by Lan Cao
I rushed to military headquarters. My wife and daughter were asleep. The first person I saw at command headquarters was Phong. The maps in our operations center lit up like pinball machines, as one city after another was attacked. Phong struck a map with his hand. “Look at this,” he said, shaking his head. A total of fourteen battalions, of paratroopers, marines, and rangers, were ordered back to the capital.
While I was at military headquarters, it was clear that fighting was most concentrated in the neighborhoods nearest to our home. Cholon, it turned out, was the staging area for North Vietnamese and Vietcong attacks on Saigon and its vicinity. Guerrillas from the Fifth and Sixth Vietcong Local Forces battalions fought, then slipped into hiding in crowded alleyways like those directly behind our house to tempt us to counterattack and inflict heavy civilian casualties. By February 5, Saigon was secured. But Cholon remained under siege until almost the end of the month.
The rangers were ordered there and would be reinforced by the American 199th Light Infantry Brigade. I had but a moment to speak quickly to my wife. Stay in the house, I warned. Keep our child inside. Keep her Chinese grandmother inside. You stay inside. There was nowhere they could have gone. The streets had been overtaken.
Why Cholon? The key to Cholon was the Phu Tho Racetrack, a hub to and from all the major streets. The enemy had to hold it to prevent this oval patch of red dirt from becoming a helicopter landing zone.
I tried to follow the events of Cholon from military headquarters. But the nerve center of our armed forces was one of their main targets that first day of Tet. Since the early morning of January 31, sappers had infiltrated Gate 5 of our military headquarters. I led my men outside to the gate’s entrance. The paratroopers under my command were fighting off attacks by the First and Second Vietcong Local Forces battalions. By late morning, Gate 4 was also attacked. I felt the rush of metal fire. Things were alive as the red and orange glare of rockets filled our eyes.
My heart pounded. On the ground right by my feet was the body of a young man. A froth of blood leaked from his head and ears. Outside more bodies lay scattered. Several loud pops came from across the street, followed by a string of obscenities. A half-dozen mortar rounds landed nearby. I was lifted inside a cloud of dust. Sand and grit, black and ravenous, blew upward, slashing my face with a fiery sting. AK-47 fire sputtered more dust all around us. A fire burned in my eyes, where the fine dust had blown. For most of the day, I fired a machine gun in the direction of the enemy with my eyes only half open. I felt fortunate that the infiltration of dust and debris did not jam the gun.
Nine hours later, we warded them off. I sank to my knees. The jolt and whiplash of adrenaline stayed in me.
Phong had received news about Cholon and breathlessly relayed it to me. “American helicopter gunships were just ordered to retake the racetrack. That will help. And our own Thirty-third and Thirty-fifth Ranger battalions are also going in,” he continued without modulation, rattling off facts meant to inform and comfort. I knew the dense alleys and tenement houses of Cholon. The fight would take place building by building, rooftop by rooftop. Helicopter gunships would be called in. Cholon would become even more dangerous.
The same realization occurred to Phong. “That means we have to hurry and get them out of there,” he barked. “The racetrack is only fifteen blocks from your house. Cholon will be declared a free-fire zone anytime now.” His face was sweaty and ashen with worry. For a moment I was touched. I felt hard-hearted in my dislike of him.
I sent a GMC truck to the house to bring my wife and child and her Chinese grandmother and whoever else was there to the safety of our compound. It was Tet. We had friends visiting. They had all been waiting to celebrate. When the truck returned to our military headquarters, I put out my arms in anticipation of Mai’s embrace. The sun’s rays caught on the side mirror of the truck and reflected an unbearable brightness. I blinked. I heard voices shouting all at once.
Where is she?
No one knew where the child was. The Chinese nanny was in a state of panic. My wife sat paralyzed on the ground. She covered her mouth and cried soundlessly. I gave her a comforting squeeze on the shoulder, then tore through the front of our headquarters into the now drastically altered midafternoon as my heart skidded and lurched in my chest. Phong was already by her side, reassuring me that he would watch over her.
I raced to the house in my jeep, through smoke-filled backstreets, past carcasses of burned-out cars and fallen debris. Solitary trees had been felled and leaned diagonally against the few telephone poles still standing. Half-burned tenement houses crouched low. There was sporadic firing from rooftops. I held my breath but could still smell the blistering tar. The immediate area surrounding the house was subdued. But the weight of what had happened still lingered. I entered the house through the garden. The interlude of quiet that now prevailed seemed wholly provisional. Anything could still happen. The external walls had been ruptured, the earth raked by gunfire. Suddenly I heard a shuffling noise and dry heaving sobs. In the far corner of the garden, near the mango tree, was my child, wide-eyed, hushed. I turned to face her. I kneeled and opened my arms for her to run into. But she stood still, removed. I saw her hesitate. She was a wholly different child. I barely recognized her and she me. In this new cobwebbed strangeness that surrounded her, it was as if another child, more afflicted, had emerged and had taken over.
Still, I walked, slowly, sure-footed, toward her. I made no sudden movements. I called her name. She backed away but I scooped her up and held her stiffly in my arms. She was all force, all resistance. I heard a muffled sound from her throat.
“Mai?” I said tentatively.
“No.” A ravaged face peeked up at me. Incompliant, she shook her head. “Don’t touch,” she growled.
I ignored her warning of course. She was frightened. I could feel something happening, a red-hot horror that glowed on her skin. I felt the force of a storm and its murdering eyes on mine. I felt the inhalation and exhalation of sour breaths. She stared at me petulantly. I knew exactly what she wanted to do—she wanted to scream and bite and kick even as her fingernails dug themselves into my flesh.
My child had changed. She had metamorphosed and crossed into an elaborately different realm. I tried to hold her, to love and to reassure. But she pushed me off. All at once, she began a low, urgent hiss that quickly turned, through sucked teeth, into a fitful, jittery cry. A roar of feelings that had been inside her, as if under her flesh, stored in the liver, hidden in the lungs, behind her ribs, came flying out. She swiped at the plants, yanked grass from the flower beds, and stomped on the stretch of mimosa plants my wife used as ground cover. Her fingers, balled and knuckled, pounded and hammered her chest. I lifted her body onto my lap and held her forcibly against me until I felt a calmness return. I relaxed my grip. She had stopped thrashing but her eyes stared back at me in terror. I pressed her against my chest and kept her there as long as I could.
That is the story about Tet that I told Mrs. An. I can tell thoughts are racing through her head. My story has produced a ping of recognition for her. She has over the years become my confidante, this gentle woman who exhibits great tenderness and warmth. She is affable and accepting. She straightens her back and studies the pill bottles on my night table as if an answer can be located there. Having taken on the burden of caring for me, she leans forward and says, “Let’s freshen you up.” Her voice wobbles. I nod. I know she understands. I want her to know how the illness that struck my daughter first began. “I see how difficult it must have been,” she says. “I didn’t know it started that early. How old was she then? Ten?” She tries unobtrusively to wipe away a tear. She coaxes me forth, pushing her body against the begrudgings of aging muscle and flesh. She props me up and brushes my hair. It is cut short, but she takes her time, as if there were long thick strands that still need to be tamed. When she tries to smooth and straighten out the tangled sheets, her hand inadvertent
ly touches the scar on my stomach. I feel her smooth hand against its nicked irregularities. It is a gesture that makes me shudder still. My bedsheets still hold the scent of purple blooms. I breathe it in. Once, when my wife was by my side, the sheets smelled of her.
“Your story is safe with me,” she says.
I nod but keep silent. Mrs. An pulls the stiffly pleated curtains over the window to shield my eyes from the streetlamps. My face has been washed. My sheets have been changed. I have on a freshly laundered shirt. I tell myself I am alert. I hear the solid click the closet door makes when it is closed. I hear voices that float in an undertone of green.
“Tell me about Hue,” she urges later. She preempts me. I have been thinking about Hue myself. “Do you know that you say his name when you are asleep?” she asks.
“Whose?”
“Mr. Phong.”
“Phong?” I repeat. Mrs. An says his name in that forthright, direct way of hers.
She nods. She wants to know more about him. Her eyes are most alive as they wait for me to respond.
I close my eyes. I see my child’s face as it once was, more gentle, less aggrieved, with an unhurried, childlike softness that touches me. I see Phong’s face, always with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. His name means “wind.” I think of it as a black, poisonous wind that changes direction and that we Vietnamese believe can inflict sickness in those caught within its grip. I feel an inner churn surging through me, making me queasy in the stomach and feeble in the knees. Without further preliminaries, Mrs. An takes my hand in hers, signaling that she is ready for me to begin.
Ten North Vietnamese and six Vietcong battalions overran the Imperial Citadel in Hue. It began the way the other Tet attacks began, in the early morning of January 31. The citadel was stormed, the airport attacked. We were vastly outnumbered. By dawn, the Communists controlled the city, except for the First Division’s headquarters and the compound housing the American military advisers.
We were not permitted to unleash artillery and air strikes. Hue was a sacred city that had to be preserved.
After twenty-four days of furious block-by-block fighting, we finally seized the citadel’s main flagpole and ripped down the Communist flag that had flown there for twenty-four days. That same day, February 24, our flag, imperial gold with three red horizontal stripes, was hoisted in the city center.
Of course we celebrated. The First Division was feted and decorated.
Inside the citadel, even in the midst of celebration, our troops discovered a city of mass graves.
These are the skeletal facts. In the early morning of February 26, our South Vietnamese First Airborne Task Force came across mounds of fresh earth in the Gia Hoi High School yard. Underneath the patches of red and yellow earth and the dying scent of a Tet truce were piles and piles of bodies—127 of them.
Once the first grave was discovered, I was commanded to head to Hue along with Phong to investigate the killings. Given his political connections, Phong was now one of the more significant staff members within the president’s inner circle. That he came on such a trip at all showed the importance of the mission and the support we were guaranteed to have from above.
It began as a bright and balmy morning but by the time we arrived in Hue and headed to the inspection sites a gray steady rain was falling. Along with a few of our local troops, we made our way through the drizzle into the sullen courtyard. Phong’s face tightened. Vultures hovered above and coveted the deadness that was everywhere. Bodies had turned black and bubbled with an infestation of maggots and flies. Rats gnawed on opened wounds and decomposed flesh. Phong’s job kept him mostly in the office. He let out a nervous, whinnying sound and quickly turned his head.
In the next few months, as our soldiers cleared rubble and debris, eighteen additional grave sites were found that produced more than two thousand bodies. Their hands were wired behind backs and their mouths stuffed with rags. They lay in puddles of black, brackish waters and bubbling scum floating on a vibrating surface of insects. Many of the bodies were contorted but suffered no wounds, an indication that they were buried alive.
Phong took refuge behind his sunglasses and white handkerchief. The stench was overpowering. Reflex alone could make most everyone recoil and vomit. I wanted to be magnanimous. I handed him a bottle of mentholated balm. He shook and hugged himself with his arms to calm the shivers. I saw the staring faces of a few troops in full battle fatigue, a glimmer of scorn in their eyes, as they watched him sink to his knees and throw up. There was a stench of nausea and sourness. His lips pursed. A gray sludge spurted from his mouth as he hurried farther away from us. I could put myself in his position, but I did not manage more than a showing of sympathy and concern. To save him embarrassment, I said nothing and focused on the task at hand.
A few days later, three Vietcong defectors walked up to our headquarters in Hue and confessed as we were preparing to divide up our duties among the Airborne Taskforce. It was early morning. A flock of raucous crows flapped their wings and took flight, creating a flutter against the galvanized roof. We were drinking coffee. I was pouring several teaspoons of condensed milk into my cup. The defectors were gaunt-looking, bedraggled. They stared at us, shaking their heads, and spoke in a low monotone of self-reproach. The oldest one walked forward with the other two by his side, one touching his arm and the other his wrist, either as a gesture of caution and restraint or encouragement and support.
They told us everything matter-of-factly. They had witnessed the murder of hundreds of people at Da Mai Creek, ten miles south of Hue. It had happened on the fifth day of Tet, in the Phu Cam section of Hue, where most of the city’s forty thousand Catholics lived. In some cases, entire families had been eliminated, they whispered. It was part of the Communist plan to wholly reconstruct society. They told us where to find the corpses of a well-known Catholic leader, his wife, his son and daughter-in-law, two servants, and a baby. The family dog had also been clubbed to death, the cat strangled, even the goldfish tossed on the floor. The father had been undressed and made to stand naked on top of a roof for all to witness.
Right away we put together a team from our Airborne Taskforce and headed for Da Mai Creek. We followed a dirt road. Several kilometers away from the village, the land closed inward into itself. The road made a final turn and then clogged itself up. Surrounded by a double canopy of thick brush, trees, and roots close to the ground, the creek would be impossible to reach on land. And it would take too long by boat. To clear a landing pad, helicopters were sent in to blast a hole through the double canopy with dynamite. In the artificial light, our burial team dug, scavenged, and found skulls, skeletons, and human bones. The lights strapped on their helmets shined a path to the discovery. Piled one on top of another, the dead were left aboveground. The bones were clean and white, smoothed by the water from the running stream. The terrible brutality startled us. Slowly, leaving out no details, we wrote our report. I planned to show it to the Americans, to Cliff.
By the time the Battle of Hue ended, six thousand civilians had vanished.
• • •
One evening, as we walked through the surrounding areas that fanned out from the village center, Phong and I followed the dirt road south on a path that curled through a small hamlet along the bank of the Perfume River. I wasn’t sure why we did it. I felt compelled to treat him like a friend. Aggrieved or not, I wanted to manifest, if not to feel, the tenderness I once had for him. I could practice the gesture in the hope that an accompanying feeling would catch up with me. I could be bigger than my emotions, let go of this seemingly purposeless enmity.
He was slightly ahead, walking at a fast clip. I remember seeing the familiar orange glow of his cigarette butt dangling from his fingers as I lagged behind. He brought it to his mouth and took a long pensive drag. The slight breeze blew odors of cigarette smoke and coffee into my face. Perhaps we had been lulled by the profusion of luminous g
reen that so defines the country’s soul. We glided unaware into what awaited us beyond the old footbridge by the stream.
I felt the soft spongy earth under my feet. It had rained a few days ago. A water buffalo with huge curving horns meandered among the translucent squares of green and headed toward us. A boy lay on its back, seemingly taking a nap. A woman walked along the edge of the rice field, shielding her face from the sun with a conical hat. I took a deep breath. Despite what had happened here but a few months before, everything seemed rejuvenated.
“Come on,” Phong said over his shoulder. He arched his back, cracking it. His legs took long, loose strides. He rotated his neck clockwise, then counterclockwise.
Before us was a patch of commonplace brown earth, an austere layer of claylike topsoil, a small and benign anthill. How quickly life changed.
I sensed it, like a flashing movement out of the corner of my eye. Something was wrong. I was a combat soldier. I was struck by a butterfly sensation that stopped me from moving forward.
“What?” Phong turned his head slightly to ask.
I was startled. Phong was walking toward its slick center. I hesitated. But I did not shout a warning.
Why?
I would ask myself that question for the rest of my life.
And then I could see it, a slight but perceptible rise in the earth’s surface. A small mound.
A loud boom rose from the startled earth, followed quickly by a blast wave of hot gases. Phong was blown to the ground. An inert metal casing had jumped up from buried earth and snapped. A volcanic redness poured from his flesh. His right leg above the knee was blown apart. A white jagged bone and a tangle of ligaments protruded from the flesh. I touched him. The bone was pulverized. Bone fragments had torn through his flesh and bits of gravel were driven into the surrounding tissue. There was severe soft tissue loss all around. The concussion effect was terrible. The entire wound area was sprayed with impregnated matter, dirt, debris, grass, cloth fibers. Phong began to shake, his face twisted and distorted. I made a tourniquet to stanch the bleeding. I tried several times. It was slippery, tissue, blood, skin. I fumbled. Phong’s head sagged, his face turning purplish and blue. I radioed for help. I calmed myself down and tied the tourniquet again. I put a handkerchief over the worst-looking wound and pressed my hand against it. As a cooling breeze blew softly, I, the spared one, waited for a helicopter to come and take him away.