The Man from Saigon

by Marti Leimbach

  Finally, after what seems like miles and miles, they come to a stop.

  “Here,” says the driver.

  He is not sure what he is being shown, or even why they’ve paused where they have, out in the wild among ant hills and elephant grass. To his right is a wild thatch of green bamboo, the same verdant bushes he sees everywhere in the Delta, an opaque greenness that closes the country in. He can hear the insects with their swell of sound rising and falling like breath, smell the brackish water hidden by shrubs. It feels good to be on his feet after so long in the jeep. He lights a Camel, offering one to the driver, who gets out his own pack. They stand together, smoking. Then the driver speaks in a casual manner, as though filling in a small point. “It where that girl was taken,” he says. “Your friend.”

  And now he knows why they’ve stopped.

  “Man, Charlie is ingenious down here. The suicide squads strap themselves with dynamite and dress up like trees. They got Chicoms and AKs, sure, but also all this other shit: flying mace, spear launchers, arrows, crossbows—”

  “Russian fucking rockets, that’s what you got to worry about—”

  “—all kinds of knives, not to mention the traps, like punji—”

  “Punji, fuck that, this marine—this riverine—he stepped into a bear trap. And that was it from the knee down.”

  “There are no damned bears in the Delta. Chinese flamethrowers, they got. Plenty of them around.”

  “I said trap, man, just the trap.”

  He listens to the soldiers, sitting inside a small hut in a row of others beneath some palms, the only shade in the camp other than beneath the open-sided marquis-style tents set up for the refugees. He stares out the entrance of the hut, his eyes crossing the humid, swimming air to the command tent, empty for the moment, like most of the tents. No sign of Halliday, and there hasn’t been since he arrived. Just scores and scores of Vietnamese peasants, looking aimless and bewildered. There must be hundreds, thousands, in the camp. He has no idea.

  The refugees don’t think much of the tents, which trap heat. The insides of these newly erected structures have the same smell as a terrarium, with hot, unmoving air like a henhouse in summer. Though the tents provide some shade, there is more shade within the bordering jungle; its trees and creepers and broad shadows of larger leaves block out the imposing sun. Some of the people want to go there, but are prevented from finding the natural shelter of trees by the perimeter which has been set up all around, rolls of concertina wire arranged untidily on the ground, guarded by ARVN soldiers who look tired and bored. Marc feels any minute the atmosphere could shift from this sleepy steamhouse to one of violence, not by the peasants, who appear too disheartened even to raise their voices, but from outside the camp. He keeps waiting for the explosions.

  “Bear paws are considered a delicacy. You know, they eat them. Hey, you,” a soldier says to Marc, “I’m just saying bear paws are a delicacy, you know that?”

  “No,” Marc says. “I didn’t know that.”

  “What’re you, a reporter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You seen any bears in the Delta?”

  He shakes his head.

  “How long you been in country?”

  “Twenty-three months.”

  “No shit? Twenty-three months? I don’t believe it. And you seen no bears?”

  “No. None.”

  “See, there you go, no bears in the Delta. What did I say?”

  There are half a dozen of them there, escaping the sun outside. It is as though the earth has taken a fever and all of them have to wait through these elongated afternoon hours until it recovers. He has seen toads baked in such sun so that they became hardened rocks that the children played with like toys, making the stiff bodies hop as though still alive. He has seen the heat dry up the soldiers so that the thinnest skin between their lips tore away when they opened their mouths. The flatness of the Delta made it all the worse, a shallow dish of land under a hard white sky. The soldiers are lucky they can take refuge in the hut, and he is glad to have found it, too.

  They haven’t seen the lieutenant colonel and they don’t know where Halliday might be. Marc established that within the first minute, so it is only the shade that keeps him here. The hut is cool, dark, the mud walls filtering out the worst of the sun. He looks around and sees a table pushed against one side, a few pegs on the wall. In a corner is a basket of unwinnowed rice, some laundry, a swatch of straw attached to a broken wooden pole making up what must be a kitchen broom. He is sitting in someone’s house, he realizes. The soldiers talk, smoke, drink Coke out of cans which they crush on to the floor.

  He hears, “So maybe they were just trying to catch a bear?”

  “There are no fucking bears here. Crocodiles, maybe.”

  “It was a fucking bear trap.”

  “For the river bears?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Glad I didn’t step in it.”

  Outside the hut, a water truck has arrived, the women gathering around it, getting fresh water and wringing out soiled clothes. One mother brings her baby to the front, undressing him beneath the spray of the tap. The baby cries, frightened by the shower of water, as the mother smoothes her palm over his skin. Marc listens as more trucks roll in, bringing refugees from a village forty kilometers north, mostly women and old men, children by the score. There is the frantic squealing of muddy pigs, baskets of hens held down by cord, bags of rice like the sandbags of bunkers, sometimes a bundle of clothes in twine, sometimes a bicycle. The camp is nothing more than an area of plowed jungle, the bulldozers working through the mud and scrub even now, pushing back more and more trees to make room for the refugees. The tents are spread from one end of the camp to another, end to end, in garish yellows and reds, like a lost circus.

  He asks the soldiers how long they are here for. And they shake their heads impatiently.

  “We’re done already.”

  “It’s not us that runs the camp. It’s ARVN that runs it.”

  “Yeah, we’re just waiting to roll out.”

  He nods, feeling his blood pumping thinly through his veins, his pulse quick with the heat, throbbing like a wound.

  The water truck goes lumbering between tents, driven by an ARVN soldier whose hair falls almost to his eyes in a weighty black curtain. Another truck rumbles down the other side, transporting a public address system that plays songs, sung in a popular style, in Vietnamese. The music is designed to be lively, festive, entirely contrasting the expression of the truck’s driver, who frowns at the people who pass near him and waves his hands in agitation, shooing the children out of the way. Marc asks one of the ARVN officers what the songs are about and is told they are educational, to teach the people about the benefits of the government. The songs continue, blaring and screeching from a tinny system that distorts even further the high flat tones of the singers. Few seem to be paying any attention to the songs or their message. If they can understand what is being said over the speakers they show no sign of it.

  Dogs trot among the people, sniffing the ground. They eat the shit from the pigs and they sniff the bottoms of the younger children until they are slapped away by scowling young mothers. It looks like a gypsy camp, made haphazardly in the mud. Near by they are given vaccinations. Mothers and old ladies stand with their small families in the sun, in long lines that run in three different directions from the medical tent, a knot of confusion at the entrance. The mothers look hot, bored, their children clinging to their legs. There isn’t anything for them to do, so they stand silently, fanning their children with their hats and looking vacantly into the distance. When the PA system arrives alongside them, they turn their backs against the blare of the music. When the water truck passes they look at it longingly, but let it go.

  It is a blistering afternoon. Every time he comes to the Delta he thinks the same thing, that it could not get any hotter. He can’t stand to leave the hut for more than fifteen minutes at a time. When he re
turns his clothes are plastered to his skin, his hair wet, and he feels slightly light-headed. He looks out at the women waiting for vaccinations, at the children with their mahogany skin, moving slowly up in the line. The hut is fuller each time he returns, soldiers wilting in the heat.

  He hears, “I don’t know, though, I wouldn’t mind some bear meat.”

  He hears, “They got some chickens around here, you know. We could fry ’em.”

  They ask him what he is writing and he explains about Susan. He repeats what information he has on the ambush and gathers from those around him other details of the event. Halliday is still no place to be found when he goes out searching, asking anyone who looks as though he might know where the lieutenant colonel in charge would be. When he returns to the hut it is as though he’s run a fast mile in the sun. He slumps on the floor, pours water from his canteen over the back of his neck, wipes the collar of his shirt over his face. The heat makes him ache, makes his nose block so that his headache blooms inside him. He looks outside at the refugees, who seem entirely dispassionate, sitting in groups, their faces blank, allowing the ARVN soldiers to carry on constructing the site.

  There has begun an effort to spray insecticide throughout the camp, and clouds of it drift between the tents. The peasants regard the canisters as dangerous, leaning away from the spray, their hands held to shield their eyes. They get up to move, some only a few feet, some rushing off altogether. The truck with the PA system still makes its rounds, as do the ARVN soldiers distributing leaflets warning that VC cadres might be in their midst and to report anything suspicious. The refugees seem like all displaced people, hopeless, remote, squatting beneath the colorful tent awnings, chewing betel or casually swatting at mosquitoes, not talking. They are not even refugees, as such, not like those in Loc Ninh who had taken their belongings and run down the road while their city raged with fires and artillery. There had been no true battle in the villages of the people here, but they were made homeless when the army evacuated them, then burned their houses down, burned the school house, the rice stores, the sheds for the animals, everything. There was never any sort of battle, other than the charge of American forces, arriving in a cloud from the air. This he discovers from a sergeant, who he interviews while standing next to a bulldozer. The sergeant explains that certain villages in the Delta were being used by the VC, and that they needed to put a stop to that.

  “By evacuating the villagers?” Marc asks.

  “We don’t leave the enemy an empty village,” is the reply. “We level the goddamned thing.”

  “So all the people of South Vietnam may one day find themselves in camps like this one?”

  This makes the sergeant laugh, as though Marc is telling a joke. “It may happen yet!” he says, and wipes his eyes. Then more seriously, he adds, “We leave the friendly villages to themselves. We’re looking for VC and hostile civilians.”

  “How many refugees are there here? Two thousand? Three?”

  “Four is expected. It may climb higher, let’s hope so.”

  “And these are hostile civilians?” He’s never before heard the term.

  The sergeant looks annoyed. “No, they are not!” he states emphatically. “Not these, no! These are victims of the Vietcong. They’ve been coerced to pay taxes and their men have been made to join their forces.”

  “And you’ve made them leave their homes to come—” He looks out on to the newly plowed earth, the sun a white light that makes the ground colorless so that he might be staring at the moon. There is so much dug-up ground that if it rains (and rain is inevitable), they will all be knee-deep in mud. As it is, it feels like being on a beach with no ocean and no ocean breeze. “—to come here.”

  “We’re helping them,” says the sergeant. “You stick around and I’ll find some time to explain to you the why of what we’re doing here. Right now, I’ve got men to organize.”

  He must mean to feed, Marc thinks. He could see the flame from a barbecue in the distance, smell some charcoal and wood.

  It would not surprise him if they sat and ate right in front of the refugees, would not surprise him at all.

  “How many villages are you set to evacuate?”

  “We’ll let you know on that one,” the sergeant says, then walks off.

  In the command tent there are fans hooked to a generator, a cooler of beer and Cokes swimming in water that may have been cold once, but is now tepid. Some tables and chairs. He waits there for a young Spec-4, who finally arrives, coated with dust, smelling like cigarettes and stale sweat, unsure why he has been singled out for an interview.

  “Are you the reporter that wants to see me?” the soldier asks. He creases his forehead, straining to see in the tent, which is not dark but is considerably darker than the searing sun outside. His eyes are irritated, bloodshot; he has sunburnt lips that are flaking. He might have been among those unloading the trucks that keep arriving, lifting down the possessions of the villagers, helping carry everything across acres of rutted ground. His uniform sags on him, the collar on his T-shirt is dark with sweat. He walks into the tent hesitantly, as though he thinks he might be in trouble, his lips pushed together, his eyes like lead. Enright is his name.

  “This about the ambush?” he says. He’s been debriefed on it before, probably many times, Marc thinks, and looks even more fed up when Marc nods, explaining he’s doing a story about what happened, about the reporters who went missing.

  Enright says, “Yeah, I’m sorry about that. They must be friends of yours?”

  The tent is nearly empty. Just him and the kid and a couple of American advisors who stand in front of a fan, going over a list. The advisors seem annoyed, glancing over their shoulders at Enright and Marc. Then, all at once, the two men leave in a single abrupt movement as though following an unseen command.

  Enright isn’t sure where to put himself. He fidgets until Marc tells him to have a seat. The kid is so nervous Marc doesn’t get out a notebook, just his cigarettes. Enright sits uneasily, parking his gun beside him. He looks at Marc as though he isn’t sure whether or not to trust him. His eyes scan Marc’s face, his pale shirt, the pen tucked into the pocket. They both smell as bad as each other. Marc smiles, then he rises and goes to the cooler, digging through the water which is only barely cooler than his own skin, until he finds two beers. He sets them on the table as though the tent is his home, Enright his guest, and nods at the kid that he should drink.

  Enright says, “That looks about right. Now all we need are the Goobers.”

  “They probably have them around here someplace, too. How was lunch?”

  “I didn’t get no lunch.”

  “They’re frying something out there.”

  “Yeah, well, not for me. We worked through.”

  “Not for the people here either.”

  “They’ll give them something.”

  Marc looks at him, blows out his cheeks. Then he wets his lips, feeling the rough edges of skin there, and pushes a cigarette into the corner of his mouth.

  “Am I supposed to be talking to you?” Enright says. “I mean, I’m not sure I’m supposed to be talking to a reporter.”

  The kid shifts from nervous to angry and back again. He turns his face away, out to the entrance of the tent, as though there is something there he needs to track. But there is nothing but dust and sun and people milling around.

  “Why wouldn’t you want to talk to me?” Marc says.

  “I don’t do anything I don’t have to.”

  “How long do you have left?”

  “Three months, one week and a day.”

  “You’re getting short.”

  “Not short enough.” He shifts in his chair, picks a few flaking bits of skin from his right earlobe, and lets his teeth show, a big horsey grin. “This going in the newspaper?”

  Marc shakes his head. “I just want to know what happened, as best you can remember.”

  “I’ve already said all that. You sure you’re a reporter?”
/>   “I’m a reporter.”

  “You don’t work for the CIA?”

  Marc laughs.

  The kid says, “I didn’t do nothing wrong out there and, anyway, I’ve already told what I know.”

  Marc nods, takes a long drink of beer. “Yeah, well, we got a fan and beer in this tent, so I’d appreciate the long version.”

  Enright keeps his pale eyes on Marc, scratches his nose, takes a sip of his beer. “Not bad,” he says. “I agree.”

  It takes some time, but eventually he talks.

  It had been a convoy of armored personnel carriers and supply trucks—ammo, fuel, C-rations, building materials. They were just bringing the supplies down to the camp, that was all. Susan and Son sat with the soldiers on the open space on an APC between the two guns. Enright was among them.

  “They were probably on their way to do a story on the camp,” Marc says. “That’s why they were with you.”

  “Doesn’t seem like there’s much to write about here,” Enright says. “Nothing happening.”

  “Maybe not, but that was the plan.” In fact, Marc thought there was plenty to write about. If Locke were here with the camera, they would need only an hour or two to get a good story. And he could easily imagine Susan and Son out interviewing families. It was how they worked best, with Son translating and taking the photographs, Susan persuading the women to open up to her. She was good at that. She had a way of entering into whatever they were doing and he’d often witnessed her engaging in some deeply Vietnamese act—drying joss sticks, wrapping pork rolls—while interviewing the women. But he tried not to think of her too much right now. There had been a moment earlier, glancing across the crowded walkways between tents, when he spotted a reporter he knew, a woman, with the same narrow hips and long back, her hair in a ponytail under a ball cap. He thought, for one brief, exalted second, That’s her. But of course, it wasn’t. The woman was six inches taller than Susan, with darker hair and darker skin. Older. As he came nearer, his footsteps fast, then slowing until he stood motionless ten yards away, he thought, Get a grip on yourself. He thought, God damn it. Now he said, “They might have been having a look down here, that’s all.”