The Lotus and the Storm (27 page)

It began as a bright and balmy morning but by the time we arrived in Hue and headed to the inspection sites a gray steady rain was falling. Along with a few of our local troops, we made our way through the drizzle into the sullen courtyard. Phong's face tightened. Vultures hovered above and coveted the deadness that was everywhere. Bodies had turned black and bubbled with an infestation of maggots and flies. Rats gnawed on opened wounds and decomposed flesh. Phong's job kept him mostly in the office. He let out a nervous, whinnying sound and quickly turned his head.

In the next few months, as our soldiers cleared rubble and debris, eighteen additional grave sites were found that produced more than two thousand bodies. Their hands were wired behind backs and their mouths stuffed with rags. They lay in puddles of black, brackish waters and bubbling scum floating on a vibrating surface of insects. Many of the bodies were contorted but suffered no wounds, an indication that they were buried alive.

Phong took refuge behind his sunglasses and white handkerchief. The stench was overpowering. Reflex alone could make most everyone recoil and vomit. I wanted to be magnanimous. I handed him a bottle of mentholated balm. He shook and hugged himself with his arms to calm the shivers. I saw the staring faces of a few troops in full battle fatigue, a glimmer of scorn in their eyes, as they watched him sink to his knees and throw up. There was a stench of nausea and sourness. His lips pursed. A gray sludge spurted from his mouth as he hurried farther away from us. I could put myself in his position, but I did not manage more than a showing of sympathy and concern. To save him embarrassment, I said nothing and focused on the task at hand.

A few days later, three Vietcong defectors walked up to our headquarters in Hue and confessed as we were preparing to divide up our duties among the Airborne Taskforce. It was early morning. A flock of raucous crows flapped their wings and took flight, creating a flutter against the galvanized roof. We were drinking coffee. I was pouring several teaspoons of condensed milk into my cup. The defectors were gaunt-looking, bedraggled. They stared at us, shaking their heads, and spoke in a low monotone of self-reproach. The oldest one walked forward with the other two by his side, one touching his arm and the other his wrist, either as a gesture of caution and restraint or encouragement and support.

They told us everything matter-of-factly. They had witnessed the murder of hundreds of people at Da Mai Creek, ten miles south of Hue. It had happened on the fifth day of Tet, in the Phu Cam section of Hue, where most of the city's forty thousand Catholics lived. In some cases, entire families had been eliminated, they whispered. It was part of the Communist plan to wholly reconstruct society. They told us where to find the corpses of a well-known Catholic leader, his wife, his son and daughter-in-law, two servants, and a baby. The family dog had also been clubbed to death, the cat strangled, even the goldfish tossed on the floor. The father had been undressed and made to stand naked on top of a roof for all to witness.

Right away we put together a team from our Airborne Taskforce and headed for Da Mai Creek. We followed a dirt road. Several kilometers away from the village, the land closed inward into itself. The road made a final turn and then clogged itself up. Surrounded by a double canopy of thick brush, trees, and roots close to the ground, the creek would be impossible to reach on land. And it would take too long by boat. To clear a landing pad, helicopters were sent in to blast a hole through the double canopy with dynamite. In the artificial light, our burial team dug, scavenged, and found skulls, skeletons, and human bones. The lights strapped on their helmets shined a path to the discovery. Piled one on top of another, the dead were left aboveground. The bones were clean and white, smoothed by the water from the running stream. The terrible brutality startled us. Slowly, leaving out no details, we wrote our report. I planned to show it to the Americans, to Cliff.

By the time the Battle of Hue ended, six thousand civilians had vanished.

 • • • 

One evening, as we walked through the surrounding areas that fanned out from the village center, Phong and I followed the dirt road south on a path that curled through a small hamlet along the bank of the Perfume River. I wasn't sure why we did it. I felt compelled to treat him like a friend. Aggrieved or not, I wanted to manifest, if not to feel, the tenderness I once had for him. I could practice the gesture in the hope that an accompanying feeling would catch up with me. I could be bigger than my emotions, let go of this seemingly purposeless enmity.

He was slightly ahead, walking at a fast clip. I remember seeing the familiar orange glow of his cigarette butt dangling from his fingers as I lagged behind. He brought it to his mouth and took a long pensive drag. The slight breeze blew odors of cigarette smoke and coffee into my face. Perhaps we had been lulled by the profusion of luminous green that so defines the country's soul. We glided unaware into what awaited us beyond the old footbridge by the stream.

I felt the soft spongy earth under my feet. It had rained a few days ago. A water buffalo with huge curving horns meandered among the translucent squares of green and headed toward us. A boy lay on its back, seemingly taking a nap. A woman walked along the edge of the rice field, shielding her face from the sun with a conical hat. I took a deep breath. Despite what had happened here but a few months before, everything seemed rejuvenated.

“Come on,” Phong said over his shoulder. He arched his back, cracking it. His legs took long, loose strides. He rotated his neck clockwise, then counterclockwise.

Before us was a patch of commonplace brown earth, an austere layer of claylike topsoil, a small and benign anthill. How quickly life changed.

I sensed it, like a flashing movement out of the corner of my eye. Something was wrong. I was a combat soldier. I was struck by a butterfly sensation that stopped me from moving forward.

“What?” Phong turned his head slightly to ask.

I was startled. Phong was walking toward its slick center. I hesitated. But I did not shout a warning.

Why?

I would ask myself that question for the rest of my life.

And then I could see it, a slight but perceptible rise in the earth's surface. A small mound.

A loud boom rose from the startled earth, followed quickly by a blast wave of hot gases. Phong was blown to the ground. An inert metal casing had jumped up from buried earth and snapped. A volcanic redness poured from his flesh. His right leg above the knee was blown apart. A white jagged bone and a tangle of ligaments protruded from the flesh. I touched him. The bone was pulverized. Bone fragments had torn through his flesh and bits of gravel were driven into the surrounding tissue. There was severe soft tissue loss all around. The concussion effect was terrible. The entire wound area was sprayed with impregnated matter, dirt, debris, grass, cloth fibers. Phong began to shake, his face twisted and distorted. I made a tourniquet to stanch the bleeding. I tried several times. It was slippery, tissue, blood, skin. I fumbled. Phong's head sagged, his face turning purplish and blue. I radioed for help. I calmed myself down and tied the tourniquet again. I put a handkerchief over the worst-looking wound and pressed my hand against it. As a cooling breeze blew softly, I, the spared one, waited for a helicopter to come and take him away.

 • • • 

I knew the moment I saw the doctor's face. Blood rushed to my head. There was to be no good news at all. When I visited him in the hospital, I knew he would lose most of his right leg. The wound had become severely infected. The doctors agonized over the level at which to perform the amputation. There was too much contaminated tissue that had to be removed. There was only one option—amputation at a level considerably higher than the original injury. Particulate matter had been driven into flesh, in between muscles. The first operation lasted almost a full day. They had to pluck out each piece of foreign matter to forestall infection. When I saw him, his flesh was perforated; his body required extensive suturing. I was reassured he was not feeling pain. The doctors understood Phong was a VIP, someone in the president's inner circle. Everything possible was done for him at this hospital. He looked up and asked in a soft voice, “Doctor, is there any chance I can see my leg? The one you cut off?”

I cringed inwardly. Miraculously they had kept it and granted his request. I knew this was not the usual protocol. I had just passed a giant canvas bin in the hallway filled with amputated body parts.

He proceeded to hold his severed leg, as if it were a baby.

When I saw him after his first operation to remove damaged tissue and suture the clean wound, he was calmly sitting on a wheelchair with an imperturbable expression on his face. I was assured he had been given the maximum allowable dosage of painkillers, both epidural and intravenous. He knew that there would be more to remove, only it would be done incrementally. He sat absolutely still in a pool of light under the fluorescent tubes, busily folding and unfolding a page from the newspaper. I could not tell if he recognized me, except for a slight nod of the head in my direction. He did take me in but without exhibiting any hint of recognition. I embraced him, the top part of his body, the torso that already felt wholly disembodied from the flapping trouser leg, the nub and remnant of bone and flesh below. He resisted my touch. I could feel his bony shoulders, the true thinness of his very being, the pure unadulterated sorrow. It was horror I felt most of all. I cast my eyes downward. My bodily presence before him, whole and intact, seemed glaringly inappropriate. I was acutely aware of my limbs. The distance that had existed between us deepened. His would be a life of pain from the moment the mine exploded.

“Phong,” I called out. “You will leave here soon,” I improvised. I was willing to say anything. “Thu is waiting for you.” I kept my voice evenly modulated. I wanted to gather him up and hold him.

My voice failed to reach him altogether. He kept silent, mindlessly rubbing a corner of the newspaper between his thumb and forefinger. With prodigious effort, he pulled his slumping body up, digging his elbows into the cushioned armrests.

I went toward the window and opened a shutter to enlarge the square of natural light entering the room. The room smelled of ointment, of petroleum. I was ever mindful of the simple, undemanding act of walking, of taking footsteps, of the sound of booted thuds on the floor. I made as little noise as possible. Phong muttered a few sounds, a muffled groan, then lapsed into silence. Occasionally he glanced at me through the sides of his eyes. I could no longer read him. I listened and watched.

During the next few days, he appeared more gaunt, almost tubercular, as he exhaled shallow, ragged breaths. But at times he was more animated. His eyes flared, perhaps reflecting an imminent fit of agitation. They were bright, almost delirious and bewildered, and then alert and focused again.

Maybe it was the drugs.

I did not know what to expect. He did not ask, “Why me?” He did not challenge. He did not once say, “Why not you?” There was no hint of righteous indignation.

I struggled to fill my lungs with air. No, he did not say, “By stepping on it, I saved your life. Again.” I shuddered. I wanted to avoid the terrain of obligation and gratitude.

What would I have said in response? No, you did not save my life again, Phong, because I would not have stepped on it.

Ah, so you did see it. And said nothing to warn me?

But I did not see it. Not really. I just would have known to avoid it.

I wondered. It was but a mere second in my mind's eye. My heart suspended in midbeat, I saw it again, the small mound. The anthill. I heard it as well. The explosion. I heard over and over the penitential murmurs of voices inside my head.

He pushed a bundle of pages from the newspaper at me, his head cocked to one side. His eyes were dark and focused, and his mouth grimly set in a straight horizontal line. I had not heard him speak since I first visited him after the explosion. I glanced at the bold headlines. I could hear his breath rattle, the ragged effort to take in oxygen. The stories were about Tet.

I rose. I did not want him to read about battles. I picked up the pages and placed them on a table away from his reach. Phong, his eyes now glazed over, returned to a deep silence, submerged inside himself. His hand caressed the empty space where his right leg had been. There it was, stroking not the ragged protuberance that remained but the naked fleshlessness immediately below. I cleared my throat, unsure what to do or say. Phong turned toward me and said softly, “Please hand me a blanket.” And when I did, he draped it over the portion of the leg that had been removed, the phantom limb itself.

“Oh, Phong,” I muttered.

“It feels very cold,” he murmured. “I feel a lot of tingling and tightness there. All cramped up.”

“There's nothing there,” I said.

His eyes teared up. For a moment he looked confused. “But it hurts. It really hurts,” he said.

Two weeks later he was released. We would return to Saigon for the final phases of his recuperation. As the helicopter took us to Cong Hoa Hospital, all I could feel was the solid iron floor and the surge and swell of the engines. Phong slept, curled inside a dream. His belongings, Tet newspapers, our half-finished report on the massacre at Hue, and a few clean shirts, had been gathered inside a duffel bag.

From above, even as the chopper's propellers whirled and rotated, the city below, a welter of neighborhoods from Saigon to Cholon, blossomed and glittered with the profound conviction that victory was indeed close at hand. Still, I couldn't quite bring myself to embrace it wholeheartedly. My reservations were sourceless. Nerves, I thought. Anxieties. There was Phong beside me, afflicted and lost inside a tortured and stormy hush.

 • • • 

What I wanted after Tet was the resumption of a pre-Tet life. I knew we would still be in a state of war, just not the kind of post-Tet war that departed so radically from the reassuringly plain version I knew—the version that focused on the military, instead of the political and psychological. There was no doubt Tet was a devastating blow to the enemy. On the fields of battle, fire had been met fiercely with fire. Despite the element of surprise, the North had not achieved a single military objective. And in the strategic gamble to overwhelm us with multitudes of attacks and trigger a popular uprising, they failed miserably. Due to a series of miscalculations, they had instead choreographed their own defeat. Enraged by the enemy's treachery and brutality during Tet, young men volunteered to join the armed forces. The number of volunteers surged, especially in Hue. Even Vietcong guerrillas rallied to the government's side, and the number of defectors increased fourfold after Tet. Seizing the momentum, our government did what it had not before dared. It decreed full mobilization. The draft categories expanded to include eighteen- to thirty-eight-year-olds, compared with twenty-one to twenty-eight previously.