Shadows of a Faded Past (fiction)

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.