Abandoned: MIA in Vietnam

by Bill Yancey

  Reading her dislike for him on Barnes’s face proved easy for Wolfe. The words out of her mouth surprised him, however. “Oh, Dr. Wolfe,” she said, frown pinned to her face. “I’d like you to meet Datu Ocampo. He’s a diplomat at the Philippine Embassy in D.C. He was Jim’s roommate at Annapolis during plebe and youngster years.”

  The short, dark-skinned, plump, white-haired man put his right hand out toward Wolfe. “A pleasure to meet you, Doctor.”

  “Did she say, Daytoo Ocampo, sir?” Wolfe asked, shaking the man’s hand. “Oh, and call me Addy or Addison.”

  The older Filipino smiled. He said, “She did, but my kids have been calling me Data, ever since Star Trek the Next Generation came out. Friends my age call me Dat.”

  “I’ll leave you two to talk,” Barnes said, almost pleasantly. “Tammy went to see about more refreshments, Dr. Wolfe. She should be back within a half hour.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Barnes,” Wolfe said.

  Barnes answered clipping her words with loathing. “You are welcome, Doctor Wolfe.”

  Wolfe shook his head. He spoke to Ocampo after Barnes left. “I’m afraid she doesn’t like me very much,” he said.

  “I’ve known Yaz for over fifty years,” Ocampo said. “She doesn’t like anyone very much. She lives in her own little world. If anyone intrudes without an invitation, they are an interloper and not to be trusted. Don’t worry about it. It took her twenty years to warm up to me. She said you knew J.T. in Vietnam?”

  Wolfe nodded. He took a sip of sweet ice tea. “Not exactly Vietnam. Jimmy and I were shipmates on the USS Oriskany. It’s an aircraft carrier. Or was. It’s an artificial reef off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, now. We spent time in the Gulf of Tonkin launching aircraft against the North Vietnamese, actually moving aircraft around the hangar deck. We also visited Japan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. It was like a working, sight-seeing cruise at times.”

  Ocampo laughed. He said, “After I graduated from Annapolis, I returned to the Philippines and became an officer in the Philippine Navy. I also spent some time in the Gulf of Tonkin, on a destroyer the Americans lent my navy, BRP Datu Kalantiaw, PS-76. It and I shared a first name. It was re-named after one of the first Filipinos to make a pact with the Spanish in 1565.”

  “I didn’t realize foreign students attended the US Naval Academy.”

  “Up to sixty each year,” Ocampo said. “That’s how J.T. and I became roommates after Plebe Summer ended and the academic year began. Some upperclassman decided J.T. looked too Asian. He was a good guy. It broke my heart to see him resign. He would have been a good officer. He had a great sense of honor and duty. I suppose he got some of that from both his mother and father.”

  “You got along well, I take it,” Wolfe said.

  “Not at first,” Ocampo said. “You have to remember the Philippines was raped by the Japanese during World War II. Many of my family died in concentration camps. My grandfather and father served in the US Navy as messmen. They happened to be home on liberty when the war started, on December 8, 1941 in the Philippines. The day after Pearl Harbor. Both were stationed on the USS Houston, but couldn’t get back to Panay Island before the Houston sailed. Eventually, they joined the Filipino resistance. The Japanese captured and executed them. I had vowed never to trust a Jap.”

  “The same Houston that was the first American ship to go down in battle after Pearl Harbor?”

  “The same,” Ocampo said. “Their fate would probably have been the same had they gotten back to the ship before it sailed. In any event, it took me three months to learn to like J.T.”

  “What changed your mind?” Wolfe asked.

  “The first day in the swimming pool. In order to avoid mandatory swimming lessons we were required to swim across an Olympic-sized pool and back. We plebes stood in lines along the side of the pool. We were supposed to jump in, swim across, swim back, and climb out unassisted. He told me later that he had looked at the other end of the pool when some plebes jumped in and disappeared under water. He assumed that was the deep end of the pool. He expected to hit the bottom when he jumped in because he thought he stood at the shallow end. Consequently, he didn’t bother to take a deep breath when he jumped. It was twelve feet deep. There was no shallow end. He came to the surface sputtering. I thought we might have to pull him out, but he managed to swim across and back. Barely. When he told me the story, I realized he was human, not inhumane. It broke the ice.”

  Wolfe smiled. Byrnes had told him that the navy thought Byrnes should hold his breath, sink to the bottom, and walk, if the ship ever sank. They didn’t think much of his swimming ability. Now Wolfe knew why. “I saw him swim at the enlisted men’s pool in Subic,” Wolfe said. “He did tolerably well. Apparently you liked him well enough to room together the second year.”

  “Yeah. We had filed down all the sharp edges by the end of plebe year, before the youngster cruise. We caught the USS Robison, a destroyer, in Puget Sound, went to Hawaii, where J.T. swam in the Pacific and almost learned to surf. At some point, he realized he had to paddle out about a mile to catch a wave. We didn’t have surfboard leashes connecting our ankles to the boards back then. He thought if he lost his board it might be a long swim to shore.”

  “Where else did you go on the cruise?” Wolfe asked.

  “I got to show him around my home town, Manila. He made friends with everyone in my family, even the veterans from World War II. Then we went to Japan. I met his extended family in Tokyo when the ship docked in Yokosuka Naval Shipyard.” Ocampo’s eyes watered. He wiped away some tears. “They treated me like family. I’ve been back many times as a diplomat. Each time I stop in and see his family. We are close friends, now.”

  Wolfe waited until Ocampo had regained his composure, then asked, “What happened the second year?”

  Grinning, Ocampo recounted their return to the Naval Academy. “When we got back, it was like vacation from vacation. No more bracing, no chopping in the middle of the passageways or square corners, as much food at meals as we wanted, no more recitals of minutiae about formations or meals for the upperclassmen. We were upperclassmen. Academics required attention, of course, but without the plebe harassment, we easily got through our studies. I played soccer; he played 150 pound football. We had it made.”

  “Until the knee injury?”

  “Yeah,” Ocampo said. “When they twisted his knee after the interception in the Army-Navy 150 pound game, he said he heard a pop. His leg collapsed when he tried to run to the sideline after he was tackled. The docs at the academy weren’t especially helpful. They told him he’d never fly; he wouldn’t pass the physical. That ate at him and ate at him. He threw books around the room. ‘Why study when they won’t let me fly?’ he said many times. Finally, he gave up and quit. There was nothing I could do to stop him. Captain Byrnes tried to reason with him, too. He told him there were more careers in the navy than flying. So did his girlfriend, although she wanted him to be a ground-pounding jarhead anyway.”

  CHAPTER 44

  Byrnes had never ridden on a train before, except for the trip from Annapolis to Philadelphia for the Army-Navy football game. The conductor curried favor with Vong, still dressed in his green NVA major’s uniform. The national railway employee practically fell over himself leading Vong and Byrnes to a relatively comfortable bench seat in the front of the passenger car. He placed Vong’s small, weathered duffle bag in the storage area in front of the seat. “No one will bother it, I assure you, Comrade Major,” the conductor said. “You and your brother have a pleasant trip. Be certain to let me know if you need anything.”

  After the man had moved toward the rear of the car, Vong said quietly to Byrnes, “Everyone is scared of the uniform. The only thing they fear more are the cadre, enforcers of the peoples’ will.” He had slipped Byrnes a second set of identity papers before they boarded the train to Sa Pa. “Everyone in my village will know you are not my brother, Con co. You are ten centimeters taller than he was. You are now Thien San
g, almost like Thien Vu’s younger brother. And I’m going to return to calling you Con co, okay?”

  “Vu? The man who lost a leg to the B-52s?” Byrnes asked.

  “The same,” Vong said. “He is now an administrator in Ho Chi Minh City. With luck, you will get to meet him again some day. He says he owes you his life. We both know that’s true.”

  “Where did you get these papers?” Byrnes asked.

  “I dealt with forgers and thieves for years as part of my job in national security,” Vong said. “The black market is our only real economy. The only criminals we sent to jail or executed were the opium dealers and anyone in open revolt against the state. Corruption is rampant. If we put all the lawbreakers in detention camps, there would be no one to run the country.” Vong laughed. “Anyway, I have, or I had, access to the best forgers in the country. Many of whom owed me favors. Your identification papers are better quality than those made by the government. In fact a man who makes documents for the government produced them. He steals their ink and papers and substitutes inferior quality materials.”

  “And my picture? How did you get that?” Byrnes asked, scanning his papers.

  “That’s a complicated story. My job in the Ministry of Defense put me in contact with most of the prisons, jails, and detention and re-education camps. After all, that’s where we sent the criminals we caught,” Vong said, quietly, even though the racket made by the ancient locomotive drowned his words before they reached anyone else in the car. “I thought you might have survived the war. I knew you never made it to Hanoi, once I saw the records of POWs repatriated to your country. Yours wasn’t included. Eventually, I discovered where you were – I found out after the Korean blew himself up in the mine field. After that, it was easy to obtain your picture.”

  With a sudden lurch the train moved forward. It took fifteen minutes of halting acceleration, with black coal smoke drifting into the compartment through open windows, before the engine attained a decent speed. “Our infrastructure suffered terribly from the American bombing,” Vong said. “This is supposed to be a nine-hour trip. It will take much longer than that.”

  The car reminded Byrnes of black and white movies he had seen. He imagined Bogart and Bacall as spies on a train through pre-World War II Europe, or maybe he remembered such a motion picture. All the wooden church pew-like seats faced forward. Two persons sat in each seat. Packed to the limit, several unfortunate villagers stood in the aisle. Byrnes suppressed the urge to stand in order to give an old woman his seat, an act that he supposed Vong would have difficulty explaining.

  Every thirty minutes to an hour, the train pulled into a small station, sometimes pitching left and right on uneven tracks, always with a loud screeching of the brakes and a sudden, stuttering stop. After the passengers in the aisle regained their footing, they usually filed out, replaced by a new set of local residents. Byrnes saw trussed pigs, chickens, and ducks carried by farm boys and young women.

  “Buses take even longer,” Vong said, wrinkling his nose to an unfamiliar odor. “And the roads will be the last to be repaired, after the canal system, the railroads, and the electrical grid. We have much work to do. Some still curse Ho Chi Minh for not surrendering to the Americans, although they praise him for his tenacity against the Japanese and French. Ten years after you defeated the Japanese, you made them a world-class economic power. Imagine where we would be.”

  Byrnes fell asleep listening to the clack-clack of the train wheels. He woke in absolute darkness, the train motionless. Unsure of where he was, having started the day in a prison camp, he waited for his senses to take in his surroundings. “You missed the announcement,” Vong said. “Engineers are checking the bridge ahead. There has been a lot of rain recently. They want to make certain it is structurally sound.”

  Shortly after that, the lights came on in the cabin. “Everyone will have to disembark,” the conductor said. “The train will go across the bridge first. Then we will walk across the overpass.” A chorus of moans greeted the announcement. “Or you can take your chances in the train. If the bridge doesn’t hold its weight, you will die.” The moaning stopped.

  “In the dark?” Vong asked the conductor.

  “No, Major,” the conductor said. “I apologize for the inconvenience, sir. We will wait until dawn. Try to get some rest.”

  There were no more incidents after the passengers re-boarded the train on the far side of the trestle. On reaching Sa Pa, Vong had good news for Byrnes. “We won’t have to wait in a hotel room overnight for the bus,” he said, “since we spent the night on the train. Our bus leaves in thirty minutes.”

  Unfortunately, there wasn’t a conductor to curry favor with Major Vong on the bus. He and Byrnes squeezed in along with the overload of passengers. The driver tied crates of birds and pigs to the roof and the back of the bus. Seated near the front, Byrnes thought he could make out French instructions written on the dash. The ancient diesel billowed clouds of oily black exhaust as it worked its way up and down the mountains. Slowly up, and too quickly down.

  What should have been a two-hour trip, 72 kilometers to Lai Chau, took four hours in the Renault passenger bus built with a truck-like front end. There were places along the mountainous road when the collective passengers held their breath looking down into a ravine along the side of the dirt highway. Byrnes almost liked his chances with the landmines better. In Lai Chau, the passengers disembarked.

  “So this is your hometown,” Byrnes said to Vong.

  Vong laughed. “This is the big city compared to our village,” he said. “Be thankful you don’t have a heavy bag to carry.”

  “Why?” Byrnes asked.

  The nine-mile walk on the dirt road to Phong Tho took the two men four hours, up and down the switchback road through the mountains. A man on a bicycle and a woman on a Honda motorbike passed them, going in the opposite direction. Both waved. On the way, they passed a deserted village, overgrown by the forest. Byrnes saw thatched roofs no longer in place, trees growing through foundations, fences crumbling, and weeds poking through the cobblestones. The surrounding fields, once meadows of tall grass, gradually had been invaded by trees. “What’s that place?” Byrnes asked as they sat by the road resting.

  “Tam Duong,” Vong said. “After the French defeat at Dien Binh Phu, the villagers abandoned it. They left the north for the south.”

  “The whole village?” Byrnes asked.

  “A million and a half northerners went south after the Geneva Accords,” Vong explained. “Mostly Catholics. Confucians converted to Catholicism by the French. The Buddhists in the south didn’t like them any more than the Confucians or communists in the north, but they couldn’t live under communist rule. In the middle of the night, whole villages left everything behind and marched south with their priests. They slept during the day, to avoid the Viet Minh patrols.”

  “So why haven’t new villagers moved in?” Byrnes asked.

  “Most young people gravitate to the bigger towns and cities these days, our workers’ paradise. It seems no one wants to be a farmer any longer. They all want to work limited hours in factories or go to university. Besides, we don’t have the population to replace those who went south. One and a half million left in 1954; another million northerners died in the war.”

  “What happened to the northerners who left their villages?”

  “Most made it to the coast, caught boats to the south. Some crossed the DMZ on foot. President Boa Dai granted them abandoned French property in the Mekong delta. Your older brother, Administrator Thien Vu, has been trying for six years to collectivize their farms. He says it’s not going to work. The southerners are too independent minded. As fast as he punishes them by sending them to the New Economic Zones, they bribe officials and return to their property.”

  Byrnes laughed. “The southerners might turn you northerners into capitalists, yet.”

  Turning serious, Vong said. “Don’t laugh. We need Vu to succeed and remain an administrator in Ho Chi Min
h City. He is trying to find you a way out of Vietnam. It may take a while. You need to be patient.”

  “So far, I have been here fifteen years, Binh. That’s a long time.”

  “Perhaps. Remember, the war for Vietnamese independence dragged on for some forty years. On your feet, Con co,” Vong said, lifting his body off the ground and picking up his duffel bag. “Use those long legs to finish the climb up the mountain.”

  CHAPTER 45

  His search for Tammy Kimura led Wolfe back, into the house. Guests gradually diminished in number as they expressed their condolences, said last prayers in front of the casket, and bade their farewells to the sisters. Wolfe heard Kimura’s voice upstairs, along with other guests. As he climbed the stairs he caught a glimpse of a black trouser leg entering the hallway bathroom and the door closing behind the gentleman who wore it. He found Kimura in her brother’s bedroom talking with a gray-haired woman.

  “Mom cut them all out, except this one,” Kimura said, pointing to a photograph in the book, “probably because it wasn’t labeled with your name.”

  The white haired woman chuckled. She said, “I never thought your mother liked me very much.”

  Wolfe waited patiently for a pause in the conversation. When Kimura finished talking, he said, “Tammy, sorry to interrupt. I have to go.”

  “Oh, Addy,” Kimura said. “We were just going to look for you. I want you to meet Emily Rose. It used to be Emily Rose, then Emily Thornton. She’s gone back to Rose, says she’ll keep that from now on, no matter what husbands three, four, and five have for their last names.”

  “Tammy!” the diminutive woman said, blushing.

  Kimura continued, “She was my brother’s girlfriend his senior year in high school. Emily, this is Dr. Addison Wolfe. He was on the aircraft carrier in Vietnam with Jim.”

  Rose turned to face Wolfe. She was short, less than an inch over five feet tall. Her blond hair had morphed into a beautiful silver gray. Her genes had been kind. She didn’t look more than fifty-five years-old, although Wolfe knew she was in her late sixties. “A pleasure. Call me Addy,” Wolfe said, holding his hand out to the woman.