Duty and Dishonor: Author's Preferred Edition

by Dale A. Dye

  Dinh reached behind him through the door of the hut and felt Emory’s hand groping for his in the dark. He closed his fist around a small, hard object wrapped in rice paper and bound with a scrap of cloth. Shoving the object into his pocket, he walked away to finish his guard shift.

  In the morning he was found to have disappeared. Three days later, the Cadre Commander called off the patrols and gave up looking for Sergeant Dinh.

  NEW YORK

  “I’m a little surprised, Justin. It’s not like you to panic.”

  Halley pointed at Cleve Emory’s empty snifter, got a nod, and poured a generous dollop of strong ruby port. He stirred his own wine with the clipped end of an after-dinner cigar and stared out at the rhythmic Atlantic breakers washing the beach of Emory’s Long Island estate.

  “It’s not panic, Cleve. Call it caution. I’m merely concerned that we might wind up haunted by old ghosts.”

  Cleve Emory fogged the salt-scented air with cigar smoke for long, silent minutes, waiting for his houseboy to clear the dinner dishes and disappear. Justin’s vague call had made him edgy. He stayed awake for the entire trip from Los Angeles posing and discounting possibilities.

  By the time the jet shut down outside the private hangar at La Guardia, he was convinced they were bulletproof on this thing. Unless, of course, his son bad somehow miraculously survived the war—but that was impossible. The Vietnamese were crowing about their defeat of the powerful Americans…David slays Goliath…and all that horseshit. If they had a live American turncoat—especially one like his son—they’d be shouting it from international housetops.

  “OK. Let’s play it out, Justin. Give me the benefit of your military thinking on this.”

  “I’m a cautious man, Cleve…always have been. My training and background is in military intelligence which involves the business of identifying and assessing threats. Some bells began to ring when Saigon fell. The POWs came home and there was all this business about live Americans still in Vietnam, the MIAs in captivity and being held back, all that kind of thing. It set me to thinking about our own little enterprise. We took a hell of a risk.”

  “Not according to what you told me back then, Justin. You said it was a rock-solid lock.”

  “That I did…and I still think we’re safe in that regard. To put it in plain language here, I have no doubt your son is dead. What’s got me wondering is this business with Pudarski who suddenly leaves Chicago and winds up in St. Louis.”

  “Where he’s visiting an old war buddy, right?”

  “Correct…the same old war buddy who was the photographer that took the pictures of your son and the black guy. That’s a little too coincidental for my liking. I think they’re up to something having to do with the story we burned and buried.”

  “And you think this represents a threat how?”

  “I’d planned on ignoring it, Cleve. Let those two flounder and flail chasing their tails, you know? They’ve got no proof. We saw to that. And then I get word that the photographer, who is now an award-winning investigative reporter, is making inquiries, trying to find me.”

  “Trying to find the man who interviewed Pudarski and confiscated his photos in Vietnam…and that leads you to believe what?”

  “That maybe they’re planning to collaborate on a story…a story we definitely don’t want investigated too deeply and certainly don’t want told. Even if no one believes it, it’s sensational enough to cause a major stink. We might find ourselves tap-dancing and dodging a flood of media speculation.”

  “You think that’s really a possibility?”

  “I’m worried it might be. You’ve got to understand, Cleve. There’s a lot of knee-jerk reaction going on among the veterans about the way the war turned out. Everyone involved from Westmoreland on down is looking to hit back, to lay the blame for the debacle in Vietnam on anyone else’s shoulders. Just say Pudarski and Benjamin start squawking in the papers and on TV about what they say they saw in Vietnam. Even with no proof, others might start digging into it. And somebody might just think to ask the Vietnamese…”

  “Who would be happy to confirm the story of two American turncoats who fought on their side.”

  “Exactly.”

  Cleve Emory pushed his chair away from the table and trailed cigar smoke to the picture window overlooking the rolling velvet surface of the Atlantic. He stood admiring the view for a while and then turned to point an accusing finger at Justin Halley.

  “Let me tell you what I think is the real issue here. I don’t think you’re afraid of a couple of low-level vets making a stink. They’ve got no proof…unless some politician gets interested in the story and forces the Pentagon to declassify a whole bunch of embarrassing information. At that point, they’d be looking at your report and comparing what it says to what Pudarski, a Medal of Honor winner and this guy Benjamin, an award-winning journalist and a veteran, are swearing is the truth of the matter. If something like that happens, the proverbial defecation hits the oscillation, doesn’t it Justin? And investigators would want to know what happened to all those photos from Vietnam. The way I see it, it’s your ass might be on the line here.”

  “You’re omitting an important consideration, Cleve. What if these two guys come a across a picture of Cleve Junior from old archives or his service records, or some high school yearbook? What happens if they start to claim publicly that one of the turncoats is your own son?”

  “I suppose, I’ll have to play the wronged and aggrieved father who was lied to by the Army.”

  “And you’re thinking the board and the stock-holders won’t be screaming for you to step down? You know what this kind of controversy can mean in our circles, Cleve.”

  Cleveland Emory placed his cigar into a crystal ashtray and took a deep breath. He’d thought all this was behind him. He wanted it to stay there. He stood thinking with hands clasped at the small of his back, rocking on his heels. “I don’t like loose ends, Justin. They often get snarled and then smack you in the ass. I’ve built a good career snipping at loose ends before things like that can happen.”

  “What do you need from me?”

  “I need you to fix this, Justin. But I want you to fix it better than you did the first time, understand? I want you to eliminate the loose ends.”

  ST. LOUIS

  Willy Pud wandered into the kitchen as quietly as possible and put a cold coffeepot on the stove. It was early Saturday and Spike Benjamin was upstairs in bed where he usually stayed on weekend mornings, fighting off the fatigue of long nights doing exhaustive research.

  Waiting for the coffee to heat, Willy went into the living room and climbed three stairs to a spot where he could get some perspective on the piles of work that had exhausted all three of them over many long nights during the past month. Crammed against a long wall of Spike’s den was an eight-foot long plywood plank that they’d installed as a work surface when the photos of MIAs started to arrive from the Pentagon. There were a bunch of photos and a ton of descriptions, background information, and status reports. The sheer weight of paper made the plywood bow toward the center. Over the weeks, they’d organized the material into stacks, arranging and rearranging to try and force some coherent system into their search. At this point, they had been through all of that material at least twice.

  Willy walked into the den and collapsed onto a padded couch. He put his feet up and grabbed at a file lying on the coffee table. It was one of the first ones they’d compiled. Inside were sheets of information on people they thought might be able to corroborate the Salt and Pepper story from first-hand observation. He shuffled through the notes in Eddie Miller’s spiky scrawl. The FBI had been cooperative, but what they revealed was hardly helpful. They got about as much mileage from that track as a butter-bar lieutenant with a broken compass.

  The first note confirmed what Sergeant Major Shifty Schaeffer had told him about his old Company Commander. Captain Stacey, Phillip A. USMC, 33, of Ceiling, Oklahoma, h
ad indeed been killed in a helicopter that crashed as a result of hostile ground fire on 23 June 70, Quang Nam Province, RVN. No survivors.

  Then the notes Miller made about the other members of Willy Pud’s recon patrol. Hampton, Orville L., Sergeant. USMC, 24, Mussel Shoals, Alabama: Old, reliable Hamhock, KIA as a result of enemy explosive device, 17 May 70, Quang Tri Province, RVN. That was just bullshit for the record. Hamhock got blown away five clicks over the line in Laos.

  Wyatt. Steven B., Lance Corporal, 21, Hampton, Virginia KIA 13 August 1970, Quang Nam Province, as a result of shrapnel wounds from enemy indirect fire.

  The next two entries came from running names through the National Crime Information Center, and it was nearly more depressing than the official military reports. Willy Pud took a deep breath, slugged at his coffee and scanned the print-out.

  Goodman, Sterling T., Lance Corporal, USMC, 20, was honorably discharged from active duty at Marine Barracks, Naval Station, Treasure Island on 23 December 1970. Home of record was Sacramento, California. He was arrested 19 March 1972—interstate transportation of stolen vehicle—sentenced to 3-5 years at California State Penitentiary, Chino. Died 4 April 1974 of stab wounds received in cell-block fight with another prisoner.

  Purdy, James Lee, Corporal, 22, of Spartanburg, South Carolina, honorably discharged at Marine Corps Base, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. He was arrested multiple times during 1971-73, possession and possession for sale of controlled substances (narcotics). There was just the one stretch of jail time in Valdosta, Georgia. And the poor guys died 19 January 1975 in Atlanta of a drug overdose.

  That left just one unaccounted for member of the patrol…Booger Ledsome, home of record, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He was not listed in the KIA files, so he’d survived Vietnam. Miller was chasing information on him. Hopefully, they’d find at least one more corroborating witness if Booger managed to sidestep the trip-wires and post-war traps that killed the others.

  Willy Pud tossed the file and lay back with his eyes closed. They had been such good Marines, fighters, wild bull riders, and heavily hung enlisted men, every one of them. What the hell happened? It was rhetorical, of course. He knew damn well what happened, knew from his own experience what went wrong with Cherry Boy Wyatt. He died due to a different and deadly sort of addiction, chasing the high of mortal combat where only the very best survived. He bucked the odds and crapped out. And there but for the grace of God…and the citation authors who turned me into a certified hero…go I. As for Poke Purdy and Studs Goodman…well, maybe they just couldn’t adjust to a peaceful routine, not after what they’d been through. Maybe being ignored or demeaned by non-hackers their own age was just too much. Theirs was just a slightly different story with the same tragic end.

  Willy Pud unfolded himself from the couch and went to stand near the long worktable. Taped above it was the blow up of the vital photo Spike Benjamin had worked so hard to produce. It was not much, but both Salt and Pepper stood out much more clearly than in earlier prints. He looked at the piles of photos received from the Pentagon and reviewed the methods they’d used in searching through them.

  Obvious Hispanics were the first rejects. Then they eliminated the MIAs who were too old, those who disappeared very early in the war, and the vast majority of aviators. Willy’s gut told him Salt and Pepper had been ground troops of one ilk or another. And the majority of the MIAs were pilots or aircrew. That made culling the stacks a little easier, but not one of the remaining men, mostly shown in stone-faced boot camp or basic training photos, looked anything like Salt or Pepper. After a couple of weeks in Vietnam, they would have looked significantly different, but there was nothing they could do about that. The MIA thing looked like a dry hole.

  Spike Benjamin, tousle-haired from sleep, appeared at his shoulder. “Maybe we should go back and take another look at the white guys we eliminated because they didn’t wear glasses.”

  Willy shrugged and walked toward the kitchen and the coffee pot. “We can try, Spike but I think we’d be pissing in the wind. You saw the specs Salt was wearing. He must have been wearing glasses since he was a kid and you know as well as I do no grunt is gonna be out in the bush wearing contact lenses.”

  Spike hit his morning coffee and slid some bread in the toaster. “I’m kind of surprised we didn’t find anything among the black dudes, you know? There weren’t that many of them.”

  “Yeah…well, you can’t say we didn’t try. Maybe Eddie will have something on Booger Ledsome.”

  j

  Eddie Miller arrived just before noon looking glum. “It ain’t pretty,” he said and pulled a notebook out of his pocket. Willy Pud and Spike Benjamin settled in to hear what the cop had discovered about Corporal William R. Ledsome, the last man in Willy Pud’s recon patrol unaccounted for. “Nothing in the NCIC about William Ledsome…discharged in February ‘71…honorable…but not before he’d gotten himself in a little trouble with the Marine Corps. It was mostly minor stuff—drunk and disorderly, missing formations, bad attitude—that kind of thing. They handled it at Office Hours and Corporal Ledsome wound up discharged as a buck private. I did get a home address and found a phone number. Next of kin is a Mrs. E. B. Fielding, an aunt who lives in Lancaster.”

  “Did you call her?”

  “I did…and like I said…it ain’t pretty. Mrs. Fielding had no idea where her nephew might be at the moment. She said he was a mess after he got home, drunk and fighting all the time. Cops came looking for him regularly but he moved around a lot, according to the aunt. She said he disappeared from sight with a pregnant girlfriend hot on his heels one day in the summer of ’72. She hasn’t heard from him since.”

  “Well, at least he ain’t dead.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Miller shrugged and snapped his notebook closed. “Sounded to me like he was on a bad path. You know what happened to Purdy and Goodman. Likely something similar happened with Ledsome.”

  “But he was clean on the NCIC check?” Spike got coffee pot and refilled cups around the den.

  “No felony arrests…and he’s definitely not incarcerated,” Eddie said, “but that doesn’t mean he didn’t turn up somewhere dead and the locals couldn’t identify him. It happens all the time.”

  “Well, we gotta stay on it,” Willy Pud said. “If he’s alive somewhere we need to find him. One more guy who actually saw Salt and Pepper in the bush would do a lot for our story.”

  “I’ll continue to work the sources in the northeast,” Eddie Miller said. “I’m betting wherever he went, it wasn’t too far from home.”

  Spike Benjamin wandered over to their work table and stared down at the stacks of research material. “I’ve been thinking. What if we’re looking in the wrong hole? These are all photos and reports on people who are officially listed as MIA, right? What if the two we’re looking for were officially declared KIA, you know? The Pentagon covers the situation up by sending home a couple of closed coffins and nobody’s the wiser.”

  “I don’t know, Spike.” Willy Pud found it hard to imagine. “I mean, we gotta give them some credit for integrity, I think. They do something like that and what happens if a guy they declared KIA suddenly turns up as a forgotten POW or something. They’d never live something like that down. Families would lawyer up and sue for the national budget. Heads would roll.”

  “Yeah, I guess we better just focus on Ledsome for now.”

  “You get anything on the MACV Colonel?” Miller asked.

  “Former Colonel Justin Bates Halley is still ducking my calls.” Spike shook his head and shrugged. “But he’s our guy. Records indicate his last active duty assignment was as an Intel Officer on the MACV staff. Time and places are right. He’s got some clout, it appears. My solid source over at the records center suddenly dried up and politely let me know they wouldn’t be answering any questions about him. I did find out where he is—New York—he’s a top-level suit with Emory Technology.”

  “That’s gotta
mean he knows we’re looking for him and he knows what we want to talk about.”

  “He’s not dumb, Willy Pud. Last time I called, I told his executive assistant I just wanted to ask him about something concerning his service in Vietnam. The pond froze over right quick at that point. I was informed that Mr. Halley did not do press…despite the fact that I was looking right at a couple of clippings from interviews he did in the recent past.”

  “I guess I could fly to New York,” Willy said. “You know, ambush him somewhere and get in his face.”

  “Guy like that would be hard to ambush, Willy Pud.” Miller cautioned. “You go harassing him, he takes out a restraining order and you get yourself arrested.”

  “That would be bad for our credibility,” Spike agreed. “We need to focus on his report. It’s still classified. I just got their version of a blank stare in response to my FOIA request.”

  “There’s gotta be a way to crack into that, Spike.”

  “I’m working on it. Let’s get some lunch.”

  NEW YORK

  “Mrs. Fielding? I hope I’m not bothering you. My name is John Bradley,” Justin Halley lied smoothly. “I knew your nephew in Vietnam.”

  “My God, you people keep turning up like bad pennies.”

  “Excuse me? I was just trying to locate Bill for a reunion we’re having next month.”

  “I don’t know where you’d find him—but he’d be interested in anything where he might get a free drink.”

  “You don’t know where he is? No address or phone number for him?”

  “It’s like I told the other fella that called. I’ve got no idea where Bill Ledsome might be. He left town in ’72 as far as I know. I ain’t heard word one from him since. You might check with the local cops. Same thing I told the other guy.”

  “Do you remember who it was that called, Mrs. Fielding? I might know him. Maybe we could compare notes.”

  “I don’t remember the name…said he was a cop from St. Louis is all I can remember. Anyway he said he wanted to find Bill for a couple of other guys who was in Vietnam with him. I told him the same thing I’m telling you. I’ve got no idea where Bill is. Sorry, Mister, I can’t help you.”