Highways to a War (47 page)

Mike was snoring; Dmitri scarcely seemed to breathe. In my heart, I spoke to them both as though they were my blood brothers.
Sleep,
I said.
Rest, brothers.

I was kept awake for a little longer by the sound of military trucks passing somewhere outside the village, the whining of their motors telling me they were old, and heavily loaded. Even when I slept, they got into my dreams: they seemed to be moving by at intervals all through the night.

By blindfolding us, the Vietnamese had taken great trouble to conceal from us where we were. But I felt certain we were in country near the Vietnamese border, since this was probably the only region where the North Vietnamese Army would still be coming inside Cambodia in any numbers. All their forces were pulling back over the border now, in accordance with the Paris peace agreements. I would prove to be right: what I was hearing was the NVA’s supply trucks, moving down a section of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

I hear it still, in my head: a sound that’s now part of history.

We were held in the village for only one night. The next morning, we were taken away with Captain Van Danh’s patrol.

There were only seven soldiers in the unit, and we marched with them on a track whose surface was sealed with crushed stones, its bed of packed red earth. It looked not much better than an oxcart path: but we were walking on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

So few people ever saw the Trail, except from the air. It was a fact and yet not a fact: a rumor. And it wasn’t one trail, but many: a network of roads and tracks that ran for thousands of miles. It came over razorback ridges; through mountain corridors and jungle; across flooded rivers. Thousands died to build it: of malaria, dysentery and exhaustion, as well as from air attacks. Its flimsy pontoon bridges were all the time bombed and all the time remade, and its convoys of trucks and bicycles never stopped coming, bringing their troops and their arms in an endless flow from the North. The Trail was what won the war; and now that the war’s over, I suppose it will exist soon only in memories, and in North Vietnamese soldiers’ songs. So it’s sometimes difficult to believe that we marched on it, Mike, Dmitri and I. But we did; and for me it’s a great thing to have done, despite all the sadness of what happened.

As I’d guessed, the village where we’d slept had been close to a point where a branch of the Trail came through Cambodia. A hundred kilometers or so to the southeast, it would pass into South Vietnam through the Parrot’s Beak: the section of the border that points at Saigon. This was where the patrol was headed: they’d been posted back to Vietnam, they said, and were taking us there with them. Captain Danh told us that we’d cross the border somewhere near Highway 1, but he wouldn’t say what they planned to do with us then: only that he was joining a larger unit.

Along the Trail at intervals, we passed way stations guarded by a few NVA soldiers: groups of little huts whose roofs were camouflaged with palm fronds. Arms and food were stored there; trucks could be hidden from air attack, and sometimes there were vegetable plots to supply the convoys. I’ve learned since then that further north, where the Trail went through the jungles and mountains of eastern Cambodia and Laos, it was far more impressive than in this section. It had become a two-lane highway, and some of the main control points were as big as villages, with barracks, fueling stations, dispensaries, shop facilities and comfortable rest houses. Hidden from the air by the jungle canopy, the convoys of trucks moved bumper to bumper, like traffic in a city at peak hour, their headlights at night making glimmering chains in the blackness.

But there wasn’t much traffic on our branch of the Trail, since the Delta provinces it led to weren’t where Hanoi’s troops and supplies could yet be concentrated. Also, the border region here was an open country of paddy fields and light forest—so that trucks would easily have been seen from the air. Traveling by day, it was safer to go on foot, as we were doing. Trucks moved at night, and even then their numbers here were few.

At first we kept hoping that we’d ride in one, instead of walking. But Captain Danh told us that the trucks were heavily loaded, and our patrol would go all the way on foot: it was less than ten days’ march, he said. He didn’t talk much about the unit’s function, except to say that it was part of a liaison team that helped to secure the Trail, working in cooperation with the local villagers.

A liaison team could be doing a lot of things; we all knew that. When we talked it over, Mike said he believed that Captain Danh’s unit was connected with COSVN: the secret Central Office for South Vietnam the Americans were always looking for, which was supposed to be directing the war. He’d heard that COSVN was located just a few kilometers north of here, in the rubber plantation area called the Fish Hook. And he thought that the team’s real function would very likely have been to negotiate purchases of arms from corrupt Lon Nol commanders on the west bank. It might also have been involved in the rubber trade, he said. The Communists sold rubber to the Lon Nol forces, and the Lon Nol Government sold it abroad: they added a lot to their treasury that way. Mike had a lot of information like that. Some of it probably came from Aubrey Hardwick; and I would guess that Aubrey’s sources were his friends in the CIA.

We were dressed and equipped just as the soldiers were, except that we carried no weapons. We wore our green cotton uniforms and cotton bush hats, and carried our packs and our cotton tubes of rice as they did. And Captain Danh had kept his word: we had Ho Chi Minh sandals on our feet. When we’d first put these on, we’d felt as though we were flying. But with our feet half-bare, we constantly feared a bite from the small brown krait which the soldiers called
cham quap.
It looks just like a dried branch, and the men were always watching the ground. Many North Vietnamese soldiers died from the krait’s bite, they said. The medic carried snakebite capsules—but this didn’t reassure us very much.

The team’s diet was extremely basic: small portions of rice, shreds of dried meat and fish; a few vegetables. Most of their provisions they got from the way stations; but sometimes they got supplies from the villages we passed through. They always paid for the food; they never plundered. They ate only twice a day, morning and evening, and marched for very long periods without breaking to rest. By carrying such light gear, they covered many more kilometers a day than Western soldiers could have done. But the weather was still very hot and humid, with little rain, and this made the march tiring. The gear we carried consisted of one canteen, a rolled-up hammock, a light nylon poncho, a mosquito net, a single change of fatigues and underpants, a metal dish, a small towel, and a fragment of soap. To clean our teeth we used splinters of bamboo. We washed in streams off the track, and filled our canteens there or from springs, adding purification tablets.

Captain Danh didn’t say much to us at first, but he was always courteous and considerate. He gave us a small ration of Vietnamese cigarettes each day which I suspected were from his own store, and he lent us his own cut-throat razor to shave with, since no other was available. It was very blunt.

There isn’t much to tell about the first four days of the march. We walked a little apart, always with one or two of the soldiers behind us. We were with these men, yet not of them: we were even made to eat our meals separately, sitting at a distance. It was only on the fifth night that we began to know them better.

That was when we were allowed to sit with them around the rice pot. The story of our march really begins there.

 

 

The woodland areas we passed through now were full of splintered trees and bomb craters—some new, some dating from the B-52 bombing of three years before. The craters were enormous: thirty feet or more across. Some of the craters had filled with water, and had turned into ponds where villagers kept ducks. Sometimes we passed ruined, deserted villages with smashed and burned-out houses that had never been reoccupied, where half-wild dogs snarled at us.

Here in this Vietnam border country was where the war in Cambodia had begun. The Americans had carried out their secret bombing raids here, trying to hit the Viet Cong sanctuaries; and this was where the American and ARVN forces had invaded in 1970. Now the B-52s were bombing here again; but during those first few days, no bombs fell in our vicinity. The important convoys they were seeking weren’t here but further north, behind us. Once we heard low thunder from the north and felt a faint trembling in the earth, and we guessed that it came from the Fish Hook.

Then, on the fifth afternoon, at about four o‘clock, they came.

There was a low, white gray sky, and we didn’t see them. But you never do; they fly too high. The Trail was taking us out of the open into a small forest when we heard the explosions. They must have been many kilometers away, but they shook the earth under our feet, and I knew instantly what they were. I’d heard that
whump-whump-whump
coming from around Phnom Penh, as the Americans carpeted the Khmer Rouge forces: but always a good way off. This was closer, and its volume was frightening.

Captain Danh shouted an order, and the unit moved quickly into the shadow of some palm trees. They threw themselves flat, and Mike, Dmitri and I did the same. The earth here was pinkish and bare and dry as biscuits, and covered with dead leaves. I will never forget that earth, because a few moments later it heaved under us.

It heaved in a huge spasm, and I found myself hugging it as though I were clinging to an upturned boat; then a roar engulfed us unlike anything I’d ever known. I’d never imagined such a sound. It was not a sound, it was something beyond sound; it opened up a gaping hole in the world and in my head, making my mind cry out in terror, making the whole world rock and sway. The palms and bigger trees nearby were bending like grass. This is not right, this is not war, nobody should be doing a thing like this, I said, and I pissed my pants. I was very ashamed: in all my years of covering action I’d never done such a thing. So I felt better when I learned later that many of the NVA soldiers did the same, in their first B-52 raid.

Now, as the sound died away, we were all staring at each other, serious and amazed. There were no more explosions; the bombers had passed on. I found that I was shaking uncontrollably, and saw that Mike and Dmitri were shaking in the same way. Captain Danh, lying close by, was looking across at us with an expression of cheerful sympathy; he saw our condition, but made no comment. He pushed back his old-fashioned sun helmet with its red star; then he smiled, and sat up.

We are lucky, Mr. Jim, he said. That was not really very close. One kilometer closer, and maybe we would have no eardrums.

 

 

The pot was big, and of black iron. The soldiers cooked their rice in it every morning and evening, and they sat around it in a circle with their metal dishes and ate from it together: Captain Danh included. In the mornings, there wouldn’t be much talk, but in the evenings they’d talk and laugh quite a lot, lingering over their canteens of hot tea. They were doing this now.

Darkness was falling, and their faces reflected the flames from the low fire on which the rice was cooking. Most of them, including Captain Danh, had taken off their bush hats and sun helmets. Their assault rifles were beside them; they were always alert; but they seemed unconcerned about the bombers. They were in constant radio contact with other groups, and seemed to know when raids were happening; apparently everything was quiet this evening, and they were listening to a newscast from Radio Hanoi on a shortwave transistor radio.

We were camped in a clearing, in the sort of forest that was common here: almost like parkland, with spindly, white-trunked trees that looked like birches, palms and stands of bamboo, and spaces of the pinkish dry earth. As usual at mealtimes, Mike and Dmitri and I were sitting apart from the group. We squatted against a clump of tall bamboo that rose like a wall behind us, watching the little circle around the fire. Soon, we knew, a soldier would bring over our helpings in metal dishes. Our hands were never tied now, on the condition that we stood and sat exactly where we were supposed to, and made no unexpected moves. But we always felt a little sad to be segregated from these men we marched with all day.

This evening, the feeling grew much stronger. We spoke about it together; we all felt it. Why could we not eat with them?

This will no doubt seem strange and absurd to you; after all, we were prisoners, and regarded as enemies. But the feeling had partly been strengthened by the B-52 raid. No doubt prisoners begin to grow childish; but the fact is, with the raid still fresh as a thing we’d all shared, we felt that we were no longer simply prisoners, but temporary members of Captain Danh’s unit. And waiting for our rice, exiled from the cheerful ring around the fire, we grew more and more sad and resentful. We should be able to eat around the pot, we said.

Until now, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers had not been real to us: they had simply been the People Over There. We had seen them only as prisoners, or the dead. Once, after covering a battle in the Vietnamese Highlands with the Americans, I had watched U.S. officers examine the body of an NVA soldier and go through his effects. It was the first time I had covered action against the North Vietnamese, so he was the first NVA soldier I’d seen at close quarters, and he had stayed in my mind. He’d looked so very small. All he had was his pack, and there was nothing inside it but a change of underwear, some letters from home, and a sad little plastic packet of rice. Such a small amount of rice, I thought, how could it sustain him? Now, I saw that these soldiers of Captain Danh’s liaison team were the same. He and his men had very little of anything; they managed on the bare essentials, and although we didn’t forget what sort of regime they fought for, we couldn’t help admiring their hardiness, and being touched by their poverty and simplicity, now that we saw it for ourselves.