The Man From Saigon (13 page)

There was another reason she didn’t take pictures that day in Pleiku. It wasn’t just that she felt wrong about doing so. The fact was that the Expectants were not always unconscious. As often as not, they were awake but dopey. One of them started a conversation with her. He thought she was his girlfriend. Then he thought she was his mother. He said,
I need a doctor.
A few seconds later, he died.

The triage system?
she reminded Howe. He seemed to have forgotten she’d asked a question, or even that she was in the room. A desk fan had come loose from its cage and the blades clacked against the casing. From somewhere behind them came a long, low howl, then a man’s voice saying,
Shit, shit shit.

Howe nodded, blew out his lips. There was a slow twilight outside the high windows of the Quonset and he seemed to concentrate his vision there, outside, where the incoming arrived and arrived.
That’s okay
, she said.
I’m sure I have enough.

They march at night, for hours at a time without pause. They march through showers and she discovers that her clothes stay cleaner because of the rain. Except in the mountains in the north of the country, the rainwater is hard, and the volume of rain during a downpour is such that it will wash your hair almost as well as a weak shampoo. She is astonished by this. She is astonished when one of the soldiers shouts a warning to her and pulls her toward him with surprising strength just before a tree falls across the path. The high humidity of the jungle means that trees rot from the inside out, falling with no warning. She asks him how he knew the tree was about to fall and he looks at her with an expression as though she is mildly retarded, or pretending to be so. Finally, unusually, he answers. “I know.” It was the one with the gap in his teeth, the pink tongue. Long Hair. Gap Tooth. The third she hasn’t a name for,
then she realizes of course that he is the Thin One, which is ridiculous because they are all so thin.

She runs into a cactus. The thorns pierce her thigh and she cannot get them all out. They give her a funny feeling in the muscle, as if menthol has been poured into her veins. The part that is disturbing is that it doesn’t hurt. If anything, she feels an increasing numbness. By the end of the day there is a red mark like an asterisk forming at the center of the wound. Son hauls Long Hair over and shows him the infection. He seems to have no reaction as Son shouts and points. She feels the numbing around the circle of red skin on her torn fatigues, checks to see where the normal sensation begins again. It hurts and itches and then goes numb again. They give her more of the iodine, which she notices has been dripping into the sack the Thin One carries. She dabs it on to her feet, on to her thigh. She wishes they’d let her be the one to carry it, but they will not. The next morning there is a swelling on her thigh, rising like a tiny volcano beneath her skin. She uses a thorn as a needle, puncturing the inflamed skin, then watches as a stream of brown pus flows.

She asks for the iodine again and, reluctantly, they hand it over. She does her best not to spill a drop, and she thinks about the tree, how it rotted from the inside.

The soldiers find it embarrassing to wait for her as she takes a measure of privacy in order to relieve herself. The three argue between themselves as well as with Son. The arguing has increased, but always in Vietnamese, so she has no idea of the content. Finally, it is agreed she can go on her own to a discreet bush, though they keep three rifles trained in the general direction in which she squats.

This is ridiculous, she thinks, to be shot while peeing.

They take turns lending her their sandals. She thinks they probably regret giving up the boots for bomb-making.

“You have more seeds?” asks the Thin One.

“Of course not. If I had, I’d have eaten them.”

“Look for more.”

She shakes her head. She has nothing on her and they know that. The soldier is impatient so he grabs her hand and pushes it into her front pocket.

In English she says, “Oh yes, do help me, please, as I have no idea how to search for items in my own clothing.”

They are nearly out of food, she finds out. And now they are stingy with the iodine, not letting her use it often enough, though Son keeps arguing for it.

Son has grown thinner, his clothes torn, embedded with filth, his hair dirty and disheveled. Hour by hour he seems to look more and more like their captors and less like himself. It scares her, this transformation. It is almost as bad as the guns and the bullets, the rotten feet, the fact that she has no choice. No choice at all.

Normally, when they didn’t want to be understood by Americans, she and Son spoke in French. Now he has clearly decided he doesn’t want her to understand and he is suddenly, resolutely Vietnamese, talking to their guards, walking with them as though he is part of their team. At times she hates him almost as much as the three others, who are silly and young and don’t even inhale when they smoke their cigarettes. Son is older than they are; he knows the agony she is in, the fear, the desperate desire to connect, to connect with anyone. He knows how to help her, to reassure her, and she is stunned by his refusal to do so. She thinks of all the things she would like to say. Dramatic damning conversations between herself and Son. She plays each scene out in her head, then suddenly dismisses them all in favor of some kind of resolution. She misses him. He is never more than five feet away and she misses him.

She listens to the soldiers arguing, having no idea what they are discussing. She always imagines it is over whether or not to kill them. They have been attacked by fire ants and sweat bees. They stink and swear. Their unit is nowhere to be found but they plow on with a ferocity that sweeps her forward, too, carrying her along. Although Son is holding up well, she is exhausted and ill. Her feet bleed and swell further, with creases developing around the ankles, even though now she has sandals. Son tries to give her his shoes again but the Vietnamese shout and gesture and threaten until he is forced to take them back, so she continues with the pairs of sandals they lend her, which are all right, really, perhaps better than shoes in some ways. But why is Son allowed boots and she is not? Why do they let her borrow their own sandals but not boots? They are capricious and stupid, she concludes.

On the third night, she listens as they sit in a circle, facing each other, smoking, sharing their dried fish, the last of her sunflower seeds, cigarettes. She cannot understand them, but they seem to be discussing something serious. The way they bow their heads together, the tone of their voices even though she cannot understand the words.

What she needs is some sense of what is in store. Ever since their capture it is as though she has been free-falling through space and it is this, as much as anything, that makes her crazy. She hears the sounds of monkeys, of flapping birds and all the hundreds of unseen insects. She itches and aches. Her clothes hang on her, oiled over and over by sweat.

“They are deciding whether or not to shoot me, right?” she asks Son now. “If they are going to keep us they have to feed us, and they’ve run out of food. Is that it?”

He shakes his head, doesn’t want to talk. His hair is greasy, pushing over his eyes in thick dark locks. His skin has a muddy cast, as she imagines does hers. “Son, talk to me,” she says, but he shakes his head.

“Okay, look, flick you, okay?”

Still, he says nothing. He is listening to them, she knows, and he cannot both listen and talk at the same time. But it doesn’t matter any more. She wants some information. Now.

“If you don’t answer me, I’m going to go over there, make a grab for one of their goddamn guns, and get myself shot,” she says. She crouches in the leaves, holds her wrists up to remind Son that they haven’t tied her this time. “Are you getting this?”

And now, remarkably, she finds herself rising, obedient to her statement, one that had come out of her mouth without any thought at all but seems nonetheless to have momentum. She will get herself shot. If nothing else, it will serve as a kind of destination. A stopping point.

Son puts out his hand, closes his palm over her kneecap. “They aren’t going to shoot you. They just don’t understand who you are.”

“What about you? Why haven’t they—” She can’t bring herself to finish the question. What she’d been told about the VC is that they kill any man of fighting age. And anyone aligned with Westerners. Certainly, Son was both these things. By rights he ought to have been shot in the first few minutes of his capture. She’s seen the bodies of men just like him, caught out at the wrong time, made an example of, left with notes stuffed into open cavities in their bodies, sometimes a dreadful mutilation adding to the details written later on to the form under Reason For Death. “Why haven’t they shot you?” she asks him.

“Same reason,” he says, but she doesn’t understand.

She remembers the hospital in Pleiku and how, on her way back to the nurses’ quarters where she was bunking for the night, she heard some commotion from the POW ward.

The POWs did not always get the first or best treatment. She’d already figured out that it was hit and miss for them. In
a situation in which the nurses and doctors were already over-stressed, they got what they got. Today there was a young North Vietnamese officer guarded by two soldiers. He’d come in the day before covered in red dust, his clothes moldy, his skin like leather, with a serious belly wound. You would think he would be left on a litter and placed to one side. He wouldn’t be allowed in the Expectant area as he was North Vietnamese and they would always be kept separately from Americans, even when dying. But in his case, he was not left to wait, much less to die. Every effort was being made to save him. He was a high-ranking North Vietnamese officer. He had a “city accent,” was educated; they needed him for questioning.

He knows something, maybe a lot of things
, one of the soldiers told her. He was chewing gum, leaning against the wall. His ears were crusted with bug bites and sunburn and he had a tattoo, she noticed, a necklace of barbed wire.
It took some doing, getting him here alive
, he said.

Five American soldiers had choppered in with him, two of those were already dead, and the three live ones were ready to take him out with their own hands. The company had lost thirteen men in a day. Thirteen dead, more wounded, and here was an enemy officer with lines coming out of him, everyone fretting as to whether he was going to make it. The grunts didn’t like that. It had been touch and go all the way to the hospital, whether someone behind an M16 was going to find it impossible
not
to kill him.

He doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere
, Susan said. She found it difficult to believe he was an officer. He didn’t look like the US officers. He was as thin as a child; had a pinched face. His mouth sagged open, revealing a white film that encased his gums. He smelled like earth and urine and sweat. Where the tubes entered his veins there were flecks of dried blood, dark bruises, swellings where fluid collected stagnant beneath his flesh. Donna arrived every so often to suction him as he lay
mute, handcuffed to the bed, conscious, but barely. Susan was willing to bet he couldn’t turn over, let alone run. She didn’t like to see him in handcuffs when he couldn’t breathe on his own and she asked the soldiers why they kept him like that. She’d never heard of such practice.

Yeah, well, one of these gook bastards got a hold of a pair of scissors and tried to stab a nurse last week, so we’re staying put
, was the answer.

She asked what happened to that guy, the one with the scissors. The soldiers looked at each other, then smiled. The one with the barbed wire tattoo flicked his hand at her dismissingly. The other said,
Think real hard, and you’ll get there.

A few minutes later, one of the soldiers had gone off for a smoke and the other was checking on a buddy of his who had come out of post-op and was now on the ward. The hospital was so small that everyone was squashed in together. You could hear conversations from behind the screens that divided the wards, shouting from outside when instructions were given, the moaning of wounded soldiers. Footsteps, clanking trays, the rattling wheels of instrument trolleys, a rush of water from the tap, doors opening and closing, and occasionally the
thwack-thwack-thwack
of more medevacs pouring in, bringing their own windstorms, bringing new men to fill up the small space where the medical staff worked—constantly, it would seem. The soldiers who were guarding the North Vietnamese officer hadn’t gone far. The officer was alone, but not very alone.

But when one of the soldiers returned from his smoke to where the officer lay, he thought the guy didn’t look right. A mustardy hue had gathered round his eyes, a blush of lavender ringed his lips. His fingernails were blue. His eyes were pinpoints. He didn’t respond when the soldier yelled at him, when he pointed his gun, when he shook him.

He’s dead!
he called.
Fuck, Evans, get in here. He’s dead!

Evans was the one with the tattoo. He collided into Susan
as she came rushing in to see what had happened, and it felt like running into a door. Suddenly there was a team of nurses, Donna screaming for a doctor, yelling that the prisoner had coded. Howe arrived, absolutely crazy, shouting at Donna that she shouldn’t have left him so long.

Donna looked down at the POW, her lips pressed tightly together. She didn’t join up to take care of POWs, you could see it in her face. You might have judged her for that, but her feet, her ankles, were swollen. She was wearing boots two sizes too large, looked ten years older than she was. The war was putting on her and putting on her.
He’s not dead!
she said.
Until I say he’s dead, he’s not dead!
She might have been speaking to the soldier who was not Evans, the one who had been yelling, or possibly to Howe or to herself. The soldiers crowded around the POW now, rifles behind them, staring intently.
Sit down!
Donna ordered and they dropped back like trained dogs.