But the men around me didn’t even look at the body. Hien hummed softly to himself. He wasn’t the only one to seem relieved. Some of these men were hard-core dedicated troops, true, but several were virtual draftees from the villages, men who had joined the Vietcong because to do otherwise would cost their lives or those of their families. Most of the auras never changed, just remained the same muddy brown, indifferent, numbed, and hard as nails, but without the vitality their late comrade had derived from hurting people. No one seemed to blame me. I would have been flattering myself to think the colonel had killed one of his own men on my account. The man had been executed for disobeying orders. Even a guard dog that doesn’t mind its master and bites unpredictably has to be put down.
Just before dark we headed down the ridge, toward another village. Everyone grew marginally more tense, the colonel’s aura sparking with anxiety. A few yards from the perimeter, we saw a man with a rifle. He yelled, “Dung lai,” but as we got closer, he saw that this was no time to play High Noon and scuttled off into the village, his aura leaving a light trail of gray-violet fear.
The colonel exchanged a few words with his men and nodded into the jungle, the paddy, up the hill. One of the men with flat, muddy auras took the point position walking into the village. I tried not to allow myself to feel excited. If the colonel was being so wary here, that must mean this was not a VC village. Or at least not entirely. Maybe they were even hiding American troops, right now. Maybe…
I was looking the other way, squinting into the hills, trying to see what the colonel had been nodding at, when the point man stepped on the mine. I heard the explosion—no big thing, really, for Nam—and the howl of pain almost at once. Some of the others started to run forward, but the colonel stopped them with a gesture and strode over to the man with a confidence only I could see was tinged with fear.
He hollered to Hien, who suddenly looked as if he might faint. His aura was whirling with teal, pale grayed olive, and violet, underlain with mustard. He believed I was special, a saint perhaps, and should be protected and helped, but he was a simple man, not a brilliant one like the colonel, and he was afraid. His very thoughts were traitorous. If there was help here for me—but the colonel was beckoning us across the minefield and Hien removed the rope from my wrists and took my hand to lead me forward, showing me by example that we must step only in the colonel’s footsteps.
The colonel nodded to the injured man, telling me to do my thing, whatever it was. Then he signalled everyone except Hien to follow him into the village. Now the yellow in his aura swirled with a sad brown the color of an old bloodstain, and red kindled in the blue. The auras of the men blended in similar combinations with his—the influence, I suppose, of a leader more charismatic than he wanted to be or realized.
I cut away what was left of the point man’s trousers. His left leg was severed above the knee, the femoral artery spurting. I started applying pressure, as I normally would, and imagined the artery sealed, the wound mending, a smooth clean stump, but the wound continued to spurt until I took Hien’s hand in one of mine and held it, trembling, against his comrade’s wound. Blood covered both of us now, but gradually it receded, like a film of a flowing river shown in reverse. Hien looked from the patient to me with eyes as large as bomb craters. The injured man had groin wounds, too. He would father no more children, but with Hien holding him with one hand and holding my hand with the other, the wounds magically began forming granular tissue from the inside, one of the initial stages of the healing process. This time the process looked like a film run on fast forward. But it wouldn’t be fast enough to save him from sepsis. For that we would need more hands. My strength was gone and Hien’s had been drained with the healing we’d done together.
I looked up from the patient to see if the colonel was anywhere close, to ask him to send us someone else to help.
He was not close, but he was close enough for me to see what happened.
They had gathered the village together, with the frightened perimeter guard, now unarmed and scared halfway to death already, in the center. His aura shot sickly pus-purple. He looked like a teenager—a good-looking boy with his black hair parted on one side. He was probably not old enough to have been drafted by the ARVN. His eyes looked like a frightened horse’s, the twilight bouncing off them, and he kept babbling at the colonel in a tone at once apologetic and argumentative.
The colonel gave an order and one of the VC, a man whose skin was mottled as if he had been burned at some time, stepped forward. Another man pushed the boy to his knees and forced his arms up so that his head bent low. I thought they would shoot the boy, but the man with mottled skin drew a machete from his belt and started hacking the boy’s neck.
I buried my head in my hands and screamed, my screams lost in those of the others, the moans and wailing and “oi oi-ing” of the frightened villagers. I didn’t want to look back up, but I couldn’t help it. One by one an old man and an equally ancient woman, a middle-aged woman, a girl and the baby on her hip, and three older children, the boy’s family perhaps, or village elders, or both, were kicked into the center, bent over double, and butchered as the boy had been. I was on my feet now, screaming and screaming for them to stop.
The colonel had been as coolly intent on the executions as if he were supervising a ditch digging or a concrete pouring. Almost casually, he glanced our way and his eyes met mine, cutting through the twilight. His face looked just the same, but his aura was a bare wisp of drabness around him.
Hien grabbed the amulet and jerked me back down beside him. His hand flew up and first stung my cheek, then burned it, and I thought my head, too, would fly off as I fell across our patient, Hien still holding the amulet. The pain in my face was nothing compared to the fear pouring from Hien. Fear more overwhelming than anything I had ever felt flooded through me, and I knew what it meant to be literally spineless as my backbone and knees turned to jelly. We’d be killed, we’d both be killed, the worst possible deaths would be needed to set an example, deaths that would make the simple beheading of those villagers look humane. I must be quiet, I must pretend not to be there, or I would force the colonel to kill me and then kill Hien for not shutting me up.
Hien released the amulet and pinned my arms as the colonel left the troops, now firing on some of the huts, and marched toward us. I was at the same time angry with Hien for slugging me and furious with myself for my own idiocy. Hien’s recriminations echoed through every capillary and nerve ending in my body. How could I have been so stupid, so spoiled, as to think the pragmatic mercy that had been shown me so far meant that I had any influence on the normal course of duty? This village had caved in to the enemy. This village had set mines that were responsible for the death of a soldier of the liberation. This village had been punished, and now my foolish actions would force the colonel to make an example of me, to show these people how worthless their American allies were.
Footsteps slapped through the mud and the colonel stood over us, the light from a torch carried by one of the men behind him reflecting off his head. He scowled down at us and examined the patient, who was now conscious, briefly. Then he nodded to my guard and put his pistol to the head of the wounded soldier. Blinding pain shot through my own head, breaking the auras into millions of light motes that spun like galaxies through the darkness.
20
I was dead. I knew I was dead. They’d shot me in the head and that’s why I saw all those stars. I was nothing but an aura looking for a place to land. When I opened my eyes to darkness again, I knew I was definitely dead. I had felt the shot. They shot me because of my wounds. A soldier with one leg and no genitals would slow them down and the nearest hospital was many kilometers away….
No, that was wrong. I was alive. It was the point man who had lost his genitals and leg. He was the one who was shot. But I was the one lying in darkness with a terrible pain in my head, scared almost literally to death. I tried to sit up, and if there had been anything in my environment
that could have spun, it would have. I fell back again and lost the day’s rice ration, having to twist suddenly to keep from vomiting while I was landing on my back, and choking myself. It was difficult because my hands were bound again, and my feet too.
I did the old deep-breathing routine and sat up much more slowly. My head hit pay dirt before I’d done a complete sit-up, and I raised my hands. A wedge of cold black, a little lighter than the blackness in my hole, poured in as something slipped back from my palms, and hot shadows danced across my face. I was in another tunnel, perhaps a rice storage bin.
I was not dead, I had not been injured, I was not even imprisoned. I was hidden. My patient had been murdered and I was alive and hidden. A whole family had been murdered, and in the village beyond my hiding place I saw that the thatch of two of the whitewashed mud houses had been set afire. Had the colonel casually burned the houses to make enough light to finish his punishment of the village?
I could not have been unconscious very long. The people had not changed position. The colonel had returned to the village, though the body of my poor patient still lay in the mud, among the mines.
Pigs squealed and chickens squawked madly as some of the VC troops tried to round them up. Children shrieked and cried while their mothers tried frantically to hush them. One old woman tried to crawl to one of the bodies and was kicked away.
The colonel made a circle with his arm, and his men stopped chasing chickens and started grabbing children from their mothers or herding them toward the gate. The shadows of flames burned across Dinh’s face and hands, making an aura of their own for him.
The children were lined up at the village gate, facing the mined path as if they were to run a footrace. Dinh took two of the oldest by the shoulders and pointed across the minefield to my dead patient. His arm dropped as the roof of one of the houses collapsed in a fountain of sparks and flying, flaming thatch straw, and the boys half ran, half stumbled through the gate.
I closed my eyes to focus. When I looked up again, Hien’s agonized face covered the opening of the hole. His lip was swollen so that his back teeth were bared. Firelight caught the gold in one of them. His eye was cut and swollen, too. He had given up on trying to be gentle. He put his hand on top of my head and tried to shove me back in the hole. He must have been sitting behind it, or to one side, so intent on watching the village it had taken him some time to notice that I’d opened the hole.
The force of the next explosion startled both of us. He jumped away from the mouth of the hole. Earth and rice tumbled to the floor of the hole as the vibrations shook the ground and the smell of gunpowder joined the acrid stench of burning thatch. A woman screamed short, staccato screams. I poked my head back out the hole again.
The colonel stood in the midst of the executed villagers, who lay at his feet like so many disassembled store dummies. Four of his men held automatic weapons on the adults of the village. Four more held automatic weapons on the children who had been walking cautiously down the mined pathway. For a split second, the children froze as if they were playing a grotesque game of statues. Then one of the smaller ones, a little naked boy of about three, began crying and tried to run back to his mother. He and his screeches were lost in the flash from another explosion.
I knelt back down in the hole and vomited bile down my legs and onto my feet. I didn’t want to look back, but I did. The guards stood menacing the two older boys, who had reached the dead VC and were now trying to drag him between them back to the gate. Only one of them made it.
I didn’t watch the rest. I retched and retched into the hole while the crackling of a fire, the sobs of the bereaved, were punctuated eight more times, I counted, with fresh explosions and shrieks.
After a very long time Hien pulled me, dizzy and shaken, from the hole. The colonel and all but one of his men stood nearby, with several new recruits from the village. Some of the new people were the mothers of the children; one I recognized as one of the boys who had been hauling the body. He was reeling from shock but trying to smoke a cigarette and look as if he’d been plucked from the unemployment line for some routine job. No one would ever be able to tell the difference between him and a regular Vietcong, and in time he wouldn’t be able to tell, either.
The fires from the houses were burned out and I did not look for the auras of either the dead or the living. I did not look in the direction of the village at all. I allowed myself to be led away from it, through a lesser nightmare of biting insects and vines and tree roots that tripped me and made me fall. Toward morning, Hien dragged me after him into another tunnel bunker. I felt him shaking beside me, as if he were palsied. Even after he grew quiet, I couldn’t sleep. I was afraid to. I could not believe, when Dinh had done such terrible things to his own people, that he would let me live much longer. My God, what if he had found Ahn? What would he have done to him? He’d never find out from me. And neither would Hien. Poor Hien. He was too damned scared of Dinh to really be of any use to me. But maybe he would send some last words to my mom, if I could think of any.
On my other side, the colonel flopped restlessly. I pulled as far from him, as close to Hien, as I could get. I could still smell the blood, the gunpowder, the smoke, on Dinh’s clothing. He rolled toward me once and I flinched away. He sat halfway up in the tunnel, and tugged my rope.
He pulled me after him into the open, where he lit a cigarette and put it to his mouth as if it were an Aqua-lung and he were underwater.
He handed it to me after a puff, but I waved it away. I was already coughing so hard my sides hurt. “Hien saved your worthless life last night, woman,” he said.
I nodded listlessly. I had dragged myself through most of the trip away from the village. Of all the terrible things that happened, the deaths of the family and the children, I think what did the worst harm to me was when Dinh shot my patient out from under me so soon after I had poured all of my energy into his cure. Part of me was still gone, out there in the twilight zone somewhere with the augmented aura of my former patient. I don’t know if it was the same for Hien. Maybe. I never found out.
I looked down at my filthy feet and ran my tongue around my blood-and-bile-fouled mouth. It tasted as if it had been stuffed with filthy dressings. I couldn’t stand to look at Dinh. Never in my life had I hated anyone so much. The way he had butchered that whole family. Those poor babies in the minefield. That helpless man who thought we were going to help him. It made me thoroughly sick to think I had ever regarded such a monster as a human being, much less a protector.
I was chilling so badly it felt as if a winter wind were blowing straight into my marrowless bones. When he touched me I felt I’d been thrown into a pit full of rattlesnakes. I couldn’t seem to stop shuddering.
I thought he winced ever so slightly as he withdrew the cigarette, as he had not winced at killing children in front of their mothers and one of his own—no, two of his own men. His aura was little more than a thread of light around him now, the colors so smudged and muddied it was hard to tell what they had been.
But he only smiled and blew a smoke ring that was immediately dispersed by the drizzle. And he spoke quietly, almost offhandedly, in Vietnamese, as you might speak to a dog or a cat, or perhaps to a total stranger when you have something so terrible to say that you don’t want anyone you know or care about to hear. “You were displeased by what happened in the village, co. I could not allow you to undermine my authority there—it would have proved fatal for you if you had even attempted to intervene. But now you can tell me what you would have told me then.”
I licked my lips, and flicked the rain into my dry mouth. One of my teeth was loose. I started to speak and he casually leaned over and touched the amulet. I pulled away, resenting the gesture as fiercely as if he had stuck his hand in my crotch. I didn’t want this man to know me any more. I didn’t want to know him. He grimaced, trying to make me think he was amused at my repulsion, but he wasn’t. I relaxed just a little with a sense of revenge. He had already known
I hated him. Touching the amulet wasn’t a sadistic act toward me—it was a masochistic one for him.
“I was just going to say stop,” I said. “I was going to say, don’t do it. They’re your own people. How could you?”
“But I had to do it. By sparing you, by sparing the village that harbored you, by sparing my backsliding daughter, I was already in grave error. Believe me, I would not have done so if it was not that I think certain influential men will be pleased to have you among us.”
I wondered then if he intended to lie for Hue and the village, to say that they captured me and had the foresight to keep me alive and hand me over. I hoped he was that human, anyway.
“You could have let me help the injured children, the ones who survived,” I said.
“I did not wish them to survive. I did not wish to make a folk heroine of you, to have legends of you spread over the countryside. I wish no one to know of you until we reach the North. I will tell you something between the two of us, co. I am still attached to that worthless daughter of mine. I am grateful to you for saving her and for what you did for those people. Did you know that the entire village risked my wrath, risked having happen to them what happened to this other village today, to plead for your life? They have not cared about the lives of anyone outside their own families for decades, and now that you are gone they will forget you as if you were a disturbing dream and revert to their apathy. Though I try not to be a superstitious man, I believe that my daughter is correct about you. I believe that you are a holy woman in a rather unusual guise, and I respect that. If it were up to me as a man, I would take you back to your people. If it were up to you as a simple woman, I believe that you would continue to use your gift as you have been doing, for the benefit of anyone who needs you. But it is not up to me, or to you.
“If I release you, your gift will be discovered in time and your government will use your gift to lead my people to the false conclusion that the Will of Heaven is with the Americans and resistance useless. Do you understand? Wandering among us in normal times, you would be a mendicant holy woman. Among your people, what you mean as good is a weapon against us. Even if you do not mean to cooperate, they can force it. You and your gift will be scrutinized, analyzed, and your talent ultimately perverted to military purposes, which I know, and you know, are the thing furthest from your heart. Unfortunately, I can promise you that if you cooperate, my side will do much the same, but it is my side. I cannot betray it by allowing you to fall back into the hands of the enemy. I can protect you only so far.”
The Healer’s War Page 30