Lost at Khe Sanh

by Steve Watkins

  “I guess you all need to do more research,” Mrs. Miller said, though still sounding nice about it. “Zorn was at a Special Forces camp about five miles away from Khe Sanh. It was a famous battle in its own right, but everybody just sort of includes it in general when they talk about the Siege of Khe Sanh.”

  “Was he at Lang Vei?” Julie asked. Greg and I looked at her, surprised. We hadn’t heard about any Lang Vei before.

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Miller said. “When Lang Vei was overrun by the North Vietnamese, the ones who survived had to fight their way out and they escaped to the marine base. It was ironic, I suppose, because they had pleaded over the radio for help from the marines, but the marine commander wouldn’t send help because he thought there would be an ambush, that the whole attack on Lang Vei, where there were only a few dozen Special Forces, was just to draw the marines outside their base so they could be attacked.”

  “So Sergeant Miller was one of the survivors at Lang Vei?” Greg asked.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Miller said. “But they never did know how he went missing from the marine base. That was always the big mystery. And still is.” She paused for a minute and then asked what my second question was.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “It was about his friend Fish. I wondered if you knew who he was.”

  “Well, I never met him,” Mrs. Miller said, “but he was kind enough to write to me after Zorn went missing and they never found out what happened. He told me what a good friend and soldier Zorn had been, and how proud I should be of him, and how honored he was to have gotten to serve with Zorn. Those sorts of things. He even sent money not long after Nugent was born. I tried to send it back, but he insisted. I have to say, it was quite a lot of money, and I wish I had been able to convince him that he didn’t have to do that. On the other hand, we really did need the help back then, so it was very much appreciated.”

  “Just one last question,” I said. “Do you know Fish’s real name?”

  “Well, certainly,” Mrs. Miller said. “His name was Troutman. Donnie Troutman. I guess you can see why he had the nickname ‘Fish.’ ”

  Julie nearly dropped the phone, but somehow held on. “Thank you, Mrs. Miller. We really appreciate your talking with us,” she managed to blurt out. “We’ll send you a copy of our school paper. Bye!”

  I was just staring at Greg. My jaw actually dropped and my mouth fell wide open, though there was no way I could even think about speaking or what I might say.

  Greg just stood there like he was frozen. Donnie Troutman was his dad’s name, and how many Donnie Troutmans could there be in the world who had served in Vietnam and been in Special Forces?

  “Greg?” I finally said after Julie got off the phone. It was the only word that would come out of my mouth. “Greg?”

  But he was so much in shock that it didn’t seem as if he could even hear me. There was something strange about his eyes, too, which I couldn’t figure out until finally it hit me. I’d seen that look before, on Z, and it was the thousand-yard stare. Greg was so lost in whatever he was thinking or feeling that Julie and I could have been anybody and he could have been anywhere.

  Julie and I just stood there next to Greg for quite a while, waiting for him to come out of his shock or his trance or whatever.

  Finally, after what seemed like a whole hour of us just standing there, Julie touched Greg’s shoulder and said his name.

  “Are you there?” she asked, her voice not much louder than a whisper.

  Greg nodded as if we’d been talking to him all along. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m here.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Your dad …”

  And right then Greg did something I’d never seen him or anybody else do before. He fainted.

  Julie and I pretty much freaked out, both of us yelling his name and stuff, as if we could call him back into being awake or conscious or whatever. Julie even pulled off his beanie and began using it to fan his face.

  Maybe it worked, because when he opened his eyes again he said, “What? What? Why are you yelling at me?”

  “Because you fainted!” Julie said, still yelling.

  Greg blinked at us a couple of times. He was lying on the floor and we were looking down at him. Then he said, “Well, would you stop it already? You’re giving me a headache.”

  I thought Julie was going to hit him. Instead, she tossed his beanie at him.

  Greg struggled to sit up and I helped him. Julie just crossed her arms and looked annoyed.

  “You really did faint,” I said. “For a couple of seconds.”

  Greg shook his head as if trying to get some fog out and stuffed his beanie back on. He got that weird look on his face again, the one he’d had before, or close to it — not exactly the thousand-yard stare, but maybe the hundred-yard stare — and said, “Z knew my dad. They were together in Vietnam.”

  In all the craziness, I’d nearly forgotten about Z. I looked around now but could see no trace of him, and realized it had been a while since I was sure he was still there with us. I hoped he’d heard everything about Lang Vei, and his Montagnard friend, and especially — most especially — about Greg’s dad.

  Uncle Dex came over to dinner at our house that night, so I didn’t even get a chance to crash in my room and think over everything that had happened that day.

  We had barely started eating when I brought up Vietnam. “So, Uncle Dex,” I said, since I just always thought he was the one who knew the most about wars and history and stuff. “That Battle of Khe Sanh, or Siege of Khe Sanh. I mean, I know it was a big battle and all, and the marine base was surrounded, and it went on for like three months or something —”

  “Seventy-seven days,” Uncle Dex interrupted.

  “Yeah, right, that,” I said. “I keep reading about how it was such an important battle, too. All battles are important, of course. And it’s terrible for anybody to get killed. But what made that one so particularly important, anyway?”

  Mom plopped some mashed potatoes down on my plate, and Dad served everybody some kind of chicken casserole he’d made.

  “Not exactly what I thought we’d be talking about around the dinner table,” Mom said, “but go ahead, Dex.”

  Dad just laughed.

  “From what I always read,” Uncle Dex said, “Khe Sanh was a military victory for the U.S., but a public relations nightmare. The numbers they officially released were around two hundred marines and maybe as many as ten to fifteen thousand North Vietnamese KIA. But it was most likely a lot more of us and a lot fewer of them. Casualty figures had a way of being not exactly the most accurate during the war.”

  “KIA?” I asked, though I could sort of figure it out.

  Mom was the one who answered. “It means ‘killed in action,’ ” she said.

  Dad, Uncle Dex, and I all stopped eating and just looked at her.

  “What?” she said to me. “Do you think you and Uncle Dex were the only ones in the family who inherited Pop Pop’s love of history and studying about wars?”

  Mom laid her fork across her plate. “The North Vietnamese, even though they kept losing so many of their men to the terrible daily aerial bombing, were hoping to draw the marines off the base and attack them when they were vulnerable,” she said.

  “Right,” Uncle Dex said. “And the longer they had the marines on the defensive, and surrounded, the worse it looked in the TV news reports. We were losing men of our own, a lot of men, and here we were supposed to be winning this war, which was becoming more and more unpopular back home, and every night on the six o’clock news there were war correspondents reporting on the latest from this never-ending siege at Khe Sanh.

  “People were growing tired of the war.”

  “And then there was the Tet Offensive,” Mom said. “Don’t forget about that.”

  “Right,” Uncle Dex said.

  “You said something about that yesterday,” I said to Uncle Dex. “But I still don’t know what it is.”

  “Shortly after the NVA at
tacked Khe Sanh,” Mom said, answering for Uncle Dex, who had a mouthful of potatoes, “there were coordinated attacks on cities and military bases all across South Vietnam, mainly by the guerilla fighters, the Viet Cong. Eighty thousand of them. They even overran the U.S. embassy in Saigon, which was the capital of South Vietnam. A lot of people thought that the attack on Khe Sanh was meant to be a diversion so the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong could successfully mount the Tet Offensive.”

  “Tet is the Vietnamese new year,” Uncle Dex interjected after he swallowed his food. “Everybody was supposed to be dancing and partying and celebrating, and instead the South Vietnamese Army and all the U.S. military were dropping everything to fight off the Viet Cong and NVA.”

  “What happened?” I asked, worried, as if it was still going on.

  “Many people were killed,” Mom said, “and there was massive destruction, especially in some of the cities in the north, but in the end it was another military disaster for the North Vietnamese.”

  “Yeah,” Uncle Dex said, “but once again it was a public relations disaster for us and for the South Vietnamese. We’d been fighting this war for so many years already —”

  “And the French had been fighting it before us,” Mom added. “For ten years.”

  Uncle Dex picked up where he’d left off. “And here was one more thing, when the president, Lyndon Johnson, kept telling us we were winning, here all of a sudden there are our enemies taking over the embassy, even if it was just for a couple of days. So both things — the Siege of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive — turned more and more people back here in America against the war. President Johnson was embarrassed. And there were more of our men coming home in body bags. It was a terrible time.”

  Dad hadn’t said much of anything throughout the conversation. Until now. “Before the U.S. got involved, France had ruled Vietnam for a couple of hundred years as one of their colonies,” he said. “The people in the North fought a war for their independence from France, and in 1954 they finally succeeded, after a battle at a place called Dien Bien Phu. The guerilla army of the North Vietnamese surrounded a French base there and kept it under siege until the French surrendered — and gave North Vietnam their independence. So, now, here the U.S. Marines were, surrounded and under siege at Khe Sanh, and in the newspapers and on TV it was Dien Bien Phu all over again.”

  My brain was about to explode from all the information — I couldn’t wait to get to my room to write it all down, or all I could remember, from what Dad and Mom and Uncle Dex had said, and from Mrs. Miller, and from the books in the library. I rubbed my temples really hard, to see if I could get rid of a low-grade headache but also to make sure everything I’d learned in the past few days stayed in.

  Everybody had settled back into quietly eating for a minute. I really wished I could tell them about Z, and I especially wished I could tell them about Greg’s dad and how he was Z’s friend in the Special Forces.

  I wondered what was going on at their house — if Greg had been able to bring everything up. And I wondered if Z was sitting in my room right now, waiting for me so we could talk about the phone call from his wife, and about the things she said, and about Fish.

  “What’s the matter, Anderson?” Mom asked. “You look like you went away for a while there.”

  They were all looking at me. “I just wish Vietnam had been like World War II,” I said.

  “That’s a strange thing to say,” Dad said. “What do you mean?”

  I fiddled with my fork on my plate for a second, collecting my thoughts. “Well, it’s just that in World War II everybody knew why we had to fight that war, and who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. The Germans and the Japanese did all these horrible things, and we went to war to protect the rest of Europe, and all those other countries in Asia, and ourselves.”

  Uncle Dex chimed in. “But Vietnam was different,” he offered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We didn’t know who the enemy was a lot of the time. And it wasn’t like we were always the good guys, exactly. And we didn’t even win.”

  Mom nodded. “That’s all true,” she said. “But you have to remember, Anderson. Soldiers don’t make the decision to go to war. They don’t decide what wars we’re going to fight. The people we elect to office make those decisions, and we hope and trust that they make the right decisions, but sometimes they don’t. But that doesn’t mean our soldiers are any less brave, and it doesn’t mean that their sacrifices have any less meaning, because they’re doing it for us, and they deserve our respect and our support and our appreciation for that. Always.”

  For some reason I felt like I might cry when Mom said all that. My lip even started trembling a little bit. I really wished I could magically fix things for Z, and for Greg’s dad, and for all the veterans who might be out there having a hard time finding their peace or whatever, whether they were living or whether they were dead.

  After dinner I went to my room, hoping Z would be there again, but he wasn’t. I tried calling Greg, but he didn’t answer, so then I called Julie.

  She didn’t even say hi, she just started talking. “I already found out a lot more about Lang Vei,” she said. “Want me to come over and fill you in?”

  I was tired all the way down to my bones, but felt like we didn’t have time to rest until we had all the answers, so I said yes, that would be great.

  I texted Greg while I waited for Julie — What about ur dad? Did u talk 2 him yet? J is on her way over. Want 2 come 2? — but didn’t hear back from my text, either. I was about to send him another one — just a bunch of question marks — but Julie was there before I had time.

  “I told my parents we had to study,” she said. “Test on Monday.”

  I was just about to reply when somebody else interrupted. It was Z, making a sort of grunting sound like he didn’t approve of something. I hadn’t heard him show up, but that wasn’t exactly unusual.

  “You shouldn’t tell stories to your mom and dad,” he said from his usual place on the floor, leaning against the wall. “It’s not a nice thing to do, and you always get in trouble.”

  Julie blushed with embarrassment.

  “We don’t usually,” I said. “Except it’s hard to be running around helping out ghosts and all. I mean, you have to tell your parents something.”

  “I guess,” Z said. “But keep the storytelling to a minimum.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  He raised one eyebrow.

  “I mean, yes, Sergeant,” I quickly corrected myself.

  Julie changed the subject. “Did you hear any of the conversation with your wife — with Mrs. Miller? She told us a lot of things. She told us about Lang Vei,” she said.

  “I did hear most of it,” Z said. “From where I was I kind of had to strain to catch everything. When I’m not all there it’s like being stuck in a closet and pressing my ear to the door trying to eavesdrop. But it sure was sweet to hear her voice, even from so far away.”

  He smiled.

  “Did you remember how they overran your camp?” Julie asked. “I read about that. The North Vietnamese. And did you remember how you all radioed the marines to help you but they wouldn’t come? And how you lost half of your men — half of your Special Forces men — and you and the others barely escaped, and you fought your way to Khe Sanh, to the marine base, even though they wouldn’t send help?”

  “Slow down, now,” Z said. “Just slow down a second. Take a deep breath.”

  Julie and I both did, even though she was the only one talking. “I just got excited,” Julie said.

  “And I appreciate that,” Z said. “Just don’t want you to start hyperventilating or anything. Plus, I’ve been remembering some things, too.”

  “Like what?” I asked, eager to hear.

  Z paused for a second. “Shouldn’t we wait for your buddy Greg? I’d be mighty interested to hear about how things went with him and Fish. That must have been quite a shock for him to realize who his dad was all al
ong. Sure was a shock to me.”

  “He fainted,” I said. “But he’s okay. At least, he’s okay from the fainting.”

  “We caught him,” Julie interjected. “Before he fell.”

  “I kind of had a sense of that,” Z said. “Even though I wasn’t there enough to exactly see it. Anyway, I tried to follow him to his house, hoping I could get to see Fish again after all these years, but I lost the way. Fog got too thick, you might say.”

  I looked at Julie and she looked at me. It wasn’t foggy out at all. But I guess that wasn’t the kind of fog he was talking about.

  “I called him and texted him,” I said. “No answer, though.”

  Z looked perplexed. “What’s that mean — you texted him? What’s ‘texted’?”

  Julie explained. “With our phones, we can type a message instead of dialing and speaking to the person. That’s called texting.”

  “Oh,” Z said. “Never heard of that before. But anyway, Fish was a good guy. I know he must be a good dad, too. Hard to talk about the war, though, unless it’s with somebody else who’s been there. I hope Greg isn’t expecting too much if he brings it up with his dad. Not right away. Maybe if Fish has time to warm up to it and all. I always had a hard time trying to talk about it, even with Philomena.”

  “Greg wasn’t sure if he would talk about it,” I said. “Mr. Troutman has kind of a hard time and Greg’s mom told him it was because of the war. Sometimes his dad drinks and Greg doesn’t like to be around when that happens so he comes over here.”

  I wasn’t sure why I was telling Z all that, but from the way he was nodding it seemed like the right thing to do.

  “I can understand,” he said. “Wish it wasn’t so, but I get it.”

  Z started flickering. Julie noticed it first. “You’re disappearing again,” she said. “Can you tell us about Lang Vei before you go this time? Anything that I might not have read?”

  “Yeah,” I chimed in. “And we can try to show you the way to Greg’s. We might be able to help. It’s not far from here. Just a couple of blocks. We can take you over to see Mr. Troutman, I mean, Fish.”