I cringed when Connie Nhu reached that point. I stared stone-faced out the side window.
It was only through Minh’s personal efforts that Mhai escaped the re-education camps that sprang up after the fall of Saigon. Although Minh produced documentation showing she was an undercover NLF agent, one wounded in action twice, her birthing a half-American bastard daughter was enough to preclude her from high positions in government, university or the economy. Fortunately, Minh had risen in his own career under Hanoi and was able to provide for her and her two children.
We were nearing the outskirts of Saigon, slowing down for traffic.
“Was it Mhai,” Doctor Cochran asked, “who got me out of prison?”
“I know that Bonnie My made entreaties to my Uncle Minh over the years. I know only that Uncle Minh finally gave my mother his personal authorization to work for your freedom. He did it for Bonnie My and for my mother, I must say, and not for you. He was a very bitter man after what happened at Vam Tho.”
“I understand,” Cochran said, and I cringed again. “There’s one more question that has bothered me for years. I know Pete, your father; had to have been deeply hurt... Did Mhai betray Pete to Commander Minh? Was she the one who set us up for what happened?”
That caught my full attention. The answer had direct bearing on the dark occurrences on the canal bank at Vam Tho. Had the operation gone as planned, Third Platoon would never have been cut off, Bravo Company and Pete’s Nguoi Nhai would have swept on in for the linkup, and there would have been no monument erected.
“You will have to let my mother answer that,” Connie Nhu said.
She directed Van to Tu Do Street past the Continental Hotel and toward the harbor. She indicated an intersection adjacent to the old Majestik Hotel where, I recalled, Pete and Mhai had spent a honeymoon of sorts during the Christmas holidays before TET. Down a narrow quiet street she pointed out a neat-whitewashed cottage with a front yard big enough for only two coconut palms. Bay’s Peugeot pulled up behind us.
“I will wait in taxi,” Van said. “Enough excitement already today for Harvard man.”
I got out of the car still tending mixed feelings of anticipation and dread. Commander Minh refused to look my way. A housekeeper answered the door. As we filed into an immaculate little front room done in French antique decor, the first thing I noticed was a framed enlargement on the wall, a copy of the snapshot I had found among Pete’s things after he died: Pete in his SEAL’s black beret and Mhai in her short-skirt Nancy Sinatra outfit. Next to it hung a full-faced portrait of Pete in his dress blues. It seemed Mhai had maintained her own shrine.
Shades were drawn over windows to make the room intentionally dim. A hush fell when Mhai entered. Connie Nhu had telephoned her from city limits to let her know we were coming. At first I saw only a tall, lithe outline wearing a long traditional ao dai. She strode in slowly, with great dignity. Light from a window not fully shaded struck the right side of her face. She stood there for a long moment gazing out the window as though composing herself, the left half of her features still in shadow.
Her face was lined now with age at the comers of her mouth and on the forehead, but I recognized her. She was a handsome woman even in her fifties when so many Asian women become mamasan. As I stared, unwilling to avert my eyes, her head began turning slowly to regard her roomful of silent visitors. My breath caught in my throat. I heard Doctor Cochran’s rapid intake. Bonnie My emitted a little cry of sorrow and pity.
The left lower half of Mhai’s face was nothing but a mass of ugly scar tissue, shapeless and without symmetry. Her hand started to rise involuntarily to conceal its hideousness. But then it fell back to her side. Bonnie My rushed to embrace her. Mhai returned the embrace, but stiffly and without warmth, as though she had lost the knack of it.
She looked us all over, smiling only briefly at her brother Minh and at her two children. I didn’t expect her to recognize me, but she also failed to acknowledge Cochran.
“I am Mhai,” she said finally, her voice slow, deliberate and slurred from nerve damage done to her facial muscles.
“I know,” I blurted out. “Mhai! The last thing Pete thought of before he died was you.”
She studied me a long time, remembering me finally when I introduced myself as the GI at the bridge. I saw that she was blind in one eye, that it was dull and fixed. Tears appeared in the good eye and slid gently down the cheek that was still pretty. She weaved on her feet. I stepped toward her, but Minh leaped to his feet as though daring me to touch her.
The housekeeper appeared with a cushioned chair. Mhai let herself slowly into it. Her eye switched back and forth between her brother and me, intuitively recognizing the hostility between us as well as its source. I was the “Butcher of Vam Tho,” responsible in Minh’s eyes not only for the unforgivable massacre of women and children but also for the maiming of his sister. Vietnam might be filled with people growing old without arms or legs and with the marks of war on their faces and bodies, but Mhai was not supposed to be one of them. She had once been so beautiful.
Mhai sighed long and deep. It was a painful thing to hear in the quiet room with all eyes riveted on her. I realized that she was a frail woman, much frailer than she first appeared. Somehow she gave the impression that she had gone into seclusion after Vam Tho. Living out her life in this cottage paid for by her brother, rearing her son and her daughter and wearing a scarf to cover her scars whenever she had to go out.
She gestured for everyone to be seated. While chairs were produced, her eye with tears brimming stared at the photographs on the wall of Pete and of Pete and her together. I was certain she had many questions to ask about Pete, but first there seemed to be something else on her mind. What irony, I thought, that Pete and she should each think the other dead for all these years. Now it was too late.
She finally withdrew from the photographs and turned to the room, adjusting her head slightly out of habit so that the good side of her face was more visible. That side looked drawn. It glistened with running tears. It must have been as painful for her to return to the past as it was for me. She had lost more than just a part of her soul,
A slender hand almost transparent enough to disclose bone and veins fluttered from her lap and touched her scars gingerly, as though even after all these years she was still repulsed by them.
“I have lived with this,” she slurred, struggling to make words clear when only one half of her mouth worked properly, “and I have lived unwilling to confront the truth. There are scars that are physical, and there are scars that are invisible but which go much deeper and are more permanent. It was easier to live, what life I had, if I simply blocked the events of Vam Tho from my mind. Today, there seems to be a need for us in this room to face the truth this one final time in order that we may properly bury the past where it belongs. We shall never find peace until we return to Vam Tho...”
I tried to block out her words. I had already been there; I refused to go back again.
But the way she began was simply too compelling to shut out. “I have known all these years that Pete did not die in the fighting,” she said. “I saw him in Vam Tho. . .”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
Mhai had betrayed Pete, she conceded with tears glistening in her remaining eye and her speech slurred and thick. She was a double agent, at least in the beginning. In fact, through careful listening she managed to garner some minor intelligence that helped lead to Minh’s destruction of Junk Base 35. The American commander of the River Rat Biet Hai, the surly one called Lump Adkins, knew her for what she was and contrived to plant seeds of suspicion against her until he was wounded at the junk base fight and transferred back to America.
“Throw the goofy cunt in the river,” she overheard Lump Adkins demanding shortly after her wounding and capture, “I’m telling you, Mr. Brauer, she’s a VC cunt who’ll cut out your heart if you ever turn your back on her.”
At first, Mhai went along with her espionage orders to play
off Pete for what she could get from him. Pete, however, proved extremely tight-lipped and difficult to open up. He was a career military man, a SEAL, who kept his personal life separate from the war, as much as possible. Besides, she felt he never completely trusted her,
For that reason, she let him think Minh was her lover. It was easier for him to believe she would chieu hoi from a former lover than from a brother. Blood ties ran strong among the Vietnamese. She likewise never revealed to him that she had a baby son born from a VC lieutenant, slain a year earlier. The deception persisted even after she fell in love with Pete. How could she confess that she had been lying to him all along? Besides, might not he also use her family ties to get to Minh? After all, while the two commanders respected each other, they were enemies sworn to destroy each other on the battlefield.
In attempting to balance her love for both Pete and Minh without betraying either, she ended up betraying both and sowing bitterness in her wake. At the end, she found herself juggling the remnants of her two separate lives, informing on neither side. She became, in effect, a neutral in the war.
Her fingertips moved to touch her wasted face.
Discovering through the goodtime girl Winni Ho that the Americans, including Pete and his Nguoi Nhai, were to conduct a surprise operation against her brother at Vam Tho in an attempt to trap him posed a moral dilemma for which she could find no easy solution. Betray Pete and warn Minh and she most likely cost Pete his life; not warn Minh, betraying him, and she sacrificed her brother.
She still had not made up her mind what to do when Bonnie My spotted her sneaking out of Dong Tam on her hidden Vespa and logically assumed she was en route to alert Minh. In fact, Mhai had one concern on her mind: reaching Vam Tho to make sure her baby was safe when the fighting started. Bay, then one year old, was staying with his dead father’s aunt, Li Ngo, while Mhai was away.
Events were to intercede which prevented Mhai having to make any decision. Decisions were made for her. She could not be sure to the present day what she would have done. Minh’s advance warning came from his own intelligence sources and the loose lips of a hooky-playing Shit City Frog and a hotel whore.
Threatening monsoon clouds blotted out the sunrise as he sped toward Vam Tho on her motor scooter. Her mood darkened. Something gnawed deeply inside her, a premonition of bad times coming. Sporadic rifle shots to her right, on the other side of Canal Six, added to the somberness of her mood.
From her VC days and recent frequent visits to see her son, Mhai knew the best trails to the village. Even she had to be careful. It was slow going. Many of the foot and bicycle paths leading to Vam Tho were booby-trapped or pitted with punji stakes. Reaching the outskirts safely and finding everything quiet, although the Americans had already arrived, she left the motorbike in a copse of trees and crept into the village to take a look.
Keeping out of sight as she searched for Li Ngo and Bay, she discovered GIs herding villagers at rifle point to a pigpen detention area not far from the canal. Women and children clung to each other as they were hurried along. Their cries of fright and uncertainty tore at Mhai’s heart.
She finally located Li Ngo amidst a small group of villagers, Bay clutched tightly in both her arms. A tall black soldier prodded them along with a machine gun. He shouted at them. He became infuriated when an old woman fell in the dirt and kicked her until she scrambled to her feet again.
Mhai focused on her son. The others she could do nothing about. Bay was crying in his aunt’s arms, wailing at the top of his healthy young lungs, his mouth open and tears cutting streaks through the dust on his face. Mhai followed along in his wake, slipping from hut to hut, seeking the right opportunity. Although it was standard practice for American soldiers to round up all civilians for questioning whenever they occupied towns, today’s operation somehow seemed different. The soldiers appeared more brutal, more anxious. From snatches of conversations Mhai overheard, it was apparent they were afraid and were taking it out on the townspeople. She felt she had to quickly get her son out of the hamlet. Her premonition of impending disaster urged her to take chances.
She recognized her opportunity when the black GI halted his captives to wait for another group to catch up. Driven by a combined sense of urgency and foreboding, she made her way closer from hut to hut until she reached the one nearest her son. She waited. As soon as the black gunner turned his back to shout at someone deeper inside the village, she darted out of hiding and squatted next to Li and Bay. Li cried out in surprise.
“Hush, you foolish woman!” Mhai scolded in Vietnamese. “Give him to me.”
She snatched away her son. Bay flung his arms around her neck and squeezed so tightly he threatened to cut off her breathing. She crooned to him in soft Vietnamese and French.
The black GI still had his back turned. No others were in sight, but their angry shouting ripped through the settlement from all sides. Tapping her lips with a finger—“Shhhh!”—she disappeared with Bay around the side of the hooch from behind which she appeared. Bay calmed and went from howling to muffled sniffling into her shoulder and neck. Hugging him tightly, she worked her way from hut to hut toward the forest and her Vespa.
Two GIs chased a young boy toward her. She ducked out of sight into the nearest house. Heart thumping, she pressed against an inside wall and held Bay tightly, praying he would not start bellowing again. The soldiers tackled the kid outside the hooch and slung him to the ground, He cowered at their feet while they kicked him and prodded him with the muzzles of their rifles,
“You VC!” they snarled. “You VC, you bad VC!”
The boy remained silent. Mhai had in fact recognized him as a courier for her brother.
“We oughta shoot the fuckin little dink and put him out of his misery,” one of the soldiers suggested.
“Come on, motherfucker!” his buddy yelled at the boy. “You want to fight me? Get up, chickenshit.”
There was bitter, nervous laughter.
“Shoot him in self defense like Bugs and Daniels shot the pregnant cunt,” came a proposal. “God Awmighty! Did you see what a mess it made of the baby? It looked like smashed watermelon.”
Mhai heard the soldier’ boots connecting with their skinny victim’s ribs. The kid lay on the ground, curled into a ball.
“Okay, get up!” the soldiers ordered. “Get outa here. Come on, gook. Di di mau! Di di mau, motherfucker.”
The trio shuffled off in the direction of the pigpen.
Mhai peeped out through the hanging beads when things nearby quieted down again. Raindrops fell here and there, cratering in the dust. Suddenly, she heard a lot of shooting and explosions down-canal in the distance. More than a firefight; a battle. Her heart sunk as she assumed Americans had surprised her brother’s troops. She hoped Minh proved as wily and elusive as his reputation credited him with.
She hadn’t time to dwell on it at the moment. From her hiding place she could see that only a narrow clearing and a living bamboo fence separated her and the village from mangrove thickets, reed fields and jungle beyond. From safety. She took a deep breath and gathered her nerves.
She dashed out of the hut toward an opening in the fence. Running for her life in her black VC pajamas. Running for the life of her baby. A flock of cackling, bare-assed chickens scattered out of her way. She had almost reached the hole in the fence when a voice yelled at her.
“Halt! “
She kept running. Only ten more feet. The sound of pounding boots overtook her.
She dived toward the fence.
Jerked back away from it by a brutal fist suddenly entangled in her long hair. A young GI leered at her as she hung helpless by her hair at the end of his arm.
“Hey, Dog. Come get a gander at this looker. How’d you like to have her face wrapped around your dick?”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
While two separate battles raged outside Vam Tho, one up-canal, the other down-canal, Mhai squatted in the stench of the pigpen among the frightened villagers and
clutched Bay tightly to her breast. In one of those battles, her brother and the man she loved were locked at each other’s throats in a struggle from, which she feared only one would emerge. There was nothin’ she could do about it now, either way.
Face ashen, she waited, holding Bay tightly. The only thing she could do anything about now were the babies. Bay... and Pete’s baby. With one hand she stroked the slight swelling of her belly. She wished now she had told Peter that he was going to be a father.
The booming, rattling sounds of the near-distant firefights, the ominous dark glowering of the monsoon moving in, turning the atmosphere oppressive and menacing, the high-pitched penetrating screams of a wounded man in the village—all combined to create a doomsday air that hovered over Vam Tho more darkly than even the swirling black clouds. GI guards around the pigpen listened to the battles, they glanced apprehensively at the sky that seemed to touch their helmets, they scowled in the direction of the man screaming in agony and his own terror. Their eyes were round and white-rimmed, faces drawn in alarm. They appeared agitated, on edge.
They acted trapped. Trapped men were dangerous men.
One of the guards threw back his head and shouted, “Shut that fucker up! Shoot the bastard if he won’t stop screamin. Wastes a pregnant broad—and now he can’t even die like a man. “
“Nobody wants to die,” said another soldier.
“If I die,” vowed the first, with a baleful glare at the pig pen, “them fuckin gooks are gonna die with me.”
The air felt alive with electricity, through which continued the staccato thunder of the battles outside the village. More rain drops fell, but the storm held off. Mhai accepted that she and her two babies, one born, one unborn, would have to wait things out in the pig pen. Sooner or later the Americans would either leave the village or be driven out.
The Return: A Novel of Vietnam Page 32
