Up Country

  John said something to Susan, who translated, “He says this was given to him by his American dai-uy during the war.”

  I nodded.

  He took out another green beret, said something, and Susan said to me, “This was given to him only three years ago by another American—a former soldier who had come to visit.”

  I said to Susan, “I don’t have any green berets to give him.”

  “Give him your watch.”

  “Give him your watch.” I asked, “What the hell is he going to do with a watch?”

  John showed us a few other treasures from his chest: a GI web belt, a plastic canteen, a compass, a K-bar knife, and a few ammo pouches. I was reminded of my own steamer trunk in the basement of my house, like a million other trunks all over America, filled with bits and pieces of a former military life.

  John then took a small blue box from his chest, which I recognized as a military medal box, like a jewelry box, and he opened it, very reverentially. Lying on the satin lining was a round bronze medal with a red and white ribbon. Stamped on the medal was an eagle perched on a book and sword. Around the eagle were the words “Efficiency, Honor, Fidelity.”

  I stared at the medal and recognized it as the Good Conduct Medal. I recalled that the Special Forces guys used to buy them in the base camp PXs and award them to their Montagnard troops for bravery, though the medal had nothing to do with bravery, but the Montagnards didn’t know that, and the army wasn’t bummed out about the Special Forces guys handing out these nothing medals to their Montagnard fighters.

  I took the box as if it held the Congressional Medal of Honor and looked at the Good Conduct Medal and showed it to Susan. I said, “John got this for extraordinary bravery, above and beyond the call of duty.”

  Susan nodded and said something to John in a respectful tone.

  John smiled, took the box from me, and snapped it closed. He put it gently back in the big chest.

  I thought about my Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, given to me by the Viet colonel who kissed both my cheeks, and I wondered if I’d actually gotten a medal for having a clean uniform or something.

  Anyway, last but not least, John lifted a long object out of the chest wrapped in an oilcloth, and I knew what it was before he unwrapped it; Dai-uy John still had his M-16 automatic assault rifle, the plastic stock and hand grip glistening with oil, and the cast aluminum parts and blued steel barrel gleaming like they’d just passed a company inspection.

  He held it toward me with both hands, like it was a sacred object, and our eyes met. I put my hands on the rifle, and we both clasped it for a few seconds. His smile had faded into a sort of stern and faraway look, and I think my own face had the same expression. We both nodded in remembrance of things past—the war, the missing comrades, and the defeat.

  Without a word, he re-wrapped the rifle and put it back in the chest. He closed the chest and stood.

  Susan and I stood, also, and we walked out of the longhouse into the overcast daylight.

  John led us back to the path, and we waved to everyone on our way. At the head of the path, he said something to Susan, and she replied. She said to me, “John wishes us a safe journey, and welcomes you back to the hill country.”

  I replied, “Tell John I thank him for showing me his medal, and for introducing me to his people.” I didn’t know if the Montagnards celebrated Tet, so I said, “I wish the Taoi tribe good fortune, good hunting, and happiness.”

  Susan translated, John smiled, then said something. Susan turned to me and said, “He wants to know when the American soldiers are coming back.”

  “How about never? Is that soon enough?” I said, “Tell him the Americans are returning only in peace, and there will be no more war.”

  Susan told him, and he seemed, I thought, a little disappointed. He’d have to postpone killing Vietnamese for longer than he’d hoped.

  I reached into my pocket and took out my Swiss army knife. I handed it to John, who smiled. He seemed to recognize the knife, and in fact, began pulling out the blades and the other gadgets.

  I said, “That’s a Phillips head screwdriver, John. Just in case you run into any screws. This weird thing is a corkscrew for your Château Lafite Rothschild, or you can screw it into a commissar’s head, if you want.”

  Susan was rolling her eyes while I showed John all the handy gadgets on the knife.

  John took the dark blue scarf from his neck and put it around Susan’s neck. They exchanged some words, and we bid each other farewell.

  Susan and I started down the trail.

  She said, “That was fascinating . . . and moving. He still . . . well, he seems to idolize the Americans.”

  “They also liked the French, which shows bad judgment on both accounts.” I added, “They just don’t like the Vietnamese, and the feeling is mutual.”

  “I understand that.” She thought a moment and said, “I can’t believe I’ve been here three years, and I didn’t know anything about any of this.”

  “It’s not in the Wall Street Journal or the Economic Times.”

  “No, it’s not.” She asked me, “Glad you stopped?”

  “You stopped. I went along to see that you didn’t wind up on a cooking spit.”

  We got to the end of the path, and I said, “I’ll bet Mr. Loc is hanging by his heels from a tree with his throat slit and the dogs are lapping his blood.”

  “Paul, that’s gross.”

  “Sorry. I wanted to drive.”

  We found the RAV, and Mr. Loc was alive and well, but looking a little annoyed, and maybe nervous.

  We got back into the vehicle, and I said to Mr. Loc, “Cu di.”

  Susan asked, “Is your Vietnamese coming back?”

  “Yeah. Scary.” Most of my Vietnamese had to do with getting laid, but I did remember some common expressions. I said to Susan, “Sat Cong,” which means, “Kill the Communists.”

  Mr. Loc did not like that, and he glanced back at me. I said, “Keep your eyes on the road.”

  The bad road continued north, and we came to a small place on the map called Ta Ay, a cluster of primitive bamboo huts in a flat mountain meadow whose inhabitants looked Vietnamese. The Viets lived in the villages and cultivated the land; the tribespeople lived in the hills and mountains and lived off the land. It was fascinating, as Susan said, and under other circumstances and without a personal history of these hills, I might have been in a better mood.

  We passed through another hamlet, which, according to the map, was called Thon Ke, and the road turned west toward the Laotian border and dropped into a narrow valley, then turned north again and followed this meandering mountain valley until, an hour later, we came to a low-lying area of rice paddies, and a village called Li Ton. The road here was actually the tops of wide rice paddy dikes. The Ho Chi Minh Trail. Amazing if you thought about it; more amazing now that I’d seen a piece of it.

  A little more than two hours after we’d left A Luoi, we crossed a new concrete bridge at a place called Dakrong, and a few kilometers further, the Ho Chi Minh Trail intersected with Highway 9, which was two lanes of semi-paved blacktop, partly compliments of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Mr. Loc turned left onto the highway, and we traveled west, toward Khe Sanh.

  I said to Susan, “This road was blocked by the North Vietnamese army during the siege of Khe Sanh, from early January to April 1968. Even an armored convoy couldn’t get through. But in early April, we air-assaulted into these hills all around the besieged camp, and about a week later, an armored column with a few regiments of marines and ARVN soldiers forced the road open again and relieved the siege.”

  “And you were here?”

  “Yeah. The First Air Cavalry got around a lot. It’s nice to have hundreds of helicopters to take you around, but usually you don’t want to go where they’re taking you.”

  We continued a short distance on Highway 9. Traffic was moderate and consisted mostly of scooters, bicycles, and produce trucks.

  To the righ
t was the plateau of Khe Sanh combat base, beyond which rose tree-covered hills, which were obscured by mist and fog. Geographically, this place resembled the A Shau Valley, though it wasn’t as remote or narrowly hemmed in by the hills.

  Historically, Khe Sanh was a place where, like the A Shau and Dien Bien Phu, a great Western army had gathered in a remote, godforsaken valley, to do battle with the Vietnamese. Dien Bien Phu had been a decisive military defeat, while Khe Sanh and the A Shau had been at best a military stalemate, and in the end, a psychological setback for the Americans, who believed that a tie score was no substitute for victory.

  We passed by the plateau of the old combat base and came to the town of Khe Sanh, which, like A Luoi, had disappeared during the war, but Brigadoon-like, had reappeared years later.

  The sky was still gloomy and overcast, and this was the way I remembered it in April of 1968, a sky as gray and heavy as my mood had been, a place where the stench of thousands of dead bodies hinted at your own fate.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  We drove into the town of Khe Sanh, where substantial buildings of stucco and red tile roofs were springing up everywhere on well-laid-out streets.

  We pulled into a big square where a large market building was under construction. Obviously, this was a showplace town, a place with an evocative name that the government wanted to look good for the tourists and newspeople. And, in fact, there were five tour buses parked in the square and dozens of Western tourists were wandering around the market stalls, probably trying to figure out why they were here in this remote corner of the country.

  Mr. Loc pulled into a gas station, and Susan and I got out of the vehicle and stretched. I said, “I need a cold beer.”

  She said something to Mr. Loc as he pumped gas, and we headed across the square toward an outdoor café.

  As we walked, Susan asked me, “This wasn’t the base, was it?”

  “No. We passed it on the way in—that high plateau. Khe Sanh combat base took its name from this town that no longer existed at the time. We’ll go up to the base later.”

  There were a number of outdoor stalls on the way toward my beer, and Susan, true to form, had to stop at most of them. A lot of the stalls sold two-kilo bags of coffee, which must be the local produce, and some stalls had pineapples and vegetables. There were a cluster of stalls that sold war souvenirs, mostly junk, like jewelry made from scraps of brass shell casings. I spotted some 105 millimeter brass shell casings with flowers growing in them, a mixed metaphor if ever there was one. There were bud vases, which had once been .50 caliber machine gun shell casings, plus the short, squat shell casings of grenade launchers that were being sold as drinking cups with handles welded on them.

  Susan said, “Where did all this stuff come from?”

  I said, “The United States of America.”

  “My God, there’s so much of it.”

  “It was a hundred-day siege. This is probably a minute’s worth of ordnance expenditure.”

  She wandered over to a stall that had bits and pieces of armaments— plastic stocks from M-16 rifles, the release levers and pins of hand grenades, the cardboard telescopic tubes of M-72 light anti-tank rockets, and so forth. Plus, there were plastic canteens, GI web gear, ammo pouches, bayonet scabbards, belt buckles, and all sorts of odds and ends, the archaeological evidence of an army that once fought here, for sale now as souvenirs to the survivors, who might want to take home a piece of hell.

  Susan questioned me about the bits and pieces, what they were and what they had been used for. I answered, then said, “Cold beer.”

  “Just a minute. What’s this?”

  I looked at what she was holding and said, “That happens to be the canvas carrying case of an entrenching tool. You clip it on your web belt, and the shovel blade fits right inside.”

  She put it down and walked to another stall where a family of Montagnards was selling crafts. She whispered to me, “Paul, do you know what tribe this is?”

  They were dressed in bright blue and red clothing with elaborate embroidery, and the women had their hair in huge piles on top of their heads, bundled in brightly colored scarves. The ladies wore huge hoop earrings and were smoking long pipes. I said to Susan, “I think they’re from California.”

  “You’re a wiseass. What tribe are they from?”

  “How the hell do I know? They’re all Montagnards. Ask them.”

  She spoke to an old lady in Vietnamese, and both of them were surprised that they each knew Vietnamese. Susan chatted with the old woman, then said to me, “Her Vietnamese is hard to understand.”

  “So is yours.”

  The whole family was gathered around now, talking away, the ladies puffing on pipes, the men smoking cigarettes. They discussed Susan’s Taoi tribe scarf and showed her their more brightly colored scarves. At some point they started looking at me, and I could tell that Susan was informing them that I was once here.

  A very short old man with bow legs approached me, dressed in an orange sort of tunic with a yellow sash around his waist. He took my hands and looked into my eyes, and we stared at each other. His hands were like leather, and so was his face. He said something, and Susan said to me, “He says he was an American soldier.”

  “Really? I don’t think he meets the minimum height requirement.”

  He kept talking, and Susan translated as he spoke. “He says he fought for the Americans with . . . the green berets . . . he spent seven years with them . . . they paid him well . . . gave him a fine rifle and knife . . . he killed . . . many, many . . . he said beaucoup, beaucoup . . . you hear that?”

  The old man said, “Beaucoup, beaucoup, vee-cee—” He made a cutting motion across his throat, which I understood very well, having done it myself. I said to Susan, “Ask him if he still has his rifle.”

  She asked him and he looked at me and nodded almost imperceptibly.

  So, I’m standing there, looking at this incredibly wrinkled old face with narrow slit eyes, and we’re holding hands in the Khe Sanh town square, and we don’t have much in common, except the bond of war, which can never be broken.

  Susan said, “He wants to know if you know Captain Bob, his commanding officer.”

  I replied, “Tell him I once met Captain Bob in America, and that he’s doing well, and he speaks often of the bravery of his Montagnard soldiers.”

  Susan translated this, and the old man totally bought it. He squeezed my hands, then went into the stall and came out with a bronze Montagnard bracelet, which you can’t buy, but which they’ll give you if they like you or if you’re brave. He opened the thin bracelet, put it on my left wrist, and squeezed it closed. He stepped back and saluted me. I returned the salute.

  By now, we had a few Americans around us, plus a few Viets who didn’t look happy with this.

  I said to Susan, “Tell him thank you, and tell him that Captain Bob and I will be back to organize another Montagnard army.”

  She said something to the old man, he smiled, and we shook hands.

  Susan absolutely had to have six scarves and sashes of multi hues, and for the first time since she’d been in Vietnam, she didn’t argue price, but gave the old lady a ten.

  Susan wanted to take pictures, of course, so she asked the Montagnards if that was all right, and they said it was. I said to Susan, “They’ll cut your head off.” But she took pictures anyway, and they didn’t cut her head off. We all posed for shots, wearing scarves around our necks, then bid one another farewell, and I made directly for the café.

  Susan said, “They’re from the Bru tribe. Let me see your bracelet.”

  I held my arm out, like a sleepwalker.

  She examined the simple bracelet and asked me, “Is there any significance to this?”

  I replied, “It’s a token of friendship. I actually have one at home. Now I have two.”

  “Really? Who gave you the first one?”

  “A Montagnard, obviously.”

  “Why did he—or she—give it to yo
u?”

  “He. You didn’t mess around with their women, or you’d wind up with your dick on a stick.”

  “Good. So, why did they give you a bracelet?”

  “Just a token of friendship. They handed them out pretty easily if they liked you. Unfortunately, they expected you to eat with them, and they ate things that were worse than C rations.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, nothing as bad as the Viets. They’re into meat—deer, boar, birds, weasels, and other horrible wildlife. They burned their meat to a cinder. But it was the cup of warm blood that was a little hard to get down.”

  “You drank the blood?”

  “It went well with the red meat.”

  We got to the outdoor café. It was nearly one P.M., and the place was filled with Euros and Americans, including backpackers. There were a few guys who could have been veterans, but mostly there were a lot of tour groups sitting together, who I didn’t think had any association with this place; Khe Sanh was obviously on the tour route, and I supposed most of these people had signed up for this at their hotels in Hue. The brochure probably said something like: Khe Sanh! See the actual site where the famous bloody three-month siege of the U.S. Marine Combat Base took place—Relive the horrors of 30,000 men locked in mortal combat from the comfort of your air-conditioned bus. Side trip to a Montagnard village—Lunch included.

  Anyway, the tables were full, but I spotted a table for four where only an American guy and a Viet guy sat, having a beer. I went over to the table and said, “Mind if we sit here?”

  The American, a big guy of about my age, said, “No. Go ahead.”

  Susan and I sat.

  The guy said, “My name’s Ted Buckley.” He put out his hand.

  I took it and said, “Paul Brenner. This is Susan Weber.”

  He took Susan’s hand. “Pleased to meet you. This is Mr. . . . what’s your name?”

  The Viet guy, who looked about sixty, said, “I am Mr. Tram. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  Ted Buckley said to us, “Mr. Tram was a North Vietnamese army officer, a captain—right? He saw combat here. Can you believe that?”