The Vietnam Reader (9 page)

There was no answer and he pressed forward, the jungle still around both of them. Then he was answered again, the mating call, two little pings, the VC’s weapon had a lower pitch than his, and the sound—and this made him angry—was coming from the right, near one o’clock, where he had just been. He cursed under his breath, and moved quickly to his right, realizing even as he pushed ahead that he was doing a foolish thing, that he was violating all the rules he had been taught, that he was offering an American officer to a trap that he might be taken prisoner; at Benning they had warned against that, don’t be captured, there was too much psychological advantage the VC could take, showing him around in the villages.

Still he pressed on, angry, frustrated. He thought the VC was mocking him, playing a game with him; you didn’t do that in war, war was not a game, you didn’t screw around, play jokes with rifles. He fired off another clip toward one o’clock and moved there. Then there was
a ping from the left, back at ten o’clock. He moved a little to his left, but he didn’t fire. A few minutes passed while the Vietcong finally grasped his message, that Anderson for the time being was not going to fire. Finally there was a ping, from eight o’clock this time; the sniper was behind him. But he couldn’t fire in that direction or he might hit one of his own men. He waited and waited and then charged toward six o’clock, ready to fire at point-blank range. But nothing happened.

Suddenly there was a ping ping from eleven o’clock. He turned and fired angrily, shouting: “Come out, you sonofabitch, come on, come on out. Fight. Come on, I’m waiting, I’m here.”

He waited but nothing happened. Did he hear a giggle? He made the same challenge in Vietnamese, but it sounded foolish to him. No giggle this time. There were no more shots. He checked his watch. He had been gone ten minutes. He waited two minutes more, and nothing happened. Still angry, he went back to the canal bank, and collected the other Viets.

“Sometimes,” said one of them, “Vietcong are like the pederasts. Don’t feel so badly. It is their game.”

Anderson nodded grimly, and they crossed the canal in single file; Anderson much taller than the Viets, his head barely above water, was amazed; just as much of them showed above water as of him.

“The war is good for the leeches in the canal,” said one of the Viets, “that is all. A full meal for them today.”

He nodded, and then moved back to the main path. At least they would be able to move quickly, while catching up with the rest of the unit.

Anderson came upon them quicker than he expected. They had stopped and were gathered around a very small Vietnamese. They had formed a circle and the Vietnamese was standing with his hands up and his back to a tree; Dang was standing in front of him, towering over him, and Beaupre was behind Dang, towering over him. They get smaller and smaller, Anderson thought. As he approached, he heard Dang say, “Murderer, we have caught the murderer. VC dog. The dog.”

“Got to be one of theirs,” Beaupre said. “Doesn’t weigh more than fifty pounds. All ours weigh more than that.”

Dang was in charge of the interrogation. “A Communist VC,” he said to Anderson, “part of the ambush plot against us.”

“He means the little scouting party you just went on,” Beaupre whispered.

“Proceed with the interrogation of the Communist Vietcong prisoner,” Dang told Thuong. “I will assist when necessary.”

The suspect said he was Hung Van Trung.

“Of course that’s his name,” Beaupre told Anderson, “they all have that name, that or Trung Van Hung or Hung Van Hung.” His age was fifty-eight.

“The Communist is probably lying about his age,” Dang said, “these people lie about everything.”

Suspect said he owned a water buffalo: “Rich bastard, eh,” Beaupre said when Anderson translated, “usually they don’t even own a goddamn chicken by the time we catch them.”

He came from the village of Ap Xuan Thong.

“Is he a Communist? Ask him if he is a Communist.” Dang shouted and the prisoner began to mumble, a rambling guttural chant which seemed half song and half prayer.

“Tell him we are interested in his relationship with Ho Chi Minh and not his relationship with Buddha,” Dang said.

A corporal slapped the prisoner. He was loyal to the government, he insisted, he was sometimes a government agent.

“Knees are too bony for one of ours,” Beaupre told Anderson. In fact the prisoner said he was in trouble because the local Communist cadre which was headed by Thuan Han Thuan (“How can the VC chief have the same name as our man there?” Beaupre said), suspected that he worked for the government and had taken his wife away last night when the Communists had come; when he mentioned the cadre chief’s name, he paused as if expecting that this would confirm his story.

Dang asked him for his identification card, and he could produce none, and Dang slapped him. He claimed the Communists had taken it and he was slapped again. They asked him about children. He said
he had three sons, and mentioned daughters, but seemed unsure of the number. Of the sons, he said, one had died of a disease. Which disease, he was asked; the yellow disease, he answered, and they all nodded yes,
the yellow disease, that one,
though later it turned out they were unsure exactly what the yellow disease was.

“Yellow disease,” Beaupre said when told, “everybody in this goddamn country’s got that. How the hell can you die from it?”

Two of the other sons had served with the government forces; he believed one was dead and one was alive.

“What units?” Thuong asked, the tone of his voice reflecting his boredom with the interrogation. The prisoner said he did not know the units, but they fought against the Vietminh, he was sure of that.

“Tell him that it is not the Vietminh, it is the Vietcong,” Dang said, and the corporal slapped him again.

“Now tell us what happened,” Thuong said, “and try to make it as honest as you can. Show us your heart is pure.”

The prisoner nodded and began: he had worked long that day and had gone to bed early. It was the rainy season and there was more to be done this year because of last year’s drought.

“Ask him what he had for breakfast,” Beaupre told Anderson, “go ahead. Speed up the interrogation.”

The prisoner was interrupted by Thuong who told him to hurry up with the story if he wanted to live to finish it. He had gone to bed early when he was called by Thuan Van Thuan.

“Is he a neighbor?” asked Thuong.

“No, he lives three houses away,” said the prisoner.

“Sweet Jesus,” said Beaupre. “The prisoner said he knew it was trouble right away.”

“Why,” demanded Dang, “because he knew all his Communist friends were coming? All the dogs were coming?”

“No,” said the prisoner, “because Thuan’s voice was loud and commanding”; he stopped, and it appeared for a second that he was going to say, commanding, like the Captain’s, but then he continued. Usually Thuan’s voice was soft and supplicating, an attitude he did not trust because Thuan was not honest. He claimed to have an electric box, the only one in the village from which he received special messages
from Saigon and Paris and Hanoi; the prisoner was sure it was a false electric box. Thuan had been arrogant and had demanded they come to a meeting; Thuan had insisted that his wife come too, which upset him since she had been sick and coughing and had finally fallen asleep, but Thuan had given them no choice and so they were taken to the center of the hamlet, where lamps had been lit, and where there were twelve visitors, all men. He knew right away they were soldiers.

“Did they have any weapons?” Thuong asked.

“I didn’t see any,” he said, “but he knew they were there.”

“How does he know?” Dang asked, “because he is one of them.”

“Because of the way the men behaved,” he said, “men who have guns behave one way and men who do not behave another.”

He seemed puzzled that they did not understand the distinction, and asked Thuong: “You have never talked with a man with a gun when you don’t have one?”

“Good question,” Beaupre said, “the sonofabitch is telling the truth.”

The suspect stopped as if waiting for someone to stop him; he said the men had talked about politics and said that the long noses (he looked embarrassed at Anderson and Beaupre) were coming to the village the next day and would try to kill all the people. Then they had served tea. He himself had taken two glasses. He had wanted to take only one, but had been afraid if he took one, this might offend the Vietminh.

“Vietcong,” Dang corrected, less angrily this time.

Some of the others had taken three cups.

“See how many cups he’ll take from us,” Beaupre said when Anderson translated this.

The next day he had been told to go north from the village, because the Americans were coming from the south, east and west, and for that reason he had slipped away and gone south. Thuong asked him about his wife; she had been kept by the Communists as a bearer and as a hostage. Thuong continued to ask questions about the enemy, and Beaupre pulled Anderson aside and told him to get on the American radio and quickly call the information in; he did not trust the
Viets; if it were left to them, the intelligence might not reach the CP until the next day.

“He was telling the truth, wasn’t he?” Anderson said.

Beaupre didn’t say anything for a minute. “Yes,” he finally answered, “he’s felling the truth. That’s the worst thing about it. Makes you long for the usual ones, who’ve never seen a VC, never heard of the war.”

He walked on a few yards. “A rock and hard place. That’s where we are, between a rock and a hard place.”

He felt dry and thirsty and a little nervous; he had mocked this operation from the start, and most of his fear had disappeared with the selection of Big William for the helicopters. Now he was becoming frightened again, aware of his age and the senselessness of the war—not the killing but the endless walking each day and the returning to My Tho with nothing done, nothing seen, nothing accomplished, nothing changed, just hiking each day with death, taking chances for so very little, wondering if he were going to be sold out, wondering whom you could trust. He had not distrusted people in World War II. He had been assigned to an infantry regiment and he had fought with a variety of men, some had been good soldiers, some weak, some brave, and some cowardly, some who had loved the war, and most who had hated it, but whatever, there had never been a quality of distrust. It had been simpler there, even in Germany, where you hated everyone, but once you entered the villages, you were not loved and kissed, you were not ambushed or tricked or betrayed. The distrust had begun in Korea when suddenly it was more than a matter of fighting and killing, instead it was a matter of wondering where you were going, and whose intelligence had set it up and who was paying, was it only one side: a matter of looking into the face of the man when you finally met him, and perhaps looking for too much, seeing things which didn’t exist, and looking for things which had no right to exist, which probably had never existed. “Don’t expect our Korean agents to have blue eyes and blond hair and friendly smiles,” they had told him, “they don’t. They don’t look like Marines. They look like gooks because they are gooks. Don’t you worry about who they are or the way they look. You let us do the worrying. All you have to do is keep the
goddamn loose change out of your pockets because it makes too much noise on cold winter nights out there, that and trust your compass and your own good common sense. We don’t expect you to like the Koreans, that’s not your job.” But compared to this country, Korea was simple: here you began with distrust, you assumed it about everything, even things you thought you knew. Even the Americans seemed different to him now, and he trusted them less; in order to survive in this new world and this new Army, they had changed. Yes was no longer exactly yes, no was no longer exactly no, maybe was more certainly maybe.

“I think we may be getting ourselves sold out,” he said, and then added to Anderson, one of the few kind things he said that day or any other, “you be a little careful now. Hear?”

There was a terrible quality of truth to what Thuong had just heard and he did not like it; he had not liked the operation from the start and he had always disagreed with Headquarters and Staff over the area. Staff called it a blue area (the Americans, he decided, loved maps even more than the French and had taught them about red, white and blue areas; the Americans loved to change the colors, to turn red into white and white into blue, to put red pins on white spots and blue pins on red spots) and blue was supposed to be secure, but Thuong had never liked the area; he did not operate there often and so he tended to accept the Headquarters’ version of the area as being secure, only to find once they were in the area that it was not quite what it seemed, that it was always a little more hostile than the authorities claimed. He suspected that it was a Communist area where the guerrillas did little in the way of challenging the government and were content to rest somewhat tranquil on the surface, using it as a communications path. The Arvin recruited, Thuong remembered, few government soldiers from the area, and the young men they did take showed a higher desertion rate than might have been expected.

He walked beside the suspect, near the rear of the column. “I believe you have told us the truth,” he told the prisoner.

The man did not look up at him.

“Perhaps you will be free by the end of the day,” Thuong said.

“Perhaps we will all be dead by the end of the day,” the prisoner said a little bitterly.

“Would you like some of my water?” Thuong asked.

The prisoner said no, but then asked if Thuong would do him a favor: “You believe me and know what I say is true.” Thuong said yes, he would do the favor, if he could, depending on what it was.

“Would you tie my hands together?” the prisoner asked. “You see if they see me walking with you…”

“I know,” Thuong said, and ordered his hands bound; the Americans, he thought, should have asked this peasant whether he thought the area was blue or red. Perhaps they should explain that it was safe to walk free, that it was blue.