Once Upon a Mulberry Field

by C. L. Hoang

  During all the movement, the snap buttons around the collar of her áo dài had come undone, exposing a bare shoulder and the top of her slip. I buried my burning face in her shoulder, and the balmy skin reminded me of moss by a mountain stream: damp and velvety, as refreshing as the cool mist it grows in. She writhed in my embrace, and as my lips clung on to her ivory softness with greater urgency, her arched body melted in a wave of shudders.

  She bit her lower lip to stifle a moan. Her rapid breathing matched my own as she drew me tighter against her until my head came to rest on her bosom. I could hear her heart pounding as furiously as mine and feel the same pulsating heat course through our limbs like untamed fever. In a haze of dreams, I found myself on the bed alongside her, face to tear-stained face, bodies entwined in a tender, desperate embrace.

  Taking refuge in the warm solace of each other’s body, we were lost to the world and all its madness. And for once, nothing more mattered.

  My eyes blinked open to the sight of the ceiling fan drawing soundless circles above me.

  Strains of music floated in the air from somewhere far off, maybe in my imagination.

  I lay sprawled out on my back, bathed in sweat and half light, my brain straining to emerge from the depths of torpor. As images came flooding back of the frenzy and passion of early afternoon, my fumbling hand detected the emptiness next to me.

  I jolted awake.

  It had been no fantasy after all. I was still in Dick’s bed in his apartment. But Lee Anne had vanished from my arms, where she had curled up earlier when together we drifted off to sleep, her slender body perfectly molded to mine.

  I sprang upright, but blinding pain shot through my skull, sending me crashing back on the pillow with a groan—a vivid reminder of the concussion, until now conveniently ignored if not forgotten. My eyes watered, and I gulped deep breaths through my mouth to ease the pain. Then, gingerly, I tried again and sat up against the headboard.

  Lee Anne had indeed slipped away without a good-bye. I must have dozed off, exhausted from the day’s physical and emotional whirlwind on top of the head blow from last night. She probably hadn’t wanted to wake me and had just let herself out, no doubt to return to her grim situation and begin dealing with it. The thought of her shouldering her crisis all alone gave me fresh pangs of anguish and filled me with sadness. I decided I’d contact Mme Yvonne later to discuss how we could assist Lee Anne and her parents through this trying time.

  The only proof of her earlier presence was a faint imprint next to me on the mattress, where she had snuggled up against me. Calling her name under my breath, I rolled over on my stomach and buried my face in the sheets, trying to breathe her lost scent, my arms wrapped around the contour of her remembered shape, unwilling yet to part with this only vestige of her.

  Already I missed her with all my being.

  Frame by glorious frame, the movie replayed in my feverish mind with a clarity that made me shiver again. Eyes closed, I could still feel her body—pristine and flawless, skin like satin—pressed up against mine in total despair and abandon. Never before had my heart experienced such agony and ecstasy, and the memory was almost unbearable. Right or wrong, I was thankful I had stayed by her side—no matter that both our lives would change irrevocably after today. One thing was for certain: in the months to come, as Lee Anne and her parents made the difficult transition to life without Vĩnh, I vowed to be there to assist them in every possible way.

  But I’d have to sort all this out later, as I needed to hustle to get back to Tân-Sơn-Nhất before the curfew. Moving deliberately so as not to trigger another pain attack, I gathered my clothes from the floor, dressed, then straightened the bed. Something yellow shook loose from the rumpled sheets. Lee Anne’s headband, made from the same silk cloth as her áo dài. It must have slipped from her hair during our moments of passion and had been forgotten in her haste to get away.

  As I stooped to retrieve the piece of material, the past twenty-four hours struck me as a dream. A blurred line between death, sorrow, and stolen happiness. But in a snap, the dream had dissolved. She had vanished like some creature of fantasy, and I was left holding the only thing real—a thin strip of yellow silk.

  Carefully tucking the headband in my pocket, I locked up the place, then headed out.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Hate to break it to you, Doctor, but you ain’t going nowhere anytime soon,” Paul announced matter-of-factly after checking my vitals. Then, after a brief pause, “Unless we need to move you to 3rd Field, if your condition doesn’t improve soon.”

  He was referring to my slow-recovering concussion, further complicated by a dreaded case of FUO (Fever of Unknown Origin), a potent combo that had sent me straight to bed upon my return from Sài-Gòn. To preempt any attitude from me, Paul had enlisted Captain Morgan’s help in imposing a week’s bed rest on me. Annoyed though I was by his clever move, I tried not to show it lest The Kid grew a big head from his newfound power.

  Deep down, however, I had to agree with their call. For the past several months, physically and emotionally, I’d sensed myself drifting ever closer to the edge, so it was indeed time for me to take a break and regroup—or risk more serious consequences down the road.

  These long hours of forced leisure also allowed me a chance to mull over the recent events. My mind had been preoccupied since the weekend with all kinds of thoughts of Lee Anne: how she’d been bearing up under the stress of her new situation; what practical help I could offer her during these difficult times; but above all, whether she’d felt put upon or dishonored by what had transpired between us. I wished she could just see into my heart and understand that for me the beautiful dream we’d experienced together had been sincere and spontaneous outpouring of love—in no way disrespect, despite the dreadful circumstances. And even though this surprise development would turn my life upside down, with painful decisions and repercussions I hadn’t yet dared to contemplate, I longed to be back by her side. But at the pace my recovery was crawling along, that wasn’t likely to happen soon.

  Paul made sure the message came across loud and clear. “No work, no alcohol, no travel—no nothing, for a week.” Then with a smug grin, he struck down any protest. “Captain Morgan’s order.” I rolled my eyes in silence and let The Kid savor his moment.

  The week went by fast. I spent much of that time sleeping, allowing my body a chance to catch up. Even Charlie must have felt burned out and required a breather, since for the first time since Tết we got to enjoy an extended quiet period with no rockets at night. “The calm before the storm,” warned the more cynical—and experienced—among us. Nonetheless, everyone was thankful for a little reprieve.

  By weekend, my condition had improved, though still not to my doctor’s total satisfaction. But as we were confronted with a temporary shortage in our staff—a red-tape snafu had delayed the arrival of two new GMOs—I was deemed recovered enough to go back to work. With the return of the monsoon season, the temperatures had escalated and a large portion of the base personnel had succumbed to the hot and soggy weather, keeping the medical staff busy around the clock. Until more help arrived and were broken in, which might take several weeks, there was no possibility of me getting away on the weekends. As the days wore on, the prospect of seeing Lee Anne anytime soon all but faded, and I became restless, then downright despondent.

  Along came Dean Hunter to my rescue. Fresh back from “temporary duty yonder,” he swung by one late afternoon to see how I was doing, having heard about my close call.

  “Everything’s fine. I’m good as new,” I assured him. “You got a minute?”

  I pulled him aside, gave him a quick update on Lee Anne’s situation—excluding the grand secret that had unfolded at Dick’s place.

  He shook his head when I’d finished. “There’s no end to it, is there?” he said, running a hand over his face. “Poor kid. What’s going to happen with he
r and her family?”

  “Can you call Mme Yvonne and find out? She must have some idea what’s going on. I’ve been really worried about how Lee Anne’s holding up through all this.”

  Dean shot me a look. “Sorry, kiddo. I should’ve left Yvonne’s number with you.”

  “Just call her, will you? Let me know if you learn anything.” The truth was I felt nervous about talking to Mme Yvonne for fear I might accidentally betray Lee Anne’s confidence and our secret.

  It took him less than twenty-four hours to get back to me.

  “Nobody has heard from Lee Anne since she was last seen with you,” he said. “Yvonne prefers to wait a couple more days before trying to get hold of her.” There was a pause, then a long exhale. “There’s the business about the true nature of her job: her parents think she works for USAID. Yvonne will have to be careful when she goes to see them. Nothing’s ever simple.”

  I shifted in my chair. You don’t know the half of it.

  Thus there was nothing we could do but wait to hear back from our friend, who had promised Dean she’d call the minute she found out something. This waiting frazzled my nerves, but I dared not breathe a word to a living soul.

  Another week dragged by before we got some news.

  “Lee Anne has been running ragged making funeral arrangements and taking care of her parents,” Dean brought me up to date after receiving his long-awaited phone call. “Vĩnh had always been like a son to them, so they took the news very hard, especially her dad who wasn’t well to start with. Thank God Yvonne was able to help out.”

  My stomach twisted in sympathy for Lee Anne and her family, and in total frustration at my situation. Less than twenty miles from Sài-Gòn, yet here I was, stuck on base, unable to even talk to her, let alone to lend her a hand in confronting the greatest challenge of her life.

  “I want to pay for the funeral,” I told Dean. “Please ask Mme Yvonne to advance it for me. I’ll settle up on my next trip to Sài-Gòn, which hopefully won’t be much longer.”

  Dean squeezed my shoulder in response.

  As I counted the days, April 1968 drew to an innocuous end—when, from nowhere, a new tidal wave came crashing down on us.

  It started with an eruption of fresh hostilities across the demilitarized zone separating North and South Việt-Nam. Seizing on the political turmoil stateside and LBJ’s announcements that the US would unilaterally stop bombing and not invade North Việt-Nam, the communists launched a full-scale campaign along the DMZ to establish their own invasion corridor into the South. The enemy, so close to their last gasp after the Tết debacle, had suddenly found a second wind. In recent months they must have sensed, as we all had, a weakening of the American public’s resolve and felt emboldened. Against wishful thinking on our part that they’d come to the Paris peace talks to negotiate a conditional surrender, they opted instead to go for broke, yet again, on the scorching battlefield of South Việt-Nam.

  Around 0300 hours on the morning of May 5th, “incoming” sirens startled us anew from sleep. After three wonderful weeks without incident, our nightmare returned with a vengeance. For forty-five interminable minutes, thirty-one rockets and twice as many mortars rained down on Biên-Hoà AFB and kept everyone flattened to the dirt inside the bunkers. When the all-clear finally went off, we crawled out from the dark and stood speechless at the havoc wreaked on our base. It looked as if a tornado had just ripped through, carving out a swath of deadly devastation amid the rows of hooches. Paul gave me a haggard look that summed it all up: bad news.

  With blind luck, our dogged enemy had scored direct hits on the temporary housing for personnel in transit: greenhorns just arriving in country for their first tour, and one-year veterans awaiting to board their Freedom Bird flight home. Their barracks had been reduced to rubble, spilled sand from burning bunkers partially covering the bloody mess underneath. Search-and-rescue medics clambered over the debris to unearth the injured and the dead, while others scrambled to put out the fires.

  Complete chaos reigned at the dispensary as we struggled to cope with the gory aftermath. The few beds in the back were filled in no time, so new casualties had to wait on their stretchers in the cluttered hallway alongside body bags. Their cries and moans echoed through the cramped building, which reeked of blood, sweat, and bodily excretions. Non-medical personnel helped out in whatever capacity they could, from bagging up dismembered bodies to comforting the shell-shocked wounded waiting to be treated or med-evac’ed. Our shorthanded staff worked frenetically from one row of stretchers to the next, doing triage and calling life-and-death decisions as fast as humanly possible.

  After many hours, bleary-eyed and drenched in sweat, we finally got through tending our last casualty. Relative quiet had returned to the dispensary since most of the patients had now drifted to sleep under sedation or from extreme fatigue. Those with serious injuries had been transported to the field hospitals in Long-Bình up the road, as we’d gotten wind earlier that Tân-Sơn-Nhất and 3rd Field Hospital were once again under attack from heavy guns and ground forces. A second wave of the General Offensive, à la Tết? We had exchanged incredulous glances but had been too busy and tired to dwell on the news.

  At 0545 hours, the situation having stabilized, we decided to take turns and grab some early chow at the club. It had been a long, hard night, and we all needed a boost of energy. Paul and I and our small group had just headed out when the shrill sound of air-raid sirens pierced the early-morning air, freezing us in our tracks. We stared at one another. Someone rolled his eyes, mouthed the dreaded word, “Incoming.” Again. The bunkers were a short sprint away, but we couldn’t just abandon the patients. I pointed over my shoulder and we turned, making a mad dash back inside and throwing ourselves to the ground. Some rolled under desks or beds for protection, but most of us simply sprawled out across the bare floor, arms and hands over heads, bracing for the worst. It took energy to even get scared, and we hardly had any left.

  For the next fifteen minutes, it was more of the same pandemonium as Charlie lobbed ten new rockets and a smattering of mortars at the base, tweaking our ragged nerves one last time for good measure before dissipating like ghosts at sunrise. The earth shook, the building groaned for what seemed an eternity, then suddenly—eerie silence. When the all-clear signaled the danger had blown over, we crawled up on our hands and knees, staggered back on our feet, even more dazed than after the previous round and no longer in any mood for breakfast. Weary beyond emotion, we nonetheless steeled ourselves for a new onslaught of emergencies, which, to our great relief, didn’t materialize. It appeared the odds had swung back our way and we had dodged the big bullets this time, with no direct hits or serious casualties. But hanging in midair with the smoke and red dirt was a distinct feeling that something sinister was again afoot.

  By mid-morning, the full extent of the nocturnal aggression became known. Biên-Hoà AFB had been but one of the hundred-plus targets under assault from the Việt-Cộng during the night, with Sài-Gòn and its airport Tân-Sơn-Nhất taking the brunt of the firestorm. Under the cover of darkness and a salvo of rockets and mortars, thirteen NVA battalions had slipped past the security cordon to launch a new attack on the capital. In the process, they overran a portion of the Tân-Sơn-Nhất airfield and shut down its runway for some time before being repelled by US forces.

  In various parts of the city, brutal house-to-house combat raged on all morning between the infiltrators and the ARVN with no sign of abating. It turned out the latest campaign of death and violence by the communists against innocent civilians in the capital had only just started. In the annals of the Việt-Nam War, this bloody chapter would come to be known as mini-Tết.

  “You realize, of course, it’s all posturing ahead of the Paris peace talks, which open a week from today,” Dean pointed out that evening when we dragged ourselves out to grab a late bite. “Their goal is to create an image of Sài-Gòn under si
ege for the consumption of the free world, mostly America. That’s much easier to pull off than a real military victory.”

  “And yet it has the exact same desired effect,” I concurred, my appetite suddenly gone. “The more carnage and mayhem they spread, even among women and children, the stronger they think they’ll come off to the world, and the better their bargaining position.” My thoughts drifted to all the tragedies befallen my South Vietnamese friends and their families, going back to 1954. “It’s always the little folks who end up paying the price, but Charlie doesn’t give a shit. Anything for the Party and its cause. How’s that for the end justifying the means—little people be damned.”

  More upsetting news awaited me at the hooch on my return.

  “Did you hear?” Paul sprang up from his cot the minute I trudged in. “Four foreign correspondents were ambushed and killed in Chợ-Lớn this morning. It’s all over the news.” Chợ-Lớn was the oversized and bustling Chinese district of the capital, essentially a city unto its own. My heart started pounding as I sank to my bed. Dear God, please. Let it not be Dick. Not another friend of mine.

  “Actually, five of them went to cover the fighting there and got caught in a VC ambush,” Paul continued, still visibly shaken. “According to the one survivor, they waved their IDs and shouted ‘Báo Chí’ to let it known they were journalists. But the VC commander in charge just scoffed at them. Then he strutted up to their Mini-Moke, pulled out a pistol, and shot them. Just plain shot them. One by one. Point blank. Even worse, two of them had been wounded during the ambush and were on the ground next to the jeep. The lone survivor escaped by playing dead.”

  I saw the dismay in Paul’s eyes, but my taxed brain was fixated on one thought only. “Any names or affiliations of the victims?” I finally managed, almost too scared to find out.

  Paul droned on as if he hadn’t heard me. “A fellow correspondent found the four bodies in the afternoon after the ARVN reclaimed the area. He took them to the morgue at Tân-Sơn-Nhất for identification, but no names have been released so far. It was confirmed, though, the victims were with Reuters and AAP. One British national and three Australians, I think.”