by Jack Twist
Chapter 18
Of all that happened in those hectic days, one my clearest memories is of that hour or so that Abbie and I spent together in the comfort and safety of the Continental Palace Hotel. For that little while the winds of war blew somewhere else and we were able to draw breath, drop our guards, see each other at last in the light of an almost normal situation. We felt, temporarily, tenuously, in charge of our lives, from the moment Abbie jumped out of the Lambretta and I followed. Come with me, she was saying. We’re in this together. And it’s okay. We like being together. And with less confidence, less courage perhaps, I agreed.
“Am I dressed okay?” My army greens, signifying no rank at all, didn’t seem right for a place like the Continental.
“I’m not exactly dressed for the Ritz myself.”
She insisted on a table inside, taking my arm as we went through the doorway, and we found a table for two that looked out over the street.
“I guess this is a little irresponsible but when I saw the place I couldn’t resist. This is our last time together, huh? I mean, really. And for God’s sake, papa san. I hardly know you and you’re the father of my child.”
When I looked around she laughed loudly enough to attract some attention, in particular from a table of young men nearby. When a waiter arrived she ordered some sort of highball. I ordered a beer.
“Now,” she said. “We can’t stay too long, obviously. I guess Julie is worried and I’d like to know why she didn’t come back for us. Though I’m kind of glad she didn’t, at the moment.”
“Me too, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“No. I’m glad. Although Killer might be worried. He and I might both get into trouble. Anyway, what else have you been up to? I thought maybe they would’ve sent you home by now. You’re not in any trouble, are you? I was told you’re restricted.”
Her restriction was supposed to be for her safety, she said, so her chaperone’s abandonment of her today, for all that she might have asked for it, raised questions. There were many questions. And where she could answer them, and where she could only try, she wanted to share those answers with me, willingly, exuberantly. Sometimes I struggled to keep up. My understanding of this country had been as limited as my interest, and I was about to be given a glimpse of the sort of commitment that some, like Abbie’s father, Jake Klein, were trying to make to its present and its future,
At present the man was in trouble. He was unwell. An attempt had been made on his life on the day that Lin was killed but, to date, his daughter had been unable to see him, though she was assured he was okay. ‘Stable,’ Julie liked to say. She promised Abbie that his assailants would be tracked down and punished and that he was in no more danger, but when Abbie suggested that Lin’s killers might have been involved, Julie Shields and her colleagues showed surprisingly little interest, even when the girl was able to provide a name, Lee Dang Bah. Instead of enquiring about him, all their focus was concentrated on someone else, a woman.
“Who?”
“Con Ma Nu, they call her. No. I hadn’t heard of her either and it’s not even her real name. And we both know her. Well, know of her. It’s an Intelligence code name allocated to Lin’s sister, and let me tell you, that shy looking woman is very well known to them.”
“Why? What’s she done?”
That was secret, too militarily sensitive for civilian ears, but it was clear that Con Ma Nu, Lin’s sister was the enemy. Abbie watched me as she considered, and then complained of her frustration at not being able to see her father to find out what was going on.
“Was your father very badly wounded?”
“Apparently he’s okay. But I can’t get details beyond what the hospital gives Julie.”
He was at a big military hospital in Danang, which made a visit impossible because it was too far north, up in Central Vietnam, and hitching a ride with the military was too risky. In any event Julie was too busy. She said she was doing all she could to arrange a phone link, but the military were difficult to deal with when you were asking special favours, especially for a civilian, and one of a thousand patients, many with needs greater than his.
But Abbie switched readily to the positive again. “Anyway, my dad likes to keep in pretty good shape. He’ll pull through. You know, I’m sure now that something was worrying Lin and him, from the day before we left Vung Tau. You see, Lin was going to have the baby there but on the day before we left she went out, something she seldom did, to see someone, a doctor or midwife, I think. And then, when she came back, she was on edge, and suddenly decided to have the baby at home, in Muc Thap. Something had scared them. And now the army has moved into the office temporarily while they investigate.”
Nearly all the embassy’s questions of Abbie had been concentrated around the person they called Con Ma Nu. When Abbie explained the sister’s attempts to save Lin’s life, her concerns for the baby, and Lin’s desperate warning, her naming of Lee Dang Bah, Julie would only say that she didn’t understand how ruthless the communists could be.
“Communists?”
She nodded as we sat back when the waiter arrived with our drinks. I looked around the big hotel room. It was relaxed and convivial and except for the uniforms, foreign to any suggestion of war. And Abbie’s tale was already proving a bit much for me. Lin’s sister certainly had no part in Lin’s death. We both knew that. From what we had seen they were close. And if Lin’s sister, known as Con Ma Nu, was a communist, was Lin? I was supposed to kill communists. Communists were supposed to kill me.
“Isn’t this Lee Dang Bah the communist?”
She shook her head. “I have no idea. They’re not interested in him. Only in Con Ma Nu.”
I remembered Lin’s sister’s strange and secretive demeanour. The assistance she gave us, if not the rescue, on the streets of south Saigon. And the nurse’s description of the scar, which, Abbie said, was particularly nasty and had precipitated all the excitement from the moment Abbie mentioned it to Julie. The appearance of Con Ma Nu on Saigon streets was the only reason we had got to go out to the orphanage that afternoon. Julie was familiarising herself with the whereabouts, looking for clues. It had very little to do with the baby.
What am I doing here? I asked myself. A nobody from nowheresville, hauled from ignorant obscurity, allocated a dump truck in South Vietnam and told where and when to drive it. Back home, drinks in a big hotel with a new and attractive female would mean, at this point, my parochial and self-conscious attempts at wit and savoir faire, and responses from her dependent on her degree of interest in me as a partner, for the future, the evening, or the next drink.
At this moment I could be preparing for a night on the town, Saigon no less, with Killer and his neat, Saigon-soldier mates. But I looked at Abbie, who had no one to turn to. Julie Shields’ support was at best distracted. Her father, for the present at least, was beyond contact. There was only me.
I watched her take a sip from her glass and look out the window. “Julie’s been good to me though. They could cancel my visa, bundle me back to the States, but she feels sorry for me. She’s responsible for the embassy putting me up, until my dad is well again.”
I followed her eyes, watching pushbikes and motorbikes moving past the window. It occurred to me how different the lives of the world’s inhabitants could be, even beyond the obvious. I remembered some friends back home, a year or two older, getting to the polling booth too late to vote in the 1969 federal election. They had wanted to have their say on the war but the surf just wouldn’t drop off in time. Here, people were fighting and dying over their country’s political direction.
Abbie was looking down at her glass, and, as if the baby was already in her care, explaining her need to let Lin’s family know. “Her aunt put her in that orphanage so they know where she is, or at least who has her. They don’t want to lose track of her, naturally. The embassy people are amazed at her nerve, going into an American hospital, such as it was. But we know how willing that
hospital would have been to get rid of the baby to an orphanage.”
I suggested that she not go out to the orphanage alone. That you never knew who might be watching, or what might happen next. “Did you ever wonder how Lin’s sister found us so soon after we got out of the jungle.”
“I know. But we know it’s just an orphanage and I’ll have Julie and Chuck with me, I’m sure. Although I’d rather it were you. There’s no chance? Tomorrow? If I got away as early as possible?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have that sort of freedom. And I’m not sure I could find the street again. Could you? On your own?”
Of course she was nodding. “I took pretty careful note.’‘
I looked out through the hotel window again. It was now quite dark so that most of the traffic had their lights on. My first view of Saigon at night. I wondered if many of these people were involved in the war. Had sons, husbands, brothers, or daughters, wives, sisters, in the fighting. Or were involved in some secret way. In the service of people like Con Ma Nu?
We were told we were here to save them. They did not look like a people who needed saving. Even without all the concrete and glass and technology we took for granted, this city bustled and throbbed. Watching the rivers of people flooding its streets, their commitment to where they were going, I wondered what sort of force it would take to bring a city like this to its knees, sap its lifeblood, make it still. Politics might come and go but Saigon looked like it would go on forever.
It had been one of those rare days without rain and with the glare of the daylight faded, the city was easier to look at. I looked back to the girl sitting opposite me, who was also easy to look at. “Well, I hope your father gets better soon. And good luck and be careful tomorrow, mama san. I’ll be with you in spirit.” I sat back and finished my beer. “I would love to be doing this somewhere else.”
But she ignored this, her mind still on the baby. “I have to do it tomorrow. And Julie will have to come with me, after I tell her that it’s not only an orphanage but one run by two little old ladies.”
“Who charge one hundred dollars per baby.”
“That’s right. And apart from that I think Julie’ll want to have a look for herself. And she’ll take Chuck. Chuck’s ex infantry. He’s seen action. He’s been posted at the embassy and is sort of Julie’s private guard.”
“She has her own private guard?”
She flashed me a look. “Well, more of a driver really. He does have other duties. I told you. Julie’s a career diplomat. The foreign service is her life and she likes the hot spots. She’s actually sorry she missed the Tet Offensive. She was in Berlin in sixty-eight. The only thing Julie hates more than the press is communists. She says communists place their political aims above all normal human feeling, and some of her stories about what they do to uncooperative villagers are frightening. I think she wants me to see Lin in that light.”
“Lin? Well, if they’re sure Lin is a communist, and her sister, why would her sister want to harm her?”
“That’s right. Julie gets very vague about it. It’s apparently all beyond me. She’ssuggested, more than once, that my father’s relationship with Lin didn’t do his reputation much good.”
“Your father’s done nothing wrong, has he?’
She shook her head slowly as she looked around again. “My father is a scientist.” But she lowered her voice and seemed momentarily to size me up before explaining that Jake Klein had made his concerns about the Saigon government all too clear, even to the military, which may not have been prudent. Because at the same time Lin had been found to be in some sort of contact with Hanoi. “And with their living together like husband and wife, his apolitical, geologist persona doesn’t wash quite so well. And, though Julie wouldn’t say so, I doubt it helps me get access to the hospital in Danang.”
She took another sip and said nothing for a moment. I looked around for a waiter and noticed two uniformed recent arrivals at the table near us. I couldn’t identify the uniform. They observed us closely, Abbie in particular, and only looked away as the waiter arrived and I ordered myself another beer. Abbie’s glass was still half full.
She looked up from her thoughts. “You know, apparently Lin’s sister spends most of her time underground, in the jungle. But she’s naturally as concerned for the baby as I am. As is little Mai, her sister. And so, indirectly, the baby saved us, on the way into Saigon.”
“And in the jungle,” I said. “Arkansas said if he hadn’t heard the baby he would never have gone looking for us.”
“My little sister. Our saviour. I’ll enjoy telling her all about it one day.”
I picked up my drink as I said, “But Lieutenant Jefferies wasn’t so lucky.”
“No. That was horrible. His death so ... gratuitous. It was wrong, my father using you guys the way he did. That’s one thing I agree with Julie on. But he was sure it was the safest way to get Lin and me out.”
“Someone must have picked up the trail. I first noticed them in Baria.”
“And they always seemed so calm. Especially Lin. So that I wouldn’t worry. They were protecting me the whole time.” She considered this a moment. “And I’m sure Julie has told my father how wrong he was to use the Australians. She sure told me. She said it made it look like he didn’t even trust his own military.”
“Would he know about the lieutenant?”
“I don’t know. Julie says she passes on all information to him, when she can.”
Abbie wanted to know about the young officer. I could tell her very little.
“He seemed English. I guess you all do. The way you say ‘leftenant’ for example. But him more so. He was one I could have imagined playing cricket.”
“Yeh. And he did.”
She took a moment to survey the big room again, meeting the looks from our close neighbours and I took the opportunity to look at her. The death of Thi Lin Quang had thrown us together in ways we barely understood and I wanted to touch her again, even at this moment, to put my hand on hers, surrounded as we were by unknown people with agendas to fit this volatile and mysterious world.
She seemed to read my thoughts. “Thanks for this, Mark.” She smiled. “I guess I’m glad you chased after me the way you did. Even if you did scare me at the time.”
“I’d chase after you any time, any place.” It sounded immediately trite and frivolous, in particular after the torment she had just shared with me. When she made no response and reached for her glass I tried for some sincerity. “Listen. Not that I want to go yet, but will you be okay to get back inside the embassy?”
“Sure. I’m practically a resident there.” She smiled again. “You worry too much. You know that?”
“Only when you’re around.”
She put the glass down. “And you’re a bit of a smooth talker when you want to be, aren’t you, papa san.”
“Take no notice. I’m just feeling good about seeing you again.” She watched me steadily, head rested on her hands. I said what I had tried to say earlier. “And I wish we were doing this somewhere else. And some other time.”
She looked around again. “There is no place,” she said quietly. “Nor is there the time.”
“I often think about our night in Arkansas’ tree-house.”
“Do you? And which part of our stay do you recall most clearly? The staircase? The apartment? Perhaps our bedroom guest?”
“Have you told anyone about him?”
“Yes. But Julie’s always so busy.”
“What will happen to him? When she reports him?”
If Julie ever had time to report him, Abbie presumed soldiers would be sent to bring him back to his unit, and his senses. I imagined they would be military police. He’d be arrested for desertion.
“Well,” she said. “We couldn’t just leave him there. Up his tree. We couldn’t just forget him.”
“No. I don’t suppose so. Or his honeymoon suite. I’ll never forget that.” She said nothing but her eyes stay
ed with mine. “Remember his honeymoon suite?” She nodded, smiling. “And now we’ll probably never see each other again.”
“You are not the only one to have thought about it. This war will actually end one day, you know.” She sat back and took up her glass. “And you must remember you did catch me off guard. I was feeling good about things at the time. Thought everything was going to be okay. And anyway,” she moved in closer again, “as I said earlier, Private Ross, I hardly know you. Because I talk too much and I never give you a chance to tell me about you. You played cricket in Australia is all I know about you.”
“Well, after your family it’s all pretty boring.”
“All pretty normal probably. Tell me about your family. Do you have any ... immediate family? You don’t have a wife and kids back in Australia, I hope. You’re good with babies”
“Hell, no. No immediate family. Not in that sense anyhow.”
“A girlfriend? Her picture in your wallet?”
“No. Nothing like that. I was still at home when I got called up.”
“And who else was at home?”
“Just my mother and father. He sells real estate in Brisbane. My mum does too, now, although she’s actually a trained nurse. I have two older sisters, both married.”
“With many babies and they taught you how to handle them.”
“One with three babies. One now in school. And actually it was my mother who showed me the most when she was babysitting them.”
“Go on. What did you do? Apart from play cricket?”
“I worked for an insurance company, a big one in the city.”
“Have you ever been outside of Australia before?
“No. Nor has anyone else in my family. We’re a sedentary lot, I s’pose you’d say. Both my sisters live fairly close by. And my father is president of the local cricket club. At least I think he still is.”
“Aha. And you are team captain. And star.”
“No. I’ve never made it into the first grade, yet. My coach says that as a bowler I have good technique but lack killer instinct.”
“Killer instinct? For cricket?”
“Yeh.”
“Sounds serious.”
“Well, not really. What about you? Do you have any ... immediate family?”
“Oh, God. You’ve heard too much about my family already. If you can call it a family.”
“It’s a family. But anyone else? A boyfriend?”
She nodded. “Ex. Quite ex. One of the last things he said to me was that I was crazy.”
“You’re not crazy.”
“Thank you. But he’s older than you and has a doctorate in psychology. He said my need to go traipsing off to the world’s most dangerous country, in search of my father, was the result of my broken family. Apparently I’m trying to do what my mother couldn’t. Keep my father at home. He said I am basically insecure, because of my unstable family. He wasn’t very happy with me at the time.”
“He was just sorry to lose you.”
“Yes, I guess. But sometimes I wonder about what he said.”
“Forget it. He was being mean because he was sorry to lose you. How old was he?”
“Thirty-six. Oh, I know. Don’t ask. It’s over.” She sat back, picked up her glass and moved it around in both hands, not drinking.
He was fifteen years her senior. Had she been looking for security? Or had it been love? I preferred to imagine naïve, impressionable girl and impressive, older intellectual, egotistical, taking advantage.
“You met him in college. Where you were studying English.” She nodded. “What sort of English?”
“English spread rather thin, I’m afraid. A sprinkling of all sorts. Milton to Mailer. I suppose it’ll mean teaching. My brother is the bright one. And a scientist like my father. And now he’s living like some hippy in a Canadian mountain town.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad.”
But her eyes reddened and she put the glass down and looked away. “Goddamn this war.”
We sat quietly looking out the window again. I still didn’t feel that close to it all. More like a spectator who had witnessed a terrible accident. Lieutenant Jefferies was someone I worked with but for whom I had no special feelings. I was a willing contributor to the shoulder-tapping jokes. Thi Lin Quang, for all Abbie’s accounts, was for me a mysterious foreigner. And I had a family whose movements I could have predicted almost on a daily basis, ready to welcome me home when the time came. At that moment, as close as I had been, physically, to the victims of the attack along that road in Bien Hoa, I was only sorry for the girl.
She smiled at me, forcing that confidence of hers through the sadness. “I just have to remember. I’m getting my baby back tomorrow.”
We can do it. That was one of the most popular slogans used on American vehicles. The Americans. They loved their slogans. And they could do anything. She took a sip of her drink and I asked if she wanted a fresh one.
“No thanks. I can’t stay for much longer. Julie must be starting to worry by now.”
“Yeh. I should go soon too. Before the Killer and I finish up in big trouble.”
“Oh, let’s just finish this drink.”
She took hers up for another small sip. Mine was empty. “Okay. I’ll get myself one more then.”
I looked around for a waiter. There was none handy and I decided to buy a drink at the bar. “Excuse me a moment.”
I made my way through tables and chairs, nearly all occupied, past the lavish, colonial décor. I wished I could tell her something from my background that might brighten her mood, something away from the war. But my past seemed so ordinary in the light of hers. I had no picture in my wallet, not even a family photo that might, for a few moments at least, have taken her mind off what was happening to her family.
And no girlfriend. Even before my army call up the girl I was seeing had begun to tire of my absence on weekends, weekends that I filled with cricket, drinks after, and whatever clubs and pubs might follow for the singles in the team.
Saigon’s Continental Hotel reminded me of Sandra at that point because we had often met at another grand old colonial style hotel - the Bellvue in Brisbane. The last time I saw her we had met there, only a week before I left for Vietnam. It had been six months since we’d been out together and when I called she explained that she was ‘practically engaged’. She insisted on bringing a friend, her ‘bridesmaid to be’. I’m sure she saw the meeting as a kind of voluntary civic duty, farewelling one of the troops en route to active service.
“You could bring a friend too. Yes, do that. One of the guys going with you might be nice.”
Well, not nice for me. The one soldier who was going with me was Greg Urquhart, at present our company’s driver/carpenter, the indispensable Mr Fix-it, and when I had explained my dilemma he insisted he join me with the two girls. We were sharing the same barracks block at Northern Command Personnel Depot at Brisbane’s Enoggera base, effectively in transit, and if a friendship had developed between us, as a consequence of our waiting to go to the same overseas unit, then it was of necessity. We were stuck together. As I felt we were on that night.
None of this augured well for the evening. But I had called Sandra after drinking with a few cricket mates during that afternoon. My vision was clouded, hopes higher than good sense would have allowed, hopes, that is, for something like the passion we had shared on a few occasions in the past, heightened with a goodbye fling aspect, and sympathy for the heroic young digger off to do his bit.
“Yes? Great. It’ll be great to catch up. Yeh, okay, I’ll get a mate. No worries. The Bellvue? Eightish? Great! Can’t wait!” Alcohol is of course a drug.
Sandra would have seen through my plan, heard the excitement in my voice. And she must have felt dragged from the past, as it were, because I had no one else. The uncertainty, the itinerancy of army life made relationships difficult to initiate, especially at a time when women in the forces were so few. And in the age of Hair, short back
and sides meant you’d somehow missed the sixties, or spent your Sundays in a white shirt and black tie spreading God’s word in the suburbs. Or you were in the army.
The first couple of hours of the evening went quietly, a little too quietly for me. And not only because of the time that had elapsed between then and when I left my mates. I heard too much from the bridesmaid about the wedding. Too much from Urquhart about the army. The presence of the girls underscored the differences in our personalities. If I triedfor a kind of droll, debonair banter, mixed with earthy Aussie charm, Urquhart didn’t. No self-deprecating twaddle from him. He was blessed with more confidence and told it as he saw it. And the girls seemed to like it.
I could have cruelled it for him at any moment by asking about his wife and child, but I was enjoying too much the reflected glory from his overblown accounts of our military achievements, past and future. And I was also caught up with my own hopes for the evening. After all Sandra glowed, even more, it seemed, than in the past. It must be like old times for her, I decided. And she glowed as well, no doubt, in recognition and appreciation of the courage and self-sacrifice that I, her former lover, was about to display in foreign fields. Listen to my good mate here, beautiful, sexy girl. Because whatever heroics he claims for himself go ditto for me.
Her smile faded when her friend agreed to leave with her blind date, but I imagined that that concern for her bridesmaid-to-be, just then, was the product of some pre-nuptial bond between them, strengthening as the wedding approached. Then she had to leave at eleven and I escorted her out to the George Street footpath, was about to hail a cab when she informed me that her fiancé was picking her up. “We can give you a lift.”
I sat in the back of a Chrysler Valiant, sobering quickly and answering Sandra’s polite questions about my overseas posting, with enthusiasm and information as scant as Greg Urquhart’s had been profuse. I don’t know if my despondency prompted the fiancé but he felt the need to tell us that he almost wished his number had come up.
“I envy you in a way. Must be a great challenge.”
He reached across and shook my hand outside Enoggera barracks. “Nice to meet you, Mark. Hope it all goes well.”
Sandra got out, kissed me on the cheek and told me to take care.
I phoned her a week later, just before I embarked, to offer a well-meant goodbye. Of course she reciprocated appropriately, and warmly. I had wondered if I should bother her again but felt pleased that I had, up until she thanked me for bringing Greg. Her girlfriend had had a wonderful time with him. I suppose he was attractive to girls, muscular and athletic with blond hair and clear blue eyes that dared you to disagree.
And so, I couldn’t resist. “Tell her he’s married.”
Soon after our arrival in Vung Tau, Urquhart had convinced everybody of his importance but, in truth, it was through his energy, versatility and all round competence that he established the sort of independence where he almost decided for himself whether he went out on convoy or attended to compound repairs.
He was a doer. At just twenty-one, a qualified tradesman, sometime professional footballer, with wife and child, anxious to start his own business as soon as he got home. During our off-duty hours at Enoggera he’d explained his plans to me, proudly, confidently. From what he said I thought his wife sounded more interesting than her virile young husband. A nurse who had wanted to be a doctor, until she fell pregnant, she had tried to have him excused from overseas service. “There must be a way out if you have a family.” There were arguments. He didn’t want a way out. No hiding behind a woman’s skirt for this proud young digger.
And a good soldier he proved to be. But he was also a self-appointed authority among us. He liked an audience, held court rather than spoke to people, explaining in definitive terms all that they should know about whatever, usually things that interested him, especially Aussie Rules football, the building trades and even the military. I found him an unmitigated pain in the arse, although that might say more about my character deficiencies than his.
