by Larry Bond
General Tri was speaking on a field phone as they approached. While Zeus couldn’t understand what he was saying, Tri’s manner made it clear he was giving orders. His right hand tapped the table as he spoke, unconsciously emphasizing what he was saying. He spoke in sharp, hard tones.
Nuhn waited at the edge of the table without speaking. The others continued to work over their maps and papers, taking no notice of them. Zeus wasn’t surprised; they undoubtedly had a great deal to do.
Tri finished his call with an emphatic slap against the table. He slid the phone onto the cradle of its field pack, and said something to Nuhn.
Whatever he said made Nuhn feel uncomfortable. The captain started to answer, but Tri cut him off. The two men began arguing. It was one-sided; Nuhn strained to be polite while making his point. Finally, General Tri ended the conversation by picking up his phone.
“What’s up?” Zeus asked his guide.
Nuhn shook his head. General Tri, meanwhile, began a conversation with one of his officers, once more giving orders and making his points with the help of his fingers.
When he was done, Nuhn began speaking to him again. Or trying to—General Tri rose from his seat, pointed his finger at Zeus, and began speaking very sharply.
Zeus imagined he was being called several names at once, none of them flattering.
“General Trung told me to come here,” Zeus said. “It wasn’t my idea. If you don’t want my advice, that’s fine.”
Tri turned to Nuhn and began berating him even more harshly than before.
“Hey, don’t pick on him,” said Zeus. “We’re going. Come on, Captain.”
Nuhn seemed a little shell-shocked.
“Major,” said Nuhn. “General Trung has ordered you to give your advice.”
“General Tri doesn’t want advice. Why waste his time?”
“Major, we must.” Nuhn caught Zeus’s arm as he started to leave. He turned back to Tri and started to talk to him again, this time his voice very soft.
“Không!” said Tri adamantly. Even Zeus understood this meant no.
The general turned and called to one of the men at the bicycles. Ignoring Nuhn and Zeus, he took a piece of paper and wrote something on it. Folding it, he handed it to the man with a brief set of directions. The man immediately set off on his bike.
The rest of his staff, meanwhile, kept their eyes fixed on their work, steadfastly refusing to look in their direction, let alone get involved.
“Come on, Captain,” said Zeus. “I’m tired.”
He went back down to the field, admiring the bright-green fields and hills in the distance. It was a peaceful, near idyllic scene—one that would shattered soon.
Nuhn followed a few minutes later.
“I apologize deeply for the insult,” said the captain.
“It’s not a problem. He probably wouldn’t have liked what I was going to suggest anyway.”
“He should have listened. It is an insult to you and General Trung.”
That was the real problem, Zeus knew. Nuhn now had to go back and tell the supreme commander that the general he was counting on to hold this sector was insubordinate.
An isolated incident? Or a sign that Trung was losing his grip on his army?
“We will find a ride in Tien Yen,” Nuhn told him. “But we have to walk there.”
“To the city?”
“I guarantee we will find a ride,” said Nuhn. “I am sorry—the helicopter was needed elsewhere.”
* * *
Evening was settling over the hills, but the weather was mild. Though Zeus’s legs were tired, he had no trouble keeping up with Nuhn, whose pace slowed as they went.
In the States, Nuhn would be considered a little overweight, though not portly. By Vietnamese standards he was Falstaffian. Though it was doubtful he had any idea who Shakespeare’s hero-clown was, his swinging arms and cheerful manner amused Zeus, easing some of his fatigue. Nuhn’s smile returned little by little.
“We have a lovely day for a walk,” said Nuhn. “A lovely day.”
Zeus asked the translator where he had learned English. It turned out that Nuhn had two brothers who were born in America, though both had returned to Vietnam just before he was born.
“I am the baby of the family,” he said, detailing a Nuhn family tree that had eight members in the present generation. Originally from the Central Highlands, several members of the clan had left for the U.S. just before the collapse of South Vietnam. These included Nuhn’s father and mother, along with a hodgepodge of uncles and aunts. The family owned two restaurants in Los Angeles, but Nuhn’s mother had been homesick and the family had made its way back to Vietnam clandestinely about a year before Nuhn was born.
“English was always my best subject in school, even better than math,” said Nuhn. “No one knew why.” He laughed.
“I’m sorry the general gave you such a hard time,” said Zeus.
“He’s a fool,” said Nuhn. “But we are stuck with him.”
The road they were walking on had been made from hard-packed gravel coated with oil. It was about three car-widths wide. The sides fell off sharply into fields that seemed fairly wet. If the soil held the Chinese battle tanks at all, it wouldn’t let them move very quickly.
About a mile after they started walking, the road intersected with a highway. This was made of thick asphalt, and was wide enough that two columns of tanks could easily travel down it, with space for other vehicles to pass. A hill rose sharply on the left, but on the right the fields were green and level. Water was channeled across by a pair of deep ditches; tanks would have no trouble getting through here.
You could ambush the Chinese from the hill, come at them from the trees at the far side as well. They’d never expect an ambush from the Vietnamese on the open plain like this, not so close to the city after just having taken it.
If you hit them hard quickly, they might fall back to the city. But ideally you would want them to move even farther south, hopefully along this road where they could be bottled up.
Zeus tried to turn off his brain. There was no sense thinking of this. The commander didn’t want help. He had better things to do.
Give speeches. See the doctor.
Not in that order.
“You know a good restaurant in Hanoi that’s still open?” Zeus asked as they walked.
“A restaurant?”
“I want to thank the doctor who worked on me,” said Zeus. “I thought I would take her someplace nice.”
“Ah, a lady doctor. I understand,” said Nuhn. “You want to impress the lady.”
“Something like that.”
“Then she will fall into your arms,” joked Nuhn.
“That’d be nice.”
“Before the war, there were many places,” said the captain. “Now, you would be best in the hotel area. You will do best finding a place for tourists.”
“My hotel looked deserted.”
“That is not bad for you, is it?”
Zeus nodded. It might not be bad at all.
“We will find you some flowers,” added Nuhn enthusiastically.
“Great idea.”
“I have often impressed women with flowers,” said Nuhn confidentially. “They are like magic.”
He sunk into full Falstaff mode, regaling Zeus with a story of how he had wooed a woman in Saigon some years before. He had found a perfect flower—he couldn’t translate the Vietnamese word, hoa cruc, but the description made it sound like a mum to Zeus. He brought it to her at work just before she was due to take lunch. This scandalized her, as she had been avoiding him for weeks. But her boss insisted on her going to lunch with him, and they ended up having a love affair that lasted for months.
“Lucky for you the boss was on your side,” said Zeus.
Nuhn winked. “Ten dollars American makes many friends.”
* * *
The war had upended Tien Yen, even though the fighting hadn’t reached there yet. A good portion of the
population had been moved by the government or fled on their own. Most of the people who remained were working on various defenses, filling sandbags and posting them on street corners, erecting barricades, preparing gun positions. Twisted pieces of metal intended as tank obstacles were piled on one side street, waiting to be deployed. There weren’t many troops in the city; most were north, waiting warily for the Chinese attack.
A company of home guards were being drilled on one of the side streets as Zeus and Nuhn passed. Nuhn told Zeus to wait at the intersection and trotted over to speak to the captain who was supervising the drill. A few minutes later he appeared with a member of the guard in tow. The man was well into his fifties, and nearly as chubby as Nuhn.
“This is Uncle Vai,” said Nuhn, introducing the soldier. “He will drive us to Hanoi.”
Uncle Vai was a farmer who lived at the edge of the city. He led them back the way they had come, turning northward near the center of town and then wending through a series of narrow alleys behind a warren of tiny houses. Zeus was beginning to feel a little dizzy when finally Uncle Vai reached over a gate and undid the wire holding it in place. He led them into a narrow yard between two brick garages. Both buildings pitched toward the yard; it wouldn’t take much to knock them down.
A small truck was parked behind one of the buildings. The hood and windshield were covered with a tarp. Zeus and Nuhn helped Uncle Vai remove the tarp, following his directions to fold it carefully so it could be tied beneath a pair of large ropes on the flat back of the vehicle. Then they stepped out to the small alley and waited as Uncle Vai maneuvered the vehicle from its parking spot.
At some point in its life, the vehicle had been a panel van, the sort used to deliver goods to small shops during the 1960s and ’70s in Europe. The rear compartment had been removed, replaced by planks to make a flatbed. If the condition of the planks was any indication, this had happened many years ago.
The front of the van had been altered as well. The original seat had been replaced by one slightly larger; the edges of the seat stuck out into space where the door closed, so that when Zeus got in on the passenger side he had to slam the door several times before he could get it to latch. About half of the dashboard was missing, leaving Zeus with an open space in front of him—a blessing, really, since it left him more room for his feet. The vehicle had a manual transmission, mounted on the floor. Nuhn had to pull his legs back and hold his breath every time Uncle Vai shifted.
How could a country whose cars and trucks were falling apart hope to hold off the Chinese?
More to the point, why would anyone want to take them over?
The answer to the second question was in the fields they passed as they drove back to Hanoi. The generously watered crops would feed a good portion of the Chinese population in the south, particularly hard hit by the climate shifts over the past few years.
There was no good answer to the first question.
* * *
Nuhn had Uncle Vai stop by the Nhat Tan flower market when they arrived in Hanoi. It was well after nine o’clock. All the shops in the district had been closed for hours. But that didn’t deter Nuhn. As Zeus waited with the truck, he ran around the corner, promising to return with “something special.” A few minutes later he reappeared, carrying a long branch of blossoms.
“Your doctor will be very impressed,” he told Zeus.
Zeus stared at the blossoms. He’d never seen flowers this beautiful before. He barely thought of flowers as pretty—they were gifts, accessories. He felt as if he were seeing flowers for the first time.
His mind drifted from the flowers to the doctor.
“Major, this is you!” said Nuhn cheerfully.
Zeus looked up. They had reached the checkpoint to his hotel.
“Right.” Zeus squeezed his hand into the door latch. The door sprang open, a bird released from its cage. “Thanks.”
Nuhn slammed the door behind him, then opened the window and leaned out.
“Good luck!” shouted the captain cheerfully.
The men at the barricade pretended not to be watching Zeus as he walked past them. They didn’t bother checking his identification; the fact that he was a westerner was ID enough.
There were more people inside than there had been that morning. Even so, the lobby was hardly full. Zeus walked to the elevators, curious about who might be still in the city, but not wanting to talk to anyone. He pushed the button and stepped to the side, waiting.
He had a few hours before she got off. The first thing he was going to do was take a shower. After that …
After that he had to make sure he didn’t fall asleep. His body was starting to droop.
A man in his twenties came up next to him, tapping the elevator button even though it was already lit. He gave Zeus a sideways glance, then an embarrassed smile.
“Never trust them,” he said in English. His accent seemed British.
The elevator doors opened a second later. Zeus let the other man go in first, then got in himself. They were headed for the same floor.
“Nice flowers,” said the man as the doors closed.
Zeus glanced down at them. “Yeah.”
“Do you think the hotel is safe?”
“Probably as much as any place.”
“Bret Cannon.” The man stuck his hand out. “AP.”
“Uh, Zeus Murphy.” Zeus shook hands awkwardly.
“Been here long?”
“Few days. What’s AP?”
“Associated Press.” Cannon smiled again, this time looking like a man who had just confessed that he had inherited a great deal of wealth. “I’m covering the war.”
“I see.”
“You?”
“I work for the embassy.” He didn’t say U.S.; it would be obvious.
“Ohh,” said Cannon knowingly.
“I’m not actually a spy,” added Zeus, “but it does sound more romantic if I leave it open-ended.”
“What do you do then?”
“I’m not really supposed to say, but basically I keep machines working.”
“A copy machine repairman, eh?”
“Pretty much.”
Cannon gave him a smirk. He thought they were playing a game—that by saying he wasn’t a spy, Zeus had in fact admitted that he was. Zeus didn’t mind that; spies were expected. What he didn’t want to do was let on that he was here as a military adviser.
“How long do you think the Viets can last?” Cannon asked.
“Got me. A long time, I hope.”
“I give them a week. At most.”
The doors opened. “See ya around,” said Cannon, stepping out. “I’ll buy you a drink sometime.”
“Sure.”
Zeus thought of stepping back into the elevator and going downstairs; he didn’t want Cannon to know which room was his. But it would be a waste of time; anyone with ten bucks could probably bribe a hotel worker for the information.
Inside his room, Zeus peeled out of his clothes, then tried to take a shower. The water trickled from the spout, and it was cold. He washed anyway.
How long can the Viets last?
Not long. A week wasn’t a bad estimate.
There was a knock on the door as Zeus toweled off. He thought of ignoring it, sure it must be Cannon. But where was the sense in that?
“Yeah?” he yelled.
“It’s me,” said Christian.
“Hang on.” Zeus wrapped a towel around his waist, then went to the door, undoing the lock.
“What’s up?” he asked as Christian came in.
“Jeez, you got water?”
“A trickle.”
“Across the hall there’s nothin’.” Christian plopped down in one of the chairs. The bottom of his jeans was crusted with mud. “God, put some clothes on, would you?”
“I wasn’t expecting company.” Zeus pulled some underwear and a fresh pair of pants from the dresser. He was getting low; pretty soon he’d have to resort to his BDUs.
�
�So they go for it?” Christian asked.
“The general wouldn’t even see me.”
“Figures. I don’t know what it is with these guys. Inscrutable Asians. And we saved their butts. You and I.” Christian got up and went to the minifridge. “All they got here is Chinese beer.”
“That stuff costs a fortune.”
“I wouldn’t sweat it. They won’t be around to collect. Bar is crawling with reporters,” added Christian. He held out a bottle for Zeus.
“I better not. I don’t want to fall asleep.”
“Why, you got a date?”
Zeus started to grin.
“You do have a date. What the hell, Murph? With who?”
Zeus shrugged.
“I’ll find out if you don’t tell me. I’ll have you trailed.”
“The doctor who worked on me. A woman.”
“Yeah, no shit?” Christian took a slug of the beer. “I think I know who you’re talking about. Good choice. That’s what the flowers are for, huh?”
Zeus looked at the branch of blossoms on the dresser. He should probably put it into water.
“We went to eight different units. Eight,” said Christian, leaning back in the chair. “They’re going to get their asses kicked. I don’t think I saw one weapon less than twenty years old. You really think they have Boltoks? Or was that a pipe dream?”
“Probably a few.”
“A few won’t do it.” Christian took another slug. “Hell, those aren’t going to go through a 99 anyway. Unless you get a really good hit. The damn tank was designed to deal with that crap.”