The Man from Saigon

“Anything more you need?” she said as they tried to figure out what the Kotex was, holding it against make-believe wounds as though it were a dressing.

They have taken Son’s map, binoculars, matches, insect repellent, gum, and his cameras, which he handed over only reluctantly. They have taken everything she owns except the clothes she wears and her hammock. Without the weight of her possessions she is looser, lighter, able to move more freely, and yet Susan feels more exposed. If she could cloak herself in the things that are hers, she might stave off the disorientation which is arriving, she knows, not because she feels it yet but because it has been described to her by others, by women she once interviewed in an Illinois State Prison, for example, who were locked up for such crimes as “lascivious carriage,” which meant they had lived with a man out of wedlock. Once the women’s clothes and possessions were confiscated, once they had been dressed identically and doused with lice powder, their personalities themselves began a process of unraveling. The draftees she had interviewed some months previously reported the same feeling after their civilian clothes were discarded, their heads shaved so that they could not recognize themselves in a mirror, and every ounce of privacy annihilated to the extent that even the toilets were set out starkly in rows on a long wall with not so much as a screen between them. It did something to you, set in motion a kind of uncertainty that was easily manipulated by whoever was in charge.

She reminds herself that the men in control now are only three youths who somehow became separated from the rest of their unit during the ambush. It was almost by obligation that they took her and Son prisoner. And though their rifles are menacing enough, they have immature, bland faces. They only want her things for the novelty value. When she reminds herself of all this she feels more herself, and she can believe, however fleetingly, that the whole thing is a game. As if any moment they will release her and Son, and then all scatter behind trees, count to twenty and start again.

That is how she will tell it, she decides, if she gets the opportunity.

Hours later she is not sure she will get the chance; the mood of the soldiers has changed. They’d been excited at first by what their prisoners had in their pockets, but now they appear bored with the whole thing. Miles into the march she is surprised they don’t just shoot her and Son and have done with it. They are weary. When they pass under low branches they are attacked by red ants which seem to wait for their prey, dropping down on them as they pass and biting at their collars. Like Susan, the Vietcong have to dig the ants out or squash them beneath their clothes. They swear in Vietnamese just as she would swear in English, if she dared to speak at all. The soldiers look at Son and Susan as if the ants are their fault. At rest stops they glare at them with hatred, Susan thinks, as though it is they, the VC, who have been taken prisoner by these inconvenient others.

She supposes it is the responsibility of guarding that weighs on them, especially in the heat of the day. For her part, she is too frightened to hate them. There are times she is so certain they will kill her that she almost wishes it would be said aloud. She thinks the admission might help prepare her for the act, like anesthesia. By mid-afternoon her head is swimming. There is a pain in her left temple that tracks her pulse. All at once, almost without meaning to, she says, “They will take us someplace and shoot us. Near a swamp or a rice paddy. In a field.” After many hours of saying nothing she is suddenly talking to herself, talking to Son. He doesn’t answer, but he is giving her a curious look as though she’s inexplicably sprouted a tail. She’s feeling giddy; perhaps that is why he is staring at her. They sit beneath a cluster of trees. Her feet are numb all the way up to her knees. She is being allowed some water and she wishes there were enough so that she could drink for as long as she wanted, pour it over her head, over her feet which are dead to her now, so that it feels like she is walking on stumps.

One of the soldiers has collected some bamboo that he is carving carefully for reasons she does not understand. She is aware of the heat, the air swollen with moisture, but she no longer seems to be sweating. She hears herself speak and it sounds like someone else talking, not her. “They’ll stand us on the side of a bomb crater, shoot us, and then we’ll fall in,” she says. Her mind flashes images, sometimes disjointed, as though she is dreaming. She sees craters and bones, tall dry grasses, the white sun. She shivers and wonders why; thinks it must be her own fatigue making her imagine this. The craters look like convenient graves. She’s seen them full of water, newly alive with marine life, and wondered then how the fish managed to find their way into bomb craters. She has seen soldiers bathing in them, peasants fishing in them. She’s also seen a body or two. She thinks this is remarkable, that she could die now in a hollow of the earth, in the footprint of an explosive whose origins are from some Midwestern town half a planet away.

Her skin has gone strangely cool. Her lips taste of salt. Son is staring at her. The soldiers seem not to notice, perhaps not to care. For a moment she thinks she might fall asleep, right here, right now. Her head begins to dip, her eyes closing. She realizes she is becoming a heat casualty. She has seen troops medevac’d on stretchers in the same condition. Her awareness of this startles her. She recovers long enough to ask for more water.

“Can you walk?” Son asks. These are his first words to her in many hours and they feel good, like the water itself. But though he has spoken only once, the sound echoes in her mind so that it feels he is asking again and again: Can you walk, can you walk? Part of her, the part that is thinking straight, still rational, knows that it is heat exhaustion that is the problem. She drinks as much as she is able, then nods and stands up. Her feet are bleeding, she realizes, but she can walk.

They reach a clearing made some time ago by US troops who, judging from the look of the place, had apparently wanted to land a helicopter right here in the jungle. She studies the tree stumps that have been blown up, charred wood, charred ground, a lot of sudden sunshine that comes through like a knife. She feels almost drunk, her legs jelly, her arms shaking, the cool sweat like the glistening oil of a snake. She is glad there are no craters near by, even though she knows she is only imagining what might happen, that nobody has told her, told her anything really.

The soldiers are busy scouring the land, looking for leftover C-rations, matches, cigarettes, gum—anything the soldiers may have left behind. There is a fair chance they’ll find something valuable. Marc once told her it was not uncommon for the Americans to bury a whole carton of C-rations rather than carry it. He told her this as they stood in a wooded area, a fire behind them from where the troops had burned a Vietcong hideout. She watched a GI walk to the river’s edge to dump a load of rations, then get another box and do the same again. What’s he doing? she asked. Marc looked up from his notepad, blinked into the sun, and explained. She’d had no idea. It was like a thousand details of this war that were a mystery to her. She looks now as the three Vietcong soldiers pick up bits of garbage, an empty Salem pack, a cracked Bic lighter. If found, rations are treasure to the Vietcong, better than money, which they seldom have a use for except to surrender to their superiors.

She imagines the Americans back again, the soldiers who made the clearing. With their M16s, their bandoliers, grenades and knives and helmets. She wishes them back and for a moment she smiles, picturing the face of a captain she met while out with Marc on a story in Gio Linh. She didn’t think she’d paid that much attention, but there is his face in front of her now, the slightly wild glaze of his expression, the thin upper lip, the whites of his eyes bright against his face, which is dark with earth and sun, with insect repellent and dust.

He’d stood in a clearing waving an ice-cream cone as he spoke. There’d been a story about how the troops were under-supplied, with TV footage of them describing how they might run out of C-rations at this rate. Command had reacted, first by getting after the reporter about “misreporting,” and second by sending barrels of ice cream and ammunition out to the soldiers immediately. She watched the captain talk between slurps of ice cream, which melted faster than he could eat it, running down his sleeve, attracting insects which he picked out with his fingers. They’d blasted out a temporary landing zone to get in a chopper for a wounded soldier and it looked like the clearing where she sat now. She half expected to see the white wrappers, the Popsicle sticks, packaging from dressings, cigarette butts. She half expected to see that captain’s grubby face, the dusty, sagging uniform, the reassuring gun.

You shouldn’t have said what you did, Davis, the captain had told Marc. Ruins morale, a story like that.

Wasn’t me, Marc said. I didn’t even know about it.

It might not be you who did it, but it was your network, that’s for goddamn sure. I mean, why can’t you people get on the team?

Marc sighed. I didn’t know the guy who did that story. We’re not all that friendly, the press. To each other, I mean.

I don’t know. You look awful friendly to me, the captain said, moving his gaze from Marc to Susan and back again. Getting altogether too friendly, I’d say.

She’d only known Marc a few weeks then, the charge of electricity so strong between them it was as recognizable as an army flag. They could deny it—to the captain, to a dozen others—but it was obvious, palpable, a disaster in the making.

Under normal circumstances, if she were to think about the captain at all, she would have recalled with a small stitch of resentment the way he looked at her as if she was a nice little can of rations tucked into Marc’s own pack. But that is not what seems important now. What she thinks of now, what she wants most of all, is the ice cream. She is almost exhilarated by the thought of something cold and sweet and wet.

Son is studying the Vietcong, the ground, the treeline. She imagines he is assessing the chances of running into American soldiers. He frowns into the distance, then looks away, and she concludes that nobody is coming. The only sounds are jungle sounds: the rustling of unseen animals, of scurrying birds and monkeys and rats. Occasionally, she hears a series of long, piercing cries and she imagines that one of the hidden creatures is murdering another of them, and she is reminded of the cries of the men she heard during the ambush. She blames herself for being here now. She swats at the insects that flutter next to her head, confusing her in the heat and dust with the vibration of their wings and the constant stimulation of movement near her eyes.

As they begin again, moving out of the clearing, she asks Son once more if he thinks they will be shot. They are walking over splintered, dead branches strewn with new vines that grow easily over the broken land, around torn stumps already sprouting new buds, the land so fertile and determined it is a force of its own, as powerful as the war. For a moment she thinks she sees Son nod. This sends her into a desperate, pleading burst.

“Is that right, then?” she says. “Is that what is going to happen? We’ll be shot?”

He has no chance to respond. One of the soldiers indicates with his gun that she needs to keep moving. Walking is increasingly difficult. Her feet hurt; she is drying out. In a minute she’ll begin hallucinating, or perhaps she will fall. She feels invisible to the soldiers, who move them on like cattle. She feels invisible to Son; perhaps in his mind she is already dead.

Salt pills, the juice of a dragonfruit, water and shade. She is nursed with these simple things and when she wakes she has no idea how long she has been asleep. She thinks it has been a long time, but judging from the light still left in the day, it has been less than an hour. They begin again to walk. She feels better than before, but not great. She wishes Son would talk to her, just a few words every once in a while and she would be satisfied. He still does not turn around or slow his pace. Perhaps he has no choice. She is handicapped by her inability to understand what is said when the soldiers speak to him. Before they took her wristwatch, she had checked the time every ten minutes, comforted by the thought that it was the same time everywhere else as here in this wilderness. Now she feels adrift, out of synch with the world. The soldier with longish hair is ahead, the other two behind. The guards keep their rifles on their shoulders, or use them to point, like extensions of their arms and hands.

You get ground down to powder, then you get greased, that’s what a GI told her once, his summation of the life of an infantryman. He was missing two teeth, knocked out when he dove during an attack on a firebase that was nearly overrun. He struggled with the gap in his mouth, his tongue escaping so that he developed an unwelcome lisp. Then you get greathed, he said. You thtart getting religion. You thtart wanting God.

She understands now what he meant. It was this right here. Her feet ache. Her hands are scratched so that the blood beads against the skin, attracting flies. She watches the soldier with the long hair, the one in front, and wishes he’d trip a wire and leave nothing left of himself bigger than a stone. Then, just as she has this thought, the soldier gestures behind him, putting Son up front to act as his personal bomb squad to clear the path ahead. It bothers her to see Son there, a rifle trained on his back. She notices with relief when the guard lets the rifle drop once more. It is not difficult to imagine the soldiers getting bored with prisoners, shooting them for convenience’s sake, bringing their bodies to the river. It is unfortunate, she thinks, that she has such an imagination that she can envision the execution, or, as she walks the narrow, difficult path, almost see a booby-trap exploding. To be brave, she thinks, you need to be right here, right now, with no sense of what might happen in a few hours or days. To be very brave you need never to imagine consequences or sudden turns of events. You need, really, to have no imagination whatsoever, which is why (she concludes) good writers are not usually good combat reporters. Wrong temperament. Like bringing a race horse to a rock concert.

They rest, squatting on the jungle floor, sitting on their ankles in the fashion of the Vietnamese. The one with the narrow head, who was carving bamboo earlier, lays the shavings in a pile and then rubs two pieces back and forth, strikes a spark with a flint and makes a fire. The flames shoot up unexpectedly and he jumps back as though something live has sprung at him. This sends the others into giggles, their grubby faces smiling in a manner that seems genuinely warm. They are friends, Susan can see that. She observes them the way she might a herd of exotic animals with their own unknowable social order. A part of her understands they may be like her and Son, who have traveled together so long that they have become a kind of family, but she doesn’t dwell on this. Instead, she tells herself they are killers—all soldiers are killers—but she hopes they are not yet completely dead inside.

The flame is for bits of fish and rice produced from a bag. The fish are old, dried, and yet her hunger makes it smell delicious. She longs to eat. She longs to talk to Son. They have bound her wrists with green wire. She does not understand at first why they find it necessary to tie her now, after so many hours without, until she sees that once they have tied her and Son’s wrists they can put away their weapons, lie down, relax. One of them stretches out on a rock; another makes a seat out of a log, then rushes back when he is attacked by ants. The soldier who lit the fire makes up the meal and brings it to the others. The soldiers eat, chatting as they do. They drink from their canteens and make jokes, particularly the smallest of the three, the one with the sword. He lies on his back, his sword above him, splicing the air with the dark blade, commenting in a manner that occasionally brings chuckles from the other two. They might have been friends together on a camping trip. When finally they have finished eating they offer some fish to her and Son, getting out cigarettes and smoking while she and Son eat awkwardly with their hands bound.

A few minutes later they turn, all at once, and stare at her. She would be startled, but she is too tired to be startled. All movement has been made slow by her exhaustion and the heat. It takes more than a tough look to raise her heartbeat, but it feels as though a pack of wolves has just woken up to her presence.

“What?” she says in English.

The thin one, the one who clubbed Son with his rifle, is the first to speak. He has a soft, high-pitched voice that is difficult to take seriously. “How long you work for American imperialists?” he asks in French.

To her it sounds like a line out of a propaganda leaflet. She ignores it at first, but the soldier repeats the question.

She looks to Son for guidance. He meets her gaze, then looks away.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she begins, and the question is repeated, same as before.

“I don’t work for them so much as explain to American women what is happening over here.”

He looks confused, probably because she said “women,” so she answers once more. “I describe the war for Americans in their own country. So that they know what is going on,” she says.

She thinks she should put up some sort of resistance, that at least she should refuse to answer certain questions. There would be dignity in opposing their efforts. Instead she answers casually, as though she is answering questions for a stranger on a bus, or when introduced to somebody at a party, rather than being interrogated. She would like to be the unyielding, self-possessed prisoner that Son is. He looks away from them, or straight through them. He answers nothing or shrugs. It makes no difference if they tie his hands or not; he behaves as though he is their superior in every way, speaking only when he wishes and refusing to be bullied. Even the food, which he picked at as though it were something he might discard at any moment, did not appear to interest him.

But there are no questions that require her silence. They interrogate her in a half-hearted way, mostly asking again and again whether she works for the American army—No. Whether she helps the American officers—No. Whether she knows of the atrocities committed by the Americans. What atrocities? The napalm, the killing of civilians. Yes, of course, I know about that. What do you think? I think it is bad. You are American? No. My mother is English. From England. I was born in Buckinghamshire. She does not tell them that it was on an RAF base, that she grew up eating Raisin Bran and peanut butter as often as Weetabix and marmalade, that she has lived in the US for almost the whole of her adult life. She does not say that the clearest memory she has of Buckinghamshire is an awful boarding school in which girls were not allowed blue jeans or tampons, the use of which was tantamount to declaring oneself a slut. The Vietcong soldiers confer for a moment. Then they say, But you look like an American! All white people look alike, she replies. The small one laughs. He is missing a front tooth; she can see a centimeter of curled pink tongue in the gap of the cage of his teeth, a snail in a shell. The missing tooth makes him look even younger. They’ve been captured by evil children, she thinks.

Because they have no idea what to do with her, or what to ask her, it seems, they move to questions about how people get engaged in America, and other odd questions about sex and marriage. American brides are not virgins, they say. Doesn’t the husband feel cheated? No. They don’t believe it. And perhaps because they don’t believe it, they go back to their original questions: Are you working for Americans? No. Do you help the American military? No. Do American girls sleep with several men before they get married?

They can’t speak English; their French is awful, a tangle of words beneath a heavy accent that itself would make communication difficult. They must think her French is terrible, too, because they wince and shake their heads and ask her to repeat everything. Moi no compris pas toi parler, they say, which means me not understood you to speak and is unlike any French she has heard. It appears no more refined language is possible between them unless Son acts as a translator, which at the moment he appears reluctant to do.

Finally, the one with the long hair says, “What does your father do for a job?”

“He’s dead,” she tells them. It is true. He died of an aneurism last year. She thinks, with some regret, that he’d never have approved of her working in a war zone, that he’d have done everything possible to prevent her from going.

“Dead?” He studies her carefully “In the war?”

“No. He was too old for this war. He was sixty—” This is too much information. She doubts these soldiers know how old they themselves are, what day they were born, let alone how old their fathers are. She repeats, “Mort. Il est mort long-time.”

They nod, satisfied. Their fathers are probably dead, too, she concludes.

Apparently, the green wire that held her wrists during their meal is necessary also for this period of interrogation. Afterwards, they free her and ask her to take photographs of them with Son’s camera. They want her to take the pictures but only when the barrel is pointed her way, and only as they appear to be taking aim. She asks to stop—again, her imagination is too fertile for this game—for what if they thought it would be amusing to have her take a photograph as they pulled the trigger? She tells herself to stop thinking so much and tries to take comfort in the fact that it is only through the frame of her camera that she sees them training their rifles on her. She comes to this realization—that they’ve relaxed their guard, that they don’t seem the least interested in killing—and it serves as a tonic to calm her. Even so, she asks them to please allow her to put the camera down. She does not want to take any more pictures, she explains. She’d like to give back the camera now.

They appear mildly disappointed. The thin one spits, then turns away abruptly. The one with the long hair gives orders for them to carry on marching. Their new manner is to carry their weapons with the absent constancy with which small children carry their favorite teddies. The guns are there, are always there, but they have all grown accustomed to the guns, herself included, so that they seem almost as though they aren’t real, or are never fired, or contain no bullets.

“That’s an interesting sword,” she tells the soldier with the sword. He holds it up, smiling at it as though it were something he has made himself. It’s an ugly sickle with a crude handle, but he presents it now to her as though it is a work of art birthed from his own genius.

“This is from an automobile spring,” he tells her, running his finger along the air above the blade. “And see this handle? From a howitzer.”

She nods, amazed. So he did make it. Seeing it as a composite of its many parts, she has to admit there is genius involved.

A soldier’s relationship to his weapon is complicated. She recalls the time a platoon she was with fired continuously in a “mad minute” because they heard a branch snap among the trees. The noise came from every direction, even from the ground, rising up through her feet, her legs. It passed through her and she felt her body as a thin veil, a kind of skin through which sound pulsed. There was no real reason for the explosion of fire. It was only that they’d been carrying so much ammunition; they were tired of hauling it all. Afterwards, she could not hear properly. She sat on a stack of ration boxes and wrote messages on a steno pad to Marc, who was with her. Smoking, listening to that single sound eeeeeeeee e spinning in her mind like an insect, her writing pad out, her water bottle almost empty, she felt suddenly exhausted, running only on nervous energy. She might have curled up next to Marc but it was too hot for that and, anyway, she would never have shown him any affection in front of the soldiers.