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 IWAS A FIFTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD U.S. Army lieutenant colonel returning to Viet nam thirty-one years after I had been there as a kid in the U.S. Navy during the war. I was beginning to feel ancient and a bit beat up but put on my uniform and boots every day with a grin, lucky to love my duty, unlike so many civilian friends I knew who were trudging uphill into their fifties carrying the heavy rucksack of professional slump, dreading sunrise and each day of a work that had lost its light. Although much of my career was spent in a standard track, assigned to infantry battalions, I also had a pattern of doing and enjoying odd jobs for the government. I taught military history at West Point, went to graduate school in history at Texas A&M University, had a secondary specialty as an army historian, and published five books. For three years I ran counterdrug operations on the Mexican border and then became the garrison commander, sort of a city manager, for the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, before becoming a war college student. When I started my student year, I began considering my next assignment , which might be at the Pentagon, which I had avoided in the past and in fact had visited only once in my entire career, or I would more likely be given an unaccompanied overseas assignment—without family—to one of the “forgotten Stans”—Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and so on, which seem to be the fate of many war college graduates lately. Facing a one-year tour without my wife and seeing my children, I decided to try to do something personally meaningful. I wanted to go to Vietnam and command the MIA search teams. I had been paying attention to reports on this mission for INTRODUCTION  Introduction several years as a succession of friends had the fortune to earn this duty and command the detachment in Hanoi. In 1985, when I was a captain attending the Infantry Officer Advance Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, we shared a beautiful old two-story duplex with Capt. Mike Peppers and his family. After Mike became a lieutenant colonel and had successfully commanded a battalion, a prerequisite for the assignment, he was selected to go to Hanoi in 1999–2000 to command the MIA effort there. I heard about this and started following the mission through media accounts. In 2000 Mike was succeeded in command by Lt. Col. Rennie Cory Jr., my mentor and friend at Joint Task Force Six at Fort Bliss, Texas, where we ran counterdrug operations. Tragically on April 7, 2001, in Quang Binh province, Rennie, along with his replacement, Lt. Col. George D. “Marty” Martin, five other servicemen from the Hanoi detachment, and nine Vietnamese officers were killed when their helicopter flew into a mountain in the fog. Lt. Col. John “J. T.” Taylor was sent to rebuild the Hanoi detachment and put the mission back on track after this tragedy. For many years “J. T.” had been a friend and also my next-door neighbor when I was teaching at West Point. In 2002 Lt. Col. Steve Hawley was selected to replace “J. T.” Steve and I had gone to graduate school together at Texas A&M and taught together at West Point. My wife, Holly, had to decide whether she should go home to our family in Texas or to remain in our quarters on Carlisle Barracks while I spent the year in Vietnam. She chose to stay at Carlisle. This would be her fourth year in the same house, a rarity in the army (we had moved eleven times in twenty years). She had developed a close circle of friends, and since I had been the garrison commander, most of the post staff knew her well. I was confident she would be carefully looked after by our army family. We knew it was going to be a tough year for her; our son, Miles, a lieutenant in the 1st Infantry Division, was in Germany preparing to leave his new bride, Tina, and deploy to Iraq after New Year’s. Our daughter, Dustin, a college senior, was at Texas State University and could rarely visit. While still a war college student I spent the spring of 2003 preparing to go to Vietnam, absorbing all I could about the mission, the unit, and Southeast Asian culture and politics. I made office calls to...

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