His voice was losing coherency, and he was tending to ramble. I motioned to the leader of the troops. He approached me, an expression of wariness on his face.
'He needs medical care,' I said quietly. 'You understand?'
'Yes,' he said in a heavily accented voice. 'Doctor, no?'
I nodded. 'Do you have a radio?'
The man paused for a moment, then shook his head. I was certain he was lying.
'Because,' I pressed, 'it may be that we have to take him to a hospital.' The man appeared to understand me. He replied in a brief, Vietnamese phrase, then appeared frustrated when I could not understand. He tried again, more loudly this time, and I heard Than laugh. I turned to him.
'He is telling you that he knows how to care for gunshot wounds,' Than said. He closed his eyes, then let two soldiers coax him into a standing, half-carried position. They started walking him carefully toward the central building. 'They know about such things,' he continued, almost as though talking to himself. 'They've had medical experience.'
'More than I have.' I let his men take him off to the main structure, oddly reassured by Than's comments. With my limited command of their language ? although I suspected a good deal more of them spoke English than admitted to it ? I would be relatively helpless without Than's interpreting abilities. Moreover, I had no real guarantees that the men would insure that I returned to civilization, such as it was, without Than's leadership.
After a short discussion amongst themselves, two men went over to examine the guard tower. Another conducted a careful inspection of the perimeter, poking at odd spots in the jungle with his rifle. Several others went to examine the barracks.
I followed the latter group, still unable to grasp what Than clearly intended. According to Than, this was the prison camp that had housed my father. For however long he'd lived, he had been imprisoned here in these windowless barracks, perhaps allowed out briefly every day to see the sun and exercise.
Or perhaps he'd been on a forced-labor crew, working every day under the raging sun, fighting the insects and heat as I had done. Not so very far from a major population center, but it might have been light-years away for all the good it would have done him. Even had he been able to escape, where would he have gone? What aid could he have expected to receive from these people? No, he would have had to have made his way south, far south ? over three hundred miles, I estimated, and through terrain that was hostile and dangerous even to a man in good health.
And that wasn't counting the snipers we'd run into in the forest.
I stepped into the first barracks building, and paused to let my eyes adjust to the darkness. A square shaft of sunlight penetrated into it, but it was insufficient to effectively illuminate the place. I could see the first sets of bunk beds clearly, but the other ones faded off into the gloom. In the rear, one of the soldiers moved, checking out the room.
'A flashlight?' I said aloud, not knowing whether or not he would understand it. There was no answer.
I stepped further into the structure, keeping my back to the bright sunshine at the door. It took a few minutes, but my eyes finally adapted. I was able to make out the remainder of the bunks, see the surface of the cinder blocks that comprised the walls of the barracks.
I walked to the wall, still keeping my back to the door, and examined the surface. There were names, notes carved into it, letters and words etched into the cinder block by some painstakingly tedious manner. I read names, ranks, dates of service, a few details about when the men had been captured. Nothing that wasn't open knowledge, and information that a POW was permitted to give. I felt suspended in the air, as though reality had receded into some other plane of existence. A surge of eagerness, compounded with fear ? would I find my father's name here? Had he been in this very building, sleeping perhaps in the bunk that stood right next to me? I moved a little bit more swiftly now, fully adapted to the dark and unable to contain myself. If it was here, I had to know it. Had to know it now. Every second of delay, even after over thirty years of believing him dead, was unbearable.
I made a complete circuit of the walls, scanning through the names quickly, pausing to read an unusually poignant note, then moving on to the next. Finally, after I had made a complete circuit of the building, I knew he had not been here.
Not in this building.
But there were two others, and I suspected each would carry its own graven record of the men who had passed through. There were far more names than bunks, indicating either that they'd shared racks, or more probably that some had died ? or been taken elsewhere.
I squinted my eyes and stepped out into the sunshine, dazzling and painful after the prolonged darkness. I moved to the next building, the one directly behind the main structure. Again the wait while my eyes adapted.
Halfway down the third wall, I found it. His name, rank, scratched into the concrete. The date he'd been shot down, although no details of his mission. That would have been classified, even then.
Was I there? I scanned down the wall, searching for my name or that of my mother.
Nothing. Just details about his captivity, a prayer that he'd evidently composed himself, and one final, cryptic note. 'Horace Greeley.'
I stared at that one phrase until my eyes began to burn, sifting through my memory for anything of family significance, some key to unravel the phrase. It was not a random thought, I knew. No, it had taken too much effort to carve those words into the concrete, and my father would not have wasted his precious energy on inanities. It meant something ? I just wasn't smart enough to figure it out.
Horace Greeley ? my mind flashed, then dumped details in front of me. A newspaperman, one in the middle of the nineteenth century. He'd been noted for saying 'Go west, young man.'
I said it out loud, heard the words drift through the still air in this Vietnamese hell.
Go west? Is that what he had meant?
It had to be. It was the most famous saying of Greeley's, and my father would not have relied on something too obscure to be of assistance.
The words of the Ukrainian representative to the last peace conference on board the USS Jefferson, the one that had followed on the heels of the last Mediterranean crisis and had crafted an uneasy peace out of the conflict there, came back to me. The Ukrainian had said he knew my father. He'd refused to say anything further when I pressed, but there had been a look on his face, some odd, secretive sense of knowing, that had driven me almost to violence. It was that comment that had sparked this mission, that had burned itself into my mind and hung there, a constant, omnipresent ache.
I turned to my left, as though trying to look west. What was west of here? I shut my eyes and called up a visual image of a map of the world. Laos, Thailand, Burma. Then India, followed by the morass of the Middle East. Had he meant those countries?
Another possibility ? maybe he'd meant it in a more general sense. Not west as in due west, running along this line of latitude, but more loosely. In that case, just slightly to the north ? Russia. Or Ukraine. There had been rumors for years that some American POWs had been taken to the Soviet Union, maybe via Thailand or Cambodia. Who was to know which part of the then-strong Soviet Union was actually involved?
Russia probably, I concluded. Russians had always been the brains and leadership behind the Soviet Union, although Ukraine had contributed more than its fair share of superb military men, particularly to the navy.
So my father had gone west. Had gone, and had known he was going. At least far enough in advance to give him time to scratch this message.
There was an odd scuffling at the door, and I turned toward it. One of the soldiers stood there. He was back- lit by the sunshine, just a dark, faceless shape. And wrongly shaped somehow. He stepped into the room, and all at once I could see that he was carrying a body. 'Than?' I went immediately to his side and examined the body.
No, it was not Than. Outside in the compound, I could hear Than's voice raised in curses at the other men.
'Sniper?' I asked, looking at the dead man.
The soldier nodded. He motioned with the almost universal forefinger pointed and thumb extended to indicate shooting. Then he pointed at the man on the ground.
I knelt behind the man and felt for a pulse. None ? not that I'd expected to find one with the bloody hole in his midsection.
There was another reason this man was not Than, one that caused me far deeper concern. I'd skimmed over it at first, but now it came back and hit me full force.
