White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘I think it’s time to push again,’ he said, not lifting his gaze from the dark gold head he held with infinite care. ‘Push for the shoulders to come out, Gaby. But don’t push too hard. Gently. Gently.’

  The pressure was building up in her again, and nothing in the world could have prevented her from pushing. She was bathed in sweat, almost mesmerized by pain, but above everything she was exultant. The baby was nearly born. It was nearly over. Her sense of triumph was ecstatic. Every muscle in her body bore down. There was a great rush of water between her legs, a slithering sensation and then an overwhelming nothingness. The rock-hard bulge that had been splitting her in two was no longer there. She was free of pain, free of the child that had inhabited her body for nine long months.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she sobbed, trying to push herself up against the pillows, trying to see. ‘Is it all right? Why doesn’t it cry, Gavin? Why doesn’t it cry?’

  He wasn’t listening to her. He was carefully and gently wiping mucus away from the baby’s nose and mouth. The umbilical cord was thick and blue, unbelievably knotted. Still the baby didn’t cry, and he blew gently on its face. There was a little shudder from the slippery wet body in his hands, and then a little cry.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she sobbed again, this time in relief. ‘Is it all right? Is it a boy? Is it a girl? Oh, let me hold it, Gavin, please let me hold it!’

  For the first time since the baby’s head had begun to crown, he looked towards her. ‘It’s a boy,’ he said with a wide, triumphant grin. ‘It’s a boy, Gaby, and he’s perfect!’

  There was nothing to wrap the baby in, and he placed it in her eager arms, the wrinkled red flesh still smeared with blood and mucus, the umbilical cord springing from its tummy, its eyes closed, its tiny hands balled into fists as it squalled lustily.

  ‘What do I do now?’ he asked, grinning down at them both, tears of joy and relief streaming his face. ‘Do I cut the umbilical cord? Tie it off?’

  ‘No,’ Gabrielle said firmly. ‘You have been magnificent, mon amour, but there is no need for you to do anything else. The doctor will be here soon. The only thing I need is something to wrap the baby in so that he does not catch cold.’

  He handed her one of the hotel’s towels, and together they wrapped it gently around their son. He stopped crying as they did so, snuffling a little and pursing his mouth hungrily.

  ‘This is what he wants,’ Gabrielle said with deep satisfaction, baring her breasts and lifting the baby toward them. She guided a nipple into the hungry little mouth and the baby immediately began to suck.

  ‘Clever little thing, isn’t he?’ Gavin said in wonder.

  Gabrielle laughed, her eyes shining joyously as they met his. ‘I think the afterbirth is coming away,’ she said. ‘Have another towel ready. Where is that doctor? It must be hours since he was called.’

  Gavin crossed to the wash basin for another towel and looked down at his wristwatch. ‘It isn’t,’ he said, his voice full of disbelief. ‘It’s only been twenty minutes.’

  Gabrielle looked lovingly down at her suckling son. ‘What are we going to call him?’ They had thought of several names, some French, some Australian, even some Vietnamese, and decided on none of them.

  ‘Whatever you want to call him,’ Gavin said, returning to the bed with the towel and spreading it beneath her.

  ‘Then I would like to call him after you, and after my father, and, if you do not mind, after my mother’s brother and her father.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ he said truthfully, ‘but Gavin Étienne Dinh is going to be quite a mouthful. What name will we use?’

  ‘Gavin,’ she said unhesitantly. ‘Mon petit Gavin.’

  There came the sound of footsteps hurrying up the stairs.

  ‘The doctor,’ Gavin said with relief. He looked at his watch again. ‘I’m going to have to leave you both in another few hours,’ he said awkwardly.

  ‘I know.’ Her spicy red curls were tousled and damp with sweat. Except for a smudge of mascara below her eyes, no makeup remained on her face. She looked unbelievably beautiful.

  ‘I love you, Gaby,’ he said, knowing that as long as he lived, he would never forget how she looked at that moment,

  cradling their newborn son. He would remember always.

  There was a peremptory knock at the door and the doctor strode into the room. Sixteen hours later, as Gabrielle lay in the small, sun-filled bedroom at Fontainebleau, their son in a hastily acquired crib at her side, Gavin sat aboard an Air France 707, flying up and over Paris, heading for Saigon.

  Chapter Eleven

  Lewis had several distinct advantages over the majority of his peers serving in Vietnam. He was there because he wanted to be, not because he had been drafted. And he believed that America’s presence in Vietnam was both justified and honourable.

  In Lewis’s eyes, any country fighting for freedom against the threat of Communist domination deserved financial and military assistance. After serving six months he no longer believed that South Vietnam was the shining democracy that America’s propaganda machine liked to depict, but he was damned sure that dictatorial and repressive and full of faults as it was, it was still a hell of a lot better than the government in the North.

  Unlike Hanoi, whose avowed aim was the invasion of the South, Saigon had never announced any intention of invading the North, nor had it tried to impose its system of government on to an unwilling people.

  In his six months in the peninsula he had witnessed enough acts of barbarism perpetrated by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army to know exactly why he and his countrymen were in Vietnam. They were there because the South Vietnam government had invited and welcomed them there; they were there because they were helping the South Vietnamese fight for their freedom; and they were there to stem the expansion of world communism.

  Besides the advantage of total commitment, he also had other, less obvious advantages. Unlike many of the conscripts, he did at least know where Vietnam was, geographically. He also had a good understanding of the country’s history and customs and language. Even rarer, he didn’t loathe the country on sight; he didn’t regard South Vietnamese civilians with contempt; and he didn’t despise the South Vietnamese who fought at his side.

  He knew he was lucky. The majority of the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam was poorly trained and poorly motivated. His fellow officers’ bitter complaint that the ARVN did not want American help in fighting, but wanted them to fight the war for them, was often justified.

  His own experience as a military adviser had been a good one. His first assignment had been with the 21st ARVN Division. By the time his six months with them had come to an end, and he had gone on leave in Hawaii, he had nothing but respect for both the South Vietnamese officers of the battalion and the men. They were hard, dedicated fighters it had been a privilege to serve with. On his return from leave, he had learned that he was not returning to the 21st, but instead was being assigned to a MAT team in An Xuyen province.

  MAT was short for Mobile Advisory Team. Each of South Vietnam’s forty-two provinces had a large American advisory team assigned to it, and, as each province was divided up into several districts, each of these teams was assigned several smaller MAT teams. The teams were based in remote hamlets and villages, and the men assigned to them lived alongside the villagers and rarely came into contact with other army personnel – Vietnamese or American.

  Lewis had been specifically trained for this type of environment and he adapted rapidly. He was promoted to the rank of captain and posted to Van Binh as team leader and district senior adviser. His wide-ranging responsibilities for the welfare and military security of the villages and hamlets in his district sat easily on him.

  The village where his team was based was deep in the delta, as far south as it was possible to go in Vietnam. The whole area was crisscrossed with canals and ditches, the water gleaming glossily against the dark green foliage of reeds and vines and waist-high elephant grass.

 
Lewis was glad that his assignment was not the usual GI troop duty. Here in Van Binh he was the most senior officer. There was no one he had to ask permission of before his orders could be implemented. With his four fellow Americans, and with the help of the local Popular Forces platoons, forces made up of trained and armed local villagers, he was able to wage his own private war against the Viet Cong units who used the area as their sanctuary.

  Lewis and his men found themselves up against more than just Viet Cong. Although An Xuyen province was eighty miles from the Cambodian border, the North Vietnamese Army regiments operating out of Cambodian sanctuaries used the Delta’s vast network of canals to their advantage.

  Nearly all the patrols and ambush operations that Lewis and his men undertook were carried out in or on water. Water dominated their lives, although the rainy season, with its nightmare of ceaseless rain and ankle-deep mud, and its attendant miseries of mildewed clothing, damp bedding, sodden cigarettes, foot rot and a dozen other forms of fungicidal infection were now behind them. Lewis came to hate the long hours spent negotiating the canals by sampan, but he never, unlike some of the men under his command, prayed for a posting to Saigon. He had spent three weeks in Saigon at the beginning of his tour of duty, and he had no desire to spend even another hour there.

  One of his lecturers at West Point, a man who had spent many years in Vietnam, both before and after the defeat of the French, had told him how beautiful Saigon was, likening it to an elegant French provincial town. By July ‘66, when Lewis arrived in Saigon, all traces of elegance were fast disappearing.

  Tu Do Street, the main thoroughfare that had reminded Lewis’s lecturer of a boulevard in Avignon, was now littered with blatantly seedy girlie bars and brothels and massage parlours. American dollars flooded the city, bringing instant wealth to some, and increasing the poverty of others. The number of prostitutes in the city doubled and then quadrupled as girls flocked in from outlying villages, eager for a share of American wealth.

  It was the sight of these girls more than anything else that sickened Lewis. The city-born whores were easy to ignore. They were like whores anywhere, tough and professional and more than capable of taking care of themselves. But the eager young girls swarming in from the countryside, lured by the knowledge that a prostitute in Saigon could now make more in a week than her father could in a year, were a different matter. Their delicate-boned faces were still innocent and fresh, their eyes full of nervous appeal as they solicited outside the restaurants and bars and the Continental Palace Hotel and the Majestic and the Caravelle.

  Lewis had been approached repeatedly, and each time had vehemently told the girl in question to pack her bags and hightail it back to her village. The only response had been a look of blank bewilderment and then a repeated honeyed request that he take advantage of the services she was offering. After half a dozen such encounters, he had stopped trying, knowing that nothing he could say or do would make the slightest bit of difference.

  Whenever he saw one of his fellow countrymen taking advantages of prostitutes’ services, Lewis was disgusted. The massage parlours and clubs in Tu Do Street were full of Americans. In some clubs, such as The Sporting Bar and La Bohéme, dope as well as sex was freely for sale, and the air was thick with Cambodian red marijuana as fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds draped themselves, topless, around the necks of relaxing servicemen.

  Despite the other problems in the countryside, the atmosphere of mercenary depravity was blessedly absent. The village girls dressed and behaved with traditional modesty; there were no small boys busily trying to sell the sexual services of their still smaller sisters and though Lewis knew no one should be trusted absolutely, since there was a great deal of Viet Cong infiltration in the area, he found the village men both courteous and helpful.

  Most of the residents were farmers or fishermen. They grew rice in the paddy fields that surrounded the village and they caught fish in the many canals. Apart from this they had very little. There was no running water in the village, no electricity, no sewerage; none of the things that Lewis and his men had always taken for granted. As an adviser it was part of Lewis’s responsibility to help the people with development projects. Aid was available, if only people knew how to apply for it. As all the villagers were virtually illiterate, no one had.

  Within hours of his arrival Lewis had requested medical aid and educational aid and had asked for everything that there was the faintest hope of getting.

  His assistant team leader was a young Texan who was as eager as he was to improve the primitive conditions.

  Apart from Lieutenant Grainger there were three northerners in his team. His light weapons specialist, Sergeant Drayton, was from New York State, and his heavy weapons specialist, Sergeant Pennington, and the team medic, Master Sergeant Duxbery, were both from Massachusetts.

  As a team they worked well together. The only short-time man, with an eye on his flight home, was Drayton, but even he was committed.

  It was while he was with Drayton in the palm-thatched hut that served as their team house that he heard the shouts and screams that introduced him to Tam.

  ‘What the devil’s going on out there, Trung uy?’ he snapped, looking up from the map he had been studying and addressing Drayton by his Vietnamese rank, as was customary.

  ‘Christ knows,’ Drayton said, hoping to God they hadn’t been hit, and striding quickly towards the open doorway.

  There was no smoke and no sign of an explosion. The ruckus was coming from the perimeter of the village, some one hundred yards away from the fortified team house and the huts that served as troop barracks. ‘It’s nothing, Dai uy,’ he said, turning back to Lewis with relief. ‘Just a local disagreement.’

  The screaming had continued, unmistakably female, and furious and raging rather than being full of fear or pain. Village life was as full of marital discord as any American army base for marrieds, but the village women were usually too indoctrinated by the Buddhist precepts of female docility and obedience to protest too strenuously at mistreatment.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, can’t someone shut that woman up?’ he said bad-temperedly, throwing down the pen he had been marking the map with and striding across to the doorway to join Drayton.

  ‘I think some of them are trying to bring her up here, Dai uy, and some of them are trying to hustle her into one of the village huts,’ Drayton said, leaning against the bamboo frame of the doorway and watching with amused interest.

  ‘I don’t want her in here,’ Lewis said decisively, knowing that once the villagers milled into the team house there was no telling when he would be rid of them. The agitated group was beginning to move slowly toward them, despite the furiously resisting girl in its midst and the several dissenters viciously tugging her in the opposite direction.

  ‘Looks like someone’s wife has been up to a bit of no good,’ Drayton said, taking a box of matches and a pack of Camels out of his pocket and settling himself to enjoy the entertainment.

  ‘We’re here to fight a war, goddammit, not act as marriage counsellors!’ Lewis abandoned all hope of finishing the job he had in hand until the fighting, kicking, and screaming group had been dispersed. ‘Come on.’ He began to walk across the beaten earth to the approaching melee. ‘Let’s settle this fracas with a little American common sense.’

  Drayton sighed and ground his freshly lit cigarette out under his rubber-soled sandals. They had been up half the night hoping to ambush a squad of Viet Cong rumoured to be bringing supplies in to the local units. Lewis was now mapping out the site for an ambush that he hoped would be more successful.

  As soon as the quarrelling villagers saw the two Americans they halted in their tracks, still holding on tightly to the kicking, screaming girl.

  Lewis strode up to them. He was wearing only a pair of black pyjama pants and rubber sandals, as he had found the loose cotton clothing that the villagers wore was more comfortable and practical than standard army issue.

  ‘What the hell is goin
g on here, Em?’ he asked the village headman, addressing him as a brother and a good friend.

  The village headman looked unusually nervous. ‘This girl crazy, Dai uy. That is why we bring her to you. So that you know we do not sympathize with her, or help her. That there are no more crazy girls in our village.’

  A slight frown creased Lewis’s brow. He had anticipated a marital or parental dispute. The nervous expression in the old man’s eyes indicated that there was more to the disturbance than he had originally thought.

  Immediately after the old man had spoken, a storm of protest had broken out from the men still trying to tug the protesting girl in the opposite direction. Yes, the girl was crazy, they confirmed, but she didn’t need to be brought before the Co Van. She needed only a whipping.

  Lewis raised his voice over the conflicting shouts, demanding that the girl’s father step forward. A man even older than the village headman reluctantly did so, dragging the girl behind him.

  ‘Is this your daughter?’ Lewis demanded. The girl was now on the beaten ground, still struggling to free herself of her father’s grasp, and of the dozens of other pairs of hands helpfully restraining her.

  ‘Yes, Dai uy.’ The old man looked as nervous as the headman, and there was something else in his eyes as well. Fear.

  He looked swiftly from the girl’s father to the headman. In the months he had been in Van Binh he had forged a good relationship with the old man, a relationship that he believed had been founded on guarded mutual trust.

  ‘Why is this girl crazy. Em? Why does she need to be whipped?’ There was steel in his voice, and the conflicting shouts from the men around them died down. Everyone was waiting and listening. Only the girl seemed unaware of the new tension, continuing to kick and struggle against her captors.