Message from Nam

by Danielle Steel

  “Yeah … but you did something pretty special. I thought about it for a long time, and I always wanted to tell you what I thought. It made me realize why he must have loved you. He did, you know.” She smiled sadly at the memory, and wondered what had impressed him.

  “I loved him too. And I guess you did. That’s why we both went a little nuts when …”

  “Yeah. But when you came back for the stuff you’d given him, so it didn’t go back to his wife, I was impressed by that. Most women wouldn’t have done that. They would have figured to hell with it, or just let her find out, and figure it didn’t matter anymore anyway. Lots of guys have other women over here, but no woman I’ve ever known has ever come back to get the evidence so his wife didn’t have to get it. He would have liked that. Those kids meant the world to him.” There were tears in his eyes, and she had to fight back her own again. “And that thing you told me about your father that day … you didn’t have to tell me that.” He took a step closer to her as she set down her empty glass. “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I was. I asked the AP guy about you once, but he said you’d gone back to San Francisco.” He stuck his hand out to her. “I’m surprised you’ll even speak to me after the things I said to you.”

  “We were all under a lot of pressure. But thank you, Tony.” She shook his hand then, and it was cool and firm and strong, just the way he looked, and his dark eyes bore into hers like bullets. “Thank you.” She was beginning to understand why Bill liked him. He was straightforward and sincere, even if he did have one hell of a temper. “Do you want to sit down?” She motioned to the chair Ralph had vacated earlier, but Tony shook his head, he still felt ill at ease with her.

  “No, I’m okay. I have to meet someone in a few minutes.” His eyes seemed to take her in and ask ten thousand questions. “What made you come back to Saigon?”

  She smiled at him. “I re-upped. Second tour.” And he laughed.

  “You’ve got guts. Most people can’t wait to get the hell out of here.”

  “That’s how I felt about San Francisco.”

  “Is that where you’re from?” he asked with obvious curiosity. Bill Quinn had told him very little about her.

  “That’s where the paper is that I work for, and where I went to school for four years, in Berkeley. But I’m from Savannah before that.”

  “Shit,” he said, looking impressed. “I spent a weekend there once years ago, after I did basic training in Georgia. Those people are about as straight as you get. I thought they were going to run my ass out of town for going dancing. I’m from New York. Things are a little livelier up north.” She laughed at his description of Savannah.

  “You hit the nail right on the head. That’s why I don’t live in Savannah … more or less … I have a hard time explaining it to my mother.”

  “She must really be thrilled you’re in Saigon,” he said, looking wise for his years as she tried to figure out how old he was. In point of fact, Tony was thirty.

  “Not exactly,” Paxton admitted, referring to her mother, “but she didn’t have much choice. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had to get out of San Francisco, and come back to Viet Nam.”

  “Why?” In some ways, he couldn’t understand it. She was a pretty girl, she was young, she obviously had a good job and she was smart, she could have gone anywhere other than Viet Nam. What the hell was she here for?

  “I don’t know yet,” she answered him honestly. “I haven’t figured it out. Unfinished business, I guess, I just knew I belonged here. I couldn’t stand the trivia at home anymore. The new cars, the old jobs, the new curtains people talk about, while people are being killed by the VC,” as they both knew only too well. “I just couldn’t stand it.”

  He touched his forehead in what she thought was a salute. “Where I come from, they call it pazza. Crazy. Nuts.” He made a very New York face and she laughed, and then she stood up. She was getting tired. There was a nine-hour time difference for her and all of a sudden she could hardly see straight. “You look bushed,” he said as she got up, almost weaving.

  “I am. I just got in.”

  He was watching her, as though trying to decide something about her, and she was trying not to let him make her nervous. She kept thinking of when he’d been screaming at her six months before, and how much he’d hated her then, and all the time she went out with Bill, but that was all over now and there was no point thinking about it anymore. And he seemed to want to make some kind of truce with her. There was no point having a vendetta with anyone. And she knew Bill would have liked them to be friends, even if the sergeant was a little strange, she was willing to overlook it. Not strange so much as intense, and occasionally very nervous. But in Saigon, who wasn’t?

  “Can I give you a lift to your hotel? I have a stolen jeep outside. I picked it up at the airport,” he said coolly, and she laughed.

  “That’s reassuring. Actually, I was going to walk.” But thinking about it now exhausted her. “Would you mind?” He shook his head. “I’m at the Caravelle, just down the street.”

  “That’s a nice place,” he said by way of conversation. “I had dinner at the penthouse once. The food is very fresh.” And he laughed when she looked at him strangely after he made the comment. “I know. That sounds ridiculous. My family are wholesale grocers. All my life I’ve been hearing about whether or not the vegetables are fresh, every place we eat. I hated hearing it as a kid, fuck the vegetables, I used to think. Then I discovered when I grew up, it’s a family curse, it becomes an obsession.” She was laughing with him, and she was so tired, she almost wanted to be friends. It was so strange to come back and run into him again, and to be chatting with him after all his hostility and anger the whole time she went out with Bill. Maybe he’d just been jealous. She’d been told that some noncoms got strangely possessive about their captains.

  “I’ll remember that, about the vegetables, if I have dinner there again.” She smiled tiredly at him.

  “You do that.” They had pulled up in front of the Caravelle by then, and he helped her get out. “Christ, you’re half asleep.” She could hardly keep her eyes open. “You gonna be alright?”

  “As long as I make it to my bed, I’ll be fine. Thanks for the ride, Sergeant.”

  “Anytime, Miss Andrews.” He saluted her smartly, and she remembered thinking that she was surprised he remembered her name after all this time. And then she picked her bags up at the desk, walked into her room, and collapsed on the bed with her clothes on, and it was twenty hours later when she woke up with the afternoon sun streaming in through the windows. And she could remember talking to the sergeant on the terrace the night before. And for a minute, as she lay there, she thought she must have been dreaming.

  CHAPTER 20

  Paxton stayed awake for two hours, unpacked her things, bathed, went downstairs to eat, and then went back to bed and slept until morning. Ralph had left a note for her at the desk, telling her he’d pick her up downstairs at seven the next morning. And the next day, at six, she smiled as she watched the sun come up. It was beautiful and hot as hell as she put on fatigues and a khaki undershirt and laced up her boots. They were the same ones Ralph had given her when she first arrived in Saigon a year earlier. She didn’t feel afraid to be here this time. Somehow everything felt right now. And as she walked downstairs she looked totally at ease in her own skin, and confident that she knew what she was doing.

  As usual, Ralph was on time, and he had Bertie, an old British photographer with him, a terrific guy Paxton had worked with and liked. He cracked bad jokes as they drove out of town, and Paxton smiled as she looked at Ralph and poured herself a cup of coffee from the thermos. The sun was well up by then, and the streets were almost steaming, and there was still the same pervasive smell of fuel and flowers and fruit everywhere, the same smoke that seemed to hang low over them, and the same green on the hills as they left the city, the same red earth that made you want to reach out and press it through your fingers … the same beggars,
the same orphans, the same wounded and maimed. The same country she had come to love so much, she could no longer leave it. Ralph had left a message at the hotel the night before that his assignment to Da Nang had been changed, but he wanted to pick her up at the same time the next morning to go to a different location.

  “Do you realize I don’t even know where we’re going today?” Paxton said. “Talk about trusting. So what are we doing?” she asked Ralph, as the photographer chatted with their driver.

  Ralph had wondered about the wisdom of taking her, and he’d wanted to call it off late the night before, but by then it had been too late to call her. He’d meant to give her a choice before they left, but then in the excitement of going out on a story with her, he’d forgotten to tell her.

  “We’re going to Cu Chi today.” He glanced at his watch, nervously. “But listen … it’s no sweat, if you want we’ll turn back. You don’t have to come on this one. The stupid thing is, I haven’t even been here for six months. And now suddenly yesterday, they came up with a hot story.” The last time they had been there had been anything but easy. And if that lunatic was still around … “I feel bad about this, Pax,” he started to explain. “I should have just canceled you out of it, when they switched me from Da Nang to Cu Chi.”

  “No, you shouldn’t. Maybe I need to face this.”

  “Do you want to go back to town, Pax?” he asked gently.

  She shook her head silently and for a long time she stared out the window. Bill had been dead for six months, Peter for fifteen. That was just the way it was here. You couldn’t stay away from the places where they’d gotten hurt or out of the places they’d been. There were too many painful memories. Peter had been killed in Da Nang, Bill at Cu Chi. She couldn’t hide from them forever. You just had to keep on going, go on living.

  “I’ll be okay,” she said quietly. She remembered all too clearly the last time they’d been there, to pick up the letters she’d written him, the day before they sent his body back to Debbie in San Francisco. And that reminded her of running into Tony Campobello on the terrace. She took a deep breath and another swig of the black coffee and looked at Ralph again. “You’ll never believe who I ran into yesterday, on the terrace of the Continental Palace after you left.”

  “Ho Chi Minh,” he said easily. He was so damn happy that Paxton was back in Saigon and covering a story with him. As much as he had wanted her to leave Saigon for her own sake, he was thrilled she’d chosen to return. And he could see for himself that the time in the States had done her good, and she was ready to do her job again, the job they all loved so passionately and couldn’t leave till the war in Viet Nam was over.

  “I saw Tony Campobello,” she filled in for him. “You know, Bill’s first sergeant.” She was able to talk about Bill again. For five months in the States she hadn’t talked about him to anyone, because no one knew him.

  “That lunatic? What did he do? Throw his drink in your face?” He remembered all too well their final meeting in Cu Chi, and it had been anything but pleasant, as he shouted at her, and Paxton grieved for Bill, and clutched the small bundle of letters.

  “Actually, you won’t believe this,” she said with a look of disbelief herself, “he was almost pleasant. Kind of uptight and nervous, but he …” She hesitated, thinking back to the last time she’d seen him six months before. “… he apologized for the last time we saw him.”

  Ralph looked at her long and hard for a moment before he answered. “There’s a change. I thought the son of a bitch was going to try to kill you. I’d have kicked his ass if he tried anything, but for a while there I thought the bastard had slipped his moorings.”

  She stared out the window as she thought about it. “I think we all did.” But there had been nothing crazy about her. She had just been heartbroken over losing Bill. It was Campobello who’d been out of order. But they were all like that, the tunnel rats, Ralph commented, they lived too much on edge, with too goddamn much stress and too much danger. And eventually, it happened to all of them. They snapped. And who could blame them?

  They arrived at the base, and came through the main gate, and Ralph told them he wanted to see the new commander of the 25th, and Paxton followed him inside. He was a pleasant man, and he explained that they had recently uncovered an entire new network of tunnels. There had been an arsenal of bombs, living quarters, “offices.” They hadn’t known it, but once again the men at Cu Chi had been living over an entire subterranean village. He showed them photographs and diagrams, and then called on an aide to show them around, and he invited them to come back and see him again if they had any further questions. And he looked appreciatively at Paxton when he said it. He didn’t know who she was when they met, but he knew she was one hell of a pretty girl in combat gear or not, and he thought Ralph was pretty damn lucky.

  They drove out to the back of the base after that, and Paxton felt her heart ache as she looked around at the place where Bill had lived and worked. Coming here was turning out to be very painful. And Ralph could see it on her face as they drove to the same place they had gone with Bill, and Ralph was suddenly sorry he had brought her.

  “I’m sorry, Pax. I shouldn’t have done this to you. I just wasn’t thinking.”

  “It’s okay.” She patted his arm, and readjusted her backpack. She kept some notes in it, and a few things, like her canteen and a first aid kit. Like the troops, she still carried her suntan cream and her insect repellent in her helmet. “I’m fine,” she said, but she was lying, as they got out of the jeep again. She was sad, and she was thinking of him as she suddenly collided with someone who almost knocked her off her feet and then caught her before she fell.

  “Shit …” the voice said as she stumbled in midair, and then he caught her. And as she turned, she saw that it was Tony Campobello.

  “Hi,” she said shyly, trying to regain her composure. Ralph was already talking to someone else, and the photographer was reloading his camera.

  “I didn’t mean to knock you down just now … sorry …” And then, with a slow smile that lit his dark eyes like embers, “I seem to be saying that to you a lot these days. You get home okay the other night? You looked so tired, I thought you weren’t going to make it.” His New York accent was familiar to her now, and she could almost see why Bill had liked him. He was nervous and tense, but he was also smart, and quick, and sharp, and he cared intensely about the people around him, and everything that happened to them.

  “I slept for about twenty hours after I left you,” she explained. “I didn’t even bother to take my clothes off.”

  “That’s about how you looked.” He smiled, watching the pain in her eyes. It was rough for her coming back here and he knew it. It was hard for him too. Everywhere he went, he was reminded of the men he had loved and lost. There were ghosts everywhere for him, and for most of them if they stayed in Nam for long enough. There were good memories, too, but there were so many sad ones.

  “How are the vegetables here today?” She smiled back at him, lightening the moment. A look had passed between them that said they both missed Bill, and for a crazy instant she wanted to reach out and touch him.

  “Pretty fresh,” he laughed, and was surprised that she’d remembered the details of their conversation, and then he sobered again. “So are the snipers. We’ve got to look out to the east. We’ve been getting some pretty lively action. One of my boys got hit in the arm a few hours ago. Nothing much, fortunately, he was pretty lucky. We’ve been keeping down ever since then. Keep well back when you go out to look at the tunnels.” He had heard why they were there, and his CO had told him to give them every cooperation.

  “I’ll watch it, thanks.” And with that, Ralph turned to her with a look of irritation. The heat was getting to him, and he wasn’t pleased to hear that the VC were so tight in that day. He hadn’t wanted to drag her out on a difficult mission. He had just wanted to start her off again with some new information.

  “You with me, Delta Delta, or you gonn
a talk all day?”

  “Keep your shirt on, I’m coming.”

  “Keep your ass down. Charlie’s out there.”

  “So I’ve been told.” She glanced at Tony, and then went off with Ralph. She was introduced to the lieutenant who had taken Bill’s place, and felt a tug at her heart again, but she tried to concentrate on what they were doing. Ralph explained about the shots he wanted the photographer to get, and told Paxton the angle of his story, and all around them there were men, and there was activity as people came and went, and some of them went out into the brush to tangle with the VC they knew were out there.

  “Christ, you’d think when they turned the Iron Triangle into a parking lot just across the river that that would have done it,” Ralph muttered to one of the men, but the guy only shrugged. He already knew there was no way to stop them.

  “There’s no way you can get rid of these guys. You can burn ’em, you can dig ’em out, you can kill the little fuckers, but Charlie keeps on coming. They just got bokoo boys to send down here to see us.”

  “Yeah.” Ralph nodded, and Paxton crouched as she followed Bertie into some tall grass beyond the clearing. He wanted to get some shots of the exchange with the sniper before he went back to look at the tunnel, and for some reason, Paxton followed him, sensing that she was hot on the tail of a story. Ralph was doing something else by then, and there were half a dozen troops all around them, and a point man out front trying to see what he could find. And as Paxton knelt in the brush, a radio man came up behind her.

  “Lady, you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You sure you’re supposed to be out here?”

  “I didn’t know they had special seats for the press.” But as she said the words, a burst of fire whistled past her. Without saying another word, she and the radio operator dropped flat on the ground, his arms covering hers, their helmets touching as they ate the dust they lay in. “Come to think of it,” she said softly as they waited, “maybe they should have special seats. That was close.”