Darkroom (31 page)

“It’s going to be all right, sweetie.”

“We just scattered Mom’s ashes. How did it come to this?”

“Are you hurt, Xandi?”

“I’m okay. Thanks to Kyle.”

“I know.” He pats him on the shoulder. “Do you know what a pain it was following the instructions that friend of yours sent? Prepaid cell phones, setting up call-forwarding, and then destroying one—”

“Necessary precautions, Mr. Carrick.” Kyle motions for him to take a seat on the sofa. I, too, sit, with Dad’s arm around me.

“Agent Matthews, could I have a moment with my daughter?”

“I’ll be in the bedroom.” He shuts the door, and awkward silence seeps into the room like household methane. In and of itself, it won’t poison you. But it’s highly combustible, and if enough of it fills a closed area, it will suffocate you. All the joy of reuniting and finally seeing Dad has ebbed, leaving those haunting images behind.

“I can’t believe the trouble you’ve gotten yourself into, Xandi.”

The entire mood shifts. Relieved smiles pull into taut frowns. Glad eyes narrow as the decade-old floodgates give way. “I’m not a murderer. And I don’t have anything to hide.”

“Says the fugitive.”

“I thought you were on my side.” I push his arm off and slide away from him.

“I am on your side! Always have been.”

“You’ve got a strange way of showing it.”

“And you’ve been clueless. It’s not just murder charges, it’s not just fleeing the jurisdiction. Every law-enforcement agency’s going to be hunting you down after that news release tonight.”

“Whatever.”

“You listen to me, young lady! The Department of Homeland Security’s flagged you as a domestic terrorist. In addition to that Dellafina girl, they’re holding you responsible for the deaths of Mitchell Cooper, George Kimble, and … what are you doing, Xandra?”

“You think I killed them?” I launch to my feet, put my shoes on, ready to walk out and slam the door. “It’s just like you! You assume, assign blame without even bothering to hear my side of the story!”

“You have no idea what you’re—”

“No,
you
have no idea!” I slam my hand on the counter so hard that the glasses in the cupboard rattle. Dad blinks in surprise. I’ve never shown him the full extent of my emotions before. But now, I’m not holding back. Never again. “You’re the one they should interrogate. You’re the one who’s been hiding behind some stoic wall of silence. You, the great Peter Carrick, Pulitzer Prizewinning monolith! You think you can hide? I know, Dad. I know about Bình Sơn!”

Kyle opens the bedroom door and sticks his head out. “Problem here?”

“Family matter, Agent Matthews.” Dad controls his voice. Barely. “Give us a few.”

“Try to keep it down.” He looks over at me. I nod and wave him off. He shuts the door. If Dad’s eyes were flamethrowers, I’d be lit up by napalm. His jaw is set, his lips curl. “I will not have my little girl talk to me that way!”

“I am
not
your little girl!”

Now he’s on his feet, stabbing his finger in my face. “You’re acting like a pubescent teenager, shacking up with Secret Agent Man back there. Meanwhile the whole stinking world is going to hell in a handbasket!”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. You know everything even without asking, without seeing, without knowing! That’s why I ran off with him. Right.”

“Listen, Xandra—”

“
You
listen! You talk big, but you don’t know, you don’t see. But guess what? I can see. And I have. And you’re going to tell me the truth about Bình Sơn.”

“What are you yammering about?”

“I saw you back there. Not last week, thirty-seven years ago. The bodies, the ashes, the graves!”

“I don’t—how could you possibly …?” His face has turned paper white. “Nobody knows about that except …” He takes an absentminded step back and stumbles into the sofa.

“What are you so afraid of?”

“Who told you?”

“Nobody. I saw it. I saw you.”

“How?”

As I explain all the visions, how every one of them proved true, how each brought me step by step to where we are now, he listens without question, without doubt.

But there’s such fear in his eyes. He’s more vulnerable than I’ve ever known him to be. Overtaken by compassion, I sit next to him and hold his hands. “Daddy, please. Tell me what happened in Bình Sơn.”

76

“Why couldn’t it just stay put?” Dad buries his face in his hands.

“If this is at all connected with the murders, you’ve got to tell me.”

He sits up, grits his teeth. “Agent Matthews!”

The door opens. “Sir?”

“Take notes, you’ll need to hear this.”

Kyle takes a seat at the bar, ready with pen and paper. “Go ahead, sir.”

Dad takes a deep breath and steadies himself on the arm of the sofa. “Anything in the wet bar?”

“High octane or regular?” Kyle says.

“Diesel.”

Kyle pulls out a small bottle of Absolut, pours it into a glass, and hands it to him. “Best I could find.”

Dad nods his thanks, downs a gulp, and sighs. All the fire in his eyes has been smothered, replaced with fear, regret. “You have to understand. Your mother didn’t even know. I had to protect her, protect you both.” He takes another swig. “It happened before I met her.”

How must it feel to keep a secret like this for thirty-three years? I feel more pathos for him than anger now. “Go on, Dad. It’s all right.”

“I’ve never told anyone this story before, and with good reason …”

77

PETER CARRICK

Back in ’73 while I worked as a war photographer with Echo Company, all kinds of crazy stuff went on in the hills of Nam. You have to understand, those boys started out all right.

Lieutenant Colonel Richard “Thundering Rick” Colson, Echo Company’s commanding officer, sent Privates Cooper and Ross on a reconnaissance mission to check out this one village in Bình Sơn, the village your mother was raised in, Xandi. He believed that the VC had infiltrated it and set up a guerrilla-warfare base amongst the population.

A day late for his expected return, Private Ross just barely made it back to report. He and Cooper had been discovered lurking in the bush by some of the villagers. They looked friendly enough and welcomed them in for a meal. Many seemed happy to see American soldiers. The privates learned otherwise, only too late.

Ross escaped, but he had multiple stab wounds and had been stripped down to his skivvies. The skin on his back had been ripped to shreds by God only knows what kind of torture devices. Apparently, there were two or three VCs living in that village. And they still had Cooper.

Ross didn’t make it through the night.

Colson treated his men like they were his brothers, and this
affected him profoundly. But the soldiers under his command took it far worse. At first they wanted to light up the village, smoke out the damn Charlies, and do to them what they did to Ross. But he calmed them down, told them their first priority was to rescue Private Cooper.

By then, everyone in the world knew about the Mai Lai massacre. I feared we might be standing at the brink of another such atrocity. But Colson kept a level head.

At least, initially.

Days went by as he made multiple plans and contingency plans, and backup plans for those contingency plans. But the soldiers were starting to talk. Some of them even questioned their CO’s ability to lead, since he appeared to be stalling.

The tension was palpable. At any moment, I might be sent away so as not to witness the breakdown of a United States military unit. But they didn’t send me away. Instead, Colson confided in me. Probably because I was the only objective party around. That, and later I learned that there was no safe way to get me out of there without giving up our position.

Tempers flared, fuses grew short. Lieutenant Marks stepped forward one day and got right in Colson’s face. “Sir, if you’re not going to lead, I’m going to have to find you unfit and relieve you of duty.”

To my surprise, Colson remained calm. “Command decisions are not to be made in haste.”

“Four days squatting in the bamboo is not my idea of haste; it’s indecision.”

“Are you questioning my authority?”

“I’m questioning your ability, or your willingness to make the tough decisions. Now, give us our orders, or step aside and let someone with a backbone do it!”

A dark cloud had rolled over into the mountains, and in the distance, the rumble of thunder reverberated under our feet. I started taking pictures, but Lieutenant Marks shoved me aside. I don’t think he realized his strength relative to that of a young civilian. I fell and landed on my camera. Thankfully, the damage was
not serious. To my utter disbelief, Marks pulled out a pistol and aimed it right at me. “What do you think you’re doing?”

But at this, Colson stepped between us. “Stand down, Lieutenant.”

“Do my ears deceive me, or did you actually issue an order?”

“Stand down and take ten to cool off.”

Marks scoffed. “We’re done here.” He pointed at four other soldiers, and they all came to his side. “Anyone who wants to do something better than sitting on your hands should come with us.”

“Stay where you are, men.” Colson’s poker face could freeze molten lava.

But Marks smirked, shrugged, and turned his back on him.

“This is desertion. Stay where you are, that’s an order!” Which was followed by the clicking off of his gun’s safety and the pointing of the muzzle in the back of Marks’s head.

“Oh, look who’s grown himself a fresh pair,” Marks said, stopping in his tracks.

I could not believe my eyes. What happened next could not have taken more than half a second. Marks swung around, pointed his gun right at Colson’s chest. A gunshot went off. I ducked, covered my head, and remained that way until the echoing of the round dissipated, blending with the approaching thunder.

A cold, wet drop hit my neck. It wasn’t blood. It was rain. Within seconds, the entire area was engulfed in a thunderstorm. I lifted my head and saw a scarlet stream of blood flowing past my foot. At the top of this stream was Lieutenant Marks’s head, or what was left of it. He lay dead on the ground, his men gawking in wonder.

By the next morning, Colson got the would-be deserters to cooperate. Seems they didn’t have much of a spine after Marks was executed, which by law, he had earned. Until then, I hadn’t yet seen a drop of blood spilled. I wanted to take pictures, but Lieutenant Colonel Colson, who seemed depressed, said, “Trust me, Carrick, the world will be better off not having to see this. It’ll do
for me to write the report. Dammit, what am I going to tell Larry’s old man?”

I was young and impressionable. What he said seemed to make sense. So I let it go. Wasn’t sure I wanted pictures of American mutiny in my portfolio, anyway. Little did I know, the Graflex would capture things unimaginably worse.

By the time the rain stopped, even I was getting cabin fever. You can’t imagine how awful it was, trying to sleep under a makeshift tent in the rain. The soldiers didn’t dare complain to Colson, but he knew they were murmuring behind his back. He also knew if he didn’t do something soon, they’d all turn on him. And this time, he would be the one on the ground.

That night, when the sun went down over the hills of Bình Sơn, he laid out his plan to rescue Private Cooper. It was to be a quick, two-pronged attack. A diversionary strike on the eastern outskirts of the village and a quick raid with minimal collateral damage in the village itself. Get Cooper, blast their way out, and fall back into the depths of the Mekong Delta. There, they would rendezvous with Delta Company, which had arranged for a medevac to take their wounded back to Saigon.

As dawn broke, I stayed behind in a hidden trench a couple of hundred meters away from the village. From there, I could remain unseen and wait.

The first prong worked like a charm. Within five minutes, Echo Company surrounded and captured a couple of villagers who looked too untrained and scared to be actual Vietcong. They surrendered readily.

What surprised me most was how quickly the second prong succeeded. We’d taken control of the village in less than thirty minutes. I was given the green light to come out.

Apparently, there were only three Vietcong hiding in the village. The people seemed more frightened of them than they were of us. Private Cooper was in bad shape when they found him. But he had survived.

The first Vietcong refused to surrender and came out wielding an AK-47 and swearing at our soldiers. They put him down with three quick rounds.

The other came out with his hands up and was taken for questioning. I don’t know what exactly they did to him behind the doors of that hut, but from his screams, I imagined an eye-for-an-eye applied.

“What manner of evil have they brought upon us?” a toothless man said, holding his hands over his five-year-old granddaughter’s ears, trying to block out the tormented cries. The screaming ended with a single gunshot, followed by deathly stillness all around the village. The eyes of the women, children, and elderly grew wide with fear.

When Colson stepped out of the hut, he holstered his gun and wiped the sweat from his brow. He addressed the village while one of them translated: “There is one more of you in this village who is a Vietcong! Hand him over and the rest of you will be shown civility.”

The entire village population, which numbered about twenty-five, gathered around and stared in disbelief. A boy whom I later learned was my wife’s brother called out, “Just those two! They came and took over, forced us to hide them!”

Colson spoke like Moses holding the two stone tablets. “You must cooperate in order for us to protect you. You know who he is. Hand him over.”

The interrogations continued for the next two days, but to no avail. You could see the frustration mounting on the soldiers’ faces, even on their COs. More than anything, they had to find that last VC, make him pay for what they’d done to Cooper and Ross.

But life just went on in the village as though nothing unusual had transpired. What else could those people do? They were innocent. It was a couple of Vietcongs who tried to set up a guerrilla base in their homes. Now the VCs were dead, and for all anyone knew at the time, there were only two of them. But Colson and his
men did not believe that to be the case, which only added to their frustration when they could not find the third VC.