I said to Susan, “I booked this through the hotel, who, as you know, are required to use Vidotour. Ask that clown for his business card.”
She nodded in understanding, and when Mr. Loc came out of the hotel, she asked for his card. He shook his head as he said something to her.
She walked over to me and said, “He says he forgot his cards. The Viets who have business cards are proud of them, and they’d forget their cigarettes before they forgot their cards.”
“Okay, so we’re under the eye. Ask him if he has a map.”
She asked him, and without a word of reply, he took a map from the front seat and gave it to me. I opened it and spread it on the hood.
As Mr. Loc stood nearby, I said to Susan, “Here’s the A Shau Valley, due west of Hue. The road ends in the middle of the valley at this place called A Luoi, near the Laotian border, where I air-assaulted in by helicopter in late April ’68. From A Luoi is this dotted line that may or may not be passable. It was part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Ask Mr. Loc if we can take that to Khe Sanh.”
She asked him, though he probably understood what I was saying. He said something to Susan, and she said to me, “Mr. Loc says the road is mostly dirt, but as long as it doesn’t rain, we can make it to Khe Sanh.”
“Good. Ask him if we can all speak English and stop pretending.”
“I think the answer is no.”
“Right. Okay, after A Shau, we travel what looks like seventy klicks north to Khe Sanh, where I also air-assaulted in by helicopter, in early April ’68. Then we head east, back toward the coast on Highway 9 along the DMZ, and arrive at Quang Tri City, where my old base camp was located, and where I was stationed during most of the Tet Offensive in January and February 1968. So, we’re traveling back in time in reverse chronological order.” I added, “We’ll do it in that order because I wouldn’t want to be in the A Shau Valley when it gets dark.”
She nodded.
I said, “It’s a total of about two hundred kilometers, then due south again for about eighty kilometers, and we’re back in Hue.” I folded the map and threw it on the front seat.
Susan lit a cigarette, looked at me, and asked, “Did you ever think you’d be back this way?”
I moved away from the vehicle and from Mr. Loc, and thought about that. I replied, “Not at first. I mean, when I left here for the last time in ’72, the war was still going on. Then, for a decade after, the Communists had a tight grip on this country, and Americans weren’t exactly welcome. But . . . by the late ’80s, when things here loosened up, and as I got older, I started to think about going back. Veterans were starting to return, and almost no one I knew regretted the trip.”
“And here you are.”
“Right. But this wasn’t my idea.”
“Neither were the other two times.”
I replied, “Actually, I volunteered for my second tour.”
“Why?”
“A combination of things . . . good career move—I was a military policeman by then, and not a front-line infantryman. Also, things were getting a little rocky at home, and my wife wrote a letter to the Pentagon on my stationery saying I wanted to go back to ’Nam.”
Susan laughed. “That’s silly.” She looked at me and said, “So, basically, you went to Vietnam to get away from your marriage.”
“Right. I took the coward’s way out.” I thought a moment and said, “Also . . . I had a brother, Benny, who . . . they had an unwritten policy of one male family member at a time in a combat zone . . . and Benny was very accident-prone, so I bought him some time. Fortunately, the American involvement in the war ended before he got his orders to go. He wound up in Germany. I don’t like to tell that story because it makes me sound more noble than I am.”
She put her hand on my shoulder and said, “That was a very brave and noble thing.”
I ignored that and said, “The little bastard kept sending me pictures of himself in beer halls with fräuleins on his lap. And my mother, who is totally clueless, kept telling everyone that Benny got sent to Germany because he took a year of German in high school. And Paul took French, so they sent him to Vietnam, where she’d heard they spoke French. She thought Vietnam was near Paris.”
Susan was laughing.
“Ready to roll?”
“Yes.”
She put out her cigarette, and we got into the back seat of the RAV. Susan asked me, “Are your parents alive?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to meet them.”
“I’ll give you their address.”
“And Benny?”
“Still leading a charmed life. I also have another brother, Davey, who still lives in South Boston.”
“I’d like to meet all of them.”
I tried to picture the Webers of Lenox getting together for a few beers with the Brenners of South Boston, and I wasn’t getting a good image of that gathering.
Mr. Loc got behind the wheel and off we went.
We drove along the tree-shaded river road past a few hotels and restaurants, past the Cercle Sportif, and the Ho Chi Minh Museum, and within a few minutes, we were out of the small city and into the low rolling hills, heading south.
I could see the tombs of the emperors scattered around, walled compounds surrounded by huge trees in park-like settings. Susan took a picture from the moving vehicle.
Most tourists, I suspected, came out of the city to see the tombs and pagodas, but I was going elsewhere. I said to Susan, “You didn’t have to come with me. There are better things to see here than battlefields.”
She took my hand and said, “I saw most of the sights when I was here last time. This time I want to see what you saw.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what I saw.
The road continued south, through the necropolis, then swung west. Since it was the Tet holiday week, there was not much traffic on the road. Within the villages, I could see kids playing, and whole families gathered outside, talking and eating under trees.
I took the map from the passenger seat and looked at it. This was basically a road map, and not a very good one. The maps I’d used were detailed army terrain maps, partly taken from the French military maps. The army maps were covered with plasticine to survive the climate, and we used grease pencils to show the American firebases, airfields, base camps, and other installations. Army Intelligence would give us updates on the suspected locations of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army units, which we’d note on the map. I don’t know where they got this information, but most of our firefights were in places where the enemy wasn’t supposed to be.
I looked up ahead and saw we were approaching the Perfume River. There was no bridge, according to the map, and no bridge in reality, in case I was expecting a pleasant surprise.
Mr. Loc drove onto a barge that could accommodate two vehicles. We were the only car waiting, and the ferryman said something to us. Susan said to me, “We can pay for two vehicles, or we could be here all day. Two bucks.”
I gave the ferryman two bucks, and we got out of the RAV. Susan and I stood on the deck as the ferry made its way across the Perfume River. She took a picture from the boat.
I said to Susan, “Ask Mr. Loc if you can take his picture.”
She asked him, and he shook his head and replied in a sharp tone.
Susan said to me, “He does not want his picture taken.”
I looked across the river to the opposite shore and said to Susan, “The Army Corps of Engineers used to bridge these rivers with pontoon bridges. Chuck, however, didn’t like to see standing bridges, and he’d load up a bamboo raft with high explosives and wait for a convoy to cross. Then he’d float along with the other craft, trying to look like Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, and at the last minute, he’d set a timer, abandon ship, and swim underwater with a breathing reed. Usually, though, we could see this coming, and we’d blow Chuck and his raft out of the water before he got to the bridge.”
Susan had no comment.
I added,
“This was why we all liked bridge duty. It was one of the more interesting games we played.” I looked at Susan, who was processing this, and said, “I guess you had to be there.”
She asked, “Paul, now that you’re grown up and mature, when you look back on this, do you see it as . . . well, not within the normal range of behavior?”
“It seemed normal at the time. I mean, most of what we did, said, and thought was appropriate for the situation. Any other kind of behavior that you’d call normal would be considered abnormal here. Getting excited about sitting on a bridge all day, waiting to blow Charlie out of the water—instead of patrolling the jungle all day—is, I think, quite normal. Don’t you agree?”
“I guess. I can see that.”
“Good.” I admitted, however, “It does seem a little weird, now that I think about it.”
We reached the opposite bank, and we got back into the vehicle.
Mr. Loc drove off the barge onto the road, and we continued on, west toward the hills and mountains looming in the distance.
We were making only about fifty KPH, and it would take us over an hour to get to the A Shau Valley, if the road stayed this good.
The countryside was hilly, but the Viets had managed to extend their rice paddy cultivation through a series of dikes and waterwheels. The countryside looked prosperous and more inhabited than I remembered it.
We came to a small town called Binh Bien, which was the last town on this road. Beyond this was what we used to call Indian Territory.
The road rose, and before long, we were in the hills, which were covered with scrub brush and red shale.
I said to Susan, “We had to dig in every night, and we’d find a hill like that one over there with the steepest sides possible, and the best fields of fire. This is mostly shale, and it would take us hours with these little entrenching tools just to scratch out a shallow sleeping hole that would also become our firing hole, if we got hit during the night. The hole looked like a shallow grave, which it sometimes became. We’d set out trip flares and claymore mines around our perimeter. The claymore had a hand-squeeze generator attached to an electrical wire that put out enough juice to blow the detonator. The claymore mine fired hundreds of ball bearings downrange, like a giant shotgun blast, and anyone within about a hundred feet to the front of it would be mowed down. It was a very effective defense weapon, and if it weren’t for the trip flares and the claymores, most of us would not have slept for the entire year we were here.”
She nodded.
The road started to twist through a very narrow pass with steep slopes rising on either side, and the vegetation became thicker. A mountain stream ran along the road, and I could imagine that it flooded during the monsoon, making the road impassable.
I said to Susan, “This is the only way into the valley from Vietnam, but the Americans never went in overland because this pass was an ambush waiting to happen. We flew in by helicopter and brought everything we needed by air.”
The blacktop had mostly disappeared, and as we got higher, the clouds drifted across the slopes, a mist rose off the ground, and it was getting cold. Mr. Loc was not too bad a driver and took it easy. We hadn’t seen a vehicle or a human being in about twenty kilometers.
Susan said, “I’ve never been this far into the interior. It’s spooky.”
“It’s like another country. Totally different from the coastal plains. Lots of Montagnards up here.”
“Who are they?”
“Hill tribespeople. There are lots of tribes with different names, but collectively we called them Montagnards, after the French name for them.”
“Oh. Now we call them ethnic minorities, or indigenous peoples. That’s politically correct.”
“Right. They’re Montagnards. Just means mountain people. Anyway, they used to like Americans and hated the ethnic Vietnamese, north and south. We armed them to the teeth, but the trick was to get them to kill only North Viets and Viet Cong, and not kill our ARVN allies. I think their motto was ‘The only good Vietnamese is a dead Vietnamese.’” I asked her, “Have you ever heard of the FULRO?”
Mr. Loc’s head turned, and we made eye contact. Now this idiot would go back and report that I was here to lead a Montagnard insurrection.
Susan said, “I saw some photos once in the war museum of—”
“Right. Me, too.”
Susan thought a moment, then said, “In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen a hill tribesman.”
“Not even in the Q-Bar?”
She ignored that and asked me, “Are they . . . you know . . . friendly?”
“They used to be. They’re actually quite pleasant, if you’re not Vietnamese. Maybe you should re-comb your hair.”
I looked up and saw Mr. Loc staring at us in the rearview mirror. The man obviously understood what we were saying, and he didn’t like this talk about FULRO and the Montagnards’ hatred of the Vietnamese.
We crested a rise in the road and started down. The pass was still very narrow and twisting, and partly obscured with fog and mist, so we couldn’t see down into the A Shau Valley.
“Look, Paul.” Susan pointed to a ridge on which stood a long structure of logs and thatch, built on stilts. She asked me, “Is that a hill tribe house?”
“Looks like it.”
As we got within about a hundred meters of the longhouse, three men with very long hair, dressed in what looked like multicolored blankets, appeared on the ridge above us. Two of them were carrying AK-47 rifles, and the other had an American M-16. My heart skipped a beat, and I guess Mr. Loc’s did, too, because he slammed on his brakes.
Mr. Loc stared at the three armed men, less than fifty meters from us now, and said something to Susan.
Susan said to me, “Mr. Loc says they are Ba Co or Ba Hy tribesmen. They aren’t allowed to carry rifles, but they hunt with them, and the government doesn’t seem to be able to do anything about it.”
This was a piece of good news. I liked the idea of armed civilians that the government couldn’t control. I just hoped they remembered that they liked Americans.
The three tribesmen were looking down at us, but not making a move. I decided to make sure they knew only the driver was a Viet. I stood on the seat and waved. I shouted, “Hello! I’m back!”
They looked at one another, then back at me.
I called up to them, “I’m from Washington and I’m here to help you.”
Susan said, “You want to get us shot?”
“They love us.”
The three tribesmen waved their rifles, and I said to Mr. Loc, in English, “Okay, they say we can go. Move it.” I sat.
He threw the vehicle into gear.
We continued down the pass into the valley. Susan said, “That was incredible. Damn, I should have taken a picture.”
“If you take their picture, they cut off your head and try to stuff it into the camera.”
“You’re being an idiot.”
“I’ll tell you what they used to do to North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong—they’d skin them alive, then filet them with razor knives, and feed the pieces to their dogs and make the prisoner watch as the dogs ate him, piece by piece. Every time they captured an enemy soldier, the dogs would go crazy with anticipation. Most enemy soldiers killed themselves rather than get captured by the Montagnards.”
“My God . . .”
“I never saw this . . . but I saw the aftermath once . . . I think it made us feel good that we weren’t quite that psychotic yet.”
She didn’t reply.
Mr. Loc turned and looked at me. It was not a very nice look. I said to him, “Drive.”
The pass widened and became less steep. The ground fog lifted, and we could see the A Shau Valley, dotted with patches of white mist, which looked like snow from here.
I stared at the valley, and it was very familiar. Not only did I never think I’d see this place again, but when I was here, I thought this was the last place I’d see on this earth.
Susan was looking at me and asked, “Remember it?”
I nodded.
“You flew in. Then what?”
I didn’t say anything for a while, then I said, “We flew in from Camp Evans, the First Cavalry Division’s forward headquarters. A huge flight of helicopters carrying infantry for an air assault. It was April 25, and there was a window of good weather. We came in from the northeast, over these hills that we just drove through. In the north end of the valley is this place called A Luoi, which was once a Viet village, but by that time, there was no trace of it. That’s where this road ends. At A Luoi, there was once a French Foreign Legion post that was overrun by the Communist Viet Minh, back in the ’50s. The Communists then controlled this valley, which was called a dagger pointed at the heart of Hue. So, in the early ’60s, the Special Forces arrived and set up a camp, right in the middle of Indian Country at A Luoi. They rebuilt the French airstrip, and recruited and trained the Montagnards to fight the Viet Cong and the North Viets.”
We were almost at the floor of the valley now, and I could see the small river that ran through it.
I continued, “The valley opens out into Laos over there, beyond those mountains, and a branch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail runs right into the valley. So one day in 1966, the enemy massed his forces in Laos, thousands of them, and overran the American Special Forces camp, and the Communists controlled the valley again.”
We were now entering the flat valley, and Mr. Loc sped up a little.
“After the Special Forces camp was overrun and the surviving hill people fled, this whole valley and the hills and mountains became a free-fire zone, a dumping ground for the air force. If they had to abort a precision bombing mission because of weather, they’d unload their bombs in this valley. When I got here, this place looked like Swiss cheese. These huge, house-sized craters became firing holes for us and them, and we’d fight, crater by crater . . . in the valley, in the hills, in the jungle up there.” I looked to the southwest and said, “Somewhere over there near Laos is the place called Hamburger Hill, where, in May 1969, the army had about two hundred men killed and hundreds more wounded, trying to take this useless hill. This whole fucking valley was drenched in blood for years . . . now . . . it still looks gloomy and forbidding . . . but I see that the Viets and the Montagnards are back . . . and I’m back.”