I walk point. The Phuong twins carry Nguyen Mot. Nguyen Hai and Bo Doi Bac Si carry Song. Commander Be Dan insists on walking, so I give him Battle Mouth to lean on.
Limping forward, I wave my hand. "Tien, Dong Chi"--"Forward, comrade sisters," I say to the tired, pretty Phuong twins.
And then I lead the fighters back to the village.
A week after the victory of the Nung combat fortress, life in the village of Hoa Binh is back to normal except that now I am not treated as a prisoner of war but as a trusted Viet Cong soldier. I'm halfway home.
I'm working in the rice fields with the people when Song comes running to get me. I'm wiping the sweat from my face with a black-and-white checkered Front fighter's bandanna, which was awarded to me formally by Ba Can Bo in front of the whole village.
My next step to freedom: earn a weapon.
"Follow me," Song says. "Di di Mau"--"Go fast."
Confused, I drop my rice sickle and bundle of rice stalks onto the paddy dike. I follow Song, double-timing.
The rice threshers raking mounds of unhusked paddy in the village common freeze when they hear the sounds of approaching helicopters.
Song and I hide in a tunnel under General Fang Cat's "office."
General Fang Cat is a Nguy, a "puppet soldier" in the Arvins, the army without a country, a Vichy zip with a sense of humor. His "office" is the fieldstone foundation of what was once the finest hooch in the village. The hooch was blown up by the General's cannons. General Fang Cat never negotiates a business deal until he has made certain that everyone understands his terms.
Song crawls deeper into the tunnel and brings back an AK-47 assault rifle. She chambers a round.
We wait.
Once a month General Fang Cat visits to pick up his Tien ca phe--his "coffee money." In America we would call it grease, a bribe.
Hoa Binh lies within the General's Tactical Area of Responsibility. Marines cannot enter the General's TAOR without his permission. In his monthly Hamlet Evaluation Reports, General Fang Cat lists Hoa Binh as a leper colony and the area around the village as one hundred percent pacified. His reports look good on paper and make a lot of other people look good, so everybody is happy.
While we wait in the tunnel, Song tells me about the old province chief, Colonel Chu, who announced his visits to the village by dropping captured Chien Si fighters out of his helicopter--alive.
One day Colonel Chu's puppet soldiers took ten men from the village, bound them, and laid them in a row in the road. Colonel Chu drove a truck toward them as they struggled frantically against their bonds. He ran over them, smashing all of their heads.
Colonel Chu and his soldiers routinely raped the women of the village and any who resisted were sent away to rot in tiger cages as Tran Cong--"Communist sympathizers."
Front agents in Quang Tri booby-trapped Colonel Chu's private toilet with a dud howitzer shell.
Colonel Chu flushed himself right out of being a problem.
General Fang Cat is not an evil or sadistic man, only greedy, corrupt, ambitious, and realistic.
His worst flaw is that he is constantly plotting coups against the Saigon government. If he were arrested during a coup, his replacement would be poorer than the General, more hungry.
The General is "full." He has been successfully corrupt and powerful for so long that his greed has lost its edge.
We hear the crunch of boots in broken roofing tile. We see an Arvin snuffy, then another.
General Fang Cat's Arvin bodyguards pull their M-16s around by the barrels, butts dragging in the dirt.
Song takes aim at the puppet armymen.
"What are you doing here?" I say.
Song says, "Security."
"So what am I doing here?" I say.
Song says, "Uncle does not trust Dai Tuong Fang Cat. And Commander Be Dan does not trust you. You might defect. Maybe the Black Rifles pay the puppets beaucoup money for you."
We watch. As General Fang Cat struts onto the ruined foundation, Song sights him in.
Dai Tuong Fang Cat greets the Woodcutter with a smile. He obviously likes to smile because it gives him a chance to show off his gold eyeteeth.
"Chao ong, Dai Tuong Fang Cat," says the Woodcutter, bowing.
"Kinh Chao ong," says General Fang Cat, bowing. "Greetings, honored sir."
General Fang Cat is tall and slender and wearing a starched tiger-striped fatigue uniform, with a shoeboxful of medals, badges, and insignia on his chest. He's wearing cowboy holsters with a matched set of jade-handled chrome-plated .38-caliber revolvers.
The General and the Woodcutter sit in bamboo chairs in the center of the leveled foundation.
The Woodcutter gives the General a small red envelope. The General nods, smiles.
General Fang Cat complains that he needs more money. The Americans have begun to question his battle reports. Battle reports are required to conceal his losses due to desertion.
A lot of General Fang Cat's troops buy their way out of the Army with forged medical discharges. Of course, all of these soldiers are still listed on the rolls so that General Fang Cat can continue to collect their pay and their rations.
The three million piasters the General owes for the office of province chief has to be paid, plus the one million piasters he owes for his general's stars. The Woodcutter is an honorable man, says the General, and will understand the necessity to pay one's debts. Without additional money he's not sure how long he can go on generating the large volume of paperwork required to keep the village of Hoa Binh safely out of the war.
Because of his desperate need for money, the General is now forced to desperate measures, which include selling ammunition, C-rations, and even medical supplies to his own troops.
The General points out that he does not allow his troops to rape the village women. His men do not steal chickens or pigs. And none of the young men of the village have been press-ganged into the Army.
The General no longer feels the need to blow up Hoa Binh with his cannons to win medals.
He has lost interest in medals and has stopped buying them. Now all he wants is to save enough money to take his family to Paris, drink vintage wine, and have French servants for the rest of his life.
General Fang Cat's philosophy is live and let live, as long as he gets his end of the deal in cash.
The Woodcutter listens politely, then says, "One hundred American dollars. And we will not fight in your region."
The General says, "Five hundred."
"One hundred."
"Five hundred and your village is safe."
"One hundred," says the Woodcutter, "and you may defecate successfully. "
General Fang Cat laughs. "Yes, Colonel Chu, my old commander. What a leech he was. He died rich."
The Woodcutter nods. "Yet even the poorest peasant may defecate successfully without the fear that he is sitting on angry explosives. "
General Fang Cat thinks about it, nodding. He slaps his hands together. "One hundred," he says. "For now."
The Woodcutter raises his hand and the Phuong twins bring a pot of green tea and two bamboo cups.
As they drink tea, General Fang Cat explains to the Woodcutter that he understands the Woodcutter's position regarding the underaged half-white girls being forced to work as whores in the village of Khe Sanh. Families with half-white girls who resist are denounced under the CIA's Phoenix Program and
"eliminated." The General wants only for the Woodcutter to understand clearly that the General has no control over the Americans and is in no way involved in or responsible for this crime against the people.
The Woodcutter listens closely, then nods. "You will not be harmed. We have had word from the forests. We know that you are not involved. A decision has been made in the forests and this problem will soon be resolved."
General Fang Cat relaxes, sips his tea.
The two men drink tea in silence.
"It is a bad thing," says the General, "when the Long Noses make whores of our children."
The Woodcutter says, "Yes."
"The Americans," says General Fang Cat, and puts down his teacup.
"Yes," says the Woodcutter, not looking at the General. "The Americans."
An hour after General Fang Cat's chopper has faded into the purple horizon the Woodcutter and I are fishing, hauling black nets from the river.
A short round comes in, bam.
The fireball explodes into long streamers, a spider of thick white smoke as big as a house.
Hissing splinters of phosphorus sputter through the air trailing white plumes.
It's a short round of Willy Peter--white phosphorus. The stink of white phosphorus is distinctive and not easy to forget.
A burning child comes running. Her clothes have been burned from her body. Her face is all open mouth and animal eyes. It is Le Thi, Song's star pupil and teacber's pet. The little girl claws at her burning flesh, digging for fire with her fingers. Her attempts to brush the Willy Peter off only spreads it and ignites it.
By the time we get to her she is holding her arms away from her body, afraid to touch herself.
She's screaming non-stop. Her face is twisted into something ugly by the pain. Her body heat ignites the splinters of white phosphorus and the air feeds it. The splinters burn through flesh, sizzling until they hit bone.
The Woodcutter and I grab Le Thi as she tries to slap paddy water onto her wounds. She fights us. The Woodcutter tries to hold her down, but she is a wildcat. I punch her in the side of the head with the meaty side of my fist, just enough to knock her unconscious.
The Woodcutter lifts Le Thi and lays her down gently on the paddy dike.
We work quickly, covering each smoldering wound in her flesh with black paddy mud. The mud cuts off the oxygen and the Willy Peter stops burning.
It's all over, just that fast. I feel sick.
The trail watchers have seen the white smoke from the shell and the village gong is bonging out an alarm.
As we walk down the paddy dike, with Le Thi in my arms, we are met by the whole village.
A woman squats on the paddy dike and wails in agony and continues to wail and the sound of it is physically painful.
Bo Doi Bac Si pushes forward with his medical kit.
But Le Thi is dead. There is nothing anyone can do.
Later that day, the village prepares for a funeral.
They lay Le Thi in a quach, a child's coffin of fresh yellow pinewood.
The Woodcutter does not attend the funeral. As Song and I leave the hooch, the Woodcutter says curtly that Tiger Eye, the Commander of the Western Region, has ordered him on an important mission and will I go with him and fight, yes or no.
"I will fight, Uncle."
The Woodcutter nods. He focuses all of his attention on a toy rifle he is carving from a scrap of bamboo. He does not look up.
Song and I go to the hooch of Le Thi's family. After a simple ceremony at the altar of the ancestors the funeral procession moves to the family burial plot in the village cemetery.
We bury Le Thi in the cold black ground and we say goodbye.
Le Thi's mother tries to climb down into the grave and has to be restrained.
After the funeral, when the villagers have returned to the village, Song stands by the grave, very straight, like a soldier standing at attention, and cries, without making a sound, her whole face covered by her hands.
A week after we bury Le Thi the whole village comes together once again, only this time for a happier occasion, the long-awaited wedding between the Phuong twins and the two surviving Nguyen brothers.
I don't want to go to the wedding, but Song nags me into submission. Maybe she thinks that if I see a wedding I might want to be in one of my own.
Song and I stroll through the cool night air to the hooch of the Nguyen family. We hear soft laughter and happy people talking.
Inside the hooch, candles flicker in the main room and music fills the air.
We are greeted by the elder Nguyen, a dignified little old man who bows and welcomes us to his home. We return the bow and Song gives him a red envelope containing a small amount of money. Song thanks him for inviting us.
We sit. We eat pork, vegetables, fruit, rice wine, and sweet cakes. We drink green tea.
Everything smells good and tastes better.
The party lasts all night. Some of us fall asleep. Some take naps and wake up to rejoin the party with renewed energy.
We are greeted at dawn by the Nguyen brothers, Mot and Hai. One sleeve of Mot's traditional high-collared blue silk tunic has been pinned neatly over the stub of the arm he lost at the victorious battle for the Nung combat fortress, where his brother Ba was killed.
When the elder Nguyen gives us the signal we begin the procession to the home of the Phuong twins.
Everyone is dressed to kill. The parade up the paddy dike is bizarrely festive when contrasted with our usual drab clothing. My Sunday suit is hanging in my closet in my room back in Alabama. But my black pajama outfit is enhanced considerably by the red silk sash Song made for me.
At the Phuong house the best men present the father of the brides with gifts of rice wine and a chocolate-brown teakwood tray filled with areca nuts and betel leaves.
We are invited inside.
The tray is placed as an offering at the altar of the ancestors. Red candles are lit and prayers for the ancestors are recited.
The Nguyen brothers bow to the ancestral altar, and to the elder Phuong, who bows and grins and seems a little soft in the head, and then they bow to the mother of the brides, who is very happy, maybe even happier than the brides themselves.
Then the Nguyen brothers and their best men go to meet the Phuong twins.
The guests drink tea and chat until the brides and grooms return to the main room together, beaming with happiness.
All of the guests join in the procession back to the groom's house.
Back at the Nguyen hooch the brides and grooms bow to the altar that honors the spirit of the soil, of Xa, the land, which is alive. They hold burning joss sticks and ask for permission to enter the house.
The brides and grooms spend a long time bowing to each and every one of their relatives. It reminds me of Decoration Day back in Alabama, when all of your cousins and aunts and uncles that you don't know are trying to introduce themselves to you all at the same time. As Old Ma, my grandmother, would say, these people got so many kin it would take a team of Philadelphia lawyers to untangle the roots of their family trees.
On the way home I am careful not to be caught up into any of Song's comments about how wonderful married life must be. She's shy, but I know that she's secretly crazy about me.
Maybe when I escape I can take her with me. If not, I can always send for her later.
When Song and I get married back in the World, she will want to buy color televisions and ruby rings and washing machines. She'll get her hair fixed at a fancy beauty parlor twice a week and will get fat and will lie around in bed all day, watching soap operas on TV, eating bon-bons and yelling at the maids, like in a horror movie.
After the wedding I go back to our hooch. Song goes to visit her best friend, the pregnant Fighter-Widow.
I'm squatting on my reed sleeping mat, using my rice sickle to cut myself a new pair of B.F.
Goodrich sandals. I'm hacking away at a chunk of truck tire Johnny Be Cool found on the wreck of a six-by that hit a land mine out on the road.
Without warning I am knocked over by concussion shock waves and a black comet hits the earth.
The sky is falling and the whole world is blowing up. I feel like a New Guy at Khe Sanh under his first bad incoming. Except that I have experienced this kind of incoming before.
Nobody makes artillery shells big enough to make the earth bounce. It's an arc-light, a B-52
attack.
Lake-bombs fall five miles from Boeing Stratofortress strategic bombers that fly too high to be heard, three planes to a flight, carrying 60 tons of high-explosive
bombs. American bombers are making toothpicks of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, vaporizing teak trees as tall as New York skyscrapers and as old as Jesus Christ. The bomb run will leave a swath of cratered badlands a mile long. As great blocks of sound are cracked by power, the impacting of the bombs overlaps into rolling thunder, not simply a sound but a hard wall of noise moving across the face of the earth like an iron glacier, a sonic roar that can tear out a man's eardrums at one thousand meters.
I yell, "MAY BAY GIAC MY!"--"American pirate planes!"
I run for the family bunker. But Johnny Be Cool is trying to pull his water bo into the water bo's bunker. I stop to help, knowing that Johnny Be Cool is too stubborn to go into the family bunker until his water bo is safe.
The water bo is stubborn too, a lumbering giant with a look of being unbelievably stupid, just like a cow back in Alabama if the cows were built like dinosaurs. Johnny Be Cool pulls on the bo's brass nose ring while I kick the gray-black monster in the ass.
We grunt and groan.
Acres of virgin forests are flying on the horizon.
Finally I do a quick comparison of weights and dimensions and grab hold of Johnny Be Cool.
I pick him up and carry him, kicking and screaming, to the family bunker.
Song is waiting for us outside our family bunker. She says, "Come, Bao Chi, my brother. My friend is having her baby and she wants you to be here."
Inside our family bunker the Fighter-Widow is in labor. The bunker smells of alcohol and is lit by four kerosene lamps. A camouflage parachute has been hung on the ceiling of the small chamber. The Fighter-Widow is lying on her back on a straw-filled mattress.
The Fighter-Widow groans, in pain, and there's blood. She looks like someone who has been gutshot. Bo Doi Bac Si is delivering the baby, assisted by the Broom-Maker.
The Fighter-Widow sees me. In the worst throes of her labor pains she glares at me, fiercely, glowing with pride. She's telling me with her black eyes that she has survived the cruelty of the Black Rifles, who shove electric light bulbs into the vaginas of Vietnamese women and break them so that the women cannot give birth to Viet Cong babies. She groans again, swallows a scream. She's sweating. The baby is coming out.
The Phantom Blooper Page 15