Up Country (44 page)

We went into the lobby, and I checked for messages. There were two for me, and I signed for them.

Susan and I took the elevator up to my suite, where I collapsed in an armchair. “God, I’m getting old.”

“You’re in great shape. Open the envelopes.”

I opened the small one first and read aloud, “ ‘You to report to Immigration Police tomorrow in morning.’ ”

Susan said, “That leash is not that long.”

“Long enough. If they were really pissed, they’d be sitting here now.”

“It’s New Year’s Eve. What’s the other message?”

I opened the big envelope and took out a fax. It was from Karl, and I read it to myself:
Dear Paul, Perhaps my last message was not clear—You really need to end that relationship. Please tell me you have.
It was signed:
Love, Kay.

The nice thing about not being in the army was that you don’t have to obey a direct order from someone who was.

I noticed a P.S. It said:
C sends her love. Will see you in Honolulu.

That could be pure bullshit to keep me in line. In any case, the situation vis-à-vis Susan had become complicated, and I didn’t know how I felt about meeting Cynthia in Honolulu.

Susan was looking at me. She asked, “Who is the message from?”

“Kay.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t look all right. Can I see the message?”

“No.”

She looked hurt, offended, and pissed.

I stood, went toward the terrace with the message, then turned around, and handed her the fax. I said, “It’s Ms. Kay now. Same guy.”

She took it and read it, then handed it back. She stood and said, “I think I’ll sleep in my room tonight.”

“Probably you should.”

She turned, walked to the door, and without hesitation opened it and left.

I went out on the terrace and looked at the city across the river. The holiday lights were still on, mostly red, as you’d expect in a Red country.

I thought of the Pham family. There was, I thought, a gray cloud over this country, formed from the smoke and fire of war, and it rained down hate, sorrow, and mistrust.

If that wasn’t bad enough, this cloud, or, as Karl called it, this shadow still covered my own country.

Truly, Vietnam was the worst thing that ever happened to America in this century, and perhaps the reverse was also true.

The phone rang, and I went back inside and answered it. “Hello.”

“I just wanted to say good luck tomorrow.”

“Thank you.”

“If something happened to you, and we parted—”

“Susan, the phones aren’t secure. I know what you’re saying, and I was about to call you.”

“Do you want me to come to your room?”

“No. We’re both tired, and we’ll have a fight.”

“Okay. Where and when can we meet tomorrow?”

“At six here in the lounge. I’ll buy you a drink.”

“Okay . . . and if you’re very late?”

“Fax Ms. Kay directly. Do you have the number?”

“I remember it.”

“Give her all the details, and be sure you stand at the fax machine, or try the GPO.”

“I know.”

“I know you do. You’re a pro.”

“Paul . . . ?”

“Yes?

“I had no right to get upset about that P.S. I apologize.”

“Forget it.”

“This is what it is. This is here and now. I said that, and I meant it.”

I didn’t reply to that, and I said, “Hey, I had a good day. Happy New Year.”

“Me, too, and you, too.”

We both hung up.

So, I’m having lady problems in a hostile country halfway around the
world, people are trying to arrest me or kill me, and it’s 4
A.M.
, and I need to see the cops in the morning, then make a possibly dangerous rendezvous at noon. And yet, for some reason, none of this bothered me. In fact, the entire Highway One ordeal, including killing the two cops, and the flashbacks, and all of the rest of it, didn’t bother me.

I recognized this feeling for what it was: survival mode. Life was no longer complicated. It all came down to getting home one last time.

I
t wasn’t the worst New Year’s Day hangover I’ve ever had, but it may have been the earliest I’d ever been awake to fully appreciate it.

I showered and dressed for success—blue blazer, white button-down shirt, khaki slacks, and docksiders with socks.

I took an orange juice from the mini-bar and swallowed two aspirin with my malaria pill. I was glad they hadn’t given me a suicide pill because I felt lousy enough to take it.

I went downstairs, skipped breakfast, and walked the few blocks to Ben Nghe Street, where the Immigration Police were located.

It was a cool, damp morning, high cloud cover, and the streets were nearly deserted, and strewn with trash from the night before.

I thought maybe I should have called Susan, but sometimes a little separation is good. I’d been separated from Cynthia more than we’d been together, and we got along great. Maybe not great, but okay.

I got to the police building, a structure of prefab concrete, and went inside.

In a small foyer sat a uniformed guy at a desk, and he said to me in English, “What you want?”

Rather than reply and confuse the idiot, I gave him a photocopy of Colonel Mang’s note, which he read. He stood and disappeared into a hallway behind him.

A minute later, he reappeared and said to me, “Room.” He held up two fingers.

I returned the peace sign and went to Room 2, a small office whose door was open. Behind a desk sat a man about my age in uniform, who looked more hungover than I did.

He didn’t invite me to sit, but just looked at me awhile. I looked at him. Something not pleasant passed between us.

On his desk lay his gun belt and holster, which held a Chicom 9mm. There wasn’t a police station in America where you’d get this close to a cop’s gun. Here, the cops were sloppy and arrogant. This offended me, and having to stand also pissed me off.

The cop looked at the note in his hand and said to me, “When you arrive Hue?”

I’d had enough of this crap, and I replied, “The Century Riverside Hotel told you when I arrived. You know that’s where I’m staying for three nights. Any other questions?”

He didn’t like my reply or my tone of voice. He raised his voice, which became sort of high pitched, and he almost shouted, “Why you not report here yesterday?”

“Because I didn’t want to.”

He did not like that. I mean, he’s working on New Year’s Day, he’s got little rice wine demons smashing gongs in his head, and he’s getting attitude from a round-eye.

So, we stared at each other, and as I said, something unhealthy was passing between us, and it wasn’t just irritation brought on by mutual hangovers. He said to me, “You soldier here?”

“That’s right. How about you?”

“Me, too.”

We kept staring at each other, and I now noticed a jagged scar running down from half an ear, zigzagging over the side of his neck and disappearing beneath his open collar. Half his teeth were missing or broken, and the rest were brown.

He asked me, “When you here?”

“I was here in 1968, I was with the First Cavalry Division, I saw combat at Bong Son, An Khe, Quang Tri, Khe Sanh, the A Shau Valley, and all over Quang Tri Province. I fought the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong, you killed a lot of my friends, and we killed a lot of your friends. We all killed too many civilians, including the three thousand men and women you murdered here in Hue. Any other questions?”

He stood and stared at me, and I could see his eyes go nuts before his face even twitched.

Before he could say anything, I said, “Any more questions? If not, I’m leaving.”

He shouted at the top of his lungs, “You
stay!
You stay here!”

I pulled up a chair, sat, crossed my legs, and looked at my watch.

He seemed confused, but then realized he should sit, which he did.

He cleared his throat and pulled a piece of paper toward him. He clicked a ballpoint pen, got himself nearly under control, and asked me, “How you get to Hue?”

“Bus.”

He wrote that down and asked, “When you leave Nha Trang?”

“Friday afternoon.”

“Get to Hue what time?”

I took a guess and replied, “Ten or eleven o’clock Friday night.”

“Where you stay Friday night?”

“Mini-motel.”

“What is name of mini-motel?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why you not know?”

When you need to explain missing time periods to the police, always come up with a sexual liaison, but do not use this excuse at home. I replied, “Meet lady on bus. She take me to mini-motel. Biet?”

He thought about that and asked again, “What is name of mini-motel?”

“The Ram-It Inn. Fucky-fucky Mini-Motel. How the hell do I know the name of the place?”

He stared at me a long time, then said, “Where you go from Hue?”

“I don’t know.”

“How you leave Hue?”

“I don’t know.”

He tapped his fingers on his desk near his holster, then said, “Passport and visa.”

I threw the photocopies on his desk.

He shook his head. “Need passport and visa.”

“In hotel.”

“You bring here.”

“No.”

His eyes narrowed and he shouted, “You bring here!”

“Go to hell.” I stood and walked out of the room.

He ran after me and grabbed my shoulder. I pushed his arm away, and we faced off out in the corridor.

We looked into each other’s eyes and both of us, I think, saw the same thing: a bottomless pit of pure hate.

I had been this close to only three enemy soldiers, and with two of them, what I’d seen and smelled was fear. On the other one, however, I’d seen this look that was not combat hostility, but a pure hatred that was ingrained in every atom of that man’s being, and which ate at his heart and soul.

And for a second, which seemed like an eternity, I was back in the A Shau Valley, and that man was staring at me again, and I was staring back at him, both of us looking forward to killing the other.

I came back to the present and tried to regain some sense of sanity, but I really wanted to kill this man with my bare hands, to bash his face to a pulp, pull his arms out of their sockets, smash his testicles, crush his windpipe, and watch him suffocate.

He sensed all of this, of course, and was having murderous fantasies of his own, probably having more to do with a sharp filet knife.

But unlike on a battlefield, we both had other orders, and we each reluctantly pulled back from that darkest place in our hearts.

I felt drained, as though I’d actually been in battle, and the cop, too, looked spent.

Almost simultaneously, we each nodded in recognition, and we turned and parted.

Outside, on the street, I stopped and took a deep breath. I tried to clear the bad thoughts from my head, but I had this almost uncontrollable urge to run back in there and smash that son of a bitch into a bloody pulp. I could actually feel his flesh splitting under my knuckles.

I put one foot in front of the other until I was well away from the police station.

I walked aimlessly awhile, trying to burn off the adrenaline. I found myself kicking bottles in the street and punching signposts. This was not good, but it was inevitable, and maybe it
was
good. Unfortunately, it wasn’t cathartic; quite the opposite.

It was about 9
A.M.
now, and the New City was starting to stir. I walked toward the Perfume River via Hung Vuong Street, which took me to the
Trang Tien Bridge. In the river near the bridge was a floating restaurant that I’d noticed the night before. There were a few people sitting at café tables on the deck, so I walked to the restaurant, crossed the gangplank, and was greeted by a young man who looked like he hadn’t yet gotten to sleep.

He showed me to an outdoor table, and I ordered a coffee with a double cognac, which pleased him and would please me more.

The deck was strewn with decorations, paper party hats, champagne bottles, and even a lady’s shoe. Clearly, not everyone had spent midnight gathered around the family dinner table and the home altar.

The coffee and cognac came, and I poured half of it down my throat. My stomach was already churning with bile and acid, and the coffee and cognac just added to the unhealthy brew.

I sat there on the gently swaying deck of the floating restaurant, and stared across the misty river at the gray, brooding walls of the Citadel.

I really didn’t want to dwell on what happened at the police station—I knew what happened, why it happened, and I knew it could happen again, any time, any place.

I finished the coffee and cognac and ordered another. The young man put the cognac bottle on the table, recognizing, I guess, a guy who needed a few drinks.

After my second C&C, I felt a little better and thought about my job. My problem at the moment was to shake any tail I might have, and meet someone on the other side of the river at noon, or two, or at four. And if those rendezvous didn’t work out, I was to await a message at the hotel, and be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice.

If, however, I made a successful rendezvous, I’d know where I was supposed to go next.

Every man or woman on a dangerous assignment has a small, secret wish that the whole thing would just fizzle out. You want to know in your guts that you’ll go, but you’re not going to be disappointed if they say “Mission canceled.”

I remembered this feeling when we’d moved out of the foothills toward Quang Tri City with orders to retake the city from the Communists. By the time we got there, the South Viets had done the dirty work, and we were all secretly relieved, but outwardly we expressed great disappointment that we hadn’t gotten a piece of the action. No one, including ourselves, believed a word of it. But that’s what macho posturing is all about.

Then, in late March, we got our wish to get a piece of the action; we were told we were going to Khe Sanh to face twenty thousand well-armed, well-entrenched North Vietnamese troops who had surrounded the marines at the Khe Sanh firebase since January. This is not the kind of news that brightens your day.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sights and sounds of hundreds of helicopters picking up thousands of infantrymen and air-assaulting into the hills around Khe Sanh. If ever there was an apocalyptic vision on this earth, short of a nuclear explosion, this air assault was it; fighter-bombers dropping hundreds of thousand-pound bombs that made heaven and earth shake, jet fighters releasing tumbling canisters of napalm, the earth aflame, rivers, streams, and lakes burning, forests engulfed in fire, and great fields of elephant grass and bamboo ablaze and, all the while, the helicopters are firing rockets and machine guns into the inferno below, and artillery shells are raining down high explosives and burning white phosphorus, making the dark earth erupt like mini-volcanoes. The sky is black with smoke, the earth is red with fire, and the thin layer of air in between is a killing zone of streaking red and green tracer rounds, hot, jagged shrapnel, and plummeting helicopters. Apocalypse
now
.

I remember the helicopter I was on swooping in for a touch-and-go landing, and I was standing on the landing skid, ready to jump, and the guy standing on the skid beside me put his lips to my ear and shouted over the din of explosions, “Hey, Brenner, you think this is a go?”

We both laughed in recognition of what we and everyone had been thinking before the assault began, and in that moment, we formed a communal bond with every soldier in history who ever waited for the sound of the bugle, the war pipes, the whistle, the red flare, or whatever it was that meant Go.

Go.
You are no longer human, you have no mothers, no wives, no one you care about, except the man beside you.
Go.
This is the moment you have been dreading for as long as you can remember, this is the fear that comes to you in the night before you sleep, and the nightmare that wakes you out of your sleep. This is it—it’s here, it’s now, it’s real.
Go.
Meet it.

I wiped the clammy sweat off my face and dried my hands on my trousers.

And then there was the A Shau Valley.

When you think you’ve plumbed the depths of fear, when you’ve gotten
to a place at the end of the tunnel, where it can’t get any more narrow or any more black, a place where you no longer have the capacity for fear, in a little corner of the tunnel where you laugh at death, you discover a secret room with the greatest fear of all: inside that room is yourself.

I stood, left five dollars on the table, and walked over the bridge to the Citadel.