The Man From Saigon (4 page)

Outside the air was one large fist of sound. It was a constant pummeling, endless, almost rhythmic. The noise seemed to go inside him; he could feel it in his bones and teeth, straight down
his spine. He had, of course, been through such things before. This was not his first war. But that didn’t matter now. The only thing that had any weight, any significance at all, was this isolated moment, then the one that followed. He felt his legs begin to shake, the adrenaline coursing through him. He felt a low weight in his stomach. The girl across from him began to cry silently, her face frozen in an internal agony he understood, understood completely. His throat was dry, his mouth gritty with sand. His arms didn’t seem to have any strength in them. He felt weighted and immobile, a statue of himself, buried in the ground. It seemed to take all his strength to raise his hand, fingers trembling, and touch the girl’s face. He looked at her, breathing purposely in and out, trying to calm herself. He put the back of his hand on her cheek, on the soft skin beneath her jaw. He wanted to offer her something. It seemed the least he could do, sitting so close to her, and through all these minutes.

She reached forward and hooked his knee with her arm, leaning toward him. It helped. He couldn’t say why. The explosions continued, stretching out so that they seemed to follow on, each from each, in one long, continual crashing song. Occasionally, he moved his hand across the girl’s face, and over the top of her forehead, as though soothing a fever. She gripped his knee and he felt her fingers gratefully, needing her touch. The lamp went out, the darkness so sudden it made him almost sick with fear, and then the sergeant wearily, hesitantly, relit the wick. He saw now that the sergeant was frightened, even him, and he felt sorry for him, sorry for them all.

It felt as though they had been tricked. That there had been some terrible swindle and as a result they would now die. He had always thought he would recognize the moment of his death—through some sixth sense or a moment of dread that informs. Now he decided the opposite was true. It would come like fire when it came. It would revolve everything, crush his guesswork, all of his imaginings.

The girl sobbed silently, her shoulders shaking, and he held her until she stopped. The siege lasted twenty minutes or more, and when he and the girl finally, tentatively, pulled themselves apart and climbed, one by one, out of that hole he felt connected to her, as though he’d known her for ever, known her through the very end of the world and now, its new beginning. He held her arm as she climbed up, stood close to her as they crawled up on to the flat, featureless scrub, this place of unending battle, destined always to be so, now and until the end of the war. At some point they moved forward in a column, each man a few meters apart. He watched her walk ahead of him, then run. A jeep was backing up at the foot of the hill, getting ready to go back up the road to Cam Lo and she moved like a bullet towards it. He steadied his eyes on her as she ran, arms flailing, cameras whipping against her back, a notebook clutched in one hand, the other holding her helmet, heading for the jeep. The jeep was full already, no room at all, but she ran and kept running until it slowed to turn and the men inside lifted her aboard among the bodies. They did so effortlessly, as though plucking a flower from the ground. She balanced herself on the rim of the thick bed and he thought he could see her moment of revulsion at having to travel with the dead. Don’t look at their faces, he wanted to tell her, and when you get to the other side go straight for the bar. You had to be careful what you focused on in the war, he thought, and he watched until he could see nothing of the girl or the jeep, just the dust rising in columns.

He didn’t know who she was, hadn’t seen her before. She turned up just like that and he fixed on her in a manner he could not shake.

She learned about taking cover, the things you needed to look for, how quickly you needed to drop. From the pages of the
Handbook
she read,
Look for a tree stump, a wall, a rock. Holes are good, buildings are good. Bunkers are good if you don’t get killed
trying to reach them.
She learned, too, that diving to the ground under fire is almost an instinctive act, although there are many new to the field who will stand, listening to bullets whiz by them, behaving as though they are nothing more than annoying insects swarming overhead. The
Handbook
had something to say about that. It said,
What you hear are not bees. What you hear are bullets at the end of their range and they are probably too slow now to kill you, but it would make sense to avoid them anyway.

She had intended to avoid them; she had intended never to come under fire at all, but as the weeks dropped away she became less certain that any kind of safety could be ensured even within Saigon, let alone if she went to crazy places like Con Thien. That had been a mistake; that had been chancing it.

But even on supposedly safer ground there were no guarantees. She’d been a block away when a small bomb blew up a diplomat’s car. The next day a bar frequented by Americans took a grenade, injuring dozens and killing two soldiers and three of the bar girls who drank overpriced “tea.” Even so, Saigon itself did not frighten her. The assaults she suffered were not by artillery but by the prostitutes on Tu Do Street who called her names as she passed. Or when she walked, trying to stay beneath the thin shade of the plane trees, and soldiers sidled up to her asking where she was from, what was her name, where was she going. The hotel was one street down from the flower market and sometimes the air around it was so fragrant that if she shut her eyes she could make herself believe she was in the lushest garden in all of Southeast Asia. At night, the smell of flowers disappeared and the rats arrived, traveling up from the rivers, feasting on garbage. Beneath streetlamps the air clouded with insects. There were candy shops that sold Belgian chocolates and marzipan flown in from Spain, restaurants that brought in fresh lobster so that you could choose your own dinner from a tank. In the cosy heat of early evening, sitting on the terraces of the better restaurants, she would look up at
the colorful sky, its reds and oranges set like a painting above her, unable to imagine anything more beautiful.

But there was contrast at every corner. People slept outdoors in the shaded entrances to shops, or flat out on benches, or sometimes curled on the steps of the cathedral until moved on. Market stalls sold goods quite obviously wrangled from the military post exchange or off the bodies of dead soldiers: combat fatigues, helmets, boots, even guns if you followed the vendor to the back room where they were kept. Old women sold tea, Marlboros and marijuana. Some sold only marijuana. Children sold pictures of naked girls, and the older ones sold the girls themselves. They stole the pens from your pockets, wrangled spare change from your hand. She lost a camera the first week and had to buy a new one. That is, purchase someone else’s camera, also stolen, but now displayed on a cardboard box propped up in a makeshift stall.

She was settling in, getting to know the places to meet, who to speak to, where to go, but also she registered an unease that (she would learn later) never truly lifted from a visitor to Saigon. The city surprised her in a million ways. There were mysterious chirpings and whistles that arrived with dawn, along with the onslaught of traffic, a ceaseless commotion that exhausted her as much as the temperature that she measured not in degrees but by how many times each day she had to immerse herself in water.

There were other sounds, too, that required attention. One night, shortly after her arrival, she heard something like thunder that confused her senses, making her imagine a storm when the night was clear. But the storm was not the reason for the noise; it was bombing to the west of the city, which from the street she could not see, but thought she could feel, detecting a kind of vibration in the air. The sound of the bombers was heard not only as thunder, but in a sudden heightened awareness of people around her, who appeared to step up their pace,
or crowd themselves at doorways, or create even more knots of traffic in the swarming streets. The war registered itself in the way the window glass rattled, how the strings of lights upon railings flickered and were still. Closet hangers danced, making their tinny sound; dogs that roamed freely began to shout into the night.

In Susan’s own small room the pendant lamp above her bed was set in motion, barely noticeable, as rhythmic as a metronome. Plaster broke away and splattered on the floor, the war approaching and receding like a tide. Even if she wasn’t in the room at the time, she would notice upon her return the broken tile, the settling of dust, feeling almost as though someone had been through her things and moved them all a millimeter or two in a ridiculous but unsettling act. Sometimes, with a group of other journalists, she stood on the rooftop terrace of the Caravelle Hotel, watching the bombing, tracking tracers and bullets many miles off that poured from the guns of a US airship as though from a firehose. She watched the sudden red of bombs meeting their targets, trying to determine exactly where they were falling. There really was no more to it than that. She hadn’t thought about what it would be like to be on the receiving end of artillery, or to be under those bombs. In her cocktail dress recently purchased from Marshall Field’s, during those first few weeks in Saigon, while clasping the delicate stem of a drink from someone she’d just met, whose name she couldn’t recall as she clinked his glass, she could not imagine such things.

It turned out not to be a matter of time, but of distance. It was a decision you made, where you put yourself in the country, who you traveled with. It began slowly enough, going out with soldiers until something—an angle, a profile, an interview, a sudden, newsworthy event—happened her way. It had almost become a game she played—how close could she get to the war
without getting
too
close. She wore chinos and a short-sleeved blouse, interviewing those who set up refugee camps and orphanages, her hair limp in its ponytail, her cheeks newly sprinkled with freckles. A gradual change was taking place; she settled into her role. She realized two weeks into what was now being called her “tour,” while trudging through a dusty, crater-filled village, barraged by gangs of children demanding their piastres, swearing in mixed-up English at her if she didn’t pay, that it was precisely because she hadn’t hungered after battlefields, and in fact had no definite opinion one way or another on whether the war was ethical or winnable, that she’d been sent in the first place. The magazine would never have chosen a “political” reporter. They’d chosen her because she was quirky enough to train horses in her spare time and because they thought—they really did think—that she would never leave Saigon. That is, all except her editor. She’d received a telegram a few days earlier:

She carried that telegram with her for days. It made her think she could do it, made her know. It was still too early for her to have bad dreams; too early for her to be woken in the night by them. She wished only to understand truly what was happening in this one small country and everything she did was a process of this unfolding. It was not unpleasant. Quite the contrary: it was exhilarating. The trip up to Con Thien had both terrified and intrigued her. She then went to Pleiku and wrote a good story about a small hospital there. That was when she came across Son, whether by fate or by deliberate intent on his part, she never knew. The country was full of random occurrences and anyway it was not surprising that she should meet him—everyone knew him. While Western correspondents
came and went, staying a few weeks or a few years, their numbers growing exponentially with each season, Son remained, a kind of ambassador to the war. He’d watched the number of newsmen in Vietnam increase tenfold and more. He’d watched Saigon fill up like a dam.

His full name was Hoàng Van Son. He had a couple of identical Nikon F cameras, a heavy zoom lens which was a recent acquisition, and he filled his pockets with Ektachrome color and a few rolls of Kodak Tri-X black and white just to walk down the street. He had a long mouth that curled up at the ends, blocky white teeth that aligned as though he’d had years of orthodontistry, which he most certainly had not. He was quite handsome—Susan thought so—but in a way she was not used to and which kept her from fully acknowledging it. He spoke English very well—that was the main thing. He knew how to cover the war. They decided to form a partnership, him as a still photographer, her as a print reporter. He was her friend—she believed they were friends—and also her translator and her entrance into combat reporting. One afternoon, still during those early weeks in Saigon, he showed her how to fall to the ground when mortared. That is, he tried to convey how fast she needed to move. But she didn’t understand.

Is there a certain technique?
she asked innocently. They were at the hotel. He’d been checking out the bathroom to see whether he could use it for a darkroom. The bathroom had a broken doorknob that occasionally locked solid, and for this reason there was a screwdriver behind the tap. The room looked as though a poltergeist lived there: rotting tiles that came off the wall and broke in pieces on the floor, plaster dust, handles that dislodged themselves overnight, doors that swelled with the humidity and wouldn’t shut or wouldn’t open. The bath was moldy; the grout grew a tenacious fur. Insects everywhere, occasional rats, which she discovered had gnawed spaces in the
plaster where the pipes were laid so that they could navigate the whole of the building through the maze of its plumbing. Despite these flaws, Son said it was perfect. The bathroom would be ideal for developing his film. But could they put a board across the bidet (rust-colored water; jammed, immobile taps) and use it as a small table? Could they get rid of the flouncy shower curtain Susan bought because there had been none when she arrived? Could he move the towels? In short, could she do without a bathroom?