Tripwire

were not written by Hobie himself. They were the work of the company dispatch clerk.
    It was very episodic fighting. The war was boiling all around him unabated, but Hobie spent a long time on the ground, because of the weather. For days at a time, the fogs and mists of Vietnam made it suicidal to fly a helicopter low-level into the jungle valleys. Then the weather would suddenly clear and the reports would clump together all under the same date: three, five, sometimes seven missions a day, against furious enemy opposition, inserting, recovering, supplying and resupplying the ground troops. Then the mists would roll back in, and the Hueys would wait inert once more in their laagers. Reacher pictured Hobie, lying in his hooch for days on end, frustrated or relieved, bored or tense, then bursting back into terrifying action for frantic exhausting hours of combat.
    The reports were separated into two halves by paperwork documenting the end of the first tour, the routine award of the medal, the long furlough back in New York, the start of the second tour. Then more combat reports. Same exact work, same exact pattern. There were fewer reports from the second tour. The very last sheet in the file recorded Lieutenant Victor Hobie’s 991st career combat mission. Not routine First Cavalry business. It was a special assignment. He took off from Pleiku, heading east for an improvised landing zone near the An Khe Pass. His orders were to fly in as one of two slicks and exfiltrate the personnel waiting on the landing zone. DeWitt was flying backup. Hobie got there first. He landed in the center of the tiny landing zone, under heavy machine-gun fire from the jungle. He was seen to take on board just three men. He took off again almost immediately. His Huey was taking hits to the airframe from the machine guns. His own gunners were returning fire blind through the jungle canopy. DeWitt was circling as Hobie was heading out. He saw Hobie’s Huey take a sustained burst of heavy machine-gun fire through the engines. His formal report as recorded by the dispatch clerk said he saw the Huey’s rotor stop and flames appear in the fuel tank area. The helicopter crashed through the jungle canopy four miles west of the landing zone, at a low angle and at a speed estimated by DeWitt to be in excess of eighty miles an hour. DeWitt reported a green flash visible through the foliage, which was normally indicative of a fueltank explosion on the forest floor. A search-and-rescue operation was mounted and aborted because of weather. No fragments of wreckage were observed. Because the area four miles west of the pass was considered inaccessible virgin jungle, it was procedure to assume there were no NVA troops on foot in the immediate vicinity. Therefore there had been no risk of immediate capture by the enemy. Therefore the eight men in the Huey were listed as missing in action.
    “But why?” Jodie asked. “DeWitt saw the thing blow up. Why list them as missing? They were obviously all killed, right?”
    Major Conrad shrugged.
    “I guess so,” he said. “But nobody knew it for sure. DeWitt saw a flash through the leaves, is all. Could theoretically have been an NVA ammo dump, hit by a lucky shot from the machine as it went down. Could have been anything. They only ever said killed in action when they knew for damn sure. When somebody literally eyeballed it happening. Fighter planes went down alone two hundred miles out in the ocean, the pilot was listed as missing, not killed, because perhaps he could have swum away somewhere. To list them as killed, someone had to see it happen. I could show you a file ten times thicker than this one, packed with orders defining and redefining exactly how to describe casualties.”
    “Why?” Jodie asked again. “Because they were afraid of the press?”
    Conrad shook his head. “No, I’m talking about internal stuff here. Anytime they were afraid of the press, they just told lies. This all was for two reasons. First, they didn’t want to get it wrong for the next of kin. Believe me, weird things happened. It was a totally alien environment. People survived things you wouldn’t expect them to survive. People turned up later. They found people. There was a massive search-and-recovery deal running, all the time. People got taken prisoner, and Charlie never issued prisoner lists, not until years later. And you couldn’t tell folks their boy was killed, only to have him turn up alive later on. So they