A week passed before Captain Franklin came to Lang Vei. Twenty minutes after his helicopter landed, he was walking with Lincoln up the hill on the far side of the fence, picking their way through stands of bamboo.
“I hear you saved Prato’s bacon,” Franklin said.
“I got lucky is all,” Lincoln said. “I just happened to look at the right time.”
“You’ve used that ‘lucky’ line with me before,” Franklin reminded him. “It seems to me Captain Prato’s the one who got lucky. Lucky having you assigned here, and lucky you made that shot when you did.”
“Maybe he should’ve been more careful about who he allowed in his camp.”
Franklin stopped, blinked his brilliant green eyes a couple of times, and turned to face Lincoln. “You know he doesn’t get to decide who serves in the Vietnamese army, right? That’s up to them. If some people get in who are sympathetic to the communist cause, that’s too bad, but it’s something we just have to keep our eyes open for.”
“Why enlist on the enemy’s side? Why not just join the VC?”
“Because they’re looking for opportunities to gum up the works, just as you saw. You have to remember the history of this place. Vietnam was colonized by the French in the middle of the nineteenth century. During the Second World War, Japan took it over for a spell. After the war, the French wanted it back, but the Vietnamese had other ideas. It took ten years of fighting to get rid of the French, but the 1954 Geneva Accords that finally did that also split the country in two—Ho Chi Minh’s Communists in the north and the former French loyalists in the south.
“The split wasn’t meant to be permanent, but when Diem pronounced himself president of all of Vietnam in ’55, old Uncle Ho put on his fighting gear again. We backed the French for years, and then we came in to help prop up the succeeding governments in the south. That’s where we’re still stuck. So when you’re surprised that someone living in South Vietnam might take up arms against his own ‘side,’ remember that every adult you see has lived with nothing but colonization and war for his entire life, and the lives of his parents and grandparents since the days of our own Civil War.”
Lincoln nodded along with Franklin’s description. When the captain finished, he turned away and started up the hill again, Lincoln following. “I’m not saying it’s not in our strategic interest to stop the spread of communism, and that’s what we’re trying to do here. I’m just saying, don’t underestimate the lengths a man will go to if he thinks he’s fighting for his country’s freedom.”
Lincoln had never thought of the struggle that way. He had come to Vietnam because that’s where the Army had sent him, and he’d enlisted because he was likely to be drafted anyway. Rich white kids who went to Harvard or Yale were exempt from such things, but not black kids from New Bordeaux—even ones who, thanks to their adoptive father’s criminal activities, were better off than most.
At the crest of the hill, Franklin stopped. Lincoln came up beside him and cast his gaze over rolling hillsides, each one cutting a line across those behind. The landscape was green and lush, each line of hills a darker green than the one before it until finally it faded into black. It couldn’t have been more different from the flat swampland around New Bordeaux, except where the rice paddies broke the foliage, looking almost as green as Franklin’s eyes. The view made Lincoln think about fairy tales he’d been read in the orphanage, as if this were a mystical, magical place where anything could happen.
Franklin pointed toward the west. “See that hilltop there?”
Lincoln looked, saw a dozen hilltops or more, guessed it didn’t matter which one in particular the captain meant. “Sure.”
“That’s in Laos. You see the borderline between here and there?”
Lincoln looked for it. From here, he couldn’t see a single man-made structure, no sign that any human hand had ever made a mark on the landscape. “Nope.”
“That’s because borders are imaginary lines. They’re not acts of God or elaborate constructions of the aliens that came before us—”
“Aliens?” Lincoln interrupted.
“You ever read Chariots of the Gods, Clay?”
“No, should I?”
“Don’t bother. It’s probably all bullshit, anyway. Point is, governments set borders. Like the line between here and Laos, or between North and South Vietnam. They’re not set in stone; they’re lines drawn on maps. They can be erased or moved at the whim of fallible humans.”
“Okay,” Lincoln said. He was confused by the captain’s philosophical musings and by the way the man jumped from subject to subject. If there were threads connecting them, they were as invisible as the border that lay somewhere below.
“Reason I’m telling you all this, Clay, is that your country needs you.”
Lincoln wasn’t sure anymore what his country had to do with any of it. “That’s why I’m here, right?”
“Right,” Franklin said. “But where you’re needed isn’t here.” He ticked his head toward the west. “It’s there.”
“But that’s Laos, you said.”
“I did. And officially, we’re not in Laos.”
“Then I don’t—”
“I said officially. Like borders, sometimes what’s official isn’t what’s real. Laos is a neutral country. But the NVA and the VC are traveling down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, through Laos—it’s their main shortcut into South Vietnam. The Chinese are there, too, and the Soviets. Officially, none of them are, but the reality on the ground is that they’re all over Laos. We need to step up our presence or lose the whole country to the communist bloc. If Laos falls, Vietnam is doomed. If Vietnam goes, say good-bye to Thailand, Cambodia, the whole of Southeast Asia. After that, Japan, the Philippines, Hawaii . . . no telling where they stop.”
“I’m still not sure what you’re saying, Captain.”
“I’m saying, you’ve made a mark, Corporal. People much higher up than me have noticed you. You take initiative. You don’t wait to be told what to do—you figure out what needs to be done, and you do it. You’re good at killing the enemy without getting killed yourself.”
“That’s what the job is, right?”
“That’s part of it. But any army needs most of its soldiers to be followers, not leaders. They want a lot of people who’ll take orders and a few who’ll give them. You’re not one of those people. That said, I don’t know that you’re officer material, either.”
Lincoln didn’t know how to respond to that, so he kept quiet. Franklin didn’t seem to notice.
“What you are is exactly what we need in Laos. Someone who’s self-sufficient. Who can determine what needs doing and figure out how best to accomplish it. Who doesn’t need to be told when to eat, when to sleep, when to piss.”
“But . . . Laos?”
“I can’t order you there, Clay. But Colonel Giunta can. He followed your training closely, at Bragg and at Benning. You surpassed everyone’s expectations, in case nobody told you. Most guys who go through the yearlong course don’t catch on like you did. He wants you in Laos, and if he wants you there, so do I.”
“What would I be doing there?”
Franklin grinned, like a fisherman who knows his hook is set firmly in his prey’s cheek. “There’s a joint Department of Defense/CIA task force going in to exfiltrate some high-value captives from a VC camp. Like I said, we’re not the only ones breaking the rules about Laotian neutrality. I’m not going to tell you who the captives are, so don’t ask. I’ll just say that if they’re transferred to North Vietnam, things are going to get ugly in a hurry. The task force is going to go in fast and hot, free the captives, and get out again.”
“DoD and CIA? Really?”
“Even that’s classified. Need to know, so don’t go repeating it.”
“When would I leave?”
Franklin looked at his watch. “You’re late already.”
“Guess we better get going, then.”
“I guess we’d better,” Franklin agreed. “The chopper’s waiting.”
• • •
The task force assembled at the B Team headquarters in Danang. There were eighteen men in all. A couple of them looked familiar, but Lincoln wasn’t sure where he might have seen them. Maybe in Green Beret training, maybe in the bush. Most of them seemed to know one another, and he felt like the odd man out. He kept to himself, listened but didn’t say much unless he was specifically addressed.
They were mostly the typical warrior types: heavy on muscle and testosterone, with big, booming laughs and fixed opinions about everything in the world, Lincoln thought. They had all been issued black uniforms with no insignia, not even Made in the USA tags on the inside. They’d had to surrender all their identification, including dog tags, and were told they’d get everything back after the mission. The gear and weapons they’d been issued had been made in other countries, including France, the Soviet Union, and Israel. While they were in Laos, an officer explained, they would carry only things that couldn’t identify them as Americans.
In the crowd of men dressed in black, the only one who really stood out was one guy, who—like Lincoln—seemed to prefer his own company. He was muscular, but slender compared to the rest. His blond hair was a little longer than most of the other men’s and was swept up off his forehead. Instead of a uniform, he wore a white, short-sleeved shirt with a pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket and tan pants. He could have been watching a baseball game or sitting at a soda fountain waiting for a cold drink. He looked as casual as could be, cool in the Quonset hut while everyone else had sweat rolling off in rivers, but there was something in his relaxed posture that Lincoln noticed; he was coiled and ready to strike without warning. He smoked and seemed like he was barely listening, but his eyes missed nothing.
CIA, Lincoln was sure. Maybe he was the only agent on the so-called joint task force, or maybe there were others but they just looked like the GIs. Either way, this one man stood apart, and Lincoln thought he was a man worth keeping a close eye on.
At the front of the room, a colonel who’d lost weight in the field but hadn’t had his uniform taken in stood in front of a map, holding a long wooden pointer. He was rambling on about the op. Lincoln tried to listen, but the guy had a droning voice that threatened to put him to sleep. Regardless, he would go where he was pointed and kill whoever got in his way; he didn’t need to know the details for that.
He figured he would fly into Laos with these guys, they’d yank out whoever it was who’d been taken prisoner, and then he would be flown back to Lang Vei. Or at least back to Danang, and he would have to make his own way back from there.
Then the colonel was finished and the door was opened and the men filed out. Their gear had been stacked outside, and each man grabbed his own pack and weapons on the way to a pair of waiting slicks—UH-1 “Huey” helicopters used for troop transport, without weapons pods—that sat on the tarmac, propellers swirling lazily overhead. Lincoln noted the lack of any military markings on them, but he didn’t question it. The less he knew, the better.
He was the next-to-last man to board. The blond guy he took for CIA got to the door before him but hung back and ushered Lincoln ahead. “After you,” he said. His voice was as cool as his appearance, smooth enough for radio, Lincoln thought. He couldn’t detect any accent.
“Thanks,” he said, climbing aboard. He took a seat in between two burly Green Berets, and the agent sat up front, beside the pilot.
“Who is that guy?” Lincoln whispered to the man on his right, nodding toward the agent.
“No idea. All’s I know is if he’s here, we’re about to wade into the shit. Cat like that don’t show up for just any old mission.”
Lincoln didn’t answer, but he thought the man was probably right. Wherever they were going, whatever they were about to do, it was important to somebody at a pay grade way above his.