The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  “You’d be surprised. Quite a few.”

  He squeezed through the terminal crowds and entered Saigon. The previous month had been the bloodiest of the war: 2,100 GIs dead. The Viet Cong had attacked the airport during the Tet holiday, and the memory of this siege was present in the scanning eyes of every person who hurried past the airport. Their anxiety seeped into Joe, and he scampered away to the center of Saigon, where dread gave way to the playfulness of slaloming scooters and revving motorcycles. Neon signs pulsed and flickered on behalf of Coca-Cola and Pabst Blue Ribbon. You’d think there was no war to fight here, no bullets to fear, but only pleasures for the gut, the loins and the eye. Inside the Club New York, Joe found mai tais and miniskirts and Michelob, and bare female legs on the barstools. He had a gin and tonic, and the alcohol and the music and the stony stares of the GIs around him made everything feel sullen, suddenly, as if he were at the bottom of a drain where American sadness collected. A U.S.A. funk pooled around army-issue boots and leather shoes. Joe stepped outside, into the evening ballet of bicycle traffic, and only then did he understand that he was not inside an American nightmare, no, but instead in a wide-awake country of nimble people pedaling in their sandals, in loose clothing and plastic white sunglasses. He stopped on the street to admire a Vietnamese Venus in a form-fitting white ao dai and was nearly hit by a motorcycle, then he dodged a few motorcycles more and found his way to a district on the northern fringes of the city, which was said by a GI at the Club New York to be “close to the action.” In his hotel room a ceiling fan turned slowly above his head, a fat fly fighting the spinning blades, growing fat on the same heavy, humid air that filled Joe’s lungs. Through the open window, he heard the putter of a scooter, followed by the peal of an old woman’s laughter.

  I’m in Vietnam.

  * * *

  JOE TRAVELED THROUGH THE CITY and got past assorted checkpoints simply by being a wavy-haired, blond and tan American with a pack slung purposefully over his shoulder. To a nervous American GI: “I’m a doctor. Come to help out the villagers.” To a South Vietnamese corporal: “I’m an American military adviser. Civilian, yes.” Horizontal hand waves told him to proceed. My blue eyes the key to any door here. Into the weekly press briefing too, the “five o’clock follies,” where he listened to the droning recitations of an Army major. “These revisions bring the total enemy combat deaths, confirmed, for the month of May to twelve thousand five hundred forty-three, which is a twenty-nine-point-eight percent increase…” The newspaper scribes and television reporters in the room sank into their folding chairs and felt their oxford shirts clinging to their chests, and they wrote down the robust numbers with unconvinced fingers and filtered out of the room, leaving Joe as the only one to walk up to the major with a follow-up question.

  Before Joe could speak, the major asked: “You headed out with the 1st Cav tomorrow? Last time I didn’t have any takers.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Report here,” the major said, handing Joe a slip of paper. “Oh-five-hundred.”

  “Yes, sir,” Joe said, and the salutation caught the major by surprise.

  “Who you with?”

  “Associated Press,” Joe said. “Just got here.”

  That night, in his hotel, as Joe prepared to leave, he heard the distant sound of an explosion. He walked down to the lobby and saw the receptionist lean out the door and lean back in again, and then the receptionist caught a glance of Joe and gave him a grinning “Good evening.” Joe climbed up to the roof and there, above the city, a distant battle came into ear focus. Gunfire and mortars, whistling rockets and their percussive fall into streets and rice paddies. Now and then a distant flash of light reflected by the clouds. VC pressed Saigon hard all week, he wrote home many days later. One of the rockets fired the night of the 16th landed only a couple blocks away. Goddamn noisy, like dropping a grenade inside a VW.

  Joe did not sleep that night, and caught a cab at 4:00 a.m. for the airfield, where he was greeted by sleepy MPs and told to wait, which he did, for three hours, until a grunt GI and a lieutenant guided him to a Huey, and soon they were climbing up and out of Saigon, over the cement-and-tin quilt of the built-up city, and then over rice paddies, and everyone inside the craft besides Joe spent their time staring absentmindedly at the sack of mail the chopper was carrying. Inside there were letters from Biloxi, Miss.; Camarillo, Calif.; Bend, Ore.; Fond du Lac, Wisc.; and many other places. Telling summer stories from back home, of the death of dogs and the birth of foals, of bad weather and car repairs, with the occasional erotic suggestion or motherly word of worry. The helicopter began to descend, and Joe’s eyes scanned the morning jungle, until they landed in a windsplash of elephant grass, and Joe followed a GI in jumping off, and he took in the ravaged ecology of charred and sheared trees that surrounded them. How many butterflies, birds, rodents and snakes had perished in the clearing of this land. “Welcome to Strongpoint Bravo,” said the captain who greeted them. “Sanderson, Associated Press,” Joe lied, and he listened and nodded as the major explained the mission. They were eight kilometers from Cambodia, the major said, right on top of what had been an infiltration route, an off-ramp for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and two hundred twenty-nine enemy soldiers had been killed here, and one antiaircraft gun captured and so forth and so on. Joe opened up his notebook to write, because it seemed the major expected a reporter would write things. Mud, Joe scribbled. Mud. Much mud. Mud. Muddy. More mud. Mud everywhere. Mud. He saw one soiled soldier cleaning a dirty M60, and others wearing bandoliers of linked rounds, and their arms and faces were splattered with mud, and some were shirtless and had their torsos painted with mud. They were surrounded by empty boxes and crates, and crushed cans. This sure ain’t Fort Leonard Wood.

  “You’re a reporter?” one of the grunts asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You see the NVA gun yet?”

  “No.”

  They walked over to an antiaircraft gun on the edge of the cleared land, and the soldier ran his hand appreciatively along the long muzzle of the Soviet-made weapon, and Joe sat in the gunner’s chair. Charlie’s seat. Looking up from there at the circling American choppers. Not long afterward Joe was rising back up into the sky in the Huey as the soldiers gathered around their letters, squatting to read them in the same way Vietnamese peasants squatted, and looking down at them Joe felt as if he were peering into a jungle library. The strongpoint disappeared, and Joe’s heart raced in time with the beat of the helicopter’s engine, because he was thinking of that enemy antiaircraft gun, and he imagined others hidden in the jungle, with living VC to fire them. I could die up here, now. And wouldn’t that be a stupid end to my story?

  * * *

  BACK IN SAIGON, he took a taxi to the Cholon district, where battles had been fought during the Tet Offensive, and where it was said the Viet Cong still prowled nearby. He found a community of displaced people living in hastily built structures, including Chinese Vietnamese families who had lost their homes in the U.S. bombing that chased out the communists. They were urban refugees who lived amid jumbled ruins of corrugated tin, charcoaled beams and singed palm trees, and their eyes fell upon Joe. This new, tall American removed his shirt and tied it around his waist, which wasn’t unusual, although everything else about him was. Joe carried no weapon or clipboard or camera, and he wore no uniform; he was not a soldier, doctor or technician. Nor was he an aid worker accompanied by a truck filled with poor-quality rice in bags stamped with the American flag, the kind of rice you would only feed to an animal. Instead, Joe was a lone American stranger, wandering with no discernible purpose, a grinning voyeur following in the footsteps of the armies that persecuted them: the stealthy Vietnamese nationalists who appeared suddenly in alleyways; the GIs of the 7th United States Infantry Regiment and their escorts of flying gunships; the scrambling squads of South Vietnamese soldiers, looking for people to shoot and things to steal; and the crazed Army of the Republic of Vietnam captain who wore a yellow scarf around his nec
k and waved a pointing stick as he screamed orders. The sight of the shirtless Joe Sanderson brought forth memories of lost souls, lost loves and ruptured bloodlines. The sudden, unexplainable dead of Cholon: the grandfather; the conscripted son, kissing his mother’s hands goodbye; the daughter, asleep in her bed. Phuong. Duc. Khiem. The Chinese characters for their names. The survivors of Cholon would remember the sight of Joe Sanderson when they moved, some years later, to places like Monterey Park, California, and Bosque Farms, New Mexico, where their lives became one with American madness for the rest of their days. By then, their war memories of men like Joe had become memoirs and poems their children wrote. mùi Mỹ … that American scent / of mosquito repellent / and unbathed skin.

  Spent a lot of time in Cholon with refugees bombed out during Tet by Americans’ helicopter gunships, Joe wrote home later. Not very pretty. But they didn’t seem to mind my presence. Not once did I catch any sniping.3

  On the northern fringes of the metropolis, Joe got close to an actual battle. Enemy fighters emerged from their hiding places at the end of a sunny morning; he did not see these warriors, but rather heard the distinctive firing of their AKs. He ran toward the sound, like a madman, until he was forced to seek cover in an abandoned foxhole. A bullet struck a mound of dirt ten yards from his crouching skull, and suddenly he wished he’d never left Urbana and never become a road bum. But he stayed, because each bullet fired in his direction carried a sense of meaningfulness. My country and my people set this fiasco in motion. Sweet land of liberty, / Of thee I sing. When the shooting stopped, he followed curious civilians to the spot where the victorious soldiers of the South Vietnamese army were rounding up their VC prisoners, kicking and slapping them into a line. He saw the POWs marched out to an army base, close enough for Joe to reach out and touch their bruised arms and bloodied cheeks. Fourteen, fifteen years old. A boys’ army. This is the fierce, feared Viet Cong? Surprise, surprise, our mortal enemy is really just skinny kids with big brown eyes.

  Joe wrote his first missive home the next day on the narrow rectangle of a torn envelope, which he then slipped inside another envelope, with Vietnamese 20-dong and 1-dong stamps attached, and a newspaper clipping inside. Quite a war. Got used to dead VC and being shot at, but I can’t quite adjust to what you see in the pictures, VC prisoners. They’d been worked over all night long by helicopter gunships. Most were wounded. I’m resting against the cemetery wall on the far right. His mother held the newspaper clipping between her fingers, and saw a grainy image of helmeted South Vietnamese soldiers (so very small and slight, these people, our allies) walking alongside even slighter prisoners, in shorts. And there, on the right, her son seated on the top of a low fence: his back and bushy hair, so clearly him. Joe had drawn a little blue check mark next to himself, to remove any doubt.

  The letter continued: Just after the area cleared, a firefight broke out. SVN marine got shot. By noon, 70 VC had called it quits, the largest surrender of the war (if you can call the defeat of children surrender).

  The second letter arrived eleven days later, in the folded spaces of an aerogramme Joe mailed when he was safely in Bangkok. He began by telling them he’d already been to Cambodia. Was quiet and peaceful the 10 days I was there. Didn’t mind. Came into Phnom Penh pretty exhausted. Nothing but war action for 7 days and nights in Vietnam. But he would have stayed if his visa hadn’t expired. Vietnam had been a bullshitter’s holiday of assumed identities, he wrote. Doctor, military adviser, reporter, without credentials but always believed. If the Yankees weren’t so gullible, we wouldn’t have entered the war in the first place. And then he returned to the firefight he had witnessed and its aftermath. The Gia Dinh battle got rough. Rifle and machine-gun fire came in from the VC position every few minutes, but no one seemed concerned. Bodies of dead VC, shot-up prisoners, the laughter of victorious soldiers, looting the dead in the rice paddies. Spent several hours along govt. bunkers while they displayed their war trophies, read letters from the Hanoi girlfriends of the dead, gave me N. Vietnamese money, showed me the bodies. Disgusting is about the only appropriate word I can think of. Sniper fire in short bursts as I moved between the ARVN and Govt. Marine positions. Too embarrassed to run for a bunker while no one else was around. The firing stopped and I walked on. Soldiers couldn’t have cared less I was out there. I went where I wanted to. Casual war, Vietnam. Some VC prisoners were brought in just as I arrived at the ARVN position. I counted 60. Later, I saw an American adviser who admitted there had been a few “mistakes” during the Gia Dinh surrender. Told me what I already knew. I’d seen the “mistakes” lying in the rice paddies. No need to go into it. Just disgusting, that’s all. All but one VC were between the ages of 14 and 20. None wore shoes. Strange thing is that eventually the VC will probably win the war.

  * * *

  VIRGINIA READ HER SON’S second letter while standing before her mailbox in Urbana. When she’d finished, she wanted to scream at him. Running from bunker to bunker, dodging sniper fire? His life is the most precious thing he owns. For what purpose, to what end? Foolishness, at play, like a boy, amid gunfire. As if he were in the Mahomet woods. She felt a sense of shame at his antics. And then she read his letter again, and thought of the word he used: disgusting. The war was disgusting, and so were the actions of the South Vietnamese soldiers, our allies. My son is outraged. He is angered by the word used by the American adviser: mistakes. What does that mean? She stepped inside her living room and showed Calhoun the letter.

  “Mistakes,” she told her husband. “He says something about mistakes. What does he mean?”

  Calhoun read the relevant passages a few times, and looked up at Virginia with a grim expression. “He’s saying they shot those prisoners. He’s saying these enemy soldiers, who were teenagers, mostly, surrendered to the South Vietnamese army—and then they were killed by the South Vietnamese army.”

  Virginia knew her son and had no doubt he’d seen something evil. “I’m worried about him,” she told Calhoun. “Of course you are,” he answered.

  A war, in a country so far away, different rules, different people. Not like here, not like any other war. Calhoun says we shouldn’t be fighting in the jungle. No way to win. Nixon will sort it all out when he’s president. Yes, Nixon. Rectitude, Republican, he will do the right things. Good man. The corpses in Joe’s letter stayed with her as she stepped outside into her Urbana backyard. My son among the murdered prisoners. Maybe I should hang some clothes on the line. Hate the sound of the dryer, the machine heat. The wind and the sun are so much better. Pure. But unsettled summer skies. Sunshine, and then gray. The towels might not dry. Is the jungle like this? Vietnam. Hands raised, white flags. Surrender. My son, with thoughts of the dead in his brain. He will lose sleep, he will be unrested, out of sorts. August in Illinois. Wind, clouds, but no rain. Roiling summer skies, dry leaves caught up in a swirl of wind. Crackle of spinning leaves. But it will not rain. Clouds heavy with water, passing overhead. No rain today, or yesterday. So unnatural, so strange.

  13

  Vientiane, Laos. Bali, Indonesia. Djibouti, Afars and Issas. Addis Ababa. Kigali, Rwanda. Stanleyville, Congo. Johannesburg. Lagos. Uyo, Biafra

  HE DID NOT SEE THE PLANES THEMSELVES, but instead the ice crystals shed by their engines in the stratosphere. As the residents of Vientiane gathered on the riverfront to watch the sunset over the milky Mekong, they saw the white contrails dissolve into mist. Nearby, a girl performed riverside somersaults for her younger brother. Pleasant little town, the capital of Laos. Here and there, a hint of officialdom, a ministry of this or that, and old French-colonial villas and signs in French, and roofs of steeply pitched tin and tile, and homes on stilts. In the sky, American B-52s made big sweeping turns over the Plain of Jars, dropping finned steel from their fuselages. The ground quaked and the jungle burned deeper in Laos, but no one here could feel or smell it. Instead Joe saw silent, orange-robed monks and then heard the scratch and slap of their sandals on dirt and asphalt. He took a final sho
rt walk through the dusk to open land where water buffalos pulled plows that cut into the wet soil.

  Yankee bombers moving back and forth overhead from runs into Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, he wrote home to his mother. Why, for God’s sake, why? Looking up from the ground were bare-breasted women, kids with malaria, workers making 50c per day. Senator Sanderson isn’t at all pleased with the whereabouts of foreign-aid tax money. It’s likely that the cost of bombing Laos during any one week would double the standard of living of every inhabitant for a full year.

  Rebecca rejoined him in Laos. At night, she rubbed his neck and wrapped her arm around him, and began to feel there was something deeply wrong with him. He talked to her about seeing the bodies of Vietnamese child soldiers. Twisted corpses, trying to climb into trenches, or out of them. Corpses frozen in mid-crawl in the roadway. And then a bit later he talked about more wars waiting along the very long path across the globe he wanted to take. A civil war in Yemen, a war in the Congo, in Nigeria. Did he want to see more corpses, hear more shells flying over his blond head? He was twenty-six, addicted to spectacle and a vagabond life, and committed to a craft he was not trying to truly master. They were the same age, and yet she felt twenty years older than him. She moved south with him, into Thailand, and they took siestas on the sand next to the sapphire Andaman Sea, and in a rented cabin they made love with decreasing passion. In Singapore, they visited a district where local men donned paisley minidresses and knee-high boots; then they sailed on the South China Sea and over the equator into Indonesia. Up with the roosters this morning for a trip into the mountains, Joe wrote home from Bali. Damn relaxing after Djakarta. Tranquil island. Hard to connect what we see to the hell the Balinese went through during the slaughter of the communists in ’65. They visited a water-filled caldera of a huge volcano, and lakeside villages where the schools were closed, because all the teachers had been killed three years earlier. Then they hiked up a trail past wild poinsettias and flocks of hungry children, climbing to the top of a volcano, and in her thoughts Rebecca practiced the lovely goodbye she would speak when they were back down at sea level, preparing to return to Djakarta. “I’ll never forget you, Joe Sanderson.”1