She realized he was standing next to her. When he smiled, he was kind of cute, except he needed some major dental work. He put his arm around her shoulders and she didn’t move it. She pointed to the leather cord on the wall.
“Are those-”
“Ears. The major, he cut ’em off dead gooks. Give them to me for Christmas, back when I was about your age.”
“And I was hoping for new soccer shoes.” She gestured at the maps on the wall. “What’s all this?”
Junior pointed at a red flag with a half-moon sword and a hammer and the face of a man with a wispy little beard and said, “Commie flag from North Vietnam. That’s Ho Chi Minh hisself. And that’s an NVA helmet, and those black pajamas, that’s what the VC wore. That’s the major’s Bowie knife and his Colt. 45s.”
“What are all these photographs, the Camp David map?” She pointed. “I know that name, McCoy. What’s all this for?”
“Oh… we’re gonna kill the president.”
Three hundred miles to the south, John smacked the steering wheel hard enough to hurt.
“How are we gonna save her, Ben? How are we gonna find her without the FBI’s help?”
“They’re holed up in the mountains,” Ben said.
“How do you know?”
“That’s where a good soldier would be.”
“A soldier? ”
Ben nodded. “John, I don’t know why the FBI wants those men-maybe they’re racists or Nazis or just nuts- but I know why those men want Gracie. I wasn’t sure until Tucker ID’d the tattoo.” He paused. “It’s about the war.”
“The war? ” John almost laughed. “Ben, you gotta let the war go.”
“I’ve tried. It won’t let go of me.”
John decided to humor Ben: “Okay, so what’s Gracie got to do with your war?”
Ben stared blankly for a time. Then he said, “There was a massacre, in sixty-eight, in the Quang Tri province of South Vietnam. American soldiers murdered forty-two civilians.”
“So?”
“So I was there.”
“You didn’t…”
“No, I didn’t.”
“My father?”
“No.”
“But our unit did. Viper team. The big man at the park, he had a Viper tattoo-he was there. He killed those people.”
“ You knew that guy? ”
“Yeah, I knew him.”
“Why didn’t you tell the FBI?”
“Because I knew that if he had Gracie, the FBI couldn’t stop him. No one can stop a Green Beret… except a Green Beret.”
“But you didn’t tell the FBI, so they closed her case.”
“That’s a good thing, John.”
“ Why? ”
“Because the men who took Gracie won’t be expecting me.”
John thought that through, not sure whether it was a plan or the delusions of a drunk.
“Okay, so that guy killed a bunch of people in Vietnam a long time ago-what’s that got to do with Gracie?”
“I reported it… the massacre.”
“What happened?”
“The Army court-martialed those soldiers on my testimony.”
“And?”
“They’re taking their revenge.”
John laughed now. “ What? Forty years later, they’re coming back for revenge? That’s a long time to hold onto a grudge, Ben.”
“How long have you held onto the bullies?”
They drove in silence for several miles, then John said, “Did my father die there?”
“Yes, he did.”
“How?”
“John, some things are best left in the past.”
“But it’s not in the past, is it? Not if it got my daughter kidnapped eight days ago.” He waited for Ben’s response, but none came. He looked over at Ben. “I’m entitled to know, Ben.”
As night falls over Indochina on 17 Dec 68, SOG team Viper, twelve Green Berets fresh off a successful covert incursion into Laos, descends the limestone facade that is the Co Roc Mountain and crosses the Xe Kong River back into South Vietnam; they are five klicks south of the DMZ in the Quang Tri province. Intelligence reports indicate that Communist forces are now entering South Vietnam directly through the fourteen-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone. SOG team Viper’s orders are to interdict the enemy at the Seventeenth Parallel. It is Indian territory, a Vietnamese Communist stronghold, where no regular Army forces dare tread. Of course, there is nothing regular about SOG team Viper; so they venture forth into the night. But, as they say in Vietnam, the night belongs to Charlie.
The major is walking point, leading his team silently through the jungle single file when his voice suddenly breaks the silence.
“Am-bush!”
The soldiers hit the deck a split second before all hell breaks loose, enemy fire incoming from every direction. They walked right into an ambush by a far superior force. They’re pinned down in a crossfire with no avenue of escape. If not for the major’s keen instincts and sense of smell-his nose picked up the pungent scent of a Cambodian cigarette favored by the VC-the VC would have twelve more Americans to add to their daily body count report to Hanoi.
Flat on their backs, AK-47 rounds cracking overhead and ripping through the jungle foliage and leaves falling like confetti, the Green Berets take turns emptying their clips at the enemy, just to let the VC know they’re still alive and to give the major time to come up with a “go to hell” plan-a new plan when the original plan goes to hell, like now.
Which he does.
“On my lead,” the major says to his men, making a sharp hand signal toward the west. “Jacko, Ace-claymore our back trail.”
Captain Jack O. Smith, who is never far from the major’s side, and Captain Tony “Ace” Gregory crawl off to the northeast and southeast. The major moves closer to his newest disciples, only seventeen days in-country, and says, “Brice, Dalton, when I move out, you boys act like hemorrhoids and stick to my ass.” And he smiles. Under fierce and likely fatal attack by the VC in a dark jungle in Southeast Asia, Major Charles Woodrow Walker smiles. His young disciples think, That’s why he’s a living legend.
And they know what it was like to have followed into battle the great generals they studied at West Point-Lee or Grant or Patton or MacArthur or Eisenhower. The major is the first to hit the ground when inserted and the last to leave the ground when extracted; he walks point, the most dangerous position; he would die for his men, and they for him. He has survived over one hundred covert missions into Laos and Cambodia and North Vietnam; most SOG team leaders don’t last a dozen. He is a warrior-god.
To Ben he says, “Let this be a lesson, Lieutenant. We should’ve taken out the old woman before she had a chance to rat us out to the local VC.”
Back at the river they spotted a lone figure down on the bank and the figure them. “Take him out,” the major
