Lost at Khe Sanh Read online

  For my friends Ray Davis and Geoff Seng, and for so many others who also served and sacrificed in Vietnam

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Band practice wasn’t going well — again. Two weeks after we totally stunk at the All-Ages Open Mic Night, Julie Kobayashi was still trying to convince our friend Greg Troutman that he couldn’t sing, and that he definitely shouldn’t be the front man, or front boy, for our band the Ghosts of War. She was right, of course. Once your voice starts to crack — which was exactly what happened to Greg right in the middle of our first-ever public performance — you need to step away from the microphone already and let somebody else have a turn.

  The only problem — besides Greg’s cracking voice — was that Julie also kept trying to convince us we should let her be the one on the mic. Unfortunately, Julie can’t sing, either. Even more unfortunately, she has what my mom calls a tin ear and can’t hear herself when she’s singing off-key. What’s even more unfortunate is she actually thinks she’s a great singer. Probably since she’s a musical genius in every other way, her parents never had the heart to tell her the truth — that her singing is awful times ten.

  Halfway through our third song that day, with Greg still on vocals, Julie suddenly stopped playing, turned off her keyboard, and threw her hands up.

  “That sounded like squeaking, not singing,” she said, before turning to me and adding, “You tell him, Anderson. He won’t listen to me.”

  I set my guitar down and retreated to the back of our practice room in the basement of my uncle Dex’s junk shop, the Kitchen Sink. No way did I want to get in the middle of those two.

  Greg bent his guitar pick in half and then tried to bend it straight again. It wouldn’t go. “That’s just how I sing,” he snapped at Julie. “It’s my style.”

  “No, it’s not,” she snapped back. “It’s your hormones.”

  I retreated even farther as they argued back and forth about Greg’s “style,” until I bumped into something. It was a footlocker. I looked down at it, confused. Just the week before I had moved it to a storage room next door to where we practiced, to get it out of the way and so I wouldn’t have to see it all the time and be reminded of what was in there. I had no idea how it got back here. Maybe Uncle Dex had moved it …

  A few weeks earlier, I’d found a World War II navy peacoat in the locker, along with a mysterious letter, setting in motion a pretty crazy adventure involving a guy named William Foxwell — or rather the ghost of William Foxwell. Greg, Julie, and I had to solve the mystery of how he went missing in action at the Battle of Midway, which was the most important navy battle of World War II.

  I wrote all about it in a notebook that I keep hidden under my mattress at home. I even gave it a title — “The Secret of Midway” — though I doubt I’ll ever let anybody read it besides Julie and Greg.

  Anyway, I knew there was a lot of other stuff in the locker that looked like it was from other wars, but so far I’d only glanced inside. Greg kept asking me if we could check out what was in there, but I didn’t want to go messing around with anything else that might have a ghost attached to it. I was still recovering from the Secret of Midway, and missing William Foxwell, who sort of became our friend but disappeared once we solved the mystery.

  It was funny about that locker, though: The more I stayed away from it, the more I couldn’t stop thinking about it, like it had some kind of gravitational pull on my brain — even after I shoved it in that storage room next door. And now here it was, somehow back in the practice room.

  Not only that, but as I stood there staring at it, the footlocker started to sort of glow. Then the latch fell open all on its own. Then, the next thing I knew, I was bending down without even thinking about it, opening the lid, and looking inside.

  Greg and Julie were still arguing about who squeaked and who squawked when they sang, and so that’s what was happening when I found the hand grenade.

  I didn’t know what it was at first because it was round and smooth, not like the pineapple-looking hand grenades you see in movies. More like a big olive-green lemon. Then I noticed the plunger and safety clip.

  There was something written on it, too, scratched into the metal, and I had to take it closer to the front of the practice room to read what it said.

  That put a quick end to Julie and Greg squabbling.

  “Whoa!” Greg said. “Where did you get that?”

  “You shouldn’t have that,” Julie said before I could answer. “It could be dangerous.”

  I held the hand grenade up toward the light so Greg and I could read what was on there.

  The writing on the grenade said Z & Fish and underneath somebody had also written, or scratched, DMZ 68.

  Greg took off his beanie, which he wore all the time because he said they made us look cool. Or at least less uncool. “What is that supposed to mean?” he asked.

  “Beats me,” I said. “Maybe we should take it upstairs and ask Uncle Dex.”

  Julie stomped her foot. “Maybe we should take ourselves upstairs and get away from that bomb before something happens,” she said. She was already heading for the stairs.

  “It’s not a bomb, Julie,” Greg said. “It’s a hand grenade.”

  She stopped. “And what is a hand grenade, exactly?”

  “Well,” said Greg, pulling his beanie back on over his wild red hair, “it’s, um, well, I guess it’s a bomb. But you throw it. You don’t shoot it out of a cannon or whatever.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s all go upstairs.”

  “Leave it down here,” Julie said again. “It could blow up and kill us. We have to get out of here.”

  I couldn’t leave the grenade, though. It felt like my fingers were glued to it or something.

  And then, as if somebody was standing right behind me, reading over my shoulder, I heard a whispery voice.

  “That looks like my lucky grenade.”

  I whirled around and collided with Greg. Nobody else was there.

  “Did you hear that just now?” I asked him.

  “Heck, yeah!” he said.

  We both looked around for a second, then bolted up the stairs behind Julie.

  I still had the grenade.

  Uncle Dex saw it as soon as we came up from the basement. He was typing on the computer behind the counter at the Kitchen Sink. He looked up when he heard us, and froze.

  In a very calm voice, he said, “Anderson, stop.”

  So I stopped. I was holding the grenade out in front of me like I wanted to give it to him. He wasn’t about to take it, though.

  “Okay,” he said, still with the calm voice. “Now I want you to very, very slowly and very, very carefully bend down and gently lay the grenade on the floor right where you’re standing. Do not take another step. Do not even breathe. Just bend your knees and softly put it down right there.”

  Julie and Greg inched away from me, and kept inching, all the way to the door. I did what Uncle Dex said: held my breath until I nea
rly passed out while crouching down to the floor so that I finally could let the hand grenade settle onto the carpet like a big green egg.

  “Good,” Uncle Dex said. “Very good. Now I want you to tiptoe away from the grenade toward the front door, and while you’re doing that I’m going to dial 911.”

  Uncle Dex was still talking to the police on his cell phone when he joined us outside on the sidewalk.

  “Keep moving,” he said, pointing across the street. “Over there.”

  The police showed up two minutes later and they ordered us to move even farther away, a whole block, in fact, as they raced around putting up police tape and stopping cars from driving in front of the Kitchen Sink. There were sirens, more cop cars, ambulances, fire trucks, even the K-9 unit. I couldn’t believe it.

  Greg just kept saying, “Wow!”

  Julie just kept saying, “We are in so much trouble!”

  I just kept saying nothing at all, knowing Julie was right.

  A big crowd of people gathered around us. I tried to slip away at one point, but Uncle Dex grabbed my arm. “Oh, no you don’t,” he said. “You’re staying right here until we get this thing straightened out.”

  A big black van lumbered up, past all the police cars and fire trucks and everything. An officer moved some police tape to let the van through until it parked right in front of Uncle Dex’s store.

  Guys dressed like heavily padded ninjas got out, along with a little robot on wheels with cameras and mechanical arms. One of the bomb squad ninjas, operating a remote control, sent the little robot into the Kitchen Sink, or tried to. It kept bumping against the front door until the guy with the remote stepped away from what looked like a monitor next to the van and went over and opened the door for the robot.

  The robot disappeared inside.

  “What do you think they’re going to do?” Greg asked us.

  Uncle Dex was now busy talking to a police officer. They kept glancing back over at us — and, I was certain, at me in particular.

  “Surveillance,” Julie said. Even as nervous as I was, it still bugged me what a know-it-all she could be.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” she said. “Mounted cameras? Hello?”

  I kicked at a loose chunk of sidewalk. “What do they need that for? It’s just lying there in the middle of the room, right where I left it.”

  “Duh,” Julie said. “If you have expensive police bomb equipment, you have to use your expensive police bomb equipment.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Greg said.

  We were all three staring intensely down the street to see what was going to happen next when somebody came up behind us. “What did you little worms do now?” a familiar voice asked.

  It was Belman, our archenemy, this eighth-grader at our school who had been making fun of us since school started. And what was even worse, he had a band, too, and they were really good. Like really good. They won the first battle of the bands at the All-Ages Open Mic Night two weeks ago.

  “Hello, Belman,” Julie said in this icy voice that almost scared me as much as the whispery ghost voice from earlier. And she wasn’t even talking to me!

  “Hello, girl worm,” Belman said. “Somebody told me you three losers set off a smoke bomb inside that store over there.”

  “Well, you heard wrong,” Greg said. “It was just a hand grenade, and it didn’t even explode. So what do you have to say about that?”

  Belman just laughed. He had a couple of friends with him who I recognized from his band, the Bass Rats. All their parents were in the military or something and they all used to live on military bases. That’s what somebody told us, anyway, and that’s supposed to be where they got the name for their band.

  “What do I have to say about that?” Belman asked after he and his friends finished laughing. “I say too bad.”

  “Too bad what?” Julie asked, her voice still icy.

  “Too bad it didn’t explode,” Belman said. “And save everybody from having to listen to your band again.”

  I was racking my brain to come up with something clever to say, but people around us started pointing and talking so I turned around to look. Julie and Greg and Belman and his friends did, too.

  The ninja operating the remote control was opening the door again to Uncle Dex’s shop so the robot could roll out onto the sidewalk. Everybody cheered, which seemed kind of dumb since nothing had actually happened as far as I could tell.

  The bomb squad got busy attaching a thick metal box to the robot, and back in it went.

  Uncle Dex came over to join us. I’m not sure if he’d overheard anything, but I thought maybe he gave Belman a dirty look.

  Belman didn’t say anything else. He and his friends retreated, then disappeared into the crowd.

  “The police are going to need to talk to you three once this is all over,” Uncle Dex said. “They’re not too happy with me, either.”

  “How come?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “My store, my hand grenade. You guys were just the kids who found it.”

  “Any idea what they’re doing now?” Greg asked. “With that box they brought in?”

  “They’re going to blow up the hand grenade,” Uncle Dex said. “They have some kind of explosive in the bomb box, and they’ll detonate that with the remote control after they have the little robot dude pick up the grenade and lock it inside.”

  I almost said something — that maybe they shouldn’t — because that whispery voice from the practice room seemed to be sort of echoing in my head: “That looks like my lucky grenade.”

  Greg might have been thinking the same thing, because I caught him staring at me, his eyebrows drawn up so his face was one big question mark.

  I shrugged and shook my head because what could we do and what could we say?

  The ground shook just a little, followed by a dull TUNK sound from inside Uncle Dex’s store, and that seemed to be the end of it, except for the crashing noise of things falling off the walls at the Kitchen Sink.

  “Darn it,” Uncle Dex said. “That sounded like my clock collection.”

  “Okay, folks!” a police officer shouted at the crowds at each end of the street. “Show’s over. Time to clear out.”

  Greg and Julie and I started to leave, even though Uncle Dex had told us earlier that we had to stay. This time it was the police officer giving the command.

  “Not so fast, you three. You don’t get to leave until we have a little talk. And we’ll be calling all your parents about what happened here.”

  “Oh man,” Greg whimpered. “My dad’s going to kill me.”

  Julie patted him on the shoulder. “I’m sure he’ll understand after you explain.”

  “Explain what?” Greg asked.

  “That it was Anderson who found the hand grenade,” she said. “And who was foolish enough to pick it up.”

  Greg seemed happy for a second, but then his face fell. “You want me to throw Anderson under the bus?” he said. “That’s terrible. I can’t do that. I mean, he’s my best friend and all.”

  “But it’s the truth,” Julie said, as if I wasn’t standing right there and could hear the whole conversation.

  “Boy, Julie,” Greg said. “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings by saying this, but sometimes there’s a lot you don’t know about being friends.”

  Uncle Dex got a warning from the police, and we got a warning from Uncle Dex: “Don’t touch anything that might explode, or fire bullets, or stab anybody. I know it’s not your fault that the grenade was there in the first place — I didn’t know it was there, either — but you have to be smarter about these things. And if something like this ever happens again, you’re out of here. No more basement, no more band practice. Got it?”

  I’d never seen him mad before, and I wasn’t entirely sure he was mad when he said all that now. The police were still there and he had to say something, and sound stern with us and stuff. So maybe it was kind of an act.
Or maybe it was half and half.

  Either way, we left as soon as they would let us. Julie hadn’t said anything since Greg got on her about not knowing how to be a friend, and she barely said good-bye when she climbed on her bike and headed home.

  “You think she’s mad at me?” Greg asked.

  “Probably,” I said. “But, hey — she had to hear it. I mean, you have to stick by your friends, right?”

  “Right,” Greg said. “I guess so.”

  “Right,” I repeated. “So, um, I mean, since you’re my friend and all — my best friend — I was just wondering …”

  “Wondering what?” he said, getting suspicious.

  “Well, I’m pretty sure we’ve got another ghost on our hands. You heard the voice back there in the basement. About the lucky grenade. And you have to figure there’s a chance that he might show up in my bedroom tonight. You know, like William Foxwell did that first time, asking for me to help him.”

  “I wasn’t there for that,” Greg said quickly.

  “Yeah, but I told you about it,” I said. “And you met him the next day. So anyway, I was hoping you would come over and spend the night so I won’t have to be there by myself if this new ghost shows up.”

  Greg shuddered. “But what if this one isn’t friendly like William Foxwell was? What if this one has more hand grenades, and what if he doesn’t want us to help him? What if he wants to kill us because we let them destroy his lucky grenade?”

  “That’s crazy,” I said, though Greg made such a convincing case that I wasn’t so sure.

  “Is it?” he asked. “Is it?”

  I wasn’t about to let him off the hook, though. “Well, that’s all the more reason for you to come over,” I said. “Don’t you think? You wouldn’t want me to have to deal with a ghost by myself. Plus, my mom and dad will be home. If anything bad happens, we can call them. They’re just down the hall. And Mom’s a light sleeper. So will you do it?”

  Greg got on his bike. “I guess. I mean yeah, sure. Gotta go home first, though, and let Dad tell me how irresponsible I am. He might even put me on restrictions once the police call him and tell him what happened. It depends on what mood he’s in.”