Up Country (29 page)

She said, “It’s five or six hours to Nha Trang. We’ll buy two seats.”

The train was passing through the northern outskirts of Saigon, and I saw a jet fighter, a Russian-made MiG, coming in to land at what must have been Bien Hoa Airbase, my former home away from home.

A conductor came into the small vestibule, and Susan and he spoke. She
counted out twelve singles, and he left. She said to me, “He’ll do the deal. He keeps the change.”

The tracks swung east now, toward the coast, and the Saigon sprawl rolled on with the train. I could see houses that were little more than shacks, and I remembered these from 1972, when almost a million refugees from the countryside had crowded into the relative safety of Saigon.

Susan said to me, “I really love the beach. Do you have a bathing suit?”

“Yes. Bathing suits in your luggage look touristy to government snoops going through your things.”

“You spies are really clever.”

“I’m not a spy.”

“That’s right.” She smiled. “I packed light, as you can see. Just a few days. I brought my swimsuit. The beach is supposed to be magnificent.”

“Is the beach topless?”

She smiled. “Always thinking. No, you can’t do that here. They go nuts. But at Vung Tau there are secluded spots where the French go to swim and sunbathe in the nude. But if you get caught by the local fuzz, you’ve got a problem.”

“Did you ever get caught?”

“I never went topless or nude. I’d love to, but I’m a resident, so I can’t claim ignorance.” She asked, “So you had an R&R in Nha Trang?”

“Yes. May 1968. The weather was good.”

“I thought you went someplace out of the country for R&R.”

“There were three-day in-country R&Rs available to people who did something to deserve it.”

“I see. And what did you do to deserve an in-country R&R?”

“I invented a new recipe for chili.”

She didn’t reply for a few seconds, then said, “I hope in the next few days you’ll feel comfortable enough to tell me about your experiences here.”

I replied, “And maybe you’ll tell me why you’re here and why you stay.”

She didn’t reply.

The train moved on, east across the Saigon River, through a landscape of rice paddies and villages.

I looked at Susan and saw that she was looking at me. We both smiled. She said, “What would you have done without me?”

I replied, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out after you go back to Saigon.”

She said, “After three days with me, you’ll be good to go.”

“After three days with you, I’ll need a three-day R&R.”

She smiled. “You keep up pretty good for an old guy. Do you swim?”

“Like a fish.”

“Hike?”

“Like a mountain goat.”

“Dance?”

“Like John Travolta.”

“Snore?”

I smiled.

She said, “Sorry. Just teasing.”

The train moved on, away from old Saigon, away from the new Ho Chi Minh City, north toward Nha Trang, and back to May 1968.

Nha Trang

T
he conductor led us through the crowded coach to seats vacated by two young Viet guys. I threw my suitcase on the overhead luggage rack, then sat with my overnight bag stuffed under my seat. Susan sat beside me on the aisle and squeezed her backpack under her legs.

The seat was wood, and it had enough legroom for an amputee. The width was okay for the two of us, but almost all the other seats had three people sitting in them, plus babies and kids riding laps.

We were on the right, so we’d have a view of the South China Sea at some point as we traveled north. There was no air-conditioning, but a few of the windows were open, and small fans mounted in the corners kept the cigarette smoke circulating.

I said, “Maybe we should have taken a car and driver.”

“Highway One can be a problem. Also, this is a good experience for you.”

“Thanks for your interest in my character development.”

“You’re quite welcome.”

I asked her, “What is the fascination here for all these young backpackers?”

“Well, Vietnam is cheap. Then you have sex and drugs. That’s pretty fascinating.”

“Right.”

“Kids talk to one another via e-mail, and this has become a hot place.”

“It was pretty hot when I was here.” I added, “It just seems a little incongruous for a totalitarian state to be so attractive to all these young tourists.”

“They don’t think like you do. Half of them don’t know this place is run by Communists, and the other half don’t care.
You
care. That’s your generation. That was your big boogeyman. These kids are into world peace through pot. International understanding through intercourse.”

“And your generation? What’s your take on Vietnam?”

“Money.”

“Do you ever feel that there’s something missing in your life? Like something to believe in or to live for beyond yourself ?”

“That sounds like an antagonistic question, though maybe I need to think more about that.” She added, “We live in incredibly dull times. I think I would like to have been a college student in the Sixties. But I wasn’t. So, a lot of this emptiness and shallowness is not my fault, or the fault of my generation.”

“Do the times make the generation, or does the generation make the times?”

“I have a hangover. Can we make idle chitchat?”

We chatted about the landscape.

A cloud of cigarette smoke hung in the hot, humid air, and the rail felt as though it had been torn up by the Viet Cong and never repaired. How bad could Highway One be?

About sixty kilometers out of Saigon, the train made its first stop at a place called Xuan Loc, which I knew had been the location of the Black Horse Base Camp, headquarters of the Eleventh Armored Cavalry. I said to Susan, “The gentleman called K, whom we communicated with in your office, was stationed here in ’68.”

“Really? Why didn’t he come back here with you?”

“That’s a good question. He would have enjoyed Colonel Mang. They’re cast from the same mold.”

People got off at Xuan Loc, and people got on. Balance and harmony were achieved, and the train moved on. I said, “Xuan Loc was the site of the last stand of the South Vietnamese army before the fall of Saigon.”

Susan yawned and replied, “I’m too vapid and self-centered to care.”

I think I’d pissed her off. Or maybe it was the generation gap. I suddenly felt middle-aged.

It had been a long night and an early morning for both of us, and Susan fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. Within a few minutes, I, too, was asleep.

We both awoke as the train approached Cam Ranh Bay, about four hours from Saigon. I could see the huge bay, and also part of the former American naval installation, and some gray warships at anchor. Farther north on a peninsula that formed the bay had been the big American airbase. Susan was awake now, and I asked her, “Have you ever been here?”

She said, “No, no one comes here. It’s mostly off-limits.” She asked me, “Were you ever here?”

“Once. Briefly in ’72. I was on a military police detail to pick up a couple of soldiers who’d gotten into some trouble. We had to take them down to LBJ—that’s Long Binh Jail—outside Bien Hoa. Back in ’68, when Johnson was still President, we used to say about guys going to jail, ‘LBJ got you once, now LBJ got you again.’ Get it?”

“Is this in the history books?”

“Probably not.”

I looked out the window again. The American naval and air installations at Cam Ranh Bay were considered among the best in the Pacific at that time. After 1975, the Soviets were handed the whole complex by the new regime. I asked Susan, “Any Russians still here?”

“I’m told there are some left. But mostly the Vietnamese navy uses the place.” She added, “It’s a deepwater port, and it would make a great commercial port for container ships and oil tankers, but Hanoi has pretty much banned all development in the area. I don’t think you’d be allowed to visit the base unless you want to get shot.”

“That’s okay.” That was two places now—Bien Hoa and Cam Ranh Bay—where I couldn’t go home again.

The train stopped at Cam Ranh Bay station. Only a few people got off, and the people getting on were mostly Vietnamese sailors and airmen, and most of them jammed into the vestibule.

Susan took a half-liter bottle of water out of her backpack, opened it, and drank, then passed it on to me.

The train moved out and continued north.

Now and then I could see a bomb crater, a derelict tank, a few dilapidated sandbag bunkers, or a French watchtower. But mostly the war seemed to have been erased from the landscape, though probably not from the minds of the people who had lived through it, myself included.

Susan took a container of yogurt out of her bag and a plastic spoon. “Want some?”

I hadn’t eaten since the hamburger in the Q-Bar, but I’d rather starve to death than eat yogurt. I said, “No, thanks.”

She spooned the stuff into her mouth.

I asked, “Does this train have a dining car?”

“Of course. You go through the bar car, then the panoramic observation car, and you get to the dining car.”

I was hungry and light-headed enough to believe that. I noticed that everyone around us had brought lots of food and drink. I said to Susan, “I’ll have some yogurt.”

She put a spoonful of this white goo in my mouth. It wasn’t all that bad.

We finished the water and yogurt, and Susan wanted to switch places, but there was no room in the aisle, so she squeezed onto my lap, then I slid across to the aisle seat. I said, “Let’s do that again.”

She smiled.

Susan lit up an after-dinner cigarette and blew the smoke out a crack in the window. She had a copy of the London
Economist
with her, which she read.

A half-hour after we’d left Cam Ranh Bay, and about six hours after we’d left Saigon, the train began slowing down as we approached Nha Trang.

We came in from the west, and the landscape was spectacular with mountains running down toward the sea. Picturesque brick towers—which Susan said were Cham Towers, whatever that is—dotted the foothills. There was a huge Buddha statue in the hills to our left, and on a small hill ahead, overlooking the train station, was a Gothic-style Catholic cathedral, which I remembered.

The train slowed down and stopped at the station.

This was the last stop, and people grabbed kids, luggage, and packages, and headed for the doors as the mob on the platform fought to get in.

As we pushed toward the door, Susan said, “Just keep pushing. You’re the biggest guy on the train, and everyone behind us is counting on you.”

We finally popped out the door onto the platform.

It was cooler here than in Saigon, and the air was about a thousand times cleaner. The sky was blue and wispy clouds floated by.

Susan and I walked along the platform into the small station house, then outside where dozens of taxis waited for fares.

We got into a taxi, and Susan said something to the driver, who did a double take at her Vietnamese, then pulled away from the station. Susan asked me, “What do you remember about that R&R hotel?”

“It was toward the south end of the beach. It was a French colonial structure, maybe three stories. It could have been white, or maybe pale blue.”

She said, “Not bad for an old guy.” Susan spoke to the driver. He listened as he drove and nodded.

We passed through Nha Trang, which looked like many other seaside resort towns—white stucco buildings and red tiled roofs, palm trees, and climbing bougainvillea. The town was in better shape than I remembered it, when it was filled with military vehicles and soldiers. It had been a generally safe haven from the war, and I didn’t recall any major war damage, though now and then Charles would lob in a few mortar rounds from the surrounding hills. Also, the CIA had a big sub-station in Nha Trang, a sure sign that the place was safe and had good restaurants and bars.

Within a few minutes, the taxi turned south along the beach road. The beachside buildings to our right ranged from ramshackle to bright new hotels and resorts. To our left was the beach, miles of white sand, palm trees, beach restaurants, and turquoise water under a bright sunlit sky. The beach was crescent-shaped, and two headlands jutted out into the South China Sea from the north and south. Across the water were several intriguing-looking islands of dark green vegetation. Susan said, “Oh, this is beautiful.”

“It is.”

“Is this how you remember it?”

“I was here only three days, and I believe I was drunk the entire time.”

The taxi stopped, and the driver pointed and spoke to Susan. About a hundred meters beyond a concrete balustrade that ran along the road was a big, white, three-story stucco building with two wings jutting out from the main section. A blue and white sign read
Grand Hotel
.

Susan said, “The driver says this was one of the hotels used by the Americans during the war. It was called the Grand then, got a Communist name change to Nha Khach 44—which just means Hotel Number 44—and it’s now the Grand again. Look familiar?”

“Could be. Ask him if there’s a waitress named Lucy in the bar.”

Susan smiled, said something to the driver, and he drove in between two tall pillars, into a circular driveway, in the center of which was an ornamental pool.

The place did look familiar, including the veranda out front where people were sitting and drinking. I could almost picture Lucy waiting on tables. I said, “This has to be the place.”

The driver let us off at the front steps, we collected our bags from the trunk, and I paid him.

As the taxi pulled away, I said to Susan, “They might not have any rooms.”

“Money talks.”

We carried our bags up the wide steps, through a set of screen doors, and into the lobby.

The lobby was very run-down and sparse, but had fifteen-foot ceilings with crumbling plaster moldings, and an air of having once been elegant. Along the right-hand wall was a long counter with a keyboard on the wall, and behind the counter sat a young clerk, asleep in a chair. Susan asked me, “So, is this it?”

I looked through an arched opening off the left side of the lobby and saw the dining room, more faded elegance, and open French doors that led to the veranda. I nodded. “This is it.”

“Great.”

Susan hit the desk bell, and the clerk jumped like he’d just heard the whistle of an incoming round.

He composed himself, and he and Susan began the negotiations. Susan turned to me and said, “Okay, he says he has only expensive rooms left. He has two on the third floor. Each room has its own bath, and hot water in the morning. They’re big rooms, but big is relative here. He wants seventy-five bucks a night for each room, which is a joke, and I offered him two hundred each for the week. Okay?”

Last time I was here, the army paid, and this time, the army was still paying. I said, “Fine. You staying the week?”

“No, but I made a better deal for the two weekly rates. He wants dollars.”

I took out my wallet and began counting out four hundred dollars, but Susan said, “I’m paying for my own room.”

“Tell this guy I was here during the war, and they had hot water 24/7, and the place was a lot cleaner when the American army ran it.”

Susan informed me, “I don’t think he cares.”

We filled out registration cards and showed our passports and visas, which the guy absolutely insisted he had to hold on to by law. Susan gave him ten dollars instead.

We each gave him two hundred dollars, and he gave us receipts for a hundred dollars, which was interesting math. He gave us each a key, then hit his bell, and a bellboy appeared. The kid looked about ten, but
he managed to get Susan’s backpack on and carry my suitcase up three flights of stairs. As we climbed the stairs, Susan asked, “Is the elevator broken?”

“The elevator runs fine, but it’s not in this building. It’s in that nice new place next door.” I added, “You can stay there, if you’d like. I have to stay here.”

“I know. I didn’t mean to complain. This is actually quite . . . charming. Quaint.”

We got up to the third floor. The hallways were wide, and the ceiling was high. Above each door was a screened transom to provide for cross-ventilation.