Once a Warrior

by Fran Baker

  “People sometimes do things in the heat of the moment that they could kick themselves for later,” he said in a ragged voice.

  After dinner, Cat had changed out of her baggy T-shirt and denim cut-offs into a sleeveless blouse and a pair of linen shorts. Now she extended her bare legs and smiled at him. “Do you see any bruises?”

  “Not there.” Cain crushed out his cigarillo, then leaned over to brush a gentle finger across her cheek. The faint shadows beneath her beautiful hazel eyes spoke of the strain she’d been under. “But here . . . I see them here.”

  “I’m worried about my mother.”

  “Your father told me you’re really close to her.”

  Even as she nodded, Cat kept her gaze locked on his. “And I’m still waiting for that explanation you promised me.”

  He owed her that, Cain reminded himself as he reached for his beer. Maybe he owed it to himself, too. He’d never known the kind of peace that he’d found so briefly in her arms. Her love had salved the wounds in his soul, had been an oasis of calm in the chaos of war, and he’d felt that a vital part of him was lost when she left Vietnam. The only way to get it back, he decided now, was to give her as much of the truth as he could.

  “It’s a long story.”

  And still she didn’t waver. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I joined the Air Force the day I graduated from high school.” The softness, but not the rawness, was gone from his voice as he recalled the patriotic young man who’d been determined to avenge his father’s death. “Vietnam wasn’t even a blip on America’s radar screen back then. We’d been aiding and advising the South Vietnamese Army for years. We’d even had a couple of casualties, killed by guerrillas at Bienhoa. But we were more concerned about Cuba than Southeast Asia.”

  “After President Kennedy forced the Soviets to withdraw their missiles from there, Johnny decided he wanted to go to the Air Force Academy.”

  “He graduated from the Academy?”

  “No.” Her eyes glimmered in the dark. “His grades weren’t good enough.”

  His mouth crooked ruefully. “Well, at least I’m not competing with a genius as well as a ghost.”

  Cat suppressed the sudden, ecstatic hope that beat in her breast as she held his gaze. Johnny was the past, and it remained to be seen whether Cain was the future. Still, she wanted to set the record straight. Just in case.

  “You aren’t competing with anyone,” she said softly.

  Cain studied her face in the starlight, remembering it flushed with passion. After all the wild oats he’d sown, it was probably wrong and certainly selfish of him to feel relieved that there was no one else in her life. But there it was, a knot of tension slowly relaxing inside his gut.

  “Neither are you,” he said gruffly.

  She took another sip of tea and then got back to the subject at hand. “When did you go to Vietnam?”

  “In February 1965.” He watched fireflies winking in the dark as he remembered the gung-ho kid who was going to kick Ho Chi Minh’s butt up between his shoulders. “Just in time for Operation Rolling Thunder—the sustained American bombing of North Vietnam.”

  “I graduated from high school that June.”

  “Well, while you were marching down the aisle to ‘Pomp and Circumstance’, I was crawling around in the jungle wondering what hit me.”

  Cat’s blood chilled. “You were shot down?”

  Cain’s fingers flexed as if working a control stick. “I was going in to bomb a group of boxcars parked off a railroad. The weather was clear. I was right on target. Then I looked out and saw a SAM—”

  “A SAM?”

  “Surface-to-Air Missile.” He stared into near space. “It went over me, thank God, but the explosion shook me up pretty bad. Anyway, I dropped my ordinance and knocked out the boxcars. I was climbing back up to ten-thousand feet, thinking I was home free, when the second SAM hit me.”

  Tears gleamed in her eyes beneath the silver of the stars. “You must have been terrified.”

  “Actually, I was dizzy.”

  “Dizzy?”

  Just talking about it, Cain could feel the plane spinning sickeningly toward the ground. Could smell the choking smoke spreading toward the cockpit. Even with his eye closed, he could still see treetops swirling up to meet him. He took a deep breath, trying to control the hot fear that even now, eight years later, made him break out in a cold sweat.

  Watching him, Cat realized that he was suffering a flashback. She’d seen it happen with other Vietnam vets. They would stop in the middle of a sentence and look around, disoriented for a moment, struggling with some nightmare image that still haunted them. The only thing to do, she’d learned, was to wait it out and, when they were ready, let them talk it out.

  “Vertigo,” he said shakily, gripping the neck of his beer bottle as if seeking a handhold. “I got a goddamn case of vertigo. I managed to bail out though a side window and the plane hit the ground before I did. It was blowing up on the way. The details get fuzzier from there. My face was bleeding and I’d been shot in the side—on my way down, I suppose. I was about half-crazy from the pain, but I had enough sense to ditch my parachute. I hid in the roots of a tree. Lord only knows how long I laid there. All night, I think. I just know I was determined not to let Charlie take me prisoner. Or mutilate my body.”

  He paused, features pinched, as he recalled darkness becoming light and hope replacing despair. “A day, maybe two days later, I made it out of the jungle. One of our patrols found me and called in a chopper. The doctors at the evac hospital did what they could—saved my life, but couldn’t save my eye. And then they rotated me out to Japan.”

  Cat had been sitting there silently as Cain spoke. Now she thought of Johnny, her first love, her husband and the father of her child. Hot tears streamed down her cheeks as she looked up at the star-studded sky, praying to God that his had been a swift death. That he hadn’t experienced more than a few cataclysmic seconds of pain and shock and fear before being enveloped in that eternal blackness. It was too horrible to contemplate otherwise.

  “I was finished as a pilot.” Cain relaxed his grip on the bottle, but his face was grief made flesh. “I wasn’t finished with the war, though. While I was laying in that hospital bed in Japan, I started wondering how many other downed pilots were out there in the jungle and who was searching for them. Then I got to thinking about my father. What if he’d survived only to die at the hands of the Koreans? Or in a POW camp? That’s when I decided to go DIA.”

  Cat blotted her burning eyes with the back of her hand. “DIA?”

  “Defense Intelligence Agency.”

  “You were a spy?” she asked with sudden comprehension.

  For security reasons, there were questions Cain still couldn’t answer. But this wasn’t one of them. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Didn’t that put you at even greater risk of being captured? Or killed?”

  “What did I have to lose at that point? There was no one at home waiting for me. Hell, the Air Force was my home. And all those pilots—Johnny included—were my brothers.”

  She clenched her hands together in her lap. “That was why you didn’t encourage me to believe that he was alive, isn’t it?”

  “Based on the information I had at the time,” he confirmed, “I was fairly certain he died when his plane went down.”

  “They never recovered his remains,” she said in a small voice.

  “That’s the real shame of this war,” he replied bitterly. “The ultimate betrayal, really. Americans are leaving their fighting men behind. God knows how many of them will die in captivity.”

  “But all our prisoners were returned in—”

  His scoff cut her off. “Last I heard, there were at least 300 POWs still being held in Hanoi.”

  She gaped at him in disbelief. “Three hundred?”

  “And that doesn’t count the two thousand or so still reported as missing in action.”

  “Why isn’t the
media reporting this?”

  “To be fair about it, some of them are. But they’re voices in the wilderness of a media elite who would rather deride those who served as either stupid or evil, and therefore deserving of their fate.”

  Her sigh echoed his. She’d read the lies and exaggerations about those who’d fought in Vietnam. The repeated misrepresentations of American soldiers’ actions—that they’d gone around shooting pregnant women and their unborn children for instance—seemed to have become conventional wisdom. Granted, a few GIs had done some gruesome things. The My Lai massacre, in which the entire population of a small village was lined up and gunned down, was certainly evidence of that. But the majority of veterans who’d been under attack on the battlefield had served both bravely and honorably.

  “They should be brought home,” she said sadly. “All of them. The living and the dead.”

  “That’s why I’m making the Air Force my career.” His announcement caught her off-guard.

  “You’re a lifer?”

  “Those men are our sons and fathers, our brothers and best friends.” He rolled his shoulders. Shifted restlessly in his chair. “I want to help bring them back. Repatriate the living and return the dead to their families for a proper burial.”

  Cat mulled it all over for a moment, then shook her head in confusion. “I don’t get it.”

  “What”

  “If you were working for the military, why was Colonel Howard so convinced that you were a traitor?”

  “That’s the dirty little secret about undercover work,” Cain explained. “The military buries your file when you take off the uniform. Then if you’re caught, they’ve got plausible deniability.”

  “Did Tiny know what you were doing?”

  “I think he had a pretty good idea, but he didn’t press me on it.”

  “How about Loc and Ngo and Kim? And Sister Simone. Did they know?”

  “The truth is, I tried to keep everyone in the dark. It was safer that way. For all of us.”

  “Well, you sure fooled me,” she said in a sudden fit of temper.

  He stared at her, surprised. “You sound angry.”

  Angry didn’t begin to describe it. “Well, how would you feel if you’d spent five years thinking the person you loved was a traitor?”

  He sat up straight, his eye glittering with wonder. “You love me?”

  “Yes, damn you, I—” She broke off, realizing what she’d just said, and looked at him with misapprehension.

  Cain reached over and caught her hand before she could retract her statement. “I love you too, Cat.”

  “This is ridiculous,” she grumbled, trying to wrest free of his grasp.

  He tightened his hold. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because we hardly know each other.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. We know each other very well. Not just in the Biblical sense, either,” he added when he saw the protest forming on her lips. “I know, for instance, that you’re one of the most courageous women I’ve ever met.”

  “You, on the other hand, are one of the sneakiest men I’ve ever met,” she shot back.

  He ignored that for the moment. “I know that you’re beautiful—not only on the outside, but on the inside, where it really counts.”

  “Now that you’ve cut your hair, you’re not so bad yourself,” she said grudgingly.

  That old pirate’s grin revisited his lips. “I know that you can give as good as you get.”

  She snorted. “A real sweet talking guy, aren’t you?”

  “I also know that you’re hell on wheels in bed.”

  Now she made a sound like steam escaping from a funnel. “In case you haven’t noticed, my neighbors’ windows are open and they can probably hear every word we’re—”

  “Lastly, I know that you’re a good mother—a wonderful mother, in fact—to John Lee.” He brought her hand to his cheek, held it there while he looked deeply into her eyes. “And I know that I’d like to make a family with you.”

  He had her there. She felt the pressure building in her chest. Her voice caught emotionally. “Oh . . . you . . .”

  “Don’t cry, Cat.” Still holding her hand, Cain rose and pulled her to her feet. “Please, don’t cry.”

  “I’m not,” she sniffed, and swiped at her brimming eyes with the back of her free hand.

  “Okay, then,” he murmured huskily. “Don’t laugh.”

  Even as a smile curved her lips at that, she felt tears well in her eyes again. She took a step back, tugging him toward the house. “Let’s go inside.”

  “I didn’t come here to pick up where we left off,” he said, standing his ground. “I came here to see if we could start over.” He lifted their joined hands to his lips. “To tell you that I’m tired of being a loner.” He kissed her knuckles one by one. “I came here to tell you that I need you in my life. That I want you. That I love you.” He lowered his voice to an urgent whisper. “I came here to ask you to marry me.”

  Her head seemed to be floating somewhere above her shoulders. “This is all happening so fast.”

  “I don’t report for six weeks, so—”

  “Report where?”

  “Washington.”

  “As in Washington, D.C.?”

  He nodded affirmatively. “I’ll work at headquarters. In intelligence.”

  Fear formed a bubble in her throat. “That means you could be called overseas again.”

  “All servicemen live with that possibility.”

  “Their wives, too.”

  Cain watched the play of expression on her face. Saw the pain that another man, before his time, had put there. Then he said what needed to be said. “Whether I’m at home or abroad, I’ll never give you reason to doubt me, Cat. I swear it on my mother’s grave.”

  She believed him. With all her heart, she believed him. “Six weeks.” She blew out a breath. “That sure doesn’t leave me much time to plan a wedding.”

  “You’ll marry me?”

  “On one condition,” she said, and watched his smile slide away from his face.

  “What’s that?”

  “No more secrets between us.”

  He frowned. “There may be times when I can’t tell you where I’m going or when I’m coming back.”

  “I’m not talking about your work.”

  Cain tensed, knowing now exactly what she was talking about. “It’s ugly.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” Cat reached up and removed the eye patch.

  He stood there, his heart thudding with dread, as she silently studied the scarred and empty socket for what felt like the longest moment of his life.

  “No,” she said, her sorrow at the sacrifice he’d made so that others might live supplanted by a swelling of pride that this heroic man had chosen her to love. “It’s not ugly.” She lifted her hand and cupped his cheek. Drew his head down until their mouths were but a breath apart. Just before their lips met, she whispered, “It’s a badge of honor.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Vienna, Virginia; April 30, 1975

  Sitting alone on the sofa with the saltine she’d been nibbling on to fend off her nausea turning to dust in her mouth, Cat was fixated on the fall of Saigon that was being broadcast on the late-night news special.

  Giving silent thanks that John Lee was already asleep, she reached for the remote and changed the channel. Only to see a sobbing Vietnamese mother, her face a portrait of fear and grief, holding her baby out and staring intently into the camera as if to say, “Please take my child.” In the background, rockets and mortars were exploding and people were racing through the streets, screaming hysterically.

  She should turn off the television right now, she told herself. Give her parents a call and ask how her mother was doing. Or go to bed and read the book of names baby that she’d checked out of the library today.

  Instead, she flipped back to the first channel and watched through moist eyes as clouds of tear gas billowed up from
the top of the six-floor U.S. Embassy building. Her pulse pounded in time to the gunfire rattling randomly in the streets below the building. She could almost taste the fear of the Marines who’d been serving as security guards and were now stranded on the rooftop. Her heart went out to the frenzied mobs of Vietnamese people—many of whom had worked for or fought with the Americans during the war—who were storming the embassy compound, trying to flee the Communist tanks that were slamming into the city.

  Oh, God, Cat thought, her blood suddenly shivering to ice in her veins, was this the field assignment that Cain had gone on?

  She strongly suspected it was. His “business trips,” as they referred to them for John Lee’s benefit, had been few and far between in the almost two years they’d been married. And most of those hadn’t lasted more than a couple of days. A week at the most. But one afternoon he’d called her from headquarters to say that he wouldn’t be home for dinner that night. That was their pre-arranged signal that he’d been pressed into undercover service again. She’d known better than to ask him where he was going. Or when he was coming back. She’d just told him that she loved him and reminded him to be careful.

  That was the last time she’d heard from in almost a month.

  Now, she laid her hand over her the slight swell of her stomach, suffering a sickening sense of déjà vu as she wondered if she was destined to lose her beloved husband and the father of her unborn child to a war that would not end.

  Then her heart soared when she spotted the American helicopter settle down on the embassy’s rooftop pad. Green, yellow and red smoke from the signal grenades marked the spot as the marines scrambled aboard the chopper. Finally, blades whirling and smoke swirling, the chopper lifted off. It took a brief, steep plunge, then clawed for altitude before fluttering off toward the horizon and the safety of the U.S. fleet riding offshore in the South China Sea.

  It was over, Cat realized, wilting back against the sofa cushion. Or was it? For her, it wouldn’t truly be over until Cain came home to her safe and sound. But even then, she wondered, would they still be prisoners of the longest, saddest, baddest war America had ever fought?