by Peter Colt
“Was anything taken? Anything unusual or out of place? Any evidence?” I like to ask the really obvious questions.
“His wallet was on the ground, no cash. They left his briefcase, which had papers in Vietnamese, which no one here knows. Miscellaneous papers and maps, whatever those are. There was a tape recorder, tapes, a 35mm camera and film. The crime scene guys found seven .380 shell casings. The ejector left a slightly off-center mark on the casings. That was it. No one saw anything and, other than his widow, no one seems to care.”
I looked at the photos. They cataloged the awkwardness of death. There were pictures of his body where he landed, contorted. His open coat, blood, and the wallet. There were pictures of his hair out of place and the permanent grimace that the pain had left on his face. The three rounds were clustered around his left eye, eyebrow, and forehead. There were pictures of shell casings and little numbered tents next to them. There was not much to be learned from the photos, and there was less to be learned from the uncaring, overworked Detective O’Brien. I wrote down Hieu’s address and thanked O’Brien and I left.
I lit a Lucky in the parking lot, cupping my hand around the cigarette. I inhaled deeply. I was not exactly upset about seeing pictures of the dead Vietnamese man. It didn’t exactly remind me of Vietnam . . . except that it did. It wasn’t that we got used to death over there, killing, seeing people killed. It was that we had grown casual about it. It took me a while to realize that I didn’t like that. There was a time that a dead Vietnamese was just a number to me.
One night, I had been on R&R and was staying at the MACV SOG compound in Da Nang. My teammates and I were on a special pass. We had snatched a prisoner. Management had been happy. We got a pass and I went to the beach, where I linked up with two old friends, Chris and Tony. That night, after a day of lying on the beach and a night of drinking, I passed out with a sunburn and head full of Chivas and Budweiser.
I woke up to the sound of explosions, communist B-40 rockets and AK-47 rounds. We rolled out of our racks in the guest quarters: huts down by the beach, the army’s version of a tropical resort. A new guy, a first lieutenant, ran to the door and threw it open. AK rounds plowed into his bare chest. Tony grabbed a CAR-15, and Chris picked up a sawed-off pump and killed the VC Sapper who appeared in the open door. The blast from his grenade bundle rocked our hut and peppered it with hot metal. I found a CAR-15 and a bandolier of ammunition and grenades.
“It is a fuck-show out there.” Tony was from New York.
“Sure is.” Chris drawled the two words into a whole sentence in deep Alabamese.
“Fuck it.” I was the eloquent one.
We were through what was left of the door. Red and green tracers, enemies in the lethal color war between communists and Americans, were whizzing by. Buildings were on fire and naked VC Sappers were everywhere. We split up. Tony said he was going to find the mortar pit and put up some illumination rounds. Chris said he wanted to go find a machine gun. I just started moving forward with no plan other than to kill as many of them as I could. The place was a madhouse, and I knew that I wasn’t going to survive the night. It didn’t matter. I was happy. I was simply acting, pure action. No thought. I was the freest man alive.
As Sappers appeared in front of me, I shot them with short bursts from the CAR. If I saw a cluster, I threw a grenade. I wasn’t sure if I was still drunk or it was the euphoria that comes from knowing you are going to die and suddenly be free from life’s worries. There is freedom in knowing your fate. I was stepping toward the battle. When my CAR ran dry, I rolled under a hut and reloaded. I heard moaning, and there was an American there. I couldn’t do anything for him.
“Don’t worry, pal. Help is coming. The cavalry is on the way. You will be all right.” It was bullshit. His chest had rosettes where the bullets had gone in. His head was leaking, too. I was lying as much as if I had said that the Red Sox were going to win the World Series. I rolled out and found more of the enemy to kill. I was euphoric; some sort of Viking berserker rage distilled down through the generations of Irish had taken over my senses.
Then the place lit up like day. Tony had found the mortar pit and the illumination rounds, essentially giant parachute flares launched from a mortar. That turned the tide. Now guys could tell friend from enemy without having to be nose to nose with them. The element of surprise was gone, and the attack lost its momentum.
Later in the morning, when it was done and the offshore breeze was keeping the flies away, Tony and I were sitting against the sandbags of the mortar pit, my CAR-15 with its last magazine across my knees. I had a hand grenade, which I had planned to blow myself up with when I ran out of ammunition. Fortunately, it hadn’t come to that. I looked ridiculous in jungle boots, skivvies, and an empty cloth bandolier, covered in sand, ash, smoke, and blood.
Tony had sported me to a cigarette. I had no idea where he had gotten a pack. We were contemplating a dead Sapper. He was wearing a loincloth, painted in charcoal and his chest stitched with bullets. His face forever frozen, wincing from the pain of the bullets I had pumped into him.
We sat together contemplating the dead gook. Me and Tony. Companionable.
“Wanna sport me to another smoke, pal? Sure, you don’t mind?” I held my hand out. He ignored it. I reached into the unbuttoned pocket of the fatigue shirt and took out the pack. I shook two out and lit them. I put one between his lips on his good side. “We’re just gonna sit here with our friend the gook and enjoy a beautiful morning by the beach. Just like a couple of normal American kids. Just like Cape Cod . . . well, with guns and shit, but you know what I mean.” Tony was smiling on his good side and his face was caved in where the Sapper had shot him on his bad side, the AK’s rounds leaving a mess of his once handsome face.
Chris came up a little while later.
“Hey, bud, come on. We gotta get you some clothes and then we gotta di di mau. Come on, bud, we gotta go.” He said bud like it had two syllables. He was right. We had places to go. Things to do. Our war wasn’t over yet.
“Good-bye, bro. I will see you in Valhalla.” Tony didn’t answer.
“Come on, man, don’t do that pagan shit. Heaven, man. He is going to Heaven.” Chris was from the South, and his god was a vengeful one.
“Yeah, but warriors go to Valhalla. Come on, we gotta go fight Charlie.” We stood up and started to walk away, leaving our dead friend and the man who had killed him to keep each other company.
Chris said, “Hey, man, do you think he will go to Valhalla?”
“Tony, of course. He was a Green Beret, a Recon man . . . Valhalla was meant for guys like him. Filled with mead and Valkyrie pussy for guys just like Tony.”
“No, man, the Cong who got him. The gook, does he go to Valhalla, too?” He was serious because nothing in Southern Baptist Alabama covered this theological point. I had to think about it for a minute. Nothing in my Boston Irish Catholic upbringing had covered this either.
“Yeah. I think he does. Little Cong, he was hard. He was a motherfucker, had to be hard to zap Tony. Little fucker deserves to be in Valhalla trying to get some mead and Valkyrie pussy, too.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Makes as much sense as the rest of your pagan shit.”
Chapter 5
Hieu’s family lived in an apartment building in Quincy. It was the same standard three-decker tenement that populated the mill towns of the Northeast. Three levels, three porches, wooden frame, filled with almost a century of near poverty and disrepair. The doorbell didn’t work, and the mailbox indicated they lived on the third floor. In the cops, especially during the hot summers, it seemed as though every call was on the third floor.
I opened the door and walked in. I went up the stairs. It reminded me of a thousand tenements that I had been in. In the cops, it was to stop a fight or take a report or tell someone a loved one was dead. This time, someone else had done that. The feeling was the same. This time, I wasn’t bringing them the unbearable heartbreak and grief, lives ripped asunder by d
evastating news brought by men in blue uniforms. Here, I was just intruding on a family’s grief in order to get some information.
The building smelled the same way they always do, of poverty and hopelessness. When I was a kid, that was the smell of burnt flour, cooked cabbage, and stale cigarette smoke. Now, it smelled vaguely oily and fishy, like stale nuoc mam, the ubiquitous Vietnamese fish sauce that went into most dishes. Cockroaches skittered around, away from the sound of footsteps.
The landing was narrow and crowded, and the apartment was crowded. It smelled of incense and cigarette smoke. In the distance, I could hear wailing. No one here was going to talk to me even if I knew more Vietnamese than I did, and my command of Vietnamese wasn’t suitable for condolences and mourning. I could say words in Vietnamese like flamethrower and anti-personnel mine, or order beer or a girl for the night. My language of death was very different from what they were speaking. I was just another awkward white guy, out of place and with no understanding of their grief.
I turned and started down the tenement steps, leaving behind a version of my own poverty experience. I had been to thousands of these apartments, people grieving after the wakes: Irish music, whiskey, beer, and cigarettes. There were always a fistfight, tears, and a relative who was hurt until the morning brought semi sincere apologies. This time, the language was different and the smell of nuoc mam was overpowering. It was ubiquitous in Vietnam, and I had thought that I would never smell it again. It was different in a restaurant, but here in a hot, crowded apartment house, it was too much.
I was grateful for the lungful of Quincy’s freshest air. I looked toward the ever-present Goliath and lit a cigarette. “Like you could have done any better.” I wasn’t far from The Blue Lotus, and the thought of a cold beer was not the worst thing in the world. I could use a dose of Nguyen’s sly humor.
I navigated the Ghia through the streets of Quincy. I couldn’t always see it, but Goliath was always towering above the skyline. It didn’t take me too long to get to The Blue Lotus. I parked and went in, the bell on the door tinkled marking my passage. The restaurant was as warm and comforting as the first time I had been in. The smells from the kitchen were welcome and seemed a world away from the family grieving not far away.
I started toward the back. Nguyen wasn’t in his usual booth. Linh wasn’t anywhere in sight. I slid out of the peacoat and put it on a hook on the outside of the booth. I moved toward the kitchen; Nguyen had an office in the back. Through the round windows, I could see two Vietnamese men talking to Nguyen and Linh. I could hear over the kitchen noises the sound of angry, high-pitched Vietnamese.
I undid the bottom two buttons of my shirt in case I had to pull my .45, and then I pushed into the kitchen. I plastered a stupid look on my face and said, “Is this the way to the men’s room?”
The two Vietnamese turned to me. One was average and looked like he dressed out of a ten-year-old catalog. My age, he was in good shape and had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He didn’t say anything. The other was a teenager, maybe twenty at the oldest. He was dressed in an Adidas tracksuit, a black one. He had Adidas shell toes on his feet and a Kangol hat on his head. He looked like the Asian knockoff of Run-DMC. He started to reach into his pocket, but the other man put a hand on his arm and said something in Vietnamese. Asian Run turned to Nguyen and said something. Nguyen handed him a white envelope. Then Asian Run and Vietnamese Old Catalog Man left.
“Linh, you take Andy to table. Get him a beer and something to eat. I will join you in a minute.” Linh led me out by the arm and did as her father told her. When she brought my beer, I asked her to sit down. She did with a look around the restaurant that spoke of years of having worked in it and of her parents’ expectations.
“Linh, who were those men?”
“Them . . . they are gangsters. Bad men, Andy.” She said it flatly. No anger, no affect, just statement of fact.
“What did they want with your father?”
“Money . . . they always come looking. . . .” She stopped. Nguyen was making his way from the kitchen. He barked at his daughter in Vietnamese, and she jumped out of the booth like she had been scalded. He sat down with me, and Linh brought him a beer. He said more to her in Vietnamese, which I took to be his ordering our dinner.
“Nguyen, who were those men? Were they shaking you down?”
“No, Round Eye, it isn’t like that. They are part of a charity, a nationalist charity that wants money. They go to Vietnamese business owners, family, friends and ask for money to go back and fight in Vietnam. They want money for nationalist papers here. They are like you, sad that the war is over.”
“They are shaking you down for money to fight a war we lost ten years ago? That seems pretty stupid.” He smiled.
“Yes, it must. They aren’t shaking me down. I believe we should fight the communists. I give them money when I can.”
“But you were arguing with them?”
“No, I was arguing with the boy, because he was rude. He is always rude. His father is an important man within the Committee. Trin thinks he is a colonel because his father is.”
“If they are shaking you down or threatening you, I can help. I would like to help.”
“There is nothing to help with. They ask for money. I give them money. If it hurts the communists, I am happy.”
“They were carrying guns?” Adidas tracksuits are comfortable but don’t hide anything. Old Catalog Man had his in the small of his back.
“They carry a lot of cash; it is sensible to have a gun.” The food came, and I knew that there was no more discussing the issue, not that I was making any headway with Nguyen. The food was good, pho with beef and nime chow.
“Nguyen, do you know a man named Hieu? He used to work for a Vietnamese newspaper.”
“Why, Round Eye? All Vietnamese in Quincy must know each other?”
“He was murdered. I was hired by his niece to look into it. I went to the house, but they are mourning, and they are not going to talk to a white guy.”
“I know Hieu. Not well, but I see him around. He didn’t escape in ’75. He wasn’t lucky.”
“Not lucky enough to be in the Vietnamese navy?”
“No, Round Eye, not lucky like me. He was arrested and sent to a reeducation camp. He was reeducated and was able to get here in 1981. He was a good writer.”
“That must have been rough.” I could only imagine what a communist Vietnamese reeducation camp would be like. “What did he write about?”
“Politics. He wrote about the struggle to take Vietnam back from the communists. Initially, he agreed with Colonel Tran and the Committee, but lately he started writing articles that were critical of the Committee, critical of the struggle to free our home. People started to say that he was a communist. He lost his job. Then this . . . very sad.”
“What was he writing that was so critical of this Colonel Tam?”
“Tran.”
“Yeah, what was Hieu writing?”
“Hieu, when he first came here, first started writing, said we should go back to Vietnam. We should run around the hills fighting like the Cong did. Then, as he was here longer, he started to say that there was no point trying to fight the communists directly. He felt they were too strong. He started to write about needing to find a political answer, a negotiation. Hieu felt that Vietnamese people are basically like Americans. He felt we need to give it time and that we would be able to influence Vietnam to accept noncommunist government.” He was saying this as though it were a bedtime story, nice to hear but total fiction.
“What do you think?” I was curious. To me, the communists had been our enemies. The Viet Cong, the NVA, were trying to kill me, and I, them. It had been very simple. They had won, and the country had fallen. It seemed impossible that after fighting such a long, bloody war the two countries could ever be anything other than hostile toward each other.
“I think Vietnamese in South are like Americans. They like good life, Coca-Cola, beer, nice thi
ngs, but Northern people now in charge. They like Ho, they like Mao, Lenin . . . can’t like America. Even if they could, they fight for so long, struggle for so long, they couldn’t ever be friends with America again.”
“So, by suggesting a political solution, he was also making people angry?”
“Yes. For Vietnamese in America, there is no compromise with communists. Anything other than fighting them is compromise.” Nguyen’s eyes behind his clear aviators were dark and hard, like marbles. “Here, Americans forget war, forget the dead, forget their soldiers. Men like you, Round Eye, forgotten in your own home.” His voice had risen, higher in pitch, and he was angry.
“Americans try to pretend it didn’t happen. At least Colonel Tran and his people don’t do that. That is why I give them money. That is why people angry at Hieu. He wants us to stop fighting the communists. It was like the last thirty years never happen for Hieu . . . except he was tortured, reeducated. He lost everything. Then he come here. Wife and kids, they here. Here he have freedom. Here!”
“Was anyone angry enough about what he wrote to kill him?”
“Why would someone kill a writer for writing? That doesn’t make sense. Not in America. In Vietnam, nationalists and communists would kill each other all the time—writers, politicians—but not here.”
“I will take your word for it. I am sure that there are plenty of writers at the Globe and the Herald who would love to take a shot at each other.” He laughed and the tension, the passion was gone. Linh came back with noodles mixed with vegetables and meat, nime chow on the side, and more beer for Nguyen and me.
“Did you know the other Vietnamese man killed?”
“In Chinatown?”
“Yes.”
“No. His name very common. Paper said he was from Virginia.”
“I wonder what he was doing up here?”
“I don’t know. Not all Vietnamese share travel plans with each other.” His sarcasm was palpable, but his tone was gentle.