Up Country Part 2

"I'm going to send you a book. You like chili?"

h.e.l.lmann drew on his cigarette, probably wondering what possessed him to contact me.

"Let me ask you, Paul, do you think you've been unfairly treated by the army?"

"No more so than a few million other guys, Colonel."

"I think the pleasantries are finished."

"Good."

"Two administrative things. First, your letter of reprimand. This can be removed from your file. Second, your retirement pay. This can be computed differently, which could be a considerable amount of money over your expected life span."

"Actually, my expected life span got longer when I left the army, so the smaller amount works out okay."

"Do you want to know more about these two items?"

"No. I smell trouble."

So, we both stood there in the cold, sniffing the air, thinking five or six moves ahead. I'm good at this, but Karl is better. He's not quite as bright as I am, certainly not as glib, but he thinks deep and long.

I actually like the guy. I really do. In fact, to be honest, I was a little hurt when I never heard from him. Maybe he was annoyed over my silliness at the retirement party. I'd had a couple, but I vaguely remember doing an impression of a Prussian field marshal named, I think, von h.e.l.lmann.

Finally, Karl said, "There is a name on this wall of a man who was not killed in action. A man, who was, in fact, murdered."

I did not reply to that startling statement.

Karl asked me, "How many men do you know on this wall?"

I stayed silent for a moment, then replied, "Too many." I asked him, "How many guys do you know here?"

"The same. You had two tours of duty in Vietnam. Correct?"

"Correct. The '68 tour, then again in '72, but by that time, I was an MP, and most of my fighting was with drunken soldiers outside Bien Hoa Airbase."

"But the first time... you were a frontline infantryman... You saw a good deal of combat. Did you enjoy it?"

This is the kind of question that only combat veterans could understand. It occurred to me that in all the years I've known Karl, we never spoke much about our combat experiences. This is not unusual. I looked at him and said, "It was the ultimate high. The first few times. Then... I became used to it, accepted it as the norm... then, in the last few months before I went home, I got very paranoid, like they were trying to kill me personally, like they weren't going to let me go home. I don't think I slept the last two months in-country." We made eye contact.

Karl nodded. "That was my experience as well." He stepped closer to the Wall, focusing on individual names. "We were young then, Paul. These men are forever young." He touched one of the names. "I knew this man."

h.e.l.lmann seemed unusually pensive, almost morose. I guess it had something to do with where we were, the season, the twilight and all that. I wasn't particularly chipper myself.

He took out a gold cigarette case and matching lighter. "Would you like one?"

"No, thanks. You just had one."

He ignored me, the way smokers do, and lit up another.

Karl Gustav h.e.l.lmann. I didn't know much about his personal life, but I knew that he grew up in the ruins of postwar Germany. I've known a few other German-American soldiers over the years, and they were mostly officers, and mostly retired by now. The usual biography of these galvanized Yankees was that they were fatherless or orphaned, and they did ch.o.r.es for the American Army of Occupation to survive. At eighteen, they enlisted in the U.S. Army at some military post in Germany, as a way out of the squalor of the defeated nation. There were a good number of such men in the army once, and Karl was probably one of the last.

I wasn't sure how much of this specific biography applied to Karl h.e.l.lmann, but he must be very close to mandatory retirement, unless there was a general's star in his immediate future, in which case he could stay on. I had the thought that this meeting had something to do with that.

He said to me, or maybe to himself, "It's been a long time. Yet sometimes it seems like yesterday." He looked at the Wall, then at me. "Do you agree?"

"Yes, 1968 is as clear as a slide show, a progression of bright silent images, frozen in time..." We looked at each other, and he nodded.

So, where was this headed?

It helps to know where it started. As I mentioned, I'm Boston Irish, South, which means working-cla.s.s. My father was a World War II vet, like everybody else's father in that place and time. He did three years in the army infantry, came home, married, had three sons, and worked thirty years for the City of Boston, maintaining munic.i.p.al buses. He once admitted to me that this job was not as exciting as the Normandy invasion, but the hours were better.

Not too long after my eighteenth birthday, I received my draft notice. I called Harvard regarding a spot in their freshman cla.s.s, and a student deferment, but they pointed out, rightly, that I'd never applied. Same with Boston University, and even Boston College, where a lot of my coreligionists had found asylum from the draft.

So, I packed an overnight bag, Dad shook my hand, my younger brothers thought I was cool, Mom cried, and off I went by troop train to Fort Hadley, Georgia, for Basic Training and Advanced Infantry Training. For some idiotic reason, I applied for and was accepted to Airborne School-that's parachute training-at Fort Benning, also in Georgia. To complete my higher education in the field of killing, I applied for Special Forces Training, thinking maybe the war would run out before I ran out of crazy schools, but the army said, "Enough. You're good to go, boy." And soon after Airborne School, I found myself in a frontline infantry company in a place called Bong Son, which is not in California.

I glanced at Karl, knowing that we'd been over there at about the same time, having traveled very different roads to that war. But maybe not so different after all.

Karl said, "I thought it would be good if we met here."

I didn't reply.

After Vietnam, we both remained in the army, I think because the army wanted us, and no one else probably did. I became an MP and served a partial second tour in Vietnam. Over the years, I took advantage of the army college extension program and received a B.S. in Criminal Justice, then got into the Criminal Investigation Division, mostly because they wore civilian clothes.

I became what's known as a warrant officer: a quasi-officer with no command responsibility, but with an important job, in this case, a homicide detective.

Karl took a slightly different and more genteel route, and went to a real college full-time on the army's nickel, getting some half-a.s.sed degree in philosophy while taking four years of Reserve Officers Training, then re-entering active duty as a lieutenant.

At some point, our lives nearly touched in Vietnam, then converged at Falls Church. And here we were now, literally and figuratively in the twilight, no longer warriors, but middle-aged men looking at the dead of our generation spread out in front of us; 58,000 names carved into the black stone, and I suddenly saw these men as kids, carefully carving their names into trees, into school desks, into wooden fences. I realized that for every name in the granite, there was a matching name still carved somewhere in America. And these names, too, were carved in the hearts of their families, and in the heart of the nation.

We began walking, Karl and I, along the Wall, our breaths misting in the cold air. At the base of the wall were flowers, left by friends and family, and I recalled that the last time I'd been here, many years ago, someone had left a baseball glove, and when I saw it, before I knew what was happening, tears were rolling down my face.

In the early years of the memorial, there had been a lot of such things left at the Wall: photos, hats, toys, even favorite foods, like a box of Nabisco graham crackers, which I saw that time. Today, I noticed, there weren't any personal items, just flowers, and a few folded notes stuck in the seams of the Wall.

The years have pa.s.sed, the parents die, the wives move on, the brothers and sisters don't forget, but they've already been here and don't need to return. The dead, young as they were for the most part, didn't leave many children, but the last time I was here, I met a daughter, a lady in her early twenties, who never knew her father. I never knew a daughter, so for about ten minutes, we filled a little of the emptiness in each other, the missing parts, then we went our separate ways.

For some reason, this made me think of Cynthia, of marriage, children, home and hearth, and all sorts of warm and fuzzy things. If Cynthia were here, I might have proposed marriage, but she wasn't here, and I knew I'd be myself again by morning.

Karl, who had probably been thinking similar thoughts about war and peace, mortality and immortality, said, "I try to come here once a year, on August 17, the anniversary of a battle I was in." He stayed silent a while, then continued, "The battle of Highway 13... Eleventh Armored Cavalry, the Michelin rubber plantation. You may have heard of it. A lot of people around me were dying. So, I come here on August 17, and say a prayer for them, and a prayer of thanks for myself. It's the only time I pray."

"I thought you used to go to church every Sunday."

"One goes to church with the wife and children."

He didn't elaborate, and I didn't ask. We turned and walked back the way we came.

He said, in a different tone of voice, "So, are you curious about the man who was murdered?"

"I may be curious. But I really don't want to know."

"If that were the case, you'd leave."

"I'm being polite, Colonel."

"I would have enjoyed that politeness when you worked for me. But as long as you're being polite, hear me out."

"If I listen, I can be subpoenaed at some future judicial proceeding. Says so in the manual."

"Believe me, this meeting and this conversation never took place. That's why we're here, not in Falls Church."

"I already figured that out."

"May I begin?"

I was on solid ground now; the next step was a greased slope. There was not a single good reason in the world that I could think of for me to listen to this man. But I wasn't thinking hard enough. Cynthia Cynthia. Get a job, get a life, or whatever she said.

Karl asked, "May I begin?"

"Can I stop you anytime I want?"

"No. If I begin, you listen, I end."

"Is this a criminal case?"

"I believe homicide is criminal, yes. Do you have any other stupid questions?"

I smiled, not because of the insult, but because I was getting on his nerves. "You know what? To prove how stupid I really am, I'll listen."

"Thank you."

Karl had walked away from the Wall toward the Women's Memorial, and I walked with him. He said, "It has come to the attention of the CID that a young lieutenant, who is listed as killed, or perhaps missing in action, was in fact murdered in the city of Quang Tri, on 7 February 1968, during the Tet Offensive battle for that city." He added, "I believe you were in Quang Tri Province at that time."

"Yes, but I have an alibi for that day."

"I only mention that as a coincidence. In fact, your unit was some kilometers away from the provincial capital of Quang Tri City on that day. But you can appreciate the background, and visualize the time and place."

"You bet. I also appreciate you checking my service records."

h.e.l.lmann ignored this and continued, "I was, as I said, with the Eleventh Armored Cavalry, stationed at Xuan Loc, but operating around Cu Chi at about that time. I don't remember that particular day, but that whole month during the Tet Offensive was unpleasant."

"It sucked."

"Yes, it sucked." He stopped walking and looked at me. "Regarding this American lieutenant, we have evidence that he was murdered by an American army captain."

Karl let that sink in, but I didn't react. Now, I'd heard what I didn't want to hear, and now I was in possession of a Secret. Details to follow.

We stared at the Vietnam Women's Memorial, the three nurses, one tending to the wounded guy lying on sandbags, one kneeling close by, and the other looking up at the sky for the medevac chopper. The four figures were in light clothing, and I felt cold just looking at them.

I said to Karl, "These statues should be closer to the Wall. The last person a lot of those guys over there saw or talked to before they died was a military nurse."

"Yes, but perhaps that juxtaposition would be too morbid. This man here looks to me as though he will live."

"Yeah... he's going to make it."

So we stayed silent awhile, lost in our thoughts. I mean, these are statues, but they bring the whole thing back again.

Karl broke the silence, and continued, "We don't know the name of the alleged murderer, nor do we know the alleged murder victim. We know only that this captain murdered this lieutenant in cold blood. We have no corpse-or I should say, we have many corpses, all killed by the enemy, except the one in question. We do know that the murder victim was killed by a single pistol shot to the forehead, and that may narrow down the name of the victim based on battlefield death certificates issued at that time. Unless, of course, the body was never found, and the victim is listed as missing in action. Are you following me?"

"I am. A United States Army captain pulls his pistol and shoots a United States Army lieutenant in the forehead. This is presumably a fatal wound. This happened in the heat of battle nearly thirty years ago. But let me play defense counsel-maybe it wasn't murder. Maybe it was one of those unfortunate instances where a superior officer shot a lower-ranking officer for cowardice in the face of the enemy. It happens, and it's not necessarily murder, or even illegal. Maybe it was self-defense, or an accident. You shouldn't jump to conclusions." I added, "But of course, you have a witness. So I shouldn't speculate."

We turned and began walking back toward the Wall. The light was fading, people came and went, a middle-aged man placed a floral wreath at the base of the black granite and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief.

h.e.l.lmann watched the man a moment, then said, "Yes, there was a witness. And the witness described a cold-blooded murder."

"And this is a reliable witness?"

"I don't know."

"Who and where is this witness?"

"We don't know where he is, but we have his name."

"And you want me to find him."

"Correct."

"How did you first hear from this witness?"

"He wrote a letter."

"I see... so, you have a missing witness to a thirty-year-old murder, no suspect, no corpse, no murder weapon, no motive, no forensic evidence, and the murder took place in a G.o.dforsaken country very far from here. And you want me to solve this homicide."

"That's correct."

"Sounds easy. Can I ask you why? Who cares after thirty years?"

"I care. The army cares. A murder was committed. There is no statute of limitations on murder."

"Right. You realize that this lieutenant who was killed, or is missing, is believed by his family to have died honorably in battle. So what is gained by proving that he was murdered? Don't you think his family has suffered enough?" I nodded toward the man at the Wall.

"That is not a consideration," said Karl h.e.l.lmann, true to form.

"It is to me," I informed him.

"It's not that you think too much, Paul, it's that you think of the wrong things."

"No, I don't. I think that there is a name on this wall that is best left alone."

"There's a murderer at large."