Me saying that, it meant something. I could see it in her face.
“You wouldn’t lie about a thing like that, would you?”
I thought for a moment before I said, “Yeah, I would. A guy I knew nearly twenty years ago? His daughter shows up out of nowhere and she asks me what he was like? Yeah, he could be the biggest jerk of all time and I’d tell her he was a nice man. But Bobby was something special. He was a friend. And a good man. A very good man. I don’t say that lightly.”
She was nodding, letting the subject build its own momentum. “We’ve got a lot of unanswered questions about him. My mom and I, we used to talk about it. Not much and not very often. She married Frank, started a whole new life, plus it hurt her, remembering him, because they were so much in love. But the times we did talk, she didn’t know a lot. About what happened, I mean. My father never said what he was doing or where he was doing it, and the Navy never gave us much of an explanation.”
I waited for her to ask and she finally did: “So… maybe you know. At least you have to know more than they told us. You were there. You were the military guy he was closest to when he was killed.”
Feeling increasingly uneasy, I said, “It’s a minor point, but I wasn’t in the military.”
“You weren’t? But he wrote about you. You had to have been there with him-”
“I was there. Yeah, we were together a lot. All I’m saying is, I was over there for a different reason.”
“See? I don’t even know where ‘over there’ is. It’s with little things like that you can help. Fill in some of the holes if you don’t mind talking about it. Bobby Richardson was killed in an explosion during a training exercise, that’s all my mom was told. A couple of times in his letters he mentioned Thailand, so we assume it was in Asia. She wrote and made phone calls, but never got another speck of information. Something else she said was that she tried to get in touch with an old buddy of his. She musta meant you. Who else? But that she never heard back.”
I was shaking my head. “I wrote your mother a letter after it happened. Whether she got it, I don’t know. I never received any calls or letters from her. That doesn’t mean she didn’t try. More likely, I was out of the country, on the road, no way for me to receive mail or messages. That was pretty common in those days.”
“I don’t get it. You weren’t in the military but you were that far out of touch?”
I said, “I was talking about the area your father and I were in. Primitive, that’s the point I’m making. You want me to answer questions about your father, I’ll answer as best I can. Ask me anything you want. But I’d rather deal with the present than talk about the past.”
A change of subject, that would be nice.
She wouldn’t be put off, though. “I’m his daughter, his only child. I think I have every right to know what happened to my own father, Doc. You don’t know what it’s like growing up without a real dad.”
Didn’t I? She could ask Tucker Gatrell about that. Not that Gatrell had ever been known to treat that subject with much honesty.
I stood there saying nothing. Listened to her say, “Tell me what you know. That’s all I’m asking. I’ve come a long way. And I’ve waited one hell of a long time.”
That kind of stubbornness. Her father had been like that…
I was looking at her face, her hands, learning what I could about her: she’d once had braces, had had an eye surgery, was right-handed, a nonsmoker, had a pencil callus on the inside of her middle finger-probably meant that she was an artist or wrote in a journal. She kept her nails short, polished, too… but it had been a while. No dates recently. No one to look nice for, maintain all the little hygienic details.
Maybe the woman had little emotional shelters for every occasion.
So what choice did I have? I told Amanda that I would share what I knew. By which I meant that I would tell her all that I was allowed to tell her about our time in Southeast Asia… and maybe hedge a little bit by telling her more than I was allowed to tell. But not much more.
I explained to her that, in the years following the Vietnam war, the United States maintained a military presence in places such as the Philippines, South Korea, places in Indonesia and Malaysia, so it wasn’t so unusual for her father to be pulling operations in places like Thailand. I didn’t mention that Thailand abuts Cambodia and I did not mention that an ethnic and political component of that nation, the Khmer Rouge, was slaughtering millions of its countrymen in nightly raids and in some hellishly one-sided firefights.
Let her look at a map, read some history if she wanted to put the pieces together. It was all there; plenty of photographs of all those skulls piled up. How many millions had died?
Something else I did not mention was that some very savvy and competent American intelligence officers- Bobby Richardson being one of them-were investigating the possibility that at least a few and, perhaps, several dozen, American servicemen listed as missing in action after Vietnam were actually being held in prison camps in the eastern regions of Cambodia.
Bobby and his team didn’t necessarily believe it, but they were investigating: MIA guys too deeply hidden to fuel the rumors, but they were there, just across the border of Vietnam.
Or so a few powerful people seemed to suspect…
The MIA guys, that was Bobby’s pet project. I was never much involved, simply because I doubted that such camps actually existed. Why would the Cambodians or the Vietnamese invest sizable amounts of time and money to secretly maintain American POW camps? There was no political leverage to be gained, no monetary profit. The premise sailed all the familiar red flags that I associate with conspiracy theories, and I do not believe in large-scale conspiracies. If I ever meet more than three or four people who can actually keep a secret, then maybe I’ll reconsider.
So… Bobby and I were both working in Cambodia. Along with his MIA project, he was assigned to train and lead guerrilla groups made up of a mountain people known as the Phmong. I was assigned to gather intelligence relating to the support or lack of support among Cambodian academicians for Pol Pot, leader of the CPK, the Communist Party of Kampuchea.
That Bobby and I would be thrown together and work some of the same missions wasn’t in our official orders, but it was something that two Americans, alone and in Asia, would naturally do. It was a brutal, brutal time in a fascinating area, and had anyone discovered what we were doing and why we were doing it, there was no doubt about how we would have been dealt with.
The story I had told Amanda about decapitation was true.
And there were other scenarios. Worse things to fear…
So, yeah, I watched Bobby’s back and he watched mine, and after just a few months we were buddies and confidants to a degree experienced only by those who have shared the uric-fear of being isolated and under fire in a foreign land.
His letter home was quite correct: After what we’d gone through, a couple of decades changed nothing.
I told Amanda Richardson, “Your father didn’t die in Thailand.”
We’d found a quiet spot off by ourselves at the very end of the dock complex. She’d plopped down on the boards and sat with her legs dangling over the water like a kid sitting on a bridge.
Now, as I spoke, she sat back a little and said, “Oh,” listening very closely.
I pressed ahead. “Bobby… your dad… was killed in the mountains of Cambodia. It wasn’t on a training mission and it wasn’t because he was screwed up, made a mistake and stepped on a mine. He was a high-level intelligence officer-some said brilliant-who knew exactly what he was doing… who knew the risks involved. He died fighting for what he believed was a…” I paused. How to say it honestly? Bobby was a patriot in his way, but he was no toy soldier, he wasn’t naive. He didn’t believe in noble causes or that war was a contest between good and evil. Bobby was a pragmatist; a professional. Finally, I said, “He died fighting for what he believed was reasonable and… right. Few men have that honesty of conviction. As his daughter, you should be proud of that; be proud of him and the work he did. Something else is… what I hope is… that you’ll respect the code of silence that his work required. And still requires.” Looking at her across the table, I added, “Do you understand what I’m saying, Amanda? What I’m asking?”
She didn’t respond for several seconds. Finally: “His death was no accident?” Shocked, but very calm about it.
“No. Not more than any other death in war is accidental… random.”
“Then how?”
“He was working as an advisor… no, that’s not true. Your dad was in command of a group of Phmong guerrillas who were on a mission to blow up-”
