He shook his head. "For being a high-priced writer, you're not too smart, are you? Just what did you expect to find out here?"

"The truth."

"And if you find the truth, will you be able to die happy?"

I never liked those Siamese-twin questions where it's a.s.sumed two queries are linked at the hip. Since I didn't have an answer for it, I kept my mouth shut.

"Just as well," he said. "You'll find no truth here, only more lies."

The only pictures I'd seen of Doc Palmer were of him when he was young and in the army. This man looked like he could be Doc Palmer's father, or the way a young Doc Palmer might look when he got old.

"Some very powerful men don't want me to find the truth about Doc Palmer," I said.

The old man sniffed. "Go back to where you came from, kid. Doc Palmer is dead."

"It's not that easy. The same men who don't want me learning the truth about Doc Palmer are attempting to frame me in an attempt to a.s.sa.s.sinate the president."

That got his attention. "What the blue blazes are you talking about?"

"Do you have a copy of my book?"

He scowled at me.

"It's easier to show you if you do," I explained.

I must have piqued his curiosity, for he marched me behind the barn to the lip of a garbage pit.

"I think it's in this end," he said.

The scent of rotten milk and meats and vegetables stirred in an unholy stew of odors. I waited for him to reach for a rake or a pole or something to aid the search.

"Jump in," he said.

"What?"

"You're the one who wants to find it, remember? I'm the one who threw it there."

There was a three-foot drop into banana peels, eggsh.e.l.ls, coffee grounds, and what looked like some kind of ledger paper saturated with salad oil.

He motioned with the gun for me to jump.

I picked my spot carefully. My feet hit a large piece of cardboard, then slid from under me. I went down hard, the corner of a milk carton jabbing me in the back. Scrambling to right myself, I stuck my foot in a mess of coffee grounds.

"Try over there," he said from above, oblivious to my discomfort.

Luckily, I managed to find my book in short order beneath a flattened Wheaties cereal box. The cover had cottage cheese on it. I brushed the curds off.

"Toss it up," he ordered.

I tossed him the book and began searching for a foothold to climb out.

"You stay down there," he said.

"I'm not staying down here! You'll have to shoot me."

He repositioned the shotgun so that it was pointed at my head. "Don't tempt me," he said. "This way I can look at what you want to show me and keep an eye on you at the same time."

I looked around and was tempted to pelt him with a fuzzy blue stalk of celery. Instead, I said, "First chapter, first word."

Tucking the shotgun under his arm, he pulled a pair of reading gla.s.ses from his shirt pocket, then opened the book to the first chapter. He began to read aloud.

"No . . . just the first word," I said, trying to find a place to stand where something wasn't squishing up between my toes. "Now . . . second chapter, second word . . ."

With the third chapter he caught on to the scheme. I let him continue on his own for a while, offering only, "It ends at the thirteenth chapter."

After reading the thirteenth word, he closed the book and laughed. "If that don't beat all. And you had no idea they'd done this to you with your own book?"

"Go ahead, rub it in."

"What did you do to deserve this . . . mess with someone's daughter? Oooeeee. They really did a job on you, didn't they?"

He reached down, offering me a hand.

"Thank you," I said.

"Call me Doc."

CHAPTER 15.

With the shotgun harmlessly at rest on his forearm, Doc Palmer walked me back to my car. I did a little jig as we walked, trying to shake the coffee grounds off my feet. "Doc, is there some place I can . . ."

He groaned loudly. "I'm getting too old for this kind of thing. I gotta sit down."

I thought he was going to take me inside the house. Instead, he slumped onto the front b.u.mper of my rental car. He propped the shotgun beside him, pulled out a handkerchief, doffed his cap, and proceeded to mop his forehead. As he did, he chuckled again, still amused at how I'd been set up with my own book. "They're clever. Yessiree . . . you gotta give them their due."

The coffee grounds wouldn't come off. I tried wiping one foot clean with the other. "Doc, is there a-"

"You know," he mused, "I've always wondered if things would be different had Noonan survived. What do you think? Can one man change history?"

Noonan. I recognized the name. "You're talking about Lieutenant Roy Noonan . . . the man the president attempted to rescue in the Ho Bo Woods."

Doc Palmer looked at me with great sadness. He took no joy in what he said next. There was no righteous indignation, no satisfaction at setting the record straight, only sadness, the kind that comes when you're forced to peel back reality's skin and show someone how ugly life can be. He said, "Lloyd Douglas may have pulled Noonan out of the Ho Bo Woods, but only after he murdered him."

"No . . . I can't accept that." My denial rang hollow. Even as I stood there with coffee grounds on my feet, the story I'd written, now a screenplay, was being filmed for a television special, and all of a sudden I sensed what I hadn't sensed before-that the reason it would make such a great television movie was because it was no more real than any other movie made in Hollywood.

The account as I had heard it portrayed Lieutenant Noonan as a likable fellow, dashing, handsome, but ambitious, and his ambitions often put his platoon in needless danger.

Living in the shadow of a famous father-all-American at Yale, World War II hero, congressman-turned-senator-Roy Noonan was in Vietnam for one reason only, as a springboard to political office. His father, inspired by Joseph Kennedy, had charted a path for him that would lead to the White House.

Fresh from personal leave, Noonan returned just as Alpha Company had come off a long, difficult mission. To curry favor with his superiors, Noonan volunteered his platoon for a particularly dangerous mission in the Ho Bo Woods. The location was a notorious death trap. Alpha Company could expect to come up against fresh Vietcong units, elite units of Vietcong sappers, and a complex system of tunnels and speed trails. All of this under a triple-thick jungle canopy.

It was a suicide mission. That's how everyone in Alpha Company saw it. Everyone except their ambitious platoon leader. He saw it as a chance to impress a few generals.

The night before the mission the men were unusually quiet. They drank heavily to numb their nerves and prepare themselves for certain death. Sensing their mood, indeed sharing it, Douglas moved among the men, encouraging them, praying with them.

The next morning, with a whine of turbines, Alpha Company was airlifted to a savannah-like clearing where they were dropped into smoke and confusion. With gunfire erupting from the woods, they maneuvered their way around tree stumps, termite mounds, and the skeletons of a hundred or more cattle. Fighting their way to the perimeter, they dug in.

The plan was to press the initiative, to keep the enemy off balance and not give them time to react. After establishing their night defensive position, they sent out ambushes along the enemy's speed trails.

Shaken by the heavy resistance during the drop, Lieutenant Noonan fell apart. He began whispering excitedly that he could hear the enemy all around them. He insisted on staying where they were. The only way to get him to carry out the mission was for Douglas to promise to remain at his side and protect him, and then, only with repeated encouraging could Douglas keep Noonan focused on the mission.

Twilight came and darkness crept through the jungle with surprising speed. Everything they touched was wet and slimy and dripping. Traversing the forest was like walking in a cave or a tomb that was covered with vines.

The enemy struck without warning, lighting up the area with a barrage of mortars, grenades, and tracer bullets. Everyone scattered from the trail, diving into the woods. True to his word, Douglas stuck with Noonan.

That's when Noonan lost it. He fell to the ground in a fetal position, refusing to move. While Douglas returned fire, an enemy grenade landed between them.

In a frozen moment, the two men exchanged glances. Noonan's eyes crystallized with the realization of what he had to do. He threw himself on top of the grenade.

Douglas fell to his knees and cradled his platoon leader in his arms. Just before he died, Noonan said to Douglas, "It's better this way, that you live and I die. Go home. Make your life count. Remember, from this moment on, you're living the hopes and dreams of two men."

Despite heavy fire and at great personal risk, Douglas carried his fallen friend back to the medevac helicopter, and when Vietnamese regulars, scared from the fighting, tried to pull American corpses from the helicopter so that there would be room for them to climb in and escape, Douglas held them back at gunpoint, threatening to shoot them.

For his heroic actions in the Ho Bo Woods, Lieutenant Lloyd Douglas was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. And when his party nominated him as their candidate to run for president, his campaign slogan was: "He carries the hopes and dreams of all Americans on his shoulders."

At Doc Palmer's farm, I shuffled my feet in the dirt and sat next to him on the front b.u.mper. "Enlighten me," I said. "If it didn't happen as I recorded it in my book, how did it happen?"

Doc sighed as though debating whether or not he wanted to relive the pain that would come with the telling. "You have the basic timeline and events of the mission correct. We had just come off a long march and our tails were dragging. We were surprised when they told us we'd be going out again so soon. But Noonan had nothing to do with our unit being selected for the mission. We were notified of the mission before he returned from leave. Like the rest of us, he didn't like it, but when the orders came down, he obeyed them.

"As for Noonan falling apart under fire? He was no more scared than any of the rest of us. You'd be nuts not to be afraid. But to the point of cowardice or incapacitation? Hogwash. Your characterization doesn't fit the man."

I was willing to concede his point. "You claim that Douglas murdered Noonan. How can you know that? They were separated from the rest of the platoon."

"Douglas was there," Doc said. "He told me."

"Now I know you're blowin' smoke. Douglas told you he fragged Noonan? You expect me to believe that? What . . . did he just come up one day and say, 'Oh, by the way, Doc, that heroic act that has become the cornerstone of my entire political career? It didn't really happen the way everyone thinks it did. What really happened is that I dragged my commanding officer into the woods and murdered him.'"

Had my sarcasm been spittle, it would have hit Palmer in the face. He made no effort to wipe it off.

Staring sadly at the ground, in a low voice Doc said, "I didn't want to believe it either."

Having forgotten all about the coffee grounds on my feet, I waited for him to offer an alternative account. He repositioned himself on the b.u.mper. "Let me tell you something about Roy Noonan," he said. His eyes took on an unfocused stare as in his mind Doc Palmer returned to Vietnam. "We had holed up in a bombed-out paG.o.da at an intersection of sorts, little more than a cl.u.s.ter of dirt lanes that connected the nearby farms and villages. We set up an ambush.

"Just before dawn we heard an ominous creaking sound. At first we couldn't tell which direction it was coming from, but it was getting louder. There was a curfew in effect, so we interpreted any sound as unfriendly. We figured it was a twenty-millimeter gun, or maybe one of those recoilless rifles on wheels. Anyway, the order came down to take it out as soon as it entered our kill zone.

"The next thing we know, there was a blinding flash of claymores-antipersonnel mines-being set off, and in the middle of it all was an old man and a team of oxen pulling a heavy cart. The oxen were riddled with shrapnel, and they began bellowing something awful and thrashing about. They blindly pulled the cart off the road and into a field where it got mired down.

"In all the confusion, an order was given to hit the position with mortars. But even after several rounds, the oxen were still alive and still bellowing while the old man found a place on the side of the road and began wailing over the loss of his oxen and his crop-peanuts-which were scattered all over the road.

"As the sky grew lighter, the situation got worse. The bellowing of the injured oxen was getting on everyone's nerves. So was the old man's wailing. That he had survived was a miracle itself. The only thing we can figure is that the thick sides of the cart protected him.

"Some of our men became so fed up with the cries of the oxen, that they began to throw hand grenades into the field, hoping to kill them. By now about a hundred local peasants had gathered on the roads and in horror were watching what the soldiers were doing. Finally, one machine gunner couldn't take it anymore. He walked to the side of the field and opened up on the oxen until they were all dead.

"That's when Lieutenant Noonan arrived to a.s.sess the situation. Also drawn to all the noise was the enemy. They chose that moment to open fire. We all scattered, diving for the nearest hole we could find, while the farmer, stunned by his loss, continued wailing on the side of the road, caught between two armies.

"Noonan took out after him. Under heavy fire he sprinted across the road, grabbed the farmer by his shoulders, and dragged him into a ditch where he tended the man's wounds. Then he called for a medevac to airlift this wounded farmer to the hospital. Under a hail of bullets, Lieutenant Noonan carried the farmer to the chopper.

"Does that sound to you like a man who would wimp out during an exchange of enemy fire in the Ho Bo Woods?" he asked.

I had to admit it didn't.

"A few days later," Doc continued, "I was at the hospital getting supplies when I saw Lieutenant Noonan visiting that same farmer. I overheard him apologize to the farmer for the actions of his men and instruct the man where to submit the necessary forms to recover his loss.

"You don't hear stories like that on the news. You hear about the atrocities, the ugliness. But that day I witnessed a man acting like a man. Taking responsibility. Doing what he could to make things right. For what? A peasant farmer he didn't know. There were no cameras there to record what he did. Noonan stood up for what was right and decent. To me, that's a true leader and I knew I would follow that man anywhere."

Sometimes the way a man speaks of another man is more revealing than the words themselves. I felt a respect for Lieutenant Noonan I'd never had before simply by the way Doc spoke of him.

But Doc still hadn't answered my question. "What reason did Douglas have for killing such a man?" I said.

"What reason does any man have for killing another man?" Doc replied philosophically. His face became drawn and saddened again. "Douglas told me what happened shortly before he announced he was running for a second term. At the time he was depressed and in a lot of pain."

"Physical pain?"

The knowing smile reappeared. "Vietnam took its toll on Douglas more than is generally known. Not only his combat wounds, but diseases he contracted while on leave, and a degenerative disk disease in his back. We managed to hold him together for the rigors of the first campaign, but in doing so he became addicted to his pain medication."

"Addicted?" It was the first time I'd heard any of this.

"As his personal physician it was my role to make him presentable to the public and lucid during key conferences and meetings. Each year my job grew increasingly difficult. I told them I would do it for only one four-year term and when Douglas decided to run again I opted out. At the levels he's at, the medication is as much of a killer as the diseases. Most of the time anymore the man is so heavily medicated he isn't competent."

"Isn't competent! I don't believe this!" I cried.

"Naturally, it's kept secret. Only a few people know how serious his condition is. As for what you believe . . . you came looking for the truth. Whether you accept it is not my concern."

When I was researching the book my access to the president came in ten- and fifteen-minute chunks of time, and on more than one occasion was canceled without warning. Pressing affairs of state was the standard excuse.

"You said he was depressed when he told you about Noonan," I prompted.

"He overreacted to my decision to leave him, threw a tantrum. He knew how I felt about Noonan and wanted to hurt me."

Doc fell silent for a few moments. Digging up the memory dug up old pain with it.