White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘Yes.’ She held the letter close to her breasts for moment, fighting an upsurge of tears. God, but she loved him! And she missed him!

  ‘Then we’d better be going,’ he said, lifting le petit Gavin up against his shoulder with one hand and picking up the Moses basket-with the other.

  She nodded agreement, blinking hard. Gavin would be horrified if he knew that she was missing him enough to cry from sheer longing. After all, she had encouraged him to leave her and go to Vietnam. By being there he was fulfilling her ambitions as well as his.

  She smiled at her idiocy, the unshed tears clinging shimmeringly on her lashes. ‘Yes, let’s go, mon brave,’ she said, walking quickly across to the door and leading the way down the stairs and into the street.

  They did not perform until the second half of the concert and afterwards Gabrielle never could remember any of the prestigious American and British rock groups who preceded them. All she remembered was Radford saying to her, his eyes glittering like agates, ‘This is it, baby! We’re on!’

  The opening riff boomed out over giant speakers. Da-da-da-da-dum! Da-da-da-da-dum! She crossed her fingers on both hands, threw a prayer up to heaven, and whirled onstage after him, mercurial dynamite in a black leather minidress and knee-high, stiletto-heeled boots.

  The audience was with her from the very first moment. ‘Do you love me?’ she belted out as the music stormed over them in a great majestic rock ‘n’ roll roar. ‘Do you want me?’ As she danced downstage towards them, her hair burning red in the sunlight, her hips grinding, her feet stamping the rhythm, twenty thousand voices roared out assent.

  They played their four scheduled numbers and the crowd howled for more, whistling and screaming, refusing to be pacified until they launched into yet another number.

  ‘Okay!’ Radford yelled to the band from his piano stool. ‘Let’s give them Lover Man.’

  It was one of the songs that she had written, and Radford’s arrangement of it was more blues than rock. Triumph and elation surged through her as she stood for a moment, suddenly still, gaining control of her breathing, and by the sheer force of her personality bringing the audience into a new mood with her.

  ‘Lover man, where have you gone?’ she sang, suddenly vulnerable, heart-stoppingly female, deliberately unleashing the touching, broken-edged quality in her voice that she had always used in the clubs to such staggering effect.

  For a rock group it had been a daring choice to close with, and it was a sensation. As the last chord died away, the audience erupted in a storm of applause, shouting and screaming and stamping their feet. She could see Michel, offstage, whooping in exultation, and Radford, only yards away from her, punching the air with his fists.

  The band was centre-stage with her, hugging her and waving and shouting compliments back to the audience.

  It was an incredible moment, a moment she knew she would never forget. And then Michel lifted le petit Gavin from his Moses basket, holding him so that he could see her, and she knew that if only Gavin could have been there, too, it would have been more than incredible. It would have been the most wonderful moment of her life.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Life for Lewis, through May and June of 1966, was much the same as it had been since his arrival. Despite the constant stress and danger, there was a routine to his days that gave them structure and that even, on occasion, became monotonous. Day after day was passed with the same activities – patrolling the surrounding canal-infested countryside; ambushing any Viet Cong forces that were detected and could be flushed out; training the local Vietnamese militia units; administering civil operations such as medical programmes and agricultural projects as well as military operations. Lewis’s only relaxations were sleeping and eating. And army rations, supplemented by local produce, left a lot to be desired.

  Sleeping was even less of a pleasure. Mosquitoes, and a dozen other bugs that Lewis was unable to name, made nights a torment. Despite heavy spraying of insecticide inside the net covering his bunk, and lavish applications of insect repellent on his skin, some mosquitoes always survived, crawling into his hair and settling on his arms and chest to feed from convenient capillaries.

  Tam’s laconic indifference to the blood-sucking pests never ceased to amuse him. She would swat them away, barely pausing in whatever task she was doing.

  His team’s euphoria at having Tam in the house, washing dishes and laundering and cleaning and sweeping, was short-lived. They had looked forward to flirting with her and teasing her, and they were sorely disappointed. Unlike most of the village girls, whose eyes were always full of mischief, and who laughed and smiled at the slightest opportunity, Tam was inscrutable. She did her work with flawless efficiency, scraping dried mud from the floors and from their boots, scouring the cooking pots until they shined, sewing up tears in fatigues. But she did it all with an attitude of barely veiled contempt, never speaking to the men unless it was absolutely necessary, and then only in a voice so ice cool and impersonal that they soon gave up any idea of thawing her into amiability.

  Far from sharing his men’s disappointment, Lewis was relieved by Tam’s aloofness. A stunningly pretty seventeen- or eighteen-year-old in the team house and its precincts for six or seven hours a day could have been a sure-fire recipe for trouble. As it was, after the first few days, when the novelty of her presence had worn off, Lewis knew that he could relax. Even his optimistically persistent assistant team leader, Lieutenant Grainger, had given up trying to elicit a friendly response from her. If there were going to be any repercussions from having her as their cleaning girl, they were not going to be the sexual ones he had feared.

  The only person she ever spoke to at length was himself, and he knew that she did so only in order to practise her English. She was a model pupil, listening avidly, never having to be told twice, returning each day with the previous day’s grammar and vocabulary committed to memory, only her pronunciation being a little uncertain.

  ‘By the time I leave Vietnam, your English will be good enough for you to apply for a job as an interpreter with the Americans,’ he said to her one morning in late July as they came to the end of her daily lesson.

  She looked across at him, and her eyes, normally devoid of expression, were curious. ‘You cannot believe that I would do such a thing,’ she said in charmingly laboured English.

  He pushed his chair away from the rough wood table and walked across to the coolbox for a vacuum bottle of drinking water.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked mildly. In the three months that she had been working at the team house, it was the first time their conversation had approached being personal. A tingle of triumph ran down his spine. If he could get her to talk about herself, then he might also be able to get her to listen to advice she badly needed, advice which, if he had given it previously, he knew she would have contemptuously spurned.

  He returned to the table with the vacuum jug and two plastic beakers and she said, her eyes holding his, her curiosity touched with defiance, ‘I am not learning English in order that I can help the Americans.’

  He poured water into the beakers and handed her one of them, swatting away an insect that had landed on his arm. ‘I know.’

  A hint of a flush touched her tawny skin. ‘You do not know. You cannot know.’

  He ran a hand through his thickly curling hair. ‘I do know,’ he said again quietly. ‘I know that you asked for English lessons so that you would be able to help the Viet Cong. I have always known that.’

  In her eyes, curiosity and defiance had been replaced by stunned amazement. ‘And yet you still taught me?’

  He nodded, her incredulity and bewilderment arousing a wave of tenderness in him.

  She frowned, and for a moment he thought she was going to retreat into her customary pose of careless indifference, and then she said, her voice troubled, ‘I am sorry, Dai uy, but I do not understand.’

  It was the first time that, addressing him by his title, she had not given the words a sarcast
ic edge. A slight smile touched the hard line of his mouth. If she wasn’t careful, she would soon find herself treating him as a friend.

  ‘No, I know that you don’t, Tam,’ he said gently, relieved that she was at last lowering the barriers that she had erected between them. He rested his folded arms on the table, leaning toward her slightly. ‘Let me try to explain.’

  ‘I do not believe you,’ she said flatly when he told her of the atrocities committed by the Viet Cong against village chiefs who refused to cooperate with them. ‘None of those things have happened here, in Van Binh.’

  ‘Only because there is an American presence in Van Binh,’ he said dryly.

  ‘I still do not believe you.’ Her hands were clenched tightly in her lap. ‘The Viet Cong are freedom fighters. They are fighting for a free Vietnam.’

  ‘They’re fighting for a Communist Vietnam,’ Lewis said, feeling his patience beginning to slip away from him. ‘And if that’s what you want, let me tell you that when you get it, you won’t like it at all!’

  ‘Why should you care?’ she asked with a flare of her old spirit. ‘You are not Vietnamese! What is it to you what we Vietnamese do? If you want so much to be in Vietnam, just wait a little while and perhaps in your next reincarnation you will be born Vietnamese!’

  She looked so pretty, her almond eyes sparking angrily, her waist-length black hair shimmering down her back, that his impatience died and he burst into rare laughter.

  ‘There could be worse fates,’ he said as Lieutenant Grainger walked into the team house, looking quizzically at them both.

  For the first time since he had known her, Lewis saw a small grin edge the corner of her mouth. ‘Perhaps, but not, I think, for an American,’ she said naughtily, and with a gleam of laughter in her eye, she rose from her rickety wooden chair, and ignoring Lieutenant Grainger completely, she swept out of the team house, walking with eye-riveting grace across the compound to her washtub and her laundry.

  ‘What was all that about?’ Lieutenant Grainger asked, dragging his gaze away from her. ‘Is the ice maiden beginning to thaw at last?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Lewis said noncomittally, irrationally annoyed by his assistant team leader’s remark and his tone of voice.

  If Tam was beginning to thaw, it sure as hell wouldn’t in Grainger’s direction. ‘It’s about time we set off for Tay Phong. Are the district chief and his cronies here yet?’

  Tay Phong was the village farthest from Van Binh in his area. It was in a particularly vulnerable position, dangerously close to the network of waterways that the Cong used to smuggle supplies from the Cambodian border to their unit Lewis had a good relationship with Tay Phong’s village chief that he wanted to maintain. If Tay Phong underwent a change of loyalty, becoming sympathetic to the Viet Cong, then he had no chance of ever again intercepting the supply convoys.

  ‘Hoan is on his way up here now,’ Grainger said, referring to the district chief who was to travel to Tay Phon with them. He picked up his M-16, turning back toward the door, wondering what the hell pretty Tam had done or said to have provoked such unaccustomed laughter from his sober-sided captain.

  Lewis strapped on his. 45 service automatic and followed him. The sun seemed unusually bright, and he blinked his eyes uncomfortably as he strode across the compound to meet Hoan and the two members of his staff who always travelled with him.

  ‘Cháo, Dai uy,’ the elderly district chief said cheerily.

  ‘Cháo, Em,’ Lewis responded. His relationship with Hoan was a good one. He was a rare creature, a district chief who was unbribable and incorruptible. Today, however, Lewis knew that Hoan regarded himself as being off duty because he was going with them to Tay Phong only because he had a brother living there. The visit, made in the comfort of a water taxi, would give him the chance for a family chat.

  As they walked down towards the village and the battered construction that served as a pier, Lewis turned his head, looking back at the compound. Tam had paused in her laundering and was standing, watching him. He grinned, pleased at the rapport that had suddenly sprung up between them, wishing he could have stayed in the team house, talking to her, rather than travel with Grainger and Hoan to Tay Phong.

  The water taxi was a small engine-powered boat with a sheltered passenger compartment and was the common means of transportation from one village to the next. As Lewis stepped aboard, he was aware that he had the beginnings of a headache.

  He sat beneath the shade, wishing yet again that he hadn’t arranged to have a discussion with Tay Phong’s village chief and to inspect its local militia platoon. He had a letter from Abbra tucked into the breast pocket of his tiger-stripe fatigues and he withdrew it, reading it yet again, his strong, hard-boned face softening slightly as he did.

  She didn’t appear to be seeing so much of Scott now that the football season was over. He didn’t mind about that too much. He didn’t want her getting so hooked on the game that she would want him to accompany her once he returned home. They would have better things to do than sit in the stands and cheer Scott on.

  His smile deepened. The birthday party at the Polo Lounge sounded like fun. It was nice to think of them all there together, Abbra and Scott and his father, being a real family. He wondered whose idea it had been to have candies and a miniature football player on the cake and guessed that it had been Abbra’s.

  There wasn’t too much else in her letter. She had been to Boston for a few days and waxed lyrical about the squirrels on the Common and the sun shining on the golden dome of the State House, and the winding old streets on Beacon Hill. He couldn’t imagine why she had chosen the East Coast and Boston for a vacation when she could quite easily have driven down to Monterey or Carmel or even Mexico.

  His head was beginning to throb, and he refolded the letter and put it back in his pocket, shivering slightly. There wasn’t long to go now before he would be back home with her, and when he was, they would vacation together. Mexico would be a good choice. They could go to Acapulco and Oaxaca.

  ‘Looks like we’re going to be in for an uncomfortable ride, Dai uy,’ Grainger said to him glumly as the water taxi approached the next village along the canal bank.

  Lewis squinted into the fierce sunlight. There was a small crowd waiting at the makeshift dock. Black-garbed elderly women with baskets of farm produce, and farmers, cage of live hens at their feet. He groaned. Travelling with the villagers on a local water taxi was always a hardship, but today it would be unbearable.

  His head was throbbing viciously and his limbs had begun to ache. If he had been back home in California he would have thought he was coming down with the flu, and he would have taken a couple of aspirin and shrugged it off. In Vietnam the solution wasn’t as simple. He could be suffering from anything, goddammit, and he had no access to any medication until they returned to Van Binh.

  The water taxi glided to a halt and the chattering villagers loaded themselves aboard. He squeezed himself into a position from which he could keep a careful eye on the canal bank, knowing that Grainger would be doing the same on the other side of the boat. They never had come under sniper fire while travelling by water taxi, but there was always a first time.

  He was beginning to feel nauseated, and determined that once in Tay Phong, his visit would be brief. He would inspect the militia, have a word with the village chief, and then he would go back to the team house and dose himself with aspirin and try to sleep off whatever it was he was coming down with.

  ‘Are you okay, Dai uy?’ Grainger called across from the far side of the boat, looking at him anxiously.

  Lewis gave a brief nod. He was far from okay, but there was no point in whining about it to Grainger.

  After a journey that seemed interminable, the water taxi glided to a halt in Tay Phong. Every muscle Lewis possessed ached as he climbed from the boat and began to walk towards the main street, Grainger, Hoan, and his cronies in his wake.

  Tay Phong was like every other village in the province. There was one
main street, hemmed in by shops and small houses made of grass and thatch. On one side the houses faced out over the canal, and a few sampans were tied up to wooden stilt pilings. Halfway down the street was the market square and a few more buildings: a Catholic church, a schoolhouse, both made of masonry blocks.

  A pig careered across their path, a stream of children running noisily in its wake as they made their way to the village office, where the village chief was waiting to meet them.

  ‘Cháo! Cháo! Co van!’ the chief said buoyantly, greeting Lewis by his title of adviser and pouring out glasses of the local homemade firewater.

  Lewis took the proferred glass reluctantly. Good manners demanded he drink it, and he did so in one swallow, certain it would either kill him or cure him.

  ‘I have information, Co van,’ the village chief said when the formalities of drinking the ba side were over. He leaned towards Lewis over a table even more battered than the one in the team house. ‘A supply unit is due to come into the area, a big one.’

  Lights were dancing on the periphery of Lewis’s vision, and he had to clamp his hands on his knees to prevent them from quivering. ‘Are you sure it’s coming this far south?’ he asked, struggling to concentrate.

  Usually it was only the offshoots of the big supply units that penetrated this far south. A main supply unit would be too big for his team and the local militia units to manage. They would need a backup force. Perhaps even a Special Forces ‘A’team.

  The village chief nodded his head vigorously. ‘Yes, Co van,’ he said emphatically. ‘My informant is a member of the Viet Cong infrastructure who has discovered that his superior officer has been sleeping with his wife. The officer will be accompanying the supply unit and it is for revenge that he has come to me with information.’

  ‘When he says a big supply unit, how big does he mean?’