The Man From Saigon (2 page)

She discovered it was hard to function in Saigon. The electricity didn’t always work. The water came out rusty from the taps. She drew herself maps, wrestled with the foreign money, drenched her clothes in sweat trying to get used to a climate that seemed from another planet entirely. One day she saw school children file past a dog that had died outside the school gates. The children walked over the stiffened legs or hopped above the bloated body. One of the boys got a stick and hit the dog’s ribs as though it was a
piñata
that had failed to burst
open its sweets. A few others stood around, watching. Then another kicked the dead body. She went back the next day and the dog was still there, most of it.

She had plenty of time to read the
Handbook
because she found it impossible to sleep. The traffic was like some background record that kept repeating itself: screeching tires, honking horns, exhausts backfiring, and engines that moaned and spluttered under the slow poison of inappropriate fuel. That ended shortly after curfew at eleven, but then there was all the noise from the assortment of odd guests at the hotel where she stayed. Some nights they arrived drunk from clubs, speaking at the tops of their voices, playing music, or kicking a soccer ball down the halls. Fights broke out between the drunken ones and those who had regular jobs that required early rising. It was not unusual to hear an argument conducted in three different languages, and once in a while it got physical.

The hotel’s owner was a middle-aged balding man named Thanh. He had a mustache like two sets of toothbrush bristles stuck above his lip, and an open, sad face. He seemed particularly burdened by the noisy guests and was concerned, too, about their impact on the quieter ones. Even so, it did no good at all when he knocked door to door along the corridors at midnight with the question,
They boddering you?
, while further down the hall came shouts of laughter.

I was asleep
, she always lied.

Even when all was peaceful at the hotel, it was still only a couple steps up from camping. Insects trailed her wherever she went, crossing whatever barrier or combination of sprays she used, bringing up itchy swellings on her skin. When she did sleep, she managed it only by putting a pillow over her head to block out the noise. Reading was good. It helped her to believe she was learning something useful and she knew there was much to learn.

In those early days she could not have understood what she had gotten into. For example, she paid no attention to the
Handbook’s
suggestion to pack belts and field straps—materials that could be made into a tourniquet—as she didn’t think she was going anywhere she might be shot. She glanced over instructions on first aid because she thought there were specific people who did that—others, not her. Okay, so she had seen some kids beating the corpse of a dog. And she’d noticed, too, how many people with crudely amputated limbs begged along the streets. But she hadn’t made the connection yet. She didn’t realize that people could play football down a hallway, walk outside and be blown up by a little anti-personnel mine strategically fixed beneath a car. She was still under the impression the war could be contained, a thing over there, something that had to be arrived at quite deliberately. She didn’t realize.

A lot of Vietnam correspondents have a story of how they came to the country: chosen by accident, paid for their own ticket by winning a game show, confused with another guy, filled in for someone else on R&R and the person never came back. Susan was no different—the choice to send her seemed random, the end result of a chain of assumptions. She was working for a women’s magazine and had a private interest in horse training—it was really the combination of those two facts that had brought her into the war. One long summer in ’66 she moonlighted for the police department, desensitizing their horses to gunfire, preparing them to cover student protests, city riots, rallies. The job required learning to shoot a pistol, launch smoke grenades from the saddle, and move the horses away from rings of fire, then toward them again—hours of this until they would happily jump through them.
What we need here
, said one of the officers, a transplant from the Southwest, a guy fond of flicking his hair back, of swaggering cowboy style into the barn in the early hours and staring right down at her
ass as she worked,
what we need here is a cow-y pony that can separate one man from another in a crowd, you know what I mean? A bolshie sonovabitch, gelded late.

She looked up from where she was working, bending down to trim a loose flap of frog off a front hoof.
You mean a mare, then
, she said.

Like hell! Mares can’t hack it when the chips are down. I don’t want to be right up against it and have my horse go all girly on me.

She took in a breath. She’d worked late on a story the night before and she was tired; she didn’t want an argument, especially one as inane as whether a mare was capable of going “all girly”. She moved to the next hoof and began clearing one cleft, then another, ignoring the guy. It was the only defense.

He came closer, gave the tag end of her chaps belt a little tug, and said,
I like the way you ride.

She stood straight, dropping the horse’s leg, staring at the guy, the hoof pick held like a pirate’s hook. Quietly, as though sharing a secret, she said,
You can fuck right off.
To which he laughed hard, backing up as he did so.

That’s good
, he said.
That’s real good.

He told her he was biding his time for her.
It won’t be long
, he promised.

The horses had to walk through smoke, explosions, throngs of people. It was exactly the opposite of what is natural for them. She taught the small herd of four the same skills as for cutting cattle and slowly the horses began to disregard everything but the job at hand. Before work, on the weekends, late into the Midwestern evenings when the heat gave way to the velvet of a summer’s night, the training took up all her free time all that summer long, until she could have ridden beside a firing canon and the horses wouldn’t spook, until not even a dog was safe in an open pen because the horses would chase him out. Finally, at the end of the summer they sent a bunch
of the officers into the ring with her and she focused her gaze on the one with the swagger, and felt her horse connect with her meaning, hooking on to the guy.

He made a run for it, whooping as though he enjoyed being chased, showing off to the others. He lifted his hat like a clown running in a rodeo; he made a show of pretending he was scared. But it took only four strides to catch up with him and less than ten seconds until she was circling him at a canter as he held up his hands in surrender, laughing. He expected her to let him go now, but she didn’t let him go. She kept up the revolutions, the horse rolling on its hocks, the sound of hooves like a drumbeat, so close to the guy he looked as though he’d been corked in a bottle. Now the officer stopped smiling; he stared at her helplessly, unable to move an inch, 900 pounds of horse around him like a cyclone. She watched a window of fear open on his face. He suddenly looked young and stupid; he suddenly looked like someone she felt sorry for. She sat back, bringing the horse to a halt.

Meet Millie
, she said, patting a swatch of mane.

At the magazine, they thought horse training meant she was a particular type of person, a kind of rugged, intrepid girl willing to take physical risks—not what she thought of herself, not at all. Spring the next year she was called into the editor’s office and given the assignment to collect women’s interest stories for a feature they wanted on Vietnam. She was to be there only a few weeks.

War reporting?
She was confused.

Her editor kept looking at the copy she was marking, barely registering the question.
As you seem to like adventures
, she said. The editor’s desk was littered with typescripts, paperweights, trays stuffed with clippings, envelopes, a grammar, a stamp pad, a half-empty bottle of aspirin, caffeine pills, two dirty coffee cups which sat next to the one from which she was now drinking. She smoked Larks, her lipstick ringing the filters of
a collection of spent butts in the ashtray. She wore browline eyeglasses in the style of Malcolm X and had an affecting glare such that one tended not to argue.

Vietnam
, Susan said.
Women’s interest.
It was more a question than anything.

The editor had a rash around her hairline, some kind of eczema that worsened with stress, and a large vein in her neck that bulged when she shouted, which was not infrequently. She looked up from what she was doing, scribbling over some copy with what might have been a glass marker, and reeled off a list:
Orphans, hospitals, brave young GIs, gallant doctors, heroic captains, courageous American-loving civilians…go there, find it.

Susan nodded.
So, no dying
—She was going to say
So, no dying sons
, but her editor fixed her with a look that brought the entire discussion back to where it had begun, as a set of instructions. Then the older woman scratched her head and told Susan there were newsmen all over Chicago desperate to go to Saigon—didn’t she know that? Her fingers unstuck a file drawer and suddenly she slapped a manila envelope on to the desk, her eyes never leaving Susan’s.

Open it
, she said.

There were photographs of women in combat gear, cameras around their necks, ponytails beneath helmets. She recognized one right away, the late Dickey Chapelle in her horn-rims and pearl studs, squinting through the lens. Another showed a girl with reddish blonde hair, a long, freckled nose. She was smiling at a soldier wearing a helmet that listed the months of the year, four crossed out, a pack of cigarettes tucked into the band.

Her editor said,
That’s Cathy Leroy, age twenty-two. Little French girl arrived in Saigon with no job and no experience as a photographer. The way she makes a living is by taking more risks than the guys.

Cathy Leroy was built like a gymnast, not even five feet tall. In one of the photos she was following a group of four marines
as they carried their dead buddy over a field of elephant grass flattened by the force of wind off a chopper’s rotor blades. Susan thought it was impressive what the girl was doing; it made something flicker inside her, a rush of possibility as though she had just stumbled upon a vision of herself in that same place, beneath the same hot sun and the same deafening sound of a medevac arriving. She had never, not once, considered a foreign assignment, let alone in a war zone. Now, as she flipped through the photographs her editor gave her, it occurred to her this was exactly what she wanted, or could want, if she dared.

She came across a black-and-white glossy of a brunette with cropped hair and large dark eyes, a pad out, a pen, a casual look on an intelligent face.

Kate Webb
, her editor explained.
She’s a stringer.

There was a pause between them, a lot of silent air that seemed solid. Susan cleared her throat.
I’ve not really had any experience
—she began.

The editor interrupted.
Kate went out with no job at all. Like Cathy. But you have a big advantage in that your room is paid for. You’ll be on salary.
She took out a fresh cigarette, waving it as she spoke.
This assignment might lead to more. So think carefully before you say yes.
She gave Susan a long look, brought a match to the cigarette, and inhaled sharply. Then she went back to marking up the pages she was working on while Susan sat in the chair across from her, not sure whether to leave or stay, to say yes or no. Not even sure whether to hand back the photographs.

After a minute the editor sat back in her chair, folding her arms across her chest and frowning at Susan, who had not shifted from her seat.
When I said think carefully before saying yes, I did mean you should
say
yes.
She dug into her handbag for a new pack of Larks, stripped the plastic seal, and offered one to Susan.

I don’t smoke
, Susan said.

Start. It’s good for keeping the bugs off you in tropical climes.

It’s not that I don’t want to go
—

I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t think you wanted to go. Of course you want to go. What I’m telling you is this: you won’t likely get another chance.

Susan tried to look confident, relaxed. She tried to imagine herself in Vietnam.
I’m just letting the idea sink in
, she said.

The editor attempted a smile, but it came out wrong, the smile was more like a grimace between streams of smoke.
The idea is to have a chance to distinguish yourself
, she said.
The
idea
is to be somebody.

And so she had arrived early in 1967. By then there was already plenty of every kind of reporter in Vietnam, almost all men, and she doubted more than one or two of those who gathered at bars and restaurants, who stood in line at the cable office or wrapped up their film for shipment, expected her actually to go out into the field. The magazine, too, had imagined she would remain, more or less, within the protection of Saigon, staging occasional day trips to nearby (secure) bases.

But she soon discovered this was not possible, not if she wanted an actual story. She attended the afternoon press conferences, winding her way through the maze of corridors and windowless, low-ceilinged offices at JUSPAO, chatting to the reporters doing the same, but found nothing in the press releases that would translate easily into magazine articles. The military gave battle statistics: body counts, numbers killed in action, wounded in action, killed by air. They talked about the enemy, but rarely about people. They talked about territories, but not homes. They had a particular way of describing the Vietcong’s movements, how they “infested” villages, so that Susan imagined them like the enormous, prodigious cockroaches that roamed freely through cracks in the skirting boards of Saigon
buildings, emerging from tiny spaces in plaster where wires flowed, even up through sinkholes. It was part of the jargon—WHAMO, LZ, DMZ, ARVN, PVA, NVA, SOP—that she was learning, that she was trying to learn, and which at first felt as mysterious and incomprehensible as Vietnamese itself. One day during her first week in the country, she made the mistake of drawing attention to herself by asking the lieutenant colonel making the announcement, a man who seemed to dread the afternoon press conference as much as the press who attended (who were said to be divided into two camps: those who did not believe the information, and those who did not care), a question about this terminology. Raising her voice so that it could be heard in the front of the room, she asked the lieutenant colonel to please tell her what “WBLC” meant.