The Man From Saigon (12 page)

Over there
, she said. She didn’t look, just gestured with her hand in a reluctant manner. The barrel was like the others but further away. At first Susan couldn’t bring herself to step toward it, imagining the nurses—imagining Donna—hauling a severed arm, a foot, a leg, burying them in the fuel, setting them alight. She got closer, looking back at Donna, who arched her hand up, the one with the cigarette, indicating she could not go near the fuel.

She saw Son again then, his wild hair, blood on his mouth, a swollen lip. He was skirting by the door, patting his pocket for a cigarette. He seemed to know her; she could feel it, the way he regarded her, the contents of her reflection through his eyes. He made a show of getting out his cigarette, putting all his attention into that one small task. But something in the way he looked at her caught her attention completely. She knew
exactly what she saw, a recognition. He wanted something from her, she thought, but she didn’t know what.

On the second day, early in the morning, the soldiers catch a monkey. It screeches at them, reaching with its claws like a cat, trying to fight off the hand that holds its neck. She turns away, unable to look, but the image of the monkey’s face remains with her, as does the sound of its screams and the way the soldiers laugh. They kill it quickly, dragging the body, now slack like a child’s doll, over to the flame to cook it for breakfast. She thinks sadly that if they are willing to risk all the smoke the monkey’s carcass makes, they must be quite convinced there are no American troops near by.

They eat what they want, then give her some of the meat. She is hungry, so she takes it. She has to push away thoughts of what it is she is chewing; she struggles to imagine the meat only as necessary protein and fat. Later, they also give her a gift. It is a ring of dull metal, fashioned out of the remains of a downed American gunship. The ring in her hand feels like some part of the dead pilot, his teeth, his eye. She drops it on the ground and it is returned to her at once. She tells them she does not want the gift. She does not tell them it makes her sick to look at it. The monkey they ate was strung up with a vine and cooked over a fire. She cannot look at what is left of it now, knowing she has eaten the flesh. She hadn’t wanted to eat it; she was driven by hunger. But there is no need for the ring. She gives it back; they press it into her hand once more. She throws it at them and it is returned as though this is her wish. It is a game. They laugh at her distress, just as they had laughed at the monkey as it fought for its life. The ring ends up in her pocket. The monkey is left charred on the grass, its skeleton not unlike that of a human baby. She feels suddenly like giving up, but she cannot think of what exactly there is to give up on. Son watches and says nothing. She thinks he looks ashamed.

She asks them for the hundredth time for her boots, explaining she can no longer walk like this—barefoot, with cuts newly infected across her soles and the tops of her toes, along her heels. She begs them for the boots.

“Tien!” they call. There will be no discussion about boots.

“No tien!” she says back. “I can’t walk!”

Finally, even Son tells her to stop arguing. The boots have been booby-trapped with explosives and planted along the trail, he explains. He whispers this information. Stop talking, he tells her, or you’ll be more thirsty. All she can think about is water and her boots. She has become a true prisoner, with her bare feet, her parched throat. The sores on her feet fill with clear fluid. They pain her, become numb, then ache. She looks down on them as though they belong to someone else. She feels sorry for her body as though it is a thing separate from herself to which she longs to be kind but cannot be. She makes herself walk, imagining her body as a dumb animal, carrying her head, her brain, all her thoughts.

The heat is a hazy, invisible force through which they travel, made worse by the nauseating stench of the jungle floor. When they stop, she tries to pick off the body crabs, rub the hurt out of her heels. She figures out later that they did not understand that her feet were soft, unused to being exposed, incapable of stepping across a jungle floor. All over the country the children walk barefoot. It was inconceivable to them that she would not be able to do even that. At one point Son tried to give her his own shoes, but the tall one with the long hair signaled no, then called out a warning in Vietnamese. Son turned toward the soldier as though to attack, spitting out something she couldn’t understand. He began firing off words so fiercely that for a moment she thought the soldier would have no choice but to shoot him. The two stared at each other for a good half-minute, the energy between them like two
bulls, and then Son leaned over slowly, dropping on to his knee as he did so. He ripped the bottom of his trousers, held up the torn portion and slit it into strips and then began to bandage her feet, the insects hovering around his head as he worked, one landing on his lip, the same place that the nurse in Pleiku had stitched. He spat it out rather than take his hand away from the job of doctoring her feet. The soldier didn’t like what Son was doing; he stood with his gun ready, but he didn’t really intend to shoot them. It was half-hearted, a show of strength, nothing more. By then the boots were miles back, and had she tried to retrieve them they would have blown up in any case.

It is this soldier, the one with the long hair, who is in charge—she guesses he is in charge. He seems to be the one who decides about such things as food and cigarettes, which direction they go and for how long. During a moment of rest in the afternoon, she shows him her feet. He looks surprised at how they have split and bled. He is sorry about that, he tells her, then gives her the remaining water in his bottle, helps her up. He tells the tall, thin one to give her some medicine and he does so from his pack, unloading the iodine that was originally hers. The bottle has a leaky cap, she notices, so that when she moves it her hands are stained by the brown fluid. She does not want to lose a drop of the liquid, which is all she has by way of defense against infection. When she hands the bottle back to the soldier, she says to him, “Be careful with this; don’t let it roll around in your pack.” But the soldier, the thin one, pays no attention. She thinks of this man as the thin one because he is so much taller than the others and he looks as though he has been stretched. His feet are long, his ankles and calves. But she notices, too, how little muscle he carries and that his fingernails are overgrown and shelly, lending an oddly effeminate character to him. He seems to disregard her even more than
the other two. He gives no indication he understands about the iodine and deposits it into his sack with no special care, turning away impatiently as though the idea of giving her any medicine—including that which belonged to her in the first place—is unnecessary.

She follows the soldiers, trying to keep up with them. The swelling in her feet means she moves with a short-strided rolling gait, pulling herself with whatever foliage she can hang on to and sometimes regretting it when a vine splits into sharp fibers that cut her skin. The one with the long hair shows her which leaves to avoid, those with saw-like edges. He looks angry when she hurts herself, tells her not to drink water during the day. It will only make you stink, he says. And your feet will swell more. The feet have become an embarrassment to them, a source of argument. The thin one seems especially resentful, as though it had been her choice to become their prisoner, to chuck out her boots, to hurt herself walking.

At one point the soldier who she now calls Long Hair lends her his own sandals with rubber tracks tied to the bottoms and she is amazed to see how he himself glides easily barefoot. After several hours he still shows no signs of discomfort. No wonder the soldiers find her complaints mysterious. She believes they practice walking barefoot in order to force themselves to be careful through the paths, avoiding mines. She notices, too, how quietly they move, even in the difficult areas. American soldiers might hack through the jungle with machetes. They might try to plow an armored vehicle right through dense brush. Bulldozers, tanks. What they really wanted was to clear the whole damned thing.

Not that they weren’t capable of more subtlety. The patrol teams that went out at night were stealthy, cat-like, silent. But the Vietnamese soldiers, who she watches and cannot help but admire, are more so. They march without any sound at all, barely disturbing the vegetation. Sometimes, they are more quiet
than usual, scowling at her when she makes a noise, as though she does so on purpose. She gets the sense that if she doesn’t follow instructions, stepping softly, warily, they will find her a liability, even shoot her, though they never say so. Perhaps she imagines this, the way she imagined the captain’s face. She hopes the need for silence is because of the proximity of American troops, and that somehow, miraculously, they will stumble upon a group on reconnaissance. That would be lovely, if by accident she was to walk into freedom. For an hour or more this hope swims in her thoughts, then her mind goes blank, concentrating only on the next step and the next. She is exhausted by the heat, the air that feels as though it contains no oxygen, the physics of movement. All she can tune into are the mechanics of her body that signal the need to drink, to eat, to shit. When she sits down, she sleeps. Her body tells her to do this, too, even through rain.

In Pleiku, where she met Son, she’d found it difficult to talk to the doctors. When finally she got to them they seemed so buggy, troubled, and exhausted that sometimes they couldn’t even answer a question. One of them, Howe, had been on shift for twenty hours. By the time she interviewed him, he seemed almost incapable of thought, let alone language. He was shaky, pumped up on Dexedrine, which a nurse dropped into his mouth like a gumball while he was working on a patient. She watched the way that happened, how he lifted his chin toward the ceiling, parted his lips for the nurse’s fingers, made an effort to swallow. His breath was sour, his pupils wide. She couldn’t understand how he could operate on one more person, let alone the dozens or so who were waiting.

There had been a push, the medevacs arriving like a swarm of bees; they kept bringing in the wounded and bringing them again. Howe stood in the operating theater like a mechanic. Susan heard a young man—he might have been a teenager—
bargaining for his legs. She’d had to leave then. It was just too much, listening to the young soldier asking so politely for the doctor to try to keep at least one leg for him.
You already took the other
, he said.
Let me have that one.
She walked around outside, shaking, the boy’s voice echoing in her head as she stood in the cooling evening air. She stood on the wet ground, staring out at the landing strip and the open red sky. A few minutes later she was surprised by Howe, who appeared outside for a break. He cupped his hand around a burning match to light his cigarette, then looked out over the muddy landscape, untroubled by her presence. She clutched her elbows, hugging herself, trying to forget how the boy had begged for the one remaining leg. Howe smoked assiduously, preoccupied, his attention turned inward. Susan paced, then stood still, thought about going back inside, then couldn’t. Howe dropped the cigarette in the mud and went back and she could have sworn he hadn’t noticed she’d been there at all.

Later, as she held her notebook over her wrist, angling her pen, she asked him what sort of changes he’d seen at the 18th Surgical. He said,
Yeah, a lot of changes. An awful lot
, but he wasn’t able to name a single one. He blinked often, rubbing his eyes. He didn’t look right. She tried another question and that one, too, seemed to bounce off him. She relaxed the notepad, repositioned her pen in her pocket. Howe seemed at times to be looking up, over her shoulder or listening to the air. She noticed he had a revolver belted on, a small Smith & Wesson, known as a “hush puppy.” She couldn’t think why he’d need such a thing during surgery and wondered if he even knew he was wearing it.
Yeah, so it’s been a day
, he kept saying.

She asked about the boy’s leg and he said,
The first was a…uh…traumatic amputation. The other, well. We couldn’t save the foot.

She had to pause just then. She thought of the boy, now a double amputee. The barrels outside, the smoking fuel.
I see
,
she whispered. She had to work to remember her next question.

She asked him about the triage system, a method of sorting casualties as they came into the hospital. A great number of hospitals across the US were now adopting the same method based on the experiences of field hospitals, and she wanted to know how they felt about the system here.

Yeah, well, you get the Immediates right away
, he said.

The Immediates were those needing attention the fastest. The Walking Wounded would wait.

How do you feel about the Expectants?
she asked. These were the guys they put behind a screen, the ones they did not make any effort to save. They were Expectants because they were expected to die. She’d sat with a few already that day. She’d meant to take a photograph. She really
ought
to have taken a photograph. But she did not. She’d recently been told a story by a photographer. He’d been standing in front of a line of bodies that were bagged and awaiting transport and they’d run out of bodybags—they ran out of everything in the Highlands—and some of the bodies had to be wrapped in ponchos. The troops saw the photographer and told the guy to put the camera away. They held their rifles pointing upwards, a sign the safeties were off.
Don’t you want people at home to see what you’re going through?
the photographer reasoned. The response,
Get rid of the fucking camera NOW
, sent the photographer’s hands into the air. He backed away. She imagined those troops, the ones ready to shoot the photographer, the look in their eyes, the hurt, the anger, every time she wanted to take a photograph of a dead body. They’d said,
How about we kill you and take a picture?
Even when the guy had walked away. They said,
You know what, you’d stink just as bad and never believe any different
, and in her mind’s eye she saw the photographer nodding as he left. The story stayed so strongly it felt at times she’d actually been there. She had not. But she thought about those men
and she found she couldn’t photograph bodies in the hospital. And she couldn’t photograph those waiting to die.