by Tom Wilson
Benny followed him into the hall, put a hand on his arm. "I'm not good company right now. I need to sort some things out."
"Maybe so," said the Bear. He didn't know Benny all that well, but the fighter pilot with the barrel chest and neck like a rhino had always seemed rock solid. Now he just seemed weak.
"I feel shitty about you and Glenn getting hammered," Benny said again, and although his head was turned away, the Bear saw the glistening in his eyes.
"You didn't do it. We screwed up trying to kill a SAM site." He glanced at his watch and grunted. "I've gotta get going. Supposed to get the lab results and find out the score about this hospital drill. Maybe you do need a little time to get your act together."
The Bear shook off Benny's hand then, leaving him to drown in his personal sorrows.
02/1900L—Hanoi, Democratic Republic of Vietnam
Xuan Nha
Sergeant Ng let Xuan off at the door of the sprawling villa he shared with Li Binh and their six political retrainees. Few homes in Hanoi were more imposing.
Since the revolution, some of the larger villas had been transformed to multiple-family dwellings, hospitals, and even orphanages, but mostly for the consumption of visiting Westerners. Most of the high-ranking Lao Dong party leaders had come from wealthy families and were accustomed to such comforts.
Xuan's father had owned the villa and the French had placed his estate into a trust when he died, but after the Communists came to power and years of petitioning, the issue was finally settled in Xuan Nha's favor. He had been a war hero, a rising star in the People's Army, but it had been the influence of Li Binh's position that decided the issue. It was more proof that marrying her had been a most beneficial thing.
He entered the door and asked the elderly manservant, "Is Madame Binh at home?"
The man said she was.
Like the other domestic attendants, the manservant was a political retrainee, working in humble circumstance to free his mind of improper influences. Like the others he'd once been a person of means. Li Binh felt that those who had fallen the farthest were the most agreeable to do her bidding without question. Xuan Nha didn't care who the servants were so long as they did as they were told.
An energetic Li Binh swept in. "You are early," she said.
"It has been a good day. Good days are the easiest."
"I heard bombs exploding south of the city."
"The Americans destroyed a few trucks, a few buildings, and they blew up three fuel tanks up north at Ha Ghia." He took his customary seat on the stiff chair made of strips of water buffalo hide. A soldier should never be too comfortable. He would grow soft and know comfort when the war was finished.
"We shot down at least eight American airplanes in all. Perhaps nine or even ten. More than ever before in a single day. It is hard to imagine what it will be like when we have all the new systems in place."
She smiled, glanced at her watch, and clapped her hands. A womanservant hurried into the room. "We eat in half an hour," Li Binh commanded, shooing the woman back into the kitchen.
She watched the departing servant with a pleased look. The woman had been the wife of a wealthy planter with household servants of her own. The government had taken over the plantation, and her husband now labored at the Tri Cau mines, hauling ore on his back alongside hundreds of other men and women of questionable political orientation. The woman was thankful for her job, eternally anxious that she might lose it and be forced to join her husband at the huge open-pit mine.
Li Binh was high in the hierarchy at External Affairs. That ministry and Defense were the two most important organs of the wartime government, and she liked to be reminded of her influence. The servants knew that and took time to flatter her and appear to attend to her smallest desires. The servants slacked off in the daytime when they were both away, and they secretly despised her. Sgt Van Ng, who lived in a small room in the garage, told Xuan so, and the aging, maimed sergeant was almost mystical in the ways he knew about such things. Xuan neither cared nor did he bring it to Li Binh's attention. His father's servants had done the same in their day, and he supposed that was the way they were.
"I must change for dinner," she said. "Would you care for tea while you wait?"
"Yes."
She clapped her hands once more. "Tea for the colonel!" she demanded, then gave him a flash of a smile before departing for the bedroom. Li Binh seemed happier with him; her anger over his scathing remarks about her nephew had begun to dissipate.
He still seethed inwardly about Major Wu's incompetence. If Li Binh had not been so adamant, he would have had the piece of pig's dung shot.
A servant brought tea. Xuan sipped it and reflected.
Before the series of endless wars had begun, Xuan Nha's father owned a company which manufactured exquisite, handcrafted furniture. Like others exporting to the depression-gripped world, they came to be in trouble. In 1934, his father began a two year excursion to revitalize their markets, accompanied by his young bride. They would cast critical eyes and make suggestions for the homes of the world's riche, with surnames such as Chang, Giannini, Hearst, Huntington, Rockefeller, Du Pont, Roosevelt, Lilley, Benz, Krupp, and Rothschild.
Midway during the voyage the bride was impregnated, and in Paris they lingered for their son to be born. Seven days after, Xuan's mother had died of infections. Troubled by the thought of traveling with the demanding, chubby baby, his father welcomed assistance from his dead wife's relatives who lived in the growing Vietnamese community of Paris. They all felt it was wise to delay the infant's voyage until he was older. When his father departed for Hanoi, Xuan Nha was left behind.
The world war had intervened to delay his return.
His playmate was a cousin a year older than he, a precocious and lively-eyed brat named Li Binh.
Xuan had left Paris after the end of the war, a twelve year old stuffed with masculine ego, overjoyed at the prospect of meeting his father and new family. He thought of Li Binh as a pestilence and was happy to be rid of her.
His father had prospered during the war by expanding into heavy construction. In 1947, when his offspring by his first wife had arrived from Paris, he'd sagely advised his son to "Back the winner, and you will always be a patriot." During the war in Indochina he had befriended, in succession, the Vichy French, the Japanese occupiers, the Viet Minh rabble army, the British liberators, then the French Union forces who came to reclaim their empire.
Xuan Nha had been confused at his father's pragmatism, for in the Vietnamese community in Paris they'd talked of a new, free Vietnam.
With each passing day Xuan Nha had felt more ill at ease with his new family. They were rich and he wanted for little. His father's wife tried to be pleasant and the children were not allowed to be discourteous. But still he felt like an unwelcome intruder. He'd emerged from a past they seldom mentioned, and his father spoke to him only about the world of commerce. He grew to hate them all.
They owned a large villa in the central quartier of Hanoi, but Xuan Nha preferred the austere dormitory of his academy. His father's family never realized how he despised their influences with this or that high-ranking French officer, or with the Bao Dai, the French puppet emperor who ruled first from his mansion in Hue, then from the palace at Saigon.
On his fourteenth birthday he wrote to Li Binh about his parents, traitors to the cause of Vietnamese liberation. He hadn't expected an answer, and was surprised to receive a sympathetic response. There followed a series of letters, each confiding their darkest secrets. He wrote of his hatreds, she of her passionate beliefs.
He was fifteen when he joined the secret Young Socialists for Liberation of the People. By then Mao Tse Tung had succeeded in China and arms were pouring across the border to the Viet Minh. A call went out for volunteers, and like many fellow students he eagerly prepared to go to the hills.
He passed a message through the Young Socialists that he was ready. After an agonizing wait the Lao Dong party passed their wishes
from their hiding place in the mountains. He was to visit often with his family and gain information from their friends.
Li Binh had also joined the Young Socialists, for the movement was fast gaining influence among the Parisian Vietnamese. She spent her time passing out pamphlets on street corners and pleading with passersby, urging that French forces stop their bullying of Vietnam.
Xuan was distraught that everyone was doing so much and he so little, but he listened carefully as his father entertained and dutifully reported each conversation.
His father spoke about his future. The following year he would be sent to the United States, first to preparatory school, then to Harvard to study economics and business. After graduation Xuan would be placed at one of the firm's field offices. Xuan despised the concept of capitalism. Patriotism flowed hot in his veins! He yearned to fight and, after heroically killing a hundred French legionnaires, to die for his country. But he nodded dutifully and said oui, mon père in the enemy's language before returning to the academy dormitory.
The next night four friends from the Young Socialists took him along on one of their secret forays. They violated curfew, leaving the compound well after midnight, and ventured into a sleazy section of the southern quartier. There they crept into a decrepit building and surprised a French corporal who was drunkenly humping on a bored prostitute. They bound and gagged him, then forced the whore to chew off his testicles before ceremoniously killing them both. At first Xuan Nha was sickened by the viciousness, and only after they left did he realize he was sexually aroused. Back in the dormitory he'd been compelled to masturbate before he could sleep. The killing forays became a weekly ritual with the group.
He finished at the academy at the top of his class, and his instructors sent a note to his father recommending that Xuan attend university to study higher mathematics. The world is controlled by businessmen, his father snapped, and you shall study business.
He could take no more. Xuan Nha had spent his final evening in the villa entertaining the son and thirteen-year-old daughter of a high executive of the Michelin company who was staying in the guest house. At midnight he'd gone to the gate to speak with the security guard on duty. When the guard turned, he's skewered him with a thin sharp knife, up through the fleshy kidney area as he'd been taught, then motioned to the shadows where his comrades waited. He'd left the villa before first light, driving his father's American automobile through the awakening streets. Only once had he stopped, to mail a letter to Li Binh.
He'd driven out the Doumer highway, across the big bridge and twenty kilometers farther before pulling off the road and into a small village at the base of the mountains. Then he'd propped open the trunk of the Cadillac, and settled down to wait. An hour later, five suspicious Viet Minh soldiers had cautiously entered the village. The French executive, bound and blindfolded, kicked feebly in the intense heat as flies droned and settled on him. He'd proven to be a good hostage, for his company donated generously for his release.
In 1955, after the country was divided by decree of the major powers, the Lao Dong party had begun to prepare for the great Struggle for Unification. Lieutenant Xuan Nha, the Tiger of Dien Bien Phu, had been selected to travel abroad to attend the University of Paris.
At the 800-year-old Sorbonne the handful of students from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam studied mathematics and physics. If North Vietnam was to become industrialized, as was Ho Chi Minh's aim, they would require a core of people with technical expertise. The French were stupid, Xuan Nha thought. Beat them in a war and they'd still enroll you into their universities. Ask any Frenchman and you were likely to hear they were great admirers of Ho Chi Minh. Vietnam had become an American problem as that country poured more and more money and materials into the puppet government in Saigon.
Xuan had explored the Western culture by fornicating with their women, drinking with their workers, arguing with their intelligentsia, and debating politics with the students. He found French women to be bovine, the workers pampered, and French communists shallow in their belief. Foreign students, on the other hand, gave him a glimpse of the world, and he examined them carefully. He observed students from India, Africa, the Far East, the Americas, Europe, and England, as well as those from the old French Union empire of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Algeria, Chad, Somalia, and Tahiti.
Fight anyone, he'd decided, except the Americans, for they believed too completely in their invincibility to be easily defeated. But because of the Americans' passion for fledgling democracies such as South Vietnam, he believed they would someday fight, so he spent a good share of his time observing them, talking with them, arguing about the similarities and disparities of the Marxist and American revolutions, and attending their movies at the campus cinemas. He'd even shared the bed of a long-haired California girl.
The more he learned of the Americans, the more he worried about their righteous enthusiasm. Only they possessed the means to stop the People's Army from taking South Vietnam by force of arms. With that thought in mind, he had come to despise them.
One Spring day in his third year, as he walked across the sprawling campus in the light rain, Li Binh appeared, saying she wished to talk. Her visit surprised him for she seemed remote whenever he visited her parents. She motioned toward a stone fountain, and they sat on a bench there. As the rain stopped she carefully furled the umbrella, mysteriously quiet.
"I have waited for you to visit again," she finally said.
She was skinny and angular, three inches taller than he, and had a long, drawn face. She also spoke too directly for the liking of the past generation of Vietnamese.
She said, "I was frightened that you would not like me. I'm scared right now that you will walk away."
"I won't," he said with a smile.
"I respect what you accomplished for our people. Did General Giap really call you the Tiger of Dien Bien Phu?"
"It was General Dung, his second in command."
"It is inspirational to speak with you, Xuan Nha," she flattered.
"Are you still a member of the party?"
Proudly she said, "I am now a full delegate to the French Communist Party."
He was impressed and told her so. After a while he confided, "I read your letters."
"And I read yours, Xuan Nha. I still have the one you wrote the night before you left Hanoi, when you told what you were about to do. I can not imagine anyone so dedicated."
"Did you tell your parents?"
"They would not understand."
"I despised my father. It was easy to kill him."
"And his wife and children?" She shuddered, but her eyes were on his face.
"They were traitors."
"The article in Le Monde mentioned your family, but they dwelled longest about how the Michelin executive's wife and children had been mutilated."
He didn't mention what he'd done to the arrogant daughter. How he'd told her that no one should die a virgin. Only after he'd had his fill of the terrified girl had he carved her like the others.
"When he was ransomed, the executive didn't mention you as his kidnapper."
Xuan shrugged. "He was blindfolded and his eardrums punctured."
She studied him carefully with wide eyes before speaking her mind. "I've waited for you, Xuan Nha. I wish to return to Hanoi with you to help the party unify our country."
Upon later reflection, he realized that she'd carefully planned it all.
At many times like this Xuan had reflected on their beginning, but never had he been sorry. Marrying Li Binh had been his good fortune. Upon reaching Hanoi she'd used his status as a hero of the republic to gain access to government officials. Within a year she'd risen to a level within the Ministry of External Affairs that she no longer needed his influence.
That night, perhaps also thinking about their beginning, she came to him.
Neither of them were highly sexual with one another. She needed tenderness, Xuan to be stirred, and neither would give those things. They fumbl
ed through the act, both careful to maintain self-control. He lay on her, thrusting silently, and she periodically grunted, her thin body protesting his weight.
When they were done they lay back as she told him about a project she was working on. "Last summer President Johnson proposed that we meet to discuss the American prisoners of war. I have prepared a response to be released to the International Red Cross. As long as the Americans continue their barbaric bombing, we will refuse to talk."
"That won't stop the bombing," Xuan said.
"Perhaps not, but we are aiming this at the American people."
"Prisoners disgrace themselves by allowing themselves to be captured," he said. "We should kill them all and eliminate the expense of holding them. Prison guards could be used to carry supplies to the south."
"Some day the American prisoners will be sold back to their people in exchange for something we want. For now, since they have not declared war, we call the Americans pilots criminals and say that we're justified in treating them like murderers. Some of their own people are beginning to listen."
"You deal with their traitors in America," he growled. "I try to convince them to leave by killing their pilots. If I kill enough of them, perhaps they will go home."
She changed the conversation. "So what do you think of your new adviser?"
"Nicolaj Gregarian is a fat and pompous Tay pig."
"You've never liked the Russians."
"They are egotistical over too little. This one is as bad as the others." He shook his head disgustedly. "Tonight I introduced him to your agent, the instructor who will teach him Vietnamese. He wrinkled his nose at her. He is no homosexual, or at least we do not think so, but he acted as if I had assigned a monkey to teach him."
Li Binh thought. "Perhaps he would prefer a Tay. I know of an Englishwoman married to a Vietnamese who was recently disgraced. She is a conniver. She denounced her country, but now she says that was a mistake and she wishes to return to England. Her case was passed to my office. I could tell her that if she makes the Russian happy and reports everything he says, we will let her return to England."
