The Eaves of Heaven

by Andrew X. Pham

  Snipers in the forest started shooting out the enemies’ floodlights. Group commander Tuan signaled the charge, and the second wave moved out onto the open field in nine columns, each headed by its platoon leader and political advisor, who was the second in command. Behind them were four men carrying two dynamite rods on their shoulders in pairs. The others followed closely, ready to pick up the rods when their comrades fell.

  It was a difficult charge. A heavy curtain of rain blurred the field. They slipped on the muddy weeds, their rubber-tire sandals finding little purchase on the blast-cratered ground. Men stumbled blindly over their dead comrades. The injured were left where they lay. Enemy artillery screamed down from the French mountain bunkers.

  In the crossing, Vi lost two men. His men reinforced the remnants of another platoon hunkered down at the outer lip of the trench. The first group had blown through two fences and laid ladders across the trench, but they were out of dynamite. An enemy plane circled above, dropping dozens of flares and turning night into day. Enemy machine-gun fire pinned them down.

  Vi signaled his first demolition crew forward. Two men scampered across the ladder with a pair of dynamite rods on their shoulders. Gunfire killed them immediately. A backup crew dashed across and pushed the dynamite rods halfway through the fence before they too were killed. A third pair slid the dynamite rods through and lit the fuses. They died crossing back over the trench. The explosion breached the fence.

  Vi led them into the gap—the one duty he regretted most. Two machine guns converged on that opening, and Vi lost half his platoon within seconds. They would have all been slaughtered then, but the Resistance had breached the camp on another front. Inside, the fighting was intense. Attacks from within crippled the wall defense. The towers collapsed from dynamite, the gunner nests falling one by one.

  He led the remnants of his team over the wall. Inside the camp, shots rang out from every direction. Bullets rained down from several machine guns inside the buildings. The fighting was chaotic until the French withdrew into the buildings. When Vi looked around, only Thanh was behind him. He turned to his second in command and nodded at a machine-gun post at the corner of the main building. Thanh reloaded his submachine gun.

  They sprinted across the body-strewn ground, Thanh in the lead. Vi had a grenade in each hand, the pins pulled. The gunner sprayed his shots in sweeping arcs. Thanh charged, his gun ablaze, his battle cry drowned. Vi threw the first grenade. It fell outside the sandbagged nest, but the explosion bought them another few seconds. As Vi threw the second grenade, Thanh was hit. He stumbled backward into Vi, knocking him over. The grenade blew out the gunner’s nest. Vi rolled Thanh onto his back. Half of Thanh’s face had been shattered. The remaining eye was open, perfectly intact.

  Vi grabbed Thanh’s submachine gun and ran along the wall toward the main door. A shell fell directly on the building. The blast knocked him unconscious. The side of the building collapsed on top of him in a cloud of debris.

  VI woke with a terrible thirst. His head was wracked with pain, his limbs immovable. The clouds had cleared. A searing sun straddled the sky directly overhead. A wood beam lay across his chest, pinning him. He looked at the burnt building—a gaping hole in the wall, the yard deserted. There was no one. The silence was eerily complete. He couldn’t hear the birds. The stink of smoke hung in the stillness. A sickening certainty closed upon him: His comrades were already miles away. They had rescued the injured and carried away the enemies’ stores of arms. They had missed him. Flies were feasting on his face. He would die there alone, forgotten. He tried moving his arms and lost consciousness.

  It was dusk when a noise startled him. He opened his eyes. A small boy was plucking buttons and insignias off the corpse of a Frenchman. Vi called out, but could only manage a guttural sound. Startled, the boy ran away. Vi sobbed. Night came, and he faded into dreams.

  He found himself on a straw cot in the care of a village medicine man. A bullet had gone through his right shoulder. His right forearm was fractured. His left leg was broken below the knee. The medicine man nursed him while word was sent to headquarters. Two days later, comrades arrived and carried him away on a hammock stretcher.

  The combat hospital was a long, thatched bungalow deep in the forest, housing several dozen patients. The nurses put Vi next to his company commander, who had lost a leg. Out of their 152-man company, seven survived and three members were entirely unscathed. Tuan, the group commander, was shot and killed. Vi’s commanding officer told him that the four companies in the first wave were wiped out even before the two buildings were taken. Three companies in the following waves took the camp a few hours after midnight.

  For three months he lay convalescing in the bungalow, haunted by the battle that claimed his entire platoon. His mind was beyond repair. Vi would neither lead nor serve in another combat unit again. What was left of him was only suited for darker purposes. He was eighteen.

  THE SOUTH

  JANUARY 31, 1968

  23. THE TET OFFENSIVE

  The afternoon bus from Phan Thiet delivered me to the Saigon depot at dusk, along with several thousand travelers and merchants rushing home for Tet—the Lunar New Year celebration, our most important holiday. Everyone wanted to be home with his family and to be blessed by his elders during Tet. I hadn’t been home for Tet in five years. Anh and the children were spending the holidays with her mother in Phan Thiet. Although my family had accepted my marriage, Father still blamed it for my years in the army.

  But I was ecstatic to be a civilian after six years of service. I had been decommissioned just four months prior. It couldn’t have come at a better time because my responsibilities had grown more dangerous as the war escalated. In addition to my Rural Development duties, I also served at the front as a liaison officer at a Vietnamese Special Forces camp established and assisted by U.S. Special Forces. During the second half of my service, my safe and comfortable office in Phan Thiet was taken over by a corrupt major, and I found myself being sent farther out into the countryside to coordinate the ever-growing RD Task Force. It felt wonderful being decommissioned and knowing that I would never have to sleep through another midnight mortar attack or drive through VC-infested countryside to visit my teams. It seemed incredible to me that I made it through unscathed. I knew I was very lucky and I was ready to start my life all over again as a civilian.

  I hopped onto the back of a Honda Cub at the motorcycle taxi queue outside the station. Darkness was settling over the treetops. The streets came alive with neon signs and headlights of cars and motorbikes. It was the drinking hour, and the sweet-fatty aroma of barbecued meats was in the air. Kids were already lighting firecrackers. Heavy traffic gave the city a feeling of prosperity. I hardly recognized the streets. New buildings, dwellings, and shops had sprung up all over the city. Since the Geneva Accord, Saigon’s population had quadrupled, from five hundred thousand to two million. Now one fifth of the population of the South was concentrated in Saigon, Cho Lon, and the adjoining suburbs.

  My driver squeezed through the bottlenecked intersections, snaking effortlessly through the snarls. After hours of broiling in the bus, the cool evening breeze made me giddy. I was grinning. Freedom was still a wonderful novelty.

  Downtown was completely lit up for the holidays. Strings of lights crisscrossed the broad avenues; red globe lanterns dangled from the eaves of buildings. Shop windows glittered with shiny displays. Cars, cyclos, motorbikes, and bicycles clogged the streets. Nguyen Hue and Le Loi Boulevards in the heart of the city were closed off and turned into an open-air market. Merchants dumped their entire inventories of rice cakes, fabrics, fruits, altar implements, liquors, American beers, French biscuits, flowers, white blossom branches, candied fruits, and whatnots right on the ground. During Tet, the populace plunged into a consuming frenzy. Most families easily spent several months’ wages in a week on travel, food, new clothes, entertainment, temple offerings, and gifts.

  I got off at the plaza and strolled down Le
Loi, looking for last-minute gifts. Kiosks, cart vendors, and bistro tables vied for space on the sidewalks. Music blared from a dozen bars lining the street. The stretch of Le Loi from the plaza to Ben Thanh Market was packed with restaurants, cafés, ice cream parlors, and shops. Business was very good and many places stayed open past midnight. The place exuded such optimism and possibilities that it was almost inconceivable that we were at war. Venture a hundred miles in any direction from here and one could promptly stumble into a pocket of insurgency. Six years in the field, I learned one thing: The countryside was swarming with VC.

  OUR neighborhood had prospered, much like the rest of Saigon. The crude wooden dwellings were largely gone, replaced by rows of two-and three-story buildings that were built shoulder to shoulder. With the money my brothers Hung and Hong and I sent home, and our stepmother’s savings from her lottery ticket sales, Father had torn down the old house two years prior and built a modest but comfortable three-story brick home, forty feet long and fifteen feet wide. The living room, bathroom, and kitchen were on the first floor. The second-and third-floor bedrooms had small balconies facing the alley. The flat roof was used for drying laundry and vegetables. Father spent most of his days and nights in his personal opium chamber, a small room built off the stairwell between the first and second floors.

  I came home just in time for altar prayers. With Hung, Hong, and my sister Huong visiting later in the week, it was one of our smallest family gatherings: Father, Stepmother, my brothers Hoang, Hien, and Hau, and my sisters Hang and Hanh and myself. Hoang, Stepmother’s first son, was fourteen. Her first daughter, Hang, was nine; her second daughter, Hanh, seven. Twelve-year-old Hien was Father’s soft spot. The boy got into all sorts of trouble around the neighborhood and was a real hellion at school, but somehow he always managed to sweet-talk his way out of a well-deserved caning. Hanh was eight, as cute and precocious as any little girl I’d ever seen. Baby Hau was barely a year old, Father’s avowed last child.

  Stepmother added my biscuits, cakes, beers, and flowers to the feast laid on the altar. Father dressed and came down to the living room. He lit the first batch of incense and started the prayers. Father was fifty-three, but looked seventy. Streaks of silver had crept into his hair. Age had mottled his skin. The opium had drained his flesh of vitality. Twenty-five years on the pipe had wasted his body, but strangely left his mind sharp.

  After prayers, the kids went outside to play while the incense burned down. Father sat me down in the living room. Without telephones or time to write letters, we rarely had a chance to talk. Besides, we were never close. Father wanted to know about my plans for the future.

  “After Tet, I’m going to look for teaching jobs here in Saigon. We’ll buy a house on a main street and hopefully open a business of some kind for Anh,” I said.

  “It would be good to have you nearby.” He nodded. “Fighting at the demarcation zone has worsened recently. There’s bound to be more trouble in the outer provinces. I’ve heard rumors that there are big anti-war protests in the U.S. If it leads to a decrease in American involvement, it will be disastrous.”

  “But they’ll never pull out completely. The Americans will never desert us,” I said, citing the general sentiment of everyone I knew, including my former commanding officers.

  “There are many ways of abandoning a cause,” Father added.

  He was the consummate living room politician, spending all his lucid hours debating war and politics with his opium cronies. I knew he was right. The situation was serious, but I was too happy with my newfound freedom to let it worry me. I had performed and survived my share of duty. The conflict belonged to others now. It was time I started building a normal family life.

  “It’s bad luck to bring in the New Year with war talk,” Stepmother said as she began serving the food.

  The incense had burned out. Hang and Hanh transferred the offerings from the altar to the table. We settled around the long makeshift table. The kids bowed and invited the folks to begin the meal. I bowed to Father and Stepmother. They nodded, acknowledging our respect, and gave us permission to begin the meal. Still very much a rigid traditionalist, Father insisted on form and manners. The children ate in silence. Table conversation was an adult privilege.

  Father asked, “Are you planning to continue your studies?”

  “Yes, absolutely,” I replied, a little too quickly. It remained a delicate subject between us. He was disappointed that I had not fulfilled my potential. Even now, he expected much of his first son and little from his other children.

  My siblings were doing well. Hung was a high school teacher in Binh Tuy. Hong was working in the Forest Service in the Central Highlands and at the army headquarters in Da Nang. My sister Huong was married to a Catholic man and living in a small town near Saigon.

  After the dishes were cleared, Stepmother brought out platters of fresh fruit, biscuits, candied fruits, special Tet sweets, and teas. Sporadic bursts of firecrackers rang throughout the neighborhood for hours. We were sipping our first cups of tea when an explosion rattled the house. Stepmother jumped. It sounded as if a bomb had detonated right outside. There were gunshots. I heard the unmistakable brassy rattles of AK-47s. Mortar or artillery explosions followed in quick succession.

  Father shouted for everyone to move to the back of the building. He wanted to put as many walls as possible between us and whatever was happening outside. Stepmother, Hang, and Hanh were terrified. None of them had ever seen fighting. I went to lock the metal grill across the front of the house. In the alley, people were running to their homes. I could hear bullets zipping in the air. Hoang and Hien were right behind me. I pushed them back inside, bolted the door, and turned out the light in the living room.

  “Brother Thong, is it a coup?” Hoang said.

  I shook my head. It seemed like a VC attack, but the thought of something so bold right in the middle of Saigon on New Year’s Eve was unimaginable.

  Hien looked at me. The boy knew what I was thinking and ran upstairs, Hoang on his heels. I went after them. The rest of the family huddled in the storeroom next to the kitchen. Stepmother fiddled with the radio, trying to find a station. The baby was crying. Father yelled after me to bring the boys back, but they were already up to the third floor. I caught them on the roof, staring out at the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) compound on the other side of Tran Quoc Toan Boulevard, half a city block from our alley.

  Explosions flashed around the MACV buildings. Red tracer bullets streaked back and forth across the darkness. Flares lit up the sky like fireworks in half a dozen places across the city. The main MACV buildings were set far back from the heavily fortified fence fronting the boulevard. The Americans weren’t firing in our direction. On the boulevard, all of the traffic had vanished. A few figures dashed for the cover of the buildings. Fighting had broken out in other areas of the city. The VC had launched a massive attack.

  We stayed awake on the first floor all night. Father had Stepmother gather a few things to prepare to run if the fighting came too close. They were profoundly shaken, their fear infecting the kids as well. I felt very badly for the children. They had waited the whole year for Tet. These were the days for going to the movies, the fair, the stage shows, and the temples. For every child, it was a time for games, toys, new clothes, sweets, and wads of li xi—money—earned by bowing to their elders and wishing them good health and good fortune.

  I lay on the living room divan, my guts knotted with worry about Anh and the children in Phan Thiet. My wife was a good woman, and I felt terrible for not being home with her. I thought of the five chicks she had bought months ago to raise in our backyard in anticipation of having chicken for the feast at Tet; the new coat of paint she put on the house; the full week she spent cleaning our home to herald the New Year properly. What had become of our country? I closed my eyes, blocked my ears to the explosions outside, and thought of the way we had celebrated Tet during my father’s time in Tong Xuyen: two weeks of feasts,
games, carnival shows, and dances.

  DAWN brought a sense of reality. The battle in our immediate vicinity had abated. The MACV compound was quiet, but explosions and gunfire raged elsewhere. From our rooftop, we saw squadrons of helicopters swarming the horizon and firing rockets into different corners of Saigon. Columns of smoke curled upward from several districts. Police cars and army vehicles raced down the streets.

  Life in the city ground to a halt. No one ventured outside. There were no newspapers or food deliveries. The television went dead. The government’s radio broadcast was sporadic and filled with propaganda to keep the populace from panicking. A pervading sense of doom settled over the city. It was a very bad omen to herald the New Year with bloodshed.

  For the first time in memory, Saigon was stunned and humbled. Disaster hung in the air like smoke. American strength suddenly appeared to be in doubt. The city’s sense of prosperity and safety was shattered. During the eight years of war with the French and the fourteen years following the Geneva Conference, Saigon was never in peril. City dwellers expected battles to be limited to the countryside. Saigon had always been the unassailable bastion.

  FOUR days later, the government ordered all civil servants to report to work, but issued a dusk curfew. City folks ventured out on short shopping errands. Traffic slowly returned to the streets. All day the planes circled overhead. Helicopters skimmed low over the rooftops. Sounds of rockets and gunfire could be heard from many parts of the city. Fighting continued in Cho Lon’s labyrinth of alleys. In Saigon, the attacks centered at Tan Son Nhat Airport, Phu Nhuan, and Gia Dinh, a town on the edge of Saigon.