The Return: A Novel of Vietnam

by Charles W. Sasser

  Finally, the rain came, thick and hurting and in sheets. Old men and women and kids squatted close together for warmth and comfort. Filthy water rose around their ankles. They bowed their heads and hunkered their backs against the downpour. Mhai bent her back over Bay to provide him some shelter. He shivered in her arms, but was silent now.

  After awhile, there were no longer sounds of battle, only the hard splashing of the rain. Somehow, the atmosphere turned more ominous than before; it seemed charged with more than merely the storm. From her limited vantage point as a prisoner, Mhai began observing a lot of activity in the rain.

  She noticed that a tall GI—the unit’s commander, she assumed—made frequent rounds through the village, apparently checking on defenses. He wore his helmet pulled low, so she failed to recognize him at first. It was only when he shoved it back slightly in a heated conversation with one of the guards that she recognized him. She half-rose to her feet in surprise. It was the lieutenant from her grandparents’ house, the polite young American whose loneliness and sincerity had drawn her to him. She even remembered his name. Jack. Jack, and a funny last name. It had been a pleasant evening talking with him. So pleasant, in fact, that she neglected to pump him for information to pass on to the NLF Central Command.

  She stood up with Bay and attempted to attract his attention. She hoped he remembered her. He would make sure she remained safe with her babies.

  One of the guards pointed his rifle at her as a warning. He gestured for her to get down. Mhai continued to stare at the lieutenant, hoping to make him feel it and look her way,

  The lieutenant was obviously having trouble. Mhai couldn’t be sure what was going on. She overheard snatches of heated conversation. What she did hear unnerved her.

  “Dog is right, LT.,” one of the soldiers argued, his voice rising sharply. “They’re just waitin for the rain to slack. We’re next, Lt. Kaz. Can’t you see that? There ain’t enough of us to hold ’em off.”

  “You’re not paid to think, Morris,” the lieutenant shot back.

  Morris glared at the pigpen. “They’re all VC, Lieutenant.”

  “They’re civilians, Morris. Treat ’em that way.”

  GIs were being swirled back and forth in the rain, agitated like wood chips caught in a raging flood. Mhai’s uneasiness grew. She suspected things were about to come to some sort of a head and that the lieutenant was only nominally in control. He moved on without looking in her direction. She almost called out to him, but the guard still had his rifle pointed at her.

  Every once in awhile a rifle shot or two snapped from somewhere around the edge of the village. Mhai flinched each time. The Americans were jittery.

  A tall black soldier with a machine gun appeared out of the water swirl, accompanied by a shorter, stockier man with “FTA” stenciled across the front of his helmet. Both wore ponchos draped from their shoulders. They held a quick conference with the guard called Morris and another one who looked Asian or South Seas, only much larger. Mhai strained her ears but could not make out what they were saying.

  As the black man and FTA walked away and past the pig pen nearest where Mhai huddled with Bay, she overheard FTA snarl, “Fuck Mother Kaz. You be ready to move ’em when I give you the signal. I’ll take care of the Lieutenant. Most of the guys agree with us.”

  He spotted Mhai and paused to leer at her. “Save that one for me,” he said.

  “I don’t be’a knowin about all this, Dog. We could get court-martialled and sent to LBJ, the Long Bien Jail.”

  Dog turned on him. “What do you want, Daniels? You the one who seen it happenin, ain’t you? You want to die in this fuckin shitpot place? The Lieutenant is gonna get us all killed. Fu-uck.”

  “What if it don’t work, man?”

  Dog emitted a harsh bark that was supposed to be laughter. “What we got to lose, nigger boy? They are in a pigpen, ain’t they? Make ’em squeal like pigs.”

  Something was about to happen—and Mhai didn’t like the sound of it. She had to get her son out of here. She looked around cautiously, thankful that the pouring waves of rain cut visibility and made the guards less alert than they normally might be.

  The wire and bamboo fence that enclosed the pigpen was less than four feet high. Given the right opportunity, she could easily vault it, even carrying Bay. This time, in the rain, she might be lucky enough to get out of the village and back to her Vespa in the jungle. She had to chance it. There was something evil brewing in this place. GIs came and went slogging in the rain and mud, looking excited and excitable, gesturing and pacing and shouting, agitating each other.

  She watched expectantly when two of the guards came together in earnest conversation, their helmets touching. A third stood at a distance looking at them. For those few seconds, no one paid attention to the prisoners. It was now, or it was never.

  Mhai acted. She tucked her startled toddler snugly underneath one arm and sprang to her feet. She almost lost her footing, slipping in the mud, but quickly recovered. Two running steps brought her to the fence. She vaulted it easily, using one hand as leverage. A sharp stab of pain shot into her palm from the tip of one of the bamboo stakes. She ignored it as she lunged past two nearby hooches and broke toward the jungle.

  In her wake erupted shouting and a volley of rifle fire as guards discovered her escape attempt. Her muscles contracted against the expected impact of the bullets. The ambush on the canal that left her wounded remained all too fresh in her memory.

  Miraculously, she remained unscathed. Then she was behind the hooches and out of the guards’ sight and running as hard as she could for the forest.

  She was almost there. She made out the gray ragged outline of the trees misty and indistinct through the driving downpour. They drove her to greater effort. She was going to reach it this time. Only an act of God could stop her. Exultation lent speed to her dash for freedom. She breathed little cries to urge herself on.

  She got a better grip on her son and cast an anxious glance over her shoulder, When she looked forward again, she was terrified to find that a GI form blurred by the rain had suddenly materialized out of the forest directly in her path. He rushed out of the trees and over the low bamboo fence, then paused to catch his bearings.

  Had he seen her?

  Most certainly he would if she kept going.

  No! No! So close!

  She veered away and darted among a cluster of huts surrounded by tiny truck crops and foot-packed bare earth now slippery with runoff. Behind her, the soldier shouted. She had been spotted. She plunged into one of the hooches to hide. A flock of chickens had also sought shelter there. They squawked and cackled, scattering in an explosion out the open doorway. Raising enough racket to signal everyone in the vicinity that they were being disturbed and resented it.

  Heart thudding, Mhai clutched her baby. She dared not expose herself to seek a new hiding place; the GI was right behind her. Desperate eyes searched the small round room with its packed dirt floor. Vietnamese peasants enjoyed few possession. Two large rice storage urns sat next to the wall. Additional spare furnishings included a Buddhist shrine, some sleeping cots elevated a few inches off the floor, a low table containing eating utensils and clay bowls, clothing hanging on the walls, rugs on the earthen floor...

  Nowhere to hide.

  She had to try somewhere else. Cooing to Bay, praying he remained quiet, she started back out the door.

  She shrank back inside. The soldier was in the neighboring hooch. She heard him slinging things about like a rampaging bull with a toothache. Once more her eyes probed the interior of the tiny dwelling, finally settling on the rice urns.

  Bay’s only chance.

  “Jesus and Blessed Virgin,” she prayed fervently in Vietnamese, adding in French, “Keep my baby quiet and keep him safe.”

  She kissed Bay quickly. Tears filled her eyes as she stuffed him into the open mouth of the largest urn. It was nearly half-filled with rice. The sudden insertion into the unfamiliar place, dark a
nd confining, stunned the poor child immobile. He stiffened and went wide-eyed, but he lay water-soaked at the bottom on the rice as though too frightened to move or cry out. The warmth after the cold of the rain would help comfort him.

  Mhai stepped away from the jar just as the Gl’s form filled the doorway. Dripping water and muck, he was some awful creature only recently risen from some primordial swamp. She caught her breath and looked around. Not a weapon in sight. Then she recognized him. Relief almost buckled her knees.

  “Peter!”

  The black abyss from the muzzle of a .45 pistol stared cold and eternal back at her. Pete slipped into the hut, confronting her. He stood spread-legged, hatless and dripping, head lowered as though about to charge. She saw horror and disgust and unfathomable loathing etched deep and indelible into the glowering countenance that trapped her in place. Rain had washed the blood of friends from his tiger stripe battle uniform.

  “Peter! Thank God. It’s me. Can’t you see?”

  He uttered one word. It was like he worked over the word to make it vile, then spat it at her. “Bitch! “

  She understood. Instant chills turned her entire body into a quivering mass of gooseflesh.

  “I kept hoping it wasn’t true,” he snarled at her. “I found the motorbike. Then I knew what a lying, two-timing bitch you really are.”

  Never before had she experienced such fear and dread and, at the same time, a kind of overpowering love and understanding. Her poor, poor Peter.

  “It is not what you think, Peter. I did not go to Minh. I—”

  Even as she spoke, attempting to explain, she knew a rage possessed him that had taken him beyond listening.

  “Lying bitch. Lump was right all along. This is Vietnam. You can’t give a scorpion a ride across the river and expect it not to sting you.”

  He pointed the pistol at her head.

  “Mhai--! “ He shouted it. His voice broke in agony.

  “Peter! I love you—“

  He shot her. Pete shot her. Shot her in the face.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  Tears were streaming from Mhai’s good eye when she finished telling it. Her chin fell to here breast. Her entire body, seemingly drained of all life force, slumped and slumped some more until she actually diminished before my eyes. It was like she was about to vanish.

  I clambered to my feet and in a second I took her in my arms. To hell with what her brother thought. I held that once-beautiful woman and remembered the gentleness of the young girl at the bridge. I remembered the sorrow in Pete every time he looked at her portrait on his Florida Room wall.

  “Pete loved you til the day he died. You need to know that.” It was the only thing I could think to say. That was for Pete. Then, for me, I added, “He died looking at your portrait and loving you. And through him I never stopped loving you either.”

  She collapsed into my arms, wilting into me completely. We cried. Two scarred old casualties from a war long over. It was the only time I had wept since Elizabeth died, and not before that either. I hadn’t even cried over Pete. But I cried now for Pete, and for Mhai. For Elizabeth, and for myself. For what the war had done to us all. And for what wars would do to others like us as long as man existed.

  Doctor Cochran and Bonnie My, Bay and Connie Nhu—Mhai’s own children—they came together around Mhai and me, close and touching. Through tears, I saw Minh standing on the outside of the circle. Standing there and looking, stunned by the revelation that Mhai’s wounds came not from my GIs but instead from the Ohmja Nguoi Nhai. He turned and walked away. But before he did I recognized in his eyes an unmistakable softening. A slight indication that Commander Minh had also let the war slip away, if but a little. It was obvious that until now he had never truly understood the depth of his sister’s suffering, nor of the love she still bore for the American SEAL who shot her.

  Lump Adkins was wrong when he called Pete a lucky bastard for not having to watch the death of a woman he loved. Pete thought he killed the only woman he ever really loved that day at Vam Tho. He died still thinking it, and maybe that was worse.

  EPILOGUE

  Another Vietnam vet bought Pete Brauer’s old house next door to me in Florida and moved in with his wife. Having a wife who endured the war with him and stayed with him afterwards was a good sign that he had come back at least reasonably normal. A good sign, but not necessarily a sure sign; after all, Elizabeth had stayed with me. First thing I asked him after we started talking about Vietnam and exchanging bono fides was if he had any secret regrets about what he might have done in the war. I didn’t want to live next door to any more Petes.

  “I was a helicopter crew chief flying Hueys out of Vung Tau,” he said with disarming openness. Vung Tau was an in-country rest and recreation center. “I did a lot of basking on white sand beaches and flying steaks to generals in safe rear areas. It was an easy war. It was so easy I sometimes feel guilty about the boys who had it rough.”

  “Don’t,” I retorted. “No war is an easy war.”

  I didn’t tell him, but I had enough guilt about Vietnam for both of us.

  Sometimes I considered what my return to Vietnam had meant. Would you call it a happy ending or not? I don’t know. Maybe. I do understand now that my Elizabeth was right: Vietnam had taken something from me. It took part of my soul. I understand too that my returning to Vietnam was a last-ditch effort in my old age to reclaim the part that it took. Maybe I also sought absolution for myself, and for Pete.

  Perhaps not absolution, but acceptance. I could never forgive myself for the horror I let happen at Vam Tho, but I could at least face it now and accept that it had happened, that while I bore the scars I could at least live the rest of my life with it. I still had the nightmares, but not frequently and not with the intensity of before.

  Maybe I could forgive myself. At least a little?

  Mhai found some peace, I think, in the realization that Pete had not hated her after all, that her love for him had been reciprocated all these years by his love for her.

  And Commander Minh? I don’t know about Commander Minh. He walked out of Mhai’s house with that ramrod-straight back and the military shoulders without speaking another word to anyone. But I had seen first the hatred and bitterness soften in his eyes as he confronted the incredible suffering to which all of us whose lives intersected at Vam Tho had contributed. I can only pray now that God will forgive Pete and him, and that He will forgive me as well. And that He will forgive all the others in past wars, and in future wars who become casualties of their all-too-human humanness.

  When I reached Florida again, I un-tubed Mhai’s portrait and bought a new frame for it. I hung it on my wall where I could look at it every day and remember this one gentle moment of a war that otherwise had few such moments. I think Elizabeth would not have disapproved.

  Nor do I think she would have disapproved of Mhai. I held Mhai in my arms in her little cottage, and I no longer saw the ugly scars. I saw only the good side of her face, how beautiful it was. I realized that we all have our good sides where there is beauty, and we have the ugly sides where there is little beauty. It is the beauty to which we must look. Accept the ugly, but relish the beauty. That is how mankind is meant to survive, if survive he will.

  “Will you come to the United States to visit?” I asked her. “Will you come to Florida?”

  “I am too old now,” she replied, “and far too ugly.”

  “You are still the beautiful woman I knew at the bridge,” I told her. “The woman Pete fell in love with and loved forever.”

  “Can I see where Peter lived for all these years?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Maybe I will come.”

  It was a start. I hung Mhai’s portrait on the wall—and I waited for her to come home to Pete and me.

 

 

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