The Lotus and the Storm (26 page)

The enemy counted on American forces being stretched to the limit at Khe Sanh, Dak To, and other far-flung posts. They counted on our forces being on leave. And most of all they counted on what they termed a General Uprising—the Communists believed the South Vietnamese would join them in a revolt.

I was asleep at home when I received a call from an aide. It was one-thirty in the morning on January 31, 1968. There was a stricken silence, then panic on the line. The Presidential Palace had been hit, not by our own plotting, rebellious generals this time but by the enemy. The enemy's Sapper Battalion was also spearheading assaults against our Joint General Staff headquarters, the national radio station, the American Embassy, and Tan Son Nhat Airport.

I rushed to military headquarters. My wife and daughter were asleep. The first person I saw at command headquarters was Phong. The maps in our operations center lit up like pinball machines, as one city after another was attacked. Phong struck a map with his hand. “Look at this,” he said, shaking his head. A total of fourteen battalions, of paratroopers, marines, and rangers, were ordered back to the capital.

While I was at military headquarters, it was clear that fighting was most concentrated in the neighborhoods nearest to our home. Cholon, it turned out, was the staging area for North Vietnamese and Vietcong attacks on Saigon and its vicinity. Guerrillas from the Fifth and Sixth Vietcong Local Forces battalions fought, then slipped into hiding in crowded alleyways like those directly behind our house to tempt us to counterattack and inflict heavy civilian casualties. By February 5, Saigon was secured. But Cholon remained under siege until almost the end of the month.

The rangers were ordered there and would be reinforced by the American 199th Light Infantry Brigade. I had but a moment to speak quickly to my wife. Stay in the house, I warned. Keep our child inside. Keep her Chinese grandmother inside. You stay inside. There was nowhere they could have gone. The streets had been overtaken.

Why Cholon? The key to Cholon was the Phu Tho Racetrack, a hub to and from all the major streets. The enemy had to hold it to prevent this oval patch of red dirt from becoming a helicopter landing zone.

I tried to follow the events of Cholon from military headquarters. But the nerve center of our armed forces was one of their main targets that first day of Tet. Since the early morning of January 31, sappers had infiltrated Gate 5 of our military headquarters. I led my men outside to the gate's entrance. The paratroopers under my command were fighting off attacks by the First and Second Vietcong Local Forces battalions. By late morning, Gate 4 was also attacked. I felt the rush of metal fire. Things were alive as the red and orange glare of rockets filled our eyes.

My heart pounded. On the ground right by my feet was the body of a young man. A froth of blood leaked from his head and ears. Outside more bodies lay scattered. Several loud pops came from across the street, followed by a string of obscenities. A half-dozen mortar rounds landed nearby. I was lifted inside a cloud of dust. Sand and grit, black and ravenous, blew upward, slashing my face with a fiery sting. AK-47 fire sputtered more dust all around us. A fire burned in my eyes, where the fine dust had blown. For most of the day, I fired a machine gun in the direction of the enemy with my eyes only half open. I felt fortunate that the infiltration of dust and debris did not jam the gun.

Nine hours later, we warded them off. I sank to my knees. The jolt and whiplash of adrenaline stayed in me.

Phong had received news about Cholon and breathlessly relayed it to me. “American helicopter gunships were just ordered to retake the racetrack. That will help. And our own Thirty-third and Thirty-fifth Ranger battalions are also going in,” he continued without modulation, rattling off facts meant to inform and comfort. I knew the dense alleys and tenement houses of Cholon. The fight would take place building by building, rooftop by rooftop. Helicopter gunships would be called in. Cholon would become even more dangerous.

The same realization occurred to Phong. “That means we have to hurry and get them out of there,” he barked. “The racetrack is only fifteen blocks from your house. Cholon will be declared a free-fire zone anytime now.” His face was sweaty and ashen with worry. For a moment I was touched. I felt hard-hearted in my dislike of him.

I sent a GMC truck to the house to bring my wife and child and her Chinese grandmother and whoever else was there to the safety of our compound. It was Tet. We had friends visiting. They had all been waiting to celebrate. When the truck returned to our military headquarters, I put out my arms in anticipation of Mai's embrace. The sun's rays caught on the side mirror of the truck and reflected an unbearable brightness. I blinked. I heard voices shouting all at once.

Where is she?

No one knew where the child was. The Chinese nanny was in a state of panic. My wife sat paralyzed on the ground. She covered her mouth and cried soundlessly. I gave her a comforting squeeze on the shoulder, then tore through the front of our headquarters into the now drastically altered midafternoon as my heart skidded and lurched in my chest. Phong was already by her side, reassuring me that he would watch over her.

I raced to the house in my jeep, through smoke-filled backstreets, past carcasses of burned-out cars and fallen debris. Solitary trees had been felled and leaned diagonally against the few telephone poles still standing. Half-burned tenement houses crouched low. There was sporadic firing from rooftops. I held my breath but could still smell the blistering tar. The immediate area surrounding the house was subdued. But the weight of what had happened still lingered. I entered the house through the garden. The interlude of quiet that now prevailed seemed wholly provisional. Anything could still happen. The external walls had been ruptured, the earth raked by gunfire. Suddenly I heard a shuffling noise and dry heaving sobs. In the far corner of the garden, near the mango tree, was my child, wide-eyed, hushed. I turned to face her. I kneeled and opened my arms for her to run into. But she stood still, removed. I saw her hesitate. She was a wholly different child. I barely recognized her and she me. In this new cobwebbed strangeness that surrounded her, it was as if another child, more afflicted, had emerged and had taken over.

Still, I walked, slowly, sure-footed, toward her. I made no sudden movements. I called her name. She backed away but I scooped her up and held her stiffly in my arms. She was all force, all resistance. I heard a muffled sound from her throat.

“Mai?” I said tentatively.

“No.” A ravaged face peeked up at me. Incompliant, she shook her head. “Don't touch,” she growled.

I ignored her warning of course. She was frightened. I could feel something happening, a red-hot horror that glowed on her skin. I felt the force of a storm and its murdering eyes on mine. I felt the inhalation and exhalation of sour breaths. She stared at me petulantly. I knew exactly what she wanted to do—she wanted to scream and bite and kick even as her fingernails dug themselves into my flesh.

My child had changed. She had metamorphosed and crossed into an elaborately different realm. I tried to hold her, to love and to reassure. But she pushed me off. All at once, she began a low, urgent hiss that quickly turned, through sucked teeth, into a fitful, jittery cry. A roar of feelings that had been inside her, as if under her flesh, stored in the liver, hidden in the lungs, behind her ribs, came flying out. She swiped at the plants, yanked grass from the flower beds, and stomped on the stretch of mimosa plants my wife used as ground cover. Her fingers, balled and knuckled, pounded and hammered her chest. I lifted her body onto my lap and held her forcibly against me until I felt a calmness return. I relaxed my grip. She had stopped thrashing but her eyes stared back at me in terror. I pressed her against my chest and kept her there as long as I could.

That is the story about Tet that I told Mrs. An. I can tell thoughts are racing through her head. My story has produced a ping of recognition for her. She has over the years become my confidante, this gentle woman who exhibits great tenderness and warmth. She is affable and accepting. She straightens her back and studies the pill bottles on my night table as if an answer can be located there. Having taken on the burden of caring for me, she leans forward and says, “Let's freshen you up.” Her voice wobbles. I nod. I know she understands. I want her to know how the illness that struck my daughter first began. “I see how difficult it must have been,” she says. “I didn't know it started that early. How old was she then? Ten?” She tries unobtrusively to wipe away a tear. She coaxes me forth, pushing her body against the begrudgings of aging muscle and flesh. She props me up and brushes my hair. It is cut short, but she takes her time, as if there were long thick strands that still need to be tamed. When she tries to smooth and straighten out the tangled sheets, her hand inadvertently touches the scar on my stomach. I feel her smooth hand against its nicked irregularities. It is a gesture that makes me shudder still. My bedsheets still hold the scent of purple blooms. I breathe it in. Once, when my wife was by my side, the sheets smelled of her.

“Your story is safe with me,” she says.

I nod but keep silent. Mrs. An pulls the stiffly pleated curtains over the window to shield my eyes from the streetlamps. My face has been washed. My sheets have been changed. I have on a freshly laundered shirt. I tell myself I am alert. I hear the solid click the closet door makes when it is closed. I hear voices that float in an undertone of green.

“Tell me about Hue,” she urges later. She preempts me. I have been thinking about Hue myself. “Do you know that you say his name when you are asleep?” she asks.

“Whose?”

“Mr. Phong.”

“Phong?” I repeat. Mrs. An says his name in that forthright, direct way of hers.

She nods. She wants to know more about him. Her eyes are most alive as they wait for me to respond.

I close my eyes. I see my child's face as it once was, more gentle, less aggrieved, with an unhurried, childlike softness that touches me. I see Phong's face, always with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. His name means “wind.” I think of it as a black, poisonous wind that changes direction and that we Vietnamese believe can inflict sickness in those caught within its grip. I feel an inner churn surging through me, making me queasy in the stomach and feeble in the knees. Without further preliminaries, Mrs. An takes my hand in hers, signaling that she is ready for me to begin.

Ten North Vietnamese and six Vietcong battalions overran the Imperial Citadel in Hue. It began the way the other Tet attacks began, in the early morning of January 31. The citadel was stormed, the airport attacked. We were vastly outnumbered. By dawn, the Communists controlled the city, except for the First Division's headquarters and the compound housing the American military advisers.

We were not permitted to unleash artillery and air strikes. Hue was a sacred city that had to be preserved.

After twenty-four days of furious block-by-block fighting, we finally seized the citadel's main flagpole and ripped down the Communist flag that had flown there for twenty-four days. That same day, February 24, our flag, imperial gold with three red horizontal stripes, was hoisted in the city center.

Of course we celebrated. The First Division was feted and decorated.

Inside the citadel, even in the midst of celebration, our troops discovered a city of mass graves.

These are the skeletal facts. In the early morning of February 26, our South Vietnamese First Airborne Task Force came across mounds of fresh earth in the Gia Hoi High School yard. Underneath the patches of red and yellow earth and the dying scent of a Tet truce were piles and piles of bodies—127 of them.

Once the first grave was discovered, I was commanded to head to Hue along with Phong to investigate the killings. Given his political connections, Phong was now one of the more significant staff members within the president's inner circle. That he came on such a trip at all showed the importance of the mission and the support we were guaranteed to have from above.