by Daniel Cano
“We submit to
pragmatists, profiteers, and the paranoiacs who insist that war is part of our
humanity, our identity.” Viet Thanh Nguyen
Chapter One
By late December 2001, Baja and U.S. authorities
had completed their investigation and found no evidence of foul play. From all
indications, the American, Raul Armenta, had chosen to “walk away.”
The family believed it had been a shoddy
investigation. Iliana Armenta, Raul’s daughter and a college sophomore at the
time, had been keeping me updated on the details of her father’s disappearance.
As one of his best friends, I’d pass the news on to members in our veterans’
support group, all of us baffled by our friend’s strange behavior that last
weekend in Tijuana.
With nowhere to turn, Iliana had asked, “Do
you think my dad’s friends could help?”
Most of us knew Iliana since she was a
kid. For years, Raul had been bringing her around to our social gatherings,
completely separate from our group therapy sessions in an old bungalow at the West L.A. V.A. We believed as long as we
protected each other’s confidentiality, we weren’t violating any psychological ethics
codes.
I’d told Iliana I’d try looking into the
matter a little further, but I couldn’t speak for the other guys. She’d said
anything I could do would be appreciated by Raul’s family, especially his aging
parents who were worried sick.
When I did approach the group with her
request, Chato Benitez, an owner of an insurance business and an elder Seabee
who had seen heavy action in Danang, had answered, “It’s Mexico, man. Anything
can happen down there. Those people see us as pochos.”
Another guy, Ruben Carrillo, a high school
counselor and ex-Army engineer with two purple hearts, had spouted, “It’s also out
of our league,” where upon all eyes shifted to Sid Castro, an Afro, half-Puerto
Rican Chicano, and a newly retired LAPD detective from Baldwin Hills. An ex-Marine who
survived the Tet offensive in Hue, Sid had looked straight ahead, arms crossed,
and said nothing, but it was clear the wheels in his brain were turning.
Someone else had piped up, “They destroyed
the Trade Center in New York, just barely a few months ago? Man, everybody’s
suspicious of everybody. Going to T.J. and start asking questions doesn’t seem like
a good idea.”
When we’d first learned Raul hadn’t returned
from a weekend trip to Tijuana, we’d danced around the reasons why. Some guys had
concluded Raul had been under a lot of pressure at work and in his personal
life, so maybe he’d had it and “just split,” or was “on a hiatus,” and “when he
gets his head straight, he’ll be back.”
A few guys thought that maybe he had, “…accidentally
gotten caught up in some ugly border dealings.” A lone voice had argued, “Raul’s
too straight for trouble, unless it found him.” I reminded them the police had
found no evidence of foul play. “That’s the Tijuana cops talking,” another
voice had reminded us. A couple of guys in the group thought it useless to
speculate, and others had no opinion.
One point we’d all agreed on was that Raul,
a university administrator, an ex-shrink, forever the pragmatist, the realist,
and the straight shooter, wouldn’t purposely cause his daughter, elderly
parents or family needless worry.
Ben Avila, a fabulist and an
award-winning novelist the guys considered eccentric, had said, “Unless, he went Alice
and Wonderland on us all.” That brought a long silence.
Guys had admitted they carried a nagging
anxiety around, thinking whatever happened to Raul could have happened to any
one of us. “The mind does strange things,” a guy had quipped, “no matter how
many years go by, you know.”
Anticipating their hesitation, I’d told
them we had to put our own personal feelings aside and consider the family’s
request. Like educated professionals, we debated the issue. It took me a lot of guilt-tripping and some deductive reasoning to persuade them.
Finally, I had eyed each of them as they sat in a circle, and I said, “Raul
started this group, and we all owe him, some of us more than others. I’m all in, and
I could use the help.”
I had the reputation for tenacity, getting
the job done no matter what. I’d go it alone if I had to, and they knew it. My wife had strong
reservations against my involvement, mainly for my own mental state. Sid, the
cop, raised his hand first and next Ben and Ray Sender, both university
professors, Army grunts during the war, Ray, a half-Anglo Chicano, ponytail and
all, and heavily into Gandhian non-violence, something of mystic still living
in the 60s.
A few guys volunteered to “work in the Rear,”
as we called it, helping to read, organize, and document whatever material we
collected.
We’d given ourselves three months. Ben and
Ray started with the Baja journalist who shared his sources with them, but warned,
a tinge of fear in his voice, “Don’t mention my name anywhere.” We weren’t naive.
We understood, more or less, border politics.
Sid had volunteered to “have a chat” with the
Tijuana cops, starting with the chief, who, once our research got going, took Sid
to lunch at a restaurant that overlooked the entire city. He told Sid everything
he knew about Raul’s disappearance, but nothing we hadn’t already heard. A cop
even took Sid on a ride-along around Tijuana, something Sid interpreted as a
way of saying, “leave well enough alone.”
We met at the V.A. and drove
to Tijuana from L.A., following Raul's route along the 405, two or three times, walked the same streets and visited the same locations he had, guided by the journalist’s sources. We showed Raul’s picture and told his story to anyone willing to listen. Mostly, though, all of it coming so soon
after 9-11, people wanted to know what we thought about extremist Islamic terrorism
and if the U.S. would invade Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia.
We collected
most of our information via telephone and Internet. We met regularly, shared
what we’d learned, and considered all angles the cops may have missed, “or,”
like Sid had said, “…refused to reveal.”
Kiki Salas, an old-timer in our group, an
artilleryman who had sacrificed his legs in the war, and Carl Figueroa, a
loner, an infantry paratrooper in Vietnam, like Raul, and one of the newer guys
in group, helped with data entry.
I pored over Raul’s digital footprint and hardcopy
files, personal journals, even books from the vast library, many tomes he’d carefully
annotated. I spent hours with his family, as well as wandering Raul’s split-level,
modernist Beverly Wood home, his pride and joy, the only possession he salvaged
after his divorce, fifteen years earlier. I saw sides of my friend I never knew existed.
Sometimes I sat and read deep into the
night, Raul’s voice taking me back to those early conversations right after our
discharge, barely out of our teens, our psyches raw, part of us still in
Vietnam. After My Lai broke, I’d said, “Raul, you believe that a Chicano captain
allowed it to happen, but the cover-up, man, that’s the worst.”
Raul’s answer had surprised me. In a cool
but tempered voice, he’d said, “Adults with authority tell 19 and 20-year-old
kids it’s alright to light up every V.C. or V.C. sympathizer, men, women, and
children…that’s what happens. Those kids don’t see human beings. They see
enemy, and that’s how we – I mean, ‘they’ viewed them.” What had he been holding
back?
When we’d gone as far as we could, the
guys working in the “rear,” compiled and categorized the cache of information,
saving it on hard drives and thumb drives. I filed it away in my home office, a
converted two-car garage, where I locked myself away trying to make sense of it
all.
A few weeks later, I emerged with
something of a rough sketch in hand, which I shared, first with my wife, Serena,
a Chicana sociologist, for her feedback, then with Raul’s family, omitting
anything possibly embarrassing to my friend. Though our work couldn’t offer them a
definitive answer, the family was grateful when I’d painted the larger picture
for them.
I continued another six months sacrificing
evenings, weekends, and breaks from teaching, Serena, finally warning me about confronting
my own ghosts of Vietnam. I’d barely made it out.
“Anthony, let it go! You know what can
happen. This isn’t like therapy, with a shrink, in controlled environment. This
is different, sitting out here alone, his voice in your head, hours of
absorbing Raul’s trauma, reminding you of your own.”
I had told her I was nearly finished with
it, and I’d be glad to finally let it go. Then, I’d return to my backyard study, more hours, mesmerized by the wall covered with colored notecards, Post Its,
plastic pins, photos, and twine connecting people, locations, and events. It
reminded me how after my discharge, during my first quickie marriage, I’d hung a map
of South Vietnam on my garage wall, colored pens marking the places I’d served,
and scribblings in the margins the names of friends killed or wounded. Sometimes,
I’d wake from a deep sleep to mark a location, afraid if I waited until I awoke
for work, I’d forget. My obsession annoyed the hell out of my ex, who had been an
avid anti-war protestor.
When we’d started researching Raul’s
disappearance, we knew we wouldn’t find out what happened to him. That was part
of the frustration. I’d told my friends if we could collect enough information,
so I could compose a cohesive narrative of his final days, and maybe we could answer
the “whys” more than the “where’s,” that would be enough.
Kiki had said, “Hey! What I don’t get is why
Tijuana—Mexico, you know? Of all places to go MIA, a shitty border town,” to
which Ben had answered, “Not anymore. It’s a city, Emerald City to some and
Gotham to others.”
After I’d given everyone our interpretation
of events, I went back and immersed myself in the volume of documents we’d
gathered, a tsunami of information, and the more I read, the more I realized Raul’s
disappearance didn’t begin that last day in Tijuana, but back in 1974, when he
had received a visit from an Army CID detective investigating alleged war
crimes committed by his recon unit, the Lion’s Claw, in a place they called the
Red River Valley, Republic of South Vietnam.
