Final Answers (16 page)

T
he man waiting for me in the CIL conference room is a civilian. He’s sitting alone at the far end of a long table framed by a luminous, floor-to-ceiling projection screen hanging against the wall behind him. Cigarette smoke curls in front of his face. He stands as I enter, and breaks into a cautious smile.

Tall and slender with thinning hair, he appears to be in his mid-fifties. His shirt, worn outside his slacks Hawaiian style, has white-on-white embroidery reminiscent of religious vestments and combines with his Scandinavian bone structure and coloring to give him a spiritual aura. His eyes have a fragile wariness, suggesting he had once undergone a harrowing ordeal that left him forever shaken—and he had.

According to the colonel, Jason Ingersoll ran the military mortuary at Ton Son Nhut Airbase near Saigon during the war. Each day, sometimes by truck, mostly by helicopter, piles of body bags were deposited on his doorstep. As mortuary officer, he was responsible for their contents being restored to as high a degree of human resemblance as possible and returned to their families. When the war ended, he went to work for the CIL. For almost twenty years, he’s been retrieving, identifying, and returning the remains of those men he hadn’t the chance to serve in Vietnam.

We shake hands.

He takes his seat and lights another cigarette.

I settle into one of the upholstered armchairs around the table on which pads, pencils, a thermos of coffee, and several cups are
set out along with a 35mm slide projector. A lectern and presentation easel are centered beneath the CIL seal on the far wall. After an exchange of pleasantries, I raise the question of drug smuggling in Vietnam and the DEA investigation.

Jason Ingersoll’s face falls and takes on a severely pained expression.

I’ve wounded him.

“Why is that so disturbing?” I ask softly.

“Because it brings back bad memories.” His eyes sharpen as he decides whether or not to share the past with me. “I was one of those investigated at the time.”

This is a complete surprise. The colonel stole none of his colleague’s thunder. “For drug smuggling?”

Ingersoll nods imperceptibly.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“They said, instead of putting the viscera back in chest cavities after autopsies, we were putting in packages of heroin, which were removed by accomplices at Travis or Dover, depending on the port of entry.”

I’ve finally found the answer. I should be elated, but I’m not. I’m angered by this violation of human dignity, and flooded with ghoulish images that turn my stomach. It takes me a moment to regain my composure. “I never heard anything about that.”

“It was pretty well hushed up. There were a few articles, but the media showed admirable restraint. I guess they decided we’d taken enough of a beating over there. The accusations were nonsense anyway, made up by a few disgruntled people. I was fully exonerated.”

“It never happened?”

“Never.”

He giveth and taketh away in a matter of seconds. I feel like the wind’s been knocked out of me. “Could it have been done without your knowledge?”

“I don’t see how. We had strict procedures, paper trails that established a chain of custody. We couldn’t afford to be slipshod. On the average we processed between fifty and a hundred remains a day. In the spring of ‘68, during the peak fighting, we must’ve done close to four thousand in a month.”

“Well, as far as I know, ‘68 is about the time this drug smuggling was going on.”

“Alleged smuggling,” he gently corrects, oblivious to the endless stream of smoke coming from his mouth. “I was the mortuary officer, Mr. Morgan. I was always on the move, overseeing every phase of the operation.”

“Certainly not twenty-four hours a day.”

“No, but dozens of men worked a given shift. The embalmers were literally back to back at these rows of tables. There was a lot of talk going on: women, sports, family, and some black humor, quite frankly, anything to lighten the mood. They’d have noticed someone walking in with a big bag of white powder. I mean, this isn’t a diamond or piece of microfilm we’re talking about.”

“In other words, it would’ve taken a conspiracy.”

He nods and allows himself a thin smile. He’s been asked all these questions before. “A massive one. The whole organization would’ve had to be involved.”

“What happened to the remains after embalming?”

“They were transferred to out-processing. We worked, two twelve-hour shifts. Remains embalmed during the day were packaged at night and vice versa.”

“I recently spoke to someone in Denver who worked at the mortuary. His name’s Bartlett. John Bartlett. You remember him?”

Ingersoll looks off for a moment in thought. “Yes, yes, I believe I do. Tall fellow, in-processing noncom as I recall.”

“Right. He’s the one who gave me the impression something was going on.”

“Really? What made him think that?”

I brief him on Bartlett’s heroin addiction; on how the out-processing noncom forced him to rebag the helicopter pilot’s corpse, the corpse that vanished.

“Vanished?” Ingersoll repeats incredulously. “No. No, somebody would’ve noticed a blank in the log. Hey, this guy came in but didn’t go out.”

“He was never logged in.”

“Oh. When was this?”

“Week of twelve May.”

“Well, the investigation was over. Months. The ‘smugglers’ were in the clear. Why do that?”

“To make sure it stayed over. The DEA was onto this guy. Your people would’ve picked up on the phony identity—”

“Absolutely. Fingerprint and dental charts were routine.”

“—DEA would’ve been notified and who knows?”

He raises a brow in acknowledgment.

“Bartlett also mentioned the term ‘Pepsi-Cola runs.’ Sound familiar?”

“No. Beer and pizza runs—I remember those. We weren’t into soft drinks much.”

“He said pilots working the drug trade used Pepsi-Cola runs as a code name for certain flights.”

Ingersoll shrugs, mystified.

“The term never came up in the investigation?”

“Not to my knowledge.” He takes a moment to stub out his cigarette. “That out-processing noncom—the one who pulled the chopper pilot’s remains—you have any idea who he was?”

“No, I don’t have his name, but Bartlett mentioned he wasn’t very well liked, got himself fragged.”

Ingersoll’s eyes flicker. “I remember that.” His brow furrows in thought, and he shakes his head no. “Been a long time. I’m sorry, his name escapes me.”

“What was he in charge of?”

“The final wrapping and shipping of remains.”

“Putting them in transfer cases?” I’d seen more than my share of the boxy aluminum caskets. Every GI in Vietnam had nightmares of ending up in one.

“Uh-huh. Also preparing manifests, and loading the T-cases on pallets and into C-141s.”

“Was he investigated?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Could he have put heroin in chest cavities?”

“You mean, gut one of those poor fellows?” Ingersoll erupts indignantly.

The sudden shift in gears surprises me. I nod, feeling guilty at having upset him.

“Right there in the middle of the out-processing building?” he charges on, his pitch rising. “And insert a big bag of heroin in his chest?”

“Look, I’m sorry if I’ve offended you, Mr. Ingersoll. But I’ve found myself in the middle of something here. People have been trying to kill me and I’m trying to figure out why.”

“The Colonel briefed me,” he says more evenly. “I know about your wife. I’m sorry.”

I nod and force a smile.

“It couldn’t have been out-processing,” he resumes. “You see, the mortuary had four separate buildings: in-processing and embalming, the ID lab, administration and supplies, and out-processing—where the remains were taken for final packaging and paperwork. Now—’

“Well, doesn’t that support my contention? I mean, the noncom who ran out-processing had autonomy in his building. He had control, right?”

“True. But I was about to say, the work was done in a large, white room. It was spotless. Even the floor was painted white.”

I sense where he’s heading. My teeth dig into my lower lip, my gut starts constricting.

“I don’t mean to be gruesome, Mr. Morgan, but if the corpse wasn’t dismembered or badly mutilated, it was embalmed under pressure; then the wrists, ankles, and knees were gently bound with gauze to secure them. Finally, the remains were wrapped in a clean white sheet, the ends folded and tucked military style, and then sealed in plastic.”

His long, slender hands—which have administered the military’s last rites to so many, which came all too close to giving them to me—gesture with rhythmic grace as he goes on.

“Now, imagine undoing all that in this immaculate room, not to mention making an incision in the chest—which requires a fail-degree of skill and a noisy electric saw, to be blunt—and removing the viscera. It’s an elegant, compact design that God came up with, but it expands to a rather unwieldy volume. So there, in this pristine environment, the conspirator stands with all this . . . Well, you get the picture.”

“Yes, I’m afraid I do,” I say queasily, fighting back thoughts of the County Morgue, of Nancy lying on the stainless steel table, of my fears of her being so horribly violated.

“Could it have happened?” he wonders rhetorically, slipping another Marlboro from the pack. “Once? Maybe. Twice? I strongly doubt it.”

“What about bodies that had been autopsied? Would that have made it any easier?”

“Not really.” He strikes a match. A thin layer of smoke stretches between us. “We didn’t autopsy that many. Only if there was no other way to determine cause of death.”

“For example?”

“The crew of a plane that went down without being hit by enemy fire. We’d want to know: Did the pilot have a heart attack? Was it G-induced loss of consciousness? And so on and so forth.”

“How long were the bodies kept at the mortuary?”

“Twenty-four to forty-eight hours, unless we couldn’t get an identification. As a rule, a man’s remains were recovered, processed, and returned to next of kin within a week. Many had difficulty accepting the loss if they couldn’t actually see their loved one dead. This fast turnaround was the key to preserving what we called viewability.” He inhales deeply on the cigarette, then pushes back his chair and stands.

I have more questions, but I sense he’s preparing for his summation, and decide to wait.

“You see, Mr. Morgan,” he resumes softly, “we were good people. Dedicated professionals with a strict code of ethics. And the stress we coped with, day in and day out, seeing the prime of American youth—” His voice breaks and he toys with his cigarette until the feelings subside. “You can’t imagine what it was like to see these kids butchered like that.”

“Yes, sir, I can.”

“Of course,” he says apologetically, emitting a steady stream of smoke. “I just can’t imagine any of my people were involved in something so heinous. I didn’t believe it then and I still don’t.”

I’m moved, and tempted to end it right here, but there is one question I have to ask. “What about now?”

He stiffens defensively. “You mean the Surigaos.” It’s a statement not a question.

“Yes. I know this is off the wall, but if it had been going on in Vietnam without your knowledge, could it still be going on now?”

“Via our operation here?” he asks, his voice ringing with disbelief.

I nod, expecting he’ll be further outraged.

“Do you know what’s being repatriated?” he challenges, bristling. “Do you have any idea what these families, some of whom have been waiting for thirty years, finally bury?”

“I can imagine.”

“I’ll show you,” he says sharply. He turns on a heel and walks toward the other end of the table.

I’m apprehensive and about to say it’s not necessary when the
lights go out and the beam from the projector splits the darkness. I I’ve forced him to share his pain with me, and if being confronted by some horrible atrocity is the price, then I must pay it. There’s no way I can back out now.

He brings up the first slide.

I Again, I’m flooded with thoughts of Nancy, and close my eyes, taking a moment to gather my courage. I open them to see a wall-sized blowup of a blinding white sheet. Arranged on it, in anatomical order, are parts of a human skeleton: half a lower jawbone with most of the teeth missing, a row of vertebrae, a small section of rib cage, pieces of a crushed pelvis, the digits of several fingers, and a single femur snapped like a tree limb. That’s it. Eroded and discolored by time and elements, they have the look of porous, brown stone. There’s nothing human about them—they could be the grotesque remains of a prehistoric animal.

“That’s quite a lot,” Ingersoll says matter-of-factly. “We often get far less . . .”

He pauses and advances the slide.

“That mound of bone fragments would easily fit in the palm of your hand. In case you’re wondering, the remains are repatriated in these boxes.”

He advances the slide again.

A group of Asians and a single American are gathered around a row of wooden boxes on a table. They are made of quarter-inch-thick mahogany. The tops, with the nails to secure them partially hammered into the wood, have been set aside. Judging by the people, each box is about 30 × 12 × 16 inches—length, width, and height respectively.

Ingersoll shuts off the projector. The tip of his cigarette traces his path through the darkness as he crosses to the light switch.

“Not the sort of thing that lends itself to smuggling bags of heroin,” he concludes as the fluorescents flicker back to life.

I squint at the brightness and take a moment to regroup. “Have whole cadavers ever been repatriated?”

“No.”

“Not even once?”

“Never.”

“What about deserters or men who chose to remain behind who subsequently died of natural causes?”

He shakes his head no. Impatiently.

“And there’s never been a case where a POW died in captivity and his body was repatriated?”

“I’ve never seen one—despite the reports of live sightings. The Southeast Asian governments insist there are no longer any prisoners of war . . .” He pauses and raises a skeptical brow before adding, “. . . under their control. You can draw your own conclusions.”