The Second Biggest Nothing

by Colin Cotterill

“Good-looking unattached older man, together with a strange woman in a hotel room. I’m afraid the temptation might be too much for her.”

  He handed me the mango plucker. “Here, take this. You might have to fight her off.”

  I still have that mango plucker somewhere.

  I decided to get the airmen out of my schedule as quickly as I could, so I arranged to be there that afternoon. I arrived at Clinic Twelve at 2 p.m. The medical team Civilai promised comprised an unsmiling but naturally beautiful nurse in military uniform, an armed guard for our protection and a boy. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old.

  “Comrade Doctor,” he said, “I’m Hung Lan, your interpreter.”

  “Hello, Little Comrade,” I said. “And how did you get stuck with this job?”

  “I excelled in languages in elementary school,” he said. “I was recruited by the National Institute of Interpreters.”

  “I’m impressed,” I said. “But aren’t you a little young to be fraternizing with the enemy?”

  “I am qualified and competent,” he said. “But I admit I was surprised to be chosen for this important mission ahead of my seniors.”

  I wasn’t. This had Civilai written all over it: smart kid, beautiful nurse, senior Lao surgeon with a great sense of humor. He was showcasing communism. When the fliers were back home in front of the cameras they’d fondly remember the last people they met in Hanoi and forget the seven years of misery.

  “Perhaps they aren’t all bad,” they’d say.

  The nurse gave me the results of the pilots’ blood, urine and stool tests. As you’d expect after years in the jungle there was a parasite orgy going on inside them. According to their medical history, two had made it through malaria. Three had survived dengue. One was currently still enjoying its effects. There was diarrhea and skin disease but, as far as I could tell from the records, nothing terminal. Or, at least nothing that would kill them in the next three weeks. And that was evidently our goal, to get them safely into the hands of American doctors who we could later blame if the pilots all keeled over on US soil. I doubted they’d ever be free of nightmares even when the physical symptoms were taken care of.

  I gave each of the young men a thorough physical, noted breaks and bruises and sprains and scars the way a car rental shop might note down scratches and dents. The first three pilots were respectful and displayed an unexpected sense of fun. They joked through young Hung Lan who seemed more than capable of finding the right linguistic tones and textures. I bantered in battle-hardened black humor, and they responded with anecdotes from years behind bars. They weren’t yet confident enough to criticize or blame. They’d start a story then stop, shake their heads, smile and think of something nice to say about their captors. They were still in enemy territory.

  I tried to imagine what years in a cell might do to me. Would I become some other Siri? One that I didn’t like? And how would I stop my mind from crusting over? What would I have to do to hang on to my memories, my knowledge, my sanity? And I’m sure it was that doubt about my own self-control that led me to leave Henry till last. They’d warned me about him. He’d spent five-and-a-half years in a bamboo cage in a remote, inaccessible area in the north of Laos. He’d been flying air support for a bombing mission over Vietnam, and his aircraft had been hit by random small-arm fire that brought him down. He broke his arm when he parachuted into the jungle and hit his head. He walked for a week, disoriented, ill, fatigued and was finally captured by a rebel militia unit. These were no regular PL troops—more a band of hill tribe bandits who sold themselves to whichever army offered the best deal.

  The standing order from central command with regard to captured prisoners of war was to send them on to Vietnam via established prison camps, eventually to end up in the Hanoi prison network—known by foreigners as the Hanoi Hilton. But Henry never left the rebel camp. The commander of the group, a battered warrior of many campaigns named Yiw, was proud of his pet airman. He invited friends over to see him and poke sticks at him through the bars of his cage. He humiliated the American and starved and punished him when he thought his prisoner was showing disrespect. He was clearly certifiable.

  But when Commander Yiw was off in the mountains, Henry befriended his captors, mostly young boys charged with preventing his escape. He learned Lao from them. They brought him herbal medicines and natural poultices and tended his wounds until the next assault. They were every bit as afraid of their leader as Henry was, but they felt sorry for the man in the cage. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this story was that Henry wrote a book during his years in captivity. The guards found him paper and pencils and he documented his experiences. When Yiw was in the camp, the manuscript lived in a plastic bag buried in the dirt beneath Henry’s cage.

  Yiw was killed in battle, probably no less than he deserved, and his second-in-command adhered to the protocol of the Pathet Lao and sent Henry to Hanoi. His only possessions were his dog tags, a shirt and shorts, a bamboo flute and reading glasses, all in one cloth shoulder bag. And sewn into the lining of that bag was his completed manuscript. The only reason I knew all this was that Hung Lan, my interpreter, had read it.

  During his four months at the Hanoi Hilton, Henry had visitors. Some were priests who had refused to join the Catholic exodus south. Some were fellow American servicemen who had repented for their sins and apologized for their actions against the Viet Minh. But some were tourists. Visiting incarcerated POWs was on the itinerary. Curious foreigners were escorted to the jails where they could ask questions and take photographs. And it was to one of these visitors that Henry entrusted his manuscript. The tourist, afraid she might be arrested, owned up to the collusion and handed the script to the tour guide. Hung Lan was asked to read and summarize the text. He told me the highlights. It would have made a splendid movie.

  I’d expected Henry to be friendly like the others. But he was not. He refused to speak English through the interpreter. It felt odd to be conversing with him in Lao. He had a strong, confusing accent and wasn’t nearly as fluent as he thought he was. It shouldn’t have worried me. He was a foreigner who had gone to the trouble of learning my language, and he’d been through a horrific experience, but I felt uncomfortable with him. I didn’t want to dislike him, but I found it impossible to engage. And there were other things that worried me.

  Despite the conditions he’d lived in for so long, he’d somehow avoided most of the parasites currently gorging on his countrymen. He’d had a bout of dengue some time back, and there was some liver damage that may have been a result of hepatitis, but apart from that he was in pretty good shape. He even had a belly.

  “So what are you saying?” he asked.

  “Just observations from the point of view of a doctor,” I said. “I’ve always been fascinated by how different people react to hostile environments. As a foreigner, you wouldn’t have any natural defenses against conditions in the jungle. Yet you’ve somehow been able to counter all the usual enemies of the human body. How did you fight off insects and treat their bites? How did you make sure the water you drank was decontaminated? How did you survive?”

  My medical team sat around us in the cell obviously frustrated that they had no idea what was being said. I was already fond of Hung Lan—he’s probably a rich property tycoon by now—but I liked being free of my interpreter.

  “You do know I don’t have to answer any of these questions?” said Henry.

  “I know.”

  “But I tell you, Older Brother, I earned the respect of those savages.”

  I wasn’t that fond of being his older brother, and I wondered whether I’d be able to respect anyone who called me a savage. He launched off into a narrative I felt he’d practiced beforehand.

  “Despite my horrible injuries, when they found me I put up a fight,” he said. “I took them on, hand-to-hand, fought to what I thought would be my death. Once they had me in the ca
ge I constantly tried to escape. Bravery was what jungle fighters expected and respected. They saw me as a real man. They wanted to be like me. I could tell they had no respect for that bastard Yiw. He was cruel to everyone. So when he was away, they treated my wounds using natural remedies that had been passed down through generations. They gave me medicine and balm to prevent illnesses and keep the mosquitoes at bay. I learned their language very quickly. I have a knack. They were in awe. Soon, I was like their brother. They loved me. But they were scared shitless by what the commander might do if he found out we were allies. So I put up with it, played along so my captors wouldn’t get into trouble. It’s all in the book.”

  “Right,” I said. “The book. You don’t seem very upset to have lost your manuscript.”

  He winked. I had a problem with winking too. I took it to mean he had a plan B. I wondered if he’d left a copy with his close friends at the border. Great foresight, that, to make two copies of a manuscript written in pencil in extreme conditions. I assumed the village didn’t have a Xerox. Either way, he seemed very confident.

  I conducted my standard physical tests while he described some of the torture he’d endured. He had a number of recent bruises that he put down to “misunderstandings” with the guards at the Hilton although nobody recalled having cause to beat him up. His broken arm had healed beautifully, and he had a messy scar on his head that would have benefited from sutures that were obviously not available. A torn ligament that he said was caused by being dragged behind a buffalo cart by the ankle had left him with a limp. I had no X-ray to check that. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, he switched to English.

  Hung Lan jumped to his feet. “You’re going to pay for this,” he said.

  “For what?” I asked through the interpreter.

  “The traumas your people have caused me,” he said.

  “We’re letting you go,” I reminded him.

  “So?”

  “So, I suggest that until you’re on the plane, you feign a little gratitude and save your complaints. It’s not too late to give your ticket to someone else.”

  He gave me a dirty look and in him I saw the ugly Dr. Siri I’d probably have become after five years in captivity. I’d probably be intolerable after five months. When we left the room, I spoke of my concerns to my team and assigned them some tasks. I had time before my date that evening to pay visits to two old friends.

  Bao Ninh was at his desk at the department of statistics at Hanoi University. He’d been collating data since the beginning of the war. The Vietnamese loved collating and recording. He had records on everything from pelicans being shot accidently by antiaircraft fire to tanks sinking without a trace beneath the mud of the monsoons.

  From there I still had time to stop by the office of General Xuan of the People’s Army of Vietnam. Being a field surgeon, I often had the good fortune of saving the lives of important people. Xuan was in his office and alive only due to the fact that I’d removed half a ton of shrapnel from his chest. He was a man who greatly appreciated being alive. We shared a jug of coffee and some reminiscences, and I left him with homework I knew would be completed thoroughly.

  I returned to my dorm, changed into clothes that looked exactly the same as the ones I’d taken off but were cleaner and took a bicycle samlor back to the Reunification. I was an hour early. The interior bar had come alive since my earlier visit. If I’d taken a photograph I doubt anyone in the world would have guessed the setting was a bar in a city that was about to be bombed to oblivion. Attempting to describe the international crowd there that evening would have been like identifying extras in a Fellini movie. I wanted to ask where all the freaks had come from—how they’d got there—why they’d bothered. But I had to rehearse my speech. I had my notes on a napkin. I didn’t know how long we’d be alone together. She spoke French, I heard, so we could communicate without an interpreter. But I wanted to hit the right tone. It went something like this:

  “Boys in their twenties in America are calling themselves ‘veterans.’ I’m sixty-eight. I’ve spent thirty-odd years fighting for something that I have eventually come to believe in. That, is what a veteran is. Those boys returned with the medals they’d been awarded for being wounded and they called our war ‘The biggest nothing in American history.’ And that hurt and offended me. You made a one-act appearance in a fifty-act play, and you killed more of us than were murdered in the entire century before and you called it nothing. And when it’s all over for you, when the white-water flow of money abates and your leaders find something sexier to support, we’ll still be here fighting for our lives against the next tyrant, or poverty, or nature. And by then you will have forgotten us. That’s what I want your Hollywood to tell everyone. Tell them it’s only nothing for you. For us, it’s survival and hope.”

  That was going to be my big finish. I could perhaps squeeze out a tear or two and make my voice crinkle a bit and do my bulldog long-jowled expression. She’d give me a glass of whisky to make me feel better and . . . well, as Civilai said, one thing would doubtless lead to another.

  The wobbly bottomed secretary found me in reception and led me up the staircase to the fourth floor and what they jokingly referred to as the “royal suite.” A queue of ten to twelve people stood at the end of the corridor, and the secretary placed me at its tail. But before I’d taken a step forward, the hotel siren sounded. Some in the queue panicked and ran. Others, like me, held their ground. There was a policy for air raids. We’d all been shown the nearest bunkers and been directed to areas like schools or hospitals that were supposedly only hit by accident. There were a lot of accidents those days.

  And then the door to the suite was thrown open, and a small scrum of people directed by a hotel official passed us in the hall headed for safety. Jane Fonda was at the rear, propped up by a large man in a baseball cap. She seemed smaller than I remembered her from Cat Ballou. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt rather than her silver space suit, and her hair was mousy brown. In her natural state she was even more naked than Barbarella. I noticed she held a ballpoint pen in her hand. She spotted me at the end of the queue and pulled away from her minder. I was holding the serviette with my speech notes. She smiled, took it from me, turned it over and signed it. She smiled again, said something I didn’t understand and followed the entourage to the hotel bomb shelter.

  There were no bombs that night. They’d be raining down in force soon enough during Operation Linebacker II, which made a mess of the northern capital and killed a lot of people. We all remarked later how limited the imaginations were of the men who came up with the name. Surely they couldn’t have run out of sports references. But Jane and her team left the next morning without my message to Hollywood. I had her autograph and I cherished it until one day when I had the flu and thought it was a tissue. It was the nearest I’d been to a movie star. She’d smiled at me.

  So, as there’d been no romance in the royal suite and I still had a tank of adrenaline, I put all my energy into my next interview with Henry. I seem to recall there was me, Civilai, General Xuan, the child interpreter Hung Lan and a CIA liaison person who was supervising the orderly release of his pilots. I can’t remember his name. Two guards escorted Henry to the canteen. Something in the way he walked told me he was confident this was to be his release day. We sat him down and he smiled only at the CIA guy, who didn’t smile back. As I was technically the lead attorney, I spoke to the prisoner in Lao, and Xuan translated into Vietnamese, which Mr. CIA seemed to understand. It was messy but it worked.

  “Henry,” I said. “I’ve been learning a lot about you.”

  He looked confused.

  “I was able to trace the records back to the day you crashed,” I continued.

  “June 1966 flying an F-100,” said Henry, smiling.

  “They never did find your plane,” I said.

  “Lot of jungle out there,” he said. “It may never be found.”


  “Perhaps because we’re looking in the wrong place,” I said.

  “Once my instruments short-circuited there was no way of being sure where I was,” he said. “Like I say, there’s a lot of unoccupied land out there.”

  “Lot of river too,” I said.

  He looked at me for the first time.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.

  “It means that a North Vietnamese radar unit plotted your course that day and had you a hundred kilometers off your designated route on the west of Bolikhamxai. You were over the Mekong when the blip disappeared.”

  Henry looked at the men in front of him and realized for the first time that this was not a handover committee.

  “What is this?” he said.

  “Your plane wreckage was not found in the jungles of Bolikhamxai because you put it down in the river a hundred kilometers west.”

  “Bullshit,” said Henry.

  “It’s undoubtedly still there,” I said. “But we’ll have to wait for the war to end before we go scavenging. You parachuted, not into hostile Laos, but, as you planned, into Thailand.”

  Henry spoke not one more word that day. He just glared angrily into my eyes as I untangled his lies.

  “You’d had enough of this war and the mindless killing,” I said. “And you wanted to get out of it. We can all understand that. And, what better place to escape a war than Thailand? Pretty women. Low prices. Nobody asking questions. I’m not sure where you’d put down the roots to this new life, but it’s unlikely you’d go to Udon Thani with its secret American airbases we all know about. You’d avoid big cities. There was always a chance you’d be recognized in the bars. I’m guessing you buried your parachute near the river, changed into civvies and jumped on a local bus to somewhere like Ubon Ratchathani. You had money saved—probably already set up a Thai bank account. And it seemed back then you could probably live off your savings forever.

  “Not a lot of difference between northeastern Thai language and Lao,” I said. “You probably married a local girl who taught you the language in a feminine kind of way, and you got confident because everyone understood you. But you aren’t that good. There are differences between Isan Thai and hill-tribe Lao. In fact, I doubt you’d find a band of hill-tribe rebels fluent enough in Lao to be able to teach you anything. Yours is the Lao of Thai bars and yours is the body of the soft life. Whatever maladies you picked up were treated at the local hospital. Those last bruises and scrapes were probably thanks to you running head first into a wall or punching yourself in the face.”