She swung open the glass door and walked across the parking lot. Straddling a Yamaha motorcycle, Sammy put on her helmet. The engine roared to life and she cruised out of the lot, the cool fall air knifing into her despite the leather jacket. She cut through the back streets of St. Louis, eventually arriving home. She rented an apartment on the top floor of a garage behind a family house; it was small and cheap and, most importantly for her, it was quiet. She’d lived there for four years now. Sammy parked the bike and bounced up the stairs.
The first sight to greet her eyes as she locked the door behind her was the flashing red light on the answering machine. Sammy turned on the small electric heater and stood next to it for a few seconds, trying to get the chill out of her bones. She reached over and tapped the message button on the machine.
“Hey, big sister, it’s me. I’ve got the late shift tonight — midnight to four A.M. Turn me on if you’re still up. Gotta go. Bye.”
The double beep sounded, indicating no more messages. Sammy put a pot of water on the stove and turned the heat on high. While waiting for it to boil, she stepped over to one of the many bookcases that lined the walls of her one-room apartment. This particular bookcase held row upon row of nonfiction — everything Sammy could find or order about the war in Vietnam. The book she wanted sat in the center at eye leveclass="underline" Green Berets at War by Shelby Stanton.
She checked the index. There were five references to Chi Lang. The last one was what she was looking for. Chi Lang had been a post on the Vietnamese-Cambodian border where Special Forces troops had launched classified reconnaissance missions. According to Stanton’s research, the post had been shut down on 23 September 1971 due to extreme Vietcong pressure.
Had B Company been used to close out Chi Lang? Sammy immediately dismissed that thought. There was no snow at Chi Lang, and it certainly wasn’t Eternity Base. So why then the orders? For the first time that day, Sammy felt a tremor of unease. More than twenty-five years ago, someone had gone through quite a bit of trouble to hide the whereabouts of B Company, 67th Engineers, for four months. If it hadn’t been for some lieutenant with a camera and one roll of film, there would have been no anomalies in the unit history and the whole thing would have disappeared into the Archives in Washington, most likely never to surface again.
Before returning the book to the shelf, Sammy turned to a well- marked place in the back. Appendix A was titled SPECIAL FORCES PERSONNEL MISSING IN ACTION. Eighty-one names were listed in alphabetical order along with a one-paragraph description of the circumstances surrounding each incident. The entries weren’t numbered; Sammy knew there were eighty-one because she had counted them one day and the number had stayed in her mind. Thirteen pages in from the first name she stopped. She knew the words by heart, but still she read:
Samuel Robert Pintella, Staff Sergeant, reconnaissance patrol member, Command & Control, MACV-SOG. Born 6 April 1941 in St. Louis, Missouri. Entered service on 23 July 1961 at St. Louis, Missouri.
Missing in action since 6 January 1972, when patrol inserted 4 miles inside Laos west of the DMZ; past initial radio contact, no further contact was ever made.
Sammy slowly put down the book and blinked the sudden tears out of her eyes. She looked up to the next higher shelf. A photo of a grinning young man astride an old Harley-Davidson motorcycle sat next to a photo of the same man wearing tiger-striped fatigues and sporting a green beret.
Sammy shifted her gaze to the clock. It was almost seven. Five hours until her sister, Conner, came on the TV as anchorperson for the Satellite News Network (SSN). Sammy decided to set her alarm so she could wake up and catch the first hour of Conner’s broadcast. Her sister had moved up to the front desk only last week, and Sammy had watched her twice so far. It was strange for Sammy to see Conner on national satellite TV, even if it was the graveyard shift. Conner certainly was on a different life track, but Sammy felt no jealousy for her sister. Sammy believed that experiences shaped your life, and her experiences had been much different from Conner’s.
She thought of a line she had once read: “It’s not the sins of the father but rather the grief of the mother that is so damaging.” Sammy disliked the word damaging because of its implications, but she did agree that their mother had been greatly affected by their father’s actions and even more by his disappearance.
Their dad had wanted sons and had accepted the births of his daughters with a certain resignation. Their mother had initially acquiesced to his attempts to defeminize Samantha and Constance, the most immediate result being the adoption of the nicknames Sammy and Conner.
As the elder, Sammy had spent more time with their father, and her idolization had found an outlet in dungarees and tree climbing. She’d shied away from their mother’s desire to slow her down and clean her up; as a consequence, their mother’s hopes for a ladylike daughter had fallen on Conner.
Sammy had spent time with their dad whenever he was home. She remembered living in the trailer court outside of Fort Bragg among the other enlisted families in the 1960s. He’d taken her out to the woods camping. He’d also taught her martial arts — a practice their mother had rolled her eyes at and curtailed every time dad went overseas.
While Conner was spending her afternoon at ballet class, Sammy was catching tadpoles and playing war. She’d learned the pleasures of solitude, and her present position could be seen as a direct result of that. Conner, on the other hand, had taken a different path; her position as newswoman had had early seeds.
The age difference between them had loomed large when their dad was reported as missing in action. Sammy was devastated. She had been close to him; to Conner he was a distant symbol.
The four years between them had become an unbridgeable gap when Sammy got her driver’s license. That was the year Sammy discovered that living and moving fast were inexplicably entwined. She had climbed into the ‘64 Mustang and never really looked back at the twelve-year-old girl dressed in taffeta and lace, tap-dancing to a tune Sammy would never understand. That summer Sammy, always a bright student, rejected the idea of college in favor of the Records Center. She’d had her own demons to exorcise, and the Records Center had beckoned with a possible solution.
Sammy had avoided her mother; she filled her days with work and her nights with men who would never be her father. When she finally realized that no man was better than the wrong man, she attained an uneasy peace with herself. She knew she could take care of herself — her dad had taught her that early on. Once she understood what was causing the many bad relationships, she stopped them like snapping her fingers.
Conner was tough too, but in a different way. She was driven to succeed, but Sammy wasn’t sure her sister knew where that drive was taking her or if it would make her happy. Sammy was sure Conner would figure herself out eventually; it would just take time. She also knew she shouldn’t judge her sister, since she herself was still struggling with an old ghost — one that the mention of the acronyms MACV-SOG and MIA had sparked in her today.
Sammy turned away from the memory-laden bookshelf, grabbed a package of instant noodles from the cabinet above the stove, and poured the contents into the boiling water.