The Return: A Novel of Vietnam Read online

  Lump peered squinting out the window into the night over San Diego, as though searching the darkness for his memory. I let him stand there in his silence, for I had my own darkness to peer into. Around us were strewn beer cans and pizza remnants. Dawn was still a long way off.

  After awhile, Lump said, still looking out the window, “Another Bud, Colonel Kazmarek?”

  “It’s my turn to empty my bladder, Commander Adkins,” I said. It gave me perverse satisfaction being able to get out of my own chair with less effort than the retired navy man required.

  When I returned, Lump was reseated with a fresh beer and had opened one for me on the end table next to my chair. He chuckled, recalling something.

  “Solitary, Nasty, Brutish and Short,” he said. “That was what Pete called the law firm he said he supported because of blackmail from ex-wives.”

  His eyelids were heavy from beers.

  “It might also be the law firm of life,” I said.

  “Did Pete ever remarry?” he asked me.

  “He said three times was all he could take.”

  “How about you, Jack? Are you married?”

  I looked away. It took me a moment to answer. I coped with Elizabeth’s death by not coping.

  “For more than thirty years,” I said.

  “Vietnam was hard on wives,” he said after another pause. “The cunts. There’d be a bounty on them if it wasn’t for what they got between their legs.”

  “You weren’t married?”

  “A marriage of inertia. Sharon stayed with me until it became a habit. Then she got fat and ugly and had a heart condition. Where else could she go after that?”

  His head and eyes dropped and his great, gnarled hands tumbled in his lap, like he had nothing else to do with them.

  “Sharon wasn’t always fat and ugly...”

  His voice drifted off.

  “Gook cunts now,” he said, looking up again. “Gook cunts were loyal if you could find a good one.”

  “Was Mhai a good one?”

  He snorted. Then he thought about it.

  “You know how Vietnam was,” he said. “You could never tell who the enemy was and who he wasn’t. A ten year old would run up trying to sell you a Coke. Next thing you knew, the little fucker was tossing a grenade down your skivvies. Kids and cunts... it didn’t make any difference to the commies, as long as they were useful. Cunts could be the most vicious. Kill ’em all, I say, and let God sort ’em out.”

  Yeah. I knew how Vietnam was. We let silence come back in.

  “Are you too tired to continue?” I asked him.

  “Lets finish this tonight. Then I don’t want to think about it anymore. It was all a long time ago.”

  He reinforced himself with a long draw from his Bud.

  “Mhai almost died anyhow after Pete brought her back to Shit City,” he went on, acquiring that one thousand yard stare that meant you weren’t actually seeing whatever you appeared to be looking at. “She had a bullet hole in her thigh that cracked her femur and another one that nicked the upper lobe of her left lung.”

  Why Pete hadn’t thrown the woman to Piss Hole and the other Nguoi Nhai for interrogation through water urn and radio battery still mystified Lump. Piss Hole would have persevered until she did talk; he hated the enemy personally and passionately, born out of the VC having executed his father and brother for refusing to yield a rice tax to the Viet Cong provisional government. He would have liked nothing better than to add the VC woman’s ears to his collection.

  This was war. War meant killing the enemy any way you could, the more violently the better, no matter who he—or she—was. Pete himself during his previous SEAL Team tour had killed at least one female enemy. Killed her while she looked at him. Killed her knowing she was female, killed her anyhow before she could raise her rifle and kill him. Stitched her with his carbine starting at mid-section and ending with the last round obliterating her face. Then he walked over, nudged her body with his boot toe to make sure she was dead, and walked off and seldom thought of it afterwards.

  Lt. Pete Brauer was not normally a man disposed to show much compassion toward fellow creatures; he had seen too much of war and its brutality. He started off interrogating the woman personally when she regained consciousness, using Piss Hole as interpreter. War also meant extracting intelligence from captured enemy soldiers in order to kill even more enemy. Papers recovered from the bodies of the woman’s dead companions revealed them to be high-ranking VC cadre. Tax collectors, a VC colonel, and a provisional VC chief. A woman in that company meant she must either have rank or was along to satisfy lusts. A photo she carried showing herself with Commander Minh reduced the likelihood that she was from a brothel. She undoubtedly contained valuable information.

  “She’s Minh’s fucking mistress!” Lump exclaimed.

  She lay bleeding on the floor of the Team House in Shit City while Piss Hole roared Pete’s questions directly into her face. Pete knelt at her shoulders with Lump while Ensign Cochran watched with both fascination and revulsion. Biet Hai and Nguoi Nhai crowded around, offering suggestions and giggling the way Viets did. From the very beginning, she refused to give her captors the satisfaction of her uttering a single sound. She merely looked up from the sod-and-sand floor. Her eyes slowly traveled around the circle of hostile faces until they came to Pete’s. She looked directly into his eyes, deeply. Her eyes seemed to say: Kill me, do with me what you will—but all you will gain is my death.

  Pete froze in place, his own eyes locked against hers and held there. Then her eyelids closed in resignation. Helpless, she waited patiently to die and for whatever torture preceded dying.

  Pete stood up, his gaze still on the woman.

  “Pol Pots bring water jar?” Piss Hole asked.

  “She will never talk,” Pete said softly. “She’ll let us kill her before she says anything.”

  “Then throw the goofy cunt in the river,” Lump Adkins insisted with a disgusted snort.

  “We make ‘goofy cunt’ talk like bird,” Piss Hole promised.

  Pete said nothing for a long minute. Simply looked down upon the still figure, her black PJs ripped and bloody from where bullets had slammed into her body. Then he turned slowly away.

  “Take her,” he said.

  He started to walk off. He turned back. “Wait.”

  She opened her eyes. They were brown, not dark like those of most Vietnamese, but lighter with flecks of green in them. They were only slightly slanted, turning down in a fold at the nose, then widening up and out in a flare. Egyptian eyes. Her skin was Mediterranean olive instead of the dark yellow-brown common in much of Asia. Dried blood stained one cheek and her forehead. But even through her blood and defiance and pain, she had to be the most gorgeous creature, brown, black, yellow or white, that most of the men present had ever laid eyes on. Even Lump admitted he had never seen a woman with quite that mixture of beauty and inner cold resolve. But it had to be something other than her looks that made the hard-nosed and icy SEAL turn back, walk over to the prone woman that he admired and respected. There was a presence about her, a deep intelligence in the eyes. She seemed to carry her head proudly, defiantly, even while lying on the dirt floor bleeding to death.

  “Cochran,” Lt. Brauer said, “take one of the trucks and run over to the 9th Infantry and bring back a battalion surgeon. Tell him she can’t be moved.”

  Lump Adkins’ eyes blazed. “Mister Brauer, she’s a VC cunt who’ll cut your throat out if you turn your back on her. She’s dying, Pete. Let her.”

  “Mister Cochran,” Pete said,” you have your orders.”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper.”

  Lump, an old man now, sipped on his Bud and peered back into that long-ago past.

  “An army doctor came over from Dong Tam and patched her up,” he said. “At first she couldn’t be moved. Pete fixed her a bunk in the Team House and kept her under guard. Sometimes I’d catch Pete just sitting in there looking at her, and her looking back at him
. Like two animals about to go at each other’s throats, but held back by something.”

  “When she could be moved, Pete kept her instead of turning her over to the army as a POW or sending her to the MAAG Intel people in Saigon for questioning. I warned him, either give the bitch to Intel, I told him, or else kill her.”

  He took a long breath. The white bristles of hair around his ears stood out as though ready to absorb his words.

  Pete finally moved the wounded woman, Lump went on. He didn’t say where at first, but Lump suspected it was to Dong Tam. Not the army post Dong Tam but instead the town Dong Tam, the nearest major feature for which the army base had been named. It was about fifteen kilometers southeast of the base, also near the river. It was more than a village, less than a city. Refugees had doubled the town’s population following the latest NLF offensive. ARVN—Army of the Republic of Vietnam—and the U.S. both had troops stationed in the town at an ARVN base. Dong Tam was supposed to be “pacified,” but the security net around the town was full of holes. There were probably as many VC in town as there were ARVN. Clandestinely, of course.

  “The gook VC cunt?” Lump asked Pete. “Where are you keeping her?”

  “In a safe place.”

  “Maybe I should ask why are you keeping her?” Lump persisted, hurt because his friend refused to confide in him.

  “Look, Lump. We have no secrets anywhere in this country as long as we conduct joint ops with the South Vietnamese. What with that photo she had of her and Commander Minh, I suspect she’ll be stirring up some interest out there in Charlie land. I want Minh to know it’s me he has to deal with, that nobody except me knows where she is. It’s for your own good, partner.”

  There was no way Pete could keep her presence and whereabouts secret for long. Not in this kind of war where anybody could be a spy, a saboteur, an assassin, up to including the ARVN you worked with. Pete realized this; he was no cherry greenhorn first time in-country. He wanted Commander Minh to find out where she was.

  “You’re taking a damn big risk, Pete. It’s goddamn not worth it.”

  Lt. Brauer spent most of his stand down days and nights away from Shit City and in Dong Tam. Watching the woman, wherever it was he kept her, using her as bait and waiting for someone to approach his trap. I have your woman, Pete was saying to Commander Minh. This is between you and me, Minh. Man to man. Come and get her if your want her, if you’ve got the balls. Capturing or killing Commander Minh would knock a big hole in Charlie’s activities along the My Tho River and in Nam Can Forest.

  Several weeks passed. Pete’s trap remained untripped, his bait untouched. Pete was beginning to think perhaps he had overestimated the woman’s value to the NLF and to Minh. Maybe she was as expendable as every other pawn within the communist system. Maybe nobody gave a damn that she was being held prisoner. Or perhaps, on the other hand, Minh was only playing it cool, letting the Americans treat her wounds for him since medical treatment was primitive at best among the VC.

  “She claims she has no rank, that she was merely the entertainment,” Pete told Lump.

  “A woman who looks like that?” Lump snarled. “Bullshit. What are you going to do with her now?”

  “I haven’t given up yet. We may still develop some intelligence. She says she wants to chien hoi.”

  Chieu hoi meant to “come over,” to defect from the enemy camp. The one who defected was a hoi chanh. It happened all the time. Most of Lump Adkins’ Biet Hai were former VC who had chieu hoi’d.

  “Do you believe she wants to chieu hoi?” Lump asked, skeptical.

  Pete shrugged. “I think she’s VC down to her pretty round eye-hating ass.”

  “Are you porking the bitch, that why you’re keeping her?” Lump demanded. “Commander Minh’ll cut your throat.”

  “She thinks she’s getting information to pass on to Minh,” Pete replied nonchalantly. “It works both ways. She can be more useful to us than we are to her.”

  “And if she fucks you over?”

  Pete shrugged again and made a sinister knife-slicing motion across his throat.

  “She will fuck you over, Mister Brauer. First of all, she’s a cunt and they can’t help it. They come built with a fuck-over installed. Second, high-ranking VC don’t chieu hoi.”

  Lump was tiring fast now, as old men will late at night. He got up wearily and went to the window. I gathered watching San Diego was one of his favorite entertainments these days.

  “There was a Catholic mission in Dong Tam,” he recalled. “The priest there was a skinny Frenchie everybody called Father Pierre. He got along with both the VC and the government by toeing a strict middle line. The mission was sanctuary for either side. Pete had been keeping Mhai in a locked room at Bonnie My’s hotel and whorehouse. When it was obvious Minh wasn’t going to take the bait, Pete moved her to the mission to allow her to recuperate.

  “I only saw Mhai one other time after Pete moved her from Shit City and that was at the mission. She had almost recovered by that time. All she had was a slight limp. From what I gathered she was voluntarily staying on at the mission to help Father Pierre and Bonnie My with the orphanage they had set up in the old rock hotel down the street on the top floor of Bonnie My’s whorehouse. I knew the bitch was good looking, even when we brought her back from the ambush and she was shot all to hell. When I saw her again, I almost understood why Pete kept her. She was the kind of woman you stood up on the mantel to be admired. They’re the most dangerous kind.”

  Mhai had slipped into jeans and a white short-sleeved blouse, Lump said. Western attire that Pete picked up for her on one of his trips to Saigon. She had tied her long black hair back with a red ribbon. She moved as silently and unobtrusively as a shadow, if a woman that striking could be called unobtrusive. She demurely acknowledged introductions in perfect English only slightly accented, then disappeared while Lump and Pete had tea with Father Pierre and a Buddhist monk in a dirty saffron robe, Thay Li Chung. Thay was the respectful Vietnamese form of addressing all monks. It meant “teacher.”

  “Thay Li and I were close friends on a rubber plantation near DaNang,” Father Pierre explained, his face gone grave. “That was before the war...”

  He looked at Lump the visitor and smiled.

  “I believe your friend Lt. Brauer is more inclined to be a Buddhist than a Catholic, but the both of us continue to work on his soul. Lt. Brauer is a very talented man.”

  He directed Lump to admire a portrait in oils hanging on the wall of his study. Mhai’s lovely face seemed to glow in the frame. She made a gorgeous model. Lump got up for a closer look. The artist had painted his name in the lower corner. Brauer.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It had all been a long time ago, Vietnam, but as Lump talked about it I began recalling things that I had not thought about in a long time. Things that had encapsulated themselves in my soul to rot and fester over the years. I remembered the Catholic mission with its mud-brown walls on a shady side street in Dong Tam, and Bonnie My’s whore house hotel and orphanage shot all to hell during the TET fighting. My company, B-for-Bravo, had entered Dong Tam to mop up after the two-day-long battle at the whorehouse. That was Pete’s fight. Curious how Pete’s and my paths kept crisscrossing in Vietnam for us not to have met until years afterwards.

  When Lump rose to make a latrine call, his bladder again, the interlude gave my memories permission to run back to those days that had provided grist for nightmares ever since. Talk of Vam Tho had rekindled ancient night sweats. Twice back then I had led my platoon into Vam Tho. The first time, the landing zone was hot...

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  No American soldiers in any war ever suffered more than infantrymen fighting in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Dense jungle, tangled mangrove swamps, muddy canals and boot-sucking rice paddies. Driving monsoon rains that made your teeth chatter, followed minutes later by a sun so fierce your brain boiled in its skull. A foot of brackish water covered the rice fields. Myriad crisscrossing canals meant n
eck-deep mud at low tide and water and mud over the head at high tide. Much of the dry land was booby-trapped. Leeches and mosquitoes sucked GI blood. Red ants had bites so painful they could make a soldier jump up screaming in the middle of a firefight. There were one hundred thirty three species of snakes in Vietnam, all but two of which were poisonous. The strike of the Krait snake was so deadly soldiers called it “0l’ One Step.” If it bit you, you made only one step before you dropped dead. Fear and discomfort were a boonirat’s constant companions in the Delta. There was little comfort. There was only survival.

  Colonel Bob Hackman, battalion commander of the 4/39th of the 9th, was one hardcore, hard-charging, gung-ho sonofabitch. Rumor had it that he had won enough medals fighting in Korea and on previous tours in Vietnam to give him back trouble if he wore them all, “Cut no slack!” was the motto for 4th Battalion, the “Hardcore.” He encouraged his troops to call themselves “Recondos.” Battalion GIs saluted officers and shouted, “Hardcore cuts no slack, sir! Recondo!”

  We were at war, goddamnit. After Colonel Hackman took over battalion command, we went looking for Charlie. The Colonel wanted Charlie to know that we were looking for him. This was war. We weren’t waiting anymore for Charlie to come to us and pick us off like helpless geese with his snipers and booby traps. We were the Hardcore and the warriors of the Hardcore were dangerous bad-ass mo-fuckers from hell.

  Maybe. The younger guys strutted around in base camp looking bad. At least they did before Charlie showed them they weren’t that bad. I wanted to do a job for Colonel Hackman, but I also wanted to keep my kids alive at the same time. As many of them as I could. The platoon called me “Lt. Kaz” or, sometimes, “Mother Kaz” I was tall and in those days as skinny and burnt as an old piece of leather left in the sun. Maybe I did act like a mother with my men. Lord knows I fussed enough at my poor bastards, trying to keep them alive. I was a retread from the enlisted ranks. That was a plus on my side among the troops. I was also at least a dozen years older than the average age of Third Platoon soldiers. I hoped that gave me a cooler head, sounder judgment. I hoped it