The Sorrow of War (13 page)

"Well, let's hope so. There must be a lot of them around here like this, not to mention the more horrible stories.The dead ones left behind, for example," another said.

"That's right! The dead ones, too," another chimed in. "They must also have a certain salvation."

That's right, said Kien to himself as he listened to these ramblings. After all these, we are the ones who are now confused and mired in shame. We are the ones who've become totally alienated. But we won't be like this forever. There must be some way out for us. But when?

As the novel continued to unfold on the cluttered desk in his Hanoi room, more stories came back to him. Flashes like film reels of events he had not thought about even once since they occurred.

Saigon, 30 April, Victory Day. It was pouring rain. Yes, on that momentous day of total victory, after that terribly hot noon, Saigon had been drenched in rain. After the downpour the sun came out from behind the clouds and the gunsmoke.

The last counterattack by the ARVN commandos at Tan Son Nhat airport was beaten off and Kien's troops moved in from the edge of the main runway. Kien dragged himself over to the airport lounge to find his regiment.

Of the entire scout platoon sent into the airport, only he had survived.

In the city five kilometers away the anti-aircraft guns were being fired noisily in celebration. But here it remained strangely quiet. Smoke continued to billow from oil fires, but the air had been cooled and soothed by the rain, creating a sleepy atmosphere. All around the airport the victorious troops were enjoying their greatest prize: sleep.

Kien lurched tiredly past a row of ARVN bodies, commandos in uniforms still wet from the rain, and stepped onto the polished granite stairs of the terminal. Everywhere soldiers were lying deeply asleep. They lay sprawled on tables, on bars, on benches, on window ledges, and in armchairs. The chorus of snores made Kien sleepy, too. He sat himself down by the door to the customs office and lit a cigarette. After a few minutes the cigarette dropped from his fingers and he slid to the ground into a deep sleep.

He was awakened a short time later by noises, the heat of a fire, and the smell of food. Next to him a group of armored-car soldiers were burning mattresses and polished wooden railings from the bar. They were cooking something in a huge pot. It smelled delicious.

"Smells good, don't it?" one of them said to Kien. "Have some. Down here they call them instant noodles."

Another soldier interrupted: "Goddammit, be quick, so we can get looking. Fuck it, if we aren't quick the fucking infantry'll get all the good stuff. Oh, sorry," he said to Kien, "you're infantry. Well, you'd probably know where the post-office storeroom is."

"I know where it is," Kien replied.

"Excellent. After we've had the noodles, take us there. I've got an empty armored car out there and I've not had any souvenirs for ages."

Then he looked disdainfully at Kien. "Shit, don't you know you've been sleeping next to a corpse? Couldn't you smell her?"

Kien slowly turned his head to see where he'd been sleeping. A naked woman, her breasts firm and standing upright, her legs stretched out and open like scissors, her long hair covering her face, was stretched out near him, blocking the entry to the customs office. She looked young. Her eyes were half-closed. No blood was visible.

"I was so tired I didn't notice her. I'll drag her away," said Kien.

"Leave her. Just don't touch her. Now the war's finished it'll be bad luck for us to touch a corpse."

"I wonder why she's naked," said Kien.

"Beats me. We'd just shot those bastards over there and when we came in she was already lying there like that."

"Strange. The commandos are already stinking, yet she's still fresh. Maybe women are cleaner, so their bodies don't rot as quickly," said Kien.

"Shut up! Gabbing on about stinking corpses while we're trying to eat."

Behind them they heard the customs door swing open and a crashing noise. They turned to see a huge helmeted soldier tripping over the girl's body and dropping a crate of Saigon 33 beer. The bottles scattered and broke, spreading the amber fluid all over the floor.The armored-car crew just laughed.

But the big soldier, embarrassed, got up and kicked at the body angrily, screaming at the dead girl: "You fucking prostitute, lying there showing it for everyone to see. Dare trip me up, damn your ancestors! To hell with you!"

Enraged, he grabbed the corpse by one leg and dragged her across the floor and down the stairs. Her skull thudded down the steps like a heavy ball. When he reached the concrete floor at the bottom of the stairs, he braced himself, lifted the dead girl, and threw her out into the sunshine next to another pile of dead southern commandos. The body bounced up, her arms spread wide, and her mouth opened as if she was about to cry out. Her head dropped back with another thud on the concrete. The lout walked away jauntily, swinging his arms as if he were a hero.

The armored-car crew had stopped eating, stiffened, and watched in silence. After the lout walked away they rose and went into the yard.The leader raised his AK and started to aim at the big man. "Damn you!" he shrieked.

But Kien rushed over and pushed the barrel of the gun up. As he did so the soldier began firing, but the bullets went skyward and fell harmlessly to earth around them.

"Just because of that you wanted to kill him?" Kien asked the armored-car commander.

They looked around them. The whole airport was full of officers and soldiers alike running as though they were in a marketplace. They were looting, destroying, and firing rifles into the air at random. No one had paid any attention to the scene with the corpse. Even the lout hadn't realized he'd come within a whisker of being shot.

The soldier wrenched his gun back from Kien, staring at Kien with loathing and hatred.

"Maybe she was an important officer," Kien said to the soldier, as though that would justify the treatment of her body.

"Shut up," the soldier replied. "What?"

"Shut up.You're talking garbage," he said, narrowing his eyes and spoiling for a fight.

The armored-car commander's men gathered around them. "Drop it, you two. Forget it. Today's V-Day, have you forgotten?"

The men took down curtains from the airport lounge and began to wrap the bodies up. They found some pretty clothes in a suitcase and dressed the dead girl, combing her hair into a bun and washing her face. They carried all the bodies out and laid them in a row to wait for the body truck to take them away.

"That's it. Farewell to one regime," Kien shouted.

The armored-car crew took off their caps and stood to attention.

The commander, calm by now, apologized to Kien. "Sorry for the outburst. It's just that we're fed up with corpses. We've had human flesh in the armored-car tracks and we've had to drive through rivers to wash the bits off and wash away the stink. But I just couldn't watch that asshole treating a body like that, and a woman, too. If you hadn't stopped me I'd have shot him and been nailed as a murderer, and that would have been senseless. We weren't any better, sleeping and eating by the corpse."

"That's enough," said Kien.

"No. I mean it. That slob gave us a sort of warning: Don't criticize others. Be sure of yourself first."

Kien frowned, then walked away. "Be sure of yourself first, what a joke!" Kien said to himself. He recalled Oanh's death a month earlier, the morning his regiment attacked the police headquarters at Buon MeThuot.

That day the southern government's police force had defended themselves as staunchly as any regular soldiers in the southern armed forces. It took the NVA regulars more than an hour to fight their way into the main police building. They'd been ordered to kill all men wearing white shirts and release those wearing yellow. No one knew who'd given the order but it went down the ranks by word of mouth. The attackers fired nonstop, yet the white shirts continued to pour out like bees.

In the leading force, Kien and Oanh had just taken out the machine gunners who'd been firing on them from the third floor. They had rushed up the hallway, throwing a grenade into each room they came to. The defenders were

using pistols, machine guns, and grenades to fight back and refused to surrender.

Kien and Oanh got to a room at the end of the third-floor corridor. It had a plush brown door lined with leather. The door was flung open before they got to it and three figures like white blurs flashed past them and rushed upstairs to the fourth floor.

"They're women! Don't shoot," shouted Oanh.

But Kien's AK had already sounded. Kien stopped shooting and shouted, "Surrender and you live. Resist and you're dead!"

But he had already shot the three uniformed women and they fell back down the stairs onto the green corridor's green carpet. Dark red blood spurted from two of them onto the carpet, while the third, just a girl really, slumped at the base of the stairs against a wall.

Kien and Oanh ran over to her. The air was full of gun-smoke and the smell of blood, yet the young girl's perfume seemed stronger. She was cradling her face in her hands, her curled hair almost covering them. Between her hands they could see smeared lipstick and her lips twisted in pain. The whole building was in chaos and all around them were grenade explosions, gunshots, screams, and footsteps.

Kien moved past the girl, heading upstairs, and Oanh said to the girl,"Go down into the yard with your hands up. No one will shoot you." Oanh picked up his knapsack of grenades and slung them over his shoulder as though they were avocados, and started after Kien.

Kien didn't hear the shots that killed Oanh.

With all the machine-gun fire and other noises he didn't even hear Oanh's cry as the girl shot him. He didn't realize that he had barely escaped death himself because her Walther PK38 had run out of bullets.

She had shot Oanh in the back several times and Oanh was falling as Kien, completely unaware of her shots, turned to lean against the wall and wait for him. He was about to tell Oanh not to rush out onto the fourth floor, but to use a grenade to threaten them first.

As Oanh fell the girl lifted the pistol in both hands, bending slightly forward, and aimed at Kien. He was less than ten meters from her and knew he would be hit. She pulled the trigger, but nothing happened.

Kien shot her then, coming down the stairs past Oanh, shooting repeatedly, until he stood face to face and shot her again, in revenge. But although she had been blasted back by five rounds she still leaned on her arm on the floor, raising her head, as if she had decided to sit up. Kien fired the remainder of the magazine into her and the tiles under the girl's white uniform reddened with blood. Kien squatted down near the four bodies, shaking and retching. In ten long years of fighting, since his first day at the front, he had never felt as bad.

That day at the airport he had recalled Oanh's fate as he walked around reviling the armored-car commander's advice to treat the dead sympathetically. Oanh had been sympathetic, and look what had happened to him.

Kien began drinking. There was plenty of free booze at the airport. He wandered around watching the soldiers looting, and joined in the drinking and destruction. The entertainment seemed riotous, but it wasn't the least bit amusing. They turned over furniture, smashed and ripped fittings and scattered them everywhere. Glasses, pots, cups, wine bottles, were all broken or shot up. They used machine guns to shoot out the chandeliers and the ceiling lights. Everyone drank heavily and they all seemed to be drunk, half-laughing, half-crying. Some were yelling like madmen.

Peace had rushed in brutally, leaving them dazed and staggering in its wake. They were more amazed than happy with the peace.

Kien sat in the canteen of the Air France terminal, his legs up on a table, quietly drinking. One after another he downed the cups of brandy, the way a barbarian would, as if to insult life. Many of those around him had passed out, but he just kept on drinking.

A strange and horrible night.

At times the noise of machine guns and the sight of the red, blue, and violet signal flares fired into the air at random created a surreal atmosphere. It was like an apocalypse, then an earthquake. Kien shuddered, sensing the end of an era.

Some said they had been fighting for thirty years, if you included the Japanese and the French. He had been fighting for ten years. War had been their whole world. So many lives, so many fates. The end of the fighting was like the deflation of an entire landscape, with fields, mountains, and rivers collapsing in on themselves.

As dawn approached it grew noisier, then the racket died down.

Kien felt the sharp contrast between the loud, chaotic night and the peaceful morning. Suddenly, he felt terribly alone; he sensed he would be lonely forever.

In later years, when he heard stories of V-Day or watched the scenes of the fall of Saigon on film, with cheering, flags, flowers, triumphant soldiers, and joyful people, his heart would ache with sadness and envy. He and his friends had not felt that soaring, brilliant happiness he saw on film. True, in the days following 30 April he had experienced unforgettable joys after the victory. But on the night itself they'd had that suffocating feeling at the airport. And why not? They'd just stepped out of their trenches.