War Baby

by Colin Falconer

  ‘He is very kind to me.’

  He looked at the room’s only bed and bit his lip, thinking. ‘How did you get by?’ he said.

  She did not answer him. Enough shame, for now.

  ‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ he said.

  In the siclo she had told herself that she would show him the child, and then she would tell him: This is what you did to me, this is what I had to do for us to survive, and then she would push the knife into his heart. But it was a fantasy, not a plan. Where was all that hate now? Just dissolved, gone. Now there was just the sadness; the sadness and the shame.

  ‘How old?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘Sixteen months.’

  ‘She’s beautiful.’

  ‘She’s too fat. She eats too much and her nose is too big.’

  ‘No, she’s wonderful.’

  She realized she was crying. It was what she had always wanted to hear. She had waited sixteen months for him to tell her she had given him a beautiful baby.

  He stood up, holding Phuong under one arm, and tried to put the other around her. She tried to push him away, remind herself that she hated him. But instead she found herself clinging to him, drinking in his never-forgotten warm smell. He kissed her forehead, and then lifted her face with his fingertips and kissed her in the special, intimate way he had once told her was purely French.

  She dropped the purse.

  He pulled at the buttons of her ao dai, slipped his hand inside the silk and cupped her breast in his palm, rubbing her nipple with his thumb and kissed so hard she could not catch her breath. This is just another stupid, reckless mistake.

  But I don’t care.

  He put Phuong gently on the floor and carried her to the bed.

  It was like a drug. She just ached to have him love her again.

  * * *

  When Webb walked into the apartment they were both asleep. Odile had one arm around Ryan’s broad, bare back, the fingers of her other hand entangled in his dark curls. His head lay on her breast. The narrow bed was a crumpled mess.

  Phuong looked up at him from the floor and grinned with her four baby teeth, two top and two bottom.

  Webb sagged back against the wall like he’d been king-hit. ‘Jesus,’ he said aloud.

  Odile’s eyes blinked wide. She fumbled for the edge of the sheet.

  ‘Well I’m glad that’s all sorted,’ he said to her and went out, slamming the door.

  Chapter 14

  The Cigale had curved iron bars on the windows and a boy on the door, whose job was to watch for any unwelcome parcels the Viet Cong might think to toss through the door. Crosby and two correspondents from the AP were sitting on bar stools, drinking brandies, watching the cowboys roaring up and down the Tu Do on their Hondas.

  Webb heard them laughing from the street, but as he walked in there was a stiff silence. Ryan was with them. Webb guessed the others knew what had happened. Gossip travelled fast in Saigon.

  Ryan grinned and waved a hand. ‘Drink, Spider?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He shouted for another round. Webb sat down.

  ‘We were just talking about the afternoon’s Follies. Croz heard there’s something big going on up at Que Trang.’

  Que Trang sat astride the Ho Chi Minh trail, a bermed fort manned by a Special Forces A-Team and four hundred Sedang Strikers. The press officer at the Follies said the fort had been coming under artillery bombardment and a company of ARVN had been sent on a search and destroy mission.

  ‘I was talking to a Green Beret colonel yesterday,’ Crosby said. ‘He told me the base is surrounded and two nights ago they were almost overrun. We’re going up tomorrow to take a look. Interested?’

  ‘Sure he’ll come,’ Ryan said. ‘You’ll do anything for a story. Won’t you, Spider?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll come.’

  The next morning Crosby, Ryan and Webb jumped on a C-130 at Tan Son Nhut and flew up to Danang. From there they hitched a ride on a Chinook flying out to an LZ ten miles east of the Que Trang camp in the Highlands.

  The moment the helicopter touched the ground, ARVN soldiers raced towards them with their wounded, crouching low under the propellers. The remnants of the company - the men the press officer at the Follies had assured them would relieve the shelling at Que Trang - were sitting on the edge of the LZ, on half-tracks and ammunition boxes, heads bowed. The black panther shoulder flashes indicated they were from the elite Hue Bao battalion. Their faces were etched with the familiar hard stares of men who had just come from a long and bitter battle.

  They found a captain sitting on a sandbag, his right arm strapped with a wound dressing. He was smoking a cigarette. Ryan went over, introduced himself as a reporter with Time.

  ‘What happened here?’ he said.

  ‘What you think happened?’ the captain said, nodding towards the rows of body bags next.

  ‘You got through to Que Trang?’

  ‘We walked into an NVA ambush, so we called in air support. Your air put their first strike right on top of us. I just lost half my company dead or wounded.’

  All three of them were scribbling as fast as they could.

  ‘What’s the situation at Que Trang, Captain?’ Crosby asked.

  ‘The camp is totally encircled.’ He drew on his cigarette. His hands were still shaking. ‘There’s three NVA battalions around Que Trang and the men inside are taking three hundred rounds a day.’

  Webb looked at Ryan and Crosby. This was a different picture to the one they had had from JUSPAO, but that wasn’t new. What the captain was describing was a Special Forces team and two companies of Montagnard mercenaries cut off and a company of ARVN regulars decimated by friendly fire. Crosby was eager to get it on the wire.

  As they walked away he turned to Ryan. ‘I’m going back to Da Nang and file.’

  ‘We don’t have the full story yet.’

  ‘My deadline’s tighter than yours. Besides, he says they’re taking three hundred rounds a day.’

  ‘Did we see the three hundred rounds?’ Ryan asked him. ‘Anyone been up there to count them?’

  ‘Shit, you still want to go to Que Trang after what he just said?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I’ve got my story.’

  Ryan looked at Webb. Webb wanted to walk away from this too, but he didn’t have as good a reason as Crosby. He asked himself again, as he had asked himself countless times before, why he was fooling with his life this way.

  Two Hueys were warming up on the LZ. A Marine colonel and two Vietnamese staff officers loped towards them, crouched down under the rotors. Ryan saw them and intercepted them.

  ‘Colonel, my name’s Ryan, I’m a correspondent with Time,’ he shouted over the roar of the Huey’s engine, his face screwed up against the dust storm. ‘Can you tell me what’s happening at Que Trang, sir?’

  The colonel looked irritated by the delay. ‘The men in the fort are temporarily isolated by enemy movement. They’ll be relieved in the next twenty-four hours.’

  He tried to break away, but Ryan clung to his sleeve.

  ‘Can we get transport to Que Trang?’

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. I can offer you a ride to Mae Son on my chaser if you want.’

  He gave Ryan a pat on the shoulder and leaped into the Huey.

  ‘Fuck him!’ Ryan swore.

  ‘Let’s get on the chaser,’ Crosby said.

  The ‘chaser’ was a second helicopter that followed VIP politicians and military in case they were shot down; in this case it was an ancient CH-34.

  Crosby jumped in, and settled on the floor next to the door gunner. Webb and Ryan slid in beside him. Webb felt a curious mixture of disappointment and relief; if they didn’t get to Que Trang he had no good pictures he could use, but at least he was alive. For Crosby it was different; he could file this as hot news.

  Ryan grabbed Webb’s shoulder. ‘All we’ve got is a snap of a few blokes sitting on sandbags.’

  Webb
shrugged: ‘If they won’t let us in, there’s nothing we can do about it.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Ryan scrambled towards the door. He jumped. Webb reacted without thinking, and leaped after him. The helicopter was already four feet off the ground and he landed rolling in the dirt.

  He looked up and saw Crosby’s startled face at the gun door before the chopper rose and tilted away.

  Ryan was already on his feet and running. Then Webb saw why; there was a medevac coming in from the north. It would be loaded with the wounded from Que Trang. And if he had made it out, he sure as hell would be going back to get others.

  Chapter 15

  It was said that a combat spiral in a Huey could pull your brains out through your anus. Webb gasped as the chopper corkscrewed down, the wind rushing through the open doors, the door gunner firing wild bursts from his M-60. Ravines and green razorback ridges spun giddyingly across Webb’s vision through the gunner’s door. Fat blobs of red rose from the 50-calibre anti-aircraft guns, floating lazily towards them as if someone were lobbing beer cans at them from the trees, then seemed to accelerate and whip-crack past them.

  The Huey bounced as it hit the ground. They didn’t wait for it to settle, throwing themselves clear and staggering to their feet to weave through the storm of dust and debris, crouching low to avoid the rotor tips.

  A mortar round thudded into the dirt not thirty yards away. Webb slipped and fell on his face. He wondered for a moment if he had been hit. Then someone grabbed him and dragged him towards a trench. He toppled in and lay on his back, winded.

  A giant in tiger stripe camous crouched over him.

  ‘Is it our reinforcements?’ someone said.

  ‘Hell, no,’ the giant said. ‘This is just some honky muthafucka with a press badge.’

  * * *

  The Central Highlands of Vietnam even scared the Special Forces. At noon the sun barely made it through the canopy of the giant hardwoods, the jungle a furnace netherworld of shadows and silence and contrary mists. It was a place from the imagination of Conan Doyle, and was inhabited by the Montagnards, a strange and silent people who had become allies of the Americans and South Vietnamese by default. The northerners hated them.

  Que Trang itself was a shambles of rusting barbed wire and rotting sandbags. The base had the look of a long siege; there were gaps in the perimeters where sappers had cut a way through, before the gunners had cut them down. Their bodies still lay there, rotting in the sun. The ground was littered with spent shell casings, rusting ration cans, sodden pages from Stars and Stripes and blood-stained combat dressings. It had rained the night before, turning the red laterite into an ochre porridge.

  The fort was manned by Montagnard mercenaries, under the command of a handful of American Special Forces and Vietnamese paratroopers. The Americans themselves had the look of men taken way too far. They looked and acted like zombies.

  Everywhere there was the smell of death and rancid sweat.

  Ryan and Webb picked their way along the red mud pathways, past the wreckage of the barracks. Most of the hooches inside the compound had been destroyed by mortar and rocket fire; those few that remained were littered with shell holes. They finally found the headquarters, a bunker near the centre of the compound, the roof lined with rotting sandbags.

  A lieutenant gave them thick, bitter coffee laced with Jack Daniels and two bennies. He assigned them racks in a bunker near the perimeter and handed them each an M-16 and three M-26 fragmentation grenades.

  ‘The enemy’s right out there,’ he said, ‘in those trees.’

  ‘The enemy?’ Ryan said. ‘You mean Newsweek?’

  The lieutenant gave him a frigid smile. ‘Cute,’ he said. He nodded towards the mountains. ‘There’s maybe three battalions of NVA sitting in those hills. Sure as God made little green apples they are going to come didley-boppin’ through that wire sometime early this morning. Fact is, we’re going to need all the help we can get.’ The lieutenant pointed to the M-16s. ‘You know how to use those mothers?’

  ‘I know how to use one,’ Webb told him. ‘But I’m not going to.’

  ‘Why not, son?’

  Son. The lieutenant was probably only a year older than Webb. ‘Because I’m a journalist, not a soldier.’

  ‘That’s up to you, I guess. It’s your funeral.’

  Webb and Ryan ate their C-rations in the bunker and watched the sun sink over the Highlands. Around them, the Special Forces guys were getting ready for another night fight, smearing blacking under their eyes, clicking banana clips into their weapons and tucking grenades into the pockets of their camous. They threw sidelong glances at the Montagnards, wondering if they could trust them to hold their line, if they would still be there on the berm in the morning.

  Every few minutes a mortar round thudded into the camp. Night fell quickly. The air grew damp, and chill. Webb shivered inside his poncho. Fear crept through the lines, tangible, like a gas.

  The radio in the bunker was tuned to the Armed Forces radio network.

  And for all you guys and girls at the 17 th Evac, especially Mo in the Orderly Room, here’s one from the fabulous Rolling Stones.

  ‘Why did you say you wouldn’t use that?’ Ryan said, pointing to the M-16 at Webb’s side.

  ‘We’re not here to fight. If we start carrying guns then we become targets.’

  ‘Oh sure, Charles is really hung up about shooting war correspondents by mistake.’

  ‘It’s professional ethics. I haven’t used a weapon yet. I don’t intend to start now.’

  ‘I’ll give you an example of professional ethics, mate. In ’68 I was with an ARVN platoon in the Delta and we were being overrun. One soldier died right there next to me and when I looked up there was Charles running towards me with an AK. I was faced with an ethical dilemma then. The dilemma was: do I want to die right now? The answer, funnily enough, was no. So I picked up the dead bloke’s M-16 and started shooting.’

  ‘Did you kill him?’

  ‘I never stuck around to find out. But I know I hit him because his head came off.’

  I see a red door and I want to paint it black . . .

  Webb shook his head. ‘I don’t believe in killing.’

  ‘Then why the fuck are you here?’

  ‘Because I don’t believe in killing.’

  Ryan shook his head. ‘You amaze me sometimes, Spider.’

  The moon rose, fat and yellow over the jagged trunk of a splintered tree. Webb watched an illumination flare drop over the perimeter. He scraped the last of the cold ham stew from the can, listened to the rats scratching on the bunker floor. Ryan lit a cigarette, offered one to Webb. Webb didn’t usually smoke, apart from the occasional opium pipe, but he made an exception. Clean lungs don’t count for much if you’re full of holes.

  ‘Croz’ll be spitting chips he missed this,’ Ryan said.

  ‘Sure. He’s back in Da Nang, he’s filed his story, and he’s eating T-bone steak and drinking chilled beer. Poor bastard.’

  ‘But we’ve got the dateline. He hasn’t.’

  Webb drew on the cigarette.

  ‘You scared, Spider?’

  ‘Of course I fucking am. What kind of person would not be scared in this situation?’

  ‘Just that... it’s okay, you know.’

  ‘I know it’s okay.’ He had never got to love the fear, not like Ryan did. He just got through it, for the sake of the story, because someone had to do it.

  The lieutenant, doing his rounds of the perimeter, swore at them for breaking the blackout and dropped the canvas flap of the bunker shut. They lay back on their bunks in the darkness, fully clothed. The only light was the burning orange tips of their cigarettes and the small, green glow from the radio valves.

  If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

  ‘About Odile …’ Ryan said.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Are you in love with her, Spider?’

  �
��No.’

  ‘She reckons you are.’

  ‘I can’t help what she thinks.’

  ‘I don’t know what there was between the two of you but ... I promised I’d look after her. She’s my problem now, not yours.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I didn’t know she had a kid, mate. That changes everything. It’s just that... I’m not the marrying kind. I couldn’t imagine spending my life making love to one woman. You might as well put me in bloody prison.’

  ‘Then why the blue blazing fuck did you persuade her to leave the convent, you prick?’

  ‘Don’t hold back, mate. Say what you mean.’

  ‘Why did you?’

  The tobacco crackled in the dark. ‘I really thought this was different. But then, after a while, it... it turned out to be just the same. I got bored, I suppose.’

  ‘Jesus, Ryan. It’s not like there’s a shortage of women in this country. You had to prove a point, didn’t you? How many points did you give yourself for screwing a nun?’

  ‘I know what I am. I don’t need you to preach to me.’

  Webb felt something sting the soft, tender flesh on the inside of his thigh. A leech had found its way there from the ooze around his ankles. He swung his legs up on to the bunk and closed his eyes. He waited for his other senses to kick in; he heard the soft pop of another illumination round.

  ‘Did you sleep with her, Spider?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what was it all about, then?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  A mosquito whined around his head.

  And this is Count Malaria here on AFVN reminding you to take your chloroquine phosphate pills ...

  ‘I couldn’t walk away and leave her like that, pretend I didn’t know her. Oh, just another gook having a bad time. I wanted to do something useful over here besides take pictures.’

  Ryan was silent.

  ‘Now I’ve got a question for you,’ Webb said. ‘What are you going to do about her?’