The sound of propeller engines was loud through the rear door of the office. There were bursts of small-weapons fire of a type familiar to Marie, the submachine guns of the Saigon police. At this time the Special Forces Lieutenant drew his sidearm and put the barrel of it in the socket of her left eye, against the fluttering eyelid.
This was nothing to her. It was no more alarming than the over-familiar grip of the strange boy’s hand on her biceps. She kept her other eye wide open and watched the cylinder turn as the Lieutenant drew back the hammer with his thumb. A peace and clarity seized the room. She thought she might fall asleep. “I wanna have all your local money,” the man said. “Captain Minh is gonna take your dollars. Care to make some trouble about it?”
“Thank you, sir,” she said. Her life was all around her. She could not, in any sense that mattered, be killed.
The man had an excellent American-style accent. “Cap’n Minh-baby,” he said.
The boy in the Air Force uniform let go her arm and removed the bundle from her blouse, reaching with surgical detachment between her breasts. When he took her packet of seven one-hundred-dollar bills for himself, she gathered that this was Captain Minh, his middle name become his last, as often happened these days. Captain Minh gave Marie’s packet of Vietnamese money, tens of thousands of piasters, to the Lieutenant, who put it inside his purple beret and replaced the beret on his head. The three other soldiers in the office looked on without any interest.
Real light broke into the room as the boy Captain pushed through the back door. He invited her with a toss of his head to follow him onto the asphalt of runways.
The sun was low — the afternoon was half gone. Heat came up miserably from the black tarmac and blew into their faces off the whirling blades of a helicopter skimming the grass between runways a couple of hundred meters west. Backed by the sun, the helicopter looked flat as a shadow in the air, converged on by the tiny figures of desperate people turned bright green by the glare in her eyes. A 707 taxiing out made sound waves and heat waves that blended into a single force she had to turn away from.
The Special Forces Lieutenant was with them. He drew ahead and led them to a hangar in which a U.S. helicopter the size of a house sat on the flatbed of a six-wheeled transport vehicle that must have been some kind of truck, she imagined, but looked more closely related to a golf cart. The Lieutenant jumped into the truck’s seat — there was only room for one, just a seat, a dashboard, and steering wheel — and began trying to get it started, pushing a button so that the engine yowled and died. For ten seconds he waited with a face of stone, then tormented it again, getting nowhere.
Standing with Marie in the parallelogram of light that fell through the hangar’s entrance and turned the greasy asphalt so intensely silver that their legs were invisible below the knees, Captain Minh pointed to a DC-3 that was landing. “Danang plane,” he said.
She didn’t quite grasp what she was seeing; it seemed that shredded humans — arms and legs and half-torsos, the torn-off parts of citizens and even, as the plane landed across their line of sight, even the uniformed parts of dismembered military people — were stuck to the landing gear and dangled from under the wings. Then it was way down the runway, moving far past the terminal building to stop near a group of minuscule figures at the runway’s other end. Jeeps and a luggage cart and people who seemed to come from nowhere, running at top speed, left the terminal area and raced in pursuit of the plane.
And as soon as the Lieutenant had the helicopter out of the hangar and Captain Minh had positioned himself at the controls, a swarm of weeping, shouting people, most of them wearing military or airport-personnel uniforms, began clambering all over it. The Lieutenant gave Marie a hand on board, making way for her by kicking one man in the chest and then suddenly, when he was unable to dislodge another from the doorway, unholstering his sidearm and shooting him in the face, an incident that would return to her over and over, both waking and dreaming. Yet once the blades began turning and the three of them were on board, neither the pilot nor the Lieutenant paid any heed to the people crushing themselves through the doors. The Lieutenant busied himself replacing the spent bullet in his revolver. Captain Minh concentrated on the levers and dials before him as if closeted alone with certain problems of aviation. Panting and whimpering strangers crammed against their backs, and Marie felt what might have been someone’s mouth on her neck. Complaints of discomfort became screams of terror barely audible in the roar of the blades as the helicopter moved along only half a meter above the runway, pursued by faces, and after a long time rose up trailing strings of humans who clutched one another by the pants, the shirts, the ankles, dragging each other down and falling to the asphalt beneath. Still there must have been more than a dozen people in the helicopter with them, those by the doors still helping aboard the ones who clung by their fingertips to whatever might be clung to — the edges of the open ports, the skis of the landing gear, even the barrels of the machine guns protruding from either port. The load was so great that the helicopter hardly cleared the shacks beyond the airport, but as it gained speed and lurched once, then twice, finally unburdened of people who couldn’t hang on any longer to the skis, it took to the upper air. Captain Minh was a savior shining in his own drugged eyes as he lifted them all above the war, and they left that world behind.
Whoever was saved that day was saved, though many of them were lost again only a little while later, and all of them were lost now but Marie.
It seemed to her that she very often had to endure more now, as an old woman, than she’d had to endure then. She dragged herself from bed into the kitchen and toward her grandson’s music through crowds of voices and long streamers of pain. Whatever room she escaped was always a war in itself, a harried landscape that could at any second be blasted out from under her, revealing a world made of memories, most of them more real than these shifting walls.
And now she was being led out of the hospital at Sangley Point — no, no, toward the red rocking chair in the parlor where she’d been all her life. The Officer’s Club smelled of spilt liquor and re-run smoke. The Rolling Stones made one layer in the layers of voices: “This coat — is torn — and frayed / It’s seen — much bed — der days. ” Outside the gates of the Sangley Point Naval Base she looked down the road of whorehouses and cheap shops of Cavete City, P.I. Somebody said, “Sige!” and a carabao nearly ran her down in the street, pulling a wooden-wheeled cart at a rate slow as its glazed eyes. In the country of her father’s death they called them water buffalo, giant living barges with dark elephant tusks set on their heads sideways and curved back, and the same impenetrable hide as an elephant.
She was standing here in the road to the Saigon Airport. She had never seen these things before, the deformed offspring of the Rolling Thunder: Napalm’s stumps and Napalm’s obliterated eyes, at least a dozen of them, several so extensively cauterized they had to be pulled along in this cart by this water buffalo walking in its sleep. Others, those who could walk, trailed the cart. A white missionary woman herded them along, very red in her cheeks, huffing and puffing, unbalanced and hopeless. Marie backed out of the way. From a faceless face one black pupil of an eye, like a marble in a puddle of fat, took her measure.
Captain Minh was screwing together a carbine; he checked its sights, placed the barrel in his mouth — Jagger goes, “Thang you — for your wine — California / Thang you — for your sweed an — bitter fruit”—placed the barrel in his mouth. her grandson began to play the oboe. He’d made it himself from bamboo. Even in the simplest melodies, the notes cracked into falsetto like the voice of a sobbing teenage boy.