by Jeff Wallace
“I have made inquiries about your dancer,” Giang said. From the timber of the few words not cracking hollow, his voice might once have been forceful. “A street peddler recognized her. He said her name is Kim Thi and she works in a club downtown.”
“Downtown,” Trong echoed, shaking his head slightly. “It is meaningless. There are too many girls from the villages. They come to Saigon by the thousands. Nobody keeps track of them.”
An edge to his tone. Working in a club on Tu Do Street, dropping into the cash-padded laps of American GIs, a bar girl could make in one day what he earned in a month from his policeman’s salary. How was he to protect his daughters from the currents wrecking the traditional society? Since 1962, in its counterinsurgency strategy to safeguard isolated populations and deprive the Viet Cong of potential manpower, the South Vietnamese government with American funding had mounted massive campaigns to resettle villagers into rural fortresses called strategic hamlets. Separated from their ancestral lands, the peasants tended to drift like scythed reeds tossed in a meandering river, and despite recent rural security improvements, most of them were never going back. People gravitated toward money, and here it meant close to the Americans.
In his sandpaper voice, Giang said, “I am concentrating on the good clubs. The better ones are in the First District. They have dancers worthy to take a picture of.”
“Which clubs?”
He named several of Saigon’s choicest establishments. “Their sponsors are powerful. They have top police contacts. If we show ourselves, much trouble. Tonight, I will send a young boy with the photograph. He will say he is searching for his sister, that the family is asking all over for her.”
Trong added, “The clubs might be more helpful with a boy than with police who are not on their sponsor’s payroll.”
He and Giang segued into rapid Vietnamese. The only parts I understood were the inflections of approval or disapproval I’d heard so often from Tuy, and the patrons and the names of the various clubs. The patrons were well-known Saigon generals or bigshots—no mystery why my friends wanted to keep the inquiry discreet. Then I caught a name, which I was slow to recognize because Trong with his northern accent pronounced it differently than Tuy would have. I interrupted to ask him to repeat it.
“Quartier Latin,” he said. “It’s a nightclub.”
“There was another name.”
“Nogaret.”
“Simone Nogaret?”
“Not Simone. André. He runs Quartier Latin. He is a parachutiste who stayed in Vietnam after the French war.”
“I know of Simone,” Giang cut in. “She is—how you say?—a socialite. She lives in the First District. André is her husband.”
“Do me a favor,” I said. “Concentrate on Quartier Latin above the others.”
“You have a special reason?”
“I heard Simone’s name yesterday. Maybe just a coincidence.”
No second guesses. A universal truth: Cops hated coincidences.
* * *
Circling above Tan Son Nhut, a formation of jets showered the base with AVGAS fumes. The day hung sultry, the air barely breathable around an intersection where the MPs halted my jeep to let pass a convoy of troop buses whose diesel smoke further clotted the atmosphere. The 1st Infantry Division was sending soldiers home. Not all its soldiers—some were being distributed to separate units as fillers. Behind the grenade screens, the lucky ones whooped and waved.
The premise that the South Vietnamese would take over the war had lurched along for nearly two decades. The French had attempted to create an anti-communist Vietnamese army, and French-trained Vietnamese soldiers had fought alongside their colonial masters at Dien Bien Phu. Since the mid-1950s, American advisors had trained the South Vietnamese military, building forces that despite advantages in firepower had proven inadequate to preserve a government that had lost the support of its rural population. The solution—more training, equipment, and experience. On MACV’s time-to-victory clock, the hands always had pointed to years.
Then the hands fell off. Last May, we’d mounted an assault on a North Vietnamese Army stronghold named Ap Bia Mountain near the Laotian border. Seventy U.S. and allied soldiers had been killed and ten times as many wounded in the battle dubbed Hamburger Hill. A few days later, the Americans withdrew and the NVA immediately reoccupied the mountain. It was a common scenario—remote terrain possessed no intrinsic value. Throughout the Vietnam War, MACV had emphasized an attrition strategy—the favorable kill ratio—that our prodigious ammunition capacity rarely failed to achieve. Hamburger Hill was a military success. Yet to the increasingly critical American public, it showcased a profligate squander of lives and the futility of the whole enterprise. Anti-war fever flared, public patience evaporated. President Richard Nixon thereupon dusted off the Vietnamization concept and announced the imminent withdrawals of sizeable U.S. forces. The pullouts to date represented a modest prelude for what was to come. Two weeks ago, the President unveiled a timetable under which more than ten thousand soldiers a month would be going home.
Ready or not, the turnover was happening.
At my desk, a message to phone Crowley. Facing the framed photo of President Nixon, the same glossy of the Commander in Chief every unit had to tack up, I dialed MACV headquarters and waited for the operator to put me through. Nixon and the humming pedestal fan kept me faint company, and I could no more feel the fan’s breeze than I could the reassurance in his enameled smile.
Crowley’s voice came on the line. “You on post, Tanner?”
“Yes sir.”
“General Cobris wants to see you, ASAP.”
“Why?”
“His staff assistant, Major Vangleman, called to ask what you’ve been doing, on a minute-by-minute basis. “He said the general disapproves of your procedures.”
“Meaning?”
“I don’t know. What have you been up to?”
“Standard actions. I sent you my report from the morgue.”
The clickety-click of a cigarette lighter over the phone line. A minute passed, and he said, “The dancer’s photo in the rifle stock. Weird.”
“I’m trying to find her through my main contact on the Saigon police. And I spoke to a couple of Gavet Rubber Company officials.”
“Sounds straightforward. Just explain to the general and answer his questions. Find out what’s digging at him. Be at the MACV landing pad at eighteen hundred. A chopper will pick you up. I have no idea where it’s going.”
“Fine.”
“Oh—I got you a ride to Tay Ninh Province Tuesday to meet Colonel Larsen. It’ll do you good to spend a few hours with the real Army. Too much Saigon is bad for the soul.”
Unsettled, I put down the phone. Two things were obvious: One, General Cobris was kicking around in my investigation; two, Crowley, my commander, a fellow military police officer, wasn’t insulating me.
* * *
On the landing pad, I watched the sun plunge behind the sharp corners of MACV headquarters and the sky segregate itself into layers of amethyst, plum, lavender. Distracted, brooding over Crowley’s feebleness, at first I didn’t notice the dot on the lilac stripe above the horizon. It enlarged into the familiar dragonfly shape of a UH-1 Huey, its rotor thudding deep in my chest. When the chopper touched down behind the hurled wall of dust, the crew chief waved me forward. Troop choppers usually sat their passengers on the floor; removing the benches saved on weight and made the aircraft more versatile. This ship was different. It came fitted with padded vinyl seats, a bolted-down map board, and a headset the crew chief clapped on my ears. “Hey there, Major,” said the pilot. “Push the intercom button to talk.”
“Nice rig,” I said.
“General Cobris’s ship.” The pilot extended his hand across the map board. “I’m Jason Stobe, Commander of the 29th Aviation Company. Also, the general’s personal flyboy. Beats haulin’ ammo crates to the infantry.”
“Where are we going?”
“Vung T
au on the coast. It’s a twenty-minute ride, so sit yourself back and enjoy the scenery.”
We swung over the plains of Tan Son Nhut until, from the right-side cargo door, I gazed out on the Saigon River reflecting the melon-tinted sky. The river flowed past the city’s lower boundaries, writhing briefly eastward to merge with the mud-gray current of another river—the Dong Nai—that gradually widened into an estuary and blended with the cerulean haze of the South China Sea. When we ascended above the range of small-arms fire, the air grew deliciously cold, and I was disappointed when the crew chief tugged the sliding doors shut. He receded into a corner, folding into a sleeper’s pose, leaving me to my thoughts and the opaque traverse of clouds through the Plexiglas. Soon we were over the estuary, where trawlers and tiny sampans tipped triangular wakes. We crossed the Rung Sat Special Zone, an intricate mangrove swamp, once a stronghold of the Viet Cong, now desolate. Tons of chemical defoliants had poisoned land that from above resembled an infected rash, the raw mud clumps and clotted streams oozing an oily film. Closer to the seacoast, the vegetation brightened, and into view panned the narrow cape of Vung Tau, its red-tiled roofs like a postcard scene from the Mediterranean coast.
The old French resort had metamorphosed into a haven for GIs bent on raucous times. The American MPs who patrolled the commercial zone generated mountains of incident reports, hence my familiarity with a place I’d never visited. At maintaining public order, the MPs were about as effective as they would have been at Mardi Gras, wading streets clogged with hundreds of nineteen-year-olds with fistfuls of cash to spend in bars, whorehouses, tattoo joints, and hash dens. The GIs were on short furloughs between stints in the jungle and fire bases, and into their hours at Vung Tau they compressed the wildest excesses. Heroin in particular flowed rich, destroying as many young men as did the NVA. There were lighter drugs too, pills and hash, the latter so pervasive that U.S. commanders in Vietnam often declined to press charges for its possession. Weed was as inexorable as the smell of fish sauce.
We banked over the downtown district and along the outer peninsula shore. To the east, the South China Sea merged with the sky, and the freighters turning on their running lights became indistinguishable from the evening stars. The chopper approached a promontory thirty feet above the rushing surf, and easing power it hovered toward a private villa. On the landward side opened a lawn whose tables, chairs, and bar on wheels had been pushed aside, clearing space for the chopper to touch down. The only person visible was a Vietnamese guard who shrank from the rotor blast.
“Head for that stairway,” Stobe said on the intercom. “It winds up the hill to the villa. Don’t mind the gook guard, he’s just for show.”
I duck-dashed beyond the fan, and the chopper lifted off. From the now-serene lawn, the stairs curved languidly between manicured flower patches and swishing, coifed palms. Vistas opened to the ocean, but not until the stairway hooked around to the top did I notice anybody. The breeze tossed the edges of a yellow-striped umbrella spiked through a glass-topped garden table. Here sat an Army major, his collar brass marking him as an artillery officer, crabbed over paperwork he held down with one forearm. Unseen, a phonograph seeped a female voice, maybe Edith Piaf’s, too indistinct to tell. The surf rushed over the chord of a woman’s laughter.
The major leered up from the papers and mechanically extended his hand. “I’m Derek Vangleman. Remove your hat and have a seat. It will be a minute or two before the general arrives.” In the chair he posed incongruously straight backed, the way a praying mantis would. His hair was black and thinning; a five-o’clock shadow darkened his jowls.
I said, “Impressive quarters.”
“MACV owns the villa. The general comes down here to relax.” Apparently the relaxing did not extend to Vangleman. He evaluated me through bloodshot eyes
“Mind if I ask you a question?”
“Not at all.” He fluttered his pencil.
“Isn’t a police investigation a bit down in the grass for the general to worry about?”
“It’s up to him what he worries about.” He forced the kind of smile you might give the neighbor’s cat. “He feels you might have gotten yourself a little lost. This meeting tonight is to set you straight.”
“Set me straight?”
“You heard me. The general will elaborate.” He resumed his paperwork, and I was left to wonder how Vangleman had amassed his arrogance. A mere major, the lowest of the field grades, he’d bullied my boss, a full colonel. Unimpeded access to the general lent Vangleman throw weight out of proportion to his rank. Some officers gravitated toward a general’s staff because it gave them a form of power without commanding troops—a role that demanded icy calmness of the soul. Soldiers glean steadiness in a leader, just as they sense the jitters, and Vangleman was the jittery type—tension wrapped him like a strangler vine. Efficient, he was going through the papers quickly, intensely focused on the details. It was a trait that generals liked.
The sliding door opened and Cobris strode onto the patio. As military protocol demanded, I sprang to attention, while Vangleman, apparently exempt from prosaic custom, stayed seated.
Lanky but not as emaciated as some senior officers whom stress had whittled to chopsticks, Cobris moved with the sang-froid of a Hollywood leading man. He was young for a brigadier general, in his early forties; the mottles of gray merely seasoned his brown hair. Since the panel of inquiry four months ago, his responsibilities had chiseled parentheses around his eyes and mouth. He wore a Hawaiian-print shirt and ivory slacks whose contrast to a military uniform did nothing to dispel the marshal impression surrounding him. He set a newspaper on the patio table from which Vangleman’s work had vanished by some sleight of hand. The newspaper was the New York Times, and I caught Gribley’s byline under the headline ‘TAY NINH KIA STILL UNIDENTIFIED.’ The story filled a column on the first page—the equivalent of a home run on the scorecard of print journalism.
Cobris gave me a few seconds to gawk at the paper before he spoke. “Tanner, I want to know why you interviewed Leon Gavet yesterday.”
As I’d observed at the board of inquiry, the general rarely used the interrogative; his style was to make a declaration and pause, inviting you to disagree or elaborate. His eyes, the shade of blue baked into fine ceramics, settled coldly.
“It was a routine part of the investigation, sir.”
“Answer precisely.”
“I questioned him about the proximity of the incident to his plantation. I was trying to eliminate possibilities.”
“To eliminate possibilities,” he echoed. “My God, with that objective in mind, I could do anything I wanted.”
Emerging with drinks he handed to the two officers, a Vietnamese servant in a white jacket turned to me to await my order. The drinks looked like Scotches, which would have tasted good about now, but I needed my mental acuity wholly intact, so I asked for ice water. The general gestured for me to sit.
I wondered how Cobris had heard about my meeting with Gavet. I’d written the report late this afternoon, in one original and one carbon, and posted the original to Crowley in a courier envelope as I was leaving the French Fort. It couldn’t have found its way to Cobris ahead of me. He must have other sources.
“I read your personnel record, Tanner. It says you’ve spent thirty-two months in country. That’s abnormal. You’ve heard of ‘Nam haunts, men whose brains are so fried, their perceptions so distorted, that they can’t function in the normal world. Maybe you fit the description.”
His sneering commentary baited me to explain why I’d stayed so long. I was tempted to tell him that, to me, Vietnam was the normal world. But my reasons would have sounded self serving. Also, I didn’t like him. “Sir, I’m just trying to do my job.”
“You’re not using this investigation to make a name for yourself, the investigator who’s got the balls to pester one of the most important foreign businessmen in the country.”
“No sir.”
“Tell me how you arrang
ed the interview.”
“G-5 set it up for me.”
Cobris glanced to Vangleman, who made a note. G-5 was going to get a call.
“Your procedures don’t fit the situation,” he declared, and now his demeanor metamorphosed from belligerent to relaxed. He leaned back, sipped his drink, and stared out at the estuary that in the last minutes of daylight looked like the vast blank page of a newspaper. “It may not be altogether possible for you to share my perspective, but I want you to try. In this matter of the unidentified dead man, my intent is front-end damage control. I do it all the time, in various ways, notwithstanding that the danger might seem a bit obscure to you. The general’s art is to see beyond the horizon.”
It did seem obscure, particularly when laced with euphemisms, but I wasn’t about to interrupt. Across the table, Vangleman had a notebook open, the pencil poised.
“Among my responsibilities is our current policy of Vietnamization, turning the war over to its rightful owners. We face real challenges. As a fighting force, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam is still developing. At the higher ranks, it resembles more a chamber of commerce than a military organization. To mold the ARVN into a self-sufficient entity, we need time, and we are starved for it. The reason is this.” He poked the newspaper. Filling the upper right quadrant was a story about an anti-war rally in Washington attended by thirty thousand protesters. The photo showed them overwhelming the police barricades. “Take a look. If all you see is a bunch of tie-dyed losers, then you’re not a member of Congress. This is what Washington calls raw pressure, and facing it, the military can serve up the best arguments in the world, to no effect. Whatever public approval the war once enjoyed back home, the footage of body bags on the evening news has erased. The politicians are running for cover. Part of the fault is ours—we pissed away our credibility a few years ago by declaring victory too soon instead of gaining an unadulterated vision. Fortunately, a few national leaders like President Nixon know the truth, and they ask us to keep the lid on the cauldron, to do our job so the pressure doesn’t cause them to break their promises. In return, we gain time to teach the South Vietnamese how to run a war and preserve our large investment from going down the toilet the minute we’re gone. We have an element of moral justice to uphold.