Chapters Sixteen-Eighteen
Chapter Sixteen
Fire Fight
In October, 1969, Captain Nick Randall, Army Ranger, was one month away from completing his second tour in Vietnam. Captain of the C Company “Wolfhounds,” 2d Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, his mission was to capture American deserters. This particular day, his eight-man team continued their Long Range Patrol on two boats on a river deep in enemy territory, an area of operation near the border between North and South Vietnam. Over the course of the war, about forty Americans deserted in Vietnam, and Nick’s unit was assigned to work with the Defense Intelligence Agency to track them down. They only had solid information on about half of them.
The platoon beached the boats at the edge of the river in dense foliage. They had intel that a VC Regiment was nearby.
In the dimming light of evening, Nick looked intensely through his Starlight Spotting Scope. Nick observed a tall white man moving across a clearing in the hills above the river. Several VC were walking with him. The VC carried SKS, Soviet semi-automatic rifles, a predecessor to the AK-47. The white-skinned man carried what looked like a slide-action shotgun.
He couldn’t be certain three hundred yards out, but the man matched the intel report description of an American deserter nicknamed, “Salt.” There had been numerous sitings of Salt with his side kick, another deserter with dark skin called “Pepper.” The sitings were similar and consistent--the pair were operating with North Vietnamese forces fighting in the South Vietnamese Army’s I Corps Tactical Zone.
The pair were thought to be laboring as rice mules, but the NVA had also used the two in battles against the South Vietnamese Army. Rumors had it they had recently split up, since the last sighting of Salt was without Pepper at the mouth of a river near a ferry crossing. He was stripped down to his fatigues and swimming out to a sampan. Pepper had been separately observed hitching a ride on a truck in a nearby province.
Nick wanted to get in closer to make a positive ID. Complicating their mission, Vietnam contained many types of non-Vietnamese, including French colonial troops left over from the French withdrawal in 1954, and third country advisors and observers. He had already killed an armed American deserter who looked like he might shoot, so Nick wanted to be sure before capturing or killing anyone else.
He couldn’t get the deserter’s dying moments out of his mind:
“What’s happening to me?”
“You’re dying.”
“I’m afraid to die.”
“It’s just like going to sleep.”
“”Where am I going?”
“You’re going home.”
“Don’t tell my parents”
The young boy’s eyes glassed over, as he rushed into eternity.
Nick motioned his squad to expand their perimeter inland from the river, but almost immediately they encountered the sharp cracks of AK’s and grenade explosions. A firefight ensued. Machine gun fire followed. He did manage to get a better look at Salt--he was about six foot with a medium build, brown hair, nothing distinctive. He carried a shotgun with a bayonet-- looked like an old Winchester pump, carried by Marines early in the War, and now used mostly by guards.
As the firefight sparked into the night, Nick ordered his men to dig foxholes about fifty yards in from the river, deep within the bamboo. He set up around a smoldering dead tree. One of his men’s arms was hanging limp and he was pale white, another had sucking chest wounds. Nick called in Cobra gunships, but the rockets couldn’t bust the VC loose, so jets came in and dumped napalm on the hill--it lit up the whole jungle. A Medevac bird hovered over the river bank long enough to pick up the two wounded, but the six of them had to spend a sleepless night in the trees.
At 0400 hours the next morning, a “hot extraction” was arranged. The pilot said their bird only had 25-foot ropes, rather than the standard 120-footers. He asked Nick to pop a smoke can so they would know they were going to the right place, then Cobra gunships would fire rockets into the hill above them.
Nick stared into the darkness until the light came. He heard the rescue helicopter before it appeared over the horizon. Because of the short ropes, the bird came down through the bamboo where they had set up their night defense with the rotor blades chopping the bamboo--a very dangerous thing. The twenty-five foot ropes dropped down, and in the midst of crackling gunfire and the explosion of grenades, the chopper came out of hover, and dragged them through the trees to safety. Everyone was badly beat up, but Nick was hurt the worst, and done with the war.
After Stretch’s comment about hearing “Salt and Pepper” used at the meth lab, he remembered the last Defense Intelligence Agency briefing a buddy sent him. After reporting recent cases of Vietnam-era deserters turning up from time to time, the DIA concluded, “We cannot rule out others are still out there.”
To survive the rocket attack and napalm on the hill that night would have been a miracle, so Salt was probably one of the dead, a deserter never scrubbed out of the MIA list, one of the many unsolved mysteries of the Vietnam War. Still, he couldn’t help wonder--what a coincidence that would be! He had to find out.
Nick recovered from his physical injuries, but still suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, like so many other soldiers before and after him. His night on the river, and days, weeks, months, and years in Vietnam had taken a deeper toll. He thought about all the untold stories that vets carried around with them, and whether or not his son, had he lived, would have joined them in the one-thousand-yard stares of the battle-fatigued warriors.
Chapter Seventeen
The Shotgun
The methamphetamine lab had been operating deep in the woods near state land for about two years. The local police were often unaware of the whereabouts of all the clandestine drug labs, even in the small geography of Northern Michigan. The labs were in old farmhouses, motel and hotel rooms, apartments, house trailers, commercial buildings, cars, boats, sheds and pole barns. “Around here sometimes law enforcement needs a little assistance,” Stretch had said.
Stretch watched the lab, crouched deep in marsh grass about 500 yards away from the run-down outbuildings that made up the complex. He noticed two men coming and going, the white-skinned one he had seen before, and a dark-skinned one. He recorded their movements and routines. Every night they left the property about nine o’clock and didn’t return until after eleven. Because of Stretch’s age, Nick would have to carry most of the weight of the operation, but Stretch did his part as an observer. The two men practiced the arm-and-hand signals that Nick had used as an Army Ranger.
A week earlier, Nick called Pete, a buddy he had served with in Vietnam. Recently retired, Pete had worked as an analyst in the tactical area of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
“Did you ever see the file on Salt and Pepper?” NIck said.
“Yes, I looked at it once, a big file.”
“Any mention of Salt having a shotgun?”
“Yes, I think a military version of a Winchester pump.”
“Can you call someone and get more details?”
“Sure, why?”
“ It’s a long shot, but I think Salt and Pepper may have surfaced.”
Less than twenty-four hours later, the DIA guy called him back.
“Salt had a Winchester Model 1200. The military version... just about the same as the civilian, except it had a ventilated handguard, sling swivels and a bayonet lug. It could hold five rounds with four in the tubular magazine. The gun was introduced in 1964, and was a takedown type of shotgun--you could take it apart easily for transportation. The Army wanted to use Springfields, but they couldn’t fit the huge surplus of World War I bayonets on hand, so Winchester started making this new model in 1964. Salt’s gun serial number: L246537, manufactured in 1967. Wasn’t actually his gun. He stole it from a prison guard when he escaped one of our brigs. The guard had an M1917 bayonet on the gun.”
“How would someone like Salt get a weapon like that back to the States after the war? I thought the military checked in all the weapons?”
“When the soldiers returned stateside, they carried their weapons with them. Somebody with a clipboard in the arms room checked the weapons, but if they weren’t on their list, they were returned to the soldier. Sometimes they were just marked lost or damaged to make the work easier.”
“So they just took them home.”
“Yes, they broke down the weapon, placed the parts in their duffel bags, and got on a bus for home.”
“But how could a deserter get back into the States?”
“Easy, when the VC started taking the Central Highlands near the end of the war, a call went out to all Americans in Vietnam--about 350 unidentified people just came out of the woodwork. They were processed at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, but in all the confusion, people slipped through the cracks. Remember, Salt and Pepper were never positively ID’d. One more thing....”
“What?”
“There was a missing section of the “Salt and Pepper File,” classified way beyond my pay grade and clearance.”
Chapter Eighteen
Night Fire
In late April, NIck and Stretch decided once and for all they were going to do this.
“We can’t kill or injure anyone, either accidentally or on purpose,” Nick had stated. We need to get inside on the night we blow it up to make sure no one, not even a dog or cat, is inside.”
So on the designated night, Nick and Stretch waited in the dark until Salt and Pepper left in the pickup. As Nick started his long crawl towards the compound, Stretch gave one of his dog commands, “Hunt-em up.” The ground was a mixture of rain-glazed snow and mud.
Nick’s plan to fast-rope down inside the lab from a hole in the roof changed once he climbed on top of the shack on an old ladder. He looked down through the hole and saw a large pot cooking something foul on a stovetop. The place seemed vacant. He waited fifteen minutes to confirm the place was empty, then struck a wooden match and lit the torpedo-shaped cigar that he had been saving for afterwards, threw it down into the pot--instant ignition.
He was blown off the roof into some spruce trees, bruised and scraped like the night the lift helicopter dragged him out of the bamboo forest in Vietnam. A few minutes later the night sky was lit. People could see the red glow from Harbor Springs, and the smoke could be seen on the south end of Beaver Island, over 30 miles away. Locals thought it sounded like a propane explosion, a common occurrence in the area. Nick had some pain from corneal flash burns, some nausea from the chemical fumes, but otherwise he was lucky to be alive. Stretch watched it all happen from a safe distance, and moved in to see if Nick needed help. Once he knew Nick was okay, he said, “Whoopie! You looked just like you was thrown off one mean bull!”
Nick’s cell phone went off in the grass about ten yards away. He was a volunteer fireman, and he scrambled into town just in time to ride out to the scene of his own creation. By six in the morning, he and his fellow firefighters lay in the grass exhausted before the smoldering rubble of the meth lab. Local people came to see, arriving on foot, in cars, bicycles, and ATV’s. A local woman brought coffee and donuts from her bakery in town. The scene was a bit festive, something you seldom see in big cities where small disasters are more common. Stretch went home to take a nap.
Just as Nick was finishing his first coat of paint at midmorning, when the county sheriff arrived uniformed and armed in his squad car. He started talking in an ominous tone:
“We can’t prove nothin’, but I think we know what happened...yep, my bet is you two boys took the law into your own hands. Our surveillance man saw Stretch stalking around out there. We had good reasons for keepin’ a watch on that operation without movin’ in--these were not locals... you’re lucky they didn’t kill you. They still may, because we have no idea where they are now. Do you hear what I’m sayin’ to you?”
Nick nodded, said nothing at first, and then after a long pause replied, “Yep.”
The sheriff jumped in the squad car, but as his tires began to roll out the long two-track road from Nick’s cottage, he said, “We’re having a spaghetti dinner fund-raiser next Saturday night at Central Town Hall. A good man needs a new kidney. I expect you and Stretch to be there, and bring two big checks.”
And so just like a priest assigning acts of penance to sinners, the sheriff told Nick how Stretch and he could absolve themselves of their transgression through charity. It was as practical as taking rust off the fenders of an old pickup--the rust of sin polished away through an act of charity, not exactly perfect contrition, but good enough for local use.
Nick had to admit that it had been a truly stupid thing to do, and he did feel a bit contrite. While he was no slave to conforming behavior, he didn’t need to be running around acting like a lunatic. On the other hand, the long days and weeks of seclusion required new material for Nick and Stretch to gab about, and he felt there was a missing piece in this jigsaw puzzle.
Nick’s theory about Salt and Pepper still tormented him, and blowing up the lab did nothing to lead his investigation further; in fact, this set things back, something he should have thought through ahead of time. Where were they now? What would they do next? Were these guys the deserters he had been assigned to track down in Vietnam, or just a strange coincidence? How could they not be truly evil, dealing in meth? He could not let this be the end of the story.
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