street,” Roh said. He and Byrnes slipped into the seats of the pedal cab in front of the driver. An awning hung over their heads, protection in case it rained again.
The old man stood on the pedals and pushed downward. He pulled up on the handlebars, straining every muscle in his body. His thick thigh muscles labored to move the cab forward. Taking a quick look to make certain no motorized traffic moved in his direction, he ste
ered the cab to the middle of the brick paved street. With no suspension, the sturdy frame of the cyclo transmitted every crack and bump in the ancient cobblestones into Byrnes and Roh’s bodies. “Rough ride, uncle,” Byrnes said.
“Life is rough,” the driver said.
As the cab glided past the twin apartment buildings, Roh and Byrnes saw the woman from the apartment across the hall standing in front of the building. She spoke with two bo dois, NVA foot soldiers, in dark green uniforms. They wore pith helmets and carried AK-47s, in addition to leather holsters and pistols on their belts. Inside the lighted room of the apartment, another soldier walked past the window.
“She turned us in,” Byrnes said, in English. Both men turned their heads away from the woman and the soldiers as the cyclo glided past the building.
“She’s ingratiating herself with the new political regime. I remember her. She’s part of the landlord’s extended family. Three generations of them live in two or three of the apartments,” Roh said. Switching back to Vietnamese, Roh spoke to the driver. “Take us as close to Doan Thi Diem Street as you can on the money I gave you. Give yourself a tip out of it. Oh, and be home before curfew.”
Three blocks later, the cyclo coasted to a stop in front of the Notre Dame Basilica. “It’s not a long ways to Doan Thi Diem Street from here,” the old man said, “about two blocks.”
“I know the way,” Roh said. He handed the bills to the driver. “I would appreciate it if you forgot you gave us a ride.”
The man’s eyes twinkled. “That watch might lock my lips,” he said pointing at the watch Roh had found in the apartment.
Roh slid the watch from his wrist and handed it to the old man. “Thank you, father. Have a good night. Get indoors quickly.”
“Where are we going?” Byrnes asked after the cyclo disappeared around the corner.
“Not Doan Thi Diem,” Roh said. They walked past the intersection of Doan Thi Diem and Hong Thap Tu, to Le Van Duyet and took a right. The street led them northwest. No traffic and few pedestrians crossed their path. Of the persons they saw, there was an inordinate number of individuals with amputations, ex-soldiers missing one or more limbs. The injured men hurried on, looking away from Byrnes and Roh, not knowing if they were communist sympathizers. Sirens began to wail in the city. “Curfew,” Roh said. He strode off the road and closer to the structures on the side of the boulevard, sticking to the shadows of the buildings. The farther they walked the sparser the dwellings appeared. Villas with large lawns and walled yards replaced smaller apartments, businesses, and restaurants.
After entering the residential district in western Saigon, the two men passed a grisly scene as they stayed close to the homes along the street. In one house the lights were on and the front door lay open. A man in the uniform of an ARVN general lay sprawled across the entranceway, the left half of his head blown away. An American .45 automatic lay on the concrete step, inches from the dead officer’s hand. Behind him in the well-lit hallway lay an adult female and two small children, all dead of gunshot wounds. “Some people won’t want to be taken prisoner,” Roh said quietly.
Byrnes followed Roh. “That includes me,” he said.
The Korean took a left and stopped six blocks farther down the road, across the street from a corner mansion. “Still standing,” he said.
“What’s this?” Byrnes whispered.
“My girlfriend’s house,” Roh said. “She works for the Saigon City public works. Her father runs an import company, really a smuggling operation, I assume. They were never too clear about the family business, but they are fabulously wealthy. They were probably among the first people to leave Saigon on a jet for the Philippines or the United States.”
“Will it be safe for us to stay there?”
“For a day or two,” Roh said. “The communists will eventually search all these villas for their capitalist owners. They will punish or execute them, depending on their crimes against humanity, in other words: earning a living and having employees. Exploiting the masses, as the communists call it.”
“We should probably get off the street,” Byrnes said.
“I’ll go first,” Roh said. He ran across the street and leaped onto the cement wall to the right of a large iron gate. Pulling himself to the top of the wall, he lay along the top and waved at Byrnes.
Byrnes jumped up and grasped the Korean’s hand. Roh pulled him to the top of the wall. They both slid off the wall to the interior of the lot. “Don’t think I could do that twice,” Byrnes said, bent at the waist and blowing out a huge breath. “I’m not as fast or as strong as I used to be.”
Roh laughed. He whispered, “We’ll get you a YMCA membership when we get out of Vietnam.”
Roh led Byrnes to the rear of the residence. He tried the French doors one after the other. Stealthily, he turned the handles. One opened and he entered. Byrnes followed, directly behind him. Byrnes pulled the door closed silently and turned to face Roh. A voice in the darkness said. “You might die, looter.” In the gloom of a large kitchen, Byrnes saw a man with a weapon that looked like an Israeli Uzi pointed at him and Roh.
He and Roh put their hands in the air. “We are not looters,” Roh said.
“Well, you are not the postman, either,” the man with the Uzi said. “Who are you and what is your business if you are not thieves?”
“I am looking for Dang Tu,” Roh said. “Does she still live here with her family?”
“And who are you?” the other man asked.
“Roh So-dong, an acquaintance.”
“Lt. Roh So-dong is dead or a prisoner of war,” the man said. He pointed the weapon at Byrnes. “Who are you?”
Byrnes saw no benefit in hiding his identity. He said, “An American. James Byrnes. Until two days ago a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. Lt. Roh and I have recently escaped from the NVA.”
A flashlight suddenly shone from behind the man. A circle of light lit the floor at Byrnes’s feet and then slowly climbed his body. “He doesn’t look American,” a woman’s voice said, when the light shone on his face.
“Tu.” Roh said. “Is that you? Tu?”
The flashlight swung to Roh’s face. It suddenly fell to the floor, the light winking out as it hit the tile and the filament in the bulb broke. “So! So-dong,” the woman screamed. “It really is you.” From behind the man with the Uzi, an obviously pregnant Vietnamese woman rushed to Roh and threw her arms around him. “Father, it is So-dong.” She laid her head on his chest and began to cry.
The man dropped the barrel of the weapon toward the floor. “Come,” he said. “Tu, take these men to the basement, where no light can be seen. Send your brother up here to guard this door. Tomorrow we will have to figure out how to secure it better.”
“Yes, father,” the woman said. She led Roh by the hand through the interior of the darkened home to the basement door. Byrnes followed quietly. A pale light escaped from the basement as she opened the door. The three walked down the steps. In the basement proper thirty-some Vietnamese adults and a score of children ranging from infant to pre-teen in age greeted them.
“My father has arranged for us and our extended family to leave Saigon tomorrow,” Tu said to Roh. Blushing, she held her hand out to a man who stood in the crowd wearing black trousers, black shoes, and a traditional, embroidered, white cotton shirt that hung over his belt. “This is my husband, Truong Truc.” She began to weep again. “I thought you were dead.”
Byrnes admired Roh’s stoicism, the Korean holding his emotions in check, obviously happy for Tu and sad for himself. Byrnes watched the young woman weep with her head on her husband’s shoulder and holding his hand. Roh quickly turned his back to Byrnes and the couple, hiding his expression from Tu.
CHAPTER 39
Transporting fifty-some people to a boat without attracting the attention of the communist vanquishers of Saigon proved difficult, but not impossible. The communists had yet to consolidate their hold on the city. The sudden collapse of the South Vietn
amese government had been as much a surprise to them as it had to the population. In the midst of hurrying administrators south from Hanoi, the army had to take the reins of government temporarily. In order to do that, they had to rely on city officials already in place, and on those citizens willing to swear loyalty, for whatever reason, to the new regime. That left huge gaps in security. It proved impossible to prevent an exodus of local officials and South Vietnamese who had worked for the Americans. Most had assumed correctly that their actions warranted the death penalty if captured by the North Vietnamese.
“Where are we going?” Byrnes asked Roh. The two men accompanied a woman with three small children, meandering slowly north and west. They took random turns at street corners, occasionally doubling back. Roh watched for NVA soldiers or civilians who might be following them, or showing undue interest in their tortuous stroll.
“Can’t tell you,” Roh said. “If the NVA question us, I don’t want you or Mrs. Hung to know, yet.”
The small group approached a bridge across a small man-made channel of water. Roh stopped the group. He leaned over the bridge railing, looking at the brown water and pointing to various landmarks. The children listened intently as he explained part of the escape plan to Byrnes and their mother. “This canal eventually leads to the Saigon River, south of where it meets the Dong Hai River. From there the combined rivers flow southward to the Binh Dong, the East Sea. Or, as the Americans call it, the South China Sea.”
“That’s a long swim,” Byrnes said. “We have water wings, I hope.”
Roh laughed. “Better than that,” he said. “Mrs. Hung and I will stay here, Con co. You go to the far side of the bridge and cross over to the other side. Wait until no one is around. There is a path down to the river. The vegetation and bridge will hide you from sight. You will find a boat there. I will send the others down one by one. Get them onto the boat.”
“Will you be down last?” Byrnes asked.