The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle

by Jeff Wallace

  “As it stands, we are beginning to withdraw our forces according to an ambitious timetable that will leave only aviation personnel, advisors, and logisticians behind. That pleases the politicians—American casualties are the lowest since our combat troops arrived in ‘65. When confronted with a big protest, President Nixon just points to the numbers—budgets, manpower, and casualties reduced—to show he’s got it under control. On this side of the puddle, our advisors are doing what they can to shore up the dike of the South Vietnamese military. There are days when I’m hopeful we’ll succeed. Then, along comes a vacuous piece like this.” He flailed his arm dismissively at Gribley’s story. “To perpetuate their theme of U.S. failure in Vietnam, the press doesn’t need two hundred casualties a week, all they need is one, if they can sensationalize it enough, and the politicians will forget we’re just a quarter-way down the Vietnamization timetable. The pressure will intensify to speed it up, withdraw everybody. Meanwhile, the NVA is stockpiling massive supplies in their border sanctuaries in Cambodia, indicating they’re cooking up another offensive.”

  Cobris’s face had re-forged itself into a rigid mask. One had to assume he believed what he was saying, yet—and perhaps it was my fault, for not having been around the higher echelons to witness his mode of thinking—in Vietnam, you had to use terms like truth and moral justice with caution. To mention moral justice and Vietnam in the same breath was a propagandist’s line. To assert that Gribley’s story might arrest the course of Vietnamization sounded like a conjurer who decried that a sneeze during a séance had kept the spirits from appearing.

  Ice tinkled as the waiter delivered my water. Sipping it, grateful for the cold flow in my throat, I wondered what had motivated Cobris’s pontifications.

  “Now, as to how this concerns your investigation. Deke, pull out the telex from the Pentagon Security Division.” I blinked and the general already had the sheet of paper in hand. “After a theater-wide accountability call—meaning every unit and service and civilian agency in country affirmed every swinging dick—I requested a comprehensive review in Washington. I know people there, and they hotfooted for me on this. They compared the dead man’s fingerprints to those on file with the Department of Defense, FBI, and other organizations. They found nothing. So I’m certain of the results—he was not an American soldier or other government sponsoree. Whoever the unlucky bastard was, he damned sure wasn’t one of ours. No basis exists for a formal investigation.”

  He reclined in his chair and took another sip of his Scotch. So he’d close the investigation now, I thought. He must have staged this excessive show to explain his logic.

  Fine with me.

  He was still talking. “People on the outside describe the U.S. military as if it were a dictatorship. In fact, it’s an organization that embodies many democratic ideals. People can talk back, and they do. I mention this because not everyone agrees with my reasoning. Colonel Larsen, the Second Brigade Commander in Tay Ninh Province, is the kind who talks back. He’s a bigger thorn in my side than you are. He’s standing his ground with the chain of command. Larsen is hard headed. I have to live with guys like him. But you do see what I’m getting at, Tanner. We already know the outcome.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Important for you to understand, because it drives how you proceed. Without context, even a smart fellow like you can go astray. Try to step up to the level of strategic thinkers for a minute and comprehend that you can’t apply the same template to every problem. You involved the Saigon police in your investigation.”

  In Cobris’s style, it was a question. “Yes sir. They’re trying to find a person who I believe can identify the casualty.”

  The creases in Cobris’s face multiplied. “Here’s what I believe. What had been under my control has been relinquished to grafters who now are in a position to issue alternative statements on the incident to sideliners like this reporter Gribley. We tell the press we’re certain the unidentified KIA was not an American. Gribley then goes to the Saigon police and obtains a quote saying, on the basis of their investigation, he was an American. Christ, they might say anything. Look what you’ve set me up for.”

  “It won’t happen. Your scenario.”

  “Never guarantee what you have no power over.”

  “It’s not a guarantee, sir. I just know the people I deal with. They won’t talk to the press. I trust them.”

  A snort from Vangleman. It was a rude sound, and Cobris snapped him a glance like a whip cracked at an unruly circus cat. The effect on Vangleman was mild, no remorse evident—the Vanglemans of the world hold themselves to be irreplaceable.

  Cobris said, “We’re not going to have a shit storm over a dead son of a bitch who isn’t an American to begin with. I don’t give an old whore’s fuck whether your procedures call for a tidy checklist wherein you eliminate possibilities with your Saigon cop buddies. What I want from you is one thing—a finding that the casualty was not an American. It’s a statement, to which you will sign your name, attesting that your investigation was thorough and complete and officially resolved. I want that very soon, without a lot of extraneous nonsense. Tell me this is clear.”

  “Yes, sir. It’s clear. But before I sign anything, I need to collect more facts.”

  Cobris stared at me. Vangleman sat motionless.

  I must be the kind who talked back.

  In the distance, the faint whop-whop of a helicopter rotor.

  “Your ride,” said the general.

  He must have signaled to Vangleman, who was on his feet. I’d been dismissed, and I had the impression I wasn’t moving fast enough collecting my hat. Vangleman was actually tugging at my sleeve to escort me down the stairs to the lawn, where, by the stacked tables, he went off like a grenade. “Jesus Christ! You’re lucky you’re still around. The Saigon cops? The interview with Gavet? What the hell were you trying to do?”

  “Did somebody complain about my interview with Gavet?”

  “Word reached the general, I don’t know from where, saying you were wildly flogging around. Which appears to have been accurate.”

  When Vangleman had phoned Colonel Crowley this afternoon about my actions, Crowley apparently hadn’t let on that asking for help from the Saigon cops had been his idea—he’d ordered me to do it. What kind of officer lets his subordinate take the heat for following orders? Yet I wasn’t about to serve up an excuse, especially to a creature like Vangleman.

  I said, “I’m not flogging around. Investigations are my job.”

  “Get it through your head, Tanner—your job is what General Cobris says it is.”

  The chopper materialized over the trees and descended deafeningly toward the pad. Vangleman leaned close to my ear and screamed to make himself heard. “You deliver the signed affirmation that your Caucasian KIA wasn’t an American, so the general can shut down this controversy, and you’re guaranteed any follow-on assignment you want. Maybe a promotion.” He stared me straight in the eye, validating with everything short of a wink where the offer had originated.

  When the skids touched, the crew chief hunched in the door and waved me forward. I scooted under the pressuring rotor, clambered into my seat, and by the time I’d buckled myself in, the g-force was tugging me into a crazy lean. We climbed past the treetops and over the villa. I scanned for Cobris and Vangleman. They were gone.

  They were gone but somebody else stood on the patio. A woman in a wind-blown dress stared up at the chopper. It was too dark, and the ship too high, to see her face, but I could tell she had a trim figure and light brown hair, which meant she probably wasn’t oriental. Her uplifted gaze followed as we swept over. The rotor wash shivered her hair and her dress and the yellow-striped table umbrella.

  Day 4

  __________

  In Saigon’s alleyways, you’d be wise to remember that the slap of a droplet on tile makes the same sound as a gun hammer cocked back.

  The logistical streams that had fed the hostilities these past twenty-fi
ve years still flowed. The place was like a sewer clot of sandbags and weaponry wrapped in barbed wire. Yet to those who’d been around a while, it was obvious that a certain quiet had settled on the town, palpable in contrast to Tet 1968, over two years ago, when any cop who stepped out to direct traffic in a Cholon intersection stood a fair chance of being riddled with bullets.

  My role in the Tet counteroffensive had been to take the Vietnamese MP company I advised across the no-man’s land between central Cholon and the VC-infested lower 6th District, a ramshackle neighborhood in the tail of the fish where you might traverse a square kilometer levitated six feet up on the shack roofs, vaulting the squeezed alleys each as wide as the reach of a man’s arms. A fanciful notion, but you wouldn’t have tried it, not during Tet. Below ran a maze, intricate because the streets and houses had been hit by artillery, splaying the walls and spilling the roofs like cards in a game of 52-pickup. The destruction compounded the chance you’d get lost, and you’d hear the nearby gunfire and the screams of your men and not be able to find them.

  Tet happened before I met Tuy or Trong. The only Vietnamese I knew were the soldiers being shot to pieces in the narrow streets. The Cholon residents who crowded the control line formed a presence on the margins of my comprehension, like an animal noise in the dark. The soldiers had ordered them to stay low, and they squatted—supple, they could stay hunched a long time—and extended their arms pitifully while I guided the tanks forward and identified the targets. The people cried out; I didn’t ask for a translation of what they were saying. Barking their concussive barks, the tank guns tore into the neighborhood from which we were taking fire. The impact of a tank round on one of those shanties was to blow it into scraps, like a puffed-up paper bag clapped hard. Then the tanks rolled over what was left, and in an hour I’d squashed flat a square block.

  Afterward the inhabitants returned. The corrugated roofs purled steam like charcoal grills. When the people found the ruins of their houses, they squatted on the surfaces in their tire-tread sandals, picking through the shards, their tears sizzling on the metal.

  Clumped together in the ruins we found the bodies of three Viet Cong and a young woman. The soldiers said she must have been fighting alongside the enemy, though her ao dai of patterned white silk wasn’t the garment VC women typically wore. I stared at her blood-speckled figure on the ground. Gunfire continued to crack from the other neighborhoods. There wasn’t much left to fight over in this one.

  That week, an American officer, having just summoned artillery and air strikes upon a village named Ben Tre, told a reporter that it had been necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. Mesmerized by the line’s apparent irony, the press reprinted it endlessly. Yet to me it made sense; I’d done the same to a district of shacks.

  The horrors of war might permanently sear a man’s consciousness. Or they might not. In the aftermath of mental shock, an officer gropes not for peace and innocence, but for lucidity and the ability to command. For me, the Tet Offensive imposed less a nightmare than a sense of place. And a question: How had I come to kill the girl in the white ao dai?

  The books hadn’t done much to answer it. So when I returned to South Vietnam for my second tour, I sought out Tuy, the window girl with the clear eyes that had regarded the upended jeep as if it were the history of her country. I remembered the house. Before I went, I inquired with Trong, who confirmed that the woman who lived at the address was not married.

  I told her about the girl in the white ao dai, how the image had stayed with me, the speckled bloodstains among the patterns in the silk. She recognized no irony in my story. Her building was not many blocks from the neighborhood I described. Along her ceiling ran black streaks from the fires; the booms of the tank guns would have echoed here.

  And now I spent my nights close to the neighborhood I’d destroyed. Afterward the residents had rebuilt their homes using what could be salvaged. The only traces left were the soot and scorch marks. And the war dreams.

  * * *

  In the morning, I phoned Hipolite and asked for Simone Nogaret’s number.

  “You’re wasting your time,” he said. “She won’t talk to you.”

  He gave me the number anyway.

  Soon afterward, Tuy and I crowded into a little grocery store on Dong Khanh. The store belonged to a friend of her mother—it was the place I gave as an address to Americans who might need to find me on short notice. I used its phone to call out when I had to. Phone lines were not all that common in residential Cholon. Tuy’s building had none.

  I dialed and handed the receiver to Tuy; whoever answered would be speaking French. I’d rehearsed with her what to say: She was to introduce herself as the secretary for an American officer conducting an investigation. I wanted her tone to ring officious, suggestive of authority, whereas in truth I had zero. Having disapproved of my meeting with Gavet, Cobris would take umbrage at an approach to a French socialite. I intended to leave it out of my report and hope the general wouldn’t find out anyway, as he’d learned of my interview with Gavet.

  Suddenly Tuy was speaking in mellifluous French, sounding anything but officious. The chatter went on for a minute. She paused and hugged the phone to her shoulder, whispering, “I’ve got Mademoiselle Dobier, Simone’s assistante de gestion. She’s gone to inquire.”

  Tuy dragged the phone cord behind her friend’s counter, while he smiled, a pluggy, honest, good-natured man utterly lacking in Tuy’s finesse. She’d known him since she was a girl, called him bac, for uncle, perhaps because he contrasted so starkly with her true uncle, the colonial functionary. I sat with him atop sacks of rice and spices, expecting her to reap a curt refusal over the phone.

  She said a few more words and hung up. “Today at six,” she said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I never kid, do I, uncle?”

  Rising on his bandy legs, he squeezed his eyes in delight.

  * * *

  Tu Do Street, Saigon’s Champs-Élysées, arrowed from the pink-hued Saigon Cathedral past the square where a bronze statue remembered the Vietnamese war dead, to the park at the riverside avenue Ben Bach Dang. In this district clustered fine hotels, foreign embassies, press bureaus, and the National Assembly building. Simone Nogaret’s apartment tower climbed in yellow-brick and glass from a tree-shaded street tucked three blocks off Tu Do. Under the trees slumbered Citroën DS sedans, the latter-day cyclos for Saigon’s wealthy set. As symbols of power, the cars were less telling than the plain-clothes French security men outside the building. Over their shoulders they slung submachine guns they fingered loosely with their right hands, while with their left they pumped Gauloises cigarettes up and down.

  The security men made inquiries before they escorted us to the lobby, where an urbane Frenchwoman awaited us. I guessed her to be in her late thirties. Her bundled hair, indigo skirt, and pressed white blouse were imprimaturs of her narrow-ranging, non-negotiable dominion. In English, she said, “I’m Marie Dobier.” She did not extend her hand. Flicking a sideglance at Tuy, she asked, “Your companion, Major?”

  “Tuyet is my translator.”

  Dobier must have realized that Tuy was the one she’d spoken to on the phone this morning. I thought, how would the elite residents of this building regard a lovely, unmarried Vietnamese woman who accompanied an American military officer? Would this turn into another bout of stereotyping, as at Le Cercle Sportif? “Wait, please,” Dobier said.

  We lounged in the wicker chairs. Sultry air spilled through the requisite grenade screens. On the street, the guards scrutinized the cars and passers-by, almost in anticipation. Downtown Saigon was prowled by various denizens, yet this quarter was kept secure, the influential residents protected. What worried the guards today?

  In ten minutes, Dobier was back. “Madame Nogaret will see you now. She has another appointment soon. Please be brief.”

  Rising to the uppermost floor, the elevator opened to an oval foyer with a single apartment door whose
panels gleamed in spotless white enamel. A bolt clicked, and Simone Nogaret stood in the doorway.

  In the angles of her face I looked for flaws and saw none, a rare absence, for nature invariably delivers faces in disproportion, either crooked or unbalanced. Hers formed a perfect teardrop tapering to a sharp chin. The only unevenness was in her color; her cheeks wore a streaky tan from a day of too much sun. Hair the shade of dried bamboo skimmed her shoulders, and a lock dangled like a pointer to her direct gaze. A hint of mascara blushed eyes neither green nor blue; they reminded me of the woods at dusk.

  Off somewhere, maybe on the roof, hummed a potent air conditioner, which was why she could tolerate the long-sleeved sweater. Knit of white Merino, it featured a diamond-hatched pattern clenching to a finer weave at the neck. The long neck might be folded over; she wore it unfurled nearly to her chin. Her slacks were white too, snug on trim hips slightly in sway as she led us inside. Her walk might be described as purposeful, expectant of doors being pulled open in advance of her arrival. Ushering us to a sofa sheathed in a lustrous cream batik, she reclined into an absinthe-green leather chair, withdrew a cigarette from a gold case, and held it at arms length across the glass-topped coffee table. Tuy and I declined. I smelled Simone’s perfume, a subtle scent that seemed to dwell between East and West.