“But you execute people,” I said. “Your own people, or at least in South Vietnam. Right? The night I was kidnapped, they were going door to door. Killing Vietnamese …”
“Killing corrupt politicians and military leaders,” Phuong says, sounding exasperated.
“Dragging people out of their beds,” I say. “Probably killing them in front of their families. Murdering them. They murdered the American military police I was with.”
Phuong scowls. “Don’t tell me about murders,” she snaps. “Did I not tell you about all the bodies of my comrades who drowned, who were shot and dumped, left to swell and rot in the Saigon River?”
“So it’s war,” I say. “That’s it? That’s the explanation for everything? The justification for whatever happens on either side, no matter how terrible?”
I know the answer even as I throw out the question. Khiem and Le Phu are sitting up now, listening to us argue in French. They pick up their weapons, as if they think they might have to protect Phuong. Or maybe they just want to get some American blood on their hands so they’ll be fully initiated into the fight. They spent the afternoon hauling dead bodies out of a bombed-out field. Now’s their big chance to add to the kill total.
“Yes,” Phuong says quietly. “War is the explanation and it is the justification for all that happens. Terrible things will occur. People will be sacrificed. No one is innocent. No one can be free of the violence of war until the last shot is fired. And the last shot will be fired by our side. And the Americans will give up and return home. And the corruption in the South will end. And the reunification of our country will be complete. And then, and only then, there will be no more war.”
“But what about communism?” I say. “You want to be like the Soviets and the Red Chinese? Like, oppressing your own people? No freedom to believe what you want to believe, or say what you want to say, or own your own business, or travel where you want, or anything?” I know I sound just like my dad, saying these things. I’ve heard him going on about the evils of communism a hundred times. Now I’m the broken record.
Phuong shakes her head. “You say this as if the Vietnamese people had these freedoms before, under the French. Or as if they have these freedoms now in the South, under the puppet government of the Americans. If communism gives us liberation and reunification, then of course I’m for communism. If the Soviets and the Chinese provide us with the weapons we need to fight the Americans and the ARVN, then yes to communism again. And if Ho says this is the way to bring us together as true Vietnamese people and country, then yes a third time.”
I don’t know what to say to all that. Probably I need to go back to my civics class and pay more attention to what we’re supposed to be learning about the different forms of government, and about democracy versus communism, and all that stuff.
“It’s still not right,” I mumble. I smell of burning fuel and burning bodies. We all do. The whole forest does. The whole world. “All this death.”
“Of course it’s not right,” Phuong says, which surprises me. “Parfois, il n’y a pas d’autre moyen.” Only sometimes there is no other way.
I shut up after that. Phuong sighs and moves to softer ground. Le Phu and Khiem put down their weapons. Maybe they sleep. I do, eventually. More bats whisper past. Or maybe I dream them. Maybe it’s all just a dream.
The next morning, Phuong leads us away from the wide trail. She says it’s best that we climb to higher paths again through the Truong Son mountains, shift to other routes in the network of narrow paths and hidden roads that make up the Reunification Trail. It’s all such a maze, I have no idea how Phuong knows her way around. She hesitates at crossroads, forks in the trail, dead ends where we have to backtrack, but we don’t stop. And when we encounter others—all of them going south—there are animated conversations, pointing, gesturing, questioning glances my way, weapons raised by Khiem and Le Phu and aimed at me, for show, or that’s what I tell myself, though my jaw tightens every time. I squeeze my eyes closed. I hold my breath.
Until someone hits me across the shoulders with a bamboo staff and grabs my arm jerking me forward. Then I’m their prisoner again. No longer just one of four following rolling hills, wading through swarms of black flies, skirting more landslides down orange-faced cliffs, fording shallow streams. We cross grassy plains, interrupted by weathered trees that could pass as abstract sculptures you’d see in a park or at the Met in New York. Strange rock formations like something thrown there from the eruption of a distant volcano.
There are people who live in these hills, and we pass them, too. More farmers in buffalo carts, more terraced rice paddies climbing the sides of treeless hills. There seem to be dozens of different communities tucked into valleys or on the sides of these foothills. They stare as we pass. Sometimes they speak, sometimes they wave. Sometimes their children look fearful and start crying. Sometimes their children sit motionless on the backs of their water buffalo and don’t pay us any mind.
We come across an abandoned coffee plantation. All the furniture has long since been stripped clean, so we sleep on the wood floor, or what’s left of it. Khiem breaks up boards for a small indoor fire. Phuong and Le Phu leave for an hour and come back with food. Spicy buffalo to go with our daily serving of sticky rice and peppers. They don’t say where they got it, but I assume they found a village.
Finally, after a week of hard travel, we enter another hidden supply base—so well camouflaged that guards blend into the brush, and even when I hear them move I can’t make out their faces or their forms until they step forward menacingly. Phuong quickly shows them her papers and explains who we are and why we’re there.
Inside the compound, there are logs shoring up the entrance to underground bunkers, and tall trees bent over to form dense canopy, held there with cables tied to heavy stones. Spotter planes would have to fly so low to see what’s there that anyone with an AK-47 could easily take them out. And everyone there has an AK-47. There are also antiaircraft weapons, dozens of trucks, repair bays, a huge underground cache of rice, and another filled with weapons and ammunition. For some reason, they let me see all of this as we’re led through the camp, which goes on for half a mile, following a brown-water stream. Phuong disappears into another bunker at some point, leaving us next to a pen with a herd of wild boar banging around inside, waiting for slaughter. Boy-faced soldiers stand guard over a sea of chickens. Small fires burn. There’s even running water of a sort—a sluice made from split bamboo lashed together and streaming down from the creek, emptying into barrels. We’re offered food, and the strips of boar meat are a definite improvement over buffalo. Back home I thought of myself as a casual vegetarian. Cheese pizza, french fries, and sugar cereal made up 90 percent of my diet. Vietnam has turned me into a desperate carnivore.
We spend the night at the supply base—on the ground, as usual—with hundreds of bo doi. There are no tents, no buildings except the bunkers, no cover except the trees. I keep expecting to be thrown into another cage, to meet other prisoners, to see more brutality. But here, nobody seems to care. I’m a passing curiosity to some of the bo doi, but that’s all. I keep close to Phuong when she returns—anxious that I’m missing something, that things might go south any second.
I barely sleep. All night long, vague figures come and go through the compound. The small fires from earlier are extinguished. There’s no light, except what little filters through the canopy from the moon and the stars. Deep in the night, from out of nowhere, I’m hit by a frantic attack of loneliness and homesickness and worry about Mom and Dad—a certainty that they are dead, and that I’m all alone in the world. I tell myself that Dad must be alive, though, or why else would they be going to all this trouble with me, unless they think they can use me for a prisoner exchange, because of who he is. And Dad would never let anything happen to Mom, no matter how many NVA attacked the embassy in Saigon on Tet.
It’s little reassurance and longer into the night, I’m still anxious and think about waking
Phuong up, asking her to talk to me—about anything, about nothing. Just for the company. Just for a familiar voice.
I know how crazy and ironic it is, that the only closeness I feel in this dark hour is with the person taking me farther and farther away from everything and everyone I’ve ever known.
I don’t know where we are, what country we’re in. I think maybe we’re still in Cambodia, but we could just as well have crossed back into Vietnam, or into Laos. Not that it matters. Not that I think I’ll be rescued from the Trail through some movie miracle.
Has it only been a couple of weeks since the monkey stew, and the food poisoning, and holding on to Phuong, pressing my body against hers to warm her as she shivered so violently, until her fever broke?
I can just make out the contours of her face where she lies near me, on her side. There’s a softness that I haven’t seen before. Wisps of straight black hair fall over her cheek, and I want to reach over and brush it back. It’s stupid thinking about her like that—like I would a girl back home, like Beth maybe. Phuong isn’t a girl. She’s a soldier, doing her job, delivering me up to a prison in Hanoi where they might make a deal to let me go home again, or they might kill me.
On the trail the next day, an hour after leaving the compound, I ask Phuong once again where we’re going.
“I’ve told you many times already,” she says. “North. I can’t say more than that.”
“I mean the route we’re taking,” I say. “The direction. What country we’re in now, and what country we’ll be in tomorrow. The next place we’ll be where there are people. The next supply base or whatever.”
Phuong sighs, like I’m asking pointless questions, but she answers anyway. “We’re still in Cambodia. We’ll climb back higher through the Truong Son mountains into the Three Borders area, where Cambodia meets with Vietnam and Laos. We’ll go to Nong Fa to rest for a few days, just inside the border with Laos, then continue on from there.”
“Nong Fa?”
“Yes. It’s also called the Lake in the Sky. I was there once before. It’s a beautiful place, with orchids growing on the bark of pine trees all around the shore. Nong Fa was created from a volcanic crater. It’s very high, and very cold, and the local people claim that anyone who swims in it will have eternal youth.”
“I could probably use some of that,” I say.
The next few days pass quietly—except for the sounds of our ragged breathing as we drag ourselves up steep paths, stumbling and sliding on loose rock. We’re in and out of forests, sweating under thick tree canopy, wading through tangles of creepers, spiky ferns, and naked, leafless understory saplings fighting their way through openings in the green ceiling and into the light.
The trail we’re on clearly isn’t one of those well traveled. And definitely no trucks could ever fit here; at most the path is maybe six feet wide. Twice we wade across streams waist deep, Phuong anxious the whole time—so much so that she holds her weapon over her head with one hand and hangs on to Khiem’s rucksack in front of her with the other. When her foot slips on a slick rock she screams and then is embarrassed, not looking at any of us for a good hour as we continue up the trail.
We come to a deep ravine that seems impossible to cross until we find a giant tree with boards nailed up the trunk. We climb to a branch so wide I could sleep on it, and from there we have to step out onto a narrow cable, with two more cables head high to hang on to. The cables—and our knees—shake wildly as we struggle to keep our balance the whole way across, with a river crashing forty feet below us, until we get to the other side and another giant tree, which we take turns hugging.
There’s a rhythm to our days, with enough water that our canteens are never empty, enough wild boar to go with our sticky rice and peppers and keep our bellies full, or sort of full, anyway, and to give us the strength for all the climbing and fording and balancing we have to do to keep going. The jungle still crowds the sides of the trail, heavy trees growing together in an unbroken wall of green. At times it seems as if we’re walking in another underground tunnel, only without the stale air and dripping rock walls.
We emerge from one of those claustrophobic sections of trail when Khiem signals for us to stop. Something small and black and furry darts out of the brush and stops in the middle of the trail. It sits on its bottom, facing us, blinking. A bear cub. Le Phu whispers to Phuong, who shrugs and takes a hard step forward to scare the cub off the path. It doesn’t move. Just blinks some more, and then opens its mouth and lets out a sound that’s a cross between a yawn and a growl. Like a little kid’s attempt at a growl.
Khiem jumps up and down, yelling. The cub stirs, scoots backward, slaps the ground, but stays.
A flock of birds shake themselves free from the upper branches of a tree and fly off. Something crashes through the brush. I should know what it is. I saw that movie Old Yeller. The mama bear always shows up when her cub is in trouble. The mama bear always attacks.
This one is no exception. She emerges suddenly, rears back on her hind legs, paws raised, claws out, mouth open, fangs showing. She roars, leaps forward, and charges.
Le Phu doesn’t have time to even swing her AK-47 from her shoulder before the bear is on her, knocking her to the ground and swatting at her face with an enormous paw. I see a spray of blood, hear her scream. There’s an explosion of gunfire, right next to me, as Phuong and Khiem unload on the bear. She pulls herself up, swats at the bullets ripping through her fur and her flesh, reels back toward the cub, falls. The explosions continue, tearing off chunks of the bear’s face, her legs, her torso. A large white triangle on the bear’s chest turns crimson as blood spurts out of a dozen bullet holes. Phuong and Khiem keep firing until their clips are empty, just as the NVA soldiers did to the drowned elephant.
The bear is still alive, though just barely, trying to drag herself away, not off the trail but closer to the cub. Once there, she collapses and doesn’t move again.
Le Phu is lying half-on and half-off the trail, one side of her face a bloody mess, most of the skin peeled off. Bone showing on part of her scalp. A patch of hair torn out. She might have lost an eye. Phuong and Khiem crouch beside her. Khiem holds on to her. She’s writhing in pain and moaning, though her mouth isn’t moving, probably because her jaw is broken.
I look back up the trail where a spreading pool of blood soaks the earth, pouring out from under the bear. The cub whimpers, though it’s hidden and I can’t see it. Maybe it’s trapped under the mother. I wonder if I should help it get free. I wonder what we can possibly do for Le Phu. We’ll have to carry her, but how? And where? We can’t go back to the last supply camp. We’ll never be able to cross the cable bridge. Or wade with Le Phu through the waist-deep rivers. And never mind the rivers and streams. Do any of us even have the strength to carry her up and down these mountain paths?
As terrible as it is to think such a thing, a part of me hopes she’ll die right here by the trail, saving us the trouble. Not just the trouble, but the impossible task of trying to save her.
But then Le Phu struggles to lift herself. Phuong and Khiem help and hold her in a sitting position. Khiem lifts his canteen to her lips and she drinks, or tries to. Most of it dribbles out of the wounded side of her mouth where her lips are shredded. She coughs and moans. She spits out teeth and blood.
I join them, and we carefully lift Le Phu and carry her to a tree to prop her up. She tries to speak, but I don’t think Phuong and Khiem can understand her. They shake their heads.
Phuong searches through her pack for her small medicine kit, which doesn’t contain much. There’s some sort of ointment that she tries to apply to the massive wound on Le Phu’s face, but Le Phu pulls away. Phuong tries again, and a third time, but it’s too painful. Le Phu begs her to stop. That’s what I guess, anyway, though the sounds coming from deep in her throat may not be actual words.
In the end, Phuong wraps gauze around Le Phu’s face—her jaw, her cheek, her ear, her eye socket, over the top of her head, coverin
g the missing hair. She looks like a mummy, though with her good eye, her nose, and most of her mouth uncovered. She can still drink, sort of. And she can still breathe and she can still see out of her one good eye.
So she isn’t going to die. That much is clear now, and I feel ashamed of myself for wishing it before. I don’t know what to think about where my mind went in the aftermath of the bear attack. What’s wrong with me that all I care about, or the first thing I care about, is how Le Phu losing half her face, and maybe her life, might affect me, might be an inconvenience? Have I always been this way, or can I blame it on the war? On being kidnapped? On all the horrors I’ve seen since Saigon?
I shake myself out of that reverie. Another voice in my head reminds me that Le Phu is also the enemy, just like Phuong, just like all the bo doi we’ve encountered on the Trail, whether they’ve been mean, or kind, or indifferent. She pointed her weapon at me numerous times and with one squeeze of the trigger could have killed me. Phuong said she was new to the NVA, but that only meant she hadn’t shot at American soldiers—yet.
Phuong and Khiem pull Le Phu to her feet. I can’t believe it, but she manages to stand. She sways, reaches for Khiem’s arm to steady herself, then points to her AK-47 in the weeds, and to her rucksack. He helps her put them on. She sways again, but once more steadies herself on his arm, and then, without another word, they start down the path like an old married couple, her leaning on him, shuffling her feet at first, then gradually establishing an even pace, him setting the direction and leading the way.
On Blood Road Page 14
