Message from Nam (46 page)

“Will you come back and see me again?” Joey asked her hopefully, sidling closer to her, and finally reaching out to touch her hair, which was so straight and gold, and so unlike his mother’s.

“I’d like that a lot, if your Mom and stepfather don’t mind.”

Joey made a face and whispered to her, “He’s not really my stepdad, he’s my uncle!”

And she whispered back, “I know! Your Dad told me”.

“He told you everything, huh?” And then he laughed. He had a new friend and he really liked her. She stroked his hair then, and touched his face, and she had an arm around him when his mother came back in.

“We had a nice visit,” Paxton said, grateful to her for letting her come. “And I’m going to send Joey some pictures of his Dad from Paris.”

“Yeah,” he said by way of confirmation. And they walked slowly outside, holding hands. It was as though they could communicate now without saying anything. And before she left, she took him in her arms and held him.

“Remember how much he loved you.” Joey nodded with tears in his eyes, and Paxton hugged him to her, remembering how it had felt when her own father died, but she hadn’t said any of that to Joey. “I’ll call you again.”

“Okay.”

She saw his stepfather then, lurking nearby, watching her, and he was tall and dark, but he didn’t look anything like his brother, and he didn’t approach to shake her hand or meet her. He went back to the garage to attend to whatever he was doing. She thanked Barbara Campobello again, and kissed Tony’s mother good-bye, and they wished her good luck in Paris, almost as though they knew her.

“I’ll send you those photographs,” she promised the child again, and he was still waving when she turned slowly around the corner, thinking of him, and how sad it was that he would never know his father.

C
HAPTER
27

S
he arrived in Paris on a beautiful spring day, a week after she’d gone to Washington to see Pentagon officials and Fort Benning, Georgia, to interview Lieutenant Calley. The interview with him had been brief, and in some ways very painful. He was becoming almost a symbol of the war, and our loss of control, our brutishness and the grief we caused, and as Paxton thought about it later, she was sorry for him, for everyone, for all that had happened.

But Paris healed some of her wounds, and she found a sweet studio near the Seine. And she would walk alone at night, thinking of how different her life was from the life she’d led in Saigon.

Here, her life was solitary and austere, and serious, as she went to the peace talks each day, and interviewed people like Kissinger and Le Due Tho. And in Saigon, as hard as it was at times, her life had been happier and easier than it was now, filled with only memories of a place she would never see again, and the men she had loved there.

She sent Joey the copies of the photographs, and he wrote her back, in a careful hand, and thanked her. And every now and then, she sent him a postcard from Paris.

She was integrally tied into all the news from Viet Nam, and by October, the American casualties were lower than they had ever been. But still, it would have been nice to know it was all over.

And she spoke frequently to all the connections she had made to find out if there was any news of the MIAs, but there was never any news of Tony. She had stopped expecting it now, and yet there was always that same strange feeling. In some ways, she just thought it was because he would always be alive to her. But by year end, they had almost convinced her it was hopeless.

In November, the
Times
flew her back to Fort Benning, Georgia, for the beginning of the Calley trial, and that was a depressing affair, with hideous photographs, and frightening testimony that, in the end, led to his conviction.

She went to see her brother after the trial, and as usual, had almost nothing to say to him, and she was beyond making the effort with Allison anymore.

She went to Washington after that, for another interview with Kissinger. And then she went to see her editor in New York. And she called and saw Joey again, and this time, she took the boy to lunch. He had just turned nine, and he looked even more like Tony than he had before. She took him to Radio City Music Hall, and before that they had a very grown-up lunch. She had taken him to “21,” and he was extremely impressed, as he looked up at the airplanes hanging near the bar. And the headwaiter had recognized her name, as an ardent devotee of
The New York Times
, and they deferred to her every whim, and brought Joey a backpack that said “21”.

“This is a terrific place,” he said, admiring her taste, and she smiled at him. “Think Dad would have liked it here?” That was the criterion for everything with him.

“I think he would have loved it. We used to talk about coming to New York sometimes. Or going to San Francisco. That’s where I used to live. I went to college there.” He was enormously impressed and demanded that she tell him all about it, and then as they finished dessert he looked at her with painful seriousness.

“My Dad … my other Dad, I mean … you know, my uncle.” Paxton almost laughed, he was so intense, and somehow it was so grotesque and confusing, and she knew Tony would have laughed too. In fact, he might almost have loved it. “He says that what you said isn’t true … about my Dad maybe being alive because he’s missing in action. He says he’s probably dead, and you’re crazy.”

“He could be right. In fact, he probably is, on both counts.” Paxton tried to smile at him. “But the real truth, Joey, is that no one knows. That’s what missing in action is. Some of the men who disappeared have been taken prisoners. But we don’t even know that about him. I keep pretty close tabs on it, and I call the Pentagon whenever I can, but they haven’t heard anything about your Dad being on the lists of prisoners. And they haven’t found his remains near where he died. So the truth is, no one knows.” It was hard for him. It was hard for everyone. It was killing not to know what had happened.

“So that still means he could be alive, doesn’t it?” He looked hopeful again, and then as he turned it over in his mind, he looked depressed again.

“But my Dad … my uncle … he says he’s dead. Paxton, do you think he is?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head as she looked at him honestly, “Joey, I don’t.” And with that she took his hand, and held it tightly in her own, thinking again how much he looked like Tony.

C
HAPTER
28

P
axton was busy in 1971, and she spent most of the year in Paris. She still had high hopes for the Paris talks, and conveyed that feeling through much of what she wrote for the paper. But the war still went on. And in Viet Nam, the troops were getting angry. They were getting tired of the war, and there seemed to be more problems with insubordination to the officers than there had been when she was there. And “fragging,” GIs using fragmentation grenades to wound their officers “by mistake,” was becoming common. Racial issues were tense as well. And in February, the ARVN began operations in Laos, to destroy parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And still, whenever she inquired, in whatever sector, there was never any news of Tony.

And in March, Paxton went back to the States for the rest of the Calley trial, and saw him convicted. And she was in Washington to see the enormous Viet Nam Veterans Against the War demonstration, where some of the men flung their medals on the steps of the Capitol. She wrote about it for the
Times
, and then flew back to Paris.

She was still in Paris when the
Pentagon Papers
were made public by Daniel Ellsberg in June. And in July, when Nixon announced Kissinger’s trip to China. And when Thieu was reelected president of South Vietnam in October 1971, she was still busy covering the peace talks. And finally, in December, she was happy to report that American troops in Viet Nam were down to a hundred and forty thousand, less than a third of what it had been when she was there nineteen months before. And in those nineteen months, there had been not a single bit of news about Tony Campobello. The evidence was overwhelming now. Had he been taken prisoner, or been hiding wounded somewhere, surely by now someone would have heard it. She couldn’t offer much hope to Joey anymore, and yet, when he asked her, whenever they talked on the phone, every few months when she called him, she always told him what she felt and that was that his Dad was out there somewhere. He was ten by then and better able to understand it. She had told him about her own father by then, and it gave him a special kinship with her. They had both grown up without their fathers.

And for her, at the end of 1971, life was interesting but strange. She was twenty-five years old, and very beautiful, and greatly admired in Paris. But it was as though a part of her life didn’t exist at all, and never had. It was sealed off now. She lived for her work, and a little boy she had come to love in Great Neck. And he was the only love in her life. The rest were memories, and photographs she kept on a table in her living room. Peter … Bill … Ralph … France … Pax … An … and, of course, Tony. It was a strange gallery of people she had loved and lost, in a place she knew she would never go back to, and yet oddly she still missed it. She missed what it had been, and who they were, and what she had been when they all lived there. And yet, she was very successful at what she did, and very respected. And in an odd way, she was content. Not happy, but satisfied, and she still missed him. And his ruby ring was still on her finger.

And in ’72, it was painful for her knowing what distress Viet Nam was in. The peace talks had gone nowhere. And in March the North Vietnamese crossed the demilitarized zone with tanks and began moving south down Highway One on a rampage of terror. By May, Route One was filled with refugees and soldiers. The southern ARVN proved no match for the northern troops, and civilians were constantly being killed, children burned and women dying. The photographs she saw, with the rest of the world, particularly in
Time
magazine, were awful.

A second wave of attacks devastated the Central Highlands with similar results in the North. Everywhere people were homeless and starving. The Americans were trying to pull out and turn the war back to the ARVN, the Army of South Viet Nam, and they were losing.

A third attack in April near the Cambodian border, north of Saigon, brought tears to Paxton’s eyes as she read the AP reports. Three thousand Vietnamese troops stormed An Loc, and took over the entire province.

It was becoming clear that the “Vietnamization” of Viet Nam was a joke, but a costly one, and no one in Viet Nam was laughing.

By mid April, Nixon authorized the bombing of areas near Haiphong and Hanoi, and for the first time in two years, Paxton was grateful that she hadn’t stayed in Viet Nam. It was becoming questionable if anyone would survive it. And wholesale slaughter made no sense. She could do more here in Paris. But what truly worried her, as well, was what would happen to Tony if he were being held prisoner, or hiding somewhere in the countryside. With the constant NVA attacks, American prisoners anywhere in Viet Nam were in great danger. But she still cherished the hope, after two years, that somewhere, out there, he was among them.

And the only thing that distracted her after the fall of Quang Tri in May, was the arrest in June of the five men who had broken into the Watergate complex in Washington. Everyone in the States was talking about it, and although she was still in Paris at the time, she wrote a very amusing editorial, which the
Times
ran and which won her a lot of favorable comment. She was slowly becoming something of a star, but it was an aspect of her life to which she paid little attention. She loved her work, but cared nothing for the acclaim it brought her. Her mission in life was to inform, to cut through the lies and brambles with a sword of truth, as it were, and her journalistic friends teased her and called her a zealot. But she had no interest whatsoever in becoming famous. And the fact that Kissinger, Nixon, and important journalists around the world had great regard for her, pleased her, but to Paxton, it still did not seem of paramount importance. All that mattered to her was that what she wrote “made a difference.”