Message from Nam (43 page)

“Oh, God, Tony, why? Why did she do that?”

“She thought she had to.”

Paxton felt a loss like none other she had felt before. A loss mixed with despair and sorrow, and loneliness now that her friend was gone. She wondered if she would ever be the same again. And Tony knew that even though she would seem to be one day, perhaps she really wouldn’t. They were all like that now. Pieces of their hearts had fallen away long since, like lepers’.

And it was a long time before she felt even halfway human again. January passed like a blur. February with it. And finally, in March, when the monsoons came, she began slowly to feel human. She had been in Viet Nam, all told, for close to two years by then. And she and Tony had been together for eight months, which, these days, felt like a lifetime. She had a hard time talking about Ralph, or France, or the children. But she could talk about others she’d lost without feeling quite so totally destroyed. But Tony had been right. They were different.

They went out less frequently than they had before, and with the bad weather now, they seldom went away for the weekend even when he had a stand-down. Instead, they tucked themselves into her hotel room and talked and drank and made love, and tried to make some sense of what they were seeing. Her articles seemed stronger now. And the paper had written her a while back and told her she was being considered for an award, but she didn’t really care. Those things didn’t matter now. All that mattered was staying alive, and the end of the war, and maybe one day going home again, to see what was there, if anything. And now they talked about Joey a lot, and Paxton urged him to write to the boy more often.

Tony’s tour was up in June, and he knew he wasn’t going to re-up, but he didn’t know what else he’d do either. He didn’t want another tour in Viet Nam, but he didn’t know if he was ready to go home yet. And Paxton had no idea what she was doing. She had told the paper she was staying another year last June, but that wasn’t written in stone. She could always have gone home sooner or later. And she and Tony never talked about future plans. It seemed too dangerous to do that now, and both of them were getting superstitious.

But they were happier than they’d ever been, and closer and stronger. The death of Ralph and France and the children had shaken her to her very core and made her reach out and come closer to Tony. And he needed her more now too. The thought of going home frightened him, although he talked about it very little. All they knew, for now, was that they were going to make one more trip to Hong Kong in May, and after that they’d have to figure out what they were doing. And she still wore the ruby ring he’d given her the last time they’d been there, everyday and everywhere. It was her bond to him. A band of rubies and a heart, and it touched him that she always wore it. Like her, he made no promises, no demands, but his heart was hers. Forever.

Three weeks before they were to go to Hong Kong, with the monsoon in full swing, he set out on a mission to an area that was supposedly crawling with VC and had been for weeks. They loved infiltrating during the monsoon, and the grunts hated to go after them in the rains. They hated the constant wet, and had immersion foot from always having their feet wet.

It was hot and sticky and wet and miserable wherever they went, but they still had to go after the VC. So on a Tuesday morning they set out, and walked into a major ambush. Fifteen men were killed almost at once, and nine were wounded. The helicopters hovered but couldn’t see a bloody thing, and the spotter planes couldn’t take off at all in the weather. A second unit was sent in to help, more boys were killed. And the lieutenant himself took some shrapnel. It was a colossal mess, and it was two days before they could extricate themselves, and retreat back to Cu Chi with their dead, their wounded, and what amounted to tremendous losses. They came back wet and sick and scared and horrified by what they’d been through. And they came back without Tony. He was listed as missing in action.

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25

T
he lieutenant came to tell her the news himself at her hotel. But Paxton knew long before he arrived and knocked on her door that something had happened. She had sensed it for two days, and she had barely eaten or slept. She just knew that something was wrong, although she was not sure what yet. And oddly, she had the feeling that he wasn’t dead, but maybe wounded. And then the lieutenant appeared at her door, and she backed into the room with a look of horror.

“No …” She held up her hand, wanting him to go away. This couldn’t be happening to her again. It couldn’t. She wouldn’t let it.

“Miss Andrews,” he said uncomfortably, standing in the doorway, “I wanted to come and see you myself.”

“Where’s Tony?”

There was an endless pause as their eyes met and held and he shook his head unhappily. “I’m afraid he’s missing in action. I can’t tell you anything more than that. No one actually saw him take a hit, or go down … but it was a real mess out there. The monsoon, the VC, we were ambushed. We were fed erroneous information and we were attacked. We lost a lot of boys, and I’m afraid Sergeant Campobello just isn’t accounted for. We combed the area before we left, and we didn’t find his body, but that doesn’t mean he’s not dead. I just can’t tell you more than that right now, except that he’s missing in action.”

“Could he have been taken prisoner?” The thought of it made her stomach turn over. She knew too many of those horror stories from Viet Cong who talked about the way they treated prisoners, and one GI who had escaped and talked to her several months before. But at least he wouldn’t be dead. At least there would be hope. Maybe.

“It’s possible.” The lieutenant didn’t want to raise false hopes. “But not likely. I don’t think they were interested in taking prisoners, just in hitting us as hard as they could. And they did,” he said sadly, still standing near the doorway, and she didn’t invite him in any farther. He was like the angel of death standing there and she didn’t want him in her life for another moment.

“Where were you?”

“We went through the Hobo Woods to Trang Bang, and then up to Tay Ninh, pretty close to Cambodia. And that’s where we lost him.”

She sat down in a chair as she listened, and put her face in her hands, trying to believe he was dead, but somehow she couldn’t. She just couldn’t go through it again. Not with him. It had been bad enough with the others. But with Tony, she’d had something she’d never had with anyone, a kind of trust, a strange symmetry, a kind of unspoken understanding. They always seemed to understand what the other was thinking. And now she was thinking that he wasn’t dead, and she didn’t know why, and she didn’t know what to say to this man standing in her doorway. All she could do was look up at him and finally she just thanked him for coming to tell her. It would have been worse hearing it from someone else. But this was odd. The other times, she had known they were dead. She could grieve, she could mourn. And if she’d been brave enough, she could have seen them. But there was no question of what had happened. But now, all they could tell her was that Tony had disappeared in a rainstorm, or something like that. It was crazy. And maybe he’d turn up in the morning. And after the lieutenant left, as she lay in the bed that she and Tony had shared for the past ten months, she had that same feeling that someone was going to come and tell her there’d been a mistake, and he was fine. Only this time she really did believe it.

And she felt like that for days. She couldn’t even bring herself to cry, because she refused to believe that he was dead. And she went on moving, like a zombie. She wrote columns, she read Teletypes, she went to the AP office, she wrote a piece about Saigon, she even went on a brief mission. And when she was in town she went to the Five O’Clock Follies. And by now, after two years in Saigon, everyone knew her. She was certainly the prettiest correspondent there, and one of the youngest, and apparently one of the best, as the award they sent her from the State of California was supposed to attest. But she didn’t really give a damn, and she brushed it off, as she did everything else, and those who knew her well knew why. Tony was missing, but she had died. In April. And as she went on moving, she could barely function. Everything she cared about was gone. The people she had loved had all left or died and taken the past with them. And without Tony, she had no present and no future. And it was May second when her brother called and told her their mother had died unexpectedly of a complication after a gallbladder operation Paxton hadn’t even known about, and he thought she should come home to help Allison with the arrangements. She told him she’d call him back, and that night she drove to Cu Chi and went to see Tony’s lieutenant to find out if they’d discovered anything, but they hadn’t. No one knew anything more than they had in April. And Tony’s family had been officially notified. First Sergeant Anthony Edward Campobello was missing in action.

“What the hell does that mean?” she railed at him, oblivious to his rank or his good intentions. “Do I wait for him here? Do I look for him myself? Do I help you? Do I go home and wait? What the fuck do I do now?” she asked, as tears bulged in her eyes for the first time. She couldn’t hide from it anymore. He wasn’t coming back, maybe never, and she was beginning to understand that. And then, in a broken voice, “What if he’s still wounded out there?”

“I don’t think he is,” the lieutenant said gently, “Paxton, I think he’s gone. I think we just couldn’t find him. I’m sorry.” He reached over and touched her arm, and she moved away so he couldn’t make the pain any worse with his kindness. “You know what I think? I think you should go home. We all have our limits here. All of us. The smarter ones go home when they reach it, the others wait too long. You’ve done the equivalent of two tours. Don’t you think that’s enough? Tony was going home in June, and he thought you were too. Why don’t you hang it up, and go home now? If we find something, I swear to you, we’ll call you.” She nodded, and looked at him for a long time, and then she walked out of the room, and she knew that he was right. It was time for her to go home. Maybe for good this time. Without Tony. She had grown up in Viet Nam. She had come here as a girl, heartbroken over the boy she had lost, searching for answers. And she hadn’t found them, she had found only questions. She was twenty-four years old, and she had lost three men to this war, four if you counted Ralph, and friends, and colleagues, and even people she didn’t give a damn about, like Nigel. And a piece of herself that she knew she would never find again. But she had found something too. She had found a truth, and a country that was dying, a beautiful place that had once been lovely and was slowly being destroyed. But she had seen it before it had disappeared. And she had loved him before he’d gone. And wherever he was, dead or alive, he wasn’t missing to her. Like Viet Nam, she knew she would always love him.

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26

H
er last day in Saigon passed like a dream before her eyes, and it was strange how little there really was to do, once she decided that she was leaving. She said goodbye to everyone at the AP office that afternoon, and she could hardly speak when she left, because all she kept thinking about as she walked across the square was Ralph, and France, and the two children. She went to the Five O’clock Follies for the last time, and then just for the hell of it, she went to the terrace at the Continental Palace Hotel. And the beggars clamoring there no longer frightened her, they just depressed her. She ran into Jean-Pierre and said good-bye to him too. But there was no one she cared about anymore. The people she had loved were gone, for assorted reasons.

She sat down and had a drink with Jean-Pierre, but he was already pretty far gone, and for some reason, he kept talking to her about Nigel. He had been dead for a long time, and she was beginning to wonder if she had stayed, whether she would have wound up like Jean-Pierre, drunk, confused, aimless, bitter. Those who stayed too often did, and yet those who left were never quite the same again either. So who was left? Those who died? Who went unscathed after the time they spent there? Maybe no one. Maybe that was the conclusion to all this. That no one won. And no one ever would.