Pham Minh said nothing. Trinh put on a pair of fancy sandals with cork insoles and pulled another chair over to sit across from Pham Minh. His dim consciousness seemed to awaken gradually.
“You’ve changed a lot.”
Pham spoke in a reproachful tone. Following Minh’s gaze, Trinh looked over at the raw opium lying on top of the tobacco box.
“You’re right. I’m an old man . . . dragging out his life too long.”
“You don’t drink?”
“Never. My body won’t let me. I can’t sleep at night. Lately I’ve been taking trips.”
“Trips?”
“To escape the Sondin of today. I’ve been roaming down in the delta region where the bananas and mangos are plentiful and the birds sing cheerfully in the trees. You can see the Mekong River.”
Pham Minh hung his head. Trinh kept on drinking tea, the hand holding his cup was shaking.
“In the old days you used to give us inspirational speeches.”
“It’s gotten boring. It’s taking too long. I hear there’s an offensive underway out there now, eh?”
“The lunar New Year offensive just started. But the cities are quiet now. Nothing has changed in Saigon, though.”
“It was the same last year and the year before. In the days of Dien Bien Phu we had false hopes. Those children who went to my school must all be dead by now, or disappeared.”
“Still, new babies are born everyday.”
Pham Minh felt the sudden chill of Trinh’s icy fingers on the back of his hand.
“True, and you are beside me. But we live in a world where you can’t go on living without choosing one side or the other. So, you quit school, did you?”
Pham Minh hesitated for a second before answering. “I too have made a choice.”
“Which side?” Trinh asked with a grin.
“I volunteered to join the National Liberation Front,” Pham Minh said flatly.
“Ah . . .”
Uncle Trinh squeezed Minh’s hand and then released it.
“So you’ve reached that age. I should add your name to that list up there.” He looked up at a Buddhist altar in the center of the inner room. There was red incense in the burner, but it was not lit. Above it stood a candlestick and on the wall, columns of palm-sized nameplates.
“Thirty to be exact. Some entered the government army and others joined the Liberation Front.”
“All killed in action?”
Trinh shook his head.
“I don’t know how many of them have died . . . perhaps all. Or some may still be alive.”
“To join the government army at a time like this is to stab your own people in the back. They are traitors.”
“You’re right,” Trinh said quietly, “but they are also part of the history produced by Cochinchina.” Trinh laughed and continued, “It is also true of the people of my generation. Ultimately, only you boys will remain, or maybe it will not end till long after you’re gone. But all must be remembered. Those who fought, and those who fled.”
Trinh reached out his bony hand for the tobacco box. He rolled a small chunk of resin-like opium into a round ball.
“Why don’t you give that up?”
“Ah, why bother? My mind is sound. And there are so many lost, that I too am tempted by destruction.”
Trinh set the long pipe down. Shoan had noiselessly crept in and was now standing behind Pham Minh.
“Hello.”
“Shoan! So you’ve come too. I trust your father is well?”
Shoan, shy, managed to voice a quiet “yes.”
“Come, sit here. You must have come to see Pham Minh off.”
Pham Minh pulled another chair over for Shoan.
“Just a coincidence.”
“Very well. I’m glad you came to see me.”
Recalling their farewell earlier, Minh and Shoan thought about their vague promise to meet at Uncle Trinh’s house. As Minh set out not long after their parting, Shoan too must have soon slipped away from home and rushed to Trinh’s.
“I have seen many young couples like you. I am happy to be able to host you in my home.” He began to fill the bowl of his pipe with opium. “There are times I feel I ought to have become a monk or a clergyman.”
“I don’t think you’d . . .”
“Why, I don’t have any religious qualities, you mean? My generation, we’re all alike. Skillful at praying and shamelessly outliving our usefulness. I’d like to pray for you . . . and be master of ceremonies at your wedding.”
Pham Minh was holding Shoan’s hands. His trembling fingers pressed into her sweat-soaked palms.
“Please don’t add my name to your altar.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll be back in person to see you.”
“No, Minh, you no longer have to come and see a man like me.”
“Don’t you approve of my choice?”
“My only wish is for you to win a victory, a clear victory,” Trinh mumbled.
Smoke curled from the pipe. The old man’s face and hands gradually merged into the deepening darkness behind him, leaving him nothing but a white figure. The room was filled with a smell of grass blended with the stench of burning opium.
“I’m selling gold now. I hid quite a bit up in the attic. My late father did the same before me. Every household had only two things, a Buddhist altar and gold. Nothing else was certain. But . . . from this year on I’m selling it to buy and squander the most uncertain of things.”
“Opium, you mean?”
At those words from Pham Minh, the old man suddenly thundered, “Even on stormy days, time goes on!”
The three of them sat in silence. Bursts of gunfire rang out. In the intervals between the sounds of automatic weapons, helicopters could be heard. Night had fallen and with it returned the fighting and the repression.
“You two, my dears . . .” whispered Uncle Trinh. “Go on out to the air raid shelter in the backyard. It’s a nice place to enjoy the fragrance of the flowers and to watch the stars.”
Uncle Trinh lied back down in the hammock. “Hurry, now, and go,” he urged as the hammock started to sway.
Shoan and Minh rose hand in hand. In the swinging hammock Uncle Trinh had fallen back into a deep sleep.
5
The climate was shifting into the dry season. Early in the morning a suffocating wind blew down from southern China and as the sun climbed into the sky the air became hot as hell. Everything came to a halt in the inferno. The “white sun,” as the infantrymen called it, was a furnace so fiery that after setting down your helmet for a minute you could fry an egg on it. All moisture was sucked from the air. Even the flies breathlessly searched for humid shade. There wasn’t a soul in sight, not in the battle zones, not in the streets.
Corporal Ahn Yong Kyu spent his last week of PX orientation at the US Marine commissaries. The first week had been the air force and the second the navy at China Beach. The detachment leader, Captain Kim, must have rated him competent. Yong Kyu was determined not to be an orderly for the remainder of his hitch, so every day he submitted his observations as scrupulously written reports.
“I was right—you’re quick. You’re the perfect replacement for Kang. See to it that you get into the market as early as possible.”
Pointer had said this to Yong Kyu after his first week of duty. However, he added one qualification to his praise.
“There’s one problem with your reports. Too many personal opinions. Of course, opinions from intelligence personnel are not entirely unnecessary. Very competent intelligence staff often make personal observations. But most important is honoring the duties required by headquarters. Only within those limits are personal opinions and views allowed.”
A hunting dog hunts only at his master’s command. But whether he runs straight or
in a parabolic arc, runs too far and comes back to retrieve or pauses a few steps before, these choices are his. Whether the targeted prey happens to be a duck, a pheasant, a snipe, an old shoe, or even a deflated ball, he’s got to lock his teeth on it and bring it back to his master. It is not for the hunting dog to figure out whether the prey is delicious, useful, or inedible. That was the gist of the captain’s words. If Yong Kyu had not witnessed the carnage of a village destroyed, or that in a jungle swamp, he wouldn’t have understood Da Nang at all.
What is a PX? A Disneyland in a vast tin warehouse. A place where an exhausted soldier with a few bloodstained military dollars can buy and possess dreams mass-produced by industrial enterprises. The ducks and rabbits and fairies are replaced by machines and laughter and dances. The wrapping paper and the boxes smell of rich oil and are as beautiful as flowers.
What is a PX? A place where they sell the commodities used daily by a nation that possesses the skill to shower more than one million steel fragments over an area one mile wide by a quarter mile long with a single CBV. A nation capable of turning a three-hundred-acre tract of jungle into a defoliated wasteland where not a single plant or animal can survive, in under four minutes.
What is a PX? It’s Uncle Sam’s attic, the old man who makes appearances at villages the world over garbed in the Stars and Stripes, a Roman-style dagger in hand as he brandishes a shield with the motto: “America is the world’s largest and greatest nation.” It is the general store of the cavalry fort, frequented by whores and ministers and arms smugglers who join hands in transforming the natives into ridiculous puppets, intoxicating them and exploring new frontiers of vileness.
And the PX brings civilization to the filthy Asian slopeheads who otherwise would go on living in blissful ignorance on a diet of bananas and rice. It teaches them how to wash with Ivory soap, how to quench the thirst and ease the heart with the taste of Coke. It showers down upon the bombed-out barracks perfumes, rainbow-colored cookies and candy drops, lace-fringed lingerie, expensive wristwatches, and rings graced with precious stones. Cheese appears on the smelly meal tables of Asia, and condoms slip out from between Asian girls’ thighs and dance on children’s tiny fingertips.
Anyone who has ever been intoxicated, even once, by that taste and smell and touch, will carry the memory to his grave. The products ceaselessly create loyal consumers who are at the mercy of the producers. Those who lay hands upon the wealth of America will have the label US military burned into their brains. Children who grow up humming their songs and eating their candies and chocolates off the streets trust their benevolence and optimism. The vast purchasing power in the market, the booming business in the city, and the enthusiasm and ecstasy in the back alleys are all in proportion to the intensity of the war. The PX is a tempting wooden horse. And it is America’s most powerful new weapon.
Ahn Yong Kyu realized that, like the sentry posts dotting the jungle, each PX was a place of protection that aroused hostility all around itself. Was this war actually a rebellion? Or had it long since passed beyond that stage? In an investigation report concerning an infantry soldier who had caught a Vietnamese child stealing a hand grenade, it was written that the child answered the soldier, “I stole it to protect myself.”
To keep the child from protecting himself any longer, the infantryman shot him. Only those in uniform were on his side. No uniform meant an enemy.
“The Americans are so naive,” muttered the detachment leader, Captain Kim, as he looked over the American CID report.
“Have you seen this?”
“Yes, I’ve looked through, sir.”
“Make a memo on it.”
Yong Kyu had come into the office to write up some paperwork. The judge advocate’s cars coming in and out told him there must be a court martial in progress. He heard it had to do with the death of some Vietnamese girl. Anyone coming out of the jungle would consider the case a joke.
Due to their nature such cases, from the standpoint of operational priorities, could not be tried as official cases. It was the kind of thing that happened every day on a large scale but was soon forgotten in the course of reconnaissance patrols and ambushes. Captured regular army soldiers with serial numbers would go through screening and be treated as prisoners. But even that procedure only applied on large-scale operations. On the company level there was no manpower to stop the savage behavior of infantrymen facing their own deaths, and for that same reason keeping prisoners of war was out of the question.
In the case of non-uniformed men identifying themselves as NLF combatants, whether in the jungle or in the city, once taken they would be treated as spies and, following the precedent of World War II, could be executed on the spot. If they sometimes were taken prisoner and interrogated or handed over to the Vietnamese prisoner-screening units, it was purely because of the information that might be extracted.
In fact, in operation areas everything moving was treated as the enemy. Even a slow-moving water buffalo would send the helicopters into the air to strafe it, lest there be some bomb strapped to the beast or some combatants using it as a shield. But it is racism, in the end, that makes a person insist that a massacre is justified. American soldiers think it absurd to fight and die for some yellow people who relieve themselves outdoors and whose so-called food is filthier than the garbage in trash cans back home. Even so, they have to fight on somebody’s behalf, not on behalf of dollars. Even the killing—in the air it is a matter of technology and on the ground a game like Cowboys and Indians. But they have to do it for someone. If a soldier in a platoon is blown to bits by a booby trap, retaliation has to be wiping out an entire village. Nothing is left alive. Even the rice fields are torched.
“What are you looking at?”
Yong Kyu turned about to find Major Krapensky walking into the office. He was in full military uniform. Yong Kyu rose and awkwardly saluted.
“I asked him to make a memo on the case,” Captain Kim said.
“I thought you were interested in the black market,” the major said with a little frown.
“You look sharp. You can tell you’re a real soldier,” the captain said, changing the subject.
“Of course, I think a uniform suits me best.”
“What’s going on? A party?”
“I was summoned to appear as a witness in court.”
The captain held up the report in his hand.
Once more Major Krapensky frowned and said, “I don’t think this is in your jurisdiction.”
“I obtained some reference materials from the Vietnamese side. We have to be in the know. We encounter this kind of case almost every day in field operations.”
A smile appeared on Krapensky’s face. He offered a cigarette to the captain and even lit it for him.
“Have you ever handled a similar case?”
“No, we’re pretty busy.”
“Dignity is the marking of a gentleman. It’s a saying we have.”
“Dignity, and not hypocrisy?” said the captain, turning to look back at Yong Kyu with a smile.
“Captain, you speak English well,” the major said calmly. “That war is irrational is a given. There are times when you can’t completely ignore that fact, can’t totally avoid acknowledging it. A confession of faith is not merely an act to cleanse past sins, it is also to expiate sins one might commit in days to come.”
“Are you a Christian, Major?”
“All Americans are believers in Christianity and are to some degree Christians. Captain, I didn’t come here for a discussion. Just like neither one of us came to Vietnam for a discussion.”
“I was just joking. You’re always joking with me, no? You made a lot of jokes based on your services days in Korea.”
“That’s true. The French and the British may look alike to you. Likewise, I can’t tell the difference between you people and the Vietnamese.”
“Anyway,
we’ve come here for the same purpose, right?”
At those words from the captain, the major shook his head and laughed, “No, you came here to make money. I’m joking, don’t take it the wrong way . . . ”
Yong Kyu gathered his words in his head before he opened his mouth.
“The allied forces always have only one purpose.”
The major peered silently down at Yong Kyu with wide eyes, glanced at his watch, and turned away. Yong Kyu saluted him.
As soon as he sat down, the captain said coldly, “Nice of you to try to help, but in the future watch your step.”
“Yes, understood, sir.”
Yong Kyu returned to work on the memo covering the case.
Concerning the Rape-Murder of a Vietnamese Women
Interrogation in the Presence of Major Krapensky, First Lieutenant Mersee, and Sergeant Lucas
Complainant: PFC Sven Ericsson (Age 23, born Minnesota)
Accused (4): SSG Tony Misova (Age 20, born Upper State New York on Canadian border, career soldier, 3 years in field)
CPL Ralph Clark (Age 22, born Philadelphia)
PFC Raphael Gomez (Age 21, born Texas)
PFC Manuel Gomez (Age 19, born Texas, cousin of Raphael)
Witnesses: 2d Lt. Harold Riley (Platoon Leader, born Oklahoma, black).
Phan Te Rok (Vietnamese, sister of victim, age 16, born Kattuong, Puye district of Khwang Kaesong)
Interrogator: Lieutenant Riley, before you confirm the charges made by Private Ericsson, please state the time, place, and nature of the mission during which the five soldiers were involved in the incident.
Riley: On November 16 I assigned Private Ericsson’s squad to a scouting mission. They were to patrol the mid-highlands in the area of Hill 192 in Bong Song Valley.
Interrogator: On what basis were they selected?
Riley: At the direct order of the battalion commander, I chose the best soldiers in the platoon. They all had a lot of experience in operations, and they were also all named by the company commander.
Interrogator: Go on.
Riley: On November 17 the newly-formed reconnaissance team was gathered at platoon headquarters in My Tho to be briefed. Needless to say, it would have been nice to find enemy forces and let loose with air-ground operations, but the battalion command had ordered that there was to be no engagement with the enemy unless absolutely unavoidable, as a self-protection measure. The recon team left the main body for five days’ encampment.
The Shadow of Arms Page 7
