I. The Lighter
In May of 1993 I received a letter from a man in Paducah, Kentucky, and a Zippo lighter wrapped in two socks.
I get a good deal of mail now. Since these accounts began appearing, envelopes come to my apartment in Alexandria from men who have carried something for twenty-five years and have decided, after reading about Team Nevada or the light at Ben Het, that I am the place you set such things down. Most of what arrives is memory, which is precious and unverifiable. Some of it is paper. This was the first time anyone had sent me an object.
The lighter is brushed steel, dented on one corner, and engraved on the front in the flowing script of a base exchange engraver:
- LOACH CU CHI 1967
The letter was five pages, ballpoint, in the careful hand of a man who does not write often and therefore means everything he writes. It was signed Wesley R. Farr, and the first paragraph said this:
“Mr. Corrigan. I read your stories. I have had this lighter since March of 1969. I did not steal it and I did not find it in the normal way of finding things. I have spent 24 years not knowing who to tell that a hole in the ground handed it to me 300 miles from where its owner dropped it. I believe you are who I tell.”
Wesley Farr was a tunnel rat with the Americal Division in Quang Ngai Province. The lighter’s owner, Dennis Loach, was a tunnel rat with the 25th Infantry Division at Cu Chi. In 1969 the two men had never met, never served within three hundred kilometers of each other, and were not in Vietnam at the same time.
I want to say something about tunnel rats before we go on, because everything in this account depends on understanding what kind of man goes down.
The Viet Cong dug for twenty years under the districts northwest of Saigon, and what they dug was not holes. It was architecture. Hospitals, barracks, kitchens with chimneys that vented smoke a hundred meters away, three and four levels deep, sealed with water traps and false floors, ventilated, drained, defended. The American answer to this was not a machine. It was a small man with a flashlight, a pistol, and a knife, going down alone into a dark so complete and so hostile that the Army never managed to make anyone do it. You could only ask. The men who said yes were a very particular breed, and they will tell you, all of them, the same strange thing: the job was terrifying and they were good at it, and being good at it depended on one skill above all others.
Knowing what belonged.
A tunnel rat crawled through the enemy’s house in the dark, reading it with his fingertips. The grain of a wall told him who dug it and when. The smell told him if it was live. Denny Loach put it to me this way, in Tucson, in the first hour of a nine-hour interview:
“Down there you can’t see, so you have to know. And you know the way you know your own street at night. Every tunnel I was ever in, I knew what I was touching. It was dirt, and men dug it, and men were maybe still in it, and that was the whole world.” He turned the lighter over in his hands. I had brought it to him; it seemed the only decent way to open the conversation. “Except once,” he said. “One time I put my hand on something down there, and it didn’t belong. And I need you to understand I don’t mean it didn’t belong to the VC.”
He set the lighter on the table between us, squared it carefully to the table’s edge, and looked at it in a way I did not understand until much later in this account.
“I mean it didn’t belong to anybody.”
II. Cu Chi: February 14, 1967
What follows is reconstructed from Loach’s interview, cross-checked where possible against unit records, which, for reasons that will become apparent, confirm the operation and deny the discovery.
In February 1967, in the weeks after Operation Cedar Falls pushed the war through the Iron Triangle, the 25th Division was systematically working the tunnel complexes in its own backyard at Cu Chi. On the morning of the 14th, Loach was sent down into a complex that had been partially mapped the previous week. It was considered a cold system, abandoned, third-priority. He went down with a .38 revolver, an angle-head flashlight, a bayonet, and a spool of commo wire tied to his ankle, running back to his topside man. Two tugs meant come back. Three meant trouble.
The complex was standard for the district. First level at three meters, communication tunnels barely wider than his shoulders, a second level below that through a water trap he had to submerge to pass. It was on the third level, deeper than the maps said the system went, that he found the room.
“Dead end chamber,” Loach told me. “Except it wasn’t a dead end, it was a door. The VC had packed it. You have to understand, the VC breathed those tunnels. They didn’t waste a cubic foot of digging. And here’s a chamber, good chamber, dry, deep, safest real estate in the province, and they’d walled it off. Packed the entry with two meters of rammed earth and laterite block. From the outside.”
He was two hours getting through the packing, working quietly with the bayonet, because a sealed room in a tunnel complex meant a cache, and a cache meant intelligence. When he finally made a hole big enough to put his light through, he did what tunnel rats do, which is smell first.
“Every tunnel in Cu Chi smells the same,” he said. “Sweat, earth, fish sauce, smoke, kerosene. Live or dead, that’s the smell of men underground. I put my face to that hole and it was air off a glacier. Cold. Moving. No smell at all. And I want to tell you, no smell is a smell. It’s the smell of no people, ever.” He shook his head slowly. “Twenty-six years, and I can close my eyes and be breathing it.”
He widened the hole and went in.
The chamber was round, which VC chambers are not, and the floor was swept, which struck him even then, a floor swept clean forty feet under a war. In the center of the floor was the shaft.
III. The Shaft
It was perfectly circular, a little over four feet across, and it went straight down.
I am going to let Denny Loach describe it, because I have heard the description twice now, from two men who never compared notes until 1987, and the two descriptions agree to a degree that should not be possible for honest men.
“VC work is beautiful work, but it’s hand work,” Loach said. “Tool marks, root cuts, shoring. Dirt, dug by men. This was not dug. The walls were smooth like the inside of a bottle, some kind of grey stone or ceramic, no seams, no joints, cool to the palm like a headstone in the shade. And when I ran my light down the wall, the beam picked up a grain in it. Very faint. Lines, finer than a fingernail catches, running around the wall in a spiral. Like rifling.” He looked at me to make sure I had it. “Like the bore of a weapon, Mr. Corrigan. Forty feet under Cu Chi, I was standing at the muzzle of something, looking down the barrel, and the barrel went down past my light and kept going.”
His flashlight, a fresh-batteried Army angle-head, showed him perhaps fifteen meters of shaft and then a darkness his beam went into and did not define. The air came up out of it slow and cold and perfectly steady, and this detail I ask you to keep, because it returns: the air moved in a rhythm. Several seconds out, a pause, several seconds of stillness, and out again.
“Deep mines breathe,” Loach said. “Barometric. I learned that later, I went and read about it, trying to give myself a normal thing to believe. Mines breathe with the weather, over hours. This was breathing like a thing breathes. I stood at the lip with the hair up on my arms, feeling cold air come out of the floor of Vietnam in time, and I did the stupidest thing I ever did in that war. I knocked.”
He tapped the rim with the butt end of his flashlight. Metal on stone, three taps, the way you’d knock on a door frame. He did it, he told me, for the same reason men whistle in graveyards.
The shaft answered.
“Three taps,” Loach said. “Maybe a second behind mine. Deeper, like it came up from a long way, but clean. Tap tap tap. And I froze, and I told myself echo, echo, echo, it’s a hard-walled hole, of course it echoes. And I stood there and made myself calm and I tapped twice, to prove it. Tap tap.” He was quiet for a moment. “It gave me back three.”
I asked him what he did.
“I did arithmetic,” he said. “I stood in a room the VC were scared of, listening to a hole count, and what I noticed, what I couldn’t stop noticing, was that it didn’t repeat me. It answered me. Two gets three. You understand? It was adding one.” He put both hands flat on the table. “And then I did the second stupidest thing I ever did, because I was twenty-two and I was a tunnel rat, and being scared just made us curious. I had a trip flare on my harness. I lit it and I dropped it in and I put my watch on it.”
The flare fell. It lit the spiral grain of the walls as it went, a shrinking ring of orange, dwindling, dwindling, and then, at twenty-six seconds by his watch, it went out. Not dwindled out. Not broke apart on a bottom.
“It was falling and burning, and then it was falling and not burning,” Loach said. “All at once, like a thumb and a finger. A trip flare burns underwater, Mr. Corrigan. I never heard it hit anything. I stood there another full minute listening, and there was no bottom sound, ever, and the cold air kept breathing past my face, and somewhere down there was my flare, still falling for all I know.”
Here is the arithmetic I can add from a desk in Alexandria, twenty-six years later. A falling object reaches terminal velocity within a few seconds. Twenty-six seconds of fall is well over a kilometer of depth. The water table in Cu Chi district in the dry season sits at roughly twenty meters. There is no geology under that province, or under any province, that accommodates what Denny Loach’s watch measured. A kilometer down, the shaft would have been under the water table for nine hundred and eighty meters, and the air coming up was dry as a bone and cold as a cellar.
And then there is the lighter.
“I wanted light I could hold steady at the lip, to look at that grain in the wall up close,” Loach said. “Flashlight in my left hand, and I flicked the Zippo with my right and held it out over the edge to watch what the air did to the flame. And the air bent the flame, real slow, in and out, breathing, and I was watching that instead of my grip.” He looked at the lighter on the table between us, squared to the edge where he had placed it. “It went in. I watched it go. Little tumbling spark, and gone. My wife’s brother bought me that lighter when I shipped out. I stood there and mourned it, honest to God, a lighter, in that place. Then I got out. And when my feet were on grass, I tied my wire off and I told my topside man to get the lieutenant, because Uncle Sam needed to know there was something under the war.”
He never went down to the chamber again. Nobody did.
He reported the shaft in detail on the afternoon of February 14, 1967, to his platoon leader and then, the following morning, to two officers from division intelligence who took notes and a sworn statement.
Forty-four hours after his report, the engineers came.
IV. The Men Who Came
They were American soldiers, Loach told me, and they were wrong the way the shaft was wrong, which is to say slightly, and everywhere, and to a man who lived by knowing what belonged.
“Engineer detachment, no unit patch, brand new fatigues with no names on them yet, like the whole outfit got issued that morning,” he said. “A warrant officer signed for the site. And there was a civilian.”
I took out a pen. I had been waiting, though I had not said so, to learn whether there was a civilian.
Loach saw him only twice, and only at a distance, standing at the tunnel entrance with the warrant officer. Middle fifties. Pressed khakis in the red dust of Cu Chi and somehow not dusty. Sunburn across the nose. And when the man raised his arm to check the time, he turned his wrist over to look at it, and forty feet away Denny Loach, who noticed things for a living, noticed that his watch was worn on the inside of the wrist, the way men wear it in the field so the glass won’t flash.
The warrant officer called him Mr. Stone.
The detachment took over the tunnel complex on the 16th of February and held it for nine days, and what Loach knows of those nine days he knows from distance, rumor, and one mess-tent conversation with a young engineer that I will return to, because I found that engineer.
On the 25th, the detachment was gone. Where the tunnel entrance had been there was a poured concrete slab, and where Loach’s sworn statement had been there was nothing. He asked for a copy of it in March and was told no statement was on file. He asked his platoon leader, who advised him, with the gentleness of a man passing along advice he had also just received, to let it be. The complex appears in division engineering records with a demolition annotation: SYSTEM DESTROYED, CHARGES AND FILL.
Twenty-two years later, working through a stack of declassified engineering summaries, I found the demolition order for that complex. It authorizes the destruction of the site Loach discovered, and it is dated February 11, 1967.
Denny Loach did not put his hand through the packed wall until February 14.
The order to destroy the chamber was cut three days before any American knew the chamber existed. I have read it, in an archive in Suitland, Maryland, with my own eyes, and I have a photocopy, because clerks make copies, and so do I. The paper does not know it is impossible. The paper is calm. The paper is going to have been in order all along.
V. Quang Ngai: March 1969
Wesley Farr is sixty-two, retired from the railroad, and lives in Paducah with a wife who knew nothing of any of this until my second story ran, when he read it at the kitchen table and, in her words, “sat there like church for an hour and then went and got the sock drawer.”
In March of 1969, Farr was clearing tunnels in the hills west of Quang Ngai City, three hundred kilometers and two years from Denny Loach’s war. The complex he was working was small, a local-force system, six chambers and a kitchen. At the back of the lowest level he found a chamber packed shut from the outside with rammed earth and block.
He was a tunnel rat. He dug through it.
Round chamber. Swept floor. Cold, odorless, breathing air. And in the center, the shaft: four feet and change, seamless grey walls, the faint spiral grain running down into the dark. His description and Loach’s agree on the diameter to within inches, on the grain, on the rhythm of the air. But I did not need the descriptions to know it was the same, and neither will you, because of what Wesley Farr’s flashlight found sitting at the lip of the shaft.
“Squared up to the edge,” Farr said to me in Paducah, and when he said the word squared his hands made the gesture, thumbs and forefingers framing a small careful rectangle. “Not dropped. Not tossed. Set. Like a man sets his watch on the nightstand. A Zippo lighter, sitting on the rim of that hole with its corners square to the edge, shining like it come out of the box, and I picked it up, forty feet under Quang Ngai Province, and I read a name and a place.” He looked at me. “Cu Chi is three hundred klicks from where I was kneeling, Mr. Corrigan. And I want to be real clear with you, because I’ve had twenty-four years to be clear with myself. That lighter was not carried there. Nothing about that room had ever been touched by people. That lighter came up.”
Farr did not knock on the shaft. He wants that in the record, he said, for his grandchildren: that he was the one man in this story with the sense God gave a goose. He took the lighter, backed out of the chamber, and reported the find that afternoon.
Forty-some hours later, an engineer detachment with no unit patch arrived, and a slab went over that tunnel too, and his statement went wherever statements go, and Wesley Farr rotated home in the summer of 1969 with a dead man’s habit of checking his shirt pocket, where the lighter rode for the rest of his tour. He did not know Denny Loach was alive. He was not entirely sure Denny Loach had ever existed. There are things you decide not to look into, because every possible answer costs more than not knowing.
Then, in 1987, at a tunnel rat reunion in Kansas City, in a hotel bar at one in the morning, a man from the 25th Division telling stories described a hole with rifled walls that answered when you knocked.
“I stood off at the edge of that circle of chairs listening,” Farr told me, “with my hand in my jacket pocket, holding that lighter so hard it left marks, and when he got done I didn’t say nothing. I couldn’t. How do you hand a man something like that? And then somebody asked him, joking, what’d it answer you, and Denny stopped smiling and said, ‘That’s the thing. I gave it three and it gave me three, and I gave it two, and it gave me three.’ ” Farr’s jaw worked for a second. “And I heard my own voice come out of me from across that circle, and my voice said: ‘It gave me three too. I gave it two taps and it gave me three.’ ”
Farr had knocked after all. He confessed it to me in his kitchen like a man laying down a weight: two taps, tested against the word echo, answered with three.
Two men. Two provinces. Two years apart. The same shaft, adding one.
They talked until dawn in that hotel bar, and at the end of it Farr walked Denny Loach out to the parking lot to give him the lighter, and Loach looked at it sitting in Farr’s palm and would not touch it.
“He told me,” Farr said, ” ‘It came back once. I’m not going to be holding it if it decides to do something else.’ ” Farr looked out his kitchen window at a Kentucky backyard, at a bird feeder, at the ordinary world going about its morning. “So I kept it in the sock drawer for six more years. And then I read your stories, and I thought, that fella counts things for a living. Let him count this.”
VI. The Engineer: Gulfport, Mississippi, July 1993
It took me six weeks to find a man who had served in the detachment, and I found him because he wanted to be found. Harlan Voss is fifty-seven and he is dying, in a VA facility in Gulfport, of a cancer he attributes without bitterness to the defoliant he handled in his first tour. Dying men count differently. It is one of the first things he said to me.
“They can’t do anything to me now that the oncologist hasn’t already scheduled,” Voss said. “Sit down. You’ll want to write.”
Voss was a heavy-construction engineer pulled out of his battalion in late 1966 with verbal orders and put into a provisional detachment that, I can now report, appears in no order of battle, no morning report, and no archive I have searched. Its designation, which I will not print in full, does not exist. The men were told they were doing classified demolition of exceptional tunnel systems. They did eleven jobs between 1966 and 1970. Voss worked three of them, including nine days at Cu Chi in February 1967.
“Job was simple to say and impossible to do,” Voss told me. “Fill the hole. We set up a batch plant topside and we ran concrete down a tremie pipe into that shaft for three days. I kept the pour log. I wasn’t supposed to keep anything, but I was a twenty-year man’s son and you keep the log, that’s what the log is.” He had it there, in the drawer of the nightstand, a green memorandum book gone soft as cloth, and he put it in my hands and made me read the columns aloud to him: truckloads, cubic yards, elevations.
Two hundred and forty cubic yards of concrete went down the shaft at Cu Chi. Enough to fill it, by the geometry of a four-foot bore, to a depth of over two hundred meters. The drop line they hung in the shaft to sound the rising fill never got wet, never touched concrete, never registered a rise of one inch.
“Three days,” Voss said. “Two hundred forty yards. That hole took everything we gave it and stayed a hole. The captain, the warrant, whoever he was, he wasn’t surprised. That’s the detail I want you to have. Nobody in charge was surprised. On the fourth day the order changed from fill to cap, like they’d been waiting to see, and we lowered a steel and concrete plug on cables to thirty feet, grouted it, tied a rebar mat across the mouth, and poured a slab you could park a battalion on. We didn’t fill that thing, son.” He tapped the log book in my hands. “You can’t fill it. We corked it.”
I asked about the civilians.
“Two of them, at Cu Chi. Khakis. One older, one younger. The older one they called Mr. Stone.” Voss described him. You know the description by now. The sunburn. The grey eyes. The watch worn glass-in. “First two days, before we poured, the civilians lowered instruments. Cameras, cables, and a wire recorder, a big Magnetophon-looking thing, down on the winch for a three-hour run.” Voss was quiet a moment, and his hands smoothed the blanket across his knees, and I have interviewed enough men now to know that gesture. It is the gesture of arriving at the thing.
“I was on the winch crew when the recorder came up,” he said. “And the younger civilian ran the tape back right there in the chamber, headphones, checking it took. And something was off, because he waved Mr. Stone over, and they ran a piece of it out loud on the little speaker, just a few seconds before they got it shut off. And it was voices. Men talking, plates, laughing, a mess tent. It was us, son. It was our mess tent, our voices. I heard Danowski telling the one about the chaplain’s jeep, word for word, and I’d stood next to Danowski the night he told that story.” Voss looked at me with the particular patience of a man who has rehearsed a sentence for twenty-six years and is finally saying it to someone whose job is to write it down.
“He told that story four days before we got our orders. Two hundred kilometers away, at our home base, four days before anybody on this earth had decided we were coming to Cu Chi. And it was on a wire that had spent three hours hanging in that hole.” He folded his hands. “That thing didn’t record us in the shaft, Mr. Corrigan. That shaft had already heard us. It heard us coming before we were sent.”
Mr. Stone took the reel. Mr. Stone took everything, every job, Voss said, and the detachment poured its slabs and moved on and did not talk, because the one time a man talked too loud in a bar in Bien Hoa, that man was gone in a week, transferred, orders nobody could ever produce, and the detachment learned the lesson the whole war kept teaching, which is that some units exist the way the shaft exists. You can knock. Something answers. It is not an echo.
I asked him about the eleventh job.
Harlan Voss looked at the door of his room, which was open on an ordinary hallway, a nurse’s cart, a television saying nothing in particular, and he asked me to close it.
“Ten jobs, we sealed,” he said, when I sat back down. “Cu Chi was the second. The last one, spring of 1970, up near the border, they flew us in at night and I couldn’t tell you the province to save my life. Slab was already there. Old slab, weathered, one of ours from early on. And the job order wasn’t fill and it wasn’t cap.” He held my eyes. “It was open. We cored that slab and rigged the winch and pulled the plug out of the only hole in Southeast Asia I ever prayed at, and then we all got sent two hundred meters back behind a tape line, all except the winch operator, and the civilians ran the site all night.”
He stopped. I waited. There is a kind of waiting I have learned in two years of this that is the whole job.
“I was back at the tape line,” Voss said, “and it was first light, and the winch ran, and they brought men up out of that hole on the cable rig. And here’s what I have for you, son, here’s what I kept twenty-three years in the same drawer as the log. There were four men on the lowering manifest the evening before. I helped rig their harnesses. Four men, no tags, no names on the fatigues, four harnesses, I rigged them myself and a rigger counts, a rigger always counts.”
He turned his face to the window, to the Gulf light, and finished it.
“In the morning the winch brought up five.”
VII. The Count
Nobody spoke, Voss told me. The fifth man came up in a harness like the others, and stood at the lip while they unhooked him, and someone put a blanket over his shoulders, and he rode out on the first helicopter, sitting between the two civilians, facing away. Voss never saw his face. Twenty-three years, and what Harlan Voss remembers is what Sam Deer Runner remembers, and if you have read these accounts you knew it before I typed it: the back of an American uniform, and the fear of it.
They re-plugged the shaft that afternoon and poured a new slab over the old one and flew home, and the detachment was dissolved that summer, scattered into a hundred personnel files, and its number does not exist.
Here is what I can add, and I will add it the way I add everything now, coldly, in daylight, with the documents squared to the edge of my kitchen table.
Item. Two shafts, 1967 and 1969, three hundred kilometers apart, identical to the inch, both discovered behind walls the Viet Cong built to keep them out. I have since located, in a captured-document translation archive, an interrogation summary from 1968 in which a VC prisoner from Cu Chi district, asked about the lower levels of his own complex, said through an interpreter that the deep room was old, that it was there before the digging, and that it was not theirs. Note the phrasing, those of you who have been with me since Ben Het. It is not ours either. Both sides of that war kept telling us the same thing, and we were too busy fighting to hear that everyone was answering the same question.
Item. A Zippo lighter dropped down one shaft was returned, polished and squared to the rim, at the mouth of the other. The shafts are three hundred kilometers apart, and they are the same hole. I do not know what the earth is like where that lighter has been. The lighter is in a safe deposit box in Alexandria now, because I found that I did not sleep well with it in the apartment, and I am done pretending such decisions require explanations.
Item. The arithmetic. Knock three times and it answers with three, and when you test it with two, it gives you three again. Whatever is down there does not echo. It answers, and its answer is always one more. I have a file now, two years thick, of things that answer one more. A nine-man manifest for an eight-man team. A ninth position on an eight-position patrol. Four men lowered on a winch and five men raised. I am not going to decorate this pattern with a theory. I am going to do what I do. I am going to write it down, and keep the copies in separate places.
Item. The eleventh job was in the spring of 1970, at a shaft sealed years earlier, near a border Voss could not name. They opened it, and they sent four men down on cables into the ground, and they brought five men up, and one of the five came home wrapped in a blanket between two men in khakis.
My father went missing near a border on the 14th of March, 1970.
Voss’s best memory puts the eleventh job in the first week of April.
Twenty-two days. I have measured it every way it can be measured, and it comes out twenty-two days every time, and twenty-two days is nothing and twenty-two days is everything, and I want to be honest with you about what this work has made of me: I no longer know whether I am a journalist documenting a pattern or a man standing at a lip in the dark, tapping, and counting what comes back.
Harlan Voss died on the 9th of September, 1993. His daughter mailed me the green log book the following week, with a note saying he had left instructions, and that the instructions were one sentence: Give it to the man who counts.
I have it. I am keeping the habit. Somewhere under a slab near a border there is a hole that heard all of this before I wrote it.
Keep counting.
D.C., Alexandria, Virginia, 1993