The summer of 1965 was drawing to a close when the Evachevski family reported to Fort Bragg, and Sergeant First Class Gil Evachevski reported to Headquarters, Special Warfare Center on highly unscenic Smoke Bomb Hill, for duty as an instructor.

Living at Bragg was a little different than living in Germany had been. The instructor position meant Gil would probably be stable there for the full three year tour; important to them both, for, without talking about it, they had decided Gil would do his best to avoid another Vietnam tour. They had a growing family – two bucking and one in the chute; Gil had not only had his turn in combat, but had it twice, and it seemed wise to not push his luck any further. Not that he wouldn’t go if he had to, but he would use what finesse he could manage to avoid another combat tour.

The three years at Bragg went quickly, with Brandy born in April of 1966 and Tara born in March of 1968. Gil took class after class through the school, and sent most of the graduates directly to Southeast Asia. Sometimes that was hard, too, as Special Forces were really a rather small group, and word from the war frequently came back to the school, sometimes bearing good news, but more frequently, bad. During that period, Gil picked up another stripe, becoming a Master Sergeant; that was something of a relief, for if he did get sent to Vietnam again it probably meant that any time would be spent in an office.

Shortly after Tara was born, Gil’s tour at Bragg was drawing to a close, and so too, as it happened, was his enlistment. It did not take Gil much investigation to find out that if he stayed in the service, he was headed back to Vietnam, nor was he surprised at the news. People kept bugging him to re-enlist, and he kept putting them off, until finally, he laid down the law to the Commandant of the school: “Either I get a stabilized three-year tour in Germany, or I’m out of the Army in June.”

“Lost your nerve, Gil?”

“No, I don’t want to lose my wife.”

It took some doing, but finally, orders came through for Germany, and Gil filed his re-enlistment papers, but for three years. He could make his mind up then.

They went back to Germany, to the same post where they had spent the first three years of their married life. They had German friends they were glad to see again, and though living on the economy was not the bargain it had once been, it was still a good deal. The three years in Europe went much as they had before, and in 1969, their last child, Daniel, joined them and Carrie drew the line. Five pregnancies in eight years was enough, especially when she had to work so hard after each one to get her figure back where she thought it belonged.

Even though the war in Vietnam was winding down, Gil knew he could not avoid another tour there if he stayed in the Army. Even with the “stabilized” tour in Germany, he wasn’t sure until about early 1970 that the Army wouldn’t send him there, anyway, so he and Carrie knew he’d be retiring in the summer of 1971.

They pretty well had made their minds up from the beginning to move back to Spearfish Lake; after all, it was home, and they had money in the bank. Perhaps they could have a permanent home, and regular lives after all. Doing what, they weren’t sure.

That was what Gil was musing about at his desk one day in the summer of 1970, when for the first time he heard the name Henry Toivo, in a transatlantic telephone call from his father-in-law.

Very senior enlisted personnel – which Gil now was – have a legendary network of communication of their own, usually inaccessible to those of higher or lower rank. So do Green Berets, and Garth Matson, having been a colonel, knew it very well. He doubted that the fact he was halfway around the world would bother Gil very much, and it didn’t.

Gil did have to spend a little time on AUTOVON, the Army’s special phone network, but soon he was able to get a much better idea of where it was that Toivo had become separated from his unit. As it turned out, it wasn’t a great distance away from a Special Forces Camp where he’d spent several months, back in ’64, and Gil realized he’d been in the general vicinity a couple of times, so had a good mental picture of what the terrain was like. With that knowledge in hand, he spent some more time working the phones with some people in Ft. Bragg to find out who he knew would be in a Special Forces camp near the site, and soon discovered Master Sergeant Dennis Conant was stationed there. Conant was a buddy; he’d gone through Special Forces School with Gil back in the fifties, and had been on Okinawa with him, and had even spent a month or two in Vietnam with him. There was a Staff Sergeant there who Gil knew, as well, Bob Marley, who Gil had run through Special Forces school a couple years before.

Gil’s communications weren’t quite good enough to get Conant on the phone from Germany – he tried, but it broke down on the last link, in Vietnam. Gil had to resort to a very old-fashioned technique: he wrote Conant and Marley a letter, setting out the problem, giving them what information he knew about Toivo, and asking the favor. It might have to be repaid, and might not be. As far as that went, there was that time in the bar in Okinawa with those Marines that Conant might remember, and might consider that he owned Gil one. There was no question that Marley owed him, for overlooking, and even covering up a little, an incident involving beer and the commander’s jeep.

What with one thing and another, it took Gil most of a day to work out what he needed to know and get the letter off to Conant and Marley. That made it a good day – Gil wasn’t very busy at the time, and it gave him something to do for an entire day.

About a week later, Gil got a brief Telex back: “NO JOY. LETTER FOLLOWS. DENNIS AND BOB.”

The letter turned up in a couple days – for everything else the Army screwed up in Vietnam, the mail service was superb, as Gil well knew. The handwritten and sweat stained letter was a little hard to figure out, since SFC Conant didn’t have the most legible handwriting in the world, but Gil was soon able to puzzle it out. To sum up a letter that ran several pages, the two had taken Gil’s problem to the camp commander, who Gil knew, but being an officer wasn’t a part of the Green Beret Sergeant’s Network. He too owed Gil, and had gone straight to Toivo’s company commander and got a detailed report on the disappearance and the search. The Green Beret captain, a big black guy by the name of Ernest Henson, didn’t think too much of the company, or the battalion, or the commanders of either one. That wasn’t surprising; while the Army units in the early years in Vietnam had been pretty good, by the time they were getting down toward the end, they were pretty terrible, part of the reason that Gil had done his best to avoid going back there. “Poorly disciplined, little field skills, don’t give a shit attitude” was the way Conant summed it up. It had taken some time for the report of Toivo’s disappearance to get to the battalion commander, who did send out a search party, but found nothing, not that it surprised Conant much.

But that didn’t satisfy Conant, Marley or Henson very much since they were of the opinion that Toivo’s battalion couldn’t find their ass with either hand. The sergeants, along with a group of ARVNs, took a patrol of their own through the area. With only a handful of them, they couldn’t be as brazen as Toivo’s unit had been on a two company sweep, since there was known to be an NVA unit in the vicinity. Conant and Marley wouldn’t have minded encountering them, since they’d have been quick to call in an air strike, but that wasn’t what they were looking for. They did interrogate some of the local zips, but none of them knew anything, or if they did, wouldn’t talk about it, but there were some good informants that had a pretty good handle on the NVA who didn’t know anything, either.

“Sorry, but it’s a lot of nothing,” Conant’s letter ended up. “We get into the area now and then and will keep our eyes open when we do, but don’t get your hopes up.”

Realistically, Gil hadn’t expected much else. He read the letter through two or three times, to try to get Conant’s sometimes convoluted sentences straight in his own mind. Finally he picked up the phone, and called his father in law, reported a summary of what Conant and the others had found, and asked for Heikki Toivo’s phone number.

“I hate to say it,” Gil reported on the trans-Atlantic phone call directly to Heikki Toivo, “But they didn’t find a thing, and I know those guys. If there was anything to find, they would have. The only hope I can offer – and it’s not much hope – is that he got captured by some unit that was passing through the area and not much in contact with the local gooks. That’s a real long shot, though, and I wouldn’t pin anything on it.”

To Gil, it had been no big deal. He genuinely liked and respected his father-in-law, who even though he’d been a reservist, from all reports had been an outstanding officer during World War II. Gil felt he owed him a lot of favors, and the few hours he’d actually spent himself on the Toivo problem were but a small repayment.

Another year rolled around. If Vietnam hadn’t been going on Gil would have been tempted to stay in the Army, but with five small kids and his background, it wasn’t a risk he was willing to take, but he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with the rest of his life.

He and Carrie often talked about the possibilities. “You know what I’d really like to do,” Gil said one day, “Is spend the summer laying around home and just waiting to see what turns up. I’ll have a tombstone promotion to Sergeant Major and some damn decent retirement pay, so maybe I can find some job that doesn’t tie me down too bad.”

“I get these kids in school,” Carrie said, “And I’m getting a job, too. I’m tired of sitting around the house, being a playroom director.”

“Tell you what,” Gil said, “We go back to Spearfish Lake, you get a job, and I’ll watch the kids for a couple years. Can’t be as nerve-wracking as Vietnam.”

“Want to bet?”

They missed their friends, and they missed home, so going back to Spearfish Lake seemed like a logical idea. Carrie’s parents wanted them home, too. A hint to Carrie’s father that they were thinking about moving back led to an offer to purchase a repossessed home in Spearfish Lake at a bargain rate, and got them a real deal on a small summer cottage at West Turtle Lake, to boot. Typically, Matson had a crew go through the house from top to bottom, bringing it back into shape, and never sent them the bill. It was settled. The Evachevskis were going home.

They came back home in the summer of 1971. Carrie was ten years older, and a lot wiser than she had been as a teen-age girl smitten with the handsome Green Beret. In spite of five kids and ten years of married life, she was still a beautiful young woman. They soon discovered part of the reason Colonel Matson and Helga were so happy to have them home: Carrie’s youngest brother, Phil, had graduated from college in the spring, and had taken a job in Florida, of all places. All of her brothers and sisters had left town by now, except for her half-brother, Frank, and the old Matson house out on the Point seemed rather empty. Having some grandchildren around helped to fill the void, a little.

Not long after they returned home, old Mrs. Berlin decided to retire from the Record-Herald when they shifted over from Linotypes to offset; she said she was too old to learn how to run the new Compugraphic equipment. Carrie happened to be at the right place at the right time, and soon was setting type for the paper.

Predictably, three pre-schoolers drove Gil nuts within a month. He was soon wondering if a nice, peaceful Special Forces camp in Vietnam that only got attacked every week or two might not be easier on his blood pressure . . . maybe he should have stayed in the Army and taken his chances with Vietnam again. It was still hard to get used to the idea that he was out, after twenty years.

It was just at that time he had a couple of visitors. One day, he was sitting out on the porch, watching the kids play, when his father in law and a vaguely familiar man walked up to the cottage at West Turtle Lake, where the family was spending the summer.

“Gil,” Colonel Matson said. “I don’t know if you’ve met this gentleman, but this is Heikki Toivo, the township supervisor.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Gil said. “We talked on the phone there, but I’m just sorry I couldn’t have had better news for you.”

“Sergeant Major Evachevski . . .”

“Please call me Gil.”

“Gil,” Heikki said, “I don’t know how I can thank you for what you tried to do for us, even though you didn’t find much. It meant a lot to me and my wife, and his fiancée, Kirsten.”

“No problem,” Gil said. “I just wish I could have done more, but I don’t know what more I could have done.”

They sat in silence for a moment, before the Colonel finally spoke: “Gil, I know you trusted your friends, but would you consider going and looking yourself? I’ll finance it, and I talked to George Webb, and he can get you correspondent credentials.”

“No,” Gil said, “It can’t be done, now.”

“It would mean much to me, my family, his fiancée,” Heikki said.

Gil shook his head. “Believe me, I would if I could, but . . . look, I never told you this, because it didn’t matter, but that’s all Indian country now. Just before I left Germany, Dennis Conant showed up. He was one of my friends who looked for Henry, and he said the division and the Berets pulled out of the area last winter, and gave it over to the ARVNs, who immediately ran away. It would be just possible to insert someone in there for a look around, but they wouldn’t find anything. The area has been combed over pretty good. Look, Henry grew up around here. Was he good in the woods? Did he have a good sense of direction?”

“He ran all over these woods and never got lost,” Heikki confirmed.

“Kinda thought so,” Gil admitted. “My guess is that once he realized he was separated from his unit, he must have headed back toward their base camp, rather than try to find the unit again, and never made it. That means there’s square miles of jungle to search through. One man, or a small patrol, staying covert, could never find anything. The chances against it are enormous. I’d be willing to try, but the chances of my coming back aren’t real good, especially since I’d be totally freelance, without any kind of support.”

“I appreciate that,” Heikki said. “I was a Marine on Guadalcanal, and I know how bad it must be.”

“Gil, I can’t ask you to take a risk like that,” the Colonel said. “I hadn’t realized it was going to be that bad.”

“Well,” the retired sergeant major said, “If he doesn’t turn up when the POWs come home, maybe someday . . . well, if I ever can, I will.”

The Colonel shrugged. “You say his unit really balled up the search for him?”

“That’s what my friend told me,” Gil said. “In Germany, Dennis said the platoon commander just acted like he didn’t care if he lost somebody or not, and when the battalion commander found out about it a couple days later, he sent a sweep back through that patch of woods. My buddy doesn’t think they missed anything, but Henry must have already left the area. I doubt very much they thought to search the area on a line back to base camp. Dennis and a couple other of my friends took a pass through that area right after that, but it was kind of unfriendly by then, so they had to stay covert. They didn’t find anything.”

The Colonel looked interested. “The platoon commander screwed up, then. Any way we can get him sent to Leavenworth?”

“No,” Gil said, “But if it’s any consolation, he already got his. Somebody fragged him.”

“Fragged?” Heikki said. He hadn’t heard the term, and neither had the Colonel.

“Somebody didn’t like him, and flipped a grenade into his hooch one night.”

“Damn,” the Colonel said. “I can think of at least one other person who would have liked to have pulled the pin.”

“Two,” Gil said.

“Several,” Heikki agreed.

To hear it from the Army was one thing; to hear it from Gil Evachevski was something else, but at least Gil’s report and the idea that Henry might be an unreported prisoner of war gave Kirsten and the Toivo family a thin reed of hope to clutch to.

They clutched it for almost three years.