“Sometimes I wonder when we’ll learn,” Carl said.
“What do you mean?”
He sighed. “Did I ever tell you about Ton Son Nhut?”
Derrick shook his head.
“Ton Son Nhut was an air force base just outside of Saigon,” Carl said. “It was where most grunts arrived when they came in-country. And you have to remember, there were a half million guys in Vietnam at any point in time, so it was a busy place. You’d land and there would be a group of guys eagerly waiting for your plane, because that was their ride home. They’d actually shout ‘replacements, replacements’ at the fresh meat that was coming in.”
Carl shook his head at the memory. He had done several tours of duty in Vietnam. As close as he was to his son, he seldom talked about that time in his life. He said it was because nothing very interesting happened to him. It was mostly just boredom, Carl had insisted. You wouldn’t be interested in any of it. Derrick always wondered if there was more to it, but he respected his father’s boundaries when it came to that long-ago conflict.
“Anyhow, I was coming into Ton Son Nhut for my third tour, so I knew my way around a little bit,” Carl continued. “I was waiting for a Huey to take me into the boonies, but it was delayed for a few days by mechanical trouble or something. I was just wandering around the base when I came across the infirmary. They had—”
Carl stopped himself for a second to look away. The glow from the television, which was soundlessly tuned to the Orioles postgame show, reflected on his face.
“They had just accepted a medical chopper full of wounded civilians. It was the usual thing. A village had been harboring Vietcong and the air force had cooked it down with a load of napalm. It was just—”
Again, Carl had to compose himself.
“The thing about napalm is that it sticks to things. That was part of how it was designed. It sticks to houses, trees, human bodies. Even small bodies. And it burns so hot. Once it gets going, it’s eight times hotter than boiling water. What that does to human flesh is…I mean, look, I had seen people burned with napalm before. But it was always combatants. And I didn’t feel a lot of…I mean, I felt bad for them, I guess, but not too bad. When you got right down to it, it was either us or them, you know?
“But these civilians were something else. And you knew most of them weren’t going to make it. People who burn up that bad linger a few days, but all the while their lungs are filling up with fluid. The body is trying to heal itself of these overwhelming injuries but in doing so it actually begins to drown itself. A few survive, but most of them…”
Carl was shaking his head. His eyes were open, but Derrick got the sense they were now seeing things from long ago. “There was this little girl. From what I understood, she had lost her mother in the attack. And God knows where her father was. Probably in a tunnel somewhere, waiting to kill himself a GI. Anyway, she couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. She was the sweetest little thing. One side of her face was perfect — olive eyes, high cheekbones. You could tell she was going to be a beautiful woman someday. Except the other side, it was just…it was ruined. The napalm had hit her on the left side and stuck to her. Her left arm had been completely burned off. Her ribs. Her leg. It had gotten everywhere. She was in so much pain.
“I visited her a few times, gave her chocolate bars from the PX to cheer her up, little dolls, that sort of thing. She tried to smile every time she saw me, even if she could only do it with half her face. The docs had her shot up with morphine, which helped some. But you could tell there were times when the morphine was wearing off and she didn’t know how to ask for more. The pain had to be…I mean, you can’t even imagine.”
He brought the beer to his lips only to find it empty. Derrick tried to imagine what his father had looked like back then: his hair dark, his skin unlined. He would have been younger than Derrick was now. Young and powerful. And yet, in that moment, also powerless.
“Anyhow, the last night I was there, I had gone to visit her again. She just couldn’t stop crying, the poor little thing. You could tell it hurt so bad. I ran to get a nurse to up the morphine, but they told me she was already getting the maximum dosage. So I just, I tried…I tried to cradle her. I mean, you could barely touch her, she was so fragile. But I wanted her to know that, damn it, someone still cared about her. Even someone from a country that had done this to her. I held her and she cried, and I held her some more. Eventually, she slipped into a coma, which was probably a blessing. And I kept holding her until…”
He didn’t complete the thought, letting his voice trail off into the darkened living room.
“Anyway, when it was all over, I went straight to the Officer’s Club to get as drunk as I knew how. I ended up sitting next to a young air force lieutenant, a Lieutenant Marlowe. I started talking about what I had just witnessed and it turned out he had been the one who airlifted the civilians there, so he had seen it, too. We started talking about the horrible things people did to each other, about war, and about the terrible irony that mankind was smart enough to be able to design these weapons and still dumb enough to use them on each other. You have to remember, this was the height of the Cold War, when the nuclear threat was still very real. And he said something like, We just can’t be trusted with certain weapons. There ought to be limits. We promised each other that someday, if either of us ever got in a position of authority within the military, we’d use it to help enforce those limits.”
Derrick nodded, pensively.
“Son, I’m an old man. I can’t really do much to keep that promise anymore. But you can,” Carl finished. “You have to do everything you can to get this weapon out of the hands of whoever has it. But you also have to make sure it doesn’t fall into someone else’s hands. Not even the United States. We can’t be trusted, either.”
“Okay,” Derrick said. “Let’s get to work.”
TEN MINUTES LATER, Carl had brewed a pot of coffee. They were in the kitchen, which was perhaps the only one in tony Fairfax not to have undergone remodeling in the last thirty-odd years. It had been pulled from a time warp, all linoleum flooring and Formica countertops. The light fixture, which looked like something out of a seventies pizzeria, glowed brightly above them.
Derrick had his tablet laid on the table in front of him. Carl had a laptop computer with a fresh legal pad and a sharpened pencil alongside it.
“At this point, we have to be thinking terrorist, yes?” Derrick said.
“Yes.”
“What type are we focusing on? A group of violent ‘true believers’? A lone wolf?”
“Any of the above. All of the above. The important thing to remember is terrorists come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they look like Osama bin Laden, yes. But Ted Kaczynski was a terrorist and he looked like half the computer science professors in this country. Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist and he looked like a pizza delivery boy. Sometimes they come in forms you don’t expect.”
“Right. And in this case, we still don’t know what is motivating these terrorists or what they want. All we really know about them is what kind of weapon they used.”
“This fancy laser,” Carl said.
“That’s right. A high-energy laser. That makes these terrorists different from Kaczynski or McVeigh. Those guys used fairly simple weapons, the kind that anyone with an Internet connection and half a brain could learn how to make in a few hours with stuff they could buy from a hardware store. A high-energy laser is a lot trickier. You can’t find those parts at the Home Depot and even if you could, your average wack job wouldn’t know what to do with them. So the question becomes, how did these particular terrorists acquire that kind of expertise?”