The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle

by Jeff Wallace

  * * *

  In the grove, defying the grubbiness from weeks in the jungle, Joshua evinced composure, even nobility, as he told his story. He’d performed his duty, and I sensed he trusted me to do mine with no less diligence. The sergeant was fortunate not to know of the politics playing in this case. He’d probably never heard of a general named Cobris who wished to settle for an open question.

  I asked him whether he’d stripped ammunition or gear from the casualty. Joshua confirmed they’d sent him back with everything they’d found, the items I’d examined at the forensic mortuary. He recalled that one of the canteens had been missing—he’d noticed the empty pouch and scoured the ground all around. It was anyone’s guess why the man had been carrying extra D-cells.

  Ulrich related how, after they’d carried away the remains, he’d ventured beyond the ravine and located a set of footprints in the muddy ground. With the tip of a bamboo thorn, he pointed to the spot on the map, traced a line from the spot where the unknown had died through the site of the footprints; the line shot off toward the east, the evident direction of origin.

  I asked, “Why might he have been heading toward Hill 71?”

  “There’s nothing there,” said Ulrich.

  Joshua said, “At night, he had to be goin’ someplace he couldn’t miss. The only place like that in this whole area is the highway.” With the thorn he plucked from his commander’s fingers, Joshua tapped a crimson line on the map four kilometers to the west. “He was trying to get his ass out of the jungle. Had a ways to go.”

  I noticed that Joshua’s black-skinned hands and Ulrich’s white hands were so equally gritted, cracked, and nail broken as to be indistinguishable.

  “Why would he risk moving at night?”

  “Just pure bad luck he ran into us,” Joshua said. You had to have an ear to catch the grief. I understood now why Larsen had pushed for the investigation. “You gonna get us some answers, sir?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  Day 6

  __________

  Aching from the bumpy ground where I’d slept curled in a poncho liner, I sat up into soup. The same brand of jungle mist that had visited Joshua at the LP had slicked me overnight with a piquant hash: aromatic, musty, bitter. I shook my boots to make sure no snakes or centipedes had wriggled in, pulled them on, and rolled my gear. The guard with the shotgun handed me a cup of coffee so black and steaming that Sergeant Lopez would have blessed it.

  At zero six hundred, summoned by Larsen, I joined him at the TOC’s main map board. He peered through reading glasses at a complexion of green outlined in black grease-pencil lines. “We analyzed the sector we think the unknown passed through. This forest eastward is triple canopy. About eight klicks from Hill 71, beyond this tributary, the ground opens into a vast marsh. We call it Area Zulu. The place is too flooded and open for the NVA to hide, so we don’t send ground patrols past the outer edges, just recon it from the air. I don’t think your man crashed there; the water’s not deep enough for an aircraft to sink whole, and we’d have spotted the wreckage. Area Zulu is tame—you can fly low without risking ground fire. Over other sectors, don’t dip below fifteen hundred feet, or you’ll be a target. The pilot will have binoculars on board for a closer look if you notice something. When will the chopper be ready, Sam?”

  The reedy major said, “Zero six thirty, sir, at the LZ.”

  “Can you make that, Tanner?”

  “Yes sir.”

  The briefing was over. The two staff officers who’d stood by walked away. I began to collect my gear

  “Tanner?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Have a look at this.”

  Larsen extended a telex dated this morning, 29 April. It was an official order that in four terse lines directed his brigade headquarters to relocate to Cu Chi camp, northwest of Saigon. His subordinate battalions were being attached to other units, with separate orders pending. The airlifts would begin tomorrow.

  “Did you know this was coming?” I asked.

  “No. It’s straight out of the blue.” His eyes stayed on the mystifying telex.

  “Do you think Cobris arranged it?” Guessing that our suspicions ran to the same end, I wanted to hear his affirmation.

  “If he did, he’d have had to impose it on the 1st Cav, a Machiavellian feat since he’s not in the tactical chain of command. In time, I’ll find out how it came about. For now, I have no choice except to comply.”

  The mist was beginning to lift. In the doorway, Larsen pulled off his glasses and scanned the scene with his old soldier’s eyes. “I wish you well, Tanner. The redeployment order means that your flight this morning will be the final search. Enjoy the view.”

  * * *

  By the time the OH-58 observation chopper reached the eastern operating zone, the mist had burned off. We flew at fifteen hundred feet, above the range of small-arms fire. From here the ground lost its intimacy; the streams and the terrain mercatorized to a two-dimensional field. There were tracts of land bulldozed or chemically defoliated to deny the enemy places to hide. Across our northwest ran a reddish-brown streak. This was Highway 246, where gigantic bulldozers called Rome Plows had widened the road’s margins to a hundred meters or more on each side to deter enemy infiltration. Deter was a briefer’s word. What the measure accomplished was to inconvenience the enemy, but not enough so that, every night, North Vietnamese Army regulars didn’t cross from their sanctuaries in nearby Cambodia. On this side of the border, we shot at them, napalmed them, and bombarded them, leaving their bodies half-in, half-out of shell craters. They kept coming, lithe figures who moved everywhere on foot, disciplined and ruthless, infesting War Zone C.

  Our first leg vectored us to the unknown’s terminus at Hill 71. The pilot banked so I could gaze down on where Ulrich and his company had set up their night perimeter amid the craters of an old bombardment. It had rained overnight, and the water-filled holes glimmered like a diamond necklace on a headless mannequin.

  “Where to next, sir?”

  “Head east.”

  We overflew grid after grid of rain forest. I hoped to spot a trail or other passage. None appeared. Kilometers to the north, a shading of lighter green. From it spiked a radio tower.

  “That’s the Gavet Plantation’s antenna,” the pilot remarked. “Best landmark around.”

  Too easy, to traverse the jungle by helicopter. I recalled the unknown’s punished feet. Navigating through the dense vegetation, in two days he might have crossed a dozen klicks, a distance my pilot would cover in minutes.

  The map was deceptively short on detail; my two fingers entirely covered the six grid squares representing Area Zulu. Lifting my eyes from the pattern of blue hash marks on the map, I peered through the Plexiglas at the real place, a tangle of half-submerged, bog-nourished roots yearning toward drooping vines. Fetid, hostile to the presence of man, it was literally a quagmire. Had the unknown crossed it, he’d have sunk to his waist in water and mud. Around its periphery ran a leaf portico whose main pillars were sixty-foot trees. Everywhere I looked, I could see through to the murky water. As Larsen had said, it wasn’t deep enough to have swallowed an aircraft whole.

  The marsh pooled below a slender tributary of the Saigon River. I measured the distance from the tributary to Hill 71, five klicks at its closest, within the radius of the unknown’s calculated hike.

  I asked, “Is that waterway fordable?”

  “Maybe farther upstream. Too deep here. A patrol could build a rope bridge across, if they ever had to. Larsen’s policy is to fly ‘em over. Why expose soldiers out in the open when we’ve got lots of choppers?”

  Larsen’s patrols probably hadn’t searched the tributary’s banks. Even if they had, they would have been hunting for aircraft wreckage, not for the subtle traces the unknown might have left.

  “Can you get lower?”

  “If the enemy’s around, he’s apt to shoot at us.”

  “I can’t make out details from this altitu
de.”

  “Hold on.”

  The pilot nosed down, flattening out at one hundred feet, shaving over the break in the trees. Choppers on patrol occasionally caught the enemy in the open. More than two years ago, on my first helicopter ride in a combat zone, I watched as the door gunner bored bullets into a file of men scrambling across a stream. The rounds kicked up founts as tall as the figures. One of them, maybe a Viet Cong, maybe an innocent, fell and managed to crawl into the greenery, leaving his fate and identity forever undisclosed. The people we blasted from the air were happy to return the favor, given the opportunity.

  The pilot was right. No fords here. If the unknown had crossed the tributary, he must have swum across.

  “Can you get down in the cut? I need a closer look.”

  “What are you trying to find?”

  “The place a man crossed. What do you do when you get ready to immerse in a murky current like that? You take your gear off, waterproof what you can, and dump anything that’s excess. In the process, you trample the underbrush.”

  “Have you ever crashed in a chopper?”

  “No.”

  “If I guide her in there and we get hit, won’t be time for me to take emergency action. We’ll hear the rounds plink, the instruments will flash red, and we’ll go down, either alive or dead. If we’re alive, that’s not so great either, ‘cause chances are we’ll be stuck in the wreckage when the fuckers who shot us down stop by to say howdy. You wanna roll the dice on that?”

  “One pass, then we climb.”

  Maneuvering the ship directly over the trench, he descended between the trees. His face muscles tightened as he wiggled the stick to dodge the outreaching branches. Tricky business—a rotor strike and we’d crash in the classic careening flip, which, once witnessed, imprints its horror indelibly. We crawled along at ten knots. If the enemy appeared on the bank and shot at us, he couldn’t miss. I scanned the edges for disturbances the unknown might have left when he’d crossed. How fast did the jungle restore itself? Over the ten days since his death, intermittent rains might have erased any marks he’d made.

  The tributary widened to forty meters. From the banks poked fingers of sand and reeds extending a third of the way across. No tracks or disarrangement. The main stream alternated between rapids and deep pools.

  The trees closed in again, and the pilot resumed his nervous squeeze under arching branches. “We’re barely getting through,” he said.

  “Try a little farther.”

  “Sorry, this is as far as we go.” His tone said he’d already breached the bounds of good judgment. He began a delicate pivot turn, and sweeping around I noticed a gap in the greenery, revealing a small clearing near the water’s edge, and nested in grass and leaves, an olive-drab surface, unrecognizable save that it was a man-made object.

  I pointed. “I want to get out and have a look at that.”

  “No way. I can’t put you in here.”

  “Not here. At those sandbars we crossed before. I can work my way on foot along the water’s edge. I’ll need about fifteen minutes.”

  “Dumb idea, sir, to step out by yourself, especially after we just buzzed by. This bitch is loud, the noise carries a long way. Who knows what unwanted attention we’ve attracted already?”

  “Fifteen minutes, that’s all. Then come back and pick me up.”

  From the sand finger where I hopped down from the skid, the distance to the object I’d spotted downriver was roughly seventy meters. At once I realized that the trip would take longer than I’d predicted. With every step, vines and thorns grabbed at me like desperate beggars. I winced at the noise I was making. Two years had gone by since the last time I’d broken through the brush by a Vietnamese river. Back then I’d had legs for the jungle. Today, armed only with my .45, I was busting through here like a Saigon cowboy on Tu Do Street.

  The NVA and Viet Cong didn’t lurk everywhere, I reminded myself. There might not be a hostile force within kilometers. Yet the enemy was legendary at materializing whenever you showed vulnerability, like ants at a sweet spill. Overhead circled the chopper, and I could almost hear the pilot cursing himself for having agreed to drop me out alone. Maybe the return trek would be faster, since I’d already thrashed out a path.

  At last I came upon the clearing, and I stepped into it with the feeling you get when you intrude into another person’s private chamber. Spread on the ground, a plastic poncho on which lay two open C-ration cans. From one protruded a white spoon, which I eased sideways with my fingertip, amid swarming ants, so I could read the can’s black lettering: Sliced Peaches.

  The yellow remnants in the unknown’s stomach.

  Beyond the cans, a plastic canteen. Coated in the jungle’s slimy secretions, none of the items would yield fingerprints, so I picked up the canteen, twisted the cap, and sniffed the faint odor of iodine. A few seconds later I found a tiny glass bottle of iodine tablets in the weeds. Soft wax sealed the lid, and when I shook it, the little pills rattled, dry and intact.

  Closer to the water I uncovered the olive-drab object I’d sighted. Held it up like a trophy. A military radio, Model PRC25. A fold-up antenna called a ‘long whip’ dangled. Recalling the items on the morgue’s storeroom table, I turned the radio over, flipped the lower latches, and wiggled loose the base cover.

  A standard PRC25 radio operated on a single battery, an item-specific model that resembled a brick.

  This one was different.

  Five D-cells stared up from their cozy bed.

  * * *

  At the TOC, Colonel Larsen examined the radio. He fiddled with the knobs and pried a D-cell from the battery cover. “I’ve seen this conversion before,” he said. “The Viet Cong don’t have our special batteries, so when they capture our radios, they rewire them to run on flashlight cells. The bastards use the radios to listen in on our tactical transmissions.”

  I said, “Our man left the radio behind, sir. I’m certain of it. He stopped to rest at the tributary before he swam across. The canteen I found is the one missing from the pouch on his web belt. If you insert a patrol, they might be able to follow his trail through the jungle to a crash site.”

  “How far do you estimate the crash site might be from where you found this?”

  “Probably not more than five klicks.”

  Larsen shook his head. “The battery conversion convinces me he was not an American. He was something else—a Caucasian Viet Cong, maybe an eastern European. Why else would he have had this piece of jerry-rigged equipment?”

  “A Viet Cong wouldn’t have been by himself.”

  “Why not? What if he was a courier coming back from delivering a message? Hell, maybe he just got lost. It’s happened to our own soldiers. A man goes off to take a shit, nobody notices, and next thing you know, he’s left by himself. I can’t risk a patrol to backtrack five klicks through the rain forest just to figure out the whys and wherefores. If somebody stumbles onto a crash site at the last minute, fine, I’ll send people to check. Other than that, we’re out of the search business. The Brigade will be gone, bag and baggage, within thirty-six hours. We’re done. And so are you.”

  * * *

  I wasn’t done.

  In a row of sun-bleached trailers at Bien Hoa, the Army Property Book Office crouched like a construction project about to break ground. Air conditioners churned noisily to suppress the temperature inside, while outside the sun blazed off the aluminum panels, the sandbag walls that separated the trailers, and the glossy mold ponds where the drip pans overflowed.

  PBO kept track of equipment, or rather it catalogued items before units in Vietnam lost them, usually for Vietnamese civilians or the enemy to find. The officer in charge of the property records section, Chief Warrant Officer Hollis, might easily have delegated me to one of his staff of enlisted clerks. Maybe the prospect of tracking a salvaged radio through the system intrigued him. Whatever his reason, he listened as I related the sequence from the unknown’s death to my discovery of the radio th
is morning on the bank of a tributary in Tay Ninh Province.

  Straight haired, slightly balding, in a pressed uniform and jungle boots that never touched the jungle, his skin leathery though sweat rarely brined it, Hollis was the kind of soldier reporters didn’t write about. Turning over the radio, he ran his fingertips to an engraving on the base, got up, and walked through the steel filing cabinets, his glasses reflecting the indices. He tugged open a drawer and plucked out a stack of cards.

  “These show various radio acquisitions. This card covers the specific item, Transmitter-Receiver model PRC25. From the manufacturer’s notation codes, we’ll be able to tell whether your radio was issued to a U.S. or an ARVN unit, and approximately when. Determining anything else about it would be impossible.”

  I said, “I thought every piece had a life history.”

  “That’s the kind of thing they say on TV. Somebody tore off the serial number plate. Without that, who knows where it’s been?”

  “So there’s nothing more you can do to trace it?”

  He stared at the radio for a minute. “You say somebody might have recovered this from the Viet Cong?”

  “That somebody is who I’m trying to track down.”

  “When units find equipment, they’re supposed to report it on a standard form. I can go through the files, but it’s a long shot. Units are spotty about reporting recovered pieces, including our own stuff they pick up. Easier to keep it under the table. If an item is interesting, someone takes it home illegally as a souvenir. If it’s functional, they use it until it breaks, then chuck it back into the jungle.” He popped open his fist like a magician to expose—presto—a bare palm. “I’ll check and get back to you within a week.”