The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle

by Jeff Wallace

  One afternoon, field men happened to be working near the garden when Simone commenced her card game. The usual household staff clustered, the maids and kitchen helpers. Diu stood by the trellis and watched—she never participated, for one part because she knew the cards too well, and for the other because she knew Simone too well. Simone invited the field hands to join, and hesitantly they agreed. The game proceeded pleasantly until Simone grew annoyed at them. Worried that they might hurt her feelings, they engaged half-heartedly. Play earnestly or leave, she insisted. Still they carried on feebly, until one of them, pledging to use all his cleverness, stepped forward. His name was Khiêm.

  The contest was balanced. Khiêm was an adult and a natural competitor, yet this was Simone’s game, and she’d invented the rules. As the play progressed, it became obvious she was losing. Almost feverish with intensity, gritting her teeth, she whooped when she selected a favorable card, shrieked when she drew an Asian face. The maids whispered anxiously in Khiêm’s ear, cautioning him of the child’s notorious temper. Then Simone had a streak of luck, three French cards in a row. At once her deportment mellowed, and she played gracefully, pretty girl in her impeccable dress surrounded by the garden flowers and the doting Vietnamese. She had gained the advantage, the game was all but finished. Only two cards remained. Khiêm reached, chose one. A Vietnamese face. No gain.

  Simone smiled and put down her cards.

  “You must take the last card,” declared Khiêm.

  Plantation hands did not instruct Simone in what she must or must not do. A hush fell over the gathered servants. None of them expected her to pay attention. Why should she? The game was hers, and Khiêm had no say over anything. Yet in her decisive way, she swept up the card and gazed at what she had drawn.

  The charm vanished. The servants vainly tried to calm the girl who screeched like a bird caught in barbed wire. Wildly she pulled at her hair. Hearing her cries, her father rushed out, and thinking that someone had mistreated his daughter, he demanded an explanation. None of the servants understood what had happened until her hand yielded the crumpled Japanese face card.

  Simone insisted that he fire Khiêm.

  Her father was a reasonable man. Gently he explained that the field hand had meant no disrespect. He allowed a week to pass, hoping that his daughter would relent. Perhaps it was his way of preparing her for adulthood, to leave to her a decision of such magnitude. He was fond of saying that all that he owned—his land, his wealth, and his power soon to be restored, once the Japanese were gone—would one day pass to her. Within earshot of the servants, no doubt to remind them, he called her his beautiful heiress.

  Silently Diu observed. She doubted that Simone would change her mind. With a servant’s perception for things the parents often missed, Diu detected a profound coldness in the little empress.

  One evening during the week, a maid informed Diu that a young woman was waiting for her by the gate that separated the garden from the groves. The woman was Khiêm’s wife. Her name was Lien, and like her husband, she was a field worker. Diu remembered her as a person of encouragement, with a ready smile. The smile was not evident now. Fingers clenching the slats, Lien appeared stricken. She said she’d heard that Diu could influence Simone. Could Diu intervene to save her husband’s job?

  Diu replied, “I’m sorry, but what you heard is not true. I have no sway over her.”

  Lien clearly had gathered the courage to make her plea. She said, “What if I speak to her myself? We have a baby—a little girl. Surely Simone will understand—she is so beautiful, she must feel kindness in her heart.” Lien’s panic was justified: The Japanese Army had commandeered the rice, and there was none to spare for Vietnamese who lacked work. These days, thousands starved to death.

  For the first and only time, Diu approached Simone on behalf of another worker. She waited in the upstairs hallway for an hour until the girl arrived. Now Diu confronted her: “Did you know that Khiêm has a wife and a baby daughter?”

  Simone snapped, “Then he shouldn’t have spoken.”

  “What did he do, except to tell you to observe the rules?”

  Diu hoped that Simone would respond as she had years ago, when Diu had forced her to stand still for the measurements. But Simone simply glared, as if she could not believe that her seamstress was speaking to her in this way. Then she stepped into her room and closed the door. Diu knew that to remonstrate further was pointless, even dangerous.

  Lien still waited by the garden gate. Diu delivered the bad news. “Simone has made up her mind. Once she has done so, her heart closes like a trap.”

  When the week passed, Simone’s father bowed to his daughter’s will. From the second-floor window, Diu watched Khiêm and Lien carrying their baby and their meager sacks of belongings. Their forms shrank until they submerged into the forest.

  Tears flooded Diu’s eyes. None of it made sense. How could Simone’s father have permitted this injustice? Until now, she had not thought deeply about the world in which she lived, in which the masters’ authority simply prevailed, imposed without her permission, and against which she dared not speak no matter how impetuously or arbitrarily the masters behaved. Now it dawned on her that such power brooked no effrontery, not even reminders to obey the rules, because any resistance whatsoever called its legitimacy into question. She saw that, to the Nogarets, the Vietnamese were like the stitched picture cards, things possessing no depth, whose role was to be played.

  The Japanese met their defeat, but only after they’d brutally deposed the French colonial administration they suspected of conspiring with the British and the Americans. When the surviving French set about to reinstate notre Indochine, the long-anticipated event didn’t go as they had hoped. Vietnamese rebels had seized the opportunity to declare independence for a nation whose history of self-governance traced back more than a thousand years. The rebels were strongest in the northern provinces around Hanoi, where Ho Chi Minh became the President of the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam. To restore the colonial paradigm, the French turned half-heartedly to negotiations and vigorously to force. French soldiers arrived on American ships. In December 1946, the French attacked Hanoi. It was then that the decades-old rural insurgency, long an irritant the French had branded as banditry, erupted into virulent guerrilla warfare. The plantations came under threat. Even benign employers like Nogaret experienced troubles with laborers who abandoned their jobs without explanation. The roads grew treacherous. Nobody traveled at night anymore.

  The First Indochina War had begun.

  (Listening to Tuy relate Diu’s story, I was reminded how irony lay as thick as the jungle mists over our quarter-century embrace of the conflict. Throughout World War II, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt had argued passionately to prevent France from reestablishing her dominion over Indochina. He’d wished to build pathways to independence for the Vietnamese and other subjugated peoples. With his increasing illness and fragility, and his death in early 1945, America’s attention drifted, and France’s wishes to remount her imperial grandeur prevailed. The ships were the first increment toward what eventually would become America’s war.)

  In the late 1940s, Mssr. Nogaret accepted an appointment to the council that advised the French Commissioner in Saigon. He moved his wife and daughter to the capital. Diu glimpsed Simone in the rear seat of the Citroën that brushed haughtily past on its way toward the An Loc highway. The young passenger did not wave to the servants who had gathered on the road only for the second time in thirteen years, this time to say good-bye. Tears streamed down Diu’s cheeks. Quickly she wiped them so the others wouldn’t notice. In Saigon, the Nogarets would employ servants. Diu they no longer needed. Exposed to the city’s elegant emporiums, Simone immediately preferred the chic, imported fashions over the clothes her seamstress would have crafted for her.

  The family’s departure marked the end of a way of life. Mssr. Nogaret visited the plantation once a week. Occasionally his wife accompanied him; Simone, never. T
he drive through the countryside was too risky. Diu recouped her former job as a sap carrier in the groves. For a time, her life grew simple again, while, around her, everything else became more complicated. Representatives of the communist guerrillas—the Viet Minh—approached men and women seeking volunteers. Diu wanted nothing to do with them. Though she was poor, her life was without bitterness, and she had no desire to entwine it with a fanatical endeavor. She anticipated that a representative from the resistance would call on her, and she knew what she must say. She practiced her reply in a tone that conveyed refusal without arrogance or disrespect.

  One morning, cloth cap in hand, a man waited where the trails merged. Edging to the far side so she could pass, she glanced up and noticed that he looked familiar. She stopped. In the cleft angles of his face she recognized Khiêm, who had played Simone’s card game and copped his own severance. He smiled. “Hello, Diu. It is good to see you again.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I represent the movement. I came to ask for your help.”

  At once she told him to go away. She wanted no part of the resistance. Her answer leapt from her tongue more abruptly than she’d rehearsed, and afterwards she fretted that she’d given offense. Still, wasn’t it preferable that Khiêm hear her true feelings? He retreated so readily she dared to hope she would be left alone. But to abandon an objective was neither the practice of the Viet Minh nor in the character of Khiêm. A few days later, he stood again at the trail crossing. This time his wife Lien accompanied him. In a shaded spot off the path, he explained that he was the leader of the cadres in the area. He spent a few minutes asseverating political truths, as he called them, about the struggle’s justness and how the people yearned to rise against their foreign oppressors. He seemed to think in terms of slogans. As she came to learn, they prefaced almost everything he said.

  Then Lien spoke. Her gentle manner contrasted with her husband’s intensity. Not everyone wished to fight, she acknowledged, and she had no wish to impose a heavy burden on Diu, a respected worker. Yet the resistance needed her—everyone knew of her skills. Ripped field harnesses cried for repair, one of the intricate and essential tasks at which women excelled and men fumbled.

  Diu asked, “How can you be part of a movement that puts your daughter in danger?”

  Lien’s eyes fell. “When we were sent away, there wasn’t enough food. Our daughter starved to death.”

  Diu was too shocked for words. Finally she managed to say, “Please forgive me.”

  “Why? It was not your fault.”

  In the end, Lien’s simple humanity rather than Khiêm’s political exhortations convinced Diu to join the movement. She became an auxiliary, called upon only occasionally, and she never carried a weapon; they were too scarce to be given to those who lacked the temperament to use them.

  Usually she interacted with the lower-ranking Viet Minh, but occasionally she saw Khiêm. When he greeted her, his features softened, as if the sun had passed behind a cloud. Sometimes they found themselves alone together, and they chatted about simple things. Always he promised to pass along her fond wishes to Lien. She enjoyed these conversations, for his smile was affectionate and his interest genuine, not simply the technique of a good commander. The conversations never lasted long; invariably one of his men would arrive to deliver an urgent message, and his responsibilities would fetch him away.

  In Tay Ninh Province, the guerrilla war swayed between tumult and slumber. Some days, hundreds of French soldiers marched through the groves. Then, for weeks afterward, she would see only her fellow laborers. Explosions split the night, and in the morning it was as if nothing had happened. She glimpsed vehicles damaged by landmines and abandoned on the roadside. The smoke she smelled always seemed to come from a place unseen.

  Stories reached her of the situation in the north. There the war was different, and terrible. The French used artillery, aerial bombardments, tanks. Hundreds died in the fierce clashes. The only reassuring aspect was that the north was far away.

  Late in 1953, the plantation’s field hands were summoned together and notified that Mssr. and Mme. Nogaret had been killed. Their Citroën had run over a landmine on the road between Saigon and Tay Ninh. Their deaths must have been fated, for the French military vehicles escorting the car from the front and behind hadn’t suffered a scratch. The news saddened Diu, but she felt relief to be working in the rubber groves and not on the household staff. Her livelihood, the harvesting of sap, would go on. Nonetheless she found herself thinking of Simone, who had not reappeared at the plantation since her family had moved to Saigon four years ago. What would become of her? Surely she must sell the plantation and leave for France, the country where she belonged, where she would be safe.

  But Diu was the one who ended up leaving.

  She was carrying her empty sap buckets when a Viet Minh messenger stepped out from the trees. He instructed her to follow him to a truck that awaited them at the plantation’s edge.

  “Now? What about my work?”

  “Leave your buckets on the ground.”

  “Will I ever come back?”

  “Yes. It is temporary.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Six months. Or until we win.”

  Half a year sounded like an epoch to her. She rode northward in the bed of an old truck. They were headed for the real war, said the messenger, and they would traverse the Central Highlands, the lofty plateau in the Annamite Mountains. The roads soon vanished, and Diu and the other passengers disembarked onto the muddy jungle paths. When the shoes she’d worn at the plantation fell apart, she donned sandals with soles fashioned from tire treads. Her feet blistered and cracked. Among the things she carried was a wooden bowl, and twice a day she held it out to be filled with rice. At times she was so weak she doubted she could walk another step, yet when she gazed down, she saw her sandaled feet slapping on the trail.

  She joined a larger column of men and women who struggled as she did. No one complained. These were mere discomforts, not war. To whine brought dishonor. She sensed no danger until they reached the hills above a French fortress named Dien Bien Phu near the Laotian border. The siege already had started, and she was astounded at the number of Viet Minh assembled, thousands of them. Without disturbing the sheltering trees, they roped artillery pieces up the steep slopes to caves they had dug out of the hillsides. Rice and ammunition arrived on bicycles heavily laden and pushed great distances along jungle trails. Her task was to lug 75mm shells, one at a time, two kilometers from the offload point to the cannon she supported. She worked with a frail teenage girl named Mai. Often they chatted while they clambered up the rocky streambed toward the gun. Diu came to regard Mai as her daughter, and she protected her as much as she could. She let Mai rest along the way and shielded her from the other shell carriers who might rebuke her.

  Weeks into the siege, hauling empty shell canisters down the hillside, they heard something buzz overhead. Abruptly the men dropped their loads and scattered. Through the leaves she glimpsed a plane tilted nose down, as if the pilot intended to crash. Suddenly it arced up from its dive, and a bomb lanced into the trees. It happened so fast she didn’t seek cover. The shock wave from the explosion staggered her. Shards of bark pattered in the white smoke. Coughing, the Viet Minh searched for casualties. The blast had sheared off branches, and they pulled away the debris to see if anyone lay underneath. Nobody said anything.

  She found Mai below a clutch of men. Squeezing past them, Diu sat cross-legged on the ground, resting the girl’s head on her lap. One of her shoulders had been blown away, exposing the jagged bone edges and the pink lung tissue. She was unconscious. Please don’t wake up, Diu begged under her breath. Mai never did.

  The Viet Minh had said Diu’s service would be temporary. After the French fortress fell, she learned that temporary was a word the leaders used at their convenience. Not six months but three years passed before she received permission to return south. She joined a column that
retraced her long journey through the highlands to Tay Ninh Province.

  The country had changed; the war had split Vietnam. Below the 17th parallel, the new nation of South Vietnam was ruled by Ngo Dinh Diem, whose devout Catholic faith and hatred for the communists endeared him to the Americans. He plotted merciless campaigns against his enemies. When his security officials learned that Diu had gone off with the resistance, they arrested her cousins merely for being her blood relatives. The southern communist cadres mounted a struggle to unite the south and the north. Not until this campaign was well under way did northern leader Ho Chi Minh acknowledge the fervor with which the southerners fought and begin sending supplies and people to help.

  At a camp in the secluded forest not far from the Tay Ninh plantation, Diu’s column linked up with the local guerrilla force. Its commander was Khiêm. Leaner than she remembered, formal and correct in front of the others, once alone with Diu he greeted her as an old friend. He related what had happened in the period she’d been away. The saddest news was that Lien had been killed by a South Vietnamese military patrol. Diu wept.

  He had more stunning revelations. Simone Nogaret had returned to the Tay Ninh plantation. A beautiful young woman, she’d astonished everyone with her acumen. She’d married a French ex-paratrooper who used his skills to organize the plantation’s defenses. Diu still pictured Simone as a child, and the revelation that her former charge had wed such a man made her feel old.

  Khiêm’s overdrawn language had not changed. He explained how he wanted to get rid of the French plantations and restore the land to the people. “I want you to stay with me and help,” he said.