The Return: A Novel of Vietnam

by Charles W. Sasser

  I pivoted in a three-sixty turn, attempting to get my bearings. Nothing but more trees ghostly and half-formed in the fluid light filtering down through the fronds. Like pratas sitting in judgment.

  I swiped water from my eyes.

  Minh was coming!

  I plunged on, rebounding off palm trunks growing so close together in places that I had to turn sideways to squeeze through. My legs went numb from the unaccustomed exertion.

  I’m getting too old for this. Too old to fight VC anymore, even old VC.

  I had to stop again. I locked my legs and leaned back against a tree, closing my eyes and struggling to breath. I thought I was having a coronary.

  I resisted an urge to shout angrily at Minh: The war is over. Don’t you understand that? We don’t have to fight it again.

  The storm-muffled bark of Minh’s pistol erupted wood chips from next to my head. I sprang away with unexpected reserve energy.

  Once again I fled, stumbling. Every muscle and nerve in my ageing body protested. Old men like me were supposed to be rocking on a front porch, drinking ice tea, smiling at grandchildren and talking to themselves. They weren’t supposed to be a half-globe away from home re-fighting a war.

  It occurred to me, oddly enough, that my death meant the last of my Kazmarek bunch. I had no brothers or sisters, therefore no nephews and nieces. Elizabeth had been unable to have a child. I was the last Kazmarek.

  No one had wanted to be the last GI killed in Vietnam before the truce. These years later, after the war was over, it looked like I might finally win the dubious honor of being the last GI killed in Vietnam battle.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

  Hopelessly lost in the palms, I unknowingly made a wide circle to the right, as most right-handed people are prone to do when lost. Trees started thinning out, leaving relatively large clearings. I paused, unsure of which way to go. Remaining in the trees offered cover and concealment, but it also allowed Minh to remain hidden while he tracked me and to approach unseen. While breaking out into the open would make me a clearer target, even through the rain, I might also be lucky enough to come out near a dwelling. Many peasants these days possessed motor scooters or, even better, autos.

  I was surprised Minh hadn’t caught up to me already, bursting upon me with gun blazing. This time he might not miss.

  It occurred to me unexpectedly that the reason Minh hadn’t caught up was because he was also an old man. Neither of us was what we once were. That realization coupled with desperation gave me renewed hope—and an idea. This old lieutenant hadn’t forgotten everything he once learned in a long-ago guerrilla war. Instead of the hunted, I would turn the tables and become the hunter.

  Quickly, I located a small clearing and shambled across it, deliberately leaving tracks that passed next to a pair of palms thatched tight at their bases with undergrowth. Rain immediately filled my Footprints in the soft loam: Here I am! Here I am!

  I backed up again in the same tracks and leaped from them into the brush growing around the palms. Before concealing myself, I selected a fist-sized stone to use as a weapon. I crouched in ambush, eyes intent on my back trail. It was an old, old trick. Cavemen may have been the first to use it. But if Minh’s combat instincts had grown as rusty as mine, he would fail to catch on until after it was too late.

  He made no sound in his approach that could be detected above the noise of the storm. He simply appeared at the edge of the clearing. A black-clad VC figure crouched forward, water draining off his clothing, outthrust pistol dripping black steel. He hesitated as his eyes followed my fresh footprints. Like his senses told him something was wrong. I held my breath.

  He glanced quickly to right and left, obviously anxious to catch up to me and put an end to it. His eagerness clearly overcame caution, for after that brief hesitation he left cover and shuffled after the trail I made for him, his eyes fixed ahead to where the prints disappeared into the trees once again. I noticed he walked stiff in the joints and that his breath rattled in his chest.

  He’s hurting as much as I. He’s old too.

  Confidence thus restored by the observation, I tensed, prepared to spring. Rain crashed. As he reached a point opposite my hiding place, almost near enough for me to reach out and grab him, low rumbling thunder diverted his attention.

  He looked up. I leaped out of the brush with a cry made up of equal parts of fear, fury, and exultation. His eyes popped wide. I swung my hand stone with all the fierce purpose of a stone age man pouncing upon prey.

  I aimed the first blow for his gun hand. I heard the crack of rock on bone. He grunted in pain. The Beretta flew from his hand.

  I closed in, raining blows at his face. Trying to crush his skull. Thinking, not thinking, but only fighting by savage instinct. Blows to the head weakened and stunned him, but I hadn’t the strength to finish him off. As he stumbled back and fell, he grabbed the front of my loose tourist’s shirt and brought me down to the ground on top of him. I lost my weapon.

  Rolling, wrestling, splashing. Pummeling each other with fists and elbows. Biting and clawing. Like two toothless, blunt-clawed old beasts past they’re prime and incapable of inflicting any real damage.

  I wrenched free of his clench, staggered to my feet. My eyes darted to find the gun I had knocked from his hand. Minh apparently had the same idea. He ignored me momentarily as he scrambled around on hands and knees, hands as deft and swift as the paws of a squirrel as they went through the mud seeking the lost Beretta.

  I kicked him in the side as hard as I could. He grunted and collapsed to one side. Glared up at me. Water rivuleting down his face failed to quench the fire burning inside.

  Then he was back on his feet with surprising agility. I shambled away with him in shambling pursuit. Breaking free of the banana forest, free of rain pounding on palms, I saw the canal ahead and then the village off to my right. I had run full circle.

  My chest felt like it was caught in a vise. Air whistled in my windpipe. Everything around me seemed to be breaking down into individual red-hued atoms, into a whirling storm of dissolving matter that defied logic. Behind me I heard Minh breathing as torturously as I. Our synchronized wheezing and rasping wet and yellow and flabby with age. Both of us blowing and moaning in agony and exertion. Two absurd, mad old men in a ridiculous slow-motion chase with the intent to annihilate each other at the end.

  I turned at bay, cornered against the canal ahead. As Minh charged, emitting a gurgling roar of rage, I unleashed a wild, weak haymaker that must have missed his jaw by at least a half foot. The momentum of the swing upset my balance. I fell hard.

  Minh loosed a poorly timed kick that also missed. His feet went out from underneath him and he fell backwards, momentarily knocking the wind out him. Both of us scrambled to our knees and faced off, neither having the strength to regain our footing. Yelling unintelligible insults, we lunged and grappled, straining to dominate. Neither he nor I had much left.

  Too spent to continue the fight, we settled for leaning on each other simply to remain upright while we fought to breath. A strange posture that might have suggested the embrace of two old friends to someone unfamiliar with what had transpired before. Panting and mumbling, and runoff water ate at the soft earth around our knees.

  It was during this forced respite that we became at least peripherally aware of shouting and of a small crowd of running people somehow taking form out of chaos. Someone took my shoulders very gently. A young man also took Minh’s shoulders. We had no resistance left. We were separated and helped to our feet. We glared at each other, but retained no inclination to resume the battle.

  “It is over,” said a curiously familiar voice. I lifted my head wearily. The rain had not let up. Connie Nhu, the young Eurasian woman from the Safe Harbor for Children in Dong Tam, stood in front of me.

  “I apologize,” she said with a kind smile. “I attempted to warn you, Mr. Kazmarek. Everyone in Dong Tam quickly knew who you were and why you were there. Father Pierre’s Co Ly does like t
o gossip. It was only a matter of time until my Uncle Minh learned of your return. I had hoped you would be gone by then. Perhaps, like you, Uncle Minh has difficulty letting go of the past.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

  Minh and I were kept separated as we were escorted to Doctor Cochran’s clinic to recover from our ordeal with dry clothing and hot tea. Cochran and I were about the same size; his khaki trousers and open-necked sports shirt fit me decently in spite of all the weight I had lost since Pete’s death, Someone rustled up peasants’ clothing in the village for Minh and for the Viet young man who now sat next to Minh in the clinic patients’ waiting room, a restraining hand resting gently on the old commander’s knee. Bonnie My had provided Connie Nhu with a traditional ao dai. It fit her snugly, as she was taller and more filled out than Cochran’s diminutive wife.

  Everyone not directly involved had been shoved out of the waiting room. Minh and the young Viet whose name I learned was Bay, a man in his early thirties, sat on one side of the room, I on the other side next to Doctor Cochran. Cochran unabashedly stared at the old VC leader, the former war lord of the Mekong Delta, as though mesmerized by him, astounded after all these years to once more be in the presence of a legend.

  “For goo’ness sake, for goo’ness sake!” Bonnie My was even more flustered as she clucked around bringing tea for unexpected visitors.

  Van my driver, still visibly unsettled, chose a chair nearest the door and nearest his taxi, in case he should have to make a run for it. I wondered what his Harvard education would say about all this. I leaned forward, knees on elbows, and clasped the teacup warm in my hands and gazed into its dark contents.

  “We are a new generation,” Connie Nhu said, as though preparing to lecture two old fools on the folly of their ways. She stood in the open between the facing rows of benches against either wall and paused to take a sip of her tea. “We are connected to our country, but I must admit we are not as connected to our ancestors and our roots as previous generations have been. Time requires that we change. We are moving into a global society and a global economy for which we must prepare ourselves. For most of Vietnam’s young people, even for those of us who were born during those bad times, the war is part of history. We have moved on out of the past and into the future. It is difficult for us to understand what there is about so many of you old people who are mired in the politics and events of that war, Who are so obsessed by them that you will continue to re-live that war and fight it until the day you die.”

  She paused to look pointedly first at her uncle, then at me. It had never occurred to me that even the surviving enemy had their demons with which to cope. Connie Nhu clucked her tongue in sympathetic rebuke.

  “What a shame that papasans like the two of you who should have dignity and wisdom and honor with advancing age are rolling in the mud like school bullies. If my brother Bay had not expected something like this to happen and kept our Uncle Minh under surveillance, you two ancients might have killed each other. Fortunately, we got here in time after we lost Uncle Minh on the highway out of Saigon. We knew Doctor Cochran was in Vam Tho; it wasn’t hard to determine you both were on your way here.”

  I was in no mood for hugs and kisses and forgiveness. Minh had forced me to go all the way back to a day when my hell began. The old bastard tried to kill me.

  “My uncle burns for revenge,” Connie continued, glancing at Minh. “Hate destroys the hater long before it destroys the hated.”

  Minh’s face was hard and unmoving. Obviously, he was in no more of a mood than I for a lecture from his niece.

  Carefully, I placed my unfinished tea on the little table next to me and stood up. Minh stiffened. He had several ugly welts and abrasions on his face from where I struck him with my rock. I weaved from a sudden attack of dizziness, but steadied myself on the bench until it passed. What I needed was to get the hell out of this shit bag country once again.

  “Van, get the taxi ready,” I ordered.

  “Mr. Kazmarek!” Connie Nhu snapped. “I thought you returned to Vietnam to look for the truth. You don’t know all the truth yet. You have one more stop to make before you leave. I think you will find it the most important since your return. You, neither of you,” she amended to include Minh, “knows all that happened that day at Vam Tho between my mother and father—“

  “Your father!” I croaked. A breath of pain knifed sharply through my chest as I recognized the resemblance. The oddly blue-gray eyes, the square set of her jaw.

  “Lt. Peter Brauer was my father,” she said.

  “But... but...?”

  “He never knew Mhai, my mother, was pregnant, Mr. Kazmarek.”

  Confused, I stared at Minh. He sat straight in his chair. Bay seemed unshaken.

  I sat down again, my legs collapsing. “You’re ...?” I began, looking at Bay.

  “The Lt. Kazmarek my mother spoke of was not the evil Lt. Kazmarek of Vam Tho,” Bay said. “You held me in your arms while we slept at the home of my grandparents. My mother said you were very gentle and a good man who made it hard for her to hate all Americans thereafter, even though she was a member of the National Liberation Front and fighting with my Uncle Minh. You left me concealed in the rice jar where I would be safe.”

  I felt tears welling in my eyes. Connie Nhu walked over and touched my shoulder,

  “Bay and I are half-siblings. Different fathers,” she explained.

  I frowned, glancing at Minh. Connie Nhu gave a brief laugh.

  “Minh is my mother’s brother,” she said. “Bay’s father was a VC lieutenant who was killed in the war shortly after Bay was born. Peter Brauer never know about Bay. My mother was afraid he would not love her if she told him.”

  It was all so confusing, so sudden and unexpected. Mhai—the only gentle thing I had known about Vietnam. And she was not dead when I found her lying on the floor of the hooch with half her face blown away. She was pregnant with Pete’s child—and she lived!

  “Uncle Minh,” Connie Nhu said to him, “my mother never told you the truth about what happened here at Vam Tho for fear of what you would do. Now that my father is dead, perhaps it is time for the whole truth... It is time for Mhai to speak.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  Commander Minh kicked up a mild protest over leaving his black Honda parked at the bridge, but his niece would have it no other way but that he accompany the crusade. There were truths that he also needed to confront. Although our passions had cooled with the depletion of our energy, he and I were kept separated. He rode with Bonnie My and Bay in Bay’s French Peugeot. Doctor Cochran rode shotgun with Van in the taxi while I took the back seat with Connie Nhu.

  The road from Vam Tho was muddy and rutted and the little caravan of two vehicles ground along it in low gears until it reached paved Highway 4. There, the rain let up and bright edges of the sun started flashing through the cloud cover, making rainbows and sparkling on freshly-washed emerald foliage. We passed Widow Maker Lane again and I looked the other way.

  Still numb from recent events, confused and agonized over old memories drawn to the surface, I had little to say during the trip. I thought of Pete and how our paths had crossed so many times in Vietnam. We knew the same beautiful woman! Ironic how we had not intersected until so many years later in Florida when we were already becoming old men. The portrait of Mhai hanging on Pete’s wall had tormented his final years and last hours and minutes. In a way that I had not understood until now, the portrait had also haunted me.

  While I rode in silence collecting all my thoughts and emotions and bringing them under control, Doctor Cochran plied Connie Nhu with questions. She seemed to understand a lot about her mother during the war years. I listened, realizing how little I knew at the time about the girl from the bridge and her baby.

  Mhai, her daughter said, was never ardently communist. She was nationalist. She enlisted with the NLF only because of her brother, and even then over his objections. Her first job as a member of the Front was to arrange
encounters with army officers from the Dong Tam 9th Division base camp and milk information from them. It seemed I may have been one of her targets the evening we spent together in the brick house. After that, Minh obtained her a position as aide to the district commander where her knowledge of languages would serve him well and where she would not be engaged in actual fighting. He had failed to foresee the new SEAL commander at Shit City penetrating so deeply into secured VC territory to conduct ambushes near his own clandestine headquarters at Vam Tho.

  Immediately after Mhai’s wounding and capture, Minh was eager to retaliate and organize a rescue effort to secure his sister’s release. He delayed any such moves, however, after he learned the extent of her wounds and that she might die without the medical attention only the Americans could provide.

  It was then learned that the SEAL commander had developed a romantic interest in his prisoner patient. District Command suggested Mhai exploit it to her advantage and to the advantage of the NLF by pretending to chieu hoi. The opportunity to plant an agent inside the enemy’s military leadership structure came infrequently. What no one counted on was that Mhai would also fall in love with the American SEAL.

  Minh decided to see for himself, personally, what sort of man this foreigner was. That led to the dinner encounter in Saigon between the enemy leaders. Minh had been much taken with Lt. Brauer, as Pete had been impressed with Minh. Communist or not, Minh began to hope Pete would survive the war and take his little sister with him back to the United States where she might pursue her studies and enjoy opportunities still not available in Vietnam nearly three decades after the war ended.

  The canal fight ended all that. Minh assumed Pete had perished in the battle, although his body was never located. An American GI platoon occupying Vam Tho wiped out one hundred thirty eight civilians. Mhai was shot in the face but survived. The man responsible for the massacre, for Mhai’s disfigurement, was one Lt. Jack Kazmarek. The Butcher of Vam Tho.