He knew that when he reported the death of his client’s son, he would have to provide Vance with full and convincing details. He also knew that back in the late 1960s, most teenagers who died were killed in car accidents or in the war. He leaned back toward the computer terminal, brought up the search page, and typed in Search the Wall. This led him to links to a number of websites associated with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., where the names of every one of the fifty-eight-thousand–plus soldiers killed during the war were etched on a black granite wall.
Bosch chose the site operated by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund because he had been to the site before both as a donor and to look up the details of men he had served with and knew hadn’t made it back home. He now typed in the name Dominick Santanello and his hunch became reality as a page opened with a photo of the soldier and the details of his service.
Before reading anything, Bosch stared at the image. Until this point, there had been no photos of any of the principals of the investigation. He had only conjured images of Vibiana and Dominick. But there on the screen was the black-and-white portrait of Santanello in suit and tie and smiling at the camera. Maybe it was a high school yearbook picture or a shot taken during his military induction. The young man had dark hair and even darker piercing eyes. Even in the black-and-white photo it was clear to Bosch that he was a mixture of Caucasian and Latino genes. Bosch studied the eyes and thought it was there that he saw the resemblance to Whitney Vance. Bosch was instinctively sure that he was looking at the old man’s son.
The page dedicated to Santanello listed the panel and line number where his name was etched on the Vietnam Memorial. It also carried the basic details of his service and casualty. Bosch wrote these down in his notebook. Santanello was listed as a Navy corpsman. His date of enlistment was June 1, 1969, just four months after he turned eighteen years old. His date of casualty was December 9, 1970, in the Tay Ninh Province. His assigned base at the time of his casualty was the First Medical Battalion, Da Nang. Location of final interment was listed as the Los Angeles National Cemetery.
Bosch had served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam as a tunnel engineer, more commonly referred to as a tunnel rat. The specialty assignment put him on callouts to many of the different provinces and combat zones where enemy tunnel networks had been discovered and needed to be cleared. It also put him to work with soldiers from all branches of service: Air Force, Navy, Marines. It gave him a rudimentary overview and knowledge of the war effort that allowed him to interpret the basic details supplied on the memorial site about Dominick Santanello.
Bosch knew that Navy corpsmen were the medics that backed the Marines. Every Marine recon unit had an attached corpsman. Though Santanello’s assignment was to First Med, Da Nang, his death in the Tay Ninh Province, which ran along the Cambodian border, told Bosch that Santanello was on a recon mission when he was killed.
The memorial site was set up to list soldiers by date of casualty because the memorial itself listed the names of the dead on the wall in the chronological order of their deaths. This meant that Bosch could click on the right and left arrows on his screen and see the names and details of the soldiers who were killed on the same day as Santanello. He did this now and determined that there were a total of eight men killed in the Tay Ninh Province on December 9, 1970.
The war killed young men by the dozens almost every day but Bosch thought that eight men dead in the same province on the same day was unusual. It had to have been an ambush or a friendly-fire bomb drop. He studied the soldiers’ ranks and assignments and identified them all as Marines, with two of them being pilots and one being a door gunner.
This was a revelation. Bosch knew that door gunners flew on slicks—the transport helicopters that carried soldiers in and out of the bush. He now realized that Dominick Santanello had gone down in a helicopter. He had been killed in an aircraft that his unknown father had probably helped manufacture. The cruel irony of it was stunning to Bosch. He wasn’t sure how he would break that kind of news to Whitney Vance.
“You sure you’re okay?”
Bosch looked up and saw Lourdes looking over the separation wall into his cubicle. Her eyes were on the stack of birth certificates Bosch had put down on his desk.
“Uh, yeah, I’m fine,” he said quickly. “What’s up?”
He tried to put his arm down casually on top of the stack but the move came off as awkward and he could see her register it.
“I got an e-mail from a friend that works sex-bats at Foothill,” Lourdes said. “She said she’s found a case that might be related to our guy. No screen cutting but other aspects match up.”
Bosch felt the dread rise in his chest.
“Is it a fresh case?” he asked.
“No, it’s old. She was backtracking in her spare time for us and came up with it. It could’ve been our guy before he started cutting screens.”
“Maybe.”
“You want to go with me?”
“Uh…”
“No, it’s okay, I’ll go. You look like you’re busy.”
“I could go but if you can handle it…”
“Of course. I’ll call you if it’s anything to get excited about.”
Lourdes left the office and Bosch went back to work. To keep his notes complete he went screen by screen and wrote down the names and details of all the men killed during the mission in Tay Ninh. In doing so he realized that only one of the men was assigned as a door gunner. Bosch knew there were always two on every slick— two sides, two doors, two door gunners. It meant that whether the Tay Ninh slick had been shot down or simply crashed, there might have been a survivor.
Before leaving the site, Bosch went back to the page dedicated to Dominick Santanello. He clicked on a button marked Remembrances and was taken to a page where people had left messages honoring Santanello’s service and sacrifice. Bosch scrolled through these without reading them and judged that there were about forty messages left over a period beginning in 1999, when, Bosch presumed, the site was established. He started reading them now in the order in which they were left, beginning with a message from someone who stated that he was a classmate of Dominick’s at Oxnard High and would always remember him for his sacrifice in a land so far away.
Some of the remembrances were from total strangers who simply wished to honor the fallen soldier and had apparently come across his entry randomly. But others, like the high school classmate, clearly had known him. One of these was a man named Bill Bisinger who identified himself as a former Navy corpsman. He had trained with Santanello in San Diego before they were both shipped out to Vietnam in late 1969 and assigned to medical duties on the hospital ship Sanctuary, anchored on the South China Sea.
This bit of information made Bosch pause. He had been on the Sanctuary in late 1969 after being wounded in a tunnel in Cu Chi. He realized that he and Santanello had probably been on the ship at the same time.
Bisinger’s remembrance gave some clarity to what had happened to Santanello. The fact that it was written as if directly to Dominick made it all the more haunting.
Nicky, I remember being at chow on Sanctuary when I heard about you getting shot down. The gunner that got burned up but survived had come to us so we knew the story. I felt so bad. For anybody to die in a place so far from home and for something that didn’t seem to mean so much anymore. I remember begging you not to go out there to First Med. I begged you. I said don’t get off the boat, man. But you didn’t listen. You had to get that CMB and see the war. I’m so sorry, man. I feel like I let you down because I couldn’t stop you.
Bosch knew that CMB meant combat medical badge. Below Bisinger’s outpouring of feelings was a comment from another site visitor, named Olivia Macdonald.
Don’t feel so bad, Bill. We all knew Nick and how headstrong he was and how he wanted adventure. He joined up for adventure. He picked medic because he thought he could be in the middle of things, but just help people and not have to kill anybody. That was his spirit and we should celebrate that, not second-guess our actions.