The Sorrow of War (3 page)

"It's raining heavily in the North," Can droned on in his gloomy, dispirited voice. "The radio says it's never rained as hard. My home district must be flooded by now."

Kien just cleared his throat. More rain was falling. The air was getting colder and now it was quite dark.

"You're about to go north, I hear."

"What if I am?"

"Just asking. Congratulations."

"Congratulations? Congratulations?"

"Please. I'm not jealous, Kien. I'm sincere. I know you don't like me but can't you understand a little of what I mean? Accept what Heaven gives you.You've survived down here and now you'll go north and continue to survive. You've suffered a lot.You were from an intellectual family, so it's not right for you to die anyway. Just go, and let events unfold here. We feel pleasant envy for you.You deserve it."

"I'm not going anywhere to make others happy. I know you're scared of being killed, but you have to overcome your fear by yourself. You can't place that responsibility on others' shoulders."

Can seemed to ignore the taunt.

"As for me, I've always longed for the opportunity to get into an officers' training course. Truly, that was my

dream. I'm younger than you. I was top of the class at school. I've tried to discipline myself, to fulfill all my duties. No disobedience, no gambling, no alcohol, no dope, no women, no swearing. And for what? All for nothing! I'm not jealous, just depressed."

Kien felt uneasy about what was coming. He feared it, yet he expected it.

Can continued, "I haven't lived yet and I want very much to live."

Kien remained silent.

"For just one week in the North I'm prepared to lose everything. Everything."

"So I'll tell personnel to put your name down instead of mine," said Kien sarcastically. "Don't moan! Please, go back to your hut and lie down."

"Don't patronize me! I'm telling the truth, not trying to change things. I can look after myself. I'm not afraid of dying, but this killing and shooting just goes on forever. I'm dying inside, bit by bit. Every night I have the same dream, of me being dead. My soul swims out of my corpse and turns into a vampire going off to suck human blood. Remember the Playcan fighting in 1972? Remember the pile of corpses in the men's quarters? We were up to our ankles in blood, splashing through blood. I used to do anything to avoid stabbing with bayonets or bashing skulls in with my rifle butt, but now I've got used to it. And to think that as a child I wanted to take orders and go into a seminary."

Kien turned and looked curiously at Can. You occasionally found such traumatized misfits in the army. Their chaotic minds, their troubled speech, revealed how cruelly they were twisted and tortured by war.They collapsed both spiritually and physically. But it was curious that after fighting alongside Can for so long Kien had never heard him go

on like this. He had seen Can only as a trusty farmer who'd gradually adjusted to the hell of the battlefield.

"You're an experienced front-line soldier, but you're starting to whine and moan.That will make you even more miserable, Can. You'd better transfer out of the scout group. We're the first to go into the fight."

Can continued his gloomy confessions as though he had not heard a word. "I used to ask myself why I'm down here while my old suffering mother is at home, helpless, day and night crying for her distant son. When I joined up my village was flooded and it was hard for Mother even to get by. Who was left to help her? My brother was already in the forces. I could have been exempted as the only son left but the village chief wouldn't agree. We have so many of those damned idiots up there in the North enjoying the profits of war, but it's the sons of peasants who have to leave home, leaving a helpless old mother exposed to hardships. So, Kien . . ."

Suddenly Can burst into tears, burying his face in his knees, his shoulders heaving and trembling, his thin back wet and shivering.

Kien stood up, picked up his fishing rod, and looked down, frowning, at Can. "You've been reading too many enemy pamphlets. If someone reported you to the upper levels you'd be a goner. Are you going to desert?"

Can remained sitting, his head on his knees. His voice came low, mixing with sounds from the stream and the rain. "Yes. I'm going. I know you're a real friend.You'll understand. Say good-bye to the guys for me."

"You're nuts, Can. First, you've no right to escape. Second, you can't. You'll be caught and brought back. Court-martialed. Shot. You'll be worse off than now. Listen to me. Calm down! I won't rat on you."

"Too late. I've already hidden my bag in the jungle."

"I'm not letting you desert. Go back to the huts.Try to hang on a bit longer.The war has to end sooner or later."

"No. I'm off. Win or lose, sooner or later, that means nothing to me. My life is fading fast, and I still have to see my mother once more, and my village.You won't stop me? What for? Why would you?"

"Listen, Can, leaving like this is suicidal. And shameful."

"Suicidal? Killing myself? I've killed so often it won't mean a thing if I kill myself. As for the shame ..." Can stood up slowly, looking into Kien's eyes. "In all my time as a soldier I've yet to see anything honorable.

"Back home I might be even more humiliated. They won't let me live. Even so, these nights all I dream of is my mother calling me. Perhaps my brother is dead already and she's ill and suffering. I can't wait any longer. It's you, not me, who's been chosen for the officers' course and being sent back. Me, I'll just have to find my own way home. I hope my friends take pity on me.

"I won't get caught, not if the scouts don't chase me. And that's you, Kien, you're in charge, you're the one who can guarantee my safety. Let me go."

Can continued softly, "When this is all over, well, you know my village in the Binh Luc district, Ha Nam province. Drop in when you get a chance."

In the darkness Can grasped Kien's wrist with his cold, thin hand. Kien slowly pushed the hand away and turned his back without saying a word, leaving Can by the stream.

Nearing his hut Kien seemed to awaken and change his mind. He dropped his fishing gear and turned back, running to the stream, calling "Can, Caaaaaaan!"

He called again, "Caaan, wait."

He rushed back through the heavy rain along the dark path to the edge of the stream. Can was gone. In the tiny

clearing Kien felt imprisoned by the rain and the thick bamboo jungle wall on the other side of the stream.

The restricted visibility compressed the space. The only movement was the stream, which gurgled on.

Kien stood there staring, then burst into tears, the rain washing over his face as the tears gushed out.

Desertion was rife throughout the regiment at that time, as though soldiers were being vomited out, emptying the insides of whole platoons. The authorities seemed unable to prevent the desertions. But the commanding officers issued specific orders for Can to be traced. They feared he would desert to the enemy and betray the secrets and the batde plans of the entire regiment.

After many days splashing around on their search the military police finally found Can the deserter. He'd only made it to a small dead-end track between hills, two hours from the huts. He still had months to travel, so many obstacles between him and home in Binh Luc.

In late September, just before the regiment's departure from the Jungle of Screaming Souls, the men got mail from their families, their only delivery for the wet season. Kien's scout platoon got just one letter. It was for Can, from his mother.

The whole hamlet shares my joy at having received your letter and I write back immediately with the hope that the kind military post officers will take pity on me and deliver it as quickly as possible to you. I might already have died, but thanks to your letter I now continue to live and hope, my dear son.

Oh, my son, since receiving word of your brother's death from his unit, then having his commemoration ceremony in the village and getting the Patriotic Certificate, my dear son, I have worked night and day in the ricefield, ploughing land and transplanting. And I pray always to Heaven and the ancestors, your late father and brother, to bless you in that distant battlefield, praying you and your comrades will return safely . . .

Kien read and reread the letter. His hands trembled, tears blurred his eyes. Can was no more.The military police had found his rotten corpse. Only his skeleton was complete, like that of a frog thrown into a mud patch. Crows had pecked away Can's face; his mouth was full of mud and rotting leaves.

"That damned turncoat, he really stank," said the military policeman who had buried Can.

His eye-sockets were hollow, like trenches. In that short time moss and slime had already grown over him. The MP gagged, spitting at the memory.

No one spoke of Can again. No one bothered to find out why he had died, whether he was killed or had just exhausted himself in the jungle, or whether he'd committed suicide. No one accused him, either.

The name, age, and image of someone who'd been every bit as brave under fire as his comrades, who had set a fine example, suddenly disappeared without trace.

Except within the mind of Kien. Can's image haunted him every night, returning during the night to whisper to him by his hammock, repeating the final, gloomy lines he'd spoken by the stream. The whisper would turn into a suffocating gasp, like the sound of water blocking the throat of a drowning man.

"... my soul swims out of my corpse . . ."

Kien recalled Can's voice. And each time Kien knelt in prayer before the platoon's altar to the war martyrs, he

would whisper a word for Can's soul, the soul of a comrade who had died in humiliation, uncared for and misunderstood, even by Kien.

In the past months of the wet season Kien had been posted to the MIA team charged with gathering the remains of the dead from the worst battlefields. He had crossed almost all the northern sector of the Central Highlands, returning to the sites of innumerable battles. The MIA team had uncovered a vast family of forgotten members of their regiment, dead under the mantle of the warm jungle. The fallen soldiers shared one destiny; no longer were there honorable or disgraced soldiers, heroic or cowardly, worthy or worthless. Now they were merely names and remains.

For some of the other dead, not even that. Some had been totally vaporized, or blasted into such small pieces that their remains had long since been liquidized into mud.

After some final touches with the shovel their graves would be done, their remains laid out.Then with their final breath their souls were released, flying upwards, free. The uprush of so many souls penetrated Kien's mind, ate into his consciousness, becoming a dark shadow overhanging his own soul. Over a long period, over many, many graves, the souls of the beloved dead silently and gloomily dragged the sorrow of war into his life.

Tonight, back at the camp, how strange that it is a night which is perhaps the most mystical of the hundreds of dark nights in his life, with Can's soul whispering to him. And now his whole fighting life parades before him, with troops of dead soldiers met on the battlefields returning through a dim arch in an endless dream. The echoes of the past days

and months seem like rumbles of distant thunder, paining then numbing his own turbulent soul.

Near dawn Kien suddenly shivers and half awakens to a piercing, horrible, sorrowful howl, flying up from the cliffs like an echo. Kien moves to get up but then stops and flops back into the hammock, closing his eyes, still listening to the howl.

That howl, the howl first heard in this damned Screaming Souls Jungle right by this same stream in the rainy season last year, the last rainy season of the war. The howl from the valley on the other side of the mountain, echoing down to us. Some said it was mountain ghosts, but Kien knew it was love's lament.

At the time, right here in the sad wet jungle, Kien's B3 scout platoon had lived a moment of love which was strange and fascinating, fueled by a passion both wanton and unique, born of a magical meeting.

Kien had unfortunately not been included in this ambience of love. He recalled his unit had arrived and chosen to build huts at the foot of this very mountain. After the first two nights had passed everyone sensed something unusual was happening to the platoon. Kien had done more than sense that mysterious atmosphere. He had listened to it, and had seen vague figures flitting by. On the third night, a rainy August night, Kien, fitful after three days of fever, was distressed and could not sleep. Uneasyjust before dawn, he put on his raincoat and with machine gun at the ready went to check the huts.The forest floor was muddy and slippery and lightning sparked the air, lighting the jungle every few moments.

Kien slipped around, groping his way through the rain, his machine gun swinging. Approaching the Squad 1 hut,

Kien stopped. Laughter? Yes, peals of laughter. But who would be laughing like that in this sorry platoon? And imitating a girl's voice? It sounded ghostly. Kien approached, looking inside. It was dark, but there was no sound of snoring. Just a heavy silence.

Kien was wary: "Who laughed in there?"