Love Like Hate (8 page)

Hoang Long’s first night away from home was the happiest of his life. Lying on his hard bunk, he breathed in deeply for the first time. He could feel each one of his muscles relax. In the months ahead, he would learn to love army discipline with a stoic pride. Ripped daily with insults and occasionally kicked in the ass, he gladly endured millions of push-ups, sit-ups and pull-ups. He ran until his balls dropped, skipping and plopping, into a ditch by the side of the road. Intimidated at first by the other recruits, he soon realized that he was superior to nearly all of them in strength, endurance and aggression. He learned how to strip and oil a rifle, to shoot standing up, kneeling, or lying on his stomach. He learned how to shoot straight, to spray, to effectively zap a limited-exposure target from multiple firing positions. Excelling on the range, he won many awards for his marksmanship. A skill to last a lifetime, in or out of the army. He loved the heft of his M14 and considered the rifle a continuation of his own body, an extra limb, his longest and most powerful, its reach extended by each flesh-seeking bullet. Later, when he had to switch to the M16, which was a little lighter, he felt as if a part of his body had been amputated.

Army food was plentiful yet bad. The grayish rice and fish sauce were of the lowest quality. Soup was a salty broth with scarce sprigs of water spinach and there was more fat than pork in the pork stew. Still, Hoang Long was grateful to eat without having to look at his father’s and stepmother’s faces, now banished to the back regions of his mind, living under a different sky, out of sight. In Can Tho, he
sometimes ate with his eyes inadvertently closed, provoking the old man into angry outbursts. In the Army he regained his appetite. Everything tasted better, even a glass of water. He also loved marching in his uniform and despised the enemy for fighting in their underwear.

In January 1963, Hoang Long graduated from the Thu Duc Military Academy as a second lieutenant. Standing stiff in the bright sunshine, he heard a bracing speech by a highly decorated and much-amputated general: “How would you have turned out had you lacked the resolution to enlist? Just think about it. A stay-at-home draft dodger, you’d be a turd, a vermin, a piece of rag! Mark my words, soldiers: Everything hinges on the right decision made at the right time. A second here, an inch there, and you could be dead a hundred times over. Just think about it. If you had waited to be drafted, your being a soldier would be devoid of significance—you’d be cannon fodder and a slave—but, no, you acted of your own volition, flexed your will, and it has changed you. Just look at yourselves! Take my case, for example: Because I enlisted, just like you, my sacrifices have profound significance. For love of country, I chose to lose three of my limbs. Just think about it. And I didn’t lose them all at once either. A single trauma is not worth talking about. Each time I lost an arm or a leg, I reenlisted.”

Nineteen sixty-three was a pretty good year to be a lowly commissioned officer, perhaps, but not so great if you were president of a country. In February, Iraq’s Abdul Karim Kassem was shot after a Baathist coup engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In November, South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem, originally installed by the CIA, was shot in a military coup engineered by the CIA. Among the plotters were future strongmen Saddam Hussein and Nguyen Van Thieu. John F. Kennedy was also shot in November. In knocking off a leader, a killer becomes in effect paterfamilias to an entire population. Unwittingly, many of us have been orphaned, then adopted, by the CIA, the world’s number-one deadbeat dad.

5
HUNCHES AND BELIEFS

A
fter their marriage, it was decided that Kim Lan should quit tending wounds and stay at home. “You should not be around death all the time,” Hoang Long said. She was more than ready to leave the blood buckets and maggots behind. She would not miss the incoming, and gurneys gliding on blood. She didn’t want to hear words like “triage” or “trauma” ever again. Near death, a soldier, his face burned, his eyes useless, confused her with his wife. Another, clutching her hand, took her for his mother. Being a nurse had not persuaded Kim Lan that pain was a normal human condition. She still considered it an aberration, a freak occurrence afflicting only the most unfortunate.

The young couple bought a two-room house in the Thanh Da district on the edge of town. There you could hear the distant booms of outgoing artillery and occasionally, close by, incoming ones. To make up for her lost income, Kim Lan decided to open a café in their home. Saigon, then as now, was a city with a million cafés. You could not walk a few steps without running into one. They all had beach chairs facing the street, so patrons could laze under awnings to watch life go by as they imbibed caffeine, nicotine and nitrogen dioxide. Beggars and shoe-shine boys drifted in and out, while motorbikes, cyclos, tanks and ambulances paraded past. Every so often there would be an accident, a fight or an explosion to provide perspective and excitement. Kim Lan named her café Kim Long, which means Golden Dragon. “I like that!” Hoang Long said, chuckling.

Marrying her had indeed turned him into a golden dragon. Before, he was just another lonely short guy with an attitude, but now he had real confidence and class. She made him look and feel significant whenever they were seen together. Other men’s stares embarrassed her, yet flattered him. Taller, better-looking men were constantly wondering how in hell such a short, ugly man had managed to attract such an attractive woman. They looked at the couple in envy and disgust and wondered if they had made a mistake with their own marriages. That evening they went home and picked a ridiculous argument with their wives.

Three years before he was married, Hoang Long had gone to a fortune-teller, Mrs. Cloudy—so-called because of her milky, pupil-less eyes. Everyone consulted her, including high government officials, prominent businessmen and the station chief of the CIA. Her blindness only added to her reputation for clairvoyance. After making an appointment two weeks in advance, clients had to crowd into a waiting room like those at dentists’ offices, with the overflow spilling onto the sidewalk. Many Vietnamese have never felt a dentist’s probe, but they have seen half a dozen fortune-tellers. In the air-conditioned parlor, Mrs. Cloudy, a regal fifty-year-old dressed in white silk, sat in a rattan armchair, a black mutt dozing by her feet. A boy servant stood near, ready to pour tea. She stopped puffing on her Dunhill, traced the minute lines on Hoang Long’s palms with her right thumb, then began, “Let’s see, your face is slightly asymmetrical, but that’s a distinction to be cherished. You are quite short also, but that’s OK. You will find a smudgy facsimile of conjugal happiness, something akin to love, but not this year or the next. You will go far away and it will be a learning experience. Hold on: I can clearly see a wrinkled body, with all of its limbs intact and both eyes securely lodged in their sockets, lying in a state-of-the-art casket, complete with a drainage system. That’s pretty good news, isn’t it? That means you will live to old age and not suffer a violent death. Hold on: I can clearly see that you will be humiliated in Chapter 30.
I’m sorry but you can’t change this destiny, it’s already published. After marriage, money will roll in.” Mrs. Cloudy said many more things that night, but since we weren’t there, we can’t possibly know what they were.

Mrs. Cloudy’s mind was a vast repository of other people’s misfortunes: terminal diseases, gunshots, stab wounds, car crashes and bone-crunching, blood-splattering falls from ladders, cliffs and windows. Funeral after funeral coursed through her feverish head. They tailgated or collided into each other at busy intersections. Dozens of funerals merged into one, not to be disentangled except at the cemetery. Her eardrums vibrated continuously with the sounds of weeping, sniveling and howling. When it came to her own death, however, Mrs. Cloudy was clueless. “A fortune-teller cannot tell her own fortune,” she’d say matter-of-factly. “And I’m too proud to go see another fortune-teller.”

Knowing one’s destiny, one became a slave to one’s given plot, whether it was glorious then terrifying, or just continuously terrifying, an upside-down roller-coaster ride through the never-spoken-about and the unshowable. Knowing the arc of one’s own life, one could only subvert it by means of annoying and desperate tangents, but Mrs. Cloudy preferred to fumble through each chapter, reading her novel as she wrote it. Remove the uncertainties and there would be no imagination, hope or frisson. That was why Mrs. Cloudy occasionally gave her cowardly clients wrong predictions, to make their lives more interesting down the road.

With great success came great jealousy, of course, and there was a rival who claimed that Mrs. Cloudy was not really blind, that she was only a masseuse masquerading as a fortune-teller. Then this other woman was run over by an M48 tank at a famous intersection. After that, no one dared to repeat the slander.

Regarding Hoang Long, Mrs. Cloudy was at least right about money rolling in after marriage. Stationed in Cao Lanh, one hundred miles from Saigon, he could come home every three months
for a one-week stay. Each time he showed up, he took from his knapsack a nice stack of money. Soldiers under his command were bribing him to keep them out of harm’s way. The ones who couldn’t pay were assigned point-man duty or other dangerous tasks. Hoang Long himself was protected by a talisman Kim Lan had procured from a Cambodian monk. It was a cobra’s fang he kept in a pouch strapped across his chest. She also got him a handkerchief blessed with a Cambodian phrase. Before each mission, he’d wipe his face with the handkerchief while mumbling some mumbo jumbo in mispronounced Cambodian. It had worked its magic, apparently, because he had not come close to being maimed since he got married.

Better safe than sorry. It can’t hurt. The gods and demons must be placated, their ghostly pockets stuffed with hell dollars. Like the Chinese, Mexicans and southern Italians, Vietnamese are highly superstitious. They possess an unscientific mind set that allows them to believe just about anything … as long as there is enough poetry in it. To ward off an outbreak of thrush, a child’s first excrement—an odorless yellow slime resembling egg yolk—is smeared into his mouth right after birth. At one month, a boy’s scrotum is caressed upward with a warm hand, to prevent it from sagging. To tighten his nut sack, three pouches of uncooked rice are hung over a door, to be squeezed by those entering the room. For a girl, a heated betel leaf is rubbed on the vagina, to prevent it from flaring. A child with a drowned relative has to wear a brass anklet to ensure against being “dragged” to a similar death later in life. Children under ten are discouraged from looking into mirrors, lest their souls, embodied within the reflected image, should play tricks with them.

Innumerable superstitions guide you from the cradle to the grave. If you don’t squash a snake’s head after you’ve killed it, it will return to bite you three days later. A chunk of cactus, affixed to a door, prevents bad spirits from entering a house. Remove all buttons from a corpse’s clothing or else the spirit won’t be able to leave the coffin.
In the home of the recently dead, an
X
is drawn in chalk on all glass windows, to prevent the ghost from reentering. During the mourning period, strips of white cloth are tied to the legs of chairs and tables, and to plants, since a plant that does not grieve will surely die. When his sales are slow, a coffin maker will sleep inside a coffin to suggest death to the gods, to simulate/stimulate business.

Most interesting are brand-new beliefs, reflecting contemporary life. Some people believe that an X-ray would trim a year or two from your life span. Drinking milk would lighten your skin; ingesting soy sauce would darken it. Discussing a sensational murder, a woman told Kim Lan that if the corpse’s eyes were wide open at the moment of death, the investigation was in the bag. “If they develop the frozen image in his eyes, they can see the murderer’s face.” Eyes were cameras, literally, in this woman’s eyes.

Bay Dom was an ARVN general in charge of the Chau Doc area. It was said that he could not be shot with a bullet. Once he dared an American adviser to shoot him, point-blank, with a pistol. Feeling no special love for the cocky general, the American readily agreed. In front of the general’s own troops, he aimed a .38 Special at Bay Dom’s temple, the mouth of his six-inch barrel practically kissing the other man’s exposed skin. He pulled the trigger twice and heard two loud bangs, but the general still stood there, smirking. On his third attempt, the American’s pistol jammed. Suddenly everyone started to laugh uproariously, including the general and the American. They would later become drinking buddies. The only way to kill Bay Dom, it was said, was to shoot him in the eye or the asshole. Once Bay Dom pulled the pin on a grenade and placed it against his heart, but it would not explode.

6
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