by Alfredo Vea
“No. Poco, poco. Beaucoup Españoles enMarseille.”
“Marseille? Français? Parlez-vous Français?”
“Mais oui, ”said the regular, his smooth face suddenly transformed by an electric intensity. “Etes-vous Español?” he asked.
“Non,” answered Sergeant Pasadoble, immediately caught up in the common language, “Jesuis Mexican,Mexican-American. Do you know where Mexico is?”
The regular nodded his head, yes. “I’ve seen it on the maps, but I am ashamed to admit that I know nothing of it. But I have noticed that many of your troops speak Spanish.”
“C‘est un pays de sang melé. It is a land of mixed blood, Spanish and Indian. It is just south of the United States. Contrary to popular thought, it was the Mexican people who crossed the land bridge thousands of years ago and populated China and the rest of Asia.”
The Vietnamese laughed with his whole face and body. Behind him, his fellow prisoners were buzzing with suspicion. The flabby PFC up above spat with disgust.
“So it is you who are responsible for les Chinois, the Chinese! I have always wondered who to blame for that.”
Sergeant Pasadoble and the NVA soldier laughed loudly at the joke, for a moment forgetting the war that had brought them together as combatants. The sudden burst of laughter turned heads from one end of the compound to the other. Suddenly a voice boomed out over the loudspeakers: “Sergeant, this visit is unauthorized and must terminate immediately.”
Jesse stepped back from the wire and walked toward the guard tower.
“Who is the commanding officer of this compound?” he asked the oafish PFC. When the answer was shouted down to him, Jesse grabbed his gear and walked in the direction of a heavily fortified hooch just north of the compound. In half an hour he returned to the tower with a piece of paper signed by the company commander. He waved the document at the PFC and shouted, “I can talk to him for one hour a day for the next three days.”
“Whatever turns you on, sarge,” answered the PFC. “Personally, I’d rather visit the bar girls on China Beach. I love that Saigon tea.”
On the fourth and last visit, the Vietnamese soldier seemed unwilling to limit the conversation to the lighter subjects that had dominated the first three visits. After a few passing remarks about Mexican food, American jazz, and Brazilian soccer, the man behind the wire grew quiet. The smile on his face faded as the enemy soldier asked something that he had always wanted to ask an American.
“I am sorry to ask this question, mon ami, but I must. I know that we will never meet again, and I believe you to be an honest man. So I must ask. In the north of my country, the children are told in school that all the people of color in the United States live in a separate country. They are told that white Americans are rich and they throw thousands of gallons of milk into the ocean to spite the poor of the world. They are taught that teachers are not allowed to teach their students. Ces choses-là, sont-elles vraies? Are these things true?”
After considering the question for a few minutes, the sergeant answered, “It is true that dairy farmers in America have been known to pour milk into the gutters when an overabundance has driven prices down. It is also true that there are many hungry people in America who could drink that milk. Schoolteachers are sometimes forced to go on strike when the classrooms grow too large or their paycheck has become too small. It is both a protest and a labor tactic. Their strikes do not fare well, because teachers are not as respected as they should be. So I guess what your children have been taught is true, but it is not the truth.”
The North Vietnamese soldier nodded his understanding. The truth no longer surprised him.
“And do you live in a separate country?”
Sergeant Pasadoble placed his right index finger on the center of his own forehead. “We do,” he said.
“Ah,” sighed the regular, “je comprends!”He nodded his head. “I am a Chàm,” he said. “Some people say we came from India long, long ago. Some say we came from Indonesia. We have a completely different way of writing and we speak a dialect that is like no other in Southeast Asia. Any radio communications between our troops—if we have a radio—is done in Chàm, since no Vietnamese, north or south, can decode it. Centuries ago we were conquered and then subjugated by the Vietnamese. Since that time we have never had an equal place in this country.
“Because I am Chàm, I must sit alone in this yard.”Just before his smile died away, he replenished it when he suddenly remembered an obvious courtesy that had been completely ignored. “Pardonez-moi. Jem‘appelleHong Trac.” He bowed as he said his name. “I have known you for four days and I have not given you my name. I am so sorry. ”
After repeating Hong Trac’s full name several times until the enemy soldier nodded enthusiastically that the pronunciation was correct, the sergeant countered with, “MeIlamo, Jem‘appelle Jesse Pasadoble. A sus ordenes. ”
Hong found the name Jesse easy to pronounce. “Do you know where we are, Jesse?”
The sergeant looked around himself and shook his head, not really. In Vietnam, all Americans lived in a separate country. Few, if any, GIs tried the local food or bothered to learn any of the language. Most passed their entire tours without ever speaking with a Vietnamese.
“This area is called Thành Bình.” Hong used his hands to indicate the area outside the compound. “The name means ‘peaceful place.’ As a child I lived not three blocks in that direction, on Thanh Long Street, the street of the Blue Dragon. Have you been to Marseille, Jesse ?” asked Hong.
Jesse shook his head, no.
“I once lived in Marseille for two wonderful years. I love that city more than any other on earth. The last time I was there I met the woman I was destined to marry. As a child, I was fortunate enough to have parents who could send me to lycée in the Bouches du Rhone. How is it that you speak French? ”
“I have always dreamed of traveling,” said Jesse. “Since my Spanish isn’t too bad, I took French in high school.” Jesse hesitated for a moment, then added, “I had a girlfriend who spoke French. She was from Quebec. And I figured with three languages I could go just about anywhere in the world.”
“Vous avez raison. You’re right about that,” said Hong. “But you must go to Marseille someday. The port is magnificent. From the hills above the sea it is easy to imagine the Crusaders leaving in their wooden boats for the Holy Land. Sit in the coffee shops or on one of those green benches on the Canebière and just listen… just listen.
“Marseille is great simply because of all the people like you and I who must go there. It is beautiful because emissaries of separate countries have conferences at every café. There are cultural exchanges in every doorway. Besides,” he smiled, “Paris is too cold for dark people like you and me.”
As he said it, Hong was smelling the sweet steam of bubbling bouillabaisse, nursing a cup of hot espresso, and listening for a moment to the conversations that once surrounded him: the sharp and muffled snapping and cooing of a lovers’ quarrel here; the directions to an address near the Château d‘If over there; at this table a lonely old man is openly disgusted with the writings of Jean Genet; at that one two Belgian students are worshiping Miles Davis. In Hong’s nostrils was the acrid odor of African tobacco and the haughty, self-conscious scent of Swiss perfume.
“What are you taught about us?” he said with a calm and distracted air.
“In America they say that you Vietnamese do not value life.”
Hong laughed a dark, sardonic laugh.
“If that is true, then why do I fear death so much?”
As he spoke, memories of diving Huey gunships and B-52 strikes filled his mind. Of the hundred and sixty men in his original company, only five were left.
“When the bombs fall, I curl up like a trembling child and I pray that death will be painless. No, Jesse, life is a valuable thing. I know that I will soon be losing mine.” Grief suddenly began to cloud Hong’s large eyes. “I will never see Marseille again. Even now my dear wif
e Hoa is waiting there for me.”
“You’re not going to die,” said Jesse. “You’re a captive and the rules are specific regarding prisoners of war. For you this conflict is over. You’ll get three square meals a day, a shower, and a place to sleep. You just have to wait it out, then go home.”
Hong smiled patiently.
“Do you see those men behind me, Jesse? Soon one of them will be taken away to be questioned. That one will quickly decide that the loss of a Chàm is a small price to pay for his own survival. So he will tell them my title: that I am a high-ranking infantry officer. They will come for me in another day, perhaps two days.”
“They kill prisoners out in the bush, Hong, but not here in a secured area.”
There was a sad desperation in Jesse’s voice. The anonymity and heat of combat were one thing, but to kill an unarmed prisoner in a secured area was murder. There was no hot blood here.
“They don’t shoot people here, Hong. They won’t shoot you. You can take my word for it.”
“You’re right, Jesse,” said Hong with even more patience.
“There is a soft and fat South Vietnamese colonel in that metal building”—he pointed to a Quonset hut just outside the compound—“and he has a good friend who is an intelligence agent from your army. I’ve seen them drinking Korean beer together. It is said that they have a very special way of torturing prisoners. They use a tournevis. It is just a rumor; no one can say for sure because no one ever comes back from an interrogation.”
Jesse culled through his French vocabulary for the meaning of the word tournevis but found nothing. At the same time, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to know.
“They place it into the ear and drive it through the brain with a carpenter’s hammer.”
As he said it, Hong placed a cupped left hand over his left ear. He wondered which of his precious memories would die first. Would it be his memories of childhood on the Street of the Blue Dragon or his memories of lovely Hoa in Marseille? Then there was that very special memory of a night in Orléans. It had been their first night of nakedness.
For days he had been sitting alone in the prison yard using all of his powers of concentration to shift his memories around so that the first to go as the hammer fell would be his days as an officer, his rousing, stupid days of ambition and war lust. He had passed the few last hours just before meeting Jesse by weighing his recollections, determining their priority, then arranging the stages of his military career along a straight line from ear to ear. All of his other memories were dispersed to other countries, other continents of the mind, far from that line.
When the tourneviswas driven in behind his eye sockets toward his right ear, the muscles of his face and the airy tendons of his spirit would strain to protect an ember, to shelter a single flicker of light and hide it safe in the ruin and wreckage of his soul. He would be there once again, looking up from a coffee-stained volume of Baudelaire to see her for the very first time, her jacket and arms closed desperately around a stack of falling books and her large eyes casting back and forth for a place to sit, a dry, safe place out of the rain. Hoa’s gaze would meet Hong’s in that small instant and life would truly begin.
Without uttering another word, Hong rose up from his squatting position and dropped to his knees as he fully embraced that moment so long ago. All at once his head fell forward and he wrenched his arms behind his own back as though they were being rudely bound.
“Hong,” cried Jesse, “écoutez-moi!”
“What’s the matter with him?” called out the oafish PFC. “Is he dinky-dau?”
No matter how hard Jesse tried, Hong would say no more; he would answer no more questions. Jesse pleaded with Hong, but the regular would not respond. The words and visions in his mind were too scrambled now for communication with the living. He had spoken his last words.
“Connaissez-vous le soldat?” the French photographer asked Jesse one week later, as she stood among the dead. Then remembering herself she said, “Do you know this soldier? ”
Jesse stopped walking when he heard the question. He turned to face the two correspondents, the dog, the orphans, and the line of dusty corpses.
“The one on the end, his name is Hong Trac!” he screamed at them with his arm extended and his finger pointing.
There were bullet holes in his body but they were bloodless and had been put there long after death. They were meant to simulate the effects of a firefight somewhere out in the bush. In Hong’s left ear there was a narrow rectangular slot; an empty mineshaft that plunged downward through soft cartilage into the auditory canal, and from there it sliced and severed the optic nerve and pons, blunting memory after memory like a ravenous disease of the aged.
“His name was Hong Trac!” he said again, quietly this time, but with the same intensity. He then turned to walk away but stopped in midstep. Without turning to face her, he asked the Frenchwoman with the long blond hair, “Que veut dire lemot ‘tournevis’? What does it mean?”
A confused look came over her pretty face, but she shrugged and decided to answer the question, but only in exchange for one of her own. As she spoke the sergeant was already walking away.
“Did you know him, sergeant?” she asked in a raised voice. “Did you know that man?”
“No,” said Jesse to no one. “But he surely knew me.”
“A tournevis? Why would you ask such a question in a place like this?” she called out after him in her lovely French accent. “Qu‘est-ce que c’est que le mot en Anglais … what is it? Oh, yes, I know. It is what you call a screwdriver.”
The buck sergeant walked for hours. With his head down and his rifle slung uselessly across his back, he walked alone and far into the night, the living and the dead face of Hong flooding his mind. An old woman on the sidewalk preparing canh chua, fish soup, looked into his eyes as he approached. She shivered at what she saw and quickly turned away.
“Chào bá,” he spoke softly as he passed.
The old woman lifted her head at the sound of the greeting. “Chào em,” she answered with a smile. Then she shook her head as she watched him disappearing into the dark of Công Húa Street. Between here and China Beach there would be dozens of snipers who would gladly put a bullet through his head. She said a silent prayer for the foreign buck sergeant as she stoked her small cooking fire. He was from the other side, but tonight he was not the enemy. She had been fooled at first, but his voice had told her that the simmering redness in his eyes had not been hatred.
“Chào em, ” she repeated as he disappeared into the darkness.
At daybreak Jesse Pasadoble would lift off on a gunship headed to the DMZ. From there he would fly on a Chinook to a small hill near the Loatian border. Grunts on the Ch-47 noted with derision that he spoke to no one and kept to himself.
Jesse stood staring through a small window as the chopper filled with cigarette smoke and aimless, nervous chatter. Visions of Hong and his wife in Marseille still crowded his mind. Through the dirty glass porthole the huck sergeant who kept to himself saw images of southern France—villages, bicyclettes, and boulevards—and not the endless gray and green of the Central Highlands of Vietnam.
When Jesse finally sat down in the chopper, he felt a strange sense of anticipation. Despite reports of heavy contact near the hill, he felt eager to get there. The thoughts weighing upon his soul were far too much to hear alone. Whether or not he would ever confide in them, there were two friends waiting for him on that hill, a black staff sergeant named A. B. Flyer and a new friend, a man of letters and of sensibilities… an army chaplain.
5
the infamous blue ballet
fFor endless hours the remote and elevated jungle garden had been battered mercilessly by brutal shards of blinding light. A calamitous din had followed closely behind each flash—discordant jumbles of shattering impact and sharp, desperate shouts. Creatures formed in the image of God had staggered backward from the western perimeter in strobe-lit steps, as the powerful slam of
a rocket-propelled grenade collapsed a sandbag bunker.
Each trip flare that had flashed in the yellow darkness had drawn the bullets of a dozen riflemen. Shaped mines had been detonated sequentially, sending wide, overlapping arcs of shrapnel into the forest and into squads of bewildered, then suffering men. Red tracer rounds flowed out in lazy, lethal sweeps. Above it all there had been the occasional yellow glare of star shells drifting serenely beneath their tiny silk parachutes. Everywhere, below curling plumes of smoke, there had been countless cries for help in a dozen separate tongues.
In the darkness, ephemeral flowers of concussive flame like red trumpet vines had flashed into bloom, then had receded, to quickly wither shut in accelerated time, in savage salvos of impossible time. In the air, callous leaden spores had burst forth from their casings, seeking out the perfect bodies of young foot soldiers. The fruits of physics had been harvested here.
In the first light of day and far into the descending heat of evening, the small hill remained stunned, shivering, and confused. Somehow the age-old laws of geological time had been reversed in an unnatural, confounding instant. Molten magma had poured from the sky and splashed down onto a perplexed earth, fiery calderas had cracked open everywhere, cinder cones and vents had erupted with no pressure from below. Above its ruptured topsoils, the hill was spiteful and suffering beneath its freshly wounded crust. The crest was smoke-enshrouded, and down below, in its deepest bedrock, the hill had been rudely torn away from the ancient comfort of tectonic, subterranean rhythms.
Two groups of men had met on one face of this hill, and their savage intentions had left every tree limb and twig disfigured. Un watered since the last monsoon rains, the small hill of dry and cracked earth had been sickened to nausea by this forced feeding of burned sulfur and human fluids. Here and there intrepid flowers persisted between fissures and foxholes, their soft petals and thin stems choked shut by the savage spray, the crimson effluence of exit wounds. Against their will, the living poppies masqueraded as roses.
