Saigon (46 page)

The guns ceased suddenly, and the flares dropped by the Dakota were swallowed up one by one in the black jungle; slowly the stars above Dien Bien Phu became visible again, and Joseph and Paul’s laughter was for a moment the only sound in the sudden stillness of the night. 

“But none of these things are important,” said the Frenchman, resting a hand affectionately on Joseph’s shoulder and offering him the corkless cognac bottle again. “What matters most is that I feel so much better for seeing you.” 

The battalion-strength sortie moved stealthily out of the camp before dawn next day, the French paratroopers gliding like silent wraiths through the clammy fog that cloaked the foothills. Beyond Beatrice, the northeastern strongpoint, the undergrowth was so thick that the wiry pathfinders from the Third Thai Battalion had to hack their way through the vines and creepers with their long-bladed coupe-coupes, and initial progress was slow. Near the front of the column Joseph marched watchfully behind the erect figure of Paul Devraux, his hands, unlike those of the armed and fully equipped troops around him, swinging free and empty. He had deliberately refused Paul’s offer of a service revolver before they set out; in China and Korea he had decided a war correspondent should always go unarmed, and he had clung stubbornly to the decision through several close brushes with death under fire He wore a canvas-peaked cap with his olive-green drabs and around his neck he carried his only “weapons” — a small pair of French binoculars and his camera. 

There had been no barrage by the French 105-millimeter or 155-millimeter howitzers to soften up the ground ahead, no tanks had rolled in front of them to the edge of the valley with guns roaring as they often had done in the past before a sortie was mounted; the patrol was going out unannounced this time, Paul had told him, to try to silence the battery of light mountain guns which had shelled the airstrip during his arrival. 

On waking Joseph had found Paul already dressed, moving briskly round the hunker, whistling softly to himself. He wore his red beret at a rakish angle and his manner was lighthearted, almost carefree, as if he felt a heavy burden had been lifted from him, at least temporarily. From time to time as they trudged up the narrow mountain track, he turned to grin encouragingly at Joseph and in the pale light of the approaching dawn his lean, leathery face looked suddenly more youthful, less careworn. 

“These mountains are home to several different hill tribes that would interest a man if your tendencies,” said the French officer playfully when they halted to catch their breath. “The Meos grow opium up there on the crests to make a harsh life bearable — but watch out for the Xas who live down here in the foothills! They’re an ancient, backward people still living in the Stone Age. They look more like jungle animals than humans. The women particularly have sloping foreheads and long apelike arms — mod more your type than mine.” He punched Joseph lightly on the arm and moved off again, laughing quietly to himself, and Joseph followed, trying to smile to hide the turmoil growing inside him. 

His failure the previous evening to give Paul any hint of his guilty attachment to Lan had left him deeply troubled. He had slept badly, listening often to the sound of the French officer’s steady peaceful breathing in the quiet bunker, and the realization that his visit had cheered and relaxed Paul had only served to make Joseph more acutely aware of the grossness of the betrayal he would have to commit if he and Lan were to join their lives at last. As he climbed the mountain path in the growing light, he turned over in his mind the reasons for his failure to speak out, and he remembered suddenly with a stab of shame a conversation he’d had with a Legion corporal during his tour of the camp the previous afternoon. When he had mentioned that he was going out on a patrol next morning, the German corporal had laughed cynically and said that the only patrols sent out were minor ones for the purpose of deceiving visiting journalists. “The enemy knows very well we can’t maneuver successfully from here because of the dense jungle and their tight encirclement,” the corporal had said with a resigned shrug. “It’s simply a matter of waiting until they choose to attack now.” Had it been that casual admission, Joseph wondered, that had really convinced him that Dien Bien Phu was doomed? Was he remaining silent because he hoped that when the dust of battle had settled, there would no longer be any need to ask a dead man if he minded him stealing his wife? 

The shock of this possibility made Joseph stop abruptly in his tracks, and for a moment he stared at the receding back of the French officer, gripped by a feeling of profound self-disgust. Then the paratrooper behind him stumbled into him with a. muffled oath and Joseph apologized hastily before hurrying on again. 

A fresh breeze that had risen with the coming of dawn stirred the waist-high grass as the patrol continued to make its way up the mountain ravine, and slowly the wind’s gentle force began to tear jagged holes in the dense curtain of morning fog. Through one of these sudden gaps the men of Ngo Van Dong’s company caught their first glimpse of the French paratroopers. Along with half-a- dozen other companies of the 59th Regiment, they were manning one of the valley’s many carefully prepared ambush points at the top of the ravine, and from their trenched and fortified positions amid trees and tall grass, the five hundred Viet Minh soldiers were able to follow the patrol’s progress a quarter of a mile below without risk of discovery. 

Dong and his men had been granted only six hours’ rest after hauling the last howitzer into its mountaintop casemate, but they had been issued with special extra rations of lump sugar to help restore their energies. The many ambush points that ringed the French camp had been manned round the clock for weeks, and Dong’s company had been moved into position the previous evening during a routine rotation of units. For several hours they had watched the French camp fires flickering in the darkness below them and had been able to hear clearly the sounds of troops splashing in the Nam Youm River; they had even been able to make out the words of the ribald songs sung by the Legionnaires before they settled down to sleep. Throughout the long night Dong had ordered his men to rest in carefully organized relays, and during his hours on watch he talked quietly to those around him to ensure their morale remained at the same high pitch that had enabled them to hoist the heavy artillery piece up the mountain in record time. 

Because all patrolling of any consequence had virtually ceased two or three weeks before, Doug and the other ambush commanders were surprised by the strength of the force climbing towards them in single file. Through a captured pair of French field glasses Dong studied the line of troops carefully as they crossed a stretch of rocky open ground only two hundred yards beneath his hiding place. He could identify clearly the little Thai guides at the front; they were of the same Highland stock as the village people of the valley who were only just beginning to shuffle sleepily from their huts in the early dawn light, and they moved quickly and nervously ahead of the first group of French paratroopers. He swung the powerful lenses from man to man, passing over the tall upright figure in the red beret and camouflaged battle dress and the civilian in plain green drabs without being able to recognize either of the men who long ago had gamboled with him and his brother in a jungle hunting camp. Dong’s company had been detailed to man the forward positions on the steep bluffs that overhung the top of the ravine, and he was searching intently for the spearhead radio operator so that he could detail his sharpest marksmen to pick him off in the opening onslaught. When at last he pinpointed him, Doug muttered a quick command to the sharpshooters at his side and the rest of the company lifted their rifles to their shoulders too; hardly daring to breathe, they peered intently into the swirling mists waiting for the white-skinned men to come into range. 

As Paul Devraux breasted the tall grass and brushed aside the tangled creepers hanging from the trees, he scanned the hills and surrounding scrub constantly with the instinctive, narrow-eyed gaze of a trained hunter. But although as he approached it, he looked directly several times towards the bluff where Ngo Van Dong’s company lay concealed, he saw no hint of their presence amidst the gently waving grass. When a quick movement did eventually catch his eye a hundred yards away on an adjoining hillside, he turned smiling to Joseph and pointed. “Look quickly — there! Do you see the Xas?” 

Joseph lifted his binoculars and studied the little group of naked Xa women who had broken out of the scrub and were scampering across a bare rock face. They moved like animals, as swift on all fours as on their legs, and the strangeness of their movement riveted his attention. From the length of the patrol there came the sound of coarse laughter, and some derisive shouts sounded across the ravine when one of the terrified women slipped and tumbled shrieking down a steep scarp. None of the paratroopers about to move into the jaws of the ambush suspected the truth: that little groups of the Stone Age tribes people were held captive all over the valley by the Viet Minh to be released as a diversion whenever it suited their purpose. In this case the ruse worked perfectly; the Xas distracted the unsuspecting patrol successfully for a few seconds, and at the precise moment when they finally scurried out of sight into the mouth of a cave, the first withering fusillade of shots rang out from the ambush positions above the patrol, scything down a dozen men. The rest dived frantically into the cover of the long grass, and immediately most of Dong’s company rose up stiff-armed on the bluff above to send a thick shower of grenades arcing down among them. 

Joseph and Paul rolled together into a shallow gully alongside the radio operator, whose face had been mashed to a bloody pulp by the accurate opening shots of the Viet Minh marksmen. As they crouched stunned against one rocky wall, a young lieutenant scrambled down beside them, tugged the radio from the dead operator’s grasp and began calling for Red Cross helicopters to evacuate casualties. The mountains quickly came alive with the rattle of rifle and automatic weapons fire as the French troops began to shoot back, and all around them groans and screams from the wounded and dying rose above the hubbub of the battle. Joseph gasped with horror when he turned and saw the body of the paratrooper who had cursed him a few minutes earlier slumped over the rim of the gully; his chest had been torn open by the simultaneous impact of several bullets, and one arm had been blown away by a grenade. The fingers of his remaining hand were visible hanging over the gully edge and they were twitching spasmodically, keeping time with the soft murmurs of agony that escaped from his bloodied mouth as he died. 

Beside Joseph, Paul was barking orders to the young lieutenant to begin pulling men back down the narrow track, and when the American turned to look at his friend, he saw that blood was trickling into his eyes from a wound on his forehead. 

“You’ve been hit, Paul,” he gasped. 

“It’s just a shrapnel graze,” retorted the Frenchmen sharply, motioning down the hill with one hand. “Start working your way back along this gully — and keep your head down!” He brushed the sleeve of his combat jacket quickly across his brow o clear the blood, then seized the radio and began calling urgently for B-26s to strafe and napalm the heights above them. 

Joseph ducked away and began slithering down the gully, but something made him stop and look back. Paul was still huddled against the rock wall, yelling into the radio, arid he hadn’t noticed the Viet Minh trooper arrive on the lip of the gully above him. The enemy soldier had already fixed a bayonet to his rifle and for a moment was silhouetted against the dawn sky, holding the weapon pointing downward like along, obscene dagger; with his feet apart and his back curved in an ungainly crouch, he was preparing to throw all his weight into the bayonet thrust, but before he moved, Joseph lunged back up the gully, yelling a warning as he went. Bunching his knees beneath him, Joseph Rung himself bodily at the Vietnamese soldier as he leaped downward, and they fell grappling blindly with one another beside Paul. The Vietnamese hit the ground heavily and the rifle flew from his grasp, but he soon recovered and began jerking and struggling frantically in an effort to break free. By the time he extricated himself from Joseph’s grip two paratroopers were rushing up the hillside to the aid of their senior officer, and he scrambled out of the gully and disappeared. 

After the Vietnamese had gone, Paul lay staring white-faced at Joseph, aware suddenly how close he had come to dying on the bayonet. Then he grinned lopsidedly. “You move quickly for a veteran campaigner, mon vieux. I’m glad you came.” 

Joseph didn’t reply; he had already begun to tremble with delayed shock, and when one of the paratroopers took him by the arm and began to rush him hack down the slope, he went without protest. His impulse to help Paul, he knew, had been a reflex action; he had acted instinctively, without conscious thought, and as his rational mind took over again, he realized with a sickening clarity that he had risked his own life so recklessly for only one reason: although he despised himself for it, deep in his heart he wished Paul Devraux dead. 

“Are you really my father? I can hardly believe it sometimes.” Tuyet’s gaze was bright, a smile almost. To anyone glancing casually at their table on the terrace of the Café Chez Maria in the Boulevard Barbet, her expression might have seemed warm and sincere: but Joseph had come to recognize of late the hard edge of mockery in her tone. The first of her moods, at fourteen, had been an innocent bewilderment; then her silences had changed in their quality from shyness to a dull, resentful sullenness. She was seventeen now, her pale gold complexion shining with a youthful radiance, and she had adopted during his last two or three visits to Saigon a light, mocking manner, as though she had realized instinctively that this would prove most wounding to him. 

She had appeared suddenly from nowhere at the last moment and seated herself at his table as he was paying his bill and preparing to leave. Straight and slender as a pencil, she perched on the edge of the chair and rested her chin delicately on the back of one hand while she looked at him. Her face held little of that chalky whiteness which often characterized mixed race girls, although her skin was noticeably paler than normal and her eyes were wider than her mother’s; but her beauty was no less striking than Lan’s, as the number of male heads that turned in her direction from the surrounding tables confirmed. She wore a high-collared primrose yellow ao dai tailored tightly around her slender wrists and waist, and her natural gracefulness was heightened by an air of self-possession unusual in a Vietnamese girl. 

“I often find it very hard to believe too, Tuyet.” He spoke quietly, trying not to let the choking emotion he always felt on seeing her show in his voice. “Until one of these rare occasions comes around and your lovely face is in front of me, that is. You’re growing up to be as beautiful as your mother.” 

“If you thought she was lovely, why didn’t you stay here and marry her?” She tossed her head and the question came out gaily as though she had been practicing it for hours in her English class at the Lycée Marie-Curie. Joseph wondered fleetingly whether he detected a faint hint of hysteria in her voice; had she been screwing up her courage to ask these uncharacteristically pointed questions that she had never dared venture before? A waiter approached, but she dismissed him with an angry little shake of her head. 

When the waiter had moved away again Joseph placed his hands palms downward on the table and studied them in silence for a moment. “I wanted very much, Tuyet, to marry your mother,” he said huskily. “But her feelings of loyalty to her father and her country made it impossible for her to say yes.” 

His daughter’s reaction was impossible to gauge from her expression. It was as blank as it had been half an hour earlier when she had looked across the boulevard in his direction on emerging through the school gates with a laughing group of friends. He had stepped out from the shade of the tamarind tree where he had been waiting and waved to her, and he was sure that she had seen him. But she had turned away in the opposite direction without acknowledgment and continued walking arm-in-arm, chattering animatedly, with the other raven-haired girls of her class. Their excited giggling drifted back to him as he followed them slowly on his side of the street, but she hadn’t looked back. 

The first time he had come to the school gates one blazing Saigon forenoon in i951, he had needed the photograph Lan had given him. With its help he had recognized her easily and hurried quickly across the boulevard among the swarm of cyclo-pousses which had by then replaced the old rickshaws of the city. Her fourteen-year-old face had contracted into a grimace of genuine alarm when he approached and touched her arm, and the expression had reminded him for a fleeting instant of the terror he had seen in her burning eyes on the edge of that muddy pond in northern Annam six years earlier. But otherwise there had been nothing to remind him of the desperate, starving child he had clutched to himself then with such a wildly beating heart. 

After that he had always stayed on the opposite side of the boulevard and waved and waited where he stood. The first few nines he went to meet her, she had detached herself reluctantly from her friends and come across to greet him. Sometimes they had walked to the Jardin Botanique or strolled through the public park around the old governor general’s palace where he had first met Lan when she was only ten years old. When Tuyet ignored him completely for the first time outside the school gates, he had been astonished and hurried after her; but she had deliberately led him a dance back and forth through the dazzling blooms of the flower market in the Boulevard Charner and had eventually disappeared from sight with her wildly giggling friends. From that time onwards he had made a habit of following her for only a short distance if she chose not to acknowledge his presence outside the school; then he fell into the habit of taking a seat on the terrace of the nearby Café Chez Maria to give her the opportunity of returning to speak with him if she wished. Sometimes she came, sometimes she didn’t; there had been perhaps seven or eight meetings in the three years before that day, and they had invariably been stilted and uncomfortable, with Joseph always trying desperately to overcome the innate hostility she had shown him from their first meeting. He had begun learning Vietnamese in an effort to get closer to her, but if he tried to converse in that language she invariably ignored him and insisted on speaking English. 

Whenever he had asked her about her life she had always spoken with enormous affection of “Uncle Tam” and his wife, enumerating their acts of kindness repeatedly as though to emphasize the obviously deep resentment she felt that he and her mother had not brought her up. Whenever she spoke of Lan, her manner had been cool and reserved, although she had never expressed any open animosity towards her. Joseph had told her a hundred times how much he regretted the way things had turned out, but she had always listened to his protestations in an unresponsive silence. Yet although her demeanor had invariably been distant, he was certain that not far beneath the surface she was struggling to conceal deep feeling of hurt and betrayal. 

“Do you still love my mother then, despite all that?” 

Joseph looked up sharply, taken aback by the directness of her question. For a moment her eyes held his, then she turned her head away, embarrassed suddenly by her own boldness. As he gazed at her delicate profile, her likeness to Lan made his breath catch suddenly in his throat. 

“Yes, Tuyet, I do,” he said at last, his voice cracking slightly. “I love her very much. I’ve never stopped loving her, and I haven’t given up hope that one day we’ll still be married.” 

She glanced at him quickly, with a startled expression in her dark eyes, but said nothing. 

“And I carry this with me wherever I go too.” He drew out his wallet and took from it the photograph of Tuyet at fourteen, now a little creased, which he had carried with him the first time to the school gates. In the photograph, her expression was apprehensive, even a little sad. “I’ve seen your face looking like that too often, Tuyet,” he said, pushing the photograph across the table. “I’d like to help make you laugh and smile more. If Lan and I marry, I’d like to take you both away from Vietnam. I want us all to be together as a family.” 

“Isn’t it a little late for that?” She tossed her head disdainfully, scarcely glancing at the picture in front of her, and turned to look absently out into the Street through one of the metal bomb protection grilles that had first been bolted across the city’s café terraces eight years before when Viet Minh bicycle guerrillas had begun bowling grenades among their tables. 

“1 hope not. The war’s definitely going the Communists’ way now and things look worse and worse at Dien Bien Phu — but I don’t think it’s too late. If the Communists do win, many things might never be the same again here in Saigon . . that’s why I wanted to talk to you.” He leaned forward earnestly to engage her attention again, but she appeared not to be listening, and her gaze remained fixed on the Street. 

Beyond the metal grilles through which Tuyet stared, Saigon had already become a vastly different city from the one Joseph had encountered for the first rime thirty years before. Although the French still thronged the fortified café terraces at midday and seven o’clock for their ritual aperitifs, a thousand or more of Joseph’s fellow Americans now walked the boulevards of the “Paris of the East” every day. The star-spangled banner had become a familiar sight in many streets in the city center as the five-hundred-strong staff of the United States Embassy was gradually augmented by the Economic Aid Mission and a dozen other government agencies that had begun arriving in the wake of President Truman’s crucial decision to take a stand against Communism in Asia. To house them, modern concrete apartment blocks were shooting up to tower above the pastel-shaded stucco of the French villas, stamping a distinctive American imprint on the city, and shops in the Rue Catinat had begun to stock nylon shirts with button-down collars, spearmint-flavored toothpaste, Coca- Cola and other goods Americans habitually favored. This small army of American government civilians, Joseph knew, had begun intriguing among the Vietnamese religious sects and other native power groups in an effort to groom an anti-Communist force that could, with American help, save Vietnam from Marxism when the French finally departed, and he had already written articles for the Gazette warning his countrymen to tread cautiously in a strange and complex country they had scarcely started to understand. To cover the war successfully, like other visiting journalists he’d cultivated clandestine contacts with wary-eyed Viet Minh agents who were ever eager to explain their cause at secret meetings in jungle villages outside the city or in flyblown cafés in the poorer quarters of Saigon. He’d learned enough to make him fear that whatever the outcome of the war, Vietnam was approaching a turning point in its affairs, and that much danger and uncertainty lay ahead. 

“Tuyet, I’m worried about what might happen to you if the Communists did win the war,” said Joseph more insistently when at last she turned to look at him again. “Perhaps you aren’t very interested in politics, but the Viet Minh want to change the way everybody lives here, including you” 

“I’ve managed very well until now in the country where I was born,” replied Tuyet, smiling with a brittle sweetness that she knew must be wounding. “It’s very nice of you to be concerned; but I think I shall be able to survive without your assistance.” 

“Please, Tuyet, let me explain what I’ve got in mind” He reached tentatively across the table to take her hand. “It doesn’t cost anything to listen, does it?” 

She pulled her hands quickly into her lap and smiled again. “No, it doesn’t cost anything to listen. But unfortunately I don’t have the time just now. My friends are waiting for me.” She stood up and offered him her hand in a little show of mock formality, “Au revoir, Monsieur Sherman, and thank you.” 

To avoid embarrassing her, he rose reluctantly, and in the brief instant their hands touched, she smiled sweetly at him again. Still standing, he watched her walk away across the crowded terrace, then when she’d gone he lowered himself slowly into his seat once more. On the table-top the sad-faced photograph of her still lay untouched before her empty chair.