The Lotus and the Storm (20 page)

“I bite my nails too, see?” He shows me his hands. The right thumb- nail is ragged. I put my hands behind my back. I know all my nails, not just the thumbnail, are chewed up. “It's okay to feel bad,” James whispers.

I nod. I do feel bad, almost like carsick. “Next time we can read a book. Listen to music. Maybe even play soccer.” His hand slaps his lap with each suggested activity.

“I will like that,” I answer. It has become easy to talk to James. Even if there is no formal lesson plan, I will be able to manage a normal conversation with him.

We are careful to talk quietly so we don't disturb the bashful plant. Sure enough, after some time, it opens up, its leaves unfolding like a shiny, green revelation. I am thrilled that I am here to witness its opening. “Hello,” James murmurs to the plant. His stomach growls. The plant blushes in the soft wind but remains wide open. “C'mon, I'm hungry. But let's do something else first,” he says.

It is early evening. A cool breeze blows as James takes my hand. We walk toward the vacant field across from our house. “Soccer ball,” James says, pointing to a bin of balls stored in a wooden shed. We draw two lines on a wall, each signifying a goalpost. The point is to kick the ball between the two lines. James shows me many of the game's inspired moves, the right fake and the left spin, the pinball swerve and the duck, the final scramble straight through a line of defense. He learned as a child to appreciate the game, its flow, the passes that are beautiful whether or not they produce points.

“Come close and watch,” he says. The ball dances between his feet. He dribbles it to me. I kick it back. We are both delirious. He bounces it back and forth, up and down his bare knees, then runs with the ball glued to the tips of his shoes until it is released,
bing,
right between the two black marks on the wall. With each ball that James unleashes, he aims and aligns his entire being into the very arc of the ball. When his sneakers hit the ball, a solid thud can be heard. My heart beats loudly against my chest as I chase after him. Heat rises from the pinkness of my cheeks. There is James, with the perfect kicking leg, the calf muscles that flex. My Chinese grandmother, it turns out, has appeared and is watching us. She sits on a collapsible aluminum chair and cheers us on. She occasionally stops fanning herself to clap and hoot. Once in a while she even gets up and runs up and down the sidelines.

When we return to the house a pitcher of lemonade, the salted kind, awaits us. My Chinese grandmother hands us both towels and insists we wash up. She offers us a tray of
banh mi.
James takes out a guitar and we strum and pluck our way through the remainder of the evening. We are in my house. My Chinese grandmother is nearby. The music has to be melodious to be house-sanctioned. Galileo and I listen adoringly as he sings “Yesterday.” I join in. I too can say the words and feel them form inside me.

Coming from him, the lyrics soar and wrap themselves around us, taking us in and holding us close. I am a rogue child claimed by a sudden sense of happiness. Coming from James, the song feels singularly personal. It is about us. It seizes our very being. We are singing about the same yesterday, or some imperfect prototype of it. I am doing it in English. This might be one way of negotiating the crossover into a new beginning, by preserving the essence of our shared past. Let it be enough to produce happiness. Let it be the way for us as we struggle to cross that line between what we expect and what we can actually get.

 • • • 

It might be purely my imagination, but I believe Mother is undergoing a transformation. Still, emanating from her room is the usual sullen and accusatory quiet that seals her from the world beyond. But she no longer disappears into the throng of well-meaning but exhausting visitors whose dealings and demands tire her out.

With my Chinese grandmother watching over him, Galileo is even allowed to enter the breakfast room. I sense it is for my sake, but our mother fusses over him too.

“Cecile, Cecile,” he calls to me. I watch as Galileo gently takes a mango slice from our mother's hand. It is breakfast time. My parents give each other a questioning look and seem amused that Galileo has come up with a pet name for me.

“Ask for more, Galileo,” I coach. I come toward him, proffering my arm as a perch. “Come, come,” I whisper.

Galileo cocks his head and jumps away from me. “Cecile.”

I am baffled. The skin on my arms pricks up. The bird continues to look at me but asks for Cecile instead.

Our mother chuckles and offers my bird more mango. I look at her with admiration. She is a woman whose beauty refuses to fade. Her well-being might be provisional but it is taking shape. Father encourages it.

 • • • 

As I try to fall asleep, I am startled by the sound of an unconcealed cry. I listen. It does not get louder as I lie there listening, and soon it fades. Our mother is not losing control. She will be sleeping soon enough. But this time, an emptiness enters me that asks not to be left alone but to be touched.

My body answers her cry. And so I get up and walk into her room. I see the form of her body under the blanket, its trembling rise and fall. As I slip into bed with her, she turns around to face me and draws me against her breasts. In that moment, I breathe in her scent and absorb her continuing sadness into mine. I realize how I have longed for her touch.

MR. MINH, 1967, 2006

T
rue, the country was covered in virgin jungles. The enemy ambushed, then retreated into its deep greenery. And there was also the fog, which might not evaporate even when it was subjected to the implacable heat. It would hang there, along the shoreline and even inland. A soft wind could loft it higher or lower, over the rice fields or above the mountain peaks, but there it would remain. In war, especially this war, where the enemy was already invisible, fog was something to be feared. It suggested opportunities for cover, camouflage, and conspiracy. It meant that the air was alive in a spooky, ghostly way. Phantoms swirled. Vapors floated. There were no straight lines, no definitive truths. Our vision was blurred. Everything became ambiguous. It was easy to imagine, with one sliver of our consciousness, those impassive eyes that followed our movements before pouncing.

And so yes, there were thick jungles and dense foliage. And there was fog. We absorbed all of these facts into our mental coordinates. Still, how did the enemy melt, evaporate, disintegrate, disappear?

The enemy did not. They went across the border into Cambodia. We knew that was the answer. But we needed evidence.

It was out in the open at last, this matter of the porous border between Vietnam and Cambodia.

Intelligence collected by III Corps indicated that the Communists were converting the Giong Bau area straddling the Cambodian–South Vietnamese border in Chau Doc Province into a base and shelter for their troops. The corps had tried to destroy the Communist forces there but after each encounter the enemy withdrew into technically neutral Cambodian territory where our forces were forbidden to enter. Aerial photographs confirmed our suspicion and pinpointed enemy movements, revealing faint smudges of enemy sanctuaries across the border in sovereign Cambodia, and later in Laos.

A winding trail used as a North Vietnamese supply conduit snaked perceptibly, belligerently, through the eastern part of Cambodia. It was meticulously configured by battalions of engineers using cutting-edge Soviet and Chinese machinery. Radio operators, ordnance experts, platoons of drivers, and mechanics all came along to support the North's army. Twenty thousand or more North Vietnamese regulars were pouring steadily into the South.

Still, the Cambodian prime minister would declare that the onslaught of North Vietnamese troops was nothing but “a myth fabricated by the U.S. imperialists to justify their war of aggression.”

The port of Sihanoukville was also receiving Communist supplies by sea from China. The Americans brought in equipment to assess the scope of the infiltration. Their Side-Looking Airborne Radar unit carried vertical, oblique, and split-image cameras. It was also equipped with horizon-to-horizon panoramic scanning cameras. There was a sensor for gathering electromagnetic intelligence. Mounted on the underwing of the reconnaissance aircraft were two high-intensity supersonic flasher pods to illuminate the ground underneath. Statistical data gathered by its digital data system recorded altitude, latitude, and date.

Based on the evidence, I received orders to lead two battalions of our elite forces into the enemy stronghold.

It was to be a solely Vietnamese operation, so that the Americans could remain faultless. No American troops, just two American advisers. Cliff was one of them.

Our clandestine operation was an acknowledgment that the enemy's war plan had shifted. It was dictated no longer by an internal insurgency within the South but by an invasion from the North itself. The invasion was launched using the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Enemy troops attacked from bases secured in Cambodia and Laos.

Once, the Trail was indeed truly a trail, a rutted, primitive footpath that meandered through the Laotian panhandle and onto the border areas of Cambodia. I knew the winding turns that looked like finely veined lines, like innocent curves, on an aerial-view map. But there was nothing innocent about the Trail. Indeed, its foliage of triple-canopied green ruthlessly clawed its way through a stampede of overgrown lushness, doing whatever was needed to get a little bit more sun, a little bit more air, even if it meant monopolizing life for itself and denying that possibility to others.

I could see the rush of waterways that patiently carved their presence into the land. The Bang Fai River wound eastward through the town of Tchepone, which served as a major transportation hub for the enemy. The Kong River descended from central Vietnam, flowed west through southern Laos, and entered Cambodia east of the Mekong River. We knew they were loading food, fuel, and munitions into steel drums and launching them into the rivers to be collected downstream by an intricate system of nets and booms.

We had no choice. Their supply train down the Trail had to be stopped, not by air but by ground operations. For years, the American military had sought permission from their government to conduct such an incursion. For years their request had been denied.

Our intelligence told us there was a discernible pattern to the enemy's movements. The plan I devised was aimed at cutting off the customary withdrawal route into Cambodian sanctuaries. The two battalions under my command would move into Cambodian territory at night in order to occupy blocking positions north of the main enemy base. Then at dawn, an armored cavalry force would launch a direct frontal attack against the base from the southwest. The enemy would be sandwiched in between. Their retreat route into Cambodia would be blocked by my paratroopers and they would be destroyed.

I selected the First and Eighth Airborne battalions for the mission, the same battalions I had refused to turn over for use in the November 1963 coup. We moved by truck from Saigon to My Tho. We sat on the truck floors that were reinforced with sandbags to shield us from shrapnel and mine explosions. Still, the rumble of the engine could be felt right through the truck's thick steel plates. From My Tho, our two battalions and an armored cavalry force embarked on naval ships waiting to take us on the Mekong River, upstream toward Tan Chau. The morning light shone sheets of silver glaze across the rippling water. Later a dense fog hung over us like a strange grief, sealing us in its solemn sanctuary. Our ships rose and dipped through the shifting shoals, chugging in the palm of the current. We moved with the tide and wind. Still, our destination was one day and one night away. A violet dusk folded around us. The men laced their boots and went through the usual rituals. They switched their safety levers from safe to semiautomatic to automatic, then back. They arranged and rearranged their equipment, checked their rounds of ammunition, canteens, helmets, rifles, medical field kits, and fragmentation grenades.

Cliff kept himself apart from the others, his body taut, controlled. He stared into empty space, his gaze swept a 180-degree arc. I considered myself lucky. Cliff was a model adviser and our only one. One unit in the II Corps had, in a span of but a few years, more than forty American advisers.

By early morning of the second day, we disembarked in Thuong Phuoc, a desolate border outpost manned by our Special Forces on the left bank of the river, three kilometers from the Cambodian border. The outpost commander provided us with a reliable local guide who, we were assured, knew the local terrain, the ghost territories inside the weak faults and gorges of the border territories that occasionally slid into enemy control and pulled men into an underground of pulsing nerves and graves.

My plan was to take the lead with the First Battalion. The Eighth would follow a short distance behind. We checked for uncommon rises in the land, unusual accumulations of leaves or dirt that could conceal wires or a row of sharpened stakes. The land itself could be choreographed for death.

I was the point man, leading our column. Cliff was by my side with an M16 and a pistol belt around his waist with six magazines of ammunition. We adopted a staggered lead sweep, surveying both sides of the corridor. I fingered my web belt with its canteen, ammo pouches, and four fragmentation grenades. I walked slowly, stroking the pistol grip of my rifle, fully alert as I studied the jungle around us. I kept my index finger on the trigger and my thumb simultaneously on the safety lever.

A meek half-light filtered through the sieve of foliage. We continued making our way through the chaos of the jungle. A somber grayness cast by the three-dimensional thickness of shade seemed to envelop everything. Some may complain about the heat, but it is really the density and darkness that consume everything—light, color, space.

Instinctively, we made the necessary adjustments and allowed sight to be superseded by sense. We developed a rhythm so that trudging became automatic. We willed it all away—friction, gravity, fatigue. As nighttime approached, a deep darkness, the true spirit of this remote jungle, settled over us, seeping into our bodies, making us a part of it. There was no moon. Our guide closed his eyes. I too closed mine, allowing them the necessary period of visual adjustment before charting the coordinates of black space. It was all one fathomless stretch, menacing in its sheer seamlessness.

We marched in ponderous silence. Each man had a ragged patch of white cloth tied to his shoulder. The soldier behind fixed his eyes on the floating whiteness, ensuring that he would remain in position within the undulating column. There was the sense that with every step forward we were being watched—by the trees and the spirits that had melted deep into the collected days of the earth itself. Several times my feet got caught among the tangle of ferns, thorns, lianas, and matted vines. Here and there, carcasses of dead trees lay scattered, their protruding branches an avalanche of dead rot and saturated mulch. We hacked our way through the greenery, using swift upward strokes. Thorns and grasses slashed our faces.

Finally our battalion got the word every man had been waiting for. “We're here,” the local guide said. The topography had changed. The canopy had thinned, the ground cleared, perhaps purposively leveled, except for a few scraggly brushes. Dried marshland materialized before us. Though relieved—all of us would be happy to rest—I was surprised and skeptical. Had we crossed into Cambodia? Here among the tangle of endless green, borders were hard to discern. In the vast oneness of life, borders hardly mattered and yet it was here that they mattered more than ever. We had walked almost a full day, but it did not seem we had covered enough territory to arrive at the planned blocking positions behind the enemy base. I looked at the line of phosphorous green on my wrist compass. The local guide insisted he never made a mistake. After a brief discussion with the First Battalion commander, I gave the orders for both battalions to take blocking positions facing south, behind what we had been told were the enemy's bases.

Sometimes the right way might seem wrong and the wrong way right. I suddenly remembered my conversation with Phong that evening after the coup.

The night was cool. A soft breeze blew through the low-hanging mist. Our radio operator carried a PRC-25 set on the internal frequency of the company for communication among our squads and platoons. Another PRC-25 was set on the command network. I scanned the empty space before me. The sky folded into itself, a tightly curled blackness that obliterated vision. Not a single feature of the enemy base could be discerned through the low-hanging fog. And yet were we not expecting a large congregation of men and equipment?

I reported this fact to Major General Phat, my III Corps commander, who ordered us to remain in place until the following morning. We settled in our bivouac for the night. We quickly ate our meal of sticky rice and dried cotton pork. Cliff ate whatever we ate. He had not brought the usual C ration cans provided for the American troops.

The ground was low and flat but moist from rain. I felt a cold slimy column crawl under my shirt. Leeches. I dug my fingernails into a fat, slimy mass, prying it from my flesh and squishing it between thumb and forefinger. A thick, slippery substance trickled down my hand. I wrapped myself tightly inside my poncho, put my head on a slight rise, and closed my eyes. Our defensive perimeter was secured by a rotation of men. Platoon sergeants organized reconnaissance patrols. A two-man team was assigned to each listening post along the perimeter. Each team was equipped with a PRC-25, weapons, and a watch. Mechanical ambushes were also set—claymore mines, detonation cords, blasting caps, a battery, and a triggering mechanism attached to a trip wire. We followed the protocol strictly.

By six o'clock the next morning, our troops were ready and alert. The easterly sun peeked from gray clouds. We would move out soon. I decided that the Eighth Battalion would take the lead and the First would follow. Perimeter guards went about the task of rolling the wires and retrieving their claymore mines.

I looked at the topography map folded in my back pocket. The local guide gave a faint smirk to signal that he would not need to rely on the mere surfeit of compasses and maps, those spinning mechanisms of extraneous scientific devices. And then it happened. A single pop cracked the air.

A body collapsed backward, faceup. An artery had been hit. I could see the bright redness of fresh blood pouring forth in high-pressured and distinct spurts that corresponded to the pulsed rhythm of a heartbeat. The bullet had hit the soft flesh of the neck, ripping through muscle tissue. More follow-up fire erupted from the east. A thunderclap of shells burst forth. I saw blazing tracers and enemy troops entrenched behind parapets along a communication trench. All around us the land itself exploded. Mortar and machine-gun fire flashed, pulverizing and whipping up dirt and rock.

It was by now abundantly clear that last night, we had not arrived at the designated blocking positions north of the enemy base. Instead, we had installed ourselves directly within firing range. We were on flat, open land, devoid of cover and in front of cement bunkers fortified by 37 mm recoilless rifles and flanks of enemy lying in wait. Our troops instinctively sought cover and fell flat against the ground. Enemy AK-47s, RPDs, and other light machine guns clattered and popped. Bursts of fire came from left, right, and directly in front of us. There was no other choice but to make our assault. I swept my hand forward, ordering the attack. I heard curses, screams, and moans. My escort platoon and several elements of the First Battalion surged forward in unison, firing as they made their lunge. The enemy mortar team responded furiously. As we made our advance through thick gray smoke toward enemy trenches, fire volume grew in ferocity and density. From a distance of about twenty meters, I saw a clutch of enemy troops struggling with a 57 mm recoilless rifle. It was aimed and fired at us but the round did not go off. Immediately, I ordered a sergeant to seize the enemy weapon. He sprang forward, shooting his submachine gun furiously as he ran toward the trench. Others ran up to support him, spraying continuous rounds to the right and left. When he got there, the enemy had fled, leaving behind the recoilless rifle for us to confiscate.