‘Mr. Hao is a good man. He meant no harm. His father died in the war. He was honored for battlefield bravery with a certificate personally signed by Ho Chi Minh.’
‘Mr. Hao is a very good man,’ answered Condley. ‘We will remember his kindnesses, and those of your entire village, to the dead soldier’s family once we have identified the remains.’
The remains were in a tin-roofed shed next to the village chief’s house, wrapped inside an old American poncho. Once they reached the shed, the eight Vietnamese men stood respectfully off to one side as Condley and Muir moved to the poncho.
It was as if Muir had suddenly gone into a trance. He stood motionless in front of the remains, looking down at them with opaque eyes. He was breathing deeply. His meaty hands clenched into fists and then relaxed, then clenched again. Finally Condley nudged him.
‘Are you OK, Professor?’
‘This is the hardest part,’ said Muir, his eyes still on the poncho. ‘Touching it for the first time.’
‘Relax. It’s dead.’
‘It’s not an “it.”’
‘Then why did you call it an “it”?’
‘Let me say something about what we’re looking at. Would you like to feel completely inconsequential, Brandon?’
‘Frankly, no. I’d just like to get out of here.’
The scientist was undeterred. It was as if anthropology were his religion and he were a high priest, and it was essential that a sermon be issued before he delved into the remains.
‘We’re looking at a mystery that’s thirty years old. It might even confound us, just as so many others have as we’ve tried to piece together old bones and clumps of equipment to unravel the tragedies of the past. But do you know what thirty years is in the context of eternity, Brandon? Nothing. Nothing. Not even a drawn breath in the lungs of Father Time.’
‘They’re waiting for us to do something, Professor. And a typhoon is getting ready to make you a permanent resident of Ninh Phuoc.’
‘I have my emotions,’ answered Muir. ‘Respect that.’
Muir now obliged Condley by kneeling before the remains and starting to undo the torn and rotting poncho. ‘Did you know that eight hundred thousand years ago a meteor smashed into what is now Viet Nam, burning forests, throwing up fresh outcroppings of rock, and killing thousands of people? We can’t find their remains, but we have been able to find the axes made from those rocks by the people who moved onto the land just after the meteor crashed. As well as the tektites from the meteor itself. Think of that. We can find the tools from almost a million years ago. We know just where the meteor hit. And yet we strain with difficulty to positively identify a man who died only thirty years ago.’
It was raining harder. Condley was growing nervous. And, besides, after five years of ‘digs’ he was used to Muir’s emotions. ‘Well, give it a go, Professor. We’ve got a boat to catch.’
Muir had calmed down. He was in his element now, all business as he carefully peeled back the old poncho and began to examine the stiff skeleton of a man dead nearly thirty years.
‘It’s in remarkable shape,’ mused the scientist as he considered the skeleton before him. ‘Definitely Caucasian – look here at the cheekbones and the structure of the teeth. I’m amazed we have a full skeleton instead of the isolated jaw here and femur there that we find in the crash sites. He’s lucky they took such good care of him.’
‘He doesn’t look that lucky to me.’
Muir caught the irony of his comment. ‘Sorry, Brandon. It’s the wages of being an anthropologist. I tend to think of them as… well, still existing, but merely in an altered state.’ He continued his intricate preliminary examination, leaning forward in the dark musty shed to get a closer look. ‘The cemetery must be mostly sand. That helped to preserve him. The jungle soil is so voracious that it even eats the teeth away in a remarkably short time. And look at this⸻’
Condley leaned forward also. Muir was holding a pair of dog tags that still remained on a chain. They had been around the dead man’s neck. Condley whistled, amazed. ‘Positive ID. What a find. What service is he, Professor?’
‘Army,’ answered Muir, squinting in the darkness. ‘Theodore Deville. Specialist, Fourth Class. Blood type, O negative. Religion, no preference.’
‘Well, he’s a Buddhist now, isn’t he?’
‘Show some respect, Condley. This is a comrade-in-arms.’
Muir stood slowly, shifting his gaze from the skeleton to the leaden sky that showed through the shed’s doorway. Along the pathway in front of them the children were gathering again, staring excitedly as if the two Americans were visitors from Mars.
‘Let’s get out of here.’
Now Condley knelt next to the remains, beginning to fold them back inside the old poncho. ‘Roger that. I’ve seen absolutely no women in Ninh Phuoc that you should spend the winter with.’
* * *
The trip downriver was quick and fun, like falling down the far edge of a roller coaster. The typhoon ended up stalling just off the coast, then turning north in late afternoon and heading inland toward Vinh. Condley made the flight to Sai Gon, leaving a depressed and disconcerted Muir in a leaking, broken-down old hangar at the Da Nang airport, where he was tasked by the American Embassy in Ha Noi to await a military aircraft. The Joint Task Force for Full Accounting had already summoned a cargo plane that would take the remains back to the Central Identification Lab in Hawaii, and Muir, who lived and worked in Hawaii, would accompany it.
‘You bastard,’ grunted the bulky scientist as he shook Condley’s hand to say goodbye. ‘I deserve at least one night of R and R for all my efforts.’
‘Take care of them bones, boy,’ joked Condley.
‘That’s my job.’
‘Exactly. You’re the scientist. I’m just the tour guide.’ Muir, ever the dramatist, came to a respectful version of attention as he looked over at the wrapped remains. ‘But let me remind you that these are not mere bones. Lying there inside that poncho is somebody’s son, Brandon. Maybe someone’s husband and father. Someone who served his country and lost his life in the process. An American hero, at this moment unrewarded for his sacrifice. We will have the honor of rendering him that award.’
‘Even if you don’t get laid in Sai Gon.’
‘I didn’t even want to do that. What’s wrong? Why are you being so adamantly cynical, Brandon?’
‘I don’t know,’ answered Condley, staring pensively at the poncho that held the pile of bones. ‘I just keep wondering how he ended up in that village when Hao said there wasn’t even a fight that night.’
‘Or why his hand is gone.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘His left hand is off,’ said Muir, obviously intrigued. ‘It appears to have been severed cleanly, as if by a knife. Very strange, on a combat casualty.’
‘Maybe some villager souvenired it,’ mused Condley. ‘Or an NVA soldier. You know, like some of our guys used to cut off ears.’
‘A gruesome thought. ‘
‘It was a gruesome war.’
‘We will have that answer soon enough,’ said Muir. ‘Once we make a positive ID on Specialist Fourth Class Deville we will locate his family, his unit history, and his former comrades. And we will also find out not simply how he ended up in that village, but why they apparently did not go back to find him when he disappeared.’
* * *
A shabby little bus took Condley from the hangar to the airport terminal, built during the war by the Americans. Inside, he sipped filtered coffee in the same waiting room in which he had stood thirty years before as he prepared to board the giant Freedom Bird that would take him away from the war zone. The cracked pavement underneath his feet was the same. So was the huge mural on the wall depicting a waterfall somewhere in the Rocky Mountains and even the fake little pond just outside one window, cobbled with molded gravel and underneath a now-unworkable water fountain. All the same – the runway, all twelve thousand feet of it, built by th
e French in one war and expanded by the Americans in another, the sagging hangars, the crumbling revetments that once had housed scores of American combat aircraft. The mountains rose up like looming shadows to the west, and just beyond them had been the war. Literally thousands of battles had been fought within an easy helicopter ride from where Condley stood.
A French Airbus with a British pilot and a crew of gorgeous Vietnamese flight attendants took him back to Sai Gon. There were not a lot of people on the plane. Condley dozed fitfully at his window seat, exhausted from his journey to Ninh Phuoc and back. At one point he awakened as if from a nightmare, imagining that he had put Specialist Deville’s remains in his hanging bag and wondering where the bag had gone. But finally he relaxed, looking out the window and remembering.
There wasn’t a whole lot to remember. He hadn’t done much with his life other than to live it. The war, first with the Marine Corps up north and then returning with the Agency west of Sai Gon and in Laos, and when it ended not knowing what to do. A year floating past as he travelled aimlessly through Australia, living off the sizable earnings of the war years, which he had never had the opportunity to spend. After that there was no sense going back home, anyway. Home hadn’t been home for more than eight years. It had been too long, he had grown too untamable, and he had perfected skills for which there was very little demand in the States. His few short visits confirmed that the good jobs were taken and that the country was on its ass, paralysed by endless and angry debates. So he had returned to Asia, sometimes with the Agency, at others on his own, pulling security work for American companies as they set up businesses in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. An easy life, devoid of ambition.
The years had blended into each other, a blur of dark-eyed women, warm turquoise oceans, and the smell of jasmine, smoke, and muck. He grew older, more cynical, less combative but somehow more confrontational. He drank less, ran slower, longed for old friends who wrote him at various post-office boxes and occasionally drifted through Bangkok or Manila and dragged him along on a two- or three-day binge of booze, friendly women, and old memories.
On rainy evenings as the typhoon winds rattled shutters on whatever hotel or house he happened to be occupying with whomever he had ended up with for that night, he might hear his mother in the whistling wind, wishing for him as she bewailed the unredeemable emptiness of his Asian fate. Now and then along the dirt roads and in the yeasty jungles of Indonesia and the Philippines he smelled the rot of dead carcasses and felt he could reach out and touch Hai and Dan and Thanh, Baker and King and McDowell, all friends he would have died for, but who instead were left violated and lifeless along the road that he himself still travelled. And always he would think of Mai, with her full lips and husky, teasing laugh, whom he had really loved and who had died because they hated her for loving him.
It was beery, painless, loveless, and so free he might have been falling through a warm sky, untouched and unencumbered. And then one morning he had stared into a brightly lit mirror and admitted that he had lost his youth. After that there had been questions. Sometimes he wished he had a wife. Sometimes he wondered if he did in fact have children. Sometimes he woke up in a panic, knowing that after all the dreams that once had mattered and the struggles that had in the end simply drained out the wishes and the hopes, after the years of trying to live without owing anybody anything, without playing the whore to any other man, he had finally comprehended that all of it added up to nothing more than a trick.
He’d spent twenty-five years trying to put salt on the tail of a mirage bird, or maybe an unrisen phoenix. Nothing had changed except his age. The whores may have sold out, but at least they had something to show for it.
In the early 1990s the ‘Bamboo Curtain’ that had been imposed by Viet Nam’s ruling communists in 1975 began to lift. The season of terror and darkness that followed the war was slowly receding. Foreigners were allowed to visit some areas of the country. And he began to dream of going back. What better place to return to, in a world where everything was lost, anyway? Sai Gon, where he might still take a five-dollar room in one of the flophouses of Pham Ngu Lao Street, float again on a band of raw emotion, no longer drearily certain of where the end might find him, no longer moribund with where the past had taken him.
Then, like some deus ex machina, the American government had delivered all that back to him. They needed a liaison officer to work with the Army’s Central Identification Lab as it searched for the remains of those still listed as missing in action during the war. Someone who understood the culture and spoke Vietnamese. Someone who didn’t mind lousy pay and frequent travel to the worst areas of the country. He’d jumped at it. So now he spent about half the year in Viet Nam and the other half in Hawaii. He’d even learned to like Hawaii, which had surprised him after spending most of the past thirty years in Asia.
He dozed again. In minutes a flight attendant awakened him, bringing him tea and a sandwich. As he ate, the plane suddenly descended from the high skies and settled toward the wide green paddies and the sluggish, curving rivers, and in one beat of his heart Condley felt that he was home again. Below him were earthly rhythms that had formed his adulthood. Merely seeing them brought him again into their cadences. In the last moments before the plane touched onto the runway at Tan Son Nhat, he looked out at abandoned military towers, the long rows of curved concrete parapets that had once housed dozens of American warplanes, the ruins of an old military hospital, the streams of thin brown people on motorbikes and bicycles, past and present mixing into a yeasty dynamism that jumped up at him from every face and tree.
Yes, he liked Hawaii, but he felt more at home in Sai Gon. He did not know why. He only knew that it was true. Sai Gon, Condley remembered from an old and happy song that spoke of the city’s beauty and its carefree ways. Dep lam.
Chapter Two
District Four, Sai Gon
Underneath the old green mosquito net five feet away, the baby was crying again. Dzung lay next to his wife in the dark room on the square board that was their bed, forcing himself awake, studying her face and trying to think of what to do. It had rained all night, and although the water had stopped flowing along the floor of their small wooden shack, the wet remained behind. The water had awakened all the odors of the cramped and squalid neighbourhood, filling their shack with the reminders of someone else’s food, someone else’s human waste, someone else’s struggle. It had brought out a legion of mosquitoes and cockroaches as big as mice. It had actually made Dzung cold.
His wife’s face was beautiful as she slept, smooth as a child’s and framed in a swirl of tangled black hair. Dzung wanted to wait as long as he could before awakening her. He knew that when she awoke, her mouth would immediately tighten and her eyes would go distant and her tiny body would grow rigid with responsibilities that would not let up until she again was freed by sleep that evening. And yet the baby, now only two weeks old, was insistent, starving, demanding. His wife needed sleep. The baby needed his wife’s breast. The burden of these two loyalties was too complicated. So Dzung stroked his wife’s face and watched her sleep and waited for the problem to solve itself.
Dzung was remembering the first time he had seen her. It was hard to believe it had been fourteen years, during the time Sai Gon was only beginning to awaken from the darkest days of conquest or liberation, depending of course on one’s perspective, just before the government announced the new change, doi moi.
He had been pedaling his cyclo along Hai Ba Trung Street just where it met the Sai Gon River. A new Soviet ship had docked near the old naval base just up the river, at the same spot the American ships used to dock and before them the French, and Dzung had been hoping to pick up a customer. She was standing on the road near a scraggly patch of grass where a pair of old French cannons still loomed over the water, also pointing toward the ship. She was holding a basket of mangoes, her circular straw non la hat tied underneath her chin with a bright yellow ribbon. The pink and yellow flowered patte
rn of her blouse and slacks excited him. It was a bold fashion statement. For nearly a decade the government had issued only black cloth at its garment stores. Sai Gon was emerging from a dark cocoon.
The tilt of her face and the sureness in the way she stood reminded him of a girl he had loved once, when he was much younger and such a thing as love had seemed more possible. She was looking at him so openly, so warmly that he knew she was not a Sai Gon girl, that she was in from the villages. She stood firmly, the mangoes under one arm, her small breasts rising toward him as she breathed, and she smiled as if she were actually happy to see him.
Somehow it made him imagine he was making love to her. Yes, like a memory. Hiding from the others, whispering and laughing and embracing as they stood lazily neck-deep in a warm pond with the water swirling and sucking against their bodies and the paddy dikes and high weeds surrounding them and the rain beating down and the smell of rotting soil and wet grass and lotus blossoms wafting over them. And the moon above them, shimmering like a mirage beyond the rain. And the sound of artillery, far in the distance. Or had it been thunder?
And so he had slowed his cyclo, pulling alongside her and teasing her.
‘Where did you come from?’ he asked.
‘Bien Hoa,’ she answered, her smiling face telling him already that she liked him.
‘Nha que, huh? A country girl. You came all this way to sell mango to a Lien So? The Russians eat nothing here in the city. They only drink. You should be bringing whiskey.’
‘My father doesn’t grow whiskey,’ she had answered, surveying his thin frame. ‘Besides, why do you want to take them in your cyclo? They’re as big as waterbulls.’
Lost Soldiers Page 3