War Baby

by Colin Falconer

  ‘We’ll find another war,’ Ryan said.

  ‘Not like this one, baby. You never forget your first love.’

  ‘I have,’ Ryan said.

  Webb stared at him. He had wanted to ask him about Odile as soon as he saw him, but he was waiting his moment. Ryan knew what he was thinking, of course, but he just sat there, smiling, giving no clues.

  ‘How’s Odile?’ Webb asked him, at last.

  ‘Who?’

  Webb felt like grabbing him by the throat.

  Ryan grinned. ‘Just messing with you, Spider. She’s fine.’

  ‘Is she still in Saigon?’

  ‘We’ve got an apartment in Cholon. Come round this evening. We’ll have dinner.’

  ‘Is Phuong with her?’

  ‘Where else would she be?’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Why don’t you take up social work, Spider?’

  Webb had hoped Ryan had got them out of Vietnam by now, put them on a flight to Australia or the States perhaps. ‘When are you going to get them out of here?’

  ‘I thought maybe I’d piss off and leave them behind,’ Ryan said, a harder edge to his voice. ‘I’m a lot of things, mate, but I’m not as big a bastard as you seem to think.’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ Crosby said.

  ‘You should have got them out of Saigon a long time ago.’

  Ryan made a face. ‘Ever see Pinocchio?’ he said to Crosby. ‘There was this character, Jimminy Cricket. He used to sit on Pinocchio’s shoulder and be his conscience. That’s Spider, in my life. Jimminy fucking Cricket.’

  Webb ignored him. ‘What are you planning to do?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Spider. I’ll get her out before the godless goons burst into Saigon.’

  ‘How long are you going to wait? Until you see them running across the square?’

  Ryan raised an eyebrow. There was a long silence. ‘She won’t go.’

  ‘Won’t go?’

  ‘Not without me. And I’m not going yet. So - her choice, mate.’

  ‘You could make her go.’

  Ryan leaned forward, impatient with Webb’s interrogation. ‘What fucking business is it of yours?’

  ‘Just don’t let her down.’

  The grin returned as suddenly as it had vanished. ‘When have I ever let anyone down?’

  * * *

  Ryan’s apartment was on the top floor of a two-storey house in Cholon, in a warren of alleys about half a mile from the Arroyo Chinois. Once it been the home of a minor French administrator, but it had long ago fallen into disrepair; now the whitewash was flaking off the walls and the green-louvered windows hung from their hinges. The alley outside smelled of camphor and fish.

  Webb pushed aside a sliding gate and went up a narrow wooden staircase. He rapped twice on the door. ‘Viet Cong. Special delivery.’

  Ryan opened the door. He was dressed in his own inimitable style, with a startling red and black paisley shirt over his jeans. Whatever women see in him, Webb thought, it’s not his dress sense.

  ‘Spider, you made it.’

  ‘Sorry I’m late. I had to cross three front lines and two border posts to get here. Tell me, what made you decide to live in the country?’

  ‘Jesus, it’s not that far. Humble journo like me can’t afford to keep apartments in two different cities.’

  The apartment was large, a spacious living room and two bedrooms leading off the main hallway. Some of Ryan’s less macabre photographs hung on the walls: monks, smiling street kids, several of Ryan himself in his field gear. There was a candlelit altar in one corner, incense burning under a crucifix high on the wall.

  Odile emerged from one of the bedrooms, holding Phuong.

  She was accompanied by a heady rush of expensive French eau de toilette. She wore a violet ao dai, and her hair was long and fell about her shoulders. She even wore pale pink lip gloss - to please Ryan, he guessed.

  She seemed pleased to see him. ‘Hugh,’ she said, and conferred a broad smile.

  ‘Bonjour, Odile.’ They all waited for him to say something else, but he couldn’t find the words. So the three of them stood in shuffling silence, until Odile turned to the child clinging tightly to her left hand.

  ‘You remember Phuong,’ she said.

  The plump little girl with sprouts of straight black hair was gone. This older Phuong was reed-thin with long glossy hair like her mother’s, the same round eyes and creamed-coffee skin. She was dressed, like her mother, in a soft violet ao dai. ‘What a beautiful little girl she is. Gets her looks from her mother, thank God.’

  Ryan studied his daughter with genuine affection. ‘Great kid,’ he said. ‘Speaks English and French as well as Vietnamese. But sometimes she mixes up her words so you have to know bits of all three languages to get it all.’

  Webb had brought Phuong a present, a doll he bought at the Central Market. He held it out to her, but she turned away and hid her face in her mother’s ao dai.

  ‘You always did have a way with women,’ Ryan said. He took the doll and crouched down. ‘Little Phuong,’ he said, from the comer of his mouth, pretending it was the doll speaking. ‘Little Phuong, why don’t you come out to play? Little Phuoooong!’

  She giggled, at him, then at the doll.

  ‘Your daddy feels pretty stupid making this funny voice, so you’d better come and get me!’

  She snatched the doll and returned to sanctuary, behind her mother’s legs.

  ‘Say thank you to the monsieur for the pretty doll,’ Odile told her.

  ‘Merci very much,’ Phuong mumbled.

  ‘She is just a little shy,’ Odile said.

  ‘How do you reckon she’ll go in Sydney, mate?’ Ryan said.

  ‘I’m sure they’ll love her.’

  He raised his eyes. ‘Yeah, I’m sure they will.’

  * * *

  Odile had prepared a three-course dinner. There was spring rolls; rice paper filled with minced pork, crab, vermicelli and mushrooms, fried until they were crisp and brown; cha ca - fish slices braised over charcoal with noodles, roasted peanuts, lemon and nuoc mam, served with green salad; and for dessert, bank daui xanh, mung bean cake accompanied by green Chinese tea, much more expensive than Vietnamese tea, only for special occasions. Webb felt flattered.

  Odile was quiet, as always. Occasionally she asked Webb questions about his new life in America, and if he was married.

  ‘No, no wife,’ Webb said.

  ‘Who’d have him?’ Ryan said.

  Ryan, as usual, dominated the conversation, talking about Cambodia, the barbarity of the Khmer Rouge, how fiercely the government soldiers had defended Phnom Penh, how they had been defeated through lack of supplies and ammunition. ‘Nixon got them into that war, and Kissinger said the Americans would back them. Then they pulled out and left them high and dry. Just like here.’

  After the meal, Odile left the table to put Phuong to bed. Ryan and Webb went out onto the balcony with a bottle of Bushmills.

  ‘I’m going to miss this place,’ Ryan said. ‘Be it ever so humble and the rest of it. I suppose your pad in Washington is a little better than this.’

  ‘But it takes me an hour and a half to get to work.’

  Ryan poured two glasses of whisky and raised his in toast. ‘Bet you thought Sean Ryan had left her.’

  ‘I don’t know what I thought.’

  ‘You’re a bloody liar, Spider.’

  ‘Of course that’s what I thought.’

  ‘One of the advantages of being a bastard, mate. You always have a margin to surprise people.’

  ‘Why don’t you marry her?’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  Webb shook his head. What a stupid question.

  ‘I’m serious,’ Ryan said.

  ‘She doesn’t love me.’

  ‘Yeah, strange. Most Vietnamese girls will love anyone who offers to get them out of here. Not this one.’ Ryan shook his head. ‘She won’t leave me, Spider. I told her I’d
send her anywhere she wants to go, but she won’t leave without me. She’s got the kid to think about. She’s being perverse.’

  ‘That’s good coming from you.’

  ‘I’m immoral, not perverse. There’s a difference.’

  Odile was singing Phuong a lullaby, in Vietnamese. He saw her shadow on the wall.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘It’s all arranged. I organized visas for them through the Australian embassy.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Mate, I’ll try and make a go of it, God knows I’ve run my luck pretty hard, maybe it’s time I gave it a break. Settle down, do a bit of surfing, the odd snap for the Coolongatta Chronicle or some such bloody thing.’

  ‘Do you love her?’

  ‘When I’m with her. Mate, I can’t help the way I am. I’m trying to do the right thing here, but a leopard doesn’t change its spots. You’re not like me, mate. Don’t try and understand.’

  They listened to the distant thunder; not B-52s, like the old days. Now it was NVA artillery, and getting closer every day. ‘So how’s Washington treating you?’

  ‘It’s okay. Sometimes I miss all this. Funny though, now I’m back here it scares the hell out of me.’

  ‘Yeah, well, we’re all scared of something. Most people, it’s dying. Me, it’s boredom.’ He drained his glass and poured three more fingers. ‘Why didn’t you sleep with her? If I’d been in your shoes, I would have done.’

  The sudden shift in the conversation caught Webb off guard. He didn’t know what to say.

  ‘You love her, don’t you?’

  Webb shook his head. ‘No.’

  Ryan raised an eyebrow to register his incredulity. ‘No?’

  Webb looked away so Ryan would not read the lie.

  ‘Christ, I feel so dirty when I’m around you, mate. You’re a fucking saint. I don’t know how you’ve survived in this world as long as you have.’

  Odile finished the lullaby. She reappeared on the balcony, leaned on Ryan’s shoulder and kissed him. ‘Goodnight, cherie,' she whispered.

  ‘You don’t have to go to bed,’ Ryan said.

  ‘I know all your war stories and I hear all your dirty joke a hundred times. And I am tired.’ She gave Webb a small smile. ‘À bientôt. It was wonderful to see you again.’

  He stood up. ‘It was wonderful to see you, too. And Phuong.’

  ‘I owe you so much,’ she said, and she stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Take care.’

  She went back inside, shutting the balcony doors behind her. Ryan looked at Webb. ‘She always talks about you, you know.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘You must be proud of yourself.’ He drained his glass and poured another. He looked across the alley at his neighbors in the next apartment. A Chinese man in a white undershirt was staring at a flickering black and white television, three small children clustered on the floor at his feet; his wife was sewing clothes at the window. The harsh staccato voices of the television jarred with the clamor of Chinese music on a radio from somewhere further down the alley.

  ‘What you would have done if I’d died at Que Trang.’

  ‘I never thought about it.’

  ‘Then you would have been stuck with it, mate. You would have had to have taken care of her, whether you wanted to or not.’ He grinned. ‘You must have had to think fast that night.’

  ‘It never crossed my mind. You think I would have let the NVA shoot you?’

  Ryan nodded, in acknowledgment. ‘I never thanked you, did I? Sorry. I guess I don’t like thinking how close it was.’

  ‘You would have done the same for me.’

  ‘Not if I reckoned there was a good snap in it.’ He refilled their glasses and raised his in toast. ‘What will we drink to?’

  ‘Saigon?’

  Ryan nodded. ‘Yeah. Goodnight, Saigon.’

  They touched glasses.

  ‘People say there’s going to be a bloodbath. I’ve heard stories that the Viet Cong beheaded half a dozen policemen in Danang.’

  ‘That’s bullshit.’

  ‘But it could get ugly. Especially if the city comes under heavy shellfire, or there’s door-to-door fighting.’

  ‘Well, we’ll be long gone.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it, isn’t it? The joy of being a correspondent. When the war gets too hot, we can always go home.’ He thought again about McCague, and Judge, and the Special Forces sergeant in the poncho up at Que Trang. ‘Do you think we did any good here?’

  ‘I don’t know, mate. There’s always going to be wars, and there’ll always be people suffering, usually women and kids. You can’t change that, not with a few snaps.’

  ‘What about the pictures Eddie Adams took of Loan shooting that VC during Tet? Or the girl running down the road with the napalm on her back. They changed people’s minds about this war back home.’

  ‘They were ready to have their minds changed. Anyway, we both know that pictures lie. That one of Loan, Jesus! One of his men just had his wife and kids executed by the Viet Cong in his own home. The bloke he shot was the local VC area commander, he was responsible for what had happened. But it put in people’s minds that the South Vietnamese were the only ones committing atrocities. Maybe two years before, not one paper in the States would have run it. But people had changed their minds about the war, and that picture just gave them the justification they wanted.’

  ‘The war was wrong, and we showed it was wrong.’

  ‘We were hitting a soft target. We only had access to one side, the Americans gave us transport and tucker so we could get a first-hand look at their stuff-ups and their massacres. That’s true democracy, mate. Where were we when the NVA executed two and a half thousand civilians in Hue and dumped their bodies in mass graves? Get any snaps of that? Besides, Spider, the real story was how affluent Vietnamese arranged for their kids to avoid the draft while half the grunts out in the boonies getting shot to shit were black and Latino kids from American ghettos. We didn’t stop the war, Spider. We just helped someone sell more newspapers and magazines.’

  ‘If you don’t think it matters, why do you do it?’

  ‘Taking snaps is the one thing I’m good at. And anyway, when did you get to be so holy? You didn’t come out here to save the world. You were an ambitious little shit like the rest of us and you got lucky at Que Trang.’

  Webb didn’t want to listen to this heresy. If what they wrote, what they recorded, did not make a difference, he’d rather be fixing cars or building houses. ‘I still think we did some good here.’

  ‘The only good thing I’ll do is get Phuong and Odile out of this shithole before Charles gets here. The rest is just an ego trip.’

  ‘What if it doesn’t work out between you and her? What if you go back and you can’t live a normal life anymore?’

  ‘Is that what happened to you in Washington?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Spider. If it gets so bad we can’t hack it, there’ll always be another war to go to. World peace is not going to break out in our lifetime. Believe it.’

  Chapter 19

  Every day brought news of another government defeat, McNamara’s domino theory in microcosm. Hue and Danang had been abandoned in March; in early April Cu Chi, in the infamous Zone C, fell to the communists, then the old US stronghold at Bien Hoa.

  The ARVN Eighteenth Division made a last-ditch stand at Xuan Loc, but when the garrison fell on 21 April, there was nothing standing between the North and Saigon. That evening Thieu tendered his resignation on television, and soon after rumors swept through the city that he had fled the country with the Bank of Vietnam’s gold reserves.

  Queues formed outside the banks and the embassies. The middle class wanted to get out but in the end only the very rich could afford it. An exit visa cost ten million piasters.

  Highway 4, the road in and out of the Delta, was severed and Saigon was isolated, encircled by eighteen North Vietnamese divisions.
Barbed wire and machine guns appeared outside the palace. A vigorous sunset curfew was put in place.

  Webb and Crosby continued to file, Ryan recording the panicked death throes of the city with his camera, taking taxis to the front lines, the ride getting shorter every day. Each morning they asked each other: is it going to be today?

  April wore on; one more day, we’ll hang on one more day ...

  Odile waved to Ryan from the balcony of the apartment as he left each morning; she was there when he returned at night. It was as if the war did not exist.

  * * *

  The flash of artillery fire danced around the horizon like sheet lightning. Ryan sat on the edge of the bed, watching. His body was slick with sweat. The fan creaked on the ceiling, Phuong whimpered in her sleep.

  He heard her roll over in the bed, turn towards him. ‘What’s the matter, cherie?’

  ‘The NVA are just a few klicks from the city. It’s nearly over.’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘I’ve got the tickets and passports for you and Phuong. The AP’s arranged a special charter flight to take their people out tomorrow. I’ve got you seats on it.’

  ‘I do not go without you.’

  ‘Look, don’t be so bloody stupid. Think about Phuong.’

  ‘She is your responsibility also. You too must think about her.’

  ‘This is my job, all right? I might have to stay in Saigon after the occupation. Do you understand?’

  ‘Then we will stay with you.’

  ‘You can’t. It’s different for me, I’m a foreigner. God knows what they’ll do too you. Do you have any idea what the Khmer Rouge did in Phnom Penh?’

  ‘That is not my concern. My place is with you.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’

  ‘I know you will do what is best for us.’

  He had underestimated her. He knew what she was doing; she thought that once she was safe he would forget about her, and she was partly right. He’d make sure she had money for Phuong but he was going back to Australia, that was for sure. She was trying to force his hand, the clever bitch.