The Man From Saigon (7 page)

No
—he began.

Your hair is short like a marine and you had a first-aid pouch
—

It was a tape recorder. The first-aid pouch is waterproof so I use it
—

You weren’t wearing glasses.

They were in my hand.

I was sure
—

Susan
, he said, the first time he used her name.
Think back. I had no weapon.

She looked down at the floor as though searching there for something she had dropped. He saw her shoulders move; she looked up and he realized that she was laughing. He tried to smile but could not. When had his life become so weighted he could not laugh with a beautiful woman?

Oh my God
, she said. She sounded happy, relieved, a little overwhelmed, even.
I thought I’d never see you again.

The truest advice she ever heard about combat reporting was that if you were really scared, you shouldn’t go. But the amazing thing about being around war so long—one of the amazing things—was how it began to feel normal; healthy fear melted away and was replaced by curiosity. The stories came daily, told at the bar or while waiting at the airport for a lift. They were printed in newspapers, cabled from the offices on Tu Do Street, and with every story of a firefight, a skirmish, a reconnaissance, a bombing mission, a search-and-destroy, came a sense of the increasing normality. It was exactly the way the horses she had trained became used to fire and smoke and crowds and sudden loud sounds: a simple system of approach and retreat. Not that she became immune to fear—in some respects she felt scared all the time—but she reached a place where it arrived too late to keep her from doing the dangerous thing.

She did not feel braver. It was more that over the weeks the
battles themselves had moved toward her, moved toward them all, into every city, every ville, so that it no longer seemed such an odd thing to witness and report, then eventually to wait around when a rumor was in the air, and at last to request to be woken at 4 a.m. to go out on an operation. It happened naturally, a slow attrition of common sense.

Now, she packed ace bandages, iodine, cotton. She regarded bits of rope or twine with interest, carried duct tape even though it weighed so much, wore a thin leather belt with a strong buckle. These things became most ordinary, like packing socks or underwear. She didn’t think about why she packed them any more, though if asked she could tell you. Almost all battle deaths are caused by loss of blood.

Midnight, miles and miles from Saigon, out with soldiers in the jungle, absolutely riveted with concentration, unable to do anything but walk forward, she strained her eyes to keep track of Son, who was in front of her, and of the man in front of him. The line of soldiers stalked the land under the absolute darkness of a jungle night, putting the flats of their hands against the backs of the guys in front of them, training their eyes on to the tiny pieces of fluorescent tape tacked on to helmets, following the flashes of light that danced in the opaque screen of black as they marched. She held the hand of the man in front, and the man behind. There were no instructions required; they were all so scared that holding hands made sense. She had forgotten that she had not been drafted and had no need to be there, that she was not a useful part of the military machine. She had forgotten, had been in the process of forgetting for some time now, and had arrived at a place in which it hadn’t seemed at all extraordinary to go on this search-and-destroy mission. Following the column, part of it now, she thought how easy it would be to become lost, to somehow spiral out of this line of safety. If she were to get herself into trouble, this would be the place. It would be so easy to become
momentarily separated and it would feel, she imagined, like losing your way in outer space. And then it happened. Not contact with the enemy, not the sudden rush of incoming artillery in her ears, but the same abrupt, unexpected tide of awareness that she had experienced before. In the middle of that night, in a manner that arrived like its own assault, while walking silently in a string of men barely out of their teens, it was as though she suddenly discovered where she was and how stupid she had been. It was, she realized, like being in the helicopter the first time she was on the receiving end of gunfire—she could not get away. She felt the sweat dripping down the sides of her body, flooding her forehead, her eyes. She would follow the men with assiduous care, with the same steady, silent footsteps, even though now she was out of her mind with fear, even though she would do anything not to have come on the operation. It happened to her the same way every time: the discovery always came too late, or in the wrong place, or the wrong circumstances. Each time that she came, however momentarily, to her senses, it was like being back in that helicopter months before, hearing the bullets like tiny hammers beneath her and wishing she could run.

Then don’t go.

Marc would tell her this late at night as they lay in bed. It was his answer to any hint of worry or doubt, any concern at all about things that happened—the chopper being hit, the awful night on the search-and-destroy mission. She wasn’t supposed to feel anything. Or she wasn’t supposed to admit it.

But I want to go
, she said. She didn’t say that it was he who had woken her with his restless audible dreams, that she would not be up late at night worrying if he hadn’t startled her in the night with his voice. When he talked in his sleep he did not sound like himself. The first time she heard him she was frightened, waking momentarily to the thought that she was
elsewhere, with a stranger, listening to a voice that seemed wholly detached from the man beside her.

He kept whiskey by the bed, always a glass of it, or a mug or paper cup. He took a long swallow now, then searched the ashtray, using a penlight so he could see.
I’ve got a jay in here somewhere. Hand me those matches. Look, you go back to sleep. You’ll feel better later. It’s always worse at night.

What is worse?

She looked at him slyly. She wanted him to admit he had the same fears as she, though it would do no good even if he did. He shook his head, pushing himself up, so that his back leaned against the wall. He had a pillow on his lap, the ashtray on the pillow.
Everything
, he said. He might have said more, about how the dreams rise with you in the morning, that you eventually find there is no rest, but he did not. He sat in bed and smoked diligently until she fell asleep. In the morning he told her it was nice that she slept so well. He told her he was jealous.

Like everything in Vietnam, their relationship seemed to be on fast forward. They’d met for the second time at the party, and after that night he’d disappeared up north again and she was forced to put him from her mind. His face, which she had known from television when she used to watch from her apartment in Chicago as he broadcast from Vietnam, was now part of her daily thoughts. She associated him not with a network but with that bunker in Con Thien, that hotel room where they stood by the window, an electric storm, a particular song that kept being played on the record player. Back when she watched him as part of a news report, it had seemed as if he was broadcasting from a world far away and unreachable. Now it felt as if the television image of him was from another world, a ghost of him that visited the living rooms of people across America. She thought of him altogether too often, and then one day he arrived unannounced at her door, telling her he
knew a very good restaurant, and asking if she had time for a bite.

She wasn’t all that shocked to see him. He’d somehow managed to get a cable to her, letting her know when he’d be back in town and asking if it would be all right to get in touch. Apparently, get in touch meant come and fetch her from her room.

It’s three in the afternoon
, she said.

Should I come back later?

No.

Am I allowed in? Or are we going to stand here in the hall?

We’re going to
—She didn’t know what they were going to do. She had a page of copy in her hand. Her fingers were stained from fixing typewriter ribbon that had gotten twisted. She wondered if there was black ink on her face. She wanted to appear bold, decisive, to be someone he would take seriously, who could surprise him.
We’re going to your hotel
, she said.
I prefer it.

He tried not to show his delight. He looked around him—at the peeling walls, the scuffed floorboards with tiny holes throughout from some kind of insect damage, at the bare bulbs and places on the ceilings where water from long ago leaks, had stained the paint.
I think I agree with you
, he said casually.

She would have changed her clothes but there was nowhere in the room to undress except in the bathroom and Son had crowded photographs in various stages of development there. She ended up brushing her hair and checking her face with a hand mirror.

I didn’t know you were a photographer
, he said.

I’m not.

He indicated all the black-and-whites clipped along the walls.

She told him they belonged to Son.
I think you know him
, she said. Now his expression changed and so she added quickly.
It isn’t what you think.

Where is he now?

Son?
She thought for a moment.
I have no idea.

He just pops in when he feels like it?

She smiled. She didn’t like the way the conversation was going.
He doesn’t have anywhere to live. No money. He sleeps on the floor, on a mat. I know it must seem very odd.

Very.
He took her hand.
You’ll need an umbrella
, he said.

He wasn’t especially tall but in her recently purchased flat canvas sandals he seemed so to Susan. He guided her as they walked along the sidewalk, which smelled like a mixture of overripe fruit and urine. He told her about his most recent story. He offered her a cigarette. Whenever the conversation strayed from the subject of the war—what was being said, where he’d been, descriptions of the men in the company he’d gone out with, or who he’d recently spoken to from an embassy—he seemed all of a sudden nervous. She let him talk, learning from him but feeling, too, that this is what she could expect, a wildly attractive tutor, an alluring purveyor of knowledge about the war.

Where are you from?
she asked.

New York
, he said quickly. Then told her how he’d grown to prefer Danang to Saigon, how he really didn’t like it down here any more.

You’re married, aren’t you?
Her question, injected into the conversation as it was, made him lose his train of thought.

Currently
, he answered.

She didn’t mind. Not at first. In the circumstances in which they found themselves, it didn’t make all that much difference.

Marc was what Son politely called “not so cautious,” by which he meant the guy had a death wish. Susan’s and his was a misguided amorphous, sprawling kind of relationship with no obvious direction or end in sight. In other words, perfect for the time being. They met between stories, holing up in his hotel
or anywhere else they could find, disappearing for a day and then emerging again, rushing out to get another story. It was exhausting and addictive. And among many other things, it had the effect on Susan of knocking away whatever remnants of common sense and perspective she had. She went out on more missions. She took more risks.

I’m thinking you might get killed soon
, Son said one night. They were sharing a meal at the Eskimo, sitting shoulder to shoulder, eating off each other’s plates and talking about something else entirely—how the Americans had brought over enormous pigs from the States in an effort to increase the size of Vietnamese pigs, a silly operation that had resulted in no demonstrable gain as the smaller pigs ran away from the atrocious, slow monsters from the West. In the middle of laughing, Son had suddenly gone quiet and then issued his concern.
If something happens to you
—he began.

Nothing will
, she interrupted. That was on the eve of an assault mission they covered. And she’d been right that time. Nothing happened—or rather, nothing happened to them.

Another telegram:

She could imagine her editor sitting in her houndstooth skirt with its matching jacket, the vein at her temple throbbing, her skin itching as though she had fleas, sleeves pushed up away from the clutter on her desk. Cursing Susan for making her sweat like this, she would dictate the wire to some trembling young secretary. The cost per word of such a wire was too high to include the expletives, which the secretary would understand must be deleted from the final dictation.
That’s it!
she’d say
when she had completed the message.
Now bring me a fresh pack of matches.
Then she’d ball up some paper as the girl fled tfrom he office, the dictated cable in hand.

Susan was fond of the woman; she did not want to cause her an early stroke, so she returned as follows:

She and Son were traveling with the 9th Infantry to what she thought would be a safe enough place in the Delta, an area where huge camps were being set up for what were being called “refugees,” that is, people emptied out of villages thought to be enemy strongholds. Her reason for choosing the story was simple: she wanted a story that did not require her to walk miles or sleep on the ground or sit in a hole in the rain. Besides, there was her editor to consider. This was meant to be easy, the refugee story, with photographs of children and mothers and smiling soldiers. She wore a pair of utility trousers, a T-shirt and field jacket. The rain was easing off so that she could flip back the hood on her poncho, enjoying the cool air, talking to the guy next to her on the armored personnel carrier about his collection of fighting fish that—so she learned—were a species that originated in Vietnam. They’d been traveling over an hour now, a slow, uneventful journey; it might have been a tractor ride on a wet summer’s day.