The Eaves of Heaven

by Andrew X. Pham

  Everything made horrible sense.

  “Bait,” I said, feeling ill. “They kept us alive all this time as bait.”

  “We should have known.” Nhan grimaced.

  “As soon as they wipe out the Regional platoons, they’ll come back here and finish us,” Viet said.

  Nhan nodded. “We won’t have a single bullet left by then.”

  “They must have relocated their troops and machine guns once they breached the fence. There’s probably only a dozen men in the hamlet, just enough to pin us down,” I said.

  “We stay, we die tonight.” Viet said, “This is my fault. I’m the veteran here; I should have known better. You were right, Lieutenant; we should have left before dawn when we had the fog.”

  “Let’s evacuate then. We’re not done yet,” Nhan said.

  Viet proposed that he and his best veterans would create a distraction and cover our retreat. We would time our evacuation for ten minutes. Everyone must get clear of the front gate within that window. Artillery bombardment would cover our escape and block any pursuit. It was a suicide mission, but we couldn’t think of better alternative.

  Nhan shook Viet’s hand and held it awhile in silence. I shook hands and wished him good luck. Viet grinned gamely; he knew his chances.

  FIFTEEN minutes later, Nhan took the first group of seven men and moved along the hedges. With a fair idea of where some of the guerrillas were hiding, Nhan picked a path among the bushes between the houses to the front gate. His group promptly encountered heavy fire. They dove for cover and began shooting. Viet, Sanh, Hiep, and Toa sneaked out of the huts, going around the enemies to attack them from the rear.

  I led the main group of fifteen. Four men carried the two wounded on hammocks. Three more helped the less critically injured. All three women had decided to come. Bullets zipping all around us, we simply ducked and ran as fast as we could. The noise from half a dozen AK-47s was terrifying. It made you want to huddle behind a wall. The fear was like a poison; once it got into your legs, you couldn’t move. I never knew how we did it.

  “Run! Run!” I crouched down and fired at a hut across the road. “Don’t take cover! Keep running! Run!”

  Once we passed their position, Nhan’s group followed, firing as they retreated. Somewhere behind us, Viet and his men were engaged in the battle of their lives.

  The sounds of gunshots softened and became sporadic after we crossed through the gate. Inside the hamlet, the fighting continued with Viet’s group. I ordered the team to keep running until we got beyond range of the enemies’ AK-47s.

  I kept glancing back, expecting Viet’s group to come out of the gates immediately after us. Every second behind that wall increased their chances of dying. Their only hope was that the artillery would fall precisely on time as promised. I had my group hunkered down inside gun range so we could provide covering fire for Viet’s group.

  I got Lan on the radio, but didn’t know what to do next. It took too long to change orders for artillery fire. Then we saw Viet, Sanh, Hiep, and Toa running out the gates.

  “Now! Artillery! Get them to fire now!” I yelled into the radio, then picked up my rifle and fired at the gun slots by the gate. The guerrillas chased Viet’s group to the perimeter, then hunkered down in the foxholes behind the wall, the very position we had held last night.

  Our covering fire distracted them, but it was impossible to hit defenders behind the fortification. Toa fell, as if struck by a sledgehammer. Bullets caught Viet and spun him sideways. Dropping their guns, the other two men wheeled around to pick up their comrades. Sanh carried Toa on his back, Toa’s feet dragging in the dirt. Hiep had Viet. They hobbled on three legs. Bullets swept around the men like hail. They should have been mowed down, but somehow they had become untouchable in this act of heroism.

  At last, when it was too late for Toa and Viet, the shells howled down directly on the gate. Sanh and Hiep hobbled toward us against a backdrop of explosions and dust. We lowered our rifles. From a distance, you could admire the awesome beauty of falling shells, their wanton, godlike power.

  Sanh laid Toa at our feet. He was vacant-eyed; he was dead. Viet grunted, doubled over on the ground, soaked in blood. Nhung cried as she tore up a shirt for bandage. It was no good. Viet had several bullets in him. We had nothing for him except our hands to apply pressure to his wounds.

  Lan called and repeated orders for us to reinforce the Regional troops directly. My throat tightened. I couldn’t answer him. I knew we should get moving. The VC could still mount a pursuit through the hamlet’s side gate. Nothing seemed to matter at that moment.

  WITHIN the hour, fueled with rage, vengeance, and fear, we would run the full distance, guided to the battle by airplanes circling in the sky like buzzards. We would descend on the enemy’s flank and, with our last handfuls of ammo, drive them into the hills. We would come to the rescue of those sent to rescue us.

  In the aftermath, we would wander the battlefield, evacuating the wounded, picking up body parts, labeling mangled cadavers, collecting munitions. We would wade through bloody pools, clouds of feasting flies, amid the stench of death, smoke, the bitter sting of gunpowder. The hot humid foothills as silent as a tomb.

  BUT that insanity was yet to come, and so was the rest of the war. Time grew still as we gathered around our comrade. In that grass-sweet clearing, we were entranced, willingly held under the spell of his passing, his great sacrifice.

  No one knew how to give Viet his Catholic last rites. We were either atheists or Buddhists. We could only witness his agony. There was no grace in it, and this was the bravest, toughest man I knew. Viet had no parting words. The way his face screwed up in pain, his tongue bloodied, I had the feeling the devil was clawing around in his guts.

  The shells kept falling like the wrath of heaven.

  eeeeeeEEEEUU—BOOM! eeeeeeEEEEUU—BOOM!

  Viet died in our arms, beneath our hands. I felt his spirit departing. All that courage, conviction, was gone. That rogue grin of his. I hoped his God existed. I hoped his God deserved such a man.

  THE NORTH

  1947

  21. THE ALGERIAN

  Mohammed was a giant—half Algerian, half French, though the villagers insisted he was also part ox and part ogre, the cruelest of the foreign devils that plagued our country. He was twice as big as the Japanese—folks called them the Dwarf Devils who, despite being shorter than the peasants, were even more wicked than the French. He stood a full head taller than the French, whom people called the Red Devils because their skin turned carroty in the tropical sun. Mohammed was neither red like his French superiors nor black like his African underlings. His skin was swarthy like roasted meat. It was rumored that the French had captured Mohammed in the Sahara, recruited him as one of their mercenaries, and then unleashed him with a band of bandits in the Red River Delta.

  Whatever his origin, Mohammed was unlike any legionnaire I had ever seen. He had a long, wavy mane of unkempt hair, a wide, blunt face fixed by a plow of a nose, and a bushy mustache, oiled into longhorns. He followed no soldierly code of conduct and wore no uniform. Like a beast, he went bare-chested, regardless of sun, wind, or rain. No one in our village had seen him wear anything other than leather sandals and a pair of khaki shorts cinched with a belt. A gnarled and knotted brute, he had biceps thicker than a man’s thigh, a broad chest covered by a thick mat of wiry hair, a cannonball gut, and rippling slabs of meat for a back. His shoulders were piles of muscles. A pistol hung on his hip. A long, curved sword was slung across his back.

  It was late in the spring of 1947 when Mohammed and his band of twenty Arab and African legionnaires first established a post along the interprovincial road two miles from our village. Like most troops sent into the delta that year, they had little success in quelling the Resistance. Mobile and intimate with the countryside, their foes struck and vanished into the population at will.

  As the weeks wore into futile months, the legionnaires became more severe in their reprisals.
Sabotage of roads and bridges brought swift executions of any men caught in the vicinity. Attacks on their encampment were answered with mortar shelling on nearby hamlets. Against a ghost-like enemy, the legionnaires eventually turned their fury on the only available targets—the peasants.

  The day Mohammed found Mr. Nhi, my cousins Lang and Tan and I were walking home from school when a man sprinted into the hamlet.

  “Patrol! Patrol! Mohammed is with them!”

  His cry fell like a blanketing shadow. Words leaped through every house in the settlement. The alarm swept down one street after another, leaving a chilling silence in its wake. The fear was instantaneous, as palpable as an evil presence. I felt it in my stomach.

  In the yards, the rice thrashing halted. Folks scrambled to hide their valuables. Women smeared soot on their faces and donned an extra layer of clothes to make themselves unattractive. In the fields, the harvest was abandoned. Older women and children rushed back into the hamlet. The men ran in the opposite direction, taking with them all teenage girls and young women at risk of being raped by the legionnaires. White-faced and empty-handed, they sprinted down the road, not sparing even a second to fetch provisions or weapons. They must get clear of the village before the patrol came within view. Not a single tree or a hill could hide their flights across the open fields. By twos and threes, they dove into the network of tunnels dug into the creek’s bank and beneath the rice fields. In moments, the naked land absorbed the peasants.

  It was a common practice in every village. Men dared not linger and risk capture, arrest, or execution on mere suspicion of being a Resistance fighter. Women, particularly the young ones, were at risk of being arrested on false charges and taken away, never to be heard from again. Although the legionnaires preferred men for hard labor, any healthy person, woman or adolescent, could be forced into service as a coolie.

  My cousins and I were thirteen, small enough to be worthless, young enough to be harmless, but old enough to understand. Lang ran home to warn our mothers in case word hadn’t gotten there already. The patrol always stopped at our estate, where they feasted at our table and re-stocked themselves from our supplies. As the wealthiest family in the domain, we were required to provide the French and their legionnaires with whatever they wanted, from rice to money to laborers, without compensation.

  “I see them!” Tan pointed at the village gate.

  “I wonder if the Resistance sabotaged something again,” I said and went to stand under a tree away from the road.

  “If they did, we would have heard it by now. The Resistance always spreads news of their work,” Tan said.

  In our young, provincial eyes, the patrol was a fearsome sight—alien, demonic, powerful, and mysterious. Mohammed strode down the middle of the road at the head of the pack, towering over his men: a dozen Arabs and Africans. Unlike the ragged and hungry Chinese horde that I had seen in Hanoi two years ago, Mohammed’s band was composed of well-fed, strong brigands. Some of them wore turbans and had exotic-looking swords and curved daggers stuck into their waistbands. Their rifles were slung across backs or carried over shoulders like shovels, barrels pointing at the sky or the ground at haphazard angles. One held the leash of a large black hound. At the rear, nearly hidden behind the patrol, Thien, the interpreter, and four Vietnamese coolies followed with empty baskets.

  In the village, the legionnaires randomly searched houses as the inhabitants, mostly women and children, waited in their yards with their heads bowed. The soldiers grabbed blankets from the drying lines and helped themselves to fruits and vegetables. They shackled two old men on charges of being informants. There was nothing their wives and children could do except wail and kneel on the ground in an attempt to block the legionnaires’ way. People averted their eyes, too terrified to move.

  As they neared the end of the main road, the commander’s dog stopped abruptly, picking up a scent. It lunged forward and barked ferociously at a haystack. Mid-harvest season, every home was flanked by several bales, each as large as a hut. Without warning, the legionnaires fired several rounds into the haystack. A muffled voice came from within.

  A legionnaire shouted, “We’ve got a rebel here!”

  They dragged a man out from underneath and began to kick and beat him. It was Mr. Nhi, one of our classmates’ father. He was a middle-class farmer who owned his land.

  We climbed a tree in the neighbor’s yard and had a clear view over the heads of the legionnaires who stood just a few yards away. They ignored us, having gotten used to being tailed everywhere by children.

  “You little pig,” Mohammed said in French. “Are you a rebel or a spy? Are there others in this village?”

  The interpreter translated the question to Mr. Nhi, but omitted “little pig,” which was what the French commonly called Vietnamese farmers. It was a term I had heard French soldiers used both in the countryside and in Hanoi.

  Mr. Nhi knelt on the ground with his head bent. “Please, honorable sir. I’m not a spy.”

  Mohammed turned to the interpreter. “Tell him, anyone who hides from us must be a rebel or a spy.”

  When the Arabs moved to shackle him to the other two captives, Mohammed barked a command and they backed away. He grabbed a machete from one of his men and tossed it on the ground. The interpreter’s translation was drowned out by the legionnaires’ guffaws. They dropped their packs and formed a circle around Mr. Nhi.

  “What did he say?” Tan whispered.

  “I think he’s challenging Mr. Nhi to a fight.” My French was rusty since the Resistance ordered all schools to stop teaching the colonialists’ tongue two years ago.

  “Not fair!” Tan hissed. “Mr. Nhi is just a farmer. He doesn’t know how to fight.”

  A soldier kicked the machete closer to Mr. Nhi, who looked at it, perplexed. The men shouted. Mr. Nhi flinched and turned to the interpreter standing under the eaves of the house.

  Thien was a small, thin-faced Vietnamese from Hanoi, a Catholic who had voluntarily enlisted under the French cause. Certainly, he had envisioned himself posted as an attaché to some noble French lieutenant. No one wanted to serve the lowly mercenaries. The legionnaires treated him like a servant and never allowed him to eat at their table. My mother paid him handsomely to keep us safe from Mohammed. When these men ate at our estate, Mother always made a point to secretly set him a special table with fare superior to what she served the legionnaires. I knew he was all that stood between us and the marauders, but I couldn’t help disliking him. Watching the legionnaires foul our home with their drunken vulgarity, I often wished I could just poison the lot of them.

  Thien said, “He wants you to stand up and fight. If you kill him, you can live.”

  Mr. Nhi’s face clenched with horror. He shook his head violently, scooted back on all fours, and then pressed his forehead into the dirt. Mohammed came forward, and Mr. Nhi inched away until he had backed into the legs of the Arab behind him. Too frightened to speak, he put his hands together and started bowing to the Algerian, over and over as if he were praying at an altar. One Arab shoved him with a foot. Mr. Nhi tumbled and curled up on the ground, arms raised to ward off blows.

  The men laughed. “What a coward!”

  In front of the home, the family huddled, crying. The grandfather had his two grandchildren in his arms to keep them from running to their father. The grandmother and Mr. Nhi’s wife clutched the arms of the interpreter, begging him to ask the commander for leniency. Thien brushed them off and stomped away to stand near the road.

  The Algerian dragged Mr. Nhi to his feet by the front of his shirt, then slapped him hard across the face. Mr. Nhi reeled backward. The man finally found his voice and begged for mercy. His mouth was bleeding. The interpreter did not bother to translate. The soldiers guffawed as the Algerian drew his sword and began stalking around the circle. Mr. Nhi crawled around on his hands and knees and got kicked when he came close to the soldiers. Mohammed lunged and made a shallow cut on the man’s thigh.

  Mr.
Nhi shrieked, curling up into a ball. The Algerian shoved him with a foot and then kicked him when Mr. Nhi didn’t get up. The soldiers jeered.

  Mohammed raised his sword, looming over the small farmer like an executioner. “Fight or die!”

  Mr. Nhi’s father rushed into the circle and knelt between the commander and his son. The old man touched his forehead to the ground at the Algerian’s feet. “Please, honorable sir, be merciful! My son is innocent!”

  “He shouldn’t have hidden,” the interpreter said from outside the circle.

  “My son is a silly man. He was afraid of the troops. He hasn’t done anything. Please spare his life. He has a family to provide for. Take me instead. Do what you want with me.”

  As if permission had been granted, the Algerian slashed the old man. The blade swept across his arm and chest. The women shrieked. The old man crumpled, his blood splattering dark blotches in the dirt. In seconds, his white hair, beard, and white peasant shirt were soaked bright red. Mr. Nhi wailed and threw himself over his father, shielding the old man. The soldiers stepped aside and let the two women drag the old man into the house. He would die of the wound within hours.

  I shuddered thinking what would happen if Mohammed knew my mother was also paying the Resistance just as handsomely as she paid the legionnaires. Would we be hacked to pieces like this family? Would the servants’ daughters be dragged away to be raped in the legionnaires’ camp? I didn’t want to watch anymore, but I couldn’t look away.

  The interpreter said, “Pick up the machete and fight. I have never seen him let anyone go. Your best chance is to kill him while you still have the strength to try. If you won’t fight, he’ll cut you in a hundred places until you bleed to death.”