Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Epilogue
Author's Note
Copyright © 2011 by Juris Jurjevics
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jurjevics, Juris, date.
Red flags / Juris Jurjevics.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-547-56451-7
1. United States. Army—Officers—Fiction. 2. Drug traffic—Fiction.
3. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3610.U76R43 2011
813'.63—dc22
2010050013
Book design by Brian Moore
Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Jeanne,
BELOVED CIVILIAN
Neil Olson,
AGENT PROVOCATEUR
And for the guys . . .
JAMES 51609945 PEARSON • HARRY PEWTERBAUGH
JERRY ROWLAND • ELLSWORTH C. SMITH
GEORGE RUCKMAN • RICHARD STOLZ • FRANK DEVIVO
JEFF BARBER • BERNIE GELLMAN • JERRY GOLD
MO MOSER • LOU NAPOLITANO • MICHAEL SEFTAS • RALPH MUIR
DAVE CADWELL • GLEN CASPERSON • ROGER BENNETT
BOYD RILEY • VIRGIL PROBASCO • RALPH GOLD • SGT. HAYDEN
STEVE "PTERODACTYL-27" HARRISON • LARRY "DOC" WHITE
MAJOR FRANK • THE LATE ED SPRAGUE • STEVE LARGE
MELTZER . . . AMESWORTH . . . MILLER . . . WEST . . . SHAEFFER . . .
LEWIS . . . MARSHALAK . . . SHEA . . . SEAN . . .
GILLESPIE . . . MOORE . . . SGT. ROBBIE • SGT. HUFNAGEL
KEN FORRESTER • MAX LUND • JIM O'MALLEY • JIM ELLIS
EDMON TAUSCH • JOE PICKEREL • KSOR KUL • THE LATE SIU BROAI
REVEREND BOB REED • JĀNIS ROZENS • JURIS MEIMIS
ALEKS EINSELN • IGORS MOCALKIN • BILL COMREY
CARL HYOPP • BOB SHOOKNER • THE LATE WILLIAM LANDECK
JOHN SCHEURLEIN • JOSEPH TROXELL • JOHN RUSSELL
DOUG BULEN • JOHN PETERSON • ED GREGORY • GARY BARTRAM
TIM MCGUIRE • RICHARD ADAMONIS • GERRY FLAVIN
FRANK VERTUCA • JOHN SPINA • JIM MORRIS • DOUGLAS BEY
RYOBERT OLEN BUTLER • NELSON DEMILLE • GEORGE E. DOOLEY
JOSEPH FERRANDINO • MIKE LITTLE • JIM HARRIS • JAMES DINGMAN
WILLIAM PELFREY • THE LATE GUSTAV HASFORD
But most especially this is dedicated to those—friends and foe—
we light the joss sticks for who didn't make it home.
The only tribute you could really pay, and I can still pay, is to remember. What else is there?
—Clark Dougan in Christian G. Appy, Patriots
Mike, you're talking well, but where are your facts? You state things so glibly. What percent of territory has the government lost in the last month? What percent does it have and what percent does it not have? Where are your statistics? Don't give me poetry.
—U.S. secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara
in A. J. Langguth, Our Vietnam
"This is the place where everybody finds out who they are." Hicks shook his head. "What a bummer for the gooks."
—Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers
Prologue
SOMEDAY WAS STANDING on the gravel in front of Bert's store, collar turned up against the cold.
I knew right off. It wasn't like I hadn't been expecting her. Once, when she was an infant, I had imagined her. The grown version demanded a quick revision. She was a stalk. Maybe a twenty-four-inch waist, a bust not much bigger.
"I'm Erik Rider," I said. "How can I help you, Miss . . . ?"
The lips were her father's, the hazel eyes soft, like her touch as we shook hands. The bones felt hollow—a bird's, they were so light. Like his when we recovered the body.
"Celeste Bennett," she said. "Sorry to just barge in on you." She withdrew her hand.
"Pleased to meet you," I said, although pleased was the last thing I was.
"You knew my father. I was hoping I could talk to you about him."
"Colonel Bennett . . . ? Dennis Bennett?" I weighed my words, pretending it was taking time for me to recall the man, as though I hadn't thought of him pretty much steadily for nearly forty years. I launched into my fine-man, exceptional-officer patter. An honor to serve under him. From her impatient expression, I could tell she'd heard all the customary guff before and wasn't buying.
"Mr. Rider, I'd really like to—"
"How on earth did you find me?" I said, feigning the most genuine curiosity, anything my face might conjure by way of camouflage.
"Your ex-wife." She brushed the hair off her forehead.
"Which one?"
"Hillary?"
"Wife number three."
She looked away, nervous. She had the colonel's angular nose too. His kid all right. Her eyes caught me again.
"She said you were in northern California, around Redding, but she wasn't sure where. You weren't listed . . . or even unlisted. I did a title search online and saw you had property near Creek. I took a chance."
She pulled her gloves on and hunched against the cold.
"Title search, huh? What is it you do in the world?"
"Lawyer. I'm a lawyer."
Shit, I thought. "How old are you?"
"Thirty-eight." She shifted her feet, uncertain. "I was conceived the last time they were together, in Hawaii," she said, by way of corroborating herself, as if that were at issue. "And you?"
"I don't know where I was conceived. Probably the back seat of a Nash Ambassador in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin." She didn't blush and she wasn't laughing. "Sixty-three this year. I'll be sixty-three." I indicated the macadam behind me. "You drive in from Red Bluff?"
"Yes. I'm still swaying. That's some twisty road."
I looked west, toward the higher turns through the pass. Some of it I'd driven yesterday, the S-curves dusted with snow.
"Yeah. There's two more hours of mountain road before you hit the Pacific Coast Highway."
I waved to Bert, visible just behind her in the big window of his grocery store. He had called to summon me down—"There's a gal here looking for you."
She glanced back at him. "Your friend volunteered that he had a weapons permit. His wife also."
I nodded. "Yep. Most everyone here carries. Not many citizens bother with permits."
She squinted against the winter sun. "Why all the weaponry?"
"The nearest law is in Weaver, two hours away. Takes them a day to get here, when they come. Which is why Bert's wife has her pistol out when she takes the night receipts to her car. They make their permits and weapons known to everyone, especially strangers."
"The neighborhood's that dicey?" she said.
"It's isolated."
"Looks so idyllic."
"There are temptations."
She took in the tiny post office and Bert's
grocery store and bar, the two connected through a common wall. "I hadn't noticed," she said. "The sign coming into town put the population at twenty-five."
"Sounds about right."
"Not a lot of nightlife in Creek, I take it."
"Bert's bar is it. The temptation's up on the ridges. The hills are full of marijuana farmers, if they're not cooking meth."
She scanned the voluptuous green slopes and pine groves all around us.
"They grow the dope in small patches," I said. "Can't be spotted so easily from the air. Reduces losses if a field gets busted. They've got armed illegals guarding them."
"Should I worry?"
"It gets a little rowdy some nights at Bert's." I pointed to the unlit neon sign in the saloon window behind her. "Otherwise they're respectful neighbors."
"Your wagon full of firearms too?" She looked over at my Bronco, probably scanning for a gun rack.
"No. I haven't kept company with a weapon in a long while. So I have to be especially polite."
A momentary silence fell between us. I was forgetting how to have a conversation.
"How did you come to settle here, Mr. Rider?" she said, her tone light, like we had just met at a cocktail party. She was pretending interest in my life to keep me talking, coaxing the reluctant witness.
"Came for a month years ago," I said. "Never left. A pal from the service asked for help building his house, a few towns over. He had a crop-dusting business, spraying walnut and almond trees from a helicopter."
"The signature sound of your generation," she said.
"What?"
"Those blades beating the air."
"Oh . . . yeah. I suppose."
The day was bright and crisp. A cloud and its shadow passed, and the air turned colder beneath it.
"About my father." She put a gloved hand on her rented car and leaned a hip against the rocker panel. "You're the thirteenth member of the advisory team I've found."
If she was just running through the roster, I could pass her along—fast. "Guess I was next on the list."
"Not exactly. The last couple of men I spoke to wanted to know if I'd seen you yet. So I moved you up."
I was tempted to ask who but suppressed the urge. Instead, I lifted my tattered Dodgers cap, scratched my head, and made homely noises, stalling with hick gestures.
"I didn't know the colonel well. I was just a captain. He was fifteen years my senior, my superior officer. We didn't exactly socialize. You know, you might try his executive officer, Major Gidding."
"General Gidding passed away three years ago. He was the first one I found." She held back wisps of hair fluttering around her face. "Two others are deceased as well. Two begged off. The seven who agreed to meet weren't very forthcoming. Mostly I get lofty sentiments about valor and honor."
"Your mother wasn't . . . ?"
"Told anything? Other than being instructed not to open the coffin, no. Not really. She was so shattered—widowed, pregnant. She just let the protocols and ceremonies carry her along. He was buried at West Point. Afterward it got even tougher for her. A while later I arrived."
"You weren't enough to keep her occupied?"
"Yes. Yes, I fit the bill," she said, sounding impatient, as if being her mother's diversion had been a challenge.
"What did your mom tell you about your father?"
"That he wouldn't have died if he had cared more about us and less about his career."
"Really?" I said, taken aback.
"Mom wanted him to stay an instructor at West Point. She said he had real gifts as a teacher and she didn't see why he felt he had to be an infantry officer. At times I wondered why they had ever been together. He was from a military family. She hated the military, hated all the deference expected of an officer's wife."
"Being an Army widow's no picnic either."
"My whole childhood she was furious with him for going back to Viet Nam when he didn't have to. She couldn't forgive him. I couldn't bear to listen to it. I'd wind up defending him."
"A lot of us volunteered for more tours or extended them. Didn't his awards—"
"For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action while serving as commanding officer . . .' blah-blah-blah. I could recite the medal citations when I was in grade school, before I even knew what all the words meant. Not much of a substitute for an actual dad."
She was his daughter. Tall, thin as a rail, with that same anxious concentration. The wind rushed through the treetops, swaying the branches.
"Except for those damn citations, I have only my mother's version of who my father was."
"I can see that."
"I wanted to hear about him from people who knew him as a soldier—knew him at the end." She wrapped her arms around her middle, fighting the chill. "A lot of people go to where their loved ones perished to commune with those they've lost: to the site of a plane crash, the spot on the highway where someone they loved was killed. For a long time I thought I'd sense something if I did that—found the place where he died."
I winced. "You're actually thinking about going back there?"
She blinked rapidly. "I did, last year."
Why was I surprised? Young Americans were honeymooning in Ho Chi Minh City these days, frolicking on the beaches at Nha Trang.
"I take it you didn't find what you were after."
She shook her head. "Never got further than Saigon. The aborigines in the mountains were demonstrating against the government. The authorities wouldn't let me into the Highlands."
"Yeah, they're crushing the Montagnards again, poor bastards. So you've come here looking for what you couldn't find there?"
"I'm hoping." She shielded her eyes against the cold sunlight. "I want to know what he was doing when he died . . . if it was true he stupidly put himself in harm's way. I want the facts—unvarnished."
I knew a bit about piggybacking ghosts around and I hesitated, reluctant to disturb hers. She slapped the car, exasperated.
"I've gotten the platitudes and pats on the head. Honestly, I don't want to be spared. It's just impossible when you don't know. It never leaves you." Her eyes cut me. "No matter what the truth is, I need to hear it."
And her gut told her she hadn't yet. I knew the war had burrowed into those of us who had been there, but it was disturbing to see it haunting someone her age. She was stuck with her grief, mourning the father she had never known.
The wind plastered our jackets against our arms and torsos. She trembled, ears crimson. Bert's neon saloon sign went on in the window. The regulars quickly appeared, crunching across the gravel.
"Mr. Rider, I can't keep standing here in the cold. Let me at least buy you a drink."
"Erik. Please call me Erik."
We went in. Bert's wife was filling glasses. The TV played, barely audible, stock quotes and news streaming above and below a talking head. I ushered Celeste to a booth, found out what she drank, and fetched it. She sipped her bourbon. I downed my shot and tipped back a Kirin.
"Haven't much time," I said, checking my wristwatch and feeling the fool for using the transparent dodge of pressing business. She looked exhausted, finding it difficult to keep pleading her case. I needed to do the smart thing and brush her off.
"Whatever you can spare," she said, her voice calming. She took slow, deep breaths, keeping herself contained—patient—even as her heart raced. I could see the pulse in her throat. She was revving for something.
"You look a little peaked," I said.
"Haven't eaten since morning," she admitted, sipping again. "Didn't want to stop."
I signaled Bert's wife and she threw on two bison burgers.
Celeste. Young, alive, and tortured. It was palpable. Even sitting, she moved constantly, darting from side to side just a fraction, as if boxing against somebody in there with her.
"Did you know my dad in Saigon in sixty-four, before Cheo Reo?"
Smart. She was easing me into it. Okay, Saigon was the easy part. I fussed with the chipped Formic
a and nodded. "I knew who he was."
"How bad was it?"
"There were street demonstrations. Occasional bombs. Otherwise Saigon was pretty much a great duty station early on."
"Oh," she said, surprised.
"Minimal bullshit, quick advancement. Sleepy, tropical. Palms, tamarind trees—like that. Exotic food, exotic women. New Orleans, with bigger and better guns. Perfumed with flowering trees and marsh water and every kind of shit, human and otherwise. I actually miss it. There were only sixteen thousand of us in country then. Most commuted to the war, did their work, and hustled back to town before sundown. We slept in real beds in real linen."
"There was fighting though, right?"
I shrugged. "The guerrilla war wasn't much, just hot enough to qualify us for hazardous-duty pay and put a little zing in life. Shootouts stayed in the hinterlands, but most of the fighting was small time—dinky and dien cai dau: crazy. The Viet Cong just kept sawing away at the Vietnamese military, a piece at a time. They'd take potshots, block roads, hit and run. Drop three mortar rounds on us and be gone before the last one landed."
"But the Viet Cong had such a fierce reputation."
"Yeah, well, in those days the VC didn't even have enough weapons to arm all their fighters. They had to take turns with them—a sad hodgepodge of copies and discards, all different calibers. When they attempted larger attacks, they'd herd villagers into nearby fields to yell and set off firecrackers . . . to sound like there were lots of them."
"Doesn't seem like much of a war," she said.
"It wasn't. More like a bad neighborhood you policed during the day and stayed out of after dark."
Mrs. Bert delivered our bison burgers and the condiment tray. I removed the cap from the mustard. Celeste worked on her burger and waited for me to resume.
"The VC owned the night, we owned the nightlife. The young sergeants partied, the middle-aged noncoms invested in real estate and bars and lived with Asian mistresses they married in Buddhist ceremonies—or not. A lot of servicemen and embassy staff had their dependents with them."
"Wives?"
"Yeah, kids too. Families leased villas in good districts, with pools and tennis courts. Had peacocks wandering the lawns. Cooks, amahs, gardeners . . . a swim before lunch, a round of golf at the Saigon Golf Club in the afternoon."
Red Flags Page 1