by Jeff Wallace
“Yes. Somebody chipped it off afterward. Incomprehensible, unless you’re trying to disguise where it came from.”
“Who sent the radio in for repair?”
“The 29th Aviation Company at Tan Son Nhut. I thought of phoning them to ask about it, then I figured you’d want to do that, maybe pay a visit. The unit is located at Building 2451 at the airfield. The company commander is Major Jason Stobe.”
The name chimed in my memory. I recalled the jolly helicopter pilot who’d chauffeured me to Vung Tau.
Major Stobe. General Cobris’s personal flyboy.
* * *
A knife’s edge of somber clouds slashed overhead. I thought I might beat the rain—the jeep I’d drawn this morning ran well—but motoring toward the gate, I nosed up behind a stopped convoy of U.S. Air Force flatbeds. The road was too narrow to pass, and I idled in the diesel-laced air while the MPs directed traffic and big raindrops began to avalanche.
The truck beds sagged under loads of wooden crates in two sizes. The wind whipped the tarps, and I could read the stenciling. The larger crates were MK-82 500-pound aerial bombs, the smaller were kits that fitted the bombs with flip-out fins to slow their descent, so the low-flying planes that dropped them could get away.
I recalled recent news reports, denied by Washington, that the United States had been bombing NVA bases inside Cambodia. Two daggers of Cambodian territory—nicknamed the Fishhook and the Parrot’s Beak—stabbed into South Vietnam north and northwest of Saigon. From these and other Cambodian sanctuaries, the NVA fed men and war materials to their units in the highlands, War Zone C, and the Mekong Delta. International law forbade breaching the border of a so-called neutral state, so U.S. and ARVN forces stood by while the NVA thumbed their noses at us from across the frontier. Cobris had told me that MACV suspected that the enemy was stockpiling supplies for a new offensive, another Tet. A disturbing prediction. I pictured the people picking through the embers of their homes, the dead woman in the white ao dai.
Then I remembered that the news reports had said B-52s had been bombing the Cambodia sanctuaries. They flew so high you couldn’t hear them from the ground. Their bombs didn’t need drag fins. Plus, they weren’t based in Vietnam—they came from Guam, hours away by air. The ordnance on the trucks was for a different kind of warplane—those that flew low in support of infantry.
The MPs signaled for me to pass the bomb trucks. The convoy stretched longer than I’d thought, half a kilometer of identical loads of MK-82s and drag-fin kits.
When the Vietnamese wanted to discern the future, they looked for signs.
The trucks were a sign.
* * *
If the 29th Aviation Company kept paperwork on the radio, one swipe of a hand could make it disappear. I figured the less warning I gave them, the better. I parked a street over from the headquarters. A jeep makes its own stage entrance, a man on foot is hardly noticed.
Supply rooms usually roosted in the rear of a unit’s headquarters, and I strolled around the cinder-block building next to an aircraft hangar and entered through an open set of double doors. Signs conveniently labeled the tall wire cages: WEAPONS, SPARE PARTS; LAUNDRY TURN IN. I found the supply office in a corner festooned with nylon airlift slings and gas masks in their canvas holders. Over a file box hunched a gangly sergeant, his arms entirely scrimshawed in tattoos. He must have heard the cage door creak when I walked in, for his head swiveled and he slowly regained his height over the box, his mouth forming a buck-toothed grin. Spivey, his name tag read.
“Looking for something, sir?”
“I’m Major Tanner, Military Police. I need to ask you a few questions.” I hadn’t thought about how I’d present myself, friendly or officious. A look at Spivey decided it. The lavishness of military supplies had made South Vietnam a candy store for profiteers, and nothing rattled them more than somebody like me pitching up on their doorstep. Not long ago, I’d investigated a supply sergeant who, claiming to be the victim of theft by a local-hire Vietnamese mechanic, had asked his commander for permission to mount a ‘recovery operation’ at the mechanic’s house downtown. As if raiding Vietnamese homes fell within his authority, the officer had approved. The sergeant and a truckload of armed soldiers had stormed the residence and retrieved fifty vehicle tires. The incident might have been forgotten, just another episode at the convergence of power and stupidity, but it had played out in the full view of the Vietnamese neighbors. Enraged, they blocked the street, threw rocks, and broke the truck’s windows. A riot ensued, and the Vietnamese police became involved. With Trong’s help, I gathered evidence that the sergeant had been black-marketing tires through the mechanic. When the scheme had failed to net the anticipated cash, the sergeant had hatched the raid to recoup his merchandise. The Army ultimately court-martialed him and relieved his commander, who wasn’t corrupt, merely an idiot.
“I want to see this item,” I said.
Spivey peered at the pink repair slip I’d borrowed from Hollis, and which I held up, not letting him touch. He flashed coffee-stained incisors, making me think that if I grabbed his arm to keep him from escaping, he’d promptly chew it off. His first worry would have been that I’d traced government property he’d traded or sold, and he seemed to relax when he saw that it was a radio. Apparently he didn’t traffic in those. If he’d had any presence of mind, he would have summoned an officer from his chain of command. Instead he was in motion, checking the serial numbers of the radios on the metal racks. “We don’t have many of these, sir, they’re not a helicopter mount, more for admin use. Hmm. It’s not on the shelf. Let’s see where it went to.”
He moved nervously through the dangling nylon slings that licked his bald pate like the tongues of snakes, returned to the wooden box, and flipped to a layer of yellow slips. “Let me check my hand receipts.” At the end of the intricate tattoos, his fingers diddled through the copies, stopped on one, read it, then flashed past it quickly. Too quickly. I was leaning close to afford him no chance to palm a document. When his eyes darted up, I caught their panic. “Well, sir, maybe you should talk to the XO or the First Sergeant.” He pointed at a soldier passing by outside the cage. “Hey, Janowicz, go ask Top to come back here.”
I reached over and lifted out the slip he’d scrolled past.
“Sir, wait a minute...”
But I already had the paper, a temporary hand receipt whose upper right corner, in hand-printed text, read radio, PRC25, serial number 117134. Across the bottom ran a signature, Jason Stobe, and a date, 27 March 1970. Three weeks before the unknown died.
I asked, “What did Major Stobe do with this radio?”
He stared glassy eyed, and without looking he closed the wooded box. Maybe it harbored a hand receipt that would trace to M16 rifle serial number 537629. I considered whether I should seize the whole box as evidence. But then the cage door creaked, and I knew my brief rampage at the 29th Aviation Company had run its course.
In the doorway posed the First Sergeant. Tall, black, present and distant at the same time, intrinsically menacing, he sported a massive forehead that cragged like a portable Mount Rushmore. He took in Spivey’s stricken face, then mine, and immediately comprehended what had happened. “That’s a company record, sir. Why don’t you hand it back to Sergeant Spivey, and we’ll go to my office and straighten out whatever problem you have.”
I folded the hand receipt into a neat square and tucked it into my shirt pocket.
“You can’t be taking our paperwork, sir.”
“Can’t I?”
The First Sergeant watched as I buttoned the pocket below the embroidered jump wings and the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. His stare narrowed, and I sensed the cyclone of his fury whirling at this intruder who dared to confiscate his unit’s records. Then his eyes roved to the MP insignia and major’s rank on my collar, and the cyclone blunted itself against the impenetrable edifice of the military structure.
“Sir, I believe you should have a word with the company comman
der.”
“Lead the way.”
I’d only seen Stobe in his pilot’s seat. Absent the cocooning aircraft, he was as tall as the first sergeant, with a linebacker’s torso. A millimeter of hair coated the cube of his scalp on which the discoloration of birthmarks seeped through like the grease stains on a bag of fried egg rolls. His lips had trouble wrapping the big teeth he exposed in a genuine smile. “Nice to see ya again, Major. Come on in.” His powerful voice was the kind meant to whoop at cheerleaders from the football team’s bench. He loped over from his desk and closed his office door. “I take it you’ve done scared our supply sergeant half to death. Those supply boys don’t take well to the military police.”
“He can rest easy. He’s not who I’m after.”
Stobe settled his elbows on the desk and regarded me calmly. Many people I could intimidate; he wasn’t one of them. He said, “My First Sergeant tells me you pocketed one of our hand receipts. Mind if I have a look?”
“I’m taking custody of it. Potential evidence.”
“Kinda serious about this, aren’t you?”
“On 27 March, you signed out a radio, a PRC25, from your supply room. You then turned it in for repair, which was completed on 30 March. Could you tell me what you did with the radio after that?”
Stobe folded his hands on his lap and tweaked up the edges of his mouth. I might have just asked him about his miniature golf score.
I fished the photograph of the dead walker out of my folder and handed it across. “Know him?”
“Can’t say I do.”
“He was killed twelve days ago in Tay Ninh Province. He’s still unidentified. But he left something behind—a PRC25 radio on a river bank. The same radio that had been in your possession. You must know how it got from your hands into his.”
“Plainly you’re a smart fellow, Tanner, but you can in no way prove that statement.”
“Before you gave it to him, you chipped off the serial number plate. You intended to render it untraceable. Why was that?”
“Why don’t you slow down for a minute and think through what you’re sayin’ and who you’re sayin’ it to. Reflect on the implications, like whose purpose your actions serve. Didn’t I drop you off with General Cobris the other night? Aren’t you working for him, same as I do?”
“You’re telling me Cobris is behind this?”
“I didn’t say any such thing. Just asked who you were working for.”
“I work for the Army.”
Stobe laughed. “Seems to me you’re too seasoned a fellow to be playing the zealot. But maybe I misread you.” He stood up, as imperturbable as ever. “I hate to be impolite, but I have flight operations to attend.” He ushered me to the orderly room, where stood Spivey, his face ashen, evidently in anticipation of a session with his commanding officer.
“This way, sir.” The First Sergeant didn’t like me afoot in his company area, and he led me to the rain-doused parking lot. On him, everything was oversized, from the Rushmore head to the baseball-mitt hands he planted on his hips, to the barge-scale jump boots on whose mirror-polished tips the rain beaded. He leaned uncomfortably close. “Major, I wish you a fine day. If you ever come back here, which I sincerely hope you don’t, please make an appointment and do your business through the chain of command. That’s how the Army is supposed to work.” Waving a disparaging salute, he went inside, thumping the door shut behind him.
The rain had pooled on the jeep seat, and I squeegeed it off with the edge of my hand, tugged the poncho over my head. Turning the ignition felt satisfying, the jeep’s choppy energy balancing my own. I recalled a story Tuy had told me, about how rats had gnawed a hole in a farmer’s rice bin, and nobody noticed because the hole was low in the shadows, and the rice disappeared in such tiny increments that the surface barely sagged. One day the farmer’s wife went to fetch rice, and it collapsed under her scoop to the bottom. A metaphor about corruption, so endemic in South Vietnam that it was both a root cause and an effect of the war.
Nothing quite tests the character of a man as when he gets what he wants. After the general’s pressuring lecture the other night, I’d wanted so much to defy the bastard. Now I knew that Cobris was disingenuous in a way I could neither prove nor define, but the certainty chugged like the jeep’s engine.
I was halfway to the French Fort before I realized that it didn’t matter.
* * *
Two hours after my tête-à-tête with Stobe, Crowley summoned me to his office at MACV Headquarters. When I entered, I sensed that my relationship with him had changed; I read it like the red shift in celestial light that indicates a body receding at great velocity.
He said, “I received another complaint about you. Perhaps you heard.”
“I can guess.”
He leaned into the corner of his chair, away from me. I might have tracked in the dung from the French Fort. “Vangleman says that you accused the Commander of 29th Aviation, Major Stobe, of giving a radio to the Tay Ninh unknown. Please tell me you’re not that big a fool.”
“The radio had a document trail that led to Stobe’s supply room.” I started to describe how the PBO had traced the radio.
He swished his hand as if to shoo away a fly. “Some things just aren’t done. You don’t confront the general’s pilot. Didn’t I tell you that Cobris was backing you up against accusations of kidnapping? And you did this?”
“Sir, you’ve got to go around Cobris.”
Crowley again adopted his stare of disbelief. Normally he reported to the MACV Provost Marshal, but in that officer’s temporary absence, Crowley himself occupied the role. Above him were the deputy MACV commander and Commanding General Creighton Abrams. A case this volatile, involving one of MACV’s senior officers, should go directly to Abrams.
I said so to Crowley.
“Not without substantiation,” he replied.
“Sir, whoever the unknown was, whatever he was doing, Cobris was aware. Stobe as much as admitted it. Cobris has intruded on the investigation from the beginning, to keep anyone from finding out what’s going on. He moved Second Brigade out of Tay Ninh Province to get Larsen out of the way.”
“That’s absurd. An accusation like that could get you relieved.”
“Only if it’s not true.”
“Wrong. What counts is whether you can prove it. Can you?”
“No.”
“Can you tell me Cobris’s presumptive motives for any of this?”
“I don’t know.”
Crowley’s laugh was full of pathos, for me and for himself. “You want me to approach General Abrams with a case you’ve pulled out of your ass?”
“If I can see the connections, Abrams will see them.”
“Your job was to learn a man’s identity. Instead you caused incidents.”
“Sir, if you won’t go see Abrams, I’d like to.”
“Out of the question.” Crowley swiveled his chair toward the window and steepled his fingers. I’d lost him. More accurately, he hadn’t been there from the beginning. “You were supposed to conduct a professional investigation. You were given latitude. What you did was to act irresponsibly and beyond the scope of your authority.”
I wondered how much of his lecture replayed what he must have heard from Vangleman. I said, “Please think about it, sir. I have no reason to invent any of this.”
“Stop talking. I’m very close to relieving you myself, and I may have to.” Past the chair, all I could see of him were the steepled fingers. “Just get out.”
* * *
I had to talk to Tuy. My time was almost eclipsed; orders might be waiting as early as tonight giving me 24 hours to be on an outbound plane. There were no more days I could squeeze, nobody I could appeal to. Crowley would be as eager as Cobris to be rid of me. I was an embarrassment, an officer in whom they’d lost confidence, one they had to make excuses for.
They were right. A soldier does not have the luxury of cutting his own way. Even authentic leaders like Larsen
and Ulrich did what they were told. Though they might recognize the folly of some of their orders, they never lost sight of their place in the military hierarchy. My looseness meant that I’d lingered too long in Saigon, adrift in its post-colonial artifice, the swimmer whose feet never touched the firmament, only water.
Gripping the rails of the scooter cornering the darkening streets, I rehearsed what I’d say to Tuy, and the words fell into place easier than I’d expected. I had to engage her in a way so as not to catalyze her stubbornness. The thought quickened my footsteps across the broken pavement, past the crooked tree and the garbage bin, and I’d reached the base of the enclosed stairs before I saw the man in the hat coming at me. I reached clumsily for the pistol in my leather pouch, wondering why he hadn’t yet opened fire.
“Don’t shoot, it’s only me,” said Giang.
“Christ, you scared the shit out of me.”
“Come. We go see Trong.” Taking my hand, he led me toward a car at the end of the street. “We must hurry. There is danger.”
“What danger?”
“We found Kim Thi.”
* * *
The prefecture loomed behind floodlights that blinded a crowd of protesters. They blocked the entranceway, and signs pumped up and down from the lake of black hair. Unintimidated, Giang pushed through. Once inside, straightening my uniform, I asked, “What was that all about?”
“No pay.”
“You mean those are cops?”
“More than normal this time.”
“Isn’t it a bad idea, to let cops go unpaid?”
“We have plenty bad idea.”
We descended a flight of steps into the clammy spaces beneath the building, veered at the bottom into a dank passageway whose floor must stay perpetually wet from the poor drainage. Following masonry walls, their mold sketching camouflage patterns, we approached a trapezoid of light from the open door of a decrepit detention cell, an artifact of the French era, now serving as a storeroom. Within, Trong leaned against a crate. He said, “Today Kim Thi went to a police station. Luckily, the commander is a friend of mine. He called me, and I brought her here.”