The Man From Saigon (45 page)

“One of the dead VCs has a pack on him with Son’s papers inside,” she says.

“Which one?”

“I don’t see him. Maybe he hasn’t been brought in yet.”

“They’re mostly here now.”

This is what she must do for him, one of the things. She must work her way through the dead men, find what he needs her to find, lie for him. It is the beginning of a series of compromises she cannot at this time imagine. She holds her hand over her mouth and nose, approaching the bodies, which are already graying, no longer looking anything like the people who once occupied them. She has to kneel to see the ones at the bottom, brush the mud off the face of another. Her eyes fill, her stomach lurches. Sometimes she finds it difficult to focus, to look for the thing she needs to find, the person. Her eyes connect with a bit of scalp, the pulpy end of a severed leg. She needs to focus on the faces; she needs to find the pack. But the sight of the dead—this close up, in front of her and around her—the fluids that pool around her feet, is all too much. She pushes one body off another and the torso goes sliding to the ground so that she almost screams.

By the time she finds him, she is retching every so often between breaths. Anh’s head is a hollow cave, his body attacked by red ants. She has to turn, then look again, over and over in little windows of sight through which she searches for the pack.

“There,” she says, trying to get the attention of the lieutenant. “There he is.”

“A dead VC. So what?”

“He has the papers. He has Son’s…he has the other reporter’s papers.”

“Oh yeah?”

“They took his papers from him. From both of us.”

But the lieutenant doesn’t move and he doesn’t ask anyone to help. What did they expect her to do? Haul out Anh’s body
herself? The pack is beneath his left arm, pinned by his elbow. She has to remove it to get to the contents. She leans over the body, her face near his shoulder, and pulls with a clumsy inefficiency you’d never see in a soldier. The pack doesn’t come away, so she has to reposition herself and try again. On the third attempt she manages to get it, the canvas blackened with blood, one of the straps missing. She steps away from the bodies with it in her hand, shaking. The pack looks like a museum piece, a bit of wreckage from some distant time. She unbuckles it and finds her arm smeared with blood from the sodden canvas. She can hardly bear to reach into it, but she does.

It must be that the lieutenant has taken pity on her because she is joined now by two soldiers. They flip Anh’s body, going through his pockets without any of the difficulty she had in handling the body. They find her yellow flashlight, her plastic comb. Meanwhile, she picks through the contents of the pack, a feeling of relief flooding through her as she recognizes the last bit of rice they carried, a water bottle, the map. Everything is covered in blood. Blood on Son’s cameras, her socks, on the pack straps and fastenings. At last she finds some papers, among them the documents verifying Son’s status:…
accredited to cover the operational, advisory, and support activities of the Free World Military Assistance Forces, Vietnam.

“There,” she says, showing Son’s MACV card to the lieutenant. She gives him the camera, too, and tells him he can ask Son what was on the last roll of film. The lieutenant takes the papers and camera over to his captain and they stand in a cluster discussing what to do. Suddenly, the wind is immense; everyone crouches as a chopper pivots, hopping upon the ground; the gunners fire upon take-off, terrifying her, and she wonders, Why bother shooting? The Vietcong soldiers’ unit, that elusive group who they have chased through the jungle now for so many days, are either stacked here dead or long gone. Any survivors would have dispersed, evaporating like deer into the surrounding
wilderness. You won’t find them, she thinks, as the choppers lift into the sky. Not out there, not a chance.

What happened later stays with her, following her always like a man in the darkness with a candle and a map. That she came rushing to his side like a loyal dog. That she never stopped to consider the dead men on either side. Literally, the American dead at the other end of the temporary landing zone, not stacked as the Vietcong were stacked that day, but arranged in a neat line of three. There were Americans holding dressings over their wounds, waiting as a chopper inched its way down, its nose bowing to the left, to the right, looking like a toad might, if it had wings. Two of the GIs were on stretchers. Another sat on the ground, his legs held out uselessly. One had a lot of blood where his knee should have been. Another had passed out but was being held up by a buddy. Kids out of high school, younger even than herself; she had not considered them. Or how complicated a single lie could be.

She found the papers. She rinsed off the blood with water given to her by a private. She told them to untie Son and, remarkably, they did.

They were brought to MACV, separated, not even allowed to change their clothes until after they were debriefed. Her clothes stiffened with dried blood and sweat; her hair matted in clumps. There was salt on her skin, at the corners of her mouth, grit in her hair, dirt so deep in her skin she would have to scrub for weeks to get it off.

I’d like some clean clothes
, she said.
I’d like a shower.

She was promised both these things, but first they had some questions for her. She sat in a windowless room in her rancid blood-stained clothes. The questions were delivered without any emotion, her answers recorded by a stenographer who pointed his long nose into the keys and typed with two fingers. Did they rape you? Did they tell you where they were going?
Did they ask you for information about the movement of American troops? Did they take advantage of your being a woman? Did they hint at where their headquarters are? The questions came and came. She wished they’d ask her something she could answer with a yes.

They did not ask whether Son was a spy. Maybe it did not occur to them, but they did ask how it was that they’d convinced the Vietcong not to murder him.

We told them we would give them good press if they released us
, she replied.
And anyway, they were too junior to kill either of us. They needed to bring us to their superiors. But they couldn’t find their unit.

Again and again this was brought up. They couldn’t find their unit. They were looking for their unit. The hamlets were destroyed; there were no people. No sign of their unit.

On the field that day, just after the battle, it had seemed more complicated than that. At her insistence, they let Son go, lancing all at once the strong tape that held his arms so that he had sprung forth like a ball, tripping over his own feet before falling once more. That had been on purpose. They did not help him, but let him struggle up, then stagger forward. He was bleeding from a mouth wound and he spat fiercely on the dry ground, then marched up to the officer who held his press credentials.

My MACV card
, he said, putting out his hand.

You’ll get it.

You have no right to hold on to it.

I have every right. You’re still a suspected Vietcong.

What grounds?

My grounds!

Do you not read the newspapers? Two missing journalists, it must have been reported
—

You saying you are one of them?

I am.

Well, you’re going to have to prove it!

She came forward. She told the officer who they were and that she was going to be writing the whole thing up, including the manner in which her colleague was being handled. He had shown his papers and according to the US government those papers were all the proof he needed. That was true, indeed. But there was more to it. The lieutenant glared at her.

We’ll see about that
, he said.

The papers were vital, but she was his proof. As they rode out on the helicopter, finally leaving after all this time, looking down at the burnt field, the husks of ruined trees, the battle and all its leftover debris that suddenly disappeared beneath them, she realized they had gotten away. Somehow, miraculously, they had lived. She looked out over the flat, water-logged earth and saw shrines between dense clusters of jungle. She saw Buddhist graves like stone bedframes, the steeples of Catholic churches. They passed a base, the sun shining off racks of gleaming cylinders, a bomb dump organized in revetments of 500-pound bombs lined up as neatly as cigarettes in their cases. She didn’t dare look at Son.

Later, while waiting to be driven to MACV, she whispers, “What were you doing, then? They said you had a gun!”

“Trying to stay alive. Like you.”

“You’re not part of us—”

“I’m on your side.
Yours
, Susan.”

“You shouldn’t have asked me to lie for you.”

“I
didn’t
ask you!”

It was true. He had never asked her for a thing.

He glances over his shoulder, making sure nobody is listening. “Please, I need to talk to you—” he says.

“You want to know what I’ll say, don’t you?” Her words rush out. She doesn’t know why she is talking like this and yet she feels incapable of stopping herself. “You want to know whether I’ll tell—”

He interrupts her. “Do what is right,” he says. He looks at her steadily and she reads in his eyes that he means it, that he is ready for whatever might happen. “That is not what I want to talk about—”

“Yes it is! Please tell me that it is. Please tell me that it is the only thing. That you want me to lie for you. Please ask me, please tell me that I have to! Or else, or else—”

She starts to cry. She has no idea why. She cries until a corporal notices and tells Son to back away. “Back right the hell up,” he says.

At MACV, they are separated for the first time and it feels to her almost as though there has been a physical incision, a cutting away. It surprises her how difficult it is to be separated. In all the days in the jungle she never realized how much she would hate this moment, when things returned to how they were and she was a person on her own, without him.

It always sticks in her mind, how at MACV, in the dingy light beneath the low ceilings of a windowless corridor, he turned abruptly as though she didn’t matter to him at all. And how she held on to that little bit of hallway where they parted, not wanting to go. “I may not want to see you,” she had whispered to him. She didn’t know what else to say. It didn’t sound like the truth, and it wasn’t. “I may not want to see you until this sorts itself out.” And with her words he turned away as though cornering a sharp bend, and went.

What nonsense. Until
what
sorted itself out? she thinks later. His allegiances? The war? Why had she sent him away like that? Because she was going to lie. She knew it as surely as she knew her own name. She was going to lie and make sure he went free, because there was something between them she did not understand, was too young to understand. He would stay with her, would always stay with her, like a tiger stalking her from half a mile off, never near but following, so that she couldn’t
settle or stop or rest, or call her life her own. It angered her. That’s why she said it.
I may not want to see you
, the exact opposite of what she wanted to say. She was
afraid
she would not see him, not in a few hours or a few days or a few years. He was being torn from her. It didn’t matter what she said; he was going to leave and she had no choice in the matter. No choice. She could not bear it—that was the truth, but she hadn’t been able to tell him. And what difference would it have made if she had?

Marc hears about it in the most sparse manner. A radio broadcast from a handheld transistor perched on a bookshelf in the bedroom, the words waking him from a drug-induced sleep:
have been found…

He is at home; not the apartment he had shared with Christine in the city but at his parents’ house, in a bedroom he occupied as a boy. The walls are cornflower blue. The window overlooks a small yard ringed by a chain fence. His mother’s old dog is outside under the bush with a bone. His mother is in the next room watching the six o’clock news, another newscast about the war. He hears the words on the radio, the words
have been found
, and knows in an instant that Susan has reached safety or is dead.

He rushes into where his mother is, puts himself in front of the television, standing in front of it and jumping in place. He is wearing boxers and a T-shirt and his movements are like those of a marionette. “Did they say anything about the two missing journalists!” he shouts. “What did you hear?! What did you hear?!”

His mother drops her sewing. He runs to where she sits and takes her by the shoulders. He is scaring her to death, but he cannot stop himself or lower his voice or drop his hold upon her. “Did they
say
anything? Did you hear
anything?
It was on the radio but I missed it. What have they said on the TV? What have you heard?”

He rushes to the telephone. He wants to talk to her; he’s got to talk to her. He’s got to know what condition she is in, what has happened, every knowable fact.

But he finds he cannot dial the phone. He is crying and he can’t move the dial all the way around; his fingers don’t hold it long enough. And anyway, he can’t think which number he ought to call. She is so far away from him, a day in a plane at least. He has to get on a plane. He has to go to Saigon. And then he has the terrible thought that maybe she won’t want to see him. All he can think is that he’s got to get a flight, and that he cannot dial the damned phone. And that the words
have been found
can refer to bodies, not people.

Outside somebody is raking leaves, somebody is driving by in a car. The dog barks, a porch light goes on. His mother stares at him, her mouth open. The television is showing footage of a demonstration in Washington. There’s no mention of reporters, dead or alive.

Tonight there is no rain and the dusty air smells of pepper and fish-heads, of flowers and garbage. Neon lights break hard colors against the pavement. A sound like thunder confuses the senses, a storm of artillery. She thinks how inside her tiny room the plaster is breaking away, splattering on the floor.