Gavin was trying to work out what the relationship between Gaby and the village chief’s wife must be, when dawn broke in a blazing crack of yellow and orange and crimson-rose, and the planes came.
There was no warning. There had been no sounds of gunfire, no indication that any engagement was taking place in the vicinity between Viet Cong and ARVN or US troops. In the early dawn light the countryside looked spectacularly beautiful and peaceful.
They were bicycling through a plantation of banana and mango trees and there was very little low vegetation to hamper their progress. After the claustrophobia of the runnels, the long night ride with humid air blowing soft against his face had been paradisiacal. In the light of the rising sun, Gavin could see a cluster of straw-thatched houses ahead. There would be breakfast of sorts. Eggs, if they were lucky, and almost certainly fruit. He was happy. He had survived what had to be the worst part of the ordeal, the tunnels at Cu Chi. He had established an amazingly close rapport with Dinh. And he had a news story that, when it was told, would establish his reputation as a war reporter.
It was Dinh who heard the planes first. ‘B-52s!’ he yelled, throwing himself from his bicycle headlong on to the ground, his hands over his ears. Almost simultaneously the two young NVA officers riding with him followed suit. Gavin crashed to the ground a mere split second behind them. The planes never broke the early morning cloud cover. They could have been B-52s as Dinh averred. They could also have been Phantoms or F-105s. Whatever they were, they were unloading everything that they carried on to the unsuspecting village.
Even with his hands pressed tight over his ears, Gavin could hear the whistling of the bombs as they fell. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ he whispered beneath his breath, and then he was rocked almost senseless by the sound of the explosions. The ground heaved and kicked beneath him, giant fissures cracking wide. He dug his elbows and feet into the earth to gain some kind of purchase, but it was impossible. His body wouldn’t adhere to the ground. He was plucked from it as if he were a dry leaf and carried amid a maelstrom of felled trees and gouged earth. When at last his body slammed back on to the ground he was fifty yards from where he had dived from his bicycle. There was no sign now of the bicycle. There was no sign of Dinh or the accompanying NVA officers. There was only a choking cloud of thick dust, the crackle of leaping flames, and the terrified screams of women and children.
He tried to crawl to his feet, but his legs wouldn’t support him. Twice he stumbled and fell before managing to stay upright and run swaying towards the village and the flames and the screams. Through the dust and still-falling debris he saw Dinh and veered pantingly towards him.
‘Why?’ he shouted to him, unable to hear his own voice. Unable to hear anything. ‘What was the provocation? The reason?’
Dinh was shouting back at him, and like a lip-reader he read the words, ‘No reason! There doesn’t have to be a reason! Perhaps a US platoon is held down some miles from here and called in air support! Perhaps it is a matter of confused targeting! Perhaps it is a matter of the pilots merely off-loading their bombs! This, Comrade, is the war as suffered by the peasants. This is why you are here. To see and experience it.’
While Dinh had been shouting across at him, they had been running in the direction of the village. The two young NVA officers were also on their feet and running. Their small party had miraculously sustained no injuries, but then, they had been on the periphery of the attack. It was the village that had sustained the full blast of the bombs.
They ran past the dead and dying buffalo, past terrified children running out into the banana and mango plantations away from the engulfing flames.
‘Christ! What do we do when we get there!’ Gavin yelled desperately. ‘We have no medical kits! No plasma! We can’t get these people to a hospital!’
Dinh turned his head towards him and smiled. It was a terrible smile. ‘War is a different game without dust offs and quick evacuation to a military hospital, eh, Comrade?’
Gavin did not reply. They were among the injured who had managed to escape from the flames. A girl of about ten years old was laid on the ground, hideous gurgling noises coming from her throat. Her chest had been stoved in, the skin burnt and withered. One arm had been blown off just above the elbow joint, and though the upper portion of her face was still recognizable, the lower half was a nightmare of charred flesh.
Gavin fell on his knees beside her. He had nothing with which to ease her agony. There was not one damned things that he could do for her. ‘Oh God, oh Jesus!’ he sobbed as Dinh grabbed hold of his arm, pulling him away, dragging him onward.
The dead and dying lay scattered over a wide area. Although dawn had only just broken, several of the men had already been making their way towards their rice paddies. A small boy whose task was to care for the family buffalo lay dead beside it in a dyke, the rope with which the animal had been tethered still held tightly in his hand.
A Vietnamese wearing only a loose pair of cotton trousers ran through the mayhem towards them.
‘See what they have done?’ he cried to Dinh. ‘See what they have done to my village!’
He was weeping, beating his bony chest with his fists. ‘They have killed Sang! They have murdered the mother of my children!’
Dinh had his arms around him, hugging him tight, and then he was saying, ‘Where is she? Take me to her.’
Gavin stumbled after them, aware that the distraught Vietnamese was obviously the village chief and that Sang must be the second cousin Dinh was so looking forward to seeing again.
She had been dragged clear of the flames engulfing the straw-thatched houses and lay on her back on the dusty ground, two small children clinging to her lifeless hand, sobbing fiercely.
Dinh knelt down beside her, his face a carved wooden mask. He felt for a pulse, a heartbeat, and then, his shoulders slumped, he slowly rose once more to his feet.
Gavin looked down at the dead woman. She had been no longer young and had the old, worn look of every peasant woman who was no longer in her early twenties. But her hair was still beautiful. Long and glossy-black, it lay spread around her like a fan.
Gavin felt his throat tighten. Somewhere, however distant, there had been a blood link between this woman and Gaby. Crazily, as he stood in the middle of the bombed and burning, obliterated Vietnamese village, the words of the seventeenth-century English poet and churchman John Donne came into his mind. ‘No mind is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.’
There was nothing more that could be done for Sang, but there were scores of other villagers who needed whatever primitive treatment could be given them.
For the rest of the morning he worked with Dinh, bathing wounds with freshly boiled water, bandaging with makeshift lengths of torn cloth, fixing splints with sawn-off lengths of bamboo. It had been countless hours since he had last slept, and as he wearily helped the villagers to bury their dead, Dinh said to him again, ‘This is why you are here, Comrade. To see and to report.’
Gavin nodded and wiped the sweat from his eyes. The question Dinh would never answer was when would he be allowed to file his report.
They worked all through the long, hot day and then rested briefly with the still-dazed survivors. No one showed surprise that the attack had taken place. No one offered a reason for it. It was possible that the village had been destroyed by criminal accident, and it was equally possible that it had been destroyed because it was reported to be a Viet Cong stronghold. Gavin had no way of knowing which was the truth. He knew only that where the village had existed there was now only a charred crater. And that Sang and dozens of her neighbours had died a hideous and violent death.
At night he, Dinh and t
he two accompanying NVA officers set off once more, their bicycles freakishly unscathed, heading northwest, towards the Cambodian border and the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
During the following arduous days and nights his rapport with Dinh deepened. Dinh told him why he had decided to go north, and what life had been like for him in the first painful years away from his family.
‘I am a southerner, Comrade. A Saigonese. Even after all these years of living in the North, I am still a Saigonese.’
‘Then what made you leave?’ Gavin asked, excitement gripping his stomach muscles. Dinh’s conversation was almost always conducted in official Communist jargon. The words comrade, imperialist, and puppet regime peppered his every sentence. His present friendly simplicity indicated that confidences might be about to be shared.
‘I left in order to be able to fight the French under the only man who appeared to me to be capable of doing so. That man was Vo Nguyen Giap. At Dien Bien Phu we achieved our success. When we raised our flag over the shattered French command post, all of us who had fought so hard to rid our land of foreign domination were euphoric. We thought that Vietnam would now be governed by officials of our choosing. But then came the Geneva agreement.’
He paused for a long moment. They were sitting around a small campfire after a hard day’s travelling. The two NVA officers had gone down to a nearby lake to try their luck at catching fish, and the only sound was that of insects in the surrounding undergrowth.
Gavin remained silent, waiting. At last Dinh said heavily, ‘Vietnam was to receive independence, but she was also to be temporarily partitioned at the seventeenth parallel until elections were held. The prime minister in the South, Ngo Dinh Diem, reneged on his promise to hold elections, knowing full well that if elections were held, Ho would be in and he would be out.’
The flames crackled and spat. A small lizard ran across Gavin’s booted foot. ‘Under Diem the government in the South became increasingly oppressive. Men who had valiantly fought to free Vietnam of the French were regarded by Diem as rivals for power. They were hunted down and murdered. And it wasn’t only those who actively fought the French who suffered. Very soon even his mildest supporters were herded into prison camps.’
Gavin remembered the countless US statesmen who had declared that South Vietnam was the model of a ‘free world democracy’ which America was committed to defend against the ‘Communist threat’. Had they known the truth? When President Kennedy had made his inaugural address and charismatically stated ‘Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty,’ had he known what kind of government he was supporting in South Vietnam? Had he known the kind of ‘democracy’ it was that he was calling on his countrymen to defend and to perhaps lay down their lives for? Gavin hoped passionately that he had not.
‘It was then I knew that I could not return to Saigon,’ Dinh continued, staring broodingly into the flames. ‘As I had been active in fighting the French, it was only a matter of time before I would have been rounded up and killed. And so I gave my loyalty to the only man worthy of it, Ho Chi Minh.’
There came a sound of leaves being crushed underfoot as the two NVA officers returned from their fishing trip.
‘It must have been very lonely for you,’ Gavin said quietly, knowing how important family was to him.
Dinh nodded, but the two officers were now within earshot and he said merely, ‘From that time on my overriding aim has been the reunification of Vietnam under Communist control. To that end I have relinquished family, personal ambition, and personal happiness.’
The two NVA officers were sitting down beside them, triumphantly displaying their catch. Before he congratulated them, and before he began to help in skewering the fish in order to roast them, Dinh turned his head. His eyes met Gavin’s. ‘And I have no regrets,’ he said simply. ‘None at all.’
For the next two weeks they continued northwest towards Cambodia, travelling only at night. They were heading towards the Fishhook area, where Cambodian territory bulged down into Vietnam like a gigantic teat.
The trail ended on the enormous Mimot rubber plantation. A wooden gate barred the way across the trail and there was a control point manned by half a dozen guards. As Dinh spoke with the guards, discussing him Gavin was sure, he felt dizzy with relief and euphoria. He was at COSVN, the famous Central Office of South Vietnam. No reporter had ever gained entry before him, and he doubted if any would after him. He had scored a momentous first and he burned with the longing to file his story.
‘Come,’ Dinh said to him. The heavy gate was lifted and they were escorted down the trail beyond by two of the guards.
The jungle vegetation on either side of them was thick and lush. Wild orchids ran riot, their wax-white cups stark against the dark green foliage; vines and creepers covered the trees so thick overhead that the sunlight fell through them in bright, slanting bars. Away from the trail, half hidden under the jungle canopy, were houses built peasant-style, and half a dozen long, low buildings with entrances to a tunnel system clearly visible.
They were taken to one of the houses nearest to the trail, and it became clear that only Gavin, under guard, was to be left there.
‘Take this opportunity to rest, Comrade,’ Dinh said as a look of unease flashed across Gavin’s face. ‘I and my companions must make our reports to our superior officers. There is much for us to discuss, and it may be some time before I see you again.’
It was three days. He was fed sparingly on boiled rice, a small hunk of salt, and dried fish. It was a diet he was becoming accustomed to. Looking down at a frame that was becoming increasingly gaunt, he wondered what Gaby would say when she saw him. In the loneliness of his temporary isolation he could almost hear her husky, unchained laughter.
His throat tightened and he clenched his fists. He must not allow his thoughts to dwell longingly on Gaby. If he did, he could become completely unstrung. The only way of surviving the tremendous opportunity that he had been given was by suppressing all thoughts of normality. Like an alcoholic, he had to live one day at a time.
However impressive Dinh’s rank had been at Cu Chi, at COSVN it was dwarfed by the men of real power. Later, when they were in the jeep travelling north again, he learned that not only was General Tran Nam Trung, the commander-in-chief of the National Liberation Forces, one of the senior officers that Dinh had to report to, but that he had also had to make his report to Pham Hung, a Politburo member and first party secretary, and General Hoang Van Thai, commander-in-chief of all northern forces in the South. It was a thunderingly impressive lineup.
‘And now it’s straight ahead for the North,’ Dinh said to him with satisfaction as they vaulted into the jeep that had been provided for them. ‘And think yourself lucky, Comrade, that you are travelling now and not ten years ago when I first made the journey. Then it was nothing but a near-impassable foot track snaking down from the North over the Truong Son mountain range.’
‘Is the route still the same as the original?’ Gavin asked curiously, deeply thankful to be exchanging the discomfort of his bicycle for the relative comfort of the jeep.
Dinh nodded as one of the NVA officers took the wheel. ‘Yes, though now it is not just one single track but a network of routes running roughly parallel with cross-links at strategic intervals.’
‘And for the moment we travel through Cambodia?’
‘For the moment,’ Dinh said, flashing one of his rare smiles.
There were times, in the nights that followed as they bumped and swayed over crated tracks, when Gavin almost longed to be back on a bicycle. Without a map he had only a hazy idea of where they were, and sometimes he was not even sure which country they were in, Cambodia, Vietnam, or Laos.
One night they only narrowly avoided being spotted by enemy planes as they crossed wide fields of thatch near Pleiku. For a little while after that he was able
to judge where they were because Pleiku was a name that meant something to him. In February 1965 the Viet Cong had attacked the US base at Pleiku and he remembered it being referred to as a traditional market town in the central highlands.
From then on the route became increasingly mountainous and the amount of heavily camouflaged traffic on the trail continued to amaze him. After crossing the Ben Hai River they had descended into the foothills of the Truong Son. The massive mountain range ran like a backbone through North and South, but now there were no more perilous passes to negotiate. Instead, they were soon in thick forest and it was then, when for the first time attack seemed unlikely, that invisible B-52s bombarded the stretch of trail on which they were travelling.
As before, there was no warning. The world simply erupted around them in an apocalyptic frenzy. Although Gavin learned afterwards that the centre of the bombing had been over a mile away, the sonic roar of explosions tore at his eardrums, reducing him once again to total deafness. The jeep was lifted in the air by the blast and thrown yards off the trail, landing on its side. A blow to his head left him with no memory of how he crawled from the wreckage. He could only remember, as the attack continued, pressing himself into the earth and losing control of both his bladder and his bowels.
When at last it was over, he couldn’t believe that he was alive. He forced himself to his knees, and then to stumble to his feet. ‘Dinh!’ he shouted into a ringing silence. ‘Dinh!’
Fifty yards away two figures moved slowly, lifting themselves cautiously from the ground. Neither of them was Dinh. A new fear gripped Gavin, even worse than the mind-bending fear he had just experienced. ‘Dinh!’ he shouted, his voice cracking. ‘DINH!’
‘I am here, Comrade,’ a voice said from behind him.
Gavin spun around, nearly sick with relief. ‘Christ! I thought you were dead. I thought we were all dead!’
White Christmas in Saigon Page 47
