Les sighed and picked up the report from his desk. He slowly held it out for Kel. “He’s got you on this one. Don’t be stupid. Diversity Awareness—it’s a PC thing and that means he has your nuts in a vise—which is just what he wants. Take this. Assign it to someone on your staff, and stall like hell. Haven’t I taught you anything over these years? Smile, nod, and wait the sonofabitch out.”
CHAPTER 5
Mililani, Hawaii
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2007
Kel swung his old Volkswagen Jetta into his driveway and killed the engine. As he opened the door and stepped out, he made sure to tuck the seat belt back inside. That had become a habit ever since one of his sons had slammed the rear door shut, with the belt hanging out. Normally that wouldn’t have been a problem except that he’d slammed it shut so hard that the lock broke, forever trapping the belt on the outside. Now the buckle dragged along on the asphalt, sparking and pinging. Kel kept intending to cut it off but never got around to it.
The other habit that had developed as of late was casting a glare in the direction of his neighbor across the street, or if the neighbor was not outside, a glare at the house served as a satisfying proxy. Mililani, Hawaii, was a small bedroom community of mostly two-income families that had sprouted from a smudge of red dirt in the central highlands of Oahu. Thirty years earlier it had been a sea of prickly green-and-gold pineapples. It was the sort of town that focused on its children, and husbands received calls to remember to stop off on the way home from work to coach the Little League team (and to stop off at the grocery store and pick up a twenty-pound sack of rice for dinner). Kel’s neighbor was a small Japanese man who always seemed to be wearing a muscle shirt and flip-flops and who never seemed to work outside the confines of his property. He could usually be spotted, on his hands and knees, cutting his grass with a pair of scissors—a feat made possible by the fact that his front lawn was only slightly larger than an AAA roadmap. When he wasn’t snipping his grass, he was tracking down errant leaves that blew into his space as if they were illegal immigrants flooding his border. It was, in fact, the leaves that were at the root of the glaring. Ever since the neighbor had pounded on Kel’s door early one Saturday morning to demand that Kel keep his mango leaves on his side of the street, Kel had been glaring at every opportunity that presented itself; glaring and hoping that his neighbor would honorably deal with his frustration by committing hara-kiri with a leaf rake.
Mary Louise McKelvey looked up from the stack of papers she was grading. “Robert McKelvey, you haven’t been home this early since,” she paused, she looked at her watch, it was midafternoon. “Well, since I don’t know when. Are you okay? See your neighbor anywhere?”
Kel had walked in the front door of his house and dropped his backpack in the entryway as if it were an anchor chain. The slope of his shoulders had the soft curve of an eroded hillside, and he had all the appearance of the elements wasting him away. He stood in place momentarily before summoning up the energy to bend at the waist and jerk the knots in his shoes free. He didn’t respond.
“Bless your heart, if you don’t look like somethin’s been chewin’ on you. A big dog, maybe. You okay?” Mary Louise would bless the devil’s heart.
Kel walked slowly into the living room and sat heavily on the sofa next to his wife. After a moment he lay down with his head in her lap and closed his eyes. He didn’t speak.
Mary Louise eased a stack of papers out from under his head and set them aside. She stroked his hair momentarily, gauging his silence. “You’re goin’ back to Iraq, aren’t you?”
Kel sighed through his nose but didn’t answer.
“Kel?”
“No.” He sighed again.
“North Korea?”
“No. I promised.”
Mary Louise nodded slowly as she looked for a loophole in the answers. “So tell me.”
Kel adjusted his position slightly. “Remember the movie Harvey?”
“Remind me. Glenn Ford?”
“Jimmy Stewart.”
“Was that the one about that big rabbit?”
“Umm. A very big rabbit that only Jimmy Stewart and his psychiatrist could see.”
“Oh, Lord, don’t tell me you’ve started seeing big rabbits. That’s all we need.”
“I wish. No, it’s the psychiatrist. Remember there’s this scene where he’s describing how he’d like Harvey to stop time? Harvey could do that, stop time, and the psychiatrist said that he wanted to go off to Canton, Ohio, and have a kind woman pat him on the head and say somethin’ like, ‘you poor, poor, man; you poor, poor, man.’”
“And that’s what you want?”
“That’s what I want.”
“Too bad you don’t know any giant rabbits,” Mary Louise replied.
“Too bad I don’t know any kind women.”
“Keep lookin’. I’m sure a rabbit will turn up.” She paused. “What happened today, Kel?”
Kel shrugged. He kept his eyes closed and took several slow breaths. “The usual. Botch-It. Reinventing the wheel. Scaling Mount Paperwork. I used to think that the myth of Sisyphus best described the lab. You know, always rollin’ the same rock up the same hill, only to have it roll back every night.” He took another slow breath. She smelled of flowers and soap and stability.
“And now?”
Kel smiled and turned his head, working it deeper into his wife’s lap. “And now I think Prometheus is my role model. You know, you try and try to bring light to the darkness and as a reward you get to have your liver eaten out every day, only to have it grow back every night. God, I can’t take this much longer.”
“So maybe it’s time to leave. You always said that we’d leave when you didn’t enjoy the work anymore. Sounds like you’re there. We’re there.”
“Almost. I still believe in the mission. And the people. It’s just—” The thought snuffed out.
They sat quietly for a moment and then Mary Louise patted his head. “You poor, poor, man,” she said.
CHAPTER 6
Thanh Lay Hamlet, East of Ho Chi Minh City, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2008
The old Russian-made MI-17 helicopter slowly throbbed in low, angling in from the northeast, shuddering and whipping dry thatch from the bamboo and wood huts. The crowd gathered in the swirl below like rice chaff concentrated by the downdraft. As it neared the ground, one of the Vietnamese crew chiefs jumped out, stumbling momentarily onto his knees, and began moving the curious villagers back, away from the spinning tail rotor.
A half minute later, the massive craft wobbled to a heavy landing and slowly began its long, complaining shutdown.
Senior Colonel Nguyen Van Dich was the second man off the aircraft after the crew chief. He stretched and popped his joints. He smoothed his shirt and pinched the crease on his pants as he looked around. Nguyen Dich was aging. The man who’d once been able to subsist on a ball of rice every two days and who could curl up under a palm frond and sleep during a monsoon rain now found that he didn’t handle these long flights as he once had. It hurt his back and his hips to spend time on the canvas cargo seating, feet propped up uncomfortably on bags of rice and dried fish and plastic jerry cans of fresh water—resupplies for the Vietnamese workers—and he found himself wondering more and more about why he did it. Why did he spend his days helping the Americans search for their two thousand war dead? He didn’t have an answer. His own country had plenty of dead. Maybe two million, maybe more, and who was looking for them? The Americans had killed his parents and two brothers. Who was looking for them? His pretty, young fiancée was missing and would never be found. Who was looking for her? He too had almost died. Many times. Instead the Americans had merely blown out his eardrums. In 1969 he’d been a young sapper with the Fatherland Brigade in Quang Tri Province when he’d been caught by a surprise B-52 strike. He was far enough away that he hadn’t been killed, but he also hadn’t had time to open his mouth to equalize the pressure, and the c
oncussion had blown out both eardrums. One had never grown back properly, and now, at sixty-two, the other ear was starting to fade rapidly. Soon he would be stone deaf, hearing nothing but distant memories.
The flight had been a short one. They’d overnighted in Da Nang after leaving Hanoi the previous afternoon. Nguyen Dich had had personal business to attend to last night, and his loins still tingled when he thought of her. Even at his age, even with other faculties fading, he was enormously vital. Perhaps it was the extracurricular aspects of the job that made it worthwhile.
The helicopter blades finally stopped turning and the ends bobbed slowly, as if nodding in satisfied agreement at the decision to stop. Several small, brown, curly-tailed dogs had overcome their initial shyness and were circling underfoot, occasionally yelping when they were kicked, but otherwise glad for another day out of the stewpot. The curious villagers formed a tight ring around the aircraft and its strangers, having turned out for what promised to be the day’s—if not the year’s—entertainment. Nguyen Dich cast a disapproving look at them—he didn’t think much of southerners, who had been less than reliable partners during the War of Liberation—then he looked back at the doorway to the MI-17 where the Americans were only now awkwardly crawling out of the helicopter. He didn’t think much of them either. They always took a long time, these Americans, and they were much too concerned about their physical comforts. They had to collect their sweatscarves and hats and expensive, mirrored sunglasses and colorful backpacks. And MP3 players. And water bottles. Always many water bottles. Always a delay.
He wanted them to hurry up. His bowels were getting restless, turning over and over with something he’d eaten last night, and he wanted to get this interview over with and make the short flight into Ho Chi Minh City and get to the newly constructed Norfolk Hotel and its flush toilets and cool marble floor tiles.
Always many water bottles.
There was a stink here that burned his nose. This village was not unlike the one he’d come from—sixty some years ago—but he’d put the fetid, sour smells of the country behind him. The garbage and the rot and the fecund smell of Mekong silt as it worked its way slowly south. This better be worth it, he thought. The American better be buried here. A Red Indian, the report from the provincial office had said. Nguyen Dich had seen movies of Red Indians, painted and feathered and whooping like wild animals. Had this Indian been whooping when he died?
Than Chu stepped forward from the crowd. He was a small wire-framed man, with dark brown skin that betrayed the bloodline of a mountain tribe, who smoked anything that he could keep lit. He looked as if he’d been up most of the previous night. His thin white cotton shirt and dark trousers were always stained and wrinkled, and Chu never failed to remind Nguyen Dich of a sheet of crumpled newspaper. But he was good at his job. And as the provincial representative of the Vietnamese Office for Seeking Missing Persons he was responsible for his boss’s coming here now. It was Than Chu who’d reported the information about the dead American—the Red Indian—to VNOSMP headquarters, and now he could only hope that it met with his supervisor’s expectations. The senior colonel didn’t look pleased to be here.
Staff Sergeant Ed Milligan had dozed off during the flight, the throbbing rap turned up so loud on his MP3 player that everyone else on the bird could hear it leaking past his headphones above the noise of the MI-17’s massive rotor. He awoke to find himself alone in the cabin, the flight crew and the rest of the joint team having already filed out. He paused his music, collected his rucksack and Camelback and extra water bottle, and hurried down the steps. He adjusted his dark sunglasses against the pulsing throb of the Vietnamese sun and took in the situation before him. There were naked children and slack-ribbed dogs everywhere, and bone-thin brown men in green pith helmets and loose sandals and even thinner women in conical straw hats were surrounding the aircraft—simply staring in moon-faced interest. Over to the side, Milligan saw that Swinging Dich and the team’s interpreter were talking to someone that he could only presume was the local VNOSMP contact. They seemed to have everything well in hand, and Milligan briefly thought about stretching out again on the cargo seat and resuming his dream before it melted forever away into the gritty creases of his brain. He didn’t. Instead, the American team leader pulled his headphones down around his neck, adjusted the sweat rag at his throat, and walked over to where Dich and the other men were talking. He stood and listened to the conversation—not understanding a goddamn word.
Just like chickens clucking, he thought. Cock-a-doodle-doo.
Sergeant Thomas Stephenson was also listening. He understood every word—almost as well as the Vietnamese themselves—except for when they lapsed heavily into local dialects. But even in that area he was improving. Now he listened and nodded to himself and, from time to time, made a small notation in his yellow hardback field book.
Then, abruptly, or so it seemed to Milligan, Nguyen Dich and Than Chu reached some sort of understanding, and together they began walking toward a concrete building on the nearby northern edge of the hamlet. It was the only building of any substance in the village, and Milligan recognized it as the hamlet’s Communist Party meetinghouse.
Stephenson and Milligan followed. The other members of the team—Vietnamese and American—stayed near the helicopter, keeping the villagers away from the helo and swatting at flies. They were using the same motions for both.
The building was roughly made of hand-mixed concrete thinly buttered over sun-dried clay blocks and was remarkably uncomfortable in appearance. Its brick tile roof was patched in places with irregular sheets of flattened metal—remnants of a downed U.S. helicopter or aircraft. It was built French-style, narrow and long, and had a cement floor, polished by the horny calluses of countless bare feet, which had been covered with a woven fiber mat. It was cool and dark, like a tunnel, and there was no door and no glass covering the small windows. A blackboard stood in one corner, and the walls were hung with posters and calendars of smiling, pretty young Vietnamese women with dark oval eyes and colorful ao dai dresses and conical straw hats. There were words on the posters that Milligan didn’t understand—but the women were pretty, and he kept staring at them, animating them in his mind.
To the side, two skinny brown men—wound as tightly as clock springs—sat in wooden chairs, looking nervous. Had there been loaded pistols pressed against their temples, they wouldn’t have looked any more uncomfortable. They stood when the two Vietnamese governmental officials entered, but otherwise didn’t move or volunteer a sound. Both held tiny stubs of smoldering, hand-rolled cigarettes between thumb and middle finger. The smell of the smoke suggested that they were made of something more than common tobacco.
Than Chu talked to his boss, directing his attention to Nguyen Dich’s better ear, and he motioned repeatedly to the two skinny men as he did so. Sergeant Stephenson had been listening intently and during a pause moved closer to Milligan and translated. “Pretty interesting. Those two are what pass for village elders here. Mr. Than says that they claim to have information on the burial location of an American soldier.”
Milligan shook his head. “Yeah, yeah. That’s what every one of these shittin’ little pencil stubs tells us. Just once I wish it’d pan out. Instead, these two will stand around smoking joints and laughing at the gringos while Swingin’ Dich has us spend the next two hours digging up banana trees at two hundred dollars a pop.”
“No. That’s what’s really interesting. The Dickster there, really—and I mean really—wants to get the interview over with. He says he has official business in Saigon and that we need to be wheels-up in fifteen—buried American or no buried American.”
Milligan looked at Stephenson and then at Nguyen Dich. “Fifteen? Shit, bro, we just got here.”
“Fifteen.” Stephenson shrugged. “Like you say, it’s not at all like Swingin’ Dich.”
“Fifteen. Well, then let’s get on with it,” Milligan said.
The two of them took up wobbly chairs near
the two village elders. Than Chu joined them and motioned for the two elderly men to sit down as well. Nguyen Dich remained standing, looking out the doorway at the MI-17, his body language betraying his obvious impatience with the procedure.
Sergeant Stephenson didn’t need direction. He’d done a hundred investigations over the last two years, and he could conduct an investigation like this one in his sleep. He offered the two men cigarettes. He himself didn’t smoke, but he always carried a couple of packs of Marlboros to help smooth out the introductions. As the men tucked the cigarettes into their shirt pockets for later use, Stephenson turned to a fresh page in his field book and triple-clicked his pen. Than Chu quietly provided the two elderly men with some additional explanation of what was going on, and what the ground rules were, and then Stephenson began. He started at the beginning: names, ages, occupations, years living in the area…
Chickens clucking. Milligan listened momentarily and then returned his singular imagination to the young women on the posters.
“Ed…Ed…Staff Sergeant Milligan…” Stephenson slapped Milligan’s arm with the back of his hand. “Ed.”
“Yeah,” Milligan responded. He took a lingering look at one of the posters and then turned his attention to Stephenson. He suddenly realized that he’d been daydreaming and that the interview must be nearly completed.
“Anything else you want to ask?”
“Huh? What you got?”
“These guys say they know where an American soldier is buried.”
“Of course they do. They always say that. And how do they know it’s an American?” Milligan asked.
KIA Page 3