Up Country Part 66

I took Susan's arm and led her to the entrance.

We stood outside under the overcast sky and Susan said, "I can't believe that. There was your name written almost thirty years ago... and those French soldiers... it's sort of... sad... almost creepy... I mean, I know some of those men didn't make it back."

I nodded.

We walked back to the RAV and continued south on the Street Without Joy.

We pa.s.sed an airstrip on our left that I recalled was the Quang Tri airport, which was where the army kept their small observation and reconnaissance aircraft. The airstrip was abandoned now and gra.s.s grew through the concrete. The control tower had disappeared and so had a huge French watchtower that had been right near the airstrip. I recalled that the concrete watchtowers had once dotted the landscape, but I hadn't seen a single one so far. In fact, every substantial landmark that I remembered-schools, churches, paG.o.das, French and American fortifications-had disappeared.

I said to Susan, "Most of this area was damaged during the Tet Offensive, but they were rebuilding when I left. It looks like nothing survived the Easter Offensive of '72, or the final offensive of 1975."

She said, "That pillbox survived."

"Hey, I should have spent the whole f.u.c.king war in there."

Up ahead, on the left side of the road, I saw a big, ruined concrete building that I could tell had not been hit by bombs or artillery because most of the roof was intact. The damage had been caused by what appeared to be a vicious firefight. The walls were pockmarked with bullet holes, and there were distinctive small round holes in the thick walls where concrete-piercing rockets had entered the building and exploded inside, leaving scorch marks on the interior walls. It took me a minute to recognize this as the Buddhist high school, the place where Tran Van Vinh wrote the letter to his brother.

Susan said, "Oh, my G.o.d. Look at that building."

I said, "A Buddhist high school."

Susan seemed fascinated by the war ruin and took a photo. She said, "You don't see any war-damaged buildings like this around Saigon-hey, look. A tank."

Beyond the high school on the side of the road was a huge M-48 Patton tank, the olive drab paint still looking good after thirty years. I should get some of that paint for my exterior house trim.

Susan told Mr. Loc to stop, and he did. She said to me, "Go sit on the tank."

"You go sit on the tank. I've sat on enough tanks." I took the camera from her.

She jumped out of the vehicle and scrambled up the sloping rear of the tank. She was athletic and agile, I noticed, and climbed like a tomboy.

She got up on the turret and sat cross-legged. I took a picture and said, "I wish all the tank crews looked like you."

She hammed it up for the camera, and I took a few more shots as she posed, lying and standing on the derelict tank.

She jumped down and walked back to the RAV.

I pointed to the east, where a wall of low hills rose out of the flatlands, about five kilometers away. I said, "I was in those hills on the night the Tet Offensive began at the end of January. We were constructing yet another firebase, and about ten that night we could see what we thought were fireworks, but then we realized it was something else. The radios came alive and reported an enemy attack on Quang Tri City. We were put on full alert and as the night went on, we got reports that Quang Tri City and Hue had been taken from the South Vietnamese troops and that our brigade headquarters, called Landing Zone Betty, which was on the edge of Quang Tri City, was under siege."

I looked around. "Our main base camp was called Landing Zone Sharon, and it was around here somewhere, but I don't see any sign of it." I stared out toward the hills. "So that's where I celebrated Tet 1968, the Year of the Monkey." I added, "It was not a lucky year for anyone."

She said, "This year will be much better."

We jumped in the RAV, and off we went.

Another hundred meters up Highway One, Mr. Loc turned left where the railroad station used to be, onto a two-lane road that I remembered led to Quang Tri City, about a mile off Highway One. The road was flanked by small wood and thatch houses surrounded by vegetable plots. There were trees here, but probably none that predated the 1972 battle. I said to Susan, "This road used to be lined with vendors selling things to GIs."

"Like what?"

"Mostly stuff they'd stolen from us. You could buy it back here."

Mr. Loc stopped the car, then looked around. He said something to Susan, and she said to me, "This is Quang Tri, and the citadel of the city used to be somewhere there to the left."

I looked to the left, but there was nothing there except more small houses, bamboo fences, gardens, and chickens.

Susan and Mr. Loc spoke, and she said to me, "He thinks the moat of the Citadel is still there, and a villager can direct us."

"Okay. We'll be about an hour."

Susan took the camera out of the bag, spoke to Mr. Loc, and we jumped out. Mr. Loc reached back into the rear, handed Susan the tote, and said something.

We started down a dirt path between vegetable gardens and small houses that were made of bits and pieces of the vanished city and the fortifications that had once been here. I saw chunks of concrete and bullet-riddled wooden planks, and the corrugated metal that the Americans used for barracks roofs, and the green plastic sandbags from disa.s.sembled bunkers, and garden paths made of red roof tile. The ruined city and the fortifications had been recycled by the peasants.

I said to Susan, "This was once a small city, now it's a big village. Back to basics through airpower."

"Incredible," she said.

I asked Susan, "What did he say to you?"

"About what? Oh, he's going to park and leave the vehicle, so he wanted me to take my stuff."

I nodded.

A few kids saw us, and soon there was a mob of them following us. A few adults watched us curiously from their gardens.

We continued on the village paths, and Susan was looking around. She said, "I've never really been in a rural village."

I replied, "I've been in hundreds of them. They all look the same. Except some held Viet Cong and some didn't." I looked around. "See that haystack? Once we found a whole room hidden in a big haystack. Chuck was gone, but he'd left some equipment. So we Zippo'ed the haystack, then got carried away and burned some nearby hootches-that's what we called the peasant houses." It was all coming back to me, and I continued, "Then there'd be these little holes hidden in the gardens, big enough for one tiny VC to stand in-we called them spider holes, and they were hard to find, unless Chuck decided to pop out and open up with his AK-47. Plus, every hootch had an earth bunker in the garden, where the family would go if the s.h.i.t hit the fan. But each bunker could also hold some VC, and you didn't want to go in there and check it out because if you did, you'd never come out again, so you shouted for everyone to come out with their hands up, and usually you'd get a few co-deps who Mama-san wanted to hide from the GIs in case we had things on our minds beside finding Mr. Charles. So, after everyone was supposed to be out, you chucked a tear gas grenade in, and now and then Mr. Charles would come running out with his AK-47 blazing, and you'd waste him, then move on."

I was amazed that this was all coming back to me so vividly, and I went on, "Buried in the thatch roofs you'd find rifles, ammunition, plastic explosives, and all that good stuff, and you'd arrest the family and turn them over to the National Police and burn their house, though nine times out of ten the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who were hiding VC or weapons were doing it under threat. One time-and I guess this was funny-we pulled on a water well rope and sure enough, whatever was down there was too heavy to be a water bucket, and so about three guys pull Charles up, his black pajamas dripping wet, his feet in this wooden bucket, and before he got to ground level, he threw his AK-47 rifle up so we wouldn't blow him away. So, up he comes, looking almost sheepish-like, you found me-and we laughed our a.s.ses off, then someone punched him in the face, and he fell down into the well, and we let him tread water for fifteen minutes before we lowered the bucket down and fished him up. Then the same guy who punched him in the face gave him a cigarette and lit it for him, then burned the house where the well was, and we tied Chuck up and put him on a chopper back to a POW camp, and the beat goes on. Day by day by day, village by village by village, until we were sick to death of searching these miserable villages and searching the people and trashing their hootches looking for weapons and wondering when Charlie was going to pop up out of nowhere and blow your head off. And other days, we'd help deliver a baby, medevac some sick kid back to an aid station, put first aid ointment on some old guy's festering sore, and hand out candy. Acts of human kindness, alternating with acts of extreme cruelty, usually on the same day, and often in the same village. You just never knew how a hundred armed boys were going to act at any given moment. I guess a lot of it depended on how many casualties we'd taken the day before, or if we found anything in the village, or maybe how hot and thirsty we were, or if the officers and sergeants were minding the boys closely, or if they didn't give a s.h.i.t that day because they'd gotten a bad letter from home, or they'd gotten chewed out on the radio by a superior officer, or if they themselves were starting to go around the bend. As the war went on, the young lieutenants got younger, and the sergeants had been PFCs just a month before... and the normal constraints of more mature people... you know, like Lord of the Flies... kids can get crazy... and if somebody kills one of the gang, they want blood in return... and so the village sweeps got... they got out of hand, and it wasn't war anymore, it was kids on the prowl with short fuses, who were just as likely to throw a fragmentation grenade into a family bunker as a tear gas grenade, or just as likely to give Papa-san a box of cookies from home as to crush a lit cigarette in his face if they found a spider hole in his garden."

Susan walked silently beside me, and I wondered if I should be telling her any of this. I also wondered if I should be telling me any of this. Back in the States, you could forget it, or sanitize it in your mind, or put it all down to false memory syndrome, the result of watching too many 'Nam flicks. But here... here is where it happened, and there was no way to spin it.

We kept walking through the village, the kids following, but not begging or being annoying, like they were in Saigon. These were rural kids, who didn't see many Lien Xo, and so maybe they were shy; but maybe they had an ancestral memory of big Americans who had walked through their fathers' and grandfathers' villages, and they kept their distance.

I said to Susan, "Imagine being a villager-you don't sleep at night, and you don't smile during the day. You and everyone around you are on the brink of madness and despair, and you're totally at the mercy of two armed enemies who say they want to win your hearts and minds, but who may one day rape you and slit your throat. And that was life in the villages of this tortured country. By the time it was all over, the peasants didn't care who won. The devil himself with his legions from h.e.l.l could have won, and that would be wonderful because the war had stopped."

Susan stayed quiet for a while, then said, "I would have joined the guerrillas and gone into the hills to fight. I'd rather die fighting."

I forced a smile and said, "You're a fighter." I added, "In fact, most of the young men and women chose one side or the other and did just that. But some stayed in the villages to plant and harvest, and to take care of aging parents and younger siblings and hope for the best. In any case, if you ever get to a rural village again, when you see people of that age, you'll understand what they went through."

She nodded.

As if on cue, an old man stood on the side of the path, and he bowed to us. Susan spoke to him, and he smiled at her Vietnamese. They talked for a few minutes, and Susan said to me, "The Citadel is just up this path. He says he's a longtime resident of Quang Tri, and if you are a returning soldier, you must be surprised at what you see."

"I am. Tell him I was with the First Cavalry, and my brigade headquarters was in the old French fort."

She told him, and he replied at some length. She said to me, "In 1972, the Communists and the Army of the Republic... the ARVN... fought back and forth for the city, and it changed hands many times, and lay in ruins, then the ARVN withdrew toward Hue, and the American bombers came and destroyed all that was left of the city, and killed many Communist soldiers who were in the Citadel and the French fort, and the American base camp outside the city. There is nothing left."

I nodded.

He said something else, and Susan said to me, "He says other Americans from the cavalry have returned, and they are always sad and surprised that nothing is left of their presence here. He also met a Frenchman once who came to see the fort where he was stationed, and the Frenchman was convinced he was in the wrong place and spent all day looking for his fort, and the... watchtowers, I think he means."

The old man thought that was funny, laughed, and said something else, which Susan translated as, "The Frenchman expected to find the cafe where he once drank, and maybe his former... ladies."

"Hey, that's why I'm here. Tell him."

Susan told him, and he laughed harder. Why he got a kick out of this, I don't know, but maybe he'd done all the crying he had in him, and there was nothing left to do except laugh at the death and destruction.

We thanked the old man and moved on.

At the end of the path, we came to a huge open s.p.a.ce, about a half a kilometer on each side, surrounded by peasant huts and gardens in the distance. The s.p.a.ce was covered with high gra.s.s and small trees, and at first it looked like a village commons. But all around the s.p.a.ce was a weed-choked moat, which had once surrounded the walls of the Citadel. Here and there around the open areas, I could see pieces of wall, none of them over three feet high, and a bomb-blasted stone arch stood where a destroyed bridge once spanned the moat.

I said to Susan, "This was the Citadel, sort of like the one in Hue, but obviously it's in much worse shape. This was the center of the city, and it held government buildings, a hospital, bank, a few cafes, the barracks and headquarters of the South Vietnamese army, and the MACV compound- that's the Military a.s.sistance Command, Vietnam-American military advisors to the ARVN." I told her, "Most of the MACV guys were killed when the Communists took the city during the Tet Offensive. Same in Hue. It's a risky job when you have to depend on unreliable allies for your safety."

Susan looked around at the open s.p.a.ce in the center of the sprawling village. "It looks like a park or a sports field, but it's completely barren."

"I guess it's been left as a monument to a destroyed city and to the people who died here, but I don't even see a marker."

"Neither do I... but look, Paul, there's a bridge across the moat."

I looked to where Susan was pointing and saw an intact, but sh.e.l.l-blasted concrete bridge that had once led to a gate in the vanished walls.

We walked to the bridge and crossed the dry moat into what was once the Citadel. The kids who were following us didn't cross, and one of them yelled something to us. Susan said to me, "He says it is government property, and we are not allowed to be here." She added, "He also said, 'Thanh Than.' Ghosts."

I replied, "That's what they tell the kids to keep them away from any unexploded ordnance."

"You're probably right. Meanwhile, don't step on an unexploded sh.e.l.l, or we'll both be ghosts."

"Stay on the paths."

"There are no paths, Paul."

"Well, step lightly."

We walked into the center of the gra.s.sy field that had once been a city, and I said, "The parade ground was about here, and the military side of the Citadel was across the field, over there... I think."

"You remember this?"

"Sort of. I was here only once, when I had to partic.i.p.ate in some idiotic awards ceremony that the ARVN liked to schedule too often."

"You mean you got an award here?"

"Yeah. And it wasn't the Good Conduct Medal."

"What was it?"

"Something called the Cross of Gallantry, after the French medal of the same name. It was the equivalent to our Bronze Star, I think."

"What did you get the medal for?"

"I'm not real sure. The whole ceremony was in Vietnamese."

"Come on, Paul. You know why they gave you a medal."

"Yeah. For propaganda. They filmed the whole thing, and showed it before the feature film-in the six movie theaters that probably existed in the whole country. Our brave American allies, and so forth. The ARVN just took the list of GIs who got American medals for whatever and gave the equivalent Viet medal. I got the Bronze Star for the A Shau Valley without a ceremony, and the Viets gave me the Cross of Gallantry here, with a lot of pomp and ceremony."

She asked, "Did they give you a copy of the tape?"

I smiled and replied, "It was a film film, Susan. I don't think they had videotape then, but if they did, they'd have sold me a copy, which they didn't."

"Maybe we can find the original film in the archives in Saigon."

"I hope the f.u.c.king thing got blown up."

"You're so sentimental."

"Right. Anyway, I stood about right here with maybe a hundred other Americans from the First Cav, and I got kissed on both cheeks by a colonel... it was June or July by this time, and the temperature was ninety degrees on this parade ground, but my reconst.i.tuted company, filled with cherries now-that means new guys from the States-were out patrolling somewhere, so this wasn't that bad. I thought I could hit a few bars in town after the dog-and-pony show, but the U.S. Army was nice enough to collect us all in trucks and take us back to Landing Zone Sharon, which, I guess, no longer exists." I looked at Susan and asked her, "Am I a great date or what?"

She smiled and put her arm through mine. She said, "This is really an incredible experience for me."

"Well... this is the last duty station for you. I've sort of taken you through my first tour-the Bong Son in November and December '67, Quang Tri for the Tet Offensive in January and February, then Khe Sanh in April, and the A Shau in May, then back here to Quang Tri Province, where I stayed until I went to An Khe base camp in November, collected my stuff, flew to Da Nang, and on to San Francisco."

"That must have been a h.e.l.l of a weekend in San Francisco."

I said, "I was ready to party hard with a few other guys I knew who I'd come home with... but we weren't overly welcome in San Francisco..."

She didn't reply.

"In truth, I wasn't really in a partying mood anyway, and I stayed a few days in a hotel, getting my head on right... showering and flushing the toilet every half hour." I smiled. "I slept in the soft bed, watched a lot of TV, finished two bottles of gin, and kept pinching myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming... then I flew home to Boston. But I wasn't completely right yet."

"And there was no counseling available?"

I almost laughed. "We're talking 1968 here at the height of a huge war. You saw a shrink before before you got inducted, and they always said you were mentally healthy enough to go off and kill people, but they never examined your head when you came back. And you know what? I don't blame them." you got inducted, and they always said you were mentally healthy enough to go off and kill people, but they never examined your head when you came back. And you know what? I don't blame them."

"Counseling might have helped."

"Sigmund Freud in consultation with Jesus Christ wouldn't have helped. Most of us found our own way back."

We walked across the moated acres that had once been Quang Tri City, and I stooped down and picked up a piece of jagged shrapnel that the metal scavengers had missed and looked at it. I said, "It could be from a bomb, a rocket, a mortar round, an artillery round, or a fragmentation grenade, and it could be ours or theirs. And it doesn't make a difference when it hits you." I gave it to Susan. "Souvenir of the lost city of Quang Tri."

She put it in her pocket.

We continued walking under the gray sky, and I could see a few Viets across the moat looking at us, probably wondering if we were scouting this place as part of the DMZ tour. Two bucks to cross the surviving moat bridge and wander around the Citadel. The tour operators would throw sc.r.a.p metal around each morning before the tour buses arrived, and everyone could take a piece home.

I said to Susan, "Okay, here's another piece of the puzzle. The letter to Tran Quan Lee that was found on his body in the A Shau Valley was written by his brother, Tran Van Vinh, who was wounded here during the battle for Quang Tri City during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Vinh lay wounded in one of the buildings that were here, and he saw something that had to do with two Americans. Do you know this?"

"No."