One Very Hot Day

by David Halberstam

  Thuong was thirty-one, though, like most Vietnamese, he looked younger to foreign eyes. He was slim and his face seemed almost innocent; he had been in the Government Army too long to be innocent, eight years, and all of them either as aspirant or lieutenant. His lack of advancement was no particular reflection on his ability, indeed, those few superiors who took the time to monitor his file, such as it was with more papers missing than enclosed, were surprised at the degree of achievement and ability; having achieved this surprise, however, they did not feel obligated to increase his rank or command. Indeed the older he got, and the more papers there were in praise of him — including, dangerously American praise — the more it tended to mitigate against him; here after all was a man of ability who had not gotten ahead. Therefore, there must be something wrong, something unseen but known, something political; his superiors were in particular surprised by his father's choice of religion. His father, having associated with foreigners in the north, did not choose to convert; he worked closely with foreigners and dutifully accepted their pay and their orders, but not their religion. This was unusual for the time; there were, after all, many Vietnamese who began to dress like the French, eat like the French, and talk like the French. His father referred to them all as the “mustache-Vietnamese” in honor of their copying French-style mustaches. Thuong had once gently asked his father about this, why he had never taken their faith, and his father had said simply that he was paid for his manual contributions, not his spiritual ones. Nevertheless, he was closely associated with foreigners and during the beginning of the French war, he had continued to work for them, as much by accident as by decision (he did not particularly like them, but he had a vague feeling that since everyone else was deserting the foreigners, it was improper for him to do it as well); one of his objections after all to the French had been the contempt they had showed toward Vietnamese people and their obvious belief that all Vietnamese were cowards, to leave now would be to confirm all the worst things the French had said. When the foreigners by their stupidity, which his father could not have been expected to have foreseen, lost the war, thereby proving to the French that all Vietnamese were not cowards and making his father's original reason somewhat obsolete, it was decided to split up the family and come to the south, splitting up into small groups so that they wouldn't be stopped by the local Vietminh bands.

  The way had been difficult from the start and Thuong's grandmother, who was in his charge, had nearly died from exhaustion. (Later Thuong remembered trying to find water for her, giving her all his water, and the terrible thirst that had stayed with him for days at a time. When he thought of the division of the country, he thought of his own thirst.) When they finally arrived in the south, they turned out to be among the few Buddhists who had made the trip, and were immediately placed in a camp for Catholic refugees. There they shared the difficult position of the Catholics of being unwanted immigrants in the south, without sharing either their faith or their protection.

  On the basis of his father's connections, he had managed to attend a military school, after first lingering on the waiting list for a year and a half. There he quickly discovered that he was a northerner in the south, a Buddhist among Catholics, and thus at almost any given time lacked the proper credentials. The southerners did not trust him because he was a northerner, the Catholics did not trust him because he was a Buddhist. In a country shorn of idealism and reeking of cynicism and opportunism, he was an object of suspicion. So he remained a lieutenant; as they remained suspicious of him, so he in turn became distrustful and cynical about them. He accepted the legacy of being his father's son with the same fatalism, largely because he could think of no real alternative to it and because if it offered nothing else, it offered him a certain sense of privacy and individualism. He went along with their rules but he tried to remain himself. He envied the Communists their self-belief, their ideology, their certainty, even their cruelty; the Catholics, their convictions and connections; the Americans, their intensity and idealism; and his father, his gentleness and enduring innocence (his father, embarrassed and uneasy and unworldly, periodically would ask him if he had to he a soldier, wasn't there something else he could do; his father knew, of course, that it paid well...); he doubted what he did and he suspected that the war would probably be lost. It was not that he wished to be on the other side — that would be easy to do, a short walk away during an operation — nor that he thought the other side more just: the Communists, after all, had killed an uncle, just as the French had stupidly managed to kill a cousin, wiping out a village (until then pro-French) as the Vietminh had planned for them to do. The Vietminh side was as cruel as the French, and lacked only the corruption of the French. He suspected that ten years of power would improve their sense of corruption (depending, he thought, on the degree of success of their system; they would need a certain amount of success to be corrupt. If their system failed, they could retain their integrity). The danger of going over, he thought, would not be that he had been fighting them all these years and had killed many of their people (they, unlike the Arvin, would have real records and they would know who he was, and who he had killed); nor that after the minimal comfort of My Tho, with its soda pop and iced beer, that life would be too rigorous. It was simply that he knew he was too cynical for the passion and commitment their life took. To gain religion in Vietnam, he thought, you must start very young; to retain it, he thought, you have to be very lucky.

  So he did his best at being a lieutenant. He told Anderson, the young American, that he was twenty-five instead of thirty-one in order to avoid embarrassing the young American; Anderson had been surprised, he had thought Thuong much younger. Thuong took a certain limited pride in what he did; more, almost in what he did not do, in that he did not play the game of promotion and did not attach himself like a barnacle to his superior officers, did not call in prolonged artillery barrages on villages before the assault. But the dominant feature of his life remained his fatalism. As his father had somehow made these fatal flaws, deciding at one strange moment to keep a false sense of integrity (false, thought Thuong, because both he and his father had made so many other demeaning decisions and accepted so much other fraud during their lifetimes), Thuong had continued relentlessly and recklessly down the same deserted path: there had been, after all, chances to convert. Others did; it had been suggested to him. There were many new Catholics in his class at the Academy, and now several were captains, and one was a major; but there was for him in conversion a sense of surrender, he had admired the Catholics when they were the minority in the north, but now that they had come to the south they had changed. What had struck him as quiet courage, now often seemed to him to be arrogance, and the converts were inevitably the worst.

  So he continued his own way: he did not desert because it would hurt his parents (and also because it would make no difference to him) and so his life had made him a very old lieutenant. The particular reward that he now enjoyed for his fatalism was Captain Dang. The Captain was a year younger than Thuong and had been in the army for a shorter time, and was soon to be a major, according to Dang himself. He was well connected in Saigon and was aware of this; he visited Saigon frequently, and he often referred to the dinners and parties he had just attended. He frequently praised Thuong (in front of Thuong, implying that he had also praised Thuong in those same great halls); he talked of promotion for Thuong, something, Thuong was virtually sure, if it ever came, would come in spite of Dang. Dang did not know the name of anyone in the unit below the rank of corporal; he cheated on the ranks, regularly turning in more men than he actually had, failing to report losses (the advantage being that he was not reprimanded for losing men, and at the same time continued to draw their pay. The result was that the company which should have been understrength by ten men was usually understrength about two dozen, and the pressure on the men was even greater than it should have been). Thuong had compensated for this in part by commandeering an extra light machine gun from a friend in an
other company: the company had lost it, then captured it back in a long battle with the Vietcong battalion. Since it had already been reported lost, it was surplus on the rolls and Thuong had been owed a major favor by his friend — he had lent them three men during a key inspection. Thuong was careful to pay as little attention as possible to Dang's corruption; Dang, indeed, was convenient for Thuong. He fitted Thuong's own view of what an officer was, what the system was, and made his own lack of promotion easier to bear; it would have been more bitter were Dang a real soldier. But for two years and a half now, he had despised Dang over one incident. It was a time just before the American helicopters had arrived with their remarkable ability to bring in reinforcement, and there was still a terrible isolation to battle: you were hit and you stayed there alone and fought it out. There had been an ambush, a brief and bitter one, and Thuong at first had been paralyzed like everyone else, sure that he was going to die there; but he had in those first minutes seen something he would never forgive and never forget (particularly since when he saw it, he expected it to be one of the last things he ever saw): Dang taking off his officer's pips. If you are going to wear the pips in the great halls of Saigon, he thought, you must wear them in the U Minh forest.

  chapter five

  It was not just the heat, Beaupre thought, struggling badly now, it was the heat and the boredom. The boredom was part of it too. He was numbed by the heat, occasionally dizzy now, losing his war to it, alone in this struggle. He had seen the others: Anderson, watched him drink, seen the tilt of the canteen, almost full. The Vietnamese lieutenant, Thuong, didn't even drink, Beaupre was not even sure he carried a canteen, perhaps he did. Beaupre never saw him use it; Dang with very small stains and often none at all, a good choice for a counterpart, perhaps that was why they had picked him. Beaupre tried to drive the thoughts of the heat out of his head, but they always returned. That was the other terrible part of the war, the boredom, no one to talk to, eight hours in the field if they were lucky, fourteen when they were not, and no one to talk to all that time. Oh, he thought, a few words to Dang, perhaps one hundred: Yes, Captain Dang, no Captain Dang, fine Captain Dang, please Captain Dang, very good Captain, Americans think, Vietnamese want, You, Us, You, thank you Captain. Perhaps two hundred words. Anderson, okay to talk to Anderson, but not eight hours' worth, lucky if thirty minutes' worth, against division rules for much longer, the Colonel didn't like it, you people don't go out on these operations to interview each other and find out where your wives came from, you're not here to talk to Americans, you're here to talk to Vietnamese. The Colonel was absolutely right, he thought, the Colonel, he was sure, spoke to Co for a total of ten minutes a day. Yes Colonel Co, no Colonel Co, You, Us, Vietnamese people think, American people feel, Saigon, Washington, good, bad. He felt dizzy.

  They came suddenly to a clearing, and the Vietnamese unannounced, no orders heard or given, only obeyed, suddenly decided to take a break (Beaupre heard no command and could never tell about these breaks, didn't know if the Vietnamese officers ordered these breaks, and the men followed up, or the men simply took the breaks and the officers thereupon followed up and gave the orders). Normally he hated these endless breaks; he could never adjust his rhythm to theirs. Whenever he wanted to move, they stopped; whenever he wanted to stop, they moved, scurried, laughed, double-timed, ran. But this time he was grateful: he was numb with the heat, dizzy now and desperately afraid of being sick. His uniform was soaked, and his face was covered with sweat, a mask, red on the surface, covered with a thin layer of his sweat, with dust and filth mixed in with it, and his beard alive and vibrant in the dense lush tropics of his face, growing like a jungle plant. He moved for the coolest place, near the water, he thought, and near a tree. He pulled out his canteen; there was very little water left, and it was now very warm from the overheated canteen. He licked his own sweat when he was through.

  Anderson came up to him and sat down and asked for a cigarette.

  “You don't smoke. What's the matter. This place drive you to that?”

  “No,” Anderson said, “leeches. I've been through too many canals today and now that big canal back there, and I think they're having dinner. 0n me.”

  “One Beaupre cigarette survival kit coming up,” Beaupre said and opened his shirt pocket. He brought out a strange-looking package, a small metal container packed in a good old-fashioned American prophylactic; Beaupre kept his cigarettes in the container to prevent them from being crushed, and a rubber band around the container to keep them from getting wet. He didn't mind, he said, his sandwiches getting wet in the paddies, indeed it improved the taste, it was like ketchup, but he couldn't stand or smoke wet cigarettes. The others had mocked him at first, but now a few of them had adopted the trick which they said prevented the cigarettes both from getting wet and from carrying diseases.

  Anderson lit one and then started unblousing his pants: he had tried desperately to keep the leeches out. Elastics. Double elastics. Stockings up to his knees. Stockings and inner stockings. Nothing had worked, always the leeches had won; they were brilliant, they circumvented everything, they came, they nestled, they fed. Once he had found one near his crotch and had almost fainted. Now he looked at his legs, the soft underside, the white meat which they liked so much; and at first he failed to see them. Then he saw them, one on each leg, huge, bloated with his own blood.

  Beaupre saw them too. “Well, you were right about them eating dinner. You got a feel for them now. That's some consolation,” he said.

  “Look at them,” Anderson said, “ugliest things in the world.”

  “Well, they're good ones. I don't think I've seen bigger since I've been in the country.”

  “I hate them,” said Anderson.

  “But you got to look at it from their point of view,” Beaupre said. “Just like in psywar. You've got to understand them. Now they think they're medics. They've read all their own publicity and their history books, got themselves sure as hell brainwashed, and they see themselves not as blood suckers, not that at all, but as life savers. They're here to save lives. They're improving relations with you. Giving you first aid, and they put on their very best for you, biggest ones they got. Biggest I ever saw, even in a country like this which is known for its small people and big leeches. You're a lucky boy for just a lieutenant.”

  “I hate these goddamn things,” said Anderson, pulling feverishly on the cigarette and applying it to one leech like a tiny blowtorch.

  “Shouldn't talk like that. Look at it a different way. Think of it as an honor. Now you take Big William. He has this leech problem. They won't bite him. Never. Won't touch him at all, and him a captain and bigger than you, with probably a lot more blood. He told me there wasn't a single leech on him ever, and he was thinking of taking it up with the civic action people and maybe higher. He said it smacked of racism, and here you are, only a lieutenant and complaining.”

  He watched Anderson push the cigarette into the leech. “Well, if you must, boy. Okay give it to him. Now, boy, now. Push. Go right in there! Don't be afraid. Don't let him stare you down. Don't let him look love at you now. Don't back down now. Harder, harder, that's it, there he goes. Give it to him now, now you've got him. He's retreating! Oh, you whipped his ass, you did. Well done.”

  Anderson, his face white because he truly hated leeches, the sight of them feeding off him, eating him and drinking his blood, repelled him terribly. He had become accustomed to most of the agony of this country, the dead men, faces ripped open like melons, the sick children whose heads and faces were covered with scales (though he wept the first time he saw that), the women so thin that they seemed to be dying in front of him; he had become accustomed to all that, yet he still hated the idea of the leeches, and if he could have brought himself to it, he would make someone else get rid of them so he wouldn't have to look. But it was not something you could admit.

  “Well, I must admit that was well done,” Beaupre said, “I mean he was in there. He was so sure he was helpin
g you, he really dug in. Dug in so much he's going to leave a scar. He really did some surgery on you.”

  “They don't bother you?” Anderson asked.

  “They're afraid of me. I poison them. A few of them have tried, but I got them all. They're allergic to me. Maybe they're trying to tell me something. Here you are, old buddy, take yourself another cigarette for the second. Leeches that big, you deserve a cigarette for each one.”

  Anderson lit it and went to work, but the leech refused to budge. Anderson tried; he made the cigarette tip red coal hot, but the leech held on.

  “I don't mean to tell you your business,” Beaupre said, “but you're going after the wrong end. You're burning his tail. You got to get his head. He'll never move that way.”

  Anderson looked at Beaupre, sure he was putting him on. “How can you tell which end is which? You don't even know if they have two ends. Don't give me that.” He went back to burning the same end.

  “Of course they got two ends. They're like everybody else,” Beaupre said. “If you can't tell which end is which, why you just try the other end. Then see what happens. You don't have to, of course, don't have to listen to me. It's not my blood.”

  Anderson tried the same end once more. The leech remained. The next time he tried the other end. The leech began to move. Very slowly. Anderson gave him the cigarette again. He moved quicker now.

  “Well, here you are. You got the right end this time, just like I told you.”