The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle

by Jeff Wallace

  “I will do it. But I must get permission. It won’t happen before tomorrow.”

  “Huang has many watchers—soldiers, police, shopkeepers, children. In time he will find her. If you delay, she will be killed.”

  “I went to the police station to find you,” I said. “I apologize, but I was worried for Tuy. They told me you don’t work there anymore.”

  He had to force his eyes to meet mine. “Last night, they removed me from my position. Giang too.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I think they will transfer me outside the city.”

  “To where?”

  “Maybe a provincial capital, or a backwater town. If I can, I will bring Giang. Otherwise, he has no place to go. Nobody wants him.”

  I thought of Trong’s garden, his daughters and wife left alone. “I’m sorry.”

  He contemplated the rain spatters. “Now is wartime. Worse things happen to people.”

  What had I ever done to merit this man as my friend?

  The rain pounded.

  Day 11

  __________

  Wriggling through traffic on the back of a Lambretta motorbike, I was half a block from the Caravelle Hotel when I spotted the woman in the miniskirt and low-cut sequined halter. I’d encountered so many weird things on Saigon’s avenues that the woman would have been unremarkable, except that her stare had settled on me. Her head turned with the scooter rounding the corner. Any woman on Tu Do Street might be a prostitute, but her focus on me was too concentrated, especially for the first hour of daylight. As the scooter sputtered by, she traipsed a few steps in her stiletto heels, pointed at me, and screeched, “You Tanner!”

  “Pull over,” I told the driver. “Wait for me.”

  My uniform had a nametag which, standing so close to the street, she might have read, though it seemed unlikely. Something else was happening, impossible to interpret, and I’d have been smart to ride away rather than to approach her as I did now. “What do you want?”

  “Come,” she chirped. “This way.”

  “Why?”

  She beckoned with a gathering motion of her wrist, the same gesture Tuy used, fingers turned down as if to stir bath water. In Saigon over the years, the communists had assassinated American and French soldiers—shot them from speeding mopeds, blown them up with grenades tossed under café tables. Why not use an aggressive prostitute who could read nametags? Warily I followed her to a plain, propped-open door, for the absurd reason that she’d told me to do so.

  “Upstair,” she said.

  For the western elite, the rooftop bar of the nearby Caravelle had become a celebrated spot, its reputation handed down from the days when pioneer journalists had lounged in the sultry night air sipping their sloe-gin fizzes, while flares like fireworks blossomed over the swamps across the river. When I entered, I thought this might be a side entrance to the famous hotel, a discreet passage for the clientele to ascend to the rooftop bar. But no, the fastidious Caravelle would not have funneled its guests along this dim staircase. Venturing another step, I called, “Anybody there?”

  “It’s okay. Come on up.” The American voice rang familiar. I squeezed past frayed electric wires and chipped bricks seeping moisture, a passage as derelict as the shack where Tuy and Kim Thi hid. In the accommodation-starved city center, westerners would rent any space they could find.

  On the third floor landing waited Gribley in shorts and a white T-shirt. He swirled a red-labeled bottle of Vietnamese ‘33’ beer that must have counted for his breakfast. Behind him opened a room that barely accommodated a sheet-crumpled bed and a side table where reposed a portable typewriter and a cairn of books: Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, David Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire, Jean Lacouture’s biography of Ho Chi Minh, and a novel—Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, all sprouting torn scraps as markers. The screened window overlooked Tu Do, and I could see my driver’s leg braced against the curb.

  I said, “I thought you stayed at the Caravelle.”

  “Too pricey for my nonexistent expense account. The desk takes messages for me.”

  “Who’s the woman on the street?”

  He grinned. “My friend Sally. I noticed you go by one morning last week, so I sent her downstairs to watch for you. She’s not bad, eh?”

  Was I so predictable that this reporter’s doxy could fish me out of traffic? It meant I was absurdly easy to kill. Alarming, but I’d known it already, hadn’t I?

  He tapped his cigarette ashes into the ‘33’ bottle. “It was tricky, confirming what you saw. Partly I wasn’t asking the right people. And I admit, I really didn’t believe it was true. People glimpse things and get the wrong idea. And you said it was dark and you were ninety feet in the air.”

  “More like sixty.”

  “What’s the difference? It provoked skepticism. You can ask a question and get the stare of disbelief only so many times before you give up. I almost did.” He tossed the ash-mouthed empty into a bucket of bottles in the corner. No wonder he was pudgy. “My hat’s off to you, Tanner. You were right. Whatever it is you MP investigators do, you’re good at it.”

  I thought of Tuy and Kim Thi sitting in a ghetto shack, of Trong and Giang removed from their jobs, of me about to be sent off to God-knows-where.

  I was good all right. Like a Rome Plow.

  * * *

  At Tan Son Nhut, I drew a jeep and headed for Bien Hoa, driving too fast past the burned car skeletons. Edgy, my nerves frayed, I must have freaked out Hollis when I walked in on him. He jumped up from his desk, moved at once to the air conditioner, and adjusted its fan to high. The whirring machine masked our voices and sent his papers flapping. Hands pressed on stacks of carbon-copy forms, he said, “I thought you were coming over yesterday.”

  “I couldn’t make it.”

  “Too bad.” His voice was barely audible above the air conditioner, and I had to lean across the desk to hear him.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This morning, my commanding officer got a call from MACV. They told him that your investigation was closed. I was to lend no further assistance and to refer all inquiries to them. I never got instructions like that before. Is it because of what we found out about the radio?”

  “Partly.”

  “Will I get burned for helping you?”

  “Not for your help before the order was issued. After, you might.”

  He opened a drawer, extracted some paperwork, and held it tipped toward his chest, a poker hand in a tight game. “You got this from me before the order, right?”

  “Couple of days ago, I recall.”

  On the table he spread three documents: a printout page and onion-skin carbon copies of a defective component record and an aircraft incident report. “This printout shows the serial number of the attitude indicator you retrieved. It arrived from CONUS in November ‘69. This form records that it was installed to replace a defective instrument in a UH-1 helicopter, tail number 87J-19. Your lucky streak continues—the defective predecessor was just a few months old, so the replacement was covered under the contract warranty. Otherwise, no record would have existed outside the chopper’s working file, and I’d never have found it.”

  “What happened to the chopper with that tail number?”

  He picked up the second carbon copy, the aircraft incident report. “It crashed in January. Nobody was hurt, but the airframe was a total loss. Or so the report declared.”

  The form revealed that the chopper had belonged to the 41st Air Recon Squadron. My eyes shot to the investigating officer’s line. The carbon signature was illegible, and, contrary to practice, the name hadn’t been typed in.

  “Who was the investigating officer?”

  “It took me a few phone calls to find out. Normally the squadrons appoint their own people. Sometimes, they get too busy—which seems to be what happened in this case. On 20 March, they handed off the investigation. Luckily, the 41st kept 87J-19’s working file. It contains a memorandum of tra
nsfer to a new investigating officer—Major Jason Stobe. Same guy who had the radio.” Hollis’s tone bore no hint of triumph. “What’s your bet, that he wrote up the chopper as beyond repair, took possession of the airframe, then had his mechanics restore it to serviceable condition?”

  “Sounds about right.”

  He handed me the carbons. “This is beginning to look like evidence, huh?”

  I opened my leather pouch, slid the copies inside, removed my .45, and tucked the gun in the belt at the small of my back. “I need a last favor from you. I’ll try to keep your name clear. No guarantees.”

  He brushed a piece of lint off his starched fatigue sleeve. “I’ve been in the Army too long to believe in guarantees. But I’ve almost got my twenty in, and I can’t afford to end my career in a court martial.”

  “No you can’t, Chief.”

  He glared. “What’s your favor?”

  “Get the squadron’s working file with the incident-investigation transfer memorandum. When you do, put them in here. Stash it in a safe place until I come back.”

  “What if you don’t come back?”

  “Then you’ll be cozy with your orders.”

  Accepting the pouch, Hollis’s expression resembled Giang’s death-mask grin.

  * * *

  The two-story, pre-fab-metal headquarters of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam—MACV—was the centerpiece of a complex of buildings whose collective vibe was frustration. Created by President Kennedy in 1962, MACV had not yet accomplished its mission: to defeat communist aggression and make a secure country out of South Vietnam. Cobris had told me we were running out of time. Today’s front page of the Pacific Stars and Stripes newspaper pictured MACV Commanding General Creighton Abrams shaking hands with South Vietnam’s military chiefs. They were touting Vietnamization, the policy to prepare the South Vietnamese to take over the war. We’d leave behind a democracy capable of its own defense.

  Or we’d just leave.

  I passed through the security barriers and upstairs toward General Cobris’s office suite. The waxed linoleum floors bore giant whorls from an electric buffer, and in them the floor and a glass display case mutually reflected each other, multiplying the shelves of war mementos and photos of the MACV edifice showing bullet scars and smoke plumes beyond. During the Tet Offensive in late January 1968, in one of their bolder moves, the Viet Cong had attacked Tan Son Nhut airbase. Breaching the western perimeter, they’d charged across the meadows toward the parked aircraft and the cantonment area, where military and air police had fought to repel them. The VC hadn’t gone much farther—only a handful reached the buildings. In the photos, among the whitewashed trunks and blown-off palm fronds, their bodies lay strewn. I wondered if Khiêm, Diu’s husband, counted among them.

  Somebody must have phoned to say I was on the way up, for sharp heel clicks emanated from the adjoining double doorway. The air conditioning kept Vangleman’s starched khakis stiff as he tapped across the floor.

  He said, “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Is General Cobris around?”

  Adopting an expression that could not have been more pained had he stood barefoot on a punji stake, he faced me from an arm’s length away. “What is it with you, Tanner? Are you so fucking arrogant that you pay no attention to orders? The investigation was closed, yet you kept on? You flew up to Tay Ninh Province without authorization. Did you think we wouldn’t find out?”

  I was halfway through the door before he realized he wasn’t intimidating me. “Wait!”

  I waited.

  “You’re directed to remain here until otherwise notified.”

  I laughed.

  “That order comes from General Cobris.” Reflected in the waxed floor and the display case, Vangleman’s figure became so many disarranged bits, not unlike someone who’d walked up on an exploding claymore. “You think this is funny? I’ll call for the MPs to detain you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He folded his arms. As I’d guessed, he made no move to summon anybody.

  “I’ll be in my office,” I said calmly. “You have an hour to get me an appointment with the general.” He was an intelligent fellow; there was no need to explain. It was only important that he see no hint of the bluff, because I still had no answers or evidence. If I’d had evidence, I wouldn’t have been here anyway; I’d have been in General Abrams’s office using it to burn down Cobris and Vangleman like spindly rice shacks.

  Down the stairs, out through the open doors, I gratefully drank the breeze that swished the palm trees. The airfield, less than a kilometer away, must have been directly upwind, for I could smell the pungent AVGAS and hear the helicopter engines shift pitch lifting toward Cambodia.

  * * *

  “You’ve dug yourself into some shit, haven’t you?” In his baggy fatigues, Lopez looked like the neighborhood gas pump guy with a rag hanging from his pocket, harmless until he pulls out a machinegun.

  “Did somebody call?”

  “Major Vangleman. He kept asking where you were. Three times I told him I didn’t know. He said I was lying to him—the son of a bitch.”

  “That’s him.”

  “He said a jeep will pick you up at nineteen hundred hours to take you to General Cobris. If you don’t show, you’ll be arrested. I asked him to repeat the last part, and he said, ‘You heard me.’”

  “Don’t let him worry you.”

  “He should worry you, he’s the general’s shit dealer.”

  “You think you can hang with me a while longer?”

  “Bad career move though it would be?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me you’ve got evidence, sir. Something that weighs.”

  The silence answered him.

  “You’re playing them. You’re playing the goddamn general. I thought I’d seen everything.” He kept the wick on his Zippo trimmed high, and now he blowtorched a cigarette. “Why not just walk away?”

  “It’s like your story about the bug in the crapper. I just can’t relax, knowing the bug is down there.”

  For a minute he pondered this. Then he wagged his cigarette at me. “That ain’t no good reason.”

  * * *

  Darkness falls suddenly in Vietnam. Caught in the day’s final lumens, the ground-hugging air meanders like a water buffalo, and the temperature might dip a few degrees before the suffocating night settles. By the time I climbed into the jeep Cobris had sent for me, the sun already had sunk over the horizon. The driver motored toward our destination, dodging past a running garrison unit that had timed its PT to catch the ephemeral coolness. The on-post traffic rules said vehicles could not exceed 10 miles per hour when passing formations in the road, but the driver, another of the general’s empowered sycophants, gave not one shit about regulations and roared past the men. I caught the cadence caller’s receding lyric that mocked death:

  “Two old Harleys and a black Cadillac,

  My daddy keeps in his yard in back.

  Under the shade of the sycamore tree,

  Bury me beneath them three.”

  The jeep deposited me outside the Officer’s Club, in front of a parked VIP sedan whose air conditioner huffed condensate on the windows. The one on the driver’s side rolled lazily down. Vangleman asked, “Are you armed?”

  “A pistol.”

  “I’ll take it until you come out.”

  I slipped the .45 out of my waistband and presented it grip-first. He tossed it on the passenger seat. “The general’s a card player. You’d better hope you are too.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Look for this car when you’re done,” he said.

  Tonight, in celebration or remembrance of something, the O-club featured a formal dinner by the poolside. I could hear the live music. A few officers tapped down the steps, nineteen-thirty their Cinderella hour, their dress uniforms drooping in the humidity. I stopped by the Vietnamese concierge at the reception dais. A functionary of the American recreation machine, he
forged his mouth into a crescent so stiff it might have been gouged with the point of a bayonet.

  “General Cobris’s table,” I said.

  He flicked a disapproving glance at my fatigue uniform. “Wait. I ask him first.”

  Waiting didn’t suit me at the moment. “Never mind. I’ll find him.”

  I walked through the doors to the pool patio. The underwater floodlights glowed up at me. At each corner hummed a pedestal fan, and the artificial breezes curled together to shudder the pool’s surface into wavelets like so many colorful prisms. Silverware clinked on china and strings resonated from a trio of military musicians on a low stage. Laughter joined the swish of palm trees, their trunks spiraled in white Christmas-tree lights. Above each table, a striped umbrella, in case rain might spurt from the tropical clouds.

  At the patio’s far end sat Brigadier General Kyle Cobris.

  Beside him, Simone Nogaret.

  It was a long walk to their table. Or I thought so, as the lights winked up at me from the fan-ruffled water. I’d not expected Cobris to be so open about his affair with her—both of them were married to other people, at least on paper. He could have met me in his office, but he’d chosen the O-club, with Simone and these little extravagances around the pool. There was a message for me in this brazen picture, Cobris showing her off, Simone showing herself off, and the message was that my knowledge of their affair did not threaten them.

  He must have guessed that I’d found out. Why else would I have been so bold as to demand a meeting? Gribley had confirmed what I’d suspected: The general and Simone had been meeting secretly for months. The reporter had located a Vietnamese civilian who catered at the Vung Tau villa, and this savvy fellow had recognized Simone as the woman who frequented the place when Cobris was staying there.

  The general’s dress whites gleamed under the rows of his decorations capped by silver aviator’s wings. He lifted his eyes from his plate of veal cutlets in wine sauce. “Good evening, Tanner.”