Once a Warrior

by Fran Baker

  * * * *

  John Lee saw him first.

  “Mom!” the seven-year-old hollered from the front porch of their red brick Georgian house, where he’d been working on a new model airplane since he’d gotten home from school. “Cain’s here! And guess what? He’s got a—”

  Cat was sitting in the kitchen, drinking weak tea and eating a piece of dry toast to help settle her queasy stomach. She was convinced that her morning sickness—which she usually suffered in the evening—was linked as much to the weather as it was to the hormone changes taking place in her body. When it was sunny, she felt fine. But when it was cloudy, as it had been these past four days, she had trouble keeping food down.

  Now, on hearing John Lee’s shout, she set her cup on the table, pushed her plate away and scraped her chair back. She was barely four months pregnant, but she was already beginning to feel awkward. Yet her feet were fleet and her arms were aching to embrace her husband, her hero.

  She came to an abrupt halt at the door.

  Cain was standing on the driveway, holding—

  “A baby!” John Lee exclaimed as he dashed across the yard.

  “A boy,” Cain explained, crouching to show off the blanket-wrapped bundle in his arms.

  “Oh, wow!” John Lee was jumping up and down for joy. “He looks just like my baby pictures!”

  Cat said nothing as she crossed the yard. She was too caught up in looking at Cain. She’d lain awake too many nights to count, aching to hold him. To have him hold her. Now she drank in the sight of him, absorbing everything about him. His hair was freshly cut, his face smoothly shaved and his uniform neatly pressed. Despite the broad smile he gave her when he looked at her, she could see that his eye was shadowed by memories of what he had recently endured.

  “Well,” she said as she approached the driveway. “Aren’t you full of surprises?”

  Still holding the baby, he rose. “His mother thrust him at me through the embassy gates and begged me to take him.”

  Cat thought of the woman she’d seen on the television screen the other night. She couldn’t imagine giving her child into a stranger’s keeping. Unless that stranger was James Lee Cain. “She knew a good man when she saw one.”

  “Guess who else got out?” he asked her then.

  “Sister Simone?”

  He shook his head negatively. “She’ll never leave the orphans. Not even at gunpoint.”

  “Well, I know that Tiny’s going to law school in Oakland, California.”

  “Last time I talked to him, he was making straight A’s.”

  She threw up her hands. “Okay, I give up.”

  “Loc and Ngo and their four children.”

  Cat’s happiness for them was tempered by her worry about another. “And Kim?”

  A spasm of sadness crossed Cain’s face. “She was killed in a crossfire last year.”

  “She loved you, you know.”

  “And I loved her. But after you, only as a friend.”

  “Can we keep the baby?” Now it was John Lee’s turn to beg. “Huh? Can we?”

  “That’s up to your mother,” Cain cautioned as he extended his free arm to draw Cat closer for a kiss.

  She moved eagerly into his embrace. His lips were warm, hers welcoming. Glad tears streamed down her cheeks as she breathed in the clean scent of his shirt. As she angled her head to accommodate the gentle thrust of his tongue, she felt a faint fluttering sensation in her mid-section. It was too soon, she was sure of it. Fancifully, though, she wondered if it wasn’t her unborn child’s way of greeting its father.

  The baby he was holding, on the other hand, lay quietly in his arms.

  Following their private wedding in the parlor of her parish priest, they had talked about adopting a Vietnamese orphan someday. But this . . . Well, it was strange timing, to say the least. In thinking back to when she first got John Lee, though, Cat realized that Cain was healing his wounds through his children. That after all the death, he desperately needed life.

  “Please, Mom,” John Lee pleaded as the only parents he’d ever known broke apart.

  “I’ll take the night feedings,” Cain whispered against her tingling lips.

  “And I’ll change his diapers.” John Lee immediately qualified his promise with, “Unless they’re dirty.”

  With her husband’s arm around her and her son’s eyes shining with hope, how could she refuse? She couldn’t. Laughing now, Cat splayed her hand over her stomach and nodded. “I guess we’re going to have twins, huh?”

  “I love you,” Cain said with a tender smile.

  “Safe home, Colonel,” she replied as she reached for the baby he’d carried halfway around the world.

  The baby stared up at her, unblinking, as she cradled him to her breast. His hair and eyes were as dark as John Lee’s but his skin was just a shade lighter. A wave of maternal love swept through her as she touched his little button of a nose. His wide but tiny mouth opened in a yawn. Then he lowered his lashes and fell asleep in her arms.

  “Michael.” She looked at Cain. “For my father.”

  “A strong name,” he agreed. “A survivor’s name.”

  “Let’s go call Grandpa,” John Lee suggested. “Maybe Grandma will feel well enough to talk on the phone and we can tell her about my new brother, too.”

  Cat’s eyes filled with tears at the mention of her mother. Despite heavy doses of radiation, treatments that had left her burned and blistered and scarred, Anne-Marie’s cancer had metastasized. The last X-rays had shown a lesion in her right lung. Cat had flown back to Kansas City in February to celebrate her birthday with the woman who’d given her life and to tell her parents in person that they had another grandchild on the way. The news had revived their flagging spirits, and she’d come home to Virginia praying it would give them a reason to keep fighting that damned disease.

  “Yes,” she agreed now. “Let’s go call Grandpa and Grandma.”

  The sun broke through the clouds and beamed down like a blessing as Cat, holding the baby, and Cain, holding John Lee’s hand, started back to the house.

  And the darkness of a war that had divided a nation but had brought their family together began to fade.

  EPILOGUE

  Arlington National Cemetery

  Six Air Force pallbearers slowly carried the flag-covered coffin of Lieutenant John Brown, Jr. from the black hearse to a spot near a dogwood tree that had been shorn of its leaves by the rising November wind.

  Wearing his dress blues, Major John Lee Brown, Johnny’s only surviving relative and a career military officer like the man who had raised him, led the procession to his father’s grave. Much to his mother’s dismay, he’d gained his air combat experience during Desert Storm, then had honed his skills over the troubled Balkans—the same region, ironically, where his grandfather had gone down in World War Two. To his mother’s delight, however, he was now stationed at Langley Air Force Base and was engaged to a lovely librarian from Hampton, Virginia.

  Taking one of the chairs that had been set up for the mourners, Cat shivered as four F-15s in formation screamed across the sky and the front fighter jet peeled up and away to symbolize the lost soldier. Sitting beside her, Cain sensed her distress. He slipped his arm around her shoulder and drew her close. She leaned on him, as she had for twenty-eight years now, and allowed the tears she’d been holding inside her all day to flow freely down her cheeks.

  Hearing the jets’ thunder, Mike Scanlon thought of an empty room on another continent in another war that had once been filled with love. Anne-Marie had been gone for more than a quarter of a century, but he wasn’t alone. In addition to Cat and Cain and their children, his daughter Mary—a former tough-as-nails county prosecutor who’d won a landslide election to serve as Missouri’s first woman Attorney General—and her husband and children sat to his right. To his left were his son Drew, a social worker and an unreconstructed hippie in bifocals and Birkenstocks, and his wife and son. Along with all the other young men wh
o had fled to Canada to avoid the draft, he’d received amnesty from President Jimmy Carter and had finally returned to the city of his birth.

  “First,” said the Catholic chaplain who was conducting the ceremony, “let us give all glory to God for bringing John Brown, Jr., a true American hero, home at long last.”

  The box containing a few bones and one tooth had been released for burial following a repatriation ceremony at Travis Air Force Base in California. The remains had undergone rigorous testing, which included taking a DNA sample from John Lee, before being positively identified as Johnny’s. A joint U.S.-Laos recovery team had found them almost eighteen months ago.

  The man who’d led the search, a highly decorated pilot, a former member of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a retired Brigadier General, was the husband of the deceased’s widow.

  As Cain had suspected from the beginning, Johnny had been shot down in the Americans’ secret bombing campaign in Laos. For years the Laotian government had refused entry to the various teams that were working to recover the remains of U.S. servicemen in Southeast Asia. Only after economic and political pressures were brought to bear had they finally relented and joined the cooperative effort.

  Based on both written reports and eyewitness accounts, the recovery team had narrowed their search to the two main mountain passes—Mu Gia and Ban Karat—between Vietnam and Laos. The area had been thoroughly scavenged when they reached it. But among the items excavated were identifiable parts of a B-52 bomber, pieces of a crewman’s flightsuit, and the human bones and tooth that were being buried today. To the team’s astonishment, an old man in a nearby village had turned over Johnny’s dogtags, which he’d kept as a war souvenir all these years.

  As the ceremony drew to a close, the mournfully slow notes of “Taps” rent the cold air. Then seven rifles were fired three times each in a 21-gun salute. Finally, John Lee accepted the triangularly folded American flag that had covered his father’s casket. It would go in the same box containing the cassette tapes his parents had exchanged during their brief marriage, Johnny’s dogtags, and the Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart and Air Medal with Four Oak Leaf Cluster that he’d been awarded for meritorious achievement during flight.

  “Go in peace,” the chaplain said to the three generations of warriors sitting before him.

  Flanked by Cat and Cain, John Lee turned to greet the crowd that had gathered. Some, like the man in a black POW T-shirt and camouflage pants who said he hadn’t known Johnny personally but was a Vietnam vet who thought it important that he pay his respects, were complete strangers. Others were firm friends.

  “It’s so kind of you to come,” Cat said as she enveloped Ngo in a hug.

  Loc, who owned a small but successful chain of jewelry stores in San Francisco, shook Cain’s hand. “Thank you for helping us gain our freedom.”

  “Don’t thank me.” Cain looked out over the endless rows of white headstones that consecrated the ground with such crushing finality. “Thank them.”

  Loc and Ngo’s four children, naturalized Americans and grown to adulthood now, filed solemnly by with their spouses, their offspring, and their own expressions of gratitude.

  Mike laid a copy of that old black-and-white picture of John and Charley and him, taken on John and Kitty’s wedding day by Daisy, atop Johnny’s casket before he stepped outside the tent to join his family.

  “What a waste.” Drew gazed at the white crosses that marked the final resting-place of so many American soldiers from a completely different perspective than Cain’s.

  Mike and Drew had long since reconciled their differences and could discuss the Vietnam War with little or no rancor now. But as he stood there beside his son, he suddenly realized that neither he nor Anne-Marie had ever fully disclosed the part she’d played with the French Résistance during World War Two. That they’d never really talked about the fact that while war is awful and sometimes morally iffy, it’s not always a wasted effort. Like so many in their generation, they’d simply rolled up their sleeves and gone back to either work or school when they’d come home, letting their actions speak louder than their words.

  Figuring better late than never, Mike smiled at Drew. “Did you ever hear about a woman called ‘Tiger Lily’?”

  Drew frowned. “No.”

  “Come on,” Mike encouraged, canting his head toward the curb, “I’ll tell you about her now.”

  Tears of joy sprang to Cat’s eyes when she saw Mike and Drew deep in conversation. She knew that this separate peace between father and son was exactly what Anne-Marie had hoped and prayed for to the bitter end. And that her mother was probably smiling down from heaven at the sight of them, arms draped over each other’s shoulders, walking toward the family limousine.

  She looked at her husband then and asked, “Where do we go from here?”

  Cain’s mission was complete, but thanks to those who’d made the supreme sacrifice, his life was far from over. He felt his throat swell with pride as he looked at his three sons—John Lee, who was working his way up the ranks of the Air Force Combat Command; Michael, who was in medical school now, and his “twin,” James, Jr., who had recently graduated from law school. Then there was the apple of his eye—his daughter, Anna Marie, named for both Cat’s mother and his. She was a sophomore at Georgetown, smart as a whip and a real beauty to boot.

  After sketching an invisible salute to all who’d gone before, he slid his arm around his wife’s waist and answered her question with one word. “Home.”

  Dedication

  For Vincent, for believing,

  and

  In loving memory of:

  Lieutenant Edmund Francis McCoy

  Lieutenant Vincent de Paul McCoy

  Sergeant Emeran Albert McCoy

  Requiescant in pace.

  Copyright © 2001 by Fran Baker

  Delphi Books trade paperback edition (ISBN 0-9663397-3-8) published November 1998; Belgrave House electronic edition published April 2001

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  This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.