Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

EARL SWIFT is the author of three previous books, including Where They Lay, a 2003 PEN finalist. He lives in Virginia with his daughter Saylor.

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Where They Lay

Mariner Books

Excerpt

1

Their buddies called it suicide, and maybe it was.
They climbed aboard the Huey knowing the enemy expected
them. They did it knowing their guns were no match for the cannons that
waited. They knew they"d be lucky beyond hope to get past them, and
luckier still to get back. They climbed aboard the Huey just the same.
Time was short. Just over the border, their allies were surrounded
and outnumbered and taking heavy fire. They depended on the four aboard
the helicopter to get them out.
So on a Saturday in March 1971, the Huey skimmed over the
mountains into the wide, wild valley beyond, following a rutted, two-lane
highway into Laos. The country below was a tangle of splintered hardwoods
and sheared bamboo, the jungle"s floor laid bare in wounds that stood fresh
and red against the green. Off to starboard, a chain of low hills marked the
northern edge of the Xepon River"s flood plain. Looming ahead was its
southern boundary, an escarpment a thousand feet high that showed its
bones in cliffs streaked pink and gray. Worn into the rock was a notch a
kilometer wide. In it was the pickup zone.
The flak started miles out. The Huey"s pilots slalomed the bird
among arcing yellow tracers and blooms of brown smoke as it dropped
toward the target. Its gunners opened fire with their M-60s, sweeping the
trees on the helicopter"s final approach.
The reply was overwhelming: Bullets raked the chopper"s thin
metal skin, whistled into the cabin, tore into man and machine. Then came
something worse — a blur, rising from the trees, a telltale plume — and a
flash. Fire swallowed the Huey. It hit the ground in pieces.
Other choppers circled low over the burning wreckage, crews
marking the spot on their charts. None landed. North Vietnamese soldiers
swarmed the bamboo thickets and forest around the smashed chopper, too
many to risk a recovery mission. America was forced to leave the Huey, and
the four, where they lay.
Which is what brings me, on a gray summer morning thirty years
later, to a vibrating seat in the cabin of a Russian-builtMi-17 helicopter. And
why its course takes me from a former American air base beside the Mekong
River into the same valley, toward the same rampart of cliffs, in the battered
highlands along the Vietnam-Laos border.
Somewhere down there is what"s left of Jack Barker, John Dugan,
Billy Dillender, and John Chubb. For two generations their remains have lain
in a remote corner of this remote land, as bamboo and hardwood saplings
erupted into new jungle around them, as monsoon rains scoured the red-clay
earth and swooning heat baked it dry. Their comrades have grown old. Their
children have had children of their own. Today, finally, their countrymen have
arrived to take them home.
Sitting beside me are the soldiers and scientists, most too young
to remember the war, who will search for the Huey"s crew, men and women
who for the next four weeks will live in a camp of canvas and nylon and
lashed bamboo in the Laotian back country, and who will pass their days on
an archaeological dig carved into the wilderness.
They will commute to work in craft all too similar to the ruined
machine they seek, and face a host of dangers once they land — steep
terrain, triple-digit temperatures, withering humidity, and thickets aswarm
with scorpions, foot-long centipedes, and bright green vipers so venomous
their nickname is "Jake Two-Steps," said to be how far their victims get
before dropping.
The mosquitoes carry malaria, and dengue fever, and God knows
what else. Tigers patrol the jungle. And if this weren"t worry enough, the
ground is laced with unexploded ordnance, leftovers of the fighting that
claimed Jack Barker and his crew — half-buried bombs and antitank mines
and rockets and grenades and baseball-sized bomblets that, jostled the
slightest bit, can all these years later turn an arm or leg into a puff of pink
smoke.
The Mi-17 is short on frills. The cabin smells of exhaust. The
sound of the rotor varies from deafening whine to bone-jolting bass chord. Hot
wind buffets in through open portholes. The floor is plywood; the bare-metal
bulkheads are stenciled with instructions in Cyrillic. It has the look and
ambiance of an old and neglected school bus.
Only school buses don"t yaw sickeningly as they travel. They
don"t boast clamshell doors like the big pair forming the cabin"s back end,
doors between which I can see a thin but significant stripe of bright Asian
airspace. I watch the gap for a while, see that its width keeps time with the
Mi-17"s shivers, which course through the frame like a dog shaking dry.
School buses aren"t typically driven by committee either. The
helicopter"s cockpit is crowded with Laotian military men. I can see four of
them from where I sit, all speaking and pointing past a pair of jerky
windshield wipers into the sky ahead. All are in bits and pieces of uniform.
The pilot is a skinny guy in a bright yellow T-shirt. His left hand is pressed
against his headset, as if he can"t hear over the chatter around him.
There are a couple dozen of us aboard, squeezed into troop seats
that line the cabin"s sides. My view of those on the far side is blocked by
luggage stacked four feet high down the length of the wide aisle. None of it is
tied down. The pile — backpacks and suitcases, hard-cased gear and
tools — teeters with each banking turn the big chopper makes. Somewhere
behind us, another Mi-17 carries a similar load of people and equipment, and
sprinkled elsewhere in the sky are four smaller Eurocopter Squirrels, carrying
a handful of people apiece.
In all, fifty Americans are in the air. Most work for the U.S. Army"s
Central Identification Laboratory, where thirty civilian anthropologists and
more than one hundred military specialists perform forensic detective work
under the microscope and in the wildest of wilds, all aimed at bringing home
those lost in America"s wars. Others are with Joint Task Force–Full
Accounting, a puree of the different services that manage the lab"s visits to
Southeast Asia and conduct the research that pinpoints where its teams
should dig.
Beyond the rain-streaked porthole behind me, wispy clouds race
past. I push my forehead against the glass to see the ground below, catch a
glimpse of squares and trapezoids and narrow rectangles of bright green, a
quiltwork of rice paddies stitched together with dikes that follow the land"s
irregular contours. A cloud interrupts the view. Then another. A moment later
we fly through a bigger, thicker mat of vapor, and then there"s nothing but
white out there.
Up in the cockpit, water drips from the ceiling, and the three guys
assisting the pilot are gesticulating more than ever. The pilot is half out of his
seat, squinting. The windshield looks painted over. Some of my fellow
passengers shift nervously in their seats. They know the lay of the land, that
with every minute we"re in the air, the terrain below gets taller and steeper
and rockier,...