CHAPTER 10

 

Saigon, Republic of Vietnam. April, 1967.

Staff Sergeant Bob Farrell nodded to the sentry as he walked briskly past the interior security perimeter and into the compound.

Farrell was sweating profusely. He’d never acclimated to the humid climate. Even though he was far enough from the jungle, Farrell considered Saigon more of a jungle than a city, and the barefoot throngs of people who occupied its crowded streets did little to dispel this belief.

He took off his cap after entering the building and checked his .45 with the desk officer, going past him to the CO’s office.

“Howdy, Bob,” said Colonel Edgewater as Farrell entered. “Thanks for coming. Coffee?”

The thought of coffee in the intense heat nauseated Farrell instantly. Shaking his head, he shook a pack of Camels from the breast pocket of his fatigue shirt, offering one to his boss in the same motion. After both men lit up, Edgewater broke the silence.

“So how is he?”

“Eerie,” replied Farrell. “Eerie as hell.”

The colonel was referring to a young Marine who was at that moment locked securely in a cell at the Armed Forces Provost Occupational Headquarters, Saigon, one building over. Farrell, the Criminal Investigation Division’s Non-Commissioned Officer assigned to the case, had spent the better part of a day-and-a-half trying to elicit information about the Marine, without much success. He was irritated at being pulled from the investigation for an impromptu conference with Edgewater. To Farrell the colonel was little more than an overblown prison-keeper and of scant help in investigative matters. Farrell was too new in-country, however, to object.

Farrell had been a San Francisco police officer for almost ten years when his army reserve unit, the 390th Military Police in Oakland, was activated and sent to Vietnam. His MP unit’s mission was to supplement the staff at the Joint Services Provost Headquarters, in Saigon. Though Farrell disliked leaving his wife with her mother in San Leandro, he welcomed the unique challenges a year in wartime Vietnam would present. He packed his bags, and was off to the Criminal Investigation Division under Edgewater.

Though in-country less than three months, Farrell had earned a reputation as a tenacious investigator and a good cop. His superiors relied on his street experience obtained in the States, and he got along well with the MPs and soldiers he worked alongside. His present case was quite unique, and giving him more than the usual amount of grief.

A young Marine, hailing from somewhere in the Midwest, had been arrested the night before by MPs under Farrell’s command. The Marine had violently resisted his arrest. This resulted in the injury of two military policemen, one seriously. But it was the crime the young Marine committed which created the real problem.

Farrell had become accustomed to a strained relationship between the residents of Saigon and the American occupational forces. The problems associated with the recreational behavior of thousands of American servicemen in a foreign country were a constant source of irritation to both the Vietnamese and American war efforts.

There was also intense political and racial strife between the Vietnamese and the American GIs. The United States military and its political overlords in Washington wanted to dilute this conflict at all costs. The war was escalating, and the Pentagon was becoming sensitive to the wavering public support for the war effort stateside. This created a delicate situation for the military police.

While trying to diminish the stigma of being an occupational army, the MPs had the tough job of not only keeping a leash on the off-duty servicemen, but had to do it in a manner that wouldn’t bring international attention to the increasing levels of American-involved crime.

The case of the young Marine was a compelling and grisly one. Two nights before, a young Vietnamese prostitute reported her four year-old son missing from the upper floor of the tenement brothel where they lived. She would never have reported it to the American military police at all, except that she’d been servicing US troops on R&R when the incident occurred.

The young woman told the MPs that several of her fellow hookers saw a tall, husky American with a crew-cut and a distinct limp carry the screaming child from the brothel. When several of the girls tried to stop the American, he beat them savagely and made off with the boy. The child’s mother was careful to explain that these women, all prostitutes like herself, did not wish to come forward and become embroiled in an investigation.

The report of the missing child was taken by the desk officer, and broadcast to roving foot and mobile patrol units. Farrell, a CID investigator, would never have been involved at all had the incident ended there. It did not.

Within six hours of the report, the son of the Vietnamese prostitute was found hanging upside down from a lamppost in one of the more secluded districts of the slum-ridden city.

The child was dead, his throat cut, and both ankles were wrapped in green parachute cord which was used to drape the body over the streetlight’s arch. The boy had been sodomized, and had apparently been hanging only a short while when discovered by an intoxicated sailor who’d detoured into the alley to relieve himself.

Farrell was assigned to investigate, but within minutes of the body’s discovery the crime scene had to be abandoned. When the local Vietnamese discovered the body, anti-American sentiment in the neighborhood became understandably ugly. A full-blown riot ensued, with every available MP in the city dispatched to assist.

Farrell suffered a cut over his ear from a thrown bottle, and before the night was over, many other MPs received similar treatment at the hands of the enraged Viets. Only through the use of teargas and riot batons were the embattled MPs able to retrieve the body of the child. Farrell had the body taken to HQ, where the child’s hysterical mother made the identification.

Though no stranger to violent crime, Farrell was nonetheless deeply disturbed by the murder. Back in the States he was only a beat cop, and the investigation into such a brutal crime would have been handled by a team in the Inspectors’ Division. But in Saigon, Staff Sergeant Robert Farrell was delving into the investigation of a heinous child-murder virtually singlehanded.

That a fellow American was responsible for the killing was not lost on the young cop. Farrell, like most soldiers of his generation, had been largely supportive of the war effort and indifferent to the growing tide of anti-war sentiment. But three months as a cop in Saigon had done much to plant the seeds of doubt in his mind. The constant contact with American soldiers whose behavior ranged from drunk and disorderly, to assault, to rape was taking its toll. As a stateside cop, he’d dealt mostly with a separate and distinct criminal element, easily distinguishable from the average citizen.

As a Saigon MP, Farrell found more and more of the servicemen he was arresting appeared to be ordinary guys. Often they were young men with no prior history of criminal offending. They had come to Vietnam to fight a war as innocent boys next door, and somewhere in-country had become drug addicts, sexual predators, and hardened criminals. It became harder for Farrell to see the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. What was once black and white became gray.

The war made things fuzzy.

He committed himself to capturing the child-murderer. His office became the command post, and he stayed around the clock. Photographs of the child hanging from the lamppost were piled on his desk, and the more he looked at them, the more disturbed and determined he got.

Farrell believed the suspect was a frequent patron of the many Saigon prostitutes, but the task of checking all the brothels in the bustling city was a momentous one. The suspect met a very general physical description, and there were thousands of American servicemen in Saigon on R&R.

It was an idea he got from one of his MPs that eventually led Farrell to the child-killer.

As a group of MPs came straggling in from another night of riot-breaking in the wake of the murder, they more closely resembled crash victims than a military police detachment. Splinted fingers and hands, bandaged heads, and torn uniforms seemed the order of the day.

As Farrell watched the troops stumble in, it occurred to him that the suspect was described by several of the prostitutes as walking with a limp. Maybe the killer wasn’t on R&R? Perhaps the killer was a patient at the naval hospital, or the army medical center, where countless servicemen wounded in the field were transferred for treatment? Many of these wounded personnel, though not fit for return to full duty, were allowed leave within Saigon during their recovery. Maybe the limp was a battlefield wound?

Farrell had his invaluable translators re-query the prostitutes who’d witnessed the child snatching. They all concurred; the suspect limped on his right leg.

He dispatched MP units to each of the medical facilities within the Saigon Command. It didn’t take long to hit pay dirt.

At 1630 hours, Farrell received a call to respond to the naval hospital regarding the apprehension of a suspect in the child-murder. He drove to the hospital code three.

When he arrived he was greeted at the entrance by a shore patrolman and a hospital staff officer. They led him to the emergency room, where one of his MPs was seated on a table.

Corporal Vincente Gomez looked like he’d gone ten rounds with the Brown Bomber. One of his eyes was swollen shut, and his normally dark-brown complexion was a sickly yellow pallor. His right hand was being wrapped in a cast by a navy doctor.

“Vinnie, what happened?” asked Farrell.

“We were checking with the orderly, Sarge, just like you told us, and giving him a description of our man.”

Gomez took a moment to swallow, his voice shaky. He looked as if he were about to throw up. “Go on,” Farrell said anxiously.

The corporal nodded. “The orderly told us to check the convalescent barracks where the outpatients and walking wounded are billeted. Orderly said there are too many dudes around here for him to keep tabs on. So me and Rick head over there.”

Farrell knew Gomez was referring to his partner, Rick Bryson, and wondered where the young MP was. “OK,” Farrell said, the nervous edge to his voice showing through, “get to the point.”

“So we go into the convalescent barracks, and the first guy we run into is this huge jarhead with a bunch of tattoos. He spots us coming into the room, and makes a bee-line for the rear exit. Only problem is, he’s got a limp, so we catch him in about three seconds.”

The young corporal grimaced as the doctor wrapped his hand. “So Rick says, ‘We want to ask you some questions, you’ll have to come with us,’ and the guy shrugs and sort of comes along, you know, real mellow-like.”

Farrell was looking intently at the MP. “Then what happened?”

“Hell, Sarge, I don’t know. Next thing I know this guy hits Rick in the throat. Rick goes down. I grab the guy, but he wiggles out and knees me in the groin.”

Farrell now knew the origin of Gomez’s sickly pallor. “OK, then what?”

“So I pull out my .45, but before I can plug the fucker he grabs my hand, and whammo, the next thing I know my hand is fucked up, and my gun is on the floor. I bent down to pick it up, and he kneed me in the face.”

“So where is the suspect now? You reported you had him in custody,” Farrell said impatiently.

“I guess Rick wasn’t completely out, because the next thing I hear is a shot. There’s Rick, puking blood, and his gun is smoking. And there’s our man on the ground.”

“Where’s Bryson now?”

Before Gomez could answer, the doctor interjected.

“Sergeant, your man is in the adjacent treatment room. I think you’d better see to him.”

Farrell went next door, where he found Private First Class Rick Bryson lying face down on a bed with his shirt off and clear plastic bags of ice on both sides of his neck. Under his mouth, on the floor, was a drip-pan full of bright, frothy blood.

It was obvious Bryson couldn’t speak. Farrell asked the doctor leaning over Bryson, “How is he, Doc?”

“Not good, but much better than it could have been. His larynx is badly bruised. We think we’ve bled out most of the fluid, and the swelling is down. His lungs aren’t in jeopardy. We’ll know soon if he’ll need a trach.”

“In English, please?”

“Your man has had a lot of damage done to his throat. I won’t know for a while if we’ll have to cut his throat open and do a tracheotomy. I believe we’ll be able to avoid that, and he’ll eventually have a full recovery, but I can’t say for sure. It’s too soon to tell.”

Bryson was in obvious pain. Tears formed in the corners of the young soldier’s eyes as he listened to his injuries discussed so casually.

“Just patch him up, will you?”

“I hope to have him good as new.”

Farrell silently prayed that Bryson wouldn’t suffer permanent disability. He patted the young MP gently on the shoulder.

“You take it easy, Rick, and soak up all this flatbed time. I’m going to work your ass off when you get back. I’m also going to put you in for so many medals you’re going to have to lug them around in a shopping cart.”

Bryson forced a smile. Farrell nodded a goodbye, and headed out to the main lobby. The same shore patrolman who’d greeted him at the entrance was still there.

“OK,” said Farrell curtly. “Where is the son of a bitch?”

The SP led Farrell to a surgical room, and had him don an apron and facemask. He entered the operating room.

He found a surgeon, as well as a group of nurses, huddled around a man laying face down on a surgical table. No one looked up as he entered.

The man on the table was huge, with a thickly muscled torso. The man’s face was obscured, and he wore the deep tan of the field soldier. There were jagged scars running up and down the man’s back, and Farrell could see several of the circular sphincter-scars that only gunshot wounds produced. The man had a crew-cut, and a Marine Corps eagle, globe, and anchor tattooed on one of his massive forearms.

Farrell imagined getting slugged in the throat by one of those beefy arms, and cringed as he remembered the nineteen year-old MP spitting blood in a room down the hall.

“I’m going to have your ass on a platter, motherfucker,” Farrell said between clenched teeth. “You’re never going to see the outside of a prison as long as you live.”

At Farrell’s outburst, the physician and nurses looked up.

“What are you doing in here?” the surgeon asked.

“That man you’re operating on is in my custody,” replied Farrell evenly. “How badly is he hurt?”

“He’s very lucky. He was shot in the buttocks, and the bullet deflected off his hip and exited. Would you care to see?”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

By the time Farrell left surgery and got out of his gown, three of the MPs from his detachment were in the lobby. He issued orders requiring twenty-four hour babysitting of the suspect. Once the suspect was awake, he was to be put in irons, the doctors be damned. And once medically cleared for release, the suspect was to be transported forthwith to the detention facility at the Provost HQ. Farrell assigned two of the MPs this task.

The third MP was to see that MPs Bryson and Gomez were taken care of. He was also ordered to obtain the medical records of the suspect and dispatch them to Farrell’s office immediately. He left strict orders that no one was to talk to the suspect. He then left to catch some much needed rest.

Farrell was not to sleep, however. By the time he returned to his billet, a message was waiting for him to report back to his office to take receipt of the suspect’s 201 file, or military service record. He took a hurried shower, stuffed a fresh pack of Camels into his pocket, and drove back to Provost HQ.

One of the GIs in the office brought Farrell some sandwiches. He unbelted his .45 and sat down at his desk. The clerk came in a moment later and he signed a receipt for the Marine’s personnel file. It was as thick as a phone book.

Lance Corporal Vernon Emil Slocum, United States Marine Corps, was only twenty years old. He’d enlisted in the Marine Corps at age seventeen after being signed in by his father, a farmer from Ogden, Iowa.

There wasn’t much background on Slocum. He’d never graduated high school, and was one of four children. His military record was considerably more detailed.

After boot camp at Parris Island, Slocum was attached to the 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, already in Vietnam. He was assigned as an M-60 machine-gunner, probably due to his large stature and physical strength. His unit was a Battalion Landing Team in the Da Nang area.

Farrell lit another in an endless stream of cigarettes and labored over the file. Slocum’s service record read like Audie Murphy’s.

In late ’65, and early ’66, Slocum was in the Cam Ranh Bay doing platoon recon. His unit was ambushed by a significantly larger NVA force. Though wounded in the chest and back by rocket fragments, he so effectively suppressed enemy fire that his platoon was able to escape. He did this after both his assistant gunner and team leader had already been killed.

After a brief stay in a field hospital, Slocum was back with his unit, this time with a Purple Heart and Bronze Star.

Then Farrell found an unexplained gap in the records, and Slocum was reassigned to another platoon. Again he distinguished himself in combat, earning the Silver Star for singlehandedly halting a Viet Cong ambush in the Chu Lai Peninsula that would have resulted in a complete rout of the Marine defensive perimeter had it succeeded. More battles, and even more medals, were chronicled in the file.

Farrell was completely engrossed in the documents and lost track of the time. He was jarred back to reality by the desk sergeant’s voice.

“Hey Bob, your baby-killer’s CO is here. He wants to talk to you. He’s in the colonel’s office.”

So Farrell found himself in Edgewater’s office, irritated at the interruption, and curious what Lance Corporal Vernon E Slocum’s company commander would have to say about what his Marine had done.

“What do you mean, ‘eerie’?” asked Edgewater.

“Well sir, I haven’t had a chance to talk to the suspect, but I’ve been going over his 201 file. I’d like to get back to it before I interrogate him.”

Edgewater said nothing in response, looking at the floor and exhaling smoke through his nostrils. It made Farrell nervous. Finally he spoke.

“Bob, you’ve done a good job on this, and I’m proud of you. But I think you should talk to this Marine’s commanding officer. He’s outside in the waiting room. I’ve already had a chance to chat with him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me he was here? You could have saved me a couple of hours of reading.”

“I have my reasons, Sergeant.” He ground out his cigarette and pressed the intercom button on his desk. “Send in the captain, will you?”

The door opened, and a tall Marine came in. He was wearing filthy, sweat-stained fatigues, and looked as if he hadn’t slept in at least as long as Farrell. It was clear he’d come in from the field. Edgewater made the introductions.

Farrell stood and shook a hand thick with the dirt of the jungle. Both sat down.

“I’ve already briefed the captain on the status of the investigation and the charges against his Marine,” Edgewater said. Turning to Bradshaw, Edgewater added, “The industrious sergeant here has been going through Slocum’s 201 file.”

Farrell didn’t like the tone of Edgewater’s voice. There was a hint of something veiled, something that spelled trouble to the young cop.

Bradshaw sighed deeply, and pulled a battered pack of Marlboros from inside his tunic. After he had lit one with an equally battered Zippo, he looked at Farrell through the smoke and said, “Sergeant Farrell, Corporal Slocum is certainly one helluva Marine.”

“There are a lot of gaps in his file, Captain. I was hoping you could fill some of them in.”

The captain sighed heavily again, and Farrell realized the Marine officer was several years younger than him. Bradshaw displayed a weariness not borne solely from lack of sleep.

“Sergeant, Corporal Slocum is without a doubt the most efficient fighting man I’ve ever known. You’ve seen his file; you’ve probably guessed that already.”

Farrell took umbrage. “Sir, he may be a super-trooper, but do you know what he did? Are you aware of what he’s being charged with?”

Bradshaw said nothing for a long minute, staring solemnly at Farrell.

“Sergeant, have you ever been in combat?”

“No, sir, I have not.”

“Then it’s going to be hard for you to get perspective on Corporal Slocum. I’m not sure you would understand.”

Farrell found himself growing angry. “Sir, with all due respect, I’m not sure I care to understand. To you, Slocum is a squared-away Marine. To me, he’s a child-killer. Your troop buttfucked and murdered a four year-old boy and left him hanging like a piñata. When he was questioned about it, he attacked two of my men, severely injuring one, and tried to escape. I don’t give a goddamn about his war heroics, or the Corps, or how rough it was out there in the jungle. He’s a monster. And I’m going to see he gets the death penalty, or spends the rest of his miserable life in Fort Leavenworth.”

Farrell half-expected the Marine captain to lash back. He knew he was out of line, but didn’t care. Edgewater glared at him hotly; he was pushing the limits of insubordination. Instead, the Marine officer shook his head slightly, smoking in silence. After a final drag, Captain Bradshaw put out his butt and looked at Farrell in contempt.