Do you have any more for me? he asked, his voice different now, plaintive, grasping. Do we know what condition she, they, were in when captured?
On the other side of the crackling line, the colonel took a breath. No, son, we do not, he said, speaking as he might to one of his own men. But you get down to where I told you and Halliday will help you with any further developments.
And so he had learned. In the dead hours just past curfew, while walking back to his hotel in deserted streets, hoping to God he wouldn’t come across anyone, that he could get back to his room, the information sank into him the way that a burn settles into the skin. Surely, Son would be killed outright. He was almost certain this would be the case. He hoped they hadn’t executed him in front of Susan and told himself they would not have done so, as they would hope to return Susan to the press with a story of their compassion, not their blood-lust, with a nice positive spin on the patriotism and humanity of the communist position. No, they would not execute Son in front of her. In fact, it was possible they would march him miles away to kill him. Or maybe they would not kill him. Or maybe they would kill them both. It was difficult for the Vietcong to understand that a woman could be a reporter, and therefore valuable for their own propaganda. They might think she was a spy. He hoped she had her press tags. Of course, she would. She never went anywhere without them. None of them did.
He tried not to think; he was too tired to think. He was glad to be breaking curfew; it gave him something immediate to worry about, as the police would shoot on sight at this time of night.
Flying to the Delta this November day he decides that after the war he will never again fly in a C-130. There is a whole list of things he will never do again—eat food from cans is another example, or wear anything in olive drab—but flying in C-130s is at the top of the list. The planes are unlined and, of course, have no seats. He sits on the floor watching the levers on the ceiling move the wings, enduring the deafening noise of the engines, waiting for the appalling landing. It is the landing that disturbs him most, how the plane spirals down, tightening its turn as though trying to fix itself into an ever-narrowing tunnel. That’s the beginning, the anticipation of which was worse than anything, when the plane dives at speed, gear and flaps down, as though deliberately crashing. It takes on even more force just before the ground opens up below, when the pilot raises the nose, moving to a less angled approach. Then the nose wheel drops and the cargo compartment makes a tremendous jolt, rattling as though the whole plane is coming apart as it goes careening down a runway.
The runway held its own perils. It was often a bit on the short side, coming to an abrupt end in front of a line of rubber trees, or so narrow the wings hang out over brush. At night, if the runway has no lights, the landing area will be lit with battery lights mounted in what look like large bean bags. Sometimes an oil drum or two. Once, because they were riding with badly needed blood, they landed by the headlights of two jeeps. He turned to Locke and said, This will he interesting, because inside the cargo area it seemed as though they were landing into absolute darkness, which could only mean they were landing in water. When he got out and saw the headlights, two jeeps angled with their brights on, he thought perhaps it was all becoming a little close. A little too close, all of it. Since then, he has dreamt several times of crashing in such a plane, and in each of the dreams it is nighttime. There is a fire outside. The plane tumbles down in darkness with that same deafening roar. He tries to think of this dream not as cautionary but as only a dream and nothing more. Whenever Susan asks him what he is dreaming about, he always says he can’t remember. Fear is a kind of disease, like the tuberculosis that plagues the peasants, and he didn’t wish to visit it upon her. She was still new to the war. He thought she had months, maybe even longer, depending on where she went in the country, before anything would bother her like this, staying with her while sleeping. He hadn’t wanted her to think the way he has come to think, or dream as he now dreams. There have been times when he has envied those who stayed in Saigon and reported whatever was given them by JUSPAO. It undoubtedly made life easier.
It has been a long spell of changeable weather. They are lucky because a tropical storm has moved away, allowing them to travel. Even so, it is windy. All through the flight there have been great troughs of turbulence. He can hear the force of the wind against the skin of the plane, feel the way it pushes them up from below, or presses down like a sudden wave from above. Puke weather is what Locke would call it. But Locke isn’t here, isn’t speaking to him, is still fuming over the fact he killed the Loc Ninh story.
What in hell did you do that for? he’d said when Marc told him. You believe it will make any difference anyway? That our boys are going to launch some all-out effort to find her because you decide not to run one story!
She’s not her. She’s Susan. Use her name.
You’ve lost sight of exactly who you are, Davis. Nobody here gives a shit about your story! And they don’t give a shit about her, either.
Susan.
Okay, that’s it, fuck you! Locke said.
Marc turned away. The end of their friendship was set in motion. He heard Locke’s words, directed now at his back. I was out there for five days to get that story and you think I’m just going to roll over and say, “Fine, Davis, it’s your call”? I’m saying no such thing. That was my story, my footage—
I’m going to try to get some information. Be reasonable.
Reasonable? You’ve lost your mind!
He pushes Locke out of his thoughts, distances himself once more from the whole Loc Ninh affair. It doesn’t matter anyway. It was only a story. Perhaps he hadn’t gotten a fact or two correct. There was always that possibility. Besides, someone else will run a similar story; that always happens. There would be no consequence for killing the story, except the fallout from Locke.
As the plane turns now into its descent, he feels a shift in himself, a kind of relief that finally all they have to do is pass through this last, dramatic finale. He fixes himself into position, sitting on a metal cargo pallet, holding tightly with one hand while the other pulls his satchel closer against his rib cage. He is surrounded by concertina wire, bags of cement, boxes of ammunition, pitchforks, shovels, hessian bags, drums, so much it might be a warehouse of the stuff. He works out the exact path to the emergency exit, watching the loadmaster to see if he seems at all concerned. The loadmaster, his face gray in the dim light, smokes through the flight. He nods at Marc as they begin to fall straight down, landing as though through a hole in the sky, the hole that has opened up hundreds of times before, and it feels just the same every time.
There is a crosswind and the plane crabs on the approach, then it straightens momentarily before the pilot lowers a wing into the wind to kill the drift. As the nose wheel touches down, Marc feels as though the ground is rushing beneath him. Then a strong pull to the left, all this happening in reverse throttle. Marc presses his own feet down into his boots as though braking, and the feeling is so real to him that it is almost as if he can feel the cycling of the anti-skid system. He’s been in the cockpit with these guys and he’s seen how their whole body is engaged in landing the plane. Feet working the pedals, hands gripping the steering wheel, pulling on the throttles. Every inch of the craft, rudder to nose wheel, controlled all at once by limbs and toes and fingers. He has watched the pilot’s eyes lock on to the end of the runway ahead while he works these subtle physics, studying the line where the runway meets the jungle, the treeline arriving disconcertingly fast, as though being pushed forward.
“Hey, man, we’re here.” It is the loadmaster. He stands by the door, his arms full, the cigarette bobbing as he speaks.
Minutes have passed and the plane is still. In his pocket, by necessity, Marc keeps a small flask of bourbon. He reaches for it now, ignoring the loadmaster’s gaze. When finally he steps from the plane, he feels as though he is pulling himself from a wreck. Suddenly out into the noon-day sun, he can see as far as his eyes w
ill take him. The Delta is flat, a mouth of land ready to take back in the salt water of the South China Sea, with air so wet it seems to have a texture, thick, viscous, a force he has to push himself through as he navigates the airfield under the strong glare of the sun. The bourbon heats him further, a little fire of his own. He crosses the airfield, the heat rising in waves from the ground. The plane ride is forgotten, already behind him. He ducks beneath the overbright sun, so close and hot it feels prehistoric, belonging to a place of tar pits and dinosaurs, of men dwelling in caves. He is here now to find something out, at least one thing, that was not in the report on Susan.
Son he does not care about, isn’t even looking for. On the phone, while making the arrangements to come down, he purposely avoided mentioning his name. What he has been thinking about, despite every attempt to push it from his mind, is that the last time he was in this area, about eighteen months ago, he reported on several killings in a small village. Six people had been murdered by the Vietcong, two of them women. It was alleged that the women had hung lanterns in the village as a warning to government troops that the Vietcong were there, scrounging rice and gathering up men to fight for them. He had seen the bodies, decapitated by scimitars which, it would appear, had not been sharp enough to make a clean job of it. All he can think about is how the women had been believed to be spies and how they had been executed with those dull blades, the bodies left to the flies. He has little comfort in the fact that there has been no report such as this, no report at all, in fact, about Susan. That is the reason he is here, to make such a report, if indeed anything has happened. Spies are not tolerated, their killings are public. The women’s heads were placed on stakes, fierce trophies set out as a warning, staying there until villagers had the courage to remove them, to kick the dust over the fallen blood, burn the stakes, hide everything, even their grief. He’d seen all that, and done the story, then flown back and forgotten it until this day.
He is met by a jeep, courtesy of ARVN, thoughts of Susan so full in his mind that he cannot bring himself at first even to talk to the driver, a Vietnamese man a few years older than himself who crouches behind the steering wheel, a serious expression on his face.
“Davis?”
He nods.
“Welcome,” says the driver, whose bored expression suggests the opposite. The plane was way off schedule. He’s probably been waiting in the jeep for an hour.
As it happens, the driver doesn’t want to talk either. Nor does he accept Marc’s cigarettes when they are offered. Marc has come to associate this kind of behavior with the older ARVN officers, some of whom remember well the last war with the French and find the Americans patronizing. They may have had family members, a brother, a father, an uncle, “recruited” by the Vietcong—that is, taken away—so now they are suspected always of being Vietcong themselves and treated badly by the US military. It all spills over into a general disdain for Americans. He is used to it. Quite frankly he is so used to it that he does not care.
The heat is made tolerable by the breeze from the moving jeep. Though it is not raining now, there has been rain and the roads are not too dusty. His sunglasses guard against the worst of the afternoon’s glare. He has water on his hip. He looks confident. He looks like he knows exactly what he is doing, but he has no clue. No fucking clue, he thinks to himself. He wonders if the driver knows this, if he can tell.
“I’m interested in a journalist who is missing,” he tells the driver.
“Yes, I hear about that,” the driver says. “Two are missing.”
“I’m looking for Susan Gifford, an American.”
“A woman. Oh, I see,” says the driver. “You should get to the radio that she only bao chi.”
What he means is to get word to the press in Hanoi, particularly to the communist radio stations, that a non-combatant, a politically neutral journalist, has found her way into the hands of the People’s Liberation Front, and that she is not a spy. The choice of words is important, the language itself somehow infused with propaganda. To appeal to the Vietcong, one must use the term People’s Liberation Front. To his jeep driver, and to any American he might meet, Vietcong would be the correct term.
“I’ve done that,” he says. He hopes the guy will suggest another idea, that there is something he has overlooked. “I’ve told everyone I can think of,” he continues. “My friends, other correspondents, they have, too. They have gotten word to Hanoi.”
He gets out his cigarettes, offers his driver a smoke once again. This time, the man nods, so Marc lights the cigarette for him, placing it in his fingers.
The driver says, “You do right things, you maybe get her back. Who the man?”
“A Vietnamese.”
The driver makes a clucking noise. “That not so good,” he says.
He thinks about Son. He has never trusted him and never liked him. The way he drifted quietly into Susan’s life, the childlike manner he assumed whenever questioned about his past, about where he’s been when he disappeared for days at a time—it was all very odd. He was at best an opportunist. At worst, perhaps he was also a spook, keeping tabs on the press. There was always this tension between the government and the press. Even with all manner of embassy parties and invitations to dinners, of private drinks, of information slipped graciously to newsmen, it was there. A strained demarcation of territory. A kind of fixed unseen barrier. He was never sure how Son fitted into it all, but always assumed he spied on them, reporting to the government and to the American military who among the press were the real trouble-makers.
“He’s a journalist, too,” he says now. “Bao chi.”
“Vietnamese will be different,” says the driver. He means Son will be killed.
Mark feels tired. If he closes his eyes long enough, he thinks he’ll probably fall asleep—that is, until he’s bounced out of the jeep. But asleep, he has nightmares. Awake, he pushes away the most unbearable of imagined consequences of Susan’s disappearance with a tablet of Valium, five milligrams every four hours, another of which he takes now.
The jeep bounces and swerves, racing beside the rolls of barbed wire overgrown with weeds edging the road, while further back, fields of rice lie tranquil for the moment, churned up in places where bombs have fallen. They pass a mile-long path of evenly spaced craters made by B-52s, now filled with water so that they give the appearance of ponds set out along a flat land.
His driver keeps the accelerator down, swooping past stacks of earthenware crocks being loaded on to a wagon, a flock of chickens, a cyclist trying to make it down the damaged road with two enormous sacks of rice braced on the handle bars. The jeep makes dramatic sweeps through potholes and often straight across whatever debris is in the road—an empty crate, a broken basket. The physical jolts help to refocus his thoughts. Like this, he can convince himself he is on assignment, like any assignment, and feel a momentary peace. A bus pulls out and the driver brings the jeep to an abrupt halt, giving the bus driver a fierce glare. All at once there is stillness; the heat gathering around them like a cloud, insects collecting at his face as though they’d been waiting for him right here at this resting place. His driver, punching the horn so that it sends out its useless bleating sound, calls out to the man driving the bus.
“Let him go ahead,” Marc says. The road has been torn apart and put back together dozens of times from bombs and mines. It will be abandoned tonight, as every night, even by the army. “Let him go first and sweep for us.”
They pass stagnant marshes, low-lying mangrove swamps, rivers with their fish traps, their small tributaries over which might be a wooden footbridge, shallow banks on which the muddy-bottomed sampans are stacked next to houses on stilts, perched like bird hides along the water’s edge. Children swim at the edges of the docks, rising out of the water, their skin sleek and shining. In Saigon he has seen so many amputees, driven from their homes into the crush of the city, that he has gotten in the habit of counting the limbs on children. It no longer surprises him when he s
ees a baby gurgling up from his mother’s arms, a stump where his leg should be. Or when, along the street, he follows the unsteady gait of a ten-year-old with a prosthetic leg. Now, as he passes through a market taking place under parasols and tarpaulins, conducted out of baskets and clay pots and sacks which might hold rice or dried beans, he sees that here, at least, the people are whole. The children wear school uniforms, ride bicycles, looking much like children everywhere. A pet dog, a pair of sisters sharing a single bicycle, a couple of brothers playing soldier. It all looks very normal.
They pass through a village. It is wash day and the women have strung lines house to house, looping them from telephone poles and drainpipes, scrubby trees with their tangle of small branches, wooden stakes, porch pillars, anything upright around which they can wind their spools of twine. The clothes weigh the lines down so that sometimes a pair of black trouser legs or a white sheet drags in the coarse grass and Marc finds himself looking twice to check if it is a body.
The air smells of wet grass and mud, a kind of earthy reptilian smell. The whole of the Delta feels to Marc like a ragged, wet landscape, like some dubious treasure dredged up from the sea, rich with the eyeballs of lizards and birds and fish. As they pass some women filling a mine hole, he is reminded how the Vietcong put charges on the edges of roads beside potholes, knowing that Americans will drive around the potholes. In their black pajama trousers, their shaded hats, their sandals, the women work slowly, methodically, in the 100-plus-degree heat. The driver doesn’t slow—would never slow for anything, just in case it was a set-up—and so the women move back from their work, wiping their brows, making room for the jeep, which passes so close that Marc could have reached out his hand and taken the hats from their heads.
The Man from Saigon Page 18
