SEVERAL AMERICAN EXPATRIATES ARE PASSING THE TIME in a bar in Bangkok, decades after the fall of Saigon. One says he hears that “Brandon Condley is back from…hell, I guess Viet Nam.” “I doubt that Brandon Condley will ever get back from Viet Nam,” responds another. In Lost Soldiers, his sixth novel, James Webb returns to the setting of his first book, Fields of Fire, acclaimed as one of the most memorable novels about the Vietnamese war. Webb, a highly decorated Marine in the war, was later a committee counsel on Capitol Hill and secretary of the Navy; he now is also a commentator on military and foreign affairs, and travels extensively in the Far East. That is to say, Webb knows the territory. Brandon Condley is the protagonist of Lost Soldiers. The title characters also include a former Soviet paratrooper who served in Indochina; a tough old soldier who fought for the South Vietnamese government and endured a brutal reeducation camp; and a former Viet Cong colonel, now an official in the Hanoi government. Condley spent six years in Vietnam, off and on, during the war as a Marine officer. After the fall of Saigon (which Webb prefers to spell “Sai Gon”), he remained in Southeast Asia—doing corporate security, spy assignments, and similar chores appropriate to a warrior displaced by events. Always, however, he returned to Saigon. It is for him a place of obsessive memory, most bitterly because of the assassination of the Vietnamese woman he loved, killed for loving him. Her memory is blended intimately into the culture of Vietnam and the city. Webb infuses Lost Soldiers with a sensual affection for and knowledge of the city—the sights, sounds, the earthy smells, the customs old and new, the authoritarian methods of the regime of the victors, and the fate of the defeated as they scuffle to subsist as aliens in their own land. Condley is a man untethered to anything but his Asian past: There is a bare mention of his father, whose funeral he did not return to the United States to attend, and episodic telephone calls to his mother for awkward exchanges. In short, there are no connections for Brandon Condley except the war in Vietnam. For the past five years he’s been working for the American government’s Joint Task Force for Full Accounting, seeking to locate and identify Americans missing in action. Condley insulates himself inside a sheathing of cynicism and disdain—until word is received of a Caucasian body found deep in the Que Sons mountains in central Vietnam. Together with an American anthropologist from the military identification lab in Honolulu and a liaison officer from the Hanoi government to the MIA task force, Condley treks to an isolated village deep in the mountains. It turns out to be near the village where Condley’s rifle platoon was ambushed thirty years before. This was his area. He had walked every inch of it in another life….Ghosts walked beside Condley on the muddy trails, dirty and unshaven, burdened by helmets and packs and weapons, loping tiredly, all parts of their bodies half asleep while their eyes stayed bright with fear. The ghosts would always be there, young-faced and yearning, even as time erased the evidence of their passing. The attackers of Condley’s platoon included a “Salt and Pepper” team—a white man and a black man fighting with the Viet Cong, presumed American deserters. Two of Condley’s grunts were killed by the renegades. The vicious betrayal of long ago newly encountered reenergizes Condley, intent now on solving that mystery and exacting retribution. The villagers produce the remains of a Caucasian body—with a set of U.S. Army dogtags. Since this was a Marine operational region, not Army, the skeleton could be that of “Salt.” The sophisticated American identification lab goes to work, only to discover that the physical remains do not match those of the individual whose dogtags were recovered with them—or any known American missing in Southeast Asia. So who was the dead man, if he was not the turncoat, and what happened to the deserter with the Viet Cong? Rendered into Vietnamese as “Cong Ly,” Condley’s name means “justice,” which is how he is perceived by perhaps the best-developed character in the novel, the former South Vietnamese soldier Dzung. For seven years Dzung fought the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese and then survived a reeducation camp. Now, married with five children, including a sick baby, he is reduced to bare subsistence as a cyclo driver while living in the noisome squalor of the city’s District Four—the ghetto in which the government confines its former enemies. For the past five years, he has been Brandon Condley’s personal cyclo driver, and the two old soldiers have become confident of each other. The Communists have carefully noted this connection. Dzung is bluntly threatened by a government apparatchik: He can cooperate in a dangerous covert project or face another session in a re-education camp, which almost certainly would doom his family. By implication his American friend, Cong Ly, may be jeopardized. Dzung’s military service and loyalty is to a past that no longer exists. His friendship to Condley, genuine as it is, cannot equate to his truest loyalty and obligation now—his family. After the baby dies lacking medical care, he agonizingly commits himself to the Communist government whose minion promises that should Dzung not survive the mission, his family will be provided for. All of these vectors from a dim past and volatile present intersect in an explosive few minutes on a dark night along the hog-slaughtering pens of the polluted Klong Toey on the outskirts of Bangkok. The trail will lead eventually, in Webb’s intricately plotted novel, to Russia and Australia, and provoke a cautious but growing respect between Condley and the former Viet Cong colonel. The haunted journey back to the war will also disclose a vastly lucrative cocaine operation that is linking Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam in a miasma of corruption. Lost Soldiers ends with a version of justice for Condley, as well as a politically useful resolution. At the end, “For the first time in his memory, Condley felt content with himself. It occurred to him at that moment that now would be a good time to go home. If he actually had a home.” Character is, as it should be, the soul of this tense narrative. Coincidence is a large part of the novel’s structure, but the author’s deft touch keeps it plausible. Lost Soldiers is an affecting and taut tale. The compass for all the characters is captured in “What Was Lost,” the William Butler Yeats poem with which Webb prefaces the novel: I sing what was lost and dread what was won, / I walk in a battle fought over again, / My king a lost king, and lost soldiers my men. Woody West is associate editor of the Washington Times.
