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that his name had been put up to command the U.S. forces in Vietnam. He also heard that they wanted me to head up the intelligence section for the Army Special Forces command in Vietnam. We both knew that the army mission in Vietnam was headed for disaster because it was a think-tank war. And the people in the think tank were more worried about restraining the army than in wiping out the Vietcong. So Trudeau had a plan: "We'll either win the war or get court-martialed, " he said. "But they'll know we were there. " And he laughed when he said that the same way he was laughing as he told me to take my time with the contents of the file cabinet. "You'll want to think about this before you start writing any reports, " he said. | couldn't help but pick up the nervousness in his voice, forcing itself through his laughter, the same sound over the phone that got me nervous when | heard it the first time. There really was something here he wasn't telling me. "Is there something else about this | should know, General?" | asked, trying not to show any hesitation in my voice. Business as usual, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing anybody can throw my way that | can't handle. "Actually, Phil, the material in this cabinet is a little different from the run-of-the-mill foreign stuff we've seen up to now, " he said. "| don't know if you've ever seen the intelligence on what we've got here when you were over at the White House, but before you write up any summaries maybe you should do a little research on the Roswell file. " Now I'd heard more about Roswell than | was ready to admit right on the spot my first day at the Pentagon. And there were more wild stories floating around about Roswell and what we were still doing there than anyone could have imagined. But | hadn't made the connection between the Roswell files and what was in the cabinet General Trudeau was talking about. Basically | had hoped after Fort Riley that it would all go away and | could simply stick my head in the sand and worry about things | could get my brain around like bureaucratic in fighting inside Washington instead of little aliens inside sealed coffins. The general didn't wait for me to answer him. He left me standing there in his office and walked out to the reception room, where | heard him giving orders into a speaker phone. He had barely clicked off the speaker and walked back to where | was standing when four enlisted men pulling a hand truck showed up, saluted, and stood there at attention while Trudeau kept looking at me. He didn't say anything. He turned to the enlisted men instead. "Load up this cabinet on that dolly and follow the colonel to his office on the second floor. Don't stop for anybody. Don't talk to anybody. If anyone stops you, you tell them to see me. That's an order." Then he turned back to me. "Why don't you take some time with this, Phil. " He paused. "But not too much time. Sergeant" - he turned his attention back to the enlisted man with the shortest haircut - "please see the colonel back to his own office below. " They loaded the file cabinet onto the dolly as if there were nothing inside, pulled it toward the back door, and stared at me until | followed them out. "Not too much time, Colonel, " General Trudeau called after me as we went out the door and down the hall. | remember | spent quite a while just looking at that cabinet after it was loaded off the dolly and set up in my inner office. There was an almost ominous quality to it that belied its quiet, official army presence. So | must confess that, given the reverse hype of the general's introduction, part of me wanted to tear it open right away as if it were a present on Christmas morning. But the part of me that won just let it sit there, protected, until | thought about what General Trudeau had said about Roswell and the amount of paper work that had circulated through the White House when | was on the National Security staff there. No, | wasn't going to review the Roswell files. Not just yet. Not until | took a long hard look at what was inside this file cabinet. But even that was going to wait until the rest of my office was set up. Whatever | was supposed to do, | wanted to do it right. I spent a little time pacing around my new office while | thought some more about what the general said, why this file was waiting for me in his private office, and why he had wanted to talk to me specifically about it. It also wasn't lost on me that | had not seen one scrap of paper from the general covering his delivery of the material to me nor my receipt of it. It could have just as easily been that this file cabinet didn't even exist. As far as | knew, only his eyes and soon my eyes would review it. So whatever it was, it was serious and, only if by omission, very secret. | remembered a hot July night fourteen years before at Fort Riley when | was the young intelligence officer after having just been shipped back from Rome. | remembered being hustled into a storage hangar by one of the sentries, a fellow member of the Fort Riley bowling team. What he pointed to under the thick olive tarp that night was also very, very secret, and | held my breath, hoping that what was inside this cabinet wasn't anything like what | saw that night in Kansas, July 6, 1947. | opened the cabinet, and almost immediately my heart sank. | knew, from looking at the shoebox of tangled wires and the strange cloth, from the vise-like headpiece and the little wafers that looked like Ritz crackers only with broken edges and colored a dark gray, and from an assortment or other items that | couldn't even relate to the shapes and sixes of things | was familiar with, that my life was headed for a big 18