by Dennis Foley
Bui heard music—American rock music from a radio—somewhere. He fought to clear his head. The sunlight stabbed into the large tunnel room through a break in the earth’s surface. His body had come to a stop in the corner of what must have once been a hospital ward of sorts. Equipment and bedding materials hung in the corners of the room, and bandages were strung from root pegs that had caught them before they were flushed away by the rushing water.
In the shallow wash of what water still remained in the rapidly dissolving room were also the remains of three of his comrades.
They were comrades he had never seen before, but comrades nonetheless. The buttocks and upper back of one was just breaking the water.
In another part of the room there was a body crumpled up and resting on its side, as if in a childlike sleep. The third could only be seen from the knees down, as they peeked around the corner of a turn in the tunnel.
As Bui became more conscious, he became more aware of his condition. He coughed and tried to clear the mud from his mouth. His ears were filled with water and debris, preventing him from hearing clearly. He put a knuckle against one nostril, closing it, and forced air out of the other one to clear his nose. His ear popped, and he immediately heard voices yelling and canceling each other out.
From a tunnel in front of him he saw the dim circle thrown by a flashlight playing on a wall. Someone was coming down an intersecting tunnel and would soon turn toward him.
It was the Americans. He didn’t understand English, but he knew it when he heard it His survival instinct kicked back in, and he tried to scramble out of the light painting him from above. But he was sitting on his good leg, and his bad one didn’t have the strength to lift him up enough to flee. He knew he would soon be killed or captured, and for a moment the options seemed to have some appeal.
The intruder, down the tunnel, began firing a pistol at the tunnel intersection to reduce his chance of being ambushed by someone hidden out of his sight but within range.
Bui knew that as soon as the shooter reached the turn, he would more than likely do the same in his direction. He could think of nothing better to do, so he started yelling to the approaching GI. He knew only the words for what the Vietnamese called those who rallied to the other side—“Hoi Chanh!”
Suddenly, he thought the Americans might not understand and think he was calling for them to surrender, so, impulsively, he shouted the only American words he remembered, “John Wayne! Salem!” He knew that it made no sense. He just wanted them to know that he knew who was approaching and that the menthol cigarettes were popular in every city in Vietnam.
Then, as a last resort, he summoned up some of the schoolboy French he had learned from the Catholic missionaries who used to run a school in his district—“Ami!”
The flashlight beam sliced down to the floor and continued to paint a steady, yet incomplete, circle on a tunnel wall. Bui then heard the distinctive sounds of someone popping a sandy magazine out of a .45 caliber pistol, reseating a new one, and jacking a round into the chamber. Then the flashlight’s beam came up off the tunnel’s muddy floor, grew brighter, and turned into the tunnel that ran directly toward him.
Bui took a deep breath, lifted his chin, and prepared to die as the brightest part of the beam fell squarely on his face. He knew he couldn’t even begin any thought, prayer, or movement before the large bullet struck him down.
The blindfold frightened Bui, but he resisted the urge to cry out for mercy. His hands were bound behind him, and his leg pounded from pain. He could tell from the heat in his leg that the infection had flared back up. He guessed that the very uncomfortable swelling in the glands in his crotch was the result of the infection.
The Americans kept talking and yelling at what Bui assumed were other prisoners around him. He had been blindfolded before they pulled him through the hole in the tunnel. He could still hear the portable radio playing American music. He told himself that men who listened to music would certainly not execute him—not blindfolded.
He listened to what he guessed was a love song and felt a sickening feeling in his stomach. He was reminded of Tich. Where had the water caught her? Had she lived through it? Was she a prisoner? Would they hurt her, rape her, kill her?
He had heard many terrible things about the Americans and how they tortured his comrades. He wanted not to think that he would never see Tich again. Then he laughed to himself at the futility of his thoughts. How could he even worry about her? He would either be shot by the Americans or die of his wound very soon.
“Get up, gook!” a voice seemed to say to him.
He wasn’t sure it was addressed to him and didn’t want to move lest he draw attention to himself.
The voice screamed again—much closer to Bui’s face. He still didn’t move.
Without warning a boot planted against his shoulder shoved him over onto his side. He could not get up because his hands were tied and his leg was all but worthless to him.
A pair of strong hands reached under Bui’s elbow and jerked him up to a shaky standing position. The yelling continued, and all Bui could think to do was drop his head and try not to provoke one of his unseen captors into striking him or shooting him. He did not want to show how frightened he was. But he was sure they could see his body trembling and his heart pounding in his chest.
One of the American soldiers tied a wire to the binding twine that held Bui’s hands together and then stretched the line around his waist and away. Bui was able to figure out that they were stringing the POWs together to move them. Bui took that as a sign that if they were going to be killed it would not be right then. As long as they were moving, they would be alive.
The pain in his leg and the loss of strength and control made him hobble and stumble. The third time he fell down he was pulled out of the line and untied from the others. The realization that he had drawn attention to himself frightened Bui. He knew he had angered his captors, and he was sure he would be shot.
He had never been in a helicopter before. Though he could not see it, he could tell by the engine noises that he was being carried to one, and he quickly remembered the stories he had heard in the political meetings in his platoon about VC being thrown from helicopters to force others into talking. He was sure he would be sacrificed to extract information from the others.
He knew he had missed too many chances at being killed to escape death on the chopper. He began to pray, occasionally and unconsciously slipping into his childhood French. Much of his boyhood Catholic training came back to him—bits of prayers and lines of contrition recalled from the rote training. To him it was all a blur of overwhelming sensations—fear of flight, fear of death, fear of eternity.
The urge to vomit came and went. Bui had no idea how high they were or how fast they were flying. But the movement of the chopper was enough to make him unsure he could keep down the rice the Americans had fed him that morning.
Someone patted him on the shoulder, and he flinched.
“Hey, man. Cool it. Here,” a voice said. He felt the end of a cigarette being pushed between his lips.
Though Bui didn’t understand the words, he did understand that someone was giving him a cigarette to smoke. Did that mean they were about to throw him out of the chopper? His mind whirled in confusion. Were they just being nice? Or were they being nice before killing him?
He took a drag off the cigarette and found it fairly pleasant. It was not like the Vietnamese, French, and Cambodian cigarettes he had smoked. Neither was it like the American menthol cigarettes. He took another drag.
The American allowed him to smoke the entire cigarette. Bui waited for something to happen. But nothing did. There was a change in the altitude of the chopper, and his stomach told him they were descending.
Bui could smell the oily protective treatment that had been sprayed on the canvas stretcher on which they were carrying him. It reminded him of the smells that had clung to Tich when she used to come to tend to him in the tunnels. He would later lea
rn that the smell was that of a standard disinfectant used in hospitals everywhere.
They took him into a building where it was cool, but filled with people all talking at once. The examining table was cold and hard, and Bui felt uncomfortable and vulnerable as he held his head down while the Americans poked around looking at his leg. He didn’t want to let anyone know he would just as soon sit up. After all, he thought, they were tending to his leg, and they wouldn’t be doing that if there were any plans to kill him. Would they?
“Take that silly fucking blindfold off this man,” someone said, but the words were unintelligible to Bui. “What the hell are we worried about? He’s gonna run off with the secrets of the Eighty-fourth Evac?”
Others around the table laughed at whatever the voice had said, and feminine hands untied the blindfold.
They were all in American uniforms, and a few had rubber gloves on. The woman who had taken off his blindfold smelled of perfume and wore wire-rimmed glasses. Bui had never seen a woman wearing glasses.
She smiled at him and strapped a blood pressure cuff on his arm. At the other shoulder a uniformed male swabbed his arm with cooling alcohol and stabbed him with a hypodermic needle.
Bui didn’t understand the words, but it was clear that the large man who had just adjusted a work light to shine on his leg was talking to him. “Okay, there, pal. You just relax, and let us clean ya up a bit. Then we’ll carry you on over to a ward and let you do some healin’ up. How’s that sound? Huh?”
Even if Bui didn’t understand the words, the tone was reassuring.
The man gave instructions to several others in the room, and people fell into a multitude of tasks, all relating to Bui. Bui took some comfort in their attention and began to relax for the first time in days. He wasn’t even aware that sleep was overtaking him.
It was late at night when Bui awoke. His first sensation was that of feeling clean and dry. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d felt clean and dry. He had been sleeping in an American hospital bed, complete with a thick firm mattress and crisp white sheets.
The ceiling was a regular pattern of extruded aluminum that curved over his head. He had seen Quonset huts from a distance, but had never been in one before. It came down from the peak to a point where the ceiling became the wall and disappeared behind him.
The room was a long rectangle with ten other beds in it. Each bed held one patient—all Vietnamese. At the end of the room the only light was a lamp that washed the desk that supported it and a small margin of flooring below it.
An American woman was seated at the desk talking to an American soldier who was wearing a pistol. Bui didn’t recognize him to be an MP, but assumed that security was his responsibility. He decided not to make any noise or motion that would let them know he was awake.
The other patients were sleeping. They all seemed to be in worse shape than he was. Two had stumps of limbs showing—bandaged and peeking out from under the covers.
At the other end of the ward, the door had heavy wire mesh covering the windowed upper half. Near the door a Vietnamese patient thrashed and moaned in low tones, as if suffering some pain that was keeping him from resting.
The scraping of the chair on the dirt that spotted the linoleum floor caught Bui’s attention. He tried not to be noticed as he looked back toward the two Americans.
The nurse got up from her desk and walked to the far end to the moaning patient. She made some adjustments to a tube that fed fluids into him. She then checked her watch and made a notation on the clipboard that was hanging from the end of the bed.
On her return trip to her desk, she made an abrupt turn at Bui’s bed and stopped near the foot. She seemed to listen to Bui’s breathing as he faked being asleep. She then pulled the sheet back and revealed his leg.
Bui couldn’t resist taking a look himself. He made a tiny slit in his eyelids and peeked down toward his leg. He could see that while he was unconscious they had done something to his leg and then neatly bandaged him from midthigh to ankle. His foot was exposed, and from what he could see they had cleaned all of the mud and grime off his leg.
The nurse turned his leg from side to side in order to see the underside of the dressings. She next reached for his toes and took them all in her hand. Bui enjoyed the warmth of her soft hand, but wondered what she was doing.
“You’re probably going to live. Your leg won’t ever work right, but you’ll live to complain about it. And I know that you are not sleeping,” she said as she looked up from his foot to his face and smiled as if she had caught him stealing a cookie.
Bui panicked and slammed his eyes shut. He didn’t know what else to do. And it began to anger him that he didn’t know what she was saying. He just lay still until she flipped the covers back and walked away.
The antibiotics worked miracles. By the fourth day Bui’s fever had cooled. The swelling in his groin and the throbbing pain in his leg were gone. He could feel the disappearance of the pressure that had been his constant companion since just after he was wounded. The general swelling had almost disappeared, and the redness on the edges of the wound was turning to a healthier-looking pink.
He didn’t know the nurse’s name, but she was his angel of mercy. That an American woman would replace Tich was an irony that he was trying to reconcile in his mind. He had been taught to hate the Americans because they were allies of the republicans. He had never seen an American up close until they found him in the tunnel. And even then he hadn’t seen much because of the blindfold.
But she was mesmerizing. She was much taller than he was, and she had blue-green eyes. Her hair was short and brushed back on the sides of her head, but that didn’t make a dent in her femininity. Each morning she would come to his bedside and change the dressing on his leg. She would give him pills three times a day and take his temperature and blood pressure morning and afternoon.
Other Americans who worked on the ward used the word “Kathy.” Bui didn’t know if this was a name, a rank, or a title. He tried to listen to the way they addressed each other to rule out the possibility that “Kathy” might be the American version of “comrade.”
After several days of healing and listening and watching, Bui decided that Kathy was a word that identified her. He was most confused when the male doctors came to check on his wounds and addressed her in words he didn’t hear very often.
An older Vietnamese woman was frequently brought into the ward to translate for the nurse and the doctors in cases far worse than his. It occurred to Bui that she was well fed, clean, and appeared to be treated well by the Americans. This was in contrast to most older women in Vietnam, who suffered and died from starvation, neglect, disease, and abuse.
As the old woman passed his bed, Bui tried to strike up a conversation with her. She seemed to be in too much of a hurry to do anything more than bid him good day. Still, he kept it up. He wanted to know things, and she could tell him what he needed to know about the Americans, about his future, and about how she found herself working as a translator.
Each day his infection died away some more, but the damage that had been done by the shrapnel and the infection left its mark. Much of the muscle had been lost to the scraping and cutting away of infected tissue. The large tendon that narrowed into his Achilles had been distorted and scarred by the course of healing and the infection, causing his leg to draw up. In bed he could neither fully straighten his knee nor lift his foot to a ninety-degree angle with his lower leg.
By the end of the second week, Bui was being taken from his bed and walked from one end of the ward to the other. The seventy-five-foot trip took him several minutes and made him suffer a great deal of pain from the lack of flexibility and loss of muscle tone. The atrophy was pronounced, and even his good leg had very little strength. Still, he was afraid not to get well. What would they do with him if he became a permanent burden on them?
The nurse made one of her trips to Bui’s bed to administer yet another injection. As always, he
forced himself not to appear to be bothered by the sight or pain of the hypodermic needle. He felt that showing such fear would make her think he was a coward.
She put the syringe down on a tray table behind her and pulled the light sheet off his legs and lower body. With a minimum of motion she pulled the strange-looking scissors out of her shirt pocket and sliced through the dressing on his leg. The wound was completely closed, save a small scab that topped the remaining break in the skin. The area was pink and clean, and the dead skin around the wound had completely sloughed off. Scar tissue broke the normally smooth profile of the calf, and his leg and ankle were still at an awkward angle.
The sight bothered Bui, but he felt lucky to be alive and still have his leg. He didn’t know much about medicine, but he did know that many of his comrades had died from infections and that he could have been one of them.
She wrapped her hand around the back of his knee and seemed to be feeling for heat. Then she reached for the snaps in the side of his trouser legs. He was wearing orthopedic pajama bottoms that could be split open without being taken off.
She had done this to him each day since he had been there, and he had been embarrassed by it, but still he couldn’t wait for her to do it. Unfastening all of the snaps, she flipped the trouser leg away from his upper leg and groin. Then she slipped her long, soft fingers down into the space between the top of his leg and his manhood. He knew she was checking the condition of the swelling that had been in his groin since he had had the infection. The swelling no longer bothered him, and he was only slightly aware of the infection’s residual effect. His greatest sensation was that of her fingers in his groin.
The nurse finished her palpation of his lymph nodes and withdrew her hand. As she snapped the pajama bottoms closed, Bui couldn’t resist the urge to speak to her for the very first time. “Bui,” he said, pointing to himself.