"I don't think we have a choice."
She holds my hand tightly as we step down the ramp. I feel the warm water move up my thigh. At its deepest, the water hugs Vanessa's waist and ripples outward like a vast black skirt. Her eyes are wide. She gives me an uncertain smile, but I don't think my expression is doing her any good.
But we warm up to it. We take big steps like the rest of the people in the street, sometimes stumbling, but for the most part, our footing is sure. I slip and fall forward and nearly go under, but another tourist grabs my arm. We laugh and I thank him in English and he says, "No worries, mate." I imagine this is what it's like in Spain, during the running of the bulls or the big tomato fight. Or like Mardi Gras or Carnival, the right place, the right time where something that seems irrational in everyday life suddenly becomes a care-free experience where everyone lets loose. For the first time since I've been in Vietnam, I feel a part of something.
"What is that?" Vanessa asks, pointing to a white piece of material bobbing in front of us. We move closer. It's a dirty diaper. "Oh, gross," I say. "Head that way."
To my right are clumps of dead cockroaches. To my left is another dirty diaper. We move quicker and the water feels deeper. Sweet'N Low packets and coffee filters and egg shells. A bloody tampon wrapped in tissue. Chicken bones and more roaches. Cigarette butts and an unopened box of Trojans and water-logged books. We step faster, harder, but our movements are slow and awkward, the way one runs in a dream. I look to the sidewalk and see how high the tide has risen, flooding all the stores and restaurants, and each time the water laps at the concrete ramps, the undertow pulls the insides out.
6
FOR SEVERAL WEEKS, Vanessa helps the clinic prepare for a sexual health and reproductive rights conference in Hanoi. She takes off from work a week early, and we buy tickets for a three-day bus ride north. The bus drives through the night. We stretch out as far as we can on the five-foot-long sleeper beds, the driver blasting loud Muzak nearly the entire ride.
I put my earphones in and listen to my father. He talks about one of his last days in Basic Training where the sergeant takes all the guys to a mock Vietnamese village behind the obstacle course. That there gave ya a li'l slap in the face, reality-wise. The sergeant led them through several thatch-roofed huts. I imagined the scene as if it were in a museum, my father peeking over a velvet rope at a wax family gathered around the hearth. He reaches out to press a red button beside a plaque on the wall and from somewhere a voice tells the family's story.
All the soldiers stood in front of the village, the sergeant droning on and on about always being alert, keeping all your senses tuned to the war. My father stretched his neck and licked the sweat from his lips. He put the butt of his rifle on the ground and leaned on the barrel like a cane. Then from beneath piles of dry grass, two Vietnamese men in conical hats sprang up and unloaded their AK-47s. My father and the rest of the men dropped to the ground and covered their heads. When the rifles were silent, my father heard laughter and looked up to see two Army sergeants remove their conical hats. The bullets were blanks.
Then they took, us to the dream room and the dream room was where you picked the country you wanted to go and the occupation you wanted to do. They had all places where the U.S. was stationed, all over the world. So I put down Korea, cuz I figured dat was close to Vietnam and I said. I'd be a medic or a cook. So, they said I gotta pick one, so I says, all right, cook. The orders get cut and he calls your name and what you gonna do. Johnson, 11-bravo. Hernandez, U-bravo. Those are all infantry. Calls me, says 94B20. Never forget that number. This li'l hodee drill sergeant, he looks at me and says, "You a spoon, boy. You ain't nuttin' but a greasy spoon."
Around two in the morning, I hear the Titanic soundtrack. I roll over to see Vanessa rolling over to look at me. Outside, yellow and red lights flash like lightning bugs, but it is too dark to see where they are coming from. I look out the windshield. The bus's headlights seem to bounce off the night as we follow the highway's sharp turns; the driver toots the horn to alert oncoming traffic. Motorbikes' headlamps burn like spotlights. I can hear the driver gently singing along with Celine Dion as he accelerates into a blind turn.
"How are you?" I whisper to Vanessa.
She smiles and stretches her shoulders up to her neck. "Good. You?"
"Good. This music is god awful."
She laughs. "And it's everywhere."
Sometimes Vietnam was a peaceful backdrop, a pleasant hum in my ear: a street vendor's sizzling wok or the Mekong patting the side of a basket boat. Other times the country was invasive and relentless: engines and horns and yelling and rain pounding on metal roofs. Speakers attached to telephone poles blasted tinny music and daily announcements from the government at six in the morning. The owner of one hotel told us the announcements say things like Keep our country clean; do not spit on the sidewalk. At first, Vanessa and I did not know where these announcements were coming from, but after we discovered the speakers, even when they were silent, the gray, bullhorn-shaped plastic cones appeared poised to shout.
"Are you nervous about the conference?" I ask.
"No, not really," Vanessa says. "One of the women was scared because she thought I was going to show everyone her paper vagina."
I laugh and want to ask her more questions: What else are the women scared of? What do they do when they're not at work? What kind of music or movies do they like? But several people on the bus are talking on their cell phones and the Muzak seems to get louder and the bus engine roars and the tires slam down into potholes as if pounding out a brain-jarring Morse code. We look at each other, silently agreeing to close our eyes and fake sleep.
We arrive in Da Nang at four in the morning. One of my great uncle's colleagues, Teddy, picks us up in his 1984 Chevy Cavalier. Never has a stranger been so excited to see us. He nearly claps his hands as he scurries out of the car, grabs our bags, and tosses them in the trunk.
"Welcome! Welcome to Da Nang!"
"Thank you," I say. "It's great to meet you."
He bows. Then he opens the back door for Vanessa, the front door for me.
We drive through the center of Da Nang. Strands of white lights stretch over the street, which Teddy explains are from last week's festival. When I ask what kind of festival, he says there are too many to remember.
"China Beach," he says, pointing to the dark shoreline.
I smile and think of the television show of the same name, a team of female Army nurses stationed along the coast. It is too dark to see what the real China Beach looks like. But even if it were mid-day, I wouldn't see the beach Teddy saw. For him, it is the place where he met the first American Marines who landed in Da Nang in the mid '60s. Teddy was in his late teens, and he hung around the base looking for work. His outgoing, funny personality caught the soldiers' attention. They never called him Phan Ngoc Thiet, but instead nicknamed him Teddy.
"'Teddy Bear,' they say to me. 'Come here, Teddy Bear.'" He smiles.
Perhaps Teddy's China Beach is not the real China Beach, either. Perhaps the real China Beach is the one described by Eliseo Perez-Montalvo, an air force sergeant whose oral history depicts China Beach as two beaches: American and Vietnamese, separated by razor wire. Marines bought sheets from the PX and gave them to the Vietnamese women on the other side. The women draped half of the sheet over the razor wire, propped up the other half with a stick, and dug a two-person wide trench. At night, the moon rippled across the ocean, and Eliseo watched green pants bunched around black boots twitch within the trenches.
The television series China Beach didn't show Teddy's beach or Eliseo's beach or the beach known by small Vietnamese boys, the ones who collected used condoms off the shore, washed them in seawater, stuffed them into little containers and resold them to fresh Marines, along with Zippos and t-shirts and pins.
Teddy's tour is epic, his voice loud and animated. Vanessa and I feel sleep deprived. We drink coffee at breakfast and lunch. I feel bad because I want to see ev
erything, but after a long bus ride, a nap is much more tempting. We make it through, though, and Teddy doesn't seem to mind when our eyes glaze over.
We pick up his wife that night, and she rides in the back with Vanessa. I turn around and make brief eye contact with Vanessa, but she seems far away. Teddy circles a large parking lot in front of Da Nang's many seaside restaurants. As he eases his Chevy into a parking spot, the Titanic soundtrack bubbles to the surface. Teddy hums a few notes and shuts off the engine.
I can't take it anymore. I ask him why that music is always on the radio.
"I haven't heard it on U.S. stations in years," I say.
"I'm not sure," he says. "American things sometimes come late."
After dinner, Teddy takes us to his home. The first thing I see is his impressive collection of shot glasses on top of his grand piano.
"Coke and Jack?" He points at me, then at Vanessa.
We nod and his wife leaves and returns with mini bottles of Jack Daniels, the kind served on airplanes, and two cans of Coca-Cola. She mixes our drinks, hands us our glasses, and walks out of the room. We don't see her again.
"My favorite drink," he grins, proposing a toast. We smile and thank him.
He finishes two Coke and Jacks and leaves to grab another bottle. When he returns, he sits at the piano and uncovers the keys and begins to play The Star-Spangled Banner. The song booms off the marble floor, and he turns and grins as if he were giving the crowd their money's worth. Tilting his head to the ceiling, he sings louder. He stares back at us and motions for us to stand. We glance at each other, then stand, holding our sweaty glasses, and sing. I feel like an elementary school kid reciting the pledge of allegiance. Teddy adds a long interlude, like at a Billy Joel concert; his fingers dance a cartoonish ditty after he sings the final words. Silence. Vanessa and I set down our drinks and clap.
"Now!" he says, out of breath. "The best part!"
Best part of what?
He leads us upstairs to a door at the end of a long hallway. The door handle is stainless steel, unlike the ornate glass knobs on the other doors. He reaches into his pocket for his keys.
Tiny red and green lights blink in the center of the room. A fan whirs. Teddy tells us to wait in the doorway. He flicks a switch and a massive model airport comes to life, taking up nearly the entire room. Sounds of air-traffic controllers and planes landing and taking off blast from little speakers. A metal sign on the wall reads: Phan Ngoc Thiet International Airport. Teddy stands with his arms spread like a magician.
"This is amazing, Teddy," I say.
"It is!" he says.
Teddy guides us into the room with his hands on our backs, then turns and shuts the door.
"TOM CRUISE!" Teddy shouts, eyes wide, as if he too is surprised to see the framed Top Gun poster hanging behind the door.
For several minutes, Vanessa and I walk around the room, looking at the airport's intricate detail. Lego men stand on the tarmac holding red batons or sit behind the wheel on handmade wooden baggage carts. I kneel down and inspect hundreds of holes that Teddy has drilled into the plywood, and see that he has inserted a small blinking light into each one. Behind me, on the wall, are at least a hundred small planes, each one on its own shelf, arranged alphabetically by airline.
The speakers in the corners of the room announce a connecting flight to Kennedy. Teddy nods when I smile at him.
"I record all this," he points to the speaker. "Every time I fly, I record new announcements."
He opens a small closet and shows me his tape recorder and the stacks and stacks of little tapes, the date and airport written on each label. Teddy holds up his pointer finger and reaches into a box with his other hand. The photo album is full of pictures of him posing in dozens and dozens of airports around the world. A newspaper clipping falls out. Vanessa picks it up and unfolds it. Another picture of Teddy, this time standing in front of his own airport, the caption beneath announcing his induction into The Guinness Book of World Records.
Vanessa smiles. "You're famous!"
"Yes," Teddy says. "Celebrity."
There is a long pause. Teddy glances at his watch and yawns, which spreads to me, then to Vanessa.
"So," he says, a smile rising on his face. "Time for karaoke?"
7
IN LAOS, it costs one U.S. dollar to shoot an M-16 at a paper target. For ten U.S. dollars, you can throw a grenade into a haystack. For fifty U.S. dollars, you can fire a bazooka at a live cow. An Englishman on holiday showed me the brochure. There are rumors that, for a certain price, you can shoot at a human being.
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)—the border that once separated North and South Vietnam—is now a popular tourist attraction. Here, for thirty U.S. dollars, one can visit The Rockpile, an infamous Marine landing zone. On the same tour, one can also glimpse Khe Sanh, the small village made famous in 1968 during the Tet Offensive, when nearly forty thousand North Vietnamese soldiers surrounded six thousand Marines. In nine weeks, the U.S. dropped one-hundred thousand tons of bombs, in addition to hundreds of gallons of napalm and Agent Orange. Air strikes occurred every five minutes, resulting in the most intense bombing period of the war. Only recently has grass begun to grow.
Vanessa and I take a tour of the Vinh Moc tunnels, just north of the DMZ. A jeep carries us down a long dirt road, past vendors selling Coca-Cola and bottled water. Very thirsty in tunnels! Buy now, save later! Some of the vendors sell frozen Snickers or extra-large t-shirts exclaiming: I survived the Vinh Moc tunnels!
At the end of the road is a small museum filled with U.S. artillery and pistols the Viet Cong made from bamboo that are capable of firing American bullets. Live ammunition once sprinkled the dirt roads and jungle floors, scattered like loose change. Some bullets are buried deep in the earth; others emerge like stones dug up by a farmer's shovel. Before we reach the tunnels, the tour guide pulls over, leads us a few feet off the main road, parts vines and tall grass and reveals an abandoned U.S. tank, undamaged save for patches of rust.
I think of a photograph of my father standing beside a tank in Bien Hoa. He looks like me when I was little, posing next to a purple stegosaurus. The tank is clean. The bright-white Army star below the gun barrel reflects the sun. My father smiles as if the tank is an animal at the zoo, a big beast that, for a moment, has allowed my father to touch it.
Images like these remind me that there was a war going on around my father. So many of his stories from Vietnam are about sex and boredom, as if he spent nineteen months inside a brothel, ticking off days on a calendar. He did keep a "short-timer's calendar," a color-by-number picture of a naked Asian woman. On the last day, my father filled in the space between her legs with a red pencil. I imagine my father sharpening each colored pencil, killing time before his shift in the kitchen. In the distance, bullets echo through the jungle.
The topographic maps of the tunnels on the wall look like giant ant-farms. A pair of German girls in short-shorts and tank tops bend over the rope barrier, gazing into the barrel of an AK-47. I want to pretend I'm not as curious as they are, but I am. Like everyone else, I have paid to be here.
A petite Vietnamese woman enters the museum and gives a brief history of the tunnels. She is dressed in a black long-sleeved shirt, heavy pants, and boots. Vanessa and I are dripping with sweat, and so are the other people we've met on the tour: the heavy-set couple from Missouri in denim shorts and t-shirts, the young guys from Norway with thick eyeglasses and strappy leather sandals, the middle-aged widow from Vermont in weathered hiking boots.
Though expanded to accommodate Westerners, the tunnels are still very tight. My shoulders brush against the walls, and sometimes we turn sideways to squeeze through a particularly narrow section. The walls drip. Our guide leads us into a five-foot-wide room that was once the tunnels' hospital and birthing center. Clay dummies with broken ears sit in the corner—one pregnant, the other wearing a white surgical mask. An Indian man with a video camera holds his lens less than a foot from their fac
es.
I am suddenly reminded of my family's vacation to Howe Caverns in upstate New York. I was eight years old. My parents had recently purchased their first video camera, and my brother and I shot hours and hours of shaky footage that gave my parents motion sickness when they watched it. My mother often narrated the scene, talking to me or my brother, or describing the beautiful weather. Later, she'd complain about the sound of her voice. "If it bothers you so much," my brother said, "don't talk."
We took the camera inside the caverns, which were lit by yellow and red and purple flood lights, casting long shadows on the slick stone walls. Most of the footage looked like it was shot with the lens cap on. In the darkness, the tour guide's voice echoed. I asked my brother if it was my turn to hold the camera. My family wandered in the cave for almost an hour, whispering.
Here, our Vietnamese guide explains that many children spent their whole lives in the tunnels, surviving only to age three or four due to food and water restrictions. Some never saw daylight. The Indian man disappears around a turn, following his camera's red glow. I imagine him watching the footage when he returns home. His family will sit around a high-definition, flat-screen television, sipping tea, captivated by crystal-clear darkness.
At one point in the tunnels, I have to hold my breath to squeeze through a passageway. When we resurface on the shores of the South China Sea, the tour group is relieved.
"So sorry if you came here for guns," the guide says.
I stare at her, wiping my forehead.
"In Cu Chi Tunnel, south from here, you shoot gun after tour. But no here. Very sorry."
She smiles, turns away from the sea and leads us up the hill, as the Indian man's video camera captures our return to higher ground.
After buying bottled water from one of the vendors along the dirt road, I pull out Lonely Planet and look up Cu Chi. For a dollar a bullet, you can fire an AK-47, the official weapon of the North Vietnamese Army. Afterwards, you can eat boiled-root soup, drink bitter tea, and pretend you are the enemy.
The Language of Men Page 5
