“We can’t eat,” he tells the others. “It’s just for him.”
“What?” I say. “No. I’ll share it. You shared with me this morning. Really, it’s okay. Here.”
I offer them the bowl, but they scoot away. The guards yell louder. Nobody takes the food. I feel terrible. My stomach growls. Greg tells me to go ahead already—Eat!—so at least they don’t have to see it or smell it. So I do, averting my gaze from their gaunt faces. I look up just once, and they’re glaring. They can’t help it, and I can’t blame them.
I finish, lick the bowl, and hand it out to the guards. One of them snatches it from me. The other pulls down his pants and urinates through the bars, the pee splashing off the hard ground toward the Americans. Nobody bothers to move. I feel guilty for eating the food, and doing it right in front of them. But, I hate to admit, a part of me is grateful that I didn’t have to share. It isn’t even a matter of being grateful. It’s something deeper than that. Like I’m an animal, and it’s instinct, and all that matters is surviving.
Later, after the Rangers forgive me—or at least after I’m able to convince myself that they forgive me—I rejoin their ranks. They want to know what Phuong was saying, and why we were speaking French. I tell them.
“So you’re out of here tomorrow?” Antwan confirms. “But now you’ve got three of them to guard you. You better hope there’s more land mines out there for them to step on, because I don’t know how you’re gonna survive getting up into Laos, never mind once you’re there. You have to travel over the Annamite Mountains most of the way, all steep climbs and nasty jungle that’ll make what you’ve been through look like a city park.”
“Yeah, you be careful,” Greg adds. “We’ve been dropping what you call bouncing land mines all up and down the trail. Bump into one of them yourself and you’ll wish you were dead. And that wouldn’t be the worst way to get killed, either.”
I ask what they know about the Hanoi Hilton, which is where I’m sure Phuong is taking me, though she still hasn’t said it. But what will happen to me there, assuming I make it that far? They look at one another, at first not wanting to say. Greg breaks the silence. “He has a right to know. No sense pretending.” I end up wishing I hadn’t asked, as they tell me about prisoners spending months in solitary confinement until their minds snap; meat hooks on the ceiling and men tied up, their arms behind their backs, hanging from their wrists until their shoulders pop out of the socket; “hell cuffs” on prisoners’ wrists that cut off circulation and cause so much nerve damage that they can no longer use their hands; men forced to kneel for hours with their arms spread like frozen wings, beaten unconscious if they move.
When they see the terror on my face, a couple of the Rangers jump in to say they’re sure it will be different for me since I’m just a kid and all. I want to believe them, but I can tell by their stammering voices that they’re just trying to make me feel better.
Later that day, Kyle says I should memorize all the commandos’ names, so if I get back to the American side—when I get back, he corrects himself—I can let the world know where they were last seen and what happened to them.
“So they can come looking for us,” Darryl rasps. “Last known whereabouts.”
“Yeah,” Antwan chimes in. “So they can at least try to find our bodies. Bury us back home. ’Cause I’d sure hate to spend all the rest of eternity stuck in Vietnam.”
“Cambodia,” Darryl corrects him.
Antwan lets out a dry laugh. “Wherever. Long as I’m not here.”
“But you’d be dead,” Greg interjects. “Why would you care?”
“You think just because you’re not living and breathing, nothing matters anymore?” Antwan responds. “Man, I feel sorry for you then.” He turns back to me. “You just make sure they find me and bury me back home.” The way he says it, I know if he was joking around before, if all of them were, that he’s not joking now.
It starts raining just after sundown. “Never expected this,” Lloyd, the big guy, says, turning his face to the sky and sticking out his tongue. It’s light at first, then quickly turns into a downpour. Guys cup their hands to collect it and drink. Pull their shirts off to soak up water, then squeeze it into their mouths. Fill and drink and fill and drink and fill and drink from the one bamboo cup they all share.
“Been a drought for months,” Lloyd adds. “I’m betting they seeded the clouds again. And this time it worked.”
Kyle, who depends on the others to collect water for him, explains that the Americans have exploded thousands of containers of silver iodide into the sky over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, hoping the rainmaking will work, first, and second, that it will turn the Trail into an impassable mud pit so no bicycles or trucks or foot traffic can make it down with weapons and supplies from the North, or if they do, that they’ll be slowed down enough to essentially still choke off the supply route.
So far it hasn’t worked. “And I bet there’s been hundreds of missions dumping that stuff, too,” Kyle adds. “But maybe tonight will be the start. Maybe it’ll rain for forty days and forty nights like in the Bible, and they’ll be screwed. No more reinforcements for their attack on Saigon and whatnot.”
“And maybe your little girlfriend won’t be able to take you away tomorrow,” Greg says. “That trail turns all good and gooey, and you’re either stuck here or stuck out there in it.”
The rain stops after an hour, though. Not enough to affect conditions on the Trail, but enough to mean we’ll spend the night wet and cold and lying in mud.
Kyle elbows me awake in the middle of the night. It doesn’t take much, since I can’t exactly call what I’m doing sleeping. There’s a buzzing in my brain, like static on a radio or the test pattern on the TV after the station goes off the air, and I can’t shake it, and I can’t get comfortable enough or warm enough to do more than doze a few minutes off and on.
“Need your help,” he says. “I gotta go and can’t use these hands.”
“Go where?” I ask, confused. The buzzing recedes when he speaks, but I still can’t make sense of what he’s saying.
“To the bathroom,” he says. “Have to take a leak. It’s embarrassing enough as it is. Don’t make me have to say it again.”
I peel myself off the ground and shuffle with him away from the others, who are still out cold. I’ve never done anything like this before, but I’ve never done a lot of things I can now check off my bucket list, if that’s what it is. Maybe a reverse bucket list. All the things in life you never, ever, ever want to do or see or hear, but you end up doing or seeing or hearing them anyway.
I help Kyle pull his pants down, and when he finishes going I help him pull them back up. Some gets on him, but he doesn’t seem to notice, or care.
“What happened to your hands, anyway?” I ask.
He lifts them halfway to his face, I guess so he can see them better in the dark. I don’t know why. He can’t lift them any higher because of his injured shoulders.
“You know there’s twenty-seven bones in the human hand?” he says. “I didn’t know that before. Antwan, he’s our medic, he’s the one who told me.”
Kyle is quiet for a minute, then continues. “One of those guards got it in his head that he could just come in our cage and have himself a good time with a club he’d made. He took, I guess you’d call it, a disliking to a guy named Dennis. Maybe that guard just didn’t like the way Dennis was looking at him. He hurt Dennis bad before I stepped in and grabbed the guard’s club away from him. But that just got a bunch more of them involved, as you might expect. The guard got his club back, and while his buddies held me down he proceeded to break every one of those twenty-seven bones in both of my hands.”
I don’t know what to say. I feel nauseous.
Kyle doesn’t wait for me to ask what happened to Dennis. He just goes ahead and tells me. “Dennis died anyway. So you might say stupid me, got my hands broken to pieces, and all for nothing.”
The Phuong who comes for me i
n the morning is different than the Phuong from yesterday. She doesn’t speak except in short bursts of angry French to order me to stand, to exit the cage, to not look back as we march away with the two new soldiers, both young like her—the girl, Le Phu, and the boy, Khiem. She orders me to keep my gaze down at my feet until we leave the camp—not that I’ve seen much except that handful of tents and lean-tos, and the cage.
I shake hands with all the Rangers before I leave—except for Kyle, who can only nod—my heart heavy with the knowledge that I’m probably the last American they’ll ever see.
Minutes after Phuong, Le Phu, Khiem, and I reach the widened trail, a convoy of heavily loaded trucks groans up on us. We press our backs into a wall of bamboo, unable to get any farther away as the tires pass, inches from our feet. An arm reaches out of the last truck and an open palm slaps me so hard I end up sprawled facedown in the road. If there’d been another truck, I would have been crushed beneath it.
Le Phu and Khiem jerk me to my feet, the same as Vu and Trang did dozens of times when they were alive. The side of my face swells from the blow, and my eyes tear up so much that everything is blurry. I blame Phuong for not protecting or warning me. For putting me in harm’s way. For not being my friend. As much of a friend as anybody could be, holding somebody prisoner with an AK-47.
Another convoy of trucks forces us into a thicket of tiger-tongue vines that rip at our clothes and tear lesions into exposed flesh. My cheek—the one that isn’t swollen—now bleeds from a long cut. The convoy trucks are packed with soldiers, most of them as young as the child guards who stood watch over us in the cage. They look hungry and scared. Nobody slaps me, but a couple of them spit at me as their transport vehicles lumber by.
More groaning bicycles follow. And more bo doi on foot, bent double with strange pouches on their backs—enormous bladders that reek of gasoline. I ask Phuong what they’re carrying, and she says, “Las essence.” The fumes must make the carriers woozy the whole time they carry their load, hundreds of miles—never mind the weight and the awkwardness. Just as I’m thinking that, one of them staggers, and then pitches into the tiger-tongue vines.
Phuong and I help him up. We start to remove his load, a complicated harness that keeps it strapped tightly onto his back, but other trail soldiers seize him from us and drag him back into their zombie formation. They all look like the living dead when I see their faces up close. But they aren’t about to stop, no matter what.
The day gets even stranger that afternoon when we encounter a parade of elephants, dozens of them, with enormous loads piled tree-high on their backs, and even more supplies on sleds that they drag behind them. Their handlers sit on the elephants’ necks with iron bars they ram into holes drilled into the elephants’ skulls—or that’s what it looks like from ground level—I guess to control them. I shudder watching it. And I keep as far off the trail as I can get until they pass.
I ask Phuong why they’re traveling during the day. “I thought the night was better, so they won’t risk being seen,” I say, hoping she’ll speak to me. Maybe an impersonal question like that will get her to answer. Other than the occasional order and brief conversations in Vietnamese with the two new guards, it’s been a quiet day, interrupted by the convoys, but that’s about all.
“It’s the rush to get reinforcements and weapons and more ammunition to the fight in the South,” she says. “At the supply base they told me our people are still holding out against the Americans and ARVN in Cholon. You probably don’t want to hear this.”
She glances at Le Phu and Khiem, as if worried they’ll understand her French, as if she’s said too much.
“Do they speak French?” I ask. “Is it a problem for you to talk to me now?”
Phuong shakes her head, but then contradicts herself. “Perhaps. Yes. French is considered the language of oppression, the language of the bourgeoisie, and anyone who speaks it is viewed with suspicion. They know it’s necessary for me to communicate with you, but I shouldn’t say too much.”
Sure enough, Le Phu and Khiem are just then staring at us, frowning. They wear matching black uniforms and helmets and olive rucksacks and red scarves and green rice belts. Le Phu is shorter and has a soft face—not that that means anything. Khiem, harder and leaner, has a faint mustache and a constant scowl—except when he’s looking at Le Phu.
Phuong is probably their same age, but she seems older. And she’s the one in charge. I don’t know why she doesn’t just tell them to mind their own business. But I don’t say any of that. Just the little bit of conversation we manage to have is enough to make me feel better about her.
We march on, keeping an eye out for more trucks, more fuel carriers, more bicycles, more elephants. The trail is a busy highway all that day, and the next. We split off a few times to alternate routes, but those are packed, too, all the traffic heading south. Too narrow for trucks, but room enough for bicycles, and for long lines of exhausted bo doi shuffling in sandals under cripplingly heavy loads.
Fatigue clouds my brain. We have a decent supply of rice now, and some peppers to throw in for flavor, and plenty of water as we transition through more rolling foothills to what I guess are the Annamite Mountains the GIs told me about. But my thinking becomes dulled again as fatigue sets in from the hard, forced march. Like it’s all my mind and my senses can handle to just take in whatever is going on immediately in front of me. Walking. Getting out of the way. Wiping off blood from thorn scratches. Mosquitoes biting me. Slapping at them, waving them away, or watching dumbly as they draw out so much of my blood that they swell to twice their size, three times their size. Crushing them under my thumb and seeing all that blood smear. Tasting it. Spitting it out.
Both of the two nights I find myself covered with leeches after sleeping on the ground—too far gone to feel them as they attach themselves, hardly minding the pain as Phuong presses a burning stick to them to make them let go, or if they don’t, just ripping them off, leaving even larger blood smears all over my arms and legs and torso and clothes.
On one of the trails, the roughest, the least developed, we come across another elephant convoy, though it isn’t moving. The reason is immediately apparent: The lead elephant is stuck in a mud hole. It has slung off its load, rice and ammunition boxes everywhere, bo doi scrambling to retrieve it all before it disappears into the mud, which has the consistency and power of quicksand. The elephant thrashes around, but only manages to sink deeper. Up to its knees when we first walk onto the scene, to its belly just minutes later. Soldiers with guns are in heated discussion. One points his AK-47 at the elephant and releases the safety, ready to shoot until Phuong yells at him and he lowers his weapon. I watch the whole thing unfold as if from a distance. A part of me doesn’t want them to kill the elephant. That little kid who used to go to the Bronx Zoo with his mom all the time. Another part of me doesn’t care what they do. That part is happy to sit down and lean back against a tree and observe. Not my war. Not my elephant. Not my problem.
An hour later, we’re still there with the elephant. Trees are cut down, ropes are pulled out, logs are rolled into the mud pit. One brave soldier leaps onto the elephant to cut loose the sled. The elephant continues to struggle, but at least he doesn’t seem to be sinking any deeper. Maybe he’s reached whatever hard bottom is under all that goo. The bo doi who wade in for the supplies have to be dragged out by their comrades. Phuong, Le Phu, and Khiem help. I don’t move until Phuong orders me to get up and help, too.
Two soldiers beat the elephant with bamboo staffs to urge him forward, though I can’t imagine the elephant feels it much. Maybe the way a human feels a gnat. Others loop ropes over the elephant’s head and around his front legs. They shove more logs into the muck. The elephant shakes, swings his trunk wildly, and makes what sounds like an anguished roar, though it could just be normal elephant noise. There’s more thrashing. Mud splatters everywhere, covering everybody.
The elephant surges forward. He finds one of the submerged logs to st
ep on, then another, but then he stops, exhausted. More trees are cut down. More logs thrown in. The beatings from behind, the pulling from in front, all continue. People are yelling, as if they can order the elephant out, or coax it, or just convince it to save itself.
Finally, in a last lurching motion, the elephant gets his front legs on solid ground. Everyone cheers. But the job isn’t finished. We redouble our efforts: beating, pulling, yelling. I’m into it now, too, shouting with everyone else. And then, with what seems to be a giant, involuntary spasm, the elephant crumples forward, his front legs buckling, his trunk and mouth sinking into the mud. His eyes widen in panic, then cloud over. There’s more beating, more yelling, more pulling, but nothing comes of it.
The elephant slumps onto its side, and that’s the end. The eyes stay open, but opaque. The mouth and trunk are submerged. There’s no way he can breathe. I have to look away. I don’t know why. It’s just a stupid animal. Over the past three weeks I’ve seen people dead in just about every way somebody can be dead, but seeing this elephant die seems to be tearing me up worse.
Two soldiers, frustrated and enraged, open fire with their AK-47s, shooting and shooting until their ammo clips are empty. I glance back to see that it hasn’t done much damage to the elephant. An ear tattered, half shot off. An eye exploded. Holes in its side. But it’s still there. Still the same elephant. Only dead.
There’s nothing to do after that. Except that the elephant is now blocking the way. The bo doi lower their weapons. I wonder what they’ll do about it. Will they plant explosives and blow it up? Cut planks to lay over the mud hole and just keep going while the elephant decomposes, or wild animals emerge from the jungle and little by little tear it apart? Or maybe they’ll get lucky and the air force will drop some incendiary bombs. They’ll have to rebuild the trail, or redirect it through a different part of the forest. But at least they’ll be rid of the obstruction.
On Blood Road Page 12
