Up Country

by Nelson DeMille

“Paul, I’m past thirty—my parents wouldn’t mind if you were a Civil War veteran. They’re desperate.” She added, “So am I, or I wouldn’t bother with you.”

  The waiter had woken up. He saw us and ambled over. We ordered two coffees.

  Susan said to me, “How does it feel sitting in a rooftop restaurant overlooking the DMZ?”

  “I’m not sure. I feel sort of . . . disconnected, like I know I’m here, though it’s hard to think of this as a tourist attraction.” I paused. “But I’m glad it is. None of this should be trivialized, but maybe it’s inevitable that it will be. On the plus side, maybe the tourists can learn something, and maybe the vets can come to terms with a lot of things, and the Vietnamese can meet a lot of Americans and make a few bucks while they’re at it.”

  She nodded. “I’m glad I came here.”

  The coffee came, Susan lit up, and we looked out over the silent battlefields below.

  I said to Susan, “Okay, here’s the brochure copy—DMZ Tours: A pleasant morning in the minefields where you can gather shrapnel and participate in a sandbag-filling contest, followed by a picnic lunch in the ruins of Con Thien firebase, after which we look for unmarked graves along Highway One, and we end our day at the Dong Ha Soccer Stadium, where we’ll see a re-creation of the surrender of Camp Carroll, performed by the original cast. Picnic lunch included.”

  She looked at me awhile and decided not to respond.

  Somewhere around her second coffee and third cigarette, she said to me, “As if this isn’t stressful enough for you—this return to your old battlefields—you’re probably worried about the trip up country and what you have to do there, and the people in Washington are giving you a hard time, and this Colonel Mang is shadowing you—”

  “Don’t forget you.”

  “I was getting to that. So, on top of all this, along comes this pushy bitch—”

  “Who’s that?”

  “This very forward, very brazen broad, who decides to pursue you—”

  “Seduce.”

  “Whatever. And you’ve got a million things on your mind, and your heart is back in the States, and your soul is on temporary loan to the dead.”

  I didn’t reply.

  She said, “And yet, Paul, I think it worked. Between us.”

  I nodded.

  She said, “But I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t go up country with you.”

  “I never asked you to.”

  “Maybe I’d be more of a burden than a help.”

  “I think you should go on to Hanoi, and I’ll meet you there.”

  “No, I think I should go back to Saigon.”

  This sort of surprised me, and I said, “Why?”

  “I think you have to finish your job here, then go to Honolulu . . . see how that works out, then . . . give me a call.”

  “From Honolulu?”

  “No, Paul, from Virginia.”

  “Okay. Then what?”

  “Then we can both see how we feel.”

  “You mean, we have to be in different hemispheres to see how we feel?”

  Susan seemed a little impatient with me for some reason and said, “I’m giving you an out. Are you dense?”

  “Oh. Where’s the out? I missed the exit ramp.”

  “You’re a complete idiot. I’m trying to be sensitive to your situation, and I’m willing to give up the man I love—”

  “You already did that. You sent him a fax.”

  She stood, “Let’s go.”

  I gave the waiter a few bucks, and we rode down the elevator. I said, “I’m sorry. It’s been a stressful day. I make jokes when I’m stressed, and when I sense danger—old combat habit. Don’t mean shit, as we used to say about things that meant a great deal. Xin loi. Sorry about that.” And so forth. By the time we got to the lobby, Susan was holding my hand and telling me she understood, which was more than I could say for myself. I mean, sometimes I’m full of shit, but Susan’s self-sacrificing performance was a whole barn-yardful of it. I know an out when I see one, and that wasn’t it. For better or worse, we were going to complete this tour of duty together.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Back on the road, we drove into the town called Dong Ha Junction, which looked a lot like a truck stop in New Jersey. There was a railroad station, a bus station, two gasoline stations, and a few guest houses. We came to the T-intersection of Highway One and turned south. On the other side of the two-lane highway I saw a building whose sign said, in English, Quang Tri Tourism Office, in front of which were a few tour buses.

  Susan asked me, “Do you know this town?”

  “I was never here, but I know it was a marine and army logistics base.”

  Susan spoke to Mr. Loc, who responded, and Susan said to me, “Dong Ha is the provincial capital of Quang Tri Province.”

  “Quang Tri City is the provincial capital. Send Mr. Loc back to school.”

  Susan spoke to Mr. Loc again, and then said to me, “Quang Tri City was completely destroyed by the American bombers in April 1972 and has never been rebuilt. This is now the provincial capital.”

  “Shit happens.”

  We drove south on Highway One, which was nearly deserted, and I said to Susan, “From here to Hue, this was called the Street Without Joy.”

  She looked around at the sparse vegetation, and the ramshackle houses, and the occasional rice paddy and said, “Were you guys fighting to hold on to this, or make the enemy take it?”

  I laughed. “I have to remember that line the next time I run into someone who was here.” I said, “Somewhere around here is where the marine area of operations ended, and the army AO began.”

  We came to a newly constructed bridge that crossed a branch of the Cua Viet River, and I said to Mr. Loc, “Stop.”

  He stopped on the bridge, and I got out. Susan followed.

  I looked downstream and saw the pylons of the old bridge, and I said to Susan, “My platoon guarded this bridge a few times. Well, not this bridge, but the one that was over there.” I could see the remains of a French pillbox where the old bridge had crossed the river and said to her, “I slept in that concrete pillbox a few times. I scratched my name in the wall, along with a few hundred other names, including guys named Jacques and Pierre.”

  She took my hand and said, “Let’s go see.”

  “Ask James Bong if he has a flashlight.”

  She asked him, and he produced one from the glove box. Susan and I walked about ten meters along the riverbank to where the destroyed bridge had been. The French pillbox or bunker was a round structure, about ten meters across, made of reinforced concrete with a domed roof to deflect rockets and mortar rounds. There must have been a time when boxes of pills looked like this, thus the name, but to me, it looked like an igloo. I could see embedded in the ground at the base of the concrete structure scraps of green plastic, which had been American sandbags. I said to Susan, “We used to sandbag the old French concrete fortifications because the newer munitions were able to penetrate six or eight inches of steel-reinforced concrete, and the sandbags would absorb that direct hit. Still, if you were inside one of these things when it took a direct, it would scramble your brains for a few hours. We used to call it ‘becoming a marine.’ Old joke.”

  I took the flashlight from Susan and shined the light inside the bunker. I said, “Looks nasty in there. I can’t even see the concrete floor, just mud.”

  She asked, “Any leeches?”

  “Not in there. I’ll go in first and throw the snakes out.” I stepped through the narrow slit opening.

  The center of the dome was about five meters high, allowing a man to stand at any of the firing slits with plenty of overhead room.

  I shined the flashlight around the concrete walls and floor and saw creepy crawlers, like centipedes, and lots of webs with big walnut-sized spiders on them, plus lots of slugs, but no snakes. The walls were all mildewed, but I could see names scratched in the concrete.

  Susan called in, “Throw some snakes o
ut.”

  “No snakes. But be careful and don’t touch the walls.”

  She squeezed into the pillbox and stood beside me. She said, “Yuck. It smells.”

  “We kept these things very clean, but no one’s been here since 1975.”

  Gray light came in through the firing slits, and I kept the flashlight moving to pick out anything I didn’t want to come in contact with.

  Susan said, “Where’s your name?”

  I moved the flashlight slowly across the round walls, and I stopped the beam at a grouping of names. I moved closer, avoiding the spiderwebs, and focused the beam on the names scratched into the concrete. They were all French names, and there was a date of Avril 1954. I seemed to remember these names and the date, which in 1968, was only fourteen years before, but to me, an eighteen-year-old kid who had been four years old when the French Indochina War ended, this seemed like the writings of an ancient army. Now, I realized the proximity of the two wars and the passage of time since.

  Susan said, “Someone wrote something under the four names. See that?”

  I placed the beam on the French words. “It says, ‘This place sucks.’”

  “No, it doesn’t.” She moved closer and read the French, “Les quatre amis, les âmes perdues—four friends, lost souls.”

  I moved the beam around and stopped at the name of Sal Longo. I said, “This man was in my platoon. He was killed in the A Shau Valley . . . incredible . . .”

  I found my name, etched into the concrete with the tip of my beer can opener. The letters were barely legible, covered with black mildew. I stared at Paul Brenner’s name, followed by the date of 11 Jan 68.

  Susan looked at where the beam had come to rest and said, “That’s amazing.”

  “Better here than on the Wall in Washington.”

  I looked at my name awhile, then moved the light around and saw a few other names I recognized, and some I didn’t. Someone had scratched a heart and arrow in the wall that said Andy and Barbara, forever. If that was Andy Hall, then forever arrived in May 1968, also in the A Shau. Basically, Delta Company, my company, had ceased to be an effective fighting unit after that three weeks, and the survivors almost all got another stripe on their sleeves, what the army called rapid battlefield promotions, but which we called blood stripes.

  I took Susan’s arm and led her to the entrance.

  We stood outside under the overcast sky and Susan said, “I can’t believe that. There was your name written almost thirty years ago . . . and those French soldiers . . . it’s sort of . . . sad . . . almost creepy . . . I mean, I know some of those men didn’t make it back.”

  I nodded.

  We walked back to the RAV and continued south on the Street Without Joy.

  We passed an airstrip on our left that I recalled was the Quang Tri airport, which was where the army kept their small observation and reconnaissance aircraft. The airstrip was abandoned now and grass grew through the concrete. The control tower had disappeared and so had a huge French watchtower that had been right near the airstrip. I recalled that the concrete watchtowers had once dotted the landscape, but I hadn’t seen a single one so far. In fact, every substantial landmark that I remembered—schools, churches, pagodas, French and American fortifications—had disappeared.

  I said to Susan, “Most of this area was damaged during the Tet Offensive, but they were rebuilding when I left. It looks like nothing survived the Easter Offensive of ’72, or the final offensive of 1975.”

  She said, “That pillbox survived.”

  “Hey, I should have spent the whole fucking war in there.”

  Up ahead, on the left side of the road, I saw a big, ruined concrete building that I could tell had not been hit by bombs or artillery because most of the roof was intact. The damage had been caused by what appeared to be a vicious firefight. The walls were pockmarked with bullet holes, and there were distinctive small round holes in the thick walls where concrete-piercing rockets had entered the building and exploded inside, leaving scorch marks on the interior walls. It took me a minute to recognize this as the Buddhist high school, the place where Tran Van Vinh wrote the letter to his brother.

  Susan said, “Oh, my God. Look at that building.”

  I said, “A Buddhist high school.”

  Susan seemed fascinated by the war ruin and took a photo. She said, “You don’t see any war-damaged buildings like this around Saigon—hey, look. A tank.”

  Beyond the high school on the side of the road was a huge M-48 Patton tank, the olive drab paint still looking good after thirty years. I should get some of that paint for my exterior house trim.

  Susan told Mr. Loc to stop, and he did. She said to me, “Go sit on the tank.”

  “You go sit on the tank. I’ve sat on enough tanks.” I took the camera from her.

  She jumped out of the vehicle and scrambled up the sloping rear of the tank. She was athletic and agile, I noticed, and climbed like a tomboy.

  She got up on the turret and sat cross-legged. I took a picture and said, “I wish all the tank crews looked like you.”

  She hammed it up for the camera, and I took a few more shots as she posed, lying and standing on the derelict tank.

  She jumped down and walked back to the RAV.

  I pointed to the east, where a wall of low hills rose out of the flatlands, about five kilometers away. I said, “I was in those hills on the night the Tet Offensive began at the end of January. We were constructing yet another firebase, and about ten that night we could see what we thought were fireworks, but then we realized it was something else. The radios came alive and reported an enemy attack on Quang Tri City. We were put on full alert and as the night went on, we got reports that Quang Tri City and Hue had been taken from the South Vietnamese troops and that our brigade headquarters, called Landing Zone Betty, which was on the edge of Quang Tri City, was under siege.”

  I looked around. “Our main base camp was called Landing Zone Sharon, and it was around here somewhere, but I don’t see any sign of it.” I stared out toward the hills. “So that’s where I celebrated Tet 1968, the Year of the Monkey.” I added, “It was not a lucky year for anyone.”

  She said, “This year will be much better.”

  We jumped in the RAV, and off we went.

  Another hundred meters up Highway One, Mr. Loc turned left where the railroad station used to be, onto a two-lane road that I remembered led to Quang Tri City, about a mile off Highway One. The road was flanked by small wood and thatch houses surrounded by vegetable plots. There were trees here, but probably none that predated the 1972 battle. I said to Susan, “This road used to be lined with vendors selling things to GIs.”

  “Like what?”

  “Mostly stuff they’d stolen from us. You could buy it back here.”

  Mr. Loc stopped the car, then looked around. He said something to Susan, and she said to me, “This is Quang Tri, and the citadel of the city used to be somewhere there to the left.”

  I looked to the left, but there was nothing there except more small houses, bamboo fences, gardens, and chickens.

  Susan and Mr. Loc spoke, and she said to me, “He thinks the moat of the Citadel is still there, and a villager can direct us.”

  “Okay. We’ll be about an hour.”

  Susan took the camera out of the bag, spoke to Mr. Loc, and we jumped out. Mr. Loc reached back into the rear, handed Susan the tote, and said something.

  We started down a dirt path between vegetable gardens and small houses that were made of bits and pieces of the vanished city and the fortifications that had once been here. I saw chunks of concrete and bullet-riddled wooden planks, and the corrugated metal that the Americans used for barracks roofs, and the green plastic sandbags from disassembled bunkers, and garden paths made of red roof tile. The ruined city and the fortifications had been recycled by the peasants.

  I said to Susan, “This was once a small city, now it’s a big village. Back to basics through airpower.”

  “
Incredible,” she said.

  I asked Susan, “What did he say to you?”

  “About what? Oh, he’s going to park and leave the vehicle, so he wanted me to take my stuff.”

  I nodded.

  A few kids saw us, and soon there was a mob of them following us. A few adults watched us curiously from their gardens.

  We continued on the village paths, and Susan was looking around. She said, “I’ve never really been in a rural village.”

  I replied, “I’ve been in hundreds of them. They all look the same. Except some held Viet Cong and some didn’t.” I looked around. “See that haystack? Once we found a whole room hidden in a big haystack. Chuck was gone, but he’d left some equipment. So we Zippo’ed the haystack, then got carried away and burned some nearby hootches—that’s what we called the peasant houses.” It was all coming back to me, and I continued, “Then there’d be these little holes hidden in the gardens, big enough for one tiny VC to stand in—we called them spider holes, and they were hard to find, unless Chuck decided to pop out and open up with his AK-47. Plus, every hootch had an earth bunker in the garden, where the family would go if the shit hit the fan. But each bunker could also hold some VC, and you didn’t want to go in there and check it out because if you did, you’d never come out again, so you shouted for everyone to come out with their hands up, and usually you’d get a few co-deps who Mama-san wanted to hide from the GIs in case we had things on our minds beside finding Mr. Charles. So, after everyone was supposed to be out, you chucked a tear gas grenade in, and now and then Mr. Charles would come running out with his AK-47 blazing, and you’d waste him, then move on.”

  I was amazed that this was all coming back to me so vividly, and I went on, “Buried in the thatch roofs you’d find rifles, ammunition, plastic explosives, and all that good stuff, and you’d arrest the family and turn them over to the National Police and burn their house, though nine times out of ten the poor bastards who were hiding VC or weapons were doing it under threat. One time—and I guess this was funny—we pulled on a water well rope and sure enough, whatever was down there was too heavy to be a water bucket, and so about three guys pull Charles up, his black pajamas dripping wet, his feet in this wooden bucket, and before he got to ground level, he threw his AK-47 rifle up so we wouldn’t blow him away. So, up he comes, looking almost sheepish—like, you found me—and we laughed our asses off, then someone punched him in the face, and he fell down into the well, and we let him tread water for fifteen minutes before we lowered the bucket down and fished him up. Then the same guy who punched him in the face gave him a cigarette and lit it for him, then burned the house where the well was, and we tied Chuck up and put him on a chopper back to a POW camp, and the beat goes on. Day by day by day, village by village by village, until we were sick to death of searching these miserable villages and searching the people and trashing their hootches looking for weapons and wondering when Charlie was going to pop up out of nowhere and blow your head off. And other days, we’d help deliver a baby, medevac some sick kid back to an aid station, put first aid ointment on some old guy’s festering sore, and hand out candy. Acts of human kindness, alternating with acts of extreme cruelty, usually on the same day, and often in the same village. You just never knew how a hundred armed boys were going to act at any given moment. I guess a lot of it depended on how many casualties we’d taken the day before, or if we found anything in the village, or maybe how hot and thirsty we were, or if the officers and sergeants were minding the boys closely, or if they didn’t give a shit that day because they’d gotten a bad letter from home, or they’d gotten chewed out on the radio by a superior officer, or if they themselves were starting to go around the bend. As the war went on, the young lieutenants got younger, and the sergeants had been PFCs just a month before . . . and the normal constraints of more mature people . . . you know, like Lord of the Flies . . . kids can get crazy . . . and if somebody kills one of the gang, they want blood in return . . . and so the village sweeps got . . . they got out of hand, and it wasn’t war anymore, it was kids on the prowl with short fuses, who were just as likely to throw a fragmentation grenade into a family bunker as a tear gas grenade, or just as likely to give Papa-san a box of cookies from home as to crush a lit cigarette in his face if they found a spider hole in his garden.”