Up Country

  A few people glanced at us, and a few cops in front of the police station gave us the eye.

  Susan said, “They don’t see that many Montagnards on the coast, so they’re curious, but not suspicious. It’s like American Indians coming into a Western town.”

  “Are you making this up?”

  “Yes.”

  We got through the town, and I saw a small, blacktopped road to the left. A sign said Dong Son and something in Vietnamese. I slowed down and pointed.

  Susan said, “It’s an archaeological site . . . the Dong Son culture, whatever that is . . . one thousand years before the common era. Maybe the road is newer.”

  I turned into the narrow road and drove about a hundred meters, then stopped.

  I pulled the map out of the pouch and looked at it. I said, “This is the road. We take this about fifty klicks to some little village called Bai-what-ever, then head north on Route 15 to Route 6.”

  “Let me see that.”

  I handed her the map, and she studied it in silence. She put the map in her jacket and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

  I kicked the BMW into gear and off we went. The road passed the archaeological digs, then the blacktop disappeared. The dirt road was rutted from carts and vehicles, and I kept the motorcycle between the ruts, which was a little better.

  We were barely bouncing along at forty KPH, a little over twenty miles an hour, less sometimes.

  The terrain was still flat, but rising. There were some rice paddies, but these disappeared and vegetable plots took over.

  The BMW Paris-Dakar was indeed a good dirt bike, but the dirt wasn’t so good. I had trouble holding on to the grips, and my ass was more off the saddle than on. Susan was holding on to me tight. I said, “We’re going to feel this in the morning.”

  “I feel it now.”

  It took us nearly two hours to cover the forty kilometers to the end of the road. We entered the little village called Bai-something, and the road ended in a T-junction. I took the road to the right, which was Route 15, and the dirt was in better condition. In fact, there was gravel on the road, and the road was crowned and had drainage ditches on both sides.

  According to the map, it was over a hundred kilometers to Route 6, and at this speed, it would take at least four hours to get there. It was now 5:40 P.M., and the sun was going down behind the mountains to my left.

  The road rose into the hills ahead, and I could see higher hills with mountains behind them. We didn’t speak much because it was hard to get the words out with all the bouncing.

  It was almost dark, and I was looking for a place to stop for the night. We were definitely in the hills now, and the Viets didn’t live much away from the towns, villages, and agricultural areas. Pine trees came up to the sides of the road, and it was getting spooky. I stopped the bike and took a rest. I said to Susan, “Maybe there’s a ski lodge up ahead.”

  She took the map out of her jacket and looked at it. “There’s a village up ahead called Lang Chanh, about twenty klicks.”

  I thought a moment, then said, “I don’t think I want to go into a North Viet village after dark.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Well . . . I guess this is it.” I looked around. “Let’s find a place to hide us and the bike.”

  “Paul, nothing is moving on this road now. You could sleep in the middle of it.”

  “Good point.” I wheeled the bike up a few meters and rested it against the trunks of some pine trees.

  Susan opened a saddlebag and took out the last two bananas, the last bottle of water, and the two rain ponchos.

  We sat near the bike with our backs against two pine trees, and I peeled my banana. I said, “Here’s some good news. No land leeches in the pine forest.”

  “Chiggers and ticks.”

  We ate the bananas and drank the water and watched the light fade. There was a thick cloud cover, and it was pitch dark around us. We could hear sounds in the pine forest, like small animals scurrying around.

  She lit a cigarette and looked at the map by the flame of her cigarette lighter. She said, “Another four hundred kilometers to Dien Bien Phu.”

  We sat in silence and listened to the night. I asked her, “Did you camp out as a kid?”

  “Not when I could avoid it. Did you?”

  “Well, not when I lived in South Boston. But in the army, I camped out a lot. I once figured that I spent over six hundred nights under the stars. Sometimes it’s nice.”

  A loud clap of thunder rolled through the hills and a breeze came up. It was either cold here, or I’d been in ’Nam too long. I said, “Sometimes it’s not.”

  Susan lit another cigarette and asked me, “Want one? It curbs your appetite.”

  “I just had a banana.”

  It started to rain, and we put our ponchos over our heads. We moved closer together to conserve body heat and wrapped the ponchos tighter around us. I said, “Crachin. Rain dust.”

  “No, this is real fucking rain.”

  The rain got heavier, and the wind got stronger.

  Susan asked me, “How much are they paying you for this?”

  “Just expenses.”

  She laughed.

  We were both soaked, and we started to shiver. I remembered these cold, wet evenings in the winter of 1968, dug into the mud with nothing more than a rubber poncho, and the sky was filled with pyrotechnics that had a terrible beauty in the black rain.

  Susan must have been thinking the same thing, and she asked me, “Is this how it was?”

  “Sort of . . . actually, it was worse because you knew it was going to be the same every night until the winter rains ended in March . . . and you had the extra problem of people on the prowl who were trying to kill you.” I paused and said, “That’s it for the war, Susan. It’s over. Really.”

  “Okay. That’s it for the war. The war is over.”

  We wrapped the ponchos around us, and lay down together in the rain under the pine trees.

  It rained through the night, and we shivered in the rubber ponchos and got as close as we could to each other.

  Tomorrow was Dien Bien Phu, if we made it, then the hamlet of Ban Hin, and the person or grave of Tran Van Vinh.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  A gray dawn filtered through the dripping pine trees.

  We unwrapped ourselves from the wet ponchos, yawned and stretched. We were both soaking wet and cold, and a chill had seeped into my bones. Susan didn’t look well.

  We shook out our ponchos and rolled them up. We opened the saddlebags and took out dry socks, underwear, and clothes from our backpacks, changed, and threw our wet jeans and shirts into the trees; we didn’t need many more days of clothes. Maybe fewer than we thought.

  Susan had more Montagnard scarves in the saddlebags, and we used one to wipe down the bike, then put on the others and changed tribes.

  We did a quick map check and got on the BMW. The engine started easily, and off we went, north on Route 15 to Route 6.

  The road was mostly red clay and bits of shale that provided some traction if I didn’t gas the engine too quickly.

  A kilometer up the road, I spotted a small waterfall cascading from a rock formation into a stream by the side of the road.

  I pulled over, and Susan and I washed up with a piece of orange soap she’d brought along, and we drank some cold and hopefully clean water.

  We mounted up and continued on. There wasn’t anything moving on the road except us, but I couldn’t get the speed past sixty KPH without losing control. Every bone and muscle in my body ached, and the last real meal I’d eaten had been in the sixteen-sided pavilion restaurant, and that was Sunday, New Year’s Day. Today was Wednesday.

  We approached the small village of Lang Chanh, and beyond the village was the beginning of the higher hills, and beyond that, the mountains whose peaks I couldn’t see because of the low clouds and mountain mist.

  I slowed down as we entered the squalid village of bamboo huts and ramshackle pin
e log structures. It was just a little after 7 A.M., and I could smell rice and fish cooking.

  There were a few people around and lots of chickens. Susan said, “I need to get something to eat.”

  “I thought you had a banana yesterday.”

  She put her hands around my throat and playfully squeezed. Then she wrapped her arms around me and laid her head on my shoulder. I noticed her arms weren’t very tight around my chest, and I knew we needed to get some food.

  We passed through Lang Chanh and continued on. The road rose more steeply here, but the BMW was an incredible machine, and it ate up the mud as we climbed into the high hills.

  Susan said in my ear, “This is actually nice. Almost fun. I like this.”

  It was actually fun, in the middle of nowhere, on the way to the end of nowhere.

  I had no way of telling how high we were, but the map had shown benchmark elevations of 1,500 to 2,000 meters, over a mile high on the mountain peaks, so we were about half that elevation on this road. It was cold, but there was no wind, and the drizzle had stopped, though the cloud layer had not one break in it.

  Now and then I saw huge stands of mountain bamboo surrounded by taller pine trees, and I was reminded of corn fields in Virginia, surrounded by towering forests of white pines. I recalled from last time I was here that when things that don’t look anything like home start to look like things from home, then it’s time to go home.

  I glanced at my odometer and saw we’d come forty kilometers from Lang Chanh, so right ahead should be the village of Thuoc. The last forty klicks on Route 15 had taken an hour, but I felt confident I could make up some time when I reached Route 6, which was designated on the map as an improved road, though that’s a relative term.

  The road swung sharply to the left and a few minutes later, I slowed down for Thuoc, which looked like Lang Chanh, except there were fewer chickens here.

  As we passed through the village, a few people followed us with their eyes. I was fairly sure that they saw dirt bikes now and then, and I was also sure they couldn’t tell what or who we were. I could tell what they were, however, ethnic Vietnamese, so we weren’t yet in hill tribe territory and, in fact, I hadn’t seen any longhouses.

  We continued on for another twenty or thirty kilometers, and the hills got higher. The road followed a mountain stream, and up ahead I could see towering peaks. I have a good sense of direction, and though the sun wasn’t visible, I knew we were going the wrong way.

  I pulled over, stopped, and looked at the map. I studied it awhile, then scanned the terrain, trying to figure out which way I was heading. I’m a good terrain map reader, but the map wasn’t that good, and there was not one single road marker. “Moss grows on what side of the tree?”

  “Are we lost?”

  “No, we are, as they say in the army, temporarily disoriented.”

  “We’re lost.”

  “Whatever.”

  We both got off the bike, put our heads together, and looked at the map. I said, “I think we were supposed to turn someplace near Thuoc in order to stay on Route 15, but I didn’t see a sign or a road.”

  Susan put her finger on the map and said, “When 15 swung west on that curve before Thuoc, the road continued on as Route 214, which is where we are. We needed to turn hard right to stay north on 15.”

  I said, “The Laotian border is just ahead.”

  “And that means border guards and soldiers.”

  “Right. Let’s get out of here.”

  I started to wheel the bike around and noticed on a ridgeline ahead, smoke curling into the air, and the silhouettes of longhouses against the gray sky. I said, “We’re in Montagnard territory.”

  She looked around at the hills and asked, “Are there FULRO here?”

  “I don’t know. I’m new at this FULRO stuff, despite what Mang thinks.” As I was swinging the bike around, I heard something and looked down the road in the direction we’d come from. Coming toward us was an open dark green army jeep with two men in the front. “Jump on.”

  We both jumped on, and I started the engine. The bike was pointed perpendicular to the narrow road, and I had my choice of going toward the jeep and passing them, or heading west toward the Laotian border, where they were going; neither of these were my first choice.

  The jeep was less than a hundred meters from me now, and the driver spotted us. He purposely put the jeep in the center of the narrow road so I couldn’t squeeze past him, thereby limiting my choices to one.

  I cut the wheel to the right, kicked it into gear, and accelerated toward the Laotian border.

  Susan called out, “Paul, we could stop and try to talk our way out of this. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “We’re dressed as Montagnards, and we’re not Montagnards. We’re Americans, as our passports say, and I don’t want to have to explain what we’re doing here.”

  I looked in my rearview mirror, and I saw that the jeep was keeping up with me. I was doing seventy KPH and the bike was handling well, but I had trouble staying in the saddle, and Susan was holding on for dear life.

  To make matters worse, I was heading toward the border post where I’d be stopped, or where I could charge right through, ducking AK-47 automatic rifle fire from the Viets, and probably from the Laotian border guards on the other side, who were also Commies and sort of friendly to the Viets now and then. So, this was like hammer and anvil; the guys in the jeep were the hammer, the border post was the anvil, and we were hamburger meat.

  I glanced in my rearview mirror again and saw that the jeep was a little farther back; he was just going to follow me until I got to the border, which must be very close now, then we’d have a chat. I looked for a place to try to put the bike in the hills to my left or right, but it didn’t seem possible, and the soldiers behind me knew that.

  Susan said, “Paul, if you don’t stop or slow down, they’re going to assume we’re running from them. Please, stop. I can’t hold on. I’m going to fall. Slow down and pull over and see if they just want to pass us. Paul, I’m going to fall off. Please.”

  I slowed down and moved the motorcycle to the right and the jeep started to gain on us. I said to Susan, “Okay . . . we’ll just take it easy here and see what they want.” We pulled off our scarves and leather hats.

  I had the strong feeling this was the end of the road.

  The jeep was right behind us now, and the soldier in the passenger seat was standing, holding an AK-47 rifle. The jeep drew abreast of us, and the guy with the rifle looked us over. He shouted, “Dung lai! Dung lai!” which used to be my line back in ’68. He motioned with his rifle for me to pull over and stop.

  As I started to slow down, I saw a strange expression on the guy’s face, then a loud explosion right beside my head, and the soldier with the rifle did sort of a backflip. The rifle went flying, and he fell in the rear of the open seat. Another gunshot rang out, and the driver’s head exploded. The jeep bucked to a halt and stalled, then rolled slowly backward down the slope until its rear wheels went into the ditch.

  I stopped the motorcycle.

  I sat there staring straight ahead. I could smell the gunpowder. Without turning, I said to Susan, “You swore you left the gun in Hue.”

  She didn’t reply, but dismounted and walked over to the jeep, the Colt .45 still smoking from the barrel.

  She paid no attention to the driver, who had half his skull missing, but very expertly she examined the other soldier, who was sprawled half in the back of the jeep. She said, “They’re both dead.” She stuck the .45 under her quilted jacket. “Thank you for slowing down.”

  I didn’t reply.

  We looked at each other for a few seconds. Finally, she said, “I couldn’t let them stop us.”

  I didn’t reply.

  She took out a cigarette and lit it. Her hand was steady as a rock. I knew I was in the presence of someone who was no stranger to guns.

  She took a few drags, then threw the cigarette in the water and watched it
flow downstream. She asked, “What do you think we should do with this mess?”

  I said, “Leave it. They’ll think it was the FULRO. But we have to take the rifles to make it look like it was them.”

  She nodded and went over to the jeep and collected two AK-47s and a Chicom pistol from the holster of the driver.

  I went to the jeep and took the extra magazines and threw them into the woods, then took their wallets, cigarettes, and watches and stuffed everything in my pockets.

  I looked at the two dead men covered with blood and gore, but I didn’t get any flashbacks; that was then, this was here and now, and one had nothing to do with the other. Well, maybe a little.

  Susan rummaged around the open jeep for a few seconds and found a cellophane bag of dried fruit. She opened the bag and offered it to me.

  I shook my head.

  She grabbed a handful of the dried fruit, put it in her mouth, chewed and swallowed, then put another handful in her mouth and stuck the bag in her side pocket.

  We walked back to the motorcycle, each carrying an AK-47 slung over our shoulders.

  I turned the bike around, we mounted up, and started downhill on the muddy road, back toward Thuoc, where I’d missed my turn.

  Before we got to Thuoc, I stopped, and we tossed the rifles, the pistol, and the personal effects of the dead men into a thicket of bamboo.

  We continued on and reached Thuoc. I saw the turn now, and got back on Route 15.

  We rode in silence. We crossed a wooden bridge over a mountain stream, and drove through the village of Quan Hoa. After another twenty kilometers, we intersected with Route 6, and I turned left, west toward Dien Bien Phu.

  It was a decent road, two narrow lanes, but wide enough for two trucks to pass in opposite directions if they squeezed hard to their right. The road surface was a sort of oiled gravel, which now and then turned to thin asphalt. I got the BMW up to eighty KPH.

  Most of the sparse traffic consisted of logging trucks, a few four-wheel drives, and now and then a motorcycle. I saw no motor scooters or ox carts, and no bicycles or pedestrians; this was, indeed, the road to and from nowhere.

  To the left rose the hills and mountains that ran along the Laotian border, and to the right were more hills, and beyond them were the towering peaks of what was called the Tonkinese Alps.