Had Ransom succeeded in bringing Bachelor back to mainland America eight months before, he would have been rewarded with a promotion and a more significant post. Having failed, the Shadow Masters had relegated Ransom to a secondary post in I Corps, where his role would have been to ensure that his "Bru" were instructed in matters of personal hygiene and rudimentary agriculture. Now enter Franklin Bachelor.
Some time after the Green Berets and their savages had fortified Lang Vei, the camp was bombed and strafed by a U.S. aircraft. The camp was destroyed, and many women and children killed. The explanation given was that the aircraft had become lost in the foggy mountains. This tale is patently false, though believed to this day. The true story is much worse than this invention of a confused pilot. This time, Bachelor had made a crucial error. The rogue major had long harbored an insane hatred for the Captain who had forced him to leave his own best camp, and provided false information that would lead to the destruction of the Special Forces camp. But the wrong false camp was selected—Bachelor had sent deadly destruction down upon Lang Vei, not Lang Vo, twenty kilometers distant. Ransom still lived, and when he discovered his error, Bachelor's wrath led him into deeper treachery.
By 1968, both Khe Sanh and the lesser-known Lang Vei were under perpetual siege. Then came the assault the world knows well—the North Vietnamese descended on tiny Lang Vei with tanks, troops, and mortars.
What is not known, because this information has been suppressed, is that Lang Vo, an otherwise insignificant Montagnard village under command of a single Green Beret, was likewise attacked, by North Vietnamese tanks and troops, at the same time. Why did this occur? There can be but one answer. Franklin Bachelor had duped his North Vietnamese contacts into believing that Lang Vo would be the next thorn in their side, after the destruction of Khe Sanh. And he sold out his country for one purpose only: the killing of Jack Ransom.
Lang Vo was flattened, and Ransom and most of the hapless "Bru" were trapped in an underground command post. There they were discovered, machine-gunned, and their bodies sealed up.
10
In 1982, five years after my retirement here to an idyllic backwater such as had always been my fondest dream, a much-travelled letter was delivered to my door. I might have committed the ghastly error of pitching it immediately into the trash, had I not noticed the strange assortment of stamps arrayed across its back. By following the travels of this heroic missive, as revealed by the stamps of successive postmasters, I learned that it had passed through army bases in Oregon, Texas, New Jersey, and Illinois before travelling finally to the house of my sister Elizabeth Belle in Baltimore, my first residence upon leaving the security of the United States Army, and where I lived until I relocated to PG County, as we residents know it. It had reached each destination just after my departure from it—a hurried, unhappy, unfortunate departure, in the final case.
My correspondent, a Fletcher Namon of Ridenhour, Florida, had heard many a time during his three hitches in the service of both the elusive Franklin Bachelor and that odd duck, Colonel Runnel of the Quartermaster Corps, who had tirelessly sought out stories of the former. Being so intensely interested in the adventures and lore of "the Last Irregular," he wanted me to be apprised of a story that had come his way. Mr. Namon could vouch for the integrity of the man who told it to him, a top-notch Ridenhour bartender who was like himself a combat veteran, but could not speak for the man who had told it to Namon's own informant.
That man had claimed to be a visitor at Lang Vo on the day before its invasion by the North Vietnamese: a certain Francis Pinkel on the staff of the much-loved Senatorial hawk, Clay Burrman, conducting his yearly tour of his favorite projects in Vietnam. These being so many, he had dispatched Pinkel, his aide, alone, to a CIDG camp assumed to be in no great danger. Pinkel arrived, quickly saw that nothing in Lang Vo would interest the Senator, and penned the usual pack of lies lauding the work of the Special Forces. Pinkel had come to praise Caesar, not to bury him. The helicopter returned to bring Pinkel back to his boss at Camp Crandall, and lifted off before sundown.
Once they were up in the air, Pinkel saw—imagined he saw, as he was later advised—something he did not understand. Beneath the helicopter, less than a kilometer from Lang Vo, was another tribe of "Yards" under the command of a Caucasian male. What were they doing there? Who were they? There was no second officer detailed to Lang Vo, and the tribesmen in the little encampment could not have been so numerous. The tribe and their leader scattered across the ridge where the helicopter had come upon them, fleeing for cover. Pinkel made an addendum to his puff of a report. The next day the North Vietnamese struck. Pinkel mentioned his odd sighting, and was ignored. The Senator mentioned it, to loud protestations of ignorance and impossibility. Fletcher Namon of Ridenhour, FL, wondered if the white man seen by Francis Pinkel—seen lurking on the outskirts of the camp under the command of Captain Ransom—was none other than Franklin Bachelor. Francis Pinkel and Senator Clay Burrman had suggested this possibility, once returned to Washington. They were suggesting that Bachelor had come down from his mountain redoubt to assist a fellow Green Beret in time of trouble. But how could Bachelor have known what the rest of the command did not? Or if he knew, why not issue a warning, as he had done at other times?
The upshot, Pinkel had told the bartender, was that the Shadow Masters had come to unwelcome conclusions and expunged the disaster at Lang Vo from military records. Everybody who had been there was dead, their survivors informed that they had died as a result of enemy action at Lang Vei. Pinkel and Burrman were put under order of silence, in the name of national security.
The letter ended with the wish that I would find this information interesting. It may have been no more than "a tale told over a bar," but if the man Pinkel saw was not Bachelor—who was he?
I did find this "interesting," mild word, interesting indeed. It is the final bit of evidence that locks all else into place. To conceal the treachery of one of its favorite sons, the army instituted a massive cover-up which has been in place to this day.
I replied to my correspondent in Ridenhour, but soon my grateful screed returned to me stamped with the information that no town of that name exists in the state of Florida. And I have since observed that "Namon" is No man spelled backwards. This in no way shakes my belief in the veracity of the much-travelled letter. Mister "Namon" is a man who takes sensible precautions, and I salute him for it!
11
Franklin Bachelor disappeared once again, it was said into North Vietnam. This rumor was false. In 1971 a marine patrol near the DMZ came upon an old camp, long since destroyed, littered with the remains of dead tribesmen. Amongst these bodies lay the severely decomposed corpse of a white male of indeterminate age. Franklin Bachelor had met, too late it is true, his proper fate. His entrails had been picked apart by birds, and wild foxes had torn his flesh. After a fruitless search for his relatives, Bachelor was buried by the army in an unmarked grave—sprung from nowhere, he was returned to the selfsame place.
For of all the oddities we have observed in the case of Major Franklin Bachelor, this is perhaps the oddest of all, that the man never existed at all. It was one of those cases where a lad enlists in the service under a false name, hiding his origins or his identity, and so enters from the dream world, the shadow world, the night world. Though he was responsible for untold tragedy, this figment was tolerated, nay embraced by the army's great sheltering arms, and encouraged toward an unwise independence that led to a dishonorable death. Call me foolish, hidebound, what you will, but in this progression from the dark dream world to success, thence to corruption and a return to nothingness and the dark, I see an epitome. Franklin Bachelor—"Franklin Bachelor," a true unknown soldier, he is the ghost that haunts us when our principles are laid aside.