Tree of Smoke (42 page)

The black Lurp stared at the colonel and cleaned the blood from his clasp knife ostentatiously with his tongue before tromping off toward the north hamlet and the Purple Bar.

Minh took the attitude that all this destruction wasn’t happening, that a foul wind of illusion blew through, dragging behind it an actuality of peace and order. The village of Cao Phuc, for instance, what had happened here?—the Echo camp a small base, now, with Quonset huts, latrines, two big MASH generators; the temple still dominating the south hamlet but resting now on a thick concrete slab with a tiled entryway; the north hamlet overrun by a compound of refugee housing resembling crates and coops—all these changes in the couple of years he’d been flying the colonel back and forth. The Purple Bar was the same oversized hooch, a loitering place for dull-faced prostitutes, waifs whose families had perished. No local girls entered there.

“Jesus Christ,” Jimmy Storm said, “that is one fucked-up nigger.”

“And who fucked him up? We did,” the colonel said. “History might forgive us for what’s going on around here. But that man never will. He’d better not.”

Minh didn’t know this black Lurp who’d cut the prisoner’s eyes out. When the man wasn’t around, everybody spoke of him. He slept on his poncho on the ground, and only in the day. At night he moved through the world, no one said where. His hair grew out in wild foot-long clusters. He’d cut the sleeves and most of the pant legs away from his uniform, and nothing kept the vermin from his flesh but the bright designs of red, white, and blue paint streaking his face and limbs.

A little after sixteen hundred hours Minh and the three Americans went back up the mountain and on to Saigon in the colonel’s helicopter, a Huey modified with two extra seats and without a machine gun, on loan to the colonel from the VNAF, though the colonel himself had arranged for the VNAF to have it in the first place. On the colonel’s orders Minh took them to several thousand feet and kept up a speed of nearly a hundred U.S. miles per hour. Sergeant Storm, sitting on his helmet with an M16 across his knees, his hair raked back by the deafening winds, occasionally raised his weapon to fire a burst down into the world below. The colonel’s nephew sat next to the sergeant, staring out the open portal at the jungle and the paddies, the flicker of fires, man-destroyed badlands from which smoke ascended like steam through rents in a cauldron’s lid. Two fighter jets passing close underneath actually drowned out the incredible racket of the chopper’s motors. The craft came very close. F-104s. Minh could almost make out the emblem on one pilot’s helmet.

Skip Sands often smiled, and always Skip Sands joked, but Minh had hardly ever heard Skip Sands laugh. Why had he laughed at the poor tormented man? Certainly nobody could have found it funny. But something had struck him as hilarious.

The colonel, wearing his headset, sat next to Minh and studied the horizon and seemed to have forgotten the terrors of the morning. Skip, for his part, looked as if they’d never leave him. The colonel hadn’t mentioned his nephew’s behavior. Maybe it didn’t bear mentioning. Perhaps Skip thanked his God right now that he had no headset and that their transport was too loud for talk. But who can look into another’s thoughts? And Minh often felt of the Americans that behind their actions lay no thoughts anyway, only passions. But he’d seen Skip’s face as his uncle had helped him aboard and he believed completely that this American was thinking only of the murdered man.

For a brief period Minh let the colonel take the controls. It wasn’t safe, but the colonel did what he wished, and nothing could hurt him. The colonel had seen war at its worst and had once made to Minh a sad confession: in order to save his fellow prisoners from a massacre, the colonel, at that time a young air force captain like Minh himself, had killed one of his own comrades in the dark hold of a Japanese POW ship, had choked him to death with his bare hands. The colonel often shared such stories, possibly because he didn’t think Minh comprehended. Minh’s English, however, kept improving. He could speak confidently about matters within the realm of his duties and sometimes followed whole conversations among Americans, though the subtleties eluded him and he couldn’t hope to participate with any skill. And Minh thought he was probably the only person who knew that the colonel kept a wife in the lower Mekong Delta and frequently traveled to visit her in this very helicopter.

T
he airfield at Tan Son Nhut in Saigon had come under rocket fire three times since the initial predawn assault, but no attack was under way at the moment, and they were permitted to land. They left Minh with the craft and crossed the field through an oily wind under gray skies. Outside the terminal Hao waited with the Chevrolet, just beyond the concrete barricades.

Skip thought he should demonstrate some minimal interest in where they were going, but he had none. Storm, however, demanded to know, and the colonel said, “Hao better have that figured out.” Skip and Storm in the back, the colonel up front beside Hao, who smoked a long cigarette and worried its filter tip with his thumb, dotting his pant legs with ash, and peered out myopically and drove without certainty. The city echoed with small-arms fire and the drumroll of helicopters and, somewhat curiously, firecrackers. They passed several unclaimed corpses at the side of the street but saw little real damage, saw people carrying on as usual, walking to and fro, sailing out on their small motorcycles. The colonel said, “Do we have a good enough fix on where we’re going?” but Hao didn’t seem to get the question, and the colonel said, “Hao, I don’t think we know where we’re going.”

“He tell to me the location. I will find it.” A few minutes later he said, ahead of the colonel’s next question, “Cho Lon is too big. Too many street.”

“There—there—those jeeps.”

Hao stopped the Chevrolet near a trio of ARVN jeeps parked randomly around the dead bodies of two Vietnamese men.

“Stop. Stop. Go ahead and kill it,” the colonel said, and as Hao cut the engine he said, “Hao, we’re going to see some dead VC up here. I want you to look and make sure none of them is our friend.”

Hao nodded.

“You know who I mean?”

Hao said, “Our friend.”

“I don’t think he’s here. He shouldn’t be. But I want you to make sure. All right—let us proceed.”

They all got out of the car.

The two corpses lay side by side in the middle of the street with their arms stretched above their heads. Each had been shot a great number of times. A squad of nine or so ARVN infantry sat in or leaned against the jeeps. Nearby a small ARVN officer smoked a cigarette, standing almost at attention with one hand on the butt of his sidearm.

“Major Keng?”

“C’est moi.”

“I’m Colonel Francis Sands.—Skip, can you get the drift for me? This is Mr. Skip, my nephew and colleague. Skip, thank him for coming out. Thank him for keeping this under guard. Tell him I’m the one his information originated from.”

The major closed his eyes and smiled. “No need for that, Colonel. I get you.”

“No,” Skip said. “Your accent is terrific.”

“Keng is a Chinese name. Incidentally, I am not Chinese.”

“How many languages do you speak?”

“French, English, Chinese. And my own, of course. What can I do for you, Colonel?”

The colonel said, “Did it all go like we told you?”

“Like a charm,” the major said. “We ambushed them.”

“Did they have explosives?”

Major Keng tossed away his cigarette and beckoned them all over to a jeep on whose rear seat lay four satchel charges. “Red China,” he said.

“What time did they come here?” the colonel asked.

“Three a.m. on the dot.”

The colonel said, “Everything like we told you?”

“Everything was correct,” Keng said, “to the tee. Oh three hundred hours.” He swept his hand out at the corpses. “Two VC. As promised.”

“What was the target?”

“To destroy the traffic bridge there,” Keng said.

“Is this stuff big enough for the job?”

“I will give you my best guess: more than enough.”

“No IDs, I suppose.”

“No identity cards.” Keng shook his head.

“Major, we won’t trouble you further. I just wanted to be sure our information was correct. We’ll take a quick look at this overpass and be on our way.”

Storm and Skip followed the colonel over to the traffic overpass evidently targeted for destruction by the two guerrillas, and stood atop it. Buzzing motor scooters echoed below them. “I’m not sure I see the point,” the colonel said. “I suppose it would have tied up the street down there. But I’m not sure I see the point.” He headed back to the car.

Storm walked beside Skip and said, “I can tell by the way you move, you like it here. You walk very softly and you don’t get your body hot for no good reason. You use the air around you.” Making this remark he seemed strangely shy, not at all the tough little lunatic. “You know what I mean?”

“Sort of.”

“You blend with the air like a native,” Storm assured him.

After Colonel Sands had shaken hands with Major Keng and invited him out for supper and drinks and been politely refused, the colonel sat in the Chevy’s front seat maintaining a zealous poise and told Hao, “Out Highway One. Let’s get a drink.”

Hao executed a lurching U-turn and they left the corpses behind.

“Goddamn it,” the colonel said, “we are in business with a double.”

They were somewhere out on Highway One at a restaurant-tavern in an unpaved cul-de-sac, the Bar Jolly Blue, a place mainly, it seemed to Skip, for whores and gangsters. But it was the Saigon watering hole of Echo Platoon and of many serving the Cao Phuc landing zone, none of them present now, as today no soldier in the country took leave, not in the northern army or the southern, not the Vietcong or the U.S. forces. Skip, Storm, and the colonel sat in deck chairs under an awning in the cooling dusk, and they kept the Chevy’s radio tuned to AFVN and stayed on top of things. Skip hadn’t slept since he’d left Cao Quyen almost forty-eight hours earlier. He assumed the colonel and Storm were equally exhausted, but none of them wanted to go down before they knew what had happened, what might happen next, how things stood with this unprecedented monster push, which seemed, at this point, to have been a disaster for the enemy.

Between hourly radio news dispatches the colonel made phone calls from a pimp’s room to the U.S. Embassy and got a wealth of confusing and contradictory reports.

“Coordinated attacks all over Quang Tri Province. At least that far north.”

“How far south?”

“They hit Con Mau down there.”

“On the peninsula? Jesus.”

“They’re all over. And being slaughtered in swarms.”

Combined NVA and Vietcong forces had assaulted nearly every sizable population center and military installation in the South. “Bold and crazy,” the colonel said at first, and then as reports accumulated he said, “Bold and crazy and stupid.” While the overall offensive was stunning in its orchestration and its suddenness, its fierceness and grandeur, the individual attacks seemed to have been mounted without clear planning or adequate support.

The colonel poured drinks from a fifth of Bushmills—out of a case of it that rode with him everywhere in his Chevy’s trunk. “We’re bombing Cu Chi nonstop already. Any square inch where a GI isn’t standing is going to be a crater. I told you all hell would rain down. I consider this hasty. We had plans for those tunnels.”

“Just to get down to the actual facts,” Jimmy Storm said, “I don’t care about the tunnels.”

“We’re casting about for some other approach to combating this enemy. Anything but what we’ve got,” the colonel insisted.

“I started out with a red-hot desire to fry their minds. Now I spend my day trying to keep my own mind from exploding.”

Skip had spent half a year in exile, missing this, longing for it, and it seemed he hadn’t missed a minute, had taken up exactly in midconversation with the red-eyed colonel and the quivering bird-dog sergeant. It seemed the two held forth on parallel tracks, confident of meeting somewhere in infinity. Skip’s esophagus burned. He drank 7Up. In his mind the day’s truest fact was that the bleeding, gouge-eyed man his uncle had dispatched so readily was a human soul in a family of others who had known him by name and held him in love, and he, Skip, a spy for history’s greatest nation, was troubled that this should trouble him.

“What did I tell you,” the colonel said, “about centralization? The VC and the NVA are controlled from a single source.”

“Most elegant.”

“Probably unbeatable. We can’t win like this. Our young foot soldier this morning phrased it correctly. This shit ain’t funny no more. This shit is a mess. This shit has got to stop.”

Skip had never heard from the colonel any statement even remotely like this one. It was all wrong. It was completely false because it offered entrance to far too much that was true.

“If we can’t be centralized, if we’re going to flounder around like ants in molasses, then we as individual floundering ants can’t wait for orders from above.”

Storm said, “What’s the skin, daddy-o?”

“The skinny is we’ve got ourselves a double, and we’ll work him very carefully. But we have a lot of planning and thinking to do, and none of that begins today. Let’s just be happy we don’t have to sit on our asses while Uncle Ho executes one grand strategy after another until something works. This time it didn’t work. This time they tossed themselves into battle and just pointlessly expended themselves.”

Jimmy Storm laughed with a kind of exhausted abandon while Skip and the colonel watched. He got control of himself. “Jesus, how can you go forty-eight hours without sleep and then come up with this eloquent moonshine? KEEP THESE HARLOTS AWAY FROM ME,” he shouted at the mamasan waiting tables. “All right—you,” he said, “you can come here,” and he snapped his lighter open for the cigarette of a petite woman with fat thighs encased in a black miniskirt, explaining, “This one’s a lying psychotic whore. Good people. My kind of people.”

The colonel took a light off the same flame. He was smoking Players cigarettes in the flat pack—the brand, if Skip remembered, of James Bond.