After the captain went back to his office, he took Newf outside for a quick pee before the two of them settled back into his cubicle.
A cursory look at the Internet made it appear to be overflowing with information, but more often than not his search engines dredged up and regurgitated garbage. He first went to Switchboard.Com and got nothing, then two other telephone registries, with the same result. Over a couple of hours of Net searching, he snared a couple of leads, one to do with Teddy Gates, the other pointing to a cultural anthropologist who might know something about Asiatic black bears.
The first sweep took him into the organizational octopus that enveloped POW/MIA affairs. There was a lot of pent-up emotion surrounding the issue, a lot of anger and mistrust of government—though based on his own experience last fall with the FBI, maybe mistrust of government agencies in some circumstances was not entirely unjustified.
He learned that there were more Americans killed in Vietnam than in Korea, but only by four thousand or so. He had always thought the differential to be much larger. He also found that about a thousand confirmed American POWs went unaccounted for after the mass repatriation. He learned that there was a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, created in 1991 and still in existence, though reports since 1993 were few and far between. He also discovered by reading various reports that there was no central government clearinghouse for POW/MIA information, no comprehensive, one-stop shopping database, and that for a long time, gathering such material carried the lowest of national priorities. Some agencies collected such information only if they could justify it in connection with a national priority, but they did not routinely share. It was depressing, especially when he read that American soldiers lost during intelligence and secret missions were somehow excluded from overall POW/MIA considerations. Had he and Tree gone missing, they very likely would have been in this category. After rooting electronically for two hours, he discovered testimony from the Senate Select Committee’s hearings of 1992—and there he found his first lead. Major General Theodore Gates had testified.
Teddy’s testimony bristled with indignation over troops left behind in Vietnam and Korea, but as strident and angry as his former commanding officer seemed, there was little in the way of actual information, and where his affiliation was to be listed, there was nothing but a series of XXXXXs. Looking at other testimony, he found the same technique employed. Okay, so they kept some personal shit secret. 1992 and Gates had been a two-star. The Gulf War was in 1991. Had Tree said Gates retired in ninety-four or -five? If so, had his testimony had something to do with it?
Two telephone calls to Washington, D.C., did not yield the general’s phone number or address. An officious senate committee staffer informed him that what witnesses said was public domain, but their private lives—including their home addresses and phone numbers—were just that, private. This sent him scrambling for a back door.
During his Net scans he had developed a list of other witnesses from the date of Teddy’s testimony, including one from a group called Reckoning Over Korea (ROK). The words of a civilian, the daughter of a missing naval aviator, struck home, and he had jotted them down: “The living bear the pain of not knowing until they die, and we can only hope that Almighty God will then reunite us.” The offices of the operation were listed in Clyde, New York, and the witness’s name was Augusta Rivitz. Teddy Gates was a gregarious softy in many ways, and if he had testified with others, there was a fair chance that the other witnesses would have his telephone number and address.
A woman answered the phone. “Mrs. Rivitz?”
“Oh, yes, it’s Ms. Rivitz, and if you’re trying to sell something I’m not buying,” she said.
“Are you the Augusta Rivitz who testified before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs in February 1992?”
“Oh yes, that was me. Are you calling about my father?” she asked anxiously.
“No, ma’am.”
“Oh, my,” the woman said, obviously deflated. “The senators promised they would get back to me, but it’s been over ten years.”
Her voice faded, but quickly strengthened. “Darn government. Oh yes, they rip out your heart and throw it in the trash bin. My father, Lieutenant Barry Rivitz, was seen alive in his parachute and on the ground by his wingman, Lieutenant Junior Grade Edward Gisseler. My father was alive but never heard from again. We are still waiting, still waiting.”
She did not identify the “we.” The woman’s father had never returned, the result being that she was mired emotionally and mentally somewhere between Clyde and wherever her father might be. He knew from his own experience and military training that the most dangerous time for a prisoner was immediately after capture—before transfer to a group camp of some kind. Ironically, this also was the best opportunity for escape. Even if her father had been seen, it didn’t mean much. The invisible companion of every soldier was luck, both good and bad, but in this case, Ms. Rivitz was as much MIA as her father.