Message from Nam

by Danielle Steel

  “Who was he?” she asked in a strangled voice, wishing she had never come, not wanting to start the hope again. She was willing to lay him to rest now, why wouldn’t they let her? “Do you know who he was, sir?”

  “I’m not sure.” He racked his memory, which was not what it once had been. They had done everything to him. Electric shock, torture, he had lost both thumbs, and almost lost his leg to gangrene, how the hell did he know who had escaped and lived. How could he do this to her, and yet he was, and she held her breath as she waited. “I know he was from Cu Chi base … a tunnel rat … but I’m not sure of the name. I might know it if I heard it,” he said apologetically, and she was feeling guilty for pumping him, but she had to.

  “Tony Campobello?” she whispered.

  “That’s right.” He stared at her. “That’s him!” He looked stunned, amazed she knew it. “He escaped, oh … I don’t know … maybe eighteen months ago … two years … I’m not sure now. And I know he made it.” She felt faint as she listened to him.

  “How do you know, sir?”

  “They didn’t bring his body back, and …” He looked mildly embarrassed. “One of the guards told me.”

  “Wouldn’t he have lied to you?” She almost wanted him to be dead now, wanted not to be tortured with the hope again, but there was no denying what this man said. She couldn’t ignore it.

  “I don’t think so. They hated to admit it when anyone escaped, so if they said it, it was probably true. And they tortured one of the others to teach everyone a lesson.”

  “Do you know where he might have gone?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t. South, I would assume, if he could … or he could still be in hiding somewhere in the interior. If he was a tunnel rat, he was probably pretty wily. He could still be alive now.” Could … and then what? And what was she to tell Joey? That his father “could” be alive somewhere in the interior? Or he could be dead in a tunnel, too, or in a trench, or a hole somewhere, or a tree trunk. She thanked the man, and feeling numb, she finished her interviews and took the red-eye back to New York from San Francisco.

  And she spent the next three days locked in her hotel room, talking to no one. There was nothing she could do or say. She had to think. She had to go over what they’d said. She read her notes over again and again, but there was nothing she could do. And on Monday, she had made her decision.

  She went in to see her editor, and at first she told Paxton she was crazy. But after a little while, Paxton had convinced her. She’d been there before, and she knew the country. There would be others staying now that the military had left. Journalists, medical personnel, a few foreign businessmen, fools, opportunists. Someone was bound to be there. And there was no doubt whatsoever in her mind. She had to go back there, and stay there until she found the answers, no matter how long it took, or what it did to her to be there.

  They agreed finally. They had no choice. The choice was to lose Paxton, or let her go with their blessing, so they let her have everything she wanted.

  And that weekend, she went for a long, long walk with Joey. She told him she was going back to Viet Nam to find his father, or his remains, or someone who could tell her for sure what had really happened. She told him about the prisoner of war at the Presidio, and what he had said. He had a right to know, and she had to tell him.

  “You know, my Mom and Dad still think you’re crazy.” He smiled at her, he wondered about it at times himself, but he also knew he loved her.

  “Is that what you think?” She smiled at him.

  “Sometimes. I don’t really care if you are, Pax. It’s okay.”

  “Thanks. To tell you the truth, I think I’m crazy to go back too. But I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied until we have the answers. I thought we knew for a while there,” after what she’d heard at Clark, from Jordan, “but I guess we didn’t. This guy was so sure he made it.”

  “You really think he could be alive by now? It’s been three years since he became MIA.” Even Joey sounded skeptical by this time.

  “I just don’t know anymore, Joey.”

  He nodded, worried about her now. “How long you think you’ll be gone?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to promise you anything. I’ll write to you, and call you if I can. I don’t know what the phone service will be like there now, with the GIs gone. Probably pretty lousy. But I’ll do what I can. And I’ll come home when I have the answers, and not before.”

  He grabbed her arm then and held it tightly in his young hand. “Don’t get hurt, Pax … don’t let anything happen to you like it did to Dad.”

  “It won’t,” she promised him, as she leaned toward him and kissed his hair, and then stroked it. “I’m not as brave as he was.”

  CHAPTER 31

  The plane came down at Tan Son Nhut Airport, and from the air it looked the same, but as they flew low, she saw that there were a lot more craters than there had been three years before. And in Saigon, things had changed too. There were more children in the streets, more orphans, more begging Amerasians, abandoned by fathers who had gone home with the military and left them there with mothers who didn’t want them. There were more drugs in the streets, more prostitutes, more buildings falling apart. More chaos. And even the Hotel Caravelle seemed somehow less than it had been, although they remembered her, and were very pleasant. And she had a different room this time, which was just as well. She couldn’t have borne being in the same room she had once shared with Tony.

  The AP office was the same, and she ran into some of the same faces, and in some ways it seemed that nothing had changed, and yet things had. The American soldiers were gone, and subtly that changed things.

  She began by establishing her contacts again, and remarkably she still felt at home there. And yet, there were too many memories for her here now, and she had been back in the West for too long. And more often than not, as she lay awake at night, she thought of Joey. Maybe it was different now, too, because she was older. At twenty-seven, she was not quite as anxious to risk her life as she had been five years before. In that sense, she was also different. And thinking of that reminded her of Ralph again, and the missions they’d been on together. Now when she went out into the countryside, she went out alone, with rented cars, or with a driver, or a photographer she got from AP, and everywhere she went, in every town, in every countryside, in every ruin, she asked for Tony. And no one had seen him. But she felt that if she asked enough people for long enough, eventually, if he was still alive, someone would know him. Maybe he was afraid to come out, maybe he was too crippled or too maimed or too injured, and if he was, she would take him home, and heal his wounds and fix them … if he was still alive, which was always uncertain. And as she began to see the damage the northern troops had done, and the American bombings before they left, she began to understand how difficult it would have been to survive, and escape unnoticed somewhere. Even knowing he was dead would have been a relief. Something. Some shred of clothing, a bone, some hair … anything … that had once been Tony.

  In April, Graham Martin arrived in Saigon to replace Ellsworth Bunker as ambassador. And in June the Watergate affair exploded in the States, much to Paxton’s fascination. Politics seemed to be getting more complicated everywhere these days, and she enjoyed the Teletypes she read in Saigon, while she continued to write articles from there, and search for Tony. And in July, the Senate held hearings on the bombings in Cambodia, which stopped in August. And eight days after that, Nixon appointed Kissinger as Secretary of State to replace Rogers. And that summer, in Viet Nam, things were quiet. It rained constantly, and Paxton continued to drive all over the countryside, showing photographs of him, and asking if they had seen him, but no one had seen him anywhere, and she wound up with pneumonia.

  And in September, she was better, and began the search again. And every week, she reported in letters to Joey. It was all beginning to seem more than a little crazy even to her. But everything in Viet Nam always had been. She kept coming
across children in the streets who were half American and had been abandoned, and she always gave them what money and food she could, but for them the situation was hopeless. This was the fate France had feared when she had poisoned herself and her children after Ralph was killed. It was hard to believe she was right, but who knew anymore? Who knew anything? Paxton was certain she didn’t.

  In October, Agnew resigned as Nixon’s vice-president, and in November Congress overrode Nixon’s veto of the law that would have limited the President’s right to wage war. They wanted the same situation never to come again. We had lost in Viet Nam, but they wanted to think twice before we ever got into something like it again. And Congress wanted to maintain their controls on the President forever.

  Paxton spent Christmas in Saigon, eight months after she’d gotten there. She told herself she would go home as soon as she found something concrete, or a year after she’d come, if by then she still had no answer. But a year to the day after she arrived, someone recognized Tony’s picture and it spurred her on. She was an old peasant woman from the North, and she said she’d found him in a wood and given him food, and then he had been taken away by soldiers. So he had been taken prisoner again, but where and by whom, and then what had happened? She spared Joey the recital of that. There was no point. But she just kept on looking.

  And three months later, in August 1974, Nixon resigned, and Ford became president, and the Times asked her to come home, and she refused. She was writing beautiful pieces from Viet Nam, and she seemed to have no interest in any other subject.

  She spent Christmas in Saigon again that year, her second since she’d been back. Her brother had given up on her completely by then. And Ed Wilson was intrigued whenever he saw her byline. Her pieces were brilliant, but she seemed obsessed with the country she had gone to as a girl, and which had wounded her, and so many others, so badly. And by then, even Joey was beginning to wonder. Maybe she just liked it there, and maybe she couldn’t face the fact that his father was dead, maybe she was more than a little bit crazy, as his parents suggested. He hadn’t seen her in almost two years, but the funny thing was, as he secretly told his grandmother sometimes, he still missed her. He wondered if she’d ever come back, but he wasn’t sure anymore. He was almost thirteen, and his father had been missing for almost five years, gone from him for ten. It was a hell of a long time to carry a torch for someone. But Paxton didn’t seem to want to give up, no matter what, even if it killed her.

  And every now and then, someone would recognize a photograph she showed them. But she never really knew if they told the truth, or lied, or wanted a tip, or a reward, or just wanted to please her. It was impossible to tell. But the one thing she could tell, and wrote about in the Times, was that South Viet Nam was in big trouble. And she wrote about the Americans secretly promising to get a million people out of South Viet Nam before it fell into Communist hands, which it was becoming obvious that it would soon. And when it did, she knew she’d have to go home and leave Tony there, whether he was alive or not. She would have to go then, and give up. But in the meantime, she just couldn’t.

  In February 1975 things got tough, and in March they got tougher. Refugees from the North were streaming into Saigon, and farther north, over a million refugees fled the Communists and entered Da Nang, as Hue fell, and North Vietnamese rockets ripped across the city and into the civilians. People were crying and running and falling, and bleeding. Children were lost and trampled by the crowds. And Americans were told to get out, and Paxton with them. The Teletypes into the AP office were going crazy. Everyone had to get out, the Teletypes said, once Hue had fallen. But three days later, people were jamming airports, docks, and beaches trying to get out of Viet Nam by any means they could. And for the last few days, Paxton forgot her futile search and once again turned correspondent.

  On Easter Sunday, Da Nang fell to the Communists, and in April the Americans began to pack up, and Paxton with them. It was time to go. It was just a matter of days before it would be all over. The country that had once been so lovely and had cost them so much was about to fall, and secretly everyone knew it.

  The Americans still in Saigon were getting anxious about getting out before the Communists arrived, and the Vietnamese who’d been too closely linked to the Americans were panicking that they would be the victims of reprisals. Fifty thousand American and Vietnamese managed to leave during April. But over a million Vietnamese had been promised that they would be able to leave for the States, and in the last weeks of April it became obvious that this was impossible, and very few were going to make it.

  Paxton was warned again by the Times to get out, but after contacting the ambassador, he promised her a seat in the very last plane, no matter what, and with one bag packed, ready to go, she continued her coverage of the fall of Saigon, with her own camera. She had totally abandoned her search for Tony by then. She had accepted it at last. He was dead, and the people in the countryside who said they had seen him had lied. They had said what they thought she wanted to hear. And as the last days of Saigon came, she knew that he had to be dead now. And she was so exhausted by then, she couldn’t think about him anymore. All she wanted was to get back to the States, to a clean bed, a safe town, and see Joey.

  On April twenty-fifth, President Thieu left for Taiwan. And on April twenty-eighth, the Communist troops faced the South Vietnamese Army at the Newport Bridge, at the gates of Saigon. Paxton was staying in the embassy by then, waiting for the very last bulletins. And if she had to go, she wanted to be one of the very last to leave Saigon.

  And in a gentle rain on the twenty-ninth, the embassy aides solemnly announced that Option IV was going into effect. It was about to be the largest helicopter evacuation on record. The million Vietnamese that had been promised asylum were being abandoned, and only those the Americans could get out by helicopter would, but it wouldn’t be many. All day Paxton watched the operation begin, as helicopters carried refugees and Americans to waiting carriers offshore, and the Communists continued to rocket the Saigon airport.

  In eighteen hours on April twenty-ninth, Paxton reported later, seventy U.S. choppers ferried people between the embassy and the waiting carriers. One thousand Americans, and six thousand Vietnamese got out. Not the million that had been promised.

  There were buses around the city to bring people to the embassy grounds, but there was so much panic that the buses got bogged down and never got anywhere, and people began running through the streets, screaming and hysterical, and everywhere there were lost and abandoned children. Paxton tried to go out at noon to help some of the people in the streets. She could get nowhere. You couldn’t move in the frantic crowd. The embassy gates had been forced open hours since, and crowds of people were on the embassy grounds trying to force their way onto choppers. They were the people of the city, the country, the mountains, some Americans, mostly Vietnamese, desperate to escape the Communists before they took over. She knew she had to go soon, and as she headed back through the embassy compound, she felt her arms and body clawed as she tried to go back the way she had come to where she knew the ambassador was waiting. And then suddenly an arm pulled at her, it was a man, an ancient Vietnamese dragging her with him as he forced his way along, and she saw as she tried to wrestle away from him that he was barely conscious. He smelled terrible and he looked worse, and he was caked with mud as she fought free of him and he lurched forward again into her arms. And then she saw … it wasn’t possible … it couldn’t be … it was a cruel joke … she had finally lost her mind in the midst of the fall of Saigon.

  “No …” It wasn’t. She only wanted it to be.

  The man said something to her in Vietnamese as he straightened up again, and instinctively she reached out to him and he started to collapse in her arms, but she knew then without a doubt. It was Tony.

  “Oh, my God …” People were pressing all around them to get on the helicopters, and most of them weren’t going to make it. “How did you get here?” she asked, still confuse
d and stunned as she stared at him, trying to be sure she hadn’t dreamt it.

  He said something in Vietnamese again, and then listening to her, he knew. He didn’t know who she was, but he knew she was American and he was safe now, as she guided him forcefully to one of the buildings.

  “First Sergeant Anthony Campobello, Cu Chi Base, Viet Nam,” he recited as she dragged him physically toward where they were loading the choppers. They couldn’t wait anymore. And she had her story. She wasn’t staying there another minute with him. She had to get him out, before someone stopped them.

  He had a vicious gash on one arm, and then he looked at her oddly, and tears began to slide down his cheeks as she half carried, half dragged him toward the choppers.

  “Come on,” she shouted at him over the racket, as someone tried to force a baby into her arms. But she wasn’t taking anyone but him. She had fought too hard and long for this. She had looked for him for five years, and so had his son while he waited.

  “Tony, come on!” He started to collapse before they reached the chopper, and they had to climb a narrow stair, which she wasn’t sure he could still climb, and she couldn’t drag him, and there was no one there who would have helped her. “Dammit … lift your feet … come on, climb …” She was screaming at him, and she was crying too. But he was crying with relief. It had taken him two months to come down from his hiding place in the tunnels he had found and used until he reached the outskirts of Saigon, and now he had just made it. And she was there, and he didn’t understand how or why he had found her. But it didn’t matter anymore. She was there. And they were together, even if they died now.