The Corsican

by William Heffernan

  “What’s our agenda, Walsh?” Peter asked.

  The aging sergeant shrugged. “Usual stuff. We gotta check in with the CO and go through all the formal crap. Then if they’ve got any new VC prisoners, you get a shot at interrogating them. They’ll like it that you speak the lingo so good—the local intelligence boys will, I mean. Most of them have to use interpreters who can’t really be trusted. Our guys mostly only talk pidgin slope. You know what I mean. ‘You VC. You talk, or you go Yellow Springs, quick, quick.’”

  Peter smiled. Yellow Springs, the land of death. He hadn’t heard the term since he was a boy. He would mention it then every time he wanted to play on the unnatural fear it produced in Luc. The supernatural land of the dead. The older men revered it; the young were frightened by the very words.

  “They usually have prisoners?”

  “They always got what they call prisoners. Most of ’em’s a bunch of farmers tryin’ to keep both sides from shootin’ their fuckin’ buffalo. They do what we tell ’em and they do what the VC tell ’em. But you never know. I’ve seen bodies of twelve-year-olds with grenades stuffed in their pajamas. Out here everybody’s so scared shitless they think everybody’s VC. But when you come across a real one, one of those hardcore cadre types, there ain’t no doubt. They are hard little motherfuckers.”

  “What do they do with them?” Peter asked.

  “They interrogate the shit out of them, then turn ’em over to ARVN,” Walsh said.

  “And ARVN?”

  “They claim they rehabilitate them. But I’ve seen the bodies. They squeeze ’em a little drier, then they pork ’em. One shot behind the ear.”

  Peter shrugged.

  “That’s the way I feel about it, sir. Charlie doesn’t exactly take prisoners of war himself. Besides, according to Westmoreland, we’re fightin’ a war of attrition here. So the way I see it, we attrite as many of them as we can. Funny thing is we never seem to run out of them.”

  “They all have brothers and sisters, Walsh. And the sense of vendetta, especially among tribal people, can last for centuries.”

  “You make them sound like the Mafia, sir.”

  “The Mafia didn’t invent vendetta, any more than they invented spaghetti.” Peter hesitated, watching Walsh for a moment. “My mother was Corsican,” he said finally, altering his family history to fit the one created for him years ago. “She talked about vendettas that went on through generations.”

  “You Corsican? How about that?” Walsh seemed suddenly impressed. “They got a lot of Corsicans around here, sir. Strange dudes. Don’t see them much. You just hear about them from time to time. Some of them are supposed to be so bad they’re supposed to make the wiseguys back home look like pussy cats.”

  Peter laughed quietly, thinking of his own family. His grandfather, Auguste, Benito. And now a new generation, just arrived.

  Chapter 21

  The mud-walled hut was an old schoolhouse that sat on the outskirts of First Cav Headquarters at Bien Hoa. Like everything else in the camp, it had been painted an olive drab and had a camouflage net stretched above it. Inside, it was one large room, electrified by a generator that groaned outside. At one end of the room was a table with several chairs, with large floodlights set on metal stands to either side. The only other furniture was a single chair placed in the center of the room. In it a small, slender VC suspect, slightly younger than Peter, sat stripped to the waist.

  “Says his name’s Loc Binh, captain,” the lieutenant in charge said. “But his papers are as phony as shit. Claims he doesn’t speak English, or French. Just sits there repeating Toi kheong biet, over and over.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t understand,” Peter said. “Maybe he doesn’t want to. But he sure as hell understands Vietnamese.”

  Peter walked out in front of the lights, feeling the intense heat they produced against the back of the jungle fatigues he was wearing. He squatted before the man and pushed his helmet back on his head.

  “Loc Binh,” he said.

  “Toi kheong biet,” Binh said, stopping him.

  Peter smiled. “You don’t understand your name?” he said in English. His eyes hardened. “Xin ong nghe toi”—Please listen to me.

  The prisoner kept his eyes on the floor, trying to appear like a frightened peasant. Peter studied him in the light. The teeth were too even, too well cared for; the body absent of any of the abnormalities caused by poor diet. Peter knew the man was not from a poor outcountry village struggling to raise enough rice to live. He had seen too many of these people as a child. Again he asked his name in Vietnamese.

  “Toi kheong biet,” Binh repeated.

  Peter shook his head slowly. “Your sister sleeps with snakes,” he whispered in English, using a peasant curse considered vile to Vietnamese.

  Binh’s jaw tightened; his nostrils flared almost imperceptibly.

  Peter grinned at him. “You understood that, didn’t you, my friend? Even in English?”

  The man’s eyes clouded, then hardened. “Go fuck self, GI,” he snapped.

  Peter laughed softly. “Goodness, Binh. You certainly do pick up a language quickly.”

  “Toi kheong biet,” Binh said.

  Peter shook his head. “Now you don’t understand again. Bat ca hai toy,” he said, using the old Vietnamese proverb, “Catch fish with both hands.” “I’m afraid you have to decide which way you want to have it, Binh.”

  The prisoner looked into Peter’s eyes, but said nothing.

  “Would you rather talk to the lieutenant?” Peter asked.

  “Thong?” the prisoner asked, motioning to the back of the room with his head. He had used a term of contempt that replaced the pronoun “him” or “he.”

  “Perhaps you’d rather speak to some ARVN people?” Peter suggested.

  Binh remained silent, but the mention of the ARVN investigators had produced a slight twitch in one eye.

  He was a tough little guy, Peter decided. Not unlike his brother Luc had been as a child.

  Peter was still squatting, and turned slightly to face the lieutenant and Walsh. He raised his hand against the interrogation lights, but they still blinded him. “There’s no question he’s not what he says he is,” Peter said. “But this is going to take a little time.”

  “That’ll be ARVN’s problem, then.” The lieutenant’s voice came from behind the lights, bored and hidden.

  Peter eased himself up and walked to the rear of the room. Once behind the lights he faced the lieutenant and struggled to focus on him. The lights were still abusing his eyes, even though he was behind them now. Small red and purple circles seemed to float between him and the lieutenant’s face. He rubbed his eyes, but the circles remained. It was like looking at someone through a transparent surrealistic painting.

  “I didn’t mean we couldn’t get the information,” Peter said. “The man’s ID is obviously phony. It’ll just take time to get the truth from him.”

  “We don’t have time, captain. Our job is just to determine if they’re what they say they are or not. If the ID’s phony, that makes them either VC or a deserter. Either way it goes to ARVN’s people, and they get the information their way.”

  The lieutenant spoke as if he was humoring a stupid child. It grated on Peter.

  “What’s their way, lieutenant?” Peter’s voice was cutting and cold.

  “They determine that,” the lieutenant said.

  “Are you talking about just beating the hell out of him, or torture?”

  “They decide that, captain. Not us.”

  “What he means, captain, is they do what we’re not allowed to do. At least when there’s witnesses around.” Walsh’s voice was light and sarcastic, but there was no anger in it.

  “I can answer my own questions, mister,” the lieutenant snapped.

  “Shut up, lieutenant. I want to hear what he has to say.” Peter stared at the man. His name was Walker and he was no more than twenty-one, and looked as though he had not yet begun to shave. His j
aw tightened under the rebuke, but he said nothing.

  “Talk to me, Walsh,” Peter said.

  Walsh shrugged. “ARVN’s newest gig is to play telephone company. They take one of those field-telephone batteries. You know, the kind you crank to get juice from. Then they clip wires onto the battery, and clip the other ends to the guy they’re questioning. One wire usually goes to the scrotum, one on the penis, and one on each of the nipples. If it’s a woman, one of the wires will have a copper rod on the end, and they push that up inside her and tape the wire to her leg. Then one guy asks questions, and if no answer comes, another cranks the battery. If he cranks slow, it’s just a little juice. Hard, and they bounce around like they were on fire. They pass out a lot, puke a lot, and sooner or later, if they’re really tough, it wastes ’em. Sometimes they talk. But usually by that time all that’s left is gibberish anyhow. What it boils down to is the ARVN boys have some fun, and we get shit for intelligence.”

  Peter stared at the floor. “That’s what you want to do now, lieutenant?” he asked.

  “I don’t decide these things, captain. Those are the orders. Our job is just to make sure nobody who’s innocent gets questioned. That’s the most we can do. And sometimes we can’t even do that.” Walker’s lower lip began to tremble. “I don’t make the rules, captain.”

  Walker was angry, and his voice came out broken. Peter felt sorry for him, the person, but contempt for his rationalizations. “You know anything about Buddhism, lieutenant?” he asked.

  Walker drew a long suffering breath. “No, sir. I’m Episcopalian.”

  “That’s too bad, lieutenant. Obviously these people also know they’re going to die later, no matter what they do. If they thought differently maybe some of them would talk. But by enduring the suffering and then dying, they’ll reach the higher plane they’ve been taught to believe in. So the choice of torture and death or talking and death really doesn’t give them an option. You give them a hope of survival and they just might tell you something.”

  “I suppose ARVN’s people don’t know that.” Walker was being defensively snide.

  “Maybe they just don’t give a damn, lieutenant. Maybe vengeance is more important than winning.”

  Peter and Walsh left the hut and moved across the compound, toward their jeep. A few hundred yards south, artillery roared to life, spitting shells at the forest, where fire teams had called in strikes. The earth trembled beneath them from the blasts.

  “It ain’t gonna do any good, you know,” Walsh said, between firings.

  “What isn’t?” Peter asked.

  “Trying to explain to that kid. The book says he does it that way, so he does. It’s the way the brass wants it.”

  Peter was silent as another round of artillery fire erupted. He reached the jeep at the next lull, then hesitated. “It’s their war,” he said, sliding into his seat. I have my own to fight, he thought. And I haven’t been told who the enemy is yet. I don’t have time for a war no one is trying to win.

  Driving back, Peter thought of a conversation he had had with his grandfather as a young boy. He had thought of it often over the years that followed.

  War is a science, Pierre, and like all sciences it has theories that work perfectly until someone tries to apply them… . Life, in that sense, is not unlike war. Corsicans have always understood that to win in life, you have to build for your family, and for the people who are loyal to you. Build, Pierre. No matter how. How is always dictated by life. Perhaps as Corsicans we understand this because we have no politics, no government to tell us what is good. The Americans and the Russians have big governments, and each of them believes in destroying in order to build. Because of this both will lose. And when history looks back at them it will marvel at their wasted greatness. It will see that every opportunity they had to build, they also twisted into a new way to destroy. Look about you, Pierre. Look at the governments of the world and tell me how much good you see. One group starves, while another eats. One that is stronger crushes the weaker underfoot. Should I choose among them for myself? Centuries ago there was a band of heretics called the Manicheans, who believed in the conflict of light and darkness. They believed that God and the devil were waging a constant battle—a battle which God did not necessarily win. They looked around them and they saw life as it was. For this they became hated, and they were all put to death. I have seen this too, Pierre. And I want no part of another man’s world. I will treat it with honor and respect, and I won’t take from any man anything that my world does not need in order to survive. And if he tries to take from me, I will stop him.

  Chapter 22

  The colonel sat behind his desk, big and burly, rolling an unlit cigar between the thumb and index finger of his right hand.

  “I understand you got to see an interrogation. That’s good. Good for a new man to see what’s happening outcountry.” Wallace suddenly yanked his wire-rimmed glasses off and stared angrily at the dirty lenses. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and began cleaning them. His brown eyes were heavily bloodshot, as they had been the first time Peter had met him. Peter said nothing. He had not gotten back to his billet until 2200 hours the previous night, and had collapsed into bed. Now, tired and irritable at 0830, he decided to say as little as possible. He hoped the colonel would not ask for his views. He was not sure how well he could conceal them.

  Wallace finished with his glasses, held them up to the light for inspection, then carefully fitted them back on his flat, fleshy nose. He rearranged himself in his chair, then hunched forward, making himself seem smaller than he was.

  “The important thing you have to remember,” Wallace said, “is that we don’t get adequate intelligence from the field. But we don’t need it, if we do our job, because VC orders originate right here in Saigon. Information goes out from here to the VC cadres. The placement of supply dumps, decisions on troop movements. And that’s because their goddam intelligence network is centered right here.” Wallace jabbed his finger against the desk for emphasis, and Peter noticed there was a slight twitch at the corner of his left eye.

  “The main agent they have here is a VC operative we know only as Cao. It’s a code name to be sure, but there’s no question he’s our main problem. All the documents we’ve seized are routed through him or come from him. And the sonofabitch operates right out of the city, right under our goddam noses.”

  “Any chance he could work for ARVN or the government?” Peter asked.

  “To be completely candid,” Wallace said, “the sonofabitch could be anyone. For all I know you could be Cao. I’ve been after that bastard for three years, and I don’t even know if it’s a man or a woman.” He heaved his body forward and placed his forearms on the desk. “But now we’ve got something new. It’s what I was working on last night. New information that was picked up, indicating Cao is operating a command post across the river in Cholon.” He yanked the cigar from his mouth and jabbed it toward Peter. “And you’re going to find him for me. That’s your main priority from now on. You’ll have to handle other jobs as they come along. But your major effort, all your free time, has to be on getting that bastard.”

  “I’d like to review the material we have on him,” Peter said, then adding, “or her,” as an afterthought.

  “Well, that should take you the rest of the day, but it’ll be time well spent.” Wallace sucked on his teeth for a moment as if trying to dislodge something, then returned his concentration to Peter.

  “You free tonight?” he asked.

  Peter groaned inwardly. “Yes, I am.”

  “Good. Thought I’d like to take you to a little party my counterpart in ARVN is holding this evening. Give you a chance to get to know the slope side of the operation a little better. You’re going to run across them off and on, and a little social contact always helps. Name’s Colonel Duc. Tran Van Duc. Has a beautiful daughter-in-law named Lin, if that’s any inducement.” Wallace grinned suddenly. “Speaking of social contact, what did you think of Molly
Bloom?”

  “Interesting name,” Peter said, returning the smile.

  Wallace cackled. “Bet you shit your pants when she told you.” He scratched an address on a piece of notepaper. “This is the place. Around eight would be good. Don’t eat. There’ll be a nice buffet and lots of booze. You’ll enjoy it. And wear a dress uniform.”

  Chapter 23

  The taxi stopped in front of the Continental Palace Hotel. Peter paid the driver and pried himself out of the tiny rear seat, barely clearing the door before the cab jumped back into the maelstrom of traffic. He remained on the sidewalk, taking in the tall, white, unimpressive building with little interest.

  When he had left Wallace that morning and returned to his own cramped office, two hand-delivered letters had awaited him. One was a dinner invitation for the following evening, intriguingly sent by Molly Bloom. The second was less pleasant, a rather circumspect message from a man named Francisci, who identified himself as manager of the Continental Palace Hotel. It had simply requested a noon meeting, on a matter of “mutual interest.”

  Peter’s first thought had been of the contact his grandfather had promised. Then his mind instinctively turned on the warning the old man had issued. Appear to be nothing more than another American soldier. Your safety depends on that.

  Standing before the hotel now, Peter glanced at his Rolex. It was 1215 hours, appropriately late for a casual military type. He shifted the soft leather briefcase in his left hand. It was standard-issue for members of the unit. Fixed inside was a sawed-off over-and-under 12-gauge shotgun. Each end of the briefcase was made of heavy cloth with slits down the middle, one to allow a hand to enter and reach the trigger and pistol-grip handle, the other to permit the barrel to be pushed through. The shotgun itself was bracketed to a steel bar that ran along the bottom so it could be held steady for accurate firing. Bringing it was his own safety measure.