IN PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN before he entered the service, John Jacobsen Chubb poses beside his cherry-red Chevy Nomad on the lawn of his parents’ home, the picture of hot-rod attitude—lanky frame clad in a T-shirt, jeans, and boots, hair swept in a James Dean pompadour, good-looking and careless and not afraid of a damned thing. The car, Chubb’s obvious pride, his baby, is chopped and lowered and gleaming. A few feet away stands a big red Triumph motorcycle, another product of his passion for motors and machines and of all things mechanical, the passion that took him to Vietnam.
He had just turned twenty when he joined the Kingsmen. Of the four men who make up Case 1731, he’d had the most quintessentially suburban American childhood: He lived his entire life in one house, a neat Craftsman bungalow in a working-class, ethnically diverse neighborhood three blocks from the Harbor Freeway in suburban Los Angeles. He attended Gardena Elementary School, where he was liked by his teachers. He was a Cub Scout and a junior fire marshal. He made field trips to the police academy, the San Diego Zoo, and Knott’s Berry Farm. In 1959, he and his parents and his half-brother Clifford vacationed in Tijuana, where they had their picture taken while wearing giant sombreros.
He played peewee football and Little League baseball, swam at the YMCA, learned judo, ran track. By the fifth grade he’d earned such a reputation as a jock that when his class produced a newspaper, he landed a front-page sports column, “John Chubb’s Sports Roundup.” Girls filled his junior high yearbooks with admiring notes.
At Gardena High School he joined school plays as a stagehand and electrician. He’d always been good with his hands; at home he’d carried a screwdriver the way other toddlers carry teddy bears, and had taken apart and tricked out his bicycles before tearing down his first car, a 1948 Oldsmobile, to the bolts. The Nomad was next; Chubb gave it air shocks so he could make the car pogo at stoplights, replaced the stock front seats with a Cadillac’s, and—hot stuff at the time—fitted it with a stereo.
But though blessed with mechanical genius, Chubb was dyslexic, and struggled in class. An army “Report of Medical History” he completed in March 1970 asked, “Did you have any difficulties with school studies or teachers?” Chubb answered: “Had lots of problems.” Frustrated, labeled a dummy, laughed at by some of his classmates, he quit school.
He worked for a rubber and plastics firm in Long Beach, then as a steelworker in L.A., bending metal rods seven days a week, saving his money for the auto shop he one day hoped to open. First, though, Chubb thought it might be wise to land some experience with engines more complex than the Nomad’s. A recruiter promised that if he served a stint as a door gunner and maintenance apprentice, the army would train him as a full-fledged helicopter mechanic. His uncle Art Jacobsen was an air force lifer, and tales of his exploits in early helicopter prototypes had long fired Chubb’s imagination. He reported for basic training in June 1970.
That November he completed the Aircraft Maintenance Apprentice Course at Fort Rucker, and the Helicopter Door Gunner Course the following January. He was immunized for typhoid, tetanus, cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, polio, plague, adenovirus, and influenza. Then he was ordered to Vietnam.
A couple of weeks before he left the country, Chubb attended the baptism of his infant niece in San Luis Obispo. His relatives made a fuss over him, worried about his upcoming trip, but they knew John could take care of himself. Besides, he was lucky: In October 1968 he’d hit a water-filled pothole while driving his father’s old Ford pickup, a hole so deep the truck flipped and its roof crushed flat against the doors. To look at the wreck was to assume someone died. John had walked away with hardly a scratch.
Chubb reported to Bravo Company on March 6, not quite two weeks after reaching Vietnam. He did not immediately join a Huey crew. “I made it to my company about a week ago,” he wrote his parents. “I work in the hanger putting inspections on helicopters. We work 7 days a week. Its not hard work but its long hours. Today I took my first shower since I’ve been in the company there isn’t any hot water either. What really makes me mad is we don’t have any sheets to sleep on it gets itchy sleeping with just a wool blanket. Its hard to get a lot of things like cameras, radios and junk like that.”
Others in the company had sharper complaints. The flights into Laos had become scary, very scary, the most intense anyone in the unit had ever experienced. Once across the border, every square foot of the ground below was hostile, and the smoke and haze were so bad they couldn’t see where they were going or where they were, and no approach, no altitude, was safe from antiaircraft shells that climbed toward them like fiery basketballs, and when they flared to land they’d be rocked by fire from an enemy that seemed everywhere at once. Crews could actually see the North Vietnamese shooting at them, and dodging their fire, staying alive, often seemed more blind luck than skill. Bullets thudded into metal and whizzed through the hatches and ripped through fuel cells and up through the floor. Jet fuel ran off the deck at a gunner’s feet. And the hell of it was, the crews had no choice but to fly into those hot landing zones again and again and again, and every time they got hotter.
Chubb finally made his first flight as a Kingsmen door gunner on March 17, and flew again all the next day. He was back in the hangar on the 19th, when Jack Barker made a satellite call home. Dee and the kids sang “Happy Birthday” to him; the satellite links were difficult to arrange and plagued by technical difficulties, and the Barkers weren’t sure they’d talk again before he turned thirty-two, three days later. Barker was tickled, especially by the singing of his sixteen-month-old son, Michael. How could it be, he asked Dee, that his baby was growing so quickly?
Dee asked him what he was doing up. The major’s calls usually came at about 9 P.M. Arizona time, when it was 11 A.M. in Vietnam; this one was during the day, when it had to be the dead of night in Southeast Asia. Why wasn’t he sleeping? she asked.
“I’ll tell you about it later,” Barker replied. “It’s nothing.”
An hour after lunch one day, a Squirrel circles the site and swoops into the LZ, and a few minutes later Kevin Smith, the joint task force’s commander in Laos, strides across the grid with three Vientiane bigwigs, among them Done Somvorachit, the director general of the Department of Europe and Americas in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Done, once Laos’s ambassador to Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, is wearing a polyester disco shirt that strains to contain a gut the size and shape of a volleyball on his otherwise skinny frame. I leave the screens to pay my respects; I met him five months ago on a dig in Khoummuan Province, when I made the mistake of asking him a question. His answer—a monologue on how Laos had been wronged by the United States during the war and disrespected by it since—lasted for forty-five minutes.
Done seems nonplussed by my mud-spattered trousers. “You are working,” he says. “I am surprised.”
“Just trying to get the hang of the team’s work,” I tell him. The last time I saw him, he was wearing a U.S. Border Patrol cap; today, I notice, one of his assistants is wearing it, and Done’s switched to a white ball cap advertising Lexus automobiles. It’s a marvelous testament to the country’s ongoing conversion from socialist self-denial to Western-style capitalism.
The segue isn’t an entirely comfortable one, as it requires Laos to interact with the rest of the planet, something it hasn’t done well since the days of its kings, who ruled for six-hundred-plus years. For the first five hundred, they oversaw a sometimes unified, sometimes disjointed kingdom unknown to the great bulk of humanity—unpenetrated by Western explorers, overlooked by merchants calling on its more powerful neighbors, not only landlocked but sequestered by mountains north and east and cascades on the Mekong to the south. Only a couple of seventeenth-century Europeans left word of their travels here; after that, more than a hundred years passed before a third set foot in the country.
With more time, the French showed up. They brought roads and modern cities and professional bureaucracy; they also imposed a foreign language, high taxes, and a harsh penal code on an unreceptive populace. When they reasserted their claim on the kingdom after World War II, the Lao chafed at the yoke and eventually achieved independence.
They might have faded back into blissful insignificance, except that Mao had emerged in China, and Ho Chi Minh was leading a war against the French in Vietnam. Suddenly little Laos, overlooked by practically everyone for centuries, was viewed as key to stanching the spread of Communism. Civil war erupted between the U.S.-propped monarchy and the Vietnamese-backed Pathet Lao. The latter prevailed, and Laos returned again to its old ways, as a place removed from and forgotten by the greater human experience.
Now, twenty-six years later, the wheel has turned anew. One of the country’s top officials is endorsing a luxury car before me. “Perhaps you and I can talk later,” I say. “Will you be at base camp tonight?”
“Yes,” Done says. “Come over to the Lao section. We will be having dinner there.” He and his party traverse the grid, eye the hole. They speak to none of the locals, and none of the site’s villagers seems much interested in speaking with them. Vientiane and its representatives don’t hold much day-to-day sway with rural folk, who depend on nothing from a state that has nothing to give, and whose hearts stir little for a nation that exists largely in the abstract.
I watch Mr. Done’s party stride along the screening station, the ambassador nodding perfunctorily to the men and women at the head of the bucket line. The French usually get the blame for the looseness of bond between government and people in Laos: In the European tradition, they used features of the terrain to establish the country’s modern borders, and in the process split highland tribes among Laos, Vietnam, China. The lowland Lao Luom, the country’s ethnic majority, was split in half by the Mekong, the divide between Laos and Thailand.
To some, the result seems less a nation than a collection of ethnic leftovers, each loyal first to kin who live across a border. Other peoples have found unity in a shared purpose, rather than blood, however; what’s really stymied Laotian nation building is the absence of decent schools. Without them, children aren’t exposed to their country’s history, or its pan-ethnic values, traditions, sources of pride. Education is essential to establishing a national identity.
As it is, villagers from Ban Chen and Ban Saturn may recognize that Mr. Done is some bigwig from Vientiane, but few know who he is or what he does, and they have little reason to care—the Ministry of Foreign Affairs simply isn’t relevant to their lives. Most have no firsthand knowledge of the world beyond a radius of a few days’ walk. His past as ambassador to Germany will mean nothing, because few, if any, know anything of Germany—or Europe, for that matter.
The visitors return to their chopper. A minute later the machine rises from the trees at the clearing’s edge, turns its belly toward us, and whisks Mr. Done away.
Early that evening, I walk Main Street to the Laotian camp, the sound of music building as I pass the last American tents. There’s no mistaking Lao pop, which relies on mournful-sounding vocals and giddily upbeat melodies played in seemingly endless loops on Casio keyboards and drum machines. The songs never peak; they just cruise on emotional and rhythmic plateaus for what seems like years.
The ambassador and his entourage are seated at one of the Laotian mess tent’s long banquet tables, not far from the speakers. He waves me over, and I take the seat to his right. He looks at me coolly. “We will talk,” he says over the music, “and you will share a meal with us.” What follows is a reprise of our conversation of months past. I ask him why the Laotian government devotes so much time and talent to the search for another country’s missing. He replies that his people have agreed to cooperate “for humanitarian reasons.”
“It is, as you know, at the request of the U.S. government and especially the families of the MIAs,” he says. “We have sympathy toward the families, those who lost their loved ones and so forth. We put ourselves in their place. We understand their emotions, their grievances, their loss.
“The war here, it was not declared. It was a secret war, a special war. Your president, to honor your Constitution, should have declared war. But he did not.” Mr. Done smiles at me. “But now we want to look beyond that, and see the future. To forget the past. We want to be friendly with the U.S. people and the U.S. government.”
As he speaks, the camp’s cooks, all women, carry plates of food to the table—greens, meat mixed with herbs, platefuls of animal flesh of a type I can’t identify. As the spread grows, Mr. Done’s colleagues fiddle with a barbecue on the table. It resembles a twelve-inch flower pot, its bottom filled with glowing coals. Across its top lies a sin dat, an aluminum plate that looks like a hubcap. The officials lay strips of meat on its domed middle, from which fat drains into a shallow trough around the sin dat’s edge. It bubbles there, cooking small pieces of vegetables.
“You can spread to the U.S. people that we are good people,” Mr. Done says, eyeing the meat. “What we want to know is how we can cooperate further.”
He does not raise the subject of money, which is undeniably a major incentive: The People’s Democratic Republic gets a lot of American dollars in return for its cooperation, hard currency without which its government, and particularly its military, would not function. This is also true of Vietnam. The Hanoi government maintains an agency called the Vietnam Office for Seeking Missing Persons, which devotes itself not to finding the roughly 300,000 Vietnamese missing from the war, but the 1,500-odd American troops whose bodies have yet to leave the place. Its representatives at the national, provincial, district, and village levels line up workers and secure permissions for the American teams that venture into the Vietnamese backcountry four times a year.
Why? The Vietnamese cite their humanitarian bent, just as the Laotians do, but their economic health is at stake, as well: Securing open trade with the United States, which they achieved during Bill Clinton’s presidency, depended on their cooperation on the MIA issue. And the Vietnam Office for Seeking Missing Persons is motivated by more immediate self-interest, because it’s paid for by American taxpayers; thus, the United States finds itself in the odd position of kowtowing to a foreign agency that would not exist without it.
Whether either country’s cooperation is as full as it could be is open to debate. Vietnam was pathological in its record keeping during the war, but seems to have somehow misplaced quite a few Americans who were at least briefly its captives during the fighting. U.S. officials are confident the former POWs are dead, but frustrated that Vietnam has been unable or unwilling to pinpoint their burial sites.
Not only that, but in the 1980s, Hanoi handed over dozens of remains that bore traces of chemical preservative, suggesting that the Socialist Republic had warehoused American bones with the intent of using them for political leverage. One summary prepared by American officials in January 1992 estimated that 60 percent of the remains turned over unilaterally by Vietnam and identified to that point—161 sets out of 270—“show signs of storage.”
Laos, quite a bit less sophisticated than its neighbor, has few records to withhold, but has refused to grant U.S. teams access to swaths of its territory.
“You can try all of this,” Done says, flipping a piece of meat on the sin dat with chopsticks. “Try this. It’s very good. It’s Lao barbecue.”
I pincer a slice of meat with my own chopsticks and take a bite. Or try to; the meat is so tough I can’t tear it. I put the whole piece in my mouth and discover that it’s mostly gristle. A full minute’s chewing fails to break it down. I surreptitiously spit it into my hand and flick it out of the tent and into the brush behind me.
A bottle of Beerlao appears at my elbow. I gratefully take a swig while I peruse the table’s other offerings. I know better than to tangle with the fresh greens: Lao salads might be washed, but usually not with bottled water. A bowl close to me is filled with chilies and small pieces of meat. I scoop some out and find it spicy, flavorful, and tender. I have more. And more. Mr. Done, happily chewing his barbecue, nods to the bowl. “Ah, you like that. Tiger meat.”
“Tiger meat?”
“Not really tiger,” he says. “It’s just called that.” He points to another bowl. “You can eat that, if you like. It’s cooked. Same as what you’re eating now, but it’s cooked.”
I’m in mid-chew. “This isn’t cooked?”
“No. But that is, over there.”
“This is raw meat?”
Mr. Done nods. “Raw oxen.” He snares another sliver of meat—barbecued oxen, I’d guess—from the sin dat. “This meat was killed today,” he reassures me. “Not bought at market. It’s very fresh.”
I smile, but switch to the cooked version, while Mr. Done talks about the person he says was most responsible for bringing Americans and Laotians together on recovery missions—namely, Mr. Done. “I was the one who did that directly,” he says, “because I was the one who was entrusted by the central government to do that.”
I don’t know whether that’s true, but it’s a fact that a series of 1989 meetings established most of the ground rules the two countries have followed since. Without them, Gwen Haugen’s team would not now be in Laos at the height of the rainy season. Ban Alang Base Camp likely would not exist. “We have been stopped by the bad weather a few times, but that is all,” Mr. Done says. “We have to have each other. When we are in need, you help. But when you need our help, we give what we can.”
A pretty young Laotian woman approaches us with a tray, on which are bottles of Beerlao and Johnnie Walker Red and two shot glasses. Custom holds that we’re to throw down a shot every time she circles the room. Dining with Laotian officialdom is, in this respect, a little like joining a fraternity.
Mr. Done stands and insists the woman give him a kiss before he does his duty. She demurs. He presses the point. She sticks to her position. He insists again. She finally gives him a tentative peck on the cheek, and Mr. Done swallows a shot of whiskey.
By the time she returns, I’ve listened to Mr. Done sulk at length about the lack of love he gets from Washington. I’ve also convinced him to let me travel by car to the site, which seems the closest I’ll get to permission to walk.