“I think we may have some help now, finding a boat,” Mr. Lee said. “Our man is one of the Sealord sailors.”
“I thought a soldier,” Moon said. “He was carrying a grenade launcher.”
“Did you notice the tattoo on his chest?” Mr. Lee asked. “It said sat cong. That was the slogan of the river sailors of the Republic’s navy from the very first. So I think he’s one of the men from the base down the river.”
“Sat Cong,” Moon said. “Means what?”
“It means Kill Communists,” Mr. Lee said. “I think that VC officer with his ear cut off would like to capture this one.”
WASHINGTON, April 28 (UPI)-President Ford today ordered the emergency evacuation of all Americans remaining in Vietnam. The plan called for picking them up at assembly points in helicopters and flying them to carriers lying off the coast.
Afternoon, the Nineteenth Day
May 1, 1975
IF OSA VAN WINJGAARDEN’S DIAGNOSIS was correct, Nguyen Nung had suffered two cracked ribs, concussion, multiple wounds caused by some sort of shrapnel on his face, neck, chest, and scalp, plus assorted bruises and abrasions.
By Lum Lee’s analysis, based on cross-examining Nguyen Nung before the shot of morphine from a U.S. Army aid kit took effect, these damages had been caused when a Vietcong rocket hit the superstructure of the LST where his PBR was based just as Nung was scrambling up a ladder. He remembered being hit by something and flung from the ladder to the deck. The next thing he remembered was awakening in a PBR somewhere out on the river and being aware that they were being shot at.
The last time he revived, he’d found himself on the bottom of the boat, with the legs of a dead man across his own. He had extracted himself to find that the PBR had been run aground on the bank of a very narrow, very shallow creek. He had walked. He had come to the warehouse compound about dawn, found the gate unlocked, and entered. When he heard voices, he’d hidden himself in the closet. Could he find the boat again? Of course. How far was it? Nung was too hazy from the morphine by now to answer that coherently.
Osa picked bits and pieces of debris from various wounds, washed everything with soapy water, applied copious amounts of antiseptic, and swathed his face and neck in U.S. Government Issue bandages. Finally, with Moon holding the groggy Nung erect, Osa wrapped his chest in strips torn from a bedsheet.
“We let him down now,” she said, glanced up at Moon, and instantly looked away.
“I shouldn’t have screamed like that,” she said. “I am embarrassed.”
“I would have screamed a lot louder,” Moon said. “You open a door and see a guy pointing a grenade launcher at you. I might have fainted.”
They lowered Nung gently to the bed and were rewarded with a grimace, followed by a dopey smile. Nung said something that sounded to Moon like “tenk,” closed his eyes, and surrendered to the morphine.
Osa, leaning over him, closed a long gash on his cheek with the careful application of an adhesive bandage. She stood straight, stretched her back, shook herself.
“We should leave him to sleep a little,” she said. “I will go now and take that shower.” She laughed. “This time I look in the closet first.”
“Good idea. Nothing to do now but wait until we find out if our friend here can help us.”
“That tattoo on his chest,” she said. “You saw it?”
“Mr. Lee said it means Kill Communists.”
“That’s what I thought,” Osa said. “Poor man. What does he do now?”
Moon hadn’t given that much thought. He watched her close the bathroom door behind her and went back into the office. Through the doorway he saw Mr. Lee prowling the warehouse, checking bales and sacks. He had no desire to talk to Mr. Lee at the moment. What could they say? That they were lucky in connecting with this sailor? Probably it was great good luck. Now there seemed to be some chance, at least. He stood at Ricky’s window looking out at the armored personnel carrier parked by the hanger. An M-1 13, the same model they’d used in training at Fort Riley. The ARVN soldiers had left the hatches open, which meant it would be wet inside. Halsey had done that once, leaving Lieutenant Rasko’s bedroll to serve as a blotter, soaking up the rainwater from the metal floor.
Moon smiled, remembering how Halsey had talked his way out of that one. What would Halsey suggest to get out of this situation? He’d say something like “Que sera sera, so don’t sweat it.” As good advice as any. And what would Halsey think of Osa van Winjgaarden? He would have been impressed. She was the kind of woman Halsey always wanted him to chase. He’d point them out across the dance floor when they dressed up and went to the classier places. The tall ones wearing pearls. The ones with the long patrician faces, Bermuda tans, and the high-fashion jackets. The ones who handed the parking lot attendant the keys to the Porsche, who knew exactly how to walk, and hold their heads, and tell the world they owned it. The ones who, when they caught him staring, examined him with cool, disinterested eyes.
“Why not?” Halsey would say. “Maybe they can kill you but they can’t eat you.” He’d say, “Not my type, Gene.” And Halsey, who enjoyed the role of philosopher, would say, “Like hell they’re not. Unlike myself, a pragmatist happy with the attainable, you are a victim of divine discontent. You yearn for the perfect. But you ain’t got no guts.”
But in fact, they really weren’t his type. He knew it and they knew it. He learned it when he was younger. The hard way. He had been calmly and efficiently rejected. The duck rebuffed by the swan. He’d learned fairly fast, because Moon Mathias was unusually sensitive to the pain of humiliation.
But the water was still dripping into the M- 113 armored personnel carrier, getting things wetter and wetter. Moon slid open the warehouse door. Seeing nothing dangerous on the muddy road beyond the fence, he walked out into the rain to check it out.
The rubber cushion on the driver’s seat beside the engine was soaking wet, but by then so was Moon. He sat on it and looked around. Basically it was identical to the ones they had driven at Fort Riley. The ARVN outfit had installed racks for GI gas cans, welded a mount beside the second hatch for an M60 machine gun, and covered the floor with bags. Moon widened a tear in one of them and checked. Sand. Something to stop the shrapnel if the treads triggered a mine. He switched on the ignition. The fuel indicator showed two-thirds. He shifted into low gear, drove the APC into the hangar, tugged the big door closed behind it, and went to work. He’d refuel it, get it ready to go. It was good to feel competent again.
Nguyen Nung became more or less awake about four P.M., about thirty minutes after the rain slackened into a drizzle and gradually faded away. When Moon came in from the hangar, the clouds were breaking, there were signs of watery sunlight here and there, and Nung was sitting stiffly in Ricky’s office being cross-examined by Mr. Lee.
“He says the boat is about an hour’s walk down the river,” Mr. Lee said. “It was run up a creek and into heavy brush in a growth of mangroves. He estimates it’s about two or three hundred yards down the creek from this road we’re on.”
“What happened to the crew?” Moon asked.
Mr. Lee spoke to Nguyen. Nguyen shrugged, then produced a lengthy response.
“He doesn’t know,” Mr. Lee said. “But they came ashore in his boat, the boat he was a gunner on. He knew them. The boat commander was from Hanoi. Two of the other crewmen were also anti-Communist refugees from the north, another was from Hue, and another from near Da Nang. He guesses they would know the war is over and try to go home. The dead man was a local man. Nguyen’s family had a rice paddy in the delta. His father had been one of the headmen in the village just downstream before the Vietcong killed him and the family. And then one morning the United States napalmed the village, and the people who survived moved away.”
“What we need to know is whether the crew will come back for the boat. It doesn’t sound likely, unless they need it to get across the river.”
Lum Lee nodded. “We need to know that. And we need to
know if the boat is in condition to take us out to the mouth of the Mekong. Mr. Nung remembers there was water in the bottom. They are made of fiberglass and it was hit by bullets.”
“Probably could be patched up,” Moon said.
“We also need to understand how to survive three days until it is time to go out and meet the Glory of the Sea.”
“That’s the problem,” Moon said. “We’re living on borrowed time staying here.”
“I think of Mr. Nung’s village,” Mr. Lee said. “He said he and some friends raised chickens there. Not all the buildings were burned.”
Since he had watched George Rice fly away, Moon had been kidding himself about their prospects, avoiding despair by not thinking about it. Now he felt a sudden rush of hope.
“Let’s go find out,” he said. “Can Mr. Nung travel?”
“Sure,” Nguyen Nung said, grinning a goofy morphine withdrawal grin. “‘Way we go.”
Special to the New York Times
SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 28-More than 150 Communist rockets slammed into Tan Son Nhut air base in Saigon today, destroying a C-130 transport plane, killing at least two U.S. Marines and forcing suspension of evacuation flights.
Evening, the Nineteenth Day
May 1, 1975
IT HAD SOUNDED SIMPLE ENOUGH. “If it’s pulled up on the south side of the creek, which is where what’s-his-name said they left it, then we can’t possibly miss it,” Moon declared.
But they did miss it. The boat had been run partly up the muddy bank in a snarled tangle of dead mangroves and palms. The trees had been killed many years past by Agent Orange. The fertilizer used to make the defoliant, diluted by monsoon rains and river flooding, had soaked into the soggy earth and fed a fierce undergrowth of deformed and distorted rain-forest brush. Moon and Lum Lee had skirted this almost impenetrable maze and found nothing downstream in the area
Nguyen Nung had described. Rechecking on the way back, Moon had waded hip-deep along the stream bank. He had spotted the stern of the craft just about three seconds before he spotted a leech feeding on his flank.
The leech was less of a shock than the boat. Mr. Lee disposed of the insect by heating it with a match, causing it to withdraw from Moon’s flesh. The boat contained the corpse of one of Nguyen’s former companions. Worse, it was also half full of dirty water. Worse yet, the water seemed to have entered through a multitude of bullet holes.
“Well, shit,” Moon said. “So much for that.”
As he said it, the sound of explosions reached him. Artillery, or perhaps rockets, or perhaps tank fire. But from where? At the creek bank, engulfed in vegetation, the noise of the explosions seemed to be coming from all around them. But it was probably another attack in the battle upriver at Can Tho. Wherever it was, it reminded Moon that when one needs a boat as badly as he needed a boat, a leaky one is better than none. The APC could get him into Cambodia, providing he had a huge amount of good luck. But even though the army called it amphibious and it could splash its way across a canal or a rice paddy, it was going to take something that really floated to get this bunch back out into the South China Sea. And he wanted it ready to go now, before he left, just in case the huge amount of good luck he needed didn’t happen.
He checked. Five of the bullets had punched through the fiberglass hull well above what normally would have been the water line. Three were lower, where they really mattered. Except for one, the holes were neat, round, and about a quarter of an inch in diameter-probably made by a light machine gun or an AK-47 rifle. The exception seemed to be an exit hole, made by a bullet that had struck something hard and deflected through the bottom, leaving a tear longer than Moon’s hand.
Lum Lee stood looking at the holes. He was wet despite his conical hat. His shoulders slumped. He looked gaunt, exhausted, and discouraged.
“Well,” Moon said, “let’s see what else we can see. And what we can do about this.”
Almost immediately he saw that being shot at was nothing new for this particular PBR. In the tradition of river boatmen, a set of large staring eyes had been painted on the bow of the craft to scare away demons. The paint partly obscured round fiberglass patches used to cover a cluster of three earlier bullet holes. Moon pointed them out to Mr. Lee.
Mr. Lee merely raised his eyebrows.
“If the navy is like the army, it put stuff in this boat to fix its problems,” Moon said. It had. In a compartment beside the engine they found a flare gun, pliers, two hammers, assorted other tools, wires, bolts, a box full of first aid kits with the morphine missing, and a plastic box marked REPAIR KIT, HULL.
The body of the VNN sailor was small, light, and already stiff with rigor mortis. Moon moved it from the boat and laid it out of sight among the mangrove roots. He jammed cloth from the dead man’s shirt into the subsurface holes, bailed out the boat, and shifted enough of its heavier contents so that he could tilt the damaged section out of the water.
Then he went to work with the epoxy glue and fiberglass patching.
The sun was just setting below the breaking clouds when Moon and Mr. Lee reached the place they’d left the APC, parked out of sight in a bamboo thicket well off the road.
“You found it?” Osa said. She was standing in the hatch, slender, dark hair pulled back into some sort of bun, looking neat and tidy as if protected from the terrible humidity by some sort of invisible screen with which nature guards its few classy women from the troubles that beset usual folks.
“We did,” Moon said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Now let’s see if Nguyen Nung can show us how to find his picnicking place.”
It was no more than two or three miles away, but getting there involved turning the APC off the relatively compact surface of the road, down into the roadside ditch, and then across a series of soggy rice paddies. The U.S. Army specifications for the APC declared it to be amphibious. If Moon remembered what he’d read about it in the maintenance manual, this particular model had been designed specifically with Vietnamese marsh country and the canals of lowland Europe in mind. Therefore it should float a bit better than the one his battalion used in training. But Moon had never quite brought himself to believe it. It was just too much heavy metal, too many tons. Not that they had any choice. if it sank, it sank.
The APC tilted down the slope, skidding and slipping, nosed into the. ditch with a great splash of mud and dirty water, and then rose majestically up the other bank and into the paddy. Its treads made a slithering sound in the mud, but it moved steadily, slowed when Moon eased off on the gas, sped when he asked it to, turned with remarkably little sliding. A damn good piece of equipment, Moon thought, even if the army did design it.
Nguyen Nung was standing on the gunner’s pedestal behind the driver’s seat, his head out the hatch where the.50-caliber machine gun was mounted. He shouted something Moon couldn’t understand, laughed, and started singing. To Moon, that seemed a good omen. But maybe it was a Vietnamese dirge.
Nung’s father, fortunately, had built his house near the canal that fed the rice paddies here and away from the little village beside the creek. The village had been incinerated, perhaps by a napalm strike, perhaps by VC or ARVN forces who suspected it of harboring supporters of the other side. The elder Mr. Nung had surrounded his house with an earthen dike, and it sat behind this wall amid a cluster of outbuildings like a low-rent castle of bamboo and palm logs in an ocean of mud. Nung untied the gate, an affair of wired-together bamboo poles. He waved them in and closed it behind them. They were greeted by a clamor of excited ducks and chickens penned in a shed behind the house, and by a trio of tethered pigs. Osa and Mr. Lee climbed out of the APC. Moon stood in the driver’s hatch, sweating profusely under the slanting, watery sun, and assessed the situation. It was better than he’d expected.
The dike must have been built to hold back the Mekong at its full end-of-monsoon flood, with a stack of sandbags ready to replace the gate when the water rose. Moon could barely see over the wall, and it would mak
e the APC invisible from the road. The roof of the house had been partly burned away. if a napalm bomber had done it he must have arrived on a wet day. Moon guessed the napalm tank had landed short, detonating in the paddy with only the last of it slashing over the dike to hit the roof. A section of palm fronds and their supports had burned out, but the fire hadn’t been hot enough to do more than scorch the bamboo walls. The floor- raised on the inevitable stilts-still looked solid.
Moon found himself feeling optimistic again. Osa, Lum Lee, and Nung could stay here until he got back. Or, if he didn’t get back, until time to meet the “shure boot” from the Glory of the Sea. With perfect luck no one would notice them in the bloody confusion of the war’s finale. With fair luck anyone who found them would be friendly. Even with bad luck-being found by desperate ARVN deserters or vengeful Vietcong-their prospects were at least as good as his.
Osa was waving to him from the floor. “One room is dry,” she said. “And most of another one.”
Time to get moving. Moon picked up his Langenscheidt map of Southeast Asia and climbed down into the mud.
Osa was standing in the partly dry room with Nung beside her, grinning and pointing at a charcoal burner and an assortment of cooking gear on the floor around it. The female instinct to make a home, Moon thought. Universal, even in someone who would look-even in a soggy, crumpled shirt- equally at home on Fifth Avenue. But there was no time for that now.
He unfolded the map Rice had marked, spread it on the floor, and squatted beside it.
“Here’s the plan,” Moon said.
It was a simple plan. Moon would take the APC northwest into Cambodia and collect Osa’s brother, his niece, and Mr. Lum Lee’s ancestral bones. That done, he would return to this house. Meanwhile, Osa, Lum Lee, and Nguyen Nung would wait here, keeping out of sight. Upon his return, when the third day was up, they would take Nung’s boat and sail away to the mouth of the Mekong and their rendezvous with the shore boat from the Glory of the Sea.
Finding Moon Page 22