If they can’t get the officer out, I realize too, they’re going to kill him.
My pilot’s name was Basus. For three days in Saigon, in Division Headquarters at Kendall Air Force Base, he and I were briefed. In that time, we barely exchanged a word. At the canteen we shared a couple of cold meals together, in silence. Our quarters were far apart. And in the dark, early morning hours of January 18th when he was killed, he was less than a thousand feet from me, but I could barely see him. We were high in the air, parachuting into the jungle after ejecting from our plane. From beneath camouflage nets, the antiaircraft battery that caught us flying so low—never mind the radar-blocking and the moonless night—had then turned its 20mm gun on our parachutes. The Pathet Lao don’t bother themselves with the Geneva Convention. They strafed Basus, and the last I saw of him, his helmet was tilted severely and his body was limp as his parachute sailed into the black trees like a ghost.
I closed my eyes and waited for them to turn the gun on me. My whole life didn’t pass before me: just a single moment, which I had often revisited, even when I wasn’t awaiting a hail of gunfire.
It was on the afternoon in February 1945 (the month you were born) that I visited the Fleischmann Planetarium in Reno, Nevada, with my mother. I was seven years old. We were standing in a room with black walls just outside the auditorium before an enlarged X-ray photograph of the Andromeda Galaxy. The galaxy nearest our own. We were waiting to see the show that ran every two hours, called “A Trip to the Stars.” My mother was wearing black gloves and a black dress and her long hair flowed out of a wide-brimmed hat. She was holding my hand and reading me the card on the wall next to the photograph when a man came up to us out of the darkness. He was wearing a white suit and he tipped his hat to her. The hat was white, too, with a black band. His face I never saw clearly; for someone my height, it was impossible to distinguish in the gloomy light of that anteroom.
In a low voice he began speaking to my mother. A voice I will never forget. Confident and confidential, with a tinge of urgency. A seducer’s voice, I would realize only when I was older. At seven, all I knew was that it was a type of voice I had never heard before. My mother was a very beautiful woman. I was aware that men looked closely at her. On the street. Even in our house. And I knew that she and my father had many acquaintances in Reno. I was used to people coming up to them when we were out. But never like this, with this kind of voice. Or with this man’s body language, as he smoothed his yellow tie leaning into and away from her at the same time.
As she talked with him, my mother let go of my hand. I waited for her to take it again, but she didn’t. Maybe three minutes had passed. Yet I knew instinctively that in that brief time I had lost her. I knew it in the following weeks when she and my father argued even more than usual. Knew it when she kept slipping out of the house without a word, first in the afternoons, then at night. Knew it before the commotion one morning in March when the maid breathlessly descended the spiral staircase to tell my father, just returned from Vegas, that my mother was gone. And that she had taken her two largest suitcases and all her jewelry and a swath of clothes from her walk-in closet.
The rest of her bedroom my father tore apart. I had seen him angry many times, but coldly so. Never enraged. Never breaking things over his knee or hurling them against a wall or tearing them to shreds, as he did with the things my mother had left behind. If he was looking for something in that big corner room flooded with desert light, he didn’t find it. My mother was not the type to leave a note. Or send a letter afterward. In fact, she never communicated with him again. Or with me, to whom she had not said good-bye.
All I ever heard was that she had first traveled to Honolulu and then possibly disappeared into Southeast Asia. When I was looking for you over the last few months, in Thailand and Japan and Hawaii, following hunches, chasing after third-hand information, it struck me it was the way I might once have set out to find my mother. A quest that would have proved equally futile, I’m afraid.
The only thing I knew for sure when my mother left was that she was with that man in the white suit who had approached us at the planetarium. Looking up at her profile, her smiling eyes, I felt a cold thread of fear wind its way around my heart. I would never forget the two of them in that black room, she in black, he in white, before the blazing ring of Andromeda.
I never saw my mother again.
When I opened my eyes all those years later in Laos, swinging from my parachute, waiting for the artillery flash out of the darkness that would mean my death, I gazed up quickly at the night sky, at the stars, certain I would never see them again. That they would be the last things I ever saw.
Descending fast over the jungle canopy, I braced myself, but the artillery fire never came. I hit the ground as my plane exploded into a hillside several miles to the south. Cutting loose from my parachute, I took out my pistol and plunged into the brush. I heard an animal thrashing nearby and all around me the birds were clattering. Without a machete, in the darkness, I knew I wasn’t going to get far. There was a lot of bamboo, sharp as razor blades, cutting my hands and face.
Within minutes I heard men approaching me, slashing through the bamboo. First to my right and left, and then from behind. There can be few worse feelings than being surrounded, hearing a circle tighten around you. They saw me before I saw them and one of them switched on a flashlight, trained it on me, and started shouting. As I spun around, half-blinded by the light, searching for an opening, they emerged from the brush, a dozen men in motley uniforms. Rubber ponchos, NVA jackets, Chinese battle fatigues, plastic sandals, Russian boots, even an American infantryman’s uniform, torn up in the back where he’d been shot. His name tag, still sewn on, read SAFKAS.
I dropped my pistol and raised my arms over my head. Immediately one of them slammed a rifle butt into my back and another clubbed me on the head with the heel of his machete handle. I fell to my knees, sharper lights flashing in my eyes and the mud seeping through my pants as I waited again for a bullet, this time just one, in the back of the head.
But they had no intention of killing me outright. They wanted to take me alive, to interrogate me. And this was even before they had ascertained my rank. Why they had mowed Basus down without hesitation—why him by chance and not me—preferring one prisoner to two, I would never know.
When they searched me and discovered that I was an Air Force major, they got very excited. But they didn’t treat me any better.
Five hours later, after they had blindfolded me and tied my hands and run me through the jungle, they beat me across the shoulders when I refused to eat something still moving—an insect—that one of them pushed into my mouth. My back and head were still throbbing, on fire, from the previous blows I had taken. When my hands were finally untied, I would find a lump the size of a plum on my skull and my hair matted with blood.
We reached our destination, wherever that was, and I was made to stand against a tree under a blistering sun. I heard men barking out commands and cursing. Once a truck came and went, and a couple of motorbikes. My knees and elbows were raw, and the flies and mosquitoes were going after the blood on my face. Twice someone slapped me. Once I was spat on. For the third time that morning, I thought I was going to be executed. I strained my ears to distinguish the sounds of a firing squad: men shuffling into a line, rifles being loaded and cocked. Had they in fact wanted to kill me, it was more likely my executioner would have been another sixteen-year-old shooting from the hip with an M-1.
Standing against that tree, exhausted and hungry, I was the most scared I had been all day. And suddenly I had the time to think about it. My eyes were open beneath the blindfold and I tried to keep the rest of my face taut, to show nothing.
Finally someone led me away from the tree and pushed me into a dank place with a dirt floor. The stench was overpowering—excrement, urine, vomit. I got sick myself, and tried to roll away from the smell. I wasn’t alone anymore: beyond my blindfold there were moans, whispers, coughi
ng. I could hear breathing close up, could feel myself being studied. “Are you Americans?” I said after a long time, my own voice sounding miles away. No one replied.
I lay there in the dirt. The hours crawled by. I had begun to realize that this was not going to be over anytime soon: I could be facing months, probably years, in a hole just like this one—maybe worse.
It was night when they removed my blindfold and untied my hands. At first, even the darkness in that place hurt my eyes. Then things came clear and I saw that I was in a long, narrow, windowless hut with about twenty other men. The others all had a wooden block secured around one ankle, to immobilize them. I hadn’t gotten mine yet. Only two of the men were Americans: a helicopter gunner and a marine corporal. Then there were South Vietnamese Army soldiers and six montagnard guerillas.
The marine told me all this. He had been a prisoner for two years, the gunner for eleven months. All he ever thought about, he told me, was escape. After less than a day of captivity, I could understand that.
His name was Geal. He was from south Texas. He had been captured in a fire fight near Par Kung after the rest of his platoon was wiped out. He told me the Pathet Lao moved him and the others around all the time. He said that as an officer above the rank of lieutenant I would be taken to a special compound for interrogation. Probably, I thought, the very place I was to have photographed from the plane. I might even meet the captain who knew too much. And maybe now the Special Forces commandos would come in and kill both of us. Except they didn’t have the map I was to have drawn for them. So instead the Air Force would just carpet-bomb the place.
This was the way my thoughts were running, lying there in the dirt.
Geal told me another thing: the montagnards were the last men captured before me, just two days earlier. Montagnards means mountaineers, the thirty-three tribes that inhabit the Central Highlands which straddle Vietnam and Laos. Centuries before those two countries came into existence, the montagnards’ ancestors were settling the steep mountain forests. Tough and independent, they survived the French and now the NVA by uniting their fighting men under one command—FULRO, a French acronym for the “United Fighting Front of the Oppressed Races.”
The montagnards imprisoned with me were from the Bru tribe, the toughest of all the FULRO forces. They despised the Pathet Lao and the VC, who in turn feared them. Geal said the Pathet Lao didn’t like to take Bru prisoners. The Bru believe imprisonment is tantamount to death. Their comrades did everything they could to free them, regardless of the risks. If the prisoners were executed, their Bru comrades pursued the executioners to the death. So even after a battle they’d won, the Pathet Lao seldom rounded up the Bru that hadn’t been killed. It was better to let them slip back into the forests.
I didn’t know it at the time, but if I was going to be shot down again, I couldn’t have picked a better time than that day or a better place than that district. The fact I had then been brought as a prisoner to that particular penal way station probably saved my life.
The next day at dawn, two guards pulled me outside the hut. They gave me a cup of water and a lump of dried rice, and then tied my hands again behind my back. Next they brought out the six montagnards and with mallets knocked the wooden blocks from their ankles. They gave them water but no rice, and after tying their hands behind their backs, ran a rope between them, so the six had to walk as one—like a centipede, I thought—as they preceded me into the jungle along a narrow trail. I never again saw Geal, the copter gunner, or any of the other men in that hut.
By midday, we had forded two rivers and entered a scorched valley where most of the trees had been cut down. We were heading due east, I realized with alarm, toward North Vietnam. Toward the prison compound near the border that I was to have photographed. I tried to put out of my mind the inquisition that would await me there. I only hoped my aerial cameras had been destroyed when my plane crashed. The NVA were known to be especially brutal with fliers doing surveillance work, blinding them with acid, cutting off their ears. If they found out the object of the surveillance had been their own compound, I would really be in for it.
After we had walked several more miles, a jagged green mountain range appeared suddenly on the horizon. At the sight of these mountains, the Bru became visibly animated, though they tried to conceal it from our captors.
My few previous encounters with montagnards had been in Saigon, where they were like fish out of water. Ears attuned to the sounds and silences of alpine forests, they found the clatter of the city intolerable. They always seemed rigid and uncomfortable in the regulation combat boots and khaki they had been issued. And few Vietnamese understood their guttural tribal dialects.
In their own element, in the mountains, wearing scant, loose-fitting clothes, they were a handsome, wiry people, lithe and well-proportioned, with coppery skin and choppy black hair. Just over five feet tall, the Bru men were generally bowlegged, which is an asset on steep slopes and dangerous cliffs. Their small feet were so callused they could travel over the roughest terrain barefoot, as if they were wearing sandals. Nearly all of the Bru—men and women—were tattooed. Some had barely noticeable markings: a circle or a line of dots on their ankles. Others had elaborate images—the heads of birds or fishes—painted on their backs and chests, or even their faces. The prisoner just ahead of me that morning had a tattoo of a dog with stars for eyes. As we trudged into the swelter of midday, I tried to focus on it, to distract from my pain.
I would soon discover that, among their other attributes, the Bru possessed an acute sense of smell and extremely powerful eyesight, like the mountain tigers they worshipped. The Bru claim that the only man they truly fear is the one who might come into their village carrying some part of a tiger’s anatomy on his person. It doesn’t matter if it’s a tooth, a piece of fur, a bone. They believe such a man can turn himself into a tiger at will. Later, the prisoner with the dog tattoo, whose name was Nol, would tell me matter-of-factly that it was just such a man who came to our rescue that day.
Whoever it was struck with the swiftness of a tiger just as we were preparing to ford yet another muddy river with the rifles of the Pathet Lao on our backs. I heard successive arrows hiss by me and saw two of our guards crumple to the ground. The arrows were short, with black-and-orange feathered arrows. Panicking, the other guards opened fire point-blank at the montagnard prisoners and five of them toppled facedown on the riverbank. Instinctively I dived into a thicket of reeds, grabbing Nol’s shirt and dragging him along with me. Then, as the guards fired blindly into the bush, they were picked off one by one, black-and-orange feathered arrows through their hearts. When the smoke cleared, of seven prisoners and fifteen guards only Nol and I had survived.
Bok-Klia, he cried, still tethered to his dying comrades, Bok-Klia. Later I would learn that this meant “Lord Tiger,” the man-tiger whose quiver contains arrows feathered with the colors of the great cat. He is also called “Mister 30” because, when enraged, he will kill a different man every day for a month.
I would learn many things after Nol and I managed to make our way deep into those green mountains I had first glimpsed from the scorched plain. But whether we had been rescued by a band of men or one man with the power of ten, I never found out. Nol’s answer to my queries was always the same: Bok-Klia.
It took us three days through the roughest country I had ever seen to reach his village. Torn up by mosquitoes and nettles, we ate what we could find. Plants, mushrooms, and roots handpicked by Nol. According to the Brus’ law, for saving his life I was now more than a brother to him. Which was how he treated me.
On the third day of our trek, he ended up carrying me on his back, a dead weight. I don’t know how he did it. The previous night, I had slashed my ankle right through my boot while crossing a swamp. At first I didn’t realize I was cut and the swamp water went to work on me. Within an hour I was feverish, my leg throbbing all the way up to the hip. Nol packed my ankle with a white moss held fast by sticky blue leaves. H
e made me chew a bitter black root and keep the pulp in my mouth as long as I could. And he tied a stringy fern tightly just below my knee, like a tourniquet.
We took shelter from a heavy downpour in a shallow cave, and the last thing I remember is watching Nol rig up a kind of stretcher out of bamboo. When I next woke up without fever, clear in the head, I was lying on a straw mat in a dark room with a thatched ceiling. I had no idea how much time had passed. The walls of the room were thick bamboo. A black macaw with an orange bill was perched in the open window. Incense was burning in a brass bowl. A pair of ox skulls painted bloodred flanked the low doorway. And there was a crossbow hung on the opposite wall, just like the one in the CO’s office back in Saigon.
14 October
I used to fall asleep in that bamboo room, Mala, trying to put myself in your place when you didn’t hear from me after Manila. I tried, but it was too painful. I knew the Air Force would have told you nothing. Less than nothing. As only they can do. You must have thought I was dead. Even now, as I write this, watching the desert sun rise through my window, I know you must think I’m dead. If you’re thinking of me at all, that is, wherever you are.
In fact, for a long time the Air Force knew nothing about my whereabouts. I had been on a mission about which maybe six people knew the details. The wreckage of my plane had been sighted. Ditto my dead pilot, hanging from a tree in his parachute. I was listed as MIA. Later, I would begin to materialize, like a wisp of vapor, a rumor that wafted to, and barely registered with, the informers and double agents who comprised the outermost reaches of the CIA’s tentacles. An American in a place where no Americans ought to be. If this rumor ever reached Saigon, it would have been too faint and insignificant to make any impression at all.
A Trip to the Stars Page 49
