Up Country (48 page)

I didn’t reply, but the thought of American soldiers, sailors, and airmen back on Vietnamese soil was mind-boggling.

She sipped her beer and lit another cigarette. She said to me, “You surprised me when you asked Captain Vu about American warships in the area.”

“This is not rocket science. It’s Political Science 101. Some of it’s been in the news.”

“Give yourself more credit, Paul.”

“Okay. Let me guess how you know all this. You’re the CIA station chief.”

She smiled. “No. I’m just a kid, a spoiled, upper-class MBA expat, looking for adventure.” She put her cigarette in the ashtray and without looking at me said, “The CIA station chief in Saigon is Bill Stanley. Please don’t tell anyone I told you.”

We made eye contact, and I asked her, “Does Bank of America know about that?”

“He doesn’t work for Bank of America. You arrived in Saigon on a weekend so you couldn’t check things out, but I did take you to my office.”

“Yes, you did. And are you and Bill . . . involved?”

“That part is true. Was true.”

“Are you having fun?”

“Not if you’re angry at me.”

“Me? Why should I be angry at you?”

“You know. Because I lied to you about some things.”

“Really? Are you still?”

“I’ve told you everything I know. They’re going to fire me.”

“You should be so lucky. Tell me why I’m here.”

“I really don’t know.”

“Does Bill know?”

“He must know something.”

“But he didn’t share that with you?”

“He did not.”

“Why were you supposed to meet me in Hanoi?”

“I’m not sure. They said you might need someone to talk to in Hanoi that you could trust. Not an embassy person. They said if you returned from your mission, you might be . . . upset by what you discovered.” She added, “I’m supposed to tell the embassy your state of mind, what you’re thinking.”

“And you just let that statement slide by?”

“I understand that the less I know, the better.”

“Where did you get the gun?”

“From my company safe. That was the truth.”

“Do you realize that about half of what you’ve said to me over the last week has been lies, half lies, and bullshit?”

She nodded.

“So? Why should I believe anything you say now?”

“I won’t lie to you anymore.”

“I really don’t care.”

“Don’t say that. I was just doing a job. Then I fell in love. Happens all the time.”

“Does it?”

“Not to me. But to people. I really hated myself for not being honest with you. But I thought you figured it all out anyway. You’re very bright.”

“Don’t try to butter me up.”

“You
are
pissed at me.”

“You bet.”

“Do you still love me?”

“No.”

“Paul? Look at me.”

I looked at her.

She gave me a sort of sad smile and said, “It’s not fair, you know, if the gods in Washington come between us. If we part, we’ll both turn to stone.”

She had a point there about Washington, and I suppose you could say we were both being manipulated and lied to. I said to her, “Of course I love you.”

She smiled.

I asked her, “What orgasm did you fake?”

She smiled wider. “You tell me.” She added, “I won’t do it again.”

So, we sat there, had another round, and retreated into our own thoughts, trying to figure it all out.

Finally, she asked me, “Did you get any messages today?”

“No.”

“Why do they want you to drop me?”

“Don’t know. Do you know?”

“Probably because they don’t like what happened between us. They really don’t want us pooling information.” She added, “I’m supposed to be working for them, but they don’t trust me anymore. And neither do you.”

I didn’t reply to that last statement and said, “I think on a personal level, your friend Bill was pushing Washington to push me to dump you.”

“I’m sure of it. He’s really pissed at you.” She laughed.

“He should thank me for getting his headache.”

“That’s not nice.”

I didn’t reply. I asked her, “Did
you
get a message?”

“Yes. They know I’m here, of course. Message from Bill
ordering
me to return to Saigon. Business jargon. Said I’d be fired and disciplined and so forth if I didn’t report to work Monday. There’s a ticket waiting for me at Hue”Phu Bai Airport.”

“You should go straighten that out.”

“I should, but I’m not. I want to go with you to Quang Tri.”

“Fine. I booked a four-wheel drive and driver, 8
A.M.
, to take us to the A Shau Valley, Khe Sanh, and Quang Tri. I requested Mr. Cam.”

She laughed and said, “Mr. Cam is home now in front of the family altar, asking the gods to erase us from his memory.”

“I hope so.”

“Paul?”

“Yes?”

“Can I give you some advice?”

“Is it free?”

“Yes. And from the heart. Don’t go where they’re sending you. Come back to Saigon with me.”

“Why?”

“It’s dangerous. You know that. That’s not what I’m supposed to tell you. That’s from me personally.”

I nodded. “Thank you. But as they may have told you, I’m counter-suggestible.”

“I don’t know about that. But I know that you think this is a personal test of your courage, and maybe you have a lot of other personal reasons for pushing on. This is no longer about duty, honor, and country, if it ever was. Well, you’ve proven your courage to me, and I’ll write a full report about Highway One and everything else that’s happened. You have to make the decision to abort. We’ll go to Quang Tri and the A Shau Valley tomorrow and Khe Sanh, and you’ll put that to rest. Then we’ll go back to Saigon together, take a bunch of crap from everyone, then . . . you go home.”

“And you?”

She shrugged.

I thought about that tempting offer for about half a second, then replied, “I’m finishing the job. End of conversation.”

“Can I go with you?”

I looked at her and said, “If you thought Highway One was bad, wait until you see this trip.”

“I really don’t care. I hope by now you know I can handle it.”

I didn’t reply.

She informed me, “You’ll increase your chances of success by about five hundred percent if I’m along.”

“But can I double my money?”

“Sure. Look, Paul, there’s no downside to having me along.”

“That’s a joke—right? Look, I appreciate your willingness to risk jail and maybe even your life to be with me, but—”

“I don’t want to spend the next week worrying about you. I want to be with you.”

“Susan . . . this may sound very chauvinistic, but there are times when a man—”

“Cut the crap.”

“Okay. How’s this? I keep thinking of those photos in your office, and sometimes I see you as Mr. and Mrs. Weber’s little girl again, and I see the rest of your family back in Massachusetts, and even though I don’t know them, I could never face them or face myself if something happened to you because of me.”

“That’s a very nice thought. Actually sensitive. But you know, Paul, if
something happened between here and Hanoi, it would most probably happen to both of us. We’d have adjoining cells, adjoining hospital beds, or matching air shipment coffins. You won’t have to explain anything to my parents, or to anyone.”

I looked at my watch. “I’m hungry.”

“You can’t have dinner until you say yes.”

I stood. “Let’s go.”

She stood. “Okay, you can have dinner. I knew I should have asked you when we were in bed. I can get anything I want out of you in bed.”

“Probably.”

We went outside, and it was raining, so we took a taxi across the river into the Citadel where Susan said she’d made a dinner reservation.

The restaurant was called Huong Sen and was a sixteen-sided pavilion built on stilts in the middle of a lotus pond.

We got a table by the rail, ordered drinks, watched the rain fall on the water, and listened to bullfrogs croaking. It was a very nice, atmospheric place, lit with colored lanterns and candles on the tables. Romantic.

Neither of us mentioned a word of business or anything that had been said in the cocktail lounge.

We had dinner and talked about home and about friends and family, but not about us or about any future plans.

Somewhere back there in the cocktail lounge, I think I used the “L” word, and I was trying to remember what I’d said. Maybe I didn’t actually use it, but I remembered agreeing to it.

Susan was staring out at the rain on the pond, and I looked at her profile.

I should have been incredibly angry at her; but I wasn’t. I shouldn’t trust another word she said; but I did. Physically, she was flawless, and intellectually she gave me a run for my money. If I were writing an officer’s evaluation report on her, I’d say: brave, intelligent, resourceful, decisive, and loyal. Divided loyalty, to be sure, but loyal.

But was I in love?

I think so. But what happened here could probably not happen elsewhere, and maybe could not be transplanted. And then there was Cynthia.

Susan turned and saw me staring at her. She smiled. “What are you thinking about?”

“You.”

“And I’m thinking about you. I’m trying to think of a happy ending.”

I didn’t reply.

“Can you think of a happy ending?”

“We’ll work on it.”

We looked at each other, and we both probably had the same thought that the chances of a happy ending were not good.

T
he following morning, Monday, Susan and I waited in the hotel lobby for our car and driver. We both wore jeans, long-sleeve shirts, and walking shoes. Susan had her tote bag filled with things for the road.

The lobby was full of tourists waiting for their buses, cars, and guides. Hue was a tourist mecca, I realized, a destination between Saigon and Hanoi, and as it turned out, a good place for my rendezvous.

She asked me, “How are you getting to where you need to go tomorrow?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ll talk about it later.”

“Does that mean you’d like my help?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll give you some advice now—do not hire a car with a Vidotour driver. You might as well have Colonel Mang along.”

“Thank you. I already figured that out.”

We walked outside, and it was another gray, overcast day, cool and damp, but no rain.

Susan said to me, “You really pumped me last night.”

“I was very horny.”

“I wasn’t talking about
that
. I meant in the lounge.”

“Oh. That was overdue, darling.”

An open white RAV4 pulled into the circular driveway and stopped. A guy got out and spoke to the doorman, who pointed to us.

The driver came over to us, and Susan spoke to him in Vietnamese. They
chatted for a minute, probably about price, which is Susan’s favorite subject with the Viets.

He was a man of about forty, and I’d gotten into the habit of matching the age of a Viet with his or her age in relation to the war. This guy had been in his mid-teens when the war ended, and he may have carried a rifle, either for the South Vietnamese local defense forces, made up mostly of kids and old men, or for the Viet Cong, who had lots of boys and girls in their ranks.

Susan introduced me to our driver, whose name was Mr. Loc. He didn’t seem particularly friendly and didn’t offer to shake my hand. Most Viets, I noticed, in their dealings with Westerners, were either very slick, or very good-natured. Westerners equaled money, but beyond that, the average Nguyen was polite until you pissed him off. Mr. Loc did not look or act like a hired driver; Mr. Loc reminded me of the close-faced guys I’d seen in the Ministry of Public Security in Saigon. In my job as an army criminal investigator, I assume many roles, and I’m good at it; Mr. Loc wasn’t very good at getting into his role as a driver, any more than Colonel Mang was at trying to pretend he was an immigration cop.

Susan said to me, “Mr. Loc needs to know where we’re going now so he can telephone his company.”

I spoke directly to Mr. Loc and said, “A Shau, Khe Sanh, Quang Tri.”

He barely acknowledged this and went into the hotel.

I said to Susan, “I booked this through the hotel, who, as you know, are required to use Vidotour. Ask that clown for his business card.”

She nodded in understanding, and when Mr. Loc came out of the hotel, she asked for his card. He shook his head as he said something to her.

She walked over to me and said, “He says he forgot his cards. The Viets who have business cards are proud of them, and they’d forget their cigarettes before they forgot their cards.”

“Okay, so we’re under the eye. Ask him if he has a map.”

She asked him, and without a word of reply, he took a map from the front seat and gave it to me. I opened it and spread it on the hood.

As Mr. Loc stood nearby, I said to Susan, “Here’s the A Shau Valley, due west of Hue. The road ends in the middle of the valley at this place called A Luoi, near the Laotian border, where I air-assaulted in by helicopter in late April ’68. From A Luoi is this dotted line that may or may not be passable. It was part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Ask Mr. Loc if we can take that to Khe Sanh.”

She asked him, though he probably understood what I was saying. He said something to Susan, and she said to me, “Mr. Loc says the road is mostly dirt, but as long as it doesn’t rain, we can make it to Khe Sanh.”

“Good. Ask him if we can all speak English and stop pretending.”

“I think the answer is no.”

“Right. Okay, after A Shau, we travel what looks like seventy klicks north to Khe Sanh, where I also air-assaulted in by helicopter, in early April ’68. Then we head east, back toward the coast on Highway 9 along the DMZ, and arrive at Quang Tri City, where my old base camp was located, and where I was stationed during most of the Tet Offensive in January and February 1968. So, we’re traveling back in time in reverse chronological order.” I added, “We’ll do it in that order because I wouldn’t want to be in the A Shau Valley when it gets dark.”

She nodded.

I said, “It’s a total of about two hundred kilometers, then due south again for about eighty kilometers, and we’re back in Hue.” I folded the map and threw it on the front seat.

Susan lit a cigarette, looked at me, and asked, “Did you ever think you’d be back this way?”

I moved away from the vehicle and from Mr. Loc, and thought about that. I replied, “Not at first. I mean, when I left here for the last time in ’72, the war was still going on. Then, for a decade after, the Communists had a tight grip on this country, and Americans weren’t exactly welcome. But . . . by the late ’80s, when things here loosened up, and as I got older, I started to think about going back. Veterans were starting to return, and almost no one I knew regretted the trip.”

“And here you are.”

“Right. But this wasn’t my idea.”

“Neither were the other two times.”

I replied, “Actually, I volunteered for my second tour.”

“Why?”

“A combination of things . . . good career move—I was a military policeman by then, and not a front-line infantryman. Also, things were getting a little rocky at home, and my wife wrote a letter to the Pentagon on my stationery saying I wanted to go back to ’Nam.”

Susan laughed. “That’s silly.” She looked at me and said, “So, basically, you went to Vietnam to get away from your marriage.”

“Right. I took the coward’s way out.” I thought a moment and said, “Also . . . I had a brother, Benny, who . . . they had an unwritten policy of one male family member at a time in a combat zone . . . and Benny was very accident-prone, so I bought him some time. Fortunately, the American involvement in the war ended before he got his orders to go. He wound up in Germany. I don’t like to tell that story because it makes me sound more noble than I am.”

She put her hand on my shoulder and said, “That was a very brave and noble thing.”

I ignored that and said, “The little bastard kept sending me pictures of himself in beer halls with fräuleins on his lap. And my mother, who is totally clueless, kept telling everyone that Benny got sent to Germany because he took a year of German in high school. And Paul took French, so they sent him to Vietnam, where she’d heard they spoke French. She thought Vietnam was near Paris.”

Susan was laughing.

“Ready to roll?”

“Yes.”

She put out her cigarette, and we got into the back seat of the RAV. Susan asked me, “Are your parents alive?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to meet them.”

“I’ll give you their address.”

“And Benny?”

“Still leading a charmed life. I also have another brother, Davey, who still lives in South Boston.”

“I’d like to meet all of them.”

I tried to picture the Webers of Lenox getting together for a few beers with the Brenners of South Boston, and I wasn’t getting a good image of that gathering.

Mr. Loc got behind the wheel and off we went.

We drove along the tree-shaded river road past a few hotels and restaurants, past the Cercle Sportif, and the Ho Chi Minh Museum, and within a few minutes, we were out of the small city and into the low rolling hills, heading south.

I could see the tombs of the emperors scattered around, walled compounds surrounded by huge trees in park-like settings. Susan took a picture from the moving vehicle.

Most tourists, I suspected, came out of the city to see the tombs and pagodas, but I was going elsewhere. I said to Susan, “You didn’t have to come with me. There are better things to see here than battlefields.”

She took my hand and said, “I saw most of the sights when I was here last time. This time I want to see what you saw.”

I wasn’t sure
I
wanted to see what I saw.

The road continued south, through the necropolis, then swung west. Since it was the Tet holiday week, there was not much traffic on the road. Within the villages, I could see kids playing, and whole families gathered outside, talking and eating under trees.

I took the map from the passenger seat and looked at it. This was basically a road map, and not a very good one. The maps I’d used were detailed army terrain maps, partly taken from the French military maps. The army maps were covered with plasticine to survive the climate, and we used grease pencils to show the American firebases, airfields, base camps, and other installations. Army Intelligence would give us updates on the suspected locations of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army units, which we’d note on the map. I don’t know where they got this information, but most of our firefights were in places where the enemy wasn’t supposed to be.

I looked up ahead and saw we were approaching the Perfume River. There was no bridge, according to the map, and no bridge in reality, in case I was expecting a pleasant surprise.

Mr. Loc drove onto a barge that could accommodate two vehicles. We were the only car waiting, and the ferryman said something to us. Susan said to me, “We can pay for two vehicles, or we could be here all day. Two bucks.”

I gave the ferryman two bucks, and we got out of the RAV. Susan and I stood on the deck as the ferry made its way across the Perfume River. She took a picture from the boat.

I said to Susan, “Ask Mr. Loc if you can take his picture.”

She asked him, and he shook his head and replied in a sharp tone.

Susan said to me, “He does not want his picture taken.”

I looked across the river to the opposite shore and said to Susan, “The Army Corps of Engineers used to bridge these rivers with pontoon bridges. Chuck, however, didn’t like to see standing bridges, and he’d load up a bamboo raft with high explosives and wait for a convoy to cross. Then he’d float along with the other craft, trying to look like Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, and at the last minute, he’d set a timer, abandon ship,
and swim underwater with a breathing reed. Usually, though, we could see this coming, and we’d blow Chuck and his raft out of the water before he got to the bridge.”

Susan had no comment.

I added, “This was why we all liked bridge duty. It was one of the more interesting games we played.” I looked at Susan, who was processing this, and said, “I guess you had to be there.”

She asked, “Paul, now that you’re grown up and mature, when you look back on this, do you see it as . . . well, not within the normal range of behavior?”

“It seemed normal at the time. I mean, most of what we did, said, and thought was appropriate for the situation. Any other kind of behavior that you’d call normal would be considered abnormal here. Getting excited about sitting on a bridge all day, waiting to blow Charlie out of the water—instead of patrolling the jungle all day—is, I think, quite normal. Don’t you agree?”

“I guess. I can see that.”

“Good.” I admitted, however, “It does seem a little weird, now that I think about it.”

We reached the opposite bank, and we got back into the vehicle.

Mr. Loc drove off the barge onto the road, and we continued on, west toward the hills and mountains looming in the distance.

We were making only about fifty KPH, and it would take us over an hour to get to the A Shau Valley, if the road stayed this good.

The countryside was hilly, but the Viets had managed to extend their rice paddy cultivation through a series of dikes and waterwheels. The countryside looked prosperous and more inhabited than I remembered it.

We came to a small town called Binh Bien, which was the last town on this road. Beyond this was what we used to call Indian Territory.

The road rose, and before long, we were in the hills, which were covered with scrub brush and red shale.

I said to Susan, “We had to dig in every night, and we’d find a hill like that one over there with the steepest sides possible, and the best fields of fire. This is mostly shale, and it would take us hours with these little entrenching tools just to scratch out a shallow sleeping hole that would also become our firing hole, if we got hit during the night. The hole looked like a shallow grave, which it sometimes became. We’d set out trip flares and claymore mines around our perimeter. The claymore had a hand-squeeze
generator attached to an electrical wire that put out enough juice to blow the detonator. The claymore mine fired hundreds of ball bearings downrange, like a giant shotgun blast, and anyone within about a hundred feet to the front of it would be mowed down. It was a very effective defense weapon, and if it weren’t for the trip flares and the claymores, most of us would not have slept for the entire year we were here.”

She nodded.

The road started to twist through a very narrow pass with steep slopes rising on either side, and the vegetation became thicker. A mountain stream ran along the road, and I could imagine that it flooded during the monsoon, making the road impassable.