Abandoned: MIA in Vietnam (28 page)

CHAPTER 46

“Con co!” Vong called to Byrnes as he returned from the terraces one evening.

Exhausted from a day of harvesting rice and clearing irrigation ditches along the terraces, Byrnes smiled and waved. He needed no excuse to halt his steep climb uphill to the hamlet. “Binh,” he said, sitting on a log at the edge of the forest. He placed his long wooden shovel between his legs. “What brings you to the workers’ paradise? I thought you village administrators couldn’t stand physical labor.”

Vong surveyed the dry mud caked on Byrnes’s arms, chest, and feet. Bare-chested, he wore only cotton pants, also covered in mud. He said, “I have been looking for you. Have you been working the fields again?”

“Widow Mai Kim-Ly’s share of the collective rice field needs harvesting. I do what I can for her,” Byrnes said. “It helps me fit in. Also, I learn many customs from her.”

Glancing around to make certain no one else could hear their conversation, Vong noted the path through the woods was empty as was the trail down the edge of the terrace. “Have you told her you are an American?”

“No,” Byrnes said, “I told her only what you wanted me to tell people. Like everyone else, she believes that my mother was a French nun raped by the Japanese during the war. That I grew up in an Hanoi orphanage until I escaped and lived as a street urchin with no schooling. Needing cannon fodder, the NVA drafted many of us into the service. All that explains my lack of manners, lack of education, and my inability to read Vietnamese.”

“You seem awful close to widow Kim-Ly,” Vong said. “Not that it’s a bad thing. A woman needs a man, especially those women whose husbands died in the war.”

“Another good reason not to tell her I’m American,” Byrnes said, nodding. “She cares for certain of my needs, and I do the same for her. And she’s teaching me Vietnamese history and to read.”

“Is she your first woman?” Vong asked.

“No!” Byrnes blurted, then reconsidered, “Well, yes, but don’t tell anyone. I’m sure many of your comrades were still virgins when conscripted by the army.”

“Many remained virgins until their deaths,” Vong said, shaking his head. “Many wives became widows. Also, some wives could not wait for their husbands to return. Fortunately, my wife remained faithful.” Changing the subject, Vong said, “I have good and bad news, Con co.”

“I am sitting. Tell me the bad news first,” Byrnes said.

“There is an ongoing investigation into your disappearance. My ex-driver apparently asked about you to someone in the Ministry of Defense.”

Stunned, Byrnes said, “It’s been nearly three years, Binh.”

“The Party is slow, but it has the memory of an elephant. Three men are on their way here to interview me, to see if I know why you did not return to your re-education camp. There is no record of your execution,” Vong said. He sat on the log next to Byrnes. “We have to go south. I sent a letter to Thien Vu. He should have it in a week or so.”

“How much time do we have?” Byrnes asked.

“Transportation has not improved much since our journey here. And the Party is slow, as I said. I assume we have a week to leave the village. Depending on how rapidly security personnel respond to my family, you, and me being gone, we have about that long to depart the country after we make it to the south. We must hope Thien Vu has made sufficient arrangements.”

“Are you willing to leave the country because of me?” Byrnes asked.

“Me and my family. Rescuing you always carried a risk. Thien and I both knew that. He will have to come with us, too. All our lives are forfeit otherwise,” Vong said.

“Your family is all right with leaving?” Byrnes asked. He thought of Vong’s three children, two girls and a boy in their early teens. “What’s the good news?”

“In his last letter, Vu said he thought he had solved
our problem
. He knows how to get you out of Vietnam,” Vong said, smiling. Trying to lighten Byrnes’s mood, he added, “It will be a great adventure.

“Vu and his family have been preparing to leave for years. Except his wife. She died of tuberculosis. The government medical services couldn’t treat her, even though Vu is a Party member in good standing. The government has no money for medications. The harshness of the Party’s oversight and the corruption in the government have discouraged him. Fortunately, he knows all about fraud and bribery, dealing with it on a daily basis. He has helped others escape. Getting his children, their families, and us out should be easy for him. Besides, the government is actively encouraging some people to leave. The Party chased the Chinese out of northern Vietnam and Saigon. They ignore misfits bribing officials to leave. The Party even encourages successful escapees to send money to their families that remain in Vietnam. Without that money the economy might collapse.”

***

Vong let everyone in the village know the Communist Party had summoned him and his family to Hanoi in order to receive a medal from the premier himself, Pham Van Dong. He said he supposed the award was for his work against corruption and the black market. When leaving the village, he wore his faded green major’s uniform. Medals hung on his shirt pulling the pocket almost to his waist. His family followed him down the dirt road to Lai Chau. Twenty or thirty residents lined the pathway near the hamlet to wish him well on his journey. Even the geese seemed to celebrate his departure by honking louder than usual.

Byrnes left the village two days later. He took the widow Mai Kim-Ly’s Honda motorbike, the widow Kim-Ly, and a small cloth suitcase with all her possessions. They told no one that they would not be returning. He wore everything he owned. In Lai Chau, they sold the motorbike, taking payment in paper Dong and some aluminum coins. With that money, they paid for their seats on the same old bus Byrnes and Vong had ridden to Lai Chau three years before. Early the next morning they arrived in Sa Pa and met Vong in front of the railway station.

“What’s this, Con co?” Vong asked on seeing Mai Kim-Ly. “Did she come to say good-bye?”

“There’s a small complication,” Byrnes said, pulling Vong to the side in order to speak privately. “She’s pregnant.”

“You’re the father?” Vong asked.

“Do you know anyone else who has slept with her since her husband was killed?” Byrnes asked.

“No,” Vong said. “Have you told her you are an American?”

“Not yet,” Byrnes said. “Give me some time. As you know, you arranged this trip suddenly. She’ll know before we reach another country. I promise.”

“All right,” Vong said. “I’ll procure another ticket. If it is running on time, the train will be here in an hour.” He left to enter the building and to buy another ticket.

He had not been gone long when the train arrived, an hour early. Byrnes could tell a new engine pulled the passenger cars, although those cars appeared more dingy and worn than they had three years before. Looking as if they had slept in their clothes, three men in wrinkled green uniforms of officers in the Peoples Army disembarked. Each carried a small suitcase and identical briefcases. Byrnes thought one officer was a major. He didn’t recognize the rank of the other two, although the major seemed to defer to them. The three men marched down the street in the direction of the bus station.

“That’s yesterday’s train,” Vong said when he returned. “The coal burner blew up on the tracks fifty kilometers north of Hanoi. The railroad authority sent this new diesel to finish the trip. The stationmaster gave me a choice: take this train south, or wait for the next one in about two hours.”

“What did you tell him?” Byrnes asked.

“The sooner we leave the better,” Vong said. “I told him we’d leave now.”

“Good. I think the officers on your investigation board arrived on that train. A major and two other officers got off while you were inside. They walked toward the bus station.”

“Yen,” Vong said to his wife, “I’ll take the children. I can’t do this in my uniform without attracting their attention. You follow those officers. See what ranks they have. Don’t get close enough for them to see you. One of the officers may recognize you from Hanoi. Hanh Ca, bring your sister. Giang Hai, gather the luggage.”

Byrnes helped Mai Kim-Ly into the passenger car. She wore only a peasant’s black pajama-like pants, black shirt, and a woven bamboo hat. Byrnes stuffed her small bag under their seat. He refrained from holding her hand in public. They sat opposite Major Binh and his family. Vong Yen returned. When the train got underway, she whispered into her husband’s ear. Vong Binh listened to his wife and then nodded in Byrnes’s direction. No obsequious steward or conductor smoothed Major Binh’s way to Hanoi on this trip. The trip took only ten hours with the new diesel pulling the cars mainly downhill from the mountains. Three days later they were in Ho Chi Minh City.

CHAPTER 47

Arlington National Cemetery scheduled Mrs. Byrnes’s funeral for a Saturday morning. Wolfe decided to drive to Washington in the Prius two days ahead of time. He left Kayla Anne with her mother’s Subaru. She also had access to the van conversion in an emergency. “Pick your mom and Junior up at the airport,” Wolfe told his daughter as she lay in Junior’s bedroom, hands over her eyes to block the light. 6:00 a.m. was much too early for a college senior who had finished her summer classes. “And don’t let them leave until I get home. Got it?”

“Like she’d listen to me,” Kayla Anne said. “When will you be back?”

“Probably Monday or Tuesday. Love you.”

“Love you, too, Pops. Drive carefully,” Kayla Anne said. “Don’t use the cell phone while you are driving.”

“What? Am I the kid now?” Wolfe asked, laughing. Twelve hours later, he returned to the same hotel he had stayed in before in Crystal City. Using his laptop and the internet, he had no difficulty finding Emily Rose’s address and telephone number in Fairfax City.

The next morning, Friday, he called her to make certain she was at home. “Sure,” Rose said, “I’d love to talk with you about Jim. My husband won’t be home until later, so the neighbors will gossip.” She giggled. “I like being the source of their entertainment.”

Wolfe found the older, small brick rambler, near George Mason University, without difficulty. A newer VW sedan sat in the driveway. There was no garage. Parking the Prius behind the Bug, Wolfe exited the car. He opened the screen door and knocked on the wooden door, using a brass knocker shaped like a lion with a ring in its mouth.

In seconds, the inner door swung open. The tiny Emily Rose beckoned him into the living room. She held her hand out to Wolfe and then engulfed him in a hug. “So good to see you, Dr. Wolfe,” she said.

He returned the hug tentatively and released her. He said, “Addy, please. May I call you Emily?”

“Of course,” she said. “May I offer you some sweet tea? Some chips? Have a seat on the couch.” She pointed to a leather couch under the front living room window.

“Tea would be great,” Wolfe said, sitting. “I really am thirsty.”

She retrieved the tea and chips from the kitchen, and then sat across from Wolfe in a matching loveseat. For about an hour, Wolfe and Rose reminisced, telling each other their favorite James T. Byrnes stories. She told him about the senior class trip to Great Falls. He shared stories about R&R in Hong Kong.

A motorcycle rumbled into the driveway. “Would that be your husband?” Wolfe asked.

Rose nodded. She said, “He teaches at George Mason. Actually, he’s a history fellow there.”

“Teaches about the Vietnam War,” Wolfe said.

Rose’s eyes grew larger. “How did you know that, Addy? I don’t believe I told you about him.”

“You didn’t,” Wolfe said, “but I learned quite a bit about him from the internet. His last name is Thien, first name Vu. A widower, he escaped from Vietnam in a sampan in 1985, along with his children. And grandchildren. Went to Thailand, then Canada, and immigrated to the US, after marrying you.”

Stunned, Rose sat with her mouth open. She did not stand when the front door opened and Thien Vu stood in the doorway. Only slightly disappointed that Thien wasn’t six inches taller, Wolfe rose from his chair and walked to the door, right hand extended. “Good afternoon, Mr. Thien, I’m Dr. Wolfe, a friend of Jimmy Byrnes. I met your wife at his mother’s wake. Your wife and I were entertaining each other with some stories about him. I have reason to believe you knew him as well.”

Thien looked at his wife, eyebrows raised. She shook her head. “I didn’t tell him anything. He figured it out by himself,” she said. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to tell him what happened to Jim when you left Vietnam.”

Wolfe scanned both their faces, hoping to tell if they would be honest. He had never been able to interpret peoples’ body language or facial expressions, except for gross displays of anger or mirth. “Would you mind?” he asked Thien.

“Please, have a seat,” Thien said. “I’ll be right back.” Thien left the room and returned with a large glass of what could have been sweet iced tea, but looked a little more like bourbon on the rocks. Limping slightly, he walked to his wife’s side and sat with her on the small loveseat, holding her hand.

“Before you begin,” Wolfe said, “tell me how you two met.”

Thien grinned. He squeezed his wife’s hand hard enough for her to make a face. “Con co gave me her name and address before we left on our journey.”

“Con co?”

“A nickname we gave him in Vietnam when he was a POW. It means stork. He was much taller than the rest of us,” Thien said.

“You were a POW, too?”

“No. I was in the North Vietnamese Army,” Thien said. He briefly outlined Byrnes’s capture, escape, and recapture, and how he and Binh vowed to rescue him. “He saved my life,” Thien explained, tapping on his prosthetic leg. “He could have taken Binh’s AK-47 and killed us both. Instead, he helped Binh find medical help for me. For that act of kindness to an enemy soldier he remained a prisoner for many years.

“I was an administrator in Ho Chi Minh City. You know it as Saigon. After the storms and floods of 1979 almost destroyed our economy – made worse by attempts at collectivization – I made plans to leave Vietnam if the opportunity presented itself. You never knew who the communists would use as scapegoats for their failures. I also knew that helping Binh and Stork might be a death sentence.

“The day before he, Kim-Ly, and Binh’s family arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, I had received the letter Binh had written about the investigation into Stork’s disappearance. I was expecting them, though, because the Party had put out an order for their arrests. I had a safe house I used in the city, so I put them up there.

“I had gotten people out of Vietnam before. Some went across the Mekong River to Cambodia after our armed forces defeated the Khmer Rouge. Many were caught and turned back by Vietnamese patrols there, though. I heard that many Chinese, like the Hoa in the north, took junks and sailed to Hong Kong…but China eventually closed its other ports. If the junks didn’t make it all the way to Hong Kong, the Chinese turned them back to Vietnam. Many perished.

“The only way out for us, in 1985, was to sail on the East Sea; Americans call it the South China Sea. We could sail to the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, or Thailand. At that point, only about fifty percent of escapees actually left the country. My government caught many and placed them in re-education camps or the New Economic Zones, which proved death sentences for some. The courts executed a number of people who attempted to escape. Many returned home to find all they owned confiscated by the communists. The officials waited for these resourceful individuals to rebuild their wealth. Then those same dishonest officials received more gold and silver in bribes the next time the people tried to escape. Corruption was rampant.

“Only about half of those people who actually made it to the East Sea survived. The lucky ones were picked up by larger ships. Many shipping companies ordered their sea-going vessels to ignore the refugees. Many expatriates died of starvation or thirst. Sailing south to Thailand exposed the escapees to the pirates in the Gulf of Thailand, who raped, killed, and kidnapped many women. They also brutally slaughtered children, and men. They stole food, water, and treasure from the escapees. They rammed and sank their boats. I have seen statistics that suggest there were two million Vietnamese refugees between 1975 and 1992. We think one-half to three-quarters of a million of them died trying to escape the communists.”

“A national tragedy,” Wolfe said.

“No. A world tragedy,” Thien said, shaking his head. “We were abandoned to die, either at the hands of our own government, at the hands of pirates, by starvation and thirst, from storms at sea, or from cruel twists of fate. It was not like Vietnam had not suffered enough already.”

“Obviously, you made it out okay,” Wolfe said. “Are those just stories Vietnamese immigrants tell for sympathy?”

“No!” Emily Rose said. “Tell him Vu. Tell him how Jim died.”

Wolfe took in a deep breath through his nose, forcing himself to remain calm. He admired how Thien kept his emotions under control. “Please, go on,” Wolfe said.

“My office received reports on the search for Vong Binh, his family, and Stork, so I knew how close the investigators were getting,” Thien said. “On the day they had narrowed their search to central Ho Chi Minh City, I left work early and went to the safe house. Altogether, we had a crowd of twenty or more, with my children and grandchildren and Binh’s family. I gave everyone instructions on how to take different routes to the Ham Tu wharf in Saigon. We split up into five or six groups and made our way to a taxi boat, arriving in a staggered fashion. The taxi made three trips in the canals to the village of Luong Hoa, southwest of Ho Chi Minh City. There is a boat yard in Long An Province, close to the village.

“I had provisioned a boat over the previous month, in preparation for leaving Vietnam in case I had come under suspicion. It was a large sampan, previously owned by a smuggler. The marine patrol had confiscated it. As administrator, I took charge of it and used it for operations against black marketers. The crew was loyal to me. All were previous South Vietnamese sailors whom I had pardoned from re-education or NEZs.

“My crew had loaded the boat with coconuts, fish, beans, rice, sausage, dried squid, cookies, water, and fuel, but no weapons. If the authorities caught us I didn’t want to face execution for treason. We took two days to meander through the canals and small tributaries to the Mekong River, traveling mainly at night to avoid detection. A coastal patrol boat stopped us in one of the smaller rivers. They fired a machinegun over our heads. We all assumed they would arrest us and send us to prison. Instead, the captain sent a man over to our boat. He held out his hat and said, ‘Give me your gold, and we will let you go.’

“I collected some jewelry from the passengers, and threw in about one-fourth of my silver. We handed that to the sailor. He returned to his boat, but came back. ‘The captain says that’s not enough,’ he said.

“We made another collection. I handed them half of my gold. The sailor returned to his boat. He waved at us from the patrol craft. ‘Have a nice voyage,’ he said, and snorted an evil laugh. Shortly after that we were alone on the river. Evidently, the additional jewelry and gold made the bribe acceptable.

“The second night we hit a sandbar. It took us two hours to rock the boat off the shoal. Stork and the crew spent those two hours in the water. Fortunately the tide was coming in and we were close to the East Sea. It was enough to lift us off the shelf.

“Patrol boats went past us in the dark many times during those two hours, but did not see us since we were close to shore and in the dark. Once the crew had us into the ocean, the East Sea, we turned south toward Malaysia. The shortest distance to safety was also the most dangerous. We knew the pirates might find us. They did.

“At one point we sailed through a cluster of drowned bodies, maybe thirty or forty children and men. Pirates had evidently kidnapped the women for the sex trade, and probably sunk the boat on which they traveled. We did not see their boat, only their bloated bodies. They were tied together at the wrists.

“I woke up on the third or fourth morning to find a Thai pirate boat bearing down on us. They moved so much faster than our loaded sampan could. Thai pirates painted their fishing boats with dragon designs on their sides. I’ll never forget that evil-looking dragon. Once the fishing boat drew near us, a pirate climbed onto the bow and fired a pistol in the air. Our crew shut down our engine. The pirates drew along side and tied our boats together. Five or six pirates jumped onto our boat. Most had machetes. The one we thought was the captain had a pistol. Another man stood guard on the pirate boat with an AK-47 in his hands.

“They lined everyone up on our boat, all twenty-six of us. Holding the pistol to cover us, the captain had his men search each of us for gold and jewels. They took great pleasure in checking the women, hands in intimate places. Then they explored the cabin and hold. When finished, they separated the men and children from the women, and began taking the women to their boat.

“My son objected to seeing his wife stripped and mounted by one of the pirates. He ran toward the pirate boat screaming at the bandits. A pirate slashed at him with his machete, cutting his arm off, and then his head.” Thien took in a deep breath. He bowed his head, and then looked at Wolfe. Tears welled in his eyes. “My boy fell dead in the ocean.”

“I am so sorry,” Wolfe said, unable to express his deep feelings of outrage adequately.

“I need a minute to recover,” Thien said. He stood and walked into the kitchen with his empty glass.