To the Ends of the Earth (11 page)

“That’s VC up there,” said Cobra One. He pointed to a series of ridges that grew, off in the distance, into hills. “You could say eighty percent of the country is controlled by the VC, but that doesn’t mean anything because they only have ten percent of the population.”

“I was up there,” said Dial. I kept forgetting that Dial had been a Marine. “We were on patrol for about three weeks. Christ, we were cold! But now and then we’d luck out and get to a village. The people would see us coming and run away, and we’d use their huts—sleep in their beds. I remember a couple of times—it really killed me—we had to burn all their furniture to keep warm. We couldn’t find any firewood.”

The mountains had begun to rise, acquiring the shape of amphitheaters with a prospect of the China Sea; eerie and bare and blue, their summits smothered in mist, they trailed smoke from slash-and-burn fires. We were on the narrow coastal strip, moving south on the patchy shoreline that still belonged to the Saigon government, between the mountains and the sea. The weather had changed, or perhaps we had finally been dragged free of the drizzle that was constant in Hué. Now it was sunny and warm: the Vietnamese climbed up to the roofs of the coaches and sat with their legs hanging past the eaves. We were close enough to the beach to hear the pounding surf, and ahead in the curving inlets that doubled up the train, fishing smacks and canoes rode the frothy breakers to the shore, where men in parasol hats spun circular webbed nets over the crayfish.

“God, this is such a beautiful country,” said Cobra Two. She was snapping pictures out of the window, but no picture could duplicate the complexity of the beauty: over there, the sun lighted a bomb scar in the forest, and next to it smoke filled the bowl of a valley; a column of rain from one fugitive cloud slanted on another slope, and the blue gave way to black green, to rice green on the flat fields of shoots, which became, after a strip of sand, an immensity of blue ocean. The distances were enormous and the landscape was so large it had to be studied in parts, like a mural seen by a child.

“I had no idea,” I said. Of all the places the railway had taken me since London, this was the loveliest.

“No one knows it,” said Cobra Two. “No one in the States has the slightest idea how beautiful it is. Look at that—God, look at that!”

We were at the fringes of a bay that was green and sparkling in bright sunlight. Beyond the leaping jade plates of the sea was an overhang of cliffs and the sight of a valley so large it contained sun, smoke, rain, and cloud—all at once—independent quantities of color. I had been unprepared for this beauty; it surprised and humbled me in the same degree the emptiness had in rural India. Who has mentioned the simple fact that the heights of Vietnam are places of unimaginable grandeur? Though we can hardly blame a frightened draftee for not noticing this magnificence, we should have known all along that the French would not have colonized it, nor would the Americans have fought so long, if such ripeness did not invite the eye to take it.

“That’s the Ashau Valley,” said Cobra One, who until then had been doing an amusing imitation of Walter Brennan. The ridges mounted into the mist; below them, in the smoke and sun, were deep black gorges marked by waterfalls. Cobra One was shaking his head: “A lot of good men died there.”

Dazzled by the scenery, I walked through the train and saw a blind man feeling his way to the door—I could hear his lungs working like a bellows; wrinkled old ladies with black teeth and black pajamas clutched wicker bales of
spring onions; and soldiers—one ashen-faced in a wheelchair, one on crutches, others with new bandages on their hands and heads, and all of them in the American uniforms that suggested travesty in its true sense. An official moved through the coaches checking the ID cards of civilian males, looking for draft evaders. This official got tangled in the piece of string held by a blind man and attached to the waist of a child leading him. There were many armed soldiers on the train, but none looked like escorts. The train was defended by concentrations of soldiers at those bridge emplacements, and this is perhaps why it is so easy to blow up the line with command-detonated mines. These mines are slipped under the rails at night; when the train goes over one of them, a hidden man—who might be a Viet Cong or a bomber hired by a trucker in Danang—explodes the charge.

Twice during that trip, at small station sidings, children were offered to me by old ladies; they were like the pale-skinned, light-haired children I had seen in Can Tho and Bien Hoa. But these were older, perhaps four or five, and it was strange to hear these American-looking children speaking Vietnamese. It was even stranger to see the small Vietnamese farmers in the vastness of a landscape whose beautiful trees and ravines and jade crags—these launched from cloud banks—hid their enemies. From the train I could turn my eyes to the mountains and almost forget the country’s name, but the truth was closer and cruel: the Vietnamese had been damaged and then abandoned, almost as if, dressed in our clothes, they had been mistaken for us and shot at; as if, just when they had come to believe that we were identified with them, we had bolted. It was not that simple, but it was nearer to describing that sad history than the urgent opinions of anguished Americans who, stropping Occam’s Razor, classified the war as a string of atrocities, a series of purely political errors, or a piece of interrupted heroism. The tragedy was that we had come, and, from the beginning, had not planned to stay: Danang was to be proof of that.

The train was under the gigantic Hai Van Pass (“The Pass of Clouds”), a natural division on the north side of
Danang, like a Roman wall. If the Viet Cong got past it the way would be clear to Danang, and already the Viet Cong were bivouacked on the far slopes, waiting. Like the other stretches between Huè and Danang, the most scenically dramatic mountains and valleys were—and are still—the most terrible battlefields. Beyond the Hai Van Pass we entered a long tunnel. By this time I had walked the length of the train and was standing on the front balcony of the diesel, under the bright headlights. Ahead, a large bat dislodged itself from the ceiling and flapped clumsily this way and that, winging against the walls, trying to keep ahead of the roaring engine. The bat swooped, grazing the track, then rose—more slowly now—as the end of the tunnel came into view, flying closer to the engine with every second. It was like a toy of wood and paper, its spring running down, and at last it was ten feet from my face, a brown panicky creature beating its bony wings. It tired, dropped a few feet, then in the light of the tunnel’s exit—a light it could not see—its wings collapsed, it pitched forward, and quickly tumbled under the engine’s wheels.

“The Street Without Joy” was above us as we raced across a treeless promontory to the Nam Ho Bridge, five dark spans secured against underwater sappers by great rusting wreaths of barbed wire. These were the outer wastes of Danang, a grim district of supply bases that has been taken over by ARVN forces and squatters; shelters—huts and lean-tos—made exclusively with war materials, sandbags, plastic sheeting, corrugated iron stamped u.s.
ARMY
, and food wrappers marked with the initials of charitable agencies. Danang was pushed next to the sea and all the land around it had been stripped of trees. If ever a place looked poisoned, it was Danang.

Raiding and looting were skills the war had required the Vietnamese to learn. We got out at Danang Station and after lunch drove with an American official to the south side of the city, where GIs had been housed in several large camps. Once there had been thousands of American soldiers; now there were none. But the barracks were filled to bursting with refugees; because there had been no maintenance, the camps were in a sorry condition and looked as
if they had been shelled. Laundry flew from the flagpoles; windows were broken or boarded up; there were cooking fires in the roads. The less lucky refugees had set up house in wheelless trucks and the sewage stink was terrible—the camps could be smelled two hundred yards away.

“The people were waiting at the gates and over by those fences when the Americans started packing,” said the American official. “Like locusts or I-don’t-know-what. As soon as the last soldier left they rushed in, looted the stores, and commandeered the houses.”

The refugees, using ingenuity, looted the barracks; the Vietnamese government officials, using their influence, looted the hospitals. I kept hearing stories in Danang (and, again, in the southern port of Nha Trang) of how, the day the Americans left, the hospitals were cleaned out—drugs, oxygen cylinders, blankets, beds, medical appliances, anything that could be carried. Chinese ships were anchored offshore to receive this loot, which was taken to Hong Kong and resold. But there is a just God in Heaven: a Swiss businessman told me that some of these pilfered medical supplies found their way, via Hong Kong, to Hanoi. No one knew what happened to the enriched government officials. Some of the looting stories sounded exaggerated; I believed the ones about the raided hospitals because no American official would tell me where there was a hospital receiving patients, and that’s the sort of thing an American would know.

For several miles on the road south the ravaged camps swarmed with Vietnamese whose hasty adaptations could be seen in doors knocked through barracks’ walls and whole barracks torn down to make ten flimsy huts. The camps themselves had been temporary—they were all plywood panels, splitting in the dampness, and peeling metal sheets, and sagging fence posts—so none of these crude shelters would last. If one felt pity for the demoralized American soldiers who had lived in these horrible camps, one felt even sorrier for the inheritors of all this junk.

The bars, with flyblown signs advertising
COLD BEER, MUSIC, GIRLS
, were empty and most looked bankrupt, but it was in the late afternoon that I saw the real dereliction
of Danang. We drove out to the beach where, fifty feet from the crashing waves, a fairly new bungalow stood. It was a cozy beach house, built for an American general who had recently decamped. Who was this general? No one knew his name. Whose beach house was it now? No one knew that either, but Cobra One ventured, “Probably some ARVN honcho.” On the porch a Vietnamese soldier idled with a carbine, and behind him a table held a collection of bottles: vodka, whisky, ginger ale, soda water, a jug of orange juice, an ice bucket. Laughter, slightly drunken and mirthless, carried from inside the house.

“I think someone’s moved in,” said Cobra One. “Let’s have a look.”

We walked past the sentry and up the stairs. The front door was open, and in the living room two Americans on sofas were tickling two busty Vietnamese girls. It was the absurd made symmetrical—both men were fat, both girls were laughing, and the sofas were side by side. If Conrad’s dark reenactment of colonialism, “Outpost of Progress,” were made into a comedy, it would have looked something like that.

“Hey, we got company!” said one of the men. He banged the wall behind his head with his fist, then sat up and relit his cigar.

While we introduced ourselves, a side door opened from the wall the cigar smoker had punched and a muscular black man hurried out hitching up his trousers. Then a very tiny, bat-like Vietnamese girl appeared from the room. The black said, “Howdy,” and made for the front door.

“We didn’t mean to interrupt your picnic,” said Cobra One, but he showed no inclination to leave. He folded his arms and watched; he was a tall man with a severe gaze.

“You’re not interrupting nothing,” said the man with the cigar, rolling off the sofa.

“This is the head of security,” said the American official who had driven us to the place. He was speaking of the fat man with the cigar.

As if in acknowledgment, the fat man set fire to his cigar once again. Then he said, “Yeah, I’m the head spook around here. You just get here?” He was at that point of
drunkenness where, acutely conscious of it, he made an effort to hide it. He walked outside, away from the spilled cushions, full ashtrays, supine girls.

“You took the
what
?” asked the CIA man when we told him we had come to Danang from Hué on the train. “You’re lucky you made it! Two weeks ago the VC blew it up.”

“That’s not what the stationmaster in Hué told us,” said Cobra One.

“The stationmaster in Hué doesn’t know whether to scratch his watch or wind his ass,” said the CIA man. “I’m telling you they blew it up. Twelve people killed, I don’t know how many wounded.”

“With a mine?”

“Right. Command-detonated. It was horrible.”

The CIA man, who was head of security for the entire province, was lying, but at the time I had no facts to refute the story with. The stationmaster in Hué had said there hadn’t been a mining incident in months, and this was confirmed by the railway officials in Danang. But the CIA man was anxious to impress us that he had his finger on the country’s pulse, the more so since his girlfriend had joined us and was draped around his neck. The other fat man was in the bungalow, talking in frantic whispers to one of the girls, and the black man was a little distance from the porch, doing chin-ups on a bar spliced between two palms. The CIA man said, “There’s one thing you gotta keep in mind. The VC don’t have any support in the villages—and neither do the government troops. See, that’s why everything’s so quiet.”

The Vietnamese girl pinched his cheek and shouted to her friend at the edge of the beach who was watching the black man swing a heavy chain around his head. The man inside the bungalow came out and poured himself a whisky. He drank it worriedly, watching the CIA man rant.

“It’s a funny situation,” the CIA man was saying. “Like you say this village is clean and this village is all Charley, but there’s one thing you gotta understand: most people aren’t fighting. I don’t care what you read in the papers—these
journalists are more full of shit than a Christmas turkey. I’m telling you it’s quiet.”

“What about the mine?”

“Yeah, the mine. You should stay off the train; that’s all I can say.”

“It’s different at night,” said the man with the whisky.