War Baby

by Colin Falconer

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t love her.’

  ‘I care for her.’

  ‘Why did you go back? If you’d left her with me you wouldn’t have had to worry any more, would you?’

  ‘I don’t need any bullshit from you. I’ll do the right thing, but I’ll do it my way.’

  Webb put the grenades and the rifle under his cot, flicked on a pencil light, checking that the first aid kit and his cameras and notebooks were within easy reach. Then he flicked the light off again and they lay there in the dark listening to the terrible silence.

  ‘What happens if you get blown away tonight?’ Webb said, finally.

  ‘Then I won’t have to worry about it anymore, will I?’

  ‘This is not about you. It’s about her. And the baby.’

  ‘Yeah, well, life’s a lottery, mate. We all take our chances. Maybe it’s karma, like the Buddhists say.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re a cold bastard.’

  ‘Look, I’ll tell you something about me, Mister Too Fucking Good To Be True! Back home there was this creek. Big Moreton Bay Fig grew right next to it. Some older kids put a rope on one of the branches so they could swing across. My older brother dared me to join in. Thing was, I couldn’t swim, but I didn’t want any of the other kids to know I was scared, so I did it. Almost made it, too. Trouble was, the rope broke. The other kids laughed, they thought I was clowning around. I went under, it was like my chest was going to burst, I took this big mouthful of water and I started to black out. I thought I was going to die. As luck would have it, my brother pulled me out, and I woke up at home in my mum’s bed. When I realized I was still alive and heaven wasn’t a feather bed with jarrah corner posts, I remember thinking two things: one, I didn’t ever have to be scared again, because I’d already died and it wasn’t that hard. And two, I wasn’t going to let anyone persuade me to do anything I didn’t want to do ever again, no matter what they thought of me. So I’ll play this my way, all right?’

  ‘The only difference is, you were ten years old then. Every ten-year-old thinks the world was made just for them.’

  ‘Well, maybe they’re right.’

  The silence was broken by the plop of a mortar round. Outgoing. A comforting sound, almost made you feel safe.

  ‘What would you have done about Odile if I hadn’t come back?’ Ryan asked him.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yeah you do,’ Ryan said. ‘And I’ll tell you something else, maybe it’s a good job I did.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn about her, or about you. Do whatever the hell you want. Now go to sleep.’

  Chapter 16

  It was two in the morning when the first 80-millimetre mortar rounds hit the camp. The noise and the concussion were like a physical blow. Webb was jolted awake and instinctively rolled off his cot on to the floor. He fumbled for his cameras and notebooks and slopped outside through the mud to the nearest firing bunker.

  Illumination rounds were streaking down the skyline, magnesium brilliant, silhouetting the jungle; blue-green tracers floated towards them, orange ones arced out. Death was beautiful by night.

  Another mortar round thudded in, very close. He heard someone screaming.

  ‘Ryan!’ Webb shouted.

  ‘Right here, mate,’ a voice said beside him.

  Then silence. Webb stared across the perimeter, heard bamboo click in the wind, saw shadows flick through the mahogany trees. But there was no wind, and no moon to make shadows.

  ‘Here we go,’ Ryan said.

  There was a series of explosions as NVA sappers took out the mines in the wire. Webb heard the distinctive popping sound of the NVA assault rifles, the answering bursts of Armalites; the stench of cordite drifted across the perimeter.

  A parachute flare fell down the sky. Bodies hung on the blown wire. There was no moon and the clouds meant there would be no air support. They were on their own.

  The NVA broke cover, the first through the wire staggered and fell under a hail of machine gun fire.

  Someone was screaming: ‘Drop back! Drop back!’ The NVA must be inside the fort.

  I don’t have to do this anymore, Webb told himself. Why do I keep doing this?

  ‘We’re being overrun,’ Ryan shouted at him. ‘Hope you’ve got your M-16, mate. Or are you still feeling ethical?’

  Webb scrambled out of the bunker, crawling blindly through the mud. Flares and explosions lit the fort like strobe, warping judgment of time and distance. He fell head first into a slit trench.

  The bunker’s only other occupant crouched on the floor, bloodied teeth set in a mess of raw mincemeat. The man had taken a round in the face. His M-16 was still cradled in his arms.

  ‘Ryan!’

  ‘I’m hit,’ he heard Ryan groan in the darkness. ‘I’m hit.’

  Another flare illuminated the battlefield, almost directly overhead. Ryan was on his knees, a lone NVA soldier running towards him. A quick burst into the back of Ryan’s head and he would run on, looking for other targets.

  Webb snatched the M-16 from the dead Montagnard, brought it to his shoulder.

  The NVA looked very young, though Webb later decided that may just have been his imagination at work. His pith helmet was silhouetted against the dropping flare. He had on a khaki uniform. He stood over Ryan, ready to fire from the hip.

  Webb hesitated. He wondered what Odile would do if Ryan did not come back to Saigon tomorrow morning.

  His finger touched the trigger and he released the prescribed three rounds, the range no more than ten yards. The Vietnamese jerked like a puppet and fell dead.

  ‘Over here,’ Webb said.

  He reached for Ryan’s hand, pulled him into the trench. A platoon of Strikers rushed past them to fill the gap in front of them. The battle washed over them, like the ebb of a tide, and they were suddenly behind the lines again, beached and safe.

  * * *

  It was raining; drifting smoke carried with it the reek of the dump fire. Ryan lay on a stretcher inside the sandbagged bunker, a large M painted on his forehead with grease pencil. Other casualties from the night lay outside, swathed in blood-soaked dressings, eyes glazed from morphine and shock.

  Webb strained his ears for the sound of the medevac chopper.

  He walked slowly back to the perimeter, to assure himself this awful thing was no dream. He found him lying face down near the trench, his back blown apart by the exit of the high-velocity bullets. A swarm of green metallic flies rose in a cloud as he approached.

  He flipped the body with his foot. There were three small bullet wounds stitched across the chest, what a professional soldier would have called a neat job. Webb felt no pride, but no regret either.

  He turned around, saw a Special Forces sergeant grinning at him. His face shone with a curious light. Combat gave a man license to go beyond the edge into madness, Ryan had told him once. If he forgot to come back, no one noticed until he went home.

  The man laughed, undid his fly and urinated into the mouth of one of the corpses. He was still laughing as Webb walked away.

  The first Hueys were coming down the valley, to take out the wounded.

  Webb mentally composed his copy: dateline, 3 April, 1972.

  ‘Today I killed a man ...’

  But a magazine feature was not a confessional. And what was there to confess? If he had not fired his weapon, he would have consigned a fellow correspondent to death. But he wasn’t proud of it either.

  He went back to get his camera and captured the aftermath of Que Trang on three rolls of high-resolution color film, for the vicarious thrill of readers in London or Paris or Sydney. Death was like pornography, a cocktail of shame and vicarious thrill.

  As he climbed aboard the medevac chopper, he turned around and saw that the Special Forces sergeant had followed him. His eyes burned under the poncho hood with messianic intensity. Webb tried to ignore him but he came over and grabbed his arm, got into his face. Webb could smell his breath, rank
like a jackal’s. ‘Don’t you got nothin’ better to do with your life, man?’ he whispered.

  He shoved him towards the chopper. As the Huey lifted from the ground he was still standing there.

  ‘I hope you die,’ he shouted after him. ‘You hear me? I hope you fucking die, man!’

  Chapter 17

  Seventh Regiment Armoury

  ‘So what happened to Ryan?’ Doyle asked.

  ‘They put him on a medevac to Pleiku and the surgeons picked thirty-four pieces of metal out of his butt.’

  ‘They didn’t get all the pieces,’ Cochrane said. ‘They say whenever he went through a metal detector he’d set the damn thing off he had so much shrapnel still in his ass. Caught a plane with him once at JFK down to Guatemala and damned if it wasn’t true.’

  There were fond smiles around the table. The Sean Ryan legend always grew a little in the retelling.

  ‘And what about Odile?’

  Crosby looked at Webb, and their eyes locked. They would both have preferred the other to have told this part of the story. Crosby reached across the table and took a cigarette from the packet Cochrane had left on the linen tablecloth. He lit it with Cochrane’s lighter.

  ‘We should have done something,’ he said, looking at Webb.

  ‘Like what?’

  Crosby shrugged and looked at Doyle. ‘It wasn’t that he didn’t care for her,’ he said. ‘I think his intentions were always good.’

  ‘His intentions were always just to get laid,’ Webb said.

  ‘You’re not being fair.’

  ‘You’re breaking my heart.’

  ‘Ryan needed adrenalin like other people need oxygen. If he didn’t get a constant rush I swear he would have died. Some people said he was brave to the point of being reckless, but they missed the point. To be brave you have to be a little afraid to begin with. But Ryan got such a rush from all that shit, I swear I don’t think he could actually feel fear like the rest of us.’ He looked back at Webb. ‘If he really didn’t give a shit about Odile and the kid, he would not have stayed in Saigon.’

  Webb shrugged. Maybe.

  ‘He was still with her when you went back, at the end?’ Doyle asked.

  Webb nodded. ‘He spent most of the next two years covering the war in Cambodia, from Phnom Penh. But he kept an apartment in Saigon for Odile and Phuong. Every few months he’d fly back and see them. I think he was hoping that she’d find some American engineer or diplomat to take her off his hands. But she never did. She waited for him.’

  ‘Perhaps she did it to punish him,’ Wendy Doyle said.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I sold the photographs and the story of the Que Trang fight to Paris-Match, and they turned it into a six-page spread. On the strength of it, the AP offered me a job. Croz here set it up for me. Not long after they asked me if I wanted to transfer to the Washington office. Frankly, I couldn’t wait to get out. I kept thinking about what that Special Forces sergeant had said to me: I hope you die. I told myself I would never go back as long as I lived.’

  ‘But you did.’

  ‘Early in ‘75 Thieu abandoned the Highlands to the NVA and things moved fast after that. When Da Nang fell it was obvious to everyone that the communists were finally going to win. I felt I had to be there, for the end. My bosses at the AP okayed the assignment at the beginning of April and I flew back to Saigon.

  ‘And that was the last time I saw Odile.’

  Chapter 18

  Saigon, April 1975

  ‘If you have not seen a battle, your education has been somewhat neglected. For after all, war has been one of the primary functions of mankind, and unless you see men fight you miss something fundamental.’

  Herbert Matthews, war correspondent

  ‘I just figured what with guns going off and things blowing up, there’d be plenty of deep truths and penetrating insights.’

  P.J. O’Rourke, Holidays in Hell

  He had flown into Tan Son Nhut many times before, but never like this. The pilot came in high, then made a steep descent towards the airstrip. It was combat flying, and the 737 groaned at the maneuver. Minutes later the airliner’s wheels hammered onto the tarmac.

  Webb looked out of the window. Heavily camouflaged bombers and transports choked the aprons. As the scream of the engines’ reverse thrust died away, the breathless voice of the air hostess announced their safe arrival in Saigon. Even she sounded a little surprised that they had made it, Webb thought. His fingers were clawed around the armrests, as if he were in a dentist’s chair. Welcome to Saigon. A little jolt of fear just to get you started, give you the taste again.

  He stepped off the plane into a damp wall of heat. He was back.

  * * *

  But this was a different Saigon from the one he remembered. On the ride from the airport he saw acres of refugee slums mushrooming on the outskirts of the city, shanties made of cardboard and flattened beer cans. The government buildings bristled with barbed wire. There were checkpoints all the way along the road from the airport, keeping refugees out of the city. The roads were clogged anyway; his driver kept his hand flat on the horn almost the whole way. Whenever they stopped, small boys jabbed Coca-Cola bottles filled with petrol through the window of the cab.

  ‘Petrol very expensive now,’ his taxi driver explained. ‘One Coca bottle same price as maybe five litre last month.’

  People seemed to be rushing everywhere. It was a city in panic. His cab crawled past sandbagged machine gun posts and the barbed wire barricades and makeshift tank traps.

  ‘Why you come to Saigon?’ the taxi driver asked him.

  ‘Bao chi,' Webb said. ‘Journalist.’

  The man fumbled in the breast pocket of his shirt and produced a folded, crumpled letter. He shoved it in Webb’s hand. ‘You read,’ he said.

  Webb unfolded the letter. To whom it may concern. This is to certify that Tran van Minh, the bearer of this letter, served in the capacity of translator and adviser to the United States Army from April 1965 to February 1966, and proved himself a loyal friend of the United States. Please render him all assistance. Captain James Metherell. First Air Cavalry. Danang, 26 February, 1966.

  Webb handed the letter back.

  ‘You help me get out of Saigon, okay?’ the man said.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Webb lied. It was like he had never been away.

  * * *

  ‘Well, look what the war dragged in,’ someone said.

  Crosby and Ryan were sprawled in wicker chairs on the Shelf, both in dust-stained Saigon jackets. Ryan had two Leicas slung around his neck, as if he were in the field. The love beads and the curling seventies moustache were gone, but otherwise he appeared unscathed. A comma of dark hair fell over one eye.

  ‘You boys must be going soft,’ Webb said. ‘Sun’s been up nearly an hour. Why aren’t you in the front line?’

  ‘We are,’ Crosby said. He pulled a chair towards the table with his foot. ‘Sit down, and join the legion of the damned.’

  Only Crosby looked older. His hair was still long but now there was a thin patch on the crown and several long silver strands in his moustache. Deep lines were etched around his eyes. He had lived his life hard and now it was starting to show. Webb wondered what made Ryan immune.

  ‘When did you arrive back in sunny Saigon?’ Ryan asked him.

  ‘Yesterday afternoon. What about you?’

  ‘We were in Phnom Penh until a few days ago. We decided to get out. Didn’t care for the Khmer Rouge.’

  ‘Butt still full of tin?’ Webb said.

  Ryan patted his backside. ‘Last time I saw Spider,’ he said to Crosby, ‘I had an ass full of frags. I asked him to suck them out before they got infected, but he wouldn’t do it. Right bloody mate he turned out to be.’

  The Shelf faced Lam Son Square and the hideous war monument, two giant Vietnamese soldiers cast in green cement. Loudspeakers had been hooked up around the statue, and martial mus
ic blared over the din of horns and traffic. ‘You look like shit, Spider.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Croz says you’re with his lot now.’

  ‘Yeah, Washington DC.’

  ‘How do you deal with all that shit? Shouting at press secretaries across the White House lawn, having Secret Service guys stick their elbows in your face.’

  ‘I did my time. I’m not a war junkie like you guys.’

  ‘Sure, you got Vietnam on your CV. That’s all that counts, right, Spider?’

  ‘What brought you back?’ Crosby said.

  ‘Same reason as you, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s like Monopoly for us,’ Ryan said. ‘We did the fall of Phnom Penh. Now we’re doing the fall of Saigon. All we need is the fall of Bangkok and we’ve got the set and we can start building hotels.’

  There was a group of civil engineers at the next table, crewcut men talking too loud. Their Vietnamese girlfriends were with them, smiles frozen into place. They clutched at the men’s arms with something approaching desperation. This was their last drink in the Continental before Tan Son Nhut and a jet to America, Webb guessed. They were perhaps signed onto a flight as fiancées or spouses. It might not be everything these girls had once wished for themselves, but it was better than being left behind.

  * * *

  The white-jacketed waiter brought their breakfasts - boiled eggs, slices of paw paw, café au lait. Ryan took a hip flask from his pocket and tipped a little Mekong whisky into each of their cups. ‘Here’s health,’ he said.

  ‘How are things back in the world?’ Crosby asked.

  ‘Same. Sometimes I think the sixties never happened.’

  ‘I guess that’s why I don’t want to go back,’ Crosby said. He waved an arm towards the square. ‘Hell, I’ll sure miss the ol’ homestead,’ he said in a mock Southern drawl ‘This war’s nearly done, Hugh. Some people say weeks, others say just a few days. Lenin’s little slanty-eyed storm troopers are on their way. This time next month the old Shelf will be the Ho Chi Minh Inn.’