The Return: A Novel of Vietnam

by Charles W. Sasser

  “I thought it was her,” Cochran replied. “I was almost sure at the time that it was her.”

  “Please tell me about it.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  “Mau di! Mau di—go fast!”

  Ensign Cochran’s captors prodded him with the long spiked bayonets of Mossin-Nagant carbines, pushing and prodding him, trying to make him run. Clearly they were in a hurry to get to the rear. But he was too exhausted, too mentally spent, to manage more than a shambling walk. He slipped and struggled in the mud because his arms tied at the wrists and elbows behind his back prevented his balancing himself. Each time he fell the VC jerked him to his feet and prodded him even harder. One of them finally attached a length of rope around his neck and dragged him at a faster pace along the small canal bank that led back to the little hamlet where the Nguoi Nhai had made their last stand.

  His breath came in quick, painful gasps. His lungs burned. Through the red, whirling film in front of his eyes, he saw crumpled, sprawled bodies strewn everywhere on the packed yards of the huts. As he was shoved over and around dead Nguoi Nhai, he saw that many had gaping holes in their foreheads. Faces were unrecognizable after the explosive exits of bullets caused their features to cave in on themselves.

  His eyes searched desperately for Pete or his body, but he saw only Vietnamese. A Viet in khaki dragged a captured Nguoi Nhai behind a hooch and shot him with a pistol. Cochran shivered with increased terror. He thought the same fate awaited him. His own death became a reality.

  The bank of the little canal was now lined with a constant flow of well-armed soldiers. Thin strands of black telephone wire running through the village toward Vam Tho indicated they had landline commo with other assault elements. Khaki uniforms mixed with black-clad troops. Only Main Force NVA units wore khaki and carried Mossin-Nagants. The NVA had harder, older faces, the faces of men who had seen long months and perhaps years of combat. Clearly, the Nguoi Nhai had run up against a lot more than they bargained for. Pete had tried to tell that army cocksucker that. Captain Crouton or whatever the hell his name was.

  The three guards dragging Cochran along by his neck suddenly stopped and shoved him sprawling inside a hooch, out of the rain. He thought his time was almost near when two VC in black, dripping water, ducked inside and stood over him. They glared balefully, but neither spoke a word nor offered him immediate harm.

  After awhile, these two dragged him out of the hut and propped him up on his feet outside. The rain had slackened to a thin, steady downpour. The American stood with his chest heaving, chin resting on his chest. In front of him appeared a pair of tire tread-sandaled feet. One of the guards grabbed him by the hair and jerked up his head. He found himself looking at an exceptionally tall Vietnamese clad in black wearing a web pistol belt to which was attached a 45 Colt in a leather holster. The man had removed his patrol cap to wipe water from his face. He had short-cropped black hair and an aristocratic face that appeared as much European as Asian. From descriptions furnished by Pete, Cochran realized he was looking into the face of the elusive ghost rider, Commander Minh, but he was too beat to care.

  “You must be Ensign Cochran,” Commander Minh said in excellent English laced slightly with British. It was a statement of fact, not a question.

  Cochran said nothing. Minh naturally knew all about the Frogman company. He had had spies in their camp. At least one—Mhai.

  “The Ohmja Nguoi Nhai?” Minh asked. “Where is Lt. Brauer?”

  “He’s dead,” Cochran murmured, not knowing if he were lying or not.

  A fleeting look of disappointment, even of pain, swept across the VC leader’s face. “Where?”

  The American jerked a nod toward the reeded irrigation ditch where he was captured.

  Minh rattled out a stream of Vietnamese to the guards.

  “They did not find a body. They say you were alone.”

  Cochran was in no mood for a further exchange with the enemy. He stood with his head lowered, grateful for the respite as he attempted to regain his strength, but determined to answer no additional questions. The Code of Honor and all that.

  “You will not be harmed if you do not attempt to escape,” Minh promised wearily. “I will see that Bonnie My receives a message that you are alive and well. I will also inform Mhai of Lt. Pete’s death if it is confirmed.”

  I’ll bet you will, Cochran thought sourly. You’ve probably got her stashed on your sleeping mat right now waiting for you to finish with us.

  Minh studied Cochran for a long minute, apparently expecting a response. When none came, he turned and walked briskly away, once more the fierce and relentless warrior leader of the Delta. A third VC guard joined the other two and hurried Cochran away in the opposite direction.

  For over an hour he was dragged like a leashed dog along an uneven path that followed Canal Six. The rain stopped and the heat and humidity soared as they skirted wide of Vam Tho through a thick banana palm grove where more VC appeared to be waiting for orders. Eventually they came out of the jungle into a clearing where Cochran saw more bodies strewn about. These were Americans in U.S. Army jungle fatigues. From the looks of it, Captain Bruton’s Bravo Company had also received a licking.

  The guards hesitated at the edge of the clearing. The fastest route led directly across through the corpses, where swarms of flies were already buzzing and beginning to feast, but the guards obviously expected Americans to return at any time to claim their dead. The Viet soldiers who had fought and triumphed over the Americans had already boogied out.

  At last, with a brutal tug on the leash, for the guards would have liked to rob the bodies, Cochran’s keepers led him around the field, keeping in the woodline. They forded small streams where leeches stuck to their legs. Mosquitoes swarmed around the captive’s head, driving him mad, except he thought he must already be mad. Once he slipped on a single-pole monkey bridge and hung by his legs upside down with his head under the water. Fortunately, the guards dragged him to safety.

  Dark descended rapidly. Moonrise occurred through broken clouds. Thin blue moonlight threaded down through the canopy of leaves. Both the terrain and the situation became more unreal in the night. Cochran lost track of time. They continued to walk until the moon was almost directly overhead and the dim glow of a lighted window appeared directly ahead.

  When they arrived at the squalid hut, an old man came out of it. He indicated a spot in the hooch for Cochran to sit while the guards ate. The room smelled of wood smoke, oil from the flickering lamp, and the rotted stench of nuoc mam, the salty Vietnamese fish sauce that was used at every meal over rice. Cochran’s stomach rumbled with nausea and his arms were numb from their bindings. He couldn’t have eaten even if food were offered. He did beg for a drink of water. The old man brought it to him in a tin cup and held it while he drank. It was warm and tasted of the swamp, from which the old man had dipped it. Dysentery couldn’t be far behind.

  The flesh wound to his arm began to sting and burn. Pending infection, no doubt.

  After the guards finished eating and resting, they got Cochran to his feet and led him to a long, narrow sampan tied up at a canal. They lay him blindfolded in the bottom of it and began poling upstream. He quickly lost whatever sense of direction and time he had left.

  His guts began grumbling and complaining in his belly. He held back as long as he could, until the cramps became excruciating and he had no choice. He voided everything with a gaseous trousers-filling explosion. The guards shouted in anger and disgust. One of them kicked him in the side, which caused a further explosion. They stopped the boat and tossed him overboard to wash him off. Blindfolded and bound, he thought he was being drowned. The guards laughed at his struggled before they pulled him back into the boat using his legs and the rope around his neck as leverage.

  Hardly had he recovered than dysentery struck again. He hyperventilated from his panicked efforts to hold it back. Once again, the disgusted guards dunked him in the canal, leaving him in longer this time to te
ach him a lesson. Half-drowned, he lay moaning and spent in the bottom of the log canoe.

  Several times the sampan stopped and everybody got out while the guards lifted it across earthen dikes. It finally stopped and the blindfold was ripped from Cochran’s eyes. He was surprised to find it was still night. He discovered himself among low, thick-leafed trees with ferns and reeds growing densely on all sides. The guards stepped into knee-deep water and dragged Cochran after them. They indicated for him to follow them through clumps of reeds into a grove of trees.

  A boy wearing filthy khaki shorts greeted them with a tiny kerosene lamp. He led the way with the lamp to a sort of cage with a long thatched roof and a floor made of crisscrossed bamboo poles. The walls were likewise a latticework of bamboo, which left openings no more than eight inches square. The “tiger cage” was about six feet long and three wide.

  Cochran was untied, deposited inside the cage, and given plain rice to eat and another cup of water from the swamp. He consumed both while the boy and two of the guards retired to a nearby hooch to sleep. The third kept watch over him with a submachine gun.

  Afterwards, fits of depression swept over him like ocean tides and he could not sleep. He felt like curling into a fetal ball and weeping with fear, pain and helplessness. Had it only been twenty-four hours ago that Pete and he stood around in the Shit City mess hut having hot black coffee and trying to shake off the morning grogginess before starting out on the day’s mission to trap Commander Minh? Look who ended up in the cage instead.

  Pol Pots, the Nguoi Nhai cook, had offered to scramble powdered eggs and make his thick flapjacks for them before they shoved off that morning. Both Pete and he declined the offer. What he would give now to be sitting in that mess hut across from Pete and having some of those eggs, powdered though they were.

  He thought about Bonnie My, but knew if he dwelled on her he would break down. At last he lay on his back beneath the mosquito net provided him, rubbed feeling back into his arms, cleaned his wound as best he could with the tail of his shirt and some leftover water in the cup, then willed his mind to go blank. His future, if he had a future, looked bleak. But whatever it was, it was out of his control. Survival depended on his thinking of nothing beyond getting through the next hour. Then on getting through the next and the one after that and all the others that followed one at a time.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  For three more days the guards and Cochran traveled like that before they reached the first prison camp. The looks of the terrain made Cochran think they were on the southern Camau Peninsula where the water was salty and controlled by tidal flow from the Gulf of Siam. Vegetation was restricted to that which could survive without fresh water—nipa palms and broadleaf ferns mixed with mangrove and dense clumps of cay duoc trees. The weather was hot and muggy and it rained nearly every afternoon.

  The prison camp wasn’t much. A log dock extended almost all the way across the entry canal. From it, a log walkway elevated above high tide led to a clumping of a half-dozen thatched-roof hooches built on stilts above water level. One of the huts served as a kitchen and mess hall. The larger one was quarters for the six guards assigned permanently to the camp, The sides of the remaining hooches were open except for a latticework of hard bamboo, which turned them into large “tiger cages.” They were empty until Cochran arrived. He was the only prisoner.

  The guards looked him over, made a few comments he didn’t understand, then issued him black pajamas and an aluminum cup, plate and spoon before they shoved him into one of the cages. For the first few weeks his status remained uncertain. He expected to be executed.

  One day “Mickey Mouse” showed up. He was a rodent-faced, English-speaking political officer from Mat Trang, the Front, sent out to interrogate and indoctrinate the American. For some reason Cochran found hard to fathom, it seemed important to Mat Trang that the prisoner renounce old political loyalties and be “rehabilitated” to new ones. Each day the “professor” arrived from somewhere with his shabby briefcase and began the day’s “forums” and classes by recounting alleged U.S. atrocities backed by capitalist lackeys in Saigon.

  “On February 6, just the first of lunar New Year TET,” he would narrate in his broken English, “there was atrocity. U.S. and ARVN clique bring thirty six men to Vinh Tinh Dam, cutting their tongues and ears, plucking out their eyes, disemboweling, liver plucking, burning with gasoline, tying together, hanging rucks, and throwing down to Vinh Tinh Dam.”

  After the “news cast,” he would begin political indoctrination and “discussions,” lecturing on how capitalism was failing compared to communism and how wars of national liberation throughout the world, and one day even in America, would defeat the United States. Cochran had no choice but to listen, but he refused to answer questions or participate in “discussions.” Finally, in the somnolent hum of one particularly hot and frustrating afternoon, Professor Mickey Mouse, apoplectic and purple with rage at the stubbornness of his star and only student, leaped to his feet and snatched his pistol from its holster.

  “You stupid man! You stupid!” he spluttered. “You not want listen to what is true!”

  Hand trembling, he aimed the pistol directly at Cochran’s forehead from six feet away and cocked the hammer. Cochran knew he was a dead man. He stood and looked down on Mickey Mouse’s five-three height from his six-foot advantage and felt surprised at how calmly the initial shock wore off and he accepted impending death. He had been expecting to die for so long anyhow that he was almost relieved to get it over with.

  The Professor Rodent panted and compressed his lips. His pointed face ran shades from purple and red to green and pale. The gun pulsated with the rapid beating of his heart. He held it with both hands to steady it.

  The standoff continued like that for an eternity. Mickey Mouse’s gun hand stopped shaking. He slowly lowered the weapon. Cochran sat down again across the table from him and waited.

  “I will obtain death warrant for you, enemy of people, and you dead man,” he vowed. “You stupid, stupid man, not want to learn.”

  “Yes. I’m a stupid, stupid man.”

  “Yes.” He bolstered his gun and sat down, patience returned. “Listen close to important discussion on how your famous movie star Jane Fonda and your Attorney General Ramsey Clark come to Hanoi and say struggle of National Liberation Front against American aggression is just cause...”

  That day appeared to be the high point and the turning point for the prisoner’s “lessons.” Although “classes,” continued for additional weeks, the professor’s intensity gradually diminished. Finally, Mickey Mouse gave up. His pupil was simply too stupid to learn. He stopped coming to the camp and Cochran was left with the guards, who mostly ignored him. Why he, a lone POW tying up six soldiers, was kept at all instead of being shot puzzled him. But the guards obviously preferred this cush rear job over the battlefield and seemed perfectly willing not to rock the sampan and upset the status quo.

  The monotony of weeks turned into repetitious months, months plodded into years. All the hairy scarecrow in the cage had to do was wait—and survive. He suffered regularly from bouts with dysentery and other illnesses, from poor and insufficient food, occasional brutality, insects, depression, boredom... He learned to catch fish in the canal, to gather edible roots and plants and birds’ eggs, to hunt bamboo rats and prepare their flesh into a gourmet delight that the guards especially relished.

  That two or three of the guards, encouraged by the rat meals, actually made friends with him turned his life easier by some hardly-measurable degree. But at least they provided much needed human companionship. He learned to speak Vietnamese and taught one of the guards, whom he dubbed “Hank” because he had a voice like country music great Hank Williams, to speak English and to sing Hank Williams’ Your Cheatin’Heart.

  The hardest part of his captivity after he got used to the deprivation was coping with his feelings of having been forgotten. His country had abandoned him, as Mickey Mouse said it would. B
onnie My must surely have fallen in love with another GI by now. Either that or she had returned to Saigon to open another whorehouse hotel.

  He had no way of knowing that Bonnie My continued her search for him over the years and that, once she learned where he was being held, hounded Commander Minh and the NLF for his release. Bonnie My had found true love. She proved more loyal than his own U.S. Government.

  How could a war continue for so long? He ached for news from the outside, for information. But time stood still for him and, in limbo, he waited for something to end that seemed to have no end.

  One afternoon during his fourth year of captivity, he was preparing rice and rat over a cooking fire in a sandbox in front of his hooch-cage and chatting with Hank when an arrival at the log dock attracted his attention. “Edgar G,” the camp commandant, went racing down the log walkway to meet the sampan pulling up with four people in it. Ordinarily, Cochran would have paid little attention. VC and NVA dignitaries were sometimes escorted out to take a look at the prisoner and, presumably, discuss his fate.

  This time, however, what attracted his eye was a woman. He had not laid eyes on a woman during all the years since his capture. He slowly stood up for a better look. Hank grinned.

  The men’s white shirts identified them as important politicians. The woman, taller than most Viet women, wore a long black peasant blouse over American blue jeans. Truly a liberated female. They all got out of the canoe and conversed on the end of the dock with Edgar G. and his second in command, Corporal Barney Fife. Everyone looked excited. There was much animated talking and gesticulating. Occasionally, they turned to look in Ensign Cochran’s direction, leading him to believe he was the subject of their discussion.

  Had the war ended? Was he about to be repatriated?

  Or had they finally decided his fate and were about to execute him for his “war crimes?”