The Return: A Novel of Vietnam

by Charles W. Sasser

  “But he very good pre-med student. Commander Minh send message he burn hotel and leave girls and little children with no home if Mhai die. Is reason Lt. Pete move Mhai to Father’s mission. I think Commander Minh have much love for Mhai.

  “By ‘n by, Lt. Pete fall in love with Mhai too, and Mhai fall in love with Lt. Pete. Mhai very secret woman. I visit her all time when she at Father Pierre’s mission. She have deep secret place inside. But me? I what my husband call chatterbox, for goo’ness sake. I meet my Ca’l because of Mhai and Lt. Pete. I tell Mhai everything... how I coming to love young navy man Ca’l. I come every day to mission to see if Ca’l come when Lt. Pete come. I much disappointed if he not come.”

  Doc Cochran chuckled. “I started riding to Dong Tam with Pete just to see if Bonnie was going to be there.”

  “I look for Turncoat Jeep every day. When I see it drive down street, I run to mission, go in back gate and pretend I be there all along to visit Mhai and Father.”

  “She never had me fooled,” the doctor teased.

  They laughed together. He reached over from his lawn chair to take her hand in his. I missed my Elizabeth.

  “Why did you come back to Vietnam after the war?” I asked him. “Why didn’t you bring Bonnie to the United States?”

  He hesitated answering, looking around at his simple surroundings. Even for a doctor, and especially for an American used to better, life in post-war Vietnam must still be hard.

  “Legally, there was no way for Bonnie to emigrate,” he explained presently. “The communists were letting nobody out. Anyone who had ‘collaborated’ with the Americans was put in re-education camps. Our only hope was for Bonnie to join the boat people and I wouldn’t let her risk that...”

  “Mhai and Commander Minh save me from re-education camps,” Bonnie said.

  “We don’t know that either,” Doctor Cochran corrected.

  “I know it in my heart.”

  “We’re not even sure Mhai’s still alive. There were rumors that she had died in the fighting during TET.”

  “Mhai not dead,” Bonnie stubbornly insisted. “You saw her, Ca’l.”

  The doctor shrugged noncommittally. “Anyway, I became a doctor while I waited. I returned to Vietnam as soon as I could—and here we are.”

  He smiled, a little sadly, I thought.

  “Sometimes I miss home, the United States,” he admitted. “But things have got so weird there. While Vietnam moves toward more freedom, America is moving toward less. While the rest of the world is giving up on socialism as a bad bet destructive to the human spirit, America continues to experiment with it. It’s something Americans will live to regret. In spite of wars and everything, there’s stability to Asia, a timelessness that Americans may never achieve. I consider Vietnam my home now.”

  “I’m sure Pete would have been surprised,” I commented. “Especially considering that you were a prisoner of the North Vietnamese for so long...”

  The doctor nodded thoughtfully. “My own country gave up on me and left me there to rot,” he said, and I detected a sharp tinge of bitterness. “It wasn’t the United States that negotiated my freedom...”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Bonnie My had been intensely curious about the Eurasian girl Father Pierre called “the maiden in the tower.” The two of them were of such different backgrounds. Bonnie My had come up the hard way on the streets of Saigon. Her family was one of the first to flee the countryside to take refuge from the war in the city. Bonnie My, only thirteen at the time, soon took to hustling and bedding American GIs in order to survive and help her family survive.

  Mhai, on the other hand, although she never said so, was born to privilege, obviously from an influential political family. She spoke several languages, all of them well. In addition to being educated and refined, she was tall and beautiful with exotic foreign blood pulsating in her veins. Exactly who she was, where she came from, or what made her throw in with the Communist North were mysteries kept shrouded. Much about her, even after she began recovery, turned chieu hoi, and Lt. Pete let her out of the mission antechamber, remained veiled in secrecy.

  “Does it make a difference now?” Mhai would ask gently whenever Bonnie My probed.

  “I have been only a whore, for goo’ness sake,” Bonnie My cried.

  Mhai hugged her tiny new friend. “And for all that, you may be the better person of the two of us.”

  During the Christmas truce of 1968, when TET was still over a month away, Father Pierre began planning a celebration to be held at the mission prior to midnight mass. He went around all the week before with black robes flapping at his skinny shins, shouting “Merry Christmas!” to everyone he met. He literally beamed with the peace and joy of the season.

  The orphans from Bonnie My’s were to be included in the celebration. Indeed, they were the reason for it. Father Pierre went door-to-door in Dong Tam collecting for their presents. Even the Buddhists donated a sack of rice or a rice-straw doll, a tiny ao dai or a small set of peasant pajamas.

  “If your Jesus and Precious Virgin brought ecstasy to all the world as you personally experience it,” Thay Li commented, flashing his elfin smile, “all other religions must be forgotten. Buddha himself would forever contemplate his navel with those who seek only inner peace instead of spiritual ecstasy.”

  “Jesus and the Holy Mother do bring joy to the world,” Father Pierre declared happily.

  “Oh, but it lasts one day only. The day after you have ‘peace and joy to the world,’ good Christians and Catholics will be shooting each other again.”

  “As will good Buddhists, Muslims and heathens in the jungle. It ees human nature, my learned friend, as you should be knowing. It ees not the nature of God.”

  Somewhere the priest found construction paper of various colors. In tolerant companionship, he and Thay Li made paper bells and chains and other decorations for the chapel. Anything that brought color and light to the eyes of little children who had lost their families and home, Father Pierre insisted, was worth every effort. The two holy men went so far as to chop down a small tree in the forest, a type of cypress, which they decorated next to the alter. Underneath it they deposited presents wrapped in old newspapers and whatever else they could find. Each child would have one. Mhai laughed openly and with contagious happiness. Bonnie My had not seen her in such a wonderful mood since her capture and transportation to Dong Tam.

  “I haven’t had a real Christmas since my brother and I were quite small, before the war,” Mhai explained.

  “I never have Christmas,” Bonnie My cried. She was a Buddhist. “What a wonderful custom.”

  The war was on what Pete called a “temporary stand down.” A holiday truce. Twice during the week, he and ensign Cochran made trips to the army PX and filled up the Turncoat Jeep with gaily-wrapped packages to place underneath the cypress Christmas tree. They teased Mhai and Bonnie My with them. The girls pretended to be too excited to wait. They made as though to seize the presents and run away with them, prompting a playful chase in the chapel. They shook the packages and rattled them and asked endless laughing questions.

  “You’ll have to wait on Santa Claus,” Cochran teased Bonnie My, grabbing her and hugging her.

  “Who is this Santa Claus, for goo’ness sake?”

  “You never heard of Santa?”

  “Is he American?”

  “He’s all over the world,”

  “Not in Vietnam, I do not think.”

  “Yes, even here. He’s a big fat man with a white beard and a red suit who delivers presents on Christmas Eve.”

  “For goo’ness sake. He must be rich—and an American.”

  Pete promised to take Mhai shopping in Saigon, which she had not visited in over a year. He dared not risk driving her in the Jeep. Instead, he disguised her in an ARVN military uniform and gave her the rank of ti’uy. She stuffed her long black hair underneath a cap. They dodged out on the ever-protective Piss Hole and hopped a U.S. Huey on a mail run
to Saigon.

  Her face was far too pretty to be that of a male soldier. The chopper door gunner kept staring at her on the flight in, but he made no comment even if he suspected the ti’uy of being a woman. What skin was it off his ass if the crazy SEALs from Shit City disguised their whores in order to take them on junkets?

  Pete and Mhai spent the day shopping for presents, buying a little something for each of the orphans and for Ensign Cochran, Bonnie My and her girls. They located a good bottle of Scotch for Father Pierre and a new plastic bowl for Thay Li. They walked Tu Do Street to the harbor and back, shopping in the bazaars. They took snapshots of each other in front of the Trung Sisters statue, in Lam Son Square, and on the street that ran past the An Quang Pagoda. That afternoon in a little photo studio, Mhai posed for the portrait of her in native ao dai that hung on Pete’s wall until he died clutching it in his hands.

  Mhai’s wounds had healed nicely, leaving only tiny indented scars that hardly showed on both her thigh and breast. Her limp was barely noticeable. Certain it proved no hindrance to her day out with Pete in the city.

  That evening they had dinner out in a French restaurant Mhai knew. In dismay, Pete stared at his place setting, which included fully a half-dozen silver forks on one side and as many spoons on the other. A formal waiter with a starched cloth draped over one arm spread a laced cloth napkin on Pete’s lap. Mhai ordered for them in excellent French, then burst into amused laughter at the look on Pete’s face.

  “I’m a country boy,” he half-apologized for his lack of social graces. “I eat at Mickey D’s where there’s one fork—and it’s plastic.”

  While he might be rough in polite company, he was surprised, pleased and a bit intimidated at Mhai’s poise and beauty. She had changed from her mini-skirt into a long black evening ao dai. She literally shone in a setting in which powerful men from several nations brought beautiful women to show off. The restaurant was apparently popular with the who’s who of Saigon society. An entourage of Americans, including the ambassador with a Vietnamese woman not his wife on his arm, entered and all eyes automatically appraised Mhai. The ambassador kept glancing across the room at Mhai all through drinks and dinner. Finally, he sent an attache to the table.

  “Pardon, Madame,” the attaché stiffly interrupted. “The American ambassador is certain he has met you before. He wonders if you’re not the daughter of Renaud Lefevre, who was a member of the old French Parliament?”

  “Tell the ambassador he is mistaken,” Mhai replied and nodded curtly in the ambassador’s direction, dismissing him.

  “Come here often?” Pete quipped.

  “Not anymore,” she quipped back.

  They stayed the night at the Majestik Hotel. Having nightcaps in the downstairs Paris Fan reminded Pete that the beautiful woman he was with had once been the consort of the notorious VC warlord, Commander Minh.

  “Why did you arrange that meeting between Minh and me?” he asked her.

  She tensed, but then relaxed. “Did you enjoy your dinner with him?”

  “Yes,” he had to admit.

  “What kind of a man did you find him to be?”

  Pete hesitated, looking into his drink. “An honorable man,” he said finally.

  She smiled sadly and squeezed his hand. “I am certain he also approved of you, Peter.”

  “Damnit, I don’t understand. What difference does it make if he approves or disapproves? If I found you with another man—“

  She pressed his hand between both hers. “Minh understands there is only one man for me.”

  She didn’t actually say that that man was Pete—and Pete didn’t push it.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” he said instead. “Why did you arrange the meeting?”

  She started to answer, then didn’t. “I will tell you someday. When we are certain we trust each other completely.”

  “You don’t trust me?” Pete demanded.

  “Can you say you trust me completely?” she shot back.

  He couldn’t say it, so he said nothing.

  “Peter, you need not be jealous. Tonight is about you and me. Look at the paintings you made of me. You paint from the heart and you captured my soul. Surely they tell all that is important between us.”

  They made love into the night. The next day they caught the mail helicopter back to Dong Tam. The door gunner kept looking at the ti’uy with the face too beautiful to be an ARVN soldier.

  “Did you take him to meet your family?” Bonnie My pried as the two girls helped Father Pierre with last minute gift wrappings. lt was Christmas Eve morning.

  “I can’t do that. Yet.”

  “You are in love with him?” Then she caught herself “Oh,” she said, understanding.

  Mhai’s family was probably anti-government, anti-American. Mhai hadn’t said, but other members of her clan probably fought with the NLF, as she once had,

  “The war will end one day,” Mhai said. She had seemed withdrawn and preoccupied most of the morning. Like her thoughts were either elsewhere or buried deep inside as she examined something about herself.

  “The war will end,” Bonnie My agreed, “but love will not end.”

  “Are you so blinded by your love for your Ensign Carl?” Mhai demanded with unexpected harshness. “Vietnam is filling up with half-breed children whose fathers return to America when their tours of duty end. They love us for the short-time, and we love them back. Then they leave and we have their children who are half-Vietnamese and half of another country. Neither of this land nor of that.”

  Bonnie My stared. “Mhai! Oh! Are you with child?”

  Mhai’s face clamped shut. She turned away.

  “Ca’l will marry me,” Bonnie My insisted stubbornly. “He has already promised.”

  Mhai shrugged. “He probably means it. Today.”

  She could be unrelentingly and brutally tough, After all, she had fought with Commander Minh. She finished wrapping a package in gay paper she and Pete purchased in Saigon. She looked up, as though having made up her mind about something.

  “Bonnie, I have to go somewhere. I’ll be back as soon as I can. If Pete gets here before I return, will you make an excuse for me?”

  “But where... ? It is almost time to bring the children—“

  Mhai touched Bonnie’s lips with her fingertips and smiled gently. “I’ll be back,” she promised.

  It wasn’t the first time Mhai had slipped away from the mission for an unexplained destination. This time, Bonnie My let her curiosity prevail. If curiosity indeed killed the cat, Bonnie My would already have lost all nine lives. She was not far behind when Mhai stole out the back door of the mission and exited by the rear gate, carrying a bag she had filled from the kitchen. Bonnie My followed the former VC at a discreet distance, heart pounding from excitement and guilt.

  They hurried down a back street to where the countryside began on the outskirts of town. Mhai hesitated before cutting off the road toward a thick grove of trees. Bonnie My ducked into some bushes. She waited until Mhai disappeared into the trees. She was about to continue the chase when she heard an engine crank over.

  Moments later, Mhai emerged from concealment riding a Vespa motorbike. She had changed out of her jeans into the black pajamas worn by both peasants and VC. Troubled, Bonnie My watched as Mhai motored off down the road and around a curve out of sight.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  “Mhai come back like she say,” Bonnie My Cochran concluded. “Lt. Pete never know she leave. We all have wunnerful Christmas in mission of Father Pierre. We bring children. Everyone come around Christmas tree and sing. It is like the war is over. Gift for everyone. Ca’l buy me this.”

  She caressed a gold-and-diamond necklace at her throat.

  “It’s pretty,” I said.

  “Ca’l pretty man. Lt. Pete bring Mhai clothes, many fine clothes. He laugh and tell her she wear them when they go to New York and he have big art show of all portraits he paint of her. I see Mhai and Lt. Pete to
gether. She have love eyes for him. It sometime very strange how love happen, but I know Mhai love Lt. Pete very much and not Commander Minh.”

  “Did Mhai go to meet Commander Minh that day?” I asked, leaning forward.

  “Mebbe so, mebbe not. Mhai most secretive, for goo’ness sake. I ask myself, where she get motorbike? Lt. Pete not give to her. Father Pierre not give. I think mebbe come from Commander Minh.”

  She gazed off into the distance and went into deep thought. Presently, she shook her head, as though the puzzle loomed too complicated for her to solve.

  “I not really understand what relation Mhai and Commander Minh have,” she said. “I ask her one time, for goo’ness sake. She smile at me. Just smile and look sad. Do you know Lt. Pete and Commander Minh have dinner together in Saigon? Minh become like... like, yes, guardian angel for Lt. Pete. Not want him kill, it seem like. Very strange. Commander Minh not angry and jealous, not act like lover. Mebbe, I think to myself, he only wait so he can kill Lt. Pete himself.”

  She lowered her head in a mood at once somber and regretful. She watched her tiny hands battling each other in her lap. She glanced up at her husband. His gaze fixed itself in the direction of the canal. The expression on his face said he had his own memories of those times, and many of them were not pleasant ones.

  “Mebbe if I had tell Lt. Pete at first about Mhai meeting with Commander Minh,” she tortured herself, “Mebbe all the bad things that happen not happen. Finally when I tell him—it is already too late.”

  I watched emotions warring on her face. Presently she collected herself and went on.

  “Communists break cease-fire at TET and there is much fighting all over the country, Fighting go on and on. Hotel is all shot up, bullet holes everywhere. Children not have home. Lt. Pete give money for repair. He say United States owe it. But in meantime, children must stay in mission. My goodtime girls and me return to the hotel and... make do. Yes. Make do. Girls must earn money if they wish to eat, for goo’ness sake.”

  Doctor Cochran’s gaze remained fixed on the distant canal.