Message from Nam (47 page)

The breakthrough in Paris finally came in October 1972, as a result of meetings between Kissinger and Le Due Tho, although few knew it. And on October twenty-first, the North Vietnamese approved the proposed plan for peace, and within five days, Kissinger himself promised from the White House that “peace is at hand.” But President Thieu of South Viet Nam refused to sign the agreement, refusing to allow northern troops to remain in place in the South, for fear of what they would do there.

And less than two weeks later, Nixon was reelected by a landslide. Two weeks after that, President Thieu demanded sixty-nine amendments to the agreement that could bring peace to Viet Nam, and Paxton, along with other knowledgeable journalists, groaned. The situation was, once again, beginning to look hopeless.

The talks stopped and started all through December. There were American bombings of military targets, and promises that fewer civilians would be affected. Hanoi indicated they would talk if the bombing stopped. The bombs stopped for a single day at Christmas. Hanoi spoke up again. And at last, on December thirtieth, the bombing stopped once more, and the talks resumed again. And through it all, Bob Hope had gone to Viet Nam to put on his Christmas show for the last time. But Paxton wasn’t thinking of him this year. She was totally engrossed in the Paris peace talks, and whatever inside information she could get from sources very high up, some of them in Washington. And the high point of her holiday that year was a call from Joey in Great Neck on Christmas Eve. He was fine, and he warmed her heart when he told her in an undertone that he missed her. She was his special ally, special friend, the guardian angel who had been sent by the father he barely knew to love and keep him.

And at last on January 8, 1973, Kissinger and Le Due Tho resumed serious talks in Paris, the day before President Nixon’s sixtieth birthday. And exactly one week after that, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, in Saigon, allegedly told President Thieu that if he didn’t sign the peace agreement immediately, there would be no further aid from the U.S. forthcoming.

As a result, the cease-fire began less than two weeks later, on the twenty-seventh of January, five days after Lyndon Johnson died. And Nixon demanded that
all
of our POWs be released at once. And he promised to have all American forces out of Viet Nam within sixty days, in March. Paxton heard the news in Paris with disbelief, and silent prayers, that maybe, maybe when the prisoners were released, someone might know something about Tony. And if nothing else, they could lay him to rest at last. It was terrible not knowing. She could hardly stand it herself anymore, after almost three years. And she had come to realize that not knowing, and always cherishing hope, was too hard on Joey. He always longed for a father who wasn’t there, and very probably never would be. Instead of adjusting to the one he had, however lacking he might have been, which by then Paxton knew he was, in spite of the fact that he had been Tony’s brother. He resented the boy, she suspected, because he himself felt guilty, and she also suspected that he had gotten more, or perhaps less, than he knew when he got stuck with the first Mrs. Campobello, and by then he knew it.

On February 5, 1973, it was announced that 57,597 men had died in Viet Nam, and just thinking of it tore at her heart, and reminded her of Peter, Bill, and Tony. At times it was hard for her to separate herself as woman and journalist. And when she heard that the first POWs were being released on February twelfth, she lay on her bed and cried, imagining what it must mean to them and their wives to be free at last, from the agony, the loss, the terror.

She was in Paris, writing then, working not only on her articles for the
Times
, but on a book she had promised herself for three years now that she would write about Viet Nam, when her editor called from New York, and asked her to hop a military transport to Manila.

“But why?” Why me? she wanted to ask. It had taken three years for the pain to dim, three years to stop dreaming of the maimed children wandering the streets of Saigon. And the prisoners were coming home, full of their own horror of it. Did she really have to go back there? At long last, she didn’t want to go back anymore, didn’t long for that incredible green, the smell of smoke at dawn. And now they wanted her to go back and relive it. Back to the memory as she looked into the faces of the men who had been there.

The prisoners of war were flying to Clark Field in the Philippines. And she had two days to get there.

“Is this an order, or a request?” she asked with a tired voice at midnight Paris time. They always called her just before they left the office in New York.

“A little of both,” the editor said gently, and Paxton sighed. It was starting again. The hope. The prayers. The wish that someone would have seen him.

“All right,” she said after a brief pause. “I’ll go.”

“Thank you. We appreciate it.” But the editor had known she’d go. She couldn’t stay away from it. None of them could. Viet Nam had gotten into their very core, their soul. It was a constant pain, even once it grew numb … a sorrow … a joy … an addiction.

C
HAPTER
29

S
he flew from Paris to Wiesbaden, West Germany, where she caught a military flight, which got her to Manila eight hours before the POWs arrived. And as she sat among their wives and children, thinking and quietly taking notes, she looked at the faces around her, the children who barely remembered them, and she knew how awful it had been for all of them. She knew it much too well as she watched and listened.

And for some time now, she had begun to accept the loss of Tony. No matter what she felt in her heart, there was no way he could still be alive today, and in her mind, if not her heart, she knew it. And she had said as much to Joey.

But these women were all talking about how they had survived from year to year, with photographs, scraps of news, reports from two men who had gotten out earlier, five who’d escaped two years before. They knew their men were alive, from time to time at least, and they, like their men, had survived it. What remained of them now, was, of course, another question.

And Paxton could feel her stomach turn over as she waited with them, wanting not to increase their pain, their nervousness, or annoy them. She spoke directly to none of them, she just sat there and listened. Later, she would ask for interviews, speak to the men. But now she just wanted to be here and watch and listen. She told herself she was dispassionate, that she was there as a journalist, that she had no right to intrude, but as the men came off the plane that afternoon, she sobbed almost as loud as their wives when she saw them. They were thin, halting, hesitant, battle scarred for the most part, with red-rimmed eyes and fungus in their hair, knuckles swollen to the size of onions from being beaten, legs that seemed wobbly and unstable. On the surface they looked whole, but if you looked beyond that, they looked awful. And as they held each other up, they stood proud, and looked around and cheered as they stood there. It was a victory for freedom and liberty, and love and sheer survival, that touched everyone’s heart who saw them.

It was an emotional afternoon, and Paxton spent almost as much time crying as they did. But there was no relief for her, no time off, no incredible embrace they had waited seven years for. How did one survive a time like that? How did one cling to hope? And what did one say to each other when it was over? What if she had been taken prisoner on one of the missions she’d gone on with Ralph! It had been close a couple of times, and she knew it. What if she had been taken prisoner by the Viet Cong? She doubted she could have survived, and marveled that they could.

And the next day, she began her interviews, talking to them after they had been debriefed, talking to their wives, in some cases their children. A photographer joined her eventually, and by the time she was almost through, she herself was overwrought. And then, as she interviewed one of them, she realized he had been a tunnel rat at Cu Chi, and had been taken prisoner not very long before Tony became MIA, and as she attempted to hold her pen, her hand shook so badly she could no longer write what the man was saying. He had been held prisoner for three years, which seemed a long time to him, and to her, but Tony had been gone for just as long and she still didn’t know if he was dead or alive now.

“I …” Her voice was shaking as much as her hands, “I’d like to ask you something off-the-record.” He looked frightened of her suddenly, as though she would ask him something terrible that might disgrace him or his family forever.

“Did you ever know a first sergeant named Tony Campobello when you were at Cu Chi?” He looked at her strangely then and nodded his head, wondering if it was a trick. Maybe Campobello had been an enemy agent.

“Why?”

“… because I loved him … I was in Saigon then,” she said in a voice as soft and broken as his own, but he had brought back the past to her and it was much too painful. “He became MIA just after you were taken prisoner … and there’s been no conclusive report in his case for three years … I just thought … I wondered …” She started to cry and hated herself for it. These people had been through enough without taking on her pain too. But he reached out and touched her hand with his own gnarled, broken fingers. She was his sister now … his friend … his child … And she looked at him through her tears as he answered.

“All I can tell you is that he was alive two years ago. They brought him to one of the prisons I was in. I don’t even know what it was called, and I was very sick when I got there,” he went on softly, and no one around them could hear them.

“Do you know where it was?” she asked in the same tone of voice.

“No … but he was there. I knew him at Cu Chi … I hadn’t been there long before I was caught by the VC … he was tough … and he was still alive when they had him. That’s all I know. You should ask Jordan. He was there too, and I think he knew him.”

But when she finally got to talk to Jordan three days later, he had bad news. Tony was one of three men who had escaped, and Jordan was sure that all three had been killed in the effort. There had been rumors briefly that only two bodies were brought back, but he was never sure, and he assured her that no one could have escaped their dogs, their weapons, their booby traps, their spears. He would have to have been killed. And in the past two years, their paths had never crossed again, and he had never heard his name. He assured her that Tony was dead. He had to be. And as he told her, he cried, and so did Paxton.

It was a terrible week for her, a brutal time, of facing pain and death and hope and grief and their tales of brutality at the hands of the North Vietnamese. It was endless, and their wives were so brave. By the time it was over, and she went back to France, she felt as though she had been in prison with them. It was the most emotionally exhausting piece she’d ever done, and she swore to herself that if they asked her again, she wouldn’t do it. But the piece she wrote as a result was absolutely brilliant, and brought her the praise of her peers, and people began talking about one day Paxton winning the Pulitzer. Ralph used to tease her about it, but that had been years ago, when she was young and green, and so had Tony. And she had her painful answers about him now. There was no hiding from it. And on the first of March, she flew to New York to see his son, and tell him what the two POWs had told her, the first who had seen him briefly two years before, the second who knew he had escaped and was certain he’d been killed by the Viet Cong when they caught him. And from everything she’d heard at Clark Air Force Base, that now seemed certain.

She told Joey as gently as she could before they went to lunch. They went for a long walk in Central Park, and finally she sat him down on a bench and told him. He was eleven now, the same age she had been when her father died, and he was a bright boy, and she knew that he could take it.

“I’m sorry, Joey.” Tears filled her eyes again. “I somehow thought that if he’d lived at all, if he hadn’t been killed that day, that he’d make it. He was so tough, so strong, so smart … so good …” But he was gone now, and they both had to face it. Without saying another word, she put her arms around him and held him close to her and they both cried.

“Do you believe it now?” he asked her painfully, and this time she nodded. For his sake as much as her own. At twenty-seven she had loved the man for so long, it was hard to give up hope, but she knew she had to.

“Yes, I do believe it now, Joey. We have to. He’s gone.” It was like losing him all over again, hearing the words of the man who’d survived the Hanoi Hilton.

“Now what?” the boy asked sadly, as he held her hand.

“I don’t know …” She felt lost again. Almost as lost as she had three years before. The other women had their men home again and she didn’t. “We remember him … we think about him and smile, we remember the good stuff, the silly stuff … we love him.”

“And what about you?” He had always wondered about her, and now he felt he was old enough to ask. He knew she’d been waiting for his Dad, but what would she do now? The same thing she always had done. In Paxton’s mind, all that was over. “Think you’ll marry someone else?” Joey asked with a worried frown. Maybe someone who wouldn’t let her see him anymore.