Uncle Thomas thought I was getting suckered on this. He believed with all his heart that his younger brother died over that bridge. He tried to talk me out of this mission, but in the end, when all else had failed, he came through with the goods.
Not that it was that tough. When you're chief of naval operations and a front-line candidate for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you draw a lot of water. If once in a while you use it to do something for your family, how wrong can that be? Especially when you're making up for something the U.S. screwed up over the years.
So I'd wangled my way over to Vietnam on Jefferson and spent some time on the ground tracing my father's steps ― or at least what I thought were his steps. There'd been one clue, a scrawled saying in the cinder block wall of one prison camp Go west.
Russia. The rumors had been floating around for years that Russian military advisors had taken American POWs back to the Soviet Union for further interrogation. The moment I saw that phrase scribbled over my father's signature, I knew that was what had happened.
West ― and into the Soviet Union, in those days the most brutal regime in the world. What the Viet Cong came up with paled in comparison to the GRU and Stalin. If my father had gone into Russia, odds were he'd been brutally interrogated until they'd leeched every last bit of information they thought they could get out of him ― then shot.
Were records even kept back then? Not likely ― Stalin had executed millions simply because he could, and a full accounting of any American POWs was not only unlikely but probably impossible as well. Hell, the Russians weren't even admitting they'd ever taken any out of Vietnam ― now, in the post-glasnost era of peristroika, what incentive did they have to admit to that particular war crime?
None. None at all.
It might have ended there, but there was another piece of evidence.
Two cruises ago, a Ukrainian officer admitted to me that he knew my father in Russia. That meant there might be records ― or, at a minimum, someone who might remember him.
Not officially, of course. The party line was that none of it had ever happened. But there were more avenues of information than government agencies and press releases. I'd found some of them. In at least one instance, they'd found me, and the possibility that my own government, the one I'd faithfully served for so long in uniform, might have lied to me about my father cut deep. I didn't want to believe it of my own country.
Tracking down the truth about POWs is like being on a ship. You want the real scoop on what's going down, the latest in information and data, you don't watch the skipper's announcement on closed-circuit TV. You might ― just might, mind you, if you can get access ― head for the deepest, darkest compartments in the intelligence spaces, the ones that they call SCIF ― Specially Compartmented Information. This is the stuff you always hear called "burn before reading," so sensitive that the average fighter jock never even knows the capabilities exist. But even with all its esoteric magic, SCIF isn't the place for the real truth.
No, every sailor knows where to get the gouge ― MDI. Mess Deck Intelligence. Somehow the cooks and the galley slaves and the mess cooks knew the real truth about what's going on far before anyone else on the ship. MDI is the tightest, fastest, and most righteous information collection and dissemination network in existence. Don't ask me how it works ― no one knows ― but it does.
Within the family-of-POWs network, there's something similar. It doesn't have a physical location like MDI does, but it's damned near as effective. The outer layer is all for show ― the Internet web pages, the public posters and pamphlets and the letter writing campaigns, the copper bracelets we wear in remembrance of those that aren't coming back. That's just the tip of the network, just like the skipper's daily pep talk on the closed-circuit TV. Under neath that are the E-mails, the hand-delivered copies of documents and resources passed from family to family when electronic means are deemed too sensitive, the volumes and volumes of in-country contacts that these survivors have amassed over the decades since Vietnam.
Discolored photos, shards of personal belongings, snatches of transcripts blurred by being photocopied and handled so many times, evidence ― of what? Of men that were alive and weren't brought home, just like my father.
I'd had some help on the first part of my search for my father in the form of in-country contacts. Now that the trail pointed to Russia, information was significantly harder to get, more ambiguous, and, in some cases, downright wrong. But it was there, flowing from the other survivors, the Navy Department, even from immigrants.
During the Vietnam War, the air bases just outside Arkhangelsk had attracted the Central Intelligence Agency's attention. The activity around the base was inconsistent ― aircraft parked on aprons, a cover story that claimed the base was an advance training facility, but a notable lack of routine takeoffs and landings. You expect a sort of cyclical activity at a training facility as classes graduate and new students arrive a spate of simple orientation and formation flights as student pilots become accustomed to new aircraft, followed by increasingly difficult training missions including ACM and bombing runs; then, a period of quiet, the time after a class graduates and the next one starts; then the whole cycle repeated over and over again.
That didn't happen at Arkhangelsk. In fact, it had more transit flights ― aircraft originating from somewhere outside our satellite coverage and vectoring in to the isolated base ― than it did training flights. That worried the CIA enough to give this one particular base code-word sensitivity and scrutiny.
They called it Hidden Archer, the name itself peculiarly appropriate for the facility. Over the next five years of painstaking observation and critical analysis, the CIA arrived at the conclusion that Hidden Archer had one primary function ― to serve as a debriefing facility for captured aviators.
In the early days of the Vietnam War, satellite technology wasn't what it is today. But by late 1970s, even after the war was officially over, we had satellite and surveillance capabilities that would have seemed like Buck Rogers science fiction to military men of just a few decades earlier.
We could read license plates on cars from space, discern a man's face as he walked between buildings. In response to these technological developments, training for aircrews changed, and the SERE ― Survival, Evasion, Rescue, Escape ― schools emphasized continually looking up at the sky, every chance you got. There was no telling when a satellite or high-flying reconnaissance aircraft might be overhead, and exposing your face to the sky maximized your chances of being identified.
At the time he was flying, my father knew something of how fast technology was coming along. He was an engineer by training, and from all accounts a pretty damned smart man. My uncle says I remind him of my father, his brother. I usually take it as a compliment, but there's something in me that protests at that. I've been shot down a couple of times, but I always made it out somehow. Out of the cockpit, out of the fire zone. That's the one difference I'm sure of between me and my father.
But what my father knew about satellites added credibility to the odd, ragged photo that had turned up carefully sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard. It had come to my house, not the office, in a nondescript brown padded envelope. Address in neat, printed letters, no return address.
Correct postage, and a postmark showing it was mailed from Washington, D.C.
Not much to go on. I suppose I could have reported it to the FBI, had them dust it for fingerprints or DNA or some such, but I didn't. I looked at the grainy photo and saw my own face staring back at me. It was blurred, either a high-resolution camera shot enlarged past its tolerance or a shot taken while moving. But the similarity was unmistakable. Even with some of the features blurred, I could see the line of my jaw in it, the set of my head on my own shoulders. It wasn't me, but it was someone who looked a hell of a lot like an older me, a Tombstone that the forces of gravity and time had warped and wrinkled.