The Return: A Novel of Vietnam

by Charles W. Sasser

  “You worthless turd!” he shouted. “You piece of shit garbage. Get you sorry ass off that ground now and get on that chopper, or I’ll personally shoot you.”

  “I ain’t goin! I’m gonna die! I ain’t goin!”

  “You are goin, you puke-faced pussy.”

  “We’re all gonna die! Tell’em, Daniels. Daniels knew when it was Mangrum’s turn. Now he knows it’s my turn. We’re gonna die!”

  The choppers bounced on their skids, engines revving, already loaded except for Sgt. Holtzauer and me and Bugs Wortham going bugs on the ground. Boonirats and pilots stared out at the unfolding drama. They already had pre-battle jitters; it didn’t take much of a scene like this to unnerve an entire outfit.

  I grabbed Wortham’s rifle off the ground and snatched the back of his web harness. The sergeant seized his belt. Wortham went limp, foaming at the mouth. Together, the platoon sergeant and I hoisted the blubbering hunk of protoplasm and rushed with him like a battering ram to the platoon’s command bird. The other choppers containing the rest of the platoon skittered into the air, like frightened birds. We heaved Bugs headfirst onto the floor of the last Huey, among the legs of the command element. Lawmaster and Daniels grabbed him and held him in place while Sgt. Holtzauer and I piled in. The chopper jerked us airborne and quickly rose to a thousand feet, just below the thickening cloud cover.

  “Let him up,” Holtzauer instructed with a sinister grin. “Okay, shit-for-breath, now you can go back if you want to. There’s the door.”

  Knowing he was trapped, Bugs struggled to regain control of himself. His eyes still rolled and his lip quivered, but he was aware enough to quickly shed his helmet and chickenplate flak jacket to sit on to keep stray ground rounds from popping the belly of the helicopter and taking off his balls. We would all re-gear just before touchdown. The door gunner with his M60 machine gun suspended in the open doorway on a bungee cord turned his head to regard us for a long minute. The dark wraparound visor of his flight helmet hid his expression. The chopperful of mostly silent grunts reflected back in surreal images.

  Morning in Vietnam always seemed to hang back until the last moment, as though ashamed to expose man’s follies to God. Then the sun would rocket suddenly into the sky, making the transition from night to day a short one. Today’s transition was longer than usual. The HU-1 helicopters lifted from FSB Savage in the misty pre-dawn purple and flew beneath a layer of clouds that only intermittently permitted through sunlight.

  The choppers pushed westward above the swamp, jungle and rice paddies that made up the Nam Can Forest and the domain of the elusive Viet Cong. Small clusters of huts among coconut palms and banana trees passed below the open doors of the choppers. Flying slightly to our right front was an armed Huey hog, its landing skids heavy with rocket tubes and machine guns. Higher and farther out, remote from all this, a graceful “spirit bird” hung motionless in the sky, suspended delicately in a rising air thermal, its lonely deceptively-peaceful world undisturbed by the passing fleets of battle helicopters.

  The last thing Bugs Wortham said as the Black Hawks came in low and fast to the landing zone was, “Lt. Kazmarek, listen to me. Please? I got this feelin. It’s different today, sir. I’m tellin you. Daniels know something. Today is a different day.”

  “Fuck you, Bugs,” Sgt. Holtzauer snarled.

  It was a cold LZ, as we had been promised. Wortham looked a little surprised, almost sheepish, at how quiet things were once the chopper deposited us into the grass and departed, taking with them the blackened-face LRRP teams who had secured the landing for us. I got the platoon lined out quickly, checked the map and gave the azimuth to Sgt. Shirkey, who was good and alert on point. Lawmaster checked in by radio with Six Actual, Captain Bruton, whose code name was “Dalton Salton.”

  “Dalton Salton says the other platoons have landed,” he passed on to me. “No contact yet. It looks like we’ve caught ’em with their pants down.”

  “Mebbe,” I said, unconvinced. Wortham’s little charade had worked on us all. “Advise Dalton Salton our ETA at Phase Line Yellow in twenty minutes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Wortham seemed subdued but still half-frozen from fright. Sgt. Holtzauer shoved him into line behind Sgt. Wallace, his squad leader.

  “You can leave anytime you want, cocksucker,” he said. “I’m sure the VC out there will take your sensitivities into consideration when they cut off your dick and stuff it down your throat.”

  Bugs gagged.

  Caterpillar-style and cautious, the platoon moved off LZ perimeter in the direction of Vam Tho. We passed through banana groves and into fields of twisted scrub brush and gray skeletons of dead trees. Reeds grew tall enough to conceal our movement as I fanned out the column on both flanks. Clothing, sodden with sweat, chafed our skin. The odors of stagnant pools and rotting vegetation hovered over us.

  The reeds began to thin out as we approached the edge of the giant rice field where we had been before. Lawmaster with the radio followed closely behind me, ready to initiate commo should something happen. Bugs Wortham stuck to Sgt. Wallace like a fearful shadow. I gave hand signals and the platoon spread out on-line facing the village on the far side of the field.

  Rifles went into on-guard positions. The squads dressed up their lines for the assault, leaving plenty of distance between soldiers. I radio-checked with Bravo’s CP and received the go-ahead. So far, so good. Still no contact.

  We walked out of the sparse reeds and into the rice. The familiar thatched roofs of Vam Tho rose in the distance above split bamboo fences. Thin streamers of smoke wafted upward from breakfast fires. I took off my helmet, dipped it full of warm rice water and turned it upside down over my head.

  Crack! Bam!

  First two shots, then two more, rang out from the village. A sentry had spotted us and sounded the warning. We had caught them with their pants down. Black-clad figures trotted out of huts to take a look. They darted back inside for their weapons.

  I pumped my arm. Go! Go! Go!

  Third Herd broke into a water-sloshing run toward the hamlet. Terrifying howls rose from straining lungs. The charge sounded like a pack of hungry wolves.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Van interrupted the howling charge across the rice paddy by reaching over in the cab and touching my arm. I flinched. I wasn’t aware until then of how closely he had been watching me from the corner of his eye. An old geezer like me, he must have been afraid I was about to have a thrombosis or something.

  “We soon there,” he announced tentatively, then went on. “Until most recent, visitors must stop and walk to Vam Tho or go in boats. Now, there is road all the way to Dr. Cochran’s clinic.”

  I wasn’t listening; my thoughts were still back in the rice field. “What did you say?”

  “I say we soon there.”

  “Yes. Yes.” I shook my head to clear it of the torment of what had been.

  The new road to Vam Tho, paved but narrow, followed close against the straight muddy canal on the left flank. Canal Six. On my side of the taxi, I stared out at banana and coconut trees, cane fields and sweet potato patches. Water buffalo browsed in a field while a skinny girl in shorts watched them.

  It occurred to me that during all the years Pete and I had known each other, living next door to each other as neighbors and drinking beer in his Florida Room and sometimes talking about the war, neither of us had ever once mentioned Vam Tho. The hamlet had been a pivotal point of the war for both of us, and, for me at least, a dark turning point in my life. I had my reasons for not talking about it. What were Pete’s reasons, other than the fact that his Frogs hadn’t done well in that day’s fighting?

  “Vam Tho,” Van suddenly reported.

  Breath caught in my throat. I wouldn’t look, couldn’t look. Van must have thought I hadn’t heard, for he repeated the dreaded name that had haunted my sleep over the decades. Slowly then, I turned my head to endure a first painful look.

  Time had not quite stood s
till for the village; to my relief, I hardly recognized the place. That was a good sign. During the war, Vam Tho had been a large hamlet in VC territory. Now, it was much larger, a small town. Its low skyline featured a few commercial buildings constructed of brick or concrete blocks with tin roofs,

  Closer, however, I began recognizing features. The road ended in a parking lot at the footbridge across the canal. The bridge was wider now, more modern in steel and concrete, but it was at the same location as before at the end of the street through town, or at the beginning, according to your perspective. A number of vehicles, mostly rattletrap farm trucks, bicycles and motorbikes with baskets, were parked noses toward the canal and the town on the other side.

  The sprawling banana grove was still there, only pushed back from the canal to make room for the parking lot. Van pulled in and cut his engine. I felt my heart pounding against my ribs. I stared across the narrow waterway and down the main street, refusing to glance to the left of the bridge where I feared the grassy, sloping banks of the canal might still be covered with blood.

  I steeled myself to return to Vam Tho after all these years. Van watched me uneasily, wearing a puzzled expression. Finally, I slowly got out of the taxi. I reined in all stray thoughts and emotions and held them in check by looking neither to right nor left as I started walking across the bridge, following the driver. I clutched Mhai in her shipping tube for moral support.

  I was halfway across. The statue intruded into the corner of my eye. It didn’t merely intrude. It intruded, it penetrated. I faltered. Fortunately, there was a hand railing on the bridge or I might have tumbled into the water. Van rushed to my side. I waved him off with a feeble gesture and leaned hard on the railing. I stared.

  “It is the monument I spoke of before,” Van began explaining. “It is memorial to—“

  I cut him off. “I know what it is.”

  It was a life-sized bronze erected on the exact spot where it had all happened. It showed two Vietnamese women with their faces lifted to the sky, as in supplication. At their feet huddled a broken, naked old papasan and a frightened baby clutching arms around her brother’s neck. How was it possible for mere metals wrenched from the bowels of the earth to reflect such terror and sorrow writ so huge for eternity?

  It was like their screams pierced deep into my soul, so that I became a part of the terror.

  Van shook me. “Mr. Kazmarek? Mr. Kazmarek?”

  “I’m not having a heart attack,” I managed.

  “Dr. C. Cochran’s clinic. It is at the other end of the town.”

  I began walking automatically. Tottering. I felt an age far in excess of my sixty years. I wrested my eyes from the statue, but it followed me anyhow, burned onto my retinas. I might have turned and run away, except I felt too drained to do anything but trail Van down the unpaved street where chickens dusted themselves, pigs grunted inquiringly, and swarms of playing children paused to check out the strangers. I felt their accusing eyes eating deep into my being, like bullets suspended all these years waiting for the right target.

  I felt a little better once the canal lay behind. I paused to glance back, involuntarily, almost expecting to turn into a pillar of salt. The canal banks mercifully hid the monument and the site of my festered guilt. A black Honda sedan pulled into the parking lot and stopped next to Van’s cab. A man dressed entirely in black immediately got out. He looked vaguely familiar, so I watched him as he slowly walked across the bridge toward us. He stopped, seeing me watching him, and pretended interest in the bronze monument. The distance was too great for my failing eyesight to make out his features, but I recognized his gait, his stance—the distinguished old man from the hotel restaurant. Still tailing me to report back to his communist bosses on my travels and activities.

  I hurried on, eager now to get this over with and get out of here on the next available flight. I couldn’t help thinking it had been a mistake to come. There was nothing a man could do to change the past. What had been, had been. There was no way to make up for it.

  I did it for Pete, I admonished myself, and for Mhai.

  So do it. Finish this hellish mission, make closure to it—and then get the hell back home and forget it all.

  The big rice field was still there too, but smaller to make room for the growth of the town. The clinic sat in front of it a short distance. The sign over the door was written in pictographic Vietnamese. The brick building was small, but nonetheless one of the larger in town. It had a low tin roof and tropical flowers growing wildly in beds along its front exposure.

  Inside the waiting room, two ageing papasans and a young girl in a faded print dress muddy at the hem sat on chairs around a wall decorated with framed photos of Vietnamese rural scenes. One of the men supported a dirty bandage that covered his leg from knee to ankle. The other appeared to be suffering from a hacking cough. Sores wept through the hands the young girl held up to her face to conceal it.

  From the other door which likely led to the doctor’s office and examining rooms burst a tiny Viet woman wearing an unstarched white nurse’s uniform. She looked middle-aged in the way of so many Asian women who were young and pretty briefly, then middle-aged for the rest of their lives. She skidded to a surprised halt when she saw Van and me. Her mouth dropped open and her hand flew up to close it.

  “Oh!” she said.

  Apparently, in spite of Van’s assurances otherwise, the war memorial attracted few strangers to Vam Tho. Van spoke to her in her own language. She looked at me.

  “Ca’l?” she called into the back in fractured English. “Ca’l? We have wisitors.”

  Carl must be Ensign Cochran’s given name. I wondered what the other C. in C.C. stood for.

  The doctor appeared wearing tattered green hospital scrubs. A tall thin man with short-cropped blond hair starting to gray and a sharp face heavily furrowed around the mouth and across the broad forehead. In spite of the erosion, he appeared younger than many Vietnam vets. I recalled how he had been only an ensign and therefore much younger than Pete. Pete and I were both at the older end of the spectrum of those who fought. I had been thirty at the time of TET and Pete had been another ten or a dozen years older than that.

  The doctor hesitated in the doorway.

  “C. C. Cochran?” I inquired, to make sure. “You were an ensign in the navy?”

  His eyes widened. “No one has called me ‘C.C.’ in ages,” he gushed. “Not since... Vietnam. “

  He caught himself and laughed.

  “Well, you know what I mean. Shit City and all that. It means you must know Pete Brauer or Lump Adkins?”

  “Pete and I were neighbors for over twenty years in Florida.” I introduced myself “I was with the 9th Infantry at Dong Tam.”

  “Kazmarek?” he repeated. “Sounds familiar. I won’t hold the army against you, Jack.” He grinned, obviously pleased to see a fellow countryman. “How is the old skipper? I haven’t seen Pete since...” He waved generally in the direction of the canal.

  I told him about Pete’s death as I slipped Mhai from her tube. I hadn’t come all this way for small talk about the war. Cochran’s face sobered. I showed him the portrait.

  “Pete died with this picture clutched in his hands.”

  “Mhai,” he breathed, then called out softly to his wife. “Bonnie...

  “Bonnie My?” I asked.

  “Bonnie Cochran now,” the doctor corrected, still looking at the picture while I held it.

  Bonnie slowly approached, as though through gel. She reached for the picture. Tears appeared in her eyes as she looked at the young Mhai’s image.

  “Mhai saved my Ca’l,” she murmured.

  “We don’t know that for sure, Bonnie.”

  “I know for sure,” Bonnie said,

  Cochran sighed deeply, his eyes still riveted on the portrait. “I have three more patients to see,” he said. “Then, if you have time, we’ll have tea and talk. Pete Brauer and Mhai—now that was a story.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
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br />   “Mhai was having much sickness from bullet holes when Lt. Pete bring her to hotel,” Bonnie My Cochran narrated over tea.

  I sat with her and her American husband in the flowering gardens behind the bungalow the couple called home. It in turn occupied a well-kept yard behind the clinic. Van had wandered off to visit acquaintances, Tropical blooms in a dazzling array of colors appeared about to envelope the back of the whitewashed little concrete house.

  “Mhai feel Lt. Pete will kill her in by ‘n by,” Bonnie My continued, “but she will die and tell him no thing.”

  “Nothing, “ her husband corrected with a smile.

  “For long time, beau coup days, Mhai not speak to nobody. Except me, in secret when nobody around. She ask me to tell nobody that we talk. She tell me she much afraid. I tell her Lt. Pete good man, not kill her, not make war on helpless.”

  She paused to dramatically place both hands over her heart. “Lt. Pete good man in here. He tough man, but good man. I see it. Days when she in fever, lie in bed and moan and thrash, Lt. Pete come and he sit at bed and look at her. Don’t do nothing else... look at her. I see she touch his heart, he afraid he has killed her. When I say something, how pretty she is, he act like water buffalo with sore tooth. He say she bitch and Viet Cong, don’t care if she die. But I see inside Lt. Pete’s heart.”

  My Elizabeth before she died used to comment on how Pete’s rough-spoken shell was only a protective crust around a soft, sad core.

  “Lt. Pete make trap to kill Commander Minh,” Bonnie My Cochran continued. “He use Mhai as... as—“ She shot an interrogatory stream of Vietnamese at her husband. He supplied the English word for her. “Yes. Bait. He use Mhai as bait. Commander Minh smart like tiger in jungle. He let Amel’can make Mhai well again. Viet cong don’t have doctors like my Ca’l.”

  “I was only a pre-med student at the time,” Cochran inserted.