We got to the door of the house, and the guy motioned us to wait. He entered through an open door.
A few seconds later, he came out and motioned us inside. As we entered, he said something to us in French about chez Tran.
We found ourselves in this one-room house whose floor was packed red clay. Glass windows let in some gray light, and I smelled charcoal burning somewhere in the damp air.
As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I could see hammocks folded along the walls with blankets in them, and on the floor were a number of woven bamboo baskets and chests. A low table without chairs sat in the center of the floor on a black rug.
In the far corner was a clay cooking stove, which glowed red from the firebox with burning charcoal. To the right of the clay stove was a simple altar against the wall, and on the altar were burning joss sticks and framed photographs. Hanging on the wall to the right of the altar was a big poster of Ho Chi Minh. Beside that hung a Vietnamese flag and some framed certificates or awards.
I looked around again to confirm that no one was home.
We stood there a moment, then Susan said, “He says this is the house of Tran Van Vinh, and we should wait here.”
I don’t like being boxed in by walls, but it was too late to worry about that now. We had arrived, one way or the other, at the end of our journey. I asked, “Did he say where the liquor cabinet was?”
“No. But he said I could smoke.” She walked to the charcoal stove, took off her backpack, sat on a hearth rug, and lit a cigarette.
I slipped off my backpack and put it next to hers. I saw that the roof was only about six feet high at the far wall, and I went over to it and pulled out the pistol from under my leather jacket. Having learned a thing or two from the Viet Cong, I slipped the .45 and the two extra magazines between two rows of tied thatch.
Susan said, “Good idea. I think if the soldiers arrive, we could talk ourselves out of just about anything but that gun.”
I didn’t reply to that overly optimistic statement, but I asked her, “What did you tell that guy?”
She replied, “His name is Mr. Khiem, and he’s the village schoolteacher. As you suggested, I told him we were Canadian military historians who had been to Dien Bien Phu, and that we were also studying the American War. I also said that we were told in Dien Bien Phu to see the war memorial in the square of Ban Hin. I made that up.”
“You’re good at that.”
“I said I’d heard that many veterans of the American War lived in the Na Valley, and we were especially interested in veterans of the ’68 Tet Offensive, and more specifically the battle of Quang Tri City.” She drew on her cigarette and continued, “But Mr. Khiem wasn’t offering any names, except his own. He was at the battle of Hue. Finally, in frustration, I just said I’d heard the name of Tran Van Vinh come up in Dien Bien Phu. We’d heard that he was a brave soldier who’d been wounded at Quang Tri.” She looked at me and said, “I didn’t want to hang around that square any longer so I went for broke.”
“Did Mr. Khiem buy it?”
“Maybe. He was somewhere between incredulous and proud that they spoke well of Ban Hin in Dien Bien Phu.” Susan added, “Mr. Khiem is also a Tran and is related to Vinh in some way or another.”
I said, “There were lots of dead and missing Trans on that memorial. I’m glad we’re Canadians.”
She tried to smile and said, “I hope he believed that.”
“He didn’t get hostile, so I guess he did. On our next mission to Vietnam, we’ll be Swiss.”
She lit another cigarette. “Send me a postcard.”
I said to her, “You did fine. I’m really proud of you, and if Mr. Khiem went to get the soldiers, it wasn’t your fault.”
“Thank you.”
I asked her, “Does Tran Van Vinh live here, or is he visiting for Tet?”
“Mr. Khiem said Tran Van Vinh lives here in Ban Hin and has lived here all his life.”
“Where is he now?”
“Mr. Khiem said something about seeing his relatives off.”
“That should put him in a good mood. When is he expected back?”
“Whenever the daily bus arrives from Dien Bien Phu.”
I looked at the picture of Uncle Ho and asked, “Do you think this is a setup?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you Canadians have an annoying habit of answering a question with a question.”
She forced a smile and smoked.
I walked over to the family altar and looked at the framed photographs in the dim light. I noticed that all the men and women were young, in their early to mid twenties. I said to Susan, “No one gets too old around here.”
She glanced at the photographs. “They use photos of the deceased when they were in their prime, no matter how old they were when they died.”
“Really? So if I died today and I was Buddhist, they could use one of the photos you just took of me.”
She smiled. “I think they’d call your mother for a slightly less recent photograph.” She added, “The family altar is more ancestor worship than Buddhist. It’s sort of confusing. The Vietnamese who are not Catholic call themselves Buddhist, but they also practice a primitive ancestor worship. Plus, they practice Confucianism and Taoism. They call it Tam Giao—the Triple Religion.”
“I count four.”
“I told you, it’s confusing. You’re Catholic. Don’t worry about it.”
I looked at the small photographs and noticed that many of the young men were in uniform. One of them, I was certain, was Tran Quan Lee, who though not officially dead, could be presumed so after nearly thirty years of not showing up for the holidays.
We still had the option of coming to our senses, and I said to Susan, “If we hustle, we can be on the BMW in about five minutes.”
She didn’t even hesitate before replying, “I don’t know who’s going to come through that door, but we both know we’re not going anywhere until someone does.”
I nodded.
Susan asked me, “How do you want to handle our conversation with Tran Van Vinh?”
“First of all, it’s my conversation, not our conversation, and I’m going to be straight. This is how I’d do it with a witness in the States. You bullshit suspects, but you’re straight with witnesses.”
“Including the fact that we’re Americans sent by our government?”
“Well, not that straight. We’re Americans, but we’ve been sent by the family of the murdered man to seek justice.”
“We don’t know the murdered man’s name.”
“Tran Van Vinh does. He took the dead man’s wallet. Let me do the talking, Susan, and the thinking. You do the translating. Biet?”
We made eye contact, and she nodded.
We waited.
I looked at Susan. We had come a long way, but beyond that, this moment of truth, which had been abstract up to now, was suddenly real and immediate. Tran Van Vinh was alive, and what, if anything, he told us would present a whole new set of problems.
Susan stood and put her arms around me. “I have deceived you, and I may still have to do some things that you don’t like, but no matter what happens, I love you.”
Before I could reply, I heard a noise behind me, and we both turned toward the door. Standing in the open doorway was the dark outline of a man who I hoped was Tran Van Vinh.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Susan walked directly to the man at the door, bowed, and said something to him in Vietnamese.
He bowed in return, said something, then looked at me. We made eye contact, and I had no doubt this was Tran Van Vinh.
He looked to be about sixty, but was probably younger. He was thin, and taller than the average Viet. He had all his hair, which was still jet black and cut short. He wore baggy trousers and a black quilted jacket, and on his feet were socks and sandals.
Susan said to me, “Paul, this is Mr. Vinh.”
I walked directly to him and put out my hand.
; He hesitated, then took my hand. I said, “I am Paul Brenner, an American, and I have come a long way to see you.”
He stared at me as Susan translated.
I said to him, “We told your compatriots that we were Canadians because we felt that there may be some unpleasant feelings toward Americans in your village.”
Again, Susan translated, and again Mr. Vinh kept staring at me.
I looked into his eyes, and he looked into mine. The last American he’d seen had probably wanted to kill him, and vice versa, but I saw no hostility in his expression; in fact, I couldn’t see anything.
I took my passport out of my pocket and handed it to him with the front page open.
He took it and looked at it, then closed it and handed it back to me. He said something, which Susan translated as, “What do you want?”
I replied, “First, it is my unpleasant duty to inform you that your brother, Lee, was killed in action in the A Shau Valley in May of 1968. His body was found by an American soldier, who removed personal items that identified him as Tran Quan Lee.”
Mr. Vinh understood A Shau and coupled with his brother’s name, he must have known this wasn’t good news.
Susan translated, and Mr. Vinh listened without emotion. He kept staring at me, then walked over to the family altar, picked up a photograph and looked at it a long time. He put it back, turned, and said something to me.
Susan replied to him directly, then said to me, “He wants to know if you killed his brother. I told him you did not.”
I said, “Tell him I was a soldier with the First Cavalry Division, and that I saw combat in the A Shau Valley in May of 1968, and that it could have been me who killed his brother, but it was not I who found the body.”
Susan hesitated and asked me, “Are you sure you want—”
“Tell him.”
She told him, and he looked at me, then nodded.
I said, “Tell him I was also outside Quang Tri City at the time he was recovering from his wounds in the Buddhist high school, and it was my duty to kill the North Vietnamese soldiers who were trying to escape from the city.”
Susan translated, and Mr. Vinh looked surprised that I knew a little of his war experiences. We made eye contact again, and again I saw no hostility, and I knew I would not. In fact, as we looked at each other, I had no doubt that he was saying to himself, “This poor bastard was there, too.”
I said to Mr. Vinh, “I’m glad I didn’t kill you, and glad you didn’t kill me.”
Susan translated, and I saw a faint smile pass over his lips, but he didn’t reply.
I was getting somewhere with him, but I didn’t know where. I said to him, “Quite frankly, Mr. Vinh, I’m very surprised that you survived seven more years of war.”
Susan translated, and Mr. Vinh stared off into space, nodding to himself as though he, too, were surprised. I thought I saw a slight tremble in his upper lip, but that might have been my imagination. The man was very stoic, which was partly for our benefit, and also an old wartime habit.
I said to Susan, “How we doing with your translating?”
She replied, “He spent a lot of time in the south during the war, and he’s aware of my southern accent. I’m catching most of what he’s saying.”
“Good. We like true and accurate translations.”
She didn’t reply.
I didn’t say anything further to Mr. Vinh, and I let him think if he wanted to say anything to me. Finally, he spoke and Susan listened, then said to me, “Mr. Vinh says he was in the 304th Infantry Division of the People’s Army of Vietnam.”
Mr. Vinh continued and Susan translated. “He was sent into the south in August 1965 and fought in Quang Tri Province. He says you should know where his division was during the Tet Offensive in the winter of 1968.”
Indeed I did. The 304th was our main adversary when I got to Quang Tri in January 1968. This guy had already been there two and a half years, with no end in sight and no R&R.
Mr. Vinh was speaking, and Susan said, “In June of 1968, the division returned to the north . . . there were few men left in the division . . . the division was rebuilt with new soldiers, and returned to Quang Tri in March 1971, then participated in the Spring Offensive of 1972 . . . the Easter Offensive . . . and his division captured the province and the city of Quang Tri . . . and suffered heavy losses from the American bombing and withdrew north again to rebuild the division.” Susan added, “He wants to know if you were there for the Spring Offensive.”
I replied, “I, too, had returned home in 1968, in November, then came back to Vietnam in January 1972, and was stationed at Bien Hoa during the Spring Offensive.”
Susan told him this, and he nodded, then looked at me. I doubted if he’d ever spoken to an American veteran before, and he was obviously curious, but arriving as I had, out of nowhere, he was trying to collect his thoughts; he hadn’t been thinking about this meeting for the last two weeks as I had.
Mr. Vinh spoke, and Susan translated. “He says he returned to the front in 1973, then participated in the final Spring Offensive of 1975, and the 304th Division captured Hue, then drove down the coast on Highway One on captured tanks. He entered Saigon on April 29 and was present at the surrender of the presidential palace the next day.”
And I thought I had a few war stories. This guy had seen it all, from the alpha to the omega, ten years of slaughter. If my year had seemed like ten, then his ten must have seemed like a hundred. And here he was, home in his native village, getting on with life after having had a decade of his youth taken from him.
I said to him, “You must have received many medals and decorations.”
Susan translated, and without hesitation, he walked to a wicker chest, as I hoped he would, and opened it. I needed to get him into the habit of opening trunks of war memorabilia.
He removed a black silk cloth, which he unfolded on the low table. He knelt and spread out twelve medals of different shapes and sizes, which were all painted with various colors of enamel, and each had multicolored ribbons attached; and there lay the pretty evidence of ten years in hell.
Mr. Vinh named each medal, and Susan translated.
I didn’t want to patronize Mr. Vinh by saying how impressed I was; he seemed to me capable of detecting bullshit, so I just nodded and said, “Thank you for showing me.”
Susan translated, and she and I made eye contact. She nodded, as if to say, “You’re doing pretty good for an insensitive idiot.”
Mr. Vinh replaced his medals, closed the trunk, and stood.
So we all stood there for a few seconds, and I’m sure that Mr. Vinh knew I hadn’t come twelve thousand miles to see his medals.
The moment had arrived, and I said to him, “I’m here to speak to you about what you saw while you lay wounded in the Citadel at Quang Tri City.”
He recognized Quang Tri, and perhaps even Citadel, and his eyes went to Susan, who translated.
He looked back at me, but didn’t respond.
I said to him, “The American soldier who found the body of your brother in the A Shau Valley removed from his body a letter written by you to your brother, as you lay recovering from your wounds at the Buddhist high school. Do you recall that letter?”
As soon as Susan translated, he nodded in understanding of how I knew what I knew.
I lied to him for the first time and said, “I am here on behalf of the family of the lieutenant who was killed by the captain,” which maybe wasn’t a complete lie. I continued, “I have been asked to inquire about this matter and to bring understanding and justice to the family.” I looked at Susan, as if to say, “Get that right.”
She glanced at me and translated.
Mr. Vinh did not reply.
I tried to put myself in his position. He’d seen his generation wiped out and was not impressed or moved by the desire of an American family trying to find justice in that mass slaughter, or to bring closure to the death of one soldier. The Hanoi government, in fact, was always a little
incredulous regarding the American government spending millions of dollars to find the remains of a few MIAs. I don’t know if this was a cultural difference, or a matter of practicality; Vietnam didn’t have the time or money to look for a third of a million missing soldiers. We, on the other hand, had become obsessed with the search for our two thousand missing men.
Mr. Vinh remained silent, and so did I. You can’t rush these people, and they don’t get nervous during long periods of silence the way Americans do.
Finally, Mr. Vinh spoke, and Susan translated. “He said he does not want to participate in any inquiry unless ordered to do so by his government.”
I took a deep breath. I wasn’t going to insult this old soldier by offering him money, but I reminded him, “This family has learned of the fate of your brother, Lee, which I have passed on to you freely. Would you be kind enough to tell me the fate of their son, so I may pass that on to them?” I paused, then added, “This is a private family matter, and has no government involvement.”
Susan translated, and there was again a silence in the room, broken by the crackling of the charcoal on the hearth, and the sound of a songbird outside.
Mr. Vinh turned and walked to the door.
Susan and I looked at each other.
Mr. Vinh left, and we could hear him talking to someone outside, then he returned and said something to Susan.
She bowed to him, and I thought we were being asked to leave, or to stick around until the soldiers came, but Susan said to me, “Mr. Vinh has asked his grandson to find a female relative to make tea.”
Why do I doubt myself ? I’m good at this. Witnesses love me. Suspects fear me. Also, I’m very lucky.
Mr. Vinh motioned us toward the low table, and we joined him there. He sat cross-legged with the warm stove at his back and indicated a place on the floor for Susan at his left and me across from him.
Susan took out her cigarettes and offered one to Mr. Vinh, who accepted. She offered one to me with a nod, and I took the cigarette. Susan lit all three cigarettes and put her plastic lighter on the table. The ashtray was a scrap of twisted steel that looked like a bomb fragment.
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