Saigon (41 page)

As they approached the central Saigon market next morning, Hawke and Joseph saw that thick smoke was pouring out through the blackened dome above the covered halls again. The market had been set ablaze for the first time four days earlier, and the sporadic fighting in the surrounding streets had prevented any attempt to extinguish the fire. In a narrow Street running alongside the burning building, Hawke slowed the jeep to a crawl, Shaking his head in dismay. “If these markets stay closed and the guerrillas keep their food blockade intact around the city, I guess we’ll start to see famine conditions down here in the south, too, before long.” 

While he was speaking, a ragged little Vietnamese boy toddled unexpectedly into their path from the mouth of a narrow alleyway, gazing awestruck at the pall of smoke, and Hawke had to stamp hurriedly on the brake. Springing from behind the wheel, the lieutenant swept the startled boy up in his arms; he was no more than three or four years old, and Joseph sat up in his seat suddenly, staring at the child. Within seconds the boy’s distraught mother rushed from a house in the alleyway and snatched him from the arms of the amused Bostonian, but when Hawke returned grin- fling to the jeep, he found Joseph staring at him strangely, his face contorted as though with pain. 

“What is it, captain?” he asked anxiously. 

“The famine!” said Joseph in an anguished whisper. “How in God’s name could I forget the famine?” His face had drained of color and he was staring through Hawke as though he wasn’t there. 

“What are you talking about?” asked the lieutenant in a puzzled voice. 

“The famine in the north!”Joseph closed his eyes for a moment. In all the confusion of the last few days his thoughts had returned constantly to the imaginary face of the eight-year-old daughter he had never seen; but until that moment he had not associated the anonymous northern village where she had been sent to live with the terrible famine zone of lower Tongking and northern Annam. 

“I don’t follow you, captain,” said Hawke, grinning in his bafflement. 

“Just get in the jeep — fast.” Joseph shifted quickly behind the steering wheel, his face set in resolute lines. Before Hawke was properly seated, he accelerated furiously away and drove at break neck speed to the Hopital Militaire. In the front courtyard he brought the jeep to a screeching halt and tore past the startled sentries, leaving Hawke to deal with identification procedures. He ran all the way through the echoing corridors to Lan’s room, and when he arrived panting at the door, he brushed the duty nurse aside without offering any explanation for his presence. To his intense disappointment, however, the bed was empty and the room’s impersonal cleanness no longer betrayed any sign that Lan had ever been there. 

“She was discharged three days ago, captain,” said the nurse sharply from the doorway. “She said she would be leaving Saigon immediately with her family.” 

Joseph ran all the way back to the jeep, took the wheel once more and drove with the same frantic urgency to the Imperial Delegate’s residence. There he found the red-lacquered moon gate had been smashed from its hinges, and he clambered over it with a sinking heart. Even before he reached the front door, the scattered belongings on the steps told him the house had been looted. Inside, the family altar lay toppled on its side, and its gilded incense burners and statues were gone. The Louis XIV furniture lay smashed like matchwood, the Chinese and Annamese scroll paintings had been ripped from the walls, and in the room where the traditional teak mandarin’s bed stood, an unsuccessful attempt had been made to start a fire. In another bedroom he found some of Lan’s silken ao dai hanging untouched m a lacquered cabinet and he was seized suddenly with a feeling of black despair; the filmy garments still smelled faintly of her perfume, and taking one of them in his hands, he buried his face in it. It was several minutes before he could bring himself to leave the room and then he walked slowly and dejectedly back to the Street. 

“Just what in hell’s name’s going on, captain?” A mystified smile creased Hawke’s face, and Joseph noticed he was sitting pointedly behind the wheel of the jeep. When Joseph made to move to the driver’s side, the young lieutenant held up both hands in mock horror. “I’ll take us back to base if you like. My nerves are in shreds and I’d like us to get there in one piece.” 

Joseph, nodding absently, slumped into the seat beside him and they traveled in silence For several minutes, heading towards OSS headquarters along the Rue Paul Blanchy. Hawke drove with ostentatious care, and when they approached the first of the log-pile road blocks which the Vietnamese had put up around the city to enforce their food blockade, he slowed to less than ten miles an hour. Since the day of the coup, the OSS men had become accustomed to zigzagging their vehicles at walking speed through the staggered barricades close to their headquarters; usually they were manned by half a dozen unarmed men, and the Vietnamese always waved them through, apparently acknowledging that they were Americans. As they approached the last barricade a quarter of a mile from the OSS mansion, Hawke’s curiosity finally got the better of him. 

“Since you risked my neck as well as your own getting us there, captain,” he said with a smile, “do you mind if I ask what it was you were looking for at the hospital and in the looted house?” 

Joseph let out a long breath. “There was somebody here in Saigon, David, who once meant a great deal to 

He paused as Hawke slowed the vehicle to begin negotiating the first section of the roadblock that was constructed of tree limbs and brush. Unlike the others, it appeared to be unmanned, and without taking his eyes off the road, Hawke nodded and smiled understandingly as comprehension dawned. “It all becomes clear now — an affair of the heart, eh?” 

“I found her again for the first time last Saturday— in the hospital..” As he spoke, Joseph’s eye was drawn to a pile of loose brush heaped in the roadside ditch; it was the same kind of brush of which the roadblock itself was constructed, and he realized suddenly that he had seen it shift. 

In the same instant Hawke noticed the movement too, and turned his head to look more closely. The jeep was halfway through its maneuver, moving at walking pace, and too late, both men realized they were a sitting target. 

“Nous sommes américains! Nous sommes américains!” screamed Hawke desperately as the brush was flung aside, but his shout was too late to prevent the concealed machine gun opening up on them from point-blank range. 

The entire first burst from the gun struck Hawke in the head, blowing away part of his lower jaw and shattering his skull. His blood flew in all directions from the terrible wounds, spattering the windshield, and after ramming into the barricade the jeep toppled slowly into the opposite ditch Joseph fell face down in the moist earth and lay paralyzed with horror, listening to the machine gun raking its chassis. When he turned over he saw Hawke’s body suspended above him on the steering wheel; his face was unrecognizable and he had obviously died the moment the bullets struck him. Lifting his head above the rim of the ditch, Joseph saw three Vietnamese emerge from their hiding place and start in his direction; they carried their rifles loosely in their hands, and he guessed they had assumed he was dead too. 

Each two-man OSS patrol carried a pair of Colt .455 and two M-r rifles as a matter of routine, and Joseph grabbed a rifle and a pistol from their clips before scrambling out from beneath the jeep and flinging himself through the bamboo hedge bordering the golf course. The three Vietnamese crossing the road opened fire immediately, and he felt their bullets crash through the foliage close to his head. On the other side of the hedge he dived into a depression in the ground and turned to fire back in the direction of his pursuers. To his surprise, he heard one of them scream as he fell to the ground, and the other two dashed back towards the concealed machine gun nest. Joseph took aim more carefully as they ran, but the rifle had jammed and he flung it from him with a curse. 

In the lull that followed he found that be had three clips of ammunition for the Colt .45 — twenty-one rounds in all — and he hurriedly loaded it. A minute later to his horror he saw a dozen other armed Vietnamese emerge cautiously from concealed positions around the barricade and begin crawling in his direction. Glancing to the west he saw that about five hundred yards separated him from the safety of the OSS mansion. The hedge provided some cover for half that distance, but he realized that if he remained where he was, he had no chance of survival. Taking a deep breath he rose to his feet and set off at a fast run along the edge of the golf course. When they caught sight of him, the whole force of Vietnamese guerrillas rose out of the grass to give chase, firing as they ran. 

As he neared the end of the protective hedge Joseph stopped. He could see that he would almost certainly he caught and killed by the guerrillas in the open unless he slowed them down, and after looking around frantically, he leaped into the ditch again. When the leading group of Vietnamese was only fifteen yards away, he lifted his head and, using both hands on the gun, emptied the Colt .45 into the running group. Two more guerrillas staggered and went down, and the rest immediately flung themselves flat on the ground. Using the fire-and-movement tactics he had been taught during his brief OSS training in Kunming, Joseph reached the end of the hedge safely the sprinted hard across the open ground. The guerrillas fired volley after volley at his back from a range of seventy yards, but he weaved and bobbed as he ran and reached the gates of the OSS house a minute later with only two bullets of his twenty-one left. 

“Hawke’s been killed,” Joseph gasped when the major commanding Detachment 404 rushed down the front steps to help him in. “I think they mistook us for the French.” 

The major quickly posted guards on the roof and ordered out extra Japanese sentries from their nearby blockhouse. When Joseph had regained his breath, the senior officer laid a hand gently on his shoulder. “This may riot be the best time to tell you, captain, hut British headquarters have just informed me that you’ve been declared persona non grata. They don’t like your views — or how you expressed them last night. You’ve got to fly out to Calcutta within twenty-four hours.” 

Still deeply shocked by Hawke’s death and the battle for his own life in which he had probably killed three Vietnamese, Joseph stared back at his superior without really taking in what he’d said. 

“And there’s another thing,” said the major, drawing Joseph towards the waiting room inside the front door. “There’s a Vietnamese here to see you. He’s been here a couple of hours. He insists on speaking to you personally and won’t tell anybody else what he wants.” 

When Joseph entered the waiting room Tran Van Tam rose unsteadily from his seat; a bloodstained bandage was bound around his head, his clothes were torn and dirty and there was no sign in his manner of the hostility he’d shown Joseph at his parents’ house a week before. 

“Captain Sherman, I’ve brought a message from my sister, Lan,” he said hesitantly. “She wishes to see you urgently. I’ll take you to her, if you’ll come now.” 

The winding, thousand-mile coast road from Saigon to Hanoi, first trodden by imperial courtiers before the Christian era dawned, has always given travelers the uneasy feeling that they are passing under sufferance through hostile, threatening terrain. For most of its length, the Mandarin Way is intimidated not only by the dense jungle that so often borders it, but also by two other great natural enemies: from the west the Annamite Cordillera occasionally thrusts down great spurs of rock to block its way, while from the east, the South China Sea seeps repeatedly across its path through the many crevices in Vietnam’s winding coastline. At the beginning of October 1945 it was still little more than a narrow, single-lane track arid Allied bombers had scarred and pitted its surface during intensive raids in the closing months of the war. But the craters had been largely patched and filled, and the ancient route of Annam’s mandarins bore Captain Joseph Sherman’s OSS jeep steadily northward over the roots of the mountains and through the clutching fingers of the sea as it had carried peasant carts and imperial palanquins during earlier centuries. 

On the third day of his journey it led him red-eyed and weary into the provinces of Quang Tri and Quang Binh, where the highway’s intangible air of threat had long since been replaced by a real arid horrifying devastation. There the rain poured down from a low, leaden sky onto a desolate expanse of paddy fields that had been flooded by the repeated August typhoons. The wheels of the jeep churned through an unending sea of gray mud, and the damp chill in the air caused Lan to wrap her hooded cloak more tightly around herself in the jeep’s passenger seat. 

They had been puzzled when they saw the first ruined village; charred corner timbers and smoke-blackened earth walls were all that was left of a cluster of houses that Lan remembered as a once thriving village. Farther on, an emaciated peasant squatting listlessly at the roadside told them the villagers had pulled down their houses piece by piece and made fires with the wood to keep themselves warm; long before they’d sold all their belongings to buy rice gruel. Many people had already died, he said, and those who were strong enough had moved on to seek food elsewhere. As he spoke the rolled mat lying in the mud at his side, apparently containing a bundle of his belongings, had shifted. Joseph heard a faint whimpering and assumed a dog had made the noise. But when Lan questioned him he admitted without taking his eyes from the flooded field beside the road that his two-year-old son was wrapped in the mat. He was waiting for him to die, he said tonelessly, so that he might bury him. 

Joseph had leaped from the jeep, broken open a package of C rations and tried to force some nourishment into the coolie’s hands. But he refused doggedly even to look at the food; instead he waved Joseph away from his bundle with threatening gestures. “We’ve already known great suffering. My wife and three other children are already dead,” he said defiantly. “It is better now that we should die.” When they drove away, the starving peasant had remained crouched by the rolled mat at the roadside, staring unseeing into the rain. The open packs of food which Joseph had insisted on leaving lay untouched before him on the flooded ground. After the faint whimper they had heard no further sound from the rolled mat, 

The sight of the first ox cart piled high with a dozen tangled bodies had left them both numb with shock. Flopping, fleshless arms and legs stuck out in disarray as the plodding animal dragged its obscene load towards them through the muddy street of another ruined village. The shrunken beast, starving itself, moved slowly at the urging of an exhausted coolie who beat its bony rump feebly from time to time with a bamboo rod. The cart halted to allow them to pass, and to his horror Joseph saw one of the heads, its long hair matted with mud and rain, jerk convulsively. He looked sharply at Lan, but found she had closed her eyes and turned away. 

Joseph stopped and ran back through the rain. He shook the coolie by the shoulder and pointed frantically to the body that had moved. Gesticulating and using a mixture of French and the few words of Vietnamese he had picked up from Hawke, he tried to make him understand that one of the “corpses” was still living. But like the dying peasant at the roadside, the man quickly became angry. He shouted and screamed abusively and pointed to the figure, now motionless like the rest. Then he turned away towards the nearby burial ground, and Joseph went slowly back to the jeep, fighting down a feeling of nausea. 

They soon became accustomed to the sight of charred houses littering the gray, devastated landscapes through which they passed. Sometimes families were still living in the shells of their homes, crouched like docile animals in the one corner still left standing. They saw other ox carts too, removing the dead, some piled with twenty or thirty corpses. Once Joseph saw the wasted body of a young peasant woman slumped in death beneath a gaunt, blackened tree that looked as if it had been struck by lightning; her half-naked body and the tatters of her clothes were streaked with gray slime, and she was scarcely distinguishable from the muddy ground on which she lay. It was the twitching at her breast of a scrawny baby, only months old, that drew his eye to her; the dying infant was mewling faintly in the dead woman’s arms and gnawing in vain at her shriveled teats. As he watched, another shrunken woman appeared, plucked the baby away and vanished into the blurred curtain of rain. They saw other corpses on the roadside, lying like twisted bundles of rags, from which the living, moving like sleepwalkers, kept their eyes averted. 

Joseph had stopped imagining he could do anything to help after he tried to distribute another packet of C rations to a group of stick-limbed children begging at the roadside. Their despairing eyes and outstretched hands made him stop, but the sight of the jeep immediately brought other swollen-bellied youngsters limping from the winding paths leading out through the thick bamboo groves that concealed their village. When he handed out two little packets of the food, the children had begun to fight among themselves with a terrible ferocity, tearing at each other’s faces and scattering the contents of the precious packages in the mud. A crowd of hollow-eyed adults, attracted by their screams, came running from the thicket, and Lan called frantically to Joseph to get back behind the wheel before the desperate villagers were tempted to attack them and loot the jeep. The children and the older Vietnamese, although obviously weakened by their hunger, chased after the vehicle, screaming pitifully as they ran, and the cries rang in Joseph’s head long after they were out of earshot. 

Even when they were back on the empty road, the smell of the wretched, starving people they had mingled with didn’t leave them; famine seemed to produce a sickly sweet smell of smoky putrefaction, as though hunger itself were burning and rotting the flesh on the living bones of the people, and although Joseph couldn’t be sure he wasn’t imagining it, the odor seemed to cling to the jeep as they drove on. It seemed to penetrate even into his mind, and he felt his own personal sense of despair deepening; what chance could there be amid all the casual horror they had already seen, of finding alive the frail daughter Lan had borne him without his knowledge nearly nine years before? 

Lan’s previous visits with her mother had always been made by train, and approaching by road, she had been unable to find the way because all signboards had been torn down and burned. As a result, they had to make a tortured search through village after village in the coastal area north of Dong Hoi. 

“These fields have always been green or gold when I came before,” she said suddenly in a haunted voice, gazing out through the windshield at the wasted land onto which the cold gray rain was still falling. “The people should be working now planting for the chiem harvest of the fifth month next year. Not only will there be no crop for this year’s tenth month harvest, but next year will be barren too.” 

Joseph noticed that she had begun to hold herself rigid in her seat, and he feared that hysteria might not be far away. The lowering skies were growing blacker, and he realized that it was more important for them to find shelter for the night than to continue searching the devastated villages as darkness fell. During most of the long journey from Saigon she had been subdued and distant; they had talked hardly at all as they headed northeast out of the city past Bien Hoa and into the vast region of regimented rubber plantations. He too had been abstracted; he found his own thoughts returning to his first melancholy journeys on that road with his mother in 1925, first traveling north to Hue in a state of youthful distress then returning later, shocked and stunned at the news of Chuck’s death. As they passed through the rubber groves and on into the tropical forests where he had so long ago hunted with his father and brother, he was haunted too by memories of Ngo Van Loc’s tragic family. 

They had begun their journey before dawn, and by driving hard through the day and into the darkness they had covered over two hundred miles to reach Nha Trang. There they had slept a few hours in rooms they were able to take in the old French-run inn that used to serve the railway when the northbound line ended there. They had risen at four AM. and driven hard again all the next day before snatching a few hours of sleep in a similar inn at Tourane, the port that would later be renamed Da Nang. As they passed the road running up into the highlands at Dalat and drove on above the massive natural harbor at Cam Ranh Bay, Lan’s mood had lightened abruptly. She had begun to talk animatedly of her idyllic schooldays at the Couvent des Oiseaux at Dalat; wistfully she described the mists that had shrouded the lake every day, the fragrant pines, the heady mountain air and the timeless beauty of the sun shining on the sparkling waters. 

“I would wander with my friends every day through the woods around the lake reading aloud . . . Lamartine . . . Baudelaire . 

Chateaubriand. . . . We would pick orchids and sing. We sang ‘Les feuilles sont mortes’ in the still air on the shore of the lake every morning, and our voices could be heard right across the other side. It was so lovely, so very romantic, Joseph.” Her eyes shone with the pleasure of the memory. “I was sure then my life would be filled always with romance.” 

Joseph had been deeply moved by the simple beauty of her words, spoken innocently without any trace of sadness. He felt suddenly that they were on the verge of entering some new and intimate realm of understanding, but then she had withdrawn quickly into an inexplicable silence again, her manner as enigmatic and uncertain as it had been when Tam had taken him to her on the day of Hawke’s death. When he arrived at the house in which she had lived since her marriage to Paul, she looked anxious and ill at ease. She told him that her parents had already left for the fortified country house with her young SOIS. Tam had been injured by drunken Frenchmen, she told him angrily, in the wild hours following the coup. In his fury he had let himself be drawn into one of the non-Communist “national resistance” movements like most other moderate pro-French Vietnamese in those days. She admitted she was frightened; with Paul wounded and in the hospital, her whole world appeared to be collapsing around her with no safe avenue of retreat. Her-conscience had troubled her, she had explained, without looking at him. She felt he had the right to know, if he wished, to which village his daughter had been taken to grow up. In an instant he had made up his mind, “We’ll go together and find Tuyet,” he said, seizing her by the hands. “You must show me where she is. I’ll look after you, protect you!” 

She hesitated and didn’t agree immediately, but he had persuaded her to wait until he returned early next morning. He had promised her he would take her then wherever she decided to go, and at OSS headquarters, he had secretly loaded up a jeep with as many jerrycans of gasoline as it would hold and thrown in four crates of C rations. Risking action later for desertion, he had returned to her house at dawn on the day he should have been deported to Calcutta, and found to his delight she was mutely willing to go with him. The fake orders he had given himself with the aid of an OSS typewriter, claiming that he was journeying to inspect American missionary properties in Dalat and Hue, appeared convincing enough for the few British and Viet Minh patrols he met on the road outside Saigon, and he passed off Lan in her hooded cloak as a sister of the order returning to the mission. Although there had been rumors that peasants outside Saigon were murdering rich landlords and corrupt village officials in a wave of revolutionary terror, during the drive through Cochin-China and southern Annam little seemed to have changed outwardly since Joseph’s previous visits; the tropical sun shone brightly, the fields were green with growing crops and the roads had been filled with the familiar jogging lines of straw-hatted peasants hauling food and livestock to crowded Country markets. Although the railway track beside the road lay smashed in many places by Allied bombs, the ancient road ferries were all in action on the rivers and inlets, and their owners helped the jeep on its way without question; the invisible ferrymen were summoned still as they had been for centuries, by a blast of a bulb horn hung from a riverside tree. 

But gradually as they drove northwards the weather worsened, and it was dawn on the third day as they headed on up the coast past Hue that they drove into the cold northern rain belt. The soldiers at the Chinese guard post at the sixteenth parallel had shown a healthy respect for the little American flag fluttering from the jeep’s aerial, and they had displayed no curiosity at Joseph’s verbal claim that he was traveling north to Hanoi with his wife to rejoin his old unit under General Wedemeyer’s command. As they drove on into Quang Tri province where the towering mountain chain thrust its bulk to within a few miles of the sea, they began to notice the first manifestations of famine; terraced fields on the mountainside lay bare and uncultivated, and from the few remaining aged peasants they learned that the population had already departed southward. The signs of devastation had increased as they continued northward until the landscape was at last transformed into a wasteland.