A Trip to the Stars (63 page)

This was the way my thoughts were running, lying there in the dirt.

Geal told me another thing: the montagnards were the last men captured before me, just two days earlier. Montagnards means mountaineers, the thirty-three tribes that inhabit the Central Highlands which straddle Vietnam and Laos. Centuries before those two countries came into existence, the montagnards’ ancestors were settling the steep mountain forests. Tough and independent, they survived the French and now the NVA by uniting their fighting men under one command—
FULRO
, a French acronym for the “United Fighting Front of the Oppressed Races.”

The montagnards imprisoned with me were from the Bru tribe, the toughest of all the
FULRO
forces. They despised the Pathet Lao and the VC, who in turn feared them. Geal said the Pathet Lao didn’t like to take Bru prisoners. The Bru believe imprisonment is tantamount to death. Their comrades did everything they could to free them, regardless of the risks. If the prisoners were executed, their Bru comrades pursued the executioners to the death. So even after a battle they’d won, the Pathet Lao seldom rounded up the Bru that hadn’t been killed. It was better to let them slip back into the forests.

I didn’t know it at the time, but if I was going to be shot down again, I couldn’t have picked a better time than that day or a better place than that district. The fact I had then been brought as a prisoner to that particular penal way station probably saved my life.

The next day at dawn, two guards pulled me outside the hut. They gave me a cup of water and a lump of dried rice, and then tied my hands again behind my back. Next they brought out the six montagnards and with mallets knocked the wooden blocks from their ankles. They gave them water but no rice, and after tying their hands behind their backs, ran a rope between them, so the six had to walk as one—like a centipede, I thought—as they preceded me into the jungle along a narrow trail. I never again saw Geal, the copter gunner, or any of the other men in that hut.

By midday, we had forded two rivers and entered a scorched valley where most of the trees had been cut down. We were heading due east,
I realized with alarm, toward North Vietnam. Toward the prison compound near the border that I was to have photographed. I tried to put out of my mind the inquisition that would await me there. I only hoped my aerial cameras had been destroyed when my plane crashed. The NVA were known to be especially brutal with fliers doing surveillance work, blinding them with acid, cutting off their ears. If they found out the object of the surveillance had been their own compound, I would really be in for it.

After we had walked several more miles, a jagged green mountain range appeared suddenly on the horizon. At the sight of these mountains, the Bru became visibly animated, though they tried to conceal it from our captors.

My few previous encounters with montagnards had been in Saigon, where they were like fish out of water. Ears attuned to the sounds and silences of alpine forests, they found the clatter of the city intolerable. They always seemed rigid and uncomfortable in the regulation combat boots and khaki they had been issued. And few Vietnamese understood their guttural tribal dialects.

In their own element, in the mountains, wearing scant, loose-fitting clothes, they were a handsome, wiry people, lithe and well-proportioned, with coppery skin and choppy black hair. Just over five feet tall, the Bru men were generally bowlegged, which is an asset on steep slopes and dangerous cliffs. Their small feet were so callused they could travel over the roughest terrain barefoot, as if they were wearing sandals. Nearly all of the Bru—men and women—were tattooed. Some had barely noticeable markings: a circle or a line of dots on their ankles. Others had elaborate images—the heads of birds or fishes—painted on their backs and chests, or even their faces. The prisoner just ahead of me that morning had a tattoo of a dog with stars for eyes. As we trudged into the swelter of midday, I tried to focus on it, to distract from my pain.

I would soon discover that, among their other attributes, the Bru possessed an acute sense of smell and extremely powerful eyesight, like the mountain tigers they worshipped. The Bru claim that the only man they truly fear is the one who might come into their village carrying some part of a tiger’s anatomy on his person. It doesn’t matter if it’s a tooth, a piece of fur, a bone. They believe such a man can turn himself into a tiger at will. Later, the prisoner with the dog tattoo,
whose name was Nol, would tell me matter-of-factly that it was just such a man who came to our rescue that day.

Whoever it was struck with the swiftness of a tiger just as we were preparing to ford yet another muddy river with the rifles of the Pathet Lao on our backs. I heard successive arrows hiss by me and saw two of our guards crumple to the ground. The arrows were short, with black-and-orange feathered arrows. Panicking, the other guards opened fire point-blank at the montagnard prisoners and five of them toppled facedown on the riverbank. Instinctively I dived into a thicket of reeds, grabbing Nol’s shirt and dragging him along with me. Then, as the guards fired blindly into the bush, they were picked off one by one, black-and-orange feathered arrows through their hearts. When the smoke cleared, of seven prisoners and fifteen guards only Nol and I had survived.

Bok-Klia
, he cried, still tethered to his dying comrades,
Bok-Klia
. Later I would learn that this meant “Lord Tiger,” the man-tiger whose quiver contains arrows feathered with the colors of the great cat. He is also called “Mister 30” because, when enraged, he will kill a different man every day for a month.

I would learn many things after Nol and I managed to make our way deep into those green mountains I had first glimpsed from the scorched plain. But whether we had been rescued by a band of men or one man with the power of ten, I never found out. Nol’s answer to my queries was always the same:
Bok-Klia
.

It took us three days through the roughest country I had ever seen to reach his village. Torn up by mosquitoes and nettles, we ate what we could find. Plants, mushrooms, and roots handpicked by Nol. According to the Brus’ law, for saving his life I was now more than a brother to him. Which was how he treated me.

On the third day of our trek, he ended up carrying me on his back, a dead weight. I don’t know how he did it. The previous night, I had slashed my ankle right through my boot while crossing a swamp. At first I didn’t realize I was cut and the swamp water went to work on me. Within an hour I was feverish, my leg throbbing all the way up to the hip. Nol packed my ankle with a white moss held fast by sticky blue leaves. He made me chew a bitter black root and keep the pulp in my mouth as long as I could. And he tied a stringy fern tightly just below my knee, like a tourniquet.

We took shelter from a heavy downpour in a shallow cave, and the last thing I remember is watching Nol rig up a kind of stretcher out of bamboo. When I next woke up without fever, clear in the head, I was lying on a straw mat in a dark room with a thatched ceiling. I had no idea how much time had passed. The walls of the room were thick bamboo. A black macaw with an orange bill was perched in the open window. Incense was burning in a brass bowl. A pair of ox skulls painted bloodred flanked the low doorway. And there was a crossbow hung on the opposite wall, just like the one in the CO’s office back in Saigon.

14 October

I used to fall asleep in that bamboo room, Mala, trying to put myself in your place when you didn’t hear from me after Manila. I tried, but it was too painful. I knew the Air Force would have told you nothing. Less than nothing. As only they can do. You must have thought I was dead. Even now, as I write this, watching the desert sun rise through my window, I know you must think I’m dead. If you’re thinking of me at all, that is, wherever you are.

In fact, for a long time the Air Force knew nothing about my whereabouts. I had been on a mission about which maybe six people knew the details. The wreckage of my plane had been sighted. Ditto my dead pilot, hanging from a tree in his parachute. I was listed as MIA. Later, I would begin to materialize, like a wisp of vapor, a rumor that wafted to, and barely registered with, the informers and double agents who comprised the outermost reaches of the CIA’s tentacles. An American in a place where no Americans ought to be. If this rumor ever reached Saigon, it would have been too faint and insignificant to make any impression at all.

The Bru village in which I recovered my strength was technically across the DMZ, in North Vietnam, in a zone where none of our forces operated. A place so remote that the only montagnards who had ever seen an American were the FULRO fighters who passed through on occasion.

I would be there for five months.

It was the rainy season when I first arrived. The point—about
twenty miles off—where the mountain footpaths were said to connect with a real trail was washed out. Where the trail connected with a safe route (or where I imagined a safe route might be) out of that country I didn’t know.

For weeks I couldn’t walk. My foot was badly infected. I was terrified of gangrene, of losing my leg. I lay in that room in a house on stilts in a village of twenty such houses nestled high in the rain forest and thought, this is where I’m going to die. And no one will ever know.

You would never have known.

You and I were together for such a short time. First in chaotic circumstances, among all those wounded men and exhausted nurses. And both of us wounded and exhausted in our own ways. Then we were alone together even more briefly, and intensely, in a city neither of us knew, before being torn apart.

Now, two years later, the idea that you could be with someone else torments me. When I tell myself this isn’t possible, it’s not out of false pride, but because I believe deep down that you must feel as I do. That for both of us there will never be anyone else.

Yet, with the passage of time, I fear I’ve become a ghost to you. Forever inhabiting the limbo of Manila. In our heads, a ghost can assume a whole other life, so fixed in the past that we convince ourselves it can’t ever return to this life. That’s a subject I know something about.

I know about possessiveness, too. My fears of losing you are still more painful to me than any wounds I’ve suffered. What two people can love each other deeply without wanting to possess, and be possessed? Isn’t love the only place we can give everything and honestly expect it may not be in vain? Even after we’re dead.

This is how my thoughts were running my first weeks in that bamboo room in which incense burned day and night. On the straw mat under the thatched roof I had plenty of time to think. The room was always twilit. In the upper corner of one small window I could see the sun light up the tall trees at midday, and in the same space I might watch a few stars flicker to life before I fell asleep. For six weeks I never saw the moon or sun directly.

As my fever abated, my mind fixed on more concrete and particular things. I thought of the bracelet I gave you. Of the slenderness of your wrist, and the scent of your skin when I kissed you there, and
then on your shoulders and breasts. Many times as I lay in that room I felt your lips brush my cheek. And settle on my mouth. And part slowly before we were kissing hard, embracing, in our room in Manila with the shutters and the slow fan.

Over and over I revisited our time together there. Every moment, from different angles, but always with you at the center of the picture. The drive down the coast. The beach at Orion. Diving for shells. The bazaar where I found the jade earrings. The green dress they matched and the soft sound it made when you walked. The playing-card leaf on which you wrote our names. The hibiscus in the hotel courtyard and the cries of the cats on the high wall. But most of all our room. The ribbon on the fan and the muffled piano music in the next room. The narrow bed. Your body pressed up against mine. The red dot on your palm where the spider had bitten you in New Orleans. The spider with the stars on its belly.

In the Bru village there was a woman who nursed me, a sorceress. Like all the montagnards, the Bru are animists. To them, every rock, tree, plant, mountain, and stream has its own spirit and consciousness. The same goes for floods and fires, and even particular sections of the sky. Their word for this spirit-force is
ae
. When you’re sick, they believe the illness to be spirit-induced, adversely affecting your own spirit. Thus they insist that, more than the organs of the body, it is the spirit which must be dealt with. Left unattended, malignancies of spirit can spread and wipe out an entire village. (Or even a country: it occurred to me that the war itself has been perpetuated by such runaway malignancies in Washington D.C. and Hanoi.) With a high fever and lingering infection, added to the fact that I was a stranger of an alien race, my case was seen as especially dangerous. This was why the chief sorceress, the caretaker of spirits, actually moved into the hut belonging to one of Nol’s cousins where I had been lodged.

The first time I saw this woman she looked thin as a reed sitting in the corner of my bamboo room staring at me. Smoking a pipe. Among the montagnards, men and women alike smoke a bitter mountain tobacco laced with mint. I had seen many sorts of tattoos since arriving in the village, but this woman’s was particularly elaborate and gave me a jolt: a red spider, finely drawn on her left cheek, complemented by a concentric web that covered the right side of her face. At the center of the web there was a silver star. Through the dim light of
the tallow burning beside me, the spider at times looked real. And at night, as the woman sat very still, the star twinkled. I came to look for it when I awoke half delirious in the darkness.

That first night, when she came out of the shadows to mop my brow and repack my ankle, the woman told me her name was Ji-Loq. Which in the Bru language means “spider crossing the stars,” a being with enormous powers in the world of spirits.

It was Ji-Loq who informed me (by drawing a circle of figures with upraised arms on a mountaintop under the stars) that the Bru I was among were a distinct branch of the tribe who worshipped the stars.