KIA

by Thomas Holland

  Just like Rawhide.

  She caught herself humming softly.

  All the things I’m missin’,

  good vittles, love, and kissin’,

  are waitin’ at the end of my ride.

  Good thing her team wasn’t issued six-shooters, she often said, they’d kill each other by accident for sure.

  The orders from Hawaii to conduct a recovery of an isolated burial promised to be an answer to her prayers for a constructive diversion. She was instructed to handpick the personnel from the several teams that were assembling in Saigon in preparation for redeployment to Thailand and then Hawaii. It was to be a small team, and a small site, which meant fewer headaches, and it was close enough that they could drive to it rather than helo in and out. That was a good thing. None of the team particularly relished flying in the old Russian MI-17s that the Vietnamese insisted they use—especially since one had gone down in the mountains a few years back, killing seven U.S. team members. The subsequent investigation showed the crash to be weather-related, but it still had managed to dampen the early bragging rights value of being able to say that you’d ridden on a taped-together Russian aircraft. This recovery site was drivable, and even if the exhumation did stretch out into two or three days—which she doubted given the little she knew about it—they could still spend their nights in a Saigon hotel.

  The team was reduced to essentials: the medic, in case someone got snake-bit or chopped a foot off with a pick; a linguist, to handle the interview with the witnesses; and two army mortuary affairs specialists to work the screens and heft the equipment. She’d handle her own photos, and there didn’t seem to be any need for an explosive ordnance disposal tech—not in a marked cemetery. The VNOSMP sent two representatives, Mr. Than Chu, the local provincial headbuster, and his assistant, a little man who never said anything but picked at his walnut-brown teeth with a sliver of bamboo constantly. And, of course, three Vietnamese drivers for the Mitsubishi SUVs that they were riding in. Americans weren’t allowed to drive the vehicles—presumably because they couldn’t honk the horns frequently enough.

  The team left the hotel before seven, but even with the early start it took about an hour and a half to clear Ho Chi Minh City’s creeping sprawl and another hour to reach Thanh Lay Hamlet in Dong Nai Province. They lost another hour and a half drinking scalding green tea and warm Coca Cola with various provincial and local officials. Bobbing heads and shaking hands and bobbing heads some more. By eleven-thirty they finally reached the cemetery.

  It was small—the area enclosed by a whitewashed cement wall measured less than thirty yards in diameter—and generally well kept in spite of the occasional burst of plantain grass. It looked to be a Catholic cemetery, a vestigial reminder of the colonial French, like so many of the older ones in the south. Most of the stone markers were chipped and pitted—some by age, more by anger. More than one displayed a rosette pattern of damage indicative of mortar or rocket shrapnel.

  The provincial VNOSMP representative, Than Chu, introduced Caroline Thompson to two little stick figures. They were wiry and brown and looked as if they’d been constructed from a couple of used pipe cleaners. When they smiled their teeth looked like little stumps of creosote fence posts. They were chronic betel nut chewers. She didn’t catch their names but Tech Sergeant Michael O’Brien, her linguist, did, as always, and he’d written them down, along with the other required information. When he’d finished, he looked at her and nodded. It was her show now. She was the scientist.

  “Okay. Well, why don’t we start at the beginning, shall we? Start by thanking them for coming and agreeing to talk to us. Stress that this is a humanitarian mission. Ask them to be patient with us as we try to get a better understanding of what happened here. Tell them that we know they’ve answered some of these questions before, but we’re going to repeat a few of them. Ask them, who’s buried in this cemetery? People from this village? Several villages? Just this one? Only one person in the grave? How deep? Is he in a container or simply in the ground? Is this a primary interment or were the remains moved here from somewhere else? You know the drill, Mike. You don’t need my direction.”

  She then took a half step back and watched O’Brien as he translated. She’d been trying to learn some Vietnamese on the weekends back in Hawaii and in the evenings in her tent in the field, but her flat Kansas accent seemed completely unsuited for mastering the rise and fall of the required tones. Her attempts always brought quick smiles and slow comprehension on the part of the locals. Now she was the one smiling at how perfectly at home O’Brien seemed with such a strange and interesting language.

  Like music, she thought, just like music.

  O’Brien bobbed his head like a quail as he listened to the men recite their answers. He made little bleating sounds of affirmation as he took down just enough notes to jog his memory. Then he turned to Caroline and paraphrased quickly, hitting only the highlights that he knew she wanted. “This is a local cemetery. Old. Been here a long time. Only people from this village are buried here. Oldest ones date to about 1952 or so. There was another cemetery located on the western edge of the village but it hasn’t been used in anyone’s recent memory. That one’s Buddhist. This one’s Catholic. Left over from the French days.”

  Other questions followed. More translations occurred. Back and forth. When the issue of where an American soldier might be buried was posed, the two elderly men grew animated for the first time and walked over to a burial plot near the southern lip of the cemetery. It was marked only by being unmarked. The plots in the cemetery were organized chronologically rather than by family affiliation, and started in one corner and snaked back and forth to the opposite corner. There were graves on either side of the unmarked one. The one to the left had a faded photograph of a young woman affixed to it behind a fogged glass plate. Information on the stone suggested it was that of an eighteen-year-old girl who had died on July 3, 1968. The grave on the right was that of an elderly man who had died sometime in April 1971. Between them, reasonably well tended but unmarked, was the unknown grave plot.

  “Now, Mr. Loc, he’s the older of the two gentlemen,” O’Brien continued his translation, “he says that everyone here was relocated during the war and when they all came back to this village in early 1971, this unmarked grave was here.” He nodded at the ground. “Said it had been recently dug when they got here—or so they all decided.”

  “Any sort of marker at the time? Anything?”

  “No. They say that it was never marked. He also says…well, they both say, actually…that they personally know everyone in the village and that none of them dug this one. They’ve always assumed it was the grave of an American soldier.”

  Caroline Thompson screwed up her face. “Why’s that?”

  “Long story, but basically there was this soldier that was always hanging around here—after the village was abandoned, that is. People saw him meeting some ARVNs here on a regular basis. Always this same GI. But then he stopped coming and shortly after that, they found this unmarked grave. Figured it was him, that’s why it’s so well tended. Some of the older folks remember us kindly and feel like it’s the thing to do—even if it’s not…”

  “Politically correct,” Caroline completed the thought.

  “You got it, Doc. That’s not how they said it, but that’s the idea, anyhow. They feel like it’s kinda like…almost sorta like their duty, ya know?”

  Caroline Thompson listened and nodded and then looked at Than Chu from the VNOSMP office. His spoken English was broken and often awkward, but he understood it with surprising clarity—a talent that he exploited with great effect. He’d been listening to both the witnesses and to O’Brien’s translation. She smiled at him. “Yeah, I know. And if it is an American, then it’s our duty to dig him up,” she said.

  Translations completed, the team went to work. The excavation proceeded quickly. They had brought several small hand-held screens with them, but there was little need for them. The soil was
dry and sandy and dug easily. Twenty minutes of shovel work was all that was required to remove the overburden, revealing a U.S.-issued poncho liner that shredded and frayed into fibers upon being touched. Another fifteen minutes of trowel work had the poncho liner fully exposed. Wrapped up inside it were the articulated skeletal remains of a large adult male.

  As she carefully lifted the skull from the grave, Caroline Thompson could see the spidery fractures of an entrance gunshot wound in the middle of the forehead.

  CHAPTER 9

  Hanoi, Socialist Republic of Vietnam

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2008

  Over the last several years the U.S.—Socialist Republic of Vietnam Joint Forensic Reviews had become something of a formality, an exercise in the First Principle of Bureaucratic Inertia: that a procedure put in place will remain in place long after anyone involved can remember why. In the late eighties when they were started, the JFRs, as they came to be called, served a real purpose. Recovery missions for unaccounted-for U.S. servicemen back then were largely unilateral efforts by the Vietnamese, with untrained and unsupervised personnel doing the work and no U.S. eyes on the process. The result was entirely predictable; the recoveries were successful in digging up a great many things besides U.S. soldiers. Even worse, bone trading was rampant throughout the country. Bone traders duped poor Vietnamese peasants and disenfranchised middle-class southerners desperate to flee the country into buying fragments of bone under the pretext that they were the remains of missing Americans. The Americans will give you a big home in California if you turn in some remains. You don’t have any? Lucky man, you, I have some remains to sell for a modest price. Some of the fragments were indeed those of missing Americans, especially early on in the game, but most weren’t. Most were the remains of elderly Vietnamese men and women who had resided peacefully in their hamlet cemeteries until their bones became, literally, more valuable than gold. Some were the remains of dogs or pigs, and occasionally a water buffalo made a cameo appearance, still showing the cuts of a butcher’s knife. It was these latter cases that gave rise to the Joint Forensic Reviews—the need to cull out the dog and the pig and the elderly Vietnamese man before they were shipped to the United States and accessioned into the Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii. Once they had been accessioned, the thick bolus of paperwork necessary to administratively eliminate these cases from the system overwhelmed the lab’s resources.

  In the early days, the JFRs had seen a great deal of give-and-take. Forensic anthropologists and odontologists from the CILHI met with Vietnamese counterparts in Hanoi’s Institute for Forensic Medicine several times a year to examine the suspected remains that had been confiscated by the local authorities. Each side would derive a conclusion independently about the age, race, sex—or species—and then strive to reach consensus, each side careful not to appear to be a rubber stamp for the other. Often there was negotiation, but in the end there was always consensus.

  Over the years, though, the reviews had become boilerplate. Remains trading had subsided, having been driven deep underground by a Vietnamese government anxious to curry favor with the West, and the unilateral recovery efforts had given way to incredibly choreographed joint endeavors, with CILHI anthropologists leading each excavation. The result was that fewer and fewer animal remains, and very few indigenous Vietnamese skeletons, reached Hanoi for examination. But following the First Principle of Bureaucratic Inertia, the American and Vietnamese scientists still met, still drank liters of lukewarm Coca Cola and boiling-hot green tea, still smoked cloudy blue roomfuls of Marlboro cigarettes, and still nodded in mutual agreement which each other’s findings. It was a bureaucratic terminal patient for which no one had been able to find the plug to pull.

  Which was why this review stood out. Davis Smart had been doing these for years. He and Kel and the other lab managers usually rotated the duty and had seen the evolution; lived the evolution. The script said: drink warm Coke, blink hard to clear the sting of smoke from your eyes, nod when spoken to and smile a lot, drink green tea, sign documents. It had been the same for a decade, but today Dr. Dang Minh wasn’t reading his scripted lines—at least not on the last case.

  Dang Hoang Minh had been a battalion surgeon during the War of Liberation. His operating room had been almost forty feet underground amid the massive earthen tunnel complex of Cu Chi. He sometimes still smiled at the irony. His operating room had been a dirt-floored oval cavern hollowed out one wicker basket of delta clay at a time. The sides were perpetually slick with condensed breath and sweat and blood. It had been the size of a small garage and by the quivering light of fuel-oil lamps he had removed limbs and sutured wounds and even delivered babies, while forty feet overhead—almost directly overhead—American GIs sat in an air-conditioned infirmary. He’d heard that they drank cold milkshakes and had pretty blue-eyed nurses apply ointments to their jock itch. Now, at sixty-three, Senior Colonel Dang Hoang Minh—Dr. Dang whenever he had his starched white lab coat on—was the head of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam’s Institute for Forensic Medicine in Hanoi.

  “Well, Dr. Dang, we seem to be in agreement with everything except Case C-E-oh-three,” D.S. said. He shuffled the notes in front of him so that case CE03 was on top of the stack. They’d broached a snag on it earlier and had agreed to put it at the bottom of the pile while they dealt with the other six cases. “Shall we talk about that now, or do you want to take another break?” The reality was that they hadn’t been working all that long, but the Vietnamese savored their breaks like rock candy, sucking them slowly and wooling them around on the tongue until the edges softened. A break at this juncture would not be out of order if they followed the usual script.

  “No, Dr. Smart, I believe we should press forward on it.” Dang Minh no longer required a translator. He had been trained in Moscow and East Berlin and spoke—or so he claimed—quite passable Russian and German. And French, of course. All educated Vietnamese of his generation spoke colonial French with lazy fluency. But over the years he had slowly acquired a heavily accented English as well. The translator who accompanied the Americans was a formal diplomatic appendage whose main function was to review the typed versions of the final diplomatic transfer documents—what the Vietnamese still insisted on labeling the Procés Verbal, as if they carried some diplomatic import—before the joint signing.

  “Very well then. Case C-E-oh-three involves a relatively complete skeleton recovered by a joint U.S. and Vietnamese team from a cemetery in Thanh Lay Hamlet, Dong Nai Province.” D.S. nervously cleared his throat, paused, and glanced up at Dang Minh. The senior colonel was not looking at his papers, but staring directly at D.S. He didn’t blink, but D.S. did. Several times. He cleared his throat again, a nervous habit that he’d been working unsuccessfully for the last twenty years to break. “My examination…ahh, our examination,” he bobbed his head at Ken Shiroma, the CILHI dentist who had made the trip with him, “ahh, it shows it to be a moderately large adult male with a probable gunshot wound to the forehead.”

  Dang Minh nodded—though almost imperceptibly—and kept staring.

  “His body was found wrapped in what appears to be a U.S.-style poncho liner. Corroded U.S. belt buckle…” D.S. read off his notes. “…jungle-boot fragments, U.S.-style pocket knife, keychain with a P-38…ah…that’s a U.S.-issued can opener…” He cleared his throat and again looked across the table at Dr. Dang. He looked as if he was preparing to say something, so D.S. paused.

  “And yet I think he is Vietnamese and of interest not to your country, Dr. Smart. We will retain this remain here.”

  “Ahhh, well,” he cleared his throat once more, this time intentionally, to give himself a moment more to think, then he pulled his chair closer to the table and straightened his back. “Ahhh, hmmm, I think we are in agreement that the skull shows some mongoloid characteristics. Yes, you’re right about that. High, flat cheekbones, round vault, shovel-shaped central incisors—but, having said that, as you’re aware, we believe this may be associ
ated with the loss of a U.S. soldier of what we call American Indian ancestry. He’d show many of the same skeletal traits—as I’m sure you are aware.”

  “You refer to Master Sergeant Tenkiller. He was a Native American.”

  “Yes, that’s right. A Native American.” D.S. was a little surprised by Dang Minh’s use of Tenkiller’s name. Usually he knew very few background details about the cases. But then this had been one that Senior Colonel Nguyen Dich of the VNOSMP had gotten personally interested in, and Swingin’ Dich had a way of making his interest everyone’s interest. And yet, Senior Colonel Dang Minh was no political welterweight and was not usually influenced by others—especially Dich, whom he considered a political hack rather than a real soldier. D.S. cleared his throat once again and lowered his head slightly as if he was preparing for a collision. “That’s right. Based on what the local witnesses tell us, this skeleton was found in a grave that dates to about the time of Sergeant Tenkiller’s loss…unmarked, but the location’s right—at least from what we know…Saigon area…”

  “I believe this is a Vietnamese body and is of concern not to your country, no,” Dang Minh repeated. If there had been any good humor in his tone the first time, there was none now.

  D.S. smiled. He bounced a quick glance at Ken Shiroma, who flexed the muscles of his shoulder in a discreet shrug, as if to say, “I have no idea what’s going on here.” D.S. returned his attention to his Vietnamese counterpart. He spent several seconds clearing his voice this time, all the while trying to understand the dynamics of the apparent power play that he found himself in the midst of.