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In search of the lost grave

So we hid. Four middle-aged, unshaven men stuffed into a cabin that was 30 inches high, 6 feet on a side.

Sailors don't choose a burial at sea. They accept it as part of the package of risk and hardship that defines service on a fighting ship. To be wrapped in canvas, weighted down with scrap iron, and slipped over the side is a navy tradition born of necessity: Dead men don't fight, they take up precious space below deck, and in tropical latitudes, they decompose fast. But a compassionate captain unhindered by war or weather will make every effort to bury a crewman on land.

On May 10, 1845, Seaman William Cook died on board the cp10.5USScp11.5 Constitution of dysentery. He had come aboard in March 1844, was paid $10 a month, and played in the ship's band. That is all naval archives recall of the short life of Seaman Cook. The Constitution approached Tourane, Cochin China - what is now Da Nang in Vietnam - in need of food and water. While the ship was anchored in the outer harbor, its Chinese translator went ashore to arrange a burial site for William Cook. He made a deal with monks for a spot in the native burial ground at the foot of Monkey Mountain on the Tien Tsa peninsula. Captain John Percival sent Cook's body ashore, and the two countries cooperated in a simple humanitarian mission. Three days later, in direct opposition to the mission of good will on which the Constitution had been dispatched, Percival tookrr the old warship into battle against the Vietnamese. It had been 30 years since either the ship or its captain had fired a shot in anger.

For 155 years, Cook lay all but forgotten. That changed in April of this year, when three Vietnam veterans from Massachusetts traveled to Da Nang to try to memorialize the final resting place of William Cook, the first American serviceman buried on Vietnamese soil.

IT ALL BEGAN 10 YEARS AGO, WHEN DENNIS O'Brien, of Roslindale, a Marine Corps veteran who had served as a helicopter crew chief based in Da Nang, came across a brief account of the Constitution's 16 days in Vietnam in Tyrone Martin's lively chronicle of Old Ironsides, A Most Fortunate Ship.

O'Brien works for the Massachusetts Department of Veterans' Services, and he could see the Constitution from his office on Causeway Street. The story intrigued him. It was a Massachusetts story, it piqued his curiosity as a veteran, and to memorialize the grave site of a fallen serviceman more than 150 years after the fact had an oddball appeal. To do it, he needed money, and he needed help. He talked the Vietnam Veterans of Massachusetts into providing an $8,000 grant for the mission. Captain Percival had paid $2 for care of the grave site ``in perpetuity,'' and O'Brien felt certain that the Vietnamese - who are fastidious in their at-tention to detail - would have honored their contract.

O'Brien recruited two friends. Joe Poli, an independent filmmaker in Medford and a Marine who had served as a helicopter crew chief in Phu Bai during the war, was recruited in February. Bob Fairbairn, now of Saigon, was a childhood friend of O'Brien's from South Boston. A veteran of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the costly battles around Dak To, he came with three Purple Hearts and a Vietnamese wife named Dao.

I had worked for 17 years as a civilian adviser in Southeast Asia and had also read the account of Percival's curious adventure. A curator at the Constitution Museum in Charlestown contacted me in Newton and connected me to O'Brien, whom I did not know. The trip was scheduled for April. It coincided with the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.

Perhaps no single element of the story was compelling enough to take us halfway around the world. Percival had buried crew members in half a dozen foreign ports during his two-year cruise. But it was Da Nang, a city familiar to hundreds of thousands of veterans who passed through during seven years of undeclared war. It was also a chance to see a Vietnam none of us had really seen, as normal relations were about to commence. In a war zone, you only see your compatriots.

Our ``guides'' in the search were three journals kept by Constitution crew members, a collection of sketches, and the ship's log. The mission was straightforward: Find Cook's grave site.

When the Constitution, today the oldest commissioned fighting ship in the world, dropped anchor in Da Nang, it was already an old ship. It was half a world away from its home port of Boston, sent by the Department of the Navy on a two-year good-will tour. The 50-year-old ship was a curious choice for the rigors of a world cruise. Condemned as unseaworthy in 1830, it was soon restored to service by an outpouring of public sentiment.

Not only was the ship old, so was its captain. John ``Mad Jack'' Percival was 65 and crippled by gout and rheumatism, but he had lobbied vigorously for a last chance to take a warship to sea. Since it was now an ambassador of good will, he had the black Constitution painted white with a red streak between its gun decks before he embarked from New York.

When the Constitution arrived in Da Nang, although it was painted white, the Vietnamese were cautious and delayed Percival in the outer harbor. They flew a black warning flag over the fort that guarded the harbor. When the flag was replaced by the yellow pennant of the emperor, Percival moved anchor and dispatched a longboat to the city, commanded by Lieutenant William C. Chaplin, with an armed body of sailors and Marines.

The first encounter between representatives of the US government and the people of Da Nang, according to Chaplin, was perfunctory. The local mandarin - after listening to the request for water and food - inquired: ``Why you come? Why you not go?''

The Americans were equally curt: When pressed by the emperor's representatives about the ship's intentions at the next port of call in Canton, China, the lieutenant replied: ``None of your business.''

On May 14, three days after the burial of William Cook, during a visit to the ship by local authorities, an interpreter smuggled a note to the captain. The note was a plea for help from an imprisoned French missionary, Bishop Dominique LeFevre. He was held in prison by the emperor, for unknown reasons, and under sentence of imminent death. It was at this moment that the military conflict between two virtual strangers began. Percival, in his indignation over the fate of a French missionary, proceeded to make every possible command misjudgment that characterized the bloody conflict 120 years later.

The misadventure should have been a cautionary tale, but no one remembered. It is fair to say that only a handful of the millions of Americans who passed though Vietnam had ever been informed that Percival and Old Ironsides had been there first.

Percival, who because of his ailments spent much of the time in his cabin, rose from his sickbed and led an armed contingent back into Da Nang. He delivered a blistering note to city officials demanding the release of Bishop LeFevre. To show he was in earnest, he kidnapped three of the mandarins and took them as hostages.

Over the next two weeks, Percival went to war. He had the ship's painters restore the Constitution's battle motif: black with a white gun streak. He captured three of the emperor's armed junks and secured them to the side. He sent boats charging ashore, fired into crowds of soldiers and civilians, and menaced the fort with his still formidable two decks of cannon. Oddly enough, he continued to reprovision, breaking off the hostilities between ultimatums to take on food and water. It was the classic talk-talk, fight-fight strategy that would reappear a century and a half later, during the Vietnam morass.

After two weeks, Percival realized he had been outmaneuvered. The five harbor forts had been strengthened. Armed junks arrived at the mouth of the harbor. Troops could be seen marching along the shore in increasing numbers. Percival weighed anchor and departed Da Nang without having seen Bishop LeFevre. He fired a final, peevish salvo. Five of the six rounds fell harmlessly into the water.

In a protest later filed at the US consulate in Singapore, representatives of Emperor Thieu Tri claimed that Percival had killed scores of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. The Vietnamese told the consul: ``The next Americans who come to Vietnam . . . we will kill.''

We arrived in Hanoi on April 8, a Saturday. Fairbairn, who had done all the legwork, and Dao, who would do everything else, met me, O'Brien, and Poli at the airport and took us to our hotel downtown.

We found a joint called Polite Bar a few blocks away that served American-style hamburgers to backpackers playing pool in the back. The place was air-conditioned, and the music was rhythm and blues. O'Brien tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to the big front window. Outside the bar was a street crowded with pedicabs, fast-talking drivers, and women in conical hats hawking mangoes, roses, and grilled chicken. Street urchins pushed postcards, maps, and pirated copies of Graham Greene's The Quiet American on passing tourists. Porters shouldered improbable loads beneath wooden yokes, the goods bobbing in rhythm with their measured gait. The continual hubbub passed by the window, unheard over the din of the air conditioning and B. B. King. The window could have been a big-screen TV.

O'Brien pointed outside again and said, `` 'Nam.''

The next day, we had an appointment with the cp9.5POW-MIAcp10.5 office, the Joint Task Force/Detachment2. The cp9.5JTFcp10.5, from their bases in Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, search for the remains of Americans declared missing during the Vietnam War. Later, we would name our own group after them, DetachmentZero, or DetZero. We were briefed at their headquarters, called The Ranch, and were given a professional slide show of their work. O'Brien and Fairbairn presented them with a plaque from the Vietnam Veterans of Massachusetts to acknowledge the difficult and dangerous work they perform.

The cp9.5JTFcp10.5/Det2's methods were in marked contrast to our own. They approach a site only after exhaustive research. They cross-reference unit histories, after-action reports, bomb-damage assessments, rumors - anything to help pinpoint the location of a forgotten firefight or a crash site that might hold the key to the unmarked graves of the missing in action. The cp9.5JTFcp10.5 has an ever-widening access to Vietnamese archives. Their counterparts have provided histories of North Vietnamese Army units and statements from local officials, People's Army of Vietnam officers, and enlisted personnel.

In contrast, DetZero's primary source material was available in the cp9.5USScp10.5 Constitution Museum gift shop.

When we showed up for our appointment with Ambassador Pete Petersen on Tuesday, his aide told us that there would be a brief delay. O'Brien and I went outside for a smoke and stood under the US Embassy seal. A Vietnamese pedaling a load of timber slowed down, looked at O'Brien and me smoking cigars, then spit in our direction. He looked angry as he pedaled on down the boulevard. It was the only open act of hostility we would see in our 23 days in country.

That man was our age: early 50s. You rarely see Vietnamese men our age. We killed most of them during the war.

Petersen was curious to know what we were up to. We told him of Percival's 16 days in Da Nang, of a sailor's unremembered grave site. The ambassador, who had spent five years as a prisoner in Hanoi, had never heard of Cook.

Our trip had begun in Hanoi three weeks before the country celebrated the 25th anniversary of the fall - or liberation - of Saigon. Petersen and the cp9.5JTFcp10.5 were preparing for an American delegation led by Senator John McCain of Arizona. At the same time, some 130 members of the ruling People's Party were holding their plenary session in Hanoi. The debates about trade agreements, Agent Orange compensation, and cp9.5MIAcp10.5s were prickly and ongoing. What we were doing was neither prickly nor of great import. It was just offbeat enough to offend no one.

We were not sure if the Vietnamese officials in Da Nang would share our enthusiasm. Would they assist in locating a grave site that recalled a single day in 1845 when two countries came together to bury a US sailor?

Petersen's parting advice to us was: ``When you get to Da Nang, make sure everyone - Security Police, Navy, People's Committee - knows exactly what you're doing. They should assist you . . . unless they think you're trying to put one over on them.''

This flew in the face of DetZero Commander O'Brien's cryptic e-mail to me a week before we left Boston. ``We are going in covert.'' That disturbed me. I didn't feel covert. I was outfitted by cp9.5REIcp10.5.

That afternoon, we flew south to Da Nang. O'Brien had arranged for us to be met by a Vietnamese national with extraordinary connections who was going to lead us through the brier patch of local politics, get the government on board, and find William Cook. The man didn't show up, and we were left standing at the airport in 95-degree heat with a sinking sense that Day 1 in Da Nang did not bode well for DetZero.

Tourism in Vietnam is a function of the state. Dao Fairbairn contacted DaNaTours the following morning. They agreed to provide us with a van, a driver, and a permit to explore the coves where the journals indicated that Cook had been buried. The Tien Tsa is restricted ground controlled by the Vietnamese military. The permit - $100 - would not be ready until the following morning. It was 11 o'clock, and we were restless. We thought we were within about 6 kilometers of William Cook.

DetZero came up with a plan. We knew that when the Constitution anchored outside the harbor, an officer took three compass sightings to record his position: He used the fort and the tips of the two peninsulas that enclose the bay. With a bit of eighth-grade geometry, a map, and a compass, we could triangulate a boat close to that first anchorage.

We knew we couldn't go ashore to explore the coves without the permit, but we wanted to see what Percival saw as he rode at anchor. Dao made a $25 deal for a fishing trawler, complete with cabin and crew. We packed a lunch, loaded our cameras, and set out.

The Han River flows silt-brown through Da Nang into the bay, which opens to the South China Sea. It is a vibrant commercial thoroughfare. We were one fishing boat among hundreds. Small cargo ships chugged upriver toward the city, while elegant wooden skiffs - sculled by women in wide, woven hats - dodged through traffic, ferrying people and goods across the Han.

The day was beautiful. We moved around the foredeck, relieved to be out on the water. O'Brien swept his binoculars around the harbor, excited in his taciturn way that the landmarks from the sketches were finally fleshing out. Monkey Mountain rose deep green on the right. Hai Van Pass, a break in the dramatic mountains that trail from the highlands to the South China Sea, rose in clouds on our left.

We could see in the distance the spade of land where the fort had been; the French had destroyed it in 1858. It had perched on a hillock at the base of Monkey Mountain.

As we approached a long stone sea wall that stretched across the river mouth, the captain said something to Dao, and Dao spoke to Bob. On our right, a line of Russian-built Vietnamese patrol boats was moored near the city's container facility.

``The captain said we have to hide in the wheelhouse,'' said Bob Fairbairn.

I said: ``Excuse me?''

``He wants us to hide.''

I've always felt more comfortable when it was my idea to hide.

``Dao says we hide,'' said Fairbairn, ``just until we pass the sea wall and get out into the bay.''

``Are we breaking the law, or is the captain breaking the law?''

``Dao says we hide,'' said Fairbairn.

We had learned - in the space of 24 hours - to trust everything that Dao said. She was smart and fiery, a perfect match for Bob Fairbairn. They had a Ralph and Alice Kramden marriage that started each day in tempest and ended in affection. Dao's father had been a Southern police general, her mother was a member of the National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong. After the war ended in 1975, her father was imprisoned, her mother was decorated, and Dao lost her place at university. She elected to stay in Vietnam, despite the exodus, and became a businesswoman with three textile factories.

So we hid. Four middle-aged, unshaven men stuffed into a cabin 30 inches high, 6 feet on a side. There was no comfortable position. The captain had us raise the wooden covers on the portals, so it was hot and close. Only 3 kilometers from Cook, and the possibility loomed that we would not get much closer.

After 15 minutes, Dao stuck her head in and smiled. ``It's OK. You can come out.'' We were in open water, well past the line of patrol boats and past whatever it was we were hiding from. We took our first compass heading and chugged through a gentle chop toward the Constitution's first anchorage at the mouth of the bay. We broke out lunch.

DetZero saw what Percival had seen: a perfect harbor ringed by mountains. From the old hill fort to the mouth of the bay are a series of five perfect coves scalloped along the base of Monkey Mountain. The first one, hard by the fort and beneath a crumbling French church, appeared as the most likely candidate. We could see a torrent of fresh water that flowed into the cove off the mountain. It was captured in a manmade pool. The Constitution's log mentioned the fresh water and that the ship had taken on 5,000 gallons of it a day.

We could see what appeared to be a grave marker enclosed by a stone wall. We wanted to get in close. We wanted machete time: the joy of carving through dense jungle, staring down cobras, crawling among the termite mounds, while Joe Poli filmed us on his digital camcorder. The captain said no, the cove is restricted, property of the Vietnamese Navy. He pointed to a small barracks set back from the beach. Two men sat on the rocks and watched us watch them.

We would be back the next day, permit in hand, walking the beaches, poking into the dense brush, not bobbing around in the swells 200 yards from shore. We moved slowly along the coast toward the South China Sea and investigated each of the other four coves. They all looked good, though it was the first cove that made the most sense. It had water and it had what looked like a burial ground. We took pictures as we passed the spot again on our return trip to the river and up the river to Da Nang City.

``You must hide until we pass the sea wall,'' said Dao.

At this point, we didn't care. We returned to the cabin and pulled up the wooden shutters. Our spirits were soaring.

Ten minutes later, our ship slowed dramatically, the following wake lifted us up and set us down, then we rocked in place. There was a rush of bare feet overhead, furtive voices, then silence.

Dao stuck her head in and said: ``We're in trouble. Police. Stay in the cabin.''

The trawler followed a patrol boat to a police landing, and we remained crammed together in supreme discomfort while Dao, the captain, and the crew were escorted down the dock to headquarters. Gradually, we overcame our caution and climbed out, settling in the stern, with guards sitting on the dock.

We put great stock in Dao's body language. Several times they escorted her down the dock to our boat and she would be frowning, talking a mile a minute, visibly vexed with her escorts. That was bad. We decided that the worst that could happen was a prison sentence.

Finally, Dao walked down the dock with her head erect, smiling, chatting amiably with her escorts. Maybe deportation, a fine, perhaps a good talking-to.

``Here comes Dao.''

``How does she look?''

``She's smiling. She's actually laughing. We're good to go.''

Dao climbed aboard the boat and said: ``Big, big trouble. Hide the cameras. You tell them you were fishing.''

The only place to hide the cameras was in the engine compartment. It was also the only place to look if you were searching the boat. I thought we might do better with the cameras strapped around our necks like amiable morons, but Dao said hide the cameras, and they were stowed below.

``There is a colonel coming out from Da Nang City,'' said Dao. ``Remember . . . you hired the boat to go fishing. You didn't know.''

There was no fishing gear aboard, other than a tangle of nylon gill nets that hadn't been wet for months, maybe years. I didn't know what we weren't supposed to know.

They sat us in an open-air interrogation room, where we waited for the colonel for a couple of hours. From my vantage point, I could see through the window to the fishing boat. If they searched, we were cooked. I wasn't worried that we had cameras - although we had been shooting film boisterously in the general direction of a restricted Navy base - I was worried because we had hidden them. That looks bad.

``We give them Poli,'' O'Brien said. We laughed. So did Poli. The vote was three to one.

Colonel Kwan arrived. He seemed young, very courteous, and he had seven or eight gold stars on his collar. He went around the room getting our stories, with Dao writing them all down. We were fishing. We didn't know. Dao did most of the talking. Bob Fairbairn, who has lived for six years in Saigon, began offering up names of People's Army of Vietnam generals, district commanders, Security Police whom he had dealt with over the years.

The colonel got around to Poli. Our cinematographer was the sanest, most reasonable member of the group, a soft-spoken Marine. The colonel turned to Poli, raised his pen, and asked him, in excellent English, ``What is your story?'' Poli had a good reason to discourage a search of the engine room. His digital camcorder was on loan from a camera store in Newtonville.

Poli replied with a shrug: ``I don't know. I'm slow.''

The colonel smiled. He let us go, but the junior officers still wanted to search the boat. Dao pointed out that it would be a sign of distrust to foreign tourists if the boat were searched. Somehow, the colonel bought that. But he kept Fairbairn's passport. He promised to come to the hotel the next morning and return it. He had already checked out Fairbairn's contacts, and they held up. He kept the captain, the crew, and the fishing boat. We had to buy them back the next day.

The colonel arranged for us to be taken back to Da Nang in the same patrol boat that pulled us over. We invited him to dinner. He accepted and then drove off. The crisis over, the police escorts waited while we sheepishly fished our camera equipment from the engine room.

The restaurant was out on the river. We ate corn soup, spring rolls, steamed fish, and cracked crab. We told the colonel the story of Cook and showed him a postcard of the Constitution. He offered to get us access to any spot on the peninsula.

The next morning, we went back to the peninsula by van with a permit and a guide. We first checked the French and Spanish military cemeteries, erected after a fruitless occupation of the city in 1858. In the neglected graveyards, elegant names of the soldiers who had succumbed to heat and disease were carved on pitted headstones. Cook's wasn't one of them.

We worked our way through dense scrub down a hillock to the apron of land behind the cove. The native burial ground was right where it was supposed to be, and Cook's grave marker was one of two small spirit houses enclosed by a low stone wall. The $2 paid to the monks in 1845 had purchased a small shrine with a faded ship motif and a slab of marble. An urn held a few sticks of joss stuck in sand; strange, because there were no more monks on the peninsula. Someone still tended the grave.

We were finally alone with Cook. There may have been a high-five, but combat vets don't show much jubilation. The last Americans in the cove who were aware of Cook's grave were the sailors who buried him. Dao sat on the sand. Our guide sat on a wall. The rest of us split up and explored.

Ironically, it was Colonel Kwan who confirmed that the grave was Cook's. He told us a story that he had learned from his grandmother: An American ship arrived before the French sacked the fort. They had one dead soldier and many sick. The monks had buried the sailor in the small cemetery. The small spirit house with the sailing motif was known by the villagers on the peninsula as ``the American pagoda.''

``Why didn't you ask me earlier?'' Colonel Kwan said. ``I never believed you were fishing.''

We swam, sat on the beach. Later, we washed the salt away in a freshwater pool fed from the stream that cascaded off Monkey Mountain. We left a baseball cap from the Constitution Museum next to the jar of burned-out joss.

In the American lexicon of much of the past half century, ``Vietnam'' was not a country but a war. ``Hanoi'' was not a city but an inscrutable group of hard-liners in drab suits and oversized chairs. Vietnam - without the grim overlay of an American presence, without the threat and misery - is an energetic, hospitable, and breathtakingly beautiful country. It is also a young country. Sixty percent of its population was born after 1975. To many young people, although the scars are still visible, the war is history.

Our final surprise in Vietnam was an invitation to present our story to the Da Nang People's Committee. Evidently they knew about DetZero and were curious. We arrived by van at a splendid former French colonial governor's house. The People's Committee sat on one side of a conference table in red, high-backed chairs, the elfin Vice Chairman Anh in the middle seat with his interpreter. DetZero sat across the table. I made the presentation.

The People's Committee seemed surprised that Percival had returned home to an official rebuke. President Zachary Taylor sent an official apology to the emperor, an act singular in US diplomatic history.

At the end, they asked us the same question that their countrymen had asked the first officers ashore in 1845: ``Why are you here?'' We told them that we came to visit William Cook, a forgotten American sailor buried in Vietnam. We were able to pay our respects, we said. We came to see your country again for the first time, we said. The People's Committee was delighted.

A month after we returned home, the People's Committee of Da Nang received permission from Hanoi to create a simple memorial in the cove beside the old fort hill. Scheduled to be completed in May 2001, it will have inscriptions in English and Vietnamese. The memorial will celebrate cooperation between the country Seaman Cook served and the country that provided his final resting place.

President Clinton plans to visit Vietnam next month. The US Embassy in Hanoi has encouraged the White House to visit the cove. Clinton's trip is designed to embrace the future. But William Cook is the first innocent in a stormy relationship marked by the loss of innocence. His grave is a part of the past that both countries can embrace.