On Blood Road

by Steve Watkins

  He doesn’t wait for me to say, just plunges off the trail the way he said he would, and goes crashing through the brush.

  I freeze. I should follow him, but I just can’t. I don’t know why. It’s too sudden. I’m too scared. Too much of a coward.

  The guards are suddenly next to me, yelling and pointing. One hits me hard behind my knees with his bamboo staff and I crumple to the ground. He keeps beating me, and I curl up in a ball and cover my head until he stops. After, I just lie there whimpering, my clothes torn, dust in my eyes, blood in my mouth.

  There’s more yelling as they chase TJ. A three-round burst of automatic weapon fire. Then more shouting. Then nothing.

  I can’t believe it. Just minutes before, TJ was the one person I could sort of depend on to help me survive all this. And now he’s dead. And now I have nobody.

  The guards pair me up with a Vietnamese prisoner who looks as frightened as I feel, and we spend the remaining daylight hours trudging back and forth between the road and the underground hospital. More trucks come with more casualties from Saigon. Part of me feels terrible for all the wounded men and women. Part of me wants them all to die for what they did to the MPs, and to TJ, and to the marines at the embassy, and to who knows how many others.

  People speak to one another in Vietnamese—guards yelling orders, prisoners whispering. I stay silent, desperately alone, with no one to talk to and no idea what’s going on without TJ.

  At one point late in the day they grab me and my new partner and march us into the jungle to bury TJ. I don’t know why they just left him there all that time. They don’t bother to explain, and I couldn’t understand them anyway. I try not to look at TJ’s body, or to step in the pool of blood that seeps into the dry earth. There aren’t any shovels, just sticks they hand us, and then point to where we’re supposed to dig. It will be a shallow grave at best, and I’m sure whatever animals live in these woods will be able to get at the body without any trouble. But I’m still glad when they tell us to stop. I’ve been working hard to shut down my brain, to ward off a full-blown panic attack. It helps that I’m so exhausted, so woozy from the hunger and dehydration, that I can barely stand up. I grab TJ under his arms and lift. His head rolls back in this ghastly way. His whole body, everything about him, is limp and dead heavy. My Vietnamese partner takes TJ’s feet. Even together we aren’t strong enough to lift him all the way off the ground, so we half carry, half drag him to the hole and roll him in. I stack as many stones as I can over him, covering his face first so I won’t have to look at it anymore, then we push dirt back on top of the stones and then we’re done.

  There is no more rice or grubs on tin plates when we finish our work that night. The guards march us deep into the jungle, away from the underground hospital, where they tie us to a tree, me and a half dozen other prisoners, our backs pressed into the rough bark, our shoulders jabbing into one another. Our unhappy guards sit nearby, their guns on their knees as they smoke cigarettes and talk in the growing dark. They give us a single canteen of dirty water. I’m the last to get it, and by the time it makes its way around the circle of prisoners, each of them taking a drink and then handing it off to whoever is next, it’s empty except for a few drops I manage to shake out on my tongue. The man next to me, the one who finished off the last of the water, won’t look at me. It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing I can do, but that doesn’t stop me from complaining to the guard. “He drank it all!” I shake the empty canteen at him, desperate for him to understand and offer more water.

  He ignores me.

  Our hands are tied in front of us, with a longer rope threaded behind our elbows, binding us all together and to the tree. I don’t think it will be possible to sleep. I’m too hungry and thirsty and traumatized by everything I saw the night before and throughout this awful day. Too haunted by the images of the dead military police and TJ. I was in a fight once, in seventh-grade gym class. It was during a basketball game. Somebody fouled me, and one thing led to another and somebody said something and I said something back, and the next thing I knew we were rolling on the gym floor, punching at each other. I got a fat lip. The other kid’s nose got broken, and the coach came over and got him to stop crying long enough to use his thumbs to straighten out the cartilage.

  I had nightmares about seeing that kid’s face for weeks after and didn’t want to go back to school. I thought I was a terrible person for what I’d done to him, even though he was pretty much fine and over it in a couple of days.

  And that was it—my entire history of violence, except for stuff I’d seen in the movies and on TV and on the news. But that stuff didn’t count. That stuff was all pretend, or far enough away that it amounted to the same thing.

  This, though—this is different. I have dried blood on me from the man who died in the cage back at the racetrack. My clothes are also covered in TJ’s blood. And I still have it on my hands. And I have welts all over from the beatings by the guards with their bamboo staffs.

  Yet even with all of that, I sleep. They might still be planning to kill me tomorrow, or start the long march with me to Hanoi, but one last thought I have as I slip under is that at least I survived today.

  I wake up in total darkness, disoriented, thrashing, confused that I can’t move my hands or my body, just my legs, flailing wildly until someone kicks me back hard in the shin to get me to stop. I freeze, remembering where I am, slowly coming out of the fog of deep sleep as night sounds crescendo around me. Insects, night birds, crawling things in the brush, wind in the trees. My eyes adjust slowly. I rub them with my bound hands and try to blink out the dust. I can’t swallow. My mouth and throat are too dry. I have to pee, only there’s no way to do it. I can’t get up, can’t walk away from the tree and the other prisoners, can’t ask the guards to let me loose so I can go—even if I knew where they were.

  I hold it for as long as I can, but then give up and pee on myself. It’s warm at first but quickly turns cold. I try to pull what’s left of my suit coat tighter around me, thankful in the chill of deep night or predawn morning that I didn’t toss it away the day before, even though I sweated through it over and over. I spend the next hour, or however long it is, hating the man beside me, the one who finished off the water in the canteen. All I can think about is how thirsty I am, so desperate to drink that I would do anything, give up anything, for just a sip of water.

  Finally, mercifully, the guards come back with another canteen and this time I’m first. I want to drink it all, every last drop, but the man on my other side is already grasping for the water with his bound hands. He can’t reach all the way because of how we’re tied up. I can keep it all for myself and make up for the miserable night and pay them all back for cheating me the day before.

  But then a guard snatches the canteen out of my hands and shoves it at my neighbor. He stands watching as the prisoners each have their drink and pass it on. And then, once the canteen makes it all the way around the tree, he unties us. It doesn’t make any sense. Why not let us loose before? It isn’t like anybody is going to run off. My legs are cramping so bad that I can barely stand, and my shoulders are so stiff I can’t lift my arms. All of us stagger around the small clearing, trying to get the blood circulating.

  Another guard comes with a pot of sticky rice. The other prisoners hold out their hands. Each gets two fistfuls, which they stuff in their mouths right away, maybe worried that somebody will steal it if they don’t. I take a small bite of mine and chew for as long as I can, and then another, and another, until, sadly, it’s gone. My stomach rumbles, and I have to go to the bathroom. I pantomime for the guard, to get his permission. I know enough by now not to try to do anything without their okay. He laughs and points to a bush, and then stands over me while I squat and do my business. I ignore him, past caring about things like privacy that no longer exist.

  Afterward, they march us down a narrow path back to the hospital. The stench hits well before we get there—of rotting flesh and buckets of blood—an
d I’m not the only one who gags as the guards herd us inside. There are as many stretchers full of wounded men, women, and teenagers as there were the day before. We have a different job this morning, though: collecting piles of amputated limbs and carrying them outside to burn or bury. I freeze for a second and then bend over, dry heaving until a guard strikes me with his bamboo staff across my shoulders and knocks me to the stone floor. They jerk me back to my feet. Sticky rice comes up in my throat and I’m afraid I’ll lose it, so I force myself to swallow it back down, though it leaves a bitter acid taste in my mouth.

  We place as many of the severed limbs as will fit on torn sections of tarpaulin and carry them aboveground, then down another hidden path deep into the jungle, where we drop them in a large hole. A guard throws lime powder over each load of arms and legs and feet and hands, covering every new layer as we add them to the pit. I think about the poet Walt Whitman’s description of a similar pile of severed body parts—“human fragments, cut, bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening”—under a gnarled catalpa tree outside a mansion-turned-combat-hospital in Virginia during the Civil War. We read it in literature class last year, a lifetime ago.

  And here it is a hundred years later, another war halfway around the world, and it looks like nothing has changed.

  I spend most of the day panicking about Mom and Dad and the attack on the embassy. I tie my coat around my waist and refasten my tie around my head, and for hours without stopping we carry more stretchers from the road through the rice paddies to the jungle, or we carry more pieces of men and women that no longer matter out to the lime pit. All of it reminds me that the battle must still be raging back in Saigon, but not knowing anything about it—and especially about what happened at the embassy—is making me crazy. Mom and I haven’t gotten along in forever, and neither have me and Dad, since he abandoned me for the war in Vietnam, but they’re still my parents.

  They let us drink out of the filthy stream that TJ and I drank from the day before, but there’s no more food, no sticky rice, no nothing. The guards no longer follow us so closely, and they don’t hit us with their bamboo staffs. I guess they figure they have us trained well enough by now that none of it is necessary. And since they killed TJ, everybody knows what will happen if they try to escape.

  It’s funny how even the most awful things—carrying amputated limbs, corpses, and dying people, with their horrible wounds and gross smells and awful noises—can become not normal, exactly, but not abnormal. You don’t get used to it, but you don’t freak out about it, either. Not after a while. Not after a couple of days. Maybe exhaustion makes you deaf and blind, or maybe your senses just turn off because you can’t take anything else in. All I know is that I’m numb, but I keep walking, keep carrying stretchers, keep drinking from that stream, keep filling the tarp with body parts, keep putting one foot in front of the other. My brain even shuts down, so that I eventually quit worrying about Mom and Dad, or anybody or anything. I just want to finish the trek I’m on and get back to that stream, back to that water, and drink and rest, and nothing else matters.

  Except that, from time to time, the panic hits me again, never far from the surface. And then, in those flashes, it’s all I can do to keep from collapsing in a little heap and crying for my mom and begging the guards to let me go see her and make sure she’s all right—or yell at the guards that my dad is going to come looking for me and they better be ready when he finds me, because he’s going to make them pay in all kinds of terrible ways for what they’ve done.

  Several of the prisoners do collapse when we’re out in the broiling sun, negotiating the dikes through the rice paddies. They stumble, sag to their knees, carefully place or drop their end of the stretcher, and then fall forward or pitch sideways into the dank water and the rice shoots. Sometimes the guards pull them up and they regain their balance. Sometimes the guards have to drag them to some small spot of shade to let them rest. One man falls and doesn’t get back up. They drag him away. We never see him again.

  Late in the afternoon, in the bunker where we’ve just brought another wounded NVA soldier, they let us sit, and then seem to forget we’re there, shuffled to the side, our backs against the wall. A couple of the prisoners fall asleep, slumped over on their sides on the stone floor. I just sit there, slack-jawed, dully watching the frenzied activity as the doctors run from patient to patient and fight to remove shell fragments and bullets and shattered bones and shredded tissue and all those arms and legs and feet we’ll be carrying off soon enough to the lime pit.

  I’m vaguely aware of people climbing down into the hospital, an NVA patrol pausing at the bottom of the ladder, surveying what’s going on, and then making their way deeper inside—and over to our little squad of prisoners. They stop in front of us. I try not to look up—TJ warned me not to make eye contact—but there’s something deeply familiar about one of the new soldiers. And the way he’s gazing, hard, makes me think he sees something familiar in me as well. And then it hits me, shaking me from my stupor.

  “Hanh!” I shout, jumping to my feet. It’s Dad’s driver!

  “What are you doing here?” I say, my voice way too loud. I’m so excited to see him, sure that he’s here for me. “Did you come to get me?”

  Hanh frowns, takes another step forward, and slaps me so hard that I fall back to the floor, sprawling into the other prisoners.

  I just lie there for a minute, not moving, not seeing or hearing anything, my mind blank. When the fog lifts, I pull myself into a seated position and press my hand to my burning cheek. Hanh glares at me, then turns away to confer with some other soldiers. After a few minutes, he turns around to look at me again. A young woman wearing the loose black clothing instead of a uniform—but still carrying an AK-47—turns with him. I crab-walk back, afraid he’s going to hit me again.

  “Stop cowering,” Hanh says. “Get up. No one will hurt you—as long as you do what you’re told.”

  I struggle to my feet but keep as much distance between us as I can. Most of the activity has stopped.

  “What are you going to do to me?” I ask in a shaky voice. “And can you tell me, about my mother—”

  “I know nothing about her,” he says.

  “But is she alive? And my dad?” I ask. “Can you just tell me that? Please?”

  “I know nothing about them,” he says again, his voice even, his face impassive. “Do not ask again.” He nods at the girl. “You will go with this soldier, Comrade Phuong Tram. That is all you need to know.”

  He looks me up and down, then says something in Vietnamese to Phuong. He turns back to me. “In America you can be a stupid, foolish boy and nothing will come of it. You think you can do whatever you like. You think the world belongs to you. Do not make the mistake of thinking you can be so stupid and foolish here.”

  He turns on his heel and leaves. Phuong and two young Vietnamese soldiers, wearing all black like her, stay. One of them hands her a length of bamboo with a rope threaded through it and a noose on the end. I back farther away, stones in the wall cutting into my back, convinced they’re going to hang me. I beg them to please, please don’t, but I’m helpless to stop them. The two young soldiers grab my arms and hold me while Phuong fits the noose over my head and tightens it around my throat—tight enough that I can feel it, but not so tight that I can’t breathe or swallow or speak. The other soldier ties my hands behind my back. I’m trembling so hard that I can’t stand on my own. The rope cuts into my neck when my knees start to buckle.

  But it’s not what I think. Phuong steps behind me, the end of the bamboo prodding me in the back of my neck, and she forces me forward. Too fast and the rope chokes me. Too slow and I get stabbed by the bamboo. We head east on a narrow trail into the jungle.

  I remember what TJ told me about the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Hanoi Hilton, and my heart sinks. I trip and fall forward. The noose jerks my head back and bites into my throat, cutting off my air. I flop helplessly on the ground, trying to breathe and not pan
ic, until the two soldiers grab me under my arms and pull me to my feet. Phuong gives me a minute, then forces me on down the trail, with stones and roots and vines everywhere to trip me again and again. I pitch forward a second time and nearly land on my face, but somehow manage to catch myself, though I stagger sideways into a thornbush. The thorns rip away what’s left of one sleeve of my coat and rake my arm bloody. Phuong loosens the noose a little. I hope I’ll see something like sympathy in her eyes, but instead it looks more like hate.

  We’re an hour from the underground hospital when we hear, screaming through the air, the earsplitting sound of jets. Explosions rip the world somewhere behind us. Fireballs erupt into the sky. Plumes of white smoke. The jets roar past, low to the ground, then circle back toward the hospital, or the rice paddies, or the road to Saigon: too far away to know. There are more explosions, more fireballs, more smoke. The ground shakes like an earthquake. We all fall.

  Phuong is the first to stand, staring hard as if she can see beyond the trees and the brush. The other two guards pull themselves up as well. They tug at her sleeve to get her to go, but she won’t move. They yank me to my feet, both their faces twisted with worry. The jets circle overhead one more time and then turn back toward Saigon. The white smoke turns black, and the sky grows dark as the haze kills the afternoon sun.

  We walk for hours afterward. The sky eventually clears, leaving us exposed under the blazing sun, or gasping for air under the stifling shade of overhanging trees that form a winding tunnel through forest, the bushes and bamboo stands and grasses on either side of the trail so thick it makes me claustrophobic.

  I beg them—beg Phuong—to untie my hands and take off the noose, but she ignores me. They all do. My neck is rubbed raw from the rope, and with every step the chafing worsens. I can’t see, but imagine rivulets of blood streaming from my throat down the front of my shirt. I can’t feel my hands. I pee myself again as we continue the march. Phuong and the others never seem to tire. They never stop. They never drink from their canteens. Not for those first hours after the bombings. They wear the straw hats so the sun doesn’t bake their heads the way it does mine. I still have the paisley tie around my forehead, partly shading my eyes, but nothing for my sunburned nose and dried, cracked lips.