I. What Arrives
Since I published the first of these accounts, things arrive.
They come by mail, mostly, in envelopes with no return address, postmarked from cities where I know no one. Sometimes they are left inside the storm door of my apartment in Alexandria, between the glass and the wood, so that I find them when I leave for coffee. Nothing has ever been on the tape of my answering machine except, twice, forty seconds of a quiet that does not sound like an empty room.
Dutch, my father’s friend, the man who told me to always look at the manifests, has now been unreachable for fourteen months. His stepdaughter tells me he is fine and traveling. She says it in the voice of someone reading a card held up behind the camera.
In October a padded envelope appeared inside my storm door. Postmark: Barstow, California. Inside were three items.
The first was four pages of a United States Army after-action report, dated 22 July 1969, originating from a rifle company operating near Ben Het, in Kontum Province, hard against the place where Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia lean into each other. The tri-border. The pages were a fifth-generation photocopy and someone had gone at them with a black marker in the usual way, but whole sentences survived, and I will get to those sentences.
The second was a Polaroid, badly faded, of a circle.
I want to describe the Polaroid carefully, because I have now spent more hours with it than with any photograph of my father. It shows triple-canopy jungle from a low oblique angle, probably from a helicopter door. In the middle of the green there is a perfect circle of grey and brown, perhaps thirty meters across, in which every living thing is dead. Not burned. There is no scorching and no crater. The trees inside the circle stand upright with their leaves down like men at a funeral. The edge of the circle is not ragged the way defoliant drift is ragged. It is a compass-drawn line. Green on one side, dead on the other, and the width of the boundary is no wider than this sentence.
On the white border of the Polaroid, in pencil, in handwriting I do not recognize, someone had written: STILL THERE.
The third item was a sheet of onionskin paper with a rubbing on it, the kind children make of gravestones with the side of a crayon. It was the rubbing of a military identification tag. A dog tag. The name on it was REDDIN, WADE T., followed by a service number, blood type O POS, and the word METHODIST.
Captain Wade T. Reddin, United States Air Force, was shot down over southern Laos on the 9th of March, 1966, and has been missing for twenty-six years.
The after-action report is dated July 1969, three years after Reddin went into the trees four hundred kilometers away, and one of the sentences that survived the black marker reads as follows:
“…prisoner was unresponsive and was found to be holding US identification tags (1) in his right hand, which he could not be made to release.”
This is the story of the night the tag came back. It is also, though I did not know it when I opened the envelope, a story about the moon.
II. The Night of July 20, 1969
You remember where you were. Everyone alive that night remembers where they were.
Six hundred million people watched or listened as two Americans put a machine down on the Sea of Tranquility. In Vietnam it was already the small hours of July 21. Armed Forces Vietnam Network carried the landing live, and all over the war, in bunkers and hooches and firebases, the volume was turned as high as discipline allowed. Men who could not stand each other stood shoulder to shoulder around radios. For a few minutes the entire American war effort tilted its head back and looked up.
Second Platoon, Bravo Company, was not looking up. Second Platoon was lying in the dirt along a trail spur west of Ben Het in a night ambush position, twenty-two Americans and one Vietnamese, a former NVA soldier turned Kit Carson scout the platoon called Hoa. They had been in position since dusk. The trail they were watching fed east off the Ho Chi Minh Trail like a capillary off an artery, and it was active. Everyone knew it was active. That is why they were there.
An ambush is a machine made of stillness. No one moves. No one speaks. And no one, under any circumstances, plays a radio out loud.
But the platoon’s RTO had the handset pressed to his ear, monitoring the company net, and the company net that night was cross-banded, against every regulation, with AFVN. Because it was the moon. Because the captain back at the firebase had decided that some things outrank noise discipline, and passed the broadcast in a whisper down the wire of the war, handset to handset, so that at 3:17 in the morning, local time, a twenty-year-old draftee lying in ambush on the edge of Laos heard a voice from the Sea of Tranquility say:
Contact light.
It is the first thing said on the moon. It means a probe on one of the lander’s legs has touched the surface. Machine words, procedure words, and then the engine stop, and then the part everyone remembers, the Eagle has landed.
The RTO wrote CONTACT LIGHT in his radio log, with the time, because he wanted proof forever that he had heard it live. The log survives. I have held it.
Four minutes later, by that same log, the light came down on them.
III. The Radio Operator: Roanoke, Virginia, November 1992
Dale Puckett teaches earth science to ninth graders in Roanoke, Virginia. There is a poster of the Apollo 11 crew on his classroom wall and a poster of the electromagnetic spectrum next to it, and when I pointed out the first one he looked at it for a while like it had followed him there.
He is direct in the way of men who have decided in advance exactly how much they will say.
“I heard contact light in my left ear,” he said. “Live from the moon. I wrote it in the log. And I’m laying there thinking, nobody in history ever heard anything from farther away than I’m hearing this. And then Delgado, who was laying next to me, put his hand on my arm. Not a squeeze. Ambush touch, just pressure, means look. And I looked where he was looking, up through a gap in the canopy, and there it was.”
I asked him to describe it, and he gave me the description I would eventually hear, with small variations, from every man I found. A single point of white light, high up, descending. No sound. No strobe, no navigation lights, no aircraft shape around it.
“I was the RTO,” Puckett said. “I knew everything in our air that night, and there was nothing in our air that night. And it didn’t move like an aircraft. Aircraft move like they weigh something. This came down the way a bead of water comes down a string.” He held up one finger and lowered it, slow, perfectly vertical. “Straight down into the trees, maybe a klick west of us. Into Laos. Right at the end it got brighter, and then the canopy just swallowed it. No flash. No noise. Contact light.”
He heard himself say it, and stopped, and for a moment Dale Puckett the science teacher and Dale Puckett the twenty-year-old with the handset were the same man with the same face.
“You know what the worst part was?” he said. “The trail. We were set up on that trail because it was active, and it was. We could hear them moving all evening, north of us, supply parties, bicycles, you can hear the frames creak. Sir, the moment that light went into the trees, all of it stopped. Both sides of that valley went quiet at the same instant, and I realized the NVA were doing exactly what we were doing. Laying in the dark. Watching the same spot in the trees. Twenty-six years, and I never once figured out how to say the next part so it doesn’t sound wrong.”
Say it wrong, I told him.
“For about an hour,” Puckett said, “there was no war. Nobody moved on either side. Not because of orders. Because every man in that valley, ours and theirs, understood at the same time that the thing in the trees was not ours and was not theirs, and that shooting at each other would have been, I don’t know the word. Blasphemy isn’t the word. Loud. It would have been loud in church.”
And during that hour, I asked, what did you hear?
Puckett looked at the Apollo poster again.
“Footsteps,” he said. “One set. Out in the middle, between us and them, walking the length of the valley floor, unhurried, like a man inspecting a fence line. Heavy enough that you felt it in the ground where your chest was. And every man on both sides laid still and let it walk. It passed maybe forty meters in front of our position. I never saw it. I have never wanted anything in my life the way I wanted to not see it.”
IV. The Hour
What follows is a reconstruction of the hour, assembled from the surviving log, the fragments of the after-action report, and the interviews.
3:17 a.m. Contact light, Sea of Tranquility. 3:21 a.m., by Puckett’s log: a white point of light descends without sound into triple canopy approximately one kilometer west of the ambush position, inside Laos. Movement on the trail network ceases.
For the next hour, the valley holds its breath. Second Platoon’s sergeant, moving man to man on his belly with the slowness the job requires, finds every position awake, oriented west, weapons untouched. Nobody has to be told not to fire. The Kit Carson scout, Hoa, is found lying with his forehead pressed to the ground and his hands flat, the way a man lies when he has decided that being small is his last remaining skill.
At some point in that hour, and the men disagree on when, a voice calls out from the NVA side of the valley. Not a challenge. A single sentence in Vietnamese, spoken at conversational volume into the dark, from a soldier of the People’s Army to whoever was listening. Several of the Americans heard it. None of them understood it, except Hoa, who did not translate it that night.
Days later, back at the firebase, the platoon sergeant asked Hoa what the voice had said. Hoa did not want to answer. When he finally answered, he prefaced it by saying the man who had spoken was young, and afraid, and that what he had said was not military.
The sentence was: “It is not ours either.”
Near 4:30 a.m., the footsteps stopped. Puckett’s log entry, 4:36 a.m., reads only: quiet again, trail dead. The trail stayed dead. The busiest supply corridor in the sector did not move so much as a bicycle for the next three nights.
At first light, the platoon leader, First Lieutenant Gordon Mercer, did the thing that was either brave or unforgivable, depending on which of his men you ask. He took a squad west, across the border trace, toward where the light had gone down. This movement appears nowhere in any official record. Laos did not officially contain Americans.
They found the circle in the first hour.
Thirty meters of jungle, dead. Standing dead, leaves down, the ground cover grey and collapsed like the whole circle had been unplugged from something. The squad’s compasses disagreed with each other inside the circle and reconciled outside it. Nothing was burned, nothing was broken, and there was no wreckage of any kind, no impact scar, nothing to mark that anything had come down at all except that a perfect round piece of Laos had died overnight.
And in the center of the circle, sitting cross-legged with his rifle laid crosswise on his knees like an offering, facing east, toward them, was a soldier of the North Vietnamese Army.
He was alive. His eyes were open. He did not respond to Vietnamese, to English, to touch, to a canteen held to his mouth, or to a shot fired into the ground beside him. His pupils, the platoon medic would note, did not respond to light. In his right fist, held so tightly that the chain had cut into the web of his hand, was a single American dog tag, bright as the day it was stamped.
REDDIN, WADE T.
The men of the squad stood around him at the center of the dead circle, on the morning after human beings first stood on the moon, and one of them, nineteen years old, said the thing that four separate witnesses repeated to me almost word for word, twenty-three years apart:
“Where’s the other tag?”
Soldiers wear two. One stays with the body.
V. The Platoon Sergeant: Killeen, Texas, December 1992
Vernon Tibbs did twenty-two years in the Army and lives eleven minutes from the front gate of Fort Hood, because, he told me, he sleeps better inside artillery range of the United States government. He kept a journal in Vietnam, which was against regulations, and he has kept every journal since, and when I visited he had the 1969 volume already on the kitchen table with a rubber band around it.
It was Tibbs who carried the NVA soldier out. The man could walk if you started him walking, he said, like a wound-up toy, but he could not be made to start or stop on his own.
“We brought him back across the trace and called it in as a prisoner taken on our side of the line,” Tibbs said. “Which was a lie, and the lieutenant knew it was a lie, and he made it anyway to get the man medevaced instead of shot. Mercer took the weight of that. People been hard on Mercer over the years. I’m not one of them.”
I asked what happened when they reported the rest. The light. The circle. The tag.
“Forty-one hours,” Tibbs said. He had the journal open to the page. “That’s how long it took. We reported on the morning of the 21st. On the afternoon of the 22nd, a man got off a resupply bird at the firebase in pressed civilian khakis, carrying nothing but a briefcase, in the middle of a war, like he was making a sales call. Called himself Mr. Gray. No unit, no rank, no last name that was a real name. And here’s what I want you to understand. Nobody senior to us ever introduced him. He introduced himself. And every officer on that firebase got out of his way like they’d been briefed their whole lives that someday a man like this would come, and when he did, you give him what he wants.”
What did he want?
“Everything,” Tibbs said. “One at a time, in the command bunker, every man who’d been in that ambush. He had a way about him. Never wrote anything down while you talked, which does something to you, a man just watching you talk. He knew things he shouldn’t have known. Knew about the radio being cross-banded to the moon broadcast, which was our little crime, nobody outside the company knew that. And at the end of my turn he thanked me, and he said, and I wrote this down that night so this is exact,” Tibbs turned the journal toward me and put his finger on the line, and the line in blue ballpoint, twenty-three years old, read:
He said: “Sergeant, you saw a flare. It is going to have been a flare.”
“Not ‘it was a flare,'” Tibbs said. “‘It is going to have been.’ Like the paperwork was a place he’d already visited.” He took the journal back. “He left on the next bird with the tag, the log pages for that night, the film out of two cameras, and my prisoner. And every man who ever asked a question about it afterward got the same answer from battalion, which was that there was no record of any of it, and you know what, they weren’t lying. There wasn’t. There is no record of Mr. Gray getting off that bird or on it. I’ve looked. The man doesn’t cast a paper shadow.”
Except, I said, four pages survived.
Tibbs smiled for the first time in two hours. “Four pages survived,” he said. “Because clerks make copies, son. Clerks have always made copies. That’s the one thing his kind never learned about the Army. You can take the file, but you can’t take the habit.”
I showed him the Polaroid then, the circle, and the penciled words on the border. STILL THERE. He looked at it a long time, and he did not ask where I got it, which told me something, and then he said the thing I drove nine hundred miles to hear and did not know it.
“You know we weren’t the first,” he said. “Hoa told me, after. Why he laid the way he laid that night, forehead down. He was from up north originally, came south on the trail in ’65 as NVA. And he said the trail watchers, the old hands, had a rule about lights that come down with no sound. He said the rule was older than the war against the Americans. Older than the war against the French. You lie down, you look at the ground, and in the morning you do not go and see.”
I asked what happened to Hoa.
“Extended his contract twice, then went home to his village near Tam Ky in ’71,” Tibbs said. “Sharpest field soldier I ever worked with, either army.” He closed the journal and put the rubber band back on it, and then, without my asking, he wrote something on a slip of paper and pushed it across the table. It was a name and a district. “If you’re going where I think you’re going,” he said, “a man should have one name in his pocket that isn’t in a file.”
VI. The Widow: Shreveport, Louisiana, January 1993
Captain Wade T. Reddin flew F-105s out of Korat, Thailand. On March 9, 1966, on his sixty-first mission, his flight was tasked against a truck park in southern Laos, and somewhere in a valley full of guns his aircraft was seen to be hit, seen to burn, and not seen to produce a parachute. Beeper contact, brief and unlocated, was reported the following dawn. Then nothing. He was twenty-nine. He has been missing in action for twenty-six years, which is to say he has now been missing longer than he was alive.
Charlene Reddin still lives in the house they bought before his last tour. She is sixty-six, precise, and she has spent a quarter century being handled by casualty offices, and she wanted me to know in the first five minutes that she can hear handling the way a piano tuner hears a flat note, and that I should not try it.
I didn’t. I showed her the rubbing.
She looked at it and her face did not change, and that was how I knew her face was a decision she had made long ago.
“His tags came home,” she told me. “One of them. In 1974, after the exchanges, the Air Force returned personal effects they said had been recovered through channels. One identification tag. No explanation of where it had been.” She was quiet a moment. “It was bright, Mr. Corrigan. I remember thinking it looked new. You imagine a thing like that coming back to you scorched, or bent. It looked like it came from the PX that morning.”
I asked, as gently as I know how, whether anyone had ever told her where the tag was recovered, or when.
“No,” she said. “But someone asked me a great many questions once.” And then Charlene Reddin told me about her visitor.
In the spring of 1970, a man came to this house. Civilian clothes, pressed khakis, briefcase. He showed her identification from a Department of Defense office she could never afterward find listed anywhere, and he gave a name, and the name was Mr. Green. He was courteous. He stayed two hours. He asked no questions about Wade’s aircraft or his mission. He asked about Wade himself. Did he sleepwalk. Was he a vivid dreamer. Had he ever, and she remembered this question word for word across twenty-three years, had he ever been somewhere he could not account for.
“And at the end,” she said, “he asked to borrow Wade’s letters. For authentication, he said. There were one hundred and thirty-one of them. I counted them into his hands.” Her chin came up. “I never saw them again. I wrote to that office for ten years. The office does not exist. It never existed. One hundred thirty-one letters, and I am told I imagined the man who took them.”
I asked her to describe Mr. Green.
She did. Mid-fifties. Sunburned across the nose, like a man just back from somewhere bright. Grey eyes. A watch worn on the inside of the wrist.
Vernon Tibbs had described Mr. Gray to me a month earlier. Mid-fifties. Sunburned. Grey eyes. The watch on the inside of the wrist, which is how men wear it in the field, so the glass won’t catch the sun and give you away.
Nineteen sixty-nine, a firebase in Kontum Province. Nineteen seventy, a living room in Shreveport. The same man, on both sides of the world, doing the same job. Collecting.
When I stood to leave, Mrs. Reddin stopped me at the door with a grip on my forearm that had twenty-six years behind it.
“You find out where that tag was between 1966 and 1974,” she said, “and you call me collect, any hour of any night. Because here is what I know that they don’t know I know. Wade wore his tags taped together so they wouldn’t rattle. He was superstitious about separating them. Whoever took one tag off of him and left the other, Mr. Corrigan, had to untape them first. And you don’t do that for a dead man. You do that when you are sending a receipt.”
VII. Kontum Province, Vietnam, April 1993
It is easier to get into Vietnam than people think, in 1993. The two governments are circling normalization, and the key that opens the country is the same grief that sent me. Joint teams are in the provinces digging at crash sites, and a journalist writing about the missing can get a visa, a government minder, and a Russian jeep.
My minder was a young man from Hanoi named Vinh who had learned his English from the BBC World Service and apologized for the roads as if he had built them. I told him I was researching wartime aviation losses in the border provinces, which was true as far as it went. I have gotten good at sentences that are true as far as they go. I learned from the best; I read their after-action reports.
The name Vernon Tibbs gave me took four days to turn into a village. I will not print the name or the village, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who has read this far.
Hoa is sixty-one now. He knew what I was the moment I got out of the jeep, and he sent his grandchildren indoors, and we drank tea in a doorway while Vinh, with the tact that will someday make him an ambassador, developed an intense interest in the jeep’s carburetor.
I asked Hoa about the night of the moon landing. He corrected me.
“You call it that,” he said. “For us it was the night the trail died.” He held his cup with both hands. “Three nights, nothing moved. Do you understand what that meant, three nights? Men were beaten for delays of an hour. The trail did not stop for the B-52s. It stopped for that.” He looked at me over the cup. “It has stopped before. My uncle worked the trails against the French. There were places even then that the paths went around. The paths are old, and the reasons are older. Your war was very young, Mr. Corrigan. It walked around in places it did not know were rooms.”
I asked him about the soldier in the circle. And here Hoa put down his cup and was silent so long I thought the interview had ended in the way interviews end in Vietnam, politely, without announcement.
“His name is Loc,” Hoa said finally. “He is alive.”
The prisoner that Mr. Gray took off the firebase in July 1969 came home to Vietnam in the 1973 exchanges, catatonic, a man-shaped absence, with paperwork that said he had been captured in a firefight that no one who was there remembers happening. His family took him back. His family has cared for him for twenty years. He is, Hoa told me, exactly as he was. He does not speak. He does not meet eyes. He sits facing east in the morning and follows the sun around the house like a plant.
Except.
“Once a year he speaks,” Hoa said. “His sister told me this, and she is not a woman who invents. One night a year, in the middle of July, he stands up in the dark, and he goes outside, and he looks up. And he says the same words. She wrote them down for the doctors years ago. The doctors could do nothing with them. They are not Vietnamese.” Hoa looked at the mountains, west, where the border is. “They are English, Mr. Corrigan. She kept the paper. I have seen it. The words are: contact light.”
I sat with that in a doorway in Kontum Province for a long moment while the world reorganized itself.
Loc’s village was eleven kilometers away. Hoa would not come with me, and did not argue about it, and shook my hand in both of his in a way that felt less like goodbye and more like the thing you do at funerals.
I was with Loc for twenty minutes, with his sister’s permission, in a swept-dirt yard under a jackfruit tree. I am not going to pretend it was an interview. He is fifty-three years old and weighs perhaps a hundred pounds and there is nobody behind his eyes, and I have been in some rooms in my life, and I have never been in a room like the space around that man.
I spoke to him in English, because of the two words, God help me. I told him my name. I told him why I had come. Nothing. His sister watched from the step, her hands folded, with the patience of someone who has watched twenty years of nothing.
And then, because I had brought it, because I bring everything now, I took out the onionskin rubbing of Wade Reddin’s tag and I unfolded it and I held it in front of him.
Loc’s eyes came to it. His eyes had not come to anything in twenty minutes. His head did not move; his eyes moved. And his right hand, the tag hand, the hand that a medic had to pry open in 1969, rose off his knee and took my wrist. His sister came up off the step. His grip was not violent. It was exact, like a blood pressure cuff, and he turned his face to me, and for four or five seconds, no longer, whatever it is that is usually not behind his eyes was behind his eyes and it looked at me.
He said seven words. English, flat, with an accent that his sister swears he cannot have, because he has never spoken English in his life, and I swear to it too, because I have heard that accent my whole life at reunions and funerals. American. Midwestern. A pilot’s calm.
He said: “Tell them we are still on the ground.”
Then his hand opened, and his face went back to the west, and he was a plant following the sun again, and his sister was beside him saying his name, and the yard was just a yard, and a rooster somewhere behind the house had never stopped making its ordinary noise the entire time.
We. Not I.
Tell them we are still on the ground.
VIII. The Overlay
I flew home through Bangkok and did not sleep, and when I unlocked my apartment door in Alexandria there was an envelope inside the storm door. Postmark: Barstow, California. Same hand.
Inside were two aerial reconnaissance photographs, official, gridded, with the classification blocks razored out.
The first was dated November 1970, and it showed the circle west of Ben Het, sixteen months after the light came down. STILL THERE, the Polaroid had said, and there it was, still there, a grey coin in the green, not one meter regrown.
The second photograph was dated August 1966 and showed a valley in southern Laos I had never seen before, and in the middle of it, a circle. Identical. Thirty meters, compass-drawn, dead. I took the coordinates off the grid and plotted them that night against the Air Force’s loss database, the one I have spent eleven years learning to read.
The 1966 circle sits four hundred meters from the last known position of Captain Wade T. Reddin.
Two circles. Two dates. Both of them a short walk from where an American disappeared and became a number on a list of 2,646.
I did not sleep the second night either, because a man does not sleep while he is doing what I was doing, which was pulling every loss coordinate I have ever collected and laying them against every anomaly I have ever filed, looking for circles. I am still doing it. It will take months. The material arrives faster than I can catalogue it, from Barstow, from nowhere, from clerks who made copies, because you can take the file but you can’t take the habit.
But I will tell you the first thing I checked, at two o’clock in the morning, with the overlay trembling a little in my hands. You already know what I checked. You have been reading these accounts.
March 14, 1970. A grid square in Laos. The last known position of Sergeant First Class Patrick J. Corrigan.
I don’t have a photograph of that grid square. Yet.
But I have a request in, through a contact of a contact of a man I am no longer able to reach, for the reconnaissance imagery of that sector, spring of 1970, and while I wait I sit up at night with Loc’s seven words and Charlene Reddin’s arithmetic and the physics of a dog tag that came home untaped, unburned, and bright as morning.
You don’t untape the tags of a dead man.
You do it when you are sending a receipt.
Keep counting.
D.C., Alexandria, Virginia, 1993