The Return: A Novel of Vietnam

by Charles W. Sasser

  The sun hung low behind the group on the dock, silhouetting figures and making it difficult for him to make out features. He squinted and shaded his eyes with his palm. He thought the woman looked familiar. It was something about her unusual height and the long flow of her black hair.

  When one of the cadre stepped between her and the sun, the shade brought her momentarily out of silhouette. Cochran gave a start. His breath caught in his throat.

  Mhai!

  At first her presence excited him. But then he sobered. She was the reason the Nguoi Nhai had been wiped out at Vam Tho, he captured, and Lord only knew what happened to Pete. It should be no surprise that the lover of Commander Minh should be in the company of NLF bigwigs. She was probably the one making the decision to execute him. Chieu hoi, my ass! Double agent was more like it.

  He watched her bitterly, squinting, as she delivered some sort of papers to Edgar G. She looked up in his direction, then turned her head so that her opposite profile was toward him. He frowned.

  He had been so certain that this woman was the traitorous bitch returned. Now, he was no longer as sure about it. There was something wrong with this side of her face. It was malformed, some sort of horrid birthmark or birth defect. Viewed from this angle, the woman was ugly. He turned back to his fire, squatted, and continued with preparation of his meal. Whatever the purpose of the meeting on the dock, he had learned years ago that there was nothing he could do about it, whether it concerned him or not.

  Less than a week later he was taken clandestinely to Saigon and released without explanation. He walked into MAAG headquarters, gaunt and unkempt, and reported. Captain Draper, of course, had long ago rotated stateside, taking his Progress Is Our Most Important Product signs with him. No one in the office knew who Ensign Cochran was; they had to look up his name on an MIA list. He was immediately sent back to the United States. He had to wait until the war ended to find Bonnie My again.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  “I can never be sure it was Mhai I saw on the dock,” Doctor Cochran mused. “But when they let me go so soon after the visit... It had to be Mhai. Who else could it have been?”

  “Mhai was dead in Vam Tho,” I insisted.

  The doctor shrugged. What difference did it make now, after all these years?

  “Whoever it was,” he said, favoring his wife with a caressing look, “I know Bonnie was behind her. Bonnie never gave up trying to get me released. They would probably have let me go after the war ended, but that was another two or three years off. I was wasting away. I might never have made it.”

  Bonnie My squeezed his hand in both hers. He leaned back in the lawn chair, relaxed now and idly gazing in the direction of the monsoon clouds creeping across the sky to blast out the sun. He had gone back to those years of the war and survived them all over again. Now, he was safely returned to the garden of his own house with his own wife and once again it was over for him.

  He was lucky. I thought it would never be over for me, not after I had opened it up again. Pete had lived with his guilt, died with it. I would have to live with mine. And die with it. If I had subconsciously hoped to end the nightmares be returning to their origins, I was finding the trip not to be a panacea. Nothing had really changed except that perhaps I had put some of Pete’s old demons to rest, if not my own. I knew Pete’s story at last and at least part of Mhai’s story and the tragedy that had separated them. Blame that one on me too. I had been the cause of Mhai’s death and perhaps Pete’s years of sorrow. Something else to live with. More grist for nightmares.

  At least I could go home now, to Florida, back to that lonely house where Elizabeth no longer was, with the house next door where Pete no longer was, to a place where soon I would no longer be. Suddenly, nonetheless, I was in a hurry to get back, or perhaps only in a hurry to get out of this place. For me, it would always be a place of death and dishonor. I wished that I had never returned.

  “Whatever happen to little son of Mhai?” Bonnie My Cochran asked me.

  “If it were Mhai he saw,” Doctor Cochran said, unconvinced.

  “Baby of Mhai not die in Vam Tho when—?”

  I interrupted her before she could finish. “I left him in the rice urn where she hid him. I knew the villagers or somebody would find him sooner or later after…”

  After Commander Minh’s VC wiped us out?

  “...After we were gone,” I finished and left it hanging, unwilling to go back there again.

  Bonnie My still looked puzzled and made as though to continue her interrogation. Cochran frowned at her and shook his head. Let it be, his expression said. They should not probe if I were reluctant to talk about it. We all faced, and avoided, our pasts in our own ways. I had gone back to that different day as far and for as long as I was willing to go. As Pete might have said, let sleeping pratas lie.

  A rumble of nearing thunder, sounding like distant mortar fire, brought me to my feet.

  “Maybe we should go inside,” Doctor Cochran suggested, with another quick glance at the lowering sky.

  Too vividly I recalled the hard rain of that other day in Vam Tho. Of how blood smelled thick and copperish in the saturated air. A fat raindrop struck my hat; I jumped as though hit by a bullet and looked anxiously at the sky. It was too much to hope that this rain, these years later, could succeed in washing clean the air of Vam Tho when that other rain back then had not. For me, the air here would always be tainted.

  I wanted to be out of Vam Tho before the rain came again. I rushed my farewells. The Cochrans seemed as eager to see the last of me and the memories I had brought as I was to see the last of Vietnam.

  “I would like to send flowers to Pete’s grave,” Cochran said.

  “Here’s my card with my address. I’ll do it for you.”

  I hesitated. The rain was coming.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. It was all I could think to say. “I have to go now.”

  “Your driver... ?”

  Van is visiting friends. He’s waiting for me.”

  I was trying to edge away from their looks of concern.

  “Are you aw’right, Mr. Kazmarek, for goo’ness sake?” Bonnie My cried.

  “I will be, once I get home again.”

  I must have appeared strange to them indeed as I dashed away as fast as my knobby old man’s bare legs in tourist shorts allowed. I hurried into their lives looking anxious, then hurried out again looking the same way.

  I kept my eyes fixed on the red taxi beyond the canal, next to which the black Honda still sat parked. When I walked into Vam Tho only hours earlier, over the bridge and down the street to the clinic, I kept my eyes focused straight ahead, looking neither to right nor left, except for that one dreadful relapse when my eyes took it upon themselves to seek out the monument to the dead of Vam Tho. I was determined to leave Vam Tho the same way I came in. I wanted as few new memories about this place as possible. I had gone back far enough.

  My mind would not have it that way. It kept picking up impressions to twist into my old torments. A few raindrops plopped in the dust, the way they were plopping when Bugs Wortham and Daniels killed the women and the fetus. Their hut, where it happened, would have been right along... here. And right along here was the hooch where I found the girl from the bridge, Mhai... Over there was where the pig pen was... and down there, down there by the canal...

  I was almost running by now, pursued by pratas, my eyes reaching for the bridge. Van trotted grinning out of one of the little houses to join me. Mistaking my haste as a retreat from impending weather, he quipped good-naturedly, “Harvard man like me know, how you say? enough to get in out of rain. Mebbe so we better stay in Vam Tho until rain—”

  “No.”

  I made it to the footbridge, panting, and trotted across, forcing myself not to so much as glance at the monument. Van picked up on my urgency, puzzling though it must have been to him, and quickly unlocked the doors to his taxi. I tossed Mhai in her tube into the back seat and started to slide into th
e seat past Van, who was still trying to extract his key from the passenger door. I failed to catch the significance of the slack-jawed look he cast over my shoulder behind me.

  I froze when something jabbed me hard in the spine. It could only be the muzzle of a pistol. Van’s face immediately drained of blood.

  “Lt. Kazmarek,” a deep voice announced in perfect English. “You have finally returned to the scene of your crimes.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  Van stood pale and pressed against the front fender of his taxi, as though he would blend into the metal and vanish if he could. His eyes round with fear stared on past me, fixated on the gunman at my back.

  “It is fitting you know who takes your life—and why,” said the voice. The gun released pressure in the small of my back as its master took a step back. “Turn slowly to face me, Lt. Kazmarek.”

  I hesitated, playing for time to let my brain slow down, to attempt to figure out what was going on. The gun jabbed against my spine, then released again. I winced in pain. When I turned around, I wasn’t all that surprised to find armed and standing before me the tall old man from the restaurant and the black Honda. His dark gaze burned from the hollow sockets of his eyes, like fire in caves. He stood erect in a black t-shirt and black, loose trousers. All in black, like an executioner. He wore sandals made of old tire tread, something the VC had worn decades ago. His bearing suggested a military background. He held the black Beretta in his hand with the authority of one intimately familiar with firearms.

  “I am Minh,” he said levelly, his eyes boring into mine. “I was once known as Commander Minh.”

  I was no longer capable of astonishment. I was too weary mentally and physically to give a damn.

  “And you,” he went on, “are the Butcher of Vam Tho.”

  I winced, not as immune to further emotion as I might have wished. Even my soul cringed and fluttered, as though it struggled to flee my body. So that was how I was viewed here, how I was remembered in the history of Vam Tho? To the Vietnamese like an Eichman to the Jews.

  My entire body succumbed to a shudder of dread and remorse. In the confusion of old remembrances suddenly released in a daytime waking nightmare, I reheard the hellish screams, the wailing of children, the sudden hoarse shouts of frightened, enraged boonirats and the ragged rattle of rifle fire in the rain.

  “No!”

  An involuntary cry torn from a soul fighting to free itself from its earthly tethers. It was not a denial. It was merely a rejection of the reality, Minh must have misunderstood. I detected an instant of indecisions.

  “You are Lt. Jack Kazmarek, 9th Division, 4/39th Infantry, Bravo Company, Third Platoon,” he asserted.

  The thought crossed my mind that I had returned to Vietnam in order to die at a place where I should have died so long ago. Perhaps justice demanded it. Nonetheless, seeing Minh’s hesitation, I felt a faint stirring of the survival instinct. Enough for me to play for time.

  “How did you know that?”

  The information, I thought, could only have come from Father Pierre at the mission or from the young woman, Connie Nhu, who had taken over Bonnie My’s old hotel orphanage in Dong Tam. They were the only ones, other than Van and today the Cochrans, to whom I had introduced myself and who might associate my name after all these years with Vam Tho. Until now, I hadn’t realized all the associations myself.

  Connie Nhu had tried to warn me about digging into old graves and disturbing pratas from the past. I should have listened to her.

  “At one time it was my duty to know the names of my enemies,” Minh said bitterly, avoiding an explanation of exactly how he had picked up my trail. “Especially the name of the enemy who massacred one hundred thirty eight helpless women, children and old men. It is said the criminal always returns to the scene of his crime. It must be so, do you not agree? Even though I never expected it.”

  “Who are you to be the judge?” I shot back, exchanging bitterness for bitterness. “You don’t understand what happened that day?”

  “I saw what remained after you and your platoon finished. I need to understand no more than that.”

  “This is not because of them,” I counterattacked, indicating the gun in his hand, refusing to allow him the higher moral ground. “This is your personal revenge because of Mhai.”

  His lips tightened. He jabbed the muzzle of the Beretta toward the bridge and the memorial statue. “Look at it,” he commanded.

  Van in his terror seemed to be growing smaller and smaller.

  “No!” I croaked.

  “Look at it!” Minh insisted. “I want what you did to be the last thing you remember when you die.”

  I resisted with every fiber of will that remained in a body and spirit already weakened over the decades by what occurred in this place. My eyes shifted involuntarily. I could not stop them, no more than you could stop looking at a bloody wreck on the highway. I was drawn, struggling and resisting, but I was drawn nonetheless back across the footbridge above the canal to the grassy bank and the bronze shrine there of the two women, the children and the old man with their terrified faces lifted to the sky.

  At the same time, I felt the mists of whirling time enveloping me, sucking me back once more to Bugs Wortham’s different day. I resisted a near-overpowering compulsion to shout at Minh, to scream at this self-righteous avenger: Don’t you understand? Nothing you can do to me tops what my soul has already done to me during the past thirty years and more.

  My conscience and my soul had rotted out a part of me that even Elizabeth had never been able to repair. Death at last might even be merciful.

  My eyes reached the monument. No! And I went all the way back this time. All the way back.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  I tried to stop them, hadn’t I? It was a conspiracy hatched out of fear and desperation, as many of the best conspiracies are. It kept building up for months, storing up emotional powder and shell that had to eventually blow up. My men were constantly in the boondocks. Get a body count for God and the Colonel Hardcore’s dic board. Looking to pin Charlie down, frustrated because we couldn’t find him and when we did find him he was like grabbing at the wind. It was always Charlie doing the pinning down instead, picking us off one or two at a time.

  My platoon lost Mangrum, with his head blown clear off. Donatelli and Sgt. Richardson went on the VC’s dic board at Widow Maker Lane. Bugs Wortham...

  It wasn’t just my Third Platoon either. What happened in Vam Tho could have happened to any other company or platoon in Colonel Hackman’s Recondo 4/39th. Battlin’ Bravo Company might have been better known as Bruised Bravo. Frustration and desperation ran deep.

  Only the month before, Bravo stumbled into a minefield while heading to a rendezvous point with Alpha Company. An explosion tore through the early morning stillness at the edge of a woodline. A man screamed. Then there was another explosion, and another, as men rushed forward to aid their downed buddies. Severed limbs flew whirring through the air. It went on for over an hour, leaving twenty-one men killed or wounded.

  Just after Thanksgiving, when Third Herd first separated from the company and occupied the crayfish berm, PPB Cougar, the rest of Bravo was patrolling in strength near a ville GIs dubbed “Pinkville.” For two days, Captain Bruton the Crouton attempted to penetrate Pinkville, but was driven back each time. Booby traps killed two men. Sniper fire took another. Second Platoon blundered into a nest of booby traps. The men extricated themselves unscathed that time, only to have two more soldiers cut down in a hasty ambush. Captain Bruton almost lost control himself when boonirats finally invaded Pinkville and found only old men, women and children remaining. As always, the guerrillas had faded into the jungle.

  Two weeks after that, adding proverbial insult to injury, Commander Minh’s battalion mortared FSB Savage, destroying most of the men’s few personal possessions.

  During the six weeks before and after the start of the TET offensive, B-for-Bravo Company, whose normal field strength was a
pproximately one hundred forty men, suffered fifty two casualties, including Third Platoon’s losses—and had scarcely seen the enemy. All we ever saw were villages empty except for “noncombatants.”

  “Fu-uck. They are all VC,” Mad Dog Carter liked to point out. “Where are the fuckin men when we come in? They’re gone because they’re VC. Everybody in the AO are VC. The fuckin brats are gonna grow up to be VC, just like their fathers. Even the fuckin birds and rock apes and snakes are VC.”

  I never consciously attempted to use all this to justify what happened, only as a reference point to try to explain it. Finally, unable to either justify or explain, I struggled to erase it from my awaking consciousness by telling myself it never occurred. Only like now, at last, forced to face it, must I honestly admit that I had seen the signs all along and simply depended too much on Sgt. Holtzauer to keep it in check. None of it would have happened if that tough, foolish sonofabitch hadn’t gone and got himself shot. As it was, by the time I recognized something evil metamorphing out of the rain, it was already a monster.

  Compelled now to once more confront that monster in the image of the monument erected on the canal bank, I felt as though shame and revulsion were tearing apart my molecules and distributing them into the air. I was going to vanish and it all would never have been.

  I had left the toddler of the dead woman I now knew to be Mhai hidden in the rice urn. He couldn’t get out and his cries would probably not be heard by anyone else until after we GIs left. He was safe there. Besides, I had other problems to worry about. I was as convinced as the rest of my platoon that Bravo had likely suffered a defeat and that the VC were coming for us.

  I hurried sloshing through the rain, sifting options through my brain on the best method for defending ourselves from an expected attack. A platoon stretched as thin as mine could not be expected to indefinitely hold a village this size. Better to consolidate, pull in the perimeter and defend some high point of ground outside the town. But I was under direct orders to seize Vam Tho and occupy it until the rest of Bravo swept in to relieve me. Lacking orders to the contrary, unable to make radio contact to either confirm, change or amend my orders, I felt obligated to carry on with my original mission. After all, we didn’t actually know whether or not Bravo had lost the fight.