On Blood Road

by Steve Watkins

  “We should continue today,” Phuong says. “We’re perhaps two days’ walk from the supply base. We might run into NVA patrols. We should meet up with a wider trail, maybe by tomorrow, wide enough for truck convoys. Hopefully we’ll be able to find food soon.”

  She checks her gear, repacks her rucksack, and picks up her AK-47.

  I ask her a question that’s been weighing on me since I learned about the attack on the embassy.

  “Phuong, do you know if my parents are alive?”

  She looks at me evenly, her face drawn.

  “Back in Saigon,” I add, “they were at the embassy when your soldiers attacked.”

  “I don’t know,” Phuong says. “I wasn’t there. But perhaps you can tell me if my mother is alive. My father as well. And my sisters and little brother.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask. “How would I know anything like that?”

  “The Americans have been dropping bombs on Hanoi for years, thousands and thousands of bombs. I haven’t had any letters from my family in more than a year. Since before Ben Suc. You think I may know something about the fate of your mother, so maybe you know something about the fate of my family.” She sounds angry. “They are your bombers, after all, dropping your bombs. The Americans say they only target military installations, but that’s a lie. Many civilians are killed—children, parents, elderly people.”

  I want to protest that those weren’t my bombing raids. I’m an American, but nobody asked my permission to bomb Hanoi, or anywhere else. And my mom is a civilian, too, and has nothing to do with the war. And my dad—Phuong seems to know more about him than I do, and I don’t know what to believe. What if he is the one responsible for bombing the Trail? Does that make me guilty, too? Or is guilt even the right word when you’re doing what your country tells you to do, no matter whether it’s right or wrong? No matter whether you’re my dad or Phuong.

  All those questions from the inquisitor, and from her, all the things I’ve been told, about Dad and the not-so-secret war in Laos and Cambodia to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail. She wants answers, or confirmation, or details. I guess I want those, too. But mostly I just want Mom and Dad to be alive, and safe. And I want to be alive and safe and with them again.

  The aftermath of the rancid monkey stew leaves us depleted. We struggle down the trail, but every few hundred steps, one or the other of us has to sit and rest. At the rate we’re going, I guess it will take a week, not a day, to get to that wider trail Phuong promised—and to the possibility of finding an NVA convoy.

  Neither of us is hungry, but Phuong says we have to eat anyway, or we’ll never have the strength to make it. Only we’re out of food. So she sets her AK-47 on single-shot and kills a barking deer. It happens as we sit yet again on the ground, exhausted from our last hundred meters, so wiped out neither of us moves for several minutes, even when insects buzz our faces, drawn to the streaming sweat. Three small antlerless deer wander up the path toward us, downwind and oblivious, until Phuong aims the gun. The deer barks and the blast are simultaneous. Two flee, one doesn’t, its head torn almost entirely off its body by the force of the shot. Phuong and I approach cautiously, as if it might spring back to life.

  I think the deer will be larger, but as we draw close, the opposite happens. I can’t believe how small it is, maybe the size of a baby goat. There can’t be much meat.

  “I haven’t done this before,” Phuong says. I don’t know whether she means firing her gun or killing barking deer. Though I’m betting on the deer.

  “Do you know how to clean it?” I ask. “Take off the hide. Cut out the organs. All of that?”

  “No,” she says. “Do you?”

  I shake my head. “I grew up in New York City,” I say. “There aren’t any barking deer in New York, unless they’re in the zoo. And you’re not supposed to shoot things at the zoo.”

  “I also grew up in the city,” Phuong reminds me, sounding slightly annoyed.

  Since neither of us know what we are doing, we butcher the deer together, taking turns with Phuong’s combat knife hacking away the hide and the white stuff underneath that keeps it attached to the meat. I’m so grossed out that I know I would start throwing up again if I had anything left inside me. Phuong keeps having to turn away from the butchering. I slit open the deer’s belly and all kinds of disgusting entrails and organs and blood and other fluids pour out, attracting an even bigger swarm of flies. We keep hacking away, separating as much as we can of what seems edible from what doesn’t. When we’re done, we throw everything we aren’t keeping off the trail, figuring the flies will take half and night creatures will drag away the rest.

  At the next stream we stop with our load, start a fire, and fashion a spit, trimming the bark off a small branch and spearing as many pieces of meat as will fit, then propping it over the flames. The meat quickly blackens. The fire pops and sizzles. We turn the stick every few minutes so the venison will be equally scorched all over. We refill canteens, wash off blood and guts from our arms and clothes, and then force ourselves to eat the burnt barking deer. It’s tough and tastes lousy, but it’s better than starving, and at least it isn’t monkey.

  The barking deer meat gets us through the next two days, until it, too, goes bad and we have to throw it away or risk another bout of food poisoning. Well into the second day, our narrow path through jungle opens abruptly onto a wider trail. It’s dusk, but Phuong insists we continue. Tall trees, hardwoods and palms, arch overhead, and Jurassic-size ferns line the way. Trees are bent over deliberately in places, sometimes dozens of them, tied from upper branches to boulders. Phuong says it’s done to hide the Trail from the Americans’ spotter planes, which fly low over the canopy and call in the fighter-bombers or Phantom jets to attack any NVA convoys they find.

  We haven’t walked far, dusk giving way to the fullness of night, when we come up on a woman dressed all in white. I jump, startled, afraid for a second that we’ve stumbled on a real ghost, standing there alone in the spooky darkness. Phuong speaks to her briefly, then we continue.

  “Who was that?” I ask. “What’s she doing here?”

  “There will be others,” Phuong says. “To help the drivers.”

  We round a curve and there’s another woman, also in white. Phuong speaks to her, too.

  “A convoy will be coming,” she says to me after we leave the second woman. “Everywhere there’s a turn in the trail, a bridge crossing, any critical location, there will be a bo doi—a trail soldier—to serve as a human road marker. Most of them are women. They wear white so the drivers can see them more easily since the trucks travel at night without their headlights on. We should be close now to the supply station where the bo doi live while they build and repair roads and pathways and escort convoys through this section of the Trail.”

  Though dead tired, we keep going through much of the night, passing dozens more trail soldiers in their white clothing. After a while, Phuong just speaks to them in passing, even though she says several beg her to stop and keep them company. “They’ll probably be standing here all night, and the convoy may not come,” Phuong says. “Or it may appear any minute.” We have to be vigilant for the sounds of laboring truck engines, she adds. The last thing we want is to let our guard down and get run over, especially after all we’ve been through to get this far.

  I stay to the side of the trail, in case I need to dive out of the way of the invisible oncoming traffic.

  What shows up finally isn’t a convoy of transport vehicles, though—at least not the mechanized kind. It’s hundreds of bo doi pushing bicycles, each carrying an enormous load—massive saddlebags, boards across the seats with bails and boxes strapped on, bulging sacks balanced on handlebars, hundreds of pounds of food, medical supplies, ammunition, boots and uniforms, rain gear, helmets, and more. There are old men, boys, women, sometimes two to a bike, one on each side, but mostly just a single bo doi struggling to keep his or her bike and load upright and moving forward. They grunt to Phuong and th
eir eyes widen when they see me, but no one stops. There’s no conversation beyond the occasional Vietnamese hello.

  It’s a good half hour of them streaming past, the strangest parade I’ve ever witnessed. At the tail end a man does pause to speak. Phuong translates for me after he leaves—that they have to hurry, because when the trucks catch up to them there will likely be no place to pull over to let them pass—not for several miles. But the supply station is close. We’ll reach there in only a few hours if we keep going tonight.

  So we keep going, listening hard for trucks, for spotter planes, for more squeaky bicycles.

  I’m asleep on my feet when we finally stumble into the supply base. More accurately, when heavily armed NVA soldiers emerge from the brush and grab us, pulling me one way and Phuong another. “Go with them,” she says. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to be locked up with the other prisoners. I will find you tomorrow.”

  And just like that, I’m dragged off into the dark, down a path in the opposite direction of wherever Phuong goes. The path opens onto a small, treeless area, but I can’t see much besides the shapes of things: other guards; a big, open cage; men lying on the ground in the cage, asleep or dead. The soldiers hand me over to young guards. The guards unlock the cage and throw me inside. I keep my distance from the bodies, but I can see that they are six Americans in ripped, tattered fatigues. None of them stir.

  I find a patch of ground near the side of the cage, which is thick bamboo lashed together, topped with what appears to be razor wire. There’s no roof, just a trembling night full of stars. I’m too exhausted to be afraid, or curious, or anything. I lie on my side, tuck my arm under my head, and sleep.

  The Americans are sitting around me in a semicircle when I wake up in the morning. I struggle to sit up as well. One of them helps me. Another hands me a cup fashioned from a piece of bamboo. “Here,” he says. “We saved you some water.”

  “Thank you,” I say before tilting it back and drinking—two swallows, barely enough to wet my lips and tongue and throat.

  A third GI holds out a handful of sticky rice. “Your portion,” he rasps. He has a bloody rag tied around his neck.

  I tuck the rice in my cheek and slowly chew a few grains at a time until they dissolve.

  “I’m guessing they dumped you in our little luxury accommodations last night,” the first GI says.

  I nod. He introduces himself as Greg. He wears a torn dark olive T-shirt and what’s left of his jungle trousers. He doesn’t have on any boots or socks. None of them do. Greg’s wide face is bruised and swollen. He’s white. The two who gave me water and food are black. Greg introduces them, too. Darryl is the guy with the raspy voice and the bloody rag around his throat; Antwan wears a full set of tiger-stripe fatigues.

  The other three guys are white. They, too, are in varying stages of dress. One can’t seem to use his hands, which sit useless in his lap. Maybe he can’t lift his arms, either. His buddy feeds him small nibbles of sticky rice.

  “Did a girl come by looking for me this morning?” I ask, looking outside the cage for Phuong. I see tents, a couple of huts, stick lean-tos, but mostly trees and brush—and a few guards in oversize NVA uniforms. The guards aren’t much older than kids.

  Antwan snorts. “What, you lose your date last night? Got turned around on your way home and ended up here?”

  I explain who Phuong is and how we got here, but that just invites more questions—and more wisecracks.

  “Let me get this straight,” Greg says. “You and her were alone after your other guards got obliterated, and she even passed out from bad monkey, and you didn’t try to escape?”

  “Man, I would have taken her AK and unloaded a round on her,” says a big guy named Lloyd, the only one with a regulation army haircut. “Then I would have got my butt out of there.”

  “I didn’t know where I was,” I protest, annoyed that I’m having to defend myself with these guys, these fellow Americans. “I didn’t know where to go or anything.”

  The GI with the useless hands—his name is Kyle—tells them to leave me alone already. “He’s just a kid,” he says. “Wouldn’t none of you do any different if you didn’t know any better. And it ain’t like we didn’t all get captured, too. And none of us run away.”

  Greg shrugs. “Would have if there’d been the opportunity.”

  They want to know how I managed to get myself captured in the first place, and what in the world a kid like me is doing in Vietnam anyway. I tell them about Mom and Dad, and about Hanh, and the MPs, and all the rest. Greg says he might have heard of Frank Sorenson. “He’s, like, one of the architects. That’s what they call them. The Architects.”

  “The architects of what?” I ask, though I already know what he’s going to say: the same thing Phuong told me about Dad.

  “Stopping all the traffic coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” Kyle says. “Or trying to. Mostly not. Your daddy’s probably one of those guys back in the embassy—they figure out what’s going to work, bomb everything that moves, drown the place with Agent Orange, napalm, all that good stuff, then they send teams like us to finish up the job, see if anybody’s still alive out here. Doesn’t ever seem to make a difference. These North Viets, they’re like cockroaches. You can’t kill ’em. Doesn’t matter what you do. They just keep coming, keep sending down their supplies, their weapons, their soldiers. So yeah, your daddy, pretty sure he’s one of the ones behind all that. The Architects.”

  They ask me more questions about my getting captured and what happened after. I tell them about the underground hospital and the tunnel complex where I was tied up for three days. They say they’ve heard the North Viets have places like that. “They’re gophers, those guys,” says Greg. “Tunnels, caves, bunkers, all that underground business. Man, I’d get claustrophobia living that way. Plus you never know what kinds of creatures are down there, crawl in your food, in your bed, in your ear.”

  When I mention TJ and what happened to him, they say he was smart to try to escape. “Would have been a lot worse for him if he hadn’t,” Kyle says. “Even if it got him killed. There’s worse things than getting killed, I know that for a fact.”

  “Must have been a spook,” Darryl rasps. “I’m betting so.”

  “What’s a spook?” I ask.

  He laughs. Adjusts the bloody rag around his throat. “CIA. Probably same as your daddy.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “My dad’s, like, the Special Attaché to something at the embassy.”

  They all shrug and say okay, like whatever I want to think is fine with them.

  There’s silence for a while after that. Then I ask how they got captured. At first they just look at one another. A couple of them shake their heads. Kyle studies his damaged hands, then speaks. “It was supposed to be a commando raid, an ambush we were setting up. We’re all Army Rangers. It’s sort of what we specialize in. We got some intel, chopper dropped us at the landing site, only there they were, the North Viets, waiting for us like they knew all along we were coming.”

  “Like they’d got a dinner invitation, time and place and everything,” Antwan adds.

  The one guy who hasn’t said anything—the other Rangers just call him J—has been sitting against the bamboo, practically catatonic. He has a red scar down the side of his face, from his temple to his jaw. J rouses himself, sits forward, and whispers, “There were a dozen of us to start out. Two six-man teams. But we’re all that’s left. And my bet—once they get around to finishing up their interrogations, beating out of us anything they think they can use, they aren’t going to keep us alive much longer, either.”

  Phuong comes to the bamboo cage that afternoon with three older men, two who look like officers and a smaller man with round, rimless glasses and thinning hair, who looks like an accountant or something. They talk for a while, looking at me the whole time. Phuong is holding food but stands quietly with it and listens to the conversation, nodding when they address her but otherwise staying out of it.
The accountant doesn’t say much, either. He has one of those tongues that’s always darting out and then back in, a nervous tic.

  “Looks like they got some plans cooked up for you,” Darryl rasps. There’s no shade—the cage is set in the center of a small clearing—so we’re sweltering under the brutal sun. The three officers—or the two officers and the accountant—leave. Phuong approaches the cage and hands me my straw hat through the bamboo, and the food in a small wooden bowl—not just sticky rice, but dried peppers, and some kind of meat.

  “Tomorrow we leave to continue the journey north,” she says, speaking our usual French. “You’ll need to eat more for strength.”

  She glances at the other Americans. I put on the hat, grateful to be able to shield my face, which is blistered and raw. The food I hold on to, knowing I should share it with the others since they shared theirs with me.

  “Just us?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “There will be replacements for Vu and Trang,” she says. “One is a young woman, Le Phu, and her friend Khiem. They’re from the same village. They’ve been assigned to accompany us to the next supply station, in Laos.” She curls her hands around the bamboo bars, examining the places they’re lashed together. She glances again at the GIs sprawled on the ground behind me. “Are you well here?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “The ground’s soft. Good for sleeping.”

  She smiles. “I would think you’d be used to it by now.”

  I smile, too, but it isn’t lost on me how strange this is. The Army Rangers say I should have killed Phuong when I had the chance. They’re convinced that they’re going to be killed soon themselves. And yet here is Phuong, bringing me a hat and extra food, checking on me, making small talk as if it’s all just a lot of polite nothing.

  After she leaves I try to share the food, which would amount to a single mouthful for each of the seven of us in the bamboo cage, but our guards bang on the bars and shout orders that nobody understands. They aim their AKs and take off the safeties. Greg gets the message.