A Million Shades of Gray (2 page)

Y'Tin's father blushed. “I got to talk to my wife first,” he mumbled. “She thought I all finish with this stuff.” Y'Tin knew that since the Americans were leaving in a couple of weeks, his father had been told that he wouldn't be needed for any more missions.

“I understand. Go on and talk to your wife. Make sure to tell her this mission is supposed to be smooth sailing.”

“What ‘smooth sailing' mean?” asked Y'Tin. “Easy mission?” Y'Tin turned to his father and spoke in Rhade. “Ama, you ask Ami if I can come too? I promise I'll do my homework for a week.”

“Why not do your homework forever?” his father asked.

“Forever,” Y'Tin said solemnly, but his father just laughed at him.

His father jogged over to their longhouse and climbed up. His mother was already on the porch, watching them.

Y'Tin turned to Shepard. “It bad luck to go now. You tempting the spirits.”

“Just this last mission. It's no contact with the enemy,” Shepard assured him.

“I come too?”

“Let's see what your mother and father say.”

Y'Tin's father climbed down again. “Okay?” Shepard asked.

“Okay,” Y'Tin's father said. “You let my son come?”

“Yep, if you want. It's smooth sailing.”

Y'Tin's heart fluttered. Riding Lady into the village and now this. What a week!

“All right, we need to get a move on,” Shepard said.

Y'Tin didn't know what a “move on” was and where they might get one, but he didn't ask.

Shepard continued. “We got the order an hour ago. We need you—you
and
your son—to find the camp and estimate how many were there. I don't know what for, the powers that be just requested the information. And who's the best tracker I've ever worked with?”

“Ah,” Y'Tin's father said, feigning modesty. Then he seemed to ponder for a moment before saying
less modestly, “I guess I pretty good, if I say so myself.”

“We took the liberty of packing for you. Canteen, PIR rations, ammunition. And here's your rifle.”

“What I need rifle for?”

“Nothing, but if we do need them, we should have them.”

“Gotcha, G.I.”

“Okay, let's get started. Remember, no contact. You see anything suspicious, you let us know, and we'll back off. Nobody wants to get hurt this late in the game.”

“Gotcha, G.I.”

Ama patted Y'Tin's shoulder proudly. Then he looked worried. “We make sacrifice first? My wife suggested.”

“The sun is starting to come up. It's getting late,” Shepard said.

“Don't say I no warn you.”

“We won't.”

They all entered the jungle together. Y'Tin's senses seemed so alive, he felt almost inhuman. Everyone said he was part elephant, and maybe that was true.

Y'Tin walked by his father's side. He felt very proud. And he really loved to feel very proud.
And he loved walking in front of the other men.

He put his whole being into tracking, just as if he were stalking prey. He walked so quietly that he couldn't hear himself, and that made him feel proud as well. They moved very slowly for several kilometers. Then Y'Tin saw them: several tracks, crossing their pathway. He noticed before his father did. He dropped to his hands and knees and studied the tracks. Six different soldiers. They made six distinct prints: One walked with his toes pointed slightly in; another had small feet—possibly a woman; one left different tread marks from the others; one came down hard on the heels; another had the second smallest feet; and one made a telltale scuff as he lifted his feet. Y'Tin's father squatted down beside him and then nodded in encouragement. “Six soldiers,” Y'Tin said. He stood up and his father followed suit. Then Y'Tin saw the pride in his father's face as he looked at Y'Tin.

As they followed the tracks, there were times when Y'Tin almost lost the trail. The others kept waiting for him silently—he always took a little longer than his father to figure out what the tracks were telling him. His father had once told him that
every trail told a story and the important thing was not to read the story the fastest but, rather, the most accurately. Y'Tin knew that Ama could read faster
and
more accurately than he could.

The six soldiers had sanitized their tracks very well. But you could never sanitize your trail completely. A broken twig, a bent blade of grass—there would always be a sign of where you were going, of where you'd been. Y'Tin glanced back at Shepard and at Ama's friend Y'Bier Hlong, who was sanitizing
their
trail. With about 100,000 members, the Rhade—Y'Tin's tribe—was one of the biggest Dega tribes in Vietnam, and many of the Rhade worked with the American Special Forces. In Y'Tin's village, however, there were only a few men who worked with the Americans. Who knew why?

The trail disappeared, but Y'Tin and his father continued in the same direction as before. After about forty meters they picked up the trail again. Y'Tin's father gestured with his hand, and they turned right, just as the trail did.

Twenty minutes later the trail split in two. Y'Tin studied the split and noticed that nobody had even stopped to talk: One trail of five prints simply went to the right, and the other trail—of just one soldier—went
left. He thought about that, knelt, and studied the fork. He looked at his father. One way or another, his father had to make a call. Ama opted to follow the trail of five over the trail of one. That's what Y'Tin would have chosen as well.

After about an hour Y'Tin realized they'd made a mistake when he saw the trail of five men heading out of the jungle. His father always said you had to tell the truth when you made a mistake, because in life when you told one lie, that always led to two lies, and the two lies led to four, until your whole life became a lie. Y'Tin thought that was an exaggeration, but he got the point.

Ama turned to the men and held himself proudly as he gestured with his hand that they were turning around.

When they reached the fork again, they followed the tracks of the one soldier this time. His trail led deep into the jungle. It was late afternoon when they reached the end of the trail. There was no debris left, but this was where the enemy had gathered. The area was full of disturbed vegetation and dirt. Y'Tin stepped in a patch of undisturbed ground and compared it to the footprints he was examining. His fresh print slowly recovered, but
some of the succulent plants he'd stepped on were permanently broken. Ama signaled the others to stop as he circled the site and slipped in and out of the abandoned camp. Y'Tin saw that his father was counting every print, but Y'Tin used the averaging method. He split the camp into quarters and counted the number of people in one quarter. It took Y'Tin three hours to count and feel sure he was close to correct. He tried not to feel the pressure, but he wished he could work faster. It was growing dark by the time he finished. His father had finished a half hour earlier, but everybody waited for Y'Tin. Finally, he turned to his father and said, “About one hundred fifty.”

His father nodded. “That's what I came up with. One hundred twenty-five to one hundred fifty.”

Suddenly, and clearly, they heard talking, and the whole group—seven of them in all—melted into the forest. That is, Y'Tin knew the others melted into the forest, as he did. The only one he could see was Shepard. Then whoever had been talking fell silent. Y'Tin could just barely hear the other men gingerly walking backward. He wondered whether the Special Forces soldiers would open fire, but they didn't. None of his group moved for a full
hour. Then all hell broke loose. Shooting exploded behind Y'Tin, before him, and above him. His group was doing some of the shooting. Then Y'Bier Hlong staggered into sight. His chest gushed blood as he dropped his rifle. Y'Tin picked it up. He'd never shot a gun. He pointed it toward an enemy soldier but hesitated—he wasn't sure where everybody was and didn't want to accidentally hit one of the friend-lies. Then a North Vietnamese soldier was aiming at Shepard's back, and Y'Tin fired. The bullet shot upward, and the backfire was so strong that Y'Tin fell to the ground. By the time he scrambled up, the firefight had ended. Shepard was taking Y'Bier's pulse. Fortunately, someone else must have shot the soldier who'd been aiming at Shepard.

Silence. Shepard hung his head, and Y'Tin knew that his father's friend had died, shot in the chest and head. Y'Tin stared at him. He had never seen someone killed before.

They walked until it was pitch dark, with Shepard carrying Y'Bier. After a while Shepard said one word: “Here.” The men lay on the ground for sleep. Y'Tin stared into the darkness. Soon he heard a soft, soft sound and realized it was his father crying. Y'Tin fell asleep to the sound. He woke up just
once, his face clammy with dew, and he still heard the sound. Ama had worked for the Special Forces for several years, but he'd been lucky—this was the first time anyone had been killed on one of his father's missions. Y'Tin knew it was his fault. If they hadn't waited for him to finish counting, Y'Suai never would have been shot. Was the guilt he felt part of war? He could feel that Y'Bier's three souls had already left the body. Y'Bier was the nicest man in the village. He always gave away all of the delicious cantaloupes that he raised every year. Y'Tin's family grew the best tobacco, but they didn't give it away like that. No one did, just the Hlongs.

The next morning Shepard carried the dead man on his back all the way to the village. He gently laid Y'Bier in the graveyard just outside the fence.

“Get a blanket, Y'Tin,” his father told him.

Y'Tin half flew to his longhouse and scrambled up. Nobody was there—they were all no doubt working in the fields. He ran back to the cemetery to lay the blanket over Y'Bier's body. But he saw he was too late. Somehow, Y'Bier's wife had already heard and was weeping over the bloody body.

Y'Tin wanted to tell her that it was all his fault, but instead, he just stared at her.

1975

Y'Tin scrubbed Lady's hide as hard as he could. She lay on her side in the river, filling her trunk with water and spraying it on herself and, sometimes, on him. He suspected she sprayed him on purpose, but he couldn't be sure. Either way, his shirt and loincloth were drenched.

“Now I'll be all wet for school!” he exclaimed. Then he laughed and slapped her side—what he always did when he had finished washing her. She stood up and filled her trunk with mud, which she blew onto her back. Elephants' bodies made much more heat than human beings' bodies, and they kept cooler by covering their backs
with mud. Y'Tin had learned that years ago, when he first became obsessed with elephants.

The other elephant keepers had already finished washing their elephants. Y'Tin always took longest because he was a perfectionist. Anyway, that's why he thought he took longest. “Lady,
nao
!” he said. She started down the path to her pen. Her spongy feet fell silently on the jungle floor. Even when she stepped on a twig, the noise was muffled by her feet. Someday, after the war ended, he might go to school to study elephants. Or maybe he would start his own elephant-training school.

Lady stopped to pull at some tree bark. Y'Tin said,
“Nao!”
and she lowered her trunk and continued silently down the path. He was one of the only elephant keepers he'd ever heard of who didn't use a stick with a hook at the end to communicate with his elephant. That was one of the skills he would teach if he ever opened an elephant-training school. He had heard there were such schools in Thailand, but he'd never heard of such a thing in Vietnam. His would be the first. He had become the youngest elephant keeper ever, and he would open the first elephant school in Vietnam. Who knew what other records he might break?

Two years ago, when he'd become the youngest elephant keeper—ever!—he had used the hook, because otherwise, Lady wouldn't listen to him. But as they had grown familiar with each other, he used the hook less and less until he finally abandoned it altogether. He did carry it with him, just in case he needed it in some sort of emergency, but he hadn't used it for about a year.

Y'Tin had just broken into a jog to keep up with Lady when she stopped walking and knocked him to the ground with her trunk. He couldn't help laughing. He got up, and she knocked him down again. It was her favorite game, but he knew she would stop if he told her to. He held her trunk a second and scratched it. When he let go, she let it sway softly one way and then another.
“Muk,”
he said, and she knelt. He climbed over her head and sat just past her shoulders, in front of where the mud was already caking. He rubbed her neck, pushing down her bristly hairs. She shook her head
no
.

“What is it?” he asked.

She shook her head again, and he felt her mood change. Maybe she sensed the tiger that had been haunting the village. His sisters had seen the
tiger yesterday. Y'Tin looked around but saw nothing except jungle. Then he heard men speaking Vietnamese instead of Rhade. “I'm telling you, the river is that way,” one said.

Two South Vietnamese soldiers stepped onto the path right in front of Lady. Even though South Vietnam and the Dega had both fought on the American side of the war, soldiers frightened him.

“Moi!”
one said to Y'Tin.
“Moi!” Moi
meant “savage.” It was what the Vietnamese—both North and South—called Y'Tin's people. But no one had ever personally called Y'Tin a
moi
. He felt anger rise in his chest, but he remained silent. The soldiers carried guns, and you never knew what might happen with men carrying guns. The soldiers might shoot him dead right there and not think of it ever again. That was what war did to people. His father had said so. And if his father said it, it was the truth. Y'Tin waited to see what the soldiers would do next.