One of the guards barks orders in Vietnamese, which the stranger seems to understand because he grabs me by the shoulder and says, “Stick with me. We’re loading these stretchers onto trucks.”
Just as he says it, a couple of flatbeds pull up next to the wounded men. The stranger takes one end of the closest stretcher and I lift the other. At first I can’t see what’s wrong with the man we’re carrying, but then the blanket falls and I see one of his legs has been blown off, his bloody, ragged stump leaking onto the stretcher. For some reason, the leg is lying on the stretcher, too, next to him. The boot is still on the foot. I’m so shocked I nearly drop my end. The leg is raw and bloody and mutilated, with shattered bone protruding out of the flesh. Bile rises up my throat and into my mouth, making me gag.
“Come on!” the stranger barks. “Don’t draw attention to yourself!”
I force myself to swallow it back down. We hand the wounded man up to other prisoners in the back of the first truck—military green, US Army insignia on the side.
“Stolen,” the stranger says.
“But why would the South Vietnamese steal from us?” I ask. “Why are they attacking us? And their own people? We’re on the same side. Is it a coup?”
“No,” he says. “These aren’t South Viets. They’re regular army North Viets. Some of them dressed up in South Viet Army uniforms they also must have stolen. They attacked all over Saigon. They even attacked the embassy. Broke through the wall. Killed a bunch of marines. I don’t know what’s been happening there since.”
“But my mom and dad are there,” I say. “Do you think the attackers got inside? Do you think my mom and dad got out first?”
“Sorry, kid,” he says as we lift the next stretcher. The man lying on it is already dead. He has a massive chest wound that’s disgusting, shards of bone and slices of organs spilling out through the rags of his uniform. They didn’t bother to cover him with a blanket. But we load him on the flatbed anyway. I keep my eyes averted and try not to throw up.
“You mean they did get in the embassy?” I manage to ask, not wanting to hear the answer if it’s bad.
“Just mean I wasn’t there to see what else happened,” he says.
The street fighting grows louder and closer. Soon mortar rounds are coming over the racetrack wall and exploding in the turf, leaving craters and bodies. Men crawl in retreat to the concrete barriers, dragging their friends with them. With the light of morning and dissipating fog, I can see body parts strewn everywhere.
We keep loading the trucks with the wounded and the dead and the dying as the sun rises and it gets hotter. I’m parched, but there’s no water—at least not for us. I can feel my face starting to blister under the burning sun, and despite how freaked out I am, my stomach rumbles. But there’s no food, either. If I stop working, a guard hits me with his bamboo staff—across my shoulders, on my arms or legs, anywhere that’s exposed. I cover my face and head and keep working. The stranger never stops, doesn’t react when they hit me, doesn’t say anything else.
We’re ordered onto one of the trucks with the wounded men and the bodies—and armed guards. A convoy of trucks pulls out of the racetrack, away from the gun and mortar battle, and we lumber through narrow Cholon streets, picking up speed gradually until soon we’re careening around corners in tight intersections, smashing roadside stands. People peek at us from upper-story windows or half-open doors at street level, but few are out on the streets. Chickens fly into windshields and feathers spray all over. Dogs limp out of the way if they’re fast enough and get crushed to the road if they aren’t. The trucks never slow down, not even when we finally leave the sprawl of Saigon and bounce down washboard roads through the countryside, heading east into the late morning sun.
“Just keep your head down,” the stranger says at one point. “Don’t look at the guards. Don’t do or say anything besides whatever they want you to do, even if you’re not sure what that is. They don’t speak English, in case you haven’t figured that out yet.”
“But you speak some Vietnamese,” I say. “Right?”
He nods. “Some. Enough to get by.”
I ask him his name. “I mean, what should I call you?”
“Let’s go with TJ,” he says.
“Just initials?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “Just initials. Better that they don’t know who I am, and better you don’t, either, so they can’t get it out of you. Let’s just say I’ve been doing work over here they don’t like and I don’t want them knowing about it.”
“Okay,” I say. “TJ.” Then I ask him, “Do you really think they’ll kill us?”
He studies the blur of landscape as we sweep past, trees so close that branches slap the sides of the truck—and us, if we don’t duck in time.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” he finally answers. “But it’s a possibility. The longer they don’t, the more likely they won’t, is the way I see it. Unless something changes, some part of the equation.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Like they find out who I am, or who you are—or who your dad is. But then again, that might work in your favor. They might think you’re worth something to them.”
“Worth something?”
“Prisoner exchange,” he says. “That sort of thing. But they’d need to stash you someplace, and I don’t know where that would be. Maybe in the North.”
“In North Vietnam?” I say in a panic. “But how?”
The truck bounces through a deep rut in the road. Some of the wounded NVA soldiers are thrown off their stretchers and the guards motion for us to help them back up.
After we get them settled again and discover another one who has died during the journey, TJ explains. “West is Cambodia. Northwest is Laos. North is North Vietnam. Simple geography. The North Viets have a secret trail that crosses the border and goes up through Cambodia and Laos. It’s how they got all their soldiers down here to attack Saigon and how they’ve been supplying the guerrilla army, the Viet Cong, all these years down here in the South. It’s been their supply line throughout the war.”
“If it’s a secret trail, then how come you know about it?” I ask.
He laughs. “It’s a secret trail that everybody knows about,” he says. “Except that they sort of do and they sort of don’t. The US can’t legally cross the border to do anything about it. And anyway, it’s not just one trail, it’s a whole network of trails, and the ones they use change all the time, and most of them are camouflaged, and some are so deep inside Cambodia and Laos that even if we—or the South Viets—do cross the border to go after them, it isn’t possible to go that far, because it would be considered an invasion, and there’s no government authorization for that. Even air raids have limited success. And believe me, we’ve flown hundreds of them. Thousands.”
We’re deep into the countryside now, with wide swaths of green rice paddies spreading out from the sides of the narrow road. “The North Viets call it the Reunification Trail,” TJ says. “They also call it Blood Road. Because they’ve shed so much blood on it—building it, defending it, transporting troops and supplies down it. They even strap bags of gas and oil to their people and have them carry it down the Trail since there’s no pipeline. Not yet, anyway. Our side calls it the Ho Chi Minh Trail. You probably got that from the newspapers back in the States? Or on the nightly news?”
I shake my head. “I guess I haven’t been paying too much attention.”
TJ spits off the side of the truck as we slow down in the middle of nowhere. “You do know who Ho Chi Minh is, don’t you?” he asks.
“Yeah, sure,” I say. “President of North Vietnam. Everybody knows that.”
“Close enough,” TJ says. “Anyway, looks like we’re here.”
We stop under a small copse of trees on an island at the center of more acres of green rice paddies spreading out on both sides of the narrow dirt road. I’m guessing we’re maybe twenty miles outside Saigon. A boy sits on the back of a water buffa
lo in the middle of one of the rice paddies, his face shadowed by his wide conical hat. In the distance, maybe half a mile away, is a green wall of thick jungle. Red dust envelops us from the dry road and breathing it leaves me parched—too dry to form any saliva and spit it out. My tongue feels swollen.
TJ points to the green wall. “I’m guessing that’s where we’re going.”
Guards swing their bamboo staffs to herd us out of the truck—me, TJ, and a dozen other prisoners, all Vietnamese. I should have figured out already why we’re here, but I don’t put two and two together until they order us to lift the stretchers and carry them single file along narrow dikes through the rice paddies toward the distant hills. TJ says the North Viets must have a hospital hidden over there to treat their casualties from the fighting in Saigon. I nod and keep my head down. Any time we slow, guards sprint up next to us, knee deep in the water, their AK-47s slung over their shoulders, and strike harder with their bamboo staffs. I have blisters on my feet from Dad’s dress shoes. I want to peel off the suit coat I still have on, but I’m afraid to stop and put down my end of the stretcher, so I continue, sweating profusely until I’m too dehydrated to even do that. The dirty, stagnant water in the rice paddies starts to look good, but there’s no way to stop, and I take my cue from TJ, who marches ahead at a pace that seems to please the guards but is killing me.
The man on our stretcher suddenly moans and opens his eyes. He winces in pain with every step we take and presses his hand to his heavily bandaged side. Blood has seeped through the bandages, and he lifts his hand to his face and seems surprised to see it covered in red. TJ’s face, which was crusted in blood when I first saw him, is openly bleeding now, too. When it gets in his eyes, he stops and wipes his face on his T-shirt. I pull off my paisley tie and knot it into a headband.
The sun is a merciless ball directly overhead, burning what’s left of my brain.
Eventually the rice paddies end and we enter the jungle—so thick I can’t see a way through. Once we’re there, though, an opening, just wide enough for us to pass inside, materializes and to anyone watching from the trucks back on the red dirt road it probably looks like we just suddenly disappear. It’s darker in here, with overhanging trees, impossible to see more than a few feet into the foliage. The path twists and turns, runs straight for a while, then seems to run the other way, the way we just came. Another trail branches off, then another.
A soldier stands guard where the path makes yet another sudden turn. He wears a wide-brimmed conical hat like the peasants in the fields. He points and we follow the stretcher-bearers in front still deeper into the jungle. The path dips slightly, to a trickle of water that was probably a true stream before this winter drought—and no doubt will be again when it’s the rainy season. TJ says something in Vietnamese to the guard. The guard looks around before nodding.
“It’s okay to get a drink,” TJ says. I hesitate at first, because as desperately thirsty as I am, all I heard from Mom for the past three days was how I wasn’t to drink the water, no matter what, unless it was boiled for twenty minutes first.
TJ lies flat on his belly and scoops handfuls up to his parched lips, and I decide better to catch some disease than die of thirst. The guard brings a canteen to the wounded man and holds it to his mouth, though most of it dribbles down his cheeks.
The guard pokes us with his bamboo staff. We stand up from the water reluctantly. He waves at us with his AK-47, so we pick up the stretcher again. I brace myself for miles of the same, but a few minutes later we’re standing at an opening in the ground I might have walked right over if another North Viet guard hadn’t been standing there, gesturing for us to lower the wounded man inside.
Peering into the hole, I see several of the men from the truck, our fellow prisoners. TJ and I hand our stretcher down, then climb in after it to an enormous underground room, with wood and rope beds, kerosene lamps, and crude operating tables, every one of them holding a bleeding man or woman, surrounded by a team of doctors or nurses or whatever they are—none wear surgical masks or scrubs or gowns or anything that makes them look medical, just NVA uniforms or what look like black pajama pants and shirts like I saw earlier on people working in the rice paddies.
We pick up our stretcher again and carry it to a triage area, and as my eyes adjust to the semi-dark I see armed soldiers everywhere, food cooking in large iron pots over small fires, cisterns full of water, tables and chairs, and more lanterns, and entrances to other rooms or tunnels shooting off from the hospital area. Somebody shoves small plates of rice and grub worms at TJ and me and the Vietnamese prisoners who’ve brought in other stretchers. I hesitate, but the others dig in, scooping the food with their fingers. Two minutes later, a guard snatches the plates, and I have time to shove a fistful of rice in my mouth before the guard gets mine, too. He finishes what’s left as he walks away with the tin plates.
Then they’re back at us with their bamboo staffs, shooing us out of the underground and into the harsh sunlight.
“What now?” I ask TJ.
“More stretchers,” he says. “That’s my guess.”
I want him to keep talking to me, but he lapses into silence after that and we plod back down the trail. I wish I could shut off my brain, but every few minutes, my anxiety spikes so high I find it hard to get a good breath. I’m afraid that at any second one of the guards will turn his weapon on me. I’m afraid they might have already killed Mom and Dad. I’m afraid they’re going to take me to North Vietnam and nobody will ever know what happened to me. I’m afraid I’ll never see my family again, or my friends, or anybody. Never go home to New York, or hear any more bands, or swim on the swim team, or hang out with Geoff, or learn how to drive a car.
I’m afraid I’ll never get to live my actual life. I keep picturing the guy whose leg got shot off, the dead man with the chest wound, the poor military police back in Saigon who ended up dead in the street, all because of me.
The trucks are gone when we return to the road, but there are dozens of stretchers still there, hidden in that copse of trees. We pick up a man whose head and face are so heavily bandaged that I can barely make out the contours of his mouth and nose. Half his clothes have been burned off, and one of his arms and one of his legs and part of his torso are black and charred and oozing pus. The rancid smell from the wounds is even worse than looking at them, and I gag.
“Get it together,” TJ hisses at me. “Don’t make a scene.”
I swallow hard, then lift my end. I ache all over and just want to drop my side and lie down. But off we go, over the dikes and through the rice paddies and the long, searing half mile back to the green wall of jungle and the underground hospital. I’m too tired to say anything to TJ until we climb back out, and once again get to stop at the little stream. “If they bring us to North Vietnam, how far is that?” I ask TJ. “How long would it take?”
“Weeks. Maybe months,” he says, glancing over to keep an eye on the guards watching us. “They wouldn’t waste using their transport vehicles to get us there, so we’d be walking the Trail the whole way. Under armed guard. My guess is it would just be you and me, and any other Americans they’ve captured.”
“What about these other guys?” I ask. “These South Vietnamese prisoners?”
“They’ll keep them around as long as they’re useful,” he says.
“What about when they’re not useful anymore?”
“Like I said, they’ll keep them around as long as they’re useful, but they won’t let them go. Maybe some prisoners will try to defect, to save themselves. Try to convince the North Viets that they want to join the cause. But that probably won’t happen.”
“And what happens to us once we’re in the North? Where would they take us exactly?” I ask.
“Probably the Hanoi Hilton,” he says.
I can’t tell if he’s being serious. “Is it nice?”
He laughs a dry laugh. “It’s not what you think,” he says. “They only call it that. It’s a prison. Wh
ere they keep American prisoners of war. Pilots they shot down. Long-range reconnaissance guys that got captured. You see those POWs making propaganda statements on the news, about how America shouldn’t be in the war and they’re sorry they took part in bombing Hanoi and the poor, innocent North Vietnamese people? Those guys are in the Hanoi Hilton. Not a fun place.”
I know what he’s talking about. I’ve seen some of those captured American pilots on the news, wearing striped pajamas with their hair chopped off. They were dirty and weary and thin as skeletons, with dark, cavernous circles around their eyes. They read statements denouncing the American war effort, but not like they meant it.
We finish our trip back into the jungle and the twisting path, once again lowering the stretcher carefully into the dark hole, then climbing down and carrying the wounded man into the triage area. It’s hard negotiating the rough ground coming from blinding light to half night, and even harder stumbling out back into the glare of the afternoon. But we aren’t allowed to stop.
“Look, there might be a way out of this,” TJ whispers to me as we stumble back onto the path. “Up ahead here, there’s maybe a fifty-meter stretch where they don’t have any guards posted, a big curve in the trail, and there’s no visibility from ahead or behind. When I give the signal, we dive off the trail. It’s going to be a steep plunge down the side, and it’s going to hurt. There’s a chance we can get some distance between us and them before they realize we’ve escaped.”
“And then what?” I ask. “What do we do after that?”
“Then we run,” he says.
I’m not at all sure about this plan, if you can even call it that, and I have a hundred questions about how it can possibly work. It sounds insane. Desperate and insane. But before I can say anything else, we’re there.
“Ready?” TJ asks. We’re in the clear, at least for the moment.
On Blood Road Page 4