The Man From Saigon (38 page)

Suddenly, Susan bolted up, off the cot, out of his embrace and the warm sleepy hold they’d had upon each other. She might have walked out of the room but there was nowhere to
go and anyway she was not dressed. He stared at her, confused; he was suddenly brutally awake, blinking into the darkness. His first thought, of course, was that there had been some sort of emergency, an alarm he hadn’t heard, a warning, the whining sound of incoming,
something
, anyway, that he had inexplicably missed. He was ready to grab his clothes, his boots, his helmet. The sweat trickled down his spine, his sideburns, into his eyes. This happened in an instant. He was even more confused when she said,
Is that what you want me to do?
in a fierce whisper.
Forget? Is that really what you want?

He didn’t know what she was talking about. He had to flip back to the conversation now, calm his ringing head. There was no sound of incoming, no shouting or the telltale noise of dozens of feet suddenly hitting the floor all at once.

He said,
Yes
, He said,
I don’t know.
He said,
What is the matter?

She hadn’t been talking about the war. She’d been talking about their love affair. He realized this eventually, but it was too late: he’d already launched them here.

You’re asking me what is the
matter? she said, all the fury suddenly burned out, her voice deflated as though they’d been talking all night, when they had not. He wanted to reach out to her, but he wasn’t sure even where she was standing. The room was dark enough to hide everything but her voice. He leaned over and got the small yellow flashlight from the floor. It flickered on, then off, and he shook it until the batteries settled and at last there was a spray of light. He saw freshly their crumpled clothing, the gray cement floor, her battered portable typewriter set up on a makeshift table constructed from old ammo boxes, a short stack of onion-skin paper on which she had already typed reams of single-spaced despatches. Earlier in the night he’d come in and picked her up off that chair, unclipped her hair so it fell against her shoulders. She’d been laughing.
Get off me! Stop, hold fire, desist!
He’d nestled
with her on the low mattress, kissed her throat, and put his face against her hair, breathing in the sweet smell of her shampoo. She was so important to him, a kind of tonic to the war; he’d put his hand across her back and lifted her to him. Such an easy, pleasant way they had with one another, but somehow it was slipping, had slipped, away. Now she slumped against the wall, dropping slowly to the ground, her bent knees hiding her face as she brought herself down to the dirty floor.
I love you
, she said.
That is the matter. And it sounds like you won’t even miss me.

He could not have her. Didn’t she realize that? He felt unfairly glued within his marriage, almost as though he’d been drafted into it. And she didn’t truly want a future with him; he didn’t believe that. What he thought was that she had become temporarily mesmerized, but that just as surely as she would one day decide she’d had enough of this war, she would decide she’d had enough of him.

Oh, I’ll miss you
, he told her.

In the evening, the sun crosses the sky in a shroud of red, the birds in dark flocks sweeping above the trees. It is beautiful. The jungle provides a shadowed backdrop of fronds and tall, elegant trees. The sky is painted with reds and oranges, changing by the minute, by the second. On the ground, however, it is not beautiful. A child is sick and a dog eats the vomit, its tail wagging slowly back and forth like an oscillating fan. There is litter ground into the mud and bits of rope and broken boxes. He sees that the driver was wrong about the Keen: the refugees are more than happy to drink it. The mosquito nets have been taken away, the cups and stirs, the dry vats, everything, so the children climb the newly empty tables as though they are playground equipment. Out on the area between the refugee camp and the military base, stepping gingerly over a muddy road deeply grooved with tire tracks and boot prints, a string of
scantily dressed girls in slit skirts and overly red lips make their way. They are the teenagers who spend their afternoons in a series of newly erected, barn-like buildings, sloppily laced with wires for electricity, with painted signs in English, reading “Paradise Club” and “Sexy Bar.” Their shoes are altogether wrong for the terrain; they try to keep the mud from their clothes. Finally they stop, huddling clumsily together near a bus that will take them to Saigon to work. They are closed for business to the soldiers in the neighboring compound because the soldiers don’t go out at night here. Too dangerous. So the hookers work the afternoons near the compound and then pile on the same blue bus that transports the young aid workers, those in their elegant
ao dzais
, so beautiful it is as though they’ve come from some other, better world. He watches the mismatch of girls, the dwindling line, and then the bus as it begins its precarious journey north to Saigon.

Halliday does not show up for days and then he appears all at once, driven into the camp in the back of a jeep by one of his advisors, and is brought into the command tent, where he stands before the press in a pair of knee-length shorts, a plaid open-necked shirt, and a straw hat around which is tied a bit of camouflage material. The hat he has brought with him all the way from Bloomfield, New Jersey, where it is not so hot, and where the strip of leather with the embossing of the hat-maker’s name that makes up the band does not cause quite so much perspiration as it does here in the tropics. Halliday brushes his hand over his brow every minute or so. It is not possible for a Westerner to acclimatize fully to the heat of the Delta, but Halliday has not made a single stride in that direction. His clothes cling to him, his wet shirt rides up his middle. He is smoking a cigar, his lips pursed around the cylinder of its base, affecting the air of a man whose vacation has been interrupted by an unexpected local conflict over which he must now preside.
But he has missed a loop with his belt and his combat boots contrast the shorts in a manner that makes him look like an undressed army officer, not a holiday-maker. He begins the briefing by explaining he has been laid low these past couple of days with a medical condition which he delights in describing to his advisors and the assembled press as “a
real
pain in the ass”—a boil, dutifully lanced by the corpsman. “Size of a peach,” says Halliday. “Lancing the bastard nearly sent me into orbit, so you will excuse me if I don’t sit down.”

There are about a dozen or more reporters present, looking uncomfortable in the hot tent. Some laugh nervously; others look completely bewildered by the lieutenant colonel’s statement, by his casual clothing and the way he smokes through the briefing. Whereas a couple of days ago there appeared to be only Marc and maybe one or two other newsmen about, they are everywhere now. There had been a lot of talk about the success of these camps and then, perhaps inevitably, an outbreak of cholera that weakened the military’s claim over the achievement. Finally, there was an enemy attack on one of the camps closer to Saigon. There had been no press there at the time; the story was nearly buried altogether, and so the press are here in force and likely, for a week or so anyway, to remain.

Marc has had enough of the camp, the refugees, the muddy, dug-up, stinking earth, the crying children, and the noise from yet more destruction of the surrounding jungle. If Halliday had been here—here at all, in the compound anywhere—in whatever state of health, boil or no boil, he feels he ought to have been told. Halliday catches his eye; it is clear he knows exactly who he is. No doubt he will make the same “medical” excuse for having made Marc wait for over two days. The thought that he’s been duped for this long infuriates Marc. Standing in cramped quarters in the oven of the command tent, he is in no mood to hear about the man’s ass.

Halliday, by contrast, seems in uncommonly high spirits.
“Are they feeding you well?” he says to the reporters up front. It’s the same way the generals greet the troops, pausing on their inspection of the line.
Getting hot meals, son? Getting your mail, son?

“Enough bunks for you all? Sleeping okay? Sorry about the noise, of course. We got to keep the perimeter safe for you. It’s what we do, ya’ know.”

They’ve been sleeping in the compound, in quarters set aside for all the visiting press. Sleep has not been easy for Marc; it never is, but here in the Delta the bugs are even more persistent. Plus, he’s been kept awake at night by the ARVN 5th Division firing liberally into the Free Strike Zones like a bunch of crazy cowboys. What little sleep he’s managed to get has been accomplished only with effort and he often feels he is straining his body toward it, that he is asking his tired muscles for a hard thing. It isn’t even the guns that bother him so much. It is only that he sometimes reaches a place where his body is like a stone, fixed, unmovable, while his mind carries on its ceaseless whirring. He is thinking about Susan and how many hours, then days, have passed without any word whatsoever about her. The constant worry seems to have settled over him like dust. He has grown used to it, so familiar with the discomfort of his thoughts that they seem normal to him, as when nightly he opens his eyes in the dark to find himself gripping his poncho so tightly his knuckles hurt, or when the blasts go out beyond the perimeter and his mind clicks off the gun and size before he has had time even to realize he is doing so. These are some of his acquired habits. He lies down with his glasses, water, and cigarettes beside him, always in the same position. A penlight, a notebook. He wears his socks; on a bad night even his boots.

His cot here in the army compound, once well away from others, is now crowded next to other journalists here to get their stories about what the military calls “the civilian half” of their operations. Even Murray is here. He sees him standing in
the front of the tent now in loose, long sleeves, a pair of shorts, a cloth hat. He has a bunk near Marc’s and he eats with the soldiers three times daily, walking around with a disapproving air since the cholera story broke (not his story, but his wire’s story), and staying fairly clear of any interaction with the refugees. The refugees, of course, sleep without blankets, on the ground.

“This, what you’re seeing here, is really the ARVN,” continues Halliday. “I can’t take credit for this, no sir. Our job is to get out and do the
military
half, find the Vietcong.”

“And how successful have you been there?” asks one of the journalists.

“Oh, very successful, I’d say.”

“You don’t have a number of dead? Of detained?”

“Not an exact number.”

“An estimate?” This is from Murray. He squints into his pad and prepares to write a figure, but Halliday doesn’t give him one.

“It’s not official yet,” says Halliday. Murray nods, and makes a note.

There are questions about medical supplies, about food supplies, about how long they intend to keep the people here. The answers are vague, never quantified. The only number he hears is when someone asks how many hours the PA system is going to carry on extolling the virtues of the government. It seems to the reporter it is repeating itself, though of course he cannot understand the language. But it turns out this is exactly the case. There is a set message and it plays all the time, or near enough.

“Fourteen hours per day, every day,” Halliday answers. You’d think he’d be embarrassed to admit as much.

The reporters are clustered uncomfortably in the hot tent, their boots sinking into the damp ground, breathing the gassy, hot air, their notebooks out. Some seem to have given up trying
to get useful information—perhaps believing the lieutenant colonel when he says he will be sure to inform them of any “new developments”—others become angry, firing off questions about the “new area” to which the refugees are purportedly being sent, and what exactly is the strategy of the
military half
of the operation.

Halliday walks three steps one way, then three steps another in a cloud of cigar smoke, blustering on with no content whatsoever to anything he says. The advisors look almost as frustrated as the reporters. There are two of them and occasionally they whisper into the lieutenant colonel’s ear some information, which he either does not report or cannot understand. Marc wonders if they have some actual information, something useful, quantifiable, that Halliday is failing to reveal. Of course, they will not interrupt their superior’s monologue.

“I’m sorry, is this
a press
conference?” says Marc. It’s the first thing he’s said, the first time he’s opened his mouth. He has no idea why it should stop everyone so suddenly, or why all eyes are on him now, as though he’s just fired a pistol in the air or done something else suitably dramatic.

The lieutenant colonel says, “Yes, this
is
a press conference, Mr. Davis.” His frustration is rising now; perhaps his ass has begun to hurt again. “But if you are interested in only one fact—that is, about the whereabouts of pretty young lady reporters who venture where they should not be—then I do not have any information for you
yet.
I can assure you our FAC pilots are looking. But so far, no sighting. Things may change, and I will be only too delighted when we ascertain the whereabouts of the two missing reporters. Does that help you, Mr. Davis?”

Halliday must have been waiting to say that for the last half-hour, Marc thinks. He also thinks of the times he has flown in the little FAC Cessnas, sitting with the pilots and looking out the windows at the yellowish rice fields, the villages nestled in
the softer greens of coconut and banana trees, taking in the view of houses and paddies and roads and rivers. From such a height, bomb craters filled with water reflected like sequins, so that when he looked down it appeared the landscape was bejeweled. He has seen, too, black masses from napalm and the way the explosions of mines left long scars over the fields. He has even seen people, if they were wearing broad conical hats and standing in a clearing. But anywhere there was jungle, he saw jungle. Only jungle.