The Lotus and the Storm (13 page)

In a country such as Vietnam, we understand karma. We have all traveled its path, felt its key points, feared its whiplash. We go to great lengths to slip free of the psychological convolutions that come from fearing its wrath.

Twenty days after the Vietnamese president and his brother were killed in Saigon, the president of the United States was assassinated in Dallas. I could only imagine what the generals of the coup must have felt when they heard the news. Only a Vietnamese would shudder at the sequence of these two events and understand their spine-clicking effect.

 • • • 

After President Diem's death, the Americans arrived in increasing numbers. In 1960, there were only advisers. Then in 1961, 3,000 troops. After President Diem's death, 184,000 troops. The number would reach beyond 500,000 in the years to come.

We beckoned and at the same time withdrew inside ourselves. We didn't want them to come but we needed them to stay.

They promised safety. With the Communists barreling down on us, entrenched along our borders, we were wide-eyed and howling to be saved. At the time, salvation could not have appeared to us in a more beautiful form than a flag with stars and stripes. We gazed into the horizon and placed our trust in their imminent arrival.

And the Americans entered our story not fully knowing what awaited them.

My friendship with Phong began when the Americans first arrived as advisers. Phong and I met at the Cap Saint Jacques officer candidate school. Training was extensive, accelerated. The world's intellectuals were throwing around words like
anti-imperialism
and
decolonization,
but we believed colonialism was less of a threat than Communism. The age of empires was in its twilight and it was the romantic promise of Communism that tantalized. In the North, nationalist leaders were being eliminated by Ho Chi Minh's followers in the most brutal ways imaginable. Some had been bound hand and foot and thrown into rivers. Others had been buried alive. We knew what Communism was really like.

I remembered our beginning well. It was 1955. Phong stood in front of the commander's desk listening to his orders. I was the junior officer. I accompanied them into another room where the map of our country was hanging. “The country is in a crisis,” the commander said. “There is no money to pay the troops and the Americans are set on remaking the armed forces.”

We understood the Americans were in a hurry. Unlike the French, they were not here to impart a superior civilization. That would have required courtship, even seduction.

The French had just left, taking with them a force of more than 200,000. To fill this vacuum and to defend the country from the North and the Vietcong, we needed a national army of around 200,000. Phong and I were assigned the task of authoring a report analyzing the state of the Vietnamese National Army. The South was trying furiously to fashion a non-Communist nationalist solution. After many months of investigation and study, Phong and I recommended that four infantry divisions, the Sixth, Eleventh, Twenty-first, and Thirty-first, be activated to fill the void.

With laconic detachment, the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group opposed our plan. The advisers determined that we should have an armed force of no more than 100,000, just enough to defeat a Vietcong insurgency, not repel a North Vietnamese attack. In the case of external attack by the North, we had only to obstruct their assault and wait for the United States to come to our assistance.

“We'd be committed to you through SEATO,” one adviser promised. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization would obligate the United States to come to our rescue. Even so, Phong and I both found it impossible to bear. We were two hotheads. We were still young, but quickly gaining experience and wisdom.

“What an absurd notion that is,” I later said to my commander.

The commander pursed his lips and nodded. “True. But draw up a plan of discharge as soon as possible,” he ordered.

Phong and I consoled each other as we performed the executioner's task of dismembering our beloved armed forces. I was distressed by the wanton elimination of names from the military roster. With a measure of clinical certainty, our superiors reminded us of the targeted goals, the deadlines, and the conditions attached to American funding. Phong was less sentimental than I was. For him, speed and determination were necessities. A quick slash across the throat. By the end of the day, he showed me the stacks of discharge papers he had signed and processed.

Sometimes I met the men who would soon be let go. I saw how they were stilled by disappointment, how sorrow showed in their faces and gathered around their mouths. Often a group would huddle on a dirt patch, passing one another a cigarette. At different hours of the day I came by and watched them from around the corner. I didn't smoke but I took a few puffs just to be among them. I listened to them and could think only about our national failings. Like a penitent at the temple's gate, my face burned with shame. Afterward, Phong and I would get ourselves to a corner café and order two big bowls of pho. To console me, Phong would pluck slices of well-done brisket, flank, and tendon from his bowl and put them in mine. I did not protest his gesture.

Our friendship deepened as we dragged ourselves to street-corner saloons where men gathered to drink, eat, and talk. We felt the loss more than we expected. The liquor would pull us out of our gray mood. The bar we frequented was owned by a wiry man, Mr. Manh, a friend of Phong's father from the North. Though it was no more than a humble storefront cursed with the appearance of imminent collapse, its tables were always filled. Around us, men congregated, grazed on tidbits of appetizers—the exotic and the mundane commingling on a serving plate. The proprietor cracked open a slab of ice with a cleaver and dropped a few slivers into our glasses. We washed down marbled beef and sinewy gizzards with gulps of alcohol. We sat on wooden stools and drank beer and rice wine with raw abandon. Jars of bone-colored homemade liquors lined a wooden shelf nailed against a plywood scrap wall. Lizards, goat testicles, gecko, gutted and washed and marinated in rice wine and herbs, lurked at the bottom of the jars. Mr. Manh elbowed Phong and me, nudging us to taste such and such a concoction to boost our libido, to ward off colds, to rejuvenate our souls and spirits. “Available by the glass or jar,” he'd say, grinning. Embers glowed as rows of dried squid crackled and popped on the grill. We usually nibbled on barbecued beef and boiled peanuts, sautéed liver, ears of baby corn coated in a mixture of oil and scallions.

Occasionally we indulged in a shot of snake liquor, the meanest drink in the country. I did not like it but Phong was a Northerner and snake liquor is a northern drink. His clan fled south in 1954 when the Communists consolidated the North. I wanted to indulge his nostalgia for his hometown, Le Mat, a village just north of Hanoi. Northerners go to Le Mat to drink snake whiskey. The Saigon version was less pungent but it would have to do.

When Phong gave him the signal, Mr. Manh brought two glasses to our table, each half-filled with high-octane rice whiskey. The old man's agility astounded me. I watched as he pinned a cobra to the ground, then grabbed its head from behind as his assistant gripped the tail, stretching out its body to leave the underbelly exposed. Mr. Manh swabbed the snake's chin with alcohol, then, with a perfectly coordinated set of movements and a warrior's calmness of mind, sliced open the sterilized area with a short blade. He deftly inserted a finger inside the cut, located the heart, and severed the main artery, allowing the blood to drain into our whiskey glasses. A pulsating, glassy heart, a potent aphrodisiac, was dropped into a shot glass. Phong tossed his head back and gulped the whiskey now swirling with bright red blood down his throat, heart and all.

Mr. Manh opened another slit farther down the snake's belly. He shoved several fingers into the slit, removed a gallbladder, and emptied the bile into my glass, turning it a luminous green. Removing the canvas sheath from a different knife, Mr. Manh then proceeded to slice off the cobra's hooded head, tossing the body to a cook in the open-air kitchen. The meat was grilled, the skin battered and deep-fried, and the bones dropped into a pot for soup. We munched on snake meat in all its varieties: snake and leek soup, rice porridge with snake, snakeskin chips. Exhorted to take a swig, I obliged and shot the whiskey down my throat. A sharp rawness caught. My nose burned. Phong hooted, hooked his arm around my neck, then pounded my back for show. I sat ungracefully, my skin prickled with gooseflesh.

Night after night we drank. We nursed our bouts of loneliness together, allowed ourselves the freedom to be unburdened. Phong confided his fears and then washed them away with a bottle of “33” beer or Johnnie Walker. He bemoaned the paucity of love. He had not yet met Thu. He was not yet married. He feared he would be left behind. Would the possibility of love ever edge its way into his life? Would he meander through life untouched by it, the extravagant, ravenous kind that altered and transformed your shape? He was looking to me for reassurance that he too would be seized by the phenomenon of love, as I already knew that sort of devotion. I had just recently met my wife.

“You're done with loneliness for good,” he said to me.

I didn't know how to respond. Agreeing smacked of self-congratulatory arrogance. And disagreeing seemed disloyal to Quy.

The realization that what I had was what Phong most wished for both comforted and filled me with unease. What if that which I loved most disappeared one day? How could I, or anyone, ever recover from that sort of loss?

How did I know, he asked, if I would love her forever. I did not answer the question. I did not know how I knew. I just did.

“Of course,” he said, his voice lowered. “It is easy for you. You have
her.
” His face glowed with heat. He turned against the open window, hands cupped, striking the wheel of his lighter.

Later, he paused after a drink and asked, “What are
you
most worried about?” as he leaned back and sucked a cigarette, blowing wisps of smoke that hung in the still air. From the ceiling, a naked bulb dangled from a bare wire, its bright light magnifying the sorrow on his face. He cupped his hand over his eyes to shield them from the glare.

I had not expected such a question. Even a hypothetical heartache was too stinging to contemplate. I revealed a different sort of anxiety to him, confiding my fear that we would be ill-equipped to push back a Communist assault. While my reply was an avoidance of his question, it was not quite a lie. Not at all, as things turned out.

 • • • 

Before President Diem was assassinated, he had looked for other allies. Malaysia sent armored cars, jeeps, and shotguns to help us equip the Civil Guards. Sir Robert Thompson arrived in Saigon from England, bringing with him stacks of notes, sheaves of maps, and the accumulated experience and wisdom that came from years of directing Britain's spectacularly successful antiguerrilla campaign in Malaysia. An ordnance delegation was dispatched to Japan to seek engineering help. President Diem wanted us to be beholden to no one. What happened to our plans? I couldn't say. After that day in November, the country drifted. All backup plans were sidetracked.

Even so, we did ask questions. Once in a while we pushed for a different strategy.

Aware of our own backwardness, we asked for modern weapons. Again, I was in charge of the paperwork, which gave me an understanding, even then, of the swift diminishment of possibilities for us. My windowless office was hot. Sweat dripped down my back. Every day I sat facing the wall, trying to cut to the fundamentals that would convince the Americans to rethink their strategy. I worked late into the evening, engaged in the niggling business of negotiating for this and that weapon. There were moments when I could concoct hope and make myself believe in a jazzed-up version of American benevolence. Surely they would see things our way once they read my reports. I felt the sharp, muttering crack of the typewriter's keys as a great source of hope. Each key was capable of producing a crisp, satisfied sound. Problem was juxtaposed against solution. We had been given M1 rifles that were no match against the Soviet AK-47, so we petitioned for the powerful M16. In a soldier's hand, the M16 automatic was capable of firing between seven hundred and one thousand rounds per minute. We wanted F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers and F-104 fighter jets to counteract the advanced MiG-21s the Soviets gave the North Vietnamese. I typed out our case, paragraph by paragraph.

My reports became repetitious. In the end, we received no offensive weapons from the Americans. With a sympathetic half-smile, an American adviser said to me, “That's what the U.S. Air Force is for if you need us.” He was not the one making the decision. The rules of this war would be decided elsewhere.

For our war, the Americans had designed a purely defensive strategy, dragging everything out for years until they were fed up with it and with us. There would be fierce, vicious, and deadly battles and then there would be time in between, a moody, fractured time that we wistfully hoped could be translated into surrender on the part of the enemy. Year after year, the war was fought in this intense, prolonged twilight of surges and shudders.