The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

David K. Harford A Death on the Ho Chi Minh Trail from Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

A Death

Years later I would think about Vietnam and how, when I first arrived in-country, I imagined that every Vietnamese I encountered on the crowded streets of Pleiku, each one plodding along country roads, all those bent toiling in the swampy ricefields, and even those hired to labor in the hot sun around the base camp for the Sixth Infantry Division (I envisioned them all as VC) might at any moment try to take my head off. It never dawned on me that some might be friendly and some might even be neutral about the war being fought all around them.

I was tentative and uncertain the first few weeks, frightened by the unfamiliar ways and circumstances of the war, frightened of the sights and sounds and smells of the city and of the strange, impoverished lifestyle of the people whose country I had come to occupy. I seemed to have absolutely nothing in common with them but a common enemy, and they could easily be that enemy.

As I became acquainted with my surroundings, my fears abated, and I relaxed a bit, got bolder, was content doing my job, got to know the people better, and although the war was still the only common thread I felt I had with the Vietnamese, I could soon move among them with ease and confidence — not totally trusting, mind you, but more curious than afraid. At that point I even found myself really getting into my work, loving it when it took me far from the boring confines of base camp, sometimes out deep into the more hostile areas of the Central Highlands.

But then, like a giant bell curve, as my time to leave the country neared and I’d survived ten or eleven months, I reverted to being overly cautious and fearful. I had made it through my year. Unlike too many others I’d seen, I was alive, and I intended to go home that way. This kept me, in the last days of my tour, staying as close to base camp as I could, letting the other guy go out to those places where I’d once ventured.

Nonetheless, I was riding high halfway through my tour and feeling bold the day Mitch called me from LZ Victoria, the forward firebase for the 3rd Brigade of the Sixth Infantry. He had someone he wanted me to talk to, he said. The man had a curious tale, and Mitch wasn’t sure how to proceed, or if in fact he should proceed with an investigation at all.

It was this incident that made me realize that a common thread did indeed unite all of us in Vietnam, Vietnamese and GIs alike.

The three of us sat at a small table in the provost marshal’s tent at LZ Victoria; I studied Pfc. Willard as he spoke. He gestured only a little, and his words were even and measured but not forceful.

“At first it just seemed odd, Mr. Hatchett. Too coincidental,” he said to me. “That’s why I decided to tell you the whole story and let you decide if the CID wants to look into this.”

He glanced down at a paper bag stuffed full of something. He’d brought the bag with him and kept it drawn in close to his body. I hadn’t asked about its contents, preferring to let him tell his story first. But whatever was in that bag, I sensed, was part of his tale. He clutched it like it contained the crown jewels of England.

“I’d known Berkley all my life,” Willard said tonelessly. “We were from the same small town in Kansas, went to the same high school. I dated his sister. We went to basic training together, and then we came down together on orders for over here. I’d taken advanced training at the Signal School at Fort Gordon after basic; Berkley took Advanced Infantry Training at Fort Polk. Over here he caught the second of the eleventh infantry, and I got headquarters company. We’d meet from time to time at the brigade mess hall over coffee and catch each other up on any hometown news. So when he told me last week he was worried that some of his own men might be after him and said that they could easily frag him out in the bush, I believed him. I mean, I knew him, Mr. Hatchett. He was scared, and not sure what to do about it. That night he’s dead; KIa’d out in the bush, just like he worried about.”

“Did he mention specifically who in his unit might be after him and why?” I asked.

Fraggings — GIs intentionally killing other GIs — weren’t all that common, but when it happened, it was usually a hard-driving officer or noncom who got the dubious honor bestowed upon him, usually during the heat and confusion of a firefight so it would go unnoticed.

Willard folded his hands atop the bag. They were large hands, callused, the hands of a Kansas farmboy, I imagined. His hair was straw-colored, his face freckled. “He mentioned no names, but since it happened while he was out on patrol, it’s got to be one of the guys he went out with. It was only a six-man short-range recon patrol.”

“You know where the 2/11th is?” I asked Mitch.

“Oh yeah. I sure do. It’s not a full company, only a small detachment. But man oh man, the trouble.” I noted the disgust in Mitch’s voice, and I knew we’d be discussing the 2/11th in fuller detail after Willard left.

“The only thing Berkley said,” Willard continued, “about why they might be out to get him was that ‘they were up to no good again, and it was getting worse,’ he said, and he didn’t like it. That’s how he put it. But like I said, he didn’t know which way to turn. He wasn’t real hot on going to his CO, I guess.”

Mitch muttered, “That’s understandable.”

“Okay,” I said. “Berkley goes out on patrol with these guys, some of whom were up to no good, and he comes back dead. Can I assume they got into some kind of firefight, then?”

“They got into something. We were monitoring it up at Brigade Headquarters. I could hear them yelling in the radio that they’d been ambushed or something or made contact somehow and were falling back. They weren’t supposed to make contact, but sometimes you can’t help it. Someone yelled to give them support. They wanted mortars. They wanted flares. They wanted out of there. They already had one KIA, their point man, they said, and they were bringing him in. Cover them. Over the radio I could hear men yelling in the background and 16s going off. It sounded like a real frenzy. It didn’t last long because they were already breaking contact and were only a few clicks, a few thousand yards, outside our perimeter. It was then I learned the patrol was from the 2/11th and that Berkley was the KIA point man.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“About one in the morning last Tuesday.”

“Besides what he told you, is there anything else that makes you think someone did him during that firefight?”

Willard squinted, considering the seriousness of the question, then said slowly, “I wouldn’t have thought—” He fidgeted. “Let’s say I would have been only suspicious, given what Berkley had said — I mean, killing one of your own is too much to comprehend — so it would have weighed out evenly in me; the weight of that monstrous act against the weight of my suspicions. You know what I mean? I would’ve probably left the country suspicious but wouldn’t’ve done anything about it if I hadn’t gone to Grave Registration. That tipped the scales — ah man, him dying is going to rip his mom apart.” Pfc. Willard twisted the edges of the bag, rolled them and unrolled them.

“What happened at Grave Registration?”

He opened the brown bag. “I got permission to go see him the next day. I guess to say good-bye, maybe take something of his back with me, back to his family. I even thought about calling his mom from here. You know, let me tell her. It might ease things. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that.” Willard drew a stabilizing breath because his voice was beginning to quaver.

“I was going to ask for his Zippo. He’d shown it to me the day before — he had had it engraved with his name and unit — but I couldn’t find it among his personal effects, which is kind of odd because he always carried it. He smoked like a chimney. I always told him his smoking was going to kill him.” Willard snickered bitterly at the irony. “Anyway, I figured the lighter got lost when they were bringing him in, probably fell out of his pocket.

“They already had Berkley laid out, stripped to his shorts. I could see where he took a burst full across the chest, probably killing him instantly. One shot high in the shoulder broke his shoulder. But most of the shots were across his chest and stomach. They’d cleaned the blood off some. His fatigue shirt was lying on the floor in a heap. When I saw his name tag and knew it was his shirt, I picked it up.

“Suddenly I was crying, holding the bloody fatigue shirt he wore — crying for him, crying for me, crying for his mom, crying for all of us, I guess — and I must have been more dazed and in shock than I realized because when I left I was still carrying his shirt wadded up in my fists.”

He reached into the bag, pulled out an army jungle fatigue shirt, and held it up by the shoulders. I could read Berkley on the name tag above the pocket. I could also see BERKLEY was an Sp/4. The shirt was badly soiled with dried blood.

Standing up and stepping back a bit, Willard held the shirt so I could view it better from a distance. “It wasn’t until the next day that I noticed it,” he said, never taking his eyes off me, watching me scrutinize the bloodstained shirt.

Mitch was watching me, too. Other than the large amount of blood caked down the front, I saw nothing particularly unusual about it. “You noticed what?” I asked.

Mitch pushed his chair back, rising.

“No bullet holes, Hatch,” he said. “There isn’t a bullet hole in that shirt. There’s blood all down the front, but that’s it.”

Mitch steered the jeep down the dirt road inside LZ Victoria. Along the perimeter, inside the coils of razor wire and barbed wire, sandbagged bunkers had been erected, every fourth one a towering command bunker. We stopped in front of one of them.

“Each unit is responsible for manning a section of bunkers twenty-four hours a day,” Mitch said, pushing his OD — olive drab — baseball cap back. “The 2/1 ith has Sector Blue, these five bunkers you see here. Cut through the rolls of wire right in front of Sector Blue’s command bunker is a path and a gate allowing patrols to go in and out of the perimeter at night, hopefully unseen.”

I noted the path and a gate of sorts. I could see trip flares tied along the path and at least two Claymores set up and pointed down the path to protect it.

“A while back I got tipped off that the 2/11th bunker guards, led by one Staff Sergeant Reynolds, were sneaking Vietnamese prostitutes in through that gate at night onto the LZ and into their bunkers, if you can believe that.”

“That’s nuts,” I said, astounded not only by the audacity but by the carelessness and stupidity of the act as well.

“Well, I caught them with four whores. I turned the women over to the National Police, who probably took their turn at them before letting them go, and I wrote up Sergeant Reynolds and his cohorts. It’s bad enough that some of them were drunk, some probably smoked up, and two were sleeping on guard duty, but to open those gates and let God-knows-who in — well.”

“Were they court-martialed?”

“They were reprimanded. I think Reynolds lost some pay, a mere slap on the hand. But understand, their CO at the time, Lieutenant Macy, was a wimp. No backbone; scared to death of his own men even. I heard his fear got worse the closer he got to going home. I had it put to me that Sergeant Reynolds actually ran the outfit. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it probably isn’t too far off. All Macy wanted was to leave. He finally got his wish. He was sent home last week. They just got a new CO, so maybe there’ll be some changes for the better.”

He put the jeep in gear. “I’ve had nothing but trouble with that unit since they got here. We’re forever catching them in off-limits bars and whorehouses in Phu Bien, in unauthorized uses of army vehicles, drunk and disorderly. And most probably some blackmarketing is going on. Drugs, almost certainly. It’s a rogue unit, I’ll tell you. It’s like a big party to them.”

“About Berkley’s shirt,” I said as we bounced along the dusty road, “any possibility he was out on point not wearing a shirt?”

“Not from what I’ve been told.”

“Oh?”

“After Willard showed me the shirt, I went to see an infantry captain friend of mine. Like you, I was thinking maybe Berkley had his shirt off when he was hit, then someone put it on him before they took him to Grave Registration. So I asked the captain if he or any of his men ever went shirtless on patrol at night. He laughed. No way, he said. First, the insects would eat you alive. Also, it’s usually dark out there. I mean, these guys aren’t carrying flashlights or anything, so they’re all the time getting slapped by branches and scraped by thorns. Lots of guys wear flak jackets over their shirts. That’s when I decided to call you.”

“But he must have had his shirt off when he was shot. Unless the VC have a new kind of bullet. Maybe it was unbuttoned under his flak jacket, if he wore one. That might explain it.”

“It wouldn’t explain the shoulder wound. A flak jacket is sleeveless, like a vest. I told you it was curious, a real puzzler. Here we are. Maybe these guys can clear it up.”

We pulled into the 2/11th’s detachment area. As I glanced around at the infantry unit’s tents, their sandbagged walls built four feet high up the sides for protection against incoming mortars and rockets, I saw three men busy painting the wooden latrine, four others washing and polishing the company’s jeeps and three-quarter-ton trucks, and a long line of soldiers being marched through the area picking up litter and cigarette butts.

The sides of the mess tent had been lifted to let fresh air through. Inside, I could see a half dozen men in white aprons mopping the wood floors, washing and polishing things.

“This is a switch,” Mitch said, smiling slightly. “I might get to like this new CO of theirs. Look at how they’ve cleaned the place up.”

As we approached the Co’s tent, we could hear someone inside getting chewed out.

“Sergeant Reynolds,” a voice growled, “I don’t care how Lieutenant Macy ran things. Things are going to be run a whole lot different around here from now on. According to the inventory I’ve taken, we’re missing about fifty cases of Lerps; we’re missing two radios; none of the vehicles have spare tires. I haven’t even gotten into the armament yet. The men’s sleeping quarters are a mess.

“There’ll be an inspection tomorrow at 0900. And you’d better start hunting around for those starlight scopes. I want to see them on my desk tomorrow morning. Am I clear on that, sergeant?”

“Yes, sir, Captain Boggs. You are very clear. Shall I steal a couple of starlight scopes off another unit, sir?”

“That’ll be enough, Reynolds. Just find them.”

We pushed through the flaps and entered the command tent. “Who are you?” Boggs asked, glaring at us like a hungry animal looking for something else to chew on and we looked good. Then his expression eased. “Oh yes, the MPs. Someone called and said you were coming over. I’m Captain Boggs, the new CO here.”

“I’m Mr. Hatchett with the CID, and this is Mr. Mitchley, the provost marshal investigator for the MPs here on Victoria.”

Still in a rigid stance Reynolds swiveled his head slowly until his eyes fell directly on Mitch, then on me.

“Sergeant,” Captain Boggs said, “these men want to talk to you.” He brushed past me on his way out of the tent. “You can use this tent if you want, Mr. Hatchett. I’ll get the others.”

He glanced back at Reynolds. “Sergeant, who was with you on that patrol last week, the night, ah — what was his name, the one killed while you were out on recon?”

“Berkley, sir. Sp/4 Berkley.”

Reynolds was staring straight ahead again, not looking at any of us. A bit of blush was leaving his cheeks.

“And the others would be Watson, Thiel, and Jefferson, sir. Collins, too, but he’s on R&R at Cam Ranh Bay. He should be back in a few days. Want me to get them, sir?”

“I’ll get them. You stay here. I just took over last Wednesday,” Boggs explained to Mitch and me, “so I don’t know a lot of my men yet.”

I nodded.

When Boggs had gone, Staff Sergeant Reynolds immediately relaxed.

“Boy, am I glad to be getting out of here,” he said. “What a monster he is.”

“Where you going?” I said, hoping to keep it informal. “Home?”

“The next best thing to home. Fort Dix, New Jersey. I’ve got orders to become a drill instructor for basic trainees. I was born and raised only ten miles from Dix. Hot damn. Good hit. I can live right at home.” He took a seat at Captain Boggs’s desk. Very bold he was, unafraid, it seemed, of further reprimands.

He shuffled through some of Boggs’s papers and finally held up the inventory list. “How the hell am I supposed to know who ate more Lerps than they were supposed to? If the mess hall put out better meals, the guys wouldn’t be eating the Lerps. How am I supposed to know where those starlight scopes are?” He tossed the paper aside. “Man, two weeks and I’m out of here. It cannot get here fast enough.”

Lerps — LRRP really, but pronounced Lerp — stood for Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol, but what it referred to was food, freeze-dried food to be exact, very tasty food infantry units took out with them when they went on patrols. The meal packages, the Lerps, weighed less than the old C-rations, and by merely heating water over a lighted hunk of C-4 explosive and pouring the hot water into the freeze-dried packages, hot meals could be made in the bush far more efficiently and quicker and better tasting than ever before. Lerps also had a great commercial value, so they often ended up on the black market.

Starlight scopes were night vision equipment, a telescopelike device that allowed you to see at night by drawing on the light of the stars or the moon. They didn’t work very well on moonless nights or on heavily clouded ones, but they were handy pieces of equipment. It was hard to imagine how a unit could lose two.

Sergeant Reynolds turned his attention to Mitch and me. “What is it about the night Berkley was killed that you want to know?”

“I’d prefer to wait for the others,” I said. “Were you in charge that night?”

He furrowed his brow. He seemed young for a staff sergeant. “I’m in charge every night, Mr., Mr.—”

“Hatchett,” I said. A big boy, too. Probably played football in high school before joining the army.

“Mr. Hatchett.” Then he muttered harshly, “Used to be in charge anyway,” and glared outside in Boggs’s direction.

The tent flap opened, and three men, two whites and a black, shuffled into the tent. Jefferson, the black enlisted man, had obviously been one of the men washing vehicles because his fatigues were soapy and soaked. Thiel, a small man with black hair and bushy eyebrows, had OD paint on his hands. It was hard to determine what chore Watson had been involved in, but he was a big blond kid who wore his fatigues skin tight.

I made Sergeant Reynolds relinquish the chair behind Captain Boggs’s desk, and I sat in it. Mitch sat on the edge of the desk. The four men we were about to question stood in a line in front of us, their arms crossed behind their backs.

I spoke to them as a group but tried to watch each man individually.

“Last week out on patrol you guys ran into some unfriendlies and got into a brief firefight. Sp/4 Berkley, a member of your patrol, was killed.”

“That’s not exactly right,” Sergeant Reynolds said.

The others stared down at the dirt floor; only Reynolds looked at Mitch and me.

“Would you care to correct me, then, sergeant?” I said.

“Yes, sir. Berkley was not killed in our firefight with the VC per se. Berkley was already dead. Actually, Berkley was the reason we got into the firefight. If he had stayed out of sight like he was supposed to, he might still be here today. May I clarify, Mr. Hatchett?”

The others, except for Thiel, had raised their heads and were now watching Reynolds. “Please do,” I told him.

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“Our job that night,” he said, “like the many other nights we went out on those recons, was to set up along a well-traveled trail about three clicks out. That’s three thousand yards, give or take. We were only to monitor any movement along the trail by the VC. We were not to engage the enemy. Understand, Mr. Hatchett, this brigade is set up in part to monitor movement all along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But the Ho Chi Minh Trail is not a trail like the Appalachian Trail is a trail. It’s a whole system of roads and trails from Hanoi to Saigon, and the trail we were monitoring is just one small part of it. We’d done this quite a few times before, whenever orders came down from brigade.”

Sergeant Reynolds drew out a cigarette, offered the pack to all of us, and continued. “Berkley was on point, maybe fifty yards ahead of us. He was to wait for us out of sight at a spot where the trail forked. Suddenly we heard a burst of gunfire ahead. I tried to raise Berkley but couldn’t, so we crept forward to find out what had happened to him. About the time we saw him, lying at the fork, we began taking fire from VCs.”

“Heavy fire,” Watson added, nudging Reynolds. “What would you say, sarge, a dozen VC?”

“Probably that many at least. Like us, a small patrol.” Reynolds drew on his cigarette. “We returned fire, of course, and moved in to get Berkley out of there. I assumed he was dead, leastways he wasn’t moving, but no way was I going to leave him there.” He paused and looked at Jefferson.

“Go on,” I said. Thiel caught my attention. He was the only one of the four soldiers who didn’t seem to want to look directly at Mitch or me or the others and didn’t seem anxious to contribute. Instead he scowled at the dirt floor and busied his hands by picking dried paint off them.

“I had Jefferson here on the horn calling for mortars to cover us when we made our way back to Victoria,” Reynolds continued. “I was finally able to make it to where Berkley was and drug him back out of fire. These guys kept the gooks busy while I was doing that. Turned out we didn’t need mortars.”

“So you four and Collins were together when Berkley was ahead on point? You’re fortunate no one else was killed.”

“We had plenty of cover. The jungle’s pretty thick in there,” Jefferson explained.

“How far did you have to drag Berkley?”

“Only fifty feet or so, to where the trail bent a bit. About that far, wasn’t it, Watson? Then I threw him over my shoulder and carried him back to Victoria while these guys covered our retreat. But the VC weren’t following us. I think they were as surprised by the encounter as we were.”

“It’s very commendable getting Berkley out of there.”

“I wasn’t going to leave him, Mr. Hatchett. He was in my command, and he was a good friend. I wouldn’t want to be left out there, alive or dead. He was a great guy.”

The others, except Thiel, nodded agreement.

“How long did the firefight last?” I asked. “Thiel? Any idea how long?”

Thiel snapped his head up, surprised. “Ah, I–I-I’m sorry. What?”

“About ten minutes. Maybe twenty,” Sergeant Reynolds answered.

“About that,” Thiel muttered.

“Seemed like a lifetime,” Jefferson added.

“I’ll bet it did,” I said. What they’d just described was a common firefight, however short it was. I’d heard nothing earth-shattering or unusual in their account, so I shuffled some papers on Captain Boggs’s desk, leaned back so I could see the entire group better, and asked the question I wanted answered most. I directed it at Sergeant Reynolds.

“When you finally reached Berkley lying there dead on the trail, you say you dragged him back fifty feet or so.” Reynolds watched my lips intently as if he were reading each word as it came out of my mouth. “How did you drag him? I mean, where did you grab him to drag him?”

Without hesitation Reynolds said, “At first I grabbed him under the armpits. But his shoulder was broken and it was flopping in the shattered socket and hard to get ahold of, so I reached down and grabbed him by the shirt. Like this.”

Reynolds stepped behind Jefferson, reached over Jefferson’s shoulders with both arms, and grabbed handfuls of fatigue material in the area of Jefferson’s shirt pockets.

“And that’s how you got him out? Holding on to his shirt?”

“Yes, sir,” Reynolds said.

“Was his shirt buttoned?”

“I suppose so. I believe so. Yes. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Steel pot?”

“He wore a slop hat.” Reynolds appeared puzzled momentarily, then recovered. “Boots, too,” he said. “Berkley had his boots on in case that’s the next question about how we dress.”

Thiel was still looking pretty sour, but the others smiled at Sergeant Reynolds’s smart-aleck remark.

I ignored it, but privately I enjoyed it because he had inadvertently given me a little more cover to disguise what we were really after. “Were his boots laced?” I asked.

“Hell, no. They were untied, and he was always tripping over them. Of course his boots were laced. His shirt was buttoned. His hat was on. His—”

“Was he wearing a flak jacket?”

“No. Berkley didn’t like them. Too confining, he said. They don’t stop bullets anyway, and Berkley always said that while your upper torso might get protected from shrapnel, your groin and face are exposed. He never wore a flak jacket.”

“So you grabbed him by his shirt and dragged him back?”

“That’s correct, Mr. Hatchett.” He ground his cigarette out on the floor with his boot. “Why all the questions about how he was dressed? Is the army becoming fashion-conscious these days?”

With grim, stone-faced expressions, every man including Thiel was watching me, awaiting the answer. Apparently this time none of them saw anything funny in Reynolds’s attempt at humor.

I sat forward in the chair and studied them. Finally I said, “It’s something we have to do from time to time. This just happens to be one of those times.”

I thought it was a great answer — truthful, in a vague sort of way.

After the session, in which everyone basically verified Reynolds’s account of the firefight, we followed the four men out of the tent. I kept my eye on Thiel as the group meandered toward the mess hall. I could tell they were talking fiercely among themselves. Once out of earshot they stopped suddenly, and I watched Sergeant Reynolds spin Thiel around, speaking to him sharply, stabbing a finger into Thiel’s face as he spoke.

“Shouldn’t we have interviewed them all separately?” Mitch asked as we watched the foursome enter the mess tent.

“We could have done it that way, yes. And we still can. I wanted to view them as a group first and see how they interacted. Besides, if something happened out there, you can bet they’ve got their story straight. These infantry units are close-knit groups. But remind me to call the CID office at base camp sometime soon. I have to make a few arrangements.”

Mitch nodded. “Interesting about the shirt, wasn’t it?”

“If Berkley was killed by VC in that firefight with his shirt on, that leaves us with those new kind of bullets the VC must have.”

“Or,” Mitch said, “maybe the VC tackled him, opened his shirt, shot him, then buttoned his shirt again.”

Although I chuckled, I added, “You might be closer to the truth than you realize.”

Captain Boggs was approaching us from across the company area.

“Where to from here?” Mitch wanted to know.

Before I could answer, Boggs spoke, “You done?”

“Yes, we are,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Anything I can do to help, let me know.”

“There is one thing. Tomorrow morning after your inspection, let’s say at 1100 hours, would you bring Thiel up to the command bunker in Sector Blue? I’m going to need him for a few hours.”

“Just Thiel? Not the others.”

“Just Thiel. And don’t say anything to anyone, even to Thiel, about where you’re taking him.”

“Can do,” Captain Boggs said.

“What do you have planned?” Mitch asked.

I donned my baseball cap. “Tomorrow you, me, Thiel, and a detachment of MPs, combat ready, are going out to where Berkley was killed. It seems Thiel might be the weak point in the group and the one we now want to separate from the others. I want him to show us just where on the Ho Chi Minh Trail Sp/4 Berkley was killed. I agree with Willard. I don’t think Berkley was killed by the VC. At least not in that firefight.”

The Village

The jungle foliage on both sides of the path we followed was so thick hardly any sunlight reached the ground, giving me the sensation we were walking in perpetual twilight.

The path was a well-traveled one and wide enough that we could walk two abreast on it. I’d sent two MPs on ahead as point men even though our chances of stumbling on the enemy in midmorning so close to the brigade firebase were slight. The VC loved the night.

Two MPs brought up the rear, five others were with Mitch and me and Thiel. But all of us were armed with 16s and M-79 grenade launchers just in case.

Earlier, when we met Thiel at the command bunker and I told him that I wanted him to take me to the spot where Berkley was killed, his only response had been a pained, twisted look and a slight nod. Then he mumbled a profanity I didn’t quite understand.

We hadn’t gone very far down the trail when the MPs on point radioed that they had reached the fork in the path and would wait for us. But when we finally caught up with them, Thiel said it was the wrong fork. “It forks again up ahead,” he said. “This path here” — he indicated an equally well-traveled path to the left — “goes into a small village somewhere over there.” He motioned with his head in a generally easterly direction.

We moved on, deeper into the jungle, where the moist heat, trapped air, and mildew made it feel and smell like we were pushing through a large sun-steamed terrarium dripping with condensation.

Thirty minutes later, a couple of thousand yards down the path, we congregated at the spot where Berkley died.

“Somewhere right in here is where he was lying,” Thiel said, pointing at the confluence of two trails. He studied the earth and kicked at some leaves and debris. “In fact, here’s some of his blood.”

Sure enough, among some dead leaves I could see large blotches of dried blood that the ants and flies hadn’t gotten to yet.

Thiel sat down beside the path, leaned against a tree, put his head between his knees, and rocked his torso slowly, rhythmically.

“Where does this trail lead?” I asked of the left fork.

“The right one goes on and on to I don’t know where. Hanoi, maybe,” Thiel answered. “The left one intersects with another trail up ahead that eventually also leads to that village I told you about back there. It’s that trail we were to monitor. The VC were coming up the right fork when Berkley encountered them.”

“How far away is the village?”

“A couple of clicks maybe. You can also get to it by vehicle, but you have to drive almost into Phu Bien and then take a dirt road back to it.”

I concentrated on studying the thick broadleaf foliage growing profusely where the firefight had taken place.

Things weren’t quite right — something was missing.

An MP called to me and pointed at the ground. There I spied three spent M-16 shell casings scattered off the path. “Aren’t many empty casings,” I said to Thiel, “for a fifteen-, twenty-minute fire-fight. How many rounds you think you guys got off before dragging Berkley out of here?”

“Hundreds, maybe. A thousand, who knows?” Thiel said, his head still down between his legs. “The VC, or civilians, come along and pick up any spent cartridges, Mr. Hatchett. They can either reload them and use them on us, or they sell them for the brass. That’s why you don’t see many lying around. They must have overlooked those there.” He raised his head and stared across the path at me. “Why am I here with you, Mr. Hatchett?” he asked. “Why are we doing this? The CID doesn’t normally do this. Berkley is dead. Berkley was killed. In a firefight. Here. By VC. That’s all there is to it.”

Again I scanned the heavy growth of trees, vines, and undergrowth at the hub of the firefight. In the mountain region of northwestern Pennsylvania where I come from, the forest grows thick and dense, although not as thick as the steamy jungle, and I was thinking of that forest back home when I suddenly realized what was missing. I pressed Thiel further.

“So Berkley was lying here, where this blood is. Reynolds reached him while you guys were firing at VC, who were firing at you — what? A thousand rounds fired all told, you said?”

“I don’t know,” Thiel said. “I don’t know. I wasn’t counting rounds fired. There were a lot of rounds fired. It could be a thousand. Twelve of them, five of us, each firing a couple or three clips; each clip twenty rounds. Maybe more, even.”

“And you saw Reynolds dragging Berkley back, is that right? He was dragging him by his shirt? Where were you?”

“Somewhere right in here. I — Mr. Hatchett, I don’t know how many firelights you’ve been in, but you lose all senses during one. Things get confusing. You are scared out of your wits. Your only thought is to lay down as much firepower as you can, as quick as you can. Understand? Your only intention is to get out of there. Alive. That’s what I and the others were doing while Reynolds was dragging Berkley.”

I figured the time might be ripe to give Thiel something to chew on, something to take back to his buddies, something to make him a little jumpy. I’d seen enough. Or rather, not enough, and that’s what bothered me. “You’re right,” I said. “I’ve never been in a firenght like this. But there’s something that isn’t quite right here.”

“What’s not quite right here?” Thiel’s voice rose in impatience and anger and disbelief. “What’s not right here, Mr. Hatchett? Berkley was lying right there. Look at his blood. You found some shell casings. What’s not right? Are the trees not growing right? That path not right? What’s not right?”

I leveled a look at him to let him know I was dead serious about what I was about to tell him. “For a small area of thick jungle where a thousand rounds, maybe more, maybe less, were fired, I find it odd that there’s not one tree scarred, not one branch nicked or broken by a bullet, not one leaf stripped. Could you tell me, Thiel, how a thousand rounds could be fired through this thick growth in this small area and not one of them hit so much as a twig? What kind of bullets were you and the VC using anyway?”

Thiel stared at me for several moments, mouth agape, face flushed a bit, maybe from the heat. His eyes skipped over the nearby branches. The corners of his mouth twitched nervously. Then he put his head back on his knees. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

I turned to Mitch and the MPs. “Let’s head back,” I said. “Tomorrow afternoon we’ll pay a visit to that village.”

“I suppose you’re going to want me to go with you then, too,” Thiel said, rising to his feet, dusting himself off.

“No,” I said. “We’ll go alone from here on out.”

The birthday party that evening in Military Intelligence’s company area was in full swing by the time I arrived, after making a call to the CID in base camp to set things in motion there.

Because part of Mi’s job was to interrogate POWs and it was part of the MPs’ job to guard POWs, MI and MP units were often set up right next to each other. The small detachment of intelligence personnel on LZ Victoria included birthday boy Tom Fingers, the commanding officer Mr. Sommers, and three others. These men, as well as Mitch and two MPs, sat in lawn chairs outside Mi’s command tent drinking beer. Tom Fingers was well into his cups by the time I got there.

There were times in Vietnam when you’d never know a war was going on, and this was one of those times: a bunch of guys off duty, sitting around in the cooling evening under a silver sky, drinking beer, joking, and barbecuing ham steaks.

“Mitch tells me you’re interested in Bravo 457,” Mr. Sommers said after I’d gotten comfortable in a lawn chair, beer in hand.

“Bravo 457?”

“That’s what we call that village you’re going to tomorrow. It’s got a name, but it’s easier to refer to it as Bravo 457.”

“You’re familiar with it, then?” I said.

Sommers, a recent law school graduate before being drafted into the army, still had a boyish, preppy look to him even in his jungle fatigues and short GI haircut. Like Mitch and me, he wore no rank insignia, and I guessed he was either a lieutenant or, like me, a warrant officer.

He stirred in his lawn chair, crossing a leg. “We had a great informant in Bravo 457. We’d pop in from time to time, talk with the villagers — individually, of course, so that no one else in the village would know who was passing us info about VC or NVA movement through the area. Most of the population — women, old men, and children — aren’t very reliable and are uncooperative, but we managed to find one good one there. Well, he used to be reliable, anyway.”

“The others are VC sympathizers?”

Sommers scrunched his face.

“Hard to tell. They could be sympathizers; they could be VC. Could be, too, they just don’t want to be involved with us or the VC. They like our money, mind you, but all in all I get the impression they want to be left alone. What’s your interest in the village, Hatch?”

“I want to look around. I want to see if it’s the kind of place a guy could kick back in, you know, relax a bit, maybe take his shirt off.”

“I’m not sure I understand that, but I’m thinking, if you don’t mind, me, Fingers, and one other, plus our interpreter, will tag along. It’s been a while since we’ve been out there, and I’m getting a little worried about our boy.”

“Oh?”

“The last couple of months or so he’s been inaccurate in his information. It used to be that we could bank on it. At least, we’ve dished out a lot of money for information. But lately we’ll have reports of VC movement along a trail that leads into the village, yet our informant will tell us there’ve been no VC through. I’m fearing he may have been turned. We haven’t used him in a while.”

“Is your other source reliable, you think?” I asked.

“It better be. It’s an American infantry unit. They send recons out whenever we request it through brigade.”

“You mean units like the 2/11th infantry?”

“I can’t tell you that. But that might be close. Do you mind if we go in with you tomorrow?”

“I wouldn’t mind at all,” I said. “I’d welcome it.”

Sommers tipped his beer can my way. “Excellent. If you want information about anything in the village without really asking it, I think you’ll find Mr. Fingers has some special talents.”

I looked over at Fingers, who was staggering to the beer cooler. Merely standing up seemed to be giving him some difficulty, so it was hard to imagine what his special talents might be.

“We’ll drive out tomorrow after lunch,” Sommers said.

“I’d prefer to walk if you don’t mind. There’s a path from the perimeter leading into the village that I want to look at, too.”

Sommers gulped down the last of his beer and watched as Fingers came toward him carrying full cans of beer for the rest of us. “Walk, huh? We can do that. We can walk, can’t we, Fingers?”

Fingers swayed. “Just barely, sir,” he slurred. “Just barely.”

The trail to the village offered nothing unusual. It wasn’t unlike the trail we’d been on the day before, well traveled and wide, except this one seemed to go downhill more.

It was midafternoon by the time we reached the village. Sommers convinced me that taking a full contingent of MPs with us might be unwise. It was intimidating to the villagers, he said. But fear not, he added, he always had a platoon or two of infantry positioned about a mile down the road toward Phu Bien, just in case we should run into problems. They could be there in a couple of minutes if we needed them.

Only a half dozen ramshackle huts made up the back-jungle village. Most stood in a row, but one hut was built back a bit near the rim of the jungle. The houses were constructed from large pieces of broken and splintered plywood, misshapen tin, thick corrugated cardboard, and whatever else could be salvaged out of American garbage dumps. The air was choked with gray wood-smoke from cookfires, and a strong stench — a thick, musty, pungent odor of animal and human feces, garbage, and unbathed people — burned my nostrils.

About two dozen peasants occupied the village, and they hardly lifted their heads when we emerged from the trail and stepped into the clearing the village occupied.

Of the half dozen huts, the one sitting by itself immediately sparked my curiosity. It looked recently built, yet there was no sign of life around it. Because it was erected from what appeared to be new sheets of plywood, it seemed too new, too well built, as if it didn’t belong there.

And of the couple of dozen old men and women stooped over cookfires or standing in the open doorways of their huts, some clutching small children, the frail old woman sobbing with soul-deep, agonizing cries was the hardest to ignore.

She wailed in long, high-pitched sounds to no one as she squatted in the doorway grasping her midsection with one hand, the other hand flailing limply in front of her, her bony fingers clawing air as if she was trying to grab handfuls of something that wasn’t there.

When the six of us walked into the village, the crying old woman for some reason picked me as the focus of her attention, or at least it seemed that way. She’d wail mournfully and claw the air, then raise her head, wipe her tearstained face with a dirty sleeve, and watch me for a moment or two before breaking into a renewed burst of sorrow. Then she’d watch me some more. She seemed to be interested in no one but me as Mitch and I moved toward the farthest hut.

Mr. Sommers, the interpreter, and another MI personnel talked with an old man off to the side out of hearing of the others. Fingers more or less meandered around the village grounds looking like he was lost and didn’t know what to do about it. I was guessing he was hung over from the night before and still groggy. He’d been pretty quiet on the long walk out, sweating profusely.

Mitch and I stood outside the door of the new hut. The plywood was American, and it was almost brand-new, not the kind you’d pull from a dump. The door was closed but not locked, so I pushed it partly open with my foot. Inside I could see a large front room with a dirt floor and a long plywood counter running along one wall. On the opposite side were two chairs and a small table. Two doors led to other rooms built behind the main room. I saw no cooking utensils, no personal objects, no religious statues, no mats for sitting on the floor, no dining area, nothing domestic. I got the impression the hut I was looking into wasn’t someone’s living quarters but a place of business — a new barroom and whorehouse like the many used in Phu Bien.

When I glanced over my shoulder across the village grounds through the thin, gray wisps of woodsmoke, I was surprised to see Sommers and the interpreter walking towards us, apparently already done with their many interviews. Sommers wiped his hot brow with his sleeve, looking very glum, and stole a look at the old woman, who was still studying me, craning her neck to see what I was doing, and still crying.

When I stepped into the hut, the door didn’t open all the way, so I looked to see what might be holding it. Fresh dirt was sprinkled heavily along the floor directly behind it. I pushed harder, scraping the dirt back until the door opened wide.

Inside, I looked behind the counter, where I found a row of washed glasses, an open box of cocktail stirrers, and a container that still had water in it from melted ice, but no booze. Two kerosene lamps were also behind the bar.

I made my way to the two back rooms, but by this time I was pretty sure I knew what I’d find in each room — beds.

Sure enough, each room had two wooden beds built against opposite walls. A thin mattress, a dingy sheet, and a small pillow made up the bedding for each. A curtain fabricated from a blanket hung on a wire so it could be drawn in front of each bed for privacy. A small nightstand held a metal washbasin with a rag and towel for cleaning up, and hooks for hanging clothes were nailed into the walls. It wasn’t hard to visualize a jungle fatigue shirt hanging from one of those hooks.

I checked all the rooms for anything to indicate that American soldiers had been there — cigarette butts, discarded clothing, empty food containers, beer cans, American magazines — but I saw nothing. The place was empty except for the bar supplies and the sparse furnishings.

I stepped from the coolness of the hut into the bright sunlight, where I almost knocked down an old man jabbering Vietnamese to Mi’s interpreter. Sommers and Tom Fingers stood nearby, listening. I was surprised when the interpreter said to me, “He wants to talk to you. He wants to talk with CID.”

“He does?” I was amazed the old man knew the difference between Mr. Sommers and his MI group and the CID. But then I remembered that the old woman had also picked me out of the group. I looked over at her. Still squatting, she’d stopped crying and was watching us.

“How does he know who I am?” I asked the interpreter.

He put the question to the old man, who gave a quick reply. The interpreter told me, “He say Mr. Tiger tell him.”

“Whooooa, stop right there,” Sommers exclaimed suddenly, reaching over and jerking me by the shoulder. He led me with Tom Fingers and Mitch off to the side, out of earshot of the villagers. The interpreter stayed with the old man. The old woman watched our little conference. “You know who Tiger is?” Sommers asked.

I shook my head. “I’m still trying to figure out how the old man knew who I was.”

“They all know who you are,” Fingers said. “And why you’re here.”

I got the immediate impression there were things going on around me I didn’t know about, and I was beginning to feel left out. “How do you know that?”

Sommers explained. “I told you Fingers has some special talents. One of them is that he speaks fluent Vietnamese. His job on these little outings is to meander around the village while we’re interviewing villagers. You’d be surprised what folks say to each other when they think someone can’t understand them. Not even our interpreter knows that Fingers knows their language. We’ve picked up a lot of useful information that way.”

I was gaining new respect for Tom Fingers. “What did you hear about me?” I asked him.

“That they know you’re CID here to look into the death of an American soldier killed in this village.”

“Up until now I wasn’t sure it did happen here. Did anyone say it actually occurred here? Did anyone see it happen?” Oh, hope against hope.

“No. Just that you knew it did.”

I didn’t know any such thing, but it was looking more and more promising. “Thiel,” I said mostly to myself. “He told the others I was coming out here. He’s the only one who could have. And they told — so, who is Mr. Tiger?” I directed this at Sommers.

“Bigtime. Bigtime VC. At least so we’ve always suspected. Tiger’s his nickname. He’s a successful Vietnamese businessman, something of a hometown hero in Phu Bien. And if what we know is true, he is very high up in the Vietcong organization. He’s the enemy, Hatch. Trust me.”

“Do these villagers know Tiger is VC?” I asked.

“Probably not,” Sommers said. “To them he’s a businessman, a countryman, a hero, a source of income, too, probably. He would not announce to these villagers he was VC any more than he’d tell us. But this is the first I’ve heard of his being involved in anything out here. Knowing what we know now, though, it fits in.”

“What do you mean?”

“Our informant is dead, Hatch. The kid was dragged off by the VC a few nights ago and killed, hacked to death. That’s his mother over there crying her heart out, poor soul.”

I glanced back at the woman and saw she was gone, probably into her hut.

“Her parents were killed by the French when they were here fighting this same war. Her husband was killed either by Americans or VC during the Tet offensive when the VC tried to overrun Phu Bien. Caught in the cross fire. Just an innocent civilian in the wrong place at the wrong time. And now her son is killed by the VC. Would you care to venture a guess at whose side she might be on?”

“No one’s, I would imagine,” I said.

“Exactly,” Sommers said.

“I’ve got to find out what this old man knows.”

“Be careful. Pretend you know nothing about Tiger. He’s just a businessman. We want to keep it that way. And the information is probably going to cost you. That’s why he came to you.”

“How much?”

“Depends on how hungry he is. If you need money, I have some here.” Sommers pulled his wallet out and stuffed a hundred piasters into my hand. “Try not to pay any more than that. That’s probably six months’ wages for this guy.”

At first I was hesitant about paying for information, paying a possible witness for his testimony. MI could get away with that; they could use bought info. I couldn’t. On the other hand, if he could give me something concrete — names, dates, or perhaps he was an actual eyewitness — I could go from there. I couldn’t pass it up. I’d be further ahead with purchased information I couldn’t use than without it. It sure beat tromping around in the jungle looking under leaves for leads.

Turned out the information wasn’t all that good. Not totally bad, mind you, but he wouldn’t be a star witness in any court-martial, that was for sure.

The old man was smoking something in a pipe that smelled like oily rags burning, and he had his own particular air about him that made me stand back a ways. He folded the money I’d given him, and through the interpreter he said, “The Americans come here at night sometimes.”

“How many? And always at night?” I spoke through the interpreter but not to him, preferring to watch the old man.

He held up six fingers to the interpreter and nodded. “Always at night,” the interpreter said. “Usually about six of them come in from the jungle down that path we used.”

The old man began to jabber in Vietnamese, a longwinded account of something. I could only wait until he was done.

Finally the interpreter said, “He say they come here at night and stay with the prostitutes Mr. Tiger brings for them in his jeep. Mr. Tiger, he leaves. The soldiers are not here every night, but they stay all night to just before dawn. Then Mr. Tiger come back and pick up girls and take them to Phu Bien.”

“Ask him what happened the night someone was shot here. When did it happen? Did he see it? Ask him like that, in those words.”

It seemed like forever before the interpreter said, “He say last week it happened, but he did not see. He was in his house when shots were fired in Mr. Tiger’s house, where the Americans and the Vietnamese prostitutes were. He say maybe five or six shots he heard. Not all at once. Then the soldiers ran out carrying another soldier, running down the path into the jungle.”

“Ask him if he would recognize any of the men if he were to see them today. Were they white soldiers or black soldiers?”

A moment later the interpreter said, “He say he does not recognize them because it is always dark and he is always in his house. He does not know.”

I pointed at my shoulder and my 6th Division patch sewn there. “Ask him, did they wear one of these?” There were hundreds of units in the area, and I was hoping to pin it down as close to the 2/11th as I could. But before his answer could be translated, the old man shook his head no, so I knew he’d seen no unit patches either.

“What else can he tell me about what happened that night?”

Vietnamese was exchanged between the interpreter and the peasant. The old man shrugged. Then the interpreter said, “He does not know any more than what he has said.”

“Just that he heard several shots last week in the hut and the GIs came running out carrying a body and the GIs come here always at night but not every night, and Mr. Tiger provides the entertainment?”

“That is correct.”

A good interpreter not only translates but also is not afraid to use his own insights into the people he is speaking with, so I asked, “Do you believe him?”

“Yes. He is telling the truth, I think.”

“Ask him one more thing. Ask when Tiger told him about me, and what did he say?”

The question was put to the old man.

“He say Mr. Tiger drive his jeep from Phu Bien to the village this morning. This man help Mr. Tiger load boxes from the hut to his jeep. He does not know what was in the boxes, but they were very heavy. Mr. Tiger tell him he must get them out because a very tall American is coming today and will be asking questions about what happened here. Mr. Tiger say he does not want to talk with the American CID soldier.”

“How many boxes? How big?”

A few moments later, “He say maybe ten and so large enough that they almost did not all fit in the jeep.”

“Do the VC ever come here?”

“Hey, Hatch,” Sommers interjected sternly. “Watch it. You’re in my territory.”

“Sorry,” I said, “just that one last question.”

The MI interpreter glanced at Sommers to see if he should ask the question or not. Sommers nodded to go ahead. “Just that one,” Sommers told his interpreter.

“He say,” the interpreter said after putting the question to the old man, “he does not think the VC come here.” The interpreter looked skyward, adjusted his steel pot on his head, added as an aside, “But he is lying about that, Mr. Hatchett.”

Before we left the village, I had Mi’s interpreter address the entire village, asking if any of the villagers had any information regarding the shooting that took place in their midst the week before. All I got in response were blank, hollow looks and stares. As we left, I glanced back at the old woman. She sat squatting outside her hut again, rocking slowly on her haunches, her arms folded around her bony knees, her scraggly black hair hanging down her face, her dead, unblinking eyes following my every step until we were out of sight.

Sommers, Mitch, and I lagged behind the others on the trail back to Victoria.

“I’d say the trip was fruitful for you,” Sommers said.

“Oh yeah. If I believe the old man, I’m now sure something did happen, and I know where it happened. I just don’t know why or who in particular did the shooting. My problem is, I’ve got to be able to place Reynolds and his patrol in that village that night. That’s all there is to it. I’ve got to chip away at the wall of secrecy and complicity they’ve built around themselves. That isn’t going to be easy, but I can use what I already know, and I’m hoping I can use Collins as a kind of battering ram.”

“Collins?” Mitch asked. “The one on R&R?”

“I have him on ice right now. When I called the CID yesterday, I told them to pick up Collins the minute he stepped off the chopper back from R&R and to hold him at the MPs’ in base camp and let him talk to no one. He’s in for a real surprise. He doesn’t have the slightest idea we even suspect something went on on that patrol. They’ll fly him to Victoria when I’m ready for him. Maybe he’ll talk.”

“What do you think were in the boxes Tiger stuffed in his jeep?” Mitch asked. “If it were anything of value, why would he leave them in that village in the middle of the jungle?”

“My first thought was so the VC could pick them up; then I realized Tiger probably wouldn’t risk the villagers’ knowing he has VC connections. So more than likely he was storing them there, out of sight. I’m guessing it’s military stuff.”

“Why’s that?” Mitch asked.

“Remember when we heard Captain Boggs complaining that they were missing a lot of items, food, starlight scopes, radios, and God only knows what else? I want to check with him later to see how his inventory came out finally.”

“Ah, Jesus, whether Tiger’s storing it or passing it out to VC, either way the VC eventually will end up with whatever it is,” Sommers said. “You’re sure it’s military materiel?”

“It’s a very good chance. If it is happening, Reynolds and the boys are in way over their heads and don’t even know it. They probably think Tiger is just another man out to make a buck off the black market. They could be selling him military stuff out here in the village, or maybe in Phu Bien. Things bought cheap at the PX in the MACV compound in Phu Bien, too, probably. The only limit over here is your own imagination when it comes to stealing and selling something.”

“You think they’re getting free use of the girls as payment?” Mitch asked.

“I hope they’re getting more than that. Those girls would be nothing more than openers for a guy like Tiger. He’ll keep asking for more and more, sucking the men deeper into his scheme. After a while it gets so bad, you can’t refuse.”

“That jibes with Willard’s saying Berkley told him that they were up to no good again and that it was getting worse.”

“Right-o. They may have gone from bringing girls onto Victoria to meeting some out here and then on to selling stuff to Tiger. They could have met Tiger sometime while they were running around in Phu Bien. I think that’s where those starlight scopes are. The VC have them now and are using them on us if Tiger is a high-level VC. I don’t know what else is going to turn up missing in Boggs’s inventory, but no one loses two starlight scopes. They probably stole them right under the nose of a very inattentive Lieutenant Macy.”

“We don’t know for sure it was military equipment Tiger got out of there,” Mitch said.

“Well, whatever it was, he was not supposed to have it and took the stuff out of there in a hurry. He didn’t want me seeing it. If it were just business or personal items, he’d know I’d have no interest in them, nor any authority to take them.” We walked in silence along the path. “I’ve just had another horrible thought, though.” What had suddenly occurred to me stopped me dead on the trail.

Sommers and Mitch stopped, too. “What?” Sommers asked.

“Your informant. You said lately he’d become unreliable. You were basing that on what the patrol of the 2/11th reported. Correct?”

Sommers nodded. “We were more or less comparing reports, yes. We were testing his reliability. If he proved out, we could use him elsewhere, pay him more. I suppose we’re not much unlike Tiger in that respect.”

“Well, try this on for size. There’s a very good chance the patrol hasn’t been going out to monitor movement. They’ve been at the village every night they were out. They might have sent one man down the path to keep watch for any VC, but that would be it. Of course, if Tiger is as high up as you say and the patrol was dealing in stolen military goods, Tiger would make sure his little operation wasn’t interrupted by a VC patrol wandering in. It’s the VC he’s buying the stuff for.”

Mitch said, “So the patrol is in no real danger, even though they don’t know it.”

“That’s right. Tiger would see to that. But these guys have to write a report when they come in. If they aren’t where they’re supposed to be, how would they know if there was any movement along that trail? They don’t. So they make up something for a report. What I’m saying is, your informant might not have been wrong at all. Probably hadn’t been turned. It makes sense because if he did turn to the VC, why’d the VC kill him?”

“I wonder why my informant never told me this was going on. He wouldn’t necessarily know who the patrol was or what their job was, and they wouldn’t know him, but he should have mentioned these guys staying all night in the village.”

“Did you ever ask him?” I said.

Sommers grunted no and continued down the path. “I would never have thought to,” he said.

“Could be he didn’t want to cross Tiger in what he might have seen simply as just another black-market operation, the kind run all over Vietnam. Could be he was getting money from Tiger, too. He wouldn’t know Tiger is VC any more than Reynolds does. We’re dealing with a lot of unreliables here.”

“Whatever,” Sommers said. “Now I’ll have to go through all the patrol’s reports and consider them tainted. Two weeks ago they reported that a company-sized unit of VC passed through the area down that trail. What you’re saying is, that could be a boldfaced lie.”

“What was your informant’s report on that?”

“I don’t know. By that time I’d stopped talking with him, figuring he’d been turned.”

“I want these guys,” I said to Mitch. “I’ve got a plan that will require a little theatrics from you. Maybe it’ll shake something loose and one of those buzzards will start talking.”

The Wall

As it turned out, wanting them and getting them were miles apart, theatrics or no theatrics, plan or no plan.

Once back on Victoria, my first step was to revisit Captain Boggs to find out what had turned up missing from the 2/nth’s inventory. I found him in the mess hall, clipboard in hand. He was counting something on the floor.

“This is a good one,” he said. “I have a requisition form here signed months ago by Lieutenant Macy for a hundred sheets of plywood and picked up at supply by Sergeant Reynolds. It’s noted on the form that the plywood was to be used to replace rotting plywood on the floor of the mess tent. Not only do I not see any new plywood on this floor, but that many sheets is enough to cover this entire mess tent three times. That’s what caught my attention. I’ve done carpentry work back in the world. A hundred sheets is thirty-two hundred square feet.”

I didn’t bother telling him I knew where his plywood was. “What else seems to be missing?” I asked.

He glanced down at his clipboard. “Let’s see here: two radios, two starlight scopes, untold cases of Lerps, five jeep tires. I think, but I’m not sure yet, two M-79 grenade launchers plus a case each of tear gas, high explosive, and shotgun rounds for the grenade launchers. The rounds would be hard to trace, but Reynolds said the M-79s were destroyed in a firefight and he thought Lieutenant Macy just forgot to report them destroyed as he should have.

“We’re supposed to have an extra medium-sized tent around here, too, but I don’t see it. Reynolds said he saw Macy doing something with it one day. We’ve got a new generator. I don’t see that the old one was ever returned, yet it’s nowhere around here. And here’s another, a good one: our potable-water trailer was stolen. According to Reynolds, an infantry unit that was pulling out sneaked in, hooked up to it, and stole it. The theft supposedly was reported to the MPs.”

“I’ll check it out,” I told Boggs. “Mitch would have a copy of the report.” I had a feeling the report would be there. That’s not to say the water trailer was actually stolen by another unit, though.

“By the looks of this, and I’m sure there’ll be more, I’m lucky I’ve got a chair to sit in.” Boggs slapped the clipboard hard against his leg. “What the hell was Macy doing all this time?”

It hadn’t escaped me that Sergeant Reynolds’s name seemed to pop up an awful lot. If Reynolds was stealing and then black-marketing the stuff, he was going about it well, mixing it up and always having a good reason for things being missing. When he couldn’t come up with one, he blamed Lieutenant Macy, who was now half a world away.

“Did any of those men I talked to in your tent go into Phu Bien after I brought Thiel back yesterday?” I asked. I was hoping to discover who had tipped off Mr. Tiger and sent him scurrying out to the village.

Captain Boggs thought for a moment. “Thiel did. He drove in an hour or so after you brought him back. He said Sergeant Reynolds told him to pick up the laundry in Phu Bien.”

“Did you hear Reynolds tell him that?”

“No. I just gave Thiel permission. I was too busy counting up everything we don’t have. I have to do it because apparently Reynolds can’t count very well. His inventory and mine aren’t anywhere near close. Especially when it comes to ammo.”

The next day I had them separated and under guard.

Reynolds was put in the provost marshal’s office. Watson was in the MPs’ commanding officer’s tent. Jefferson was being watched in Mitch’s hooch. Thiel got the empty POW compound. I was saving Mi’s command tent for when it was time for Mitch to bring Collins in from the chopper pad. Mitch knew the part he had to play, and he had what he needed with him.

I went from tent to tent hitting each soldier with everything I had: Willard’s conversation with Berkley the morning before he was killed; Berkley’s jungle fatigue shirt; the lack of any sign of a firefight where they’d said they had one; the old man in the village telling me of GIs being there; the gunshots in the hut and the body being carried out; the missing items from their compound — I listed them one by one; Mr. Tiger.

Even in the face of all that, they didn’t budge. They didn’t waver from their version of what had happened. Whenever I tried to get into particulars, like Berkley’s shirt, they went vague. “Things were real confusing in the firelight.” Or, “I wasn’t watching.” Or simply, “I don’t know.”

I concentrated on Thiel, hitting him hardest, but he had grown a little more sure of himself and more fortified. I hoped it was a false security.

“Come on, Thiel,” I said to him. “I know what happened. Instead of being out on the trail where you were supposed to be, you guys were going to that village and meeting girls that Mr. Tiger brought out to you. You were doing this regularly. But something happened that night. Was there an argument? Was it that Berkley didn’t like the increasing amount of stuff you were selling to Tiger? Who shot Berkley in that hut?”

Thiel sat there stone-faced.

“I don’t know, Mr. Hatchett. I don’t know where you got all that. Berkley was killed out on the trail where I showed you.”

“Like hell he was, Thiel. He was shot in the hut, and you guys carried his body to that spot and then staged a fake firefight by firing into the air. You had to have some way to explain his death.”

“You’re not hanging nothing on me, Mr. Hatchett, simply because you think you’ve got to have someone,” Thiel said. “All you have is suspicions and the word of an old man. I’ve never been in that village in my life that I remember. How much did you pay the old man? Did any of the other villagers verify it?”

I ducked out of the tent without answering that.

All the others were basically the same.

Jefferson: “The old man is probably VC. You ever think about that, Mr. Hatchett? He’d tell you just about anything. I may have been in that village once or twice, I don’t know. I’ve been through a lot of villages.”

Watson: “I don’t know about the shirt. I didn’t see it. Do you know for sure it wasn’t unbuttoned? Maybe he was taking a breather when the VC saw him, and he’d unbuttoned his shirt to cool off.”

Reynolds: “You think I stole all that stuff? Hell, the water trailer should be or better be on a report right in this MP office somewhere. It was stolen by another unit. It happens all the time over here, one unit stealing off another. The plywood was used for something else, I think. I can’t remember what Lieutenant Macy did with it. I don’t know about the shirt. I can’t explain the shirt. Maybe it was unbuttoned after all. I don’t know any Tiger. There are lots of tigers around. Did you know, Mr. Hatchett, this is the area Teddy Roosevelt used to come to to hunt tigers? It wasn’t called Vietnam then. But I don’t know a man named Tiger.”

“I’ll tell you where the plywood is,” I countered. “It went to build that hut.”

“Prove it,” Reynolds said confidently. He knew what I knew: the plywood was untraceable, no numbers on it.

I ignored his brashness. “And I’ll tell you about that shirt. Berkley’s shirt was off when he was shot in the hut. He took it off, undressing for one of the whores, and then something happened and he was shot. Before you carried him out, you had to put his shirt back on. But you forgot about the shirt needing bullet holes in it to match the wounds. You couldn’t know Pfc. Willard would pick the shirt up. That’s how it worked.”

He stared straight ahead. “I’ve never been in that village. Never. Never been any nearer to it than where those recon patrols took us.” A smart-aleck, cocky grin passed over his face; apparently he sensed my frustration. He laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back. “I found Berkley lying dead on the trail. Thiel told me you found his blood there. Shell casings, too. Maybe I was wrong about his shirt being buttoned. Maybe it was open. It gets—”

“I know, I know,” I said. “It gets pretty confusing during a fire-fight.”

“Right on, Mr. Hatchett.”

I figured it was time to bring in Collins.

I had all the men brought to the PMO tent. I threw open the tent flaps so they’d get a good look when Mitch pulled in with Collins in the jeep.

Through the open flaps we watched Mitch lead Collins across the MP area toward Mi’s areas. Mitch held a starlight scope, which actually belonged to the MPs, and he was playing his role well.

Mitch made sure the group in the PMO tent got a good look at the starlight scope. He waved it at Collins as if he were talking to him about it.

“Good,” I said to the group as they sat in the tent with their eyes glued on Mitch and Collins. “You see we have your friend,” I told them. “I’ll find out what he has to say. And it looks as if Mitch finally caught up with Tiger. Do you guys recognize what he’s carrying?”

None of them spoke. Thiel lowered his head and put his hands over his face; I sensed a crack in the wall. Sergeant Reynolds tried to snicker, wanting to give the impression he was unconcerned, but it wasn’t very convincing. Watson and Jefferson continued staring wide-eyed past the tent flap but saying nothing.

I turned to leave the PMO. Even if Mitch’s theatrics didn’t get to them, I still had the possibility Collins would talk, so I was feeling confident, very confident, when I said, “I’m going to leave you guys in here alone. I’m going to give you one more chance to come clean on this. I’m going to give you a chance while I see what Collins has to say. You guys discuss among yourselves what you want to do.” I motioned for the MP in the tent to leave and went to see Collins.

Collins was worse than the others; not quite as cocky as Reynolds but just as firm in his story.

I knew why they were corroborating each other’s lies.

This was a group of men, like many infantry units, whose lives often depended on the other guy’s being dependable, being there for him in the worst situation a man can find himself in, the very hot, frantic, life-and-death experience of a firefight. Who lived, slept, ate, talked about families and futures together; shared laughs and heartaches with each other. They lived and died together. To lie for one another was nothing.

Collins’s version was an echo of what the others had said: Berkley was killed on the trail by VC. He didn’t know about a shirt or even anything about Reynolds’s dragging Berkley out of there. He was too busy off to the side firing at the VC. Things get pretty confusing, he said. (Oh, how I hated hearing that again and again, however true it was.) He didn’t think he’d ever been to the village; knew no one named Tiger; knew nothing about selling anything to anyone. Had no idea, in fact, why Berkley might think one of them wanted him dead. Berkley was kind of a weird farmboy anyway, Collins stated.

While I escorted him to the PMO tent to join the others, I could feel my confidence ebbing. For a brief moment I began to wonder if maybe Berkley had been killed by the VC in just the way they said. But then, I believed the old man. I’d seen the spot Berkley was supposedly killed in and had my doubts about that. I had Willard’s statement, and I had the shirt. But I wasn’t anywhere near as sure of myself as I had been when I’d first brought them to the MP area. At this point I sensed that instead of my chipping away at them they were chipping away at me, at my confidence and determination; the sledge hammer was being weakened by the sheer heft of the wall.

What I lacked was any physical evidence, or even a reliable statement, to verify my suspicions. Without either I couldn’t place them in that village, let alone connect them to what happened there.

When Collins entered the tent, he winked at Reynolds. Reynolds gave him a slight nod in response.

“Well, Mr. Hatchett,” Reynolds said, “if you’re about done with us, I’d like to get back to our area. I’ve got to start packing. I’m due to go back to base camp tomorrow to begin being processed out of this country.”

“None of you are going anywhere,” I said sharply. Nothing I’d said all day had the effect that telling them that did. Reynolds frowned.

“What do you mean?” Thiel asked.

“I mean you all are going to be confined to quarters until this investigation is over. No one’s going anywhere. This isn’t the end of it.” I bent down and got right in Reynolds’s face. “And I’ll put a stop on your orders for Fort Dix, sergeant.”

“You can do that?” His lower lip twitched spasmodically.

“Not only can I, I already have.” I hadn’t actually done it, but I could do it and I intended to make it my first order of business once I got to base camp.

“How long will the investigation take?” Thiel asked. “I’m due to be discharged from the army within the month, maybe earlier if I get an early out.”

“How long?” I said. “As long as it takes. And sometimes I move real slow. If I were you, I wouldn’t be planning any big coming home party just yet.”

Thiel swore out loud. “Jesus,” he said.

The first winning blow I’d scored all day.

“And if your investigation turns up nothing?” Sergeant Reynolds asked. “Then we can go home?”

“Then you can go home. But not until I’m satisfied, and I warn you, I’m not easily satisfied.”

The telephone rang, and an MP picked it up. “He’s right here,” the MP said and handed me the phone. “One of the MPs guarding the front gate wants to talk with you.”

From the other end I heard, “Mr. Hatchett, this is Sp/4 Jones out at the main gate. I have a female Vietnamese civilian who insists on talking with you. She doesn’t speak English, so bring an interpreter. Luckily a Special Forces jeep was going through, and one of the Green Berets translated for us. She says she wants to talk about some GI being killed by another GI in a village somewhere. She says she was working in the hut when it happened. She says she works for someone named Tiger.”

I could not believe what I was hearing. One of the prostitutes, I thought. That was going to be my next step, to find them and question them. They were the only other ones in the hut when Berkley was killed, and they wouldn’t have the allegiance to the patrol that the men had for each other. What a lucky break, I thought. A softhearted whore.

“I’ll be right out,” I told the MP. “Make her comfortable. Treat her like a lady. Don’t try anything with her no matter how good-looking she is.” Many of the Vietnamese women were very good-looking, and I figured that a man of Tiger’s stature would only employ top-of-the-line girls. Last thing I needed was a sex-starved MP making unwanted advances on what I hoped would be my top-of-the-line witness.

The MP snickered. “You don’t have to worry about that, Mr. Hatchett,” he said.

I sent an MP to MI to get their interpreter and told the group in the PMO, “Don’t go anywhere just yet. It seems one of your girlfriends has something to say.”

By the stunned, ashen looks that spread over their faces, I assumed I’d scored another blow. For me, things were beginning to brighten suddenly. But when I got to the main gate, it was my turn to be stunned.

The female Vietnamese waiting for me was not a young, good-looking prostitute. It was the old woman who’d been crying in the village, the mother of Sommers’s dead informant.

A Mother’s Story

“Tell her I can’t pay her. Tell her it isn’t that I don’t want to, I just can’t.”

The interpreter spoke to the woman as we drove slowly back to the PMO. I wanted to give her time to tell me what she knew before we stood face to face with the patrol.

“She say she does not want to be paid.”

I stole a sidelong glance at the somber old woman in the passenger seat of the jeep.

For warmth against the cool evening she wore a thin shawl draped over her bony shoulders and a faded, thin, print blouse that looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks. She had on typical black silk pajama bottoms and a cone-shaped straw hat. She held onto the hat to keep it from being blown away by the air of the moving jeep rushing back in her face. Her skin had a dark yellow tint to it and was cracked and wrinkled like old, worn, dirty leather.

The interpreter was in the back, leaning over her shoulder.

“Ask her what she saw in the hut. Why was she in the hut?”

“She say,” said the interpreter, “sometimes she work for Mr. Tiger. She pour drinks for the prostitutes and the American soldiers sometimes; sometimes she bring them what they ask for. Every morning she clean the hut when they are all gone.”

“What happened the night the soldier was shot?”

“She say they argue loud. She does not understand what they argue about. But she thinks they had too much to drink. And she see them smoke some, ah, some pot. How you say? Marijuana?”

“Okay, go on.”

“She say the one GI who got killed, he come out of the room where he was with the prostitute, and he argue with another GI and push him hard against the wall. Then the GI who was pushed, he point his rifle at him and he shoot him.”

“Would she recognize the man who did the shooting?”

“She say each one shoot the American soldier after he was shot the first time. She would recognize them all. She say also she think the shot GI was dead because she go to him and she grab his hand and she can feel the life leave him then. They push her aside, and each soldier shoot the dead American again.”

“What were the others doing during all this?”

“She say they looked very scared, and they argue some more. Maybe, she think, they do not like to shoot the dead man some more. But they do. Then they talk and argue some more. Then someone go get the dead GI’s shirt, and they put it on him and carry him out of the village.”

“So one man shot him and then the others went up and put a bullet in him? Where’d they shoot him, in what part of his body?”

The interpreter said, “Here.” He motioned to his upper torso.

I pulled the jeep to a stop. “Was Mr. Tiger there when the man was killed?”

“She say no. She say Mr. Tiger always there when they arrive at the village, but Mr. Tiger, he always leave. He come back the next day and take the girls to Phu Bien.”

“Does she know the girls, their names, where they live?”

“Oh yes. She know the girls.”

This Vietnamese woman might make an iffy witness, but if the prostitutes verified her account, that could be testimony weighty enough to place the patrol in the village.

“What did she do after they left?”

The interpreter touched her shoulder, asking the question. “She say she clean up the hut and she go get some dirt and spread the dirt on the large amounts of blood from the GI bleeding on the floor so the flies do not come around.”

“Where was the GI lying when he fell bleeding?”

“She say right behind the door.”

“And that’s where she spread the dirt?”

“Yes, that is correct, Mr. Hatchett. She did not want the flies to drink the blood.”

I could have kissed that old lady. She knew where on his body Berkley was shot, and she knew about the dirt spread on the floor. I was beginning to believe her.

“Ask her why she didn’t tell me this when we were in the village?” There was still the possibility that she knew the old man had made money with his story and saw an opportunity to make some, too. Maybe she’d hit me up later. There was also the possibility she was telling me her story because she was a VC sympathizer bent on getting some GIs into trouble. Being a VC sympathizer would most certainly call her testimony into question. But Sommers didn’t seem to think that was the case with her, and he knew her tragic history better than I.

“She say she did not say anything because she did not want to at first. Then she changed her mind this morning after she saw you in the village. She say she came here because she does not want the others in the village to know she talk with the American CID soldier.”

I jammed the jeep in gear and drove on. “Tell her I want her to identify the men who were in the hut that night. The one who first shot the GI and then the others.”

She nodded once, agreeing.

Each man’s putting a bullet into Berkley certainly explained why the patrol had been lying for each other. They all had a hand in Berkley’s death.

“And tell her I’m very sorry about the death of her son.”

The interpreter translated as we stepped from the jeep in the MP area. She responded by glaring at me across the jeep, her hollow black eyes unflinching and angry, almost accusing, like she thought I was insincere in my condolences, or worse, she was blaming me, a U.S. soldier, for her son’s death. She rattled off a few terse, angry Vietnamese sentences.

The interpreter said, “She say how can you be sorry about his death? The VC kill him and she does not like the VC, but if there was no Americans, there would be no one for the VC to fight. No war. And her son would be alive.” The interpreter shrugged as if it made perfect sense to him, too.

So it really made little difference to her whose side I was on. She didn’t like us any more than she liked the VC. We were fighting for some cause, however vague it was sometimes to us, but it was not her cause. In her mind all of us had a hand on the machete that hacked her son to pieces out in the jungle. We all had a hand in killing her husband in Phu Bien and maybe even her parents.

As we walked to the tent, I was bothered by why she’d sought me out with her story. Why was she getting involved?

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen so many dumbfounded expressions on so many men as there were on the faces of the five from the 2/11th when I escorted the old woman into the PMO tent.

Mouths dropped open as if they had weights tied to their chins. They sat in folding chairs staring at her, their faces awash with disbelief. One of them swore under his breath. They all fidgeted nervously in their seats. Someone said, “Oh, God.”

None of them rose, so I said, “Have you men forgotten military training? Stand up when a lady enters a room.”

“A lady?” Sergeant Reynolds laughed harshly. He was the only one who didn’t rise. “That old hag? I’m not standing up for her.”

Behind Reynolds stood a black MP who was as big as a mountain. I told him, “Sergeant Reynolds is having difficulty standing up. Would you help him?”

“Gladly,” the MP said.

He grabbed Reynolds’s shoulder with a huge paw and a vise-like grip and jerked him to his feet in one swift motion.

“Get your hands off me, nigger,” Reynolds shouted angrily.

The black MP released his grip when he had Reynolds on his feet. With a slight smile he shrugged the slur off and stepped back. He’d been called that before, I imagined, busting up barroom brawls. It was part of his MP training — to learn you’re going to take insults from GIs, racial insults included. It was Jefferson who surprised me. The black infantryman shot a hot, angry look at Reynolds, and I sensed that the mere presence of the old woman was having a crumbling effect already. They were already coming apart. Suddenly they all seemed very, very uneasy; once cocky and sure of themselves, they were now angry, feeling pinched. And she hadn’t even begun to point fingers yet.

“Ask her,” I said to the interpreter, “if she recognizes any of these men.”

The old woman gave them a casual glance and replied.

“She say all of them plus the dead GI come many nights to the village. These men were the ones who were in the hut when the GI was killed. She has seen them all there many times.”

“Who shot the GI the first time?”

No one as much as twitched for the longest moment.

Finally, “She say that one get pushed and he shoot the one who push him.” The interpreter pointed at Sergeant Reynolds.

“That lying gook!” Reynolds shouted. “She’s VC. I’ve always thought she was a VC.”

I looked at the big black MP again. “It seems Sergeant Reynolds is having his usual problems keeping his smart mouth shut. If he speaks out of turn again, cuff him and stuff him with something.”

“Will do,” the MP smiled.

Back to the interpreter. “And the others?”

He translated her reply. “She say, after Reynolds shoot the GI, this one,” he pointed at Watson, “shoot him. Then that one,” he indicated Collins, “then that one and that one.” He pointed at Jefferson and Thiel in that order. Thiel had his face in his hands. The others, except Reynolds, looked at the ground. Reynolds was glaring at the old woman.

“Any smart remarks now, Sergeant Reynolds?” I asked.

“Oh? I’m allowed to speak now, am I? Well, let me tell you this. Are you going to take the word of that old lady against ours? I’m telling you she’s VC. I’ve always thought that.”

“How do you know her, Reynolds? You’ve already told me you’ve never been near her village. How could you suspect this woman of being a VC if you’ve never been there?”

“Shut up, Reynolds,” Jefferson said. “He’s right. You talk too much. And you definitely say the wrong things sometimes.”

“Ask her if these men know Tiger.”

The answer: “Of course they know Mr. Tiger. He bring the girls. This one,” the interpreter pointed at Reynolds again, “she say he always have some drinks with Tiger, and they talk outside the hut before Mr. Tiger leave the GIs with the prostitutes. Sometimes he put some small things in Mr. Tiger’s jeep that they carry with them when they come in from the jungle. Oh yes. They all know who Mr. Tiger is.”

“What did he put in the jeep?”

The old woman shrugged as she answered the interpreter.

“She say she cannot see because she is always busy with the GIs and the prostitutes.”

“How much did you pay her?” Sergeant Reynolds asked me.

I nodded to the interpreter to ask the question.

The interpreter said to Reynolds, “She say she does not want money. She was not paid. The American CID soldier does not give her any money.”

“You’re still taking the word of a gook peasant over us,” Reynolds said, his anger rising. “She must want something. Ask her why’s she doing this.”

Now that was a question that concerned me. I’d read that a lawyer won’t ask a question he doesn’t already know the answer to. Right then I couldn’t have agreed with that more. What if she replied, “Mr. Tiger tell me to.” That would throw her reliability and thus her testimony right out the tent flap. But I thought she was acting on her own. And I was curious myself about why she’d offered to speak when she didn’t even like us, when she blamed us, in part, for the death of her son. I told the interpreter to ask her, because I had to know.

There are things that are universal in this world, and facial expressions are one of them. Her face suddenly took on a contented, peaceful look, as if she had been waiting for the question and wanted very much to answer it.

She took a long, deep breath that led me to believe she was organizing her many thoughts. When she spoke, it was so rapid that the interpreter translated as she talked, as if he were she.

“She say, after he was shot, I held the GI’s hand, like I told you, and he grip my hand and then I could feel the life leave him in that hut. I did not think much about it then. Only that he is very young. I have lost a husband and my parents. So what is it to me if this GI dies, too, I think.

“She say, then a few days later my son is killed by the VC. She say, now I have no one; no husband, no parents, no son. I am like a single cloud floating in the big sky.”

“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” I thought. She had never read Wordsworth, I was sure, but the best poetic images are also universal.

“She say, I spend my days crying for my son, and I think a lot about the dead GI and I wonder what the GI’s mother will say in America when she learns her son is dead.”

“Berkley’s mother she’s talking about?”

“That is correct,” the interpreter said. “She say, I think about the GI’s mother, and I think how sad she is going to be. Perhaps the GI’s mother is farmer like myself, I think. Is her life hard, too? We are from different countries, and we are great distances apart and we do not know each other, but we are both mothers who have no sons now; hers killed by Americans, mine killed by Vietnamese. We have lost them in war. So for this we are near, too, I think. This is what I’m thinking while I mourn my son.”

I interjected, “Tell her Berkley’s mother is a farmer.” I wasn’t sure she was, but I wanted her to keep talking.

He told her, and the woman smiled a little smile.

“She say, I do not know about America. I am told it is very big. Very rich with big farms. I have seen pictures of these. I am a poor woman who has three cattle and some chickens. That is all I have now. But I am like the GI’s mother because we are both mothers who have lost our sons. So I cry for my son and I cry for her son and I cry for the GI’s mother, too.”

Out of the corner of my eye I watched Thiel shake his head hard and then stand up and stare out the tent flap, listening to the old woman.

“I come to you and tell you all this about what I see in the hut and what I think,” the interpreter said, “because I want someone to tell the GI’s mother her son did not die alone. The GI’s mother will want to know this. Tell her I held her son’s hand when she could not. I was glad to do this for her because we are both mothers. He did not die alone.”

Thiel was shaking his head harder and harder, and when he turned to face us, his eyes were moist.

“All that is pure hogwash, chickens and cows,” Reynolds said. “It proves nothing. It’s nothing but talk from a VC.”

But the woman kept on talking.

The interpreter said, “She say, you should give this to the GI’s mother. She will want to have it. She say, after these men ran out of the hut carrying the body, I found it on the floor of the hut near where the GI died and they put on his shirt.”

The old woman reached into a tiny pocket in her shawl and held her open palm towards me.

The story she’d just related was an expression of universal motherhood, one mother feeling the need and loss of another, a wide ocean away. What she held in her small palm, however, was just then more vital to me than motherhood. It was the final link, the concrete piece of evidence I had sought that put the patrol in the village. Coupled with her testimony and the prostitutes’ testimony when I located them, I now had the patrol cold.

It lay in her hand like a jewel glittering in the tropical sun that poured through the open tent flap: a new Zippo lighter engraved Robert Berkley 2/11th Infantry 6th Infantry Division.

“And she found this in that hut that night?”

“That is correct, Mr. Hatchett,” the interpreter said.

I held up the lighter so they all could see it and announced, “I have an American GI who will swear at your courts-martial that Berkley was in possession of this lighter only a few hours before he went out on patrol with you guys. How could his lighter end up in that village that night unless you all were there and not out on the Ho Chi Minh Trail where you said you were?”

For the first time since I began interviewing this group they were speechless. All Reynolds could manage was a cold stare. Collins wiped his hands down over his face and pulled at his lower lip. Watson and Jefferson slouched in their chairs and scowled at their feet. Thiel shook his head faster and faster, looking at the lighter. “Ahhhh, man,” he said.

And the wall came tumbling down.

The Letter

In the following days, Thiel was the most cooperative. The shooting had happened pretty much the way I’d figured.

Berkley, Thiel said, was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with what Reynolds was selling to Tiger. Berkley didn’t mind the plywood, which they loaded into a truck and hauled into Phu Bien to give to Tiger there. He didn’t mind the nonarmament items like cases of food. But when they began taking starlight scopes and M-79s and ammo on patrol with them to sell to Tiger in the village, that got to be too much.

And Tiger kept asking for more and bigger items and paying more, and when Reynolds said he thought he could get his hands on a few LAAWs — Light Anti-Armor Weapons, a kind of one-shot, throwaway bazooka used against tanks — Berkley issued his final complaint, which started the argument that got him killed.

Reynolds feared that Berkley would go to their new CO, Captain Boggs, and report everything that had been going on. It was Reynolds’s idea that everyone should put a bullet in him so they would all have had a hand in it. Thiel said he had trouble with that, so he shot Berkley in the shoulder. He thought Berkley was already dead by then.

“We would contact Tiger in Phu Bien the moment we knew we’d be going on patrol,” Thiel explained. “Tiger would bring the girls out that night.”

There was only one big surprise for us, from Thiel.

Sommers was with me; he had a stack of the bogus intelligence reports the patrol had filed. “Here’s one here — a whole company of VC passed along that trail, you reported,” Sommers said sharply. He was not a happy camper. “I have to assume that that never happened, that none of these reports are accurate.”

“Oh, the one on the company of VC is true,” Thiel told him.

“You saw a company of VC pass through the village? An entire company? While you were in bed with whores? Come on, Thiel.”

Thiel shook his head.

“We didn’t see them. What happened was, a kid came to us when we first got into the village that night. I don’t know who he was, just a kid who lived there. He was all excited about something, and he didn’t speak English very well, but he was babbling about some VC. Sergeant Reynolds took him outside and talked to him, and when Reynolds came back into the hut, he was grinning, saying, ‘Well, the kid gave us something we can put on our report for tonight. He told me he’d seen a company of VC going through a couple of nights ago. I paid him a few bucks for the info.’ ”

Sommers was simmering, his words precise and hot:

“That kid did not speak English. Who translated for Reynolds?”

Thiel thought a moment. “Tiger did.”

Sommers spun around and left the tent shouting, “Tiger? You idiots. You got that kid, my informant, killed. Tiger is VC.”

I realized then that the woman was right — that in fact there was an American hand on the machete the VC used to hack her son to death.

My two-page letter to Mrs. Berkley was almost complete. I had promised the old woman that I’d write to her, detailing everything the old woman had told us. It was the only thing she’d asked for. I offered to have it translated so she could read it, but she only wanted to get back to her village, back to her life.

I’d also promised the old woman that I’d send Mrs. Berkley the lighter when the trials were all over and the members of the patrol began serving hard time in Leavenworth. For the time being we needed it for evidence.

I was searching for some way to end the letter.

On my desk was a recent issue of Stars and Stripes; the newspaper’s lead story was a report on the peace negotiations just beginning in Paris. I added to the letter, closing it out:

I sealed the letter and stood gazing out my office window, out across the olive drab — very drab — military compound that was headquarters for the Sixth Division’s war machine, out toward Pleiku and the parts of that impoverished city I could see, up and across the high blue tropical sky.

Two small clouds were drifting, wandering, floating.