War Baby (12 page)

A single rocket had demolished every house on one side of the alley, and the ensuing holocaust had razed everything. A middle-aged Vietnamese stood among the twisted sheets of iron, his face blank. At his feet were two bodies, charred beyond recognition, arms petrified into the pugilistic attitude of the burned corpse. The man’s shoes were smoking. He seemed oblivious.

Webb stumbled through the wreckage; smashed crockery, family portraits with their incongruous smiling faces. Crosby followed behind. ‘They’re gone, Hugh,’ he said.

There was an overpowering smell of burned human fat and singed hair. A policeman was shouting at them, pointing at something he had seen in the ruins. Webb ran over.

Her face and shoulders were burned, her lips, ears, eyelids all gone. Her hair had been melded to a piece of corrugated iron by some burning plastic. What he had at first thought was a leaking gas pipe was actually the sound of her breathing.

‘Odile,’ he said.

The policeman shook his head and backed away. The woman should be dead. Impossible to survive, this badly burned. One hand, somehow untouched by the flames, clawed at the air.

Webb tore at the wreckage around her. ‘Odile!’

Crosby grabbed his arm. ‘Hugh! Come away!’

‘Odile!’

‘Hugh,’ Crosby said. ‘Come away, it’s not her.’

‘Get some water!’

‘It’s not her!’

‘Somebody get some water!’

‘Look at her arm, man. It’s not her.’ Webb stared, wanting to believe. He was right, the uninjured arm was not the arm of a young woman. The hand was calloused, the nails broken from menial work. Not her, not Odile.

‘Christ, why isn’t she dead?’ Crosby murmured.

Her hand clawed at the air, waving backwards and forwards, like a sea anenome in the tide. Two uniformed men stumbled through the hissing ruins with a stretcher. Webb heard the click and whirr of a camera. He looked around. Crosby was taking pictures.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘We’re not tourists, Hugh. We didn’t stay for the last day so we could talk about it at dinner parties.’

Webb tried to snatch the camera away. Crosby backed off.

‘For God’s sake!’ Webb shouted.

‘If we don’t take the pictures, why the hell are we here?’

His hands hurt. He looked down at them; they were blistered from where he had pulled a piece of hot tin away from the woman’s body.

‘Jesus, you’re burned,’ Crosby said. ‘Let’s get back to the Caravelle.’

‘No, we have to find Odile.’

* * *

The city sweated under a grey overcast. Webb and Crosby heard the crackle of small-arms fire. Deserters were roaming the streets, the police had disappeared. The twenty-four-hour curfew had been ignored; the whole city was out on the streets. Webb saw entire families loaded on to tiny Honda motorcycles.

‘Jesus, where are they all going?’ Crosby said in wonderment.

They found a Renault taxi, drove through the chaos to the surrounding hospitals. The wards were overflowing with wounded from the rocket attacks, the doctors harassed, frightened, overworked. They did not have the time to talk to two crazed American
bao chi
. The corridors were bedlam, filled with shouting, frightened and desperate people. Bodies lay crying out on abandoned stretchers; others lay silent, already dead.

‘They’re dead, Hugh,’ Crosby said. ‘They’re under half a ton of smoking rubble. Let’s get the hell out of here.’

‘They can’t be dead.’

‘You saw the house. There was nothing left, for God’s sake.’

‘I have to find them.’

Crosby grabbed his arm. ‘They’re dead, Hugh. Okay? We’ve been to every fuckin’ hospital in Cholon. If they were alive we would have found them. There’s nothing more you can do.’

He knew Crosby was right. He sat down and put his head between his knees. ‘Fuck,’ he whispered.

Webb crouched down and put his hand on his shoulder. ‘This is not your fault, man. You’ve done all you can. Now we’ve got to get out of here.’

* * *

Lam Son Square was empty, eerily quiet; even the bootblacks and the urchins selling cigarettes and pornographic pictures had disappeared. They picked their way through the coils of barbed wire that lay across the footpath. Three soldiers watched them from under a tree on the other side of the square. Webb heard the grate of metal as one of the men jammed a new magazine into his Armalite.

‘Run,’ Crosby said.

They turned down a sidestreet. A middle-aged man, dressed in a dark suit and tie, waved a wad of American dollars, as thick as a hamburger, in their faces. Another man grabbed Crosby’s arms and tried to pull him into a doorway. ‘Take me with you! Take me with you!’

Webb pulled him away.

Someone grabbed Crosby’s bag, wrenched it from his grip. ‘Jesus, my bag! You crazy?’ Crosby shouted.

He ran up an alleyway after a skinny street kid who was still dragging the heavy carpet-bag behind him. Webb was about to follow, then saw a woman in a blue
ao dai
on the footpath on the other side of the road, making her way towards the embassy, clutching a small child by the hand.

‘Odile!’

He ran through the press of traffic. A man appeared in front of him, a handful of American one-hundred-dollar bills fanned in his fist like playing cards. ‘You take me, please!’ he shouted. ‘Please! You take me!’

Webb pushed him away. ‘Odile!’

He could see the woman’s blue dress through the press of people outside the ermbassy gates. He used his strength and size to clear a path through the crowd. ‘Odile!’

He grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around.

Not Odile.

The young Vietnamese woman stared up at him in shock. Then her face underwent a transformation; from surprise to hope. She picked up her child and held the small boy towards him. ‘You take to America!’

But then Crosby was beside him. He had the carpet-bag but there were long raking scratches down the side of his face.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ he shouted, pulling him away.

The woman followed them. ‘Please, you take!’

‘That kid tried to claw my eyes,’ Crosby said. ‘Jesus. Who’s that woman? What were you doing?’

‘I thought it was Odile.’

‘We’ve got to get out of this shit.’

Webb turned around, saw the woman staring after him. He looked at her child. He had round eyes.

Then they were both lost in the crowds.

It was almost dusk when the last of the Chinooks landed on the heaving deck of the
Blue Ridge
. Crosby and Webb leaned on the rail, side by side, watching the coast of Vietnam fade to violet shadow in the distance. The warm salt air was tainted with the smell of grease and aviation fuel.

‘Well,’ Crosby murmured, ‘and so to the next war.’

Webb shook his head. ‘I’m going back to my desk job in DC and I just want to forget all about Vietnam.’

‘You’ll never forget,’ Crosby said.

Two Marines, crewcut, starched white T-shirts under their uniforms, appeared on the deck beside them. ‘Look at that,’ one of them said, laughing. ‘Reckon I could just about zap that gook from here.’

Webb saw what they were pointing at. An old fishing boat wallowed in the water below, crowded with Vietnamese. A woman stood at the stern, holding up her child, imploring someone on the carrier to take the infant with them.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Webb said.

He felt dirty and ashamed. The war might finally be over but he knew he would relive it every day for the rest of his life, and the last scene would always be Odile standing in the middle of the flames, holding her daughter towards him in outstretched arms before she vanished, swallowed up by the gathering darkness, a fading silhouette against the backdrop of the hot green coast.

The PA crackled as the ship’s admiral prepared to make an announcement. ‘Well, folks,’ he said. ‘That just about wraps up Vietnam.’

Thank you for coming. We hope you enjoyed the show.

Seventh Regiment Armoury

When Webb finished there was silence around the table. At the back of the hall one of the British guests had apparently ingested a restricted substance in the gentleman’s washroom during the interval and had become boisterous. He was being coaxed towards the exits by friends.

Cochrane and Crosby refilled their glasses. The Bushmills had almost gone. Cochrane picked up the bottle, reread the poem on the back and smiled. There was no eye contact around the table for a long while. Then Crosby said: ‘It really wasn’t Sean’s fault. The guy wasn’t planning on getting zapped.’

‘The point is he should have got her out long before the end,’ Webb said. ‘He was so wrapped up in himself he never gave a thought about what might happen to her or the kid. Death or injury was an everyday reality in a war zone. We all knew that.’

Cochrane shook his head. ‘I think you’re being a bit tough on him. It was bad luck, that’s all.’

‘It was bad luck for Odile, that’s for sure. Seven years’ bad luck. But Ryan didn’t let himself get too fazed by it. He was out of hospital in three months and back in Angola in six.’

Crosby shook his head. ‘You’re doing him an injustice. He loved her, in his own way. Besides, she was partly to blame. He wanted to get her out of Saigon. She wouldn’t go.’

Doyle leaned forward. ‘I didn’t know him as well as you fellows. But I did know him in the biblical sense. And it seems to me ...’

‘Yeah, when was that?’ Cochrane asked her.

‘The Gulf War. Dhahran. Must be something about hot desert nights. And if you ask me, as a woman, I’d have to say he never loved anyone except himself.’

Crosby looked at Cochrane. ‘Help me out here, Lee. They’re beating up on my friend.’

El Salvador, October 1982

‘When one’s nation is at war, reporting becomes an extension of the war effort.’

Max Hastings

‘I wouldn’t tell the people anything until the war was over - and then I’d tell them who won.’

military censor at a meeting in Washington

They were almost a tourist attraction, in their own way, these bodies of the disappeared. They turned up everywhere, at bus stations, on vacant lots, in the ravines behind San Benito and Escalon. One of the most popular repositories was the lava field at El Playon. The previous year the panorama of rotting flesh had featured regularly on the evening news across the United States.

Their job lately, it seemed to him, was just to drive around each morning photographing the new bodies that had appeared at the roadsides or on the garbage tips or dumped between the graves in the cemeteries where they were picked over by wandering dogs. One day, for a change of pace, Webb and his photographer, Mike Daniels, hired a VW Golf at the Avis desk in the Camino Real and drove up to Puerto del Diablo.

The route took them past the Casa Presidencial and up a winding road narrowed by landslides and deep gullies that had eaten away the roadbed. When they reached the top, Daniels stopped the car and they sat for a few moments looking back towards San Salvador, the city framed by the walls of the gorge. The morning was grey, the lowering sky as suffocating as a blanket. As they got out of the Golf, Daniels shuddered.

‘This place gives me the creeps,’ he said.

Webb had been told about the executions that took place here at night. The bodies were then rolled over the lip of the cliff into the Puerto del Diablo. They started to climb down. The way down was not easy, the stones slick with moss and damp, the air thin. Giant ferns blocked out the sky, and the buzz of the cicadas was deafening.

The first bodies began to appear; maggoty mounds of flesh and bone and hair. The vultures had already been busy. Daniels started to take photographs, his face sickly grey. You could never get hardened to this, Webb thought, no matter how many times you saw it. The only difference was that professional held on to their breakfast.

A little further on they found more bodies. These had been there a long time. They stared over a landscape of stripped spines, blood-caked scraps of clothes, heads rotted to skulls beneath a tonsure of hair.

‘Look at this,’ Daniels said.

He handed Webb an identity card. A schoolboy in a badly knotted tie grinned back at them from the photograph. Webb wondered which mouldering pile of bones was his. He stooped to pick up a shoelace, held it between his fingers, overcome with revulsion. Difficult to breathe down here.

They worked in silence. He had thought before he came to El Salvador that he was inured to death and killing, but he was wrong. It was even harder to accept that his adopted country condoned and supported this.

Daniels focused on an empty ribcage, a woman’s shoe.

How long before they ran out of politically suspect victims? Webb wondered. The Puerto del Diablo and El Playon were already choked with the remains of priests, teachers, journalists, students, writers and doctors. So many had been murdered that all possibilities for rational democracy had been eradicated. But the United States - a supposedly democratic country - continued to support President d’Aubuisson and his death squads because they were committed to fighting ‘Marxists.’ These days a ‘Marxist’ was anyone who was opposed to President d’Aubuisson. By now every dictator in Latin America knew that if he wanted guns and planes, he just had to honey the hook with some leftist guerillas, and the US came snapping on the line every time.

Daniels’ Canon clicked and whirred.

There was no proof that the government was involved, as there was no proof that the current president of the country, Roberto ‘Uncle Bob’ d’Aubuisson had ordered Archbishop Romero murdered as he said Mass in the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador. There was no proof; even though d’Aubuisson’s diary, with the date of the assassination ringed in red, had been produced in evidence, with a list of the armaments required for the job listed on the same page.

There was no proof because one of d’Aubuisson’s judges said there wasn’t.

Daniels changed film, fired off half a dozen frames of the bones littered along the rocks.

Every morning in the national daily,
El Diario del Hoy
, there were photographs of the missing, juxtaposed with grainy photographs of mutilated bodies found the previous day by the side of the road. Officially the government blamed the
desconocidos
, the ‘unknown men’, claiming their victims were casualties in a clandestine war being waged between rightist militia and leftist guerillas.

Daniels was standing over a disjointed spine. He raised his camera, changed his mind, lowered it again. He seemed overcome.

When he first arrived in El Salvador, Webb had interviewed an ORDEN member. ORDEN was one of the death squads, they had links with the current president, and its members were reportedly paid off by one of the country’s leading businessmen, Fabian Ventura.

The man had claimed that if you were asked to join one of the death squads, and you refused, you were labeled a subversive and became their next victim. But there were other reasons men joined, besides fear; he had also been promised year-round employment on Ventura’s coffee plantation, as well as an interest-free loan. The choice was simple. If you did not want to become one of the oppressed, then you joined the oppressors.

‘Do you enjoy killing?’ Webb had asked him.

The man had stared at his hands, trying to frame an answer to this difficult question. ‘Once a victim is chosen,’ he said. ‘everyone has to join in, so that the guilt is shared equally. Everyone must have a little of the victim’s blood on their hands. It is not death but brutality that makes people afraid. That is what they teach us.’

‘But do you enjoy it?’ Webb repeated.

‘It is like sex with a prostitute,’ he said. ‘Afterwards you feel dirty. But at the time . . .’

Daniels put down his camera and turned away. ‘Look too long into the abyss and the abyss looks into you. That’s Nietzsche.’

‘And I think to myself, what a wonderful world. That’s Louis Armstrong.’

The atmosphere was oppressive. Mist rose from the ground like corpse gas. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Daniels said.

‘Got everything you needed?’

‘There’s only so many ways you can do death. I think I did them all the first day I got here.’

When they got back to the car park a battered Toyota pick-up truck - it had no plates - was parked right behind their Golf. Half a dozen men were sprawled on the bonnet and the tray. They all wore aviator sunglasses and cowboy boots, and had machetes or revolvers tucked into their leather belts.

ORDEN.

‘Oh shit,’ Daniels said.

‘It’ll be all right,’ Webb said.

He walked over to one of the men sitting on the bonnet of the pick-up. His paunch swelled his golf shirt and bulged over his jeans. ''
Buenos dias, señor,
’ Webb said to him, smiling, and then, still in Spanish: ‘Do you think you could move your truck? We have to return to San Salvador.’

He grinned at the others. No one spoke. The man took off his cowboy hat and brushed some imaginary dust off the brim. He hawked deep in his throat and spat on the ground by Webb’s boot.

Webb turned away and went back to Daniels.

‘They know who we are,’ Daniels whispered. ‘This is a fucking set-up!’ His face shone with sweat.

‘Stay calm,’ Webb said.

‘We’ve been set up! Let’s just walk. Leave the fucking car right here.’

‘I’m not walking all the way back to San Salvador.’

The men were grinning at them. This was a good game, some light entertainment on a slow morning. Webb checked the clearance between the cars. A foot, perhaps a foot and a half.

He climbed in behind the wheel of the Golf. Daniels leaned in the window. Webb could smell the sweat on him. ‘What the fuck are you going to do? Drive over the cliff?’

‘I used to live in a terraced house in Hammersmith. I know how to get a car in and out of tight spaces.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Hugh! You dent their truck, what the hell do you think they’ll do to us?’

‘I’m not walking and I’m not waiting.’ He started the engine.

He reversed three times, wrestling with the wheel to get full lock on each forward turn. The
desconocidos
watched intently from the bed of the truck, leaning forward with rapt attention as if they were watching a chess game. They grinned at each other; bad teeth, stubble and toothpicks.

Webb inched forward, then inched back. He tried to forget about the giddying drop below. He left the door open. If the Golf started to topple he hoped he would have time to jump clear.

Daniels slammed his fist hard on the boot. He came to the open door. ‘You’re about an inch from their front bumper.’

Webb nodded and the Golf crept forward again. He thought he could do it this time. He heard the truck roar to life behind him. Perhaps the
desconocidos
had tired of the game.

Not a bit of it. The truck drew forward and the space behind him was gone, trapping him against the edge of the cliff.

Daniels came back to the window. ‘Let’s just get the fuck out of here.’

Webb glanced in his mirror. He remembered something Ryan had told him once, that he’d seen more men killed running blindly from a battle than staying behind and using their instincts to get them out of trouble.

These guys were not about to let them walk off the mountain. If they tried, they would follow them in the truck. Running just persuaded people to run after you.

Webb left the engine running and walked around to the front of the car. The wheels were at full lock; there was just inches between the left front wheel and the edge of the cliff.

It was possibly enough; and anyway, there was no choice.

He went back to the Golf, got behind the wheel and gunned the motor. If he was going to do it, there was no point in being prissy about it. ‘Get ready to jump in,’ he said to Daniels. ‘If I don’t make it, you’re on your own. See if you can win them over with a few jokes.’

‘What are you going to do?’

Webb put the car in gear, keeping his body weight on the wheel, holding the lock as far to the right as it would go.

He released the clutch. The tires shrieked, and the passenger-side front wheel lost traction for a moment, but then the car swung around through 180 degrees. He slammed on the brake.

Daniels jumped in and Webb gunned the car back on to the highway, his driver’s door still flapping open. He put his foot to the floor and headed back towards San Salvador.

Daniels wound down his windows. There was a ripe and overpowering smell in the car. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I shat.’