Excerpt PROLOGUE
During the War in Vietnam
Although they served in the same unit, twenty-five-year-old Dennis Oats and thirty-nine-year-old Bill Roper could not have been more dissimilar, and were never close friends.
A tall, Adonis-like bachelor with nerves of steel in combat, Lieutenant Oats considered himself a lucky catch for attractive females; but on the ground his self-assuredness, bordering cockiness, often wore thin with those who worked with him.
Sergeant Roper was none of those things. Short and balding, the slightly built radar intelligence specialist had survived nineteen years in the Air Force; years that weighed heavily on his narrow shoulders. Like Martha, his wife of twenty years, waiting impatiently at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas for his return, Bill was anxious to quit the war and retire. A devoted family man, he had two grown children: Mary, a newlywed, and Bill Jr., a recent Air Force enlisteemuch to his fathers delight.
Despite their many differences, however, Bill and Dennis shared a common bond. Both conceived a child with young Thai women, and each gave them expensive gifts for their indiscretion. Bill gave the bar girl a gold locket with their photos inside. Dennis gave the fruit peddler a ruby pendant. Second cousins, they sublet a room in a warren of bamboo apartments perched alongside the Chao Phraya River in Takhli, Thailand.
Smitten as only a man can be at his age, Bill laid claim to the pixie-face bargirl the second week of his combat tour, moving her to an apartment closer to the airbase. Dennis succumbed a week later on a river cruise to Pran, the cousins village fifteen miles southwest of Takhli.
A Saturday outing, a break from the demanding war, they were accompanied by men from their unit and girls from the B-29 Bar and Grill, a place of refuge for enlisted and officers alike. Bill and Dennis spent the remainder of the weekend in their respective love nests, returning to the war on Monday.
Dennis flew the F-111a revolutionary, two-place fighter with movable wings. Bill provided crews with targeting data: location, description and possible enemy fire.
Despite their shared indiscretions both served the Air Force well, but tragedy struck their unit early. Within six weeks, two F-111s crashed in Laos and a third, Dennis plane, mysteriously disappeared over the Dangrek Mountains in Southern Thailand. Intensive searches recovered only two pilots. The others, including Dennis, joined the legend of aviators designated as Missing in Action.
Losing four pilots that quickly devastated the close-knit unit. Older than most, Bill felt each loss keenly. To assuage his griefand guilt he felt over his hooch girls expanding pregnancyhe commiserated with longtime friend, Sergeant Max Willigus. But talking didnt help, and six months later, Bill returned to the States and retired.
In an attempt to put the war behind him, he bought a small cattle ranch near Boulder, Colorado, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. But remorse over his indiscretion with the teenage bar girl, which he couldnt bring himself to admit to Martha, and depression over fallen comrades worsened.
To blot out the torment he drank heavily, but that didnt help either; it only made his nightmares worse.
Fearing for Bills life, Martha suggested counseling, but he shrugged off his depression as something that would soon pass.
It didnt. It became even deeper.
Adding to his misery, Bill lost a newly acquired herd of cattle to bad water, about which hed been warned but did nothing.
Meanwhile, the body count in Vietnam increased, and protests over the unpopular war became more virulent. Draft dodgers fled to Canada. Flower children, often dazed on drugs, cavorted salaciously for the Press. All subjects Bill found ominously distressing.
With mounting debts, his melancholy worsened. Until finally, unable to cope with his pain, Bill killed himself with wifes 32-caliber revolver that she kept in a bedside drawer for her protection.
The following day, halfway around the world, the seventeen-year-old bar girl bore Bills daughter Loy, Floating Leaf. And three days later, on Christmas day, the nineteen-year-old fruit peddler gave birth to Dennis son Kai.
Before returning to the States, Max Willigus helped Soo Che and Ling Mai as best as he could but wished he could do more. Martha had written to him about Bills death, but he couldnt bring himself to tell Soo Che.
What follows is the story of those two remarkable children and the people who loved them.
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