A River in May

by Edward Wilson

  They had laid him out on a table in the LLDB teamhouse, the same table on which Lopez laid out the piles of banknotes for the monthly pay parade. He was a very handsome soldier, about twenty years old, with the spare athletic body of the healthier sort of peasant. There was no sign of any wound at all. A lock of hair hid the bullet hole and there was no exit wound. Lopez brushed aside the dead soldier’s hair, and shooed away a fly that had been drawn to the congealed dot of blood.

  It was such a tiny hole; otherwise, the young soldier was still perfect, unblemished. Lopez thought, fancifully, that when he got to wherever Vietnamese go when they die – and he realized that if the dead soldier wasn’t a Catholic he didn’t know where that was – the angels, or whatever, wouldn’t know what to make of him. Most of the soldiers they sent there would arrive in quite a state, often with large chunks missing. Maybe, he thought, they’d think there’d been some mistake, and that the soldier didn’t belong in the underworld. Maybe they’d even chase him all the way back again, to life. Lopez prayed this was true and willed with all his might to see that broad young chest fill with breath and heave again – but it didn’t and he started to cry. He couldn’t stand much more. He couldn’t hide from the reality of what was going to happen and who was going to die. It wasn’t just bastards like Boca who were going to die, but young Vietnamese soldiers too whose only crime was being conscripted into the wrong army.

  For a while Lopez thought about ditching the explosives and dropping the whole thing, but then images he could no longer confine to nightmares invaded his brain. Travis, Bobby, Xuan Huong, the little girl who had so innocently played with the live grenade, Kim’s face in the shadows as he told Lopez about his last glimpse of his wife and baby – those he couldn’t ditch. Just because his decision meant blood – even innocent blood – didn’t absolve him of his duty to carry it out.

  The camp nurse arrived with a bucket of soapy water to wash the body, and Lopez swallowed his tears. He didn’t want her, or anyone, to see him like that. The nurse was an attractive woman with full breasts that darted about like carp beneath her loose cotton blouse. She smiled at Lopez. He knew that she gave everyone the eye and drove her husband – a CIDG company commander – crazy. He’d been in two fights on her account since Tet. Lopez left her to her duty. He turned in the doorway and looked back. The nurse had undone his trousers, but the handsome soldier was still dead.

  Moc the coffin-maker was already at work. His coffins – finished in a watery matte red – were only for Vietnamese corpses; dead Americans were zipped into plastic bags. Moc no longer had to design the coffins from start to finish, he merely had to nail them together. Before Lopez arrived, when there weren’t so many deaths, he used to make beautiful coffins out of local hard wood and finish them by carving the lids with the Chinese symbol for happiness and long life. Back then Moc had to work all day for two days. Otherwise, the coffins wouldn’t be ready before the bodies began to stink too badly. The previous May, after the first batch of bad casualties, the American supply section at China Beach tried to end the coffin shortage by sending a consignment of twenty pine ones. The Vietnamese reacted badly. They refused to go on patrol and began to make threatening noises about the safety of the team. Americans, however, are an ingenious people and solved the problem in a way that satisfied everyone. The next consignment of coffins arrived in prefabricated flat packs that merely required assembling. The Vietnamese were happy to think that the packages were nothing more than stacked timber; the Americans were happy because the disassembled coffins took up a lot less space. And Moc the coffin-maker was happiest of all because he got paid the same rate for a job that took a tenth of the time.

  There were times when Lopez felt a great sense of release. It was the most exciting thing he had ever done; sometimes there was nothing but exhilaration fueled by rushing adrenalin. Late the previous evening he had disabled the emergency radio in the ‘endgame’ bunker, the bunker where the American team were supposed to hole up for a last-ditch stand. The radio was connected to a secret underground antenna reinforced by armored cable that would continue to transmit if the other antennas had been knocked out. Lopez had felt so charged when he cut the coaxial cable connecting the radio to the antenna that he was afraid that his body itself would start transmitting. He had felt as he imagined an Aztec priest might feel, holding the execution blade in both hands and raising it high above his victims. That power was more potent even than the morphine.

  But later the exhilaration dissipated and cold fear crept in. But he had gone too far to back out. Besides, it had to be done; it had become an inevitability. What had started as mere hate and moral outrage had become something else, something far bigger than his individual self. Lopez felt that he had surrendered himself to history. He wasn’t just carrying out a personal vendetta, he was acting as an agent of positive historical change. In this he was beyond blame, beyond guilt – but not beyond uncertainty. He remembered a political science professor at Harvard – a German Jew – who used to argue that pragmatic self-interest caused far less human misery than ideology. Perhaps, thought Lopez, the tragedy of that man’s personal experience was speaking too. What the professor had failed to admit was that ‘pragmatic self-interest’ was an ideology too, a powerful and insidious one that starved peasants and sold arms to tyrants.

  Lopez slid the box out from under his bed. It was time to booby trap the mortars; the explosives were primed and ready to slide down the tubes.

  Lopez finished his final job – rigging trip-wired explosives in the escape tunnel – twenty minutes before the attack began. He then crawled the rest of the way through the tunnel to an exit concealed by rocks and thick vegetation. The stars were out and the night, after the deathly dank of the tunnel, was fresh and clear. He felt that he was being reborn, that he was wearing his own skin for the first time. He could see the river, a faint silver thread, reflecting all the stars and constellations that had guided men and women since time began. He had to get to the river…

  RUMORS ABOUT AN IMMINENT ATTACK had swept through the camp early that evening and more than half the CIDG deserted before the assault had even started. It began with a mortar barrage. While the remaining defenders huddled in their bunkers, the sappers cut their way through the barbed wire.

  The attack was a great success. All the Americans were killed as well as twenty-eight Vietnamese defenders. Mendy was splattered over the 4.2 mortar pit when the tube exploded. The best resistance came from the weapons NCOs, who managed to remove the explosives from the 81mm, and then started dropping rounds into the camp itself by firing the mortar in a vertical position. They were killed when Kim lobbed two fragmentation grenades over the wire and into the mortar pit. Two other Americans were killed immediately and two buried alive when the secret escape tunnel exploded and collapsed. Boca, terrified into urinary and fecal incontinence by the tunnel blast, dug his way back into the bunker and cowered under his bed praying for help to arrive before the Communist sappers blasted their way in. He waited some time, soaked in his own piss and excrement, before a sapper managed to feel his way through the ruins of the bunker and hurl two satchel charges into the darkness. Boca squealed like a pig as he listened to the pre-death hisses of the time delay fuses.

  The following day the 199th Light Infantry Brigade re-took Nui Hoa Den in a helicopter assault after massive bombing. The Communists had already withdrawn by the time the brigade arrived, but twenty-three Americans from the 199th were killed when a booby-trapped ammunition bunker blew up. Later that day Jackson, Castro and their patrol were found safe and sound, and airlifted back to Da Nang.

  Epilog

  Vietnam, May 1997

  THE MINE IS A SMEAR on an otherwise idyllic landscape. The coal is strip-mined, scarring the rich green of the mountain with yellow concentric rings and leaving a cloud of gray dust over the immediate surroundings. The Vietnamese think it is ugly, but an ugliness worth paying for to break the economic cycle of rice-paddy dependency. An American bu
lldozer is gouging away at the base of the mountain. Vietnamese mechanics, ingeniously tooling ersatz replacement parts from scrap metal, have managed to keep it running ever since it was captured in 1975.

  Kim was badly wounded in the 1972 offensive, but survived the rest of the war and afterwards retrained as a primary school teacher. He returned to the valley of the Son Thu Bon with Nhung, whose husband had deserted her because she couldn’t have children, to run the school in Dai Binh. Nhung was surprised at first that Kim loved her and wanted to live with her. ‘Surely,’ she said, ‘you must want to have children to replace the ones you lost.’

  ‘No, I want to be alone with their spirits.’

  Sometimes, when Kim cried out their names in the night, Nhung became angry, jealous of this other family that had preceded her and which she couldn’t displace. Once she said, ‘But Kim, they were only babies.’

  ‘To lose an infant isn’t to lose one child, it is to lose a hundred – the child that speaks his first word, the child that takes his first step, the child that learns to swim, to sing, to make friends, to fall in love, to write a poem and show it you. I have lost all of these children.’

  One of the things that Kim liked best was getting his children out of the classroom and into the countryside. At the end of the academic year he took them to the pig farm at Phu Gia. The bombing had destroyed the paddy dykes beyond repair, so a scheme was launched to breed Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs on the site of the old village. When the minefields had finally been cleared, the pigs were allowed to roam about on the low hill overlooking the river where Bobby Hatch had been fatally wounded. They were handsome pigs with blackberry-purple bodies.

  As the boat carrying the schoolchildren churned past Nui Hoa Den, Kim called for the attention of his class. ‘Look, the Tran brothers are going to go for a swim.’ Two middle-aged men with lean sinewy bodies blackened by coal dust had began to undress on the river bank. When they slipped off their baggy trousers it became apparent that they were both amputees. One brother, who had been wounded the day of the Phu Gia evacuation, had lost his left leg just above the knee; the other had lost his right leg just below the knee during the 1972 offensive. They sat down and helped each other undo the crude prosthetic contraptions of wood, steel and leather straps that had replaced their limbs. ‘You must watch them,’ shouted Kim in his schoolteacher voice. ‘They are an amazing example of what co-operation and brotherhood really mean.’

  The children watched as Tran Van Loc and Tran Ngoc Troi linked arms and slid into the river. The brothers swam, stump against stump, one complete pair of legs beating the water in perfect harmony. They swirled through the water with all the swiftness and grace of otters. Their laughter rang out over the river as they left a trail of whirlpools and bubbles in their wake.

  That evening, after dinner, Kim returned to the empty classroom and took out his writing materials so he could work on his poem. He took off his sandals and felt the tiles cool under his bare feet.

  He remembered what the river had looked like and felt like that morning: the laughter and noise of the children, the river gleaming like silver reflecting the sun, the sky, heaven.

  Then he saw a great throng of children coming to the river, and saw that his generation, who had suffered to the limit of human endurance, were the river. If only it could be true, if only for a fraction of a second .. .

  I see them coming to the river

  From Nui Hoa, from Phu Gia, from My Lai,

  From Xuan Hoa, from Hue, Hanoi,

  From Haiphong, from the highlands too.

  The Rhadé, the Katu, the Jarai,

  And the Chams, the Chinese and the Khmer.

  When I close my eyes I see them,

  Children, coming to the river.

  From the Mekong Delta,

  From Pleiku, Da Lat and Da Nang,

  From Quang Tri, Quang Nam, Nam Dinh,

  They are all coming to the river.

  Ho Cuc’s children, Kim’s children, my own,

  They are leaping, splashing,

  Laughing in our arms, whole and happy.

  In crystals of water shine the rainbow arches of heaven.

  For one second, let us hear the laughter of their spirits.

  For one moment, let us have a miracle.

  Let us hold them, whole and well again,

  The war-killed children of Vietnam.

  A River in May

  Edward Wilson served in Vietnam as an officer in the 5th Special Forces. His decorations include the Bronze Star and Army Commendation Medal for Valor. Soon after leaving the army, Wilson became a permanent expatriate. He formally lost US nationality in 1986. Edward Wilson is a British citizen, but has also lived and worked in Germany and France. For the past twenty-six years he has been a teacher in Suffolk. The author enjoys sailing and has a twenty-foot sloop at Orford on the River Ore. He is currently working on his second novel.

  Copyright

  First published in 2002

  by Arcadia Books Books, 15-16 Nassau Street, London, W1W 7AB

  This ebook edition first published in 2011

  All rights reserved

  © Edward Wilson, 2002

  The right of Edward Wilson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978-1-908129-14-7