Gil Evachevski was surprised it had taken this long for Mike to come to him asking for information about Henry Toivo.
Gil had seen a lot of Mike in the last few months, mostly due to the Kirsten connection with Carrie. That afternoon Gil saw a side to Mike that he hadn’t detected before: a trained reporter, not knowing much about his subject, but trying to get to the bottom of things and present them in an understandable fashion. Mike wasn’t a veteran, especially of Vietnam, and he liked the kid, but that afternoon Gil found himself having to explain things that any of the other Vietnam vets around town would have taken for granted, common knowledge. Under the pressure of Mike’s questioning, Gil found himself surprised to be saying “I don’t know,” an awful lot.
Mike went away half satisfied, no nearer an answer than he’d ever been, but left Gil wondering just what he did know.
It had been some years since Gil had actually thought very much about Henry Toivo’s disappearance. As he reflected on it over the next few days, he came to the conclusion that he didn’t really know a hell of a lot – just what was in Dennis Conant’s letter, which he still had, and the half-remembered conversation with Dennis over a couple of fliptops in the Rod and Bottle in Bad Worslingen several months later.
He’d told Heikki Toivo some years before that if the chance ever came he’d be willing to go and look for some trace of Henry himself. After the fall of Vietnam and the evacuation of Saigon the previous spring, it didn’t seem as if the chance would come any time soon. But, with the war now over, the chance might come – or, it might not. There were places he’d been in Korea more than twenty years before that might as well have been on the back side of the moon for all the chance he had of ever going there, not that he had any desire to.
For example, he knew the fire base and the patch of woods where Toivo was last seen were “east of Phuoc Lot.” What direction east? How far? What were the map coordinates of either one of them? What, for that matter, was the name of the fire base? He hadn’t read Conant’s letter in some years, but knew damn well it didn’t include that little fact.
For that matter, Gil couldn’t even remember ever hearing what unit he’d been in! He thought maybe it might have been the Tropic Lightning, but wouldn’t have wanted to bet money on it – they’d operated in the area a lot, he knew, but that had been some years after he’d last been in-country. Gil had a detailed knowledge of what Special Forces camps were where, even from times when he’d been gone for years, but with a true beret’s feeling of natural superiority, hadn’t paid a lot of attention to what the leg outfits did and where and when they did it.
Even that knowledge was division level, and he needed battalion and company level knowledge. Gil knew Henry had been in some Charlie Company, but what battalion, what brigade? He’d known at one time, or he wouldn’t have been able to sic Conant and Marley onto the problem, but he couldn’t remember now. Gil figured he could go to the library and look that much up in the archived copies of the Record-Herald – there was no way in hell he was going to go down to the paper and admit such ignorance.
Gil thought about it for several days, and most of the thinking just added to the list of the things he realized he didn’t know. Much of it was stuff he would need to know if he were to ever go seriously looking for any trace of Toivo.
New Years came and went. Gil had to spend a few days installing appliances that he’d sold as Christmas gifts, but once that died out, he knew he wasn’t going to be doing much until the weather warmed up, so he started to pick at what problems he could, by mail and by phone from Spearfish Lake. He managed to come up with a few items, but really nothing much that narrowed the search.
What he did discover was it was going to be difficult to get the information he needed at Spearfish Lake from the outside. Things that would have been easily accessible to him from his office in Germany as a Sergeant Major were damn near impossible for him to get as a civilian, from the outside. Worse, he’d been out of the Army five years. While he still knew people, times were changing, people were moving on, people were leaving. Like him, a lot of his contemporaries had hung up their uniforms in the last few years, people who knew the things he needed to know, or who had easy access to them. Memories faded, too; things that had been crystal clear in 1970 would be foggy and fuzzy, even now.
And, things would only get worse. It didn’t take much thinking to realize if there was ever going to be a search for Henry Toivo or his body, he needed all the information he could get, now, not in the somewhere distant future that might or might not come.
His research from Spearfish Lake did turn up one thing of use: Sergeant Major Dennis Conant was at Headquarters, Special Warfare Center. One night in the middle of January, Gil had a long talk with Carrie. The next morning, he hung an “On Vacation” sign in the window of Spearfish Lake Appliance, drew a couple thousand out of the bank, and started the long drive to Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.
After five years away from the Army, Ft. Bragg seemed a little strange to Gil, even though he’d spent a lot of time there – a long tour there in the fifties with the 504th, and in the sixties at the Special Warfare Center, plus another year there in the fifties, as well. Everything seemed familiar, just maybe a little different.
It turned out that Conant wasn’t particularly busy. After the war had tailed down, there was a lot of excess overhead in Special Forces, so there wasn’t the incoming training that there had been at the peak, when Gil had been there doing pretty much what Dennis was doing now. Gil started off by thoroughly debriefing his friend – not just some stories over some beers, although there were a few of those, but serious, professional discussions with Gil taking lots of notes. Conant was able to fill in lots of blanks just from his own knowledge. Conant also had a spare bedroom, his last kid just having left for college, and he offered Gil a place to stay, which helped, too.
Since Dennis Conant had spent some time on the Henry Toivo question a few years earlier, it didn’t take him long to get interested – it was something to do, if nothing else. And, Conant had full access to the Senior NCO Network, while Gil only had a few places he could touch, any more.
A lot of the reports of patrols, contacts, and the like from the Special Forces camp where Conant, Marley and Henson had been were right there in the Special Warfare Center, and Gil was able to go through them, and make copies of the ones that seemed pertinent. While he was doing that, Conant extended his reach through the Senior NCO Network, and came up with more.
It turned out that SFC Bob Marley hadn’t been able to find a slot in the berets currently, but had a platoon in the 504th, right across the base. The three got together for the sake of old times, and Gil had his notebook out. Marley was able to add some details that Conant hadn’t picked up, including the information that Ernie Henson was a light colonel, now, and had a staff slot in Division Headquarters.
The next day, Gil went over to see Henson. Gil hadn’t seen him since he was a second john, but they’d had a good relationship, and Henson remembered him. Since Henson had done most of the officer contacts he’d learned things that the sergeants hadn’t picked up, and Gil’s notebook got a few more pages filled in. Moreover, Henson had his contacts in the Field Officer’s Network – Gil had always known there was one, although it probably wasn’t as efficient as the Senior NCO’s, he thought patronizingly. Henson was soon able to turn up the fact that Toivo’s old company and battalion commanders were both still in the Army, the former a major down at Ft. Gordon, and the other a rather senior Lieutenant Colonel in the Pentagon.
Gil had figured he was going to have to get to the puzzle palace sooner or later in this search, but needed an insider to help him with access. After discussing it, Henson told him he had a friend in the Army historical records department up there, and gave a call to grease the skids. After Henson explained the problem, the friend said, “Sure, send him up. I’ll do what I can. What’d you say this guy’s name was?”
“Gil Evachevski. Used to be over at SWC, got out at a Sergeant Major.”
“No shit?” the friend said. “You mean that big lug made Sergeant Major? I had Camp Baker the day the gooks almost cleaned his clock. How the hell he got out of that slick I’ll never know.”
Henson got a big grin on his face. “Hey, Gil,” he said. “You remember Captain Lenny Young?”
“You’re kidding!”
“Call him Colonel, now,” he smiled, handing Gil the phone.
“Jeez, Colonel,” Gil said, shaking his head. “The world is a small place, ain’t it?”
By the time Gil made it to DC, Colonel Young had managed to pull a lot of the records Gil needed, and had made copies for both of them – well, actually, he had an SFC on his staff do it. Gil and the SFC, Mike Riley, thought they recognized each other, but it took a while for them to work out that they’d been in the First Infantry, way back in the fifties after Korea, in the same battalion but different companies. They’d probably had a few beers together way back when. Gil agreed those were the good days and the Army had gone to hell in a hand basket, and started diving into the mass of reports.
There was a lot of good information there, and it gave him leads to more. Not a lot of it was directly pertaining to Toivo, but some was, and Gil soon realized Toivo’s unit had put more effort into searching for him and investigating the disappearance than he’d been led to believe. Some of it could be cover your ass stuff, not based on the real thing, and Gil still had the feeling they could have done a better job.
Not everything had gone as well in DC. Wright, the battalion commander, hadn’t been a lot of help, and didn’t remember much about the incident, or at least said he didn’t. Gil got the impression that he was ticket puncher, an office type without much in the way of field skills who was really more plugged into kissing tail in the Pentagon corridors, and that he’d been lost in the field. It was one of the down sides; there were a lot of officers running around who had no business being in the field, Gil knew, but had to get in a six month tour in command of a field unit, preferably a combat command, in order to get promoted. Occasionally one screwed up bad enough that a promotion didn’t result, but not badly enough that they got kicked out of the Army – especially if they had enough pull in the right spots, or had kissed the right asses. Gil figured that the man’s having not been promoted since his return from Vietnam pretty well told what kind of an officer he was. By then, Gil had long come to the conclusion that it was Henry’s bad luck that had gotten him stuck in a unit that had been commanded by a series of such ticket punchers. A real officer would have taken better care of his men.
By the time Gil left DC, he’d filled the notebook and started another, and had a large cardboard box filled with copies of reports of one thing and another, maps of the area, and other information, like the names of several of the other men on the patrol and their last known addresses. That included the platoon sergeant, who was currently in Korea, but most of the rest were out of the Army.
Gil stopped back off at Ft. Bragg for a night, updated Conant and Marley a bit about what he’d learned at the nuthouse on the Potomac, stopped off to thank Colonel Henson, and started for Georgia. Toivo’s former company commander was now on the staff of the post commander, doing what, Gil wasn’t sure, but he suspected that since it was winter and the grass wasn’t growing, it involved inspection of how well the rocks around the base had been painted. Gil already knew by then that the man hadn’t been any better than the former battalion commander had been, but at least this guy had known he was in over his head and had done the best he could, even if his best wasn’t very good. Gil was gentle with him, though, and did manage to get a lot of useful information that wasn’t in the reports, especially the routes that the main part of the patrol took, and the major’s surmise about where Toivo’s squar must have gone.
With that interview out of the way, Gil spent a couple days at a motel outside Ft. Gordon, just trying to comprehend some of the mess of information he’d collected, and gain a little more understanding out of it. In one sense of the word, he didn’t know much more about what had happened to PFC Henry Toivo than he’d been able to learn nearly six years before in Germany. In another sense, he knew a lot more about the background of the incident, where it had happened, and, to a degree, why it had happened.
There were still some holes in his research on official records – he’d be a while getting his hands on a copy of Toivo’s service record, for example. Although it wouldn’t add much, if anything, to the problem at hand, there was always the chance. However, Gil figured out he’d probably found out pretty much what he was going to find out from the records. About the only thing he hadn’t really done yet was to talk to the men who were in Toivo’s squad on the patrol – Taylor, the man who had been physically closest to him when he became missing, and the others.
Counting Taylor, and not counting Henry, there were six of them. Of them, one had been a KIA several months later, and he was the squad leader, the man besides Taylor who Gil would have most liked to talk to. Two lived well out west – one in California, the other in Arizona – and Gil figured he’d go there if he had to but would exhaust the other possibilities first.
Gil spent some time hunting around Anniston, Alabama for one of the men, but he didn’t live there any more, nor did his family, and Gil couldn’t find any further traces of a lead. The next one was in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and Gil got behind the wheel and drove. Gil did learn a few things, like, yes, they do smoke marijuana in Muskogee after all, but once he got past that, the kid had been fairly willing to help, considering he wasn’t in a position to help very much. He’d known Henry pretty well, was able to pass on some war stories, but had been on the far side of the squad when Henry disappeared and hadn’t known he was missing until hours later. Gil tried to get some sense of the route the patrol had taken from him, but the kid couldn’t read a map to save his ass. But he was basically a decent kid, still shaken from the war experience, and Gil hoped he could get rid of the dope and pull himself together, and tried to offer some gentle encouragement.
The kid did offer some more help, in a negative sort of way – he’d written a letter to the guy in California, looking to maybe go visit and smoke some dope with him. He got a letter back from the family saying the guy had wrapped his car around a light pole, not long after he got back. There’d be no talking to him. He’d also sent a letter to the guy in Arizona, but it came back “Moved, no forwarding address.”
That left Taylor, who Gil thought lived outside of St. Louis. Gil headed on up there, a little depressed himself. Toivo had wound up in a squad of dopers. No wonder no one had given a shit for each other. Was he a smoker himself? No way of telling; the Oklahoma guy said Toivo stayed away from the stuff, but he could have been trying to put a good face on it. In any case, the attitudes had to have rubbed off. Gil decided to not tell Kirsten or the Toivo family about that part, whether he was following in the Oklahoma guy’s footsteps or not.
Taylor proved relatively easy to find and Gil almost wished he hadn’t. The guy was useless. Yeah, he remembered Henry disappearing; the platoon sergeant got all pissed off about it. Taylor had been smoking a joint and didn’t realize till a long time later that he had no idea what had happened to Toivo. Now piss off.
It took a supreme effort of self-control for Gil to keep from pounding the dumb shit to a pulp, right on the spot, just on general principles. If he’d had half a lick of sense, if he’d had any idea of what he was supposed have been doing, Henry would be up in Spearfish Lake, married to Kirsten and raising kids. But no, all the dumb shit could think of was smoking his fucking joint and what an asshole his fucking platoon sergeant was, and Henry Toivo was missing and probably dead as a result.
Gil swung back and forth between fury and philosophy as he pointed the car back toward Spearfish Lake. Up till then, he’d been pissed off at the damn weasels in the government who hadn’t supported the military when they needed it, but cut and run. But then, the Army had done it to themselves, too, with units commanded by numbnuts and ticket punchers who didn’t care, fielding half-trained and halfassed draftees with no discipline, no sense of unit cohesion, little grasp of tactics, and only the ability to count backwards from 365. It wasn’t the Army that Gil had known and respected, and yes, loved. Gil knew that even the quality of the berets when he got out wasn’t what it had been, say, ten years before, but it was only a matter of degree.
As a professional soldier, which Gil had been for many years, he’d always had to confront the possibility that something could happen to him in combat, and there had been times that it came close. Though he’d usually shoved the thought to the side, he realized that if it had to happen in a good cause, well, so be it. But to die uselessly, just because people didn’t give a shit – whether they were the doper who was supposed to be covering you, or the useless weasel in Congress who thought the military was made up of subhumans – well, that was another story. If he had a time machine, considering what he had learned in the last few weeks, he’d go back to 1969 and tell Henry to grab Kirsten and head for Canada. Poor Henry.
Gil had been gone three weeks when he got back to Spearfish Lake. He’d learned a lot, some of it useful if there were ever to be a chance to go and try to find a trace of Toivo, like he’d told Heikki and Kirsten that he would. And, if the chance ever came, Gil knew he’d do his damndest. Gil knew that finding out what happened to him would be a long shot, at best. A lot of people had failed Henry, but the failure to try would only add to the list of disgrace.