The Sorrow of War (21 page)

Kien started to protest again, but it was too late. The train was moving out of the station with sharp, sudden tugs as the cars clanked against each other. Soon it settled into a modest speed.

"Come over here," said the voice, "plenty of room, more comfortable.You can sleep in each other's arms. President Johnson's on holiday, he won't attack tonight."

They moved hand in hand between bales of goods piled roof-high. "Move along, move along," the voice said and there were grumbles from other men trying to sleep. "Make way for a pretty young girl," the voice continued.

Phuong entwined herself with Kien the moment they were settled. She kissed his cheeks, trying to calm him. To Kien it was part nightmare, part daydream, and even in the tightest embrace a sense of the unreal stayed with him.

The crudely made, old-fashioned freight car had a high roof which creaked along with the joints of the car's walls. Wind howled through broken timbers.

A sensation of hopelessness swept over Kien. Phuong felt his unhappiness: "Why don't you . . . why don't you want me?" He couldn't answer. He simply lay there listening to the puffing of the engine, smelling the damp odor of the straw and earth on the car floor and the mixture of coal dust and fumes in the air.

Every few minutes very small stations and sidings whizzed past his vision, some with dim lights on poles the only evidence of their existence. Then a thundering as they crossed a steel trestle bridge.They were heading into the Red River Delta where the action started and he was savoring the last moments of freedom and romance with Phuong. God knew what would happen to them when they got there.

Kien, more than a decade later, relived those last minutes in the train. Phuong had long since left him for the second time, although for some reason a lamp still burned in her apartment. Many times, after a night of drinking, he would forget the lamp had been left on and imagine Phuong had returned. He would stand before her apartment door knocking and calling before remembering the light had been burning ever since she left.

From now on it was nostalgia and war recollections that drove him on. With Phuong gone this was his only hope of staying in rhythm with normal life. The sorrows of war and his nostalgia drove him down into the depths of his imagination. From there his writing could take substance.

Kien and Phuong had been just sixteen years old when they completed the ninth form. Kien remembered the event well. It had been in August, the start of August.The Chu Van An school's Youth Union had organized a vacation camp at Do Son, on the Tonkin Gulf. Even non-Union members like Phuong and Kien were eligible to go.

The early days of the camp were wet and dismal. The sea seemed to be perpetual foam and it rained all day long. Then one afternoon the clouds parted and the sun shone brilliantly and the mood changed.

The students unpacked their gear and began pitching tents on the foreshore. As they shot up it reminded Kien of multicolored mushrooms suddenly sprouting between rows of casuarina trees. That evening the students made a huge campfire and started a party around it. It was an extremely happy time for them all, and as the flames grew higher in the night the beer, wine, and music flowed and

guitars and accordions started playing as the students began to sing.

It was a memorable, happy evening around the campfire amidst the trees with a background of the darkest of seas. The night wound down slowly and pleasantly, the students gradually dropping off to sleep. Kien, close to Phuong, noticed she was a little apprehensive and asked why.

"Something abnormal about the sea," she replied evasively. "Frightening."

A normal sea breeze was blowing, the waves were soft. The moonlight glittered on the waves and overhead the starry night seemed peaceful.

Kien noticed nothing unusual.

He threw some more driftwood on the campfire. Phuong gently strummed a guitar but didn't sing.Then they heard muffled adult voices and heavy footsteps.

From a group of men, one stepped forward. "Why haven't you doused the fire?" he asked angrily.

"Put it out? Why?" asked Kien, looking up.

A sailor with a rifle slung over his shoulder stood there looking down at them. "Put it out," he said, starting to kick sand over the fire.

"Why?"

"Don't ask why. We got orders tonight. No fires on the beach. No lights. They order it, we carry it out. We aren't allowed to ask why, it's a military order."

"Is singing banned, too?" asked Phuong, feigning innocence.

The sailor lowered his gun, softened his stance, and sat down with them. "No. Don't stop singing. That's got to go on at all costs. Sing us a song now," he invited.

Two others from the shore patrol returned, sitting down and looking at Phuong. She said to the first sailor, "Oh, I wasn't intending to sing. I just asked if singing was banned."

"Sing all the same, sister," he said sadly. "Sing a farewell song to us. I'll tell you a secret; you'll know tomorrow anyway. It's war. America has entered the war. We're fighting the Americans."

Phuong nervously started picking at the guitar, sweeping her slim fingers along the strings. After taking a deep breath as if to calm herself, she raised her head and, as her shawl fell from her shoulders, began to sing sweetly. Her audience of Kien and the patrolmen sat silently, moved to sadness as the sweet words flowed:

The winds, they are a-changin'.

The harsh winds blow in the world from tonight,

No longer the peace

We were hoping for.

Our loved ones grieve for those who'll be lost.

No longer in peace

Our children will live.

From this moment on,

The winds, they are a-changin'.

The first old sailor had begun to sniffle. He looked over sadly at beautiful Phuong and handsome Kien as though they were a doomed generation, already victims of a new, long war.

War! War! The sea roared out the message in the small hours of 5 August 1964. A small storm began far out across the Tonkin Gulf and the group looked on as distant forked lightning seemed to signal the start of the war. Nearby the other students in tents around the fire also began to wake up and slowly, realizing something new was upon them, began to gather around the fire and talk over the news.

Kien and Phuong slipped out of the campfire circle to a quiet spot where they couldn't be heard or seen. They

embraced urgently. The realization they would certainly soon be parted and their world would soon be changed heightened the desperation. They whispered innocent, passionate vows to each other, promising never to waver in their love. And they spoke of death.

When they returned to camp it was to an unruly scene; the wind had whipped up and the distant storm had quickly found them. Blankets rolled off along the shore, sand blew in sprays and tents broke from their pegs, and just as the howling wind died down the heavens opened and the short-lived seaside vacation was washed out.

That's how the war started, with a storm. For Kien the storm continued for nearly eleven years, and even after the war his mental skies were clouded for another ten.

Now, twenty years later, he let the pictures flow back across his mental screens. He pictured himself and Phuong on the freight train, heading forVinh. It was a crazy adventure. Kien was now a different man from then; Phuong was perhaps not so much changed. She had in those years accumulated a mountain of sins and an avalanche of innuendo on her reputation. Yet she remained for him an enigma, someone ahead of her time in so many ways and strangely, eternally pure.

The freight train had not stopped at Phu Ly as they expected. It had turned a little east and rushed on towards Vinh on the coast, blowing long, sorrowful whistles as it gathered speed in the night. Phu Ly, Nam Dinh, Ninh Binh, all flashed by and were left behind to the north. Everything seemed to be going so well.

"Good for us," said Phuong, pleased the escapade was being prolonged. Her sense of adventure was heightened with every mile and she cuddled up to Kien, whispering to him, "The farther we go, the more I'm lost, the better it is. We'll see what war is like."

Now it seemed like fiction, some imagined story on the fringe of his war memories. But it was real enough.

The train howled on through the night, never stopping at stations. Once, on a straight run through some grain fields, it stopped for a few minutes. Several men furtively climbed aboard and the train started off again.

As the newcomers moved in, everyone moved along and space became tighter and tighter. Who were they? Soldiers? Merchants doing quick deals? Highway robbers? More smoke, more stink.

One of them imitated a stationmaster shouting after their train as it sped through his small station: "Doonnnngg Giiaooooooo—whooosh!"

Phuong laughed softly. "How far to the killing fields?" she asked.

"So you can't sleep either?" Kien replied. "Sleepy, but can't sleep."

lomorrow. "What if there's no tomorrow?"

And so their intimate nonsense had continued for the next hour, a period of delirious romantic joy in extraordinary circumstances.

On the peace train returning home Kien had met Hien, the invalid girl. They had become friendly and on the last day they had shared a hammock. Hien, sad-eyed, sweet, the girl from Nam Dinh. She'd not been able to sleep either and kept whispering sweet nothings to him as the train clattered north towards Hanoi.

The first days of the war, with Phuong, passing Nam Dinh. The last days of the war, with Hien, herself from Nam.

The peace train, as the soldiers called it—it was officially called the Thanh Nhat, the Unification Train—passed Thanh

Hoa in the glow of dawn. Easing himself from Hien's embrace, he peered out through the window. Fields, roads, mounds, villages, dewy grass, riverbanks, bamboo clumps, coconut plantations, ponds, hills, cemeteries, rocks, creeks, all flashed past in the dim morning light. "Going home, going home," the murmur of the tracks, began to change gradually to "Going south, going south." For an eerie moment he seemed to be with Phuong ten years earlier, both of them seventeen, going south, south, south.

They had clutched together in furious embrace on the floor of the rough freight car, surrounded by unseen but close shadowy figures, snoring and smoking and murmuring.

Yet they were a world apart and Phuong stretched herself invitingly against him time and time again as if lying on a soft bed in a first-class sleeping-car. Kien's passion would rise and he would move in close, only to withdraw at the last moment, like a warrior half-drawing a sword from its sheath, then ramming it home again.

She urged him on. "Come on, darling. Are you afraid?"

Kien was about to respond, he recalled now. What would it have been? Finally, their pure spirits joining in true love in those strange conditions?

A strange, whistling sound came to them from above, then other sounds like the howling of engines high in the air. "Planes! Bombers!" someone shouted and the mob in the car began scrambling in the dark.

Jet planes had found the train. High above, in the very early morning, they were circling, then diving.

Kien was slow to react. He was still dazed by the activity as he heard orders being shouted: "Stop the train. Alert, alert!"

As the train was slowing, terror reigned. The compartment door was jerked open with a crash and men in panic

began jumping from the braking but still moving car, hitting the tracks and sleepers with sickening thuds. Kien was standing up close to the door trying to get his bearings when the first direct attack came. "Kien! Kien!" he heard a girl call. It must have been Phuong, but it came from a different corner of the car and he couldn't see anyone in the dark. The planes dived again, strafing with increasing accuracy as flares lit the scene.

Blinded, he turned inward and saw in the blinding light the incredible sight of Phuong lying prone on the floor, fighting a big man on top of her. She was struggling desperately, her hair flowing, her clothes being ripped from her, her mouth covered by a massive, brutal hand as he settled over her in a rhythm.

A blast hit Kien and he was flung from the car onto the rail embankment and rolled roughly, striking metal with such force that he fainted. When he came to his chest was burning, blood had begun seeping into his mouth, bringing a salty taste, and he felt sick. He looked at the train, with cars broken but basically intact, and heard a whistle. With some urgency the engine began puffing away, and the cars one by one clanged as the slack was taken up and began moving slowly on.

Kien jumped up and opened a freight-car door. But Phuong was not there. Nor was she in the next, or the next. In panic, he jumped onto the steps of an escort locomotive, fearing he would otherwise be left behind. Two mechanics, wearing overalls smeared with oil, looked over at him with sympathy. Their faces were smeared with coal dust and oil, their eyes shone chalk-white through these strange masks. One of them picked up a shovel and began stoking the furnace. The older man, the engineer, pulled on a cord and a screaming hoot was emitted. Kien sat there, hardly taking any of this in. He began to fall sideways into a faint. The