A River in May

by Edward Wilson

  ‘Speak up,’ said Tho.

  ‘I said that my husband does nothing.’

  ‘How can he do nothing? Tell the truth: is he a cadre, a guerilla? What does he do?’

  ‘He does nothing.’

  Tho sighed and made a face.

  ‘He does nothing,’ her voice was quiet, calm and sounded as if it were coming from far away. ‘He does nothing because you have just killed him.’

  Lopez wondered what it would be like to be Vietnamese. He remembered a Jacques Brel song where a drunk staggers around in the early hours from nightclub to nightclub telling people J’ai mal d’être moi. It must be better to be a Vietnamese, he thought, because ‘I’m sick of being me’.

  He knew that in the morning Co Dep’s mother would be gone, presumably to a Saigon government POW camp. They never inquired too closely about what happened in those camps. It was better not to know about the head-in-mud trick, the face-in-the-water trick, skinning, rack, orifice penetration, beatings various – or the electrodes attached to a man’s genitals or a woman’s vagina and breast. Lopez knew that, whatever happened, Co Dep would never see her mother again.

  A week later, Dusty and Ly found a family in Nui Hoa village who offered to adopt her, a kind family who were involved with the local coal-mine. The mine, esteemed by both sides as a future natural resource, was respected as ‘neutral ground’. So at least she would be safe. Lopez wondered why the girl was so warm and friendly. They had killed her father – probably her mother too – but the girl still smiled at their murderers. She should, thought Lopez, have hated them all, but instead she just wanted to be a little girl who was loved. Maybe, he thought, love was instinctual, but hate was learned. And maybe it was a good thing we did learn it.

  The 5th Group commander escorted the American congressman, a fiscal conservative from the Midwest. The congressman was dressed in a safari suit, but donned a flak jacket and helmet so his photographer could take some pictures. Redhorn and Lopez gave briefings on the local situation and then the colonel gave a talk about the wider implications – the financial and political sides. He pointed out that Nui Hoa Den and the CIDG program were part of a process known as ‘Vietnamization’. The congressman nodded approval: Americans in body bags were not vote winners, but Vietnamese stacked up in the Dead House didn’t matter. The colonel went on to explain that the soldiers at Nui Hoa Den were part of a border screening force called the Biet Kich Quan, which translated as Special Commando Force. The congressman stopped him and said he was confused. He couldn’t understand why the program was more widely known as the CIDG, the Civilian Irregular Defense Group. The colonel smiled and said, ‘I suppose something got lost in that particular translation.’ He didn’t say that it had been a PR psy-op con-trick to fool people into thinking the CIDG was a peasant militia who had risen up spontaneously to drive the Communists out of their villages with light caliber weapons, pitchforks and hoes.

  But the important thing – a point which the colonel emphasized by tugging on the sleeve of the congressman’s safari jacket – was that CIDG soldiers were cheap, dirt cheap. It was the program’s most important selling point. Whereas it cost thirty-five dollars a day to keep a US soldier in the field, a CIDG soldier could be flung against the enemy for a mere three dollars and fifty cents. His actual pay amounted to a small fraction of that – about thirty cents.

  The congressman was satisfied. As far as Nui Hoa Den was concerned the American taxpayer had nothing to complain about. He was impressed that the CIDG cost even less than the chain gang he hired from the penitentiary to fill in the potholes in the lane to his farm.

  On the other side of the camp Lopez saw Dusty Storm togged up in battle gear and posing for a British photographer who had arrived on the same flight as the congressman’s entourage. ‘What an asshole,’ he thought. The Brit had hit it off well with Redhorn, even though Redhorn insisted on talking to him in a camp English accent. The guy was nothing like Lopez’s idea of the English – smooth, debonair snakes in pinstripe suits riding around in black London cabs in the rain. He had known an Englishman in Paris, seedy, drunken, a chronic victim of his sexuality who – despite his decay – had a voice as refined and clear as a Steinway grand. Later, Lopez found himself talking to the photographer.

  ‘That Dusty Storm,’ the man said. ‘He seems like an interesting character – what’s the story on him?’ Lopez knew – they all knew – but he didn’t feel like telling this British tourist any of it.

  Dusty Storm had been born Pavel Kirillov, but changed his name when he enlisted in the American army. Part of him was ashamed of being Russian: he adored the Germans. He tried to impress Lopez by quoting Nietzsche and claiming that his mother was an ethnic German. He actually succeeded in impressing him by quoting from T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, a poem Lopez loved. ‘ “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.” That’s me – not Russian but Lithuanian, a good German!’ He bleached his dark hair Aryan blond to try to prove the point, but wore it far too long for a Prussian regiment. In fact, the long peroxide hair made Dusty look almost American, in a Californian-surfer sort of way. But his most striking feature was the enormous rose tattoo that he wore on his chest.

  Dusty claimed to have been born in Moscow in 1940. His father disappeared in the war and his mother took on a drunken lover who used to beat her up. She got tired of the beatings and managed to get the necessary travel documents to visit her sister who was a translator in East Berlin. The visit was, of course, only a pretext to emigrate to the West. Dusty and his mother lived in the West Berlin refugee reception center for almost a year. The mother worked as a cleaner in a hospital, while Dusty played truant and became fluent in the argot of the Berlin underworld. He was a delinquent child who preferred the streets to the refugee center.

  At first, Dusty picked pockets and played American pool during the day. At night he slept in the U-bahn – he found that the best places were on the hot air vents, but ‘sometimes you had to beat up a tramp to get one.’ By the age of fourteen Dusty had discovered how easy it was to make good money on the Ku’damm and around the Hauptbahn-hof. There were always wealthy clients cruising the precincts in their Mercedes, a lot of ex-Nazi officers among them. Sometimes Dusty would beat them up and rob them, especially if they had lost an arm or a leg and couldn’t fight back.

  Once he beat up a client who was a black market racketeer and stole his Mercedes. The racketeer was a small plump man who wore thick spectacles and liked ‘rough trade’. Dusty thought that he gave the guy what he really wanted – punishment, penitence. Dusty said that pummeling that soft pink face with fist and boot was a completely moral act: it was as if he was carrying out God’s will, like a modern flagellum Dei. Throughout his perverted atonement beating the dealer kept pleading: ‘Don’t break my glasses; please don’t break them – take everything, but don’t break my glasses.’ When he had finished, Dusty snapped the spectacle frames in two, and then stomped the thick concave lens to dust. Redhorn loved the story. ‘People like Dusty Storm,’ he said, ‘enrich all our lives.’

  Dusty found that the Mercedes’ trunk was packed with medieval icons: virgins, saints, smiling infant Jesuses, sad-looking Jesuses hanging on crosses. The haul represented a small but irreplaceable portion of Poland’s national heritage. In addition to the icons, there was a Renaissance oil painting of the Last Supper. Dusty had an uncanny feeling that he had seen the painting before, or something very like it. It proved to be the work of an itinerant drunk who roamed all over Poland doing holy paintings on commission for wealthy merchants. The artist was simply a whore with a paintbrush: for ten zlotys the purchaser’s wife or mistress would be portrayed as the Virgin Mary; for a few zlotys more his enemy or a rival merchant might appear as Herod or Judas Iscariot.

  Even so, Dusty bragged that he got enough money for the painting from his fence to rent a luxury apartment and get married. His bride, Frederika, was a seventeen-year-old orphan who worked on the cosmetics counter at the K
aufhaus. He was fond of flashing photos of her around – she had large blue eyes that were clear as crystal and as innocent as cornflowers. Dusty also liked to brag about how he taught Frederika to breathe through her nose and repress her gag reflex by using his thumb as a training aid. When the cash from the Mercedes’ haul had nearly run out, Dusty began to evaluate his wife’s possibilities. One evening he hinted as much and she tried to stick a bread knife in his face. He had a bad scar where he fended it off with his arm.

  Their other arguments were always about America. Dusty wanted to stay in Berlin, but Hollywood and skyscrapers bedazzled Frederika. They finally made it to America under the Lodge Bill – which meant you could become a US citizen if you served a minimum of five years in the military. The Romans, Lopez thought, offered a harsher deal to their foreigners – twenty years in the Legion. He imagined that, on a quiet night, people could still hear the ghosts of those dead deracinated legionnaires squeaking and gibbering, from Scotland to Asia Minor, in bad Latin.

  LOPEZ SPENT THE AFTERNOON helping Sergeant Jackson paint aiming crosses on the inside walls of the 4.2-inch mortar pit. By sighting on the cross and then leveling the two aiming bubbles, it was possible to quickly lay down mortar fire – after windage corrections – on a preplanned target. Each cross had a description: Hill 60, Black Widow Mountain (east ridge), Hill 38, Xuan Hoa church, Phu Gia (bunker complex A). When they had finished, Lopez headed toward the team house to get a beer. Dusty appeared out of a bunker entrance and said, ‘Can I have a word, sir?’

  They walked over to the 81mm pit. Redhorn was right: it was the best place to have private conversations in the narrow confines of the camp. The sandbags seemed to absorb voices. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I don’t like to cause trouble between officers,’ Dusty looked around furtively, ‘but I think you should know that Captain Redhorn’s been going around telling people that you’re “an arrogant gook-loving Ivy League bleeding heart” – or words to that effect.’

  ‘I think you should mind your own business.’

  Dusty looked hurt. ‘I’m only trying to help you, just letting you know you ought to watch your back.’

  ‘What’s behind it all? Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Don’t you see, sir? We have a great deal in common.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We neither of us belong. We’re cut off from our roots, and just pretending, putting on a masquerade.’

  Lopez turned and walked away. This had been happening for some time. It seemed that Dusty was always there, lurking in the shadows, turning up out of nowhere. He knew it wasn’t a homosexual thing – he’d been pursued by men before – but this was something different, in a way deeper and more complex. Dusty always seemed to be watching him and listening, not just to his voice, but to his thoughts as well. Sometimes he could feel Dusty’s eyes looking at him even when he was nowhere near. It was an uncanny feeling, as if Dusty could see his soul.

  Redhorn’s ‘gook-lover’ accusation was nothing new. It was an ongoing conflict. Everyone on the team had at least a smattering of pidgin Vietnamese, but Lopez had become almost fluent. This irritated Redhorn. ‘It’s just a typical Ivy League egghead affectation. What’s the point? Might as well learn to bark and howl so’s I can talk to my daddy’s ‘coon-hound.’

  One night, when both officers were drunk, they actually came to blows. The fight started with an argument about ‘free fire zones’, areas where all living things – pregnant women, babies, water buffalo – were fair game, to be shot, shelled, bombed or napalmed on sight.

  ‘It’s a coward’s charter,’ said Lopez. ‘And you know it.’

  ‘There’s a lot you need to learn about cowardice, Lopez. You’re not a physical coward – it would be inaccurate to call you that – you’re a moral coward, an ethical fucking coward. If people like you had ruled the world for the last thousand years, it would be even more overrun with üntermenschen than it already is. The whole fucking Western Hemisphere would still be a malarial swamp inhabited by disease ridden tribal creatures too ignorant to invent the wheel.’

  ‘Like the Aztecs?’

  ‘Exactly. Cortes certainly got their asses into gear.’

  Lopez descended into a red mist, and suddenly he was on Redhorn, fists flying, and screaming, ‘My people, you asshole! My people!’ He had never felt anything like racial pride or anger before. Before that moment his ancestry had always been something distant, past and best forgotten. It was as if Redhorn had found a hidden button – and jabbed it hard. The fight ended when Lopez got his forearm across Redhorn’s windpipe: for a few seconds he had seriously considered killing him.

  In the morning, when they sobered up, it was all forgotten. No one paid much attention to fights at the border camps, or even the drunken brawls that occasionally broke out in the Headquarters’ bars. There was an unspoken etiquette: if you only used your fists no one reported the fights and no one was disciplined.

  Lopez did not hate Redhorn; in a way he respected him. Sure, Redhorn was evil, but his was an evil with integrity, conviction and even a certain intellect. Redhorn was, above all, no politician, no armchair warrior – he was the real thing. Lopez also knew that a part of Redhorn despised the free-fire zones and the high level bombing. Not for humanitarian reasons, but because it offended his ideal of war as something bloody, personal and close, where you could smell the blood and hear the bones crunching. Redhorn was, after all, a warrior.

  Lopez knew that the free-fire zone policy, although it killed civilians, also attracted recruits into the camp strike force. The big advantage for the Vietnamese of being in the CIDG instead of the regular army was that they could bring their families with them, which was what Phong, Kim’s RTO, had done. Phong’s family used to farm in the Que Son valley. One day the Communists took over Phong’s village: there was no one to oppose them, the nearest government outpost was miles away, and no one bothered to send in ground troops to eject them. A week later there was a leaflet drop, and then a helicopter with loudhailers, to warn the local populace that their homes and fields had been declared a free-fire zone and that they should evacuate the area. No one left: there was no other place to go. And even if they had left for the nearest refugee center they would have been turned away: the Saigon government had solved the refugee problem by refusing to accept any more.

  A week later Phong’s wife’s eldest sister and her three children were busy in the paddy transplanting seedlings. When the gunships came over, she told her children to ignore them and not to run, otherwise they might be mistaken for Viet Cong. They continued to plant rice – holding the seedlings just at the root top, poking a hole in the mud with the thumb and then guiding the seedling into the hole – but all the while watching the shadows and reflections that the circling helicopters cast on the ankle-deep water. Phong’s sister-in-law began to tell the children not to run even after they opened fire – she thought their innocence was merely being tested with warning shots – but failed to finish her sentence when the machine-gun bullets snapped through her spine and her aorta erupted into a fountain of blood.

  Phong had no problem dealing with the Communists, but the prospect of his family being used for target practice by American helicopter gunners was, on balance, worse than leaving the graves of his ancestors untended. So he packed up and left the village that had housed and fed his family for a thousand years. It was only because he signed up with the CIDG that Phong was able to move his wife and two children out of the free-fire zone into the Due Due District refugee camp. Once there, he built a house from cardboard boxes and plastic sheeting tacked to a bamboo frame. Few of his neighbors had anything better. He never stopped smiling and was known as Phong the Philosopher. ‘Nothing,’ he told Lopez, ‘is completely bad. When the river floods, it may be bad luck for the farmers, but it’s good luck for the coffin maker.’

  Keeping the camp perimeter clear of vegetation was a lousy but necessary job. If you didn’t keep it clear, you gave cover to a
ttacking troops and obscured your fields of fire. Cutting grass and clearing brush from the barbed wire around the camp perimeter was hot sweaty work, and dangerous too, for not all of the camp’s mines and booby traps were where they were supposed to be. It was the sort of job that made Lopez feel more mal d’être lui and culpable than usual. The ragged civilians were paid with Catholic Relief Agency food parcels, which Redhorn had promised the Monsignor in Da Nang he would give away to the neediest poor. The possibility of some widow refugee woman getting her legs blown off in order to collect a sack of rice paid for by a donation from some poor widow woman in Dublin had, Redhorn considered, ‘a certain symmetry’.

  Lopez wasn’t happy that Redhorn had recruited refugees to do the job. He flinched as he saw an elderly woman pick up a ‘Bouncing Betty’ landmine. He turned and shouted at the interpreter, ‘Ly, tell them to leave those fucking things alone. Just mark them with tape.’ Suddenly the ground shook. Lopez looked around: no one was hurt, but everyone had frozen. The shaking was too enormous to be a mine explosion, and it had come from a distance. At first, Lopez thought it was an earthquake. The tremor lasted for a few seconds; it was as if a chill or spasm had passed through the loins of the mountain. The noise came as a low rumble, then rolling clouds of dust and smoke appeared like a genie above a nearby ridge line. Then another, even stronger, shudder passed through the mountain – a piece of corrugated iron clattered off a sentry post.

  There was another tremor, but less violent. Lopez heard the thunder come again and saw more clouds of smoke and dust plume higher up over the mountain valley. He left the refugees and went to ask Redhorn what was happening. He even wondered if Lyndon Johnson had gone mad and authorized the use of tactical nuclear weapons.