War Baby

by Colin Falconer

  His shirt lay on the floor beside the bed and he picked it up and fumbled in the pockets. He found the envelope with the travel documents and threw it on the bed. ‘Take the bloody tickets!’ he snapped.

  ‘No,’ she said, very calm.

  He got up and went to the window. The sound voices and tinny music drifted along the alley. He looked at his watch. Almost midnight. Cholon never slept, even during curfew.

  Bugger it, he thought. There was no real choice, he would have to do it her way.

  He would stay two more days, perhaps three. He would know when it was time to go. When the other correspondents got out, he would go with them and he would take Odile and Phuong.

  Two more days.

  Perhaps three.

  Chapter 20

  In the early hours of the 28th the airport came under shellfire for the first time. Ryan woke up and smelled smoke. He went to the window; a cordite haze had settled over the Saigon rooftops. He kissed Odile and Phuong goodbye, rushed down the stairs into the street and took a siclo into the city.

  The streets were choked, trucks, vans and siclos piled high with furniture and suitcases. Everyone was ignoring the curfew, panic had taken over. Where were all these people going? he wondered. There was nowhere left to run to.

  He went to the AP office to look for Crosby. Webb wasn’t there, Crosby said he’d gone to the Doc Lap palace, he’d heard that one of the army generals, Big Minh, was about to take over the government and try to arrange a last-minute truce with the communists.

  There was fighting at Newport Bridge, just half an hour from Saigon.

  A Vietnamese had parked his Dodge outside the Caravelle. Both the rear doors were missing and the exhaust manifold was held on with bits of wire but it still ran, and the owner was offering rides out to the front line. Crosby paid him crazy money for the fare and they headed out on the old Bien Hoa road.

  The four-lane highway was jammed with cars and buses, bicycles and bullock carts. The tide was all headed the other way; farmers in conical straw hats pushed handcarts loaded with cages of chickens and ducks and rice sacks and ancient wicker chairs; old women clutched the hands of small children as they ran; military trucks barreled through it all, the drivers’ fists jammed on the horn. People were running, eyes wide, like animals running from a bushfire. A pall of dust hung over the road.

  This terrible tide washed around them. Ryan finished one roll of film, reloaded his camera and kept shooting, frame after frame.

  A Honda had spilled in the middle of the road, and a man lay on the ground beside it, blood forming a sticky pool around his head. His wife was crouched beside him screaming, her children standing behind her in utter anguish. They were all covered in blood, perhaps their father’s, perhaps their own.

  Traffic milled around them; a knot of bystanders stood in a group and stared.

  Another truck rumbled past. The soldiers in the tray all wore the snarling tiger patch of the Hac Bao battalion, one of the ARVN’s elite units, the men who had fought so fiercely at Hue and Xuan Loc. When they saw Crosby and Ryan they shouted and shook their heads, telling them to go back.

  ‘This doesn’t look good,’ Crosby said.

  Black smoke spiraled into the sky just ahead of them. Their driver stopped the car, refused to go on. Crosby and Ryan jumped out.

  Ryan could see the red and yellow liberation flag of the Viet Cong among the palm trees on the other side of the river. Shadowy figures moved among the burning warehouses on the far bank. He heard the crackle of small-arms fire.

  The government paratroopers holding the bridge were crawling up the span, preparing to counterattack. Well, he wasn’t going to get any good snaps standing here.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to Crosby.

  Crosby shook his head. ‘I don’t like this,’ Crosby said.

  ‘Wait here for me.’

  Ryan started to run. The mortar round landed without warning. Ryan heard a dull thud as it hit the road, and then he was sitting down, watching an olive-drab ARVN truck crackle into flames. A cloud of gritty dust drifted over him. He was aware of people screaming.

  He had to get a shot of that truck. He fumbled for the camera around his neck, tried to change the 25-millimetre lens on his Leica to a 105. He didn’t seem able to make his fingers do what he wanted. Everything seemed to be slowing down. He couldn’t focus his eyes properly.

  ‘Sean! Oh, Jesus Christ, Sean!’ Crosby was standing over him and he looked scared about something. He realized he must be hit. ‘Sean. Christ! Oh, Christ!’

  Something was obviously wrong. There was no pain, just an uncomfortable sensation at the side of his head, like sunburn.

  ‘Tell Spider to look out for Odile,’ he said, but the words didn’t seem to come out right at all.

  The next thing he remembered was a bright light hanging in the air above his head and someone saying: ‘I don’t think he’s going to make it.’

  After that it went dark.

  * * *

  The monsoon had come early, the thunder indistinguishable from the sounds of the battle closing in around Saigon. Just two hours before, the city had been bombed from the air for the first time; three American A-37s, captured from Da Nang, had roared over the rooftops and attacked Tan Son Nhut airport.

  It was ten o’clock. The guests at the Caravelle, all international journalists, had gathered in the restaurant. The atmosphere was festive; it was almost like a graduation party. They ordered salade niçoise with their trout almondine, and raised their glasses of wine in a farewell toast, heady with the knowledge that they were witnessing history.

  Webb had spent most of the day in taxis, rushing to and from interviews at the palace and the US Embassy, then out to the airport to cover the stalled evacuation, took a last walk along the Tu Do to interview the handful of bar girls who remained. He was wired, physically exhausted, running on adrenalin. He ordered a bottle of Montrachet and some vichyssoise and spread his scribbled notes on the tabelcloth, mentally composing his file story.

  Then he went back to his room and sat down at his typewriter.

  Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door. ‘Who is it?’

  No answer.

  ‘Who is it?’ Angry at the interruption he jumped up and threw open the door. ‘Croz.’

  There was blood on his Saigon suit, a lot of it, more caked black into his hair. His face was sickly grey.

  ‘Ryan?’ he said.

  Crosby nodded.

  ‘How bad?’ The first thing he thought was: what about Odile and Phuong?

  ‘We went out to Newport Bridge. He was standing right there next to me. Then he kind of sat down, real hard, and when I looked at him it was like the whole side of his head was gone. It was just one fucking mess of blood.’

  He was shaking. Webb pulled him inside and sat him down in a chair. He grabbed his Johnnie Walker and splashed some into a glass.

  Crosby drank it like it was water.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I put him in the taxi and brought him back to Saigon. It was a fuckin’ nightmare. We couldn’t get through the traffic. Must have taken maybe two hours, I don’t know. He was doin’ the funky chicken the whole freaking way. The doctors at the hospital say he’s got shell fragments in his brain. I don’t think he’s going to make it.’

  ‘Is he still at the hospital?’

  ‘I used my connections at the embassy. They flew him out of Tan Son Nhut on a Huey to one of the carriers. Shit, man. This is crazy.’ He ran a hand over his face. ‘What a fucking mess.’

  Webb grabbed his flak jacket and his helmet, left his cameras on the bed. It felt like he was going out naked without them.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Crosby asked him.

  ‘I’m going to get Odile and the kid.’

  ‘No way, man! It’s fucking insane out there. You can’t go to Cholon! There’s soldiers fuckin’ everywhere, shooting at anything that moves. I didn’t think we were going to make it back from the airport. We’ll
wait till the morning, after the curfew. Okay?’ He stood up, put a hand on Webb’s chest. ‘You get shot, you’re not helping anything. We’ll get her tomorrow.’

  Webb knew Crosby was right. He slumped on his bed.

  ‘I knew this would happen.’

  ‘It will be okay,’ Crosby said.

  ‘Fuck.’

  Crosby reached for the whisky bottle, poured two more shots. ‘I got this,’ he said. It was one of Ryan’s Leicas. There were blood stains on the casing.

  ‘His camera?’

  ‘I got some good shots of him, after he was hit.’ He looked at Webb, pleading for sanction. ‘He would have wanted it that way.’

  Webb nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘He would.’

  * * *

  The rockets were 130-millimetre, Russian-made, sleek and black; the Vietnamese called them ‘hissing death’. There was no warning scream as they came in, as with artillery shells. They came during the night, with a sigh, silent as death.

  Just after four, Webb sat at the window of his room in the Caravelle watching a premature dawn. The orange glow he could see was a direct hit by one of the rockets on the ammunition dump at Tan Son Nhut. He heard more explosions as other rockets rained down into the slums of Cholon.

  It wasn’t only the Americans who made war on civilians, he thought; Ryan was right about that.

  He cradled a bottle of Johnnie Walker in his lap. He wasn’t drunk; impossible to get drunk with this much adrenalin pumping through his body. He intended to stay topped up enough to get him through this last night in this damned place. He wasn’t like Ryan, could never be like Ryan. He was afraid.

  They said it could all be over as soon as tomorrow.

  Tomorrow he would get Odile out of here.

  Chapter 21

  A single rocket had demolished every house on one side of the alley, and the ensuing holocaust had razed everything. A middle-aged Vietnamese stood among the twisted sheets of iron, his face blank. At his feet were two bodies, charred beyond recognition, arms petrified into the pugilistic attitude of the burned corpse. The man’s shoes were smoking. He seemed oblivious.

  Webb stumbled through the wreckage; smashed crockery, family portraits with their incongruous smiling faces. Crosby followed behind. ‘They’re gone, Hugh,’ he said.

  There was an overpowering smell of burned human fat and singed hair. A policeman was shouting at them, pointing at something he had seen in the ruins. Webb ran over.

  Her face and shoulders were burned, her lips, ears, eyelids all gone. Her hair had been melded to a piece of corrugated iron by some burning plastic. What he had at first thought was a leaking gas pipe was actually the sound of her breathing.

  ‘Odile,’ he said.

  The policeman shook his head and backed away. The woman should be dead. Impossible to survive, this badly burned. One hand, somehow untouched by the flames, clawed at the air.

  Webb tore at the wreckage around her. ‘Odile!’

  Crosby grabbed his arm. ‘Hugh! Come away!’

  ‘Odile!’

  ‘Hugh,’ Crosby said. ‘Come away, it’s not her.’

  ‘Get some water!’

  ‘It’s not her!’

  ‘Somebody get some water!’

  ‘Look at her arm, man. It’s not her.’ Webb stared, wanting to believe. He was right, the uninjured arm was not the arm of a young woman. The hand was calloused, the nails broken from menial work. Not her, not Odile.

  ‘Christ, why isn’t she dead?’ Crosby murmured.

  Her hand clawed at the air, waving backwards and forwards, like a sea anenome in the tide. Two uniformed men stumbled through the hissing ruins with a stretcher. Webb heard the click and whirr of a camera. He looked around. Crosby was taking pictures.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘We’re not tourists, Hugh. We didn’t stay for the last day so we could talk about it at dinner parties.’

  Webb tried to snatch the camera away. Crosby backed off.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Webb shouted.

  ‘If we don’t take the pictures, why the hell are we here?’

  His hands hurt. He looked down at them; they were blistered from where he had pulled a piece of hot tin away from the woman’s body.

  ‘Jesus, you’re burned,’ Crosby said. ‘Let’s get back to the Caravelle.’

  ‘No, we have to find Odile.’

  * * *

  The city sweated under a grey overcast. Webb and Crosby heard the crackle of small-arms fire. Deserters were roaming the streets, the police had disappeared. The twenty-four-hour curfew had been ignored; the whole city was out on the streets. Webb saw entire families loaded on to tiny Honda motorcycles.

  ‘Jesus, where are they all going?’ Crosby said in wonderment.

  They found a Renault taxi, drove through the chaos to the surrounding hospitals. The wards were overflowing with wounded from the rocket attacks, the doctors harassed, frightened, overworked. They did not have the time to talk to two crazed American bao chi. The corridors were bedlam, filled with shouting, frightened and desperate people. Bodies lay crying out on abandoned stretchers; others lay silent, already dead.

  ‘They’re dead, Hugh,’ Crosby said. ‘They’re under half a ton of smoking rubble. Let’s get the hell out of here.’

  ‘They can’t be dead.’

  ‘You saw the house. There was nothing left, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I have to find them.’

  Crosby grabbed his arm. ‘They’re dead, Hugh. Okay? We’ve been to every fuckin’ hospital in Cholon. If they were alive we would have found them. There’s nothing more you can do.’

  He knew Crosby was right. He sat down and put his head between his knees. ‘Fuck,’ he whispered.

  Webb crouched down and put his hand on his shoulder. ‘This is not your fault, man. You’ve done all you can. Now we’ve got to get out of here.’

  * * *

  Lam Son Square was empty, eerily quiet; even the bootblacks and the urchins selling cigarettes and pornographic pictures had disappeared. They picked their way through the coils of barbed wire that lay across the footpath. Three soldiers watched them from under a tree on the other side of the square. Webb heard the grate of metal as one of the men jammed a new magazine into his Armalite.

  ‘Run,’ Crosby said.

  They turned down a sidestreet. A middle-aged man, dressed in a dark suit and tie, waved a wad of American dollars, as thick as a hamburger, in their faces. Another man grabbed Crosby’s arms and tried to pull him into a doorway. ‘Take me with you! Take me with you!’

  Webb pulled him away.

  Someone grabbed Crosby’s bag, wrenched it from his grip. ‘Jesus, my bag! You crazy?’ Crosby shouted.

  He ran up an alleyway after a skinny street kid who was still dragging the heavy carpet-bag behind him. Webb was about to follow, then saw a woman in a blue ao dai on the footpath on the other side of the road, making her way towards the embassy, clutching a small child by the hand.

  ‘Odile!’

  He ran through the press of traffic. A man appeared in front of him, a handful of American one-hundred-dollar bills fanned in his fist like playing cards. ‘You take me, please!’ he shouted. ‘Please! You take me!’

  Webb pushed him away. ‘Odile!’

  He could see the woman’s blue dress through the press of people outside the ermbassy gates. He used his strength and size to clear a path through the crowd. ‘Odile!’

  He grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around.

  Not Odile.

  The young Vietnamese woman stared up at him in shock. Then her face underwent a transformation; from surprise to hope. She picked up her child and held the small boy towards him. ‘You take to America!’

  But then Crosby was beside him. He had the carpet-bag but there were long raking scratches down the side of his face.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he shouted, pulling him away.

  The woman followed them. ‘Please, you ta
ke!’

  ‘That kid tried to claw my eyes,’ Crosby said. ‘Jesus. Who’s that woman? What were you doing?’

  ‘I thought it was Odile.’

  ‘We’ve got to get out of this shit.’

  Webb turned around, saw the woman staring after him. He looked at her child. He had round eyes.

  Then they were both lost in the crowds.

  Chapter 22

  It was almost dusk when the last of the Chinooks landed on the heaving deck of the Blue Ridge. Crosby and Webb leaned on the rail, side by side, watching the coast of Vietnam fade to violet shadow in the distance. The warm salt air was tainted with the smell of grease and aviation fuel.

  ‘Well,’ Crosby murmured, ‘and so to the next war.’

  Webb shook his head. ‘I’m going back to my desk job in DC and I just want to forget all about Vietnam.’

  ‘You’ll never forget,’ Crosby said.

  Two Marines, crewcut, starched white T-shirts under their uniforms, appeared on the deck beside them. ‘Look at that,’ one of them said, laughing. ‘Reckon I could just about zap that gook from here.’

  Webb saw what they were pointing at. An old fishing boat wallowed in the water below, crowded with Vietnamese. A woman stood at the stern, holding up her child, imploring someone on the carrier to take the infant with them.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Webb said.

  He felt dirty and ashamed. The war might finally be over but he knew he would relive it every day for the rest of his life, and the last scene would always be Odile standing in the middle of the flames, holding her daughter towards him in outstretched arms before she vanished, swallowed up by the gathering darkness, a fading silhouette against the backdrop of the hot green coast.

  The PA crackled as the ship’s admiral prepared to make an announcement. ‘Well, folks,’ he said. ‘That just about wraps up Vietnam.’

  Thank you for coming. We hope you enjoyed the show.