White Christmas in Saigon

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘I will find someone,’ Gabrielle had said with immovable firmness. ‘I’m sorry, Maman, but he’s coming with me. It’s hard enough living without Gavin. I’m not going to live without my baby as well.’

  It had not been easy. Maids, in the hotels they had stayed in, had looked after him for her whenever they could, as had some of the fans she attracted, but baby-sitters on such an ad hoc basis were not an ideal solution. When she was in Dublin, the young Irish girl who had offered to care for him while she was onstage was so likable and so enamoured with le petit Gavin that Gabrielle asked her if she would like to become his nanny, travelling with them wherever they went.

  She had accepted immediately and Radford, who had been left on more than one occasion literally holding the baby, was extremely grateful. ‘Every band should have a nanny,’ he had said laconically when she had asked if Maura could be put on the payroll. ‘Man, it’s what this band has needed all along!’

  When the LP was released it was even more successful than the single had been.

  ‘America next stop,’ Radford had said triumphantly. ‘Marty is fixing up a tour for the fall. From now on there ain’t going to be no stopping us. This time we’re really on our way!’

  It was the end of the summer when the crucial letter from Nhu arrived. Gabrielle was in Paris because they were rehearsing for the autumn tour and her mother brought it into the kitchen with a troubled face.

  ‘It is much heavier than usual, ma chére,’ she said as le petit Gavin tried to walk towards her on chubby legs, holding on to the edge of a chair. ‘Do you think there is news?’

  Her eyes flickered over the envelope; Gabrielle knew that there was news, and that it wasn’t good. She tore open the letter, reading slowly, her heart racing.

  ‘I am very distressed to have to tell you that a visitor came to see me yesterday in order to inform me that we can expect no farther news of your uncle, or of the friend who is travelling with him. Nor should we seek for such news. I am terribly sorry, dear niece, but it seems that at the moment nothing further can be done …’

  She passed the letter silently across to her mother. Vanh read it slowly and then raised her eyes to Gabrielle. ‘Perhaps …’ she began quaveringly.

  Gabrielle shook her head. She knew that her mother was beginning to believe that both Dinh and Gavin were dead. But she didn’t believe that they were dead. They couldn’t be dead. ‘No,’ she said fiercely, her hands balling into fists. ‘Don’t say it, Maman. They are alive. I know they are!’

  Gabrielle had never really spoken to Radford about Gavin, but he knew the brief outline. Her husband was in Vietnam and was officially listed as missing. Now she told him about Nhu’s dispiriting letter.

  ‘That’s pretty bleak news, baby,’ he said sympathetically.

  ‘My mother thinks that both he and Dinh are dead—’

  He put his arm around her shoulders, hugging her tight. ‘Hey steady there. No news is good news, isn’t that what they say? And this letter from your aunt is a no-news letter. All it’s saying is don’t hound them. They’ll get in touch in their own good time. Don’t say one damn thing about either of them being dead.’

  She had been grateful for his reassurance. She didn’t want him as her lover because she didn’t want anyone as her lover, only Gavin. But she did want him as a friend.

  His eyes sharpened as he looked down at her. ‘You’re not going to do anything silly, are you?’ he asked with sudden, terrible intuitiveness.

  Her eyes were blank. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said truthfully.

  He gave an inward sigh of relief. For once he was way ahead of her. She hadn’t yet taken it into her head to hotfoot it to ’Nam herself. He hoped to God she never did. The band would certainly not survive without her. Thinking of the American tour that was soon to start, he said, ‘I’m going to take time off when we’re in Washington to march with the brothers. Why don’t you join me? You might even meet up with other chicks in the same position as yourself.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, wondering how on earth she was going to survive the American tour when her mind would focus on nothing but Gavin. ‘I don’t understand.’

  He tossed a foreign edition of the Washington Post across to her.

  ‘A pretty uptight-sounding English chick isn’t too pleased at the line the American government is taking toward POWs. Her husband is a chopper jock being held in Hanoi.’

  Gabrielle took hold of the newspaper, reading the letter that had caught his attention. ‘I’m going to write to her,’ she said immediately. ‘I’m going to write to her today.’

  ‘And the march on the Pentagon?’ he asked. ‘The Black Muslims are taking part in a march on the Pentagon in a couple of weeks time.’ He grinned and gave a black clenched fist power salute, raised high. ‘I thought my old friend Malcolm X might like a little support from me.’

  ‘Are they going to protest the war?’

  ‘They sure as hell ain’t going there to enlist!’ he said, laughing down at her.

  Despite her fearful anxieties for Gavin’s safety, a small smile touched her mouth. An antiwar demonstration in the heart of Washington would be an event Gavin would certainly not want her to miss. And the English girl who had written so angrily to The Washington Post might also be going.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said decisively. ‘The brothers won’t mind, will they?’

  With great difficulty he resisted the urge to scoop her off her high-booted feet and crush her against him. ‘Hell, honey,’ he said, wondering how much longer it would be before she finally shared his bed. ‘The brothers ain’t going to mind having you with them. They’re going to be de-lighted!’

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The pain in Lewis’s shoulder was excruciating, and blood was pouring down his arm and his chest. To evade being captured he knew he had to act. Immediately. Before he even left the water.

  ‘Duoc!’ The North Vietnamese screamed at him. ‘Di di!’

  His left arm was useless. It was a heavy blood-soaked weight that felt as if it had been ripped from its socket. He had to hurl himself at the North Vietnamese; he had to knock the Kalashnikov from his grasp. From far behind him, from the other bank, there came a high-pitched scream and then a silencing blast of machine-gun fire. He staggered in the waist-high water. It wasn’t Duxbery. Duxbery had been killed in the first barrage of shots to hit the boat. It was Drayton. They’d killed Drayton and now they were going to kill him.

  The water around him was carmine with blood. He steadied himself on the mud and slime of the canal bed and then, as the North Vietnamese, losing patience, moved angrily towards him, he summoned up all his strength and hurled himself forwards.

  He knew as he moved that he stood no chance of escaping. Even if he disarmed and killed his potential captor, there were swarms of other North Vietnamese on both banks who would immediately open fire. He couldn’t escape, and he knew it, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to flounder to dry land at the point of a gun only to be shot like an animal at his captor’s leisure.

  The grin of triumph on the North Vietnamese’s face vanished as Lewis dived upon him. At the same instant as Lewis’s right arm made contact with the Kalashnikov, knocking it upward, it blasted into life, bullets plowing into the air. There would be other bullets soon, bullets far more lethally directed, but Lewis didn’t care. His right hand was on his victim’s throat as they fell together, rolling and tumbling under the surface of the filthy water.

  He never knew why he wasn’t shot there and then. His initial advantage, that of taking his enemy by surprise, was lost almost immediately. Blood was still pumping from the wound in his shoulder, pain was still searing through him, and his left arm was as useless as a piece of dead meat. It was only seconds before his opponent had the upper hand, and only a fraction of a second longer before other hands laid hold of him, dragging him half drowned and semiconscious towards the bank.

  He expected to be shot. Never for one minu
te did he imagine that he was going to be taken prisoner. He was thrown facedown, a half a dozen Kalashnikovs pointing at his head.

  The officer in charge gave a brusque order, and instead of the expected blast of automatic fire smashing him from this world and into the next, hands were laid on him once again and his sodden clothes, right down to his khaki shorts, were savagely stripped off him. His boots were next, yanked from his feet and handed over, the spoils of war, to the officer in charge.

  Still with the Kalashnikovs aimed at his head, coughing and spluttering up fetid canal water, he rolled himself on to his knees. The wound in his shoulder was now clearly visible, and he saw with relief that it was a flesh wound and that though nerves and tendons to his arm had been severed, no bones had been smashed.

  The officer nodded to one of the soldiers standing guard over him, and the next minute his right arm and his injured left arm were yanked behind his back. He cried out in agony, falling and blacking out. When consciousness returned, he was still on his knees and still in excruciating pain. His arms had been tied behind him with vine rope, and a pad made from the shirt they had stripped him of had been tied across the gaping wound in his shoulder.

  It was the first hopeful thing that had happened to him since he had hit the water. Their action made no sense unless they intended to keep him alive. And if they were going to keep him alive, then he would be able, at some point, to make an escape.

  He was gestured to his feet, and he rose with difficulty, towering over the smaller Vietnamese soldiers like a captured Gulliver over the inhabitants of Lilliput.

  There was no noise from the river behind him, no sign of life. The bodies of the men who had travelled out from Van Binh with him floated facedown on the water, or lay sprawled on the far bank. He saw no sign of Duxbery or Drayton.

  He was almost grateful for the pain. At least it dulled the rage he felt at being herded along like a tethered bull. They didn’t make for the village he and his men had so recently searched. Instead, they forged a path westward, through the bush. With no boots, Lewis’s feet were soon as bloody as his shoulder. He tried not to think about snakes, about red ants. Instead, he tried to recreate a map of the area in his head, to anticipate where they might be heading, and for how long the hideous march would last.

  It seemed to take forever. At one point the North Vietnamese came to a halt, and water from a plastic bottle was poured into a tin pannikin and passed around, but he was given none and he would have roasted in the fires of hell before he would have lowered himself to ask. He wondered why he’d been selected to be a prisoner. Perhaps they were a regular unit of the North Vietnamese Army, and they were trying to emphasize the difference between themselves and the local Viet Cong. Perhaps they had a tradeoff in mind. Perhaps they thought he was a colonel or a bigwig in the CIA. Perhaps they wanted information from him.

  He winced as he stumbled in the wake of the soldiers. He’d always believed he was mentally prepared for torture, but he had imagined himself facing it in the peak of physical fitness, not with a half-severed arm. He was burning up with the beginnings of a fever, and though his feet never stopped moving forwards, he knew that he was slipping in and out of semiconsciousness.

  At the next halt he was given water. His near-naked body was tormented by feeding mosquitoes and leeches. He tried to distract himself by thinking of Abbra, of how the news that he was missing in action would be conveyed to her, and failed. He couldn’t think of Abbra. He would fall apart. Think about Tam. Pretty Tam, who had begged him not to leave on the morning’s mission. Tam who had so devastated him by telling him that she was in love with him.

  He plodded on, pain from his injured arm and shoulder raging through him, the fever intensifying. What would Tam do when she heard the news? Who would tell her the news? Presumably the bodies on the riverbank would be found. Duxbery and Drayton would be verified as being killed in action. What about him? Would it be believed that he was dead as well? Somehow he had to escape. He had to inform someone that he was alive, that there was no need for Abbra to be contacted, no need for her to worry.

  When they finally came to a permanent halt it wasn’t in a village. It was a campsite deep in the bush. Half a dozen thatched bamboo and straw huts circled blackened rice pots and a mud-baked oven. Green and black nylon sleeping hammocks were slung between the surrounding trees. The soldiers immediately in front of him rounded on him, yelling at him to squat, Vietnamese fashion. He did so with relief, swaying dizzily, and then, unable to balance himself for his bound arms, toppling over. As he struggled back into a crouching position the wound in his shoulder began to bleed profusely again.

  ‘Ten yi?’ the officer demanded, standing over him. ‘What is your name?’

  His name at least he could give them. His name, his rank, his service number, and his date of birth. But nothing else. Section five of the Code of Conduct for Members of the Armed Forces of the United States, the oath he had sworn when he first joined the army, was categorical. ‘When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am bound to give name and rank, service number, and date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability. I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to their cause.’

  If his captors had not shot him because they thought he would give them information, then they had made a grave error of judgement. Section six, the final part of the Code of Conduct, was in his blood and his bones. ‘I will never forget that I am an American fighting man, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free. I will trust in God and in the United States of America.’

  ‘Captain Lewis Ellis,’ he replied curtly, wishing to God that he didn’t feel so faint, that the blood streaming hotly down over his chest and arm would once more begin to congeal. He gave his service number and his birth date and then felt himself beginning to lose consciousness.

  There was a sharply rapped order from the officer, and two of the soldiers who had trekked behind him all the way from the canal ran forward and physically supported him, hauling him to his feet. Still bound, with leeches feeding on his blood-soaked body, he was dragged towards one of the huts and thrown inside. Seconds later a young boy entered. He was in uniform and over his shoulder he carried a small box. He put the box down, regarded the wound in Lewis’s shoulder without moving forward to physically examine it, and then turned abruptly on his heel, leaving the box behind him.

  Lewis struggled into a half-sitting position, leaning against the wall of the hut. He tried to focus on the box that the young boy had left behind. Was it a first aid kit? Was the boy a paramedic? He summoned up all his remaining strength and began to edge himself towards it. He was saved having to attempt near-impossible contortions by the return of the boy. This time he carried an aluminium bowl of steaming water. Lewis began to tremble with relief, then was suddenly consumed by fury at the thought that his trembling would be seen as a sign of weakness.

  His face impassive, the boy put the water down while two other soldiers remained at the doorway of the hut, rifles in their hands. The vine thongs tethering his arms were released.

  With cloths that had obviously been used many times before but which had been boiled clean, the boy began to swab his arm and shoulder. Looking down, Lewis could see the wound clearly and he knew he had been lucky. The bullet, no doubt aimed at his heart, had scored a near miss, hitting no vital organs. But the way his arms had been wrenched behind him and tethered had caused the real damage to the severed nerves and tendons.

  With a pair of stainless steel tweezers the boy began to dig into the wound for the bullet. With his jaw clenched tight, and his teeth clamped together to prevent himself from crying out, Lewis stared with fierce concentration through the open door of the hut, fixing his gaze on the mud-baked oven. Food was being prepared. Rice was being cooked in one of the large blackened pots. He fixed his eyes firmly on the pot as the boy prodded deeper. Once the bullet was out
and the wound was cleaned, it would heal. And then he would be able to think of escape.

  The bullet was retrieved and the boy began to swab his shoulder with a ball of cotton soaked in alcohol. The sooner he made an escape attempt, the better. Statistically, early escapes were the most successful. And he wanted to put a quick end to the mental agony – for him and Abbra.

  The boy began to work the alcohol-soaked swab into the wound, and a nerve ticked convulsively at the corner of Lewis’s jaw. Finally, just when he thought he could bear it no longer, the swab was withdrawn and discarded and fresh swabs, soaked in a solution he could not identify, were plugged into the gaping hole. His upper arm and shoulder were then bandaged with strips of green cloth.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said automatically when the boy had finished.

  The boy picked up the aluminium bowl and the medical box and looked at Lewis directly for the first time. There was a faint gleam of surprise in his eyes but nothing more. He still did not speak. He merely gave a slight shrug of his shoulders and then turned, walking out of the hut, past the soldiers who were still standing guard.

  Now that he was no longer in danger of dying from loss of blood, Lewis became aware of how ravenously hungry he was. He could smell the rice that was being cooked and hoped fervently that he would be offered some.

  That he had been captured by a small group of North Vietnamese Army troops instead of Viet Cong was surely to his advantage. If he had been captured by the Viet Cong, he knew he would have been a short timer indeed.

  The general pattern of Viet Cong captures was for the prisoner to be tethered by the neck and then hauled around Viet Cong sympathetic villages in order that the peasantry could observe how inferior and animal-like the Americans were. When the fun and games of baiting the helpless American were over, he would be shot, preferably by one bullet and by a very young boy just to emphasize to the onlookers how easy it was to kill a large, apparently invincible, khi dot. A big monkey.