The Point Team (2 page)

As the orphanage supervisor’s weaknesses became more evident to his wards, he grew increasingly distant with them and allowed
them to run their own affairs so long as they caused no trouble. His way of saving face at their insolence and lack of respect
for him was to pretend they were not there. It was understood on both sides that any effort on the part of the children to
force him to acknowledge their existence would have unpleasant results for them.

They were unwanted. A breed apart. They had the stigma of foreign blood. There was no place for them in Vietnam’s new egalitarian
and fraternal society forged by the glorious revolutionary fighters. The only hope they
would ever have was to perform tasks that all good party members had to shun.

None of this was ever put into words. The children knew these facts of life instinctively, and accepted their lot. The more
adventuresome of them watched and waited for any opportunity offered.

The youth in the Coca-Cola T-shirt had not resumed his work on the vegetables. He dusted off his hands thoughtfully and fished
an expensive digital watch from a pocket of his jeans.

“We ought to be going,” he said to the boy next to him.

“Can I come too?” a girl asked.

“Maybe next time.”

Four boys washed their hands and faces with a garden hose, then climbed a plum tree alongside the wall of the compound, sat
for a moment atop the wall, and dropped down into the street outside.

Katie Nelson was still in high school when the Vietnam war ground slowly to a halt. Back then, cheerleading for the school
football team had been more important to her than American military policy in Southeast Asia. She still wasn’t quite sure
what it had all been about, but didn’t worry overmuch since political or military analysis was not what the TV network expected
from her. They paid her to do “human interest” stories.

And she was damn good at them. Good enough to move from a local station in Spokane to St. Louis, to Cleveland, to network
TV in New York. She handled cats up trees, bears and coyotes in suburbs, chronically ill babies, skiing octogenarians, vandalism
in cemeteries … she could wring a tear or a smile from any assignment—and build a newscast’s ratings overnight.

Katie Nelson was also ambitious. She knew that the anchormen, with all their bullshit contacts in the White House and Congress,
did not take her seriously. She was
light relief in their eyes. Tinker Bell lost among the hard facts of men’s deeds. They hardly noticed her demanding, and
getting, choice assignments. What they did notice was that she helped get them ratings. They’d peddle their mothers for ratings.

Katie lay on her back on the bed, looking up at the plaster decorations on the ceiling, and smiled her famous smile. People
all across America knew that smile. She reminded a lot of people of a 1980s Mary Tyler Moore. Cute, pretty, bouncy, smart.
Folks liked that.

She’d done a lot of coke late the previous night and early in the morning. Jake, the sound man, had brought it in with his
equipment. She giggled. Here they were in Southeast Asia where most of the world’s heroin originated, and Jake smuggled in
cocaine. Jake was a nut.

She looked at his naked body beside her on the bed. He was perspiring as he slept. The air conditioner didn’t work—it probably
hadn’t since the evacuation of Saigon. When other media people in New York heard she was coming to Ho Chi Minh City and was
going to stay in this hotel, they’d regaled her with stories of the wild days (when she had been a cheerleader in high school).
She checked out the bar. It was still the same as they had described, except there were no loaded Western journalists, blitzed
American and ARVN officers, no hostesses, no good bourbon. Now it was vodka, Russian technicians, and Viet bureaucrats. She
guessed it just wasn’t like the good old days anymore.

They’d eaten strips of fried gray meat, bamboo shoots and rice, drank plum wine and vodka, then retired to her room, where
Jake produced the coke.

She turned away from Jake, over on her side, and ran her fingers down the muscular back of Roger, the cameraman. If only the
viewers out there in TV land USA could see her now, lying nude in bed between two snoring, naked men with a slightly anesthetized
nose and a sore crotch. She’d given both the guys a real workout!

She poked Roger in the back. He groaned. Then Jake in the side, who muttered something incomprehensible.

“Come on, fellas,” Katie said. “It’s almost eleven o’clock. We gotta meet our little friends at midday.”

Lt. Tranh Duc Pho gestured his men forward. His fifteen-man unit held their Kalashnikov AK47 assault rifles at the ready and
advanced slowly through the undergrowth. The jungle was silent except for their bodies brushing against the thick undergrowth.
The lack of light beneath the canopy of huge trees and their camouflaged fatigues and careful movements made them almost invisible
from beyond a hundred yards. The unit eased its way down the jungle-clad slope to the slow, muddy river.

The river flowed southwest out of Vietnam into Laos and emptied into the Mekong. Here, fifteen miles inside the Vietnam border,
nearly four hundred miles north of Ho Chi Minh City, the lieutenant and his crack unit fought a continuing war on several
fronts. They subdued rebellious Montagnard clans, and intercepted smugglers on their way into Vietnam and refugees on their
way out. When an area party cadre was not toeing the Hanoi line, the unit paid his headquarters one warning visit. Second
time, it was discipline. After only a few punitive missions, the reputation of Tranh Duc Pho’s unit spread so that now even
the mention of the possibility of a warning visit was enough to tame the most erring local leader.

Tranh Duc Pho took things personally. These were his mountains, his jungles, his rivers. He said who went where. The tribal
villages in the mountains and the Vietnamese farmers in the foothills supplied him and his men with women, food, and shelter.
His father and brother unloaded ships at Haiphong. Tranh Duc Pho was the star of the family—a miniature warlord!

The green-brown water of the muddy river slid silently by twisted roots of giant trees on its bank. The lieutenant and his
fifteen men reached a pathway that wound among
the tree trunks alongside the river. They carefully checked a section of the pathway and withdrew to cover.

The lieutenant briefed his men in a low voice. “This was one of the branches of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that supplied the area
around Da Nang during our war with the American imperialists. Unfortunately, heroes no longer walk on it today. It’s the only
trail around here that the hill tribes don’t booby trap. So, apart from the river itself, it’s the only line of transportation.
They wouldn’t dare try the open river in daylight. And they were moving overland when spotted yesterday. Unless we’ve already
missed them, chances are they’ll be along here in the next few hours.”

He arranged his men in a long line on higher ground above the trail. The men covered themselves with green mosquito netting
and settled down to wait.

Katie Nelson and her crew were at the meeting place on time, along with their three Vietnamese “guides.” The three Americans
had found that they were free to wander alone in the city so long as they had no video or sound equipment with them. When
they were set to make tapes, they found themselves accompanied always by “guides” who appeared from nowhere to escort them
to “suitable locations” or chased away certain individuals from them.

Jake and Roger took all this passively, being used to this kind of treatment all over the world, from Lebanon to Guatemala
to Indonesia. But Katie was not going to stand for it.

“I want to film ordinary people eating their midday meal,” she told one of the Viet guides, who all spoke a smattering of
English. She pointed down a street of ramshackle houses. “Down there.”

“No, no, madam,” the Viet said. “Dirty, lazy people down there. I bring you nice place.”

“There!” Katie insisted.

The wiry Viet, a few inches shorter than the pretty
American woman, eyed her for a moment and then spoke rapidly in Vietnamese to his two colleagues.

“You wait here,” he said to the three Americans. “We find you a house to film in.”

The three Viets went down the street a way, peering into houses as they went. Then all three entered one newly painted house.

The Americans were alone less than a minute when they heard a call. The voice came from a shady lane overhung by large-leafed,
flowering trees. Katie pushed her way past some of the branches.

“Follow me,” an American boy about thirteen told her. He was dressed in a Coca-Cola T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers.

“Eric,” Katie called after him, “where are you taking us?”

“You’ll see,” he said shortly, and nodded to three other American boys his own age.

They brought up the rear behind Jake and Roger.

“Follow me,” the youth repeated. It was a command.

They trailed him down the lane, turned into a rocky roadway lined with shacks, and then followed the bank of a filthy river
that stank of sewage. Shacks and boats lined the muddy bank, and children played at the edge of the offal-strewn water among
clouds of flies.

“You want to stop and film this?” the youth challenged Katie.

“No, Eric. This is poverty and ignorance. I don’t have to come to Vietnam to shoot scenes like this.”

Eric sneered. “I think maybe you’re too friendly with the communists here to show something they mightn’t like. Otherwise
they’d never have let you, as an American, come here in the first place.”

“I want to be fair,” Katie said firmly. “Deliberately searching out a place like this is not fair. I could do that in any
country.”

“This isn’t what I brought you to film,” Eric told her.
“What I’m going to show you near here, you won’t find in any old country.”

Roger changed his video camera from one shoulder to the other, glad of the pause, and wiped the sweat from his forehead with
a handkerchief.

“You speak real good English, all four of you,” he said. “How do you manage that?”

One of the other boys pointed to Eric. “He makes us talk it all the time. The people who watch us talk Viet and French perfectly,
but they don’t understand our English when we talk fast and use slang.”

“It’s our badge,” another said.

“They don’t want us, so we show we don’t need them,” Eric summed up the conversation abruptly. “Let’s go.”

Eric set out along the riverbank again, beyond the last shack, along a path among rank eight-foot-high weeds and saplings.
Katie followed him, then Roger, then Jake, with the three other boys behind them. Although they could see nothing because
of the huge weeds, they smelled the river nearby.

The cameraman and sound man lugged their equipment through the midday heat uncomplainingly. As long as they weren’t being
shot at, they had nothing to gripe about. However, Katie Nelson had led a more pampered existence up till now in her TV career
and was becoming increasingly agitated.

She suddenly froze. “I think I saw a snake! Over there! A large green one!”

“Leave it alone,” Eric told her. “I got worse to show you than snakes.”

Katie shuddered and obediently scampered past the reptile’s lair.

Jake and Roger exchanged a look. They had no need to say to each other what they felt about this damn insolent kid dragging
them around. Yet both felt amused that he was pulling such a number on Katie. Neither of them had
managed so far to get the upper hand with her. They were
her
crew. She let them know that. Now here was this kid leading her into who knew what kind of shit … But Katie had a nose for
a story. Maybe this would be one. They respected that, kept quiet, and trudged after her.

Eric, in the lead, held up his hand for them to stop and went ahead himself to investigate. He came back in a moment and waved
for them to follow. Around a turn in the path the weeds began to thin so they could see the river again to their right. Ahead
of them was a huge clearing in which stood a compound, seven or eight feet high, of bamboo stakes with sharpened tips. More
than two hundred women sat on the bare earth within the compound, without shelter from the blazing sun. All had children.
The oldest were two or three years old, and the youngest, a few months old, still being suckled at the breast.

Roger had already taken cover in a forward position among the weeds. He had no idea what the hell he was filming, but he knew
a striking picture when he saw one. They could put words and sense to it later. He used his zoom lens for close-ups, panned
across the sea of women and children, did retakes after making adjustments to the camera. Jake tried for sound. The women
were raising an eerie, mournful keening, not outright wailing, but a sound very far from the chatter of women in a marketplace.
Jake shook his head in disappointment to Katie and held up a meter.

“I need to get closer in,” he said.

“What’s going on here?” she asked Eric.

“What happened to me when I was three years old,” the youth said. “My mother and I were separated. I never saw her again.
She died in a reeducation camp.”

“Will they take these women’s children from them?”

Eric nodded.

“But why?”

He shrugged. “They are judged by the state to be unfit as mothers to bring up communist children.”

“That’s inhuman!” Katie said.

“When the trucks arrive, you’ll see it happen. We’ll wait here.” Eric glanced at his watch. “They’ll be here in the next half
hour.”

Katie examined the thirteen-year-old carefully as they sat hidden in the weeds near the compound. She had met him the previous
day on the street, and knew only his first name and that he was an orphan.

“Do you know where your father is?” she asked, phrasing her question more bluntly than she meant to.

Eric met her gaze angrily. “My father was married to my mother. I’m not a war bastard. Look at this.” He fished out a sheet
of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. “A letter from my father to my mother. It’s a copy. You keep it. He’s dead.
He was a pilot.”