“Alexander, forget it, stay here,” said Richter, glancing away. “I know how Tania feels about me with regard to my own wife. For this, she’ll never forgive me.”
“Enough talking, let’s go.” She forgives worse than this.
“She’s going to think I ruined you. Forget it. I’ll take on a division of Viet Cong before this happens under my watch. Stay here. Elkins and I will go. I’ll bring one of our Yards, Ha Si, to translate.”
“By all means bring him. I want to meet him. Which jeep are we taking?”
Richter rubbed his face. “I think we should talk about this...”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake! Do you always do this much talking? It’s a wonder anybody ever goes out on missions. Let’s go!”
Alexander didn’t leave Richter’s quarters, not even for some fresh air. He smoked inside, stayed inside, and for dinner they had beef pho— Vietnamese thin noodles with beef broth—which Alexander couldn’t get enough of. Richter asked Alexander if he wanted to rest, wash up, but Alexander wanted only for it to get dark so they could leave.
When it got dark, they drove to Pleiku. The road was unpaved but straight. It took them an hour.
As in any good capitalist city, the run-down bars—fronts for dingy brothels—were all located within a small stretch of dilapidated streets in a squat, low-to-the-ground wet downtown, running along a muddy narrow river, overflowing after the rain. The whorehouses like ducks, all in a row, made it easier for the consumer in a hurry to make his inebriated choices. They certainly made it easier for the four men to look for Moon Lai. Alexander wished he had a picture of her, but at least he had a photo of Anthony to show around. They split up. Elkins and Ha Si, a Montagnard warrior, took half the bars, Alexander and Richter took the rest. From Ha Si they learned how to say in Vietnamese, “Does a young girl with eight fingers work here?”
Heads down, they walked from place to place, standing in narrow doorways, behind red curtains, in small smoky rooms, drinking a little beer, talking to the madams, quickly looking over the girls who hovered on chairs, waiting for customers like Richter and Alexander. There were dozens of establishments all laid out on these darkened unpaved streets, just mud and dirt from the rain. Alexander tried to wipe his boots before he entered the bars, but it was no use, the mud was slowly hardening into cement on his heels. Lights twinkled, men laughed, there was a sound of a fight somewhere. Alexander and Richter went to seven places with no luck.
In the eighth one, the madam, an older Vietnamese woman, smacked her chest and exclaimed, “Ah, Moon Lai! Dien cai dau! Dien cai dau!”
Richter whispered, “Dinky Dau. She’s saying she’s crazy.”
“Tell her,” said Alexander, “that’s not as helpful as she thinks. She knows the girl?”
Apparently, yes, the madam knew the girl well.
“Where is she?”
They couldn’t get that out of her. Alexander took out a hundred dollars. The madam started talking rapid-fire Vietnamese, interspersed with English words, grasping for the money, “I no see her! She go! I no see her! She go! I told you. Dien cai dau!”
“Tell her she doesn’t get the hundred if all she’s got is ‘I no see her.’”
Alexander stayed behind while Richter ran to find Elkins and Ha Si. They needed Ha Si to talk to the madam.
While Richter was gone, the madam paraded her best-looking, youngest girls in front of a smoking and a politely inquisitive Alexander. “While you wait,” the madam kept saying in broken English. “No take long. Thirty piastres.” The girls—in various states of complete undress and what looked to Alexander various states of shocking underage— were trying to lure him with cheap prices for extremely advanced wares. “What the hell took you so long?” he said when the three men finally returned.
Ha Si talked to the madam. After he was finished, Alexander gave the nearly-fainting-with-gratitude woman a hundred American dollars. They went out into the clear air and stood by the short wooden railing over the brown river.
“She knows little,” said Ha Si, a tiny highlander, who stood still as a rock and had skin like ageless leather. He was their point man on missions, Elkins had told Alexander, because Ha Si was undetectable by the enemy until he was on top of them with his shiv in their throats. “She said Moon Lai worked for her for about two, three years.”
“Two, three years? How old is she?”
“No one asks. No one would tell you the truth anyway.”
Elkins said, “She could have been twelve. Or twenty-two.”
Alexander shook his head. “Probably not twelve, if she worked for three years?”
Ha Si said nothing, unblinking and unfazed. Alexander groaned.
She was a quiet girl, Ha Si said, always did as she was told, never complained, never refused work, but had only a few repeat customers. She lived in the farthest, smallest room upstairs. The madam said even when Moon Lai had two eyes and was pretty, “the men did not come back for her.” Except for one—and that was the soldier in the photograph, and he came back for her when she had just the one eye, and paid a lot of money for her so she could live in the room and not take other customers. He was very generous, madam said.
“She also said Moon Lai would sometimes disappear without notice for two or three weeks. Then she would reappear, ask for her old room back, and work without complaining. That is why madam said she crazy. She just comes and goes as she pleases. Last time madam saw her was in the early spring. Not since. Madam thinks maybe she die or become pregnant and could not work.”
Alexander was thoughtfully smoking. Richter and Elkins milled around him. Ha Si stood still. He had not been released. “Where’s Moon Lai from, Ha Si?”
“Madam was not sure.”
“Are you joking?” Alexander exclaimed.
“I never joke, sir.” Ha Si stood gravely little in front of Alexander.
“It’s the only piece of info we can’t leave Pleiku without. Go back immediately, take another hundred dollars, and don’t come back out until the madam is sure. Go.”
Ha Si slowly put up his hands. “Wait,” he said reluctantly, not taking the proffered money. “Madam said she heard the fingerless girl talking about a ville called Kum Kau. Moon Lai’s mother and sister lived in Kum Kau. Perhaps that is the place she went to every few months.”
“Never heard of this Kum Kau,” Richter said suspiciously. “Must be either very small or far away from here.”
Ha Si said nothing.
“This is so fucked up,” Elkins said. “Could Ant have gone with her to her stupid village? As a new husband? A father-to-be? To meet the in-laws, perhaps?”
“Let’s say he did,” said Alexander. “Why didn’t he come back?”
“Maybe he tried,” said Richter. “Maybe we’ve been looking for him in the wrong place. This Kum Kau—where is it, Ha Si?”
Ha Si did not reply, and was no longer unblinking. They asked him again, but he still did not reply. Richter raised his voice on the river street.
Very quietly Ha Si said, “You do not want to know, Colonel Richter.”
“It’s the only fucking thing we want to know!” Richter exclaimed. “It’s the only thing we came here to find out. Stop fucking with us. That’s an order. Now where is it?”
“Fourteen klicks north of the DMZ,” Ha Si replied.
“It’s in North Vietnam?” Richter said in an aghast voice.
“It’s in North Vietnam!” said Alexander in a deathly voice, his voice inflecting, his heart falling.
Not speaking anymore to anyone, he barely finished his cigarette as he walked back to their jeep. With raised weapons, the men drove in silence for fifty kilometers through the dark countryside, back to base. It’s in North Vietnam! was all Alexander kept thinking.
At Kontum, in Richter’s quarters, Richter brought out the whiskey— beer was not strong enough. Ha Si was not drinking; he was sitting quietly in a chair; he was actually quieter than the chair. Alexander thought he himself had learned stealth wel
l, but he was a jittery epileptic compared to Ha Si. Even now, the small man was imperturbable. Well, why shouldn’t he be imperturbable? It wasn’t his son who was missing in North fucking Vietnam.
“Do you see what I was getting at before, Elkins?” Alexander said finally. “You were ambushed.”
“With all due respect, Major,” said Elkins, “and pardon me for saying so, of course it was an ambush—that’s clear to a duck—but what does an ambush a year and a half ago have to do with where Ant is now? Or with Moon Lai?”
Richter and Alexander exchanged a long whiskey-sodden look. Richter shook his head, pouring Alexander another glass from the carafe. They clinked and drank. “Don’t worry, Major,” Richter said. “Tomorrow I’ll call Pinter, the commander of CC North. I’ll ask him to send a recon team to the DMZ, up to where the fortress of Khe Sanh used to be. I’ll ask him to send another RT to the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. It comes down from North Vietnam and enters Laos about 30 klicks north of the DMZ. Let’s see if they can scope out something there. I’ll ask Pinter if he’s ever heard of this Kum Kau.”
Alexander’s mouth twisted. He put his drink down. He put his cigarettes down, got up from the table and stood at attention, clicking his heels, looking grimly at Richter. “Colonel Richter,” he said, very quietly, “can I talk to you alone for a minute?”
With great and visible reluctance, Richter motioned Ha Si and Elkins out and turned to Alexander, who was still standing stiff inside the barracks. “Look, I know what you’re going to say—”
“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“Oh, I do, I do.” Richter slumped in his chair.
“Tom, what the hell are you talking about, Pinter, his RT teams? I mean, whose benefit was that for?” Alexander started to pace in front of the long table.
“Only yours. Alexander, Pinter’s men know that area by heart. You know my guys stay in the triangle.” Richter poured himself another drink. “Want one?”
“Tom.”
“Alexander!” The drink was slammed into the table. “There is something about this, I can see you just don’t understand.”
“Tom!” said Alexander. The fist was slammed into the table. “There is something about this you just don’t understand.”
Richter jumped up. “Listen to me! You do know that we are under direct orders not to go into North Vietnam? You do know that, right? Direct orders!”
“Oh, come on. I know how the SOG works. You tell your men where to go, they go where you send them. End of story. You’re telling me Elkins won’t go? Mercer won’t go?”
“Alexander!” Richter’s voice was lowered to a furious whisper. “You’ve lost your mind! It’s not my area of operations! I’m here. My AO is in central South Nam, in Laos, in Cambodia. Here.”
“Yes, and we’re not supposed to be in Laos or Cambodia either, here, there, anywhere. You’re not supposed to be sending your little excursion teams to the Trail. You’re not supposed to be running SLAM missions into the Cambodian jungle to intercept their supply runners. Yet you are.”
The two of them stood tensely across from each other. Two pairs of fists were clenched against the table.
“Fourteen miles north of the DMZ!” Richter said. “Not five miles from Pleiku, not ten miles from Kontum but three hundred miles from here in North Vietnam, where Abrams himself on express orders from Johnson said we could not set one toe so we wouldn’t upset the Soviets and trigger an international incident that no one will be able to walk away from!”
“Give me a fucking break.”
“Well, let me ask you, since you seem to have all the answers,” said Richter, “what the fuck do you know about Kum Kau? Say we defy the commander of MACV and the President of the United States—your commander-in-chief, too, by the way—and we send our guys there, and we find out it’s a nice little village where Vietnamese women in coolie hats stroll around with rice buckets on their shoulders and have babies. Say we find your son in that village, eating pho, helping in the paddies. Then what? Are we going to bring him back for a nice court-martial? Because it’s been five months, and if he’s picking his navel in a ville, he ain’t coming back. You want us to bring back your son to be tried for desertion during time of war?”
“The answer to that is yes,” Alexander growled through his teeth, “since you and I both know he is not sitting in North Vietnam picking his fucking navel.”
“Fine,” said Richter, also through his teeth. “Second question. So you think he met with foul play—”
“As you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be all twisted up like this.”
“Do you think he’d be sitting unsecured in some little civilian village?”
“We find Moon Lai, we’ll know,” said Alexander. “We find her, we’ll know everything.”
“Okay, we find her and then we’re in enemy territory, and she kindly informs us that he is eight hundred miles up in the Hanoi Hilton or is part of the Cuban Program, at one of the POW camps deep near China, run in stealth by the Cubans from sugar cane country who come to North Nam pretending to be diplomats and then set up and run the NVA camps, brutalizing American men. Then what? You’re going to walk eight hundred miles to Hanoi?”
“If that’s what it takes,” said Alexander.
“Holy Mother of God!” Richter was panting. “Okay, and that brings me to my fourth fucking question. We’re in enemy territory, we get in an asskick situation, we need help. Where are we going to get help from? We usually have eight choppers on stand-by for support for this kind of mission. But for this? Anyone finds out we’re in North Vietnam, and the shitstorm is going to be a lot worse than one missing boy.”
“I don’t fucking think so,” said Alexander. “And you know what? Save it for another idiot, Richter, because you’re forgetting who you’re talking to. SOG has its own planes, its own helicopters, its own medevacs, its own hospitals, its own weapons. Clandestine, top secret, and this is precisely what they do. You’re running Macvee’s covert operations! This is SOG’s whole point, otherwise they’d be fighting in open battalions with artillery support. They’d be the Marines. Do not, do you hear me?—do not try to sell this bullshit to me of all people!”
“I’m sorry I ever gave you a fucking G-2 MI job!” yelled Richter.
“Well, it’s too late for sorrys. Now we have to go and get Ant.”
“Oh my God,” Richter gasped, “is that why you came here?”
“Why the fuck did you think?”
“I don’t go into North Vietnam!” yelled Richter.
“You’re going there tomorrow.”
“Like fuck I am.”
“The NVA have been breaking the rules and destabilizing supposedly neutral countries since 1954 to ferry Soviet-made weapons to South Nam so they can kill you,” said Alexander. “Destabilizing Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Papua New Guinea. Now you’re worried about breaking a little rule? They’ve been arming the 17th parallel and the DMZ for fifteen years with their pretend civilian villages. You know that better than I do.”
“That’s right, but this isn’t the DMZ, this is actual North Nam, and you do realize we have no information on Ant! We know absolutely fucking nothing! Why are you against sending a recon force there first? Pinter will send a seven-man team from CCN in Da Nang; at least then we might find out what we need. What if he’s not there? What if we need a hundred men to extract him? What if we need just one, to carry his body? You did think of that possibility, did you not? God forbid, that he may be dead?”
“Alive or in a bag,” Alexander said with a clamped everything, “we are bringing him back from North Vietnam.”
“What if there is no Kum Kau, but I’ve sent twenty troops into enemy territory and they all get greased and I can’t explain what the fuck they were doing there?”
“So you think if you send Pinter’s men and they get greased, that’ll make you feel better? You won’t have Ant, but twenty of Pinter’s guys will be dead. That’ll be better?”
The t
wo of them stood panting, facing off, two men, fifty years old, soldiers, fighters. The two of them at their wits’ end, two men who could not believe it had come to this. But come to this it had, and now it had to be dealt with.
“You are thinking only of your son, Alexander,” said Richter. “But I have to think of my whole command. There are a thousand guys I’m responsible for.”
“Tom,” said Alexander, “you know what the NVA and the fucking Cubans do to American soldiers.”
“Kum Kau is near the DMZ. The Cubans are in Hanoi and near China. We’re not going anywhere near China, are we?”
“North Vietnam has directly violated every sentence of the Geneva Convention, which, by the way, they signed. Our guys are turning up on the Trail dead, drowned, burned, mutilated beyond recognition because they can’t be released alive to tell the world how the NVA treat their prisoners of war and you want to leave Ant there?”
“They can release them or not release them,” said Richter. “Like the world gives a fuck how the NVA treats its prisoners of war. The world only cares what the Americans did at My Lai.”
“Yes,” said Alexander, “because they are judged mercifully for having no standards whatsoever, while we are judged harshly for failing to live up to our high ones. It’s like Carthage being regarded more highly than Rome. I know. More is expected from Rome. But the point is,” he went on, “you can posture all you like, with Elkins outside your door, but you know perfectly well that one way or another I’m going to Kum Kau to find out what happened to my son. I didn’t come to Vietnam to go to cathouses with you. We’re talking about Anthony. Anthony!” Alexander nearly broke down.
“I know who we are talking about!” Richter fought for his own composure. “I’ve taken care of him and protected him as best I could since he got here. He’s had the run of everything. I barely asked him any questions, as long as the mission was accomplished, he could do whatever the fuck he liked. I did this for him because that’s what he wanted.”
“Good,” said Alexander. “And this is what I want, just so we’re straight. Either you help me like you’re supposed to and meant to, or you stand there and give me five hundred more reasons why you can’t, but Anthony is not going to remain in North Vietnam.” Alexander’s fists remained down at the table. “Not my son, and not one more day.” He took a deep breath, not moving an inch, his shoulders up, the hair on his body standing on end.
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