Sand in the Wind

by Robert Roth

  Calmed without being comforted, Kramer continued walking. A whining, pain-filled voice drew his stare from the street. Three Marines were directly in front of him. The man in the middle was supported on the shoulders of the other two, and he talked nervously in an attempt to relieve his mind from the pain of a wounded leg. The false bravery of his whining voice irritated Kramer. He wanted to distance himself from it. His steps quickened as he passed the three Marines. Almost out of the voice’s range, he heard it say, “God! Look at that Buddha. I wish I had my camera.”

  Kramer continued to walk, his mind giving no significance to these words. But suddenly he froze. For a few seconds he tried to make himself begin walking again, knowing that this was impossible. Finally, he turned. Before him stood a form too huge to be obscured by the rain — a stone Buddha, facing towards the south. Kramer tried to tell himself that it must be one of hundreds within the city, at the same time hoping that it was the one Tuyen had described. His eyes searched the rain for the dragons, and it was almost with relief that he failed to see them. Still, he began to circle the Buddha, wanting to prove to himself for the last time that the dream was dead. He walked along the near side of the square and came upon nothing but rubble. Satisfied and yet thwarted, he continued to walk. Then he saw it, the severed head of a huge bronze dragon.

  The dream was again alive. His steps quickened, and on the next side he saw the huge, terrifying form of another dragon. No longer could he hope to deceive himself, and he mumbled audibly, “The Square of the Four Dragons.” On two corners where there had once been houses, he had seen only rubble. Kramer walked slowly to the third corner, and again he found rubble. Once more he walked along a side of the square. His eyes searched through the rain hoping to see a house, the window where she had waited for the dawn. Suddenly it was before him. A wounded Marine hobbled by as Kramer stood motionless in front of it. He began walking slowly towards the house, stepping over the remains of a stone wall. The house itself seemed almost untouched. Much of the glass remained in the windows. He approached the huge wooden door, afraid that it would soon reveal no one or a stranger.

  Kramer hesitated for a few seconds, then tapped the butt of his rifle against the door. There was no answer. He knocked harder, again and again until a feeble, tear-choked voice called out, “All dead, Go away. All dead.” Kramer slowly pushed the door open. The walls were pockmarked with bullet holes. In the middle of the floor sat an old woman, legs folded in front of her, rocking back and forth with her arms wrapped tightly across her chest. Her tear-reddened face looked up at him in a mute plea to be left alone. He walked towards her slowly. She turned her head away and began to cry, still rocking back and forth, pleading, “Go away. All dead. Go away.” He stared down at her, wanting to leave, thinking how cruel it was that she had been allowed to live long enough to endure such grief, knowing that he was a part of this grief.

  “Tuyen?” he said to her. She merely continued to sob. Kramer dropped to his knees and asked again, “Tuyen?”

  “All dead. All dead.”

  These words sickened Kramer, though he knew she probably hadn’t understood him. He kneeled helpless for a few seconds before remembering Tuyen’s picture. Nervously, he took it out. The photograph was damp but unharmed.

  Barely looking at it himself, he held the picture in front of her. “Tuyen?” She turned her head away while tightening the grasp of her arms around herself. Kramer forced her to take the photograph. She drew it close to her feeble eyes before looking up at him with a pathetic stare that could have meant a thousand different things. “Dep lam,” she said weakly.

  Kramer kept repeating these words as if by doing so he would be able to understand them. “Tuyen?” he finally asked, but she refused to answer him.

  Again he forced her to look at the picture. She merely repeated, “Dep lam.”

  Kramer gently took back the photograph. Slow steps led him to the door. Without looking back, he closed it behind him. He no longer remembered or cared where the supply point was, but some Marines passed by and he followed them. Viciously forcing his boots through the ankle-deep water, he repeated, “Dep lam. Dep lam.” Unconsciously his steps quickened as he continued repeating these two meaningless words. He began to pass other Marines, not caring that they could hear him mumbling— wanting to run like a little boy, too drained to do so. His steps finally slowed. A Vietnamese with his arm in a sling and wearing a Marine Corps uniform passed him. Suddenly Kramer realized it was Binh, one of the battalion’s Kit Carson Scouts. Kramer rushed to him. When Binh felt someone grab his arm, he jerked it away in fear. For a second the realization that it was Kramer calmed him, but then he noticed the wild look on Kramer’s face as he repeated, “Dep lam, dep lam?” Binh tried to break away. Kramer refused to release his arm. “Dep lam! What does it mean? Dep lam?”

  “Dep lam?" Binh repeated.

  “Dep lam!"

  With a look of confusion, Binh finally answered, “Dep lam, very pretty, very pretty.”

  Kramer broke into a harsh laugh as he repeated, “Very pretty, very pretty.” Binh backed away a few steps, then turned and quickly walked off. Kramer continued to laugh as he followed behind, repeating, “Dep lam, very pretty. Dep lam, very pretty.”

  Kramer stood somberly under the eave of a house while a thin sheet of rain fell directly in front of him from its roof. He was only dully aware of the painful throbbing in his arm. A few feet away, twenty plastic bags lay side by side in the road. There hadn’t been more than a dozen when he’d first arrived, and he had watched as more and more bodies were brought over and fed into these bags.

  A few uncovered corpses still lay out in the rain, and he heard somebody yell, “We’re out of bags.”

  Somebody else yelled back, “Use ponchos.”

  More and more bodies were brought to the supply point, often three and four at a time, carried slowly, almost in procession, the rain turning this scene into a rite, a primitive mass funeral.

  A truck pulled up, and the men began to load it with the bodies. At first they did so carefully, but soon they tired and began throwing the corpses carelessly upon the truck bed as if they were sacks of fertilizer.

  Someone yelled, “Did you get more bags?”

  “I told you to use ponchos!”

  “I did. Do you want them put on the truck like that?”

  “Hell, yeah!”

  “What about the ones we haven’t even got ponchos for?”

  “For God’s sake, get them all out of here!”

  The corpses soon covered the truck bed. Someone yelled, “All you medivacs, get on the six-by.” A wry smile crossed Kramer’s lips when he heard this. He walked over to the truck and saw some of the men hesitating to board it. The more seriously wounded had already been medivacked by amtrack. The remainder were now being sent by truck to a safe landing zone on the outskirts of the city. Kramer had no qualms about boarding the truck, and he was actually amused by the faces of some of the men as they climbed on.

  A voice behind him said, “One of you help this guy, will you?”

  Kramer turned to see a man with a bandage over his eyes. He gripped the man’s arm to help him board the truck. As he was lifted up, the bandaged man placed his hand down on the bed for balance; but when he felt the uncovered face of a corpse, he quickly drew it away. A Marine already aboard helped the man towards a seat against the side of the truck. While Kramer himself boarded it, he saw the bandaged man step on one of the corpses and ask, “God, did I hurt him?”

  “No, you didn’t hurt him,” someone answered.

  Kramer sat down next to the tailgate. He felt the six-by lurch forward and watched the mud fly from its wheels. After a quick glance back, he lowered his stare to the truck bed and mumbled, “To have come so close.” He had intended these words to be tragic, but a wry smile crossed his lips as he realized there was no tragedy in them. He repeated them, but this time as if they signified a victory, and they did, a kind of victory, perhaps the only possible one
, and he knew it.

  The truck was already outside the city. What had taken weeks and lives to gain was now left behind in minutes. Once more he glanced back at the rain-obscured outline of Hue, and he thought, ‘The Ancient City.’ His stare returned to the bed of the truck and the bodies it contained. Many of them had already slid from beneath their ponchos.

  ‘At least I’m alive,’ he thought, not perceiving the irony of these words, or how absurd they would have seemed a few months earlier. Only later would he realize that in a place where anguish and suffering were everywhere, a country in which human life was cheap enough to be measured in body counts, only here had he been able to place a value upon his own life.

  Suddenly something strange happened. There was a glare in his eyes. The rain had stopped. For the first time in weeks the sun appeared. He looked up. The clouds were drifting towards the mountains. Almost half the sky was a deep crystalline blue, the lucent gleam of which made it seem impossible that it hadn’t always been like that. Again Kramer glanced back towards the city. It had seemed so important once, promised so much. Yet something had been fulfilled. He had been there as he had dreamed — only to see its ruins. What little difference it made now, now that he could accept what he had always known. However beautiful this Ancient City once had been, it was always merely the work of man, foredoomed to ruin by and despite him, fruit of his conceit, his enchanting delusions of creation — never destined to be anything more than sand in the wind.

  A patch of color caught Kramer’s eye. The street was deserted except for a little girl standing by the side of the road in a bright burgundy dress. She had a smile on her face, and she waved to him — to a strange man with a gun riding in a truck filled with corpses. Kramer smiled back at her, hoping that she saw, thinking, ‘It’s always the children that come out first after the rain.’