Old Man

by David A. Poulsen

  I wanted to take time to wring out my T-shirt, but the old man shook his head.

  “Saddle up. We’re moving out … now.”

  Was it just me or was he starting to sound like somebody out of a war movie? I didn’t have time to think about it because he headed off down what looked like a bit of a jungle path, moving even faster than he had before.

  I saddled up and hustled after him, the canteens jouncing around as I sort of jog/sloshed off into the jungle. I was able to catch up even though neither Mr. Vinh, who I could just make out up ahead, nor the old man slowed down even a little bit.

  I wasn’t sure how long we’d been hiking, but I was sure of one thing. I was tired to the point I could have fallen over. I was walking with my head down, and I almost ran into the old man. He’d stopped suddenly, and Mr. Vinh was just a couple of metres ahead.

  I looked up. We were at the edge of a huge clearing that looked like someone had gone through and cut down all the trees and left a lawn. The grass was a little long for a lawn, but I was so happy to be out of the jungle I wasn’t about to criticize the groundskeeper. It was a space about the size of our school gymnasium, maybe a little bigger.

  The old man dropped his duffel bag. Mr. Vinh did the same thing. The old man said some stuff, some English, some Vietnamese, and threw in a few hand signals. I was getting used to their way of communication, and I figured out that the old man and I were going to set up the tents while Mr. Vinh’s job was to get the food out.

  “Where are we?” I dropped the canteens and backpack on the ground. Then I set the briefcase down very carefully. I still didn’t know what was in it, but after the effort I’d made to keep the thing dry back there in the swamp, I wasn’t about to let anything happen to it now.

  “A clearing. It was an LZ — Landing Zone. Places like this choppers used to set down to drop guys for search-and-destroy missions. Evacuate wounded too.”

  That was a big explanation for the old man, so I decided not to push it. I looked around, tried to imagine helicopters coming in, getting shot at from the jungle all around, landing, taking off again. I shivered. Part of it was because my clothes were still soaked, and it was getting cooler. But I don’t think that was all of it.

  “We’ll stay right here tonight, push on again in the morning. There’re dry clothes in the duffel bag Mr. Vinh was carrying. Better get changed.”

  “Change like right out here?”

  “The master bedroom’s occupied. And I don’t recommend you go back into the jungle and start peeling off clothes. No telling what might happen.” This time he didn’t try to keep the grin off his face. Didn’t matter. I wasn’t setting foot into anything that looked like jungle without the old man and Mr. Vinh real close by.

  The old man started setting up one of the tents and Mr. Vinh was doing something to do with food. I got some dry gonch and socks and another T-shirt and jeans out of the duffel bag. Then I turned away from them and tried to change. Going for privacy. It wasn’t easy. The clothes I had on were sticky, and the ground was uneven, so I was hopping around trying to get the wet jeans off and the other pair on. It took a lot longer than I wanted it to.

  I had one leg in the dry jeans and was trying to get the other leg in without losing my balance when I heard laughing behind me.

  “You try it, you think it’s so easy,” I yelled over my shoulder.

  I got the other leg into the jeans and whipped around to look at them while I did up the button and the fly. The old man was looking at me, still grinning but not actually laughing. I looked over at Mr.Vinh. He was bent over, and he was killing himself laughing. Making little Vietnamese comments to the old man, who was nodding.

  “And just when I thought ol’ Mr. Vinh had no sense of humour at all.” I gave them both my best pissed-off face, but that got Mr. Vinh laughing even harder. “You son of a bitch,” I said.

  But the thing is, it was funny. And for the first time since I’d started on this whole stupid summer from hell, my old man and I laughed at the same time. But neither of us was coming close to Mr. Vinh in the laughter department. I thought the old guy would have a heart attack or something.

  “Actually, you’re both sons of bitches.” I threw my soggy T-shirt at Mr. Vinh.

  It wasn’t long before we had two tents set up, my wet clothes hanging from a tree on the edge of the clearing, and we were eating. Something. Some of it I recognized. There was bread and a can of some kind of meatballs that we passed around, each of us spearing a meatball when it was our turn.

  The rest of it I wasn’t sure about and didn’t ask. There was some kind of fish; at least I thought it was fish, raw fish. There were cold noodles (what’s a meal without noodles), and this salad looking stuff that didn’t taste like salad. I drank quite a bit of water with that meal.

  7

  Dark came in fast and I was real tired, but I didn’t want to go to bed. Not yet. We’d cleaned up from our meal, and the old man was sitting down against one of the folded up sleeping bags and looking up at the darkening sky. Mr. Vinh was sitting cross-legged and smoking a pipe.

  I spread out my sleeping bag on the ground and lay down on it, my head propped on one elbow. I watched them. I was trying to figure out what was going on.

  “You feel like sleeping, that’s our tent.” The old man pointed.

  “I feel like sleeping, but I feel more like talking … that is if anybody wants to talk to me.”

  “I can’t speak for Mr. Vinh.” The old man went back to looking at the sky.

  “I was thinking more that I’d like it if you talked to me.” I’d noticed that now we were actually out here, the old man seemed a lot calmer, more settled than when we’d been travelling to get here.

  “What would you like to talk about, Nathan?”

  “Nate.”

  “What would you like to talk about, Nate?”

  “How about where are we for starters?”

  He pointed back over his shoulder. “In that direction is the A Shau Valley. That’s where we’re headed. During the war, this valley was part of something called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. North Vietnamese soldiers used this as their main infiltration route into the south. A lot of battles were fought around here. A hell of a lot of people died in that valley.”

  “And this is where the battle you told me about, the one you and Tal were in, this is where that battle happened?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did you want to come back here?”

  “Jesus, Nate, you could be one of those interviewers on 60 Minutes or something. These are tough questions.”

  “Sorry.”

  “A lot of guys come back. Visit the places where shit happened. I don’t know exactly why. I never wanted to experience anything like that ever again. And I didn’t think I’d want to be reminded of what happened here. So I can’t explain exactly why we’re here, except that I guess I changed my mind.”

  “It just seems weird to me after all this time.”

  “Forty years.”

  “Seriously? Forty years?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you remember stuff that happened that long ago?”

  “Like it happened this morning.”

  “I still don’t get why … after forty years.”

  “It’s the right time.”

  I shook my head. That didn’t make sense. But I was too tired to try to figure it out.

  “What happens tomorrow?”

  “We walk. Five miles to a place I want to see. A place I want you to see. After that I don’t know.”

  I stopped listening after the five miles part. I hoped there weren’t any more swamps. I picked up the sleeping bag and pushed it into the tent. I fell asleep like somebody had hit me over the head with a brick.

  The A Shau Valley

  1

  I woke up and freaked.

  In the pre-dawn semi-light, I was sure of one thing — I’d been carried off to a giant jungle spider’s web. The spider’s webbing was all around me.
I tried to move my eyes without moving my head so that whatever it was that had taken me prisoner wouldn’t know I was still alive. Or awake.

  I didn’t see a spider. But I did hear the old man’s voice outside the tent, talking softly, and Mr. Vinh’s high-pitched singsong answering.

  “Uh … morning,” I called out. I didn’t want to let on that I might need to be rescued from a bloodthirsty insect, but I wouldn’t have minded if the old man happened to look into the tent right about then.

  He didn’t. “Hey, Nathan, gather up that mosquito netting as you’re getting up. We’ll need it again tonight.”

  I pulled my hand out from under the covers and gently reached up, touched the spider’s web. Mosquito netting.

  “Uh, yeah, mosquito netting. I’ll gather up the mosquito netting. I’ll just gather it up. No problem.”

  “Good.” I heard the old man saying something to Mr. Vinh. I was pretty sure the phrase “strange kid” was part of what he said.

  I gave up on the netting long enough to pull on the rest of my clothes. It didn’t take long since I hadn’t totally undressed the night before. I’d pulled off my shirt and running shoes and that was it. I had this feeling that sleeping in your gonch in the jungle was an open invitation for some creature to sneak into your sleeping bag and start gnawing on some private area best left un-gnawed.

  I’d just finished getting the shirt and shoes back on and picked up the jumble of netting when the old man and Mr. Vinh stomped into the tent, wearing slickers but looking wet anyway. Raining outside. The old man was carrying the briefcase. He opened it and pulled out what looked like some maps … and a couple of old photographs.

  They both sat on the floor of the tent. The old man was sitting cross-legged with the briefcase in his lap, lid down, and one of the maps lying on its surface. Mr. Vinh sat next to him. Both were staring hard at the map.

  The old man pointed at a couple of points on the map. Mr. Vinh nodded and spoke in a mix of Vietnamese and English that was pretty well gibberish to me. The old man answered him also with a mix of words, most of them one syllable. As usual, I understood pretty well nothing.

  But it was quite an animated conversation. A couple of times Mr. Vinh didn’t seem to know the answer to whatever the old man wanted to know. When that happened, he shrugged and shook his head. The old man’s voice got pretty loud right about then. After maybe the third time it happened, the old man looked up at me. It was like he suddenly realized I was there, still sorting mosquito netting and watching the two of them.

  “Get that sleeping bag rolled up and into that duffel bag outside, the bigger one. The mosquito netting too.” That was it. He went back to the map, except that now he had some of the photographs spread out on the briefcase, and he was pointing at them too.

  I gathered up the netting and sleeping bag and stepped out of the tent. The rain wasn’t hard, but there was enough of it that I knew I’d be soaked pretty fast. There was a gathering of branches next to the tent, sort of a lean-to and the two duffel bags were under it. I didn’t remember the lean-to from the night before. Maybe they’d put it up after I’d gone to bed or maybe it was there from before. I didn’t know and it didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was dry under there. I took my time packing up the rest of the gear.

  The old man and Mr. Vinh came out of the tent, and the old man tossed a slicker to me. I pulled it over my head, lifted the hood into position and stepped out from under the lean-to. It was raining harder now, a lot harder. Even with the slicker I got pretty wet … pretty fast. Not as bad as after the swamp episode but fairly damp just the same.

  I went around to the other side of the lean-to to take a leak. It was the most privacy I could hope for unless I wanted to go out into the jungle a ways. And I didn’t want to do that.

  We ate bananas, two each, under the lean-to before heading out. Nobody was going to get fat on this trip. That was obvious. I pulled my hood back just long enough to check the sky. It looked like the clouds were about fifty metres above our heads and the rain was coming down even harder. Nice day for a walk in the jungle.

  I gathered the canteens and the backpack. The old man had stashed the briefcase in the bigger duffel bag, so I didn’t have to carry it anymore. Mr. Vinh grunted a couple of times and started off across the clearing, machete in hand, toward the jungle that was on the other side. This time the old man nodded that he wanted me to go next and that he’d be at the back. I didn’t mind that actually. At least this way I wouldn’t get lost in the jungle or picked off by some python without anyone even knowing.

  2

  I don’t know how long we walked. I do know that the rain stopped. Trouble was, it was actually worse after that. Hot with a humidity of maybe four hundred percent. Steam was actually rising off the jungle floor. I pulled off the slicker, but it didn’t matter. I think I was wetter when it wasn’t raining than when it was. I laid on my second layer of mosquito repellant. I noticed something unpleasant. The mix of sweat and mosquito juice and the lack of shower facilities (I didn’t count my dip in the swamp) didn’t make for a really great-smelling boy. I was pretty sure neither of the Jens would have found me all that attractive right about then.

  We finally came out of the jungle, and there was this field stretched across in front of us. Neat rows of plants stood maybe a foot high in a layer of water across the whole field. The water looked to be about fifteen centimetres deep. Maybe more. The old man came up alongside me.

  “Rice paddy,” he said. “There was one in about this area the last time I made this walk. May be the same one.”

  I was thinking who cares.

  Then he pointed. There was another stretch of jungle on the other side of the rice paddy, not very big this time, and a hill that kind of rose up out of it. Behind that hill there were a couple of good-sized looking mountains.

  “That’s where we’re going. Hill 453. Not a very exotic name is it? Not like Hamburger Hill, the one they made the movie about — that’s over there.” He waved an arm in an arc to his right, but there were lots of hills and mountains in that direction, so I didn’t know which one he meant. I’d seen the movie but I couldn’t remember very much about it, other than the name.

  I looked at the hill we were heading for. Not a real big deal. Hill 453 definitely didn’t look like it was worth fighting for. Or dying for. I wondered if people had died on that hill during whatever happened when the old man was there. And I wondered if I’d find out.

  “Stay as close to him as you can,” the old man told me, nodding toward Mr. Vinh. “And don’t decide to stroll off the path any.”

  “What path?” I wasn’t trying to be funny. If there was a path, I was having a tough time seeing it. Yet there had to be one since Mr. Vinh’s machete was hanging from his belt as he walked through the growth.

  “Just stay in his line. Step in his footsteps if you can.”

  I looked at him. I was going to ask why, but he beat me to it. “Unexploded ordnance. Shells and stuff that didn’t explode. An average of five people a day die in this country from coming in contact with unexploded ordnance. And this is a bad area. Walk where he walks.”

  No kidding. Unexploded ordnance. Doesn’t sound all that nasty. Oh, look a shell. Make a great souvenir. Think I’ll just … BOOM!

  I hustled after Mr. Vinh at pretty close to a sprint. I didn’t want him out of my sight. This was one time I wasn’t going to argue with the old man. If he said walk in Mr. Vinh’s footsteps, that’s what I planned to do. I wondered whether the old man had mentioned unexploded ordnance when he’d talked Mom into letting me go on a little summer road trip.

  We set out across the rice paddy. No hip waders this time. Just sloshing water up to your ankles and in your shoes and soaking your socks. Just as we got to the other side, a woman came running up to us. She was yelling and waving her arms. My guess was that she was pissed off about us walking through the rice paddy. Her rice paddy. I didn’t know if we had wrecked any of the plants or not — I�
��d tried not to — but I could see her point.

  The old man kept walking, and I figured I’d better follow along. Don’t forget the unexploded ordnance. We left Mr. Vinh to deal with the rice paddy lady. Almost immediately we were once again surrounded by dense jungle growth and animal noises. This part of the jungle seemed noisier than any we’d been in so far. I wondered why that would be. The water maybe. Greater number of animals because of the water right close by. Although water didn’t seem to be something that was in real short supply in the jungle. We’d walked through lots of little puddles and pools.

  The old man hadn’t been BS-ing. There actually was a path in this part of the jungle. It wasn’t very wide, and sometimes you had to duck your head, but it was a path.

  Mr. Vinh caught up to us and went right by without saying anything. Took the lead again. I never found out what happened with him and the rice paddy lady after the old man and I got our butts out of there.

  3

  I’d had this piece of jungle figured right. It didn’t go for long, and pretty soon we were at the base of a hill. I’d lost track during our trek, but I figured this was the hill the old man had pointed to. Hill 453.

  There were some trees and brush on the lower part of the hill, but it wasn’t nearly as dense as in the jungle. The old man spread one of the slickers on the ground and motioned for me to sit down. He pulled out the sandwiches — I’d almost forgotten about them — and passed them around. Mine was jam.

  “Sorry, there’s no meat. I figured it would go bad in this heat, and we’d all get sick if we ate them.”

  “Jam’s fine,” I said.

  Mr. Vinh didn’t say anything, but he pretty much attacked his sandwich. And for the next twenty minutes we had this weird picnic, sitting on a slicker at the bottom of Hill 453. We polished off one entire canteen. All of us were thirsty.