The Man from Saigon

by Marti Leimbach

  Susan said, If he is dead—I don’t get it. Why do you want a blood sample?

  I don’t give a rat’s ass if he’s six feet under, I’m taking bloods. He’s had some kind of suicide pill or some such, I just know it.

  Donna, honey, said the other nurse. She shook her head as though she was sad for Donna. As though the young nurse were losing her mind. He couldn’t even move his hand.

  Meanwhile, Howe was walking out of the hospital, his head low, holding his arms away from his sides, as though he’d touched so many people that day he couldn’t bear to come into contact even with his own flesh. The soldiers seemed to recede into space. Donna got a syringe and a set of phials. She didn’t let him die, she said. Something happened. The needle she used was a fair-sized gage but even so the blood wouldn’t flow. So she told Susan—she ordered her—saying, Massage the arm.

  It took her a moment to understand Donna’s meaning, and then to contend with the fact she needed to touch the dead body. She approached the North Vietnamese officer’s arm, squeezed it, and released. Donna said, I don’t know what he did, but he did something!

  Susan squeezed the arm again, watched the slow intake of blood into the syringe. At her knee, on the floor, was her pen and pad, all her assembled notes. She wondered what the hell she was doing.

  Like this, Donna said, demonstrating. She worked the arm vigorously, patting it, kneading it like bread. Work it down.

  She did as she was told. It felt like milking a cow. She couldn’t bear to look at the man’s face. Instead, she looked past the curtain and there she saw Son, whose name she did not yet know, watching as though from the other side of a plate of glass. He was standing in a doorway looking at the officer. His lip was purple with black spiky pieces of gut sticking out, the stitches he’d protested about. His eyes were gloomy and full. It was unlike Son to look anything other than happy, enthusiastic, even playful. Only late at night, only when he thought he was alone, did you see the expression he wore then, watching as she and Donna drew the blood from the dead man’s arm. If she’d known as much, she’d have paid more attention to what might have been the reasons he was sad. As it was, she looked at him and then returned her attention to the North Vietnamese officer, trying to imagine the arm was, in fact, a loaf of bread and not a man’s limb. She wondered what they did with the bodies of enemy troops, whether they fed the bodies straight back into the earth, dumped in rivers or rice paddies or bomb craters. In the Delta the US troops defended bridges, regularly shooting into the water so that enemy frogmen could not swim under the current and plant explosives. Bodies floated down rivers as regularly as driftwood and splintered sampans. She didn’t know what they would do with the officer now. It was one of those questions, like how to dispose of severed limbs, that she couldn’t help but ask herself.

  Surrounded by the screeching, whistling, croaking, cawing sounds of the jungle, hunkered down, her knees to her chin as though pressed into a small space by the darkness of the tropical night, and all around her a pungent, rotting vegetable smell so strong it leaves a taste in her mouth, she misses Marc. He has always been that person who somehow linked Vietnam with home, who made it seem perfectly normal for her to be here. The small routines of meeting up at restaurants after many days of being apart, how they compared notes, talked about people they both knew, holding hands, touching their legs together under the table. Being with him made her feel part of something larger, something important. Not just the press corps, more than that, part of a history that was unfolding. She missed the milky coffee he brought to her in bed, how he set a battery-operated radio on the edge of the bath and read the papers there until they became soggy under his wet fingertips. If he were here, she would not feel so foreign, so completely disoriented. He would ground her, she thinks.

  Sometimes the feeling of wanting him with her is so powerful it seems to gather color and texture, occupying a place just beneath her eyelids so that when she tries to sleep she sees his face, feels his body beside her, imagining the breath of the soldiers is his breath, that he is here with her instead of them. She misses him so much the aching becomes a part of her no longer attached, a phantom limb, every nerve on fire. If he were here, he’d know what to do. He’d have a solution, or at least an idea. If she could have had any one thing just now, even more than her boots she’d want paper and pen to write him a letter. And among the ways in which she drives the Vietcong soldiers to distraction is repeatedly asking for paper to do this. They do not answer her when she speaks English, when she speaks French. Finally, she says, “Giáy! Giáy viu lòng!” and even then they behave as though she has said nothing, not even turning in her direction, so that she begins to doubt her own ability to be understood. Dear Marc, she thinks.

  She wants to touch him, to write to him, to dig out the letters in the layers of rotting leaves on the jungle floor if that is what is required. Instead, she forms each word on the roof of her mouth with her tongue. She scowls at the guards. She thinks as hard as she can, spelling out a message for Marc in her brain, hoping that some invisible power she does not believe in will transport her thoughts to his. She considers that death begins with just such a desperate, impossible cry. She has seen young men die and often they were still trying to speak as they did so. For the first time she deliberates whether it is inevitable that they will die here, die in the next few days or weeks, or that she will, anyway. Not necessarily by gunfire, but because that is what the jungle does to you. You leave it or it kills you. She can think about this rationally for the moment. They’ve given her a bit of rice and it has cleared her head for now, so she can think about such matters.

  Maybe they were just arguing about which direction to take, but she always imagines that there is one of them who thinks they should be shot, while another wants to spare them. The Vietnamese soldiers stand in a huddle like a three-man football team. Their voices have a high, light tone for young men and contain a musical quality that might seem beautiful if she didn’t imagine they were speaking of death. She wishes she could tell which one was arguing for their lives, as she’d like to thank him. She wishes she could know who has been persuaded to their side, for she would like to thank him, too.

  At the end of the third day, after a long heated discussion, she hears Son say, “It’s okay now.” He’s been listening, his head alert on his long neck, bent like an antenna in the direction of their captors.

  “Son, please, tell me what they are saying. Tell me exactly.”

  He sighs, looking away and then toward her again. “They have to present you to their officer in charge, which means they have to take you with them—for now. But they think they are likely to run out of rations, so the question was whether they should release you, which would get them in trouble—if it was ever discovered, that is.”

  “Let me go now? Where? Here?” In the middle of the jungle, she thinks, without any idea where she is and with no food, she is willing to bet.

  “They don’t themselves have the authority to release you. They don’t have any rank. But they are also worried that you are becoming a burden, that you are slowing them down.”

  She is silent. So she had been right about what they were discussing. Though she had guessed as much, she is surprised. Though she knew, it comes as a shock.

  “Because they are running out of food,” she concludes.

  Son nods. “They need to find their unit.”

  “Are they going to shoot me?”

  “Susan, they don’t need to shoot you. They could just walk away from you and you’d perish. Unless they let me go with you, but they will not—” The look on her face silences him. He pauses, saying nothing for a minute or so, then changes the direction of his conversation. “Anyway, they aren’t going to do that. They are keeping you with them.”

  He states this flatly, without any joy in his face. She knows there must be more. She thinks—she knows—what it is he will not say.

  “They are considering whether to stop feeding me?” she whis
pers.

  Son swallows; his eyes are heavy, burdened. She can see he feels he is failing her. He is not failing her, but she has nobody but him, and she is hungry. She is tired.

  “There are plenty of fruits,” he says cautiously. “We have coconuts, dragonfruit, breadfruit—”

  “They’re going to stop feeding me!”

  “Susan,” he pleads, “at least they aren’t going to leave you here alone. You would die. As surely as if they dropped you in the sea, you would die.”

  “But why not you? It’s like you’re one of their own! And you, according to every understanding I have of this war, are an enemy!”

  He wags his chin, dismisses the question. He will not look at her. She thinks this means that he knows already that they will kill him. She will be spared, perhaps because she is co anh, an English girl, but he will be taken somewhere and shot, left there. She suddenly sees his body slumped at the base of a tree, the black red blood seeping into the earth, his skull in pieces. She shields her eyes with her hands in an effort to erase the vision from her mind. Meanwhile, Son rises and goes over to where the guards are standing, ignoring their guns, treating the AKs as though they are nothing more than disused sports equipment. He speaks to them so boldly that her attention is drawn away from the thought of hunger, of possible starvation, and is suddenly, acutely, located upon Son, whom she admires and thinks remarkable. He’s not afraid; he never has been afraid.

  He returns a few minutes later, twiddling one of the guard’s cigarettes in his fingers. “We’re going to keep marching north,” he says. How has he managed to get them to give him a cigarette? They only reluctantly share their food with her, Susan thinks, but he gets a cigarette? And why is it that he said keep marching north? He must have known they had been marching northwards and had not told her. He knows exactly where they are going, she concludes, and has known all along.

  “Tell me where,” she demands.

  He lights the cigarette, drags deeply then offers it to her on the end of two dirty fingers. “Hanoi,” he says casually.

  Hanoi is hundreds and hundreds of miles away.

  “They are out of their minds,” she says.

  “But I don’t think we’ll have to go that far. Their unit will be in one of these hamlets along the way.”

  All she can think is Hanoi?

  “In these stupid sandals! With no real food?! Look at me, Son! Look at me!” She slaps her hands against her collarbone, her thighs. Her clothes are grimy with little holes puckering through. She is covered in scratch marks, swollen, infected insect bites, the oozing thigh, the pus-filled feet. Welts from the red ants, black grime all around her fingernails, her toes. The only clean part of her is her eyes, shining through a film of dirt and sweat that makes her appear almost to be wearing a mask. She turns to the three soldiers now, all her anger directed at them. They look up with alarm as she yells, “Hanoi! Are you out of your fucking minds?! You stupid little shits! How thick can you be? You might as well kill me now as—!”

  She stops when she hears a rifle bolt pull back, then another, a third.

  In Pleiku she slept in the nurses’ hootch. Donna found her in her bunk, waking her from what wasn’t exactly sleep. It was the middle of the night or early in the morning—she had no idea. Donna was whispering in her ear. Morphine overdose, she said. And nobody remembers giving it to him.

  She felt the weight of her head against the thin mattress. Her limbs were heavy, immovable. All she had done was follow the nurses and she was this tired. What was more remarkable was that Donna was still awake. She looked at Susan with an alert, nervous energy, passing on this information about the Vietnamese officer.

  How would he have gotten any morphine? Susan managed.

  I don’t know, but he did. Must have stolen it from somewhere. They all have suicide contingencies, these gooks.

  But he couldn’t even move! He was so bad—

  He was a train wreck, but damn if he didn’t get hold of a syringe. He probably had it hidden under the mattress. They are not like you and me, these people; they have unbelievable physical resources. You should write about that. They are not the same kind of human. Must be some kind of genetic thing, super strong, believe you me. I don’t get it.

  Donna sat on the end of the cot, nearly lifting it from the ground. Susan got the impression she’d been a rather stout woman when she first started in the army. She still had substantial hips but the flesh hung on her arms and throat as though she’d suddenly lost whatever it had been attached to. She thought she never wanted to have to work this hard, the way Donna worked. The way all of them worked out here.

  They’re just people, Susan said.

  I know they’re people! I’ve seen them inside and outside, and you are right they look the same, but I am telling you now—

  They were interrupted by a sound outside, an explosion, not too near.

  Don’t worry about that, Donna said.

  In the dim light Susan could make out the shadows under Donna’s eyes, the hollow between her brows. Her face looked ragged. Her hair hung in sections, unwashed. She’d changed from the smock she’d had on earlier, but the way she sat, the way she held her arms in her lap, showed her fatigue. Susan wondered if this was what happened to a person if they spent enough time at a hospital in Pleiku. Maybe their biology changed so that they no longer slept normal hours. Maybe they felt wired all the time and there was no way down, no place to land after flying an all-day adrenaline high. She imagined Donna falling asleep, her body finally collapsing, limb for limb, like a camel dropping slowly to the ground. It would almost be a forced thing, she thought, an insistence from the body, like a sudden blow.

  What’s in your canteen? Donna asked.

  Water, Susan said. I’ve got water in my canteen. She gave her the canteen, sitting up now.

  That’s good, ’cause I’ve got some whiskey! Donna patted her hips for matches, looked on the table, and found a lighter there, swigged out of the canteen, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. He wasn’t going to talk, that VC.

  I thought he was a North Vietnamese regular.

  Yeah, well, they’re all VC.

  Outside the bombs continued, not too close, the sound like a thunderstorm. That was okay. That was safe. When it felt as if you were on the inside of a drum, being pounded from all sides, was when it was close. Donna didn’t look worried, but Susan felt each distant explosion inside her like a little hammer on the casing of her ribs. What she worried about mostly was if one of their own fell short.

  That is outgoing, right? she asked meekly.

  Oh, yeah. You’ll know when it’s incoming. Now that the Russians are giving them rockets, what you really want to listen for is the whining sound before the explosion. You hear that, take cover and say hello to Jesus. I’ll tell you when.

  Take cover, Susan repeated. She wondered where. She wondered how you get to a place where you can calmly smoke a cigarette as Donna was now doing and listen to artillery as though to a song on the radio. She wanted to get back to Saigon where the illusion of safety was much greater.

  Aren’t you scared ever? she asked. She knew Donna would have had no idea what was in store when she signed up. The enlistment people told nurses they couldn’t be posted to Vietnam unless they volunteered. That was the first lie. Others followed.

  Donna shook her head as though to say no, but out of her mouth came, All the time. Then she said, That little fucker, I still don’t know how he got it. Must have grabbed it out of one of our pockets. Or maybe it fell.

  Susan tried not to remember how she’d massaged the arm muscles to work the blood down, what the arm felt like in her hands. She wondered if he’d been afraid of being tortured, and that’s why he’d killed himself. Or maybe it was a case of not wanting to give information. Whatever the reason, he was dead, and the war continued very well despite this fact.

  There were high windows in the hootch. From her angle, Susan could see red tracers in the night sky; the white fla
res that suddenly illuminated, then were gone. She could hear the shelling, like a constant Fourth of July. They’re making more work for you out there, she said.

  They’re always doing that. Did you get the story you wanted?

  I’m fine.

  That photographer asked about you. The gook with the lip. He wants to show you his pictures.

  Oh yeah?

  They’re always trying to sell you something, these guys. Just be careful.

  They smoked their cigarettes, listening to the bombs. Donna dumped the rest of her scotch into Susan’s canteen and took a long swallow, offering it back with a nod. She told Susan that when they dropped white phosphorus it just made her crazy.

  You have to keep neutralizing the burn or else it continues right to the bone, like it’s aiming for it. I wish they’d stop that shit. We don’t have the time, you see, to do what you have to do to treat those casualties. Napalm is bad but the Willie Pete takes full up every minute you’ve got. Hey, how about you put that in your article?

  The scotch had a lovely, warming effect. Susan began to feel a little more relaxed. She smiled at Donna, who slouched on the other end of the cot.

  Man, I’m beat. I’m going to hit the hay, Donna said. Write that thing and let me see a copy. We don’t get anything interesting to read up here. Stars and Stripes is all. Closest thing we get to a women’s magazine is a Sears Roebuck catalog. Tell them not to strafe with the Willie Pete, please. We’re already flat out. And send me a copy.

  I’ll tell them, she said, though of course nothing like that would make it into the article. If she wrote in the problems of treating burn victims it would be edited right out.

  This night in the jungle she is thinking about Donna, about the white phosphorus, the fireballs of napalm, the VC captain suiciding in a hospital bed. It didn’t seem such a bad idea now, she thought, a suicide pill. Some kind of poison. Reporters who carried guns often did so for this one reason. A kind of Plan Z when all the other plans fail, if you had any plans to begin with. She can’t think of any right now, except to try to eat enough, to drink enough, to rest enough. Maybe to hide, she thinks. Wouldn’t that be nice? Just hide and wait and let it pass over.