From the corner of her vision she sees the trees send forth a shower of sparks, hears a rush of fire from napalm, and then the curling, burning grass. A minute passes and eventually there are voices. They are not far away and they sound American. She might be imagining this, but she can hear their footsteps, place their accents. She hears the rustling of elephant grass and then, all at once, a pain in her side. She thinks at last a bullet has found her. Well, it is not surprising, the same sentiment expressed by Dickey Chapelle. It was bound to happen sooner or later. She cries out and looks up to where the sun floats above the sharp grass. There above her is a cloud of faces, the barrel of an M16, somebody’s arm pointed toward her, a .45 right in her face.
“What the fuck?”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“What the fuck are you doing out here?”
The pain in her rib is not from a bullet but from the boot of one of the soldiers. She was kicked, whether deliberately or by accident she will never know. Later she will find a bruise like a sunrise. For now, she can barely feel the pain, she is so tuned to everything outside of her, these new soldiers looking like monuments above her, moving like gods.
There is blood all down her front from Anh and it takes them a second to see that she is American and that she is a woman. One of them calls for a medic. “Where are you hit?” she is asked.
“I’m not hit.”
A large lieutenant kneels beside her, the cords of his neck standing out, the sweat from his brow running down his face, the adrenaline pumping through him. “Explain to me what the fuck is going on!”
“I’m a reporter.” The lieutenant says nothing and in her confusion she thinks perhaps he doesn’t understand her. “Press corps, un correspondant, bao chi—”
“I know what a fucking reporter is!” he says. “But we didn’t come out with any reporters!”
“No, no, you didn’t. We’ve been lost. We’ve been—” She digs into her pocket for her MACV card and hands it over. She begins to cry so hard she can no longer speak. She wants to tell Son that Anh is dead. That she has seen Minh fall and that she thinks he must be dead, too. She wants to ask him if Hien has survived, though she doesn’t care about Hien. She just doesn’t care. She puts him out of her mind, gets up, kneeling in the field of grass, the sun pressing on her skull, black smoke from the napalm billowing up to the clear pale sky. The lieutenant lifts her up and she sobs into his field jacket and feels the deep hollow of his breath when he roars to his radio operator to get a chopper down here. There are wounded and dead all over the place; and would they please get a fucking chopper down here now.
When she sees him, it is through clouds of dust and the localized hurricane that is always created by the rotor blades of incoming choppers. At first she does not recognize him. It is as though he has been disguised by those around him, the American soldiers who, even if they allowed him to get to his feet, would be almost a foot taller than he, and who have pulled his shirt off his shoulders and drawn it like a tourniquet around his elbows, holding his arms in position. His wrists, too, are tied. In the crazy wind his hair is flattened as though someone has poured water on it. He crouches in the dust with his knees by his chin, sunken beneath the tall frames of soldiers who stand over him as guards. In this way he has been made small and insignificant. She stares as though into a sudden bright light, knowing him and not knowing him, wanting nothing more than to cross the flapping leaves, the flying debris, the stones and twigs, branches and broken fronds, to come to his rescue. To untie his arms, his hands, to lift him up from the American soldiers, her own countrymen, who she is at once grateful to and terribly afraid of. More than anything, she is glad he is alive.
She watches him, unsure what to do, and then, all at once, he turns to her quite deliberately, as though he had known she was watching all along, and meets her eyes. His face is puffy. He has a cut on his cheek and someone has hit him in the mouth. It reminds her of when she first met him, first saw him in Pleiku at the 18th Surgical. He’d had a puffy lip, a hairy line of black stitches. She sees in his face a mixture of sorrow and longing, maybe even regret. He seems so sad there, helpless among the enormous Americans. The Americans are involved in some sort of radio operation, trying either to contact command operations or get the status of others searching for more wounded and dead in the bush. They hardly notice Son, squatting at their feet. And he, for his part, seems unaware of their presence except as a force that keeps him bound. He is focusing entirely on Susan now. She looks at him and she cannot think what to do or what he is asking her to do, as surely this hard, determined gaze is for a purpose. She’d asked him all that time ago: when they were captured, what would happen next? Then what happens? she’d said, the question posed in case, by some miracle, they were allowed to walk out of the jungle. And he’d replied, It is up to you. She hadn’t understood then what he meant, but she does now. She must do something—that much is clear to her. But she finds herself slowly, almost imperceptibly, moving her chin back and forth, still looking at Son. She doesn’t want to cross this line but she knows, even as she stands there shaking her head, that she will.
The same lieutenant who picked her out of the elephant grass and who has held on to her MACV card is still not convinced about who she is and what she was doing in the jungle. He suddenly strides over to where she stands and barks, “Who the flick is he?” pointing now to Son.
She might say he is a spy. She might explain the whole matter to them, or try to. But she sees Son, the gash on his face from shrapnel making a long comma from his cheekbone to his chin, a bruise above his eye. He is bleeding, struggling to keep up with a soldier who pulls him up and moves him out of the way of another helicopter that is landing. He stumbles in the dust, shouting in English his name, his occupation, the date and place they were ambushed. But nobody is listening. The soldier pushes him forward and tells him to shut the fuck up.
“I asked you a question!” shouts the lieutenant. He looks at Susan, then Son, then back at Susan again. She can see him making the connection.
“He’s a photographer,” she says.
“He’s not a fucking photographer!”
“He works with me!”
“How about right quick you tell us what you know about this prisoner before we get a couple of guys to find out for us?”
To beat him, she realizes. Maybe to kill him.
“His name is Hoàng Van Son. He just told you that!”
“So what is he?”
“A photographer! I’ve told you!”
The lieutenant shakes his head, steps closer to her, and yells right into her face. “He was found with a weapon two yards away from his dead comrade! So don’t tell me he’s just taking snapshots for the local paper!”
So Hien is dead, too. She is not surprised.
“Get him off the ground,” she says now. Her voice rises as she continues, “Get that tape off him! Turn him loose! Turn him looser!”
She pushes past the lieutenant, running to where Son is, but she’s quickly stopped by a couple of the GIs, who hold her so that she cannot move, not an arm or a leg, not even to turn her head.
“I can prove it!” she says between clenched teeth. Then, in a moment inspired perhaps by some long-ago advice given her by her father, she tells them who her father is, his rank and standing. She shouts this information and demands they let her go. She is so convincing that for a moment it is as though her father is still alive, that she could phone him at a moment’s notice.
It works. They release her all at once so that she stumbles forward, nearly falling. Then she rubs the places on her arms where the soldiers held her and goes to a stack of Vietcong bodies that have been dragged out of the field, the lieutenant following her.
“What do you want with them?” he says, nodding at the dead. “They’ve got nothing to say.”
Some of the bodies have already been stripped of their gear—their weapons now collected and leaning against a log, their small packs in a pile. T
here is always so little from a Vietcong—a gun, a dagger, some rice, maybe a P38, the tool used to open American ration cans, maybe some grenades. They travel lightly while the Americans are weighed down with all manner of packs and sleeping gear, C-rations, entrenching tools, radio equipment, medical supplies. She hopes to see Anh’s pack there among the captured supplies, but she does not. She scans the bodies lying near by, piled like rotting fish in the hot sun. Some are missing limbs. She can see clean bones jutting out from ragged, bloodless flesh. She can see the open mouths of chest wounds, whole sections torn away. Some are missing heads, feet, hands. Almost all of them are nearly naked, their clothes having been blown away or burnt. The napalmed bodies are the worst of the bunch. She cannot bring herself to look.
“One of the dead VCs has a pack on him with Son’s papers inside,” she says.
“Which one?”
“I don’t see him. Maybe he hasn’t been brought in yet.”
“They’re mostly here now.”
This is what she must do for him, one of the things. She must work her way through the dead men, find what he needs her to find, lie for him. It is the beginning of a series of compromises she cannot at this time imagine. She holds her hand over her mouth and nose, approaching the bodies, which are already graying, no longer looking anything like the people who once occupied them. She has to kneel to see the ones at the bottom, brush the mud off the face of another. Her eyes fill, her stomach lurches. Sometimes she finds it difficult to focus, to look for the thing she needs to find, the person. Her eyes connect with a bit of scalp, the pulpy end of a severed leg. She needs to focus on the faces; she needs to find the pack. But the sight of the dead—this close up, in front of her and around her—the fluids that pool around her feet, is all too much. She pushes one body off another and the torso goes sliding to the ground so that she almost screams.
By the time she finds him, she is retching every so often between breaths. Anh’s head is a hollow cave, his body attacked by red ants. She has to turn, then look again, over and over in little windows of sight through which she searches for the pack.
“There,” she says, trying to get the attention of the lieutenant. “There he is.”
“A dead VC. So what?”
“He has the papers. He has Son’s…he has the other reporter’s papers.”
“Oh yeah?”
“They took his papers from him. From both of us.”
But the lieutenant doesn’t move and he doesn’t ask anyone to help. What did they expect her to do? Haul out Anh’s body herself? The pack is beneath his left arm, pinned by his elbow. She has to remove it to get to the contents. She leans over the body, her face near his shoulder, and pulls with a clumsy inefficiency you’d never see in a soldier. The pack doesn’t come away, so she has to reposition herself and try again. On the third attempt she manages to get it, the canvas blackened with blood, one of the straps missing. She steps away from the bodies with it in her hand, shaking. The pack looks like a museum piece, a bit of wreckage from some distant time. She unbuckles it and finds her arm smeared with blood from the sodden canvas. She can hardly bear to reach into it, but she does.
It must be that the lieutenant has taken pity on her because she is joined now by two soldiers. They flip Anh’s body, going through his pockets without any of the difficulty she had in handling the body. They find her yellow flashlight, her plastic comb. Meanwhile, she picks through the contents of the pack, a feeling of relief flooding through her as she recognizes the last bit of rice they carried, a water bottle, the map. Everything is covered in blood. Blood on Son’s cameras, her socks, on the pack straps and fastenings. At last she finds some papers, among them the documents verifying Son’s status:…accredited to cover the operational, advisory, and support activities of the Free World Military Assistance Forces, Vietnam.
“There,” she says, showing Son’s MACV card to the lieutenant. She gives him the camera, too, and tells him he can ask Son what was on the last roll of film. The lieutenant takes the papers and camera over to his captain and they stand in a cluster discussing what to do. Suddenly, the wind is immense; everyone crouches as a chopper pivots, hopping upon the ground; the gunners fire upon take-off, terrifying her, and she wonders, Why bother shooting? The Vietcong soldiers’ unit, that elusive group who they have chased through the jungle now for so many days, are either stacked here dead or long gone. Any survivors would have dispersed, evaporating like deer into the surrounding wilderness. You won’t find them, she thinks, as the choppers lift into the sky. Not out there, not a chance.
What happened later stays with her, following her always like a man in the darkness with a candle and a map. That she came rushing to his side like a loyal dog. That she never stopped to consider the dead men on either side. Literally, the American dead at the other end of the temporary landing zone, not stacked as the Vietcong were stacked that day, but arranged in a neat line of three. There were Americans holding dressings over their wounds, waiting as a chopper inched its way down, its nose bowing to the left, to the right, looking like a toad might, if it had wings. Two of the GIs were on stretchers. Another sat on the ground, his legs held out uselessly. One had a lot of blood where his knee should have been. Another had passed out but was being held up by a buddy. Kids out of high school, younger even than herself; she had not considered them. Or how complicated a single lie could be.
She found the papers. She rinsed off the blood with water given to her by a private. She told them to untie Son and, remarkably, they did.
They were brought to MACV, separated, not even allowed to change their clothes until after they were debriefed. Her clothes stiffened with dried blood and sweat; her hair matted in clumps. There was salt on her skin, at the corners of her mouth, grit in her hair, dirt so deep in her skin she would have to scrub for weeks to get it off.
I’d like some clean clothes, she said. I’d like a shower.
She was promised both these things, but first they had some questions for her. She sat in a windowless room in her rancid blood-stained clothes. The questions were delivered without any emotion, her answers recorded by a stenographer who pointed his long nose into the keys and typed with two fingers. Did they rape you? Did they tell you where they were going? Did they ask you for information about the movement of American troops? Did they take advantage of your being a woman? Did they hint at where their headquarters are? The questions came and came. She wished they’d ask her something she could answer with a yes.
They did not ask whether Son was a spy. Maybe it did not occur to them, but they did ask how it was that they’d convinced the Vietcong not to murder him.
We told them we would give them good press if they released us, she replied. And anyway, they were too junior to kill either of us. They needed to bring us to their superiors. But they couldn’t find their unit.
Again and again this was brought up. They couldn’t find their unit. They were looking for their unit. The hamlets were destroyed; there were no people. No sign of their unit.
On the field that day, just after the battle, it had seemed more complicated than that. At her insistence, they let Son go, lancing all at once the strong tape that held his arms so that he had sprung forth like a ball, tripping over his own feet before falling once more. That had been on purpose. They did not help him, but let him struggle up, then stagger forward. He was bleeding from a mouth wound and he spat fiercely on the dry ground, then marched up to the officer who held his press credentials.
My MACV card, he said, putting out his hand.
You’ll get it.
You have no right to hold on to it.
I have every right. You’re still a suspected Vietcong.
What grounds?
My grounds!
Do you not read the newspapers? Two missing journalists, it must have been reported—
You saying you are one of them?
I am.
Well, you’re going to have to prove it!
She came forwa
rd. She told the officer who they were and that she was going to be writing the whole thing up, including the manner in which her colleague was being handled. He had shown his papers and according to the US government those papers were all the proof he needed. That was true, indeed. But there was more to it. The lieutenant glared at her.
The Man from Saigon Page 34
