I do talk about it some to Geoff, but only the bare outline. He doesn’t push, and he hasn’t abandoned me out of frustration because I won’t open up. He just keeps coming to visit, to walk on the beach, to go for swims, no matter how cold the water is, to raid my grandparents’ refrigerator and watch movies. Even with that gulf between us. And who knows, maybe it has shrunk a little.
I’m still embarrassed about my prosthesis. I hate when people notice me limping. I get tired of them asking what’s wrong, and all the sympathy coloring their faces if I tell them. Geoff is so matter-of-fact about it, though, that eventually, over time, I’ve kind of learned to be matter-of-fact about it, too.
I didn’t go back to Dalton. Instead I’ve been taking night classes in town and told Mom I don’t want to go to college. Not just yet.
I’ve been looking hard to find some meaning to my life, buried in all I’ve been through, all I’ve seen, all the suffering and death I witnessed, and that I caused, however inadvertently. But I’m not having an easy time finding it. I go to church. I meditate. I listen to the new Beatles’ double album with the all-white cover over and over. I volunteer at a school for refugee children, driven by that image I’ll always have of the little boy who lost his hands and died in Phuong’s lap.
While the astronauts return from orbiting the moon, I take a train into the city so the doctors can make adjustments to my prosthesis. It’s been chafing for quite a while, and Mom finally noticed the bleeding. She asked why I hadn’t said anything, and I said because I hadn’t felt anything, which was only partly true.
Geoff meets me at the clinic. There are a lot of veterans here, as usual, missing legs, arms, hands, feet. He talks to a couple of them while I have my appointment. Afterward, heading back to Penn Station, he fills me in. “This one guy, he’s in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He’s been going to antiwar protests. And this other guy says he wishes he still had his arm, because he’d reenlist in a heartbeat and go back to Vietnam. They’re still friends, though.”
“That makes sense—after what they’ve been through, the politics of the war don’t compare to how they feel about each other. Like brothers,” I say.
Eventually I start limping from the long walk, so we stop at a sidewalk café so I can rest. The seats are freezing, but I barely notice.
“You think you’d ever go back?” Geoff asks. “I mean after the war, assuming it ever ends.”
It takes me a long time to respond. At first I say, “I don’t know,” but then, after I think about it some more, I say, yeah, maybe I would. “And the war will definitely end,” I add. “I mean, it might take twenty years, but North Vietnam will win. The trail soldiers will continue their supply missions, no matter how many cluster bombs and napalm drops and Dragon Ships and fighter-bombers and commando raids and spies and poisoned rice supplies we use against them. They’ll sacrifice so much more than we ever will. Right or wrong, they’re the ones who’ll endure.”
“Endure what?” Geoff asks.
“Anything,” I say. “Everything. Literally everything.”
“So that girl you were with over there,” Geoff says, choosing his words carefully. “Phuong.” This is new territory for us. “You don’t hate her for keeping you prisoner all that time, and all the things they did to you—the beatings and the torture you told me about, and not knowing if your mom and dad were even alive, and all the rest of it? I mean, you lost your leg, man.”
“She was just doing what she had to do,” I say. “She was under orders. But she took care of me. Yeah, I saved her life, but I’m pretty sure she saved my life, too. I believe she told me what was going to happen at the lake because she wanted me to escape. I think she couldn’t bear the thought of me in a Hanoi prison and all the things they’d do to me there.”
Geoff shakes his head. “You think she’s still alive? Think you’ll ever see her again?”
“I can’t imagine her not being alive,” I say. “At least when I picture myself back in Vietnam, she’s always there.”
I pause before saying, “When the war ends and we have diplomatic relations or whatever, I was thinking, maybe I could go back there, to Hanoi, and find her. Maybe meet her family. Just, you know, go for a walk by the Red River, and all these famous places she told me about. Like, the French Quarter, and the Lake of the Returned Sword, and these mountain gardens they have there, and this island she told me about. She wanted me to teach her how to swim so she could go there again, so maybe I could do that.”
Geoff nods. “You should take me with you. I think it’d be cool to see all that.”
I say that’d be great, because I also have this other idea, though I don’t mention that it just came to me, like a vastation of my own.
“Which is what?” Geoff asks.
“Which is Phuong and I learn how to disarm those cluster bombs. Get trained in how to do that. And we go back to the Trail, to find all the unexploded ones in Laos and Cambodia.” I tell Geoff he can even come with us. It’ll take a long time. There are millions of bombs. But we could be the ones who start. Because somebody has to do something.
“Sort of clean up the mess left by your dad?”
I nod. “Yeah. I guess something like that.”
“You really think Phuong would help you with that?” Geoff asks.
“Maybe,” I say. “At least we wouldn’t be enemies anymore—not us and not Vietnam and America. We’d just be these two people who were together in the war. Who went through a lot. Just these two people who survived.”
While Taylor and Phuong’s journey along the Ho Chi Minh Trail is fiction, the events leading up to it, including Taylor’s trip to South Vietnam as a civilian, and what they experienced along the way are all based on historical events and accounts. The notorious Hanoi Hilton that Taylor fears is his destination was unfortunately a real prison where captured Americans were tortured in North Vietnam. The Vietnam War was a deeply complicated conflict that divided the US in a way nothing had since the Civil War, starting in 1961, when President Kennedy sent Green Berets and military advisers to train South Vietnamese troops, and continuing until January 1973, when the last US troops left—a long and tragic twelve years later.
Vietnamese rebels had already been fighting French colonial rule since before World War II, finally defeating French forces in the famous Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The victory by Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary army forced France out of Vietnam and led to the Geneva Accords, by which Vietnam was partitioned along the 17th parallel into communist-controlled North Vietnam, backed by China and the Soviet Union, and nominally democratic South Vietnam, supported—many would say controlled—by the United States.
The US began bombing North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1965 and sent the first US ground troops into South Vietnam that same year. The number of American troops in Vietnam grew quickly, from 185,000 in 1965 to a high of 535,000 three years later, fighting alongside nearly a million South Vietnamese troops in a war of attrition against the North Vietnamese Army and their Viet Cong guerrillas, who controlled hundreds of villages, towns, and even provinces throughout South Vietnam.
The Tet Offensive began on January 30, 1968, the start of the Vietnamese New Year, when 80,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army troops launched surprise attacks on more than one hundred South Vietnam towns and cities and military installations, including the capital, Saigon, where the attackers briefly overran the grounds of the US Embassy. The coordinated attacks came after the US government had assured the American public for months that the US and South Vietnam were winning the war, and that there was, in the words of then–Army Chief of Staff General William Westmoreland, “light at the end of the tunnel.”
Though initially successful, the Tet Offensive ended in military failure for the North Vietnamese Army, when all the captured cities and territory and installations were retaken in counterattacks by the US and South Vietnamese forces, who inflicted heavy casualties on the NVA. But the widely publicized attacks no
netheless shocked the American public, who had been led to believe that the enemy was too weak to mount any sort of massive and coordinated military campaign. With the rising number of American casualties, revelations of atrocities committed by some US soldiers, and mass protests against the war back home, support for the war fell in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive.
Support declined further when President Nixon ordered a resumption of the bombing in the North and in 1970 sent troops into Cambodia, widening the ground war at a time when an increasing number of Americans wanted it to end. Massive antiwar protests continued; the US began secret peace talks with the North; and in 1972, the NVA launched what was dubbed the Easter Offensive, once again attacking military bases throughout the South, and surprising the US and South Vietnamese forces. US troop levels, which also began a dramatic decline in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, were down to 24,000 in 1972. The United States pulled the last of its troops from Vietnam a year later, in January 1973. The war ended in victory for the North Vietnamese two years after that when they defeated the South Vietnamese Army and entered Saigon on June 6, 1975.
The names of 58,307 Americans who died in the war are inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. Estimates of the total number of North and South Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians killed in the war range from 1.5 million to 3.5 million, the majority of them civilians.
The US conducted nearly 600,000 bombing runs during the war and dropped more bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos than had been dropped in all of World War II. Three million tons of those bombs—plus a near constant aerial spraying of chemical defoliants—were dropped on the 12,000 miles of roads, trails, and waterways that comprised what the North Vietnamese called the Truong Son Strategic Supply Route, and the Americans dubbed the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Hundreds of thousands of civilians and bo doi—NVA soldiers and trail workers—were killed or wounded in the bombings and spraying and clandestine assaults by US and South Vietnamese units. But the supply route, also called the Reunification Trail, or sometimes Blood Road, was never broken.
An estimated 80 million of 270 million cluster bombs dropped in Laos during the war—the baseball-size “bomblets” like the ones described in this story—remain in that impoverished country today, where hundreds of civilians still die every year from delayed explosions.
In the novel, Taylor Sorenson quotes his father as saying, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” That quote, in slightly altered form, is borrowed from a February 7, 1968, dispatch by journalist Peter Arnett, writing about a small provincial capital in South Vietnam, and a US Army major’s explanation for the decision to bomb the town to force out the Viet Cong, regardless of civilian casualties: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
I am indebted to Virginia Morris and Clive Hills, who traveled the length of the Trail a decade ago, for their important contemporary study A History of the Ho Chi Minh Trail: The Road to Freedom, and to John Prados for his exhaustive political and historical account, The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War. For insight into the lives of those who came down from North Vietnam to bring the fight to the South, I am deeply appreciative of Dang Thuy Tram’s recently discovered wartime diary, published posthumously thirty years after she was killed in the war, Last Night I Dreamed of Peace. The New York Times Vietnam ’67 series was enormously helpful, especially Ron Milam’s essay “1967: The Era of Big Battles in Vietnam,” and Hai Nguyen’s “As the Earth Shook, They Stood Firm,” both important accounts of the decimation of the village of Ben Suc. While I have relied on these and other sources to help ensure historical accuracy in On Blood Road, any mistakes are, of course, my own.
My deepest thanks, as always, to my agent, Kelly Sonnack; to my wife and partner, Janet Marshall Watkins; and to my editor, Jody Corbett, who’s been as much coauthor as editor on this one. My thanks also to John Prados for his time and invaluable suggestions while this book was still in manuscript form, and to Professor Jim Gaines for his help with the French dialogue. And finally thanks to a host of terrific folks at Scholastic: Nina Goffi, Rachel Gluckstern, Jana Haussmann, and the rest of the sales, marketing, and publicity departments. Shakespeare said he hated ingratitude more “than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, or any taint of vice whose strong corruption inhabits our frail blood.” No worries about that here, as these folks will always have my deep and abiding gratitude for all their hard and talented work helping to bring On Blood Road into the world.
Steve Watkins is the author of the novels Juvie; What Comes After; Great Falls; Down Sand Mountain, winner of the Golden Kite Award; Sink or Swim; and the Ghosts of War series, including The Secret of Midway, Lost at Khe Sanh, AWOL in North Africa, and Fallen in Fredericksburg.
A former professor of journalism, creative writing, and Vietnam War literature, Steve cofounded and helps a nonprofit yoga studio and works with an urban reforestation organization in his hometown of Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Copyright © 2018 by Steve Watkins
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First edition, November 2018
Jacket art © 2018 by Tony Mauro
Jacket design by Nina Goffi
e-ISBN 978-1-338-19702-0
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