A CS canister landed in a courtyard beside the house, and the girls and their clients had to flee upstairs to escape the gas. Lopez crawled up the steps, feeble and short-breathed, as the CS stung his eyes and burnt his lungs. Dusty was wheezing and rubbing his eyes while two of the girls were hammering on his back with their fists. ‘It’s not my fault,’ he kept saying. ‘Why are you blaming me? It was the fucking QC.’ Then he saw the baby.
The baby, who was a year old, had stopped breathing, and had turned a blue-gray color; the tips of his fingers were purple.
‘Help me,’ Dusty shouted ‘Please. Help me!’
Dusty thumped the child’s back, but nothing came out except for a little clear fluid. They needed to do something fast, even though Lopez seemed to be coughing up his lungs and Dusty’s eyes were two dripping pink pin-pricks.
‘You do the massage,’ said Dusty.
He put his mouth over the baby’s mouth and nose and breathed gently twice, while Lopez put two fingers on the baby’s breastbone and pressed firmly but gently four times. Then they did it again. They kept it up – it seemed a lifetime – until finally the baby started moving, then he threw up over Dusty’s shirt and began to cry. Lopez was shaking and his eyes were still full of tears from the gas. ‘I didn’t press too hard, did I? His rib cage felt so fragile.’
‘No, he’s fine.’ Dusty used his little finger to clear the last of the vomit out of the child’s mouth. Then he hugged the child close. ‘We’re not always vermin, Trung Uy, not always.’
They hadn’t planned to go back to China Beach that night; they’d arranged to get a lift in the morning with the truck that fetched mail sacks from the air base. But they hadn’t expected the QC to go on the rampage. The girls hid them in a loft that was rank with damp straw and rat droppings. The QC wouldn’t have bothered with them, but for some reason jeep loads of US MPs were also careening around. Outside, the night was loud with Tet firecrackers and the sound of drunken voices. One of the girls brought them a gourd of rice wine.
The first rocket attack started at 3 a.m.; it sounded like the air base was being given a pasting. Husac said it was more prolonged than anything he’d ever heard. A few minutes later a 122mm rocket passed close overhead – Lopez thought it sounded alive and breathing like a dragon – followed by a shatteringly loud impact in the dock area.
He wasn’t really frightened until he heard small arms fire – some of it from the next street. Lopez removed a couple of pantiles from the roof so he could peep out into the night. Arcs of tracer crisscrossed the sky in the direction of the bridges; the area around the air base was so bright with flares that it looked like an early dawn. Then one of the girls came up and told them to keep absolutely quiet. A minute later there was hammering and shouting at the door, and the sound of Co Hai arguing with an excited male voice. The only words Lopez could make out were Giai Phong Quan – Liberation Army. He was terrified, close to urine incontinence. There were other men’s voices, also nervous and urgent. Lopez thought he heard someone say Hoa Ky, an impolite term for American, then the voice of one of the girls, the baby’s mother, sounding angry and hysterical. A voice from outside shouted something. There was more arguing downstairs, and then the sound of footsteps running in the street. More shooting, then a pause followed by the sound of armored personnel carriers and heavy machine-guns. The street battles continued until first light, but seemed further away.
By dawn the neighborhood was back in government control. Some buildings were pockmarked by heavy caliber bullets and a few places were burnt out and still smoldering. It was obvious there would be no mail truck, so they hitched a lift with a truck full of Vietnamese paratroopers. They told Lopez that they were being sent to Hue as reinforcements. All the soldiers seemed to be laughing and smiling, to be exhilarated by the whole thing. Many were wearing brightly colored scarves of exquisite and transparent fabric, as if, thought Lopez, they were medieval knights carrying their ladies’ favors into battle.
Lopez was stuck at China Beach for two more days. All the helicopters had been diverted to Lang Khe. The news was awful. The story came out in bits and pieces. The team-sergeant at Lang Khe had been woken up in the middle of the night by a loud grinding, clacking noise and assumed that the gasoline generator that provided power for the camp’s radio transmitters and other electrics had thrown a flywheel belt. When he went out to inspect the generator, he realized that the noise was coming from outside the camp. He was totally confused – he couldn’t imagine what sort of machine could make such an infernal gear-grinding metal-shearing racket. Then he realized that tanks were coming through the barbed wire.
This was the first time that the enemy had used armor of any kind. For this reason, the camps were not supplied with anti-tank weapons. The CIDG at Lang Khe were Bru Montagnards, usually good reliable soldiers, but they decided that fighting tanks wasn’t part of their contract of employment. By first light the perimeter bunkers had been abandoned, and the Americans and Vietnamese that were left had sealed themselves into the dome-shaped command bunker.
When Lopez was at Lang Khe, the team engineer had told him that the command bunker’s four-foot-thick concrete walls could withstand ‘anything non-nuclear’. But ‘anything’ did not include the small handmade grenades which the North Vietnamese infantry, who managed to scramble on top of the bunker between air strikes, dropped down the ventilation shafts. The first grenade blew the foot off a Vietnamese sergeant, the second didn’t detonate. By the time the third grenade was dropped the defenders had grabbed broomsticks and were using them to block the overhead vents. The grenade concussion, however, knocked the broomstick from the grip of the man holding it; he ended up lying on the floor, without any face and without any hands, making gurgling noises, and still alive.
In the early afternoon, a series of intense air strikes managed to sweep away the North Vietnamese and opened up the chance for a helicopter evacuation. The survivors left the bunker and made a dash for it, leaving the footless Vietnamese and blood-gurgling American behind. A pair of Cobra gunships hosed down the area with covering fire, the rescue helicopters dropped to a low hover at maximum power. The survivors jumped on and that was the end of that.
The fall of Lang Khe made Nui Hoa Den the northernmost camp. When he finally got back, Lopez and everyone else had the same thought: ‘Does that mean we’re next?’ The mood was bad tempered and nervous. Boca had developed irritable bowel syndrome. Lopez had started to use one of the Vietnamese two-holers in order to avoid the indignity of listening to Boca’s colonic rumbles. Latrines were dangerous places. The American latrine at Thoung Due was rocketed while the commanding officer was defecating; he lost part of his penis.
It was early evening and Lopez was lying on his bunk reading Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome when the door curtain moved and Boca’s sweaty red face appeared. ‘I want a word with you, Lieutenant, now. Outside.’
He was annoyed at being disturbed. He was reading Jerome K. Jerome because his was a world so far from Vietnam, from America: a strange damp island where people gave dogs names like Montmorency and rowed the wrong way up the Thames. He reluctantly put England aside and came back to Nui Hoa Den. ‘Can’t we talk here?’
‘No. What I have to say to you is strictly private.’
Lopez followed Boca outside. The camp felt deserted.
Boca turned and started jabbing a finger in Lopez’s face. ‘Have you been reading classified documents that have nothing to do with your job?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Lopez knew that Boca didn’t have any proof.
‘You know something, Lopez, you really are an asshole. You thought you were being a real smartass when you went to see the consul. Well, he told me all about your whining little visit.’
Lopez ignored Boca’s verbal abuse and calmly and plausibly lied about his knowledge of the Phu Gia bombing plans, but at the same time he was furtively looking around for a metal stake or a rock, anything he could use to smas
h in Boca’s face and beat him to death. But there was nothing handy: only sandbags, corrugated iron and barbed wire.
Meanwhile, Boca was droning on, ‘What happens here is for me, me, to decide, you fucking asshole. And I’ll tell you another thing, Lopez, you are not, I repeat, you are to have no further contact with civilian officials unless you have my express permission. And that, Lieutenant, is a direct fucking order.’
‘Are you finished?’
‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to get your ass off this hill.’ Boca jabbed the finger again. Lopez wanted to grab it and break it off, but let Boca carry on. ‘I’ve had a gut full of your bleeding-heart gook-loving shit. And by the way, since you’re such a fucking gook-lover, you can go down to Phu Gia yourself to move your little slope friends. And when you start getting your ass shot off, don’t go screaming for air strikes or 155 artillery – ’cause some little mama san with a little baby gook san might get in the way.’ Boca finished ranting and started to walk away.
‘I have something to say.’
Boca turned and affected to look bored and uninterested. ‘Yeah, what is it?’
Lopez just stared at him. It was at least a minute before he said, ‘You are a piece of shit, Boca, if you…’ He was too angry to finish the sentence. Lopez stared at him again and waited for Boca to start shouting and begin the process of reprimanding him for insubordination. But nothing happened. Lopez tensed up: he wondered if Boca was going to throw a punch or, more likely, go all calm and professional and say that he was relieving him of duty for misconduct. But Boca did none of these things; he just turned his back and walked away without a word. Lopez knew then what he had suspected for some time: Boca was a coward.
But he also knew that being a coward wouldn’t stop Boca from getting revenge or annihilating Phu Gia and the people who lived there. Those were the things that cowards did.
The putting forward of the evacuation plan for Phu Gia meant that Lopez had to see Archie again. As soon as Lopez got to China Beach, he realized that he’d left his morphine behind at Nui Hoa Den. He discovered that he’d forgotten the tablets as well as the syrettes while unpacking his things in the transient officers’ billet next to the beach. He sat on his bunk and hissed a litany of ‘fucks’, then threw his rucksack across the room. The noise woke up a helicopter pilot, who started crying because it was the first time he had been able to fall asleep for a week. Lopez was too pissed off about forgetting the morphine to apologize.
The transition to alcohol alone was a rough one and he felt pretty nasty the next morning. All the aches and pains of normal life – headache, sore throat, diarrhea, nausea, insect bites, crotch rot from jungle fungus, toothache – so easily obliterated by the magic poppy, came back in a flood of unwanted reality.
Things were a lot different since the offensive. After he signed in the adjutant took him into the CO’s office to show where a mortar fragment had gone straight through Cale’s armchair and splintered the plywood wall behind. ‘Unfortunately,’ said the adjutant, ‘Catfish wasn’t sitting there at the time.’
The next day, on his way into Da Nang to see Archie, Lopez thought the RMK girls seemed subdued and fewer in number. Driving was a pain because the Quan Canh had set up checkpoints all over the place. It seemed to Lopez that every duck or chicken had to have its backside fingered for hidden explosives before it could go to market. As he drove past the I Corps mortuary he noticed a construction team erecting a prefab extension.
Archie looked different too. Lopez noted that a flak jacket and a pair of oil-stained trousers had replaced his Brooks Brothers suits. He was, however, still wearing the same brown English brogues, polished like the varnished woodwork of a classic yacht. Lopez noticed that, beneath the decades of highly polished veneer, the leather was cracked and worn, like the patina of ‘distress’ that gives value to antiques. It occurred to him that Archie’s shoes were an emblem, a seal of social hierarchy – you couldn’t ‘buy’ shoes like that, you had to inherit them. Lopez supposed that they were a bit like Cinderella’s slipper: if you weren’t related to the Cabots or Lodges you wouldn’t even be able to get them on your feet.
Archie noticed that Lopez looked unwell and poured him some whiskey. ‘How are things at Nui Hoa Den?’
‘Not too bad. We seem to have been bypassed for Hoi An and the district capitals. But now that Lang Khe’s gone, we feel that we might be the next border camp to get knocked off.’
‘I shouldn’t think so: you look pretty impregnable on that mountaintop – unless, of course, it’s an inside job.’
‘How were things here?’
‘Not too bad. We knew it was coming. I was woken up by my marine guards about an hour before it began. They bundled me into an armored personnel carrier and carted me off to the airbase just in case. Later, an ARVN parachute company secured the consulate. Not much happened; this place hasn’t got the same propaganda value as the embassy. But the QC did arrest my gardener, and I still haven’t been able to find out what’s happened to him. In any case, he wasn’t a very good gardener.’
‘Seems a pity he should end his days in a tiger cage because he didn’t look after the borders well enough.’
‘I am,’ Archie’s voice was cold and firm, ‘doing everything possible to find him and secure his release. Which, considering the fact that he might have led an assassin into my bedroom, is more than generous.’
‘Your security here strikes me as pretty minimal; aren’t you worried?’
‘Not too much. You see, I’ve got good intelligence, the best in I Corps. The trick, Francis, is to use the agents that you can’t trust, the ones you know are doubled – they’re the ones who can really let you know what’s going on.’ Archie poured himself more whiskey, then offered Lopez a refill as an afterthought. ‘I suppose you’ve come here about that village business – Phu Gia, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right. We shouldn’t bomb it if we don’t get the civilians out first.’
‘You realize that the policy is still the same – no more refugees. And I don’t think I need to tell you that the offensive, and our response to it, has left a helluva lot more people wandering around homeless than before.’
‘Are you reneging on our deal?’
‘Circumstances have changed.’
‘Then we’ll just bring those people out anyway, and march them into the resettlement center at gunpoint.’
‘You’re talking crazy, Francis. By the way, did you know that your Captain Boca thinks you ought to see a psychiatrist?’
Lopez didn’t rise to the bait. ‘Listen, you made a deal.’
‘Listen to me, Francis; refugees are defined as people fleeing a disaster or war voluntarily. If you remove them by military force – as you intend – they’re classified as Displaced Persons.’
‘What difference does that make?’
‘It means you’re in serious violation of international law. If you kill civilians in a war, it means they just got in the way. If you round them up and march them out of their ancestral homes at gunpoint, you’ve violated a basic human right.’
‘That’s worse than killing them?’
‘Legally, it is – and maybe it is in other ways too.’ Archie poured another whiskey.
‘I’m not going to back down. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Only too well, Francis. But I want it to be perfectly clear that this thing is your responsibility and, if it goes wrong, you’re going to carry the can.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Rule number one. Whatever you do, Francis, don’t call the Phu Gia people “civilians” You’re not removing civilians, you’re bringing out prisoners of war.’
‘But some of them are only babies.’
‘What do the Jesuits say – “Give me a child before the age of seven…”? In any case, when you get to Que Son, you’ll meet the District Chief. Remember to keep insisting that the Phu Gia people are POWs no matter how much he argues. He’ll know that he won’t be able to s
end them to a POW camp, because they’d only send them back again. Ergo, the District Chief will just have to find room for them in the resettlement village.’
‘This sounds devious and complicated. I’m not sure I like it.’
‘That’s all there is, Francis. Take it or it’s off to bed and no supper.’
For a second Lopez imagined Archie as a knobbly-kneed child self-righteously digging clams on a family holiday on Cape Cod. ‘What’s your role? What are you going to do to help?’
‘I’ll have someone there to do some arm twisting just in case. But, as far as I’m concerned, this conversation never took place.’
Lopez finished the whiskey. ‘Thanks for being so helpful.’
‘You disappoint me, Francis. I thought I told you before that I don’t care for sarcasm. But I have been helpful and I want you, for my own satisfaction, to know why.’
Archie had been leaning forward with his hands on his desk; he slipped imperceptibly, then regained his balance. Suddenly Lopez knew why the conversation was so bizarre – Archie was drunk, stinking.
‘Because, Francis, it’s obvious that you’re a troublemaker, the sort that writes letters, learns which ropes to pull and which ears to bend. You know how to play people’s personalities, you can be charming. Someone bought you a good education and taught you a few urbane tricks, but they left out the loyalty lesson. I know a lot of people in the State Department, and in the Agency too, who are completely cynical and ruthless shits, but at the end of the day I can trust them. I don’t trust you. I’ve helped you for time management reasons – it’s the quickest and easiest way to get you off my back.’
A River in May Page 19
