by C. L. Hoang
We rose. She took my hands, gave them a squeeze. “Be safe, Roger. Thanks for everything. Send Dean and Richard my love.” Her final hug said all that hadn’t been said.
She stood at the gate and watched as I crossed the street on my way to the Conservatory to catch a cab. When I heard the wrought-iron gate clank shut behind me, I slowed to a stop and turned. For one last time, my eyes lingered over the arbor of orange hibiscus that hung above the gate like a big welcome sign, the sight of which from the street had always hastened my step and filled my heart with excitement. Already hidden from view behind this rustic entrance was my one sanctuary from a world gone berserk—now forever sealed off and entombed with the past.
As I resumed my course, my eyes went blurry and my face felt wet.
The rain had started to fall.
Chapter Twenty
As reality began to sink in, I slipped into a blue funk.
With two months to go until my DEROS and a heavy load weighing on my mind, I decided to forgo my last chance for R&R while also toying with the idea of extending for another half-year. Besides the lure of an early exit from the USAF upon my return to the States, it would give me time to track down my friend Dick and enlist his help in locating Lee Anne and her family. Or so my thinking went, until I awoke in the night with Mme Yvonne’s plea ringing loud and clear in my ear: “Please leave them be, dear. It is for the best.” Whatever Lee Anne’s reasons— family obligations, or concern for social stigmas and biases in her traditional culture—there was no ambiguity as to her wishes. She had requested to be left alone with her parents.
Much as it pained me, it seemed the only right thing to do: to respect her decision and not pile on to the extraordinary burden already on her shoulders. I wanted desperately to help make life more tolerable for her and her parents, but not to the point of intruding on their privacy and causing them more stress or trouble. Do no harm, first and foremost, was the golden rule here. Overriding my own desire to see her again was my sincere concern for their well-being, and in particular, their safety. Now that they’d moved out of the capital to the less secure suburbs or countryside, any contact with Americans would surely attract unwanted attention.
As if to highlight this very point, Charlie returned to launch another wave of attacks on Sài-Gòn during the closing days of May, no doubt in the hope of scoring more cheap points against civilian targets. Once again death and terror ruled parts of the city, and I could only imagine how much more perilous it was for those living outside the capital. Totally in the dark concerning the safety of Lee Anne and her family, I buried myself in work in an attempt to keep the worries at bay. But like the stealthy enemy, they crawled out at night and haunted my dreams, waking me in sweat-drenched terror in the small hours of the morning. Paul never made a fuss over it, though I’d be surprised if he didn’t think Three-o-clock Charlie had gotten the best of me.
In the midst of this ongoing madness, the news of Robert Kennedy’s assassination in early June dropped like a bombshell on a nation already in turmoil, a scant two months after Martin Luther King Jr.’s own violent death. The sweltering summer appeared to careen out of control, and even the coolest of heads began to wonder.
Dean and I, with The Kid tagging along sometimes, still met at the club after work for an occasional drink or smoke. But long since gone were the ready laughter and excitement that used to precede our past weekend jaunts. Though we never discussed it, we both realized the curtain had fallen on that happy phase in our lives. For good.
One night before lights-out, Paul brought up the subject for the first time. The news had all been about General Abrams replacing General Westmoreland as US Commander in Việt-Nam come July 1st, and we’d been discussing it when Paul dropped the question. “You really haven’t said much, but aren’t you on the home stretch yourself? Will I get a new hooch mate soon?”
“Can’t wait, can you?” I teased him. “I considered extending, but in the end decided not to. I’m following Westy home in a month’s time. The final paperwork arrived just days ago.”
“With your orders stateside, too? Where are you serving out the rest of your two years?”
“Mather AFB, outside Sacramento,” I said. “It’s a few hours’ drive from my folks. Then another ten months and I’ll be out of the Air Force. Hopefully forever. Can’t remember what life was like as a civvie.”
There was a touch of envy in his voice. “Any plans for your thirty-day leave?”
“Haven’t given it a thought. It hasn’t really hit me yet.” That was the truth, my mind having been consumed by yearning for Lee Anne. “But I’ll start boxing up my junk and have it shipped home ahead of me. Any books, magazines or what-not you want me to leave with you?”
Paul shook his head. “How about we exchange helmets? I want your lucky steel pot.”
I picked up my dented helmet, set it squarely in his lap. “Done. It’s yours. May it ward off bad luck and keep you out of harm’s way, as it did me.”
He flashed his boyish grin in response.
One afternoon about two weeks out from the day, Dean poked his face inside my office door and signaled me to take five. He had on his tiger-striped jungle fatigues and floppy hat, which meant he either had just returned from the boonies or was on his way out.
“I don’t recall when’s your big day, so I wanted to stop by and see you before we head out to camp,” he said as we plopped down at our regular table in the corner at the club. “A Falstaff for you as usual? Drinks on me, kiddo.”
For a while we carried on small talk over the beers, both of us careful not to bring up any names of our Vietnamese friends. No point going there and getting mired in nostalgia. I dropped a dime in the jukebox and hit a random select button, and by pure chance the sparkling sound of Paul Mauriat’s “Love Is Blue” came pouring out. This had been one of Elise’s most requested piano pieces when it was still a little-known French hit called “L’Amour Est Bleu.” For fleeting minutes, the familiar music swooped us up and carried us, despite ourselves, back to those innocent days.
When the final note evaporated in the dusty air, Dean let out a long exhale and pulled himself up, breaking loose from the short-lived spell.
“You been following the news on the home front lately?” he asked.
I nodded, not sure what he was driving at.
“Then you know how strong the antiwar movement has grown all across the country, especially in your home state. I hope you’re not expecting a welcoming band at the airport. You’re landing at Travis near San Francisco, right?”
Another nod. It began to dawn on me where all this was going.
“You might want to forewarn your family then. In case they’re meeting you off the plane. Beware of protesters picketing outside the main gate. Most likely they’ll try to harass you about your service in country. Ignore them, man. Just get the hell out of there as fast as you can.” He pinched between his eyebrows. “The passion’s boiling over out there. People have gone crazy with anger and frustration.”
“Has it gotten that ugly?” I asked. “Are we the bad guys now? Perhaps I should tell my family to just wait at home, let me catch the bus back. No way I want them subjected to that spectacle. It’ll be very upsetting to them, not to mention unsafe.”
Dean tapped out a cigarette and offered it to me. It was a Ruby Queen, the favorite smoke among his native CIDG buddies. When I declined, he lit it himself and took a long drag.
“I heard incredible stories from guys just gone back recently,” he said. “Many were booed and hissed and called ‘baby killers.’ Some were spat on, if you can believe it. Others had their AWOL bags ripped out of their hands. In some instances, the mob even hurled rocks and red paint at their cars as they pulled out of the gate. Great fucking way to welcome home your war veterans, eh?”
I stared at him, incredulous. How in the hell—how had we come to this?
“Maybe I’ll change my mind and extend for a while,” I mumbled at last, half serious. “Not sure how anxious I am to go home now and face that music.”
“Sorry, bud. Just thought I’d prepare you so it won’t hit you between the eyes when you step off the plane. The times they are a-changing. But it’ll do no good to rearrange your life because of it.”
My thoughts flashed back to Bob and the ultimate sacrifice he and his family had made. How would they have felt in the current toxic atmosphere? I cringed and hastily pulled back from this train wreck of thought.
“Got to ask you a favor,” I said, removing Dick’s key from my wallet. “Can you return this to Hayashi? I doubt I’ll see him before I leave. It’s a damned shame. Would’ve been nice to have the latest news of him for his folks in Lone Pine.”
Dean stuck the key in his back pocket. “There’s a man with a mission—more like a death wish—ever since the tragedy with Vivienne.” He drew a sharp breath, apparently unaware he’d just broken our tacit agreement not to mention our Vietnamese friends. “I heard he’s been trying to sneak into remote hamlets to document Charlie’s war crimes against civilians. Even SF guys don’t venture in those places. Not without serious backup. The kid’s out of his mind.”
It struck me again how things had changed for all of us in one short year. One by one, we had become swallowed up in our own maelstrom of tragedies, yanked apart from one another in different directions, each tumbling headlong toward his unknown destiny while the others watched helplessly. An anecdote Lee Anne had told me that afternoon long ago as we were strolling in the shade of poinciana trees suddenly popped back in my mind.
We’d been discussing the difficult lot befallen her people throughout their long history and how they’d always seemed to find the resilience to cope with it.
“There is no secret there,” she’d tried to explain. “We just do our best then let the—chips fall? How do you say—wherever they fall? In the end, it is all about destiny. Nobody can foresee or explain it.” She had then smiled at me. “We have a nickname for ‘Fate’ in Vietnamese. Con Tạo. Can you guess what it means?”
“The Crazy One?” I said.
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “You are close. Word for word, Con Tạo means ‘Child Providence.’ You see, through the ages our elders have always compared Fate to a fickle child at play, with us mortals its playthings. There is something to that, don’t you think?”
Her words had struck a chord with me back then, but they took on an even more prophetic and personal meaning on this somber night.
I turned to Dean. “Guess I won’t mention any of Dick’s daredevilry to his family at home. It would just make them worry sick. And you, too, Captain. Take care of yourself. Stop pressing your luck all the time. It’s bound to give at some point.”
As we stood, Dean reminded me, “If I’m not back before you go, leave me a note at Woodson Compound with your contact info. I’d like to keep in touch.”
On our way to the door, I noticed with concern the catch in his step. “That ankle still bothering you after all these months?” I asked.
“Nothing a little therapy can’t fix,” he said. “Just a matter of taking the time for it.”
We stopped outside the club in the deepening twilight. He squeezed my hand in an iron clasp. “I get it’s been no camping trip for you in Việt-Nam. But you came, and you done good. I’m proud of you, guy.” Before I could react, he clutched me closer and gave me the briefest of bear hugs. “We’ll see each other again, I hope. One way or another.”
Dean had never been one to demonstrate his emotions, so his thoughtful words and action caught me by surprise and touched me deeply. At the same time they also brought home the sobering realization that the end was indeed upon me. I was going home. For real.
As I stood there—dumbstruck, my breath caught in my throat—he pivoted on his heels and limped off, his hand still raised in a farewell salute.
That was the last I saw of Dean “the Lonely” Hunter.
In my final days at Biên-Hoà, Paul kept me close company as if to save me from spending too much time alone, and we hung out together even more than we already had. It was a comfortable routine I gladly settled into since it helped to keep my mind off the coming big change. Starting with a dinner of cheeseburgers at the club right after work, we’d hang around long enough for Paul to watch Bobbie “the Weather Girl” Keith perform her nightly gags on Channel 11. Along with all the fellows in the club, he’d stay glued to the tube until the end of the show when she purred her signature signoff, “Until tomorrow, have a pleasant evening, weatherwise and, you know, of course, otherwise.” On that cue her fans erupted in uproarious laughter, whooping and hollering their approval as the blond, mini-skirted weather girl grooved to the music from the Box Tops’ hit single “The Letter.”
“She’s hysterical, isn’t she? And easy on the eye, too,” Paul once remarked, immediately blushing at his own effusion. “Sometimes I forget I can still laugh like this.”
Amen, I thought.
From the club, we’d step next door to the movie theater that doubled as a house of worship on the weekend and catch whatever was being shown that evening, usually a rerun of a John Wayne western or some old Bob Hope comedy. Most of the time we could not even hear the audio, which was muffled by jets taking off from the nearby runway or trucks rumbling past out in front. But that didn’t bother us in the slightest since we already knew the stories by heart. It was more about just letting the visuals lull our brains into temporary respite.
After the movie, we’d return to the club for a nightcap beer before lights-out. Paul would make me listen to his new jukebox favorite, Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” over and again until I could no longer stand it and had to insist we leave. It was a surprising departure from his bedtime standard, “Green, Green Grass of Home,” and seemed out of character with the squeaky-clean image that had earned him his nickname. But then it might simply have been a manifestation, in his case, of that pervasive change we all underwent in Việt-Nam.
As mundane as this nightly routine appeared in retrospect, it served its useful purpose at the time, filling the hours and the void in my heart. Until bedtime, that was. Alone in the dark, I faced my past and my future as I pondered the consequences of my actions while sounding my own motives and innermost feelings. With Lee Anne gone, the future stretched empty and unclear before me. One thing was certain, however: I could no longer return to the way it used to be with Debbie after all that had happened. Only days from being reunited with loved ones whom I hadn’t seen in a year, I was racked with secret guilt for finding so little comfort in the occasion. Instead, a sense of doom sprung over me as I knew I was about to fly straight into a storm—the biggest crisis of my life.
Adding to the building tension, my final days didn’t go without a hitch.
Forty-eight hours before my scheduled flight, I finished out-processing and went to pick up my boarding pass only to discover I had been bumped.
“Sorry, Lieutenant. Last-minute reassignment,” the old sergeant at the desk said. “It’ll be another couple days. Or you can hitch a ride on a Graves Registration flight to Bangkok any day of the week, then switch planes over there. Many folks go that route if they can’t wait.”
I assured him I could.
On my last day, I was granted time off to tend to loose ends. Around noontime, all packed and with nothing left to do, I checked out an Air Force-blue cracker box to go for a drive. One final spin around this windswept dirt bowl I’d called home for the past year—and then, adios.
Without a thought in mind, I drove to the open area on the north side where Bob had taken me before. A shower had cleansed the air and dispersed the clouds, revealing the bluest of skies. In bright daylight, the remote site did not appear nearly as forbidding as I’d remembered. There was even a feeling of peace and serenity about it, reminisce
nt of the mountain meadows at home in late summer. I pulled off the road and hopped out. Squinting to the northwest, I located the hillock with the small pagoda, or what was left of it, perched on top. During Tết, the Việt-Cộng had used the temple as a surveillance post to coordinate their attacks on the base. Army gunships had retaliated with heavy firepower and demolished the old structure, causing an outcry among some in the press. From where I now stood, the charred ruins showed like the carcass of a downed bird of prey.
Judging from the surroundings, I must have been near the spot where Bob and I had parked and talked that evening—a lifetime ago, it seemed, when death and tragedy hadn’t yet tainted our personal world. In a flood, memories burst forth that had been carefully stowed away all these months, as vivid and poignant as if from yesterday.
Wide open fields of reed and elephant grass extended on both sides of the road, stretching well beyond the barbed-wire fences along the north border to the encroaching jungle on the outskirts. I wandered off from the road and waded into the tall grass, which came up to my chest. The setting resembled countless landing zones all over South Việt-Nam. I imagined myself jumping from the skid of a hovering slick, then scrambling through the grass for cover as intense enemy fire zinged past my head. Would I be among the slow-footed kids who never reached safety behind the trees, immediately mowed down on their first time out? The last images they’d glimpse of this earth as their stunned faces hit the mud would be of these long, thin blades of elephant grass swaying gently in the sun.
So much death. Brutal, obscene death—with no rhyme, reason, or justice. My brain reeled off the list of its recent victims and their loved ones within my small circle of friends and acquaintances: Lee Anne’s husband; Elise’s father; Vivienne; Bob; the MEDCAP team; Joey. Most of them cut down in the prime of youth. All with so much yet to live for.