You Are Not Forgotten

by Bryan Bender

  George rode separately with the Vietnamese colonel as they made their way through heavy traffic out of the city and headed northwest into the countryside. Before long, George began to grow anxious. The colonel’s repeated inquiries about his grandfather—George had finally given him a few copied pages from the book that depicted his grandfather’s final battle—bordered on obsession. George now suspected that he was taking them to Cu Chi, where his grandfather was killed.

  “Where are we going?” George finally asked.

  His guide didn’t have to say anything; his devilish grin said it all.

  Cu Chi Province, about forty miles away, was at the end of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and had been the location where the Vietcong launched its operations against Saigon. The Vietcong had dug a network of tunnels estimated to snake 240 miles—some even crossing into Cambodia—that included hospital wards, dining facilities, and sleeping quarters. The entire area, which had been designated a “free fire zone” by the American command in South Vietnam, was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the Vietnam War. The tunnels were now a national landmark, heralded as a testament to the Communists’ resolve and ultimate victory.

  Traveling along Highway 1, George steeled himself. He had toyed with the idea ever since he was sent to Vietnam of making a pilgrimage to Cu Chi, but he wasn’t psychologically prepared. Yet as they got closer to Cu Chi, his nervousness dissipated. A growing curiosity seized him. This was the place where Grandma Harriet, his father, and the whole Eyster clan had lost so much forty-one years earlier. He was to be their emissary in paying honor to the man who had meant so much to all of them. Soon he felt himself being pulled toward it.

  At mid-morning they turned in to the dirt parking lot of the Cu Chi war museum. A rusted tank, helicopter, and other captured American war trophies were lined up in the courtyard, while posters beckoned visitors to “crawl through the tunnels that brought America to its knees.” Vendors milled about hawking cheap souvenirs, including knockoffs of American GI dog tags. Inside the museum, which was adjacent to a shrine honoring the locals who died in the American bombardment of Cu Chi, George perused the small displays of photographs, guns, and other artifacts and viewed the Communist propaganda films about the war. His Vietnamese military guide followed close behind, explaining some of the collections to George and his soldiers through an interpreter. After about an hour they emerged into an extensive outdoor exhibit of reconstructions of some of the famous guerrilla tunnels and passageways. George lowered himself into one of the vertical crawl spaces, not much wider than himself, and pondered the miserable existence that the Vietcong guerrillas must have endured, living for months at a time in a claustrophobic, subterranean world.

  He also thought about the heavy toll the tunnel fighters had exacted on his grandfather’s troops and so many other American GIs. He had read and reread the bloody details of the fighting here so many times. How the tunnel fighters would lie in wait in the darkness of the shafts for an American soldier to enter, usually feetfirst, and by the dim light of the tunnel opening swiftly bayonet him in the groin or fire a few machine gun rounds into his stomach. How they would then retrieve the wounded American’s flashlight, weapons, and grenades and slither back down the shaft through a trapdoor and disappear—until more Americans came to retrieve their mortally wounded comrade. What American soldiers confronted at Cu Chi made the war in Iraq look like child’s play, he thought. But the destruction inflicted by the Americans across Vietnam was also unimaginable.

  As he posed for a photograph in one of the shafts, George felt an eerie parallel to another image he had seen years before, right next to the one of his dying grandfather in the book on the Cu Chi tunnels. It was a photograph of one of the commanders of the Vietcong forces that ambushed his grandfather’s battalion, poking his head out of a similar-looking shaft and peering back over his right shoulder.

  The Vietnamese colonel interrupted George’s reverie as if he knew what he was thinking.

  “We shall go to the place.”

  George’s grandfather was mortally wounded on a rubber plantation at a place called Trung Lap, about eight miles from the village of Cu Chi. Now George wordlessly wound his way along some of the very same paths that Grandpa George had trodden. His Vietnamese guide purposely walked several paces behind him. George glanced around him at the thick foliage. He raised his eyes toward the gnarled tree branches. He tried to imagine the hidden enemy bunkers and wondered where the sniper who felled his grandfather had nested. George conjured the battle scene. Operation Crimp, as the incursion by his grandfather’s Black Lions was known, had been an inferno.

  “Riot gas drifted through the trees, burning where it touched a man’s sweating skin,” read the dispatch of the AP reporter who had been there. “Wounded writhed on the ground, looking grotesque in their black gas masks.… [D]eath lurked in the trees where the enemy snipers hid, and under the ground where their mines lay.”

  Now, on the very trail where his grandfather had been shot, George replayed in his mind those final moments when Grandpa George and his troops had proceeded carefully along the dusty path in search of the enemy.

  “Cut the wires, don’t pull them,” the forty-two-year-old battalion commander had instructed one of his riflemen trying to disarm a claymore mine. Colonel Eyster then pulled out his map and conferred with the company commander. It was at that moment, standing where George now stood, that the crackle of gunfire pierced the trees. Colonel Eyster fell to the ground, his arms clutching his chest, and groaned in pain. A medic rushed to his aid and watched his eyes close, his skin turn gray. The medic lightly dressed the wound but privately concluded the bullet had entered his neck and lodged in a lung. Eyster probably didn’t have much time. But as they waited for a chopper to extract him, the color began to return to the colonel’s face, and his heart appeared to beat a little faster. Grandpa George lived long enough to utter those words that had been seared into George’s consciousness.

  “Before I go, I’d like to talk to the guy who controls those incredible men in the tunnels.”

  On the way back to Ho Chi Minh City, the car unexpectedly pulled off the main highway onto a one-lane paved road. George assumed his guide was stopping for a bathroom break or perhaps a cup of tea. They approached what appeared to be a small but modern-looking village. On the right side, set about thirty feet back from the road, was a row of simple but well-tended single-story brick dwellings with small gardens and open front porches. The vehicle stopped in front of one of them, and the Vietnamese colonel opened the door and got out. He motioned for his companions to follow. George and his translator, a Vietnamese-American Army sergeant assigned to JPAC, hopped out and were led onto the small porch. They stepped through a sliding-glass partition covered in silk and entered the house. The Vietnamese colonel quickly disappeared through an archway covered in beaded curtains at the back of the house.

  George was puzzled. They were standing in what looked like the main living space of a family home. “Was this the colonel’s place?” he wondered. He scanned the small room. The immediate area was furnished with a few chairs and intricately carved cabinets, neatly decorated with houseplants and fresh flowers. The floor was covered with large square tiles and the walls painted pale blue. Toward the rear was a rectangular table covered in a green-and-white floral tablecloth set with a thermos and some kettles. A small electric fan circulated the stale, warm air. George also noticed various family heirlooms hanging on the walls, including several framed photographs. His gaze settled on one of them and then froze. It was the picture from the book The Tunnels of Cu Chi. The picture of the Vietcong major, poking his head out of one of the tunnels and glancing back over his right shoulder.

  The Vietnamese colonel suddenly reappeared through the beaded curtains accompanied by an old woman in a print dress, her hair pulled back. She was carrying a tray of tea. She pointed to one of the chairs around the table and politely motioned for George and his translator to sit. She poured green tea i
nto little porcelain cups. Then a slight elderly man, small even by Vietnamese standards, quietly entered from the kitchen in the back. He wore a white short-sleeved button-down shirt opened at the collar, dark slacks, and sandals. George looked at him intently. He studied the old man’s face and then turned back to the picture on the wall. He drew in a quick breath. There was no doubt it was the same man—the legendary tunnel fighter at Cu Chi who had spent years fighting the Americans from his underground lair. The man who had commanded “those incredible men in the tunnels.” This was his house. The old man sat across from George at the table.

  Major Nam Thuan was thirty-three years old when George’s grandfather came to Cu Chi. He had known war for much of his life. When he was a boy, his father fought the French invaders from the tunnel complex. He had played in them as a child. By the time the Black Lions arrived, the American war had been raging for more than three years. Thuan had already been awarded several medals for his exploits as a member of the Vietcong. He was master of his subterranean domain, able to count the number of American armored personnel carriers by listening intently in the darkness to the rumble of their engines as they rolled by overhead. He became a guide for the regular North Vietnamese troops who used the tunnels to smuggle weapons through Cu Chi from the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  Thuan had lost count of the American GIs who were unlucky enough to be ordered into one of the shafts—flashlights announcing their arrivals—as he hid in the alcoves and crawl spaces barely large enough for a man.

  One American tactic had always confounded him. Their concern for their dead and wounded defied the laws of war, in his view. Even though it meant placing other soldiers at risk—and allowed the enemy to regroup—the Americans almost always came back for their comrades. When they did, Nam Thuan often tossed one of their comrades’ grenades at them, killing more.

  As the long war dragged on, he was recruited to join the regular North Vietnamese Army and was eventually responsible for the defense of six hamlets. In 1973, as the Americans prepared to withdraw from Vietnam, he was a member of the district Communist Party committee when Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops wiped out forty-seven South Vietnamese military posts in a month.

  Sitting across from George, he was now approaching the middle of his seventh decade, with deep lines etched in his tired-looking face and thinning gray hair. The two men looked at each other silently as they sipped tea for several minutes before George, still trembling and sweating, realized he should probably say something. He turned to his translator and relayed a greeting. Then George pulled from his pocket the photocopy of the page from the book depicting his wounded grandfather and slid it across the table. He tapped on the photograph and struggled to find words.

  “You were the commander?” George asked. “My grandfather was the commander.”

  After George’s words were relayed by the translator, the old man understood. His eyes widened and his mouth opened a bit in a sign of recognition.

  George, meanwhile, noticed the Vietnamese colonel standing over them with a wide, mischievous grin on his face. He had set all this up without George’s knowledge. That is why he wanted copies of the book.

  George turned back to the diminutive man across from him. He had difficulty forming words. He clumsily recounted his grandfather’s story—his family’s story. The details stumbled out at first and then came in a torrent, until he felt a nudge from his translator. George had yet to pause long enough to give him a chance to relay what he was saying. He stopped so the young sergeant could catch up.

  The old man stared intently at the blond American in the black polo shirt with the POW/MIA emblem on the arm, a symbol widely recognized in his own country. He said nothing. Finally, George repeated the words that his grandfather uttered before he was evacuated from the battlefield—those indelible words that would become his final, and unfulfilled, wish. George told of his grandfather’s desire to meet the enemy commander—the same man who now, more than four decades later, was sitting across from his grandson.

  “I’m here to do that part of it,” George told him.

  The old man grew visibly emotional.

  “How is your family?” he asked George, almost pleading, wanting to know how many children George’s grandfather had.

  The last question got mistranslated as “Did your grandfather have any children that lived?” and for a brief moment the tense atmosphere was infused with a welcome dose of levity as George and his companions chuckled at the phrasing.

  The man’s question was repeated, accurately this time. “How many children did he have?”

  George was still shaking a little, on edge about what he had been thrown into and nervous about where this was going. He blurted out that his grandfather had five children, though Grandma Harriet had only four—two boys and two girls, including his own father.

  “Big family,” the man responded. He seemed relieved by George’s answer. The fact that George’s grandfather had a big family—that his seed hadn’t died out—was evidently important to him. So George repeated it.

  “My grandmother is well,” George added. “My grandmother had children, and everyone is happy.”

  George then asked the former Vietcong commander about his own family and what he did after the war. Nam Thuan told him he married after the Americans withdrew, had a child, and went into politics. George sensed the war had taken a toll on the old man’s family as well, though he didn’t say so.

  George then suddenly realized that the man might think he hated him for what happened to his grandfather. He felt the need to let him know that it was all okay now.

  “A big family in America,” George said again. “The children of this man,” he tapped on the photograph again, “we are happy and always together.”

  The old man now looked wistful, and for the first time he smiled. George’s American translator, however, was on the verge of tears, the poignancy of the moment overtaking him. He had left Vietnam as a boy of twelve, he had told George, and along with his brother went to America, where he joined the Army. They were the only ones in their family who escaped the aftermath of the war.

  The old man’s wife watched them, shaking her head and rolling her eyes slightly, as if to say “you boys.” George and Thuan sat and talked for a while longer, sipping green tea—two warriors, their kin once sworn enemies, now sharing their stories and their tears and making peace.

  Before George bade good-bye to the man who commanded the troops who killed Grandpa George, the two of them stood for a photograph in the house’s small patio, arm in arm.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MISSING

  Corsairs soared in roaring flight

  Noble arm first to fight

  The foe was smitten by their might,

  And our son,

  His plane a mighty lance,

  Flew high and fast,

  By the seat of his pants

  No stranger he to death, and so,

  With blazing gun he strove against the foe.

  He saw the great planes safe and homeward go.

  But some must die,

  But some must die—

  Oh, God, not he!

  Yet the brave must keep our nation free

  Others pray on bended knee,

  Others have, just as we,

  Toy planes in attic hung

  That their sons built when they were young.

  Nostalgic memories of a day

  Before their son was called away.

  Woodson E. Marshall

  On the late morning of January 20, 1944, under a deep blue sky dotted with puffy heaps of cotton-white clouds, eighteen B-25 Mitchell bombers from the Army Air Corps’ Forty-Second Bombardment Group took off from a coral airstrip on the small island of Stirling in the Treasury Islands. The twin-engine planes, each carrying a crew of six men, eased into position in diamond-shaped formation and headed north, like a flock of menacing prehistoric birds. Their assigned mission was “to strike at minimum altitude Vunakanau Airdr
ome,” about eleven miles south of Rabaul on New Britain’s Gazelle Peninsula.

  The bombers each carried a dozen “para-frags,” small bombs weighing about twenty-four pounds and fitted with a parachute. Designed to break into small fragments upon detonation, they were developed primarily to be dropped in large numbers over Japanese airfields, where they could shred the aluminum of enemy aircraft parked in their revetments. But first the bombers had to rendezvous with the fighter escort that would protect them from the swarms of Japanese Zeros that might try to stop them. The bomber pilots tuned their radios to the frequency 6050 kilocycles and at exactly 12:15 p.m., flying at about one thousand feet, linked up with several dozen Marine and Army fighters over Torokina. Among them was Ryan, flying his newly assigned plane, tail number 02402, and the rest of his four-Corsair division. They were assigned to fly “top cover” above the bombers—the most likely position where enemy fighters might try to use the element of surprise to attack the formation.

  The mammoth swarm of American aircraft—with the bombers flying at one thousand feet and fighters at two thousand feet—continued northwest from Torokina on a heading of 295 degrees. They flew in total radio silence. The hum of their propellers and the whine of their engines were the only things piercing the stillness of a bright Thursday afternoon in one of the remotest corners of the world.