The heat and humidity hit all of them like a sledgehammer as they walked down the flight of stairs from the Air Thai 737 onto the tarmac of Tan Son Nhut. It had been a cold fall and a cold December in Spearfish Lake, and they'd gotten pretty well acclimatized to it. It was actually a cool winter day in Vietnam, only in the nineties or so, but it was like an unending sauna to these north woods people. Even the heat of Bangkok hadn't prepared them for this. Seven of them had been there before, and knew what to expect; two -- Mike and Rod -- were new to it.

After Binky had announced that she would go to Vietnam with the expedition after all, Steve had made a quiet visit with the family doctor, and without telling Binky had loaded up with both sedatives and antidepressants, just in case. He didn't plan on telling her that he had them unless it became necessary, but as far as he could see, she stayed pretty much her normal self on the flight from Bangkok -- except that she downed two stiff vodkas in quick succession, this from a person that almost never took a drink, so clearly, there was something going on there. But, she seemed normal.

Once off the plane, they went to pick up baggage. There was a lot of it, 22 Army duffel bags. Mark checked them each off as they were loaded onto an airport cart, and a little to his amazement, all the bags had made it through, and there were some that would have been hard to miss.

They headed off to customs. A little to their surprise, the customs check seemed cursory. Binky was the only one that had the slightest problem, and it was minor. "Born in Vietnam?" the inspector asked.

"Yes," she replied. "But my mother and I left when I was very young. I don't have many clear memories of it here, so I guess this is really my first visit."

"Welcome back," he smiled, stamping her passport.

The customs inspector selected a couple bags to look at, one of them camping gear, and the other food, which was tightly packed. It took Bud close to 20 minutes to get it repacked as well as it had been, while Steve and Mike went to see about permits. There was little discussion; the paperwork seemed all in order. "Enjoy your tour of Vietnam," the official said. It was like night and day, compared to the previous trip.

Best of all, they found Nhu Lap waiting with another Vietnamese man as they came out of customs. "Good to see you again, Nhu Lap," Steve said in Vietnamese. "This is our group."

"Good to see you again, my friend," Nhu Lap replied. "You remember my brother-in-law, Dong Kien Thanh."

"We met briefly," Steve told him. "But it's good to see you again, Kien Thanh. Is your cousin with you?"

"He stayed with the vehicles," Kien Thanh replied.

"We'll go get them, while you gather your things," Nhu Lap said.

Steve looked around. "I guess we're ready to go if you are."

A couple of minutes later, a small convoy pulled to a stop in front of the terminal. It consisted of Nhu Lap's Renault taxi, Kien Tan's Toyota, that Steve and Nhu Lap had driven out to Target One in July, and an old, battered army 3/4 ton truck, driven by a somewhat older Vietnamese. All of the drivers got out of their vehicles, and Kien Tanh introduced his cousin, Vam Cai Cung, who walked with a bad limp. "Pleased to meet you," Cung said in English. "We heard the flight was on time. Did you have any trouble with customs?"

"No, none at all," Steve said in Vietnamese. Based on that one sentence -- and as much the sound of it than the words -- Cai Cung's English was much better than he'd expected. "Nhu Lap, when we talked before I told you of the soldier's body we came looking for. These are his friends, who have come looking for his body with me. He introduced them around, coming at the end to the one woman with the party, wearing blue jeans, sunglasses, and a Green Bay Packers t-shirt. "And, this is my wife," he said, "Augsberg Binh Ky."

"Ah," Nhu Lap grinned. "I wondered why your Vietnamese was so good. You've taught him well, Binh Ky."

"Thank you, Nhu Lap," she grinned back. "It hasn't been easy."

"If you're all set to go," Steve told him, "Let's get moving. We need to get out to Duc Vinh and see about a place to camp before dark."

"Let's get going then," Nhu Lap replied. In but a few minutes, the duffel bags were loaded on the 3/4 ton, and people started piling into vehicles. They were a little shy on space, and Mark and Mike volunteered to ride in the back of the truck with the gear.

Steve and Binky got into the back seat of the Renault, with Gil in the front with Nhu Lap. In a few minutes, they were heading out. "Jesus, Steve," Gil said. "That was a whole lot easier than I ever dreamed it would be, after last time."

"Yeah, it did go pretty smooth," Steve replied. "Actually, that pretty much pays for the last trip, all by itself." He switched to Vietnamese, and asked Nhu Lap, "Have you heard of any roadblocks or checkpoints out to where we're going?"

"Nothing, unless they've been put up since yesterday," he was told. "Kien Thanh and I drove out to Duc Vinh just to check, since we knew you were worried about it."

Steve got a broad grin on his face. "Nhu Lap, you're a good man," he said. "Any other problems?"

"Just that bridge when we get off the highway," he said. "I think it'll be all right, but maybe the people in the truck had better walk, just in case. Cai Cung hasn't seen it, so he'll have to make up his mind. We talked to the villagers in Duc Vinh, and gave them some money so we can camp."

"How much?"

"Ten thousand dong. Not much."

It was about a dollar and a half. "We can afford to be generous," Steve said.

"Don't be too generous," he warned. "Or, they will get greedy."

"We will bear that in mind," Steve said. "I'm sure we will ask for your advice many times, and we will be grateful for it."

"What are you guys talking about?" Gil asked, in English, of course.

"Nhu Lap and Kien Thanh reconned out to Target One yesterday," Steve summarized. "No problems, but there's a bridge that might be a little iffy. They arranged for the campsite, too."

"Very good, Nhu Lap," Gil said in very bad Vietnamese, one of the few phrases he's managed to learn.

"Thank You," Nhu Lap said in English.

They drove through the streets of the north part of the city formerly known as Saigon. The streets were more crowded than they'd been on that rainy day six months before, but much was the same. Still, much was different, at least to the way that they remembered from long ago. Gil hadn't come this way in July, but he'd been familiar with the route from way back when.

All of a sudden, Steve found Binky's face buried in his chest. "You all right?"

"I'll be OK, round-eye," she whispered back. "I . . . I just can't look. I grew up here."

"Hang in there," he said, thinking of the pills he had in his pocket. He'd use them if he had to. "It won't be long, now."

Back in the back of the three-quarter ton, Mark and Mike were looking around. Mark was at least a little familiar with it, having been there during the war, but Mike was goggle-eyed at the sights and sounds and smells of the foreign, oriental city, something like he'd never dreamed of before.

"Sure have come down in the world," Mark said. "The last time I came this way, I was riding in the back of a deuce and a half. Of course, I didn't mind a hell of a lot, since I was on my way to Bien Hoa and the freedom bird. It's changed a lot, since then."

"It's just hard to believe," Mike replied. "Hell, back then, well, let's not say that I was trying not to come here, but it sure didn't particularly want to. Now, well, we're here, after all these years."

"Beats coming here to carry a rifle," Mark said. "I felt half naked on the ride out to Bien Hoa without one."

"I suppose. I'll bet it seems like a long time ago."

"It was a long time ago," Mark said. A lot has happened since then. It's even been ten years we've been trying to get back, but it looks like most of the pieces have fallen into place."

"What do you think the chances are?"

"It's a long shot," Mark said over the increasing sound of the road noise as the traffic thinned out and the truck speeded up. It didn't have the greatest muffler in the world, and it was a rough ride. "But it was never more than a long shot. Really, the best we can hope to do is to give it a good look. We've done the best we can to get ready. Whether we find anything is in God's hands."

It had been a long day, one that had started in a hotel near the airport in Bangkok, where they had tried to let the jet-lag wear off of them a little. It had been a long and hard trip, especially for Bud, and especially for Mike and Mark, who had ridden in the three-quarter ton; they were already sunburned, in spite of liberal applications of sunblock. The trip was slower than Steve and Nhu Lap had made six months before, mostly because the truck wasn't very fast, although Cai Cung with his bad leg didn't have any trouble double-clutching the monster. Steve didn't mind, since that kept Nhu Lap's NASCAR driver expectations under control. The bridge had creaked and groaned at the weight, but it held, and on the far side the passengers got back aboard, grateful for the chance to stretch their legs for a few minutes.

Evening was beginning to fall as the strange little convoy pulled into the grove of trees near Duc Vinh that Steve had picked out for a campsite. The sun was getting low, and the dust and haze in the sky was well on the way to producing a spectacular sunset. The handful of trees was on a little rise, a few feet above the surrounding, nearly flat countryside.

The camp went together quickly. All of the guys that had spent time in the field found it a little strange to be setting up tents and unrolling sleeping pads in the field in this country -- they'd never bothered with it before -- but everybody was older now. Mark had come up with a good deal on some lightweight backpacker's tents that had a lot of mosquito netting and a fly to keep off the sun and the rain, and had gotten a discount by purchasing six of them. They had practiced putting them up, so that went quickly. There was one more tent, an old one of Mark's that was used for general gear storage. Steve and Binky shared a tent of course; Bud had a good conversation with Cai Cung on the way up, and offered to share a tent with him; and the rest of them paired off in one way or another. As soon as the tents were up, Mark and several of the others took a sheet of light cloth -- it was actually an old, tired spinnaker from Ryan's sailboat -- and rigged a shade over a central area of the camp, to give a little relief from the sun which would clearly beat down hard during the day.

The activity drew some curious villagers from Duc Vinh, amazed at the odd sights before them, and Steve thought they might as well make some friends from the beginning. With Nhu Lap beside him to help, Steve asked a couple of the villagers if they might be able to buy some small sticks for fire wood, and a couple of men agreed quickly, heading back to the village for it. Soon, a small fire was blazing. "Might as well get started," Steve said to Binky in English, and she joined them at the fire.

"In my country, it is the custom in the evening to gather around a fire and talk," Steve told the villagers. "Please, friends, come and join us." Soon there was a small circle of Americans and Vietnamese around the fire in the dying light, while Bud and Cai Cung worked on dinner over several Trangia alcohol stoves they'd brought.

For a while, they didn't talk about anything important; Steve asked about the crops, and they talked of little things, with Nhu Lap doing a lot of the small talk. Finally, after everything started to get a little mellow, Steve got down to business, but this time, he decided to let Binky do the talking, so he wouldn't have to depend on his relatively limited Vietnamese.

"You have asked why we are here," she told them. "Many years ago, a friend of these men was here, a soldier with the Americans. He was last seen near here, in a woods not far away. Steve?"

"It was over in that direction," Steve added in Vietnamese and pointing, "About twice as far as from here to the village."

"His mother is old and ill and far away," Binky continued. "She says she will not rest peacefully until she knows what happened to her son. The woman he was to marry still wonders where he is, after all these years. They have asked these men, his friends, to come and see if they can find the body. We know it was a long time ago, but it was just before the Americans went away. Our only hope of finding him is if someone here remembers seeing a body of an American soldier somewhere in these woods around here, all those years ago."

There was considerable conversation after that, but the upshot of it was that no one had seen anything or had talked to anyone who had.

"We will be here for several days," Binky said. "We will be asking many people these questions. But, I will tell you now -- if someone can lead us to his body and we can find it, we will give ample reward. As you talk to other people around the area, please let them know why we have come and what we are looking for."

"Binky, ask them about mines and booby traps," Gil suggested.

She turned back to the villagers and talked for a while more, stopping once in a while. She didn't have the words for 'mine' or 'booby trap', but Cai Cung, who had been monitoring the conversation, came over and helped her out. She and Cai Cung talked with the villagers for a long time, with the non-Vietnamese speaking Americans wondering what was going on.

Finally, Binky filled them in. "The booby traps are long gone, mostly rotted away. There were never a lot of mines but there are still a few. Most of them have gone bad, too, but a pig got blown up in a woods not far from the village a few years ago."

"I don't know how far we want to trust that," Gil said. "I guess we just have to be careful and hope for the best."

There was another long exchange in Vietnamese, mostly with Cai Cung and some of the villagers. "They say that there were more mines down around the old American camp than around here," he reported.

They sat around and talked for a while, and eventually the Americans asked the handful of villagers to join them in supper. It wasn't much, just macaroni and cheese, but Bud cut the portions a little thin to make sure there was enough to go around. After dinner, several of the villagers said they'd noticed the pack of cigarettes in Bud's pocket, and asked for a cigarette, and Bud was glad to give them to him. Bud actually didn't smoke very much, but remembered from years before when cigarettes had been a token of friendship, so the few light smokers and many nonsmokers in the expedition had brought as many cigarettes as they were allowed. Bud was the designated smoker of the expedition, just to keep it from being a nuisance.

They sat around smoking and talking for a while longer, and eventually Gil said it had been a long day and it was time to go to sleep, and the villagers agreed that it was late, too.

"We really didn't find out much," Steve commented to Gil as they readied themselves for bed.

"No, but it's a good start," Gil said.

The next morning as Bud cooked breakfast -- oatmeal and coffee, with a little tropical chocolate -- they got themselves organized.

"I think for the moment, we need two contact teams," Steve said. "As long as we have two good interpreters, I don't want to trust my marginal Vietnamese any farther than I have to. The people up here use the language a little different than I'm used to, anyway, and I know I have a horrible accent."

"It is a little different up here," Cai Cung said. "And yes, your accent is bad, and will make you harder to understand here. Binh Ky, you have some of that accent, too, but not as bad. You should have no problem."

"Well, that answers that question," Steve smiled. "Cai Cung, I'm impressed. Your English is quite good, much better than I expected."

"I worked with the Americans at Tan Son Nhut for ten years," Cai Cung told him. "I tried hard to learn the language, because the Americans paid more."

"You did well," Steve said; feeling that there were a number of questions that he'd like to ask Cai Cung; the guy obviously had field knowledge. But now wasn't the time. "All right, what I think we want to do is to have two Vietnamese in each party, and either two or three Americans. Binky, I'm counting you as Vietnamese in this; at least you look the part. Cai Cung, since you don't know that much about what we're looking for, I'll take you, and I guess Nhu Lap in one team, and I don't know. Mike, you like to come with us?"

"Sure,"

"Why don't you bring your camera, but don't use it unless I say you can. We'll take the Renault, and go get started in Pham Dong. Binky, you and Kien Thanh are the other team, take, oh, Harold and Mark in the Toyota with you, I guess, and go work Duc Vinh some more."

"How about the rest of us?" Gil said. He was more or less the acknowledged leader, but knew it was better to defer to Steve on working with the Vietnamese.

"Except for leaving Bud here as a camp guard, go look at Target One. You and Rod are going to have to be the basic field search team, since he knows how to look and you know what to look for. I shouldn't have to tell you to be real damn careful about going into the woods. Rod may be good at seeing stuff, but if there are any old mines, they'll be pretty buried and invisible. If you run into one, well, Ryan almost got his EMT card back. In the future, if we don't have something to search, we'll switch around contact team duties a little."

"At some point, I want to get over to the old fire base and look it over," Rod offered.

"Why?" Steve said. "We know Henry never made it back there."

"Yeah, but we know when it was abandoned. That'll give me a feel for how fast stuff gets covered up."

"Good point," Steve said. "But, we're going to have the drivers with the contact teams. Maybe, if we get back early, you can run over there. Be damn careful if you go over there, too. They may have spread some mines around just in case anyone ever decided to come back. That's why I didn't go in the place when Nhu Lap and I were here in July."

"I think we'll take a metal detector with us," Gil said. "We better not trust it too damn far, though. A lot of that stuff won't get picked up by a metal detector. While I'm thinking about it, everybody take plenty of water. The Vietnamese should be used to the heat, but the Americans, and that includes Binky now, well, we aren't. We all might as well take enough rations that we can snack our way through lunch."

A few minutes later, the three teams fanned out. Steve was already a little doubtful about working in the villages in the day, since a lot of the people that were likely to have seen something would be out in the fields, but he intended to talk to as many of them as he could, and warned Binky to do the same.

Pham Dong proved to be much like Duc Vinh, although objectively, Steve thought that the view from Pham Dong was a little nicer. Relieved that he had Cai Cung with him to help with the language, they started out talking with the villagers, working their way around to the American's body. It was interesting to watch Cai Cung work with the villagers; although Steve made no secret of the fact that he could talk Vietnamese, it was Cai Cung that did the talking, and he was much more indirect than Steve would have been, and probably more effective. He certainly wasn't pulling the punches that Hong would have, he thought.

There were a number of times that day that Cai Cung used a term that was vaguely military, and Steve was sure he must have been in the war, although there was no telling which side. If he'd been working with the Americans at Tan Son Nhut, he must have been fairly trusted, but that meant nothing and he knew it. Besides, he could have been an ARVN before he was wounded and acquired his limp, but then, he might not have been, either. Either way, Steve found he didn't mind too much.

At the same time that the two contact teams were working in the two villages, Gil, Ryan and Rod were out at Target One, having followed the same path out there that Steve had followed months before. They soon found out that Steve had been right; the woods were more open than they imagined, and there was considerable evidence of animal grazing. They walked around the woods a couple of times, looking into it, but saw nothing.

Actually, going to Target One was a forlorn hope, and they knew it. It had been searched intensively at least three times after Henry's disappearance, twice by berets that Gil trusted, and no one had ever found a sign of him. Yet, right from the beginning of the idea for the expedition, everybody had it in their head that Target One deserved one more search, if for no more reason than it was the last place that Henry Toivo had been seen. It was why it had been named Target One in the first place.

Yet, from what they could see, Target One was barren of evidence, barren of any traces of Henry. After a while, their curiosity overcame their doubts, and they decided to try going through the woods. Gil warned the other two to stay in animal tracks or animal paths, and not step outside unless they really, really thought they had to, and they started working their way back and forth across the woods.

But, despite several slow and careful trips through the woods, nothing caught their eyes, and especially, nothing caught Rod's eye. Finally, after several hours, they found a shady patch at the edge of Target One, and sat down to work on their lunches.

They were actually a little on the thin side -- granola bars, tropical chocolate, dried fruit, raisins and peanuts.

"We're not finding anything," Ryan said.

Gil shrugged. "We didn't expect to find much. I don't know why we ever did think we would. Maybe, if we'd been able to get out here in the summer of 1970, we might have found something, but after twenty years, well, we're just covering a base. It does make me feel good about one thing, though."

"What's that?"

"Well, back in '71, Heikki asked me to come out here and look. I turned him down, since it was all Indian Country then, but I did think about it. Shit, I know now that all I could have accomplished was to probably find nothing, and get my ass in a sling, besides. Things were different, then. We may not find anything, but if we do, searching is probably going to be a small part of it."

"You're probably right," Rod said. "However, we should probably have a look at some of the other patches of woods around here, just in case Henry started somewhere and didn't get very far."

"That was always part of the plan," Ryan said. "I don't think we're going to find much, but we need to look."

"It's probably going to pretty much fall to the three of us," Gil said. "Steve is right, we're the best three to do it, for the reasons he pointed out."

"He sort of took charge this morning," Rod said.

"So long as we have to work with the Vietnamese, that's fine," Gil said. "He may be the youngest one of the vets, but with his language skills, he's the obvious one. I'm just glad we have him along. If we didn't, we'd be back in Tan Son Nhut, arguing with someone like Hong, and we might never have even gotten out here. Realistically, we don't have much chance of finding out what happened to Henry, but without him and Binky, it'd be a hell of a lot worse. I'm not arguing."

"Well, all right," Ryan said. "I think we've worked this place out about as well as we can. Where do you want to go from here?"

"East, I guess," Gil replied. "That was the direction the patrol took. If he tried to catch up, that'd have been the direction he'd go. I don't know how well Dennis and Bob and the battalion searched the other woods around here, although Dennis told me that they looked in most of them at least a little. It's probably the same story there as here, but we'd better go look. How about that one over there to the east, maybe two hundred meters?"

"Since when have you used meters?" Rod asked with a grin.

"Since I've been back in-country," Gil grinned back.

.oOo.

It was hot in the middle of the afternoon when their water was getting low, and the search team decided to head back to camp. "We need to take more water tomorrow," Gil said. "That way we can stay out longer."

"Yeah," Rod said. "This makes Montana on a hot day look cool."

When they got back to camp, they found the two contact teams waiting. "We pretty well worked out the people in the villages," Steve reported. "What I'm thinking is that we sit around here, have an early dinner, and then the contact teams can go back out to the villages again, and try and see if we can catch anybody that was working in the fields when we were there earlier. We can get back here, oh, just after dark, and maybe have a fire and debrief. But, I can give a simple debrief right now. Nothing."

"Well, we didn't find anything either," Gil told him. "But, considering what we know, it doesn't surprise us. I got to thinking, though. What if he came out of Target One and went the wrong way?"

"In essence, we're screwed," Mark said. "Our whole search strategy, our whole understanding, is based on the guess that he tried to get back to the fire base. If he went any other way, well, we don't have any idea."

"Well, what I'm thinking is that we might as well do a little contact team work to the south," Gil suggested. "I agree, the wedge of probability from Target One is the highest likelihood, but we shouldn't ignore the alternative."

"I don't know," Mark said. "We're guessing, and it's a pretty good guess, that he had at least a general idea of the direction of the fire base. I think we'd better work the wedge, first. If we don't find anything when the contact teams have worked the wedge out, well, then, I guess ask to the south a little."

"Yeah, I guess," Gil conceded. "It's just so damn frustrating to come out here and find nothing."

"You will find nothing, and nothing, and more nothing, unless you should happen to find something," Cai Cung told him. "If you find something, it will be the last place you have to look."

.oOo.

That evening, while most of the group gathered with a few of the villagers from Duc Vinh around a campfire, Steve and Binky took the time to walk up the road toward Pham Dong a couple hundred yards. With the group close together all the time, it was hard to get a few minutes to be alone.

"How's it going with you?" Steve asked when they were out of earshot of the camp.

"OK," she said. "I actually let Kien Thanh do most of the talking. He seems to have a little bit better grasp of the local accent than Nhu Lap. The men will listen to a man better than they will listen to a woman, anyway. I just added something when I thought I needed to. I guess my Vietnamese has gotten a little rusty."

"I don't mean about that," Steve said. "I mean, how are you bearing up?"

"Not too bad, now that we're out of the city," she said. "That was hard. I was really, really scared at customs."

"I thought that was a little funny," he smiled.

"What? Watching me almost have a heart attack?"

"No, not that. Remember this morning, when Cai Cung said you had a funny accent, like mine, but as not as bad?"

"What are you getting at?"

"No wonder they didn't bat an eye at customs. You've been listening to my accent for so long you've picked up some of it. No wonder they didn't think you were a local. The guy at the terminal heard your American accent, with a touch of Finnish, probably."

"I didn't realize that," she said, genuinely surprised.

"Well, neither did I until Cai Cung pointed it out," he smiled. "Look at it this way. You must really be an American, since you sound like one."

"You don't think we're going to have any trouble leaving?"

"No, it should go pretty easy. The only trouble I can imagine is if we find Henry's remains. We're going to have to hassle with officials about that, and that may cause some problems."

"What kind of problems?"

"Official bullshit, probably. But, honestly, Binky, I wouldn't worry about it. I'm sure we're going to do all we can, but the chances are pretty slim. In fact, they're slim enough that we've never even planned much about that. And, now that we're finally here, I don't think the odds have improved."

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To be continued . . .

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TO ABSENT FRIEND ARCHIVES

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