Saigon (66 page)

She took her hands from her face and stared across the room, dry-eyed. “I’m sorry, Guy. You may be able to shrug off the death of that young Buddhist quite easily, but I can’t. It’s made me realize suddenly what I’m doing.” 

“What are you doing?” he asked in an astounded voice. 

“Trading other people’s lives for my own selfish ends!” 

“Look, maybe you’ll feel better later — have some more champagne.” He touched her bare shoulder and made to get up and refill her glass, but she shook her head. 

“No, Guy — I don’t want any more. I’m going.” She rose and pulled on her trousers. 

“Naomi, what’s gotten into you?” He stood up quickly and tried to take her by the shoulders, but she pulled away from him. He glanced down at the table, snatched up the tin of film and held it towards her. “Don’t you even want this?” 

“Five minutes ago I wanted it very badly,” she said in an urgent undertone. “But now I’m not going to take it from you.” 

“Why in heaven’s name not?” He moved towards her and forced it into her hands. “I want you to have the damned film. I went to a hell of a lot of trouble to get it for you.” 

Avoiding his eyes she took the film and hurled it savagely towards a wastepaper basket. It struck the side of the metal container and sprang open, and the film uncoiled in snakelike loops across the carpet. Without Stopping to finish dressing she walked quickly towards the door, carrying her blouse, and with one hand on the doorknob she stopped and spoke over her shoulder. 

“Guy, I don’t want you to think I’m passing judgment on you because I’m not — that’s for you to do yourself. It’s my own actions that I’m suddenly disgusted with.” 

Without turning around again she opened the door and stepped out into the corridor; Guy called her name more urgently, but she ignored him and walked quickly away towards her own room, the shreds of her torn brassiere still hanging loose about her naked breasts. 

We Have Fought a Thousand Years! 

President Kennedy’s decision to encourage and support the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem proved to be a fateful turning point in the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. The American president was himself assassinated three weeks after the anti-Diem coup, but General Duong Van Minh’s 

administration in which he had invested so much hope lasted only three months before it was overthrown in its turn by another military junta. A bewildering succession of ineffectual “revolving door” governments emerged from the flurry of coups and countercoups that followed, and relations between them and the mass of the people in South Vietnam remained as poor as they had been under Diem. The Buddhists, elated and strengthened by the success of their campaign to bring Diem down, expanded into a formidable antigovernment, 

anti-American force in the cities, and public strife became a familiar, everyday occurrence. Buddhists and Catholics died in street fighting, student unrest compounded the troubles, and because the new governments in Saigon wished above all else to avoid the crude, police-state methods of Ngo Dinh Nhu, these disturbances were dealt with only tentatively. Against this background of growing chaos, the Strategic Hamlet program collapsed in the countryside, and the Viet Cong went from strength to strength. Ho Chi Minh and the rest of the Communist leadership in Hanoi were not slow to exploit this deteriorating situation, and they began for the first time to infiltrate large tactical units of the North Vietnamese Army into South Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia. Under these circumstances a hoped-for withdrawal became impossible for the United States, but although President Lyndon Johnson increased the number of military advisers in Vietnam to thirty thousand, by early 1965 the Communists were standing clearly on the brink of total victory, and it was then that he decided to change radically the nature of America’s commitment. He first ordered U.S. warplanes to begin regular bombing raids against targets in both North and South Vietnam in February, and in July of that same year he sent the first batch of fifty thousand ground combat troops into Vietnam to fight independently of the South Vietnamese. With aircraft carriers and destroyers of the Seventh Fleet already cruising off the coast of the war zone, the might of the United States Army, Navy and Air Force was from that time firmly committed to the war, although the commitment was termed “limited” and it had been made by political stealth, without any formal declaration of war. Such a commitment had been made possible by mystery-shrouded events that had occurred off North Vietnam’s coast in the Gulf of Tongking in August 1964; according to an announcement made by the president himself, North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked two U.S. destroyers without provocation, and in response to “Communist aggression” he had ordered air strikes against the patrol boat bases and oil storage depots in North Vietnam. This dramatic revelation was made to reporters at midnight on August 4, and in an emotional atmosphere three days later, the U.S. Congress passed almost unanimously a resolution drafted in the White House giving blanket approval to any measures the president might take to prevent “further aggression.” Known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the legislation also stated that the United States regarded Vietnam as vital to both its national interest and world peace, and it allowed President Johnson a few months later to start the bombing and begin dispatching a force of ultimately half a million men to Vietnam without further reference to Congress or the people. Later it became clear that the US. Navy ships had not been innocent victims of aggression at all, but the controversial Tongking Resolution nevertheless remained in force for six years, until antiwar sentiment eventually forced its repeal. The million or more GIs sent to fight in Vietnam under its provisions, however, found themselves no more able to find and defeat their elusive enemy than the French or the ARVN forces had before them. Even though they were aided by North Vietnamese regular battalions, the Viet Cong still rarely fought anything but guerrilla-style actions and a third of all American combat casualties throughout the war were victims of booby traps and mines. As the number of troops committed by President Johnson rose, the U.S. aid bill to Vietnam also grew for what was variously termed “rural development,” “pacification” or “the other war” — but these efforts to woo South Vietnam’s peasants away from allegiance to the Viet Cong did not meet with much success hither. In fact, far from improving living conditions, the policies of the Johnson administration had a disastrous impact on the life of many people in the South; by early 1968 the combined effects of the American search-and-destroy operations, the chemical defoliation of the jungles and the bombing in the South had produced millions of new homeless refugees who flocked to the already overcrowded cities to live in shanty zones. There they faced a new struggle for survival because the presence of so many Americans and their generous aid programs produced a massive economic inflation. Meanwhile the political leadership of South Vietnam became more stable, first under the premiership of Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky and then under General Nguyen Van Thieu’s presidency, but these administrations remained as fundamentally unpopular and corrupt as that of President Diem, arid they never won the support and trust of the people at large. As the war continued inconclusively through the mid-sixties, the United States resorted increasingly to air attacks against the North in an effort to convince the Communist leaders in Hanoi that there was a firm resolve to defeat them; but in practice, the privations of the bombing served to unite the people of North Vietnam and make them more determined than ever to resist the “foreign enemy” that had haunted them throughout their history. During these years a growing number of American air force and navy pilots shot down over the North were made Prisoners of war in Hanoi, and as their number grew, rumors began to filter out that they were being subjected to brutal, medieval tortures in the course of “brainwashing,” and as a result, this small group of Americans became a focus of intense emotional interest in the United States. 

The heart of Hanoi was blacked out, and the broad, deep waters of the Lake of the Restored Sword reflected only a dull glimmer of light from the thinly clouded night sky as a rattling, twenty- year-old government Tatra nosed cautiously along its northern bank in the last week of January 1968. As usual the streets were clogged with mule carts, hand barrows and bicycles piled high with farm produce, and the Tongking peasants hurrying to resupply the capital under the cover of darkness refused doggedly to yield to the honking motor car. Already they could hear the distant drone of American B-52s and F-105s, and this familiar sound that they had heard almost every night for the past week was causing them to quicken their pace and lean their shoulders against their loads with a greater urgency. 

Because the weather was still oppressively hot, the windows of the ancient Czechoslovakian-built vehicle were wound right down in their rusty runnels and the noise of the aircraft engines was clearly audible to Lieutenant Mark Sherman, who sat hunched between two armed Vietnamese guards on the rear seat. But if lie heard them, he gave no sign to his captors; his wrists were manacled, traveling irons had been locked around his ankles, and he stared out listlessly at the dim outline of the lake’s pagodas and the swarm of passing peasants without registering them. He still wore the olive drabs which he had donned with his flying gear the night he took off from Da Nang for the last time early in 1966; these flying overalls had long since grown threadbare, and his appearance now bore little resemblance to that of the spruce, young air force pilot who had climbed so eagerly into his F105D Thunderchief two years before. His skull had been shaved and the pallid skin of his gaunt face was stretched taut across his hones, leaving his eyes darkly ringed in their hollow sockets; his shoulders sagged, his gaze was lifeless, without light, and his shackled hands dangled limp in an attitude of hopelessness between his splayed thighs. Occasionally the gastric stench of the Tatra’s poorly refined Soviet benzene caused his features to twitch into a grimace of distaste, but his face otherwise remained devoid of expression. 

From time o time, Tran Van Kim half turned in the front passenger seat to look at him, but the American showed no curiosity. In his early fifties, the round face of the Vietnamese above his high-necked cadre’s tunic was still curiously youthful, effeminate almost, and if Mark Sherman could have seen the high-ranking aide to Ho Chi Minh with his father’s eyes, he would have detected instantly in the regular cast of his features a hint of that quality that had produced a face of such great beauty in his sister, Lao. But Mark remained oblivious to his presence and continued to peer listlessly out into the night as he had done throughout the entire, hour-long journey from the Son Tay prisoner-of-war camp northwest of Hanoi. 

‘Have you no wish to know where you are being taken, Lieutenant Sherman?’ asked Kim speaking English in a sibilant undertone. But although both his guards jabbed him sharply with the muzzles of their machine pistols, the question still drew no response from the American, and after warning the guards with a little hand gesture not to repeat their actions, Kim turned away and relaxed in his seat again. 

The Tatra, with its bizarre tailfin jutting through the camouflage covering of palm leaves and jungle vegetation, chugged on around the lake and skirted the old craft quarter of the city before heading towards one of the outlying suburbs on its southern borders. Once, the density of the crowds thronging the streets brought it to a standstill, and the army driver stuck his head out of the window to listen to the sound of the aircraft for a moment. 

“Haiphong — the harbor again would you say, Comrade Kim?” he asked over his shoulder. 

Instead of replying Kim listened intently to the drone of the aircraft above the clouds; the roar of their approach was growing louder as twin missions converged from U.S. bases in northern Thailand and Seventh Fleet carriers in the South China Sea, and it became clear from the sudden added noise that some antiaircraft and missile batteries ringing the city were beginning to open up. ‘It sounds to me as if they might he coming our way tonight,” said Kim quietly, signaling for the driver to press forward again. “The sooner we get to our destination, the better.” 

The driver restarted the engine and moved off, peering intently through the windshield as he eased the car through the shadowy crowds by the inadequate light filtering through the blackout grilles on the headlamps. On display boards at the roadsides every few yards, giant head-and-shoulder portraits of Ho Chi Minh gazed down between posters showing Vietnamese peasant girls destroying American warplanes with a single rifle shot, and seeing these, Kim turned towards the back seat again. 

“Since you show no curiosity, Lieutenant Sherman, about the purpose of your visit to our capital, I shall tell you why you’ve been brought here — you are to be accorded the honor of being received by the beloved leader of the Vietnamese people. The president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, whose portrait you see all about you here, wishes to talk with you in person.” 

Kim watched his prisoner closely, but no flicker of interest disturbed the blankness of Mark’s expression, and in the silence that ensued, the distant crump of falling bombs became audible. 

“Perhaps you don’t believe me, lieutenant. Perhaps you find it impossible to believe that such an important national leader would remain in the heart of the city at a time when there’s great danger from your imperialist bombers.” Another brittle smile flashed across his face. “But you Americans don’t understand the true nature of his greatness. He insists on sharing all the dangers that his people and his comrades face. 

A brilliant orange glare lit the interior of the car suddenly as a bomb exploded with a great burst of light on an oil storage depot a mile or two ahead of them, and the driver stopped the car instantly in the middle of the street and dived out of the door. Kim watched the flames for a moment then rapped out instructions to the guards on the rear seat before flinging himself out of the door on his side. All around the car the peasants were abandoning their produce carts and dashing towards the sidewalks to clamber into rows of barrel-sized, one-man bomb shelters that had been excavated from the Street and lined with concrete; once inside they pulled lids, like manhole covers, into place above their heads, and within a minute the area appeared deserted. 

The two guards dragged Mark clumsily from the car and forced his tall, angular frame into one of the tiny shelters. But he refused to crouch down and remained limp in their grasp, doing nothing to cooperate in getting himself under cover; in their frustration they began to shout and scream at him, clubbing him repeatedly with the butts of their weapons and when another stick of bombs exploded much nearer, showering the road around them with earth and rubble, they let go of him and flung themselves into nearby shelters on their own. As they pulled the protective covers into position, the flash and roar of exploding bombs became continuous, and debris rattled down on the abandoned car close by. The light from the blazing oil storage complex gradually filled the whole sky with an orange incandescence, and gazing upwards, Mark Sherman’s face tightened into a mask of fury. Standing upright suddenly in the inadequate shelter that had been designed for slighter Asian men, he flung the cover from him; it cart wheeled away across the street until it came to rest with a clatter in the opposite gutter, and stretching his clenched fists towards the darkened heavens, he screamed incoherently at the invisible American planes. 

His words were garbled and unintelligible, little more than animal sounds gushing uncontrollably from his throat in the hysterical cadences of abuse; sometimes they were drowned in the elemental roar of the attack, at others his screaming rang piercingly through sudden intervals of silence. Once, the cover of the shelter beside him shifted slightly, and Tran Van Kim looked out through the narrow slit with startled eyes. Then another heavy deluge of rubble made him clamp the cover shut again, and a moment later a 1istsized chunk of masonry struck Mark on the forehead, stunning him, and he pitched forward, half in and half out of the shelter. He lay there without moving while the roar of the attacking planes faded gradually into the darkness. When quiet eventually returned to the street, the faint sounds of his sobbing were for a few brief moments the only human sound in the stillness of the night.