The Man From Saigon (39 page)

“Lieutenant Colonel,” Marc begins, “are you telling us that currently you are
searching
for the two missing journalists?”

“We’re looking for anything we can find, including the journalists.”

“From fifteen hundred feet?”

“Our pilots are on the lookout.”

“Fifteen hundred feet, sir? Is that what they are flying at?”

The lieutenant colonel nods. He isn’t sure what Marc’s point might be.

In the destroyed areas you would see ruined trees and scorched ground. If there were people in among all this, even in the open spaces where the jungle had been burned, the houses flattened, the villages bulldozed so that rainwater has left only muddy reddish patches, you would not notice them. The people would need to build a fire. They’d need to move and wave their hands to be seen.

“Are you looking for people before, say, applying the
military half of your
operation here? Before destroying the villages?” asks Marc.

“As you
know
, Mr. Davis, we only return fire. We do not initiate it.”

Another reporter interjects. “Are you stating that all the people in this camp came from villages in which the US military took fire?”

“No, that’s…uh…different altogether. Let’s not confuse
the conversation gentlemen. The people here are from villages we have had to shut down so that the enemy cannot use them to their advantage. We evacuate first. We only fire on Vietcong who are hiding in the villages.”

“And how do you know they are Vietcong?”

“Because they run. Or they shoot at us. These are planned operations. We do not make a quick decision to destroy a hamlet or village just because we come across one!”

“Then what are the FAC planes looking for?” Marc asks.

“People.”

“But they can’t
see
people,” Marc says. But the press conference is suddenly over. The lieutenant colonel has sat down.

Halliday finds him in the officers’ mess, at one of the dark tables in the back. Marc has been at the table a long time, but he hasn’t managed to eat, and he hasn’t managed to get up and return to wherever he ought to be now—which is nowhere, he now realizes. Here in the mess there are some gas lanterns and a set of lights strung along loops of cable. The way the lights are set up, the loosely arranged tables and chairs, and the smell of smoke and beer and food make it feel as though a party has taken place recently, the guests now shuffling away or already home in a collapsed half-drunken state, with only the stragglers remaining. But there has been no party and the mood is anything but festive. Nobody wants to be here. Not the men, not him. He doesn’t dare imagine the refugees in their camp, where there are only candles or spotlights, so the place is either overlit as though for a theater production, or shut up in darkness. He has a long, awful night ahead of him and, tomorrow, another day in this godforsaken place. He doesn’t know what good his being here could do, but it is almost too awful to go now, returning to Saigon with no more information than he left with. When he looks up and sees Halliday, he is hardly surprised. He’s probably come over to gloat. He notices also a
second man. The graying curls, the thin limbs and quick movements tell him it is Murray. He hasn’t talked to Murray since the riot in Saigon. He sees now there is still a mark on Murray’s forehead from that day, and poking out from his hand is a white bandage, a splint, it appears, like a little boat for the smallest finger on his left hand.

“Sorry about that,” says Halliday. He slaps a beer on the table and stands there, looking down on Marc. “Earlier. No need to humiliate you, though you do give us a hard time, Davis. You always give us a hard time.” He shakes his head slowly back and forth as though considering Marc, how awkward he always was when he could have been useful.

“I wasn’t humiliated,” says Marc.

“It’s tough,” Halliday says. He has a match in his fingers that he flicks back and forth, then sticks in his mouth, chewing one end. He isn’t a tall man but he is enjoying feeling tall, with Marc in the chair while he looks down. “When it’s a friend in trouble, it’s tough. But it happens. Any of us can get in trouble over here.”

Marc doesn’t say anything. He is thinking what a waste it was to come to the Delta, what an idiot he has been. He is thinking the only way they might find Susan is by dropping a bomb on her.

“It is hard. My men lose a buddy, that’s hard. We all know what it is like.”

Marc takes a swig from his beer, looks down at the floor, then up at Halliday again. “I don’t need you to lecture me. You can sit, or you can go someplace else.”

Halliday smiles uncomfortably, then nods. “All right then,” he says. “Don’t mind if I do.” He takes a seat, nodding to Murray, who also sits. There is a beat of silence between the three men, then Halliday says, “You’ve been around a while, Davis. How long you been in country?”

“Twenty-three months.”

Halliday says, “That’s a good while.”

Murray says, “We have a kind of joke among us at the bureau that the North Viets will be marching through Saigon and Davis will still be there with Locke at his shoulder filming them!”

Halliday interrupts. “You see, that’s the kind of thing that just pisses me off, you know?” he says. He has an expression on his face as though someone is stepping on his foot. “I mean, thinking the North Vietnamese are going to march through Saigon.”

“It’s just a joke.”

“Damned unfunny one.” He tells Murray. To Marc, he says, “Davis, you’ve been here long enough to know what happens here. That sometimes things don’t go as planned.”

He wonders suddenly if Halliday is going to tell him that Susan is dead. It would make sense that he would approach him in exactly this way, let him have a little to drink—not too much—and then tell him the news. Suddenly, he is sure this is what is about to happen. He sits in his seat rigidly, waiting for what is coming next.

“What do you know? You’ve heard something?” he says. His heart is beating hard; he can feel it against his breastbone.

Halliday says, “We don’t have anything new on the missing reporters, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m just saying that you’ve been around a while and you know the score.”

Marc lets out a breath. He cannot hide what is happening inside him and does not even try. He looks at Murray and Halliday, the two of them sitting next to each other. They look like they could be brothers, but Murray is younger, in his late thirties. Marc will be thirty in two weeks, a fact that comes to mind suddenly, as though someone has said it out loud. “Is this a pep talk?” he asks. His voice is heavy. He is relieved, very relieved, but the ache that has remained inside him since Susan’s disappearance is still there, will not go away, and he does not
even want it to go away. As long as he feels this way it is because he believes she is still out there somewhere, that she has the chance of being found, so he does not want it to stop hurting. If it stops, it is because he knows she is dead. “I don’t want a pep talk,” he says now. Every part of him feels heavy, as though he has been asleep for hours, or as if his limbs are not attached to him or that he is drugged.

Halliday coughs, then presses a part of his body that Marc suspects harbors a boil, and says, “You know what, Davis? You need a great deal more than a damned pep talk. A great deal more.”

Marc ignores him. He drinks his beer and looks toward the front of the mess, trying to make out if there is anyone he knows coming in, some other journalists, the guys he hung out with in the hut when he first arrived. Even Enright would do right now. He tries to regulate his breathing, his vision, his muscles. When did the physics of his own body become something he had to actively govern? If he focuses out across the room he feels better, more in control, so he looks there and waits to come back to himself.

Murray says, “There’s a good chance they won’t do much to her. She
is
a woman, after all.”

Marc says, “In my experience, women blow apart just as easily as men do.”

“I meant they wouldn’t torture her.”

“They wouldn’t even know it was torture. It’s interrogation for them.”

“But they
won’t
,” Murray says. “They won’t because she’s a reporter. I mean, she could be traded, or…uh…she could write something about how they were kind to her—”

“You are forgetting,” says Halliday, “that we are talking about the
enemy.
They are cold-blooded murderers. I’m surprised you don’t know that by now, Murray.”

“Even so, I don’t think—”

Halliday interrupted: “You don’t
think?.
I’ll tell you what, there’s not a lot the VC
won’t
do!”

“God, go back to the pep talk,” says Marc. He’s finding it difficult now to control himself. He issues himself a set of instructions: remain calm, look normal, sit in the goddamned chair. “How’s your head anyway, Murray?” he says, trying to change the subject.

Murray touches his forehead lightly with his fingers, brushing the loose curls there. “Oh yeah, it’s a lot better. Thanks for that. You and Locke, it was good what you did.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“That was one hell of a day. One hell of a riot. That girl, you know, she died. I heard later.”

Marc thinks of the young girl lying on the street, a college student not yet out of her teens.

“Be glad you didn’t pick up the gun,” he says.

“What gun?”

“The one the CIA planted next to you. You mean you didn’t
see
it?”

“Planted a
what?
A
gun?”

“This is bullshit,” says Halliday. “I swear you guys make this shit up.”

Marc shakes his head. “I wish.”

“Well, I didn’t see a gun,” says Murray.

“No, you didn’t,” says Halliday.

“It’s on film,” Marc says. He thinks it is, anyway. There was so much confusion that day. Suddenly, he cannot remember what was filmed.

“Bullshit!” says Halliday. “Bullshit it’s on film!”

For a minute nobody speaks. They drink their beer. They have nothing to add to or agree upon, nothing even to argue about. Then Halliday hands Marc a map and a little penlight that shoots a slim beam of white. He indicates a particular quadrant, focusing the beam on a section of territory to the
west. “We’re moving out this way, covering this area here. I am
asking
them to look for her. How much good will that do? How the hell should I know, so don’t ask.”

“They won’t hurt her, I don’t think,” says Murray. “It wouldn’t do them any good to hurt her.”

“Oh, shut up, Murray!” Marc says. He has taken too many of the tablets and his mind isn’t where it should be. He can’t focus on the map and it is bothering him. Everything is bothering him. Murray, for example. He’d like to hit him. He’d like to squash him like a bug under his shoe.

“I’m just trying to help—”

“Well, shut up! That would help.”

Halliday is still talking or has begun talking again; Marc doesn’t know which. He hears Halliday’s voice: “—we’ve got some scout planes. Like you said back there at the briefing, it’s fifteen hundred feet. But I’m trying anyway. Davis? Are you with me, son?”

Yes, he can hear him, but though he can see Halliday’s mouth moving and hear the words, he cannot make the connections he is supposed to make or answer the lieutenant colonel. His thoughts have loosened from him. He is thinking about Susan and about the likelihood she is hurt or dead. Or dying. Then, all at once, he is thinking about last February when he sat in a chopper watching as the gunner went into an explosion of temper, unable to fire properly on the enemy troops below because they were carrying children over their heads while crossing a river. Children as shelter from American bullets, little trophies that guaranteed the Americans would not fire. It was almost a physical effort for the gunner to turn away from all those moving, targetable Vietcong, dozens of them there, treading through the river. You could see the soldiers’ wet clothes, their boots splashing. The gunner could have taken them out in a matter of seconds, but for the children. All of a sudden, the gunner wheeled the gun and fired, shooting up the
river banks. He was screaming and firing, strafing the water’s edge. The children were screaming, the soldiers running through the water.
You getting this?
Marc had shouted at Locke. The children bounced along on the soldiers’ backs. They were like pieces of equipment, shields of human flesh, crying, terrified.
Are you
getting
this?

“Maybe she’s already been let go,” Murray says. “Could be at a field hospital. Could be—”

“It takes us a little time to get info back here,” says Halliday. “We could hear at any time.”

Marc is suddenly present once more, the images from the helicopter that day receding to the edges of his mind. “She’d get word to me,” he says. “Somehow.” He doesn’t want to think about those children any more. Or about what might be happening to Susan. He doesn’t want to think about Halliday or Murray or about this awful camp. The place was enough to make you crazy. On the way to the mess some brothers of the teenage hookers hounded him for dong, dollars, MPC. They tried to sell him beer, stolen from the base, a trained monkey on a chain. He found it all absurd and depressing. The whole time he’s been in country he’s kept on the move. Up in the sky in a chopper, or out on the flat plains with the open country flanking him, squinting into the brightness. He has always had the distance that a chopper or a fixed wing or even a jeep afforded him. In short, he’d been protected from the squalor and boredom and neediness created by war. He hates it. A siege would be a relief to him. An enemy attack almost welcome. He cannot imagine how the peasants hold up, why they don’t just sink into the mud in which they’ve been dropped and give up. Perhaps they have.

Halliday sits back on his chair. “You don’t have to stay,” he says now. “We will be in touch if anything—and I do mean
anything
—”

He wants to scream,
Then why the hell did you bring me here!

He wants to throw a chair across a room. Instead he says, “I keep hoping that somehow, by some miracle, she’ll be found.” His words are slow and strained. They hardly seem to come from him at all. He thinks he’d better stand up now. Stand up and walk the hell out of here before he says anything more. He reaches into his pocket for a tablet of diazepam and finds the foil empty. The camp, dark except where the ARVN has set up floodlights under which they construct yet more tents, puts him in mind of a prison. He wants out of here. He looks in the general direction of the jungle, which has been scalped back, so it is a good half mile away. He tells himself to stand up, but his legs don’t obey. It is a dreadful time to be coming apart and he wishes it weren’t happening in front of Halliday and Murray.