“But I don’t know besides that. Being here. What we’ve seen and done since Saigon. It’s just—the world isn’t the same anymore. I don’t know what my place is in it anymore. I don’t know if I have a place anymore.”
I wake up with sharp stomach cramps deep in the timelessness of night. I have to go to the bathroom—bad. I sit up suddenly. Khiem sits up, too. I point to my abdomen and make a face, hoping he can see me well enough in the shadows to understand. He nods and I plunge into the forest, wading through brush and ferns until I’m out of sight and can squat and do my business in privacy.
It doesn’t take long, but I stay squatting for a few more minutes, just in case.
A soft breeze whispers through the pines. An owl or something like it flies over my head, so close I duck. I reach back to pull my pants up from down around my ankles, and then freeze, sensing or maybe hearing something behind me. I steel myself to turn and look, but before I can, a hand clamps over my mouth, scaring me so bad that I nearly fall back into what I just did. I feel a breath on the side of my face, and then a voice—an American voice!—practically inside my ear and pitched so low I can barely hear: “You know how to swim? Nod if you do. Don’t speak.”
I nod.
“Good. First light tomorrow, early as you can get away, you have to swim your tail off across the lake to the other side. Understand?”
I nod again. My heart is beating so fast and so loud that I’m afraid Khiem will hear.
“It’s maybe a mile across. Sure you can do a mile?”
Another nod. I tell myself to breathe.
“Look for a signal from us when you’re halfway. That’ll tell you where to swim to. If the North Viets come after you, in a boat or something, we’ll have them in our sights once you make it that far. Don’t worry about what’s behind you. Just keep going, fast as you can. If they start shooting at you when we’re in range, we’ll shoot back.”
He lets me turn around to look at him. He has black greasepaint covering his face, night-vision goggles on his helmet, full camouflage, a handgun, a string of grenades, a KA-BAR knife.
I think he’s going to say something encouraging, but instead his last words to me are, “Don’t screw up. You’ll get yourself killed and get us killed, too.”
Then he vanishes.
I take several more deep breaths, press my hand over my chest, as if that will stop my heart from pounding, then return to the edge of the forest and Khiem and Phuong. Both are sitting up, staring into the dark after me. As soon as I come into view, they lie back down on their nests of pine needles.
I don’t think I’ll sleep any more tonight as I play the conversation with the American over and over in my mind. I should be able to swim a mile. I’ve done it a hundred times. But that was before Vietnam, before the past two months, before I lost so much weight that my ribs stick out. What if I can’t make it? What if I drown? What if Khiem shoots me before I can get away?
What if I freeze in the morning, right there at the water’s edge? What if I never get any closer to home than this side of Nong Fa? My heart is racing again—panic-attack racing. I gulp in air. My head is spinning. Maybe I cry out, or whimper, or something else pathetic.
I feel a hand on my arm, light and warm. It’s Phuong.
She says, “You were making noises. I think you were having a bad dream.” She gives me her canteen. “Here. Drink some. Maybe it will help.”
I thank her. A few hours earlier we were talking about our lives after the war—Phuong in Hanoi, me back in New York. The earth has shifted since then, into a new orbit. Who knows what it will look like when the sun comes up.
We have our sticky rice in the morning but no fish. I don’t know if I can hold anything down anyway. My hands shake—not a lot, but enough that twice I drop rice in the sand. Phuong asks if I’m all right and reaches over. For a second I think she’s going to put her hand on my arm again, but instead she picks the rice out of the sand, blows on it, and hands it back. I eat it because what else am I going to do, even though I get grit in my teeth.
“Do you feel better?” Phuong asks. “You seemed feverish last night.”
“I think I was just dehydrated,” I say.
She hands me a canteen—Le Phu’s this time, the one I’ve been carrying—and urges me to drink more. We have a polite conversation about nothing. The kind you have with someone when there are secrets you can’t let them know about, and they have their secrets, too.
Khiem finishes his rice and goes into the forest to do his morning business. Phuong asks if I’ll teach her how to swim.
“Now?” I ask, panicked.
“Well, no,” she says. “Perhaps the first lesson could be in another place, where the water is shallow. They say Nong Fa has no bottom, so I think it would be too deep for me here, but I would like to learn one day. I’ve always wanted to swim in the ocean, especially at Tuan Chau Island. My parents took us there once, before the war, but we only waded in the surf.”
“Were you on a vacation?” I ask, relieved that Phuong doesn’t want me to teach her today.
She smiles. “I suppose we were. I don’t remember ever going on a holiday before or after that. Maybe it was a special occasion. I was just a little girl. The ocean was so big, and I was terrified, but at the same time I wanted so badly to be out in it.”
I promise I’ll teach her when we’re farther up the Trail, someplace where she can touch bottom.
“I would like that very much,” she says. She cleaned her AK-47 twice the day before and has been cradling it in her lap while we talk. She begins breaking it down to clean it again.
It’s time.
“I think I’ll go for a swim now,” I say, standing up. My legs are shaking. I pray she won’t notice. I glance back at the forest, but there’s no sign of Khiem yet.
Phuong smiles and nods. She tells me to be careful, then turns her attention back to the gun.
I look at the lake. I look across the water to the distant shoreline, which seems twice as far as it did the day before. I wonder what signal there will be—if I make it far enough for the commandos to even bother. I take a deep breath and let it out slow.
“Good-bye, Phuong,” I say.
She smiles again. “Good-bye, Taylor.”
Once again my feet sink into the filmy sediment as I step into the water, and I splash forward immediately. I swim out fifty yards, then lift my head, turn around and look back to shore. Khiem has returned. He’s sitting next to Phuong and breaking down his weapon, too. I wave. Khiem doesn’t respond, not that I expect him to. Phuong waves back. I wonder if she suspects what’s about to happen.
I tread water for a little longer, keeping my gaze on her. I’m looking for something, but have no idea what. Maybe she’s looking for something, too.
Then I take off, swimming freestyle, praying that I’ll be strong enough and fast enough to make it to the other side.
Five minutes into the swim I pull off my clothes. They’re so heavy, dragging so much, that it hardly seems as if I’m making any progress. I’m afraid Khiem will start shooting any second. I have to go faster. I pick up speed and swim hard for several minutes, just like old times in the pool with the swim team. It feels good to stretch out without the anchor of wet clothes. I might not have ever been fast, but I always had good form. I let myself glance back and sure enough, the shore has receded. Khiem and Phuong are standing now—I can see that much—and waving, maybe yelling, though I can’t hear anything. Khiem raises his AK-47 and takes aim at me. Phuong pushes the barrel away, toward the ground.
I try to swim faster, keeping with freestyle for as long as I can, as far across the lake as it will take me, until fatigue sets in, then I switch to breaststroke, which makes it easier to study the far shore for whatever signal the commandos send. After another ten minutes in the water, I finally see it: a flash of light, like a hand mirror reflecting the morning sun. I swim toward the light.
I settle into a new pattern of ten strokes freestyle, ten
strokes breast, back and forth, and when my arms lose all feeling and I think I can’t go any farther, I kick backstroke, which is the closest I can come to resting. I know there’s no way I can stop again.
The lake is flat, but I still manage to breathe in water, which sends me into a coughing fit. My chest feels like it’s on fire. I get side cramps. Nausea. But I keep going. Backstroke kicking again. Breaststroke. I no longer have the strength for freestyle. My arms won’t cooperate. My legs go dead. My breaststroke is more like dog-paddling. I see the mirror flash again, closer. Something zips through the water near me. It must be Khiem, Phuong no longer stopping him from shooting at me. I can’t stop to look around, to find out. I dive underwater and swim as far as I can holding my breath—which isn’t far at all. I try freestyle again. I flip over on my back again. I kick and kick and kick, but I keep going under, keep swallowing water, keep breathing it in and choking.
And then someone is with me in the lake—throwing an arm across my chest, gripping my side, pulling me against him, swimming for me, swimming for both of us. Other hands lift me, drag me onto land, drop me onto my back.
There are voices, but I’m blind, incoherent from all the lake water in my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my lungs.
“That him?”
“Yeah. Who else could it be?”
“Why’s he naked?”
“Beats me. Guess he swam right out of his clothes.”
“Somebody give him some shorts. That’s embarrassing.”
“No time. Grab him and let’s go. Chopper will be at the LZ in five. Place has to be crawling with North Viets.”
“Haven’t seen any sign of them.”
“Maybe not, but they’re here, and we’ve gotta get out fast. No way they haven’t figured out our position.”
They half-carry, half-drag me through the forest and up a steep hill, threading our way around trees and bamboo stands, tearing through brush. I try to help, try to walk on my own, but they move too fast and I’m too weak. We burst into an open meadow just as a helicopter roars into view overhead and descends. The commandos crouch low to keep us clear of the whirling blades. The door gunner waves us in with one hand, keeping his other on his M60. We dash toward the chopper.
They throw me on board. They throw themselves in after me. They yell to the pilot, “Go, go, go, go, go!”
I feel the helicopter lift off the ground. And then the world explodes.
Nearly everyone is hit by bullets or grenades or shrapnel. Something rips into my leg, and I bolt upright with a surge of adrenaline to see splintered bone and gristle. I reach down, to touch it, to make sure it’s real, because that has to be somebody else’s leg. No way it’s mine. Someone falls on top of me. I can’t push him off, but it doesn’t matter because the pain, delayed by the shock, now sears my leg, my whole body, and all I can do is scream and scream and scream, only I’m not the only one screaming. Everybody is screaming: Medic! Medic! Medic! Bullets tear through the chopper as the pilot takes action, clipping the tops of trees, listing hard to one side, then overcorrecting to the other. The door gunner unloads everything he has, spraying bullets in every direction as I thrash around, crazy from the pain. Someone pulls the body off me, holds me down, pins my shoulders to the floor of the chopper. A medic ties a tourniquet above my knee, then stabs me with a syringe.
In minutes, the pain dulls and I’m in shock again, and trembling, dimly aware of the frantic activity going on all around me, wounded men helping one another with blankets and gauze and more syringes and more tourniquets, and the door gunner still firing at the jungle below as we pull farther away from the LZ and the ambush.
As if from a great distance I see the faces of the men who saved me, every one of them twisted in anguish and dripping with their own blood or the blood of their friends. I want to thank them and to apologize for swimming so slow, for getting them into this mess, but I’ve lost the power of speech.
There are two miracles that day.
The first miracle is that the helicopter, which by all the laws of physics should be destroyed under the furious onslaught of automatic weapons fire, is still able to lift off and make its way thirty miles to a firebase with a field hospital in the foothills of the Truong Son mountains, back in Vietnam.
The second is that—though no one on board will ever be whole again—everyone lives.
Dad is waiting at the firebase when the rescue chopper lands, and he helps carry my stretcher to the field hospital. I’ve never seen him cry before, not even when his own dad died, but in my morphine haze I’m dimly aware that his eyes are rimmed with tears as they rush me into surgery. He stays in the tent as the field surgeon works furiously to staunch the bleeding from my leg wound. Nurses give me transfusions to replace all the blood I’ve lost. They cover me with a clean blanket.
I’m conscious, though just barely so, coming out of anesthesia, when the surgeon speaks to Dad. “I’m sorry, Major Sorenson,” he says. “It doesn’t look as if we’ll be able to save his leg.”
Dad curses, loud, and then orders the surgeon to do more. “That is not acceptable,” he says, in his sternest voice, the one that always scared me when I was little. “My son will not lose his leg. It’s not an option.”
The surgeon says he’ll do what he can, but Dad interrupts and says he expects hourly reports on my condition, and a detailed plan by tomorrow morning for how they’ll save my leg. End of story. It’s almost as if he’s talking about something else besides me and the leg that I might lose. But of course I won’t lose it, because nobody ever wants to disappoint my dad.
The surgeon stammers that he’ll take care of everything, then makes his escape. Dad turns his attention to me. “Hey, sport,” he says. “How you doing?”
My throat is too dry for me to speak. My tongue swollen. He lifts my head and tilts a cup of water to my lips. It hurts to swallow, but I drink it all. The first thing I manage to say is, “My leg?”
Dad frowns. “Going to need more surgery, I won’t kid you. You’re going to pull through.”
“But will I lose it?” I ask. “I heard what they said. Are they going to have to amputate?”
He doesn’t answer right away and my heart sinks. I start to cry.
“Hey, hey,” he says. “Nobody’s taking off your leg. I promise. I won’t let them. You’re going to be okay.”
I sink back into unconsciousness. This goes on for the next couple of days. Waking up, asking about my leg, fading out. Dad is always there, though, and I know nothing bad can happen to me now. He’ll take care of me. He’ll make sure I keep my leg.
When I can stay conscious for more than five minutes, Dad asks me what happened the night of Tet. I tell him as much as I can remember about Hanh and Bunny Bunny Go Go, about the murdered MPs in Cholon, about TJ and the underground hospital, about the tunnels where I was interrogated, about the American commandos in the bamboo cage, about the elephant, about the bear, about the bombies and the kids, about Vu and Trang and Le Phu and Khiem, about the Lake in the Sky, about the Trail. About Phuong.
Dad unleashes a long string of curse words about Hanh and everything he’s going to make sure happens to him once he’s caught.
I’m staring at him, wide-eyed, wondering if that’s what this is all about—Dad being more worked up about Hanh than he is about me? But that can’t be.
He stops his tirade abruptly and once again turns his attention back to me. “I’m sorry, son,” he says. “I’m so sorry. It’s just that your mother and I were afraid we’d lost you. I know she blames me for what happened to you and thinks it was my fault. And I don’t know that she’s wrong about that.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Dad,” I say. “I was the one who ran off. I didn’t know what would happen. I’m the one who’s sorry, for you and Mom, for making you worry so much. I thought I’d never see you again. I thought they’d put me in the Hanoi Hilton and torture me.”
I break down. “I just want to go home, Dad. Please can you just take me home? And you c
ome home with me and Mom? Please?”
He puts his hand on my head and brushes the hair out of my face. “I’ll try, Taylor. I promise I will.”
But that’s not what I want to hear. I’m done with the war. I need him to quit it, too.
Back in Saigon a few days later, once I’m stable enough for them to transfer me to the base hospital there, Mom fusses over me nonstop. She can’t seem to stop hugging me and crying and telling me how much better everything’s going to be now, just you wait and see. “It’s our chance to start over,” she says. “I haven’t been a good mother. I know that now. You deserve so much better, and I’ll make sure that I am the mother you deserve.”
“No, Mom,” I say. “It’s not like that. I’m the one who screwed up. You didn’t do anything.”
But she insists. “Nonsense. You’ve always been a good boy.” And now I know she’s making things up. Or just deciding to forget the past. Or something. Not that I care. I was afraid everybody would be mad at me. I was afraid everything would have changed so much that nothing and no one would be familiar anymore. I was afraid I’d never get to see Mom and Dad again, never get to go home.
I ask Mom to tell me what happened to them the night of Tet. She doesn’t want to say at first, but eventually I get it out of her. She says some of the embassy guards were killed protecting her and the others when the NVA attacked. She says the fighting in Saigon went on for several days, mostly in Cholon, where I was kidnapped. The NVA and Viet Cong held out there the longest. Thousands were killed. I guess they destroyed Cholon in order to save it, too.
She says she hasn’t forgiven Dad, and she’s not sure she ever will.
“Forgiven him for what?” I ask, though I tire quickly and can feel myself sinking into my bed, my brain going fuzzy.
“For being here,” she says, as if that explains anything. “For us having to come here to be with him. For everything that happened to you.”
On Blood Road Page 17
