White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘WBLCs?’

  ‘Waterborne logistics craft.’

  ‘What the hell are they?’

  ‘Sampans,’ Paul said with a grin. ‘Come on, let’s go to the Continental for a drink. I want to know why you described the camp the villagers were transferred to as a concentration camp.’

  It was a planned shantytown, Gavin wrote later that day to Gabrielle, miles from anywhere, with no paddy fields for the villagers to farm, and no trees for shade. All the surrounding ground had been bulldozed flat so that there was no vegetation to give cover to any Viet Cong. To keep the Viet Cong away, the tin-roofed houses were surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. The place was dirty, dusty, and utterly soulless. The refugees already living there were sullen and resentful, and who can blame them? If they weren’t Viet Cong sympathizers before they were uprooted from their land, then they must surely be Viet Cong sympathizers now. But the Americans can’t see it. This morning’s operation was described officially as being a great success, the ‘removal of several score villagers from a place of insecurity to a place of safety’.

  In his last letter, he had written about his meeting with Nhu, and had only, hinted that he might meet Dinh, saying that he was ‘looking forward to meeting the rest of her family quite soon’. Now he wrote: I love you and I miss you, and I’m beginning to love this country too, or at least the un-Americanized bits! Tu Do Street has to be seen to be believed! It’s like the worst parts of Las Vegas and Los Angeles all rolled into one and the clubs make the Black Cat seem a model of respectability!

  The rest of Gavin’s week was spent covering the routine briefings at the Follies. US airforce and navy jets had begun a major campaign to wipe out fuel installations in the Hanoi-Haiphong area, and the briefings were even longer than normal, the hundred or so journalists in attendance asking a lot of questions about the escalation of the war.

  He was alone in the bureau office, typing, when the door opened and to his utter astonishment Nhu stepped a trifle uncertainly into the room.

  ‘Is it all right if I come in?’ she asked hesitantly, looking around and seeing with relief that he was alone.

  ‘But of course!’ He was on his feet, pulling a chair away from one of the other desks so that she could sit down.

  She shook her head when he motioned her to sit. ‘No. I am not staying, Gavin. I have come to tell you that the time is now. Dinh has sent someone to escort you to him.’

  ‘When? Now? This very minute?’

  She nodded.

  ‘But I can’t, Nhu!’ he protested. ‘I have to finish my article, tell my bureau chief—’

  ‘That is precisely what Dinh does not want you to do,’ she said gently. ‘You are to leave now, without speaking to anyone either here or at the Continental.’

  Through the screen door of thick, inch-square wire meshing, he could see a small Renault, a Vietnamese at the wheel.

  ‘I can’t possibly, Nhu! To disappear without a word would arouse far more problems than it would solve!’

  ‘You are to leave a note, which I am to make sure your bureau chief receives,’ Nhu said, unperturbed. ‘And you are not to return to the Continental for a change of clothes. A change of clothes has already been arranged for you.’

  He gazed around him helplessly. His half-finished article protruding from his typewriter read: China has reacted by calling the bombing of the fuel installations in the Hanoi-Haiphong areas, ‘barbarous and wanton acts that have further freed us from any bounds of restrictions in helping North Vietnam’. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember what he had planned to type next.

  ‘You must write your note now,’ Nhu said. ‘The messenger Dinh has sent will not wait for you more than a few minutes.’

  Gavin groaned. He had no choice but to write a note to Paul and disappear in the waiting Renault, but he was well aware that it was an action that could cost him his job.

  ‘How long will I be away, Nhu?’ he asked, reaching for a sheet of typing paper.

  ‘I do not know. Three or four days. Perhaps a week.’

  He scrawled: Paul. Something huge has come up. Will explain all when I return, possibly end of week. Gavin.

  He propped it on Paul’s desk, praying that when he returned it would be such a big story that forgiveness would be automatic, and followed Nhu out into the street.

  ‘I am not going with you,’ she said as the Renault’s driver indicated to him that he should sit in the rear of the car. ‘I am to stay here and make sure that your note is found and read.’ She hesitated and then said, her voice trembling slightly, ‘When you see my brother, tell him that I miss him.’

  He nodded, stepping into the Renault’s stiflingly hot interior.

  The car sped out of the city through Cholon, the Chinese quarter, the driver remaining uncommunicably silent. Since he knew it would be a waste of time to ask where they were going or how long the trip would take, Gavin did neither. He sat back, looking out of the window at paddyfields and swamps and canals, wondering if they were on the road that ran northwest from Saigon to Phnom Penh in Cambodia, and how far they could possibly go before being stopped and questioned by the police or the military.

  Some ten or eleven kilometres from Saigon they careened into a small village looking much the same as the other villages they had driven through. This time, however, they turned off the road, bumping and swaying into a dusty alley between closely packed thatched-roof houses built of bamboo and corrugated iron.

  ‘Are we here?’ Gavin asked in Vietnamese. It was the first time he had spoken, and the driver’s eyes flew wide at the shock of being spoken to by a round-eye in his own language.

  ‘I return to Saigon,’ he said uninformatively as two black-pyjama-clad figures emerged from the nearest house, Soviet Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles in their hands.

  The men began to walk towards the car and Gavin, suspecting that he was not going to be a passenger on his companion’s return trip, opened the rear door and stepped out into the blistering midday heat. He didn’t wait for the men to approach but took the initiative, walking confidently towards them.

  ‘Cháo,’ he said, smiling tentatively and shaking their hands firmly.

  ‘You are Mr Gavin Ryan?’ one of them asked in Vietnamese.

  Gavin nodded.

  ‘Your press accreditation card, please.’

  Gavin removed his card from his shirt pocket, and handed it to him. The man, in his black pyjamas and sandals made out of discarded truck tyres, scrutinized it as carefully as if he were a civil servant in a government office.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, handing the card back to Gavin. ‘Please follow me.’

  Gavin hesitated for a fraction of a second. Behind him the Renault’s engine revved into life, in front of him the door of the nearest thatched-roof house opened, revealing an intimidatingly dark interior. The man who hadn’t yet spoken to him walked across to the Renault, exchanged a few words with the driver, and then the Renault began to back out of the alley, raising a cloud of dense dust.

  Gavin turned and watched it for a moment. Then he followed the man who had been speaking to him into the house.

  It took his eyes several seconds to adjust to the gloom. When they did so, he looked round him in astonishment. He had expected to find Dinh in the room. There was no one, just a few functional articles, a sleeping pallet, a table, two chairs, a grate for a fire, and a few cooking pots.

  The Vietnamese handed him the suitcase that had been removed from the rear of the car. ‘Are you armed? Have you a gun? A knife?’ he asked.

  Gavin shook his head and the man ran his hands swiftly and efficiently over him.

  ‘Good,’ he said, satisfied. ‘You are to come with us, Comrade Ryan. This way, please.’

  The Vietnamese who had so far remained silent kicked the cooking pots away from the grate with his foot and then squatted down, plunging his hand into the middle of a pile of cold ashes.

  Gavin watched, mystified, and then his mystification changed
to disbelief as the Vietnamese pulled hard, lifting open a small wooden trapdoor. As the man eased himself into the opening, dropping feetfirst out of sight, his companion turned to Gavin.

  ‘This way,’ he said again, and Gavin was almost sure there was a gleam of relish in his eyes as he motioned him forwards.

  If he had been as chunkily built as Jimmy Giddings, or as big-boned as Lestor McDermott, his adventure would have ended there, before it had begun, because there would have been no way Jimmy or Lestor could have eased themselves down through the narrow opening. As it was, he was almost as slight as the Vietnamese and with a last longing look toward the open door of the house and sunlight, he lowered himself into the claustrophobic darkness.

  The shaft dropped into a tunnel, not high enough to walk in, but large and wide enough to wriggle along. It did not run straight. It zig-zagged, and every now and then there would be a cavity hollowed out in the tunnel’s side, just deep enough for a human body to squeeze into. Sweat was pouring into his eyes and his breathing was harsh and rasping. He wondered how on earth the tunnel was ventilated, where it lead, and then, after about thirty-five to forty yards, they came to a second trapdoor which opened on to another shaft, which led deeper into the earth.

  When he had entered the tunnel he had imagined that it led, after a few yards, to an underground hiding place. He never imagined that it would be so long and complex. There was bamboo lining the tunnel roof now, and they kept coming to intersections where other tunnels led off blackly.

  Something scurried past his face, and he hit out blindly with his hands, barely controlling his panic. Had it been a spider? He hated spiders and he knew that in the tropics all spiders were likely to be poisonous. He was trembling violently, barely able to control his rising panic. It would be over soon. It couldn’t go on for much longer. They would reach their destination. There would be light and air.

  And the return? He wouldn’t think about returning, only about arriving without disgracing himself by betraying his claustrophobia and his fear of whatever insect life was present but unseen.

  Just when he thought he could continue no longer, faint light permeated the darkness and the Vietnamese in front of him scrambled from his belly on to his feet, standing upright.

  Two seconds later Gavin was gratefully doing the same thing. He stared around him. The light was not daylight. It was the light of an improvised oil lamp, an old medicine bottle with a wick in it, and he was not in a shaft leading upward, as he had hoped, but in a chamber large enough to hold ten or twelve people. At a makeshift desk a Vietnamese wearing the green uniform of the North Vietnamese Army sat writing. The two black-clad Vietnamese waited respectfully for him to look up from his work. When he did so, he said only, ‘Colonel Duong is waiting for you, Comrades.’

  With every muscle in his body aching from the effort of his crawl, and his skin drenched with perspiration, Gavin followed his Vietnamese companions across the chamber and into another tunnel, this time one that was high enough to walk in upright. There was a dull rumble and the ground shook above them, a scattering of earth falling on to their heads. ‘It is the big monkeys,’ the Vietnamese who had done all the earlier talking, said to him. ‘They are bombing the Boi Loi Woods.’

  By big monkeys, Gavin assumed that his companion referred to the Americans. He wondered if Australians were also referred to in the same derogatory manner.

  The chamber they walked into was as big as the previous one, but more comfortably furnished. There was a large table made out of packing cases and planks of wood, around which stood three men, all in North Vietnamese Army uniforms and all looking down at a large scale map. There were other boxes stacked against the wall which appeared to be serving as filing cabinets. And there was a hammock in one corner, and a smaller table on which was a lamp made out of an old menthol bottle, a dagger, a rifle, and a rice bag.

  The men looked up, and the smallest of them, the one standing centrally and facing Gavin, said, ‘I am Colonel Duong Quynh Dinh. Welcome to the tunnels of Cu Chi, Comrade Ryan.’

  ‘I’m very pleased to be here,’ Gavin said, trying to suppress his feeling of being entombed and to inject a note of sincerity into his voice.

  Gabrielle’s uncle looked far older than his forty-two years – the lean, wiry figure with not an ounce of excess flesh on his bones and a taut, heavily lined face seemed nearer to fifty-two.

  He moved from behind the desk, walking up to Gavin, standing in front of him and holding his eyes for what seemed an eternity.

  ‘I am told that you are a journalist and that your sympathies are with us, Comrade?’ he said at last.

  Gavin nodded. If Dinh was under the impression that he was a committed Communist, now did not seem the time or the place to enlighten him.

  ‘And that you are my nephew-in-law?’

  Gavin felt a tremor of relief. By publicly acknowledging the family connection, Dinh was giving him credentials in the eyes of the other North Vietnamese.

  ‘Yes.’ He unbuttoned his shirt pocket. ‘I have brought two photographs for you, Colonel. One of them is Gabrielle and myself on our wedding day, the other is of your sister, Vanh.’

  Dinh took them, looking down at them for a long time. Gavin knew that Dinh had not seen Vanh for several years, and that he had never seen Gabrielle.

  ‘It is a long time since I have seen some members of my family,’ Dinh said to him, taking a small notebook from his pocket and slipping the two photographs between the leaves. ‘It is a hard price to pay for victory, but it is a price that I and my fellow comrades pay willingly.’

  He motioned Gavin forwards towards the table. ‘Let me tell you something about the area you are in, Comrade.’ He indicated a point on the map some twenty kilometres northwest of Saigon. ‘This is Cu Chi district.’ He circled an area of small villages clustered astride Route One. ‘Here are the villages of An Nhon Tay and Phu My Hung, referred to by the Americans as the Ho Bo Woods. Phu My Hung is our area command post.’ To the north of the area Gavin could see a faint blue line indicating the Saigon River. ‘It is a district that was important to us in our war with the French, and that is important to us now, in our war with the Americans.’

  ‘Because of its strategic significance?’ Gavin interposed, trying hard to sound intelligent enough to warrant the confidence being placed in him.

  Dinh nodded. ‘Yes. As you see, the main road linking Phnom Penh and Saigon runs through Cu Chi, as does the Saigon River. We need to control these routes in order to bring supplies in from Cambodia.’ He paused, and something that could have been a hint of a smile touched the hard line of his mouth. ‘When I was a boy, this area was very green, very lush.’

  Gavin knew that most of it was anything but green and lush now. A huge American army base had been built in the area, and in January a large-scale American military operation, code-named CRIMP had poured hundreds of troops into the countryside around Cu Chi in an effort to clear it of Viet Cong, and to secure it. In case they overlooked any Viet Cong, B-52s had then pounded the area with thirty-ton loads of high explosives.

  ‘Were the tunnels here in January, when the area was bombed?’ he asked, forgetting his claustrophobia as his reporter’s intense interest in the story took over.

  Again Gavin saw a faint glimmer of a smile. ‘The tunnels have been here ever since the days when we fought the French. Every hamlet and village in the area built its own underground network where guerrilla fighters could hide, and from where they could launch surprise attacks upon the French Army. Now the tunnels have been repaired and extended. They cover an area from the Cambodian border to the outskirts of Saigon.’

  If there had been a chair handy, Gavin would have gratefully sat down upon it. All the time he had been studying about Vietnam, preparing himself to come to Vietnam, he had never read a word referring to the enemy’s use of tunnels. Paul hadn’t mentioned the tunnels, nor had Jimmy or Lestor, which meant that they did not know about them. He felt like whooping with elation. When Paul
read his story about Cu Chi, he wouldn’t give a damn about the way he had disappeared without so much as a by-your-leave. He certainly wouldn’t get the sack. He would get the press bureau’s equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize!

  ‘Let me give you some idea of the sophistication of our tunnel network, and then I will tell you why it is that I asked you to come to Cu Chi, and what it is that North Vietnam would like from you,’ Dinh said, leading the way out of the chamber.

  Gavin took a deep breath and followed him. He was beginning to feel slightly more acclimatized now and his interest superseded his fear.

  For sixty yards or so at a time they would wriggle on their bellies like giant underground moles, and then they would scramble upright in a large chamber that served as a dormitory or an ammunition dump or a first-aid station. There was even a kitchen.

  ‘Where does the smoke go?’ Gavin asked, perplexed.

  ‘It is ducted through several channels and finally escapes, greatly diffused, through ground-level chimneys a good distance from any tunnel entrance. Though most of our food is eaten cold,’ Dinh said, a note of regret in his voice.

  The strenuously physical tour continued. There were ventilation shafts and wells. There were false tunnels near some entrances, leading nowhere. There were dead ends. There were booby traps for any American soldier so enterprising as to discover an entrance and see through the false trails.

  The booby traps were nearly Gavin’s undoing. He was just congratulating himself on the way he had adjusted to the dark and the bodily stenches that poisoned the air, when there was a strange scuffling sound and Dinh wriggled into one of the hollows carved out of the tunnel’s side that served as both a hiding place and a passing place.

  ‘We will go no farther in this direction,’ Dinh said, lighting a small candle to give light. ‘It leads to a booby-trapped entrance. Can you see?’

  In the flickering light of the candle, Gavin saw ahead of him, a mere three or four feet away, three huge rats reared on their haunches, teeth bared.