“I probably didn’t tell you this before,” said General Duncan. “There was so much going on, I mean, who has the time to focus on last week or even yesterday when you’re getting your ass shot off in combat? But when we rotated out of the mountains back to the regimental rear, the Office of Naval Intelligence sent an investigator out to An Hoa to interview me. I brought in a machine gunner from second platoon who had shot the white guy in the leg from a ridgeline on your right, maybe thirty feet away. We set up a little interview room in the company office. The ONI guy had a book of missing American servicemen. It was all very official. The ONI guy swore the gunner in and interviewed him, and then he walked him through the picture book. When he flipped over the page to where Deville’s picture was, the gunner damn near shit in his mess gear. ‘Him!’ he said. ‘Are you positive,’ says the ONI guy. ‘This is a very serious charge.’ And my guy says, ‘Positive. I’ll never forget the motherfucker’s face as long as I live.’

“We wrote up a statement.” General Duncan dropped another paper onto the table. It was a photocopy of a faded hand-typed statement. “So when I saw the name in the message traffic the other day, I finally knew for sure that the gunner had been right. I had them pull this out of the ONI archives too, just in case somebody would think I was losing the bubble and fantasizing. It’s the report from An Hoa.”

Condley quickly read the paper, in which one Corporal Dustin Richards on 1 July, 1969, had identified the white turncoat in the incident of 24 June, 1969, as Specialist Theodore Deville, absent without leave 5 September, 1967, declared a deserter 5 December, 1967, whereabouts unknown.

“So where’s Pepper?” asked Condley, working to regain his offhand cynicism. “I remember him.”

“Let’s just focus on Salt here for a minute,” said Duncan. “How are we going to report finding this guy to the media? We can’t say he was an MIA, because he’s never been on any list of those reported missing. I suppose we could just say he’s a deserter and let it go at that, but then are we doing our duty? On the other hand, if we make the allegation that he was a turncoat, can we really back it up? If we try and then fall on our asses, how stupid will we look? We’ll be accused by the media of being vindictive, opening up an old war wound without justification. And what about his family? And even more important, if we start refighting the war, dwelling on the past, what’s going to happen with the cooperation of the Vietnamese government on future digs?”

“What about the two dead Marines?”