Читать книгу Beyond Survival - Gerald Coffee - Страница 10

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The Enemy’s Other Face

The absolute tests are those we face alone, without the support of others who believe as we do. There the beliefs we hold most dear are challenged—some to be strengthened, some to be tempered, others to be abandoned—but all to be examined. From deep within we claim the values that we know to be our own. Those are the ones by which we are willing to live or die.

My eyes opened and I was wide awake. I sensed my surroundings more than I could see them—dark, dingy, and unfamiliar—so I closed my eyes and thought for the next five minutes or so. The sounds and smells were familiar, from many, many years past; they were almost comforting. How many hours had I played and daydreamed in the hay-loft of our old barn on the ranch, sharing the lives of my barnyard friends? Never before had that era of my life seemed so distant as now.

The scent of the fresh straw on which I was lying was very strong. I could hear more straw being sorted softly and munched by a nearby animal: a cow, my nose told me. I could feel a light chill in the musty air—unmistakably early morning. I heard two low voices nearby; one was that of my guard of the previous day, the other of a stranger. They were discussing who knows what. Their conversation was interrupted occasionally by the guttural bubbling of the water pipe they shared. The sweet, exotic smell of the opium mingled with the barnyard smells around me. The strange pipe sound seemed almost an extension of the conversation itself. I had decided by now that when spoken without anger, the Vietnamese language had a kind of careless, bubbly rhythm— like coffee perking. Coffee perking! God, would I love to have a cup of hot coffee!

Again my eyes opened. This time as I blinked, the dried sweat at the corners of my eyes cracked loose and began to sting again, like the day before when it was fresh.

I was aware of the roof now, close above me; the low side of what appeared to be a fairly large lean-to structure, maybe a stable. It was loosely thatched, and many of the sisal ties that held the dark, moldy straw to the crooked stick frame had rotted loose, dangling down in clumps and strands like grimy little stalactites. The thick bamboo uprights of the shed were polished to a dark patina from the rubbing of the tethered animals around me. Sure enough, a light brown cow—bony but content—was cudding away just a few feet from me, her breath making little steam puffs from black nostrils. I hadn’t thought the air to be that cold, even though I had awakened covered only by the combat fatigues I’d been shot down in and was curled into a fetal S to ward off the chill.

A water buffalo stood near the cow in resigned stillness as three or four reddish chickens clucked and scratched aimlessly about its feet. A couple of scrawny milk goats tethered near the broad, open entrance seemed to complete my morning menagerie. As I lay there, quietly taking it all in, I was struck by the strange, dreamlike quality of the scene, the universal simplicity and serenity of the animals, the low bubbling of the opium pipe nearby, the unique mixture of smells, and finally, the incongruity of my own presence within it all, plucked suddenly from my familiar, professional environment and plopped down here in the middle of Southeast Asia among people we’ve been bombing and strafing. I’ve been captured by them. I am a Prisoner of War. I moved my head slowly from side to side, incredulous at my plight. God, I thought, I guess it doesn’t always happen to the other guy. I think I’m going to need you a lot, Lord. Please stay with me.

I started to raise myself up on one elbow and tried, without much success, to repress the exclamation of pain. The water buffalo swung his stately head in my direction for a cursory check before raising its nostrils to test the dampness in the awakening air. My entire body seemed to beg: Don’t move me again, please! My right arm and shoulder ached more than the rest. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so sore and stiff in my life. How long had I not moved? Every joint in my body seemed to be fused in place to hold me mercifully still, as if in a body cast. Not surprising, I thought, since every limb and muscle had been wrenched—some past their limit—in that tumbling, plummeting ejection. Not to mention the subsequent pummeling at the hands of those first villagers as I had run their impromptu gauntlet up from the beach to the toolshed that had been my first “cell.”

How long had it been now? Three days? Four? I wasn’t at all sure. I wasn’t even sure how long I had just slept. I seemed to recall arriving here at my stable the previous evening, but it could have been the one before that. The effect of having taken such a blow and being unconscious for a time was taking a long time to wear off.

My neck and both forearms were blistered crimson, and I imagined my face looked the same. I wondered, could I have been burned by the pyrotechnic charges in the ejection system? We had never been briefed on that as a hazard. Or had the plane exploded at the moment of ejection? So much for wishing I had delayed the ejection just long enough to get out over the Gulf, closer to our rescue forces.

Gradually, I groaned my way up to one elbow and then to a tenuous sitting position, leaning stiffly against the plaited bamboo that formed the back boundary of my little straw burrow. My grunts and expletives distracted the cow and the goats from their chewing. They stared curiously at their strange stable mate.

The morning-twilight space between the top of the rickety mat walls and the scalloped eaves above revealed the pinkish silhouettes of thatched ridges and gables of other huts. As we had approached the hamlet in the dusk of the previous evening (or whatever evening it had been), the variegated clumps of huts and trees and foliage had appeared as a homey little island in a serene pond of gray-green paddies—all crisscrossed by a network of levees like the one on which we had wended our way. Once inside the village, however, it had become a warren of twisting footpaths, prickly hedges, smelly little ditches, vegetable patches, and a maze of plaited walls and fences—all partly obscured by dense clumps of bamboo and shrubbery. In the fading light it had all looked so peaceful, yet quietly ominous. The air was pervaded by the salty, pungent odor of nuoc-mam, the fermenting sauce stored in crocks in every house and used in varying degrees to spice up food. I would come to know it as possibly the most memorable sensory characteristic of Southeast Asia, a lifelong reminder of my experience there. After the survival gear on my torso harness and in the pockets of my G-suit, my boots had been the next thing taken from me. As we had continued on through the hamlet, the duck and chicken droppings that squished between my bare toes were all that connected the scene to reality.

The straw beneath me was matted now into the shape of my sleeping form. It was surprisingly well defined, I thought; my sleep should have been fitful. My mind certainly had been alternatively embracing the hope of a terrible nightmare, and then trying to reject the all-too-evident reality. By now, the chronology of my final flight from the Kitty Hawk was clear: The struggle to control my disabled plane, the high speed, topsy-turvy ejection, the mad confusion of my capture, the unwitting strafing attack by our own A-1 Skyraiders as we scurried back to the shore as fast as the scrawny oarsman could propel us. And finally, the nagging uncertainty of Bob’s fate.

We hadn’t been together all that long. He had recently completed the transition syllabus in the training squadron where I had been an instructor for three years. I had taught him and others—pilots and bombardier-navigators—to know and operate the aircraft systems, and the flight tactics of the aerial reconnaissance mission. As I had rotated back to sea duty, I was pleased we had been paired up as a crew. Bob was good, and our Trans-Pac flight of a Vigilante from central Florida to Japan and finally aboard the Kitty Hawk confirmed his skills. Our three-day layover in Atsugi, Japan—hotsi baths and massages, and liberty time with our new squadron mates—had drawn us closer. His young wife, Pat, a schoolteacher, and Bea were probably in touch right now, sharing the uncertainty of their husbands’ fates, and supporting one another as much as possible.

How many times had I relived it these past few days, that brief glimpse of Bob, alive in the water and closer than I to the shoreline and the approaching boats? Obviously he, too, had cheated the odds for surviving an ejection so far outside the accepted speed and stability parameters of the system. But had he survived the hairtrigger contempt of our captors? The straffing attack? Had his life been spared as miraculously as mine from the deadly swarms of 20mm slugs rained down upon us by the planes of our RESCAP (Rescue Air Patrol)? God, he was my responsibility! Have I gotten him killed? What could I have done differently? What emergency procedure or flight tactic might have saved us? God, please let Bob be alive. Please be with him, wherever he is.

I sat there in the half-light of the awakening stable, mentally wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth imagining all the things I might have done differently to avoid my present predicament and the apparent loss of my friend. The possibilities were endless.

Had I continued to harbor this line of thought, I would have become a member of a deadly club; a few POWs I would come to know who assumed personal blame for the loss of one or more crewmen in their aircraft. And with the self-blame would come a consuming guilt. In the coming years, I would find enough more immediate reasons for guilt without laying this on myself as well.

Somehow I realized, even at this very early stage, that what had happened was well within the range of risk we had all embraced. I was certain that had our positions been reversed, with Bob in command of the aircraft and responsible for our fate, he too would have accepted the addition to our mission with a positive nod and a thumbs-up just as I had. I struggled to the conclusion that if I was to maintain faith in myself to survive this ordeal—the ramifications of which I could not yet begin to fathom—I must learn to keep events in perspective and to keep the past behind me.

The crispness of the morning air around my upright body seemed to sharpen my recollections, subordinating for the moment at least my awareness of the painful stiffness of my calcified body.

Now, I couldn’t seem to erase the scene from my mind. Our guys had been relentless in their attack, hoping, I’m sure, to keep the boats from reaching us farther out in the Gulf, where the wreckage probably had been and where they thought we would be as well.

I had pulled myself up along the shallow gunwale of the boat watching the A-l Sky Raider aircraft roll in pass after pass, their bullets raining down. White plumes of water walked their way across our bow and then close aboard the stern. My captors never flinched, and returned the fire with their own weapons. The acrid smell of cordite stung my nostrils.

I couldn’t imagine how the boat I was in made it safely to shore. The instant the bow had touched the sandy beach, we jumped into the shallow surf and ran toward the safety of the berm on the far side of the beach. The next strafing attack caught us halfway. With my bright yellow flotation gear left in the boat, there was nothing to differentiate me from the enemy. I scrambled like hell just as they did.

As others were frantically half dragging, half pushing me across the beach between wooden fishing boats and fan-shaped nets spread to dry, two or three went down around us. The mere sound of steel impacting flesh and bone seemed to slam their suddenly lifeless bodies to the sand.

I tried to coordinate my steps with the two who were jerking and pulling me across the soft sand. I would gladly have run like hell, but they wouldn’t allow it. They were out of sync with each other, too, so we stumbled and scrambled toward the far side of the beach. God, it took forever. As the geysers of sand erupted around me, I instinctively tightened my sphincter as if to suck myself in and disappear. At least the tensing seemed to make me feel like a smaller target. Small comfort! Cradling my injured right arm tightly to my body, I had flung myself behind the levee, rolling as I hit the soft earth.

With my brain still numb from the concussion, I was in a strictly reactive mode. I seemed to be on the outside of all this—a detached observer—no pain, no fear, no other emotion, just a body trying instinctively to survive.

Just before they pushed my face down into the mud, I followed the terrified, over-the-shoulder glances of the last stragglers across the beach. There, boring down straight toward us, was the head-on view of an A-4 Skyhawk—the smallest and deadliest light-attack aircraft in the Kitty Hawk’s air group. In the space of a second I half-saw, half-imagined the face of my shipmate up there. Had we passed each other in the passageway that morning? Had he sat across the white-linened table in the wardroom last night? Right then in my mind’s eye I saw his right eye quadrisected perfectly by the glowing crosshairs of a gunsight between us. I took into the mud with me the rapidly enlarging image of the warbird, wing roots engulfed by blue flame and smoke from his cannons. With my eyes closed, the sudden, rending scream of the 2.75 rockets was unexpected and even more terrifying—like the violent ripping of a sheet but magnified a million times. The rippling explosions were immediate. Four times in quick succession my body convulsed upward with the earth around me, my face making a new print in the mud each time I crashed down. The rain of sand kicked up by the 20mm slugs was replaced by heavy dirt clods and bits of wood and smoldering net. A rusted oarlock still threaded through a jagged piece of wooden gunwale plopped down on its edge a few inches from my face.

I remained still for a long time with heaving lungs and pounding heart, my body unwilling to release its straining clutch on the ground. The Vietnamese on either side of me were in no hurry to let go either, and I was aware of the commonality of our instinctive response to the prospect of instant, violent death.

Long after the last decibel of jet engine had faded into the distant sky, the Vietnamese who seemed to have assumed my charge eased off on the pressure of his rifle, which had pinned my neck and shoulders to the ground. Tentatively, I raised my head and looked down the levee to my left. We seemed like turtles, heads poking from shells, testing the air for more danger. The beach was strewn with the smoldering splinters of several boats and debris of fishing paraphernalia. It was scarred by deep craters, the damp sand yielding to the rapid seepage from the sea. But I was conscious mostly of several bodies that seemed to jump out at me in vivid color from this otherwise black-and-white war movie I was observing.

Strange, I had thought, here I am thirty-two years old and, not counting funerals, these are the first dead people I have ever seen. One was rocking gently in the shallow waves, while others were partly obscured by sand and wreckage. I still seemed to be detached, and they registered to me only as other people, people like me whose blood made the sand red and sticky.

With much shouting and jabbering, and with no one in particular in charge, they led me roughly along the edge of the beach toward the little fishing village and up what appeared to be its central lane. Others were running, wide-eyed, past us toward the water to aid their wounded and gather the dead. The villagers were hostile and excited. Spontaneously they formed a corridor lining the little dirt path up from the beach, clubbing me with whatever was handy: shovel and hoe handles, bamboo shoulder poles and a few rifle butts. As I stumbled and winced along through their gauntlet, each seemed to take his cue from the earlier one in line so that any natural restraint or compassion was overcome by the mob’s momentum. Some threatened—or perhaps only feigned—fatal blows with pitchforks and scythes, but were restrained, sometimes at the last instant, by a uniformed cadre who emerged from somewhere to take charge. He walked ahead of me, half sideways and half backward, always watching for such threats from the people, even while inciting them with some sort of singsong chant. Although I only blinked and stared back dumbly, I was aware of the emotional extremes reflected in their faces and voices—men and women, children, even grubby little toddlers riding the hips of their mothers or older sisters. There was curiosity, uncertainty, fear, pity; but mostly there was hatred in them. Aside from those casualties on the beach, how many more of their fathers and brothers were drifting lifelessly out in their placid little bay where the fight for my capture had taken its toll? Which others of their sons and uncles would gradually be rolled and nudged up from the depths and carried up finally onto the beach by three or four successive waves, just like the ones they had played in as children? I was lucky these villagers were having at me right then, before the frenzy of their victory celebration gave way to the full realization of its cost.

Somewhere in the middle of the village, we turned off the lane and walked through a courtyard to the back of someone’s house. There was a small shed, rows of green vegetables on two sides, and the fence and shack of an adjoining yard on the other. In the shed were various gardening and farming tools hanging on the walls and stacked in corners. A rack of sun-dried fish hung overhead, and the little hut smelled of fish and manure. The cadre motioned for me to sit on a pile of burlap sacks, and while one of the young militiamen took off my boots, he demanded my dog tags and my wallet, which held only my military ID card, my Geneva Convention card, and about ten dollars. This was my “combat wallet,” the cards to identify me as an American Fighting Man—a combatant as opposed to a spy—in case of capture, and the money to buy a meal or a couple of beers should I have to divert from landing aboard the aircraft carrier to some military airfield in South Vietnam. My “blood chits”—which consisted of a written explanation in several Southeast Asian languages and dialects of who I was and the reward to be expected if turned over to friendly forces (a silk American flag, and several taels of gold for immediate incentive)—had been stripped from me in the boat. Fat chance of being turned over to friendlies by these hornets, I thought.

The loss of my dog tags and ID cards had been devastating to my morale. It would take a long time to realize that it had been only the first small step in the incremental peeling away of my identity, an identity built up over a lifetime but condensed on my dog tags to name, rank, serial number, date of birth, blood type, and religion.

The confiscation of my boots—probably in part to discourage me from escaping—increased my vulnerability, further compounding the sense of helplessness caused by my injuries. Under the crude scrutiny of the villagers, who took turns crowding up to the half-open door of the shack, I had never felt more naked and vulnerable.

Indeed, by then my brain was beginning to recover sufficiently from its trauma to comprehend more fully the real danger I faced. I was now beginning to feel considerable attachment to the situation; this was no dream or war movie. I was beginning to understand that all of this was real.

As darkness fell and the crowds became sparse, I was jolted from my simple prayers for strength and courage by the flat, metallic, nerve-rattling sound of a gong close by. Someone was beating on a piece of metal—like a triangle dinner bell, but with more “clank” than “ding”—each blow widely spaced at first, but then with gradually increasing frequency to an intense crescendo finished off by one final, distinct beat. I heard other gongs from distant villages, each with its distinct tone, but all signaling, in this case, the end of the formal work day and calling the people in from the fields and paddies. There was an alien savageness about it. Suddenly, it seemed the plug had been pulled on my remaining reservoir of confidence and I felt very, very far from home.

After talking with a villager who seemed to convey official instructions, the cadre ordered one guard to tie a rope around my neck and the other to blindfold me. He used a piece of rag found on the dirt floor of the shed and permeated with the same offensive smell.

We headed off, the cadre, two guards and myself, out of the village and inland, I guessed. The going was slow the first mile or so. Unable to see my way, I slipped down the sides of the muddy paths every few minutes, only to be yanked up each time by the coarse rope around my neck. It was cutting and chafing my already stinging face. Holding onto my injured arm with the good one made it even more difficult to keep my balance and, when I fell, to hurriedly wallow back up onto the path to ease the bite of the leash. Finally, the cadre became impatient with the slowness of our progress along the narrow levee and ordered the stinking rag across my eyes to be removed.

We traveled easier then, guided along by the beams of two flashlights and pale moonlight diffused by a layer of thin clouds. We still stopped frequently for the three of them to confer about our route. One time during a stop, we were approached by a young man who seemed to know our mission. He had come from the direction of a village just ahead on our pathway. It was marked by a cluster of dim oil lamps and the frenzied sounds of some kind of rally. There was chanting and cheering punctuated by a gong. The conversation had been in whispers and had obviously been about me. One of the guards turned to me and, with a smile that matched the menacing sound of the gong, pointed to the village then to me, making a slashing motion across his throat. “They want to kill you,” I translated his accompanying words intuitively and marveled at how rapidly we pick up sign language, especially on issues of life and death.

The cadre took the messenger seriously. We reversed course and circumnavigated the village, always talking in whispers and sometimes crouching low along hedgerows to remain undetected. The sounds of the frenzied villagers ebbed and flowed as we crept along and I was relieved as the din faded behind us. At least the concern for my immediate survival was reassuring. They were taking seriously their apparent order to deliver me someplace safely.

Later, after moving along for some time at a steady pace, we encountered two old women shuffling along in the opposite direction. They both carried shoulder poles (I would later know them as chogi sticks) balanced at each end by shallow woven baskets, their obviously heavy contents obscured by cloth tucked in around the edges. The first woman also carried a small kerosene lamp with a wide conical top so its tiny flame could not be seen from the air. As they approached, the lamp swung quaintly to and fro with the rhythm of her bouncing load, like a scene described in a child’s storybook. The path was wide enough for us to pass one another, but our lead man with the flashlight seemed to recognize the old lamp swinger. We all stopped as they talked softly but excitedly. They were exchanging news from the opposite ends of our path, his version animated by airplanes and shooting gestures. Several times the two women glanced guardedly toward me. The leader shined the light directly into my face and they moved closer cautiously for a better look at the “black-hearted American air pirate,” as I was to be called frequently in the future.

In the reflected light, I saw their faces and was astonished at how much they looked exactly as they were “supposed to”—right off the page of some National Geographic of my youth, all delicate wrinkles and indented mouths where teeth should have been. In the shadows of their woven conical hats, little threads and tufts of gray hair—more silver in the soft light—poked from beneath the black scarves tied beneath their chins. Their little black eyes sparkled in the light, belying the tiredness of the sagging skin around them. They held no youthful fervor and certainly no hatred. One of them asked a question of the guard holding the rope to my neck, then clucked her disapproval of his answer.

Her face revealed the genuine concern and compassion of the grandmother she surely was. The gentleness of her touch as she reached up to test the tightness of the rope around my neck transcended the political and ideological conflicts that had led us both to this unlikely nocturnal encounter. She bubbled a few words to her companion, who immediately withdrew a banged-up thermos bottle from a shoulder bag. As the other woman poured hot tea, she stooped slightly, looked into my eyes questioningly, her hand held out straight, palm down, and level with her knees. She then stair-stepped it up, pausing briefly at three higher levels. She finished with her finger pointing at me and curiosity in her face. My mind searched for her meaning for only a second. Of course! Did I have children? I smiled wanly and held up three fingers, then four. No, three! How could I explain to her that my wife was pregnant with our fourth child? As she acknowledged my perplexity, I reemphasized three, then traced a bulging tummy with my good hand. Her eyes widened and the little wrinkles on her forehead furrowed even more deeply, as she shook her head slowly in comprehension.

She shared a few words with the other woman, but without breaking the link from her eyes to mine. Her expression was a mixture of compassion and wonderment. Again she clucked her puzzlement and wagged her diminutive head. I could imagine her thinking, “Why would a young American flyer come so far away from home when he should be back there with his wife and babies?”

The taste of the hot, bitter tea lingered on my tongue as my guards and I hurried on. Even the second cupful the crone offered hadn’t quenched my thirst, a thirst I hadn’t been aware of until it had been teased alive by the first swallow of the tea. I must have sweat much more than I had realized during the afternoon and evening.

With the blindfold removed, I was able to move along fairly well, head down, eyes fastened to the bobbing white light preceding us along the path. The night was otherwise very dark now, the previously misty-thin clouds having thickened to block out the moonlight. There seemed to be no light or activity ahead that might define our destination.

The Vietnamese were speaking sparingly now as we continued on rather mechanically. My thoughts wandered back to the old women and their kindness. Where had they been going on such a dark night? Probably returning to their own shabby homes after visiting their children or grandchildren. I would have many future occasions to recall them fondly, as well as my own naive assumption about their activities as the “party line” would be espoused repetitively on the VOV, the Voice of Vietnam radio:

“In accordance with the enlightened policy of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam toward the equality of women in the revolutionary society, women are allowed to work equally, side by side with men. In the rural areas, older women, pregnant women, and women who are menstruating are allowed to work in dry paddies closer to home.”

“Make watah! Make watah!” One of my guards from the previous evening, the one I heard chatting and smoking a while ago, stood in the doorway pointing to his crotch. I had so intensely projected myself back into the events of the past few days that I had not even been aware of his appearance. His half-question half-command brought me back instantly to the reality of my humble accommodations. “Make watah!” he repeated. I guess he’s asking if I need to take a leak, I told myself. I don’t really, but I’d better take advantage of the opportunity. As it turned out, he had anticipated the morning gong, for as I struggled to my feet in the straw, the flat brassy clang of a tire iron on the 100mm shell casing hanging from a limb in the adjoining courtyard assaulted my ears, adding to the anguish of my effort. As the inhabitants of the hamlet, My Xa, fell to their morning ritual, I pissed in the binjo ditch sewer across the path from the doorway. My urine was deep amber in color, and I realized this was the first time I had relieved myself since my capture. I must have been really dehydrated.

To say the rest of the day passed uneventfully would have been true in the normal sense, but for me, as I became gradually immersed in this strange society, everything was an event. The soup and rice I was given in the morning and early evening—my first food in North Vietnam—were a major event. The soup had been made of coarse, bitter greens, but was thick with pork and well seasoned. The rice was sticky. Both had been served piping hot and I had found myself ravenous, but didn’t know it until the food was available.

I had “made water” a couple more times and learned that these two words accompanied by crotch pointing made it clear that I had to take a leak. And as I thought about the phrase “taking a leak,” I realized, with minor amusement, that it would probably be thought more strange by a Vietnamese than “making water” seemed to me.

Various groups and individuals looked in on me through the day as word apparently got around. To these simple people, I was obviously quite an oddity, a subject of curiosity in any case, and a rare flesh-and-blood sample of the Enemy. One group had been all children, I guessed from the local school. I was the subject of their current events field trip. Their young teacher had been as wide-eyed as her pupils when they all squatted down a few feet from me as the cadre who brought me there related—with considerable animation and detail—the odious crimes I had supposedly committed upon their country. This was to be my first experience of the incredible hold the Communists have on their people when they control every input from birth on. Children were taught daily that my government and country were the reasons for their need for total sacrifice and deprivation in the defense of their homeland and for the unending harshness of their existence. They needed a scapegoat to explain away what, I would soon see at first hand, was actually the inefficiency, unresponsiveness, and total failure of their state-controlled agricultural and industrial programs.

Just after the clanging of the gong that ended the nap period after lunch—around 2 P.M.—the cadre apeared in the entry with a very old man. The two of them talked with a great deal of intensity, pointing in my direction frequently. Finally the cadre left and the old fellow shuffled toward me and hunkered down a few feet in front of me. But for a lifetime in that flat-footed, knee-rending posture, eating, gossiping, gambling, and observing, there was no way that septuagenarian body could have swung down so easily into such a squat, at least not from my western perspective, which glorified chairs, benches, and stools. There weren’t a lot of those to be seen around here.

Squatting there with his clear but somewhat watery eyes, he seemed to contemplate me and the reasons for my presence there. Finally, after several minutes—so many, in fact, that I was just beginning to ignore his stare—he blurted out suddenly, “Why you come Vietnam?” There was true inquiry in his voice and just a hint of hostility. “Why you come Vietnam?” I was startled both by his question and his English. “Why you come Vietnam?” His tone and expression indicated he was genuinely perplexed at why I’d come to Vietnam and also that he honestly wanted to know. I stared back at him, my mind grappling with the question.

Wary at first that this could be some very clever attempt to interrogate me, to trick me into saying more than my name, rank, serial number, and date of birth, as required by the American Fighting Man’s Code of Conduct, I decided finally that there was no guile in the old man’s questions. Why indeed had I come to Vietnam?

My mind raced back several months to the home squadron’s weekly intelligence briefings. The Intelligence officer had intoned matter-of-factly:

“During the Japanese occupation of Indochina during much of World War II, the French presence had dwindled to a minimum. Their preoccupation with the European front had effectively left a colonial vacuum in Southeast Asia, which the Japanese had gladly filled for as long as they could. During the war, the Vietnamese patriot, Ho Chi Minh, organized the resistance against the Japanese. During his leadership of the resistance to the Japanese, Ho and his followers built up a strong and very nationalistic guerrilla movement. They were called Viet Minh (Vietnamese Communists) because of Ho’s political background and ideology. Nevertheless, there had been many instances of cooperation against the Japanese between the Viet Minh and Allied forces, especially in the safekeeping and return of downed U.S. flyers in Indochina.

“After the war, the French were eager to reestablish their colonial presence. Ho Chi Minh—through unofficial channels, since his was not a recognized government— requested the support of Western nations in unilaterally establishing an independent Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The U.S., however, mostly because we perceived Ho was at least as much a Communist as a Nationalist, and because of our knowledge of the brutal Communist regime in Russia after Stalin, chose to support our longtime ally, France, instead. During the early postwar years, the French, with our blessing and military aid, reoccupied Vietnam. And the bloody, protracted French Indo-Chinese War between the French Colonial Army, Legionnaires, and locally conscripted Vietnamese, and the Viet Minh Guerrilla forces began!”

It occurred to me that the old man squatting in front of me had lived a part of it all. He had probably lived that entire briefing I was now replaying in my mind. Where had he learned his English? From some American pilot whose plane had been damaged raiding Japanese forces in southern China, but who had been able to limp to a safe area where indigenous friendlies could help? Had he, an indigenous friendly twenty years before, rescued, aided, and ultimately helped repatriate an American airman like me? Was he, too, reflecting on this peculiar irony of history?

“After the French defeat, an international conference was called in Geneva to help decide the future of Vietnam. Because most of the French forces, infrastructure, and sentiment were centered in Saigon, in the South, and the majority of the Viet Minh forces and support were in the North, centered around Hanoi, the country was divided in two at the 17th parallel as an interim measure. The space immediately on either side of this line was declared a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a buffer to facilitate the disengagement of the two opposing forces. In 1956, there was to be a free national election to decide the fate of the entire country.

The situation polarized rapidly. However, with eleven million people in the North ruled with an iron hand from Ho Chi Minh’s Hanoi, and only nine million in the South, ruled temporarily and barely by an aging mandarin, Bao Dai, who had been favored by the French, one could see the obvious outcome of any election.

The election was not held. The government in South Vietnam stonewalled the whole process, refusing under the existing circumstances to discuss arrangements for the elections or any aspects of reunification. Finally, the entire plan broke down and the international commission established to facilitate and monitor the reunification process disintegrated. The people of South Vietnam, through a series of governments succeeding one another due to abdication, coups, and classic Oriental intrigue, began building—albeit inefficiently—a free and independent nation. They had been blessed by the cream of Vietnam’s agricultural land, natural resources, and beneficent climate. On the other hand, the weather in the North was more harsh, the land more stingy, and subsistence more difficult. These factors alone throughout history had kept the people of the North and South separate and sometimes openly hostile. The North Vietnamese, under the leadership of Ho’s Viet Minh military council, stepped up the guerrilla infiltration and subversion of the South until finally the war between the North and the South was on.”

The old man had smoked his third cigarette down to a tiny stub that he could barely pinch, then tucked it between the dirt floor and the sole of his rubber sandal to crush it. He lit another, and again I declined his offer, shaking my head and uttering the Vietnamese thank-you I’d picked up. “Cam Ud!” He shifted his weight—I thought in preparation to leave—but he just repositioned his butt on the inside of his ankles and closer to the floor.

“The fighting between North and South escalated over the years. Although in the early sixties President Kennedy never envisioned the use of regular U.S. combat forces in Vietnam, he pledged generous technical and material support to the South Vietnamese in their struggle to remain free of Communist tyranny. He also founded the Special Forces— Green Berets—and from their ranks sent advisors to South Vietnam. They were designated in noncombat roles, training the South Vietnamese army units, villagers, and even the mountain people in couterinsurgency warfare. Given the context of the time, the earlier anti-Communist warning of John Foster Dulles seemed well founded. Stalin’s brutality had been well documented, and Khrushchev’s nasty threat—“We will bury you!”—was becoming more than just rhetoric. The earlier Communist blockade of West Berlin, the defeat of the French by the Vietnamese, Castro’s consolidation of his Marxist government in Cuba, followed by the Soviet’s brazen introduction of missiles there—all combined to reinforce the need to make a strong stand against further Communist expansion. Besides, Kennedy realized that the Communists’ typical strategy of consolidation in one country and infiltration and support of antigovernment guerrillas in neighboring countries made the domino theory worth heeding.

Gradually our advisors began taking casualties and we were slowly drawn in deeper, with greater commitments. After Kennedy’s assassination in late ’63, President Johnson held sacred his predecessor’s pledge to the people of South Vietnam. Johnson didn’t want to box the North Vietnamese into a corner with no option but to fight, so he escalated the bombing very slowly and offered to negotiate at the same time.”

With the thought of escalated bombing, my mind drifted to reports I had heard of the first to be shot down in the bombing, Lieutenant JG Everett Alvarez. I had seen newspaper articles about his shootdown and capture. The columns had usually been accompanied by the soulful, gaunt-faced picture of him as a prisoner. His loss in August ’64 had been big news, and the North Vietnamese had milked it for all the propaganda the Western media would provide.

Bea and I had been on leave from Florida visiting my parents in central California when we saw the news. I had been reading the Sunday paper in bed and sipping my morning coffee. Alvarez’s picture was in the world section, and there was some statement from his wife about a controversial letter she had received from him. Bea was brushing her hair in the bathroom a few feet away.

“Honey, if I go to Vietnam and get shot down and become a POW, when I write to you I’ll put little dots under certain letters so they spell out my secret message to you.”

Bea said something like, “That’s nice, dear. Do you want biscuits or scones for breakfast?”

Hell, what am I saying, I thought at the time. She’s right. Vietnam will be history by the time I ever get back on sea duty.

The old man continued his intense scrutiny of me. For the first time I noticed his scraggly beard, a few dozen wavy white threads hanging down from his chin and from the outer edges of his upper lip, just like the beard I had seen on Ho Chi Minh in news magazines. He would be one of Ho’s contemporaries. Maybe he had even worked with him personally . . . . He obviously enjoyed some status, or the cadre wouldn’t have left him alone with me.

“Why you come Vietnam?”

He had apparently noticed that I was back in the present with him.

I knew why I had “come Vietnam,” but how could I tell him? Even if his English hadn’t been limited, I felt helpless to explain. He no doubt had his own historical version of the Intel briefing I had just reviewed in my mind. I wanted desperately to explain to him that I and my countrymen were involved in the affairs of his country for a good and worthy purpose. How could I explain we had been asked to come by Vietnamese who didn’t want to live under a repressive and tyrannical Communist regime? How could I tell him I believed they had the right to determine their own destiny, independent of their neighbors in the North? With his historical perspective, he probably would have fathomed my reasons far better than most of the younger generation of his country who had learned a distorted view of that same history.

I stared back at him dumbly, matching his gaze blink for blink. I felt the frustration of trying to help someone and having the effort go awry to make the situation worse somehow; of having my good intentions misperceived, and yet being unable to explain. Finally, the old man shrugged his thin shoulders and shook his head sadly as he added his final cigarette butt to the five already scattered near his right sandal. I heard his knees creak as he hoisted himself upright, then he turned and walked out into the ebbing twilight. I shook my own head sadly as I watched him become one of the shadows.

Later that evening, I was visited by a man and woman. They hesitated in the doorway and surveyed my situation, the woman speaking softly. By now the lengthening shadows had blended into darkness, and I could barely distinguish their forms in the opening of my shelter. Soon the man disappeared in the direction from which they had appeared. His companion stood quietly and waited. When the man returned he had a small oil lamp, the flame hardly bigger than that of a birthday cake candle. They approached together and squatted down very close to me. Only then could I see that they were a boy and a girl, probably in their late teens. The girl appeared to be the elder and was truly beautiful. They exchanged a few words in Vietnamese before the boy set the lamp on a cross-piece of the rickety little fence that separated my stall from the next one. Then he looked at me thoughtfully. After a moment, he spoke: “Her brother and her mother are killed by U.S. napalm. She hate you very much.” The young interpreter shaped his words carefully, his boyish face overacting the emotions he felt appropriate for the statement. It was clear that he had practiced this opener. “She herself call Lan,” he said more casually. “Lan . . . nurse! Different village. It call self Son My.” His inverted sentence structure belied the French background of his English teacher.

The two of them sat low and side by side, their eyes slightly above the level of my own. The boy, like the old man, squatted squarely on flat feet; the girl knelt symmetrically on her knees, her hands pressed palms down against her thighs. But for the simplicity of her clothing, she exuded the elegant grace of a Tonkinese courtesan.

Lan! Even in the dim light I could see that her face was almost a perfect heart shape, with a delicate chin and cheeks curving gracefully up and around to the top of her forehead and the distinct widow’s peak. Her jet-black hair was pulled to the back of her head in a bun, but the wisps that escaped here and there arched down over her delicate ears and forehead, adding to the weariness in her young face. A thin gold chain around her neck hinted at the femininity otherwise obscured by the coarse gray cotton blouse that buttoned down the front and was gathered into the small waistband of her classic black pajama pants. A webbed military belt cinched her waist even more trimly.

“She hate you very much! Nevertheless, her heart is in the right place.” My eyes flicked to the boy’s expectant face, then back to Lan’s eyes. His well-rehearsed speech couldn’t have seemed more incongruous.

Lan returned my stare with her enormous dark eyes, more round than almond-shaped. It’s likely there had been a Frenchman in her ancestry, I thought. From the depths of her eyes I could sense her confusion; some hatred, yes, but more than that, searching and curiosity. She uttered a quick phrase to her interpreter without breaking our eye contact. “You must remove shirt,” he said. While I did so—very painfully and laboriously working the sleeve down and off my swollen arm—she began methodically removing the small first-aid kit attached to her belt. I was struck by its resemblance to the play-nurse kit that my daughter Kimmie had received for Christmas less than two months ago. And Lan herself—dark hair and eyes and diminutive frame—caused me to recall for a trembling instant the bright effervescence of my little first grader now so far away in space and context. Lan’s touch upon my arms and face belied whatever hatred she might have harbored. Her gentleness seemed to be the most natural part of her, both as Lan the nurse and Lan the girl.

From her touches and terse commentary I deduced my situation before it was interpreted to me—mostly by signs and motions—by the boy. My right forearm was broken; my right elbow was badly dislocated, probably shattered as well. There was a gash there—now crusted over— that had probably been caused by striking some part of my jettisoning canopy or ejection seat. My entire arm and shoulder were swollen to twice their normal size and were completely immobile, just as if in a cast. Lan applied Mercurochrome to the numerous cuts on my face and gently spread some kind of ointment on the burns there and on my neck and arms. As she finished knotting the gauze-strip sling around my neck and arm, she sat back in her best courtesan pose. She shook her head slowly from side to side, her huge eyes fixed upon mine, and then, like the old Viet Minh soldier who had visited me earlier, shrugged her tiny shoulders in helpless commentary. “Lan say you must wait more for doctors. You hurt very bad but you OK. She say you have very good fortune.”

“Why does she say that?” She turned toward him to catch the gist of my question. “Because the brave army men of Tan Loc show they courageous. They shoot down your American piratical airplane on the spot.” The airplane motions with his hands ended in a squirming tangle of fingers and flip-flopping palms. “It blow up over the water. Everybody think you must be killed, but I don’t think so.” He smiled as if happy for me.

“But there were two of us. What about the other man who was in the airplane with me?” Lan knew my question by the anxiety in my voice and my two upraised fingers. “He is . . . I don’t know. He is somewhere else, I think.” I could see more sadness creep into Lan’s eyes and for the first time I doubted that Bob was still alive.

In an instant Lan’s eyes became shiny with moisture and she lowered her gaze. God, she is actually sad for us! She may actually hate me but it’s clear she is sad, too, either for me or for Bob, or about the whole damned situation. I didn’t know if she had even heard my “Cam Ud!” croaked in the darkness behind her.

I thought of Bob and prayed hard—but without much conviction— that he was also alive and being treated all right. I thought of the seeming miracle of my own survival through it all; how I had removed my oxygen mask, released my parachute harness, and then inflated my flotation gear—all with only one hand and while unconscious. That was the miracle, the miracle of the subconscious. If I had been able to recall and implement the survival procedures learned throughout the years, could I trust my subconscious to recall all the patterns and processes I had ever learned in my life? Did it necessarily require unique life-and-death circumstances to bring them to the surface?

At this moment I began to realize, though not yet fully, that I had within me all the knowledge and intuitive resources that I would ever need to survive. Right here I began to trust myself and my capabilities. This was to be the intellectual foundation of keeping faith in myself; that along with my faith in God’s help and comfort—the spiritual foundation—I would be able to survive the incredible challenges that were yet to come. It would take even more time to realize that just surviving would be the minimum and that I would ultimately go beyond survival.

But for now, in February of ’66, the short-term perspective prevailed. Surely now with our Marines in South Vietnam, and the resumption of our air strikes in the North following the Christmas holidays and January bombing pause, this whole mess would be wrapped up soon; it would take only a few more months at most. A political settlement—if not an all-out military victory—was very likely. Uncle Sam will have me out of here by summer, I told myself. I can hack it till then and if Bob is alive I know he can, too.

I didn’t realize I had just exercised a critical survival tool. I had defined the first of many six-month increments by which I would measure my time remaining. Not “one day at a time,” but one half-year at a time. How could I know at that point that there would be fourteen such increments, that these were but the first few days of a seven-year journey? Thank God I couldn’t.