Four Blind Mice

Chapter Seventy-Two

Tran Van Luu was fifty-four years old and he informed me that he spoke Vietnamese, French and English fluently. His English was excellent and I couldn't help thinking that he looked more like a college professor than a prison inmate convicted of several murders. Luu wore gold wire-rim glasses and had a long, gray goatee. He was philosophical about everything apparently. But was he the Foot Soldier?

“Nominally, I am a Buddhist,” he said as he sat in a cell that was only seven by twelve feet. A bed, a stool and a fixed writing shelf filled more than half of the space. The fixtures were all made of poured concrete so they couldn't be moved or disassembled by the inmates.

“I will give you some history, ”he said. The back story.“ I nodded. ”That would be a good place to start.“ ”My birthplace is Gon Track Village in the Quang Bihn Province, just north of what was the DMZ. This is one of the country's poorest provinces, but they are all relatively poor. I started work in my family's rice fields at five.

Everyone was always hungry, even though we grew food. We had one real meal a day, usually yams or cassava. Ironically, our rice was handed over to the landlord. All loyalty was to family, including ancestors, a plot of land and the village. Nationalism was non-existent, a Western notion imported by Ho Chi Minh.

“My family moved south in nineteen sixty-three and I enlisted in the Army. The alternative was starvation, and besides, I had been brought up to hate the Communists. I proved to be an excellent scout and was recommended to MAC-V/Recondo school run by US Army Special Forces. This was my initial encounter with Americans. I liked them at first.”

“What happened to change that?” I asked Luu.

"Many things. Mostly I came to understand that many of the Americans looked down on me and my countrymen. Despite repeated promises, I was left behind in Saigon. I became a boat person.

“I finally got to America in seventy-nine. Orange County in California, which has a very large Vietnamese population. The only way we could survive was to recreate the family village structure from our own country. I did so with a gang the Ghost Shadows. We became successful, at first in California, then in the New York area, including Newark. They say I murdered members of rival gangs in New York and Jersey.”

“Did you?” I asked Luu.

“Oh, of course. It was justifiable, though. We were in a war.” He stopped talking. Stared at me.

“So now you're here in a super max prison. Have you received a date for the execution?”

“No. Which is very humorous to me. Your country is afraid to execute convicted murderers.”

“It's comical? Because of things you saw in Vietnam?”

“Of course. That is my frame of reference.”

“Atrocities committed in the name of military activity.”

“It was war, Detective.”

“Did you know any of these men in Vietnam: Ellis Cooper, Reece Tate, James Etra, Robert Bennett, Laurence Houston?”

Luu shrugged. “It was a long time ago. Over thirty years. And there are so many American surnames to remember.”

“Colonel Owen Handler?”

“I don't know him.”

I shook my head. “I think you do. Actually, Colonel Handler was in charge of the MAC-V/Recondo school when you were there being trained as a Kit Carson scout.”

Luu smiled for the first time. “Believe it or not, Detective Cross, the scouts didn't usually get to meet the man-in-charge.”

“But you met Colonel Handler. He remembered you to the day he was killed. Can you help me stop the murders?” I asked Luu. “You know what happened over there, don't you? Why did you agree to see me?”

He gave another indifferent shrug. “I agreed to see you... because my good friend asked me to. My friend is Kyle Craig.”