A Trip to the Stars (62 page)

How did I come to be there? What was my mission—and why did I even have one? For starters, I was practically shanghaied. When I got
to Luzon after leaving you at the hotel, I was called in to the CO’s office. I was pleasantly surprised, thinking my transfer had gone through at record speed.

The CO is a one-star general. Tall, with a gut. He has a crossbow hanging behind his desk. Pictures of himself fly-fishing. He sits me down. We drink coffee. He smokes a meerschaum pipe, brown with nicotine. Two other guys come into the room. A bug-eyed blank-faced lieutenant who has a skull above crossed swords tattooed on both forearms. He’s been flying Spookies—AC-47 gunships—over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, knocking out truck convoys. He’s my pilot, who won’t make it. The other guy is wearing a Nehru jacket, rope sandals, and black shades. He looks like a blind man. He barely says a word. Clearly he’s CIA.

The CO tells me what a hero I am. Shot out of the sky, pulling a crewman from the burning B-52, twenty-eight combat missions to my credit. You’ve done your part, Major, he says, knocking some ashes out of his pipe. Oh yes, you’ve been promoted, and there’s a Purple Heart and a Silver Star on the way. Maybe a Distinguished Flying Cross in the cards, too. Depending. On what? Well, you’ve got your transfer, it’s yours. But you have one more run to make. It’s been in the works since before you requested transfer. One more mission. Then you get your medals and you wake up on a NATO base in southern Europe. Aviano, Malta—you name it—a year of Mediterranean sun. But first.

First I have to go into the burning belly. Just once. After which I’ll be sipping wine with cheese and olives at sunset.

Someone’s told the CO I’m the best navigator out of Guam. That I can read the stars without a map—
the way other men read a book
. Also that I’m experienced in surveillance and night photography, from my days flying over Russia and Japan which I told you about. And cartography, too. In short, I exactly fit the bill for the mission: a navigator who can use a camera, know what he’s looking at, and map it. And here I am in Luzon, the right place at the right time.

I feel exactly the opposite: that I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t like any of it. Especially the part about fitting the bill so exactly. For what purpose?

My pilot and I are to be flown to Saigon at once. From there, in an OV-10 with extra fuel tanks, we’ll take off at 1
A.M
. on the 18th of
January and fly north over the whole of Cambodia to the Laotian border at Khong Island. That’s about 300 miles. We’ll follow the river north another hundred miles, over a ridge of mountains that puts us within thirty miles of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Trail runs through Laos, the lifeline of the NVA in the south. I’m supposed to guide us to a very small wedge the CO has penciled onto a map he spreads out before me. A narrow valley between the river and the mountain highlands through which the South Vietnamese border runs. I’m to photograph and chart the means of access to this valley, which they think is two winding dirt roads. High-flying surveillance has not been able to detail the area enough. We’ll draw rocket fire, but the plane has a radar-blocker and under cover of the night we should be all right. As soon as I’m done, we’ll veer east out of Laos and fly south to a base near Da Nang.

What’s in this valley that’s so important? It’s top secret, the CO says, but they’re going to tell us—because we’re volunteering for the mission. Volunteering by this definition: if I don’t do it, medals or no medals, they’re going to make me finish out my tour back on Guam, navigating bombing runs on B-52s. This little trip into Laos is my ticket out of the war.

The top-secret item in the valley is an Air Force officer being held in a VC compound. They want him out badly. Why? Mr. CIA in his shades clears his throat to say that this is high-security clearance information. Then the CO informs us that the officer is a former Air America pilot who has in his head the locations of every secret landing strip and rendezvous point in Laos. The VC may not have a clue who he is; and it’s doubtful they could know that he knows so much. But working him over they’ll find out. Maybe in a month, maybe in six. So he has to come out. Special Forces commandos are poised to do it. But only after they have a detailed map and photos of the compound.

If they can’t get the officer out, I realize too, they’re going to kill him.

My pilot’s name was Basus. For three days in Saigon, in Division Headquarters at Kendall Air Force Base, he and I were briefed. In that time, we barely exchanged a word. At the canteen we shared a couple of cold meals together, in silence. Our quarters were far apart. And in the dark, early morning hours of January 18th when he was killed, he was less than a thousand feet from me, but I could barely see him. We
were high in the air, parachuting into the jungle after ejecting from our plane. From beneath camouflage nets, the antiaircraft battery that caught us flying so low—never mind the radar-blocking and the moonless night—had then turned its 20mm gun on our parachutes. The Pathet Lao don’t bother themselves with the Geneva Convention. They strafed Basus, and the last I saw of him, his helmet was tilted severely and his body was limp as his parachute sailed into the black trees like a ghost.

I closed my eyes and waited for them to turn the gun on me. My whole life didn’t pass before me: just a single moment, which I had often revisited, even when I wasn’t awaiting a hail of gunfire.

It was on the afternoon in February 1945 (the month you were born) that I visited the Fleischmann Planetarium in Reno, Nevada, with my mother. I was seven years old. We were standing in a room with black walls just outside the auditorium before an enlarged X-ray photograph of the Andromeda Galaxy. The galaxy nearest our own. We were waiting to see the show that ran every two hours, called “A Trip to the Stars.” My mother was wearing black gloves and a black dress and her long hair flowed out of a wide-brimmed hat. She was holding my hand and reading me the card on the wall next to the photograph when a man came up to us out of the darkness. He was wearing a white suit and he tipped his hat to her. The hat was white, too, with a black band. His face I never saw clearly; for someone my height, it was impossible to distinguish in the gloomy light of that anteroom.

In a low voice he began speaking to my mother. A voice I will never forget. Confident and confidential, with a tinge of urgency. A seducer’s voice, I would realize only when I was older. At seven, all I knew was that it was a type of voice I had never heard before. My mother was a very beautiful woman. I was aware that men looked closely at her. On the street. Even in our house. And I knew that she and my father had many acquaintances in Reno. I was used to people coming up to them when we were out. But never like this, with this kind of voice. Or with this man’s body language, as he smoothed his yellow tie leaning into and away from her at the same time.

As she talked with him, my mother let go of my hand. I waited for her to take it again, but she didn’t. Maybe three minutes had passed. Yet I knew instinctively that in that brief time I had lost her. I knew it in the following weeks when she and my father argued
even more than usual. Knew it when she kept slipping out of the house without a word, first in the afternoons, then at night. Knew it before the commotion one morning in March when the maid breathlessly descended the spiral staircase to tell my father, just returned from Vegas, that my mother was gone. And that she had taken her two largest suitcases and all her jewelry and a swath of clothes from her walk-in closet.

The rest of her bedroom my father tore apart. I had seen him angry many times, but coldly so. Never enraged. Never breaking things over his knee or hurling them against a wall or tearing them to shreds, as he did with the things my mother had left behind. If he was looking for something in that big corner room flooded with desert light, he didn’t find it. My mother was not the type to leave a note. Or send a letter afterward. In fact, she never communicated with him again. Or with me, to whom she had not said good-bye.

All I ever heard was that she had first traveled to Honolulu and then possibly disappeared into Southeast Asia. When I was looking for you over the last few months, in Thailand and Japan and Hawaii, following hunches, chasing after third-hand information, it struck me it was the way I might once have set out to find my mother. A quest that would have proved equally futile, I’m afraid.

The only thing I knew for sure when my mother left was that she was with that man in the white suit who had approached us at the planetarium. Looking up at her profile, her smiling eyes, I felt a cold thread of fear wind its way around my heart. I would never forget the two of them in that black room, she in black, he in white, before the blazing ring of Andromeda.

I never saw my mother again.

When I opened my eyes all those years later in Laos, swinging from my parachute, waiting for the artillery flash out of the darkness that would mean my death, I gazed up quickly at the night sky, at the stars, certain I would never see them again. That they would be the last things I ever saw.

Descending fast over the jungle canopy, I braced myself, but the artillery fire never came. I hit the ground as my plane exploded into a hillside several miles to the south. Cutting loose from my parachute, I took out my pistol and plunged into the brush. I heard an animal thrashing nearby and all around me the birds were clattering. Without
a machete, in the darkness, I knew I wasn’t going to get far. There was a lot of bamboo, sharp as razor blades, cutting my hands and face.

Within minutes I heard men approaching me, slashing through the bamboo. First to my right and left, and then from behind. There can be few worse feelings than being surrounded, hearing a circle tighten around you. They saw me before I saw them and one of them switched on a flashlight, trained it on me, and started shouting. As I spun around, half-blinded by the light, searching for an opening, they emerged from the brush, a dozen men in motley uniforms. Rubber ponchos, NVA jackets, Chinese battle fatigues, plastic sandals, Russian boots, even an American infantryman’s uniform, torn up in the back where he’d been shot. His name tag, still sewn on, read
SAFKAS
.

I dropped my pistol and raised my arms over my head. Immediately one of them slammed a rifle butt into my back and another clubbed me on the head with the heel of his machete handle. I fell to my knees, sharper lights flashing in my eyes and the mud seeping through my pants as I waited again for a bullet, this time just one, in the back of the head.

But they had no intention of killing me outright. They wanted to take me alive, to interrogate me. And this was even before they had ascertained my rank. Why they had mowed Basus down without hesitation—why him by chance and not me—preferring one prisoner to two, I would never know.

When they searched me and discovered that I was an Air Force major, they got very excited. But they didn’t treat me any better.

Five hours later, after they had blindfolded me and tied my hands and run me through the jungle, they beat me across the shoulders when I refused to eat something still moving—an insect—that one of them pushed into my mouth. My back and head were still throbbing, on fire, from the previous blows I had taken. When my hands were finally untied, I would find a lump the size of a plum on my skull and my hair matted with blood.

We reached our destination, wherever that was, and I was made to stand against a tree under a blistering sun. I heard men barking out commands and cursing. Once a truck came and went, and a couple of motorbikes. My knees and elbows were raw, and the flies and mosquitoes were going after the blood on my face. Twice someone slapped me. Once I was spat on. For the third time that morning, I thought I was
going to be executed. I strained my ears to distinguish the sounds of a firing squad: men shuffling into a line, rifles being loaded and cocked. Had they in fact wanted to kill me, it was more likely my executioner would have been another sixteen-year-old shooting from the hip with an M-1.

Standing against that tree, exhausted and hungry, I was the most scared I had been all day. And suddenly I had the time to think about it. My eyes were open beneath the blindfold and I tried to keep the rest of my face taut, to show nothing.

Finally someone led me away from the tree and pushed me into a dank place with a dirt floor. The stench was overpowering—excrement, urine, vomit. I got sick myself, and tried to roll away from the smell. I wasn’t alone anymore: beyond my blindfold there were moans, whispers, coughing. I could hear breathing close up, could feel myself being studied. “Are you Americans?” I said after a long time, my own voice sounding miles away. No one replied.

I lay there in the dirt. The hours crawled by. I had begun to realize that this was not going to be over anytime soon: I could be facing months, probably years, in a hole just like this one—maybe worse.

It was night when they removed my blindfold and untied my hands. At first, even the darkness in that place hurt my eyes. Then things came clear and I saw that I was in a long, narrow, windowless hut with about twenty other men. The others all had a wooden block secured around one ankle, to immobilize them. I hadn’t gotten mine yet. Only two of the men were Americans: a helicopter gunner and a marine corporal. Then there were South Vietnamese Army soldiers and six montagnard guerillas.

The marine told me all this. He had been a prisoner for two years, the gunner for eleven months. All he ever thought about, he told me, was escape. After less than a day of captivity, I could understand that.

His name was Geal. He was from south Texas. He had been captured in a fire fight near Par Kung after the rest of his platoon was wiped out. He told me the Pathet Lao moved him and the others around all the time. He said that as an officer above the rank of lieutenant I would be taken to a special compound for interrogation. Probably, I thought, the very place I was to have photographed from the plane. I might even meet the captain who knew too much. And maybe now the Special Forces commandos would come in and kill
both of us. Except they didn’t have the map I was to have drawn for them. So instead the Air Force would just carpet-bomb the place.