Once a Warrior

by Fran Baker

  “Give me a break,” she scoffed.

  “Cat, please,” Anne-Marie begged, rising to position herself between them.

  “What could he possibly know about what Johnny loves or hates?”

  “I know a lot more than you think.”

  “Like what?”

  Drew pushed to his feet and pressed on. “Like why he was so nervous when he was home. And why he couldn’t sit still or couldn’t concentrate on anything.”

  He couldn’t sleep, either. Cat recalled waking up in the middle of the night on more than one occasion to find Johnny’s side of the bed empty and him pacing like a caged animal in the kitchen. Then, she’d attributed it to what he’d seen in the war. But now . . .

  “Of course he was nervous.” Her voice wobbled. “He was going back to Vietnam.”

  Drew frowned. “That wasn’t all that was bothering him.”

  Mary tilted her head inquiringly at her brother. “What else was there?”

  As Mike paused in the kitchen doorway, Anne-Marie turned questioning amber eyes to him. He shook his head, silently telling her that he hadn’t been able to reach anyone who could help them learn anything more tonight about Johnny’s situation than they already knew.

  “Answer Mary’s question,” Cat prodded Drew in a caustic tone.

  He lifted his shoulder in a single shrug. “All I know is what Johnny said after you two had that last big fight about him going back to ’Nam.”

  “He told you about that?” She hadn’t breathed a word to anyone, not even her parents. That Johnny had gone behind her back—and to her younger brother, no less!—seemed like the ultimate betrayal on his part.

  “You weren’t speaking to him,” Drew reminded her, “and he needed somebody to talk to.”

  Cat held her breath against the memory of all the angry things she had said to Johnny. That if he really loved her, he wouldn’t leave her again. Or that he’d already done his duty, dammit, and now it was time for him to stay home and for them to start a family. And worst of all that she might not be waiting for him when he returned.

  “I tried to talk to him,” she whispered shakily. “But all he would say was that he was going back.”

  “Well, while you were student teaching one day, Johnny signed me out of school for lunch”—Drew shot an apologetic look at his parents—“and we wound up spending the rest of the day together.”

  Mike, seeing that Cat was on the verge of tears again, moved to her side. “What did you talk about, son?”

  “He didn’t want to go back, Dad, he really didn’t. And believe it or not, he said I was right to keep protesting the war.”

  “What?” Mike looked skeptical.

  “It’s true.” Drew appealed to Cat now. “He said the morale of our troops is so low, it’s pitiful, and that Americans are being fed a pack of lies—”

  “Lies?” Anne-Marie gasped.

  “About how heavy our casualties really are and how bad the drug problem—”

  “That’s why we need Richard Nixon for our next president,” Mary piped up.

  Drew rolled his eyes. “So he can bomb Southeast Asia back to the Stone Age?”

  “So he can end the war and bring our boys—”

  “That’s enough, you two.” Mike shot a quelling look at Mary, then nodded at Drew. “Go on.”

  “Johnny said it was a sad day when the most powerful country on earth can’t find officers who can read a map or a compass.” Drew’s frown deepened as he stared at his father. “And he said that even though you’re retired from the reserves now, you could still probably call in a better air strike or artillery barrage than all of those ‘Saigon Generals’ who are sitting on their butts behind desks combined.”

  Cat swallowed hard. “Then why did he want to go back?”

  “He didn’t say . . .” Drew hesitated for a few seconds before adding, “Exactly.”

  “Exactly?” Being a trial lawyer, Mike picked up on equivocations like that.

  “He told me that he had some unfinished business to take care of, and that he needed to talk to some guy named Cain—”

  A car backfired out in the street, the sharp burst of sound reverberating through the small living room and cutting Drew off in mid-explanation.

  “Cain?” Cat echoed, thinking she’d heard him wrong.

  “Do you know him?” Mary asked in a tiny voice.

  Cat shook her head at her sister, then turned bewildered eyes to her father. “But Johnny mentioned him in the letter I opened today.”

  “Let me see it,” Mike said.

  Anne-Marie handed him the letter, then stood at his elbow to read it with him.

  “He was worried about something, all right.” Mike stated the obvious.

  But a bemused Anne-Marie wondered just what Johnny had meant by that last sentence.

  “You’ve got to help me, Dad,” Cat pleaded, knowing now what she needed to do.

  “But of course he will,” her mother hastened to assure her.

  “It’s too late to call anyone else tonight,” Mike said. “First thing tomorrow, though, I’ll get on the phone to the Defense Department and see if I can open some channels there.” He folded the letter and passed it back to Cat. “You stay home from school in the morning in case—”

  “No, that’s not what I mean.”

  He gave her a blank look. “Well then, what do you mean?”

  Cat took a breath that was remarkably steady, given the momentousness of the announcement she was about to make. “I want you to help me get to Saigon.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Saigon, Vietnam

  “To put it bluntly, Mrs. Brown, this Cain is a disgrace to all red-blooded, right-thinking Americans.”

  Flabbergasted, Cat rested her elbow on the arm of her chair and pressed her fingers to her temple. “Colonel Howard, are you sure we’re talking about the same man?”

  “Sure as God made little green apples.” The colonel’s thin mouth twisted sourly as he handed back the sealed envelope across the inlaid wood of his desk. “He fancies himself some kind of soldier of fortune when he’s nothing but a dirty, low-down mercenary. Smuggling drugs, running guns—you name the crime, he’ll name his price.”

  More confused than ever, Cat tucked the envelope in the zippered section of her shoulder bag, next to Johnny’s letter. She’d written to Cain and told him that she was coming to Saigon. And had received her unopened letter back stamped “Return to Sender.” Now, on top of everything else, she had to worry about how her husband had gotten mixed up with some shady man for hire.

  “Why haven’t you arrested him?” It seemed like the logical question to ask, but the colonel’s back stiffened.

  “Because we haven’t caught him with the goods.” He looked like he couldn’t wait to put the elusive Cain on the gallows and personally watch him hang as he added in an ominous voice, “Yet.”

  “Have you thought about setting him up?” She remembered the police doing that to one of her father’s clients. And her father tearing the prosecutor’s case apart in court.

  His face went blank. “What?”

  “You know, one of those sting op—”

  “In case you haven’t heard, Mrs. Brown,” Howard replied in a tone that told her that his patience was fast running out, “there’s a war going on.”

  Cat’s own patience was none too plentiful at this point. She was so hot and tired and discouraged that she wanted to scream. Or throw something. Preferably something heavy, like that halved shell casing full of cigarette butts that was sitting on his desk.

  “I’m painfully aware of the war, Colonel Howard,” she said, struggling to keep her temper under control. “But even if I weren’t personally involved, even if I weren’t—to stretch the term some—a casualty of war myself, how could I not know what’s going on over here when it’s on the news at home every night in living color?”

  “Damn television reporters have no respect for the military.” He pulled a cigarette out of the
pack in his shirt pocket, flipped open his Zippo and bent his head to the flame.

  “Colonel—”

  “Non-clotting, bleeding-heart liberals, every one of ’em,” he sneered, snapping his lighter shut. “I’ve heard they’ve even taken to calling their daily briefings the ‘Five O’Clock Follies’.”

  “Please—”

  “It’s not like our last two wars, that’s for damn sure.” Leaning back in his swivel chair, Howard blew a stream of smoke toward the lazily rotating ceiling fan. On the wall behind him hung a huge plastic-overlay map of Indochina on which battles were tracked in grease pencil. “I was still in high school when World War Two ended. And by the time I got to Korea, I was just another cop on the beat at the 38th Parallel. But back then the press was our ally, not our enemy.”

  “About Cain,” Cat persisted through clenched teeth.

  “Last I heard, the sonuvabitch had left Saigon,” he snapped, and sat up straight.

  His statement caught her like a cuff to the chin. “Left? When?”

  “Right before the Tet Offensive.”

  “But that was in—what? Late January or early February?” She didn’t recall the exact date when the North Vietnamese forces had launched their surprise attack against the South. She did, however, remember being glued to the TV with tears streaming down her face as she’d watched the flag-draped coffins of those brave Marines who had died defending the American Embassy being loaded onto a transport plane for the long trip home.

  “It began on 31 January, the Lunar New Year.” Howard’s eyes turned flinty and smoke curled out of his flaring nostrils. “Seems to confirm what I’ve been saying about where that turncoat Cain’s loyalties lie, doesn’t it? His leaving two steps ahead of the Viet Cong?”

  “And Johnny’s letter is dated March 23.” She had shown it to him first to help him understand why she was so determined to get in touch with Cain.

  “Your husband was under a lot of stress when he wrote that letter, Mrs. Brown.” Pulling rank, or perhaps simply dismissing her, he set his burning cigarette in the metal ashtray and reached for a briefing book on a corner of his desk.

  “How would you know what kind of stress my husband was under, Colonel Howard?” Cat’s voice dripped a scorn born of sheer frustration as she looked around his small but well-appointed office in the old French colonial bungalow that was now being used by the American military for administrative purposes. Taking in the comfortable furniture, sisal rugs and glass-fronted bookcases, she couldn’t help but hear Drew repeating Johnny’s scathing description of the commanders who were running the war.

  Eyes bright with indignation, she returned her gaze to the one whose hand was frozen in mid-air just an arm’s reach away from her. “‘Saigon Generals’ like you sit behind a desk all day while men like my husband fight your wars.”

  “That’s enough, young lady,” he snapped, and stood.

  “Yes, it is.” She stood too, graciously unfolding her long legs, then shouldered her purse and spun on her heel. After opening the door to the reception area, though, she stopped and took a last look over her shoulder at Colonel Howard. With his crew-cut hair, neatly pressed khakis and shiny brass, he reminded her of one of those recruiting posters back home.

  A trap, she realized with a sudden, bitter clarity. That’s all those posters were. Just cleverly posed, professionally photographed traps meant to lure patriotic young men like Johnny into the deadly maws of war.

  “I’ll find Cain myself,” she vowed. “And when I do—”

  “Tell him for me that he’s a goddamned traitor.”

  “Tell him yourself, Colonel Howard.” She lifted her chin and let him have it with both barrels. “Or do you expect others to fight your verbal battles as well?”

  A muscle rippled in his clean-shaven jaw but his voice remained calm. “Go back to Kansas City, Mrs. Brown, and get on with your life.”

  “What life?” she retorted.

  “You’re what”—he looked her up and down—“twenty?”

  “Twenty-one.” Her birthday, on February 11, had been the second one in a row she had spent without her husband. She didn’t dare think about her first wedding anniversary or she might start crying—something she was determined not to do.

  He glanced down at Johnny’s file, which still lay open on his desk. “No children, right?”

  She tightened her grip on the doorknob as a pang of regret struck deep into her soul. That Johnny had rebuffed her pleas to have a baby and insisted that she continue taking her birth-control pills was none of the colonel’s business. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You’re young, you’re unencumbered.” He reached for the cigarette he’d left burning and took a drag. Exhaling smoke, he delivered the coup de grâce. “You’ll be remarried before you’re twenty-five.”

  Cat reeled at his callous prediction. “Johnny’s been reported as missing in action, Colonel Howard, not dead.”

  “Not yet.”

  “How can you say—”

  “Go home, Mrs. Brown,” he warned her again, “before you get hurt.”

  Only when Cat had spent her anger by slamming his door shut behind her, causing the young Vietnamese secretary sitting at the reception desk to look up at her in alarm, and then storming out of the air-conditioned building into the blistering early May heat did she realize what she had done.

  Cain.

  She had exhausted her last, best hope of finding him. And perhaps ruined all chance of ever learning why Johnny had wanted her to contact him in the first place. Tears stung her eyes at the realization, and a niggling little voice in the back of her head told her that she was probably a fool for not following Colonel Howard’s advice about going home.

  But she’d come too far to turn back now. She hadn’t spent a fortune on long-distance calls or the better part of a month getting her visa to be so easily deterred. Nor had she resigned her student-teaching position to fly almost ten thousand long miles, hitting practically every island in the Pacific on her way, only to be stopped short of her goal by yet another rear-echelon desk jockey.

  Cat slid on her sunglasses, her mind made up. She’d gone the official route—not once, but twice—and had found it barricaded both times. Now she was going native.

  And she knew just the place to start.

  She squared her shoulders and marched down the narrow walk, past a sadly neglected garden and dried-up goldfish pond, to the jumble of sandbags and concertina wire that had turned the small courtyard into a compound.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am,” said the MP who had checked her visa and had her sign the visitor’s log on her way in. At first glance, he didn’t look much older than her younger brother. But his ancient eyes, combined with that bandage on his neck and the M-16 slung over his shoulder, proclaimed him a veteran of war.

  Cat was tempted to stop and ask him if he knew where Cain was, but she just acknowledged his farewell with a nod and kept moving. At the curb, she raised her hand to hail one of the cyclo cabs, a cross between a taxi and a motorbike, streaming along the street amidst the trucks and busses and jeeps. Then she changed her mind, dropped her arm and joined the swarm of pedestrians parading along the sidewalk. Her feet felt like melons in her square-toed pumps, but she was only a couple of blocks from her hotel. And she could use the time to plan her next move.

  Despite the fact that the ravages of war were everywhere in Saigon, that its people were still reeling under the impact of Tet, the city continued to throb with its normal peacetime pursuits.

  Take the Central Market, for example.

  She’d gone there yesterday to walk off her anger after a dead-end meeting with that pompous, patronizing attaché at the American Embassy who’d kept calling her “honey” while he’d cleverly avoided answering her questions about Cain.

  As she’d wandered from stall to stall, rubbing elbows with women in loose black peasant’s pajamas picking their way among fish and fruit, inhaling the pungent garlic and pepper ar
omas that permeated the air, and listening to the singsong exchanges between businessmen in immaculate white suits and merchants in soiled aprons, it had occurred to her that a person could buy everything from thousand-year eggs to turtledoves in elaborate bamboo cages.

  Now she took heart from the idea that, for the right price, that same person could probably buy the most precious commodity of all—information.

  Before she went shopping, though, she was going to cool off. She hadn’t been outside even five minutes yet and already her hair was wilting, her makeup was melting, and sweat was pouring down her back and pooling between her breasts. Even the sleeveless mint-green skimmer that she’d put on only a couple of hours ago was wrinkled now from neck to hem.

  Hang convention, she decided as she limped up Tu Do Street, a half-mile long avenue of carnal pleasures ranging from gaudy bars featuring blaring rock music to head shops to doorways full of Vietnamese prostitutes in mini-skirts and white go-go boots hustling young American GIs in their filthy jungle fatigues or ill-fitting “civvies.” It was too damned hot for pantyhose. And she had a pair of Capezio sandals in one her of her suitcases that—

  “Mrs. Brown?”

  Cat was standing at the intersection, waiting for the traffic to clear so she could cross Le Loi Boulevard, when she thought she heard someone call her name. It was impossible to tell over the chain-saw buzz of the cyclo cabs and the gritty strains of “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” blasting out of one of the open-doored bars. Not to mention the clatter of those Huey helicopters overhead and the roar of that jet taking off from Tan Son Nhut Airport just a few miles away.

  Her ears were probably playing tricks on her, she mused as she glanced first to her right, and then to her left. Either that or the ruthless rays of the sun had finally fried her brain.

  “Mrs. Brown!”

  There was no mistaking it this time. Someone really was calling her. Turning, she saw a petite Vietnamese woman running to catch up with her. While she looked vaguely familiar, Cat couldn’t place her to save her soul.