On Blood Road

by Steve Watkins

  Before I can tell the driver to turn around and take me back to the embassy, though, we’re deep inside Cholon, and whatever forward momentum has taken me this far pulls me out of the tuk-tuk and onto the crazy street in front of Bunny Bunny Go Go. I pay the driver a lot more than I should and he takes off, leaving me standing there looking ridiculous—and scared—in a cloud of exhaust.

  I step toward the entrance, but that is as far as I get before somebody calls my name.

  “Taylor Sorenson!”

  I can’t believe it. How can anybody know me here?

  I turn to see a jeep with two US Army MPs—military police—pulling up behind me. “You Taylor Sorenson?”

  I nod, still so shocked that I can’t speak. People around us stop what they’re doing to stand and stare—and point and laugh.

  “You need to come with us,” one of the MPs says.

  “Why?” I ask. “How’d you know it was me?”

  They laugh, too. “Apparently, somebody at the embassy got worried about you and sent out word that you were on your way here,” he says. “We were dispatched to intercept.”

  His partner points his nightstick at me. “Yeah. You been busted.”

  I just stand there for a minute, defeated. Cindy must have ratted me out, mad because I abandoned her back at the embassy, and when word got back to Dad he notified the military police.

  Music pulses out of the nightclub every time the doors swing open. A lot of loud guitar and earsplitting reverb and machine-gun percussion. A lot of smoke and shrieking and strobe lights.

  I climb into the back of the jeep. I was already feeling stupid before in my black suit and loud tie and oversize shoes. Now I feel even stupider.

  “Hey, don’t worry about it, kid,” the other MP says. “Look at it this way—not too many your age would have even made it this far. Plus I guarantee, you did not want to see what was on the other side of the doors to a place like that. People in there—they’ll steal you blind before you even know they’ve got hold of your wallet. And you’ll be lucky if that’s all that happens to you.”

  “Yeah, think of it like we just did you a big favor, pal,” the second MP says as he guns the jeep forward and away from the party.

  We only make it a little way, though, maybe a hundred yards, before we run into a South Vietnamese Army patrol blocking traffic. Two soldiers with automatic weapons hanging off their shoulders wave us to a stop. The MPs curse, then get out of the jeep to see what’s up. One of them says something to the ARVN soldiers in Vietnamese that sounds like he’s reading from a phrasebook. I can feel a headache coming on.

  I close my eyes and rub my temples, just for a second, slumping back in my seat, until a loud burst of fireworks right next to the jeep jolts me upright.

  At first I can’t see anything but smoke, with a strange, acrid smell that stings my nose. I break into a coughing fit until it clears.

  Where are the MPs? Why are the ARVN soldiers waving their weapons at people on the street? Why is everybody cowering like that? There’s a loud ringing in my ears. The fireworks must have been closer than I thought. I shake my head, lean forward in the jeep, see the MPs lying in the street, but can’t figure out why they’re doing that. Maybe they got scared by the fireworks, thought it was gunfire and dove for cover.

  The ARVN soldiers are pointing their guns in my direction now. People on the street are running away. The soldiers are talking excitedly, gesturing my way, shaking their weapons, looking down at the MPs. I don’t understand any of it—why the MPs still aren’t moving, why they’re just lying there like that. Why the soldiers are coming toward the jeep now, and yelling at me in their rapid-fire Vietnamese.

  One of the soldiers waves his gun in a way that I finally understand means he wants me to get out of the jeep, which I do, moving as slowly and carefully as possible, still trying to make sense of what’s going on. I step closer to the MPs and see a pool of blood spreading out from under their bodies, and it’s only then that I understand.

  They’re dead.

  But that isn’t possible. The ARVN are our allies. We’re fighting for them, to save their country from the communists in the North. Why would they shoot us?

  One of them jams his muzzle into the small of my back and shoves me forward, past the MPs and over to a waiting truck. I want to yell at him to stop, that he can’t do that to me, that I’m an American! But I keep my mouth shut. The only smart thing I’ve done since coming to Vietnam. The soldier keeps jabbing at me, barking at me, gesturing at me to climb in the back of the truck. The sides are open. There are long benches on either side in the bed, with several Vietnamese men, a few of them in ARVN uniforms, already sitting there, their hands bound in front of them. I take a seat on one of the benches. No one looks at me. A couple of the soldiers climb into the cab. The rest climb into the back and keep their guns on me and the men who are bound.

  The engine roars to life and the truck lurches forward. I nearly fall out of my seat.

  My heart is racing. Sweat pours down my face. I want to tear the suit off and throw myself out of the truck and run away. But I can’t move. The thoughts slowly, reluctantly, line up in my mind—thoughts I don’t want to have but can’t keep out any longer: If I don’t do what they say—and maybe even if I do—they’ll kill me, just like they killed the MPs. What I can’t figure out, for the life of me, is why.

  The truck lurches through Cholon and all over Saigon, the driver grinding through the gears as if he’s never driven stick before, doesn’t know how to double-clutch, to keep up the RPMs, to keep from stalling out, which we also do over and over. Geoff’s family has a car with a manual transmission, and he drove us out to the wilds of Long Island and showed me how to do all that stuff. I got whiplash then and I get it even worse now. Everyone in the back of the truck does.

  There are other stops. Awful, horrible stops as we leave the congested streets of Cholon and slip into residential neighborhoods on avenues lined with towering hardwoods, thick stands of bamboo, and oceans of bougainvillea. One soldier is left to guard us while the rest storm up to a house or into a compound, their guns drawn. Sometimes there are sentries and shootouts. Sometimes there are walls that have to be scaled. Always there is the loud banging on doors, the crashing sound of doors kicked in. Shrill Vietnamese voices—protesting, pleading, screaming, begging. The pop-pop-pop of what I keep pretending are more fireworks, but I know aren’t.

  Sometimes there is more screaming. Sometimes there is just silence, which is even worse and makes my skin crawl. I start shaking as if it’s cold out and can’t make myself stop. Most of the bound men next to me are stoic, staring down between their shoes like those hunchbacked old men and women I saw earlier when I was in the tuk-tuk on my way to Bunny Bunny Go Go.

  A few of the bound men are crying. Tears streaming down their faces like it’s pouring rain. They don’t make a sound from it, though. They just cry. About what’s happening to the people in those houses and compounds. About what’s going to happen soon to them, to all of us. I just want to be back where it’s safe. The embassy. Our apartment in New York. We have a doorman, for God’s sake. He won’t let anyone in our building if we aren’t there to vouch for them. Not a friend, not a service man, not the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese Army.

  The soldiers come back and the truck jerks forward again. But they keep stopping, again and again. Another house. Another compound. More crashing, banging, explosions, firecrackers, screaming, silence.

  Only sometimes there aren’t firecrackers. Sometimes the soldiers come back with more prisoners—some in street clothes, some in pajamas, some in uniforms. We squeeze closer to make room. And still nobody looks at anybody else. And as the night continues toward morning, it finally does turn cold, giving me a real reason to shiver.

  In the distance, we hear bigger explosions, bigger fireworks lighting up the night sky all over the city. It’s clear to me that we’re with a team of assassins—executing government officials, military officers,
prearranged targets. Even the ones who are taken prisoner—that must have been planned, too. But what about me? Why did they take me captive? I’m the only American. Is this all just a freak accident? Maybe they were looking for somebody else and just happened to stumble on me and the MPs. If they didn’t know who I was before, they know now. They have my passport, my embassy papers, my name.

  I keep hyperventilating and then telling myself to calm down, just calm down. I have to be steady. I have to keep my hopes up. Every minute that passes when they don’t return and kill all the rest of us in the truck I take as evidence that they aren’t going to kill us later, either. It must mean they have other plans for us. Hostages, maybe. Maybe they’re just going to hold us for ransom, and then let us go. Maybe they know who Frank Sorenson is—the Special Attaché to Whatever—and they know Frank Sorenson will do whatever is necessary to get his son back.

  But what if they attacked the embassy, too? Dad and Mom could be in danger. Or captured like me. Or worse. I panic, can’t stop trembling, bite my lip to keep from bawling out loud out of fear.

  At one house, the last as it turns out, someone runs. Somehow he gets past the soldiers and sprints out into the street, after careening into the side of the truck. For just a second, our eyes meet—he looks shocked to see me, almost as if he recognizes me from somewhere, though that isn’t possible—then he races off. It takes the guard a minute to react before he aims and fires, a loud burst of automatic gunfire spraying the asphalt behind the disappearing man. Somehow, miraculously, the man gets away. He’s in his nightclothes, barefoot, but he keeps sprinting, maybe outrunning the bullets, or more likely just lucky, or saved by lousy aim.

  From miles away, all over the city, I can hear battles raging. The assassins shrug, sling their weapons over their shoulders, and climb into the truck. We drive off into the night, but there are no more stops. I close my eyes and try praying, though Mom hasn’t taken me to church in years, so the best I can come up with are bits and pieces of prayers I’ve heard other people say. I wish I hadn’t been such a jerk to so many people, and I swear I’ll be a better person if I get out of this. And if Mom and Dad survive as well. The man sitting next to me is whispering under his breath. I wonder if he’s praying, too, and if it will make a difference.

  We pull into what looks like a racetrack with a wide, grassy infield full of soldiers with automatic weapons, and dozens of mortars lined up behind concrete barriers, and a makeshift cage with hundreds of men and even some women crammed inside.

  The truck stops next to the cage and guards order us out, shoving us hard from behind to force us in with the others. They hit us with bamboo staffs if we don’t move fast enough. One blow lands on the back of my head, just behind my ear, and leaves me with a headache and a persistent ringing sound that I can’t shake. I cling to the side of the cage and press my face against the wire so I can breathe, and so this claustrophobic feeling won’t spiral out of control. My heart is pounding hard enough that I can hear it, even with the loud ringing in my ear, and I struggle to keep myself from bursting into tears and begging my captors to let me go.

  Someone keeps pressing into my back, like he’s leaning on a lamppost instead of another prisoner. I shove him away, but he slumps into me again. “Get off !” I snap, and shove him again. He doesn’t say anything. Maybe he leans into somebody else for a while, but then he’s back, and this time I can’t push him off. I twist around so I can see him and say something directly to his face. His eyes are wide, staring straight at me, but no matter what I say he doesn’t respond. I get angry and louder, but still nothing.

  And then I realize there’s blood. On him, on me, on my black suit, my tie, Dad’s wing tip shoes. I feel all over myself to see if I’ve been wounded and haven’t noticed, which is stupid, but I’m not thinking straight. I’m not thinking at all, until it hits me: Oh God, he’s dead.

  He’s been shot, or bayoneted, or beaten so badly that all the life bled out of him. But he isn’t dead enough, because he won’t stop staring at me. I want him to close his eyes. More than I want to get away from him and all that blood, I want him to stop looking at me. If he’s going to be dead, I want him to look dead, too. I can’t explain why that’s so important to me. Others around us back away, though it’s inches, not feet. There isn’t room. They speak to one another in whispered Vietnamese; I don’t understand a word of it. I lift my hand tentatively to the dead man’s face and press on his eyelids, afraid they’ll be frozen open, but they aren’t. They close as easily as if he blinked them shut himself. Other bodies shift in the cage, making a little more room, and the dead man slumps halfway to the ground. That’s as far as his body can go, though, and he stays there, pushed against our legs as if he insisted on sitting down, just taking a rest.

  I twist back around and press my face to the wire again as more trucks pull into the racetrack with more soldiers and more prisoners. The sky turns purple from the first light of morning. I just want to lie down and curl up in a ball. I’ve barely slept since leaving New York. I regret everything. Why did I sneak out? Why was I such a jerk to Mom and Dad? To that girl Cindy? I should have stayed. I should have thought about Beth and not messed around with Cindy in the first place. I shouldn’t have been trying to impress Geoff. He isn’t even here. I could have just made up some wild stories for him when I got back to New York. I could have stayed at the embassy. I could have been safe.

  And now look where it’s gotten me. There’s blood on my hands, and I have nowhere to wipe it off.

  Small arms fire and then mortar fire erupt near the racetrack. We’re still in Saigon, and I’m pretty sure we’re still in Cholon. There have been explosions across the city throughout the night, but this is closer, though I can’t see anything except the soldiers outside the cage setting up defensive positions behind the concrete barriers and trucks and some armored vehicles that also pulled in during the night.

  “Light infantry,” someone says in English, practically right in my ear. I turn to see another American, an adult, who has somehow worked his way through the crowd of prisoners, because I know he wasn’t here before that.

  “Whose?” I ask.

  “American and South Viets,” he says. “I’m guessing they’re still several blocks away. Judging from the sounds. North Viets are returning fire. You can tell by the different sounds the automatic weapons make—our M16s and their AK-47s. I’m betting the North Viets are shooting from windows and rooftops of whatever high-rises are over there. Our mortars will take them out, but it’ll be awhile.”

  I already know that about the M16s and the AK-47s. I know a lot about weapons, and a lot about the military, from when I was little and still hanging on to every word from my dad. You might say he and I bonded over the war. Though not over this war. Once this war started, my dad basically went MIA on Mom and me. It was like he was marking time, living with us for a handful of years in Paris, and for a few more back in New York, then he jumped at the chance to go off to another war. But I couldn’t get enough of his World War II stories when I was a kid, as sanitized as they were so I wouldn’t get freaked out by the horrors I read about later on my own. He’d been part of the invasion of Normandy on D-day. Fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Spoke German and worked in army intelligence. Interrogated Nazis after the fall of Berlin. Met my mom when she was a college student in post-war Paris and my grandfather, a big Eisenhower supporter, was ambassador to France.

  Not that that’s any help to me now.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” I ask this new American.

  He shrugs. More explosions light up the early dawn sky, and he looks back over that way. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt with blood splattered on it. He has a heavy five-o’clock shadow and more blood caked to the side of his face and in his thick black hair, which is way too long for the military or anybody who works at the embassy. But he’s the only other American as far as I can see.

  “How did they get you?” I ask.

  “Wrong place
, wrong time,” he says. “Who are you, kid? How’d you end up in a mess like this?”

  “Taylor Sorenson,” I said.

  He blinks at me. “Any relation to Frank Sorenson?” he asks. “He your dad by any chance?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “We got here three days ago. Me and my mom. For his birthday. Then there was a party at the embassy. I sort of cut out and didn’t tell anybody.”

  “They got your passport, your ID?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “But there’s so many people. They probably forgot who it belongs to by now. Right?”

  There’s a heavy barrage of small arms fire that starts and doesn’t stop. We have to shout to hear each other.

  “Don’t tell them who you are if that’s the case,” he says. “You don’t want them to put two and two together and figure out you’re connected to Sorenson if they don’t already know. Though I’d be surprised if they don’t.”

  “Why?” I ask. “I don’t understand. He just works at the embassy. What difference does it make? You think they’ll, like, hold me for ransom?”

  “Your dad does a lot more than just work at the embassy,” he says. “So keep your mouth shut tight. They’ll have to do something with us and hopefully that doesn’t mean execute all of us right here in the middle of the infield like this. Not exactly the way to win hearts and minds. Hasn’t worked for us, and won’t work for them. Not like this. Not a public massacre.”

  “Execution?” I stutter. “Public massacre?” The words hit me like a fist in the gut.

  He doesn’t have an opportunity to respond—to reassure me that nothing like that could possibly happen, which is what I desperately want to hear—because the guards open the cage and wave some of us out and over to a section of the infield where dozens of stretchers hold wounded men, some just lying there, as still as death, some moaning and writhing in pain.