by Lan Cao
But somewhere between the first smile and the ones that followed, there was, I was sure, something different. The corners and curves of the lips. The slow drawl. The liquor confidently downed with a gulp and an accompanying flamboyant snap of the head. More amorphously, there was just something about him that shied from being named or understood and hence gave me pause.
He was now a man rapt with desire, acutely aware of his own body. He sat at the table, straight-backed. I scarcely remembered how he was before, a man free of affectation.
After dinner we drank coffee in the sitting area. We each had our own percolator. I knew how he liked his. Hot water brewed over espresso, coarsely ground with a dash of chicory. And a slow burning drip over a cup of condensed milk. A record was placed on the player and a soprano unleashed one of the most amazing trills I had ever heard, sustained at the highest register. My wife was drawn to operas and I too was beginning to see their appeal. It mattered not that we didn’t understand the words. That only made the beauty of Tosca all the more mysterious, the tragedy all the more tragic. This Italian opera resonated with us Vietnamese because Tosca’s story was not much different from our beloved Tale of Kieu.
“Listen,” Phong said abruptly. “I should say this at least once. I am sorry I couldn’t tell you about the plans beforehand.”
Thu and my wife stopped their own conversation nearby. My wife’s eyes flashed, as if to remind me, again, that Phong had saved my life.
I nodded and gave his shoulder a quick, friendly pat. He reciprocated with a decorous smile.
“No one really thought you would be willing to be part of the plan and so there was no point approaching you.”
“Why were you all so sure, Phong?”
“You’re an innocent,” he said. “Nobody believed you’d switch sides.” His voice trailed off.
Inwardly I cringed but outwardly I maintained a façade of imperturbable calm. Quy sidled close to me and gave my shoulder a squeeze.
“I know, I do know, Phong, that I would have been taken out and shot if it weren’t for you.” I realized I hadn’t said thank you to him. But among friends and family, that would have been extraneous. We were, supposedly, part of each other. The heart does not thank the arm for shielding it from a blow.
Phong hadn’t finished unburdening himself. “I wanted to tell you but everything had to be tightly sealed. On General Minh’s order.”
“General Minh. Yes, of course. Your mentor.”
Phong detected my sarcasm and arched an eyebrow. “The plan could be revealed only to those we were sure about. The stakes were too high.” He was laying claim to virtue. “I couldn’t tell anyone, not even you. We had to succeed especially with the Americans . . .” He stopped and looked at me calmly. His face shined, a switchblade sprung from its sheath.
For an instant, something raged inside me, a quickening of blood that surged right through to my heart. He had merely articulated that which I already knew. “You will curse the day you did what you did, Phong. You think you’re using the Americans but they are using you. They are the ones with the guns and the money.”
I stopped speaking. I saw his pupils, like a pair of cat’s eyes that glowed macabrely in the dark. They stared through me. “And you will curse the day you did nothing.” He clicked with his tongue as he flashed a smirk from a corner of his mouth. “We are not dealing with poetry here but with the life of the country,” he said with mock but slurred gentleness, taunting my love of poetry, and French poetry no less. The eyebrows were kept stiffly raised. The knife in his hand cut through the hard rind of a mangosteen. “We as nationalists had to do something.”
A rancorous silence settled over us. I kept my eyes fixed and stared unblinkingly. I struggled for a levelheaded understanding of his actions but his noble rhetoric could scarcely explain the president’s murder.
Thu put a restraining hand on her husband’s arm. My wife too gave him an appeasing smile. Phong eased up, his body relaxing backward against the chair. He made his voice soft. “Sometimes, the right path might seem wrong at first. Give it some time.”
“Or the wrong path might seem right,” I said.
I couldn’t help myself. No one knew everything and he, of all people, shouldn’t act as if he did. It had been reported that the CIA had given the plotters forty-two thousand dollars in financial support on the morning of the coup. There was no doubt President Kennedy himself had supported it. I wanted to ask him about all that—the false beginning of their so-called revolution.
But our wives moved to defuse the situation and we returned to the drudgery of small talk. Yes, no, maybe. Even Phong put forth a less belligerent countenance. For the sake of my wife and the peace, I stopped fueling the fire. And so the evening meandered along, until it came to what seemed like a natural, unadorned ending. Thu was half-asleep. My wife’s shadow was thrown against the wall like a beautiful silhouette softly aglow. We took turns pouring the last bottle of wine.
“Let’s drink to the success of our revolution. Surely you wish us—the country—success, even if you don’t approve of our act,” he said.
I chose my words carefully. “Even when one knows better, even when the naked facts point to a different conclusion, one may nonetheless hold hope in reserve.”
“Exactly,” he said with a stray smile. “Exactly.”
Phong finished his last cigarette, crushing it against the curve of the ashtray. Smoke leveled above us. He carefully put his gold cigarette holder in his pocket and began to gather his things. I cleared some of the clutter. As I moved from the back end of the room toward the door, barely lit by the muted streetlamps, I saw a shadow of a hand on the small of my wife’s back.
I did not miss the moment, as unspectacular as it appeared. Immediately after, I disbelieved. Indeed, in retrospect, through all of our years together, I was certain I had myself touched more of his wife than the small of her back. Had I not carried the whole of her body and run with it straight into the formidable surf of a Vung Tau beach? It was this and many other such incidents that had sanctified our friendship. Still, that single miniature gesture stayed with me. A hand on the small of a back.
I hurried Phong and Thu out the door. My wife quickly went upstairs to get ready for bed. “I’m going up first,” she said. Her voice was strangely ruminative. Left alone, I mulled over the evening. The silhouette of the body, the slip of a hand, the ghost of a good-bye, mere shadows, like the loose weave of threadbare cotton against the tropical heat. Fires had been started by this very mix of ingredients.
I lay awake most of the night. Ordinarily I was not the sort of man who was plagued by the details of human interaction. I understood innocence and coincidence. Still, I began methodically to revise what I had seen.
But I lacked the nerve for concentration. In the end, all I had was doubt. But doubt is not proof. It is a grain of nothingness yet it has the power to unravel everything. I did not ask my wife, “What really happened, darling?” I resolved to treat everything that had transpired as commonplace; an occasion worthy of no remark. I reprogrammed my memory and shut my eyes.
I reached over and pulled her close to me, pressing myself against her back. There was the line I loved running down her spine, the gully that dipped slightly below the skin’s surface. I ran my finger inside its groove. I thought only this: It would all begin and end with her and me, with us.
• • •
A day passed, then another. The country was subjected to the undisciplined, hopscotched wishes of one leader after another. Against a landscape of continuing anxiety and intrigue—there were rumors of more coups in the making—General Minh allowed me to regain my old position, despite my refusal to join him and his conspirators. Or perhaps it was precisely because of it. I had refused to join their coup. They could count on me to reject future coups.
As our stricken city tried to recover, we too went through the motions, wi
th measured steps, my wife and I, to create normalcy with the new army. We continued to attend casual gatherings at the Officers’ Club. In the early evenings, drinks were served; music still played in the background. Officers congregated in different areas. I could see a gathering of junta leaders around the bar, edgily celebrating the new trappings of authority. Phong mingled about, his cap at a jaunty angle, his dark aviator glasses hiding his eyes. He gave Quy and me a long, slow nod and raised his wineglass, as if to toast us. Around him were others who had cooperated and succeeded in quietly getting troops into Saigon to unseat President Diem.
My wife and I had danced there many times. A melody, deep and grainy, leaked from the stereo and hung its naked sorrow in the room. We danced together to the deep foghorn sound of the saxophone. I could feel tight knots lodged along the flanks of her back. I scanned the room. I was the only officer not part of the coup.
Despite the appearance of cordiality, November had changed everything. The coup had aged me beyond my years. Picture an army, its spirit strong, its conscience clean. In the immediate aftermath of the coup, the military was suddenly transformed; no, more precisely, transmogrified. Political ambition reared its ugly head. High-ranking junta generals shamelessly distributed medals and insignias to lower-ranked officers. New loyalties needed to be cultivated.
Every day, in the half-light of early morning and the darkness of late evening, I sealed myself inside the monastic tranquillity of my study. Things were changing. A new culture of coups d’état had seeped into our land and continued to lurk below the surface. The narrative that defined the armed forces, honor and esprit de corps, was being whittled away as the country succumbed to the spit and sibilance of intrigue.
That was how the story of our country’s transformation began. By coups and the fear of more coups, by the glide of power on the glistening belly of a snake.
And then the Americans arrived.
• • •
It was still November 1963 and the air was perfumed with lavender blooms. I remained inside myself, in my own sphere, even as I moved among the junta generals. At night, soldiers at the Presidential Palace walked its black, scarred grounds. In the fading light, they lit flares, stood guard, hunched on parapets reinforced with sandbags, and stared through their rifles’ telescopes. Others monitored signals over their shortwave radios. They were not watching for enemy movement. Instead they were fully concentrated on friendly troops that might have turned, might be turning, suddenly, ruthlessly, against the junta generals. They stayed in the darkness and stood with binoculars aimed toward the horizon, scrutinizing all that came within their sights.
For after that day in November, mine was a country dislodged and lost, a country immersed in false rumors. Having come into power by violence, its leaders feared they too would be removed by violence. Coup plotters feared those they had overthrown would be plotting their own resurrection. It was simply a matter of karma, after all, and the genetic instructions it carries. This possibility had to be acknowledged, the sowing and tilling of karma. How could they prevent others from doing to them what they had done to others? This became the single, overriding concern of the junta generals. Despite the place and the time, despite an enemy buildup right outside, and even within, the city’s gates, despite the movement of North Vietnamese divisions and regiments down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, what they were most sensitive to, most obsessed with, was detecting signs of betrayal: an unbecoming swagger, a cocked eyebrow, a forehead crease on an otherwise unfurrowed face. Anything that signaled inner deceit or discontent. Anything that suggested brooding or the artificial absence of it. Power had to be edgily guarded.
Of course the ghosts of the dead president and his brother continued to haunt the junta generals. Both had been buried secretly within the headquarters of the Armed Forces General Staff, in a field near a gully choked with dandelions and other weeds. The brothers were denied burial in a public cemetery to prevent their deaths from acquiring either historic or lurid significance. In no way would current events be allowed to converge around their tombs.
Later, when the city could not shake itself free of conjectures and rumors, the generals abruptly had the brothers’ bodies exhumed and buried in two unmarked graves in a municipal cemetery in Saigon.
In a country such as Vietnam, we understand karma. We have all traveled its path, felt its key points, feared its whiplash. We go to great lengths to slip free of the psychological convolutions that come from fearing its wrath.
Twenty days after the Vietnamese president and his brother were killed in Saigon, the president of the United States was assassinated in Dallas. I could only imagine what the generals of the coup must have felt when they heard the news. Only a Vietnamese would shudder at the sequence of these two events and understand their spine-clicking effect.
• • •
After President Diem’s death, the Americans arrived in increasing numbers. In 1960, there were only advisers. Then in 1961, 3,000 troops. After President Diem’s death, 184,000 troops. The number would reach beyond 500,000 in the years to come.
We beckoned and at the same time withdrew inside ourselves. We didn’t want them to come but we needed them to stay.
They promised safety. With the Communists barreling down on us, entrenched along our borders, we were wide-eyed and howling to be saved. At the time, salvation could not have appeared to us in a more beautiful form than a flag with stars and stripes. We gazed into the horizon and placed our trust in their imminent arrival.
And the Americans entered our story not fully knowing what awaited them.
My friendship with Phong began when the Americans first arrived as advisers. Phong and I met at the Cap Saint Jacques officer candidate school. Training was extensive, accelerated. The world’s intellectuals were throwing around words like anti-imperialism and decolonization, but we believed colonialism was less of a threat than Communism. The age of empires was in its twilight and it was the romantic promise of Communism that tantalized. In the North, nationalist leaders were being eliminated by Ho Chi Minh’s followers in the most brutal ways imaginable. Some had been bound hand and foot and thrown into rivers. Others had been buried alive. We knew what Communism was really like.
I remembered our beginning well. It was 1955. Phong stood in front of the commander’s desk listening to his orders. I was the junior officer. I accompanied them into another room where the map of our country was hanging. “The country is in a crisis,” the commander said. “There is no money to pay the troops and the Americans are set on remaking the armed forces.”
We understood the Americans were in a hurry. Unlike the French, they were not here to impart a superior civilization. That would have required courtship, even seduction.
The French had just left, taking with them a force of more than 200,000. To fill this vacuum and to defend the country from the North and the Vietcong, we needed a national army of around 200,000. Phong and I were assigned the task of authoring a report analyzing the state of the Vietnamese National Army. The South was trying furiously to fashion a non-Communist nationalist solution. After many months of investigation and study, Phong and I recommended that four infantry divisions, the Sixth, Eleventh, Twenty-first, and Thirty-first, be activated to fill the void.
With laconic detachment, the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group opposed our plan. The advisers determined that we should have an armed force of no more than 100,000, just enough to defeat a Vietcong insurgency, not repel a North Vietnamese attack. In the case of external attack by the North, we had only to obstruct their assault and wait for the United States to come to our assistance.
“We’d be committed to you through SEATO,” one adviser promised. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization would obligate the United States to come to our rescue. Even so, Phong and I both found it impossible to bear. We were two hotheads. We were still young, but quickly gaining experience and wisdom.
“Wha
t an absurd notion that is,” I later said to my commander.
The commander pursed his lips and nodded. “True. But draw up a plan of discharge as soon as possible,” he ordered.
Phong and I consoled each other as we performed the executioner’s task of dismembering our beloved armed forces. I was distressed by the wanton elimination of names from the military roster. With a measure of clinical certainty, our superiors reminded us of the targeted goals, the deadlines, and the conditions attached to American funding. Phong was less sentimental than I was. For him, speed and determination were necessities. A quick slash across the throat. By the end of the day, he showed me the stacks of discharge papers he had signed and processed.
Sometimes I met the men who would soon be let go. I saw how they were stilled by disappointment, how sorrow showed in their faces and gathered around their mouths. Often a group would huddle on a dirt patch, passing one another a cigarette. At different hours of the day I came by and watched them from around the corner. I didn’t smoke but I took a few puffs just to be among them. I listened to them and could think only about our national failings. Like a penitent at the temple’s gate, my face burned with shame. Afterward, Phong and I would get ourselves to a corner café and order two big bowls of pho. To console me, Phong would pluck slices of well-done brisket, flank, and tendon from his bowl and put them in mine. I did not protest his gesture.
Our friendship deepened as we dragged ourselves to street-corner saloons where men gathered to drink, eat, and talk. We felt the loss more than we expected. The liquor would pull us out of our gray mood. The bar we frequented was owned by a wiry man, Mr. Manh, a friend of Phong’s father from the North. Though it was no more than a humble storefront cursed with the appearance of imminent collapse, its tables were always filled. Around us, men congregated, grazed on tidbits of appetizers—the exotic and the mundane commingling on a serving plate. The proprietor cracked open a slab of ice with a cleaver and dropped a few slivers into our glasses. We washed down marbled beef and sinewy gizzards with gulps of alcohol. We sat on wooden stools and drank beer and rice wine with raw abandon. Jars of bone-colored homemade liquors lined a wooden shelf nailed against a plywood scrap wall. Lizards, goat testicles, gecko, gutted and washed and marinated in rice wine and herbs, lurked at the bottom of the jars. Mr. Manh elbowed Phong and me, nudging us to taste such and such a concoction to boost our libido, to ward off colds, to rejuvenate our souls and spirits. “Available by the glass or jar,” he’d say, grinning. Embers glowed as rows of dried squid crackled and popped on the grill. We usually nibbled on barbecued beef and boiled peanuts, sautéed liver, ears of baby corn coated in a mixture of oil and scallions.