Another Man's Moccasins

Another Man's Moccasins is the fourth novel in Craig Johnson’s detective series about Sheriff Walt Longmire. Published in 2008, the novel returns the action to Longmire’s jurisdiction of Absaroka County, Wyoming, after the third novel’s detour to Philadelphia. In Another Man's Moccasins, the story is divided between two investigations: the murder of an unidentified woman in the present day and Longmire’s first ever homicide as a marine in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The narrative jumps back and forth between the two periods, linking Longmire’s feelings and experiences.

Longmire spends most of his time running for reelection as Sheriff and also acting as a rehab coach for his daughter, Cady, an ace attorney who is still recovering from the brutal assault she suffered in Johnson’s third Longmire novel, Kindness Goes Unpunished. However, he is recalled to duty when brothers and ranchers James and Den Dunnigan find the body of a young Vietnamese woman alongside the highway. As Longmire tries to figure out the dead woman’s identity, he can’t help but flash back to his days as a second lieutenant during the Vietnam War, where he served as a Marine investigator. His first case back then also involved a murdered young Vietnamese woman – a local sex worker.

Although the two stories are interwoven in the novel, this summary will narrate each separately in chronological order.



Longmire is drafted into the army as a USC graduate with an English degree. In 1967, he is sent to the army base in Tan Son Nhut to investigate a possible drug smuggling operation after the son of a U.S. Senator dies of a heroin overdose. He tackles the case with the help of two other officers: Mendoza of air force security and Baranski of the Central Intelligence Division. In Tan Son Nhut, Longmire spends a great deal of his time at a bar just outside Gate 055 near the “Hotel California” called the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge. There, he befriends Mai Kim, a bar hostess and they grow very close.

In the process of investigating this homicide, Longmire has a weekend off to meet up with his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, a Native American man who is part of the Cheyenne Nation or the Bear. In Vietnam, Standing Bear works as an expert sniper for RT One-Zero, Recon Team Wyoming and is partnered with Babysan Quang Sang, a sharpshooter from the indigenous Vietnamese Montagnard tribe.

In 1968, Longmire, suddenly deciding to experience the war firsthand, participates in the Battle of Khe Sahn, during the Tet Offensive. While he is away, Mai Kim is brutally murdered in a graveyard. On returning from the front, Longmire hallucinates a conversation with Mai Kim, which leads him to her body and shows him that she was somehow connected to the drug ring operating at the base.



In the present day, the investigation of the murdered Vietnamese woman in Wyoming leads to a nearby culvert, where the police find her purse – and also a seven-foot-tall, mentally unstable homeless man named Virgil White Buffalo. This find seems to make the case open and shut; they arrest Virgil and get him to jail after he takes down a few men.

However, Longmire doesn’t think that Virgil is responsible for the murder and continues trying to make sense of what has happened. With the help of Henry Standing Bear, who is now a barkeep, he learns that Virgil is a Crow Indian who also served in Vietnam, and whose experiences there have had a dramatic and lasting impact on his psychological wellbeing, partly because he was twice put in prison for crimes that he didn’t commit.

The woman’s purse identifies her as Ho Thi Paquet, a Vietnamese national in the U.S. illegally, who had six weeks earlier been arrested on prostitution charges in LA. But the purse also reveals something much more mysterious: a photograph of Mai Kim from the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge, with Longmire in the background of the shot playing the piano – a photograph taken forty years ago. A shocked Longmire continues to try to piece the puzzle together. Could Ho Thi be one of the “dust children” – a child born from the union of an American GI and a Vietnamese woman?



Following up on Ho Thi’s last known whereabouts, Longmire meets Tran Van Tuyen, a Vietnamese man who claims to be Ho Thi’s grandfather, a filmmaker, and also the head of an organization that helps half Vietnamese and half American children find their fathers. Tran tells Longmire that there was another girl traveling with Ho Thi, pressing him to find her as soon as possible – but there is something about this man that makes Longmire suspicious.

Eventually, we learn that Longmire’s hunch was right. Tran Van Tuyen isn’t anyone’s grandfather. He was part of the notorious Black Tigers and STRATA units during the Vietnam War – units that were later accused of a variety of war crimes. Now, he has been working as part of a human trafficking network smuggling Asian girls for the sex trade. When Ho Thi and another young woman escaped from their captors, Tran was charged with hunting them down. He killed Ho Thi when he caught up with her and she refused to give up the location of the other young woman, Ngo Loi Kim. After framing Virgil for the crime by throwing Ho Thi’s purse into his culvert, Tran has been trying to find Ngo Loi Kim.

Longmire finds Ngo Loi with the help of Virgil, who is then freed and disappears. Despite speaking almost no English, Ngo Loi has lucked out, hiding in a nearby Ghost Town. In a final showdown there, Tran is killed by rattlesnake bites and Longmire rescues Ngo Loi. Her last name turns out to be the clue that explains the photograph – the granddaughter of Mai Kim, she has held on to the photograph of her grandmother, Longmire’s name, and the emotional letter he wrote to the Kim family after Mai Kim’s death.