I took a puff on the cigarette and left it in the ashtray. Mr. Vinh seemed to like his Marlboro Light.
I said to him, “May I tell you the story of how I came to read your letter to your brother?”
Susan translated, and he nodded.
I related the story of Victor Ort, and the Vietnam Veterans of America, emphasizing the VVA’s humanitarian program of helping the Hanoi government discover the fate of their missing soldiers. The story changed somewhat, however, and Mr. Ort and I both became members of the Vietnam Veterans of America, and by chance I knew a family whose son, a First Cavalry lieutenant, had been killed in Quang Tri City. Sounded good to me.
I further explained that the family was convinced that this lieutenant who was mentioned in Mr. Vinh’s letter could be their son. I spun a little more stuff, and being Boston Irish, this is my specialty. I did not mention the army Criminal Investigation Division, nor did I mention the name of the deceased lieutenant, because I didn’t know it; but Mr. Vinh did.
Mr. Vinh listened as Susan translated.
A middle-aged woman entered and without a word went to the hearth where a water kettle hung permanently over the charcoal. She put three bowls on the rug and took a pinch of tea leaves from a ceramic canister and sprinkled the leaves in each bowl. Then, with a ladle, she filled each bowl with hot water, put the bowls on a wicker tray, and on her knees walked to the table, where she bowed.
I really liked this country. I looked at Susan and winked. She stuck her tongue out at me.
Anyway, the tea ceremony complete, the lady disappeared.
We sipped our tea. I smiled and said, “This is awful.”
Susan said something else to Mr. Vinh, and he smiled.
Susan and Mr. Vinh smoked, sipped tea, and chatted. Susan said to me, “Mr. Vinh asks if we are lovers. I told him we began as friends when you hired me in Saigon to translate, then we became lovers.”
I looked at Mr. Vinh, who had a faint smile on his face, probably thinking, “Way to go, old man.”
Susan said, “Mr. Vinh is amazed at the number of American veterans who have returned to visit in the south. He sees this in the newspapers and in the schoolhouse where there is a television.”
I nodded and had the thought that Ban Hin was not completely cut off from the world, and this fact might be relevant if my suspicions about the murderer were true.
Susan and Mr. Vinh continued their tea chat and lit up again. This was necessary, I knew, before you got down to business, but I was becoming a little impatient, not to mention concerned about who might show up next.
I said, directly to Mr. Vinh, “May I ask you if that woman was your wife?”
Susan translated, and he nodded.
I asked, “Was that Mai, who you mentioned in your letter?”
Susan hesitated, but then translated.
Mr. Vinh put down his bowl of tea and looked straight ahead. He said something to no one in particular.
Susan said to me, “Mai was killed in a bombing of Hanoi in 1972. They had been married when he returned from the front in 1971, and they had no children.”
“I’m sorry.”
He understood and nodded.
Susan and he exchanged a few more words, and she said to me, “He has remarried and has seven children, and many grandchildren. He wants to know if you have children.”
“Not that I know of.”
Susan gave him a one-word answer that was probably “No.” The pleasantries over, Mr. Vinh asked me something, and Susan translated, “He would like to know if you have the letter which he wrote to his brother.”
I replied, “I had a photocopy of it, but lost it in my travels. I will send him the original, if he tells us how to do that.”
Susan passed this on to him, and he replied. She said, “He has a cousin in Dien Bien Phu, and you can send it there.”
I nodded.
I wished I had the letter, of course, to see if what he’d written was what had been translated and what I’d read. But, hopefully, I’d find that out soon.
There were no refills on the tea, thank God, and Mr. Vinh and Susan were keeping the mosquitoes away with cigarette smoke.
I asked Mr. Vinh, “Do your wounds bother you?”
Susan translated, and his reply was, “Sometimes. I have more wounds after Quang Tri, but none so serious as to keep me from my duties for more than a month.”
He pointed to me.
I replied, “I had no wounds.”
Susan translated, and he nodded.
I asked him, “How did you escape from Quang Tri City?”
He replied and Susan translated, “I was able to walk, and all the walking wounded were told to try to escape at night. I left in the early morning, and I walked alone, through a rainstorm in the moonless night. I passed within ten meters of an American position and escaped into the hills to the west.”
I hoped he took the dead lieutenant’s stuff with him.
He said something else, and Susan said to me, “Mr. Vinh says he may have walked right past you.”
“He did.”
That got a smile from everyone, but no belly laughs.
Okay, down to business. I said to Mr. Vinh, “May I show you some photographs so that we may discover if the lieutenant whose family has sent me here is the same lieutenant you saw in the bombed building in Quang Tri City?”
Susan translated, and he nodded.
Susan stood, went to her backpack, and returned with the photographs. She placed the small album on the table and opened it to the first page.
Mr. Vinh stared at the photo, then stood and went to a wicker trunk. He returned with something wrapped in cloth, and produced a canvas wallet. He opened the wallet and removed the plastic photo holder, which he laid next to the photo on the table.
Susan looked at both photos, withdrew the one from the album, and passed both photographs to me.
I looked at the photo from the wallet, which was of a young couple. The woman was good-looking, and the man was the same one in the photo pack.
We now had the victim, and what we needed next was the victim’s name, though of course the CID already knew that; but I didn’t.
I said to Mr. Vinh, “May I see the wallet?”
Susan asked, and Mr. Vinh pushed the wallet across the table.
I opened it and went through it. There were some military payment certificates—what we used for money instead of dollars—and a few more family photos—Mom and Pop, two teenage girls who looked like his sisters, and an infant who could be the child of the deceased.
There were a few other plasticized odds and ends in the wallet: the Geneva Convention card, the card that listed the Rules of Land Warfare, and another card with the Rules of Engagement. Lots of rules in war. Most of them didn’t mean shit except Rule One, which was, “Kill him before he kills you.”
This young officer, however, had the required cards, and I got a sense of a young man who did the right thing. This was reinforced somewhat by his PX liquor ration card, which only officers had access to. The card had only two punch holes in it, indicating two liquor purchases. If I’d had this card in ’Nam, it would have looked like Swiss cheese hit by shrapnel.
The final card was the man’s military identification.
I looked at the ID and saw that the name of the dead man was William Hines, and he was a first lieutenant in the infantry.
I looked at Mr. Vinh and said to him, “May I return this wallet to Lieutenant Hines’s family?”
Mr. Vinh understood without translation and without hesitation he nodded.
I pushed the wallet aside. If nothing else came out of this, the Hines family was going to get this wallet returned after nearly thirty years, assuming that Paul Brenner returned from Vietnam.
I said to Mr. Vinh, “In your letter, you said to your brother that an American captain killed this man.”
Susan translated, and Mr. Vinh nodded.
I continued, “We have some photographs of a man who we
believe to be this captain. Perhaps you can recognize this man.”
Susan spoke to him and opened the photo pack to the last ten photos and showed them, one by one, to Mr. Vinh. I watched his face as he looked intently at the photographs.
When Susan came to the last one, Mr. Vinh stared at it and said something, then went back and looked through the photos again, and again he spoke. I had the feeling he was unsure, or unwilling to commit to an identification, and I didn’t blame him.
Susan said to me, “He says the light was not good. The captain’s face was covered with dirt, and he wore a helmet, and from where Mr. Vinh lay on the second floor, he could not see the face clearly, and in any case, he could not remember after all these years.”
I nodded. I was close, but approaching a dead end. I asked Mr. Vinh, “Can you tell me what you saw that day?”
Susan asked him, he replied, and she translated directly. “What was in the letter is what I saw.”
I didn’t want to tell him that his letter and my letter might not be the same. So, putting my detective hat on, I said to him, “In your letter, you said to your brother that you could attach no meaning to the murder of the lieutenant by this captain. But you said they argued. Is it possible that the lieutenant threatened the captain? Or was the lieutenant showing insubordination or cowardice? It seems unusual that an officer would draw his pistol and shoot another officer over an argument. Could you think about what you saw, and perhaps another thought will come to you.”
Susan translated, and Mr. Vinh stared at me, though I couldn’t tell why. Finally, he said something, and Susan said to me, “He says he can still attach no meaning to it.”
I wasn’t going to give up that easily, especially after we’d risked our lives to get here and killed four men in the process. I said to Mr. Vinh, “Perhaps my memory of the letter is not good, and perhaps the translation of the letter was not accurate. Could you please re-tell the story as you remember it?”
Susan translated.
Mr. Vinh took a deep breath, as though he didn’t want to tell a war story, and didn’t reply.
I said, “Mr. Vinh, no one likes to re-live that time, but since I’ve been here, I’ve visited the sites of my old battles, including Quang Tri, and also the A Shau Valley. I have re-lived those times in my mind, and I’ve told these stories of war to this lady, and I believe this has been good for me. I ask you now to re-live this time, only so that some good may come of it.”
Susan translated, and Mr. Vinh said something, which she translated as, “He does not want to speak of it.”
Something was wrong here, and I said to Susan, “Are you translating accurately?”
She didn’t reply.
“Susan, what the fuck is going on here?”
She looked at me and said, “You really don’t want to know, Paul.”
I felt a shiver run down my spine. I said, “Yeah, I really fucking want to know.”
“Paul, we’ve come a long way, and we’ve found Mr. Vinh alive. Now we need to see if he has more souvenirs, then go back to Hanoi and make a report.”
I glanced at Mr. Vinh and saw that he understood that his guests were having an argument.
I took the wallet and held it up. I said to Mr. Vinh, “Souvenir?,” a word that most Viets understood. “Souvenir de guerre? Dai-uy souvenir? Captain’s souvenir? Trung-uy souvenir? Lieutenant’s souvenir?” I pointed to the wicker chest. “Beaucoup souvenir? Biet?”
He nodded, stood, and went to his war chest.
I looked at Susan and asked, “Do you know what this is about?”
“I do.”
“You saw the true translation of the letter?”
“I did.”
“You’re a lying bitch.”
“I am.”
Mr. Vinh returned with a few items in his hands, which he put on the table.
I looked at them. There was an American military watch, whose second hand had stopped long ago, a plastic army canteen that would still be in use by Mr. Vinh, except it had shrapnel tears in it from some other battle, a gold wedding ring, a set of dog tags, and some papers in a canvas pouch.
I picked up the dog tags and they said Hines, William H., followed by his serial number, then his blood type, and his religion, which was Methodist.
I looked at the ring and inside was inscribed Bill & Fran, 1/15/67, about a year before he was killed.
I opened the canvas pouch and found a bundle of letters from Fran, from Mom and Pop, and other people. I put the letters aside and found an unfinished letter that he’d been writing, dated February 3, 1968. It said:
Dear Fran,
I don’t know when or if I’ll be able to finish this letter. As you know by now, the VC and NVA have attacked all over the country, and have even attacked the Citadel here at Quang Tri. MACV Headquarters has been hit by mortars, and we’ve got lots of wounded guys who can’t get medical attention. The ARVN soldiers have cut and run, and the MACV guys are fighting for their lives. So much for this soft job as an advisor. I know this letter sounds very pessimistic, and I don’t even know if you’ll get it, but maybe you will, and I want you to know
And there it stopped. I put the letter down.
Also in the canvas pouch was a small notebook, and I opened it. It was a typical officer’s log, showing radio frequencies and call signs, codes, names of South Vietnamese army contacts, and so forth. Plus Lieutenant Hines had used the pages as a diary, and I flipped through it and read a few dated entries. It was mostly stuff about the weather, staff meetings, thoughts on the war, and other random notes.
One entry, dated 15 January, caught my eye. It read, “Capt. B. much beloved by sr. officers, but not by me or others. Spends too much time wheeling & dealing on black market & every nite in whorehouse.”
I closed the diary. It sounded like Capt. B. was enjoying his war, until Tet.
I looked at Mr. Vinh and pointed to the stuff on the table, then to myself.
He nodded.
I looked at Susan and said, “The Hines family will want this. They’ll also want to know how Lieutenant William Hines died.”
Susan said to me, “You know how he died. In battle.”
“Sorry. He was murdered.”
“They don’t need to know that.”
“Well, I can’t speak for the Hines family, but I was sent here to find out who killed Lieutenant Hines.”
“No, that’s not why you were sent here. You were sent here to see if the witness to this murder is still alive. He is. And does he have any souvenirs? He does. And can we get those souvenirs? We have. The people in Washington already figured out the name of the murderer—the other guy in these photos, obviously—and neither you nor I need to know that name. You don’t want to know.”
“Wrong.” I looked at a folded sheet of yellowed paper on the table, the last souvenir from Mr. Vinh’s trunk. I’d recognized it as a unit roster, and I pulled it toward me. It had been typed on an old ditto stencil, and the names were hard to read, but not illegible. The paper was headed U.S. Army, MACV, Quang Tri City, RVN. It was dated 3 January 1968.
I scanned the names and saw that there were sixteen Americans in the advisory group, all officers and senior sergeants. It wasn’t a particularly dangerous job, until something went wrong, as it had during the Tet Offensive.
The commander of the group was a lieutenant colonel named Walter Jenkins, and his executive officer was a Major Stuart Billings. The third in command was a captain, the only captain listed above a string of lieutenants, which included William H. Hines. The captain’s name was Edward F. Blake.
I stared at the name awhile, then pulled the photo pack toward me, and looked at one of the pictures, the one where the captain was wearing a tie. I looked at Susan and said, “Vice President of the United States Edward Blake.”
She lit a cigarette and said nothing.
I took a deep breath. If I’d had a Scotch and soda, I would have downed it. Edward F. Blake. Capt. B.
Vice President
Edward Blake, one heartbeat and one election away from becoming the next president of the United States. Except he had a problem: He murdered someone.
I glanced at Tran Van Vinh, who sat patiently, though perhaps he was getting bad vibes now. I tried to look cool and calm so as not to upset Mr. Vinh. In a normal tone of voice, I asked Susan, “What are the chances of our host here recognizing Vice President Edward Blake?”
She drew on her cigarette and replied, “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. I mean, TV reception is not real good out here.”
She said, “We discussed all of that in Washington. They asked me my opinion.”
“What’s your opinion?”
“Well, my opinion is that almost every Viet in the country can recognize the president and maybe even the vice president of the United States from pictures in the newspapers. Newspapers here, as in most Communist countries, are universal, cheap, and available to the masses, who are almost all literate. That’s what I told them in Washington.”
She added, “Also, the news is heavily political and focuses on Washington. The Viets are not badly informed, even in Ban Hin. Plus, we have the television set down at the schoolhouse. And as you might know, Vice President Blake, when he was a senator, was on the Foreign Relations Committee and the MIA Committee, and he has made numerous trips to Vietnam. You may recall that he’s a close personal friend of our ambassador to Hanoi, Patrick Quinn.” Susan glanced at Mr. Vinh and said, “There could be a potential problem, especially if Edward Blake becomes president.” She looked at me and asked, “What do you think?”
I pictured Tran Van Vinh sitting in the marketplace downtown, smoking and reading the local Pravda, and he’s staring at a photo of Edward Blake, and a little bell goes off in his head, and he says to himself, “No . . . can’t be. Well, maybe. Hey, Nguyen, this guy who’s president of the Imperialist States of America is the guy I told you about—the guy who blew away that lieutenant in Quang Tri.”
But then what? Would he report this interesting coincidence to the local authorities? And if he did, what would come of it? That was the question.
Susan asked again, “What do you think, Paul?”