The Man from Saigon

MARTI LEIMBACH

The Man from Saigon

To Alastair, always

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Marti Leimbach

Copyright

About the Publisher

I

The first shots came as they were flying northeast toward Danang. Over the terrific noise of the engine and rotors, she could hear a pinging sound, something like coins being lobbed against the metal where she was sitting. It wasn’t particularly loud, and didn’t sound remarkable or worrying. For many minutes she sat stiffly in the nylon seat of the helicopter, the wind rifling across her trouser legs, sending her field jacket back so that she could feel a button pushing against her neck, being aware of many things, but not the pinging sound, the bullets directed at her, at all of them, as they spun above a canopy of jungle.

She had much to distract her from the pinging: the roar of the engine as the chopper skimmed over the tops of trees, the throbbing of the rotors, the explosions of fire from the door gunners, the effort she made to keep from being sick. It was a while before she even thought about it. She only registered the gravity of the sound because she felt a force behind her, a sudden pushing in of metal as though a fist had pressed the fuselage of the chopper inward, feeling mildly uncomfortable and new. The place where the metal had bent was low on her back, just above her belt. Had the bullet passed through the side of the chopper, it would have found a home in her right kidney. When she reached back to check that it was not her imagination, that there really was a small, convex lump behind her, she felt the hot metal at the same time as a rising panic, a kind of insistence from inside her that she respond to the assault, as involuntary as a sneeze.

It may have been that her body knew even before she clocked it in her mind that they were being shot at; that they were being hit. When she realized the sound she’d been hearing was of bullets meeting the skin of the chopper she found she had to control herself as she might a bucking horse, staying focused, intent, sitting the ride as the chopper dipped and swerved, as the pinging sound seemed to dissolve all others, so that it felt to her that the volume had been turned down, that the whole of the earth was silent, except for this one noise. She felt a kind of last-minute, hopeless panic, her life opening before her. Not her life passing year to year in a flash as it is said to do at such moments, nothing like that. Only where she was, and that she’d had a choice some time back, not now, and that she’d made the wrong choice. It was a feeling of being trapped and desperate, of having been cornered by her own mistakes.

She did not look at her colleague, her friend, Son. She knew he did not like being so close to American marines, that he did not like this particular route into Danang, flying over the jungle. There were always VC there, cloaked by the jungle’s thick canopy, willing to take a few quick shots in case they got lucky. Son had warned her, but she had not taken it in. Now, she could not bring herself to look at him. Nor did she watch the door gunners or turn to see the pilot. In fact, she could not see properly; every nerve seemed to focus inward at the terror brewing inside her.

If she’d had the presence of mind, she’d not have blamed the enemy, or the pilot, or command operations—not even the war, itself, for what was happening, for what more might happen—but would have cast the blame on her own poor judgment for getting on the chopper in the first place. For every small, seemingly inconsequential decision that had led her here, to this place, right now. Under fire, she found it hard to breathe or swallow or make a noise. More than anything, she wanted to run, which was of course not possible, and the fact that she could not run, that she was caged and airborne and entirely at the mercy of whatever would happen next, was almost unbearable.

She wrapped her hands over her head, over her eyes. She stared down at the floor and watched as a bullet made a mark there, a little rise of hot aluminum not far from her foot and she wished she’d followed the advice she’d read about traveling by helicopter in Vietnam, which was not only to wear a flak jacket, but to sit on one as well.

And then the pinging stopped. She waited for it to begin again, but there was no sound. She heard the chaos of voices and gunfire, wind and rotors, loud and relentless, hammering at her skull, but the pinging was gone. She felt something inside her shift and she was able finally to look up, scanning the faces of the others. She looked at Son. His black hair stood straight up, a result of sweat and wind. He tried to smile but his mouth was dry and taut so that all he managed to do was squint and meet her eyes with his reassuring gaze. One of the gunners was intent on unjamming his gun, the other so pale she thought for a moment he would faint and fall out of the open door. The gunner’s shirt was wet, as though someone had poured a bucket of water across his chest, and she watched as the wind dried it little by little, all signs of the terror of the last few minutes quietly disappearing.

Someone began to laugh. The pilot whooped and the gunner with the jammed M60 suddenly opened fire at no particular target. They had flown through it; they had won this moment. It wasn’t long before they could see the sands stretching eastward toward the South China Sea, the chopper landing safely in Danang. They trotted out, inspecting the fuselage for dings, for all those little holes that meant bullets. She walked around the helicopter, finding the area outside where she’d been sitting, looking up at the dented metal, the pocket where she’d felt the heat, the sharp splinters of metal beginning to fracture. The others were pointing to more serious breaks in the chopper, but she stared only at that one place where the bullet hadn’t quite broken through. Nothing had come of it. She would tell herself this thin truth for many days: while in the shower at the press center, while standing in line at the USO for burgers, while drifting off in thought when she was supposed to be interviewing someone, she would insist that nothing happened. The bullet had fallen back through the sky; the chopper had touched down like a giant trembling bird; everything ended the way it ought to have, with them safely on the ground, the heat gathering round them as the rotors slowed. It was a July afternoon and the air was still.

Shall I take a photograph? Son asked her, nodding up at the chopper, at the scar in the metal that held her attention. It seemed so innocuous now, the bullet hole, like the head of a lion mounted on a wall.

She told him no, the words coming out quickly, perhaps a little too loudly, as though he’d asked for something inappropriate and personal. Then she said, I didn’t mean to sound like that. Take the picture. Go ahead.

He brought the camera to his eye, framed the photograph, adjusted the focus, and released the shutter. They walked together across the airfield with their packs and cameras and she suddenly ran forward and was sick on the dirt by the fence-line. Son waited, then carried her pack for her.

You might one day want it, he said. That picture.

She was wrung out of emotions. She felt places in her body that were like bruises, the result of clenched muscles. She shook her head and wondered why anyone would want that photograph. Why would they keep such a thing? She did want it, not then but many months later when she was packing for home. It was among the few mementos she took with her.

A month before, in Saigon, a guy had given her a mimeographed pamphlet written by another reporter, the pages stapled together, corners curled, the title stamped across the front in capital letters: HANDBOOK FOR NEWSMEN IN VIETNAM. It was written during the years when the war was still young, a small affair with none of the sense of increasing disaster that hung about it now. Its author mixed practical advice with his own, idiosyncratic observations about the locals, warning reporters never to travel without ID papers, for example, and that the Vietnamese will always tell you what they think you want to hear. Nobody spoke much about the Handbook; everybody read it and pretended they had not. In fact, the reporter she borrowed it from made a point of saying he did not want it returned.

They were in a bar, a group of other newsmen around them, enjoying the air conditioning and the darkness that contrasted with the extreme light outside. She had arrived exhausted into Tan Son Nhut airport sixteen hours earlier, the plane diving toward the landing strip as though it meant to bury itself there. She’d never been to Asia, or covered a war. Now she found herself in a bar that might as well have been in New York or Chicago. She didn’t know what to expect. She felt a little disoriented. The chatter of the reporters confused her; she couldn’t even figure out what they were talking about—this infantry, that unit. Drinking did not help, but she certainly was not going to sit in the bar surrounded by men drinking scotch and order a ginger ale. The reporter who had asked her to meet him said he had something for her, and that something turned out to be a copy of the Handbook. He gave it to her along with his business card, his home number handwritten on the reverse side.

Let me know when you get back, he said. I’d like to hear how it went. He was ten years older than her, maybe fifteen, the beginnings of gray in his hair making his head appear to shine. He looked as though he felt a little sorry for her. He regarded her as one might a younger sister, even a child.

She smiled. You don’t think I’ll last two weeks, do you?

He was taken aback, though he tried not to show it. I didn’t say that. Anyway, it depends on where you go.

She laid the Handbook on the table next to their drinks. So where did you go? she asked.

He brushed the question aside. You’ll notice how slim it is, the Handbook. That’s because you really can’t tell people what they need to know. But read it anyway. Definitely read it.

He smiled. He explained he was leaving for New York the following day and all he could offer by way of good advice was for her to go home now. Or at least soon. It’s hard enough for a man, he said. Though being a woman will have one advantage. You’ll be the first on at the airstrip, that’s for sure.

She nodded. She didn’t know exactly what he meant and yet she felt to admit this would embarrass them both, so she filed the words away in her head: first on at the airstrip.

The drink came to an end. The man smiled and then looked right at her for a single, long minute as though trying to memorize her face.

I’ll be fine, she said. It was odd that he should be so concerned. It made her nervous—not of him, but of where she was, what she was doing. These were the earliest hours of the earliest days, long before bullets or chopper rides, before anything at all. She said she’d be fine but she had no way of knowing if this would be the case. She hadn’t really thought there could be any other outcome, until now.

He took a long breath. You’re awfully young, he said, or maybe it’s me. I’ve gotten old here. He finished his drink in one long swallow. Then he stood, shook his head as though to push away a thought, and flicked his ash into his empty glass. She extended her hand to shake his, and he took her fingers, drawing her forward and planting a soft kiss on her forehead. He nodded slowly, then turned away, holding a hand up at his shoulder as he went. He left the Handbook on the bar table for her as one might an old magazine, disregarding entirely the warning in the pamphlet’s introduction that the contents were confidential.

She read that she must bring a canteen, a poncho, zinc oxide, a hat, malaria pills. Never to go out with any unit smaller than a company. Bring pencils as well as pens because pens dried up in the heat and pencils broke or needed sharpening. Halazone, iodine, chlorine. She was told by those around her to be careful; some even recommended she not leave the ever-tightening boundary of the city. In the hotel’s narrow bed, she passed her first sleepless jet-lagged nights with the Handbook across her knees, scanning a flashlight across the words on each mimeographed page. In the middle of the night, just upon falling asleep, she would suddenly jerk awake, asking herself frankly how on earth anyone thought she could do the job of a foreign correspondent, a war correspondent, because she was quite sure she could not. She told herself it was normal to feel this way, that everybody must have their doubts. Then she doubted that, too.

She discovered it was hard to function in Saigon. The electricity didn’t always work. The water came out rusty from the taps. She drew herself maps, wrestled with the foreign money, drenched her clothes in sweat trying to get used to a climate that seemed from another planet entirely. One day she saw school children file past a dog that had died outside the school gates. The children walked over the stiffened legs or hopped above the bloated body. One of the boys got a stick and hit the dog’s ribs as though it was a piñata that had failed to burst open its sweets. A few others stood around, watching. Then another kicked the dead body. She went back the next day and the dog was still there, most of it.

She had plenty of time to read the Handbook because she found it impossible to sleep. The traffic was like some background record that kept repeating itself: screeching tires, honking horns, exhausts backfiring, and engines that moaned and spluttered under the slow poison of inappropriate fuel. That ended shortly after curfew at eleven, but then there was all the noise from the assortment of odd guests at the hotel where she stayed. Some nights they arrived drunk from clubs, speaking at the tops of their voices, playing music, or kicking a soccer ball down the halls. Fights broke out between the drunken ones and those who had regular jobs that required early rising. It was not unusual to hear an argument conducted in three different languages, and once in a while it got physical.

The hotel’s owner was a middle-aged balding man named Thanh. He had a mustache like two sets of toothbrush bristles stuck above his lip, and an open, sad face. He seemed particularly burdened by the noisy guests and was concerned, too, about their impact on the quieter ones. Even so, it did no good at all when he knocked door to door along the corridors at midnight with the question, They boddering you?, while further down the hall came shouts of laughter.

I was asleep, she always lied.

Even when all was peaceful at the hotel, it was still only a couple steps up from camping. Insects trailed her wherever she went, crossing whatever barrier or combination of sprays she used, bringing up itchy swellings on her skin. When she did sleep, she managed it only by putting a pillow over her head to block out the noise. Reading was good. It helped her to believe she was learning something useful and she knew there was much to learn.

In those early days she could not have understood what she had gotten into. For example, she paid no attention to the Handbook’s suggestion to pack belts and field straps—materials that could be made into a tourniquet—as she didn’t think she was going anywhere she might be shot. She glanced over instructions on first aid because she thought there were specific people who did that—others, not her. Okay, so she had seen some kids beating the corpse of a dog. And she’d noticed, too, how many people with crudely amputated limbs begged along the streets. But she hadn’t made the connection yet. She didn’t realize that people could play football down a hallway, walk outside and be blown up by a little anti-personnel mine strategically fixed beneath a car. She was still under the impression the war could be contained, a thing over there, something that had to be arrived at quite deliberately. She didn’t realize.

A lot of Vietnam correspondents have a story of how they came to the country: chosen by accident, paid for their own ticket by winning a game show, confused with another guy, filled in for someone else on R&R and the person never came back. Susan was no different—the choice to send her seemed random, the end result of a chain of assumptions. She was working for a women’s magazine and had a private interest in horse training—it was really the combination of those two facts that had brought her into the war. One long summer in ’66 she moonlighted for the police department, desensitizing their horses to gunfire, preparing them to cover student protests, city riots, rallies. The job required learning to shoot a pistol, launch smoke grenades from the saddle, and move the horses away from rings of fire, then toward them again—hours of this until they would happily jump through them. What we need here, said one of the officers, a transplant from the Southwest, a guy fond of flicking his hair back, of swaggering cowboy style into the barn in the early hours and staring right down at her ass as she worked, what we need here is a cow-y pony that can separate one man from another in a crowd, you know what I mean? A bolshie sonovabitch, gelded late.

She looked up from where she was working, bending down to trim a loose flap of frog off a front hoof. You mean a mare, then, she said.

Like hell! Mares can’t hack it when the chips are down. I don’t want to be right up against it and have my horse go all girly on me.

She took in a breath. She’d worked late on a story the night before and she was tired; she didn’t want an argument, especially one as inane as whether a mare was capable of going “all girly”. She moved to the next hoof and began clearing one cleft, then another, ignoring the guy. It was the only defense.

He came closer, gave the tag end of her chaps belt a little tug, and said, I like the way you ride.

She stood straight, dropping the horse’s leg, staring at the guy, the hoof pick held like a pirate’s hook. Quietly, as though sharing a secret, she said, You can fuck right off. To which he laughed hard, backing up as he did so.

That’s good, he said. That’s real good.

He told her he was biding his time for her. It won’t be long, he promised.

The horses had to walk through smoke, explosions, throngs of people. It was exactly the opposite of what is natural for them. She taught the small herd of four the same skills as for cutting cattle and slowly the horses began to disregard everything but the job at hand. Before work, on the weekends, late into the Midwestern evenings when the heat gave way to the velvet of a summer’s night, the training took up all her free time all that summer long, until she could have ridden beside a firing canon and the horses wouldn’t spook, until not even a dog was safe in an open pen because the horses would chase him out. Finally, at the end of the summer they sent a bunch of the officers into the ring with her and she focused her gaze on the one with the swagger, and felt her horse connect with her meaning, hooking on to the guy.

He made a run for it, whooping as though he enjoyed being chased, showing off to the others. He lifted his hat like a clown running in a rodeo; he made a show of pretending he was scared. But it took only four strides to catch up with him and less than ten seconds until she was circling him at a canter as he held up his hands in surrender, laughing. He expected her to let him go now, but she didn’t let him go. She kept up the revolutions, the horse rolling on its hocks, the sound of hooves like a drumbeat, so close to the guy he looked as though he’d been corked in a bottle. Now the officer stopped smiling; he stared at her helplessly, unable to move an inch, 900 pounds of horse around him like a cyclone. She watched a window of fear open on his face. He suddenly looked young and stupid; he suddenly looked like someone she felt sorry for. She sat back, bringing the horse to a halt.

Meet Millie, she said, patting a swatch of mane.

At the magazine, they thought horse training meant she was a particular type of person, a kind of rugged, intrepid girl willing to take physical risks—not what she thought of herself, not at all. Spring the next year she was called into the editor’s office and given the assignment to collect women’s interest stories for a feature they wanted on Vietnam. She was to be there only a few weeks.

War reporting? She was confused.

Her editor kept looking at the copy she was marking, barely registering the question. As you seem to like adventures, she said. The editor’s desk was littered with typescripts, paperweights, trays stuffed with clippings, envelopes, a grammar, a stamp pad, a half-empty bottle of aspirin, caffeine pills, two dirty coffee cups which sat next to the one from which she was now drinking. She smoked Larks, her lipstick ringing the filters of a collection of spent butts in the ashtray. She wore browline eyeglasses in the style of Malcolm X and had an affecting glare such that one tended not to argue.

Vietnam, Susan said. Women’s interest. It was more a question than anything.

The editor had a rash around her hairline, some kind of eczema that worsened with stress, and a large vein in her neck that bulged when she shouted, which was not infrequently. She looked up from what she was doing, scribbling over some copy with what might have been a glass marker, and reeled off a list: Orphans, hospitals, brave young GIs, gallant doctors, heroic captains, courageous American-loving civilians…go there, find it.

Susan nodded. So, no dying—She was going to say So, no dying sons, but her editor fixed her with a look that brought the entire discussion back to where it had begun, as a set of instructions. Then the older woman scratched her head and told Susan there were newsmen all over Chicago desperate to go to Saigon—didn’t she know that? Her fingers unstuck a file drawer and suddenly she slapped a manila envelope on to the desk, her eyes never leaving Susan’s.

Open it, she said.

There were photographs of women in combat gear, cameras around their necks, ponytails beneath helmets. She recognized one right away, the late Dickey Chapelle in her horn-rims and pearl studs, squinting through the lens. Another showed a girl with reddish blonde hair, a long, freckled nose. She was smiling at a soldier wearing a helmet that listed the months of the year, four crossed out, a pack of cigarettes tucked into the band.

Her editor said, That’s Cathy Leroy, age twenty-two. Little French girl arrived in Saigon with no job and no experience as a photographer. The way she makes a living is by taking more risks than the guys.

Cathy Leroy was built like a gymnast, not even five feet tall. In one of the photos she was following a group of four marines as they carried their dead buddy over a field of elephant grass flattened by the force of wind off a chopper’s rotor blades. Susan thought it was impressive what the girl was doing; it made something flicker inside her, a rush of possibility as though she had just stumbled upon a vision of herself in that same place, beneath the same hot sun and the same deafening sound of a medevac arriving. She had never, not once, considered a foreign assignment, let alone in a war zone. Now, as she flipped through the photographs her editor gave her, it occurred to her this was exactly what she wanted, or could want, if she dared.