Phuong and I try to drag the bear off the trail, but she’s so heavy we can barely budge her. Just enough to uncover the trapped cub.
She presses the barrel of her AK-47 into the cub’s ear and pulls the trigger. My heart’s gone stone cold. I don’t even flinch.
Phuong and Khiem take turns helping Le Phu walk. When I offer, she recoils as if I’m a viper. Phuong says I can just carry Le Phu’s pack and rice sling. Phuong takes her weapon.
We stop frequently to rest. Blood soaks through the gauze on Le Phu’s face. Phuong changes it after a few hours, when it gets so bad that it’s dripping onto her shirt and leaving a blood trail behind us. Dead flesh and scabbing tear off when Phuong peels away the gauze, and Le Phu faints. I think we’ll stop for the night, but when Le Phu wakes up she insists that we go on.
So we do, following a ridge trail until dusk. Phuong lets us build a small fire to heat the last of the wild boar strips, which are starting to go bad. Le Phu can’t chew, can barely get any food into her mouth. Khiem chews the food for her, rice and boar, and then carefully, as gently as he can, tucks each bite into Le Phu’s cheek on her good side. She sucks on it, swallows, and waits for more. She’s so worn out that she doesn’t bother to lift her hands to accept the food, or do it herself. Or maybe she just doesn’t have the strength. Khiem continues feeding her, like a mama bird and a baby bird, until Le Phu shakes her head to make him stop.
The gauze is soaked through again, but Phuong doesn’t have anything to replace it and is reluctant to pull off the old gauze anyway, for fear of the pain it will cause. There’s yellow seepage in places mixed with the blood.
Le Phu sleeps, or tries to, leaning on Khiem, who sits up all night propped against a tree so he can hold her. I hear them, or hear him, whispering. Someone is crying, but I can’t tell in the darkness if it’s him or her. I had wondered if they were a couple. I don’t wonder anymore.
In the morning, Le Phu is flush with fever, but there’s nothing to do for her except press forward, Phuong and Khiem practically carrying her as she slips into delirium and keeps trying to leave the trail, pointing and grunting at things we can’t see. She finally lets me help, or just isn’t aware that I’m helping. Khiem won’t let go of Le Phu. He stays on one side; Phuong and I take turns on the other, whoever is with her soon drenched in sweat—hers, our own.
When Le Phu’s knees buckle and she slumps to the ground, we stop to rest. When she fights her way back to standing, we start again.
The day before there was a bear cub in the middle of the trail. Now, late that afternoon, there are suddenly children. Just like the cub, they stand blinking at us. Then they plunge into the forest.
We follow, fighting our way through vines, tripping over creepers, trying to keep close to the sound of them so they’ll lead us to their village. Khiem and I pick up Le Phu and carry her, as Phuong leads the way, hacking at saplings and low branches that block us, until finally the forest opens up, giving way to a dirt clearing. The kids we’ve been chasing are huddled behind their adults, pointing at us and talking excitedly in their language.
The grown-ups don’t share their children’s excitement. Two men wearing loincloths and T-shirts approach us. Phuong gestures at Le Phu’s face, mimics the bear attack—fingers spread like claws, swiping at her own face. The men nod and lead us to a longhouse on log stilts across the clearing. It has a high thatched roof, with smoke rising through the thatch. Inside, it’s too dark to see anything until our eyes adjust to the deep gloom. There are several women squatting around a small fire. The walls are black from smoke. Straw pallets line the floor on one side, and they have us lay Le Phu on one of them.
An old woman comes over with water in a metal container that I realize is an army helmet. American. The old woman bathes Le Phu’s face and then starts taking off her clothes. Phuong pulls Khiem and me out of the longhouse, shoves us down the wobbly steps, then goes back inside to help.
Khiem and I sit on the ground outside, too tired to move. The kids keep their distance. An old man shuffles over with another army helmet filled with water, and we drink it all, nodding our thanks. A woman brings us each a whole fish that has been cooked so black that it’s like eating dust. But we eat it, even the bones, which are hardly bones anymore, they’re so brittle.
Khiem takes Le Phu’s rucksack from me, for no real reason other than I guess he just doesn’t want me to have it. He won’t look at me. There’s no point in trying to talk. We don’t speak the same language. Several of the villagers come over, but Khiem can’t make out what they’re saying any better than I can. We both shrug helplessly. Khiem leans back on his post, and I lean back on mine. He closes his eyes, and I close my eyes, half to signal to the villagers that we don’t want to try to communicate with them anymore, half because we’re too exhausted to keep them open.
Phuong comes out after an hour to tell us Le Phu is dead. First Khiem, in Vietnamese. He buries his face in his hands and just sits there shaking. Then me, in French. “Elle est morte.” But I’ve already figured it out. I don’t know how to react, so I don’t.
Phuong puts her hand on Khiem’s shoulder, for a second, then goes back inside to see to the body.
All that work getting here, I think. All that work to survive. Le Phu fighting and fighting through the wound and the blood, her eye destroyed, her jaw shattered, the infection, the fever. Phuong and me and Khiem carrying her. Not giving up. Never giving up. And for what?
The kids are oblivious, still running around the swept-dirt clearing, playing a game, rolling heavy balls at one another, half a dozen of them, the size of fists. The game seems to be a cross between marbles and dodgeball. I watch idly, not seeing much point to it. But they’re having fun, dancing out of the way when one is rolled at them. Rolling their own at their friends.
Khiem lifts his face but doesn’t move otherwise. His cheeks are wet, his eyes red. The kids sweep back and forth in front of us with their game. The grown-ups have disappeared, except for a couple of elderly men sharing a bamboo cup. They laugh, slap each other on the back. One lights a long thin pipe. They pass that back and forth, too.
Shadows grow as the afternoon fails. I don’t see the point of anything. Ridiculous as it is, I start humming a new song by the Beatles, “Magical Mystery Tour.” It was the last record I bought back in New York. Actually I stole it, not because I didn’t have the money, but just for the stupid thrill of shoplifting. It was right before Christmas. A lifetime ago. Ten lifetimes.
I don’t want to think about Le Phu lying inside the longhouse. I don’t know how to reach out to Khiem to comfort him, and he wouldn’t let me anyway. He probably wants to kill me, because aren’t I the reason Le Phu got attacked? Why wouldn’t he hate me? If only we hadn’t been assigned to take this stupid American to the North, Le Phu would still be alive. But the American, he’s the one who should be dead.
It’s what I would have been thinking.
I start singing the Beatles song under my breath. It isn’t lost on me how ironic it is. Like I’m on some magical mystery tour of my own, only dark and deadly instead of the Beatles on a painted bus raging through the English countryside with their goofy soundtrack.
Phuong comes back out. I hear her on the steps behind us. I turn to look. She looks so sad; it breaks my heart to see her like that.
The kids squeal, still playing their game, though it’s growing dark now. Phuong’s expression changes. Her eyes widen, her jaw drops open, she yells. She flies past Khiem and me, racing toward the kids.
They stop to stare. One picks up his ball. Maybe he’s going to give it to her.
There’s a bright flash, an explosion. There’s smoke. The kid is sitting on the ground, holding up his arms. What’s left of his arms. His hands are gone. His arms are bloody stumps. He tries to say something. He can’t speak. His friends freeze around him. One is lying on the ground ten feet away, not moving.
Phuong is knocked down by the blast. She gets up and goes to him, but it’s alrea
dy too late. The boy with no hands reaches for her. She takes him in her lap and strokes his hair. Khiem quietly approaches the other kids and slowly, carefully, lifts the heavy balls out of their hands.
There’s so much death in this village. There’s so much death everywhere.
They’re cluster bombs. Or bouncing bombs. Or bomblets. Or even, sometimes, bombies. They go by different names. The commandos in the bamboo cage warned me about them, warned me to be careful, to be on the lookout, but I forgot. The bomblets are contained in larger bombs, which are designed to open before hitting the ground, releasing the bomblets. The bomblets, each with its own little parachute, land near the Trail. Or they blow far off course. There are millions of them.
Some explode when they hit the earth. Some bounce and explode at the level of a torso, or a head. Some explode when trucks run over them. Some explode when bo doi kick them accidentally. Some, buried in fields or lost in the forest, explode when buffalo step on them, or plows hit them, or branches fall on them, or night animals sniff them, or birds perch on them, or the wind blows heavy on them. Some never explode. They’re duds. Some explode for no clear reason after kids discover them in the forest, and carry them to their village, and play with them for hours, rolling them on the ground like bocce balls, jumping over them, stopping when a stranger, a Vietnamese soldier, steps out of the longhouse and yells at them, in a language they don’t understand, to stop.
Khiem herds the children and villagers away from the clearing and into the forest, taking the bodies of the two dead kids with them—the one who was holding the cluster bomb, the other who was hit in the forehead by shrapnel. Once everyone is safe, Khiem aims his AK-47 at the remaining bombs and fires. The explosions leave small craters in the packed earth.
Le Phu is buried. The kids are buried. One of the villagers, perhaps the mother of one of the dead children, kneels and wails and hits herself on the head over and over with a large, flat stone. Others stop her, but not before blood streams down her face.
We leave soon after. No one in the village acknowledges our departure. They aren’t angry. At least they don’t seem to be. Maybe they’re resigned to this—to losing children to a war that they know somehow, distantly, is going on around them, but I doubt they understand. I barely understand it myself, and I’ve grown up with it on the news.
I can’t shake the images: of the little boy right after the explosion, reaching with his bloody stumps for Phuong, mouth open but no sound coming out; of Phuong holding the dying child in her lap; of Khiem, still numb from the loss of Le Phu, collecting bombies from the other children.
And I can’t shake the question that won’t go away, though I already know the answer: Can my dad be the architect of this as well?
Another freak rainstorm catches us the next day on the side of a mountain, and we’re exposed to everything the sky hurls down at us, as if we deserve it. We trudge through for hours, slipping on the muddy trail, climbing around places where the trail is washed away, looking for any shelter but finding none. We come to a cliff, with wooden stairs lashed together and nailed or tied to the sheer rock face, a steep climb that we have to make. Below us is a sharp drop with boulders and a river at the bottom. Above us is the promise of a return to the ridge trail, and maybe a cave where we can dry off and sit out the deluge.
The stairs wobble dangerously. With all three of us on them, they pitch in unpredictable directions. I can’t believe they’ll hold us, but Phuong assures me that hundreds, thousands of bo doi have made this passage with their heavy loads of supplies. “These trails will be used until the Americans discover them, and then abandoned until the Americans forget,” she says. I’m supposed to take solace in this, but my legs and arms are trembling too much.
We’re a third of the way up when the rain quits. We’re halfway up when we hear the whine of a twin-engine plane cresting the horizon. Phuong and Khiem press their backs against the cliff, brace themselves, and unshoulder their AK-47s. An American spotter plane flies at us from the north, so close that I can see the face of the pilot, just for a second. Khiem fires a short burst, and the plane veers away but doesn’t leave. It circles around and comes back at us from the south. This time an arm reaches out the passenger window—with a hand holding a pistol. Bullets ricochet off rocks a few feet above our heads, sending a spray of dust and pebbles raining down.
“I’m an American!” I yell as loud as I can. “American! American!” I pull off my straw hat and wave it at the plane. Khiem slams the butt of his weapon into my chest. I stagger, think I’m going to pitch over the side, grab the safety rope, and barely manage to hang on. Khiem raises his gun to hit me again, but Phuong stops him. At first I can’t breathe. He’s knocked the wind out of me. Then, when I get my breath back, I feel the ache of a deep bone bruise. It hurts to breathe. Khiem tugs me to my feet, shoves me ahead of him, and jams the barrel of his AK-47 into the small of my back to force me the rest of the way up the wooden stairs.
It takes forever, every arduous step more painful than the one before, every breath a knife to my ribs. Khiem keeps jabbing me with his weapon, barking at me in Vietnamese. Twice when I slow too much he hits me higher, at the base of my skull. I pitch forward. He grabs my shirt and jerks me upright. Phuong, in the lead, doesn’t know any of this, or maybe she knows and chooses to ignore what’s happening.
Khiem isn’t through. When we finally crest the ridge and climb off the wooden stairs, I don’t even have a chance to sit before he starts hitting me with his fist—keeping his AK trained on me the whole time. I double over from a blow to my stomach, then to my chest. He slaps me hard, twice, in my face. The third time I cover myself, but that just makes him angrier. He trips me, and when I fall he kicks me wherever he can—my legs, my back, my shoulder, my arms, the back of my head.
I curl into a fetal position, wrap my arms over my head, struggle to pull away when I see where he’s kicking me next. He catches me anyway, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I vomit blood. Phuong finally intervenes, yelling at him, stepping between us, pushing Khiem away.
I want to hurt him back. I want to kill him. I hate him, and hate what he’s done to me, leaving me scared and helpless—and raging inside, with no way to let it out. I can’t even yell at him, curse at him, anything. I pound the dirt with my fist, spit up more blood, sit up sobbing, snot running down my burning face. My jaw aches. I’ll have bruises all over my arms, legs, back, face, everywhere. I’m afraid Khiem broke one of my ribs when he slammed his gun into my chest on the stairs—that’s how bad it hurts to take anything more than a shallow breath.
“We can’t stay here,” Phuong says. “We’re too exposed. The Americans might return.”
She’s right. There’s no tree cover, no cave, no shelter of any kind. Just barren rock, a moonscape. We make for the tree line, a quarter mile away. I swear that if Khiem gets behind me again, if he stabs me one more time in the back with his weapon, I’m not going to be afraid. I’m going to fight. I seethe and wait for the moment, that deep well of anger powering my legs forward. But Khiem keeps his distance. Phuong tells him to take over the point position—the lead—so he passes ahead of me. I could jump on him from behind, grab a rock and pound his head in, seize his weapon and kill him and make my escape.
Only I’ll probably get killed instead—by him hearing me make my move, or by Phuong, to protect him.
“Khiem—his heart is broken. You should know this. He was in love with Le Phu.”
I can barely hear Phuong’s quiet voice over the cacophony of insects that night. It’s hard to sleep through the noise, reminding me that I’ve only occasionally heard them on the Trail. Or birds. Or night animals. We’re inside a shallow cave Phuong found, just as darkness was taking hold. She let us build a small fire that was mostly smoke from green wood. We ate sticky rice. We hadn’t asked the villagers for food, so there wasn’t anything else.
“Why are you telling me that?” I ask, not bothering to open my eyes. My eyelids feel too heavy, t
oo bruised. Everything about me is sore.
“So you’ll understand why Khiem did what he did,” she says. “It wasn’t just because you shouted to the American plane.”
“Whatever you say,” I respond curtly. “You don’t have to explain anything. It’s war. We’re enemies. I get it.”
“Yes,” she says. “And we have our orders, and we follow our orders. But …”
She stops.
“But what?” I ask.
“Just, I shouldn’t have let Khiem hurt you like that. It wasn’t right. I knew he was suffering, that he was angry and grieving. Khiem blames you for what happened to Le Phu.”
I clench my jaw, though it aches. I don’t want to feel sorry for Khiem. I don’t want to have sympathy for Phuong, for Le Phu, for anyone. I just want to go home.
“I think he broke my rib,” I say. “It hurts when I breathe. Everything hurts from where he hit me. And you let him.”
“I know,” she says softly. “I’m sorry for that. But you’re right that this is war, and it’s the only explanation for much of what happens that can’t be justified, just as we talked about before. The harshness. The brutality. The indiscriminate deaths. Those kids in the village, the people. How can there ever be enough justification for their lives ending in that terrible way? How can there be justification for their lives ending at all, at their young age? When I was a kid, I played with my brothers and sisters, with my friends at school. My parents took care of us. They made sure we attended to our studies. That we burned sacrifices to our ancestors. That we took care of our grandparents. That we supported the cause of liberation.
“That was before the bombings. Before we heard so many stories of sacrifice, knew so many who went to fight but never returned, or who were wounded, or who were maimed, or who were never again right in their minds. The only way to see this and continue fighting, is to believe in the cause, that it is right and just and that we will prevail. In war, both sides must think this way. But for our side, sacrificing so much more than yours, we can’t afford to question. We can only persist through all that must be endured.”
On Blood Road Page 15