Once Upon a Mulberry Field

by C. L. Hoang

  “Indeed you did.” Dottie leans in closer and lowers her voice. “He must have stopped by every day while you were gone—kept circling the place and knocking on your door. I also caught him peeking inside your windows. Your car was gone, but I called to alert you anyway.”

  “And I had my answering machine turned off. Sorry, Dottie.”

  She reaches and pats my arm. “We neighbors have to watch out for each other, you know. Especially Margaret staying out with her boyfriend all hours . . .” She falls quiet, seeming to pursue a private thought.

  I drink my iced tea and wait.

  “Ah, yes. Your friend. Sometimes he’d stop back later in the day. I was very concerned, so I kept an eye on him the best I could. I was all set to call nine-one-one. In case.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He was a big man. Six feet or taller, quite robust looking. I imagined he’d have no trouble kicking in your door if he chose to. Short-cropped silver hair. A catch in his step—more like a limp, actually. I was an absolute ball of nerves.”

  The warm Santa Ana winds have died down and the sun has dipped behind the hills, the dwindling twilight now a balmy evening.

  Her eyes bright with excitement, Dottie continues. “And Doc, he came knocking on my door yesterday! I got a good look at him. There was a ruggedness about him, but he sure was easy on the eye, if I dare say so myself. And what a smile. A charmer.” Her hand moves to her heart. “He said he’d noticed me watching, and he apologized if he had caused me concern.”

  Dottie leans back in her chair and sighs wistfully, while I rack my brains to recall any acquaintance who may fit that description.

  “He asked when you would be back. I was so rattled I could barely get a sentence out. Then he reached in his pocket and handed me an envelope.”

  She disappears into the house, soon reemerging with a letter. She gives it to me with an apologetic frown. “Your friend was out of here before I could glean more information for you. I’m sorry, Doc. He got me all flustered.”

  It’s an ivory-colored envelope with the name of a nationwide hotel chain printed in gold letters in the upper left-hand corner. In the center, my name is scrawled in blue ink in strong handwriting. Sealed, the envelope feels light, almost empty.

  “You did fine, Dottie,” I say. “Thank you so much.”

  She beams, and as I rise to leave she places a hand on my arm.

  “Hang on. You probably don’t have time to cook, just getting back today and all. I have some fresh lasagna I want to send home with you.”

  The handwriting on the envelope looks bold and masculine but otherwise unfamiliar. Seeing no markings indicative of its content’s importance or urgency, I decide it can wait until later, and so I toss it in the tray by my chair the minute I get home. There it remains for the rest of the evening while I sample Dottie’s home cooking and unpack. It’s ten o’clock when I finally plop down in the chair, shoes still on and teeth unbrushed, thinking how wonderful it will be to sleep in my soft bed again. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spot the letter.

  Exhausted, but now well fed and caught up, I feel my curiosity piqued. A stranger took the trouble to seek me out. Every single day for a week, according to Dottie. Must have been for something important, at least to him.

  Reluctantly, I pick up the envelope, tear it open, and pull out a single sheet of paper folded in thirds. Putting on my reading glasses, I unfold the flimsy note and adjust its distance until the few lines of scribbling come into focus before my tired eyes.

  When I next blink, the note is lying face up on the carpeted floor, the writing on it no longer legible at this new distance. How or when it has slipped through my fingers I do not know, as I’m only aware of a floating sensation in my head accompanied by a pounding in my eardrums. Then, the skin on my neck and shoulders starts to crawl with goose bumps that quickly spread down my arms like icy breaths.

  Dropping my head back against the headrest, I shut my eyes and breathe deeply.

  As the shockwaves gradually ebb, the short message replays itself in my mind, word by stunning word, and its extraordinary content begins to sink in.

  Chapter Two

  Every once in a while, you experience a rough night like this:

  In the dead of night you rise from deep sleep, not jolted awake by a terrifying nightmare, but rather emerging softly from the mist of your dreams. Straddling the fault line between reality and the subconscious world, you wander space and time, reconnecting with people and places of your past. When you least suspect it, a magical door opens on a treacherous landing that lures you down a trail best left unexplored—one that trespasses on secret dead ends strewn with pieces of your own broken heart and shattered dreams from days gone by. Trapped in this time warp, an unwitting prisoner of the past, you find yourself sinking in the quicksand of nostalgia and regret, reliving heartaches and disenchantments of younger years.

  I am wading through this waking nightmare as I bend to pick up the innocuous-looking letter from the floor. With just a few written words, the bottle has been shattered and the genie set free, and with it, years of suppression and denial. Old memories shut away for decades are tumbling forth faster than I can catch my breath. His handwriting has looked unfamiliar because we ceased corresponding ages ago. Yet I can still recall his voice, even his rare laughter, as if we had parted ways only yesterday. And burned forever in my mind is a clear picture of his face, surrounded by other young faces. Some more grubby or weary than others, but all still glowing with youthful vitality and innocence.

  It was another lifetime. Another country.

  Sunday, Aug 22, 1999

  Hello kiddo,

  Surprise! I finally got hold of your contact info.

  Just so happens I’m in town this week, so I thought I’d take my chances and look you up in person. Lousy timing as always: no one answered the phone or the door.

  Acquaintance from Việt-Nam would like to speak with you. If/when you get this, call me at the hotel and we’ll make arrangements to swing by again.

  Hope to hear from you soon.

  Dean Hunter

  It’s not unlike Dean Hunter to be laconic in his message, which reads more like a riddle to me. Yet his cryptic intimation has torn open a forbidden past, one I have attempted—clearly in vain—to put behind me.

  An acquaintance from Việt-Nam.

  Can it possibly be her?

  It’s been thirty years or more since I’ve seen either of them. Funny how the passage of time burnishes certain memories while dulling others, and not necessarily in accordance with our wishes. As diligently as I have strived to keep that compartment of my life clasped shut, my subconscious mind sometimes escapes and tiptoes back. In my half-awakened dreams she returns, frozen in time, looking the same as she did that afternoon, forever captive to her grief.

  This lovely ghost I struggled all these years to bury—has she now returned among the living?

  PART II

  “The Dogs of War”*

  Biên-Hoà, South Việt-Nam

  July 1967 – July 1968

  *William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

  Chapter Three

  I met Dean Hunter only days after arriving in Việt-Nam in late July 1967.

  Fresh out of medical school and having just completed my internship at a hospital in San Diego, California, I’d been commissioned into the US Air Force in exchange for an earlier deferment. My assignment was a one-year tour of duty as general medical officer at Biên-Hoà Air Force Base in South Việt-Nam. As was true with most young draftees, it was my first trip overseas. And what a journey it turned out to be, carrying me halfway around the world to this sultry land about which I knew nothing except its foreign-sounding name and the war footage shown nightly on television.

  On this particular afternoon, I found myself in the 3rd Tactical Wing Dispensary getting
oriented by Captain Bob Olsen, a flight surgeon and the rotating MOD (medical officer of the day), who also happened to be my hooch mate. There had been spectacular thundershowers almost every hour since midday—typical July weather in monsoon season, with an average monthly rainfall of twelve inches. With one hundred percent humidity, the temperature around a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and the dispensary only partially air-conditioned, I had my first introduction to jungle warfare.

  Bob, a gregarious type from the Midwest who looked like a rawboned lineman with the World Champion Green Bay Packers, wiped the sweat off his sandy eyebrows with the back of his hand and grinned sympathetically at me. “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it soon enough. I arrived in April, the start of the season, and already I’m paying no mind to the rain. It’s wet all the time. Soon, you don’t know any different.”

  It had been a rare quiet day. After the regular rush of morning sick calls, things had settled down. So far we’d had no in-flight emergencies and only one non-critical work-related injury. On days like this, the 3rd Tac Dispensary at Biên-Hoà seemed just like dispensaries on air force bases in the continental United States. We weren’t operating a field hospital on the front line, like the one in nearby Long-Bình Army Base, nor were we saddled with the responsibility of a casualty staging unit (CSU) to assist in out-country medical airlifts. The latter fell to our sister base to the south, Tân-Sơn-Nhất AFB, on the outskirt of Sài-Gòn, the capital. The reason was simple. With a skeleton staff, we already had our hands full trying to meet the needs of our own base’s personnel of several thousand strong and growing. Since 1965, Biên-Hoà had developed into the busiest airport in the world, commercial or military, bar none.

  “You’ll learn fast to speak in acronyms, too,” Bob went on. “Some will catch on naturally, but most are plain ridiculous. Takes more time to figure out what they stand for. They’re a lingo all their own.” Chuckling, he added, “That, on top of sounding out those impossible Vietnamese names you have no clue how to pronounce.”

  We were going over the various tables of organization and equipment, or TOE, when the telephone rang. Bob picked it up. A rapid exchange ensued, which concluded when he bounded from his chair.

  “You betcha. We’ll be right there,” he said and hung up.

  “Tweety,” he hollered to our cohort in the back room before proceeding to give me a quick rundown. An Army helicopter was coming in for a crash landing. Hard hit by enemy fire while returning from a routine ash-and-trash supply run, the crew had radioed in a Mayday.

  Bob gathered his tool bag. “Operations asked me to assist. Their own flight surgeon is away on a mission. Why don’t you come down to the flight line with us?”

  Tweety was a twenty-year-old medic who looked no older than a high school kid, short in stature but built like an armored personnel carrier, whose chipper disposition and last name Finch earned him the nickname.

  Tweety came barreling down the hallway. “Yes, sir?”

  “Get a ‘cracker box’ ready and grab one of your buddies,” Bob told him. “We’re going out to the Bird Cage.” Then, addressing me: “Bring your flak vest and steel pot for protection in case of an explosion.”

  As soon as the two medics had hopped in the back of the cracker box, a three-quarter-ton truck fixed up as military ambulance, Bob Olsen grasped the steering wheel, brow furrowed and jaw firmly set. I jumped in the front seat next to him.

  “We’ll take the perimeter road,” he said. “It’s longer but faster.”

  Biên-Hoà Air Base was spread out over a vast dust bowl, with the small city by the same name encroaching on its southern border and the Ðồng-Nai River to the west. From a minor airfield left behind by the French, it had grown considerably in recent years but still retained a distinct transitory feel, as if the powers that be had expected a short war and a quick exit. Built around a nucleus of dilapidated buildings in the French colonial architectural style was a huge military camp—a sprawling hodge-podge of canvas tents, wooden hooches, Quonset huts, and trailers, thrown in among two-story barracks, hangars, and concrete revetments. Protected by sandbag bunkers all along their foundation lines, these ad hoc structures were interconnected through a maze of crisscrossing dirt roads. The single runway, Runway 27, had undergone a complete upgrade from temporary pierced-steel planking to permanent concrete paving. It now stretched ten thousand feet to accommodate jet landings.

  “This road wraps around the base to the Army side,” Bob shouted over the background din as our cracker box bounced away from the dispensary complex. “We’re heading straight to their helipad. The Bird Cage.”

  The airbase was home to USAF squadrons of various functions including fighters, air commandos, forward air controllers, as well as rescue parajumpers. It also housed a US Army battalion of assault helicopters and multiple units of the Vietnamese Air Force. In addition, it served as one of the most important logistical airports in South Việt-Nam and controlled heavy traffic of cargo transports and troop carriers in and out of the country. Day and night, aircraft of every description lined up over the windy runway for takeoff or landing, deftly performing a perilous ballet in the air, where one mistake could result in fiery disaster.

  This madness in the sky was matched by feverish activity on the ground. The roads always seemed clogged with heavy-tonnage trucks rumbling through congestions of jeeps, buses, bulldozers, and ambulances. Adding to the chaos, base personnel and civilian contractors were constantly on the run, weaving their bicycles and motor scooters through the gnarled traffic like ants on a hill. Meanwhile, the rolling thunder of bombs reverberated in rice paddies and jungles just beyond the safe confines of the base, an incessant reminder of the reason we were here: a full-blown war was raging out there at all hours of the day.

  “This can get nasty,” Bob bellowed against the strong wind. “They’ve activated Local Base Rescue. Pedro 75 is airborne and ready.” Sensing I was lost, he elaborated. “It’s the Air Force rescue helicopter. A Kaman Huskie with fire suppression kit. It’s escorting the wounded bird in as we speak.”

  We’d barely passed a French “pillbox” on the roadside, a fortified circular bunker topped with a metal turret, when Bob hung a sharp right. The cracker box flew past the first L-shaped revetments at the Bird Cage and screeched to a stop on the sideline of the short helipad runway. We all jumped out and raced for cover behind a stack of sand-filled canisters, where another group had already gathered. Everybody was craning to watch the spectacle unfolding over the far end of the runway, a safe distance away from all the parked birds.

  An Army Huey, in this instance a “slick,” or troop-carrying chopper with no machine guns mounted on the outside, was gyrating dangerously in a slow, unsteady descent. Even from where we stood, it was obvious the twin blades of its main rotor had sustained serious damage from enemy artillery, causing the helicopter to shake violently as if it might shatter into pieces at any moment. Above it, the ungainly-looking Huskie with its double tail sections hovered at the ready. The laminated blades of its tandem rotors slashed the air in counter circles, creating a powerful downwash that would smother the flames in case of fire.

  “Holy cow,” Tweety uttered, pointing at a smokelike tail that trailed down to the ground. “The slick’s bleeding fuel. Charlie must’ve busted a hole in its belly.”

  JP4 jet fuel was highly flammable and could ignite instantly if the wind blew it up into the hot exhaust. The fire suppression kit had already been lowered from the Huskie. The two airmen from the LBR team, dressed in shiny fire suits, had laid down a blanket of fire-retardant foam on the ground where the wounded bird was trying to land. Base fire trucks had also arrived on the scene and stationed themselves around the hot spot, ready to intervene.

  A group of soldiers was silhouetted in the open cargo door on each side of the wobbling aircraft, seemingly frozen so as not to upset its balance.

  Bob whispered in my ear, “They normall
y ride the skids and un-ass the ship before it even touches ground. But that might cause it to topple in this case.”

  We all held our breaths as the helicopter hovered a few feet above ground, suspended in time. Suddenly it dropped to the landing pad with a loud thud, took a couple of rough bounces, and nosed forward through the splattering foam. Having lost momentum from the impact, the Huey shuddered like a dying beast before slowing to a full upright stop on its skids.

  The crowd gave a collective cheer of relief.

  In one big blur of motion, the transported troops in tiger-stripe uniforms hopped off the carrier and dashed away from the danger zone. The regular crew of two in green fatigues, their flight helmets still strapped on, yanked the cockpit doors open and helped the pilot and copilot down before they all scurried to safety. Right on cue, the firemen swooped in with hoses, blanketing the area with fresh foam.

  Bob tapped my shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  We ran out to meet the incomers halfway and directed them toward the company’s dispensary. Bob recognized a face among the helicopter riders.

  “What the hell. Dean Hunter. You all right?”

  The guy was about the same age as Bob, who at thirty was deemed an “old man” in this war fought by youngsters. Tall and powerfully built, a steel pot on his head and a flak vest over his jungle fatigues, he looked like a regular Army guy but was toting a medicine bag instead of an M-16.

  He gave Bob a nod. “I’m fine. Make sure you check out the crew chief right away. The kid took a round in his helmet. I have to look my guys over, too. Let’s catch up when we’re done.”

  He rounded up the tiger-stripe uniforms, all six of them, and together they disappeared into the back room of the dispensary.

  In the front room, Sp4c. “Rusty” McCormick kept staring at the broken helmet in his lap while running his fingers through his short red hair. “Fucking unbelievable,” he mumbled over and over, more to himself than to anyone in particular.