Up Country

by Nelson DeMille

  I looked up at the roof and saw the smaller structure where the last Americans had left the city by helicopter on April 30, 1975, as the Communist troops approached. It was yet another of those famous or infamous video scenes that were emblematic of the whole sorry mess; the marine guards fighting with screaming and crying Vietnamese civilians and soldiers, who had overrun the compound and wanted to escape, the embassy staff trying to look cool as they made their way to the helicopters, embassy files burning in the courtyard, the city of Saigon in chaos, and the Ambassador carrying the folded American flag home.

  I’d seen this on the TV news with a bunch of other soldiers, as I recalled, on a television in the NCO club at Fort Hadley, where I was still stationed. I recalled, too, that no one around me said much, but now and then someone would say softly, “Shit” or “Oh, my God.” One guy actually wept. I would have left the room, but I was mesmerized by the image of this real-life drama, and further fascinated by the fact that I’d actually been to the embassy a few times, which made what I was watching even more surreal than it looked to most people.

  Susan broke into my time trip and said, “The building is used by the Vietnamese government oil company, but the American government is negotiating to get it back.”

  “Why?”

  “They want to level it. It’s a bad image.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “It’s American property. They may build a new consulate building there. But I think the Communists might want to make it another tourist attraction. Six bucks at least. Free to Vietnamese.”

  Again, I didn’t reply.

  Susan said, “The Americans are back, the people want them back, and the government is trying to figure out how to get their money without getting them. I live this every day on my job.”

  I thought about my own reason for being in this country, but there were still big gaps in my understanding of this mission, which is not the usual way to send a man on a dangerous assignment. This only made sense if I put Susan Weber into the equation.

  Susan asked, “Do you want a picture of you with the embassy in the background?”

  “No. Let’s go.”

  We drove through central Saigon, crossed a small bridge over a muddy stream, and she said, “We’re on Khanh Hoi Island, mostly residential.”

  This was a low-lying piece of land, swampy in areas, with clusters of wood shacks near the wetlands, and more substantial residential blocks on the higher ground. I asked, “Where are we going?”

  “I need to get my motorcycle.”

  We drove through a warren of wooden houses with gardens, then a cluster of multi-story stucco buildings. Susan turned down an alley and into a parking area that was actually an open space beneath a stucco building, elevated on concrete pillars. The parking space was jammed with bicycles, motorbikes, and assorted odds and ends.

  We dismounted, and she chained her motor scooter to a rack.

  She walked over to a big black motorcycle and said, “This is my beast. The Ural 750. It’s illegal for foreigners to own anything over 175cc’s, so I keep it here.”

  “To look at?”

  “No, to drive. The police check up on what foreigners have around their house. Friends of mine, the Nguyens, live in this building.”

  “What happens when you take it on the road?”

  “You move fast.” She added, “It’s not a huge problem once you’re out in the country. From here, Khanh Hoi Island, I can head south over a small bridge and be out of town in another fifteen minutes. The motorcycle has Vietnamese citizen plates, and is actually registered to a Vietnamese national—another friend of mine—and the police, when they stop you, have no way to check who actually owns it. And if you give them five bucks, they don’t care.”

  “You have been here too long.”

  She unchained the big bike with a key from her pocket and said to me, “Ready for adventure?”

  “I’m trying to keep a low profile. Do we need to take the illegal bike?”

  “We need the muscle on the hills. You weigh too much.” She patted my stomach, which sort of surprised me.

  I said, “You should wear a helmet for highway driving.”

  She lit a cigarette. “You sound like my father.”

  I looked at her and said, “It’s a long way from Lenox, isn’t it?”

  She thought about that, then said, “Indulge me in my petty acts of rebellion.” She took a drag on her cigarette. “You wouldn’t have recognized me three years ago.”

  “Just don’t get yourself killed over here.”

  “You, too.”

  “Hey, I’m on my third tour. I’m a pro.”

  “You’re a babe in the woods is what you are.”

  She took out her cell phone, and still smoking, she dialed someone, spoke in Vietnamese, listened, spoke sharply, then hung up. She said, “A message for you that they didn’t call me about.”

  “Would you like to share it with me, or are you not finished complaining about the desk clerk?”

  “The message was from Colonel Mang. He said you are to report to the Immigration Police headquarters tomorrow morning at eight, and ask for him.” She added, “I’ll help you make out an itinerary.”

  “I can study a map.” I pointed out, “I may be going home, and I know the way.”

  She asked me, “Did you say or do anything to get this guy angry with you?”

  “I was firm but polite. However, I may have said something to honk him off.”

  She nodded, then asked me, “Do you think he knows something?”

  “There’s nothing to know. Thanks for your concern, but this is not your problem.”

  “Of course it is. You’re from Massachusetts. Plus, I like you.”

  “Well, I like you, too. That’s why I want you to stay out of this.”

  “It’s your show.” She jumped on the big Ural, and I got on the back, which was much roomier and more comfortable than the motor scooter. She had a backrest, which had a grip for me to hold on to. She started the engine, and the roar echoed off the low ceiling.

  Susan pulled out of the parking area, and we headed south and crossed another small bridge over a stream, and off the island. To my left I could see the wide expanse of the Saigon River, filled with pleasure boats on this Sunday afternoon.

  Susan pulled off to the side of the road, turned to me and said, “If they think you’re up to something, they won’t kick you out. They’ll watch you.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “If they arrest you, they’ll do it in some small town where they can do what they want with you. That’s why it would be good if you had someone with you.”

  “Why wouldn’t they arrest you, too?”

  “Because I’m an important member of the American business community, and it would cause a real stink if I were arrested for no reason.”

  I replied, “Well, if I need a nanny along, I’ll let you know.”

  She said, “You’re a cool customer, Mr. Brenner.”

  “I’ve been in worse situations.”

  “You don’t know that yet.”

  She gunned the motorcycle and bounced back onto the road.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  We headed west through a mixed landscape of rural and urban: rice paddies, new industrial parks, primitive villages, and high-rise apartments.

  Within twenty minutes, we had left the urban sprawl behind us, and we were into the open country. Motor traffic was light on a Sunday afternoon, but there were lots of ox carts, bicycles, and pedestrians, which Susan wove through without slowing down, horn honking almost continuously.

  The countryside had gone from low-lying rice paddies to rolling terrain; vegetable plots, pasture, and clusters of small trees.

  Now and then, I’d see a pond, which I could identify as a bomb crater. From the air, they used to come in three colors: clear blue water, muddy brown water, and red water. The red water indicated a direct hit on a bunker with lots of people in it. People soup, we called them.
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  Susan shouted above the noise of the engine, “Isn’t this beautiful country?”

  I didn’t reply.

  We passed four wrecked American-made M-48 tanks, which all had the faded markings of the former South Vietnamese army on them, and I assumed they had been destroyed in April 1975 by the North Vietnamese as they drove toward the final battle of Saigon, which mercifully never took place.

  A huge cemetery appeared around a curve in the road, and I said to Susan, “Stop here.”

  She pulled off the road, and we dismounted. I went through an opening in a low wall and stood among the thousands of lichen-covered stone slabs lying flat on the ground. Stuck in the ground beside some of the slabs were red flags with a yellow star in the center. On each of the slabs was a ceramic bowl that held joss sticks, some of which were smoking.

  An old man walked up to us, and he and Susan had a short conversation.

  Susan said to me, “This cemetery is mostly for the local Viet Cong and their families. That part of the cemetery is for the North Vietnamese who died liberating the South—well, he said liberating. I guess you—we would say invading.”

  “Ask him if there’s a South Vietnamese military cemetery around here.”

  They conversed, and Susan said, “Such cemeteries are forbidden. He says that the North Vietnamese bulldozed all the South Vietnamese military cemeteries. This makes him sad and angry because he cannot honor the grave of his son, who was killed while serving with the South Vietnamese army. His other son was a Viet Cong and is buried here.”

  I thought about that, and about our own Civil War cemeteries that honored the North and the South. But here, all memory of the defeated nation seemed to have been obliterated, or displayed in a dishonorable way, like the wrecked tanks that had been left as reminders of the Communist victory.

  I saw an old lady sitting against the wall selling joss sticks. I gave her a dollar and took a joss stick. I walked to the closest grave and read the inscription: Hoang Van Ngoc, trung-uy, 1949”1975. He was born the same year as me, but thankfully that’s all we had in common. Susan came up beside me and lit the joss stick with her lighter. The smoke and smell of incense rose into the air.

  I don’t pray, unless I’m being directly shot at, but I put the stick in the bowl, thinking about the 300,000 North Vietnamese missing who had no grave markers, our two thousand who were missing, and the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers who I’d just discovered lay underground in bulldozed cemeteries. I thought about the Wall, about Karl and me standing there, then about Tran Van Vinh.

  One part of me said that Tran Van Vinh could not possibly be alive, while another part of me was convinced that he was. My conviction was based partly on my own ego; Paul Brenner had not come this far to find a dead man. Partly, too, there was that almost miraculous set of circumstances that had led me here, and which, as a rational person, I wanted to discount, but couldn’t. And finally, there was this suspicion that Karl and his friends knew something I didn’t know.

  I turned away from the grave, and we walked back to the motorcycle.

  We continued on. I remembered this area west of Saigon because I had ridden shotgun a few times with convoys to Tay Ninh near the Cambodian border. In those days, the rural population lived mostly in strategic hamlets, meaning guarded compounds, and the ones who didn’t were Viet Cong who lived in the Cu Chi tunnels. Then there were the part-time VC—pro-Saigon government by day, dinner with the family, then off to the night shift with the AK-47.

  This area between the Cambo border and the outskirts of Saigon had been heavily contested throughout the war, and I recalled reading somewhere that it was the most bombed and shelled piece of real estate in the history of warfare. That could be true, from what I remembered.

  I also recalled a lot of defoliation with Agent Orange, and when the vegetation was all dead and brown, the American bombers would drop napalm and set the countryside on fire. The pall of black smoke would hang for days until a rain came and deposited wet soot on everything.

  This is what the generals could see from the rooftop of the Rex, if they looked west during dinner.

  I saw that the vegetation had come back, but it didn’t look right; it looked scrawny and sparse, the result no doubt of the residual defoliants in the soil.

  The Ural 750 made a lot more noise than an equivalent American or Japanese motorcycle, so we didn’t talk much.

  We’d been on the road about an hour, and now we were heading northwest toward Cu Chi and Tay Ninh, which was where Route 22 went. Funny, I still get lost in northern Virginia, but I knew this road. Obviously, it was important to me once.

  We entered Cu Chi, which I remembered as a small heavily fortified provincial town, but which was now a bustling place of new buildings, paved streets, and karaoke parlors. It was hard to imagine the intense fighting that had gone on in and around this town for thirty years, beginning with the French Indochina War in 1946, through the American War, and ending with the Vietnamese themselves in a fight to the finish.

  Red flags flew everywhere, and in the center of a traffic circle was yet another North Vietnamese tank on a concrete platform surrounded by flags and flowers.

  Susan turned into what looked like the main street, then she pulled over and stopped. We dismounted, and I chained the motorcycle to a rack as Susan took her camera out of the saddlebag.

  We stretched and beat the red dust off our clothes. She asked me, “Have you ever been here?”

  “A few times. On my way to Tay Ninh.”

  “Really? What were you doing in Tay Ninh?”

  “Nothing. Part of a convoy escort, as I recall. Bien Hoa to Cu Chi to Tay Ninh, then back before dark.”

  “Amazing.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what was amazing, and I didn’t ask. My butt was sore, my legs ached, and I had dust in all my body orifices.

  We took a walk along the main street, and I was surprised to see groups of Westerners. I asked Susan, “Are these people lost?”

  “You mean the Americans? They’re here to see the famous Cu Chi tunnels. They’re a big tourist attraction.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No. Do you want to see the tunnels?”

  “I want to see a cold beer.”

  We turned into an open café and sat at a small table.

  A young boy hurried over, and Susan ordered two beers, which materialized in a few seconds, sans glasses. So we sat there, covered with dust, chugging beer from bottles without labels, Susan smoking, still wearing her sunglasses.

  The sinking sun was angled below the café’s canopy, and it was hot. I commented, “I forgot how warm it is here in February.”

  “It’s cooler up north. As soon as you go over Cloudy Pass, the weather changes. It’s rainy season up there.”

  “I remember that from ’68.”

  Susan seemed to be staring off in space, then said, as if to herself, “Even all these years after the last shot was fired, the war hangs over this place . . . like that guy across the street.”

  I looked across the street and saw an old man swinging on crutches, one leg missing, and part of one arm also gone.

  She said, “And those tanks on the sides of the road, the Cu Chi tunnels, military cemeteries all over the place, battlefield monuments, and war museums in every town, young men and women with no living parents . . . I kind of ignored all this when I first got here, but you can’t ignore it. It’s everywhere, and I don’t even see half of it.”

  I didn’t respond.

  Susan continued, “It’s also part of the economy, the reason for a lot of the tourism here. The young expats sort of make fun of all this war nostalgia—you know, the vets coming back to see this and that. They . . . we call it visiting Cong World. That’s pretty awful. Very insensitive. That must piss you off.”

  I didn’t reply.

  She said, “That was nice of you—the joss stick.”

  Again, I didn’t reply, so we sat in silence. Finally, I said, �
��It’s very strange being back here . . . I’m seeing something you’re not seeing . . . recalling things you never experienced . . . and I don’t want to get weird on you . . . but now and then . . .”

  “It’s okay. Really. I just wish you’d talk about it.”

  “I don’t think I have the words for how I feel.”

  “Do you want to go back to Saigon?”

  “No. I’m actually enjoying this more than not enjoying it. Must be the company.”

  “Must be. It’s sure not the heat and the dust.”

  “Or your driving.”

  She called the boy over, gave him a dollar, said something to him, and he ran off into the street. A few minutes later, he was back with a pair of sunglasses and a wad of dong in his hand, which Susan told him to keep. She opened the sunglasses and put them on me. She said, “There, you look like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider.”

  I smiled.

  Susan picked up her camera and said, “Look tough.”

  “I am tough.”

  She snapped a picture of me.

  Susan gave the camera to the boy, then pulled her chair next to mine, and threw her arm around me. The kid took a shot of us with our heads together and bottles touching. I said, “Get a few extras for Bill.”

  Susan took the camera from the boy and said, “Can I send these to your house, or will that cause a problem?”

  I recognized the question for what it was and replied, “I live alone.”

  “Me, too.”

  We used the single WC in the rear and washed off the road dust. Susan gave the proprietor a dollar for both beers and exchanged New Year’s greetings with him. We went out to the street and walked back to the motorcycle. Susan asked me, “Would you like to drive?”

  “Sure.”

  She slung the camera over her shoulder, gave me the keys, and we mounted up. I started the engine, and Susan gave me a quick course on driving a Russian Ural. She said, “The gears are a little sticky, the front brakes are soft, and the back brakes grab. The acceleration may be a little faster than you’re used to, and the front tends to climb. Otherwise, it’s a dream to drive.”