Once a Warrior (40 page)

“Be careful,” she managed to choke out, then turned and hurried into the busy terminal.

As Colonel Howard had promised, Kim met her at the ticket counter with John Lee’s passport and exit permit. She also had a certified copy of the baby’s birth certificate that she had already filed with the American Embassy on her way to the airport. Cat checked it over, then lifted her confused gaze to the girl’s pretty face.

“The birth certificate lists me as the mother,” she pointed out.

Kim’s lips curved in a complacent smile. “Colonel Howard said it would be easier for you to take him into the United States that way.” 

Concern crimped Cat’s brow. “But I haven’t adopted him yet.”

“Adoption in Vietnam by an alien could take months,” Kim explained. “Maybe even a year.”

The word “alien” left a bitter taste in Cat’s mouth. As did the knowledge that a certain officer was once again manipulating the law to suit his own purposes. “So Colonel Howard decided to smooth the way.”    

“The plane to Hong Kong is boarding, Mrs. Brown,” the ticket agent said then.

Kim extended her arms. “May I hold him?”

“Of course,” Cat said, and passed a blanket-bundled John Lee over.

But she had to look away when an emotional Kim partially unwrapped the baby and kissed his elbow in parting. Then she whispered something to him in Vietnamese—goodbye, perhaps—before she rewrapped him and handed him back. She lowered her head then, her hair falling like a black velvet curtain across her sweet-sad face. “You see what I meant when I said that Cain was an honorable man.”

“Will you do something for me?” Cat asked quietly.

The girl raised her head and looked at her quizzically.

“Love him twice as much for me.”

Kim’s dark, almond-shaped eyes shimmered with tears as she nodded in understanding. Then, murmuring something about having to get to the office, she straightened her narrow shoulders, turned on her spiky high heel and ran toward the door.

The ticket agent pointed in the opposite direction. “That way, Mrs. Brown.”

Her vision growing misty at the edges, Cat followed the crowd to her gate. As she crossed the tarmac, a planeload of American replacements marched past her, double-timing their way toward the military buses that would take them to the in-country processing station. Each of them was wearing khaki and carrying a duffel bag on his shoulder. And all of them looked so young, so innocent—more like boys playing soldier than men going to war—that she felt fear clutch at her heart. How many of these cherub warriors would survive to return home? 

Numb with grief for those unknown mothers and wives still to receive a chaplain’s call and a curtly worded telegram, she climbed the steps of the plane. In the front were the officers, all creased and pressed and playing gin rummy with each other or with their aides; in the rear were the enlisted men, smelling of hair tonic and after-shave and making plans for R & R in Hong Kong; in the middle were the civilians.

The flight was only half full, which meant that Cat had no seatmates. And that suited her just fine. She was no mood for company or idle chitchat, either one.

A stewardess with teased blond hair and a full makeup job offered to hold John Lee while she slid into her window seat, stowed his diaper bag under the seat in front of her and buckled up.  

“What is it?” she asked as she handed him back.

Cat tensed at the question, thinking of how Cain had been treated because of his heritage. “A baby.”

The stewardess rolled eyes as blue as the shadow that decorated their lids. “I mean is it a boy or a girl?”

“Oh.”  Cat’s lips relaxed into a smile. “A boy.”

“It’s kind of hard to tell when they’re so little.” 

“Let’s get this show on the road!” an enlisted man two rows back hollered.

“We’ll be airborne in a few minutes,” the stewardess told Cat. “If you need me for something—”

“
I
need you for something,” that same GI chimed in.

Hoots and catcalls rewarded his clever statement. 

“You sure you wouldn’t rather trade that boy for a girl?” the stewardess asked, sotto voce, before she left to finish her pre-flight duties.

“I’m sure,” Cat said softly but firmly.

Once the doors were closed, the captain’s voice came over the intercom to inform the passengers that they were ready to take off.      

At the stewardess’s suggestion, she gave the baby a bottle he really didn’t want to help keep his ears clear when the cabin pressure changed. Then she laid her head back and swallowed thickly as the plane taxied along the runway. Within minutes, they were airborne.

She was going home, but she was leaving her heart in Saigon. 

When she removed the bottle from a sleeping John Lee’s mouth, Cat saw a silvery tear glistening on his little cheek. She used her thumb to brush it away. Only to realize that it wasn’t his, but hers.  

Unbeknownst to her, it matched the single tear trickling down the lean, darkly bewhiskered cheek of the man who was sitting astride his motorcycle in the shadows of the hangar, watching her fly away from him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Kansas City, Missouri; 1973

“In your opinion, Mrs. Brown,” the reporter queried, “what should the government do about all the Amerasian children our troops have so cavalierly abandoned over three-plus decades?”

Cat folded her hands on the table in front of her, casting a surreptitious glance at her watch as she did so. The statement she’d prepared for the press conference was still in her purse. Instead of reading it, as she’d originally planned, she had instead spoken from the heart, giving a capsulized rendition of the plight of America’s forgotten progeny of war. She had even quoted Cain, though not by name, as she described the lifetime of discrimination and poverty they faced in ethnically pure societies that considered such children less than dirt. Then she had opened the floor to questions.

Which might have been a mistake.

The reception room was thronged with reporters, cameras and recording equipment. Politicians from the city to the federal level, figuring this was an opportunity to do a little glad-handing and maybe garner some favorable publicity in the process, were strategically scattered throughout the audience. There were also representatives from several veterans’ groups as well as a number of interested citizens who had read about today’s event in the newspaper.

Normally Cat would have been delighted to draw a crowd of this size. But the air-conditioning in the room that had been provided by the Alameda Plaza Hotel was on the fritz and the early June heat was so stifling that peoples’ tongues—hers included—were practically hanging out. Plus, this was taking longer than she had expected it would. She needed to pick up John Lee shortly at the YMCA, where he was practicing with his T-ball team, then swing by the grocery store on their way home. And after dinner, she wanted to run by her parents’ house to see her mother, who’d had her first radiation treatment today following her radical mastectomy four weeks ago.  

She looked down either side of the conference table—first at the frowning military men who sat to her right, and then at the beaming civilians on her left. Finally, she gave the television reporter who’d posed the question a cool smile and spoke into the microphone that sat in front of her. “To be honest, I wouldn’t necessarily characterize it as cavalier.”

“But—”

“On the other hand,” she continued firmly, “I do think that we as a nation have a responsibility toward these children. They are, after all, the living legacy of our presence in Asia. The real victims, if you will, of our three wars on that continent. And I believe we owe them at least as much as we do the thousands of political refugees from Indochina on whom we’re now spending millions of dollars.”

“Owe them what?” the reporter followed up.

Cat paused to take a drink of water and to gather her thoughts. As one of the regional spokespersons for Americans for International Aid, which, among other things, worked to facilitate reunions between the American soldiers who had fought in Vietnam and their Amerasian offspring, she walked a fine line. For one thing, she was a volunteer, not a paid staff person. And for another, she worked both sides of the political aisle on legislation that was being considered, so she had to be careful to keep her personal views from spilling over into her answers.

She set her glass back on the table and idly scanned the crowd that had turned out in honor of the reunion between a local veteran and the Vietnamese wife and daughter he’d had to leave behind when he’d finished his stint. He’d promised faithfully that he would return for them just as soon as he could. But the fates had conspired against him. After the Paris Peace Accords ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam were signed in late January and the American ground troops pulled out in March, followed by the return of the “last known prisoners of war,” there was no going back.

AIA had worked diligently to bring the small family together again. Their reward had come a little over an hour ago, in an empty office behind the conference room, when the soldier had enfolded his wife and daughter in his arms after their year-long separation. Even his parents, who’d been rather dubious about their son’s choice of a spouse, had literally melted when their new little granddaughter had taken her first toddling steps toward them. Once everyone’s eyes were dried, the doors to the conference room had been thrown open, the audience invited in, and the serviceman had given a short but moving speech thanking everyone who had helped him get his family back.

Now, Cat felt her heart skid to a jarring halt when her gaze lit on a tall man in Air Force blues who was standing in the shadows in the back of the room. She couldn’t see his face because of the cameras that were still popping like fireworks, the microphones that were being held up to catch the panel members’ answers and the reporters’ hands that were waving in the air. But there was something hauntingly familiar about him . . . something that caused her senses to come tingling to life . . . something that reminded her of Cain.

Which was ridiculous, since he was wearing a uniform.

Thinking her eyes were simply playing tricks on her, she turned her attention back to the reporter who had asked her what the government owed the children under discussion. She couldn’t divorce herself entirely from the issue, of course. John Lee was such a happy, loving little boy that she couldn’t imagine her life without him. He was also a daily reminder of the orphans at
Sacré Coeur
—many fathered by American soldiers, some scarred, others sick, all without hope of a loving family—and the nuns who had put their own lives in jeopardy to care for them. All she could do was continue to call the public’s attention to their plight and pray they would eventually demand that their children be brought home.

“Let me answer your question this way,” she began. “Because many of these children are American citizens by virtue of the fact that their fathers married their mothers in legal ceremonies”—she looked pointedly at the couple to her left then—“I believe that Congress should pass the special bill that’s being introduced which exempts them from the current two-year residency requirement.”

“And if the bill doesn’t pass?”

Now she focused on her congressman, a rather pompous fellow with white hair and a florid face who was sitting in the second row of the audience. “Then they should provide the funds to bring the children here—to live in foster homes, perhaps—so that they can fulfill the residency requirement.”

“That’s a lot of money, Mrs. Brown,” one of the newspaper reporters challenged her. “Especially for a country that’s already spent something like a hundred-and-ten billion dollars and lost over fifty thousand men . . . not to mention the war.”

Cat glanced down at her folded hands again before she answered. She didn’t wear her wedding ring anymore, but she could still see it on her finger, as shiny and new as the happily-ever-after dreams that that God-awful conflict had destroyed. Then she met the reporter’s gaze head-on. 

“Yes, it is a lot of money,” she agreed. “And I know the American public is tired of hearing about the war. Frankly,
I
get tired of hearing about it sometimes. I get tired of talking about it, too.”  She lifted her chin defiantly higher. “But I believe we have a moral responsibility to those who carry half our features, half our blood and who bear all the terrible consequences of being
Half
.”

A smattering of applause broke out in the audience when she finished. She pushed the damp bangs of her shag-cut hair out of her eyes and sat back in her chair, more grateful than words could say that the next question was directed to one of the military officers instead of to her. Listening with only half an ear to the question he’d been asked and was now answering, she let her gaze stray to the back of the room again.

But the man she was looking for was gone.

* * * *

Cat emerged from her reverie to find that she’d shredded a whole head of lettuce when she only needed half. Disgusted with herself, she opened the drawer beside the sink and reached for a plastic bag. She’d been in this painful, bittersweet state since the press conference that afternoon, and she blamed it—unfairly—on the man who’d made her think of Cain.

These head-trips, while growing fewer and farther between, weren’t all that uncommon. In fact, she’d taken quite a number of them over the past five years. She would see a stranger, usually from behind, whose dark hair or devil’s laugh reminded her of him, and her heart would do the old hanky-panky. Then the stranger would turn around, as if he sensed her staring at him, and she would turn away, embarrassed to realize that she was.

Five years was a long time to carry a torch. Too long, perhaps, for what might have been—on Cain’s part, at least—nothing more than a pleasurable but ultimately inconsequential escape from the war. On Cat’s part, though, the flame had never been extinguished. That one night of love had illuminated her soul. And it was that golden light, still burning bright, that had sustained her all this time.