Saigon (50 page)

The Frenchman went very still in his seat, and all the color drained from his face. “What are you talking about?” 

“It’s me, Paul — I’m in love with Lan. I have been ever since I first met her all those years ago.” 

Paul’s only reaction was a slight narrowing of his eyes; otherwise he remained motionless in his chair. 

“I’ve been meeting her secretly off and on for a year or two now in Saigon. I’m desperately sorry this has happened, you must know that.” 

Paul removed his helmet and placed one hand gingerly against the soiled dressing covering his head wound as though it suddenly pained him — but still he said nothing. 

“It isn’t something that’s just begun recently,” continued Joseph in a desperate voice. ‘Lan and I were lovers once, long before you married her. It all began before she agreed to become your wife. I asked her to marry me first — but she refused.” 

“Where did you become lovers?” 

“In Hue at the time of the last Nam Giao ceremony Joseph hesitated and drew another long breath. “Lan begged me not to tell you this, but I think you should know the whole story. A baby girl was born to her before she married you — my daughter. I knew nothing of her existence until I came back to Saigon at the end of the war. She was eight then and she’d been brought up secretly by one of the family servants in a village in the north.” 

Paul straightened slowly behind his desk. “Does she still live there?” 

Joseph shook his head. “While you were recovering from your wounds, Lan and I drove north to look for her. We found her just in time. She almost died of starvation. We took her back to Saigon and she was brought up secretly in the household of Lan’s brother, Tam,” 

There was a long silence and outside they heard the noise of gunfire start up again. As he stared at Joseph, Paul’s face darkened with anger. “So you’ve been meeting secretly behind my back all this time in Saigon.” 

Joseph nodded miserably. “I hated deceiving you, Paul, but I couldn’t help myself. Lan and I didn’t become lovers again until we met at Dalat ten days ago — that was the first time Since 1945. She always insisted on remaining loyal to you before. But now Fm sure we can be happy together. I want to make amends for the past. I’ve asked her to marry me—-and I’m going to offer Tuyet a home with us too.” 

On the table Paul’s knuckled whitened abruptly as he clenched his fists. “Has she agreed to go with you?” 

“She’s refused to give me any decision until Joseph’s voice died away and he shifted guiltily under Paul’s gaze. “Until she’s seen you again.” 

“You mean until she knows whether I come out of here dead or alive!” Paul rose slowly from his chair, his features contracting into a grimace of cold fury. “You’re both waiting, aren’t you, to see whether the Communists clear the way for you!” 

“Paul, you told me yourself your marriage hadn’t been right for a long time.” Joseph’s voice took on an imploring note. “Don’t you see, knowing that changed everything for me.” 

“Lan’s been my wife for nearly twenty years!” Paul spoke through his gritted teeth. “We’ve got a grown son — or had you forgotten that?” 

“No, I hadn’t forgotten.” Seeing the Frenchman’s expression harden, Joseph drew back in alarm. 

“Does Lan love you?” 

“She’s always stopped short of saying so, out of loyalty to you. But I’m sure she does — I think she did from the start.” 

“Then why did she marry me” 

“Because her father wished it! He wanted to demonstrate his loyalty to France through her, don’t you see? She was just obeying his wishes.” 

The moment the words were out, Joseph regretted saying them. Paul started back, glaring at Joseph with a new expression of loathing in his eyes. For a long time neither of them spoke, and outside the bunker the intensity of the firing increased. Without taking his eyes from Joseph’s face, Paul dropped his hand to the flap of his revolver holster and lifted it to free the grip of the weapon. “You wouldn’t believe me, Joseph, would you, if I told you that after your last visit I felt your friendship was one of the few worthwhile things left in my life?” 

Joseph felt his heart lurch sickeningly inside him, and he took an instinctive pace towards the Frenchman. “I’m sorry, Paul, I’m deeply sorry. I’ve been such a goddamned fool 

“Keep away from me!” Paul drew the gun and took a pace backwards, pointing its muzzle at Joseph’s chest. “Nobody’s going to ask how a crazy American journalist got himself killed at a time like this.” 

Joseph stared transfixed at the gun. “Paul, let me stay. Let me see it through with you — there’s plenty here for me to write about.” 

Paul’s chest rose and fell erratically, and his voice took on a note of incredulity. “You still think you can square your conscience even now, don’t you? You still think there’s a noble way out.” 

The roar of an aircraft passing low over the bunker momentarily drowned out the sound of the guns outside, and on hearing it, Paul extended his arm stiffly in front of him. With calm deliberation he leveled the revolver at Joseph’s head, and his finger began to whiten inside the trigger-guard. Then the sacking covering the doorway was wrenched aside, and Paul’s adjutant burst in; he gazed open- mouthed at his superior for a moment before recovering himself. 

“The hospital plane’s just landing, sir— if Monsieur Sherman is to take it, we must go now.” 

“Monsieur Sherman is refusing to obey my order to board the plane,” snapped Paul, without shifting his gaze from Joseph’s face. “You will escort him to the airstrip and embark him at gunpoint.” 

The young lieutenant quickly drew his own pistol and motioned Joseph ahead of him up the sap. Five minutes later, as the Red Cross Dakota, laden with wounded, lifted ponderously off the pitted run. way, Joseph looked back towards the command bunkers; as he watched, the sack covering the entrance to the chief of staff’s dugout was moved aside and Paul emerged blinking into the daylight. He was helmetless and although he held himself characteristically upright, the grimy bandage around his head gave him a bedraggled, crestfallen air. His revolver dangled limply in his right hand, and as the Dakota climbed away through a light mortar barrage he gazed blankly up into the leaden sky; a moment later the aircraft was swallowed up in the low cloud hanging over the valley and the last image of Dien Bien Phu that Joseph carried away with him was of the forlorn, diminishing figure of Paul standing alone in the heart of the doomed fortress. 

An hour before midnight on May 6, 1954, Ngo Van Dong pulled his flimsy helmet of plaited bamboo low over his eyes and raised his head cautiously above the edge of one of the forward trenches facing the Elaine group of hills. His mouth was dry, and he hugged his carbine tight against his chest with its bayonet fixed, ready to clamber out of the slimy ditch as soon as the signal to advance was given. Like all the other men of the 59th Regiment of the 3 12th Division of the Vietnamese People’s Army, he now wore a gauze mask over the lower half of his face because of the risk of disease in the oozing, mud-filled trenches where they trod constantly on the putrefying bodies of their own and French dead. The dugouts and blockhouses through which the battle had swirled for fifty-five days reeked of excrement and vomit too, and in the heat of the day, flies and maggots infested the bloated corpses. 

Beneath the glare of parachute flares dropped by French transports which still flew in relays from Hanoi, Dong could see other Viet Minh units swarming through the outer defenses of the smaller strongpoints in the Elaine group. On their crests dwindling bands of French and Foreign Legion paratroopers were pouring desperate bursts of machine gun and mortar fire into their ranks, but sensing that victory was near, the Asian Soldiers were advancing endlessly now over the corpses of their dead comrades and overwhelming the Europeans by sheer weight of numbers. Elaine Two, the hill in front of Dong’s company, was the group’s key bastion; it was manned by the remnants of the First Battalion, Parachute Chasseurs who had set up their command post in the house of the former French governor of Dien Bien Phu on its summit, and because the hill was the last major stronghold iii the valley in French hands, Viet Minh sappers had spent several days tunneling deep into the hillside and wiring together thousands of kilos of explosives to make a massive underground mine. The blast had been scheduled for 2300 hours that night, and Dong had led his company stealthily into position through the maze of trenches half an hour before. 

Few of the troops waiting around him had taken part in the fierce fighting that had gone on all through April; while capturing the cluster of Huguette hills to the west of the French command center, General Giap had seen the strength of his four divisions reduced from fifty thousand to thirty thousand men, and many of the soldiers in Dong’s company were sixteen-year old boys who had arrived only a week before. But in daily indoctrination sessions their political commissars were constantly reminding them now that the French garrison of thirteen thousand men had been reduced effectively to less than a third of that number and that the survivors were close to exhaustion. Final victory was at hand, they had been told repeatedly during the last few days, and as they crouched in the trenches around him waiting for the giant mine to be detonated, Dong could sense the fear and tension in them. 

But he, too, was unusually keyed up and on edge. The bitter hand-to-hand conflict that had gone on for nearly two months had taken a terrible toll of Dien Bien Phu’s attackers as well as its beleaguered defenders, and Dong, like the rest of the Viet Minh forces, was, without fully realizing it, nearing the limits of his endurance; he had subsisted since early February on little more than a few daily handfuls of rice supplemented by a meager issue of a dozen peanuts once a week; he had also lived constantly with the fear that even a minor wound might eventually kill him, since the field medical facilities — half-a-dozen doctors and surgeons working in hastily erected palm-thatch huts in the mountains — were even more rudimentary than the underground hospital on the valley bottom which overflowed daily with the French dead and dying. With the exception of some new shell splinters in his bandaged left shoulder, however, Dong had come through the lighting unscathed, and the knowledge that the climax to the long siege was approaching had helped him forget his weariness. Waiting impatiently for the underground explosion to signal the charge, his thoughts returned involuntarily to the first time he had waited like this in the darkness to attack the French — at Yen Bay. Then, he reflected grimly, his father and little Hoc had been at his side, and as he gazed up the flare-lit hillside, he made a silent promise to his dead family that he would fight bravely and unselfishly that night to help avenge them once and for all. 

When at last the massive subterranean mine exploded a few minutes after eleven o’clock, it shook the hillside like an earthquake, and Dong saw an enormous fountain of black earth and smoke soar upward; then the night was filled with a delayed roar, and mud and debris began to cascade down over the Viet Minh lines. The moment the deluge ceased, Dong rose up out of the trench yelling, “Tien buoc! Tien buoc! — forward!” then Hung himself up the bill. 

As he ran, he let out a full-throated scream, arid hearing thousands of his countrymen giving simultaneous voice to their hatred of the enemy filled him with a murderous ecstasy. Stumbling and leaping through the smashed trenches, he felt he was being borne irresistibly upwards by an unstoppable wave, and with a wild cry of triumph he bayoneted to death two terrified French paratroopers who had been trapped and wounded by the blast in an abandoned dugout. One by one the remaining machine guns of the defenders either grew too hot to touch and seized up, or fell silent when they ran out of ammunition, and Dong and his men found those few French troops who had survived the massive explosion crouching stunned and shocked behind walls of French corpses killed in earlier assaults. 

While he was skirting the great black chasm gouged from the hillside by the mine, however, half-a-dozen youths new to his company were caught in a hail of machine-gun fire coming from the old governor’s house, and Dong watched helplessly as they toppled, shrieking, into the pit. Looking towards the incongruous European mansion on the hilltop, his anger boiled up afresh; the building seemed suddenly to symbolize all the hatred he felt for France, and without stopping to think whether it was wise, he rushed up through the remaining trenches alone, and crawled swiftly across the open ground around the command post. Drawing a grenade, he plunged down a flight of outside steps towards a lighted cellar window, then stopped and crouched down beneath the sill when he heard the sound of a French radio operator’s voice calling a frantic message to command headquarters. 

“Tell Colonel Devraux that Elaine Two can’t hold out much longer without reinforcements,” yelled the radio operator, repeating the message emphatically over and over again to make himself heard above the din. “Tell Colonel Devraux we must have reinforcements — now!” 

Dong’s eyes narrowed as he registered the name; then he sprang to his feet, kicked open the door and fired three shots into the radio transmitter, shattering it beyond repair. When the young French radio operator turned, still wearing his headphones, he found Dong’s bayonet tip pressed against his chest. 

“Who is this ‘Colonel Devraux’ you were contacting?’ snarled Dong in French. “Which unit is he commanding?” 

When the terrified radio operator didn’t reply, Dong jabbed the bayonet harder against his chest. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll kill you. What is Devraux’s other name? Who is he?” 

“He’s Colonel Paul Devraux,” whispered the radio man. “He’s chief of staff to Colonel de Castries, I think he knows Vietnam well — he’s lived here a long time.” 

Dong’s eyes glittered suddenly in his grime-streaked face, and with a convulsive movement of his whole body he plunged his bayonet into the Frenchman’s chest.