Authors: Greg Dinallo
“But you don’t have them here,” I say, knowingly.
“No. They’re retained by Mortuary Affairs.”
My shoulders sag in defeat.
Collins notices and studies me for a moment. “Better get used to it.”
“That bad, huh?”
He nods gravely. “You have no idea what you’re getting into, believe me.”
“But getting copies of the mortuary records shouldn’t be a problem. I mean, I’ll be asking for information under my name and serial number.”
“True. Of course on the other hand—” he shakes his head, dismayed by a thought that occurs to him “—there’s no guarantee now that he was even Army.”
“Hadn’t thought of that,” I say, feeling a little shell-shocked.
“That’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. I’d give serious consideration to forgetting about this, if I were you.”
I shove my hands into my pockets and nod numbly.
“Anything else you want?”
I mull it over for a moment. “A copy of that medic’s report, I guess.”
“No problem.”
As Collins heads for a nearby copying station, I stand amid the records of the countless millions who served in the military through four wars in this century alone, thinking that every new piece of information seems to be complicating the mystery instead of solving it. I still have no idea who the soldier is, just the slim chance that the answer lies somewhere in the files of the casualties that were processed by the military mortuaries in Vietnam—mine, or one of the other 58,176.
I
’m twenty-eight thousand feet above the Grand Canyon, spread out over two seats in the first-class cabin of a 767 working on my laptop. Undaunted by Collins’ warning, I got the address and phone number for Army Mortuary Affairs at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, from him before leaving the NPRC; and as soon as my flight was in the air, I began writing a letter requesting copies of all data filed under my name and serial number.
Due to the three-hour difference in time, it’s only 3:35
P.M.
when I arrive in Los Angeles. Nancy picks me up from business trips whenever she can. It gives us a chance to talk before the clients, computers, and phones close in. Her Range Rover came with all the options, but she made sure a cellular phone wasn’t one of them. Today, her flight from Washington arrived just a few hours before mine, so I’ve arranged for one of the company drivers to meet me instead.
Minutes after touchdown, I’m tucked in the backseat of a Lincoln Town Car heading north on the 405. At the first interchange, we take the Santa Monica west to the tunnel that channels all traffic onto Pacific Coast Highway. I drive through it every day on the way home from work. It’s right out of
Star Trek
—a fleeting fifteen-second time warp that teleports me from a world of stress and urban sprawl to one of peace and natural beauty. The Lincoln is soon climbing Malibu Canyon Road into the mountains, where, I bathed in golden light as our architect planned, a cluster of angular
white structures hugs the rugged terrain. Nancy said I needed to get home and she’s right.
I intend to go right to my den and print out the letter to Mortuary Affairs, but I don’t. Instead, I take a refreshing swim in the pool, then spend some time in the spa with Nancy, watching the sunset. But as the last amber rays streak skyward from beneath the horizon, I start feeling restless again.
“Better go do it now,” she says, knowingly.
“Do what, Nance?” I ask, as if I haven’t the slightest idea what she’s talking about.
“Whatever it is that’s making you fidget. You’ll be distracted all through dinner. Go.”
I get into some comfortable clothes and head downstairs to the den. It’s an electronics-packed sanctuary with a view guaranteed to make the most insecure executive feel invincible. I transfer the Mortuary Affairs letter from the laptop to my PC, which is tied in to the mainframe at the office, then print it out on the laser jet. I’m proofreading it when my mind wanders to the time/place discrepancy. I’m lost in thought when Nancy pokes her head in the doorway.
“You going to be much longer? Cal?”
“Oh, sorry, I was somewhere else.”
“I don’t need to ask where, do I?”
I smile and shake no. “I was thinking about helicopters.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about food. How does Geoffery’s sound?” she asks, referring to a trendy restaurant perched on a bluff above the Pacific.
“Sounds okay,” I reply halfheartedly. I turn off the computer, then come around the desk. “You know, according to the master casualty list, whoever died with my tags was killed three weeks after and four hundred miles north of where I was wounded.”
“That’s strange.”
“Yes, it’s been bugging me. I was just thinking the medevac chopper might account for it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, they linked the fire bases to the hospitals and mortuaries. There’s a chance my ID got lost in the chopper that took me to the field hospital.”
“And you think it might’ve been reassigned to another area after that.”
“Uh-huh,” I reply as we start upstairs. “Weeks later the same chopper’s working this other province; goes into a hot LZ and hauls out a load of grunts: live, wounded, dead—happened all the time. My ID turns up, and some terrified kid figures it belongs to the pile of carnage next to him without tags.”
“That makes sense.”
“So what? No matter how I look at it, it still doesn’t give me a thing.”
“That’s because you haven’t eaten. You know how your brain refuses to function without fuel.”
“Without protein. Forget the angel hair and shitake mushrooms. Let’s go get some steaks.”
The next morning, Nancy is out of the house by 7:15. I spend a half hour on my rowing machine, working off a sixteen-ounce T-bone and sorting through the events in Washington and St. Louis. I have a feeling that something basic is wrong but can’t put my finger on it. I shower, dress, and head for the office—an effortless drive in a Mercedes 560 sedan that seems to know the route by heart.
Morgan Management Consulting is located in one of the aluminum-clad towers in Century City. It’s within striking distance of the corporate and financial center downtown, and the electronics and defense industry corridor on the west side.
I park in the underground garage, using one of those card keys to activate the gate arm, and take the elevator to the twenty-fourth floor, half of which my company occupies. In keeping with the management philosophy we preach, the decor and furnishings are minimalist in design, the artwork contemporary. I drop the letter to Mortuary Affairs in the mail chute and head for my office. I’m settling at my desk when my secretary informs me that Washington is on the line.
My words didn’t fall on deaf ears. One of the senators’s aides, faced with revising the legislation to reflect my data, needs help. It’s too complex to cover over the phone, but could be handled in person by a subordinate. I assign it to a bright young woman who worked on my prepared testimony, then meet with one of our actuarial teams to review a troubled pension plan study.
It’s obvious a poll used to gather raw data was poorly designed. “Garbage in garbage out,” I lecture. “We ask the wrong questions, we don’t stand a chance in hell of getting the right answers. Now—” I pause. Something just clicked. I know what was bothering me at
home this morning. I’ve been too driven by emotion and impulse. I haven’t really defined the problem and developed an approach to solving it. I clear my office and call the National Personnel Records Center.
“You have it figured out already?” Collins prompts when he comes on the line.
“Not the way I was going at it.”
“I’m not sure I follow you, Mr. Morgan.”
“I’ve been asking the wrong question,” I say, feeling a little guilty for chastising my staff. “I mean, the question I’m trying to answer is: Whose body was recovered with my dog tags? But when you really think about it, the one I should be asking is: How has the military accounted for this guy? John Doe’s body or part of it was identified as mine, right? When Mr. Doe didn’t turn up—dead or alive—what did they think happened to him? I may be wrong, but the way I see it, there are only two possibilities: They listed him as either missing in action or AWOL.”
“You might be on to something there.”
“Can you help me narrow the parameters?”
“Well, for openers, I’d say the chances that he’s listed as AWOL are pretty slim.”
“Why?”
“The circumstances. Bolikhamsai Province in Laos, or any battle zone for that matter, isn’t where GIs go AWOL. In most of the records I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot of them in my day, guys who went AWOL in Vietnam were usually last seen somewhere in one of the big cities, Saigon, Bangkok, Chiang Mai.”
“Heavily into women and drugs,” I hear myself adding, which makes me acutely aware of just how selective my memory has become. I knew guys who went AWOL: for days, for weeks, forever. “It’s been a long time, Mr. Collins, but that makes a lot of sense now that you mention it.”
“Yes, when you get right down to it, odds are he’s listed as MIA. Nothing else left.”
“There any way to find out for sure?”
“Not without his name.” He pauses briefly, then adds, “I don’t know what this’ll give us, but I’m kind of curious to see what the master list has under yours. Hold on.”
After a short silence, I hear a muffled thud followed by the rustle of pages turning. “Yes, here it is,” Collins says. “There’s a category
called Body State; the entry is BNR; that means body not recovered.”
That’s the last thing I expected. It really throws me. “I don’t get it,” I say, thinking aloud. “I mean, I assumed a body somehow ended up with my tags by mistake; and my name ended up on the wall.”
“So did I. That’s why I didn’t check it the other day. Was your family notified?”
“No. That’s one of the first things I covered.”
“Well, that fits the pattern. A body had to be fully processed by one of the mortuaries before a notification was triggered. No body, no notice.”
“And no records,” I add, realizing this latest twist means the letter I sent to Mortuary Affairs is a waste of time. “In any event, assuming it’s not a data encoding error, chances are I’m looking for someone who’s listed as missing in action.”
“Yes, which narrows those parameters quite a bit. There are only about twenty-three hundred MIAs.”
“Twenty-three hundred,” I repeat, hearing pages turning again in the background.
“Twenty-two hundred and seventy-three at last count, to be exact,” Collins corrects.
I quickly calculate that out of a total of 58,176, I’ve eliminated 96.093 percent of the possibilities. “I guess that’s not exactly back to square one, but I haven’t the slightest idea where to go next.”
“I’d try the National League of Families,” he suggests. “They’re the authority on MIAs. If they can’t help you, they’ll know who can.”
“Where are they? Alaska?”
“Washington, D.C.,” he replies with an amused chuckle. “I warned you.”
After ending the call, I track down the staff member to whom I gave the Senate committee assignment and suggest she cancel her travel plans. She isn’t going to Washington next week. I am.
D
espite narrowing the possibilities to 2,273 men, I’ve raised as many questions as I’ve answered. There’s nothing in my personnel file that suggests a clerical error was made. All the entries—date, place, cause and type of wound—are correct. But my entry on the master casualty list contains conflicting information: all the basic data—the dog tag stuff—is mine; all the casualty-related data—the field stuff—is someone else’s; which, as Collins pointed out, means another GI, who was killed in action, was identified as me by mistake. But the time/place parameters of that casualty aren’t even close to when and where I was wounded. The tags-in-the-chopper theory I developed could account for it; but it also means that a body—with my ID attached—had to be
recovered
for my name to be on the wall. Yet the master casualty list indicates Body Not Recovered.
I spend most of my spare time building a computer model of all the possible intersections of time, place, and personnel. I’ve been working on it for almost a week and am no closer to an answer. Only one angle makes any sense: Whoever died with my tags had to be listed as missing in action. I’m counting on the National League of Families to help me sort it out.
The sun is sending long shafts of light across the Virginia countryside as I land at Dulles. I stumble off the red-eye with my two-suiter and attaché and take a taxi to Capitol Hill. Work sessions to revise the actuarial data in the Social Security bill have been scheduled
over several mornings in the senator’s offices in the Russell Building on Delaware Avenue.
“What’re you doing here?” he says when he sees me. “I thought you were leaving the nuts and bolts to one of your staffers?”
“So did I,” I confess, going on to explain about the National League of Families.
“Courageous group,” he replies, his brows arching in tribute. “Took on the government and won. There was a lot of suspicion and mistrust in the beginning. Now, they’re like this.” He crosses his fingers tightly.
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Well, in the late sixties when the League was formed, the country was getting fed up with the war, and the government was keeping a very low profile on the POW/MIA issue. They wanted to get on with the fun stuff: relations with China, Watergate, Begin and Sadat, the SALT talks. But those wives and families wouldn’t let go. They wrote letters, raised money, brought law suits, and held a lot of people’s feet to the fire. They’ve come a long way. The League’s even involved in policy-making now; an integral part of the IAG.”
IAG? Like every infrastructure, mine is as rife with acronyms and insider jargon as the next, but I’m finding myself more and more on the outside. “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that, Senator.”
“Inter Agency Group: Defense, State, the JCs, DIA, NSC, and NLF are members. Every time we meet with a Southeast Asian government on this issue, the League’s Executive Director is at the table; and every bit of new data on an MIA or POW is released to his family, regardless of its substance or reliability. The League fought long and hard for those rights, believe me.”
When our first session comes to a close, the senator and his staff go to a committee meeting. I take a taxi to the National League of Families on Connecticut Avenue. Unlike the Friends of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial offices, where an almost eerie quiet prevailed, the League’s cramped, second-floor quarters are alive with ringing phones and harried staffers at long tables assembling packages of information, stuffing envelopes, working the phones. It reminds me of a telethon.
I make my way to a reception desk where a young woman who can’t be much older than my daughters is fielding calls. There’s
a sense of righteousness and divine purpose about her. She’s so preoccupied that I skip the preliminaries—my initial discovery at the wall and the ground I’ve covered since—and explain that I have information that, if it matches one of their profiles, might resolve the fate of an MIA.
“I’m sorry. We don’t have that data computerized, Mr. Morgan,” she explains, handing a stack of pink phone messages to a woman who passes behind me on the way to her office. “All we have are mailing lists for fund-raising and letter-writing campaigns. That’s it.”
“You people are the experts. It’s hard to believe you don’t have any data on the men who are missing.”
“Oh, we are the experts; and we have tons of data.” She gestures to a wall of file cabinets across the room. “Most of it’s stuff the families send us. Letters, photos, clippings from local papers, personal mementos. Remember you’re dealing with people here; with the families, not bureaucrats.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” I say, more amused than offended by her zeal. “Now, just to be certain, you’re saying you don’t have any loss data? I mean, I can give you very specific parameters: 12 May ’68, Bolikhamsai Province, Laos.”
“It’s possible there’s a match in our files,” she says, jotting the information down with one hand and reaching for a ringing phone with the other. “But we have no way of finding it without a name.”
“That’s the only thing I don’t have,” I say, unable to conceal my frustration. “That’s what I’m looking for.”
She answers the phone on what must be the sixth ring, puts the caller on hold, then buzzes one of the offices on the intercom. “It’s the General on two.” She hangs up and turns back toward me. “I’m sorry it’s so crazy around here today.”
“What’s going on?”
“Our annual meeting’s next week. It’s usually in July but we changed it. Something to do with hotel accommodations. By the way, have you reported this to the Army Casualty Office?”
“Yes. I’ve also been to the FVVM, the NPRC, and now—” I pause, exasperated. “Frankly, I’m not getting the kind of feedback I expected. I thought you folks’d be thrilled to get some information that might—”
She pouts and lets out a long breath. “I’m sorry, but you have no idea how much we get. Most of it’s useless, just a lot of DTRs.”
“A lot of what?”
“Dog tag reports. This issue is exploited by a lot of people. They start rumors that we’ll pay cash or resettle the finder for information. Then they make it up and sell it to desperate refugees who think it’s their ticket to a new life. We get pictures of dog tags, information copied from dog tags, lost dog tags, fake dog tags, snapshots of GIs, letters. It’s endless. The bottom line is, less than four percent has anything to do with a man that’s missing.”
“Well, this does,” I say sharply, stabbing a finger at the pad where she’s written the information. “Now is there any chance you might be able to tell me how many men are listed as missing in Laos?”
“Five hundred forty-seven,” she replies somewhat contritely.
“Thank you,” I say, calculating that I’ve just eliminated 1,726 out of 2,273 possibilities, or 75.93 percent. “That helps.”
She studies me for a moment as if deciding something, then gets one of the women working at the tables to cover the phones.
“I shouldn’t be doing this,” she says in a confidential tone as she directs me aside. “I mean, we have a policy of not encouraging free-lancers, but one of our family members might be able to help you even more. Her husband was lost in Laos. When it came time for reparations, and their government didn’t cooperate, she took it on herself to organize the families of all the men missing there. To make a long story short, they got Congress into it and the Laotian Government recently agreed to abide by repatriation agreements and give us access to crash sites.”
“Sounds like somebody who gets things done.”
“You bet. Her name’s Kate Ackerman. You should talk to her.”
“But—she’s in Laos,” I say, making, what I hope for my sake, is an attempt at levity.
She smiles. “Pennsylvania—” she corrects, letting the smile widen before she adds “—Avenue.”
“She’s in Washington?” I exclaim, thinking it’s about time I had some luck.
“Well, she lives in Alexandria, but she’s over at the Marriott this afternoon. That’s where the meeting’s going to be. Try the Grand Ballroom.”
“The Marriott.”
“It’s on Fourteenth just the other side of Lafayette Square. You can walk it.”
“Thanks,” I say, with a little farewell wave. She escorts me to the door. I’m not sure whether she’s being polite or making certain she’s rid of me.
“I have a feeling you and Kate’ll hit it off,” she offers as we walk to the elevator.
“Oh?”
“She’s sort of a loose cannon too.”