One Very Hot Day

by David Halberstam

  “So you would force them to commit suicide.”

  “Only to protect my county, my Lieutenant,” he said.

  “Perhaps you would protect your country by not walking so close to Private Thanh ahead of you.”

  “Ah, Lieutenant, then I was not thinking of protecting my country, I was thinking only of protecting Private Thanh.”

  Thuong watched while the two of them skirmished, Binh pushing Thanh and making him walk ahead, jabbing Thanh in the ass; the talk had given Thuong a respite, but only a brief one, and as he continued to walk back, he felt the pain coming at him; he was sure he was showing the limp, and the thought of that, and the giggling it would cause the troops, made him angry. He thought he saw one of the privates staring at him, looked at the soldier, saw the soldier staring back. He pulled the private out of line and demanded to see his cartridge case; the man produced a full one. Thuong was almost disappointed; with any real luck, the case would have been half full and he could have barked out an order, and thereby eased the pain and humiliation.

  “Where is your medical kit?” he demanded, and the soldier, surprised by the anger in his officer, normally so calm, looked up at Thuong guilelessly and said he had none. The face was one of great innocence, and Thuong was about to give a rebuke, sharp and commanding, when he stopped himself and told the soldier to bring one the next time, you can never tell when you will be wounded or injured (or, he thought, put your stupid foot in a punji trap). The soldier smiled back at him and Thuong, in spite of himself, smiled.

  “What great wisdom,” he asked the soldier, “decided you to bring all your ammunition with you today? Did your wife check her horoscope?”

  “I am simply a fortunate man,” the soldier said.

  “Do you know your horoscope?” Thuong asked.

  “My wife says that her horoscope says that a very great man will be good to me this week,” the soldier said.

  “Your wife has a fine horoscope,” Thuong said, “but what happened to it the day she married you?”

  At eight-thirty they entered the first village. As they walked in, there was a report that two old men had been seen running out of the village on the north side. A squad was sent after them, but it appeared in no hurry moving out. Anderson told himself it was just two more old men who would never be seen again; but for a moment he was pleased by even this little flurry of events; perhaps, he thought, there might be some action after all. They moved toward the village, and he scanned the tree line and picked out what he thought was the best position for the Vietcong, a clump of bushes and trees to his right which had a commanding view of the open field in front of the village where the troops were crossing. He steadied his Armalite, and started to cover the position; he was aware as always that if the Vietcong were there, they would have an excellent view of him; because of his height he was the most obvious target. Were the roles reversed, he knew he would be distracted by any Vietcong who towered over the others.

  They were not there. They entered the village without a shot.

  Beaupre walked a few feet away and Anderson watched him; Beaupre appeared to be studying the entrance to one of the huts, but Anderson could tell that he was eyeing the giant cistern of rain water outside the hut. He is trying to decide whether or not to drink some, or put some in his canteen, Anderson thought. It might be poisoned, and at the least, it would require halazone tablets, which both of them detested. He's crazy, Anderson thought, he drinks all that whiskey and worse, and then he comes out here every day to die a little. Anderson watched the instant of indecision in Beaupre's eyes as he decided against it, and for a moment, he liked the Captain, and felt a rare touch of sympathy for him; for the moment Beaupre was not the cynical and bitter older man, but simply a thirsty soldier. I wonder, he thought, how he'll hold out the next time.

  “Hot day,” Beaupre said, walking back toward Anderson.

  Then he pointed to the Vietnamese, “Here they come with the mother corps right now.”

  The troops were assembling the women in the center of the village. There were about half a dozen women, and about four children trailing after them; in this village even the children had fled. The women all looked old, in their fifties and sixties, and when Anderson had first come to Vietnam, he had believed that they were that old. Thuong had taught him the truth, that some of these women were no more than thirty-five, but the life and the work and the disease and the bearing of children, live children and dead children, had aged them and robbed them of their sex. Their teeth had turned into the terrible mocking of the betel nut teeth, like black halloween pumpkins, their breasts so long departed as if never to have existed; their skin was not yellow, not brown, he could not describe the color, the color was dry, their skin was something you could strike matches on. Once when he was new in the country, he had said something to Thuong about understanding the country. If you want to understand this country, Thuong had answered, you should go to Saigon and the newest bar there, and find the prettiest Vietnamese prostitute and then take her with you, only you must not take her to a hotel, you must take her to her own home, in Cholon or wherever she lives, and you must sleep with her in her own little hut and listen to her mother and her grandmother spend the entire evening coughing into the night. Then you will understand my country.

  One of the women was standing aside from the others and Anderson walked over and began to speak to her in Vietnamese. He said he was sorry if they had interrupted any work that morning.

  He could see the woman's teeth: they were set and unyielding. He gave her a tentative smile. She did not reply.

  He asked her if she were cooking something; if so, what. She did not even look away. He did not exist for her.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Thuong. Without words he asked Anderson to leave the interrogation to Vietnamese. Anderson slipped away and went over to the hut where Beaupre was leaning. He thought he detected a very small smile on Beaupre's face.

  Anderson felt slightly embarrassed, he was proud, after all, of his linguistic ability. He told Beaupre it was better if the Vietnamese did it.

  The mocking left Beaupre's face. He was absolutely deadpan. “Maybe they were scared by your teeth,” he said.

  Anderson thought: you son of a bitch, I hope it gets even hotter today, even if I have to walk in it too. “You're getting to be more like them all the time,” he said instead, “even beginning to think like them.”

  Thuong took over the interrogation reluctantly. It was, he thought, the part of the operation he disliked the most and as such it mirrored the change in his career. When he had first begun, as a young aspirant, he had liked this the best, and, he felt, perhaps because his parents were poorer than the parents of the other officers, that he did it better than the others, that he was able to play the role of the good officer. But each year it had gotten a little worse; the distaste had begun two years before when they had moved through a village they knew to be Vietcong and had found nothing; they were about to leave when a little boy, perhaps three years old, looked at him and began to weep and then ran to a tree by the canal and pulled out his father, a young Vietcong officer, a husky healthy young man. The father had never looked at Thuong, never said anything to him, simply walked to the child and began to pat him, to quiet him and keep him from crying; then finally when the child was silent, he had turned to Thuong and said, “Now which way do you want me to walk, north or south? Let's get on with it.” After that, the war had gotten steadily a little older and uglier; they had, both sides, taken a higher price of these people, and the people had withdrawn into themselves, until it was more and more of a charade, more and more futile, more and more words on their part, fewer words on the part of the people, until finally it was the part of the war he liked the least. He sensed the political officers for the Vietcong must be experiencing the same thing, but they, he was sure, would have some phrase, some idea, some revolutionary rationale with which to continue, some fortuitous quotation from Ho which they memorized, and wors
e, believed. They would be told that it was for the people's own good, even if the people did not understand it, until perhaps in exhaustion and desperation the people would come to believe it too. Perhaps in desperation, the people told them yes, we promise to believe if you will promise not to come back here.

  So now he began, wondering if his own feelings were showing: trying both to comfort and frighten at the same time, probably, he sensed, failing at both. He began with the question of the crop: did it look like a good one, he hoped so. He heard her noncommittal answer: didn't the Lieutenant have eyes, couldn't he see for himself, he was an educated man, perhaps he would look and tell her, a good crop and a bad crop, she could not tell the difference, they would be poor either way. He heard himself saying that they were luckier in this part of the Delta, that if they were living further south, as he had, near the U Minh (he had worked hard at it, losing his northern accent, and had been assured that it was gone now) the land was swampland and the children were not healthy. He looked down at the little boy beside her, and saw himself viewed with fierce anger, a boy four years old already knew anger and hate. He heard her answer that she was glad the military gentleman thought they were lucky. They had been unsure themselves. Only a wise and educated man would know something like that, she said.

  He looked at the little boy, surprised and at first irritated by his hostility, then finally admiring the defiance; he would want his own boy to behave like this; then he noted the dark stain around the boy's crotch. He was surprised and admired the boy even more.

  “Why do you come here?” he heard her say.

  "Not because we want to,” he answered. “Even for a foolish man like myself there are other things to do.”

  “This is not your village,” she said. “There is nothing here for you, there is no money, there are no rich people here. If the people were rich, why would they want to live here?”

  “We don't come for money,” he said.

  “We will be poorer when you leave,” she said. “We always are.”

  “And when the Vietcong come,” he said, “will you be poorer then too?”

  “There is nothing here for them,” she said, “nothing for you, nothing for them. We are poor even without you, without your help.”

  He looked at her and thought somehow (did one plant his own ideas on someone else, did he do this too often) she was not saying what she thought (Why are you one of them? What do you get out of it? Once his father, whom he loved, had said to him, Have they given you your American motorcar yet? and he had answered that unlike his wealthy father, he did not even own a motorbike).

  “Is there anyone in the village who is sick and needs medicine,” he asked, “the young children?”

  “They will not take your medicine,” she said. “As far as you are concerned, there is no sickness here.”

  “I have three children,” he lied. “I would deny them many things because of my pride. But the one thing I would never deny them is medicine. If the Vietcong came and visited my family and left medicine, I would tell my children to take it.”

  He looked at her straight in the eye.

  “I am sure,” she answered, “that your children will be healthy.”

  She turned from him.

  He could have stayed there and fought with her but he was a realist, there was no point in it; in the end, he would be forced to argue, to become angry and finally to take her prisoner with them for the rest of the day, and he was not up to that. So she had won, and he turned away and walked toward Anderson, realizing that he had not only lost to the woman, again, but had probably hurt the young American, again; he had pushed the American away and he had still failed to succeed with the woman: you do all the right things, and still it makes no difference, he thought.

  He went over to Anderson, which was something rare for him, usually he broke contact instead of initiating it, and shook his head. He spoke in Vietnamese, it was his way of apologizing: It is getting worse all the time.

  “Have you been in this village before?” Anderson asked.

  “No,” said Thuong, “not this one, but all of them. Everywhere we go now, everyone is angrier.” We are angrier, he thought, the enemy is angrier, and the people are angrier. It gets worse every day. The peasant woman lies to me, and we get to the next village and another woman will lie to me, and so we will get to the third village and by the time someone there begins to lie, then the nice Lieutenant Thuong, so bien élevé, at eight o'clock will lose his temper, and make a mistake, perhaps capture some farmer, and then a couple of weeks later someone else walks into the same village at eight o'clock in the morning, and wonders why everyone there is already angry and bitter. And tomorrow at eight o'clock, I will be angry at my first village. It is a happy circle.

  Anderson was Thuong's sixth American, covering a period of three years. Six times he had given the same lessons, six times at the least he had repeated himself during that period. Normally he would have had only three, but there were constant problems; some were transferred, one couldn't stand him, and one couldn't stand the pressure and had gone slightly insane, beginning to complain that too much rice was served at the Seminary where, in fact, rice was never sewed. Thuong had watched them with a steadily decreasing sense of curiosity, and a mounting sense of disappointment; when they had first come, and he was younger, he had believed they would work and that they, could change what no one else could change; they did not, after all, lose wars, that was well known in all the history books (even the French ones) and they were big and rich (much richer, he knew, than the French) and somehow they would bring the touch for this to Vietnam. He had watched as the Americans arrived, and he had waited patiently for them to change the country, but first nothing had happened, and then suddenly one day he had realized what was really happening, that instead of changing Vietnam, they were changing with it, and becoming part of it; until finally he was more aware of their frailties than he was of Vietnamese frailties (Vietnamese frailties he saw as human frailties, whereas American frailties, because they were different and foreign, were American ones; a drunken Vietnamese in My Tho on Saturday night was a drunk, but a drunken American was an American; a Vietnamese coward was a coward, but an American coward was an American). His first American had come as a disappointment, a big heavy-set man named Rainwater whom Thuong had disliked intensely at first, a man who drank heavily and smelled of whiskey in the morning, and who complained bitterly about the country and the lack of war (he was always saying, “Where the hell is this pissant war you people keep talking about, Thuong,” pronouncing his name Tooong, like a long whistle, then adding, “How can I fight this pissant war when I cain't even find the goddamn thing?”); he spent a good deal of time complaining about Vietnamese women and comparing them unfavorably with the Japanese, largely it appeared because the Japanese whores could speak English where the whores in Vietnam still spoke French, something he had never learned to do. The whores, he said, called him something like “beaucoo kilo” which he demanded that Thuong translate for him, the translation amusing Rainwater greatly. He had spent much of his year counting the days left and often at lunch would give the days and hours remaining. He professed to be amazed by the fact that Thuong himself did not want to leave the country too, as soon as the war was over, if they could ever find it in order to put an end to it; then Rainwater would give the answer himself: “But you're one of these people yourself.” At first Thuong had thought him a fool and a drunk, but later in the last months (and days and minutes), had come grudgingly to like him and enjoy Rainwater for his honesty and his anger, even the fact that he used the adjective “little” every time he described Vietnamese and told Thuong that the Vietnamese were the worst soldiers he had ever seen, worse even than the Italians (“If I was to advise you to invade any country," he had said, “it would be Italy, but that was before I come here, and now I ain't so sure”). By the time Rainwater left, they were good friends with a surprising amount of mutual respect, though it is true that with Rainwa
ter the myth of the Americans was once and forever ended, and they were in the eyes of Thuong at the very least a fallible people. Thuong was no longer fooled by Rainwater, and his pleas for Thuong to defect because he was “too damn good for this war and this here country”; similarly Rainwater was not fooled by Thuong and once in final days in My Tho had turned to him and said: “Toong, you sure are a funny little bastard. Thing about you is that you could be on either side. You don't give a damn for none of it, do you?” Rainwater, now out of the Army at the Army's request, was the sole American who corresponded with Thuong; Thuong's name was always spelled correctly on the envelope but inside the letters began faithfully, “Dear Mr. Toong.” They told of the difficulties of selling used cars in Arkansas (“all the people here have been out of the Army for a long time and because of that, have become rich and therefore buy themselves only new and not used cars”); of Rainwater's troubles with his wife (“that woman is no good which I always knew, but now she drinks more whiskey than I do, which is bad”); of his apprehension on the increase in the pace of the war (“I hear you can find that little war now. Don't be no fool and get yourself shot and killed or even wounded because you ain't visited Rainwater yet like you promised"). Thuong often had difficulty reading Rainwater's handwriting in English and needed the assistance of Rainwater's successors who complied, though obviously disapproving of the contents, grammar, and spelling. The other Americans were to a man better looking soldiers than Rainwater; there were, as the war continued and the war became more important in America, more of them, and they were younger, better educated, slimmer and more sober. Instead of counting the number of days left, they were often threatening to reenlist; they were earnest, always careful to praise the country and its people, never used the word “little” as an adjective in describing Vietnamese, and never referred to the Vietnamese soldiers as Rainwater had done, as our gooks (to him the Vietcong had been their gooks). But to Thuong they remained a disappointment; they were brave, professional, and competent, but they were curiously without passion. Thuong saw them as actors rather than soldiers: they came full of idealism, they tried, and then they accepted until soon they mirrored the same frustrations and fatalism that he saw in the young Vietnamese, indeed, the same frustrations and fatalism he saw in himself.