Up Country (40 page)

T
he sky lightened, bringing a false dawn, which was common to the tropics, then an hour later, the real dawn broke, and a rooster crowed. A stream of sunlight came in through a small arched window to the right of where the altar had once been. A shard of blue glass, still stuck in the window frame, cast a streak of blue light across the floor and up the opposite wall.

I sat up, and Susan and I watched the dawn unfold.

The interior of the small church was clearly visible now, and I could see the whitewashed walls and the crumbling stucco, and the places where the bullets had hit, and where exploding shrapnel had scarred a faded fresco of the Virgin Mary.

There wasn’t a single scrap of wood left in the structure, except the charred remains of a fire that someone had lit on the floor where the altar once sat.

The rice paddies don’t attract many birds, but I heard a lone bird singing somewhere. Then I heard the first vehicle on the road.

Susan said, “Today is Lunar New Year’s Eve.” She took my hand. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see a sunrise in my life.”

I could hear a truck on the road and a motor scooter. I glanced out through the open doorway and saw a farm cart and two girls on bicycles.

I remembered when the first vehicles on the road were minesweepers, tanks that could safely set off explosive devices buried in the potholes during the night. Then would come the Jeeps and trucks filled with American
and Vietnamese soldiers, rifles and machine guns ready to take on any ambush that had been set in place during the night.

Then came the civilians, on foot, in ox carts, on bicycles, off to the fields, or to school, or wherever.

Within an hour of sunrise, Highway One would be open, piece by piece, from the Mekong Delta to the DMZ, and life would go on until the sun set.

I said to Susan, “Highway One is open to Hue.”

I
n the daylight, I could see that the driver’s side of the Nissan had picked up some yellow paint from my contact with the police jeep. Susan and I each had Swiss army knives, and we scraped the paint off, while Mr. Cam, who I’d untied, used a shard of glass to help.

I cut our plastic water bottles in half and collected some rice paddy muck outside, which we smeared along the scrapes.

In the muck, we found a few bloodsucking leeches. Susan was repulsed by the leeches, Mr. Cam didn’t seem to care, and I had some unpleasant memories.

She looked at a big, fat leech in the muck of the plastic water bottle. “Do they bite?”

“They attach themselves to your skin somewhere. They have a natural anesthetic in their saliva, so you don’t know you’ve gotten bitten. Also in the saliva is a blood thinner, so your blood just keeps flowing into these things while they suck. You can have them on you all day and not know it, unless you do periodic checks. I had one under my armpit once that got so fat and bloated with my blood that I accidentally squashed it when I lay down on my side to take a break.”

Susan made a face.

After I’d returned from Vietnam, I’d probably told more leech stories than combat stories. These stories never failed to gross out people, and I got really good at it.

We used one of my polo shirts to wipe our hands.

I let Mr. Cam drive, and this made him happier than having his thumbs tied together. I sat in the front and Susan in the rear. We pulled out of the church and onto Highway One. A few people on bicycles and motor scooters looked at us, but by all appearances, we were two Western tourists with a Vietnamese driver, who had pulled over to check out a war ruin or make a pit stop.

Within a few minutes, we were in the provincial capital of Quang Ngai. I kept a close eye on Mr. Cam, and Susan was engaging him in conversation. He seemed okay, but Susan said, “He wants something to eat, and he wants to telephone his family.”

“He can do whatever he wants after he drops us off at Hue”Phu Bai Airport.”

Susan relayed this to him, and he seemed quietly unhappy.

Quang Ngai was nothing to write home about. It was, in fact, an ugly town, but I spotted a beautiful gas station.

We pulled over, and I said to Susan, “You pump. I’ll keep Mr. Cam company.”

Susan got out and pumped gasoline. A few people hanging around the gas station watched her pumping while Mr. Cam and I sat in the front. They probably concluded that Western men had their women better trained than the Vietnamese men did. They should only know.

Susan paid the guy, who had been standing near her, and the guy seemed very curious about us and the Nissan. He even drew Susan’s attention to the scrape marks and the dent. Susan pretended she spoke no Vietnamese.

I looked at Mr. Cam. If he was going to make a break for it, this was his best shot.

The pump attendant said something to Mr. Cam, who replied, and they exchanged another few words.

Susan got in the car and said to Mr. Cam, “Cu di.”

Mr. Cam started the engine and threw the car into gear.

I asked Susan, “What did he and the guy say?”

Susan replied, “The guy noticed the Nha Trang license plates and asked if we’d driven through the night. Mr. Cam said no, then the guy asked him where we’d stayed last night, and Mr. Cam didn’t have an answer. It was just polite conversation, but it didn’t go well.”

I said, “Well, no one calls the police about anything here. Right?”

Susan didn’t reply.

We passed through the rest of the ugly town and crossed the Tra Khuc River via a bridge that looked like it had been the prize in a game between Viet Cong sappers and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In the end, it looked as though the engineers had narrowly won.

We were in the open country again, and Highway One was now crowded with motor vehicles, ox carts, bicycles, scooters, and pedestrians. We were barely making fifty KPH, and I could see how the drive from Nha Trang to Hue could take eleven or twelve hours during the day.

I looked at the map and saw an asterisk north of Quang Ngai, which meant a point of interest. The point of interest, which was only a few kilometers from here, was described in Vietnamese and in English. It said:
My Lai Massacre.
It went on to say:
War crime occurred here, March 16, 1968, when three U.S. infantry companies killed several hundred unarmed villagers. A memorial commemorates the dead and reminds one of the insanity and tragedy of war.

I said to myself, “Amen.”

We approached a small road that had a hand-painted sign with an arrow that read in English
My Lai Massacre
.

As I said, I hadn’t seen any helpful road signs so far, so I had to wonder who put up that one and why. I wondered, too, if any of the surviving three hundred American soldiers who had been there had ever come back.

I looked at the terrain. There were long stretches of rice paddies and small villages clustered on pieces of high ground, shaded with palm trees, and surrounded by growths of towering bamboo. This was typical of what I recalled when I thought of Vietnam, though I’d also operated in much more rugged terrain, away from the coastal populations, which I preferred.

When the war was in the jungles and the highlands, it had a better feel to it, a sort of boys’ adventure, the ultimate rite of passage. In the hills and the jungles, you didn’t kill civilians by mistake or on purpose, as at My Lai, and there were no villages to burn, or water buffalo to shoot. The boys seemed more focused and intent in the quiet presence of the primeval jungle and the highland forests; it was just us and them in the greatest game of survival ever conceived or carried out. The war had clarity, and the kills were clean, and there were no women or children dying around you, and no My Lais.

We passed into the province of Quang Nam, and approached the once
huge American air force base at Chu Lai. This, I recalled, was where some of my air force friends from Apocalypse Now had been stationed.

I saw strands of rusted barbed wire from the old base, then abandoned concrete buildings. I saw a few hangars and dozens of concrete aircraft revetments built in the white sands that stretched to the east down to the sea. I could also make out a runway, covered with white objects that I couldn’t identify.

Susan saw me looking and said, “The farmers use the old runways to dry manioc root.”

“Really? You mean that millions of U.S. tax dollars were spent to build jet fighter runways that are now used to dry manioc roots?”

“Looks that way. Swords into ploughshares. Runways into—”

“What the hell is manioc?”

“You know. Like cassava. You make tapioca pudding out of it.”

“I hate tapioca. My mother force-fed it to me. Call an air strike on that runway.”

Susan laughed, and Mr. Cam smiled. He liked happy passengers.

I said, “I’d love to be here when those jet jockeys from Apocalypse Now get up to Chu Lai. They’ll have a fit.”

The Chu Lai base was big and sprawling, and we kept passing pieces of it. I saw kids pulling wagons through the area, and I asked Susan, “What are they doing?”

“They’re scrap metal scavengers. It used to be a huge business in Vietnam, but most of the easy stuff has been found.” She added, “A lot of the stuff blew up in their faces. There were hundreds of scavengers killed and maimed every year, according to what I’ve heard. Now, the pickings are slimmer, but safer.”

I watched the kids digging in the sand. After thirty years of war, and nearly thirty years of peace and recovery, this nation still had scars and unhealed wounds that continued to bleed. Maybe that’s what we had in common with them.

Susan said, “When or if you go into the interior, be advised that a lot of the unexploded stuff is still lying around.”

“Thank you.” In truth, even during the war, there was so much unexploded stuff around that you had just as much chance of being blown up by your own duds as by their booby traps.

I looked at Mr. Cam, who had obviously not had a good night’s sleep.
He was starting to nod a bit, and I shook his shoulder. I asked him, “Do you know that twenty-five percent of U.S. auto fatalities are caused by fatigued drivers?”

“Eh?”

Susan translated something, but not quite what I said. She said to me, “He wants some coffee.”

“Next Burger King, we’ll stop.”

She said something to Mr. Cam, and I didn’t hear the words Burger King.

The coast curved inland now, and the highway passed over several small bridges that spanned creeks and streams, which ran down from the hills into the sea. It really was a beautiful country, and I appreciated it more now than I did when I had to walk it seven days a week.

Susan said, “This area was the center of the Champa civilization. Did you see Cham Towers when you were here?”

“Actually, I did, though I didn’t know what they were. We used them as watchtowers or artillery spotting towers. I saw everything through the eyes of a soldier. I’m glad I came back. I’m glad you’re with me.”

“That’s very sweet. Don’t forget you said that.”

We drove awhile, and I looked at the map. I said, “According to the map, Highway One runs far to the west of Da Nang, so we don’t have to go through the city.”

“Didn’t you say you left Vietnam from Da Nang?”

“Yes. November 3, 1968. Caught a helicopter from Quang Tri to my base camp at An Khe and collected the stuff in my trunk, which I hadn’t seen since my R&R, got all my paperwork in order, saw the pecker checker about VD, said good-bye to a few people, and di di mau’ed the hell out of there. Caught a big Chinook chopper to Da Nang. We drew fire someplace over the highlands. I mean, I had less than seventy-two hours left in-country, and these bastards are trying to kill me on the way to Da Nang. But aside from a few holes in the chopper, we made it. Then, while I’m in the transit barracks waiting for my flight home, the next day, at about three in the morning, Charles lobs in a few mortar rounds on the going-home barracks.” I added, “He did it on purpose.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“The empty mess hall next door got blown up, and some shrapnel flew through the barracks. I got knocked out of my upper bunk bed and
sustained yet another head injury. But no one noticed, and I caught my flight to San Francisco.”

“I’ll bet you were happy to be going home.”

I didn’t reply for a while, then said, “I was . . . but . . . I thought about staying with my company . . . everyone who left had mixed feelings about leaving their friends . . . it was weird, and it stayed with me for months . . . it wasn’t a death wish, it was a mixture of emotions, including the thought that I wasn’t going to fit in among normal people. It’s hard to explain, but nearly everyone who’s been to war will tell you the same thing.”

She didn’t reply.

We continued in silence awhile, then we crossed a bridge that spanned the Cam Le River, and I said to Susan, “Ask Mr. Cam if the Cam Le River is named after him.”

She said to me, “There aren’t that many words in Vietnamese, Paul, and fewer proper names, so you’ll see a lot of names and words appearing with great frequency. Try not to be confused, and no, the river was not named after Mr. Cam.”

Mr. Cam knew we were talking about him, and kept looking over his shoulder at Susan. Susan put her hand on his shoulder and said something. He laughed.

I guess he got over being kidnapped, almost killed in a high-speed chase, being tied up, sleeping out in the cold, and being threatened with death. Or, maybe he was smiling because he was thinking about his tip. Or maybe his revenge. The unhappy truth is, if Susan hadn’t been with me, I’d have had no choice but to kill Mr. Cam. Well, of course I had a choice, but the right choice was to get rid of him. And yet, deep inside of me, I knew I’d killed too many Vietnamese, including the two cops, and the thought of killing yet another made my stomach knot up. But if I believed that what I was doing here was important and right, then just like in 1968, when I believed the same bullshit, I’d do what I had to do for God, for country, and for Paul Brenner.

The Da Nang airport was off in the distance to our right, and beyond the airport, I could see the low skyline of the big city.

The airport, I recalled, was bigger and better than Tan Son Nhat because the Americans had built it from scratch. Now, according to my map, it was designated as an international airport. I said to Susan, “You could dry a lot of manioc on those runways.”

“It’s a major civilian and military field. In a few years, you’ll be able to fly to the States from there.”

“How about right now?”

“There are already American cargo planes making the run once in a while.”

Actually, I knew this. This was escape Plan C, according to Mr. Conway. Paul Brenner in an air shipment container labeled bananas or something. Might work. Might not.

She got her camera out and took a picture of the airport in the distance. She said, “A souvenir for you. And no one is trying to kill you this . . . well . . . you know what I mean.”

“Right.”

“I fly up here once in a while on business. Did you say you never got to China Beach?”