The Sorrow of War (4 page)

"Why, Kien?"Thanh's voice. Alert.

"Who? Maybe an angel," said another.

"Don't piss around. Someone laughed. I'm not that feverish, you baboon."

"So come in, platoon commander. Check for yourself."

Kien was confused. Shit! Was there another ghost in this Screaming Souls Jungle? Kien dropped the flap, then left. Still, the laughter had seemed clear, sharp, genuine. A girl's laughter, not a ghost's. He was not imagining things.

Walking slowly back, he sensed a movement and stopped, stiffening to stay still and alert. He could hear his own heart come almost to a standstill. In the reflection of the stream he saw a lovely young girl. Her midriff was bare, her skin shone like the light dancing on the water, her hair, long and flowing, hung down on her thighs. She walked slowly out of his vision, leaving her reflection dancing among the reeds along the bank.

Kien stared after her into the jungle, then shook himself free of the vision and shouted out, "Stop! Who's there?" He stepped forward with his hand on the
trigger.
"Code Five!" he called. No answer.

The rain, the thunder, and the lightning seemed to halt abruptly.

"Stop! I'll shoot!" Kien shouted angrily.

"It's me—Thinh!"

"What?"

"It's me. My turn on duty," answered Lofty Thinh clearly. "What's wrong?"

"Who's been in there with you?" "No one."

"Didn't you see anyone?" "No.What's up?"

Kien swore through his teeth. Just then the lightning and thunder flared up again. Kien stared into the swaying trees, looked again at the swirling stream, then back at Thinh.

Thinh stood before him, looking innocent. He wore shorts, his bare midriff glistening in the rain.

Kien groaned softly, then trudged back slowly to his tent. He threw himself back into his hammock, overcome by a sense of self-pity and impending doom.

What had he seen? Ghost or girl?

The next morning the matter was not mentioned. Neither Thanh nor Thinh said a word, but Kien felt they and the others shared a secret, while pretending nothing unusual was happening. It was the first time he had felt cut off from his friends.

Kien slowly discarded fears that he had imagined things. Something was happening, something strange. No more beautiful ghost-girls slipped by the huts near the stream. But he sensed other mysterious movements.

At midnight shadows slipped silently from the hammocks. Gently creeping to the hut doors, making signals to the night guards, they disappeared in single file into the dark jungle. The shadows slipped quiedy into the stream and headed, in teeming rain, towards the great dark mountain.

Night after night these shadows moved around, until one night Kien too awoke. He lay still, feigning sleep, listening. At first he heard the whispers, then movements from hammocks, then bare feet stepping into mud. Then muted conversation with the guards. Someone slipped over. Muffled laughter.

Some nights they were shadows from his own hut: the next night from another hut: once from the hammocks near him. They were going out every night, returning hours later, just before dawn. He could hear them, out of breath, muddy and shivering from the drizzle and cold air.

After a few nights Kien began caring for them, worrying for the welfare of these shadows. He would he awake until every one of them had returned. When the last one had returned he would hear a long, mournful call from the base of the mountain, like a call of farewell. At the return of the last shadow Kien would sigh with relief and drop into a slumber.

Not the entire platoon of thirteen were involved. Three regulars, he was certain, made the dangerous journey at night to the dark mountain through a wild, gloomy valley. He now recalled there had been a prosperous farm there by a waterfall, before the war had spread inland.

The farmhouse had been abandoned, then commandeered by the district military officers as their headquarters, then abandoned again many years ago.There had been three very young girls from the original farming family. It dawned on him that the girls, who would now be in their late teens, had returned home despite the farm's vulnerability.

Kien felt he now knew what was happening and that he understood their feelings. Which is why, as a commander, instead of stopping the undisciplined and dangerous haisons, he did nothing. He recalled the standing orders from the political commissar: "It is necessary to readjust, rectify, and re-establish the rules, the morals and behavior of your men, when there are breaches." Of course that would have meant pulling the soldiers out, snapping them out of their romantic spell. Kien's heart would never allow him to truly discipline those boys. It begged him to keep silent and sympathize with the young lovers. What else could they do? They were powerless against the frenzied forces of young love which now controlled their bodies.

At the time Kien felt old. Only he and Can were over twenty. All the others were still teenagers, still boys.

It was then that the honeyed dreams began, and in his sleep he saw his beautiful girl from Hanoi appear before him. During those rainy nights she would come to him from the back door of his memory, stepping lightly like a sprite. His body would shiver, then tremble, starved and thirsty with desire, wanting to savor the heightened sensations of smooth body contact. "We two may die as virgins, our love is so pure. We ache for each other, unable to be together," Phuong would say, causing their seventeen-year-old hearts nearly to break.

In his dream he knew that he was dreaming and he would writhe, trying to change the images, trying to get away from the pain and desolation he suffered from knowing it was all a dream.

When he awoke he heard the young men's footsteps from far away. Now he had no need to await their return. He could tell long before. In their hut, along with the gentle perfume of dope, there was now a new fragrance, distincdy soft, tender and ethereal, which lingered vaguely in the wind.

Kien thought back to the source of his own love, when he had been young.That was now hard to imagine, hard to remember a time when his whole personality and character had been intact, a time before the cruelty and the destruction of war had warped his soul. A time when he had been deeply in love, passionate, aching with desire, hilariously frivolous and lighthearted, or quickly depressed by love and suffering. Or blushing in embarrassment. When he too was worthy of being a lover and in love, as his troops were now.

But war was a world with no home, no roof, no comforts. A miserable journey, of endless drifting. War was a world without real men, without real women, without feeling.

War was also a world without romance. He couldn't avoid the drain on his soul, the ruin his young men were escaping from as they set about squeezing the last remaining drops of love from their nightly adventures. Tomorrow, they might be dead. We might all be dead.

But the love he knew had been within him seemed now to have drained away. He despaired that he could never again share the frivolities and elations of ordinary love.

Closing his eyes, looking back, Kien remembered the pain of those weeks. Those young girls and the boys of his platoon were all dead now. A constant fear for them had wrenched his heart. True, it was war, and the times were abnormal. The great issues, the important tasks of fighting and their sacred duties, had become the most important matters in life. Whereas the tiny issues, those filigree-fine joys and sorrows of human destiny, like the boys' dalliance with the three farm girls, seemed less important.They were such rare occurrences they were considered by some as a bad omen, as though happiness must necessarily call down its own form of retribution in war.

It was indeed true; those small acts of love were an omen of terrible events to come.

Kien recalled the scene as if it were only yesterday. He was standing there in the pelting rain in the wet grassy yard of the small farmhouse in the isolated valley at the base of a huge mountain where every night his young men had secretly met their new lovers.

His face, clothes, and hair were all sopping wet.The submachine gun was about to slip from his shoulder. Around the farmhouse the huts and storage areas from the district

headquarters days seemed to send off vapor from the teeming rain as the drops bounced off their roofs. The sky gradually lightened and a few rays broke through, although some light rain persisted.

"Ho Biaaaaaa!" Lofty Thinh had started calling.

Kien had simply gone along with the search. After Thinh's calls the other scouts scattered around the farm all shouting the girls' names: "Ho Biaaaaa! May, Maaaay! Thorn, Thooom!"

There was no reply. From the high waterfall by the cliff between the farm and the foot of the mountain a huge fountain of white water arose, rumbling and foaming, sounding like perpetual thunder.

But no one replied.

The other sounds were from the rain.Water running off roofs, dripping into pools. Kien went inside. It was a lovely three-roomed house with a bamboo roof, covered with perfumed wild lily. The furniture was in good condition, and tidy A full set of rattan chairs and table, a flower pot, tea and teacups. An opened book. Beds, pillows, blankets. Mirrors and combs.

At the back, clothes were hanging on the line, washing that should have been brought in by then.

The larders were well stocked with paddy, rice, and cassava. The smell of dried mushrooms, honey, and stores of other fragrant foods and spices filled the little kitchen. All seemed in perfect order. The kitchen table had been laid neatly, as though a full dinner had been prepared but the family had been called away. Bowls of dried fish, eggplants, rice, had been placed in the center of the table and covered with insect-proof netting. For each person there were chopsticks, bowls, salt, pepper, and small side plates. The main rice pot was still on the stove, and below it the charcoal and ash glowed dimly, still warm.

Kien and his men stepped out back, through peanut plants, eggplant, thyme, and oregano. They walked cautiously down the yard to banana trees and marrows. Beyond this vegetable garden a simple low wooden gate opened onto a tiny narrow path leading to a stream which ran into the main river a litde way down. They stood there looking over the stream and up into the dim shadows of the mountain under which the little farmhouse stood.

Though it rained day and night, the farm girls had used water from the stream, wisely saving their well-water for the dry season. Kien approached the well. It seemed in good order; the lid fitted snugly and around its base a gutter had been dug, to drain away muddy water during heavy rains. The silence was unnerving.

Kien left the others and on a hunch turned towards the stream and noted the girls' tiny bathhouse built over the water, almost totally hidden from view behind bamboo. The narrow track from well to bathhouse was graveled, weed-free.

Kien approached not by the path but circuitously, by stepping quietly into the water and wading upstream.

The door of the bathhouse was open. He kneeled, unslinging his machine gun. He was certain someone was in there . . .

That had been so long ago, yet now it was still vividly clear in his mind.The bathhouse door hadn't been opened. It had been ripped off its hinges and thrown aside onto the bank. Inside there were two buckets, part-full, a dipper, a pair of rubber sandals, and soap. A thin, worn housecoat and an embroidered towel hung on a tiny line. A piece of muddied clothing lay by the wall near a green canvas raincoat.

Something on the smooth rocks caught his eye. It was a torn white bra. In the dim light it looked like a strange large

flower with smooth, soft petals. On one petal there was a trace of blood.

Kien shivered as though twine had been wrapped tightly around his heart. Then he pictured several greenish, ghosdy enemy forms passing silently under the jungle canopy, quietly arriving at the jungle's edge to find the farm, then entering . . . finding three young girls. One girl had been in the bedroom, another in the kitchen near the table, the third at the bathhouse.There had been no time to react. No cries. No shots. No escape.

"The commandos! The commandos, they did it," someone howled.

"Oh, Kien," said Thinh in a whisper, his voice hoarse and trembling.

Beyond them the bamboo branches scratched eerily against the bamboo walls. Kien sighed, tightening his lips.

"Did you hear anything this morning?" he asked.

"No. Nothing," they replied.

Kien tried to put the picture together. So, what had happened? These young men had been here with the girls last night, enjoying themselves.

This was 1974, not the dark times of 1968 and 1969, the worst years of the war. This was now a day's walk to the front line.Yet this morning the young lovers in the platoon had sensed something wrong. They had persuaded Kien to take a look. Kien now agreed their hunch had been right.

"How do you know they're commandos?" Kien asked, aware that whoever the visitors had been, they were still alive, and not far away.

"We found a Rubi cigarette-end. And footprints," Thinh said.

"What made you sense something was wrong this morning? You were happy enough when you came back,"

Kien said, letting them know he had known all along of their nocturnal visits.

"Nothing specific.We suddenly felt unbearably anxious, that's all."