The Return: A Novel of Vietnam

by Charles W. Sasser

  Emotions long neglected welled painfully in my soul. I didn’t want to embarrass myself and lose face in front of the Chinese cabbie. Not trusting myself to maintain composure, I put off returning to the taxi by walking slowly out what had been the post’s main front gate and toward the canal where a little hooch city of whore houses, beer stands, laundries and souvenir shops had sprung up after the U.S. Army roared in. The people, of course, were now gone, having moved to Dong Tam the city and elsewhere after their GI source of income dried up when the war ended. Everything was now grown over with jungle. Only the bridge and the road remained.

  I paused at the bridge over the canal and felt an old man’s reminiscing smile touch my lips. In the midst of cruelty and barbarity, there had been at least one thing gentle—the girl in the brick house. Funny, I hadn’t thought about her in years. It was she, I realized unexpectedly, whom Mhai in her portrait resembled. Perhaps that was why I was so drawn to Mhai and why I understood Pete’s curious infatuation with his own golden Asian girl.

  I fell in love with the girl at the bridge, in a way, for only that one evening, without being disloyal to Elizabeth. There was something about the Orient that you could love and hate at the same time. One emotion gave contrast and depth to the others.

  Early in my war, shortly after I arrived in-country, before Mangrum and Widow Maker Lane and my own wound and all that, my Third Herd pulled rotating duty between security at the bridge and night patrols from an abandoned school house a few klicks further down the road. It was the same school where VC shot the teacher and hammered pencils into children’s ears. At the bridge were two brick houses, rare in Vietnam, one on either side of the canal, conspicuous signs that the owners were prosperous merchants or tradesmen. I gradually made friends with the ageing papasan and mamasan who lived in one of the houses. They often invited me in to relax away from the other GIs.

  The house had rare features beyond brick siding—electricity, radio, chairs and a table, beds instead of mats tossed on the floor, and a portable black-and-white TV set. I frequently sat at the table in the three-room house and wrote letters home to Elizabeth, or I watched Mission Impossible or Bonanza on TV, in English with Vietnamese subtitles.

  One evening while I was occupied writing letters, I looked up in surprise and admiration when a gorgeous girl entered as though she belonged there. She was tall for a Vietnamese, especially a Viet woman, and stately with squared shoulders and a regal walk that rippled sleek black hair flowing down the middle of her back. Her almond eyes were slightly rounded instead of slanted. French colonists had been mixing with the local population since before World War II. She may have been in her mid-twenties, maybe younger, She wore a plain red traditional ao dai and carried a plump baby on her hip.

  Apparently, I was no surprise to her. She made her way directly to me. Without a word, without even so much as a smile, she deposited the baby in my lap and started back out the door.

  “Wait a minute,” I protested, alarmed at the wriggling creature on my lap. “What is this?”

  She hesitated. “It is a baby, of course,” she replied in perfect English, only slightly accented.

  “What am I going to do with it?”

  “It is a him.”

  She smiled with amusement and kept going, disappearing into the night. Mamasan paid no attention. As part of the family, I should be willing to baby-sit if the need arose. I shrugged. The kid was cute—all round-bottomed and round-faced with black eyes shining through slitted lids and hair as thick and dark as a Vietnam night. He’d probably grow up to be Viet Cong.

  The girl returned shortly carrying a bag. She sat at the table with me and we began to talk. The little boy was her son, she said—his father was dead, killed in the war. The old folks who lived here were her grandparents. They had lived in Saigon until recently when they thought it best to leave because of their politics. I didn’t ask about that, nor about which side the boy’s father fought on. It was a night when such things didn’t matter.

  We talked for over two hours, not about the war, but instead about art and literature, about normal times before the war when we had both been happy. She told me she was educated in England and had been to Paris. I told her about Oklahoma, where I grew up poor on a hardscrabble farm, and about how that led me to enlist in the army to get away when I was only seventeen. I told her about Elizabeth and about how we couldn’t have children.

  Eventually I grew tired. She invited me to stretch out on a plaited rug to catch a little nap before tonight’s security patrol. To my astonishment, the girl and her baby lay down next to me. We soon slept while papasan and mamasan watched Gunsmoke on TV.

  She was gone when I awoke, She never told me her name. But for that one evening, the beautiful girl in the red ao dai pushed back the war and I was almost happy. Memory of that night, and of her on that night, were the only gentleness I brought back from Vietnam. It was not enough to overcome the horrors that had changed me from the inside out.

  “You left home young and laughing to go to the war,” my Elizabeth used to say. “Thank God you came home with all your physical parts, but Vietnam still took something from you. You were never young and laughing again.”

  My Elizabeth was almost always right. Vietnam robbed my childhood and youth from me and turned me into an old man. It was like all life before Vietnam had never existed. I still had memories, although vague ones, of Grandpa’s farm on Drake’s Prairie west of Sallisaw in Oklahoma. Of his hitching the big black mare and the red one-eyed mule to the wagon and all of us piling in on Saturday mornings to ride to town. Of all the other wagons and people in the back alley gossiping and catching up on the news while peddling their vegetables and fruits and chickens and pigs. Of going to the old Ritz Theater with my brother and watching Roy Rogers and Lash LaRue and Tarzan in black-and-white double features, plus a cartoon, a cliffhanger serial, and selected short subjects. I still had the memories, but it was like the events themselves happened to someone else. All I really had left of my life was that part of it after Vietnam.

  I missed that little boy I once was,

  I missed me as a young man.

  I missed Elizabeth.

  I missed Pete.

  I wished I could go home again and start life all over. But home was people and there was no longer a home to go home to.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I was both surprised and relieved to find Father Pierre still alive, as old as he looked. He looked even more ancient than his stone Catholic Church with its scarred spire reaching for a salvation that might never come. He was so thin and wasted that he hardly threw a shadow as he tottered around with the help of a hand-hewn cane carved like a dragon and the assistance of a young Vietnamese girl attendant. When he learned of my mission, the girl helped him into the weedy garden between the high brown-mud wall abutting Dong Tam’s Huang Avenue and the church and served us tea.

  “It ees mos’ difficult for me to care for zee garden zees days,” he apologized in English heavily laced with his French accent. “Time has zee disagreeable way of wearing out zee bones and sinews. Still, it ees a most pleasant place from which to pursue your errand, true?”

  I agreed. Pete and Mhai had been here, together.

  The priest smiled, just a touch of one, as though in fear of his leathered face cracking.

  “‘Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest,’” he quoted,

  “‘And passage through these looms

  “‘God order’d motion, but ordain’d no rest.”

  By some remarkable coincidence, I knew that one. It was a favorite. “Henry Vaughan,” I said. “From his Allan.”

  “Yes,” he said, clearly pleased.

  We sat on concrete benches facing each other, he propping both hands on the handle of his cane. Van my cabbie and the Father’s pretty young attendant withdrew a few paces to a fountain featuring a nubile nymph that had greened and crusted from time and neglect.

  “It ees much distressing to learn of Lt. P
ete’s death,” Father Pierre said, “but I do understand why he might die holding the portrait of his lovely Mhai. Thay Li Chung, who ees the monk who has since also died, Lt. Pete, I, and later Mhai herself occupied many pleasant hours in this garden.”

  The priest met Pete Brauer, he said, shortly after Pete took command of the Lien Doc Nguoi Nhai at the Dong Tam Naval Riverine Base. Pete acquired a cold-water room on a monthly basis from Madam Bonnie My, who operated a combination whorehouse, orphanage and rooming house in a rundown former French hotel. There were always plenty of both orphans and whores in Vietnam, what with the war.

  “I think he letted the room from Bonnie My so he might escape from the war from time to time,” the Father surmised.

  Madam Bonnie My was a gregarious wisp of a young woman with a pleasant, open nature, in spite of a profession in the peddling of women flesh, her own included prior to her assuming proprietorship of the hotel. She quickly grew to know, accept and even like the rough-mannered SEAL. It wasn’t long before, bowing politely in the gentle and gracious way of most Vietnamese women, she began asking Pete for little favors. Would he please be too kind as to drop off bundles of clothing, food and medicines at the mission for Father Pierre’s poor parishioners? The Father and she had built a partnership of sorts in the region’s poor, homeless and orphaned.

  “Pete-san, if your duties should take you near Father’s mission,” she would implore, “will you please take this package? You have your wonderful Jeep Turncoat and the bundle is very heavy.”

  A friendship soon developed between Pete and Father Pierre. It became customary for Pete to stop by the mission whenever he was in town. Considering his indifference to religion, he found himself oddly drawn to Father Pierre’s island of peace in a world of deceit, turmoil and death, He always contributed a few C-rations for the feeding of the good father’s flock and a bottle of bourbon for the feeding of the good father’s earthly soul. They sipped bourbon while relaxing together in the garden, which was lovely in those days but already starting to show some decay. In this manner, Pete unintentionally inserted himself into the local Vietnamese community. Undoubtedly, Commander Minh learned of his non-warrior activities.

  “The activities of all who live in a Vietnamese community are known and evaluated,” Father Pierre explained.

  “Does that include Americans?” Pete asked.

  “Especially Americans. Enemies are of two types. There are enemies who are enemies personally and who you may not respect. Then there are enemies who are enemies because of war but who are not personal enemies. You can respect them.”

  One afternoon while the two unlikely friends were in the garden working on a bottle, a wizened gnome of a Buddhist monk with a shaved head and wearing dirty saffron robes stopped at the wrought-iron gate. His round face, neither young nor old, reflected a deep inner light. Father Pierre jumped up and hurried to greet him. They were obviously old friends.

  “Lt. Pete, please, have the honor of meeting Thay Li Chung...”

  Thay Li bowed gracefully. He was a Hinayana Buddhist whose followers exalted individual austerity and salvation by personal example. His only possession was a bowl, which he always carried with him. Inner peace provided him sanctuary while war raged without.

  Father Pierre, Thay Li and the navy SEAL became a regular threesome at the Catholic mission whenever Pete happened to be in Dong Tam. The priest and Pete would split a bottle of bourbon while the three-way conversation spirited itself deep into the night.

  “Lt. Pete was the most remarkable man,” Father Pierre recalled now with a wisp of nostalgic smile. “By reputation, he was the fierce fighter against his enemies, and he could be brutal in the war. But he also had affinity for the Vietnamese people. I think if his life ees different, he would have made the wonderful missionary. Always he ees bringing food for the orphans at Bonnie My’s, and from somewhere he ees collecting boxes of clothing and having them delivered to the orphans.

  “He and Comrade Minh, who were enemies and fought each other savagely, were men very much alike. Minh too sent rice to the orphanage and directed orphans to Bonnie My. Sometimes he ees recommending to me particular villages or areas where the inhabitants are infected with toothaches, infections or the chronic respiratory ailments. Lt. Pete would then get the army medics to bring the poor population needed medical care. Army MEDCAP medics soon learn they are having nothing to fear from the Viet Cong. Minh ees lending his personal protection to them.”

  Father Pierre sagged more and more on the handle of his cane. It trembled slightly beneath his gnarled hands.

  “Then came Mhai,” he said. “Lovely, spirited Mhai. Monsieur Kazmarek, you will be staying the night in the mission? I will rest now, for I tire easily. Then in the evening over supper I will be telling you the story of Mhai, as I know it. As much as I know. If you wish, you will be staying in the same antechamber where Mhai slept. Sometimes I am feeling as if she remains there yet.”

  Hobbling with the aid of his dragon cane, Father Pierre led the way around to the back of the church. We ascended a narrow stone stairway to a hallway and a heavy wooden door. The room beyond was as dreary as the hallway and contained in the way of furnishings only a bed and a water stand. A barred window overlooked the garden. A large oil painting on the far wall immediately caught my eye.

  It was of Mhai. There was pensiveness to the full-face portrait, a melancholy caught in the eyes as they rested upon red bougainvillea blooms cupped tenderly in her palms. My throat ached at sight of that lovely, familiar face. The painting made me feel as though I were finally meeting her, after having lived with her presence for so long. I felt shy and awkward—and foolish.

  Father Pierre smiled his wan smile, as though he understood.

  “That ees the only one that remains,” he almost whispered. “Lt. Pete came the evening after Mhai left and burned all that he had painted of her. Except for this one, which I am hiding from him.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  In the evening, after a simple supper served by the young Vietnamese girl, whom my cabbie couldn’t take his eyes off, Father Pierre leaned back slowly in his chair. His eyes misted as he peered into the past. He said Lt. Pete Brauer and Madam Bonnie My brought the young Viet Cong woman to the mission on the afternoon of a day in which there had been fresh rain in the morning to launder the tropic air, followed by sunshine. Pete rushed through the wrought-iron front gate and into the church. Not finding Father Pierre there, he tried the rectory, then went out the back door where he located the priest and Thay Li walking in the garden. Normally he carried only a sidearm when he visited. This time he had a carbine slung over one shoulder.

  “Father Pierre,”’ he began, “I’ve always heard that the Catholic Church is a sanctuary that won’t be violated by either side in a war.”

  The priest’s eyebrows lifted. “Here, it ees sanctuary only so far as the guerrillas are honoring it,” he replied. “Commander Minh sees fit to so honor, as the church ees of benefit to him as well. Minh ees a Catholic.”

  “If sanctuary is claimed, you can’t deny it?”

  Thay Li’s eyes twinkled. “You are claim sanctuary, Lt. Pete?”

  “It’s not for me, little monk.”

  “My son,” explained Father Pierre, “one person cannot request sanctuary for another. The person himself must be asking it.”

  “What if the person is incapable of asking for herself?

  “Herself?”

  “Bonnie My is out front with her now. She’s wounded, Father. She’s healing, but we can’t keep her at Bonnie My’s any longer. It’s not safe.”

  “I am hearing that Bonnie My ees entertaining a guest,” said the priest. “But why will she not be safe. The Viet Cong will not harm one of their own.”

  What Pete didn’t tell the priest was that his plot to use the captive as a decoy to lure Commander Minh into a trap had failed. Instead, Bonnie My received a message from the guerrillas warning that if the prisoner died, Bonnie My’s hotel would be
burned to the ground and her orphans and whores made homeless. Bonnie My suggested the VC be moved to the mission. The guerrillas would never burn it.

  “Father, she’s spiking a temperature again,” Pete argued. “I need someplace else for her to stay. She’ll die without the medical care I can get for her at the army base. She can’t be moved just yet. Not very far anyhow.”

  “She ees your prisoner, Lt. Pete?”

  “Technically speaking.”

  “The church cannot be a prisoner of war camp.”

  “Father, she’ll die...”

  The priest thought about it. “Well—“

  “It’s only until she’s better, Father.” The scar on his lip narrowed and whitened. This seemed so important to him.

  Father Pierre and Thay Li exchanged long looks. The ill and the needy could never be turned away.

  “’I slept, and dreamed life was Beauty,’” he quoted.

  “’I woke, and found that life was Duty.’”

  Outside the mission gate, Bonnie My paced next to the gray repainted Jeep Pete called Turncoat. Piss Hole, who had become his American commander’s virtual shadow, kept guard over the pitiful black-clad figure crumpled in the Jeep with her hands tied. Piss Hole’s hawk-like face and odd, piercing red-rimmed eyes always made Father Pierre uncomfortable. Something about his demeanor suggested he was prepared to either kill or to die in service of the navy SEAL. Such loyalty was rare in this war.

  Father Pierre nodded curtly at Piss Hole but produced a genuine smile for Bonnie My.

  The title madam affixed to Bonnie My’s name implied some age to its bearer as well as denoting her profession as mamasan to a bevy of prostitutes. Actually, she was probably not even old enough to vote in the U.S. She was tiny and wholesome-looking attractive, with slanted eyes both shrewd and compassionate. She seldom spoke of her past, but rumor had it she started off as a Saigon goodtime girl when she was fourteen years old. She soon earned and saved enough bed money to purchase the old French Revoluccion Hotel in Dong Tam. She imported some of her friends and established a profitable business to service GIs from the Dong Tam army base.