On Blood Road

by Steve Watkins

  “Vu doesn’t like you, either,” Phuong says. I think maybe she’ll smile when she says it, but her expression doesn’t change, so she must be serious about that, too. Maybe about everything.

  “This is a war, Taylor,” she says, her expression still not changing. “You still don’t seem to know what that means, but you will learn. I didn’t know what it meant when I was a schoolgirl in the North, in Hanoi, but that was a long time ago. Before the Americans began bombing us. Before we were forced to see, right in front of us, in our own families, so much death. The carnage. Before we left our homes and came to liberate the South and face your army. You are a foolish boy who thinks he did a heroic thing. If I had died in the river, I would have died as a martyr to the great cause of uniting our country. The People’s Army requires that dedication of all.”

  It sounds like a propaganda speech, but everything she’s saying, I can tell she believes. In her mind, we’re the enemy—the Americans and the South Vietnamese. And I guess the French before us. We’re the bad guys. Phuong says they’re fighting to liberate their own country. Geoff, whose parents are both liberal, pacifist professors at Columbia University, is always saying the same thing back home—that the South Vietnam government is corrupt, a puppet controlled by the US, and that America is on the wrong side in this war. Geoff says Ho Chi Minh is, like, the Abraham Lincoln of Vietnam, and this is their Civil War.

  It’s the opposite of everything I’ve ever heard from Dad, who says the North Vietnamese are communists, in league with the Soviet Union and the Red Chinese, out to destroy democracy. He says Ho Chi Minh is as bad as Stalin and Mao, and all the communist countries want the same thing: world domination.

  I don’t know what to think.

  I lie back on the hard ground and close my eyes. Vu is doing a kind of whistle-snoring, until Phuong crawls over and pinches his nose. He flops around for a second and then is still. I shut my eyes again, taking some small comfort in the soft night sounds—the river, a gentle wind through the trees—and I’m almost asleep when a thought comes to me: Phuong said my name, for the first and only time. That has to mean something.

  The next morning it’s cold sticky rice and nasty tapioca roots for breakfast—a smaller handful for me; not much more than that for Phuong, Vu, and Trang—and then we’re back on our feet, following the curve of the river to find the trail we lost, or gave up, or haven’t yet found after the crossing. The new sandals chafe some, but not nearly as bad as Dad’s wing tips did. The black uniform I’m wearing is cooler and a lot more comfortable than what had been left of my suit, and as the sun rises and bakes the earth yet again, the straw hat is a great relief, like having an umbrella on my head to keep me in shade. Any time we find water, no matter how small the stream or how shallow the pond, Phuong, Vu, and Trang splash themselves head to toe, and then air-dry as we continue walking afterward. I start doing the same thing, and that helps keep me cooler, too.

  And then suddenly there’s no more jungle. We pull up short at the edge of what looks like it should be a cliff. Instead we’re just a step removed from a barren landscape that stretches before us farther than we can see. A ghost forest, ground cover gone, no leaves on the trees, the trees themselves little more than white-gray stalks, thousands and thousands of them, most broken, some nothing but ragged stumps with shards so sharp that to stumble into one would mean being impaled. Everything seems white, not just the trees. Everything. Like somebody dumped massive amounts of powder in every direction.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” I ask Phuong. What is this?

  “The Americans call it the Iron Triangle,” Phuong says.

  “What happened here?” I ask.

  She scowls and then counts off on her fingers: “Phosphorus. Poison herbicide. Agent Orange. Napalm. American bombers have sprayed hundreds of thousands of kilograms across the whole province, from this forest and the Saigon River in the South, to the Thi Tinh River in the East, to the Than Dien forest in the North.”

  “Can we go around it?” I ask. The last thing I want to do is be anywhere close to all this chemical death.

  “We’ll have to wait until night when we can’t be seen by spotter planes or patrols,” Phuong says. “And then we’ll go through.”

  We rest and sleep through the heat of the afternoon, hidden in the jungle where the air force hasn’t reached with their—I guess with our—chemical sprays and mass defoliants and incendiary bombs.

  As soon as it’s dusk, we move out—Phuong once again in the lead, then Trang, me, and Vu bringing up the rear and making sure I don’t try to run. Not that there’s anywhere to run to. I can’t see that we’re following a trail anymore, so maybe it’s the stars, the constellations, something nocturnal, anyway. We’ve only been walking for half an hour when Phuong pulls up suddenly. We all step to the side of the path. There isn’t any place to hide except almost comically behind one of the white trees—all four of us. With the moon out, and no clouds, and no other cover, we couldn’t be more exposed. We might as well be out in the daytime.

  A line of soldiers materializes out of the ghost forest. Phuong steps out from behind the tree and quietly hails them, her voice a whisper. But the forest is so deathly quiet that it still seems to echo. The line freezes and three people in the lead, two men and a woman, separate themselves from the night army to speak to Phuong. Vu and Trang pull me out into the open as well. The officers, if that’s what they are, look me over hard. One woman lifts her weapon and keeps it leveled at me.

  Phuong lowers her voice even more and shows them some papers. Vu and Trang are summoned and hand over their papers as well. One of the officers produces a penlight and studies the documents, then turns the light on me, directly into my face. I blink nervously and can’t stop blinking until he shuts it off.

  There’s more whispered conversation, and then the officers rejoin their unit and march on, or rather creep, through the prairie of dead trees and white ash. What I thought was a small unit, maybe a platoon, turns out to be several hundred—a battalion—moving not in a straight line as I also thought, but spread out much wider. We wait for them to pass, but every time I think they’re gone, there’s a break, and then another wave of soldiers—all of them in military uniforms, none of them with ranks showing that I can see.

  And then, without warning, the night explodes. A squad of low-flying planes suddenly appears overhead, flooding the forest with searchlights. The gunships roll over on their sides as they pass, opening up with their side guns. Hundreds of rounds rain down on us, red phosphorus tracers lighting up the sky and the ground and everything in between. I know what they are—converted cargo planes that the Vietnamese call Dragon Ships because those red tracers make it look like they’re spitting fire. The Americans call them Puffs, like Puff the Magic Dragon, each one capable of spewing eighteen thousand rounds a minute from three massive guns, blasting soldiers and trees into splinters. I can’t move, just stand there, transfixed by the suddenness, by the awesome firepower, by the deafening sound, by the psychedelic light show, by the chaos and frenzy as everyone runs in every direction until they can’t. I see a man literally shot in half not ten feet away. Two men run past me going as hard as they can, stupidly looking behind them. Both slam into trees, knocking one out completely, while the other becomes a slow-crawling target who is quickly killed, his head split open, his body dancing on the ground as more bullets catch what’s left of his corpse.

  My legs give out and I sit at the base of a white tree. I press my hands over my ears and, without meaning to, start shouting, not saying anything that makes sense, just noise to try to drown out the horror. The Dragon Ships keep circling and I keep squeezing, but there’s no escape: It’s every monster that ever hid under my bed when I was little, or lurked in my closet and sprang out at me in nightmares; it’s every siren screaming toward every blood-soaked tragedy down New York streets; it’s riots in Harlem, a meteor striking Earth, the atomic bomb, the end of the world.

  And it stops as abruptl
y as it began. The Puffs straighten themselves and leave, maybe out of ammunition or maybe on to a new target, leaving behind murdered earth and skeletons of trees bursting into flame and white dust, a ghastly rain falling on everything and everybody, the living, and the dying, and the dead.

  There’s a terrible efficiency to how quickly the NVA survivors bury their dead. Teams with trenching tools hack out shallow graves. Other teams pick up bodies or what’s left of them. Some collect identification papers from their dead friends, some take their weapons, some gather rucksacks and rice rations and ammo pouches and knives and anything else—uniforms, boots, helmets. Some fashion stretchers with bamboo staffs and ponchos. Others take up the stretchers and the march continues toward Saigon.

  Nobody speaks to me, or gives me orders, or even seems to notice I’m here. I could be invisible.

  I wonder if Phuong and Vu and Trang have been killed, and if that means I’m on my own. Free, but so far away from home that it doesn’t seem possible that I could ever get back there. Not just to Saigon and the embassy, but New York. Do I even have a home anymore? My parents could be dead for all I know. The full weight of that realization—how completely and horribly alone I am in the world—makes me drop back to the ground, where I sit, legs splayed, arms so weak they fall palms up as if they’ll come unattached like all those amputated limbs I carried out of the underground hospital.

  Two ghosts emerge from out of the gloom—Phuong and Trang, covered in that same white dust that camouflages us all. They don’t speak, just slump to the ground next to me, letting their rifles drop beside them. Nobody moves, nobody says anything, no explanation about what happened to Vu, but no need to ask. I care but I don’t care. So he’s dead. At least I’m not alone.

  Phuong is the first to stir. She shakes herself. Lightly slaps her own face. Then says, “We can’t stay here. The Dragon Ships might come back.”

  That doesn’t seem likely, especially since the NVA battalion is long gone. There’s little cover in the skeletal forest during the night, but there’ll be even less during the day. So we move out, stumbling across the pocked earth. I trip a couple of times. Trang does, too, and accidentally discharges his AK-47. Phuong chews him out in Vietnamese, her voice hoarse from all the dust, or from screaming like I did during the attack, or from fatigue. Trang doesn’t respond.

  The Saigon River bends near us deep into our night march, the water a harsh, metallic silver. We climb down the bank to wash the dust out of our eyes and mouths, and to fill canteens. Phuong hands me the extra canteen and says to keep it. It must have been Vu’s. She also gives me a rice carrier like the long cotton tubes she and Trang wear over their shoulders. She tells me it holds two weeks’ worth of dried rice. I wonder if that means we’re two weeks away from Hanoi, but that can’t be right. From what TJ told me it would be more like two months, so we’ll have to get more rice from somewhere along the way—if they’re actually taking me to Hanoi. So far, Phuong hasn’t said.

  The sun rises that morning on a new problem: the sudden end of the trees. As dead as they were, as white and ashen, at least they broke up the landscape. But now it’s as if we’re walking on the moon. Even the air feels too thin to sustain us, as if most of the oxygen has been vacuumed out of this place. It’s deathly quiet, our footsteps the only sounds. No birds, no forest creatures, no wind through trees, no trees at all, no wind at all, no brush, no livestock, no roads, no paths, no villages or hamlets, no people.

  We pass burnt mounds of what must have once been trees and brush, but long since destroyed and turned to cinders. Then we come to the edge of an enormous crater.

  Phuong stops us. The silence is so heavy that it turns just standing here into a battle with gravity.

  “This was the village of Ben Suc,” she says.

  “It looks like a meteorite landed here,” I say, looking around in horror.

  “No,” Phuong said. “Just Americans and South Vietnamese. They attacked from the air first and bombed every hamlet and village in this province. Then the ground troops and the tanks moved in. They dropped leaflets from spotter planes telling all who lived here that it had been declared a free-fire zone, which meant they were authorized to shoot everyone and target anything.”

  “There was a battle?” I ask.

  “No,” Phuong says. “Only a slaughter from the sky. Some escaped. Some were captured. Some were relocated. Many were killed. Afterward, they drove in with their bulldozers to destroy all the buildings, the trees, everything. More phosphorus from the air. More chemicals, not only in the village but everywhere you see. They set fires that burned for weeks.”

  “Because the NVA was here?” I ask.

  She nods. “The National Liberation Front—the Viet Cong guerillas—had controlled the province. The North Vietnamese Army sent me and dozens of others from Hanoi to help them establish political cadres, weapons training, medical clinics. We were stationed here in Ben Suc. Until the Americans came. They found our underground stores of rice and weapons. They brought tons of explosives and placed them in bunkers under the village. Then they blew the whole village away.”

  She sweeps her arm in an arc in front of her. “And so the crater.”

  I can’t get my head around how complete the devastation is, even though it’s right here in front of me—like a giant mouth, silently screaming into the sky above. I’ve seen pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after we dropped the bomb. I could at least see the remains of buildings there, the outlines of foundations and roads. Here, in the crater, there is nothing left. Nothing at all.

  We follow the exposed edge of the crater, careful not to fall in. Phuong says there might still be unexploded bombs. It seems to take forever, but eventually we come to the far side and then keep going until we reach a worn path that Phuong finds, like a secret tunnel into a green forest where the devastation ends and it’s the old Vietnam again—thick foliage, canopy trees, bamboo walls, tiger-tongue vines with thorns so sharp that just grazing the tips leaves bloody claw marks across my arm.

  We come up on the Saigon River yet again, and Phuong lets us pause long enough to wet our bandannas and refill canteens.

  “I’m sorry about Vu,” I say to her, as Trang takes extra time at the river’s edge. “It must be hard to lose your friend like that.”

  Phuong looks at me like she thinks I’m crazy. “Vu wanted to kill you,” she says. “I had to threaten him to keep him from doing it. And he wasn’t my friend. We were comrades, yes. But that’s all.”

  I’m dumbfounded. “Why did he want to kill me?”

  Phuong wipes her sweaty face with her damp bandanna, then ties it around her neck. It’s late afternoon but still sweltering. “He didn’t want to be on this mission. He wanted to join our other comrades in the battle for Saigon. He said we should shoot you and tell our superiors that you tried to escape.”

  “But he was always smiling,” I say stupidly. “I thought he was nice. Nicer than Trang.”

  “Trang wanted to kill you, too,” Phuong says. “He was Vu’s friend, and now he wants to kill you even more. He says it’s because of you that Vu is dead.”

  A chill shoots up my spine. I must look terrified because Phuong seems to take pity on me or something. “I won’t let him,” she assures me. “Unless you try to escape. But you have to do your part.”

  “What’s my part?” I ask, trembling. “And why do you want to keep me alive, anyway?” I’ve come so close to being killed so many times already since getting kidnapped in Saigon, I don’t know why finding this out about Vu and Trang hits me so hard. I want to throw up.

  “We have our orders,” she says. “You don’t need to know anything else. All you need to do is your part—keep close. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Don’t speak to Trang. At night be still and be silent.”

  Trang comes up from the river and sweeps past us back onto the trail. I hesitate, then follow, keeping as much distance between us as Phuong will allow. She’s close behind me, but we don’t talk anymore
that day. I’m tired and hungry and freaked out.

  Maybe what she told me is true. Maybe it’s just her way of scaring me into being compliant. But all along I’ve been compliant—mostly compliant, anyway—so that can’t be it. I carried wounded soldiers until I thought I would pass out. Hauled amputated limbs and helped bury the dead. Walked in Dad’s stupid wing tips until my feet felt like bloody stumps. Been tied to a wall in an underground dungeon until I lost touch with reality.

  I haven’t been any trouble, or I’ve tried not to be. Except for the very occasional tantrum. They have to see that. Trang has to see that.

  I barely sleep that night whenever he’s on guard duty. Every movement, every noise from his direction, hidden near us in the woods, I tense up, my eyes shoot open, and it’s all I can do to keep from scrambling into the brush so he can’t kill me while Phuong is asleep.

  We skip breakfast the next morning, Phuong wanting to put more distance between us and the ghost forest and Ben Suc. Early that afternoon, the jungle path opens onto a wide expanse of elephant grass, half a mile across, and we wade through, following what appears to be the intended trail, judging from some of the grass that’s bent and in some places trampled, as if a group of people congregated in those places, then resumed snaking through in single file.

  One minute Trang is in front of me, and the next minute I’m lying facedown with a loud buzzing in my ears, my eyes clouded over, blood covering my face and hands and everywhere else. Phuong is standing over me, speaking but not making any sound. I try to ask her, “What? What?” But nothing. I check my face for wounds. Then I check my arms and legs and torso. All that blood, but none of it seems to be mine.

  “Trang,” Phuong is saying. “It was Trang.”

  I sit, my head spinning. I hold it with both of my bloody hands. That stops the spinning. Some. I wipe the blood off on elephant grass. I start to get up, but Phuong grabs my arm and holds me in place. “Trang,” she says again.