The Wrong Side of Goodbye(37)
It was unknown whether Santanello had cleared these off or whether the Navy’s KIA unit did so while sanitizing his belongings, but it made Bosch all the more interested in what was in the box Santanello had sent home. He now opened it up and put the light on its contents.
The box apparently contained the things that mattered most to Santanello and that he wanted to make sure got to Oxnard as he drew close to completing his tour of duty. On top were two sets of folded civvies—non-uniform clothing that would have been unauthorized for Santanello to have in Vietnam. These included jeans, chinos, collared shirts, and black socks. Beneath the clothes were a pair of Converse sneakers and a pair of shiny black boots. Having civvies was unauthorized but commonplace. It was no secret that wearing uniforms while traveling home after completing a tour of duty or while on leave in foreign cities could cause confrontations with civilians because of the unpopularity of the war around the world.
But Bosch also knew that there was another purpose to having civilian clothes. In a one-year tour, a soldier was guaranteed a week’s leave at six months and a standby leave at nine—where they waited on the possibility of an open seat on a departing plane. There were five official leave destinations and none were in mainland USA because returning to the mainland was not authorized. But a soldier who had civvies could change in a hotel room in Honolulu and then go back to the airport to hop a flight to L.A. or San Francisco—as long as he avoided the MPs who were on the lookout in the airport for just such subterfuge. It was another reason to grow your hair out in the boonies, as Santanello had apparently done. A guy in civvies at the airport in Honolulu could easily be spotted by the MPs if he had clean sidewalls and a military cut. Long hair provided cover.
Bosch had done it himself twice during his time in-country, returning to L.A. to spend five days with a girlfriend in 1969 and then returning again six months later, even though there was no girlfriend anymore. Santanello had been killed more than eleven months into his tour of Vietnam. That meant he had gotten at least one leave and probably two. Maybe he had snuck back to California.
Beneath the clothing Bosch found a compact cassette tape player and a camera, both in original boxes, the tape player marked with a price tag from the PX in Da Nang. Next to these were two neat rows of cassette cases lined spine out on the bottom of the box. There was another carton of Lucky Strikes and another Zippo lighter, this one used and showing the Navy Corpsman chevron on the side. There was a well-worn copy of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien and he saw several beaded necklaces and other souvenirs bought at different places where Santanello had been posted during his Navy service.
Bosch experienced a sense of déjà vu as he looked through the contents. He had also read Tolkien in Vietnam. It was a popular book among combat veterans, a rich fantasy about another world that took them away from the reality of where they were and what they were doing. Bosch studied the names of the bands and performers on the plastic cassette cases and remembered hearing the same music while in Vietnam: Hendrix, Cream, the Rolling Stones, the Moody Blues, and others.
Along with that familiarity came his experience and knowledge of how things worked in Southeast Asia. The same Vietnamese girls who sold the necklaces at the White Elephant landing docks at Da Nang also sold pre-rolled joints in ten packs that fit perfectly into cigarette packs for easy transport into the bush. If you wanted fifty joints you bought a Coke can with a false top. Use of marijuana was widespread and open, the popular view being “What’s the worst that can happen if I get caught, they send me to Vietnam?”
Bosch opened the carton of Lucky Strikes now and pulled out a pack. As he suspected, it contained ten expertly rolled joints neatly wrapped in foil for freshness. He assumed each of the packs in the carton would be the same. Santanello had likely taken up a regular habit of getting high while in the service and wanted to make sure he had an ample supply to bridge his return home.
It was all mildly interesting to Bosch because it drew on his own memories of his time in Vietnam, but he didn’t readily see anything in the box that might lead him further toward confirming Whitney Vance’s paternity of Dominick Santanello. That was his purpose here—confirmation of paternity. If he was going to report to Vance that his bloodline had ended in a helo crash in the Tay Ninh Province, then he had to make every effort to be sure he was telling the old man the truth.
He repacked the cigarette carton and put it to the side. He lifted out the boxes containing the camera and the cassette recorder next, and just as he was wondering where the photos were that went with the camera, he saw that the bottom of the box was spread with a cache of black-and-white photos and envelopes containing strips of film negatives. The photos appeared to be well preserved because they had not been exposed to light in decades.
He removed the two rows of cassette tapes next so he would be able to access the photos. He wondered if Santanello had purposely tried to hide them from his family in case they opened the box before he arrived home. Bosch pushed them into a single stack and then brought them out of the box.
There were forty-two photos in all and they ran the gamut of Vietnam experiences. There were shots from the bush, shots of Vietnamese girls at the White Elephant, shots taken on the hospital ship Bosch recognized as the Sanctuary, and, ironically, shots taken from helicopters flying over the bush and the seemingly endless grids of rice paddies.
Bosch had pushed the stack together in an order that was neither chronological nor thematic. It was a hodgepodge of images that again felt all too familiar. But those misty feelings crystallized into a hard memory when he came across three consecutive shots of the upper deck of the Sanctuary crowded with a couple hundred wounded servicemen for a Christmas Eve show featuring Bob Hope and Connie Stevens. In the first photo the two performers stood side by side, Stevens’s mouth open in song, the faces of the soldiers in the front row in rapt attention. The second photo focused on the crowd at the point of the bow, Monkey Mountain seen in the distance across the water. The third photo showed Hope waving good-bye to a standing ovation at the end of the show.