We got a table by the rail, ordered drinks, watched the rain fall on the water, and listened to bullfrogs croaking. It was a very nice, atmospheric place, lit with colored lanterns and candles on the tables. Romantic.
Neither of us mentioned a word of business or anything that had been said in the cocktail lounge.
We had dinner and talked about home and about friends and family, but not about us or about any future plans.
Somewhere back there in the cocktail lounge, I think I used the “L” word, and I was trying to remember what I’d said. Maybe I didn’t actually use it, but I remembered agreeing to it.
Susan was staring out at the rain on the pond, and I looked at her profile.
I should have been incredibly angry at her; but I wasn’t. I shouldn’t trust another word she said; but I did. Physically, she was flawless, and intellectually she gave me a run for my money. If I were writing an officer’s evaluation report on her, I’d say: brave, intelligent, resourceful, decisive, and loyal. Divided loyalty, to be sure, but loyal.
But was I in love?
I think so. But what happened here could probably not happen elsewhere, and maybe could not be transplanted. And then there was Cynthia.
Susan turned and saw me staring at her. She smiled. “What are you thinking about?”
“You.”
“And I’m thinking about you. I’m trying to think of a happy ending.”
I didn’t reply.
“Can you think of a happy ending?”
“We’ll work on it.”
We looked at each other, and we both probably had the same thought that the chances of a happy ending were not good.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The following morning, Monday, Susan and I waited in the hotel lobby for our car and driver. We both wore jeans, long-sleeve shirts, and walking shoes. Susan had her tote bag filled with things for the road.
The lobby was full of tourists waiting for their buses, cars, and guides. Hue was a tourist mecca, I realized, a destination between Saigon and Hanoi, and as it turned out, a good place for my rendezvous.
She asked me, “How are you getting to where you need to go tomorrow?”
“I don’t know yet. We’ll talk about it later.”
“Does that mean you’d like my help?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ll give you some advice now — do not hire a car with a Vidotour driver. You might as well have Colonel Mang along.”
“Thank you. I already figured that out.”
We walked outside, and it was another gray, overcast day, cool and damp, but no rain.
Susan said to me, “You really pumped me last night.”
“I was very horny.”
“I wasn’t talking about that. I meant in the lounge.”
“Oh. That was overdue, darling.”
An open white RAV4 pulled into the circular driveway and stopped. A guy got out and spoke to the doorman, who pointed to us.
The driver came over to us, and Susan spoke to him in Vietnamese. They chatted for a minute, probably about price, which is Susan’s favorite subject with the Viets.
He was a man of about forty, and I’d gotten into the habit of matching the age of a Viet with his or her age in relation to the war. This guy had been in his mid-teens when the war ended, and he may have carried a rifle, either for the South Vietnamese local defense forces, made up mostly of kids and old men, or for the Viet Cong, who had lots of boys and girls in their ranks.
Susan introduced me to our driver, whose name was Mr. Loc. He didn’t seem particularly friendly and didn’t offer to shake my hand. Most Viets, I noticed, in their dealings with Westerners, were either very slick, or very good-natured. Westerners equaled money, but beyond that, the average Nguyen was polite until you pissed him off. Mr. Loc did not look or act like a hired driver; Mr. Loc reminded me of the close-faced guys I’d seen in the Ministry of Public Security in Saigon. In my job as an army criminal investigator, I assume many roles, and I’m good at it; Mr. Loc wasn’t very good at getting into his role as a driver, any more than Colonel Mang was at trying to pretend he was an immigration cop.
Susan said to me, “Mr. Loc needs to know where we’re going now so he can telephone his company.”
I spoke directly to Mr. Loc and said, “A Shau, Khe Sanh, Quang Tri.”
He barely acknowledged this and went into the hotel.
I said to Susan, “I booked this through the hotel, who, as you know, are required to use Vidotour. Ask that clown for his business card.”
She nodded in understanding, and when Mr. Loc came out of the hotel, she asked for his card. He shook his head as he said something to her.
She walked over to me and said, “He says he forgot his cards. The Viets who have business cards are proud of them, and they’d forget their cigarettes before they forgot their cards.”
“Okay, so we’re under the eye. Ask him if he has a map.”
She asked him, and without a word of reply, he took a map from the front seat and gave it to me. I opened it and spread it on the hood.
As Mr. Loc stood nearby, I said to Susan, “Here’s the A Shau Valley, due west of Hue. The road ends in the middle of the valley at this place called A Luoi, near the Laotian border, where I air-assaulted in by helicopter in late April ’68. From A Luoi is this dotted line that may or may not be passable. It was part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Ask Mr. Loc if we can take that to Khe Sanh.”
She asked him, though he probably understood what I was saying. He said something to Susan, and she said to me, “Mr. Loc says the road is mostly dirt, but as long as it doesn’t rain, we can make it to Khe Sanh.”
“Good. Ask him if we can all speak English and stop pretending.”
“I think the answer is no.”
“Right. Okay, after A Shau, we travel what looks like seventy klicks north to Khe Sanh, where I also air-assaulted in by helicopter, in early April ’68. Then we head east, back toward the coast on Highway 9 along the DMZ, and arrive at Quang Tri City, where my old base camp was located, and where I was stationed during most of the Tet Offensive in January and February 1968. So, we’re traveling back in time in reverse chronological order.” I added, “We’ll do it in that order because I wouldn’t want to be in the A Shau Valley when it gets dark.”
She nodded.
I said, “It’s a total of about two hundred kilometers, then due south again for about eighty kilometers, and we’re back in Hue.” I folded the map and threw it on the front seat.
Susan lit a cigarette, looked at me, and asked, “Did you ever think you’d be back this way?”
I moved away from the vehicle and from Mr. Loc, and thought about that. I replied, “Not at first. I mean, when I left here for the last time in ’72, the war was still going on. Then, for a decade after, the Communists had a tight grip on this country, and Americans weren’t exactly welcome. But… by the late ’80s, when things here loosened up, and as I got older, I started to think about going back. Veterans were starting to return, and almost no one I knew regretted the trip.”
“And here you are.”
“Right. But this wasn’t my idea.”
“Neither were the other two times.”
I replied, “Actually, I volunteered for my second tour.”
“Why?”
“A combination of things… good career move — I was a military policeman by then, and not a front-line infantryman. Also, things were getting a little rocky at home, and my wife wrote a letter to the Pentagon on my stationery saying I wanted to go back to ’Nam.”
Susan laughed. “That’s silly.” She looked at me and said, “So, basically, you went to Vietnam to get away from your marriage.”
“Right. I took the coward’s way out.” I thought a moment and said, “Also… I had a brother, Benny, who… they had an unwritten policy of one male family member at a time in a combat zone… and Benny was very accident-prone, so I bought him some time. Fortunately, the American involvement in the war ended before he got his orders to go. He wound up in Germany. I don’t like to tell that story because it makes me sound more noble than I am.”