Red Flags Read Free

the steep grade.
    "Yeah," I agreed. "Hard not to be, with that vista."
    The sun set like a boiling rock, turning the Trinity Alps dark green. Faint remnants of gold from below the horizon rounded the rolling hills.
    The cabin sat on the edge of a steep drop, giving the back porch an enormous view of our valley, nestled in green twists and slopes. There wasn't another house in sight. The faint whiff of wood smoke was the only sign of other human habitation.
    "Do you mind the isolation?"
    "I've come to like it."
    She put her things in the room next to mine and returned to claim the armchair in front of the hearth. It was growing colder as the light outside died.
    I said, "Would you fire up the kindling in the fireplace? It's all set to go. The matches are by the hearth, on the log pile."
    She knelt to ignite the wood shavings and splints, baring a band of skin at the small of her back. The room filled with the aroma of apple wood and sage as the scrap caught. Celeste stood up and paused at the framed photos on the mantelpiece. She spotted her father in a group shot.
    "I don't have this one. Is this Team Thirty-one? I recognize a couple of faces."
    "Yes, some of it."
    "You guys ever get together?"
    I shook my head but she didn't see; she was still examining the photograph. "No," I said. "We don't."
    She looked back, holding my gaze for a moment, weighing something about me. I held up a bottle of fifteen-year-old whiskey. She nodded yes and I got down the cut-crystal glasses, bringing everything over to her. Nothing like kick-ass whiskey in a heavy tumbler. The fragrance alone revived me some. Celeste resettled in the armchair, covering up in a quilt.
    "Why do you think he volunteered to go back?" she said.
    "To get another crack at a field command, maybe. Career officers needed that on their resumés to advance. That and gongs."
    "Gongs?"
    "That's what GIs called medals. You needed gongs and a field command or you'd be out of the running for promotion and eventually out of the Army. The higher you went, the harder it got. It was like musical chairs."
    "So my mother was right. He was as ambitious as the rest of them."
    "General Westmoreland allotted six-month combat commands to as many officers as possible. He rationed them because the fight was going to be over right quick."
    "Did you think it would be done that fast?"
    "No, but they didn't ask me or other ordinary mortals."
    Her cheeks were rosy from the warmth of the fire. I knocked back my drink.
    "Whole regiments of North Vietnamese regulars came streaming across, accompanied by Chinese generals advising them. The local Viet Cong armed up too. No more improvised bombs made out of rice husks and sugar. Forty miles north of Saigon, the South Vietnamese lost three hundred men in one ambush, including four U.S. advisers. Just to make sure they got our attention, the Communists decapitated the Americans."
    "Good God. Why?"
    "Beheading was real popular. The VC decapitated local officials all the time and dumped their heads in the toilet. Burying people alive was big too. Four Americans beheaded, though—the message was clear. We weren't immune. It wasn't going to be a cakewalk if we were truly getting in the fight. The unwritten rules changed as well."
    "What rules?"
    "They'd never gone after American dependents: no attacks on wives or school buses. One afternoon in Saigon, two VC killed the MPs guarding a movie house and then rushed into the theater with a bucket full of arsenic sulfide and potassium chlorate they'd picked up in a pharmacy. The bomb wounded a lot of our civilians, killed an officer."
    I wedged the logs closer together with the poker and stood with my back to the fire. Wrapped in the quilt, she looked tiny.
    "They car-bombed our billets, restaurants, the embassy, set off a bomb at a baseball game out at Pershing Field. It was open season on Americans. Dependents were ordered out, the Marines and combat battalions in—two hundred thousand of us. There was