Message from Nam (48 page)

But she read his thoughts and pulled him closer. “No, I don’t. Unless you’re willing to grow up real quick. I could wait, you know.”

“What are you going to do now? Are you still going to be in Paris?” He missed her when she was there. Between them, they had something very special. It was a little bit of what she had shared with his Dad, but not having children of her own, it was more and less, and different. And she had good news for him in answer to his question.

“It looks like I’ll be coming back to New York pretty soon, to work for the
Times
here. Probably at the end of March after the last troops pull out. It won’t be long now.”

He looked pleased. If he couldn’t have his father, at least he had her.

“Maybe your Mom will let us go away for a weekend somewhere when I come back. Think she would?”

“Sure.” He would see to it that they’d let him, no matter what. And they were both more peaceful when they went to lunch. Peaceful, but sad. They had finally started to let go of Tony.

C
HAPTER
30

T
he last American troops left Viet Nam on March 29, 1973, and three days later, on April first, the last American POWs were released in Hanoi. And the day before that, Paxton flew to New York after giving up her apartment in Paris. She was staying at the Algonquin until she found her own place, and when she got to the paper the next day, she couldn’t believe it, but they asked her to fly to San Francisco to interview the prisoners of war at the Presidio. And she told them she just couldn’t do it. They had to send someone else, she’d just gotten back, she was tired, and she had to look for an apartment. None of which held water, and both she and her editor knew it. And when finally they pressed her, she turned on the editor and told her that she didn’t give a damn what they did to her, she wouldn’t go, it was just too fucking painful.

They left her alone all that day, and at six o’clock the editor in chief called her in and begged her to go. And finally, tired, jet-lagged, exhausted, and more than a little angry, she relented. She flew out the next day, just in time to meet the plane as it was arriving at Travis Air Force Base. And as she stood looking at the same scene she’d seen in Manila six weeks before, she knew just how draining it was going to be and how painful. But at least this time she was prepared, and she braced herself for what she would hear from the wives, the men, and even their children. And for the next few days, it was every bit as bad as she knew it would be, and worse. But the very worst came when one of the men talked about three men who had escaped, and the story had a familiar ring to it. Part of her wanted not to know, and another part of her told her she had to. And she began asking him the same questions as she had the other men at Clark, but this time, the answers were different. Yes, he was certain three men had escaped. And two others had successfully done it before that. The others who tried it were all killed, he thought, a group of seven once, a foursome, another pair. But some made it through, and of the threesome he referred to, one did. Two were killed, but one of them never came back.

“Who was he?” she asked in a strangled voice, wishing she had never come, not wanting to start the hope again. She was willing to lay him to rest now, why wouldn’t they let her? “Do you know who he was, sir?”

“I’m not sure.” He racked his memory, which was not what it once had been. They had done everything to him. Electric shock, torture, he had lost both thumbs, and almost lost his leg to gangrene, how the hell did he know who had escaped and lived. How could he do this to her, and yet he was, and she held her breath as she waited. “I know he was from Cu Chi base … a tunnel rat … but I’m not sure of the name. I might know it if I heard it,” he said apologetically, and she was feeling guilty for pumping him, but she had to.

“Tony Campobello?” she whispered.

“That’s right.” He stared at her. “That’s him!” He looked stunned, amazed she knew it. “He escaped, oh … I don’t know … maybe eighteen months ago … two years … I’m not sure now. And I
know
he made it.” She felt faint as she listened to him.

“How do you know, sir?”

“They didn’t bring his body back, and …” He looked mildly embarrassed. “One of the guards told me.”

“Wouldn’t he have lied to you?” She almost wanted him to be dead now, wanted not to be tortured with the hope again, but there was no denying what this man said. She couldn’t ignore it.

“I don’t think so. They hated to admit it when anyone escaped, so if they said it, it was probably true. And they tortured one of the others to teach everyone a lesson.”

“Do you know where he might have gone?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t. South, I would assume, if he could … or he could still be in hiding somewhere in the interior. If he was a tunnel rat, he was probably pretty wily. He could still be alive now.” Could … and then what? And what was she to tell Joey? That his father “could” be alive somewhere in the interior? Or he could be dead in a tunnel, too, or in a trench, or a hole somewhere, or a tree trunk. She thanked the man, and feeling numb, she finished her interviews and took the red-eye back to New York from San Francisco.

And she spent the next three days locked in her hotel room, talking to no one. There was nothing she could do or say. She had to think. She had to go over what they’d said. She read her notes over again and again, but there was nothing she could do. And on Monday, she had made her decision.

She went in to see her editor, and at first she told Paxton she was crazy. But after a little while, Paxton had convinced her. She’d been there before, and she knew the country. There would be others staying now that the military had left. Journalists, medical personnel, a few foreign businessmen, fools, opportunists. Someone was bound to be there. And there was no doubt whatsoever in her mind. She had to go back there, and stay there until she found the answers, no matter how long it took, or what it did to her to be there.

They agreed finally. They had no choice. The choice was to lose Paxton, or let her go with their blessing, so they let her have everything she wanted.

And that weekend, she went for a long, long walk with Joey. She told him she was going back to Viet Nam to find his father, or his remains, or someone who could tell her for sure what had really happened. She told him about the prisoner of war at the Presidio, and what he had said. He had a right to know, and she had to tell him.

“You know, my Mom and Dad still think you’re crazy.” He smiled at her, he wondered about it at times himself, but he also knew he loved her.

“Is that what you think?” She smiled at him.

“Sometimes. I don’t really care if you are, Pax. It’s okay.”

“Thanks. To tell you the truth, I think I’m crazy to go back too. But I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied until we have the answers. I thought we knew for a while there,” after what she’d heard at Clark, from Jordan, “but I guess we didn’t. This guy was so sure he made it.”

“You really think he could be alive by now? It’s been three years since he became MIA.” Even Joey sounded skeptical by this time.

“I just don’t know anymore, Joey.”

He nodded, worried about her now. “How long you think you’ll be gone?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to promise you anything. I’ll write to you, and call you if I can. I don’t know what the phone service will be like there now, with the GIs gone. Probably pretty lousy. But I’ll do what I can. And I’ll come home when I have the answers, and not before.”

He grabbed her arm then and held it tightly in his young hand. “Don’t get hurt, Pax … don’t let anything happen to you like it did to Dad.”

“It won’t,” she promised him, as she leaned toward him and kissed his hair, and then stroked it. “I’m not as brave as he was.”

C
HAPTER
31

T
he plane came down at Tan Son Nhut Airport, and from the air it looked the same, but as they flew low, she saw that there were a lot more craters than there had been three years before. And in Saigon, things had changed too. There were more children in the streets, more orphans, more begging Amerasians, abandoned by fathers who had gone home with the military and left them there with mothers who didn’t want them. There were more drugs in the streets, more prostitutes, more buildings falling apart. More chaos. And even the Hotel Caravelle seemed somehow less than it had been, although they remembered her, and were very pleasant. And she had a different room this time, which was just as well. She couldn’t have borne being in the same room she had once shared with Tony.

The AP office was the same, and she ran into some of the same faces, and in some ways it seemed that nothing had changed, and yet things had. The American soldiers were gone, and subtly that changed things.

She began by establishing her contacts again, and remarkably she still felt at home there. And yet, there were too many memories for her here now, and she had been back in the West for too long. And more often than not, as she lay awake at night, she thought of Joey. Maybe it was different now, too, because she was older. At twenty-seven, she was not quite as anxious to risk her life as she had been five years before. In that sense, she was also different. And thinking of that reminded her of Ralph again, and the missions they’d been on together. Now when she went out into the countryside, she went out alone, with rented cars, or with a driver, or a photographer she got from AP, and everywhere she went, in every town, in every countryside, in every ruin, she asked for Tony. And no one had seen him. But she felt that if she asked enough people for long enough, eventually, if he was still alive, someone would know him. Maybe he was afraid to come out, maybe he was too crippled or too maimed or too injured, and if he was, she would take him home, and heal his wounds and fix them … if he was still alive, which was always uncertain. And as she began to see the damage the northern troops had done, and the American bombings before they left, she began to understand how difficult it would have been to survive, and escape unnoticed somewhere. Even knowing he was dead would have been a relief. Something. Some shred of clothing, a bone, some hair … anything … that had once been Tony.

In April, Graham Martin arrived in Saigon to replace Ellsworth Bunker as ambassador. And in June the Watergate affair exploded in the States, much to Paxton’s fascination. Politics seemed to be getting more complicated everywhere these days, and she enjoyed the Teletypes she read in Saigon, while she continued to write articles from there, and search for Tony. And in July, the Senate held hearings on the bombings in Cambodia, which stopped in August. And eight days after that, Nixon appointed Kissinger as Secretary of State to replace Rogers. And that summer, in Viet Nam, things were quiet. It rained constantly, and Paxton continued to drive all over the countryside, showing photographs of him, and asking if they had seen him, but no one had seen him anywhere, and she wound up with pneumonia.

And in September, she was better, and began the search again. And every week, she reported in letters to Joey. It was all beginning to seem more than a little crazy even to her. But everything in Viet Nam always had been. She kept coming across children in the streets who were half American and had been abandoned, and she always gave them what money and food she could, but for them the situation was hopeless. This was the fate France had feared when she had poisoned herself and her children after Ralph was killed. It was hard to believe she was right, but who knew anymore? Who knew anything? Paxton was certain she didn’t.

In October, Agnew resigned as Nixon’s vice-president, and in November Congress overrode Nixon’s veto of the law that would have limited the President’s right to wage war. They wanted the same situation never to come again. We had lost in Viet Nam, but they wanted to think twice before we ever got into something like it again. And Congress wanted to maintain their controls on the President forever.

Paxton spent Christmas in Saigon, eight months after she’d gotten there. She told herself she would go home as soon as she found something concrete, or a year after she’d come, if by then she still had no answer. But a year to the day after she arrived, someone recognized Tony’s picture and it spurred her on. She was an old peasant woman from the North, and she said she’d found him in a wood and given him food, and then he had been taken away by soldiers. So he had been taken prisoner again, but where and by whom, and then what had happened? She spared Joey the recital of that. There was no point. But she just kept on looking.