“What about Pete?” I demanded. “He didn’t make it to Vam Tho!”
I was in Vam Tho. I would have known if he made it.
The doctor’s hands opened wide in a shrug. “The Vietnamese kept me in a POW camp for over four years. It was even more years after that before I knew if Pete were alive or dead.”
Had we thrown Mhai in the pigpen? Had she been among those on the canal bank? Was I a part of Pete’s tragedy?
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
I was remembering the rain. The same rain that fell on Pete and Cochran at the canal fell on me in the village. Dark gray sheets of it that all but obliterated distant vision. It continued for over an hour, flooding the canal and reinforcing our moat against enemy hiding in the banana grove. Muddy water flooded the hamlet’s foot-beaten streets. Bedraggled chickens with their plumage soaked and wilted sought refuge in abandoned hooches. Most of the inhabitants had been rounded up and now huddled in the rain inside the pigpen, guarded by surly GIs wearing coated canvas ponchos.
I ordered Doc Steinmeyer to transfer Sgt. Holtzauer and Bugs Wortham into the shelter of the nearest hooch. Bubba Lawmaster helped him; he was having no success getting through on the PRC-25 radio anyhow. The damned airwaves were jammed tight. The Doc and Bubba hoisted the wounded platoon sergeant between them and lugged him out of the weather. He was half-unconscious from pain and shock and the morphine Doc shot into his veins. They deposited him and came back for Bugs. I stood in a sea of water and mud with my poncho around me, listening.
“Listen, L.T.,” Lawmaster said.
After more than an hour of fierce battle, firing had all but ceased on both forward flanks. At first, I thought the rain might be masking the sounds of combat. But, no, the fighting out there was actually over. We wouldn’t know until later that the Nguoi Nhai company from Shit City had been all but wiped out and that our own Bravo Company suffered serious losses before breaking contact in the rain and slogging most of the way back to FSB Savage. Third Herd had been left alone in Vam Tho.
“There’s a reason why he ain’t screamin no more, Lt. Kaz,” Lawmaster went on.
I had been so intent on listening for the firefights, attempting to assess the shifting vagaries and judge the outcome, that I blocked Bug’s howling totally out of mind. Now, the silence in the aftermath seemed deafening.
“Bugs is dead,” Lawmaster said.
I shook my head. Damn! “Put him in the hooch anyhow,” I ordered.
Word of the reason for the cessation of Bug’s soprano dirge spread quickly along the defending lines around the village. At first, there was relief that he had shut up. Uneasiness followed that. The uneasiness of knowing that another of our own had passed from among us, killed by the villagers. Disliked and disrespected in life, Bugs Wortham in death became a symbol of how boonirats were being picked off one by one while extorting small revenge in return. Only by dying had Bugs become one of us.
A burst of nearby rifle fire shattered my contemplations on death and dying. I started as though out of a nightmare. Lawmaster dropped to one knee and brought up his weapon. Doc Steinmeyer dived for his rifle leaning against the inside of the medic hut. Sgt. Tolliver threw me a questioning look from this side of the canal berm.
“It’s from the pig pen!” he shouted.
“Keep the troops alert,” I shouted back, already jogging laboriously through the mud toward the makeshift prison.
I found villagers inside the fence wailing and threatening and bunching up with faces outward like water buf protecting their young. Sgt. Wallace had left Pineapple and one of the FNGS, Morris, along with Bias from Third Squad, to guard the captives. The three GIs were spaced out around the pen, brandishing rifles as though they expected the villagers to rush and overpower them.
“Some gook broad with a little kid made a break for it,” Bias explained.
“Where are they?”
“I guess they got away. Pineapple tried to even the score, but Hawaiians can’t shoot for shit.”
Pineapple flipped him the finger. Bias replied with a sour laugh. He threw his Ml6 to his shoulder and yelled at the prisoners, “Shut the fuck up!”
They seemed to realize they were pushing the Americans to the breaking point. Bias laughed as they quieted down. He patted his rifle. “This is the only fuckin thing they understand,” he said. “L.T., Bugs has stopped screamin. Is he dead?”
“We don’t shoot civilians,” I said, not answering his question.
“Sure we do, Lt. Kaz. If they’re VC and they’re tryin to escape. Ain’t none of these slopes civilians anyhow. They’re Viet Cong right down to the little nipple suckers.”
All three boonirats wore ominous expressions, like masks. Nothing was more dangerous than a nineteen-year-old American kid who had learned to hate and kill—and who was scared to death. Morris, the FNG, had pulled his helmet low over his eyes. Even through the miniature waterfall cascading off his helmet, I saw and recognized the fear in the wildness of his eyes and the way they stared out at me.
“Is it true, sir?” he asked nervously. “The shootin has stopped. Bravo ain’t comin, are they, sir? They been wiped out. There ain’t nobody left out here except us. Sir, the gooks are comin. Ain’t they comin, Lieutenant?”
“We don’t know Bravo is wiped out,” I lectured sternly. “We got a job to do, Morris. You just think about that.”
“I wish Sgt. Holtzauer hadn’t got hit,” he said wistfully.
I let it roll off. I had also depended on the tough platoon sergeant.
Bias was still gnawing on something else. “Is Bugs dead?” he asked again.
I took a deep breath and acknowledged he was. Most of the platoon had accepted as much anyhow.
“If the slopes come in after us,” Pineapple vowed, “we’re gonna shoot every cocksucker in the pigpen first.”
“The only thing you’ll do is keep an eye on them,” I said.
“And leave ’em to stab us in the back like they done ol’ Bugs?”
“You heard what I said, Corporal.”
“Whatever you say, Lieutenant,” he replied with a hollow burst of laughter.
It was a gray, liquid, threatening world. There was no wind, but undulating curtains of rain formed and reformed the landscape. I walked the entire perimeter, checking to make sure the men were watchful, hoping my appearance would reassure them. They were nervous, tense.
“The shootin has stopped, L.T.,” they said. “Bugs was fucked up, but he didn’t deserve to have his guts cut out by these little yellow fuckers.”
I sloshed across the village, head down and shrinking from the roar of rain on my helmet. Sgt. Wallace stood with his back pressed against a palm, seeking some shelter beneath the tree’s fronds. He was peering out across the rice paddy when I came up.
“There ain’t nothin movin out there yet, Lt. Kaz,” he said.
Daniels had his machine gun set up for traversing fire in one of the abandoned VC positions. He squatted in the mud with his poncho spread out around him like a tent. His head stuck out the chimney. Rainwater rivulated off him and formed a small pond around his base. Beyond to his either flank huddled other boonirats, their forms made indistinct by rainfall. Mad Dog pushed himself erect and walked over inside his collapsed poncho tent. “FTA”—Fuck The Army-was initialed across the front of his helmet cover.
He made the same observation I had heard repeated all around the perimeter. “L.T., the shootin has stopped.”
I nodded.
“You know what that means, L.T.? It means we’re next. We’re the only ones left out here.”
“Look at the bright side, Dog,” Wallace teased without humor. “You’re finally gonna get to look the gooks eye to eye.”
“Fu-uck. It ain’t I mind shootin ’em, Mother Kaz. They got it comin. It’s them shootin all of us I don’t particularly cater to.”
I looked at the Dog with his dark mad dog eyes and black hair stringing down across his forehead from underneath his helmet. I had to admit t
hat things didn’t exactly look up. Apparently, we were cut off from the rest of the company, or what was left of it. Without radio contact, we had no way of calling for either artillery support or extraction. Helicopters wouldn’t be able to fly in this weather anyhow. Mad Dog was right. We probably were next.
“Colonel Hackman’ll know something’s wrong when none of the units check in by radio,” I rationalized.
“So what the fuck, sir? It’ll be too late for us.” Dog’s eyes blazed fiercely. “L.T., I got an idea. If we was to take those gooks out of the pig pen an’ put ’em right down on the bank of the canal so the VC could see ’em...”
“It’s against Geneva Conventions to use civilians as hostages or shields.”
“Fu-uck, L.T. Nobody who wrote them Geneva Conventions is out here about to get creamed. Put ’em on the banks so Charlie knows if he attacks us, we’re gonna shoot them. Charlie is gonna think twice about attackin us if he thinks we’ll shoot his family first.”
“Mebbe we oughta listen, L.T.,” Sgt. Wallace said, to cut off my objections.
“We won’t actually have to shoot ’em, Lieutenant,” Dog argued, “Just make the gooks think we will.”
The Dog’s eyes shined from some savage inner fire. “Lt. Kaz, they’re all VC anyhow. Let God sort ’em out. Fu-uck.”
“Do you have a better plan, sir?” Sgt. Wallace asked, as though hoping I had.
Using civilians like that was against all ethics of war, even though this war had few ethics anyhow. Maybe no war did. It troubled me that I possessed so little force of character as not to reject the proposal outright and with force. If I had thought more about it, I should have seen how the captured villagers were becoming targets for misplaced GI ire and anger, emotions exacerbated by the monsoon storm. Rage in Vam Tho that day was slowly building upon the anxiety that the VC would come for us as soon as they finished with the rest of Bravo and the ARVN Frogs.
“Keep alert,” I warned Sgt. Wallace as I turned to leave.
“Think about it, Lieutenant.” Dog’s voice rose shrilly, coming through the rain. “We’re all gonna end up like Bugs Wortham. We can’t just sit here. We’re next, Lieutenant. We’re next.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Attempting to shake the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach that things were getting out of hand, I walked back through the village toward the canal where I had established my platoon command post. The corpses of the two dead women lying in front of the hooch where they had fallen only added to the feeling. Rain beat the earth and splashed mud on them. Pink water filled the cavity left in the belly of the older woman whose fetus had been evicted out onto the ground. I turned my head away and hurried on past.
I had to do something.
A stifled cry brought me up short. I swung my rifle round and stared at the dead women and the fetus still partly in its sack in the mud. It had to be dead too.
The cry came again. A mewling sound, like that from some helpless trapped animal. But not from the fetus. Cautiously, I turned toward the door of another nearby hut. I approached it, crouching with finger on trigger ready to start pumping steel.
I swept the grass door curtain aside with my rifle barrel. I stood there a moment, waiting for something to happen. When nothing did, I took a deep breath and literally leaped inside the hut, sweeping my weapon and ready for action.
Still nothing.
As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I mentally catalogued a little Buddhist shrine to one side, grass mats on the floor, raised sleeping platforms, several huge four-foot-tall grain jars against the back wall... Vietnam peasants enjoyed few possessions.
There was a young woman sprawled on the floor beneath the shrine, face up. She wore black homespun peasant pajamas. Fresh blood spidered a grotesque pattern on her upturned face. She remained deathly still. I knelt at the body and immediately discerned that she was not making the sounds I heard. The woman was dead.
Something about her features, something vaguely familiar, prompted me to take a second look. I gave a little start of recognition. She was the tall, beautiful girl from her grandparents’ brick house at the bridge outside the Dong Tam army post. The memory of her and the plump little baby she had plopped onto my lap were the only gentle images I retained of Vietnam—and now she was dead in a most ungentle way. A bullet had all but blown off the left side of her face and head.
I knelt at her side for what seemed a long while. I felt the weight of the war bearing down on me; the sound of rain and my own blood rushed in my ears. Pineapple had not missed after all when he opened fire on the woman escaping from the pigpen. Some outfit I commanded, that made war on women. So far, Third Herd had a body count of three for the Colonel’s dic board, four if you counted the fetus, and all were female.
Still kneeling, I reached out and rested my palm for a second on the undamaged side of the girl’s cold face.
“I am so sorry it had to be you,” I whispered, then stood up.
In the emotion over discovering the corpse of someone I knew, I had almost forgotten the baby and the noise that attracted me to the hut. She had had her baby with her when she broke from the pigpen. I looked around the room. There, again—the whimpering, the stifled little cry. They came from one of the giant clay jars. This brave, beautiful creature had managed to hide her son before she died.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
A furious case of the shakes overcame me in Doctor Cochran’s garden. Remembering that day in Vam Tho, I trembled violently and sweat crawled off my face. My breath came in short, painful gasps. Doctor Cochran jumped to his feet to come to my aid.
“Mr. Kazmarek!” Bonnie cried.
I held up one hand to reassure them I wasn’t having a heart attack.
My mind had suppressed so much of what happened that day in Vam Tho that it wasn’t until this moment that I made the connection. All those years seeing Mhai’s portrait on Pete’s wall in Florida, knowing she seemed familiar, like someone I had known and perhaps cared about long ago, and not until now did I realize that I had known her. Pete’s and my path had almost crossed once again. The girl I met at the bridge, the girl lying dead in the hooch, was Mhai.
“Mhai is dead,” I said slowly, with finality, while Doctor Cochran and Bonnie My stared at me.
“How do you--?” the doctor began.
“I saw her here, in Vam Tho,” I said. “I think when she found out Vam Tho was going to come under attack, she came here to get her baby son out.”
Had Pete somehow made it to Vam Tho without my men spotting him and also found Mhai like that? Dead? Was her death what had eaten at him all these years?
Incredulity wrote itself on the features of Doctor Cochran and his Viet wife.
“Mhai have baby son, for goo’ness sake!” Bonnie My gasped.
“How do you know all this?” Cochran demanded suspiciously. Then it struck him with the sudden impact of a hammer falling. “Oh, my God! You were here! You were the... You were that Lt. Kazmarek!”
There was nothing I could say, no way to defend myself. I stood up slowly when I saw the doctor’s eyes harden. Horror and disgust appeared in his face. I looked away. I expected Pete’s former executive officer to ask me to leave, to run me out of town, even before I could depart on my own.
“I was here,” I confessed.
It was the first time I had admitted it to anyone since leaving Vietnam. Not even my Elizabeth had known about Vam Tho and the black events of a day I had tried so hard for so long to believe never happened.
I drew in a long, ragged breath, a breath old men with deep and permanent regrets sometimes take because they have to breath even when they may not want to.
“I’ll be going now,” I murmured through the cold silence.
Doctor Cochran reached a restraining hand toward me. “You came back here,” he said. “Why?”
I stood before the younger man, as before a judge. Each breath burned in my lungs as though I breathed in the memories themselves, like flames. I stood l
ooking in the direction of the canal and the statue erected there to memorialize the victims of that day. People who were my victims. And I could not answer why I returned.
At first, I had convinced myself it was because of Pete and Mhai. I knew Mhai’s fate now, had known it all along perhaps, had I possessed the courage to delve into the past I carried within myself. As for Pete and the secret he couldn’t live with? Maybe I would never know that.
But the return was about more than Pete and Mhai, I now realized. I returned to Vietnam for myself, to somehow confront what had been and see if there were hopes of making amends. I still couldn’t adequately explain it. Not to someone else, and least of all to myself
“Was it... ?” I stammered, unable to hide my anguish. “Was it all real?”
“It was real,” Cochran murmured after a pause. “But sometimes we who were there were not real.” His voice softened. “We became someone we were not before nor were afterward. The war made us that way.”
I nodded slowly and made to leave.
“Please sit down, Jack.”
The horror and disgust had disappeared from his expression. I saw once again in it the sadness so many Vietnam vets lived with for their entire lives.
“We all have our penitence to pay because of the war,” he said. “Veterans who have been there should not pass judgment on each other. Let God do that.”
I felt like crying. I had felt like crying when Pete died. I felt like crying now. But no tears came. I slowly sank back into my chair and looked at the approaching black clouds.
“There’s heavy rain coming,” I said. “I need to get back to Saigon. I won’t burden you much longer, Doctor. But there is still one thing I’m curious about. Mhai was dead here in Vam Tho. I saw her. Yet you said you saw her when you were in the POW camp. How could that be?”
The Return: A Novel of Vietnam Page 27