White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

‘This girl’s brother-in-law is a Viet Cong, Dai uy,’ the old headman said at last, reluctantly. ‘He is not from Van Binh. He is nothing to do with Van Binh. The girl’s sister has shamed her family and has run off to join her husband in the jungle. This girl, who is crazy in the head, was trying to follow her.’

  Lewis understood the villagers’ agitation. Their village was designated as one that was free from. Viet Cong control. As such it received special privileges. If it was suspected that there was a Viet Cong infrastructure at work, life would become more difficult for both the villagers and the team.

  ‘Truly, Dai uy,’ the headman said, his eyes pleading for Lewis to believe him. ‘The girl’s brother-in-law is not from Van Binh. No one in Van Binh knows him. He sent message to his wife and his wife go into the jungle to join him. No one knows where. Even this stupid girl does not know where.’

  Lewis’s instincts were to believe him, but he had no intention of relying on instinct alone. There was a good deal of questioning to be done before the matter was closed, but he had no intention of conducting questioning out in the open on the village perimeter.

  ‘You take the girl, Dai uy,’ the headman continued. ‘You punish her. Then you know that our village does not sympathize with Cong.’

  Lewis had no intention of doing any such thing. For the first time he turned his attention to the panting, breathless girl. Despite the tangled mat of hair half covering her face, he was surprised to see that she was far younger than he had anticipated, fifteen or sixteen.

  ‘Let her father punish her,’ he said, determined to keep the incident on a domestic level if possible.

  There was a general murmur of relief from the crowd of interested villagers, and the girl’s father beamed toothlessly at him. ‘That is what I say in the beginning, Dai uy,’ he said with a look of defiance towards the headman.

  His daughter didn’t share in the general relief. Still with her rump on the beaten earth, her knees bent and her bare feet planted firmly in the dust, she glared up at Lewis, her delicate-boned face filthy, her sloe eyes sparking venomously. Then, to the horror of the bystanders, she spat at him.

  Lewis’s jaw hardened fractionally, and then he gave a nod of dismissal to the headman and turned, striding back towards the team house. Sergeant Drayton remained just long enough to see the girl’s father clump her energetically around the head and then, as she was dragged off to her family hut, this time with the full support of the headman, he turned and followed Lewis.

  ‘You shouldn’t have let her get away with it, Dai uy,’ he said, referring to her contemptuous spit. ‘Not responding to such an insult will be seen by the villagers as a weakness.’

  ‘Did you get a close look at her?’ Lewis asked wearily, hoping to God that there weren’t more village women in contact with lovers or husbands who were Viet Cong. ‘She’s little more than a child.’

  ‘Not in Vietnamese eyes,’ Drayton said truthfully. ‘Under all that dirt and that mat of hair she was quite a looker. The only wonder is that she isn’t married and hauling a couple of kids around with her.’

  Lewis grunted, knowing that Drayton was right. She had probably been of marriageable age in Vietnamese eyes for over a year. ‘Tell the headman and the girl’s father that I want to see them both.’ He still believed that his indifferent reaction to her gesture had been the only one possible; any other reaction would simply have made matters worse.

  Drayton left again, and spotted Pennington, who was returning to camp after a training session with one of the Popular Forces units. ‘Hey, Pennington,’ he said, when he reached the other man, ‘looks as if Charlie is more welcome in Van Binh that we thought.’

  ‘What the shit is that supposed to mean?’ Pennington said after him as Drayton continued to stride away toward the village.

  ‘It means that one of the local belles has a VC for a husband,’ Drayton yelled back, turning his head around but not bothering to halt. ‘And she wasn’t alone in thinking he was the local hero. Her sister wanted to follow the pair of them into the jungle and share in the action as well!’

  Richard Pennington stared after him and then shrugged and continued on his way to the team house. It wouldn’t have surprised him if the whole damn village was Cong. The villagers smiled, agreed with everything that was said to them, took every dollar that was offered, and left him with the uncomfortable sensation that none of their real feelings had been revealed. Whoever had coined the word inscrutable for Orientals hadn’t been exaggerating. They were so damned inscrutable that most of the time, at least for a boy from rural Massachusetts, they were incomprehensible.

  By the time Lewis finished questioning the headman and the girl’s father, he was nearly a hundred per cent convinced that the girl’s marriage to a Viet Cong was an isolated instance.

  That night he took Sergeant Drayton and Sergeant Pennington and five of the village men out on another attempt to ambush the Viet Cong supply squad rumoured to be trying to make its way through their area.

  Lewis was almost certain he’d picked the correct trail, and for seven long, tedious, damp hours they lay in wait at a strategic point along it, tortured by leeches; ants, mosquitoes, and a hundred and one other nameless tormentors, and by the constant drip, drip, drip of the tropical moisture seeping down from the foliage above them.

  It wasn’t until the first hint of grey touched the night sky, that Lewis began to think that another night’s efforts had proved fruitless. Then he heard faint sounds of stealthy movement coming down the track toward them.

  ‘Cong lai!’ one of the village militiamen whispered urgently. ‘The Communists are coming!’

  Lewis nodded, pressing his cheek against the stock of his M-16, his finger tightening around the trigger. There was no need for him to give any orders. Each man knew exactly what to do and when to do it. It was going to be a textbook operation.

  The slightly built, black-pyjama-clad figures took on shadowy shape and substance. Lewis could hear their laboured breathing, smell their body odours. His excitement grew to fever pitch, he could hear his own heartbeat slamming, could feel his pulse racing. It was an exultancy that he could never in a million years have explained to Abbra, an exultancy that would only increase if the unsuspecting Cong engaged them in a fierce firefight.

  ‘Any minute now, you bastards!’ he whispered to himself. ‘Any minute now!’

  The first of the Cong was now nearly level with him, and he hoped to God that he had judged the positioning of Drayton, Pennington, and the militiamen correctly. If he had, then by now all the Cong trudging in their leader’s wake would be in a rifle sight. If he hadn’t, then when he opened fire, and the others followed suit, they would come under answering fire from Viet Cong at the rear of the column. He took a deep breath. The barely visible, dark-clad figure leading the column was now abreast of him. Zero hour had arrived.

  ‘Okay, Charlie,’ he thought as he positioned the M-16’s sight on to the leader’s chest. ‘It’s bye-bye world time.’

  His finger tightened on the trigger, and the instant his own volley of shots blasted the man into eternity, Pennington and Drayton and the militiamen opened up on his followers.

  It was all over in under a minute. A short and bloody operation that wiped out the unsuspecting Cong while resulting in no injuries to themselves.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Dai uy! They really walked into that one!’ Richard Pennington whooped triumphantly as they speedily searched the pockets and packs of the dead Cong. ‘Bam! Bam! Bam! One after the other. Not even one round of retaliatory fire! Grainger is going to shit himself with envy when he hears about it!’

  Lewis grinned, still on an adrenaline high as he sifted through the packs of provisions that the Cong had been carrying. Pennington was right. It had been a dream of an operation.

  ‘He sure as hell is,’ he said, knowing that his lieutenant was going to be apoplectic with fury at having missed out on such a trouble-free confrontation.

  Fatigue was beginning to set
in as the nervous energy of the long wait and the resulting action began to ebb. He distributed the supplies among his men and then ordered them to head back to Van Binh, assigning himself the task of bringing up the rear. There was a slight chance that they hadn’t accounted for all the Viet Cong in the supply squad. A chance that, tired and triumphant, they could come under unexpected sniper fire. And if they did, Lewis wanted to be in the position to handle it.

  He slept the next day until noon. During the afternoon he made out his report on the night’s action, and it never occurred to him to wonder what had happened to the girl who had caused the disturbance the previous day.

  During the next two days he sent out a platoon of local men, under Lieutenant Grainger’s command, to make a thorough sweep of the area where the ambush had taken place, while he supervised a full-scale medical check of the women and children in the village that his medic, Master Sergeant Duxbery, had been planning.

  The operation met with great success. Women and children from nearby villages swelled the ranks of Van Binh’s population, all of them queuing patiently in the sweltering heat until it was their turn for Duxbery to examine them.

  It was only as Duxbery was coming towards the end of his task that Lewis remembered the kicking, screaming girl who had put the village’s loyalty to the South Vietnamese government in doubt.

  ‘Was the sister of the Viet Cong bride a genuine head case?’ he asked, not really believing for a moment that she had been, but idly curious.

  Duxbery sat in one of the bamboo and thatch village houses that he had turned into a temporary clinic. He looked up at Lewis, his eyes red-rimmed and tired. ‘What was the name?’ he asked, pulling a sheaf of paper towards him.

  ‘Tam. Nguyen Van Tam.’

  Duxbery looked through his list of names and shook his head. ‘She’s not down here, and the only women still to be seen are the ones who are too old or too sick to make it to the clinic. She wasn’t sick, was she?’

  Lewis remembered the girl’s fierce and energetic struggles. ‘No, she wasn’t sick,’ he said, his brows drawing together as inner alarm bells began to ring furiously. Had he been too complacent about the incident? Too quick to believe that the girl didn’t know the whereabouts of her sister and her brother-in-law? The thought that there might be more than one village girl with knowledge of the local Viet Cong’s whereabouts, and who was more than willing to keep slipping away from the village with information for them, was not a pleasant one. Still frowning, he strode quickly out of the makeshift clinic and went in search of the headman.

  The headman was beamingly reassuring. ‘The girl is still in the village. How could she run away when neither she nor anyone else knows where the local Viet Cong camps are?’

  ‘If she’s in the village, why didn’t she attend the medical inspection?’ Lewis demanded.

  ‘She is still being punished, of course.’

  ‘Let me see her,’ Lewis demanded suspiciously, no longer trusting a word that was being said to him.

  The headman nodded obligingly, leading the way down the single village Street toward one of the closely packed bamboo and thatch houses that backed out on to a canal.

  ‘She is there, Dai uy,’ he said with flourish of pride, indicating a darkened doorway. ‘Her father punish her very, very good.’

  Lewis bent his head down to enter the house, and was almost immediately overcome by the stench of stale sweat and vomit. A middle-aged female figure sitting just inside the doorway rose with a cry of alarm as he entered.

  ‘It all right,’ Lewis heard the headman saying to her as she fled outside, ‘the dai uy just wants to see how your foolish daughter has been punished.’

  The interior of the hut was so dark that for a few seconds Lewis could see nothing. When his eyes adjusted to the dim light he saw only too well, and what he saw he didn’t believe.

  The girl was lying, half-naked, on the floor, her wrists manacled together with bamboo and secured to a stake driven in the ground. But it wasn’t the sight of her bound wrists that filled him with horror. It was the blood-encrusted weals that scored her back and buttocks.

  ‘Jesus!’ he spat out, sucking in his breath and striding quickly across to her. She was barely conscious. Her lips were dried and cracked and he could see no sign of a water jar.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ he asked urgently. ‘Can you speak?’

  A swollen eyelid flickered open. The tangled mat of her hair was even thicker now, stiff with dried sweat and flecks of blood.

  ‘Di di mau,’ she whispered hoarsely. Added to Lewis’s feelings of horror and revulsion and concern, was a tug of amused admiration. Loosely translated, what she had said was, ‘Get the hell out of here.’ It was a strong language for any rural Vietnamese girl, and unheard of language for anyone to be using to an American who was not only a dai uy, but a co van possessing life-and-death powers.

  ‘I’m going to take you to the bac-si,’ he said, taking a knife from his belt and slicing through the bamboo. Bac-si was the Vietnamese word for doctor and the title that the villagers gave to Master Sergeant Duxbery. The girl closed her eyes again, muttering a word that was barely intelligible but which Lewis was certain was grossly insulting.

  Arranging the scrap of dirty blanket that covered her as strategically as possible, he lifted her up in his arms, carrying her out into the fierce sunlight.

  When he emerged, the expression on the headman’s face changed from one of beaming complacency to one of alarmed concern.

  ‘What is the matter, Dai uy?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Why do you look so angry?’

  ‘Did you know what had been done to her?’ Lewis asked, white-lipped. ‘Was it on your orders?’

  ‘No, no, Dai uy,’ The headman hurried at his side as Lewis made his way up the village Street toward the hut where Master Sergeant Duxbery was seeing the last of his patients. ‘Your orders. The girl was to be punished by her father. You said so.’

  Lewis swore viciously. ‘For Christ’s sake! I didn’t mean she was to be beaten to death!’

  The headman gave a slight shrug. The dai uy had chosen not to punish the girl himself. No one could be blamed if the girl’s father had punished her in a way that displeased the dai uy. It was the dai uy’s fault. He should have carried out the punishment himself.

  ‘Bring her father to me!’ Lewis ordered, hating himself for not foreseeing what would happen; hating the primitiveness of the society that allowed such things to happen; hating, for the first time since he had set foot in it, the whole damned fucking country.

  ‘You found her,’ Jim Duxbery said unnecessarily as Lewis entered the hut. He eyed the savage whip marks on the girl’s back as Lewis laid her as gently as he could on the table. ‘It appears that parental discipline is a little heavy-handed in these parts,’ he said dryly, reaching for a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

  ‘You’re fucking right it is!’

  Jim Duxbery looked across at Lewis with interest. Ellis was that rarest of breeds, a professional soldier who very rarely resorted to foul language.

  He saturated a swab with the peroxide and said briefly, ‘This is going to sting like the devil, but it’s the only anti-septic I have.’

  As the peroxide touched her flesh, beginning to bubble, the girl let out an agonized cry, her eyes flying open.

  ‘It’s to stop the cuts on your back from becoming infected,’ Lewis said to her, taking hold of her hands and gripping them hard. ‘Hold on to me. It won’t hurt for long.’

  For a minute he thought she was going to drag her hands contemptuously from his grasp, and then Duxbery began to swab the weals in earnest and she moaned, digging her nails into his palms.

  ‘When this is over, I want you to come up to the team house,’ Lewis said to her in Vietnamese. ‘I want you to be our cleaning girl.’

  Jim Duxbery looked at him, his eyebrows rising slightly. They already had a cleaning woman. She wasn’t a day under fifty and her teeth were blackened with betelnut. It had long been a so
urce of contention with the team that Ellis had hired such a crone when there were lots of pretty village girls that he could have chosen.

  ‘No,’ the girl whispered hoarsely, shaking her head vehemently.

  Lewis dismissed her refusal. ‘It wasn’t a request, it was an order,’ he said brusquely. He knew that if she came up to the team house every day, no one would dare to lift a hand to her.

  ‘No!’ Vainly the girl tried to pull her hands free of Lewis’s comforting grasp. ‘No, no, never!’

  Lewis swore. He was sure that if he returned her to her home,

  another beating, this time to punish her for attracting the dai uy’s attention in such a way, would soon follow.

  He explained all this to her, but her only response was a sullen silence and a firm shake of her head.

  ‘She won’t come,’ Jim Duxbery said, cleaning the last of the hideous blood-encrusted cuts. ‘If gentle docility is a natural characteristic of Vietnamese women, then this girl is the most uncharacteristic Vietnamese girl I’ve ever met.’

  ‘She’ll come,’ Lewis said grimly. As the peroxide bottle was put away and Jim began to apply salve to the festering weals, the girl determinedly pulled her hands free of his.

  Reluctantly, he did not restrain her. There was something about her that intrigued him, something that attracted him as he had been instantly attracted to Abbra. He wondered if it was because, in some curious way that he couldn’t define, she reminded him of Abbra. As soon as the thought came into his head, he dismissed it as ridiculous. How could she remind him of Abbra? She was an illiterate, dirty Vietnamese peasant. And yet there was something about her … the defiant tilt of her jaw and the uncompromising light in her eyes.

  ‘Dai uy.’ It was the first time she had addressed him with any semblance of politeness. She had pushed herself up on one elbow, facing him, her dark eyes suddenly speculative. ‘Dai uy, I will come to the team house as a cleaning girl on one condition.’

  It was going to be money, of course. A spurt of disappointment surged through him. For some insane reason he had been sure that the girl, despite her obvious hatred toward Americans, was not mercenary.