Mark Gimenez - The Abduction

“You think they’re after the money?”

“I’m afraid so, Colonel.” The colonel sat in an adjacent chair; Devereaux adjusted his butt position. “Rewards of a few thousand dollars can be productive, but $25 million-that’s a whole ’nother ball game. Two thousand sightings, we’re wasting too much time chasing too many false leads.” He put his hand on the stack. “What if there is one good lead in all this?”

“May I?”

“Sure. Here, I’ve been through these.” Devereaux pushed a stack of papers toward Colonel Brice and yawned.

“You need some sleep. Give your prostate a rest.”

“I’ll sleep after we find Gracie.”

The colonel gave him a firm look. “You’re a good man.”

“And you were a great soldier.” The colonel did not respond. The silence was awkward, so Devereaux broke it by confessing to an American hero. “I wasn’t. I just wanted to come home. Nineteen days left in my tour and I’m walking point on patrol again and all I’m thinking is, My luck, I’m gonna be the last American soldier to die in Vietnam, when this VC steps out from behind a tree not ten feet in front of me, his weapon on me. I’m a dead man. Except his rifle misfires-it was an old bolt-action piece of shit. I raise my M-16 and shoot him dead. I step over to him, see he’s just a kid, maybe fourteen. I threw up.” Devereaux was too embarrassed to look directly at the colonel. “I’ve carried a weapon most of my adult life, but that’s the only time I’ve ever killed another human being.” He paused and shook his head. “Looks like we’ve both done some confessing now. I’ve never told anyone that story, not even my wife.”

The colonel’s voice was almost a whisper when he said, “Killing isn’t an easy thing to talk about… or live with.”

The two men were silent with their own thoughts of war and killing until Devereaux said, “How long were you a POW?” The colonel appeared puzzled, so Devereaux answered his unasked question. “Agent Randall, he saw the scars on your back, during your polygraph.”

The colonel nodded. “Six months, barely enough time to get settled in.”

“Hanoi Hilton?”

He shook his head. “Outlying camp, San Bie. After we escaped, NVA closed all the camps, moved all the Americans to Hanoi.”

And then it dawned on Devereaux, why the name Ben Brice sounded familiar.

“You’re the one. You’re the guy that rescued those pilots.” He paused and stared at this man. “You saved a lot of soldiers that day.”

Colonel Brice showed no emotion. He broke eye contact and squinted as if trying to see something in the distance. Or in the past. When he spoke, his voice was soft.

“Commander Ron Porter.”

“Who?”

His eyes returned to Devereaux. “One of those pilots, he flies out of Albuquerque.”

“Colonel, they gave you the Medal of Honor.”

The colonel picked up the papers, stood, and said, “So they did.” Then he walked away.

Six months before the day he had walked into the San Bie POW camp in North Vietnam, Colonel Ben Brice had been living in the jungles of Vietnam with the Montagnards, the indigenous inhabitants of the country known to GIs as the “Yards,” a people much like the American Indian. The men wore loincloths; their bronze-skinned bodies were lean and muscular and their facial features were hard and sharply etched, but they were not without humor or intelligence. The tribal elders spoke French fluently, learned when the owners of that language took their ill-fated turn at colonizing Vietnam. Eighteen million people called Vietnam home; the Montagnards numbered one million, scattered among numerous tribes. Ben’s tribe was the Sedang.

When first deployed to Vietnam, the Green Berets’ primary mission was to organize the Montagnard tribes into Civilian Irregular Defense Groups to stem Communist infiltration into South Vietnam along the western borders with Laos and Cambodia. Ben was supposed to teach the Sedang guerrilla warfare tactics; but it was the Sedang who taught him: how to live off the land, how to hunt wild game and Viet Cong on the mountains that rose eight thousand feet and in the thick jungles that covered the valleys below, and how to move through the night like a shadow. The Sedang were natural hunter-killers. He became one of them. They even presented him with a hand-fashioned brass bracelet, which represented membership in the tribe; it was a great honor for a white man. Ben Brice had “gone native.”

They were operating in North Vietnam just inside the Seventeenth Parallel-the DMZ that divided North from South, Communist from free-when they spotted a USAF F-4 Phantom flying low overhead and trailing smoke, hit on a Rolling Thunder raid over Hanoi. The two-man crew ejected just before the jet crashed and exploded in a fireball; both parachutes opened, so Ben and the Montagnards made for the Americans. But they arrived too late; the NVA had captured them.

The NVA marched the pilots north to the San Bie prison camp. On still nights, camped a thousand meters out, Ben heard the blood-curdling screams of the Americans being tortured. The next morning he heard them sing “God Bless America.” Ben and the Montagnards planned a rescue, which required he be captured. The NVA had standing orders to kill their American prisoners in the event of a rescue attempt. The only successful rescue would come from inside, with help on the outside.

Now, six months a prisoner of war, he will escape and take one hundred American pilots with him, with the help of the Montagnards. Ben Brice had taught them a few things too, including the proper use of C-4 explosive. Together they destroyed enemy arms depots, disrupted supply convoys on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, ambushed VC, assassinated NVA officers, radioed in grid coordinates for B-52 Arc Light bombing raids, and snatched that Marine slick driver back from the NVA in Laos. Today they will rescue American POWs.

He remains sprawled in the same position on the concrete floor in which he had been deposited five hours earlier, awaiting the morning guard. He soon hears the familiar sound of keys rattling, so familiar that he knows the guard’s exact location in the hallway outside as he comes closer and closer to Ben’s cell. The guard arrives and bangs on the cell door, then looks in through the small barred opening and sees the American colonel still lying on the floor, the blood on his raw back dried and caked and the rats nibbling at his feet. Ben hears metal grating against metal as the guard slips the key into the rusty lock. The key turns, and the lock releases. The door creaks open. Footsteps, a bit wary, come close; the guard wonders if the highest-ranking American officer in the prison survived the fierce beating inflicted by Big Ug and his fan belt last night. Ben braces himself not to react to the kick that is sure to come and does; he stifles a groan as the guard’s boot drives into his side. The prisoner did not respond, so the guard circles around and squats to check his pulse.

It is his last living act.

Ben grabs the guard by the throat with hands made strong in the oil fields of West Texas and the jungles of Vietnam and chokes off all sound and jerks him to the floor. Ben Brice does not kill him out of vengeance; he kills him because he must. The guard’s neck sounds like a brittle chicken bone snapping when Ben rotates his head past the breaking point.

Ben stands and surveys his cell for the last time. The thick odor customary to the cell is joined by that of fresh urine and feces as the guard’s body accepts its death and surrenders its dignity. More death will follow. He must kill to save these pilots. He takes no satisfaction in the killing, but he is skilled in the art of killing. It is what he knows.

This is his moment in the great human tragedy known as the Vietnam War.