CIA AMBUSH

The Traffic Light

Leaves.

Thousands of them, raining down out of a clear sky. Branches too. I remember thinking, absurdly, that it looked like autumn — except this was Tây Ninh, and there is no autumn, and autumn doesn’t sound like that.

Twenty feet away, a tree had just come apart.

I was already moving. Out of the truck, into the air, down into a fence of concertina wire before my brain caught up with my body. My team thought it was the funniest thing they’d seen all week. There I was, an officer, tangled up like a fish in a net, cursing, while they laughed themselves sick.

Two weeks earlier, I’d started asking questions nobody wanted to answer.

Same truck. Same route. Same time, every single day. Lunch at the CIA compound, courtesy of the U.S. Army. Convenient. Predictable. Exactly what you don’t want to be in a war.

I called a meeting. Told the other officers we needed to vary our routes, change our departure times, stop making ourselves an appointment the enemy could keep. Most of them thought I was being paranoid. Maybe I was. I just didn’t want to die of stupidity.

There was one traffic light in Tây Ninh City. Three roads met there. We stopped at it every day, boxed in by hundreds of bikes and scooters, sitting still for the better part of a minute. I hated that light. I stopped riding in the back of the truck because of it.

Then the tree exploded.

The MPs found the answer afterward: two Claymore mines, wired to blow toward our truck. Command-detonated. Except somehow — nobody could say exactly how — they’d tipped backward before they went off. The blast went up into the treetops instead of into us.

Nobody was laughing at the wire fence after that.

I was put in charge of mission security from that day forward. Nobody questioned my paranoia again.