The Return: A Novel of Vietnam

by Charles W. Sasser

  The thought of returning to Vietnam kept appearing at odd times in the front of my mind. Each time, I felt a jolt of excitement and curiosity mixed with dread and fear. Perhaps it was simply that as we get older we begin to search our pasts for the things in it—symbols, memories, places, people—that help make sense of our lives as they converge with approaching eternity. No one could ever actually go back, but we could go back to points on earth where our lives changed or were re-directed.

  Vietnam had relaxed its restrictions on tourist travel. Many Vietnam War veterans were beginning to undertake pilgrimages back to the skinny, curving strip of Southeast Asia that had haunted us for more than thirty years. I saw them on TV sometimes. Misty-eyed coots, some frail, some pot-gutted and bald, some in wheel chairs and missing limbs, others in their forties and fifties but gray and looking older, all returning to remember fallen comrades and days of our lives which were lived more intensely than at any time before or since. Some men broke down and cried like babies; it was often the first time they had cried since the war ended.

  “Goddamned fools!” I fussed, stomping about the house just to make some noise and get the thought out of the front of my brain.

  Besides, I admonished myself, chances were slim, damned slim, that I could locate either the priest Father Pierre or Ensign Cochran, if either were still alive. Who could possible remember Pete and Mhai and those times in a war nearly three decades ended? It was foolish to even think about it.

  But when I thought about it, really thought about it in the middle of some night with the moonlight shining through the bedroom window and lying cold on Elizabeth’s empty side of the bed, when I was truly honest because there was now no one left to deceive except myself, I was forced to admit that returning to Vietnam, if I decided to go, was about more than a whimsical quest for the story of Pete Brauer and his Vietnamese lady. It was also about me.

  It terrified me to consider the possibility that I could die in my sleep without the nightmare ever being resolved to the point that I could live with it in the daylight. It occurred to me that I was nurturing a subconscious drive to return and face my own skeletons from that different day. Maybe I owed it to myself as much as to Pete and Mhai.

  One thing for certain: In digging for Pete’s past, there was no way to avoid confronting my own. They were intertwined, our pasts, his and mine, in and around Dong Tam and Vam Tho. I had an uneasy feeling that the quest I hoped would end with Lump Adkins was actually only beginning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “I was with the LRRPS, 173d Airborne,” said the American who sat next to me on the airliner. He stuck out his hand. “Bill McCracken. My brother was killed with the Marine Expeditionary Brigade in 1965. His name—“

  His voice cracked.

  “—His name is on The Wall.”

  I shook his hand and exchanged bona fides. “Jack Kazmarek. I was with the 9th Infantry Division at Dong Tam.”

  “We lost friends,” he said with that misty-eyed look.

  “Yes,” I said and glanced away.

  “I don’t know why I’m coming back,” he mused. “I was so happy to get out of here the last time.”

  “We all were.”

  I tried to imagine what he might have looked like back then. He was almost completely bald now and any height he might once have possessed had gone to potbelly. Undoubtedly, he was a grandfather with chubby grandkids he spoiled. Probably a retired restaurant owner or company accountant.

  “Are you all right, Jack?” he solicitated. “You’re pale and sweating.”

  “I don’t think I’ve really been all right since—“

  Maybe Lump was right—we all had left something behind in Vietnam. He spent almost an entire night telling what he knew of Pete and Mhai, saying, once started, he had to follow it to the end. Well, I had also started. Now I had to follow it to the end, to wherever it might lead, to see what it was that both Pete and I might have left in Vietnam.

  The retired grandfather rested a kindly hand on my arm.

  “I know,” he said. “I do understand. Maybe that’s why we come—so that we can be all right again.”

  Nervousness, anxiety, uncertainty, anticipation... I felt like I was going to vomit. I quickly unbuckled my seat belt and made a dash for the in-flight toilet. That was where I spent most of the rest of the flight into Ho Chi Minh City.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I had visited Saigon only twice during the war, once while recuperating from wounds not serious enough to earn me a bird home. The year was 1968--a strange year back in the U.S. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Peace marchers turned violent and rioting students closed down Columbia University. It was dope, sex, and rock ‘n roll. LBJ chose not to run for President again. Miami had its first race riot during the Republican Convention, and the Democratic Convention brought “Days of Rage” to Chicago to tear the city apart. “Our children are trying to tell us something” was the code phrase of the year. Half the 58,000 men whose names would later appear on the Vietnam War Memorial, The Wall, were already dead.

  In Saigon, an NBC-TV cameraman kept the film rolling to show Americans in their living rooms General Loan firing his pistol point-blank into the head of a handcuffed VC in front of the An Quang Pagoda. It was a TV war, dinner fare in homes in Cincinnati, Jacksonville and Phoenix. The narrow street known as Dong Khoi to the Vietnamese, rue Catinal to the French, and Tu Do to GIs was home to raunchy massage parlors and bawdy dives where B-girls stripped, sipped fake champagne called Saigon Tea and made frequent trips towing drunk GIs to little rooms out back or upstairs.

  The year began with TET, the Vietnamese New Year, and the TET offensive. U.S. Marines fought it out on the grounds of the American embassy—and seven years after that, in 1975, frantic Vietnamese rioted to get inside the embassy compound to escape approaching North Vietnamese troops. Relays of helicopters flew embassy personnel and a few faithful retainers to U. S. aircraft carriers waiting offshore. NVA tanks rammed through the wrought-iron gates of the presidential palace and the war was lost.

  Although Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, the name failed to stick. Saigon was still Saigon.

  The Continental Hotel, where the travel agency had reserved me a room, looked down on Lam Son Square, named for the village where the Fifteenth Century Vietnamese patriot Le Loi was born. Across the way was the Caraville, on whose roof Eric Sevareid conducted his nightly stand-up news broadcasts in 1967 with the low Saigon skyline behind him. My quarters was a carpeted extravagance with reproduction Oriental furniture, huge armoires, welcoming bowls of fruit and flowers, a tea set on a carved table, a mini-fridge, a TV, and a VCR. Elizabeth would have appreciated it.

  The travel agency had also booked me a cab and an English-speaking driver to pick me up at the hotel tomorrow morning. I had the rest of today free. After resting in my room, I steeled myself to venture out into the city.

  Tu Do Street began at a lively square, a broad intersection where Saigon’s own Notre Dame, red-bricked and spired, competed for attention with the glass-domed central post office. The post office contained, as did all government buildings, a huge romantic portrait of Ho Chi Minh. From there, the street proceeded south toward the Saigon River and the waterfront until it reached the old Majestik Hotel where Pete met Commander Minh that time. I left the big portrait of Mhai in my hotel room but brought with me the snapshot of her in her Nancy Sinatra outfit and Pete in his SEAL’s black beret, I attempted by the background in the photo to determine where it might have been taken, but soon gave up. Everything had changed so much.

  Saigon’s population had swollen to about five million, matching its wartime bloat when refugees had fled to it seeking protection. It was a jumble of new construction with neon marquees and billboards hawking Sanyo and Panasonic. Honda motorbikes and Toyota cars snarled at each other in the busy street. Whole families sputtered by on a single bike, balancing on it like a carnival act. Sport-shirted young men and long-gloved young w
omen in dark glasses zoomed solo. High school girls in white ao dai peddled by on flotillas of conventional bicycles when classes let out. Grade schoolers zipped about in white shirts and red ties. Only tourists these days rode about in old-fashioned trishaws and cyclos.

  I couldn’t walk a dozen steps without being surrounded by people vending postcards and t-shirts bearing mottos like No Hope Without Dope. Souvenir shops were filled with piles of metal dog tags, purportedly from GIs in the war, and Zippo lighters etched with wartime place names like Chu Lai, Ben Tre, Bien Hoa. I bought one that said Dong Tam, even though I no longer smoked. Everyone, it seemed, sold Rolex watches. Everything was fake, the dog tags, the lighters, the Rolexes. Everything. Fakery had reached epidemic proportions.

  I liked Saigon better during the war. Somehow, the war made it seem more honest.

  Overwhelmed and exhausted by it all, I escaped to my room at the Continental. I stood at the window, looking down on the square, sweating profusely. My stomach felt jittery, like I might vomit again, and my hands trembled, sloshing the ice in my drink. I was here, back in Vietnam, and it was different but somehow it was the same. I came looking for Pete Brauer’s secret. What I must also face was the secret that I had kept from everyone, even Elizabeth, for all these years. I wasn’t so sure now that I could go through with it.

  Returning to Vietnam might turn out to be the biggest mistake of my life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  It was either the end of the monsoon season, or the beginning. I couldn’t tell which. At any rate, the sun shone bright in the morning on Highway 4 leading out of Saigon toward Dong Tam and the Mekong Delta. It would be hot and muggy soon and the red Toyota cab the travel agency hired for me had no air conditioning. I had decided to try the Catholic mission at Dong Tam first. Perhaps, if Father Pierre still lived, I would need to go no further.

  Last night in the hotel had been another nightmare night, as I feared. Even orange juice hadn’t helped me sleep. I finally arose fatigued and out of sorts to dress in baggy shorts, a short sleeved sports shirt and a straw hat to beat off the sun. I was surprised and embarrassed all over again at the long shanks of bony pale legs protruding from the khaki shorts I bought at Wal-Mart before I left home. Some men as they got older lost hair on their bodies. I was one of them.

  The only thing I took with me was the tube case containing the large portrait of Mhai. It might come in handy in refreshing foggy memories. I climbed into the front seat with the driver.

  He said he was Chinese and for me to call him Van. He seemed to remember an elderly French priest still presiding over the mission in Dong Tam.

  “Welcome back to Vietnam, Colonel Kazmarek,” Van grinned happily, a little annoying considering the mood I was in. He was short and squat, about thirty, with a flat Pekinese face and friendly eyes. He knew my rank and background from the visa information I filled out for entry. The government must provide it on request.

  “I attend Harvard University and speak wery good Englis’,” Van said proudly. “I am at your service for week.”

  I hoped not to be here for a week.

  “With which outfit did you fight, Colonel Kazmarek?”

  I told him, grumpily.

  “I know it well,” he said, brightening even more, and continued as though reading from the indoctrination literature once passed out to newby replacements. He had done his homework, “The division was known as ‘Old Reliable.’ It was first American division since World War II to organize, equip and train for deployment to oversea theater of war. Also first infantry unit to fix permanent base camp in Mekong Delta. I discover all this information at Harvard. Wery good university.”

  He went on chattering tour guide-style as we raced, horn blaring, into the Vietnamese countryside. If it weren’t for the incongruous juxtaposition of a modern brick or wooden house here and there, signs of electricity, and a few TV antennas on grass-thatched roofs, time might well have stood still outside Saigon. Kids rode water buffalo and old women squatted around breakfast fires chewing betel nut leaves. Men rolled up the legs of their black pajamas and settled straw cone hats on their heads to work the rice fields. I stared out at the passing scenery, so foreign, so alien, yet so hauntingly familiar. I searched back into the fog of memory for familiar landmarks. Selectively seeking some memories, denying and refusing others.

  I started to sweat, not simply because of the mounting temperature, as I remembered my first trip over this road. It had been in the bed of an army deuce-and-a-half truck with a bunch of other FNGs, all of us scared bugfuck. I was a second lieutenant being assigned as platoon leader to replace another lieutenant who had lost his balls to a Bouncing Betty mine. Because I was older by eight to ten years than any of the other officers or EM replacements, a former career sergeant retreaded into a gentleman, the replacement depot put me in charge. I lighted a cigarette and tried to appear nonchalant as we pulled out of Saigon to travel through enemy-held territory in a one-truck convoy full of nervous greenhorns and one veteran driver from the motor pool.

  “I’m issuing you cherries ammo—that’s ammunition,” he growled. “Under no circumstances will you lock and load without my command. Is that clear?”

  Many of the bridges along Highway 4 had been blown up and were being repaired by U.S. Army engineers. ARVN checkpoints and security camps built of dried mud and barbed wire squatted alongside the road. South Vietnamese ARVN troops resembled little children garbed in oversized helmets and baggy uniforms, like kids playing war in a vacant lot. Few of them weighed much more than one hundred pounds. I was only six feet tall, and lean, almost skinny, but I appeared as a giant among them. ARVN held hands, as was the Asian custom, and waved at us.

  After covering a number of miles, the motor pool driver pulled the truck over to the side of the road next to a machine gun checkpoint. He looked tense. We were in the heart of the Mekong Delta.

  “Get out and stretch your legs and take a leak,” he advised. “We’re about to enter Ambush Alley.”

  Ambush Alley? I almost heard the Spoing! of assholes clamping shut and the dry crackle of tongues trying to moisten lips,

  “Okay. Now you’re getting my command. Load a round in your chambers. Squat down below seat level and keep an eye peeled on both sides. If anybody shoots at us, return fire. Suck it in and let’s go. I ain’t stopping for nothing from here until we reach Dong Tam.”

  Now, these years later, the checkpoints and the ARVN outposts were gone and the bridges were intact. There was the somnolent buzz of peace in the air.

  “Wait!” I exclaimed.

  Van calmly braked and pulled over; he had obviously tour-guided other American veterans.

  A narrow asphalt road, much repaired but still pot-holed, junctioned off the main highway. I knew that road.

  “Widow Maker Lane,” I murmured, staring. “Van, that road dead ends in two kilometers?”

  “You are familiar with it, Colonel Kazmarek,” Van said with a smile. “There are rice fields and canal at the end.”

  “Turn down it.”

  Stately coconut palms and their shorter cousins, banana trees, shaded the narrow road, turning it into a pleasant tunnel. Mamasans in black with baskets balanced on their heads, shouting children, a boy with a long stick driving a water buf cow all walked the side of the road. The children waved. The adults continued walking. I looked out upon little farms with grass or tin hooches.

  The road curved where I remembered it. I held up my hand. I felt a shortness of breath as Van stopped the cab and I got out. I stood by the edge of the road in the shade and gazed out over emerald rice fields edged by palms and even greener jungle until my breathing returned to normal. Then I turned back to look at the road.

  It had happened right at this spot. Two men died here that day. Fortes lost a leg; Norman got punched though the lungs; and little Arles Gray would never be the same again mentally. It had happened right here, but there was nothing here now to mark this spot of death as any different from any other spot. L
ife went on, time covered the scars, and soon even those memories upon which events had seared themselves would vanish.

  Van drove me to the dead-end, and I got out again. Back then, there had been four hooches at road’s end. A trail cut around the hooches and through jungle before it reached the rice paddies.

  The jungle was gone now. Rice paddies grew all the way up to the road. Only two hooches remained; the other two had been replaced by a decent-looking house constructed of concrete blocks.

  I gazed out over the rice to a distance of about a half-mile, and there was nothing there now except more rice. PPB Cougar, platoon patrol base, once occupied the center of that field like a giant crayfish berm. A primitive frontier mini-fort, three-sided, with mud-and-sandbag reinforced walls and razor concertina outside those. Barely one hundred feet in length on each of its long sides, it contained a command and commo bunker and fighting defensive bunkers in its three corners. Brackish water from the rice field kept it flooded. We connected the bunkers with walkways made of sandbags. Hardcore’s FSB Savage lay over the horizon in one direction, while 9th Division’s Dong Tam base camp lay further on down the road.

  Mad Dog Carter had his own idea of the true function of PPB Cougar. “If a large enemy force were to start marching to attack Dong Tam,” he mused, “they’d have to hit us first. That would give Dong Tam time to prepare.”

  “History would record us as a speed bump,” said Donatelli, the platoon’s RTO.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Vietnam during the war was a moral vacuum full of meaningless violence. You seldom saw the enemy and often when you saw him you didn’t recognize him. Ancient mamasans tossed grenades into your skivvies when your back was turned; children begged GIs for “chop-chop” during the day and set booby traps at night; little girls were VC messengers. There were stories of whores booby-trapping their snatches with razor blades or being sent out deliberately diseased with “Black Syphilis” to infect American soldiers.