I back away, climb on a rock, and look down on the strange tableau. Phuong is talking to the elephant handlers. Khiem and Le Phu squat off to the side of the trail. Le Phu seems upset. Khiem, his hand on the small of her back, looks to be consoling her.
For some reason, I start thinking about this German philosopher named Nietzsche we learned about in lit class. Nietzsche was walking down the street one day when he saw a man beating on an old, sick, nag of a horse pulling a heavy cart. The horse collapsed in the street, blocking traffic and attracting a crowd of gawkers. Nietzsche was horrified. He threw himself on the horse to stop the beating, wrapping his arms around the horse’s neck and breaking down and sobbing right there in front of everybody. He was never the same again. They took him to a mental hospital. Later on he thought he was Jesus, and Buddha, and various other deities. But mostly he just sat and stared at the walls in an asylum for the next eleven years until he died.
I’d copied down one thing Nietzsche wrote when he was still mostly sane, because I didn’t quite understand it, but I sort of did: “Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.”
Like, maybe there isn’t all that much difference between the elephant and me. The doomed GIs back in the cage and me. Vu and Trang and me. TJ and me.
Before, I couldn’t have cared less about the elephant. Now I want to do a Nietzsche and crawl in that mud pit and throw my arms around the poor animal and hold on to him so they won’t hurt him anymore, or blow him up. And if I could just sit in a chair staring out a window and not move or say anything or think anything for the next eleven years like Nietzsche, maybe that would be okay, too.
We don’t stay to find out what they do about the elephant. We press on for higher ground and less-traveled trails. The thick forest gives way to terraced rice paddies that climb the hills like enormous stair steps. Cambodian farmers work the fields with their buffalo and their children. The children stare when they see us passing. The adults don’t bother to look. I suppose that’s how it is with war. The civilians keep their heads down and try their best to live their normal lives, maybe try not to think about how it can all be taken from them in a quick burst of gunfire, or an errant bomb, or worse.
Phuong buys food from the farmers when she can. A handful of greens here and there. The occasional chicken. Most villagers are reluctant, and she never does anything that’s threatening to them, as far as I can tell.
The more we walk—fifteen, eighteen hours, from before sunrise until after dark—the more everything and everyone I’ve ever known seems to recede. Some days I can’t picture my mom’s face or remember the sound of my dad’s voice. My friends from school and the swim team are all a blur—kind of recognizable, but mostly out of focus. Even Geoff. I might as well have never met Beth at the Moby Grape concert, for all I can remember of her.
Snippets of songs play in endless loops in my head, but I can’t come up with much of the lyrics. Dumb romance songs, mostly. Jefferson Airplane. The Doors. The Troggs. I wonder what month it is. Can it still be February? Has it already turned into March? I do the math as best I can and finally settle on the end of February.
The main thing that occupies my thoughts—that occupies every fiber of me—is food. I ask Phuong why she doesn’t just take what she wants from the farmers we encounter. She doesn’t like the question at all.
“We’re not fighting the peasants,” she says. “We’re fighting for them. Whenever we can, it’s our job to provide them with food. And medical care. And protection.”
It sounds like propaganda, all communist sunshine and unicorns. But I suppose it’s true, too. If the NVA steal food from the villagers, the villagers will hate them as much as they hate the Americans. Of course from what I’ve read and been told over and over by Dad, the Americans give the farmers and villagers food and supplies and medical care, too. At least we do when we aren’t bombing their villages and cities, killing all their livestock, and burning everything to the ground.
I remember Dad one time talking about a place where that happened. “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” he said, somehow managing to keep a straight face.
We keep climbing. Steep slopes, unsteady footing. Loose rocks, erosion. Sudden drops, limestone cliffs. In and out of forest cover. Phuong nervously checking the sky whenever we’re exposed. Twice we encounter long lines of bo doi with their crippling loads and have to press ourselves against stone walls, or balance on the edges of scary drops, while they pass. One of the columns—a hundred bo doi—carry pigs and piglets in baskets on their backs. The pigs have been sedated to keep them quiet and still.
I spend a couple of sleepless nights shivering, curled in a ball, unable to get warm, until Phuong convinces one of the columns to give me a blanket. She and Le Phu and Khiem have thin, quilted jackets that they pull from the bottoms of their rucksacks, and they wrap themselves in those and in their rain ponchos when we camp off the trail and sleep on the hard ground.
Even with the blanket, I’m cold at night, but at least I’m not freezing. The days are still blisteringly hot, especially on those trail sections with no tree cover.
Phuong is back to not speaking to me. I can’t take offense, though, because she and the others don’t talk much, either. I figure this is just the way it’s going to be, trudging silently up and down the Annamites, which Phuong refers to as the Truong Son.
But then a freak storm catches us. One minute clear skies, and the next, black clouds, and then, a rain so hard it hurts. We’re crossing one of those open sections, so nowhere to hide, nothing for cover, no choice but to keep going. I pull the blanket over my head. Phuong and Le Phu and Khiem put on their coats and ponchos and tilt their hats low on their faces. In minutes, the trail starts giving way to streams cutting down the side of the mountain, some of them so wide we have to jump over—and fight to keep our balance landing on the other side.
Phuong begins running, with the others right behind her. She yells something back to me, but it’s in Vietnamese, and the rain is making too much noise for me to understand her no matter what language she uses. I hear something above me, look up to the higher reaches, and see what she must be yelling about—a wall of mud and rock sliding loose. I take off behind her as fast as my jellied legs can carry me, toward the tree line a hundred yards ahead. Twice I slip, but I manage to catch up to the others just in time to dive for cover.
The landslide continues to roar down the mountain behind us, ripping out trees, so Phuong urges me to get up again, this time in French. We aren’t yet safe. The whole mountain could come down on us.
We keep running, stumbling, catching ourselves, crawling, lurching down the trail until it finally seems okay to stop, the four of us huddled under an outcropping of rock, rainwater washing in sheets over the edge, a full-on waterfall, and us hiding behind it, as if that might be the protection we need.
But somehow it holds, and the landslide doesn’t reach us, and the thunder ends, and, after half an hour, the freak rain lets up and then quits altogether, leaving a thick mess of a trail ahead of us.
“We could have been killed,” Phuong mutters to me in French, as if I need to be told. It seems like a funny thing to say. Every day of this trip, every hour since I was kidnapped, I could have been killed. In a hundred different ways. And I still might. Who knows what’s waiting for me. And I’m sure Phuong could say that about her life the whole time she’s been in the South, since leaving her home and family in Hanoi. Maybe it’s the nature of this latest threat. You don’t expect to be attacked by a mountain.
We return to the busy truck route, back down in the Truong Son foothills, but find it strangely quiet. No convoys, no bicycles, no bo doi staggering under their unwieldy burdens of fuel or pigs. The rain didn’t reach this far, so every step we take kicks up dust. There’s more tree cover, so that’s good, though a lot of the trees are barren, with that skeletal look we saw back in the ghost forest. P
huong says the Americans must have sprayed their Agent Orange here, but probably not in great quantities. Yet. The chemical smell is fainter than it was in the ghost forest, but still present, making me vaguely nauseous.
The silence isn’t just from the absence of traffic, I soon realize. Just like back in the ghost forest and the devastation that was Ben Suc, there are no birds chirping. No insects buzzing around our heads. Our footfalls echo, but that’s the only sound I hear, other than my own ragged breath.
“Maybe the war’s over,” I say to Phuong. “Maybe everybody went home already, and we’re the last ones to know.”
“You are so foolish,” she says, but she smiles at me.
We continue for mile after quiet mile, grateful for the shade but growing thirstier from all the dust and the heat.
And then, rounding a deep curve and stepping out of the thinning forest, we find our answer. The trail opens onto a wide grassy field, bisected by the rutted tracks from a thousand trucks. And everywhere—dead in those tracks, dead everywhere in the field—are the smoldering wrecks of supply trucks, an entire convoy reduced to twisted metal and burning tires. And bodies. Charred skeletons. Severed limbs and torsos and heads. Blackened faces fixed in pain. Strange mounds of fire still flickering are all that remain of a hundred petrol carriers whose cargo must have erupted into flames. There are craters everywhere. Some empty. Some littered with more bodies, more wreckage, more smoldering remains. The stench is terrible. Le Phu vomits, then begins sobbing. Khiem hugs her. She buries her face in his shirt. Phuong steps forward to look for survivors, anyone who needs help, whoever she might save.
I follow, reluctantly, wading through the high scorched grass, around the wrecks and the burnt men and women, holding my breath through waves of acrid fumes. We see others who somehow survived the assault, wandering in shock, also looking for anyone still alive. Or not looking at all—too stunned themselves to even be aware of what’s happened. A few stumble off into the forest, or sit down where they’d just been standing. Several times, not watching closely enough where I’m going, or my eyes tearing up from smoke, I step on brittle bones—a hand, a forearm, half of a rib cage, the flesh cooked entirely off—and they crack like twigs. The sound, and the realization, leaves me with a sick feeling, but I don’t throw up like Le Phu. I can’t be stoic, like Phuong, but after weeks of this, I steel myself and keep going.
We only find a few who are still alive, and they’re just barely so. One begs for water while holding tightly to her belly over a massive wound, to keep her insides from spilling out. Phuong sends me to find a canteen. Ours are long since empty. I scour the field, careful about stepping on any more bodies, but I can’t find anything. Except, finally, a medical pouch. I bring it back to Phuong.
“Maybe there’s something in here,” I say in French. “There’s no water.”
She rummages through the pouch and finds a vial and a syringe, somehow unbroken. She fills the syringe and injects the dying woman with whatever is in the vial. I guess it’s morphine. The woman whispers something to Phuong. There’s a suggestion of tears at the edges of her eyes. We sit with her for a long five minutes. Phuong keeps her hand on top of the woman’s. They don’t speak anymore. The woman doesn’t ever cry. Instead she just dies.
We go on to help a few more survivors, none of them keep breathing for very long after Phuong injects them, too—until she runs out of morphine, and there isn’t anything we can do for anyone else except wait with them until they quit breathing on their own. I don’t know where Khiem and Le Phu are all this time. Maybe they went somewhere else in the field, to help others make the transition from this world to whatever world might be next. I want to believe there’s a heaven, not just for believers, but for everybody, for these poor destroyed souls all dead or dying in this wretched, stinking field.
Late afternoon shadows creep in from the edges of the field and grow longer as the sun expires—way too late to be any kind of mercy.
Phuong speaks to the bo doi who have also been helping. They find ponchos that will have to do as makeshift litters, and we start collecting the dead and carrying them to the edge of the field, where we line them up for burial later. I’m back at the underground hospital carrying stretchers, carrying amputated limbs for burning. I’m back in the ghost forest doing the same thing. My brain shuts down to the horror of it all. Do the job, I tell myself. Do the job. You are the same as them, just a different species of the dead.
Finally, Phuong tells me to stop. “We have to go,” she says. Khiem and Le Phu are standing there, too. I didn’t see them approach. I don’t know where they’ve been. “There’s nothing else we can do to help these comrades.”
“But what about graves for them?” I ask, thinking back to how efficiently the soldiers buried their dead in the ghost forest after the Dragon Ship massacre.
Phuong shakes her head. “There are too many. Word will have gotten out about what happened. They’ll have heard the attack from very far away. Others will come in the darkness to dig the graves and to move the wreckage, so that more convoys can come this way tomorrow.”
“Wait,” I say. “They’ll still use this road?”
“Yes.” Phuong stands and picks up her pack. “It’s how the war will be won.”
I stop at the edge of the clearing to look back one last time, wondering if what I’ve been told is true—that this is my dad’s doing, that he’s one of the architects of all this devastation. A Frank Lloyd Wright of death.
That night when we camp, miles north of the carnage, Phuong spends a long time talking to Khiem and Le Phu, who seem traumatized by what we’ve seen. They keep weeping, hanging their heads, only whispering their responses when Phuong stops speaking or asks them questions. They don’t eat their allotment of sticky rice and peppers. My stomach growls, seeing it sitting there in their cupped hands where Phuong ladles it out.
Finally, late, they lie back on the ground, their heads propped on the root flare of one of the tall trees with smooth bark. The tree branches reach high overhead, forming a cathedral arch above the small forest opening where we hide. A hot, dry wind rolls off the mountains from the west. I find my own tree to lean on, too hungry to sleep, too shaken by what we saw that afternoon, and what we had to do, to close my eyes.
Phuong comes over to check on me, too. She hasn’t tied me up at night in weeks. I can’t remember the last time she did it. Not that I feel any freer.
“Khiem and Le Phu haven’t seen this before,” she says.
“Seen the results of a bombing?” I ask.
“The war,” she says. “It’s their first time in battle. Or not in battle, but seeing what happens in battle. Or from your bombing of our people. They’re from the same village in the North. Farm children.”
“I’d never seen it, either, until I came here,” I say. “Except on the TV news, and you can just change the channel when that comes on. Since Tet, it seems like I haven’t seen anything else.”
Phuong nods. “You become used to it in some ways. But in many ways, you never do.”
We’re quiet for a while. I thought she was going to ask me how I was doing, but now it seems as if she wants to be reassured herself—that we’ll all get past this, that we won’t be haunted by what we’ve seen, the things I assume she was saying to Khiem and Le Phu. Or maybe she just wants to hang out with someone, even an American, who’s been through it before and doesn’t need to be consoled like Khiem and Le Phu.
“What did you mean when you said this is how the war will be won?” I ask.
There’s a rustling in the dark, some small night creature moving through brush. The beat of invisible wings darts past. I wonder if they’re bats.
“The Vietnamese people have been fighting for independence since before I was born,” Phuong says. “Even my parents saw their training, their studies in Paris, as part of the struggle. Ho Chi Minh also studied in Paris. He lived there for many years, to get to know the enemy, and to learn how to defeat them. First we fought
against the French. In the Second World War, we fought against the Japanese, with the promise that Vietnam would be liberated when the war was won. But that was a lie. The Japanese were defeated, but the French returned, saying Vietnam still belonged to them. They controlled the South, but the North belonged to Ho and the Viet Minh, the party of liberation. In Hanoi, we celebrated our independence, but how do you accept a divided country? So we fought the French and defeated them at Dien Bien Phu. Once again, in the peace talks, there was the promise of elections to reunite the country. But the promise was broken. Corrupt politicians and corrupt military in the South refused to give up their control, their power. The elections never happened. We were lied to yet again. So we began the war against the South. We would have been victorious yet again, but then came the Americans.”
I’d been thinking the war between North and South Vietnam was like our Civil War—the North fighting to keep their country united, the South wanting to secede. The way Phuong is talking about it now makes it also sound like the Revolutionary War, with Ho Chi Minh as their George Washington, fighting the tyranny of a foreign colonial power. For us it was the British; for them it was the French. And now, it’s us.
I can tell Phuong believes every word of what she says—not just in a schoolgirl kind of way, but in her heart. She’s as much a patriot for North Vietnam as my dad is for America—or the America that he’s convinced has to save the world from communism, wherever it might be taking root, like in Vietnam. I’ve heard much of what Phuong’s been saying from Geoff, of course, but I used to just figure he was repeating stuff he’d heard from his parents, the same way I used to repeat the arguments for the war I heard from my dad.
“So you see, we will never quit,” Phuong continues. “We will never surrender. No matter how many of our comrades perish. No matter how many of your bombers murder our convoys of bo doi. If we have to sacrifice ten of our people for every one American life or ARVN life, that’s what we are prepared to do. We sacrifice for the greater good. This must always be true of a people fighting for their own liberation.”
On Blood Road Page 13