Red Flags (3 page)

"What intelligence?"

"That their local officials, their foreign minister, even the mayor of Hanoi—they were all sending their sons and daughters of military age out of the country."

I banked the fire and unfolded the metal screen. The aroma of the fireplace mingled with her scent. I was wound up, mulling the lost crusade.

"Well, Communism didn't win either," I said, sounding regretful. "The old corruption is eating the new Communist state alive." I raised my glass in a toast. "To each according to his greed."

I slumped onto the couch. Even fatigued, she looked pink and delicate, her hazel eyes clear and penetrating, hair luxurious, cheeks perfect. Her teeth were rabbitty though, big, with a gap between the two in front. The imperfection seemed childlike and endearing.

I asked if she wanted coffee; she said she did. I rose to make it, but she waved me back down. "Let me," she said.

Celeste braided her hair while she waited for the water to boil. Been squatting in the woods too long, I thought. Horny at the proximity of a girl twenty-five years my junior. Or maybe apprehension was revving the hormones. Either way, my vision sparkled.

She was efficient.
The café filtre
press was soon on the coffee table. She poured out our cups.

"Your tour," she said, "when you served with my dad." She handed me a cup. "What happened in Cheo Reo?"

I took a sip and didn't say anything.

"If you're worried about sparing my feelings," she said, "don't."

Had the time come for her to hear it?

"I'm aware he was burned. Mom didn't listen to the warning not to open the coffin. My gran said it was two years before my mother slept through the night. What was the slang for it—crispy critter?"

I stared into my coffee. "I'm sorry. Family shouldn't have to—"

"Yes, we do. We do have to . . . even that." She pushed back her hair. "He was a husband, soon to be a father. How could he have been so cavalier?"

"He wasn't," I said. "Your mother married a professional soldier. Your dad went back because that's where the war was. If she couldn't live with that . . ." I took a slug of java. "But honestly, I don't think I'm up to talking about—"

She cut me off. "Out of fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and sixty-three casualties, do you know how many full colonels, like my father, died in Viet Nam?"

I shook my head.

"Eight. Pretty damn rare, wouldn't you say?"

"Very."

"Did you hurt a lot of people in the war, Erik?"

"More than I wanted. Why?"

"Do they haunt?"

Something had shifted in her tone and my comfort level. Suddenly I felt like a hostile witness.

"I'm not sure where you're going."

"Some of your former comrades intimated my father didn't die as officially reported."

"You mean—not in combat?"

She froze, realizing what I might have let slip. "Are you suggesting he wasn't killed in action?"

"Who did this intimating?" I said, evading the question.

"It's not important. What's germane is they implied you were involved."

I closed my eyes for a moment, tilting my head back.

"Were you?" she said.

"Was I what?"

"Did you have any part in it?"

"Not the way you seem to be thinking." I opened my eyes.

"One person referred to you as Captain Sidney. Said you weren't who you appeared to be."

"Maybe because I wasn't. Listen—" I held up a hand, stopping her as she was about to press me again. "If I tell you . . . you have to put it away and move on."

"I'm not sure I can promise that."

I went to my jacket hanging on the wall rack and slipped my wallet from the inside pocket. I took out the military scrip I'd carried since the sixties and unfolded the mauve and green "funny money" on the coffee table.

"What's this?" she said, peering at the woman's profile printed in place of George Washington's on the military money.

"You're a lawyer. It's a retainer."

She let the peculiar-looking dollar sit on the low table between us.

"You feel you need a lawyer?"

"I need attorney-client privilege."

"Why?"

"There's no statute of limitations on what you want to know."

Her face hardened; she was no longer anyone's child. Someday reached out and picked up the bill.

M
ISER GOT US
rooms at the Five Oceans in Cholon and we went out to get reacquainted with the city. Saigon was still sordid and fabulous. Neither of us had eaten actual food since departing San Francisco so we indulged ourselves, feasting on lobster and salted crab at classy La Miral and then savoring small dishes of unimaginable flavors cooked in modest family restaurants with just a few tables in the yard, sampling morsels of eel grilled on stove carts in the street and unidentifiable meat smoldering on braziers yoked across the cooks' shoulders on
chogie
poles and lowered to the curb. We strolled on, flirting with all the other food on offer: shrimp from the Saigon River, sparrows roasted in oil and butter, frogs' legs, skewered snake, buffalo-penis soup, steamed mudfish, baked butterfish, shark. We finished at the open-air place near the Old Market that had cobra on the menu and bananas flambé for dessert. Both of us settled for espresso.

We walked again under the brilliant crimson blossoms of the flamboyante trees, moved through the flower market and avoided clusters of Vietnamese draft dodgers who idled on shady street corners hustling hot watches. At the PX, GIs and the odd American deserter scored reel-to-reel tape recorders and electric fans for locals to resell at inflated prices. Chinese drug dealers scooped coke off sidewalk tables with elongated pinkie nails, and Macanese hoodlums carted bricks of cash to their moneychangers. Outside the British embassy, turbaned Gurkhas guarded the gates while, close by, street urchins hawked one-liter bottles of gasoline. Whatever lit your fire, Saigon had it all.

Astrologers trading in futures, mama-sans extolling taxidermied civet cats and live bear cubs. Stick-thin men selling U.S. Army–issue rations and assault rifles, flak vests, toilet paper, jackets made from GI ponchos lined with speckled parachute silk. Whether it inflicted pleasure or pain, whatever you desired was yours. Hell, armored personnel carriers and helicopters if you had the cash, a howitzer for four hundred bucks, an M-16 rifle for forty, a woman for ten. Or a tooth yanked out curbside for a dime.

We ambled past clubs with live bands imitating famous rock groups, and Cholon gangsters taking their leisure in open-sided billiard halls. Near the Central Market, refugees squatted in giant sections of stockpiled sewer pipe. We stepped around night soil and lean-tos on the pavement. Lights burned in MACV SOG and in General Westmoreland's old office on 137, rue Pasteur. The brass was working overtime.

In the morning we put on our work clothes—civvies—and reported to the Headquarters Support Activity, Saigon (HSAS), office. A dozen of us worked out of the rickety place, not much more than a bunch of desks. We were special agents loaned out to HSAS by our various investigative and counterintelligence agencies—ONI, OSI, CIC, CID. U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, and us—U.S. Army, "El Cid." GI slang for Criminal Investigation Division; "Sidney" behind our backs. The work didn't make us popular with our fellows, who considered us barely better than snitches.

No investigators were commissioned officers, although we frequently went undercover with officers' ranks. Our mandate was mainly to investigate crimes against U.S. personnel and property. Miser and I had been teamed up for a couple of tours, him an E-7 noncom, me a warrant officer, a rank halfway between the lowliest lieutenant and the highest-ranking sergeant. Early on we investigated the occasional homicide, but mostly we looked into the pilfering of supplies, scams like selling the U.S. military thousands of inedible eggs for thousands of American breakfasts, and the unexplained deaths of dozens of sentry dogs. As terrorist acts began to target U.S. personnel and dependents, the American head count rose steadily, along with our caseloads. We didn't get much support. Our little outfit had to improvise even as we found ourselves investigating suicides, rapes, security violations, even espionage and treason.

Our boss, Major Jessup, gave us a perfunctory welcome-back and instructed us to trade our civvies for jungle fatigues and fly up to Pleiku to investigate a threat against a company commander who had called in artillery on his own position, earning him a medal for valor and a bounty on his head of eight hundred and seventy dollars. Not from the VC; from his own men, for shelling some of their buddies into hamburger. The brass hats loved their heroic young West Point star. Eighty-seven recent high-school graduates had pledged ten bucks apiece to see him dead.

"Local talent in Saigon would've done it for fifty," Miser growled. "The kids could've saved their fucking pennies."

"Never mind that, Sergeant," Jessup snapped.

The U.S. Army wasn't about to charge nineteen-year-old survivors of horrific combat with mutiny and solicitation of murder. The solution was obvious; Major Jessup strongly suggested we put it into effect the moment we got to Pleiku: "Get his ass out of there!"

"Yes, sir," we answered.

The second case Jessup assigned us was out in the boonies and wasn't going to be anywhere near as simple or quick.

A chunk of our work involved GIs' attempts to smuggle dope home: cannabis and heroin, both extremely high grade and insanely cheap. The purest scag went for a dollar or two a dose, commonly sold roadside by kids. A buck would buy you the quintessential experience of the exotic East: a dozen pipes in an opium den. Fifty dollars got you six pounds of marijuana, though most everyone bought rolled joints, ten for fifty cents, or special cartons of Salems—ten bucks instead of the two you'd pay at the PX. The Salems were perfectly repacked by hand with opiated grass, and the carton artfully resealed so you couldn't tell it had ever been opened.

All you had to do was step up to the perimeter wire anywhere holding a sprig of anything, and you'd be set upon by vendors of marijuana and heroin. Business indicators were all good. Mainlining GIs were on track to outnumber stateside addicts. Normally the South Vietnamese drug trade was off-limits, untouchable, none of our concern. Saigon was a smuggler's wet dream, as Miser often pointed out. We couldn't even arrest Vietnamese nationals who were stealing from American supply ships and American supply depots, much less the ones smuggling narcotics in and out of their own country. Besides, transporting and refining them was practically a South Vietnamese government enterprise. Which is why the second assignment came as a surprise.

The major said, "We need you to bust up a drug operation in one of the Highland provinces." Miser and I exchanged glances, wondering if the major was serious. "
Half
the proceeds turn up like clockwork in the Hong Kong bank account of a Viet Cong front organization. Their cut's way too big to be just a tax or a toll. Which means the VC are in partnership up there—in business with somebody."

He paused to see if he'd gotten our attention. He had.

"Since the forties, the Communists have sold captured Lao opium to traffickers in Hanoi to help finance their arms purchases, and even bought quantities to sell. But actually growing dope ... that's new. They denounce the imperialist French for their government-sponsored drug dealing, but evidently the North Vietnamese need an infusion of U.S. dollars to buy supplies, so they've parked their ideology while they stock up on arms and ammo. You with me so far?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. The money the VC are banking is major. Ten times their usual five- or ten-grand rake-off. An informant puts this cash crop of theirs somewhere in Phu Bon Province."

"Sir, do we know what kind of dope they're growing?" I said.

"No, and I don't particularly care." Jessup assumed his best hands-on-hips command posture and looked us each in the eye. "No way we're going to wipe out their drug trade, that's for sure. The Vietnamese and their neighbors have been at it for five hundred years. Screw the dope. I don't care if they're growing pistachios. The higher highers don't want our guys getting the bang from those bucks. Slow the cash. They don't like their having so much capital. The buying power needs to be contained—at least for a while. Sabotage as much of the money as you can for as long as you can. And then bail."

"What are our specific orders, Major?" I said.

"You heard 'em: fuck up their revenue stream."

"But how, sir? I doubt the money ever touches down in that province, just shifts from one Hong Kong account to another. So what do we do? Kill their pack mules? Kidnap their women?"

"Do it any way you can. Just don't tell me about it. Especially if it's hinky." He tapped the unit shield hand-painted on the piece of plywood mounted on the wall behind him bearing the CID motto:
DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE
.

What he meant was, since we didn't have any jurisdiction over Vietnamese nationals—couldn't arrest them, couldn't so much as detain them—he didn't want to know about us getting over on any South Vietnamese who might be involved. No such strictures applied to Communists who got in the way. Their only right was to sacrifice themselves for their cause. So we had to make a case for any casualties being VC if it came to that, and stick to our story.

Miser assumed his
Oh, great
look as we stood at ease in front of Jessup's desk while the major finished speechifying. He gave us nothing to go on—neither where to start looking for the operation nor what to do once we found it. Zilch. The absence of direct instructions kept him conveniently free of blame for whatever we wound up doing. Never mind that it left us in the dark about how to carry out the assignment. That was our problem.

As usual, we were to do our work unnoticed: fall back on our early occupational specialties as signalmen, put on field uniforms, and pass as regular soldiers. Or as the major put it, "Do your thing and get out of there as quietly as you came."

"Will the commanding officer know what we're about?" Miser asked.