The Man From Saigon (44 page)

She lies still in the elephant grass, containing the terror within her as one might try to contain an explosive. When Anh rushes past her, crouching low, head down, she can see the determination on his face, the pulsing artery at his neck, the effort of his moving under fire. She cannot help but admire him. He is a leader, a thinker. All those days ago, almost a week now, she wondered who it was that argued for her life. It was Anh, she is now sure of that. He understood that a reporter was a useful bargaining chip, that to deliver her back eventually to the arms of her people may mean that the Vietcong would be favorably described in the press to the people of the country, of the world. He was not simply a plain soldier, unaware of the larger political arena in which he fought; in this way, among so many other ways, he was different from Hien. She would like to think, too, that there was a deeper reason why he would not kill her, why he treated her well: because the war had not sucked out all his humanity, had not emptied him the way it did so many soldiers. He is Anh, not just a man with a gun. And when she hears the sound of Anh’s body dropping into the grass not far from her, she hopes that it is only that he is taking cover. Automatically, she crawls in his direction. Inching along the sharp blades of grass, the motionless air scorching her cheeks, she thinks he is only hiding, he is only doing as she has done. She is almost certain this is the case, that he is not wounded, not dead. She sees first his sandals, his feet, his thread-bare, filthy trousers, the plain collarless shirt
he has worn for so long it shines with the oil of his skin. It is all right; he has no obvious injury; he is taking cover as she is.

“Anh! Anh, are you okay?” she asks. She calls out, too, for Son. But neither man answers. She moves closer to Anh and sees now that something isn’t quite right with his head. The outline seems flattened, with an unnatural shape she does not recognize. Looking now, she can see he has a head wound. Leaking from a hole below his ear are the frothy rivulets of brain matter mixing with dark blood and shards of skull. She looks away, feeling her breath leave her all at once. She thinks of how he stood in the dim moonlight of the night before and handed her back the shirt she now wears, how he tried not to appear friendly and yet performed the most thoughtful of acts. The contents of his skull spill out on the dry grass. She wishes she could see him again in the moonlight of last night; she would like to say thank you once more. Not just for the shirt but for everything he did for her, that he tried to do, once he found himself saddled with her. She gulps in air, feels a wild rush of panic. His face is distorted, blown outward in a grotesque mask that she cannot recognize, his open eyes covered in dirt. She thinks, not for the first time, that life and death are too close to each other. She begins to cry and move away from him, then freezes because she is afraid even to move.

There is no sign of Son and, of course, he has no weapon. She has the awful feeling that he has not survived, that none of them will. They have come all this way only to find themselves stopped in an instant. She hears helicopters once again and now the strafing begins. The bullets will land with such density among those hidden in the grass that there is no hope. She will die among the humming insects and the flies that already gather at Anh’s head. She knows she must find some way of protecting herself. She cannot sit and wait to be killed, and so she pulls herself back to where Anh lies, and in one, terrible effort, turns his body over so that he covers her, his
chest toward the high white sky, the oozing of his wounds pooling at her neck. She closes her eyes and hopes the shield of his body will protect her from the bullets above.

The spray of bullets lasts only a short time, only an instant, but during that time she feels the ground being pumped with them, the sound unlike any she’s heard before. Never did she imagine she would come under attack from Americans and she cannot understand how the war has carried on as long as it has, how the communists have lasted this long, if this is the manner of an American assault. By the time she pulls herself out from beneath Anh’s corpse, calling out to Son, hoping by some miracle he is alive, her heart beating so hard she can feel her whole head swelling with its pulse, she thinks she would almost rather die than continue with this level of fear. She feels Anh’s blood on her neck, the gray matter like a slow-moving slug. It has attracted insects which she swats away in a sudden, hysteric frenzy. Then she vomits and spits and pushes her face into the ground. As the sound of choppers recedes and still she cannot hear Son, she thinks he must be dead, and the thought of this causes her to cry out, as though struck by those same bullets that lanced the grass around her, perhaps even entering Anh’s body, though she does not look. She crawls over to the body once more, finding it covered in flies, and takes the rifle she does not know how to reload. Then she wonders who on earth she thinks she is going to shoot. The Americans? Certainly not. The Vietcong? She drops the rifle and sobs, balancing on her hands and knees, moving one way then another, like some blinded, terrorized animal. She has a sudden, unaccountable image in her mind of Minh holding up the plastic bag containing the chicken parts, the beak and skull and feet and bones. He looks so triumphant, standing with the bounty, his sword curved behind him like an eighteenth-century general, his jack o’lantern smile making him so young. He is dead. Anh is dead. She believes Son must be, too. She begins to feel hazy;
she is going into shock. The screams and cries of dying men ring out around her, but she cannot hear any more firing.

From the corner of her vision she sees the trees send forth a shower of sparks, hears a rush of fire from napalm, and then the curling, burning grass. A minute passes and eventually there are voices. They are not far away and they sound American. She might be imagining this, but she can hear their footsteps, place their accents. She hears the rustling of elephant grass and then, all at once, a pain in her side. She thinks at last a bullet has found her. Well, it is not surprising, the same sentiment expressed by Dickey Chapelle.
It was bound to happen sooner or later.
She cries out and looks up to where the sun floats above the sharp grass. There above her is a cloud of faces, the barrel of an M16, somebody’s arm pointed toward her, a .45 right in her face.

“What the
fuck?”

“Who the fuck are
you?”

“What the fuck are you doing out here?”

The pain in her rib is not from a bullet but from the boot of one of the soldiers. She was kicked, whether deliberately or by accident she will never know. Later she will find a bruise like a sunrise. For now, she can barely feel the pain, she is so tuned to everything outside of her, these new soldiers looking like monuments above her, moving like gods.

There is blood all down her front from Anh and it takes them a second to see that she is American and that she is a woman. One of them calls for a medic. “Where are you hit?” she is asked.

“I’m not hit.”

A large lieutenant kneels beside her, the cords of his neck standing out, the sweat from his brow running down his face, the adrenaline pumping through him. “Explain to me what the fuck is going on!”

“I’m a reporter.” The lieutenant says nothing and in her
confusion she thinks perhaps he doesn’t understand her. “Press corps,
un correspondant, bao chi
—”

“I know what a fucking reporter is!” he says. “But we didn’t come out with any reporters!”

“No, no, you didn’t. We’ve been lost. We’ve been—” She digs into her pocket for her MACV card and hands it over. She begins to cry so hard she can no longer speak. She wants to tell Son that Anh is dead. That she has seen Minh fall and that she thinks he must be dead, too. She wants to ask him if Hien has survived, though she doesn’t care about Hien. She just doesn’t care. She puts him out of her mind, gets up, kneeling in the field of grass, the sun pressing on her skull, black smoke from the napalm billowing up to the clear pale sky. The lieutenant lifts her up and she sobs into his field jacket and feels the deep hollow of his breath when he roars to his radio operator to get a chopper down here. There are wounded and dead all over the place; and would they please get a fucking chopper down here now.

When she sees him, it is through clouds of dust and the localized hurricane that is always created by the rotor blades of incoming choppers. At first she does not recognize him. It is as though he has been disguised by those around him, the American soldiers who, even if they allowed him to get to his feet, would be almost a foot taller than he, and who have pulled his shirt off his shoulders and drawn it like a tourniquet around his elbows, holding his arms in position. His wrists, too, are tied. In the crazy wind his hair is flattened as though someone has poured water on it. He crouches in the dust with his knees by his chin, sunken beneath the tall frames of soldiers who stand over him as guards. In this way he has been made small and insignificant. She stares as though into a sudden bright light, knowing him and not knowing him, wanting nothing more than to cross the flapping leaves, the flying debris, the
stones and twigs, branches and broken fronds, to come to his rescue. To untie his arms, his hands, to lift him up from the American soldiers, her own countrymen, who she is at once grateful to and terribly afraid of. More than anything, she is glad he is alive.

She watches him, unsure what to do, and then, all at once, he turns to her quite deliberately, as though he had known she was watching all along, and meets her eyes. His face is puffy. He has a cut on his cheek and someone has hit him in the mouth. It reminds her of when she first met him, first saw him in Pleiku at the 18th Surgical. He’d had a puffy lip, a hairy line of black stitches. She sees in his face a mixture of sorrow and longing, maybe even regret. He seems so sad there, helpless among the enormous Americans. The Americans are involved in some sort of radio operation, trying either to contact command operations or get the status of others searching for more wounded and dead in the bush. They hardly notice Son, squatting at their feet. And he, for his part, seems unaware of their presence except as a force that keeps him bound. He is focusing entirely on Susan now. She looks at him and she cannot think what to do or what he is asking her to do, as surely this hard, determined gaze is for a purpose. She’d asked him all that time ago: when they were captured, what would happen next?
Then what happens?
she’d said, the question posed in case, by some miracle, they were allowed to walk out of the jungle. And he’d replied,
It is up to you.
She hadn’t understood then what he meant, but she does now. She must do something—that much is clear to her. But she finds herself slowly, almost imperceptibly, moving her chin back and forth, still looking at Son. She doesn’t want to cross this line but she knows, even as she stands there shaking her head, that she will.

The same lieutenant who picked her out of the elephant grass and who has held on to her MACV card is still not
convinced about who she is and what she was doing in the jungle. He suddenly strides over to where she stands and barks, “Who the flick is
he?”
pointing now to Son.

She might say he is a spy. She might explain the whole matter to them, or try to. But she sees Son, the gash on his face from shrapnel making a long comma from his cheekbone to his chin, a bruise above his eye. He is bleeding, struggling to keep up with a soldier who pulls him up and moves him out of the way of another helicopter that is landing. He stumbles in the dust, shouting in English his name, his occupation, the date and place they were ambushed. But nobody is listening. The soldier pushes him forward and tells him to shut the fuck up.

“I asked you a question!” shouts the lieutenant. He looks at Susan, then Son, then back at Susan again. She can see him making the connection.

“He’s a photographer,” she says.

“He’s not a fucking photographer!”

“He works with me!”

“How about right quick you tell us what you know about this prisoner before we get a couple of guys to find out
for
us?”

To beat him, she realizes. Maybe to kill him.

“His name is Hoàng Van Son. He just told you that!”

“So what is he?”

“A photographer! I’ve told you!”

The lieutenant shakes his head, steps closer to her, and yells right into her face. “He was found with a weapon two yards away from his dead comrade! So don’t tell me he’s just taking snapshots for the local paper!”

So Hien is dead, too. She is not surprised.

“Get him off the ground,” she says now. Her voice rises as she continues, “Get that tape off him! Turn him loose! Turn him
looser!
”

She pushes past the lieutenant, running to where Son is, but
she’s quickly stopped by a couple of the GIs, who hold her so that she cannot move, not an arm or a leg, not even to turn her head.

“I can prove it!” she says between clenched teeth. Then, in a moment inspired perhaps by some long-ago advice given her by her father, she tells them who her father is, his rank and standing. She shouts this information and demands they let her go. She is so convincing that for a moment it is as though her father is still alive, that she could phone him at a moment’s notice.

It works. They release her all at once so that she stumbles forward, nearly falling. Then she rubs the places on her arms where the soldiers held her and goes to a stack of Vietcong bodies that have been dragged out of the field, the lieutenant following her.

“What do you want with them?” he says, nodding at the dead. “They’ve got nothing to say.”

Some of the bodies have already been stripped of their gear—their weapons now collected and leaning against a log, their small packs in a pile. There is always so little from a Vietcong—a gun, a dagger, some rice, maybe a P38, the tool used to open American ration cans, maybe some grenades. They travel lightly while the Americans are weighed down with all manner of packs and sleeping gear, C-rations, entrenching tools, radio equipment, medical supplies. She hopes to see Anh’s pack there among the captured supplies, but she does not. She scans the bodies lying near by, piled like rotting fish in the hot sun. Some are missing limbs. She can see clean bones jutting out from ragged, bloodless flesh. She can see the open mouths of chest wounds, whole sections torn away. Some are missing heads, feet, hands. Almost all of them are nearly naked, their clothes having been blown away or burnt. The napalmed bodies are the worst of the bunch. She cannot bring herself to look.