The Sorrow of War (2 page)

Kien sinks into reminiscence.

Whose soul is calling whom as he swings gently and silendy in his hammock over the rows of dead soldiers?

Howls from somewhere in the deep jungle echo along the cold edges of the Jungle of Screaming Souls. Lonely, wandering noises. Whose soul is calling whom this night?

To one who has just returned the mountains still look the same. The forest looks the same. The stream and the river also look the same. One year is not a long time. No, it is the war that is the difference. Then it was war, now it is peace. Two different ages, two worlds, yet written on the same page of life. That's the difference.

Kien recaUs: At the time of our first stay here it was late August. Between the jungle and the forest along this stream,
rosa canina
blossomed in the rain, whitened everywhere, its perfume filling the air, especially at night.The perfume vapor permeated our sleep, fueling erotic, obsessional dreams, and when we awoke the perfume had evaporated but we were left with a feeling of smoldering passion, both painful and ecstatic. It took us months to discover that our nightly passion-frenzied dreams were caused by the
canina
perfume. Those diabolical flowers! Kien had seen them in the jungles along the western ridge of the Ngoc Linh mountains and even deep inside Cambodia around Ta Ret, but nowhere did they grow the way they did here, with such powerful scent.

The
canina
here grows close to creek banks, within reach of the mountain carp, which nibble at the roots, so when caught their taste is exquisite but instantly intoxicating. The local people say
canina
thrives in graveyards or any area carrying the scent of death. A blood-loving flower. It smells so sweet that this is hard for us to believe.

Later it was Kien's scout platoon, taking a break in some idle moments, who decided to try drying the
canina,
slicing the flowers and roots, then mixing them with tobacco as a smoke. After just a few puffs they felt themselves lifted, qui-edy floating like a wisp of smoke itself floating on the wind. The tasty
canina
had many wondrous attributes. They could decide what they'd like to dream about, or even blend the dreams, like preparing a wonderful cocktail. With
canina
one smoked to forget the daily hell of the soldier's life, smoked to forget hunger and suffering. Also, to forget death. And totally, but totally, to forget tomorrow.

Smoking
rosa canina
Kien would immerse himself in a world of mythical and wonderful dreams which in ordinary moments his soul could never penetrate. In these luxurious dreams the imagined air was so clean, the sky so high, the clouds and sunshine so beautiful, approaching the perfection of his childhood dreams. And in those dreams the beautiful sky would project pictures of his own lovely Hanoi. The West Lake on a summer afternoon, the scarlet flame trees around the lake. Once in his dream-picture he had felt the waves lapping the side of his tiny sampan and looking up he had seen Phuong, youthful, innocently beautiful, her hair flying in the Hanoi breeze.

The soldiers each had their own way of smoking
canina
and ridding themselves of their shared harsh realities. For Cu, cassava alcohol or
rosa canina
conjured up images of returning home. Cu could relate the scenes vividly, making them sound so joyful that tears fell from everyone's eyes as he unfolded the scene in soft words. Vinh dreamed only of women, describing his imagined and planned love affairs with youthful enthusiasm. As the affairs dragged on the women became more voluptuous and the affairs more complicated, the descriptions more erotic and explicit. As for Elephant Tac, he dreamed mainly of food. He spoke of long tables laden with wonderful and exotic dishes and of sitting down to savor the moments, morsel by morsel, dish by dish.

The lethargy brought on by
rosa canina
spread from Kien's scout-platoon huts through the entire regiment. It wasn't long before the political commissar ordered the units to stop using
rosa canina,
declaring it a banned substance.

The commissar then ordered troops to track down all the plants and cut all the blooms, then uproot all the trees throughout the Screaming Souls area to ensure they'd grow no more.

Along with the gambling and smoking of
canina
went all sorts of rumors and prophecies. Perhaps because the

Is soldiers in their hallucinations had seen too many hairy monsters with wings and mammals with reptilian tails, or imagined they smelled the stench of their own blood. They imagined the monstrous animals plunging about bleeding in the dark caves and hollows under the base of Ascension Pass on the other side of the valley from the jungle.

Many said they saw groups of headless black American soldiers carrying lanterns aloft, walking through in Indian file. Others paled in terror as horrible, primitive wild calls echoed inside their skulls in the rainy, dewy mornings, thinking they were the howls of pain from the last group of orang-utans said to have lived in the Central Highlands in former times.

The rumors and the predictions were all seen as warnings of an approaching calamity, horrible and bloody, and those who leaned towards mysticism or believed in horoscopes secredy confided these fears to their friends. Soon there sprang up tiny altars in each squad hut and tent, altars to the comrades-in-arms already fallen. And in the tear-making smoke of the incense soldiers bowed and prayed, whispering in prayer:

Suffering in life, pain in death,

The common fate of us soldiers.

We pray the sacred souls will bless us,

That we may overcome enemy fire

And avenge our lost comrades . . .

The rain had kept pounding, day after day. The fighting seemed blanketed by the immense dull sea of rain; if one stared hard and long into the dark, grey, wet-season sky, or listened to the rain falling on the canvas canopies, one thought only of war and fighting, fighting and war.

The rain brought sadness, monotony, and starvation. In the whole Central Highlands, the immense, endless landscape was covered with a deadly silence or isolated, sporadic gunfire. The life of the B3 infantrymen after the Paris Agreement was a series of long, suffering days, followed by months of retreating and months of counterattacking, withdrawal, then counterattack.Victory after victory, withdrawal after withdrawal. The path of war seemed endless, desperate, and leading nowhere.

At the end of the wet season the echoes of cannon fire could be heard a hundred kilometers away, a harbinger of a poor dry season over Con Roc, Mang Den, and Mang But.

That September the NVA forces attacked Kontum township's defense lines.The firing was so loud that it shook the earth as if every square meter would rise in a ground-swell and burst. In the 3rd Regiment, hiding in the Screaming Souls Jungle, the soldiers waited in fear, hoping they would not be ordered in as support forces, to hurl themselves into the arena to almost certain death.

Some of those waiting found they were hearing a musical air in their heads, the sound of guitars rising and faDing with the sounds of the Kontum carnage. Soldiers of that year 1974 sang:

Oh, this is war without end,

War without end.

Tomorrow or today,

Today or tomorrow.

Tell mc my fate,

When will I die . . .

Late in the afternoon of Can's escape, that wet, boring autumn afternoon, Kien was sitting by the stream fishing.

The drizzle was relentless, the day lifeless and gloomy. The stream was swollen, its waters turbulent and loud, as if it wished to wash the banks away. But where Kien sat fishing there was a silent eddy around bare tree roots, exposed where flood waters had bitten deep.

Kien nestled in his jute raincoat, hugging his knees, staring blankly into the rolling stream, thinking of nothing, wanting nothing. Now that the
rosa canina
had all gone there was nothing for his soul to grab hold of, so it wandered, meandering freely. Every day Kien would sit for hours by the stream, motionless, letting its sorrowful whispering carry him along.

That autumn was sad, prolonged by rain. Orders came for food rations to be sharply reduced. Hungry, suffering successive bouts of malaria, the troops became anemic and their bodies broke out in ulcers, showing through worn and torn clothing. They looked like lepers, not heroic forward scouts. Their faces looked moss-grown, hatched and sorrowful, without hope. It was a stinking life.

To buoy himself up, Kien sometimes tried to concentrate on uplifting memories. But no matter how hard he tried to revive the scenes, they wouldn't stay. It was hopeless. His whole life from the very beginning, from childhood to the army, seemed detached and apart from him, floating in a void.

Since being recruited he'd been nicknamed "Sorrowful Spirit" and this now suited his image and personality, just as the rain and gloom fitted the character of the Jungle of Screaming Souls.

Kien waited for death, calmly recognizing that it would be ugly and inelegant. The thought of his expected end brought a sense of irony.

Just the week before, in a battle with Saigon commandos on the other side of the mountain, Kien had truly made fun of death. When the southern ARVN had faced his own northern NVA troops both sides had quickly scattered, rushing to take cover behind tree trunks and then firing blindly. But Kien had calmly walked forward. The enemy had fired continuously from behind a tree ahead of him but Kien hadn't even bothered to duck. He walked on lazily, seemingly oblivious to the fire. One southern soldier behind a tree fired hastily and the full magazine of thirty rounds from his AK exploded loudly around Kien, but he had walked on unharmed. Kien had not returned fire even when just a few steps from his prey, as though he wanted to give his enemy a chance to survive, to give him more time to change magazines, or time to take sure aim and kill him.

But in the face of Kien's audacity and cool the man had lost courage; trembling, he dropped his machine gun.

"Shit!" Kien spat out in disgust, then pulled the trigger from close range, snapping the ARVN soldier away from the tree, then shredding him.

"Ma . . . aaaaaa!" the dying man screamed. "Aaaa . . ."

Kien shuddered and jumped closer as bullets poured from all sides towards him. He hadn't cared, standing firm and firing down into the man's hot, agonized body in its death throes. Blood gushed out onto Kien's trousers. Walking on, leaving blood-red footprints in the grass, he slowly approached two other commandos hiding and shooting at him, his machine gun tucked carelessly under his arm, his shirt open. He was unconcerned and coldly indifferent, showing no fear, no anger. Just lethargy and depression.

The enemy backed away and dispersed in retreat.

Despite that imprudent, risky action Kien was invited on return to the military personnel section and told he was on the list of officers selected to attend a long-term training

course at the Infantry Institute near Hanoi. The order would soon come down from the divisional commander and Kien was to travel back up north.

"The fighting is endless. No one knows when it will stop," the hoarse, gloomy personnel officer told Kien. "We must keep our best seeds, otherwise all will be destroyed. After a lost harvest, even when starving, the best seeds must be kept for the next crop. When you finish your course and return to us, your present officers will all be gone and the regiment with them.The war will go on without you."

Kien remained silent. A few years earlier he would have been proud and happy, but not now. He did not want to go north to do the course, and felt certain he would never join them, or become a seed for successive war harvests. He just wanted to be safe, to die quietly, sharing the fate of an insect or an ant in the war. He would be happy to die with the regular troops, those very soldiers who had created an almost invincible fighting force because of their peasant nature, by volunteering to sacrifice their lives. They had simple, gentle, ethical outlooks on life. It was clearly those same friendly, simple peasant fighters who were the ones ready to bear the catastrophic consequences of this war, yet they never had a say in deciding the course of the war.

Someone was coming up to him from behind, but Kien didn't turn. The person came closer, then silently sat down behind Kien as he fished on the edge of the stream. At that late hour the bamboo forest on the other bank seemed to make the dusk thicken. The brief rainy day faded away quickly.

"Fishing?" the person asked.

"Obviously," Kien replied coldly. It was Can, chief of Squad 2. A small thin boy, nicknamed "Rattling" Can. "What's your bait?"

"Worms." Kien added: "I thought you had a fever. What're you doing here in the wet?" "Caught anything?" "No. Just killing time."

Kien mumbled. He hated any confidences, any sharing of personal problems. Hell, if everyone in the regiment came to him with personal problems after those horrendous firefights he'd feel like throwing himself over the waterfall. He knew Can was going to unload some personal problems on him.