War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  The night nurse tended him carefully, talking with him, protecting him from the Red Cross do-gooders and the brigade chaplain. She watched him sleep from her chair at the nurses’ station across the room, bathed him every night with that same soft cloth and warm efficiency. Then one night while she bathed him, not long after he arrived, she wiped her hands of soap and encouraged an erection. His cock, dotted with stitching, rose from between his thighs with quick jerks – a fine, firm hard-on, though all he felt through the dazzling morphine was a peculiar fullness. The woman took hold of it with one hand and, caressing his belly with the other, leaned down and licked the head (shining like an oiled plum) with her swirling tongue, and gingerly caressed it more and more with her warm fingertips (the stitches stretching, stinging). He put his hands on her head and worked his fingers into her short hair – astonished, luxuriating in the wonderful pleasure (a sweet, toothache pain). A good long time she masturbated him, sucking languorously, and soon enough he felt the pause and urge of terrific inevitability. She sensed it, too (the muscles of his buttocks hunching under the bandages), reached for a large bandage, and clapped it over the head of his cock. And when he climaxed he went on and on. She cleaned him up, dusted his crotch with talc, and Paco felt fine, considering the stitches – just fine.

  Then one night Paco was softly, abruptly awakened by two strapping medics, doped with an unscheduled shot of morphine, laid on a litter from the triage, loaded on a regular Huey chopper waiting at the dust-off pad with its running lights blinking, and brought – plaster casts, IV bottles, tubes, and all – to Tan Son Nhut Air Base on the outskirts of Saigon. Paco and several other deathly wounded, plus a couple of guys they waited better than two hours for, were strapped to tiered racks in the dim, reddish light of the spartan cargo bay, given another healthy dose of morphine, and flown to hospitals in Japan where they could get better treatment, prosthetics and skin grafts, and whatnot; where they could convalesce in heightened comfort and superb peace. During the flight, metal cabinets slammed open and shut, and the plane jerked and swung and vibrated like a thousand needles. Paco lay on his litter in the rack with his arms squeezed against his sides, holding clenched fists over his groin. He gritted his teeth, rolled his head back and forth to assuage the pain, and endured it as best he could (along with the other wounded) in gripping silence. Travel time was every minute of five solid hours. Two of the several wounded brought in from the bitter fighting around Ban Me Thuot bled to death, whimpering, because the medics could not staunch their wounds, which soaked through everything – field dressings and hospital dressings, skimpy blankets and litter canvas – the blood glistening.

  One evening at the hospital in Japan a pasty-faced full-bird colonel from Westmoreland’s MACV headquarters in Saigon arrived in Paco’s room with a retinue of curious staff doctors and well-behaved nurses to give Paco his medals – a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. The colonel wore a fat wedding ring, his sleeves crisply folded above the crook of his elbow, and jungle trousers tailored nicely and bloused neatly into his immaculately spit-shined jungle boots. Paco was still wrapped in bandages head to toe, his legs and hips packed in solid plaster casts. The colonel leaned over the head of the bed – the doctors horning in to clear away some of the bandages around Paco’s head right and proper – and a keen startled look came into his eyes as the doctors unravelled more and more dressings and the colonel encountered Paco’s wounds. Suddenly awkward, he opened his musette bag and laid the medal cases on the night table. He pinched some of the material of Paco’s hospital pyjamas together above the breast pocket, slipped the pin of the Purple Heart through, and clasped it. His clean, well-manicured hands smelled of expensive, woodsy pipe tobacco. ‘For wounds suffered,’ he said in a low and steady voice, whispering just loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. Then he took up the Bronze Star. ‘For particular bravery,’ he said, repeating a key phrase in the citation, pinning the medal crooked and close to the other so that there was a mumbling buzz of comment in the softly lit room because the medals were draped oddly across his bandages. The colonel leaned over even farther, pressing Paco into the mattress somewhat, and whispered something in his ear. And Paco can never remember what it was the man said, as many times as he has puzzled over it, but always recalls the warm breath on the side of his head and in his hair. (Paco had the distinct memory then of when he was a small boy and his father would come into his darkened bedroom some evenings, in his rawhide slippers and baggy pants, sit down lightly on the edge of his bed, and sing him to sleep in that whispering, croaking voice of his:

  Here comes the sandman,

  Stepping so softly,

  Stealing around on the tips of his toes,

  As he scatters the sand with his sure little hand,

  In the eyes of sleepy children.

  Paco remembered the warm, firm caresses of his father rubbing his back, and how the song always provoked yawns, and how his father would lean down and kiss his face when he had finished.)

  The colonel fumbled with the ribbons and the cases and the tissue-paper citations, a sheen of tears welling in the man’s eyes as he straightened up and left the room, saying to Paco, ‘Goodbye, young sergeant,’ with the doctors and nurses right behind.

  That was the reason Paco never threw away the medals, or pawned them, as many times as he was tempted and as stone total worthless as the medals were – the Army gave them out like popcorn, you understand, like rain checks at a ball park. It is the kiss he cherishes and the memory of the whispered word. He has the medals still, packed in the shaving kit of his AWOL bag under the seat of that done-up tow truck from the Texaco station – the medal cases smeared with shaving soap and soaked with dimestore aftershave, and the citations folded up as small as matchbooks.

  Christopher J. Koch

  WELCOME TO SAIGON

  The war in Vietnam ended with the fall of Saigon in April 1975. With North Vietnamese troops on the outskirts of the city, US Marine helicopters evacuated the last remaining American citizens. The atmosphere of initial chaos and then quiet resignation is suggested here in an extract from Christopher J. Koch’s novel about war correspondents in Indochina, Highways to a War (1995).

  BY MONDAY THE 28th, there were sixteen North Vietnamese divisions around Saigon, some of them only eight kilometres away.

  Tan Son Nhut airport was being rocketed, and although many South Vietnamese pilots went on fighting, going up in gunships to hit the Communist positions, others now fought each other for the possession of planes. They made their escape in these, flying them out to Thailand.

  There were thunderstorms that day, I remember: the noise mingling with the sound of shelling. Mike and I moved about the city, getting pictures and film. Restaurants and shops were still open, but thousands of people were streaming out to the airport in cars, lorries and on foot, still hoping that they could somehow get on planes.

  The Army of South Vietnam continued to defend the city’s perimeter. It had fought with great bravery in these last stages, but now it was falling into panic. The South had put all its hopes on the military aid promised by the Americans: now the news had come through that there would be no more aid. The last shipment of artillery had been sent, and there were no shells. The Government and the ARVN troops knew now that there was nothing more to hope for.

  The end came the next day: on Tuesday the 29th. That morning, the US embassy began its evacuation. Americans in Saigon had been told to listen for a coded message on US Armed Forces Radio as the signal that evacuation had begun; it would come every fifteen minutes, followed by Bing Crosby singing ‘White Christmas’. When this was heard, all the remaining foreign media offices began packing up – in the Eden Building, the Caravelle Hotel and elsewhere. The Telenews staff had gone the week before, taking their equipment to Bangkok, abandoning the office, and leaving me the keys. London was happy for me to cover since I chose to do it, I was told, but Telenews took no responsibility for me.

  Despite the rocketing of Tan Son Nh
ut, Marine helicopters were being sent there from the US fleet off the coast to ferry out all remaining American citizens in Saigon. They were also to take Vietnamese who worked for American agencies. But fixed-wing aircraft could no longer fly because the bombardment had closed down the airport, and this meant that fewer Vietnamese could now be taken out than the Americans had planned. The people in the city knew this, and panic grew. The Americans had told Western correspondents that places would be found for them on the choppers; special buses were picking their people up from prearranged points around the city, and journalists were told to go to these points. Only a very small number of journalists and photographers decided to stay, as Mike and I were doing.

  We had made our base in the deserted Telenews office in the Eden Building. The AP office was on the floor above, and at around 11 A.M., after we’d loaded and checked our cameras, we decided to look in there and say goodbye.

  Nobody had much time to speak to us. The scene was frantic, like an out-of-control schoolroom. Phones were ringing and not being answered, an American voice was coming over a radio, and all over the room people were emptying desks and files and stuffing things into bags, moving very fast. Most of them were sweating a lot; some were laughing and joking; some looked pale and scared.

  One of them glanced up at us from an airways bag he was packing: he was a staff writer with a blond moustache, whose name I’ve forgotten. You guys coming? he said. Better move your asses.

  No, we said, we were staying.

  And we gave him some film to take out and deliver for us. He did it, too, and Telenews were very happy with what I sent; it was shown in a great number of countries.

  You’re lunatics, he said. Crazy as Ed Carter. You’re gonna die.

  In the middle of the jerking and hurrying and shouting figures, Ed was sitting at his desk with his feet up, reading a newspaper. Ed was always very calm.

  We went over to him, and he looked up over his glasses. I figured somebody should be around to welcome General Giap, he said. You guys gonna keep me company? I’ve got transport.

  And he held up a bunch of keys.

  The correspondents going out on the choppers had only been allowed to take one bag each; they had to leave everything else. One AP staff writer had been forced to leave a beautiful Ford Mustang, and he’d given the keys to Ed, with instructions that Ed was eventually to sell the car and send the money, if the Communists spared his life. So we went out to the man’s house and picked up his Mustang, and drove in it around the city.

  The crowds in the streets were huge, surging everywhere. Everyone carried bags or children. Many were running in a sort of hysteria: but I don’t think they knew any longer where they were running to. I saw one little grey-haired man in a white canvas hat, a small suitcase in one hand, who was actually running in circles, in the middle of Nguyen Hue: I think he’d lost his wits. The White Mice had now disappeared, and we realized there was no law and order any more: no one was in charge of the city. There was supposed to be a curfew, but that meant nothing now. It was like a crazy carnival: but not a carnival of happiness.

  The American buses for Tan Son Nhut were moving about the city to their special pickup points, collecting their passengers; and the people in the streets were following these buses in tens of thousands, begging and screaming to be let on. They saw the buses as their last hope, and they were right. The drivers were fighting them off when they opened the doors, not always successfully. Most of the windows were protected with heavy-duty mesh, but some people got in through sliding windows at the back; others pushed their babies in. Cars stood abandoned, keys still hanging in the dashboards: if you wanted a car, you just had to steal one. In many side streets, we saw ARVN uniforms lying in the gutter; the soldiers were changing into civilian clothes, and melting into the crowd. Looting had begun: people were breaking into rich villas, and the streets were getting dangerous. Many now hated the Americans for deserting them, and as we went by, and they saw the white faces of Mike and Ed Carter, they shouted: Go home, Yankees. The Saigon Cowboys were out on their Honda motor scooters, looking for what they could steal. We also saw people who did nothing; who stood crying on the pavements like lost children.

  Taking the Mustang, Mike and Ed and I went around to the American embassy that evening. Mike and I shot film of the Marine Corps Sikorsky and Sea Knight helicopters landing inside the compound and on the roof, taking out the embassy staff while Marines stood guard on top of the walls. The Jolly Green Giants and the smaller Sea Knights had been coming and going since late afternoon, and it was now around seven-thirty. They would keep on coming at intervals until dawn. We got hold of an American newspaper journalist by the gates who was going out on one of the choppers, and gave him our film to deliver. You’ll have seen the pictures – including the shots Mike took that were published in his American newsweekly, and which now appear in books on the war.

  Thousands of people were hammering at the closed gates and on the walls with their fists, demanding, pleading, weeping, many of them holding up documents. A lot of the time it was raining, and very dark: the city’s power supply had cut out at seven o’clock. The whirring and beating of twin rotors filled the blackness, and the choppers hovered and tilted, the glaring white lights in their noses guiding them down. Young Vietnamese climbed the walls and made it to the top, but the big Marine guards kicked and fought them off. Other Marines lobbed tear gas canisters into the crowd. What are you doing? I thought. You came here long ago to help them against their enemies; how can you do this to them now? And I felt ashamed to be filming.

  There were some ARVN soldiers there, full of anger against the Americans for deserting them, and shouting up at the Marines. Du-ma, they called – meaning ‘mummyfucker’. Yet some of the people around the walls were actually in a cheerful mood, knowing that we who were staying behind faced a new situation together, and that there was nothing more to be done. There’s a sort of excitement in such disaster: a comradeship which most of us don’t admit. And these people had now faced the fact that what they most wanted they were never going to have: they would never be lifted out by one of those giant green choppers that were the only things that could save them. All they could do now was to watch the white lights that kept on coming down through the dark, like lights from another world.

  I won’t forget those scenes; but what I find hardest to forget are certain other rooftops in the city, which we passed later in the evening. The Americans had sent some helicopters to these buildings in midafternoon, to pick up Vietnamese who’d been promised evacuation. Now, although many were still left, the choppers did not reappear. Yet little groups of people stood on those rooftops in the dark, quiet and patient, their luggage beside them. The throbbing of the choppers was gone from the air, except in the direction of the embassy; the evacuation was over. But still these people could not believe that the Americans would not come back. I heard that they were still there at dawn, watching the sky. They were waiting for helicopters that were only in their minds, coming to rescue them from tomorrow.

  When tomorrow came, Saigon was very quiet. All the noise had stopped: it was the strangest quiet I’ve ever known.

  Mike and Ed Carter and I sat at breakfast in the restaurant of the Continental: orange juice, croissants and coffee. There were only about half a dozen others there: some Italians, two French journalists from Le Monde, and a Japanese photographer. It was a hot morning, calm and pleasant. The power was working again, the big ceiling fans turned, and the Chinese waiters in their starched white jackets stood by the yellow pillars.

  The whole city seemed silent, and the streets were half empty. Out on the square, some military trucks went by, and a few refugees still trudged through the streets with their possessions. But there were no ARVN troops; no black market operators; no Saigon Cowboys on Hondas; no White Mice. The blue haze of exhaust fumes was dissolving, and the air was almost clean. After the din and fear of the day before, waking to this silence had been like waking from a fever to f
ind yourself well. Saigon was waiting for the victors to arrive.

  Sure is peaceful, Ed said. I can handle plenty of this. The only thing is: who’s in charge?

  No one’s in charge, Mike told him. I never thought I’d miss those little White Mice – but not having them around’s a bit creepy.

  We laughed, and Ed signalled for more coffee. One of the old Chinese waiters came shuffling forward, carrying the tall silver coffee pot. He had a dignified expression, but I detected a faint frown of worry. I wondered what would become of him after today. He’d probably been at the Continental for forty years: could he even understand what was happening?

  We began to discuss where we should position ourselves, to be ready for the NVA’s arrival. No one could know when that would be, or where they’d head for first when they came into the city.

  Right here in the middle of town seems best to me, Ed said. We might as well make ourselves comfortable. I don’t want any dealings with the South Vietnamese Army, either: they’re pretty mad at Americans today. Yesterday on the sidewalk an ARVN sergeant spat at me, and told me we were running out on them. I told him I was staying, and then he shook my hand. They’re feeling pretty emotional.

  Can you blame them? Mike asked. His face grew set and bitter, and Ed looked at him.

  I guess not, he said.

  We were quiet for a moment; then Ed said: The NVA are going to want to hoist their flag somewhere significant, when they come into town. Maybe at the Palace. I guess Big Minh’s sitting in his office out there, waiting to surrender. But my bet is they’ll go just around the corner here, to City Hall.