by Lan Cao
I imagined Kissinger skirting the room. I could see the slow, fluid shuffle, the calamitous face. He had some calculating to do. There was Congress to deal with. There was the matter of American pride, American projection of power, still necessary to maintain the American empire. And to bring me back to reality, there was also Cliff’s voice, insistent still on its own loping assertiveness, its right, through mere repetition, to convince me.
Once it had been simple enough. The United States merely wanted to get rid of Diem. Conveniently for them there were enough facts out there for them to declare that he was ruthless and tyrannical. They ordered his assassination. It would be an organic rebellion. There were plenty of coup plotters willing to help. And look what they have on their hands now. The unreckoned consequences of their action.
A dizzying sensation took over, making me feeble in the knees. I knew about unintended consequences. I looked at Cliff standing close to my wife and I could see far too clearly the complexities of unintended consequences. I squeezed my eyes shut. A spiking heart rate thumped against my chest.
“The Americans come and go as they please.” These words came to me as suddenly as a monsoon sweeping through the startled grass. And so it was. From the vantage of power, they planted their heavy boots squarely on our faces as they entered and exited. The map beneath our feet shifted. Borders would be redrawn, cities renamed.
When did we become dispensable? Or were we dispensable all along? I wanted to ask Cliff, who till the end never permitted himself to contemplate defeat. Defeat came fragment by fragment, in the many meetings in which our fate was discussed and determined. In the end, it was all about the straight-line speed with which they could extricate themselves.
“You know, Cliff, that there is a lot of treachery going on, don’t you?”
He said nothing.
“Peace. The so-called secret peace agreement. Who would ever have thought of peace as treachery?”
Cliff met my pronouncements with a languor that was irritating. His acceptance of CRIMP and now his view of the ongoing peace negotiations as harmless annoyed me. I wanted to shake common sense into him, force him to revise his perspective. I wanted him to feel bad, now, in front of me.
“I’m not the only one saying this, you know. Listen to your own American officials. The political landscape has changed. You know that,” I said.
“Just because the political landscape has changed doesn’t mean that the peace agreement we end up with will be bad for you.”
“And why not? Because America would care about us? Because it is loyal to its allies? Why, Cliff? Vietnam is not Europe. You know full well that countries betray other countries. Friends betray friends.”
Indeed, I understood the rumblings underneath. For years there had been a secret plan to end the war. Nixon himself had announced on television years before, on May 14, 1969, that there would be no one-sided withdrawal of American forces. If the Americans withdrew so must the North Vietnamese. This was only common sense. It was supposed to be nonnegotiable. A truce had to be based on a continuing balance of forces and it remained the public negotiating position of the Americans.
“I believe we will make sure the South has a strong footing to defend itself after peace is struck,” Cliff said.
But bigger things have a way of overpowering smaller ones. There were forces involved that were beyond our control. This is why a soldier escapes death on a raging battlefield and a little girl playing on her own street does not.
We sensed this warming of relations with the Chinese and the Soviets. They called it détente. The timepiece ticked while the world experienced a realignment of the cold war powers. When an entire landscape shifted, countries could be sent spinning wildly on their axis. I imagined Kissinger, his hooded eyes scanning the geopolitical situation, piling on the reassurances in his deep, gravelly timbre. No doubt he studied us for a few seconds as he weighed our fate and decided it could be flicked away. He gave Hanoi assurances that America was willing to let them stay where they were, on our soil. And to the Chinese, he went even further. Because America was courting a new relationship with China, we became an object of exchange. Bigger ambitions and great political gravity were at stake. Kissinger told the Chinese premier that a Communist takeover of our country by the Chinese was fine but they must wait for an appropriate interval after the Americans departed. It was about saving American face.
At some point during the course of our many Friday dinners, I told Cliff about these secret negotiations. The part about bartering us away in order to strike a grand arrangement with China was not publicly known. Of course he would ask, “How do you know all this?”
My wife’s Vietcong brother had told her and then me.
We knew what would happen next. A cold metal coil would be slipped around our neck. The year was 1973.
• • •
I walked into Phong’s new office and sat on one of his upholstered armchairs. He had been assigned to oversee our national pacification program, which President Thieu and the Americans deemed a national priority. Areas controlled, contested, or heavily overrun by the Vietcong would be targeted for pacification. The villagers would be trained and armed to defend their own home provinces. Land to the Tillers programs would be implemented to give land to the landless. Bridges, canals, roads, were repaired at record pace.
Phong was in charge of all that.
He was still slight, a single silhouette of leanness, but he had not been miniaturized. His political skills and instincts were being put to good use. And he was still the person I went to when I needed to work through the war’s complications with someone. Despite the posture of certainty I adopted when speaking with Cliff, I still wheedled Phong into taking positions that were more comforting and hopeful. I allowed myself to experiment with him, as if it were still possible to reorder the world in line with our needs. It seemed right somehow that exploratory musings about our fate were appropriate only with a fellow Vietnamese to whom I’d been tethered through history.
“We can always refuse to sign the peace agreement,” I said.
The cigarette in Phong’s hand glowed red against the gold holder. He poured a glass of whiskey from the bottle.
When did the whiskey habit start? I wondered.
“No, we have no such choice,” he tersely declared in a hoarse, mad-prophet voice. His hair was uncombed, his face unshaved.
“Why not?”
His back was stooped and he sat with slackened jaws, deep in thought.
“Phong,” I called, and moved closer to him, calling out his name once more. I pulled the answer out of him.
“The Americans have threatened to sign a separate peace with the North,” he said. “So it hardly matters whether we sign a peace agreement or not.”
“So it is true. It is hopeless,” I said.
But just as I was about to leave his office, Phong said something that pulled me back. “Minh, listen. I have personally seen Nixon’s letter to the president.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
He chuckled. “It’s not just lying about for us to read whenever we want. But I memorized the crucial paragraphs. So it might not be as hopeless as we had feared,” he said. “The letter contains a very clear threat from the Americans.” He was testy and tired. He cleared his throat and enunciated Nixon’s very own words.
“‘I have therefore irrevocably decided to proceed to initial the Agreement on January 23, 1973, and to sign it on January 27, 1973, in Paris. I will do so, if necessary, alone. In that case I shall have to explain publicly that your Government obstructs peace. The result will be an inevitable and immediate termination of U.S. economic and military assistance which cannot be forestalled by a change of personnel in your government. I hope, however, that after all our two countries have shared and suffered together in conflict, we will stay together to preserve peace and reap its benefits.’”
He laughed. “So finally all that memorizing and rote learning in grade school is useful for something, eh?”
A separate peace, he said with a smirk. His knee creaked in all its angry metallic petulance. They would not hesitate to plow us into the ground.
And when Hanoi balked at this point and that point in the treaty text and walked away from the negotiating table, Nixon ordered the war’s biggest bombing campaign against them. B-52s, one after another, were lined up on five miles of ramp space in Guam and began round-the-clock bombing of rail yards, petroleum storage facilities, missile storage sites, warehouses, and docks in Hanoi and Haiphong until there was in the end no military target left to bomb. After eleven days of all-out air war, Hanoi returned to Paris and agreed to agree.
In its final version, the North got to keep their privileged sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos and their entire forces wherever they were in the South.
Here it comes, the white-hot deadline for peace.
The North would sign the peace treaty.
The Americans would sign it regardless.
The South signed too, just as Phong said it would.
“It will be a death sentence,” I said to Phong when the announcement was made on the evening news. It was January 27, 1973.
“Perhaps not,” Phong answered. We were both in the office, watching the momentous occasion on television. His voice was one distant, undifferentiated hum. Other officers in the room listened intently as Phong made his pronouncements. We were trying to make sense of the information he was giving us. “The Americans,” he said, “have pledged in the strongest of terms to maintain their air bases in Thailand. To keep their Seventh Fleet off our coast to deter any attack and to continue economic and military aid if we sign. If we do not, of course their Congress will move swiftly, swiftly,” Phong repeated, dragging the word out for emphasis, “to cut off all aid.”
I shook my head.
“The language is strong,” Phong admonished. It was not spineless. I searched his face for clues to his real thoughts. I could see only an impervious shield.
• • •
The war was over as far as the Americans were concerned. They had peace at last and the tincture of honor plus the release of their 591 prisoners of war. But, as Phong kept reminding me, we had all the reassurances we needed from the president of the United States himself. Rumor had it that the letters were all signed originals and safely kept in a fireproof box in the Presidential Palace in Saigon.
Soon after the Paris Agreement was signed, the North stopped its lip licking and attacked. Here was the bewildering military reality. Thirteen enemy divisions and seventy-five regiments, more than 160,000 troops in all, were still in place in our country. There were also arms and troops that poured down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, more than four times the numbers that took part in prior attacks.
I walked into Phong’s office early one evening. He was sitting morosely at his desk with his chin on the palms of his hands. A pale pearl-gray light shone on his face, revealing deep, creviced cheeks. His gaze leveled and settled on me.
“You look terrible,” I said.
“I haven’t eaten. I can’t think about food,” he said.
I took a closer look at him, his hunched shoulders, his slender frame, and his importunate face. His body was in slow decay, racked by long stretches of arduous, convulsive coughs.
The war’s outcome now seemed beyond our control. The attacks in violation of the peace agreement were incessant and relentless. And in the face of this malevolence, both houses of the American Congress moved in perfect lockstep to tighten the noose around our neck. To great applause, their Congress cut off all funds to finance combat activities by American forces in North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
The only insult left was to deprive us of money. This time, after all that had occurred, we knew it was coming. Phong did not even object when I suggested this possibility. Cutting off the funds was what did it. Death could be guaranteed not by the shedding of blood but rather by an indifferent and innocuous pen, by merely crossing off an item in the budget. We shut our eyes and tried to do the calculation in our heads. A furious math, additions and subtractions, stared us in the face. Here was the worst of both worlds. Communist bases permanently on our land and no funding for the military to expel them.
I kept thinking about how Phong and I came full circle at last. Twenty or so years before, when my wife and I first married and Phong and I became friends, we were given the task of whittling down our armed forces. Now, once again, we had to embark on the same mission.
The air force was ordered to reduce air support, tactical airlifts, and reconnaissance flights by half and to reduce helilifts by 70 percent. We were told to retire more than two hundred aircraft and cancel preexisting orders for upgrades. We were instructed to recall four hundred pilots from training in the United States. The navy inactivated more than six hundred vessels and river craft and reduced river patrols by 72 percent. Not one plane, ship, or boat was replaced after the peace treaty.
The drumbeat march toward finality, toward a more perfect peace, had to be hurried. Quick, quicker, and even quicker if possible.
Our ammunition supply rate had to be reduced. The daily allowance for rifles was set at 1.6 rounds per man. Cliff said the daily allowance for the Americans when they were still in the war was 13 rounds. For machine guns, it was 10.6 rounds (while it was 165 for the Americans). For mortars, it was 1.3 rounds (and 16.9 for the Americans).
While we were conserving, the enemy was profligate. At Tong Le Chan border camp, soldiers of the Communist army shelled the base three hundred times, using more than 10,000 rounds, over a sixteen-week period.
In the meantime, in an audacious act that showed supreme confidence and advance planning, the North Vietnamese proceeded to build and finish a petroleum, oil, and lubricant pipeline that extended as far south as Loc Ninh, a mere seventy-five miles north of Saigon.
The few hundred military advisers who remained after the American pullout were soon ordered to return to their country. And so it continued. In the midst of a machinelike juggernaut that aimed itself straight at us, it was, more than anything, a quiet departure by one friend that proved devastating, especially for Quy.
When Cliff left he promised to return. He said good-bye in January 1975, early one morning. He drove down the driveway of our house, probably through the main thoroughfare in Cholon, heading back toward the fine houses and shops of Saigon’s fashionable district before taking that turn toward Tan Son Nhut Air Base. We watched him go. I saw my wife stand on the rim of disappointment and heave, hanging on to his disappearing form.
We could feel the movement of time as it nudged, then pushed itself against us. Hurry up and let go so we can all begin anew.
As 100,000 North Vietnamese soldiers advanced toward Saigon in 1975, President Ford declared that the war was finished as far as America was concerned. Defended by 5,000 men, Phuoc Long Province, along the Cambodian border north of Saigon, was the first to fall under attack by 30,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers.
The American State Department issued a “strong protest.”
For the first time since I had him released, I heard from my brotherin-law, who had a message sent secretly to my house. I had bought a plate of pork buns for lunch from a vendor who frequented our street. When I bit into the soft, white dough, I found a strip of paper neatly folded in half. It read: “Make arrangements for your family to leave. Quickly. Before it is too late.” The note was signed “Little Brother Number Five.”
17
[Untitled]
MAI, 1975
I know, as Father and I get on a helicopter to fly out of Saigon, that my mother will stay behind, enfolded inside her tormented heart.
II
HALF-LIVES
18
The Keepsake and the Storm
BÃO, 2006
It is I, Bão.
I rush out of our apartment as fast as I can and gaze right through the winter mist. The air is sharp and cold. The bright blue energy that clattered and jangled through my body during that moment of violence has lessened but it has not dissolved. I can feel its effect, a formlessness of spirit carried into the unknown edge of the present. A long memory converges inside me, pulling itself into shades of colors and sounds.
It is Mai talking to herself. Of course I can hear her and see her. Even though I am hidden inside her, I am the omniscient one among us three. Cecile is merely the charming little child, freshly hatched, who allowed a bird to coax her into talking and then became its playmate. But I am Bão, the storm, not Ba’o the treasure. I am the malevolent central player. Mai is here, half bewildered, half alert, adjacent to the distinct lives we have been spinning in this country where we have dwelled for thirty tarnished years. I know she is conscious of the wisp of movement whenever I stir. I see the slow rise of Mai’s chest and watch as she sits herself down on the sidewalk, dumbly, and kicks a lamppost with punitive force. She has become the sort of person who reserves her anger for inanimate objects. Her stomach dips and rises, whipping up thick and bitter bile that she struggles to push back down. Here I am alone already, inside the buried, threadbare narratives hidden from her view.
I know what I have done. I have smashed a television and a teapot. I have wreaked havoc inside our father’s enclosure of calm. There is a medical word in this country to describe Mai and Cecile and me. Our madness was once called multiple personality disorder but now it is coined dissociative identity disorder.
When the thay phap told our parents years ago that a spirit might have seized Mai’s body and soul, Father associated her white-hot anger and her many indecipherable moods with alien demons. At first he was unsure when I elbowed her out, uncertain of what he called my storms—“Bao”—and for the most part, he was alienated from and afraid of me. But over the years, he has developed a different perspective—distance morphed into furtive affection which bloomed into something like love. Love for me, Bao, not just for Mai. As he aged, he somehow found a way to cherish not just the perfect moments but also life’s deviation—the fortuitous turn against the grain, the sort of dissonance and melancholy that produced someone like me.