Ted replied, “It’s a frontier, all right. Complete with Indians.”
Susan asked Mr. Tram, “And you are a tour guide here?”
Mr. Tram replied, “I instruct English at the high school. It is the Tet holiday now, so I come here to see if I can be of any service to the tourists.” He added, “For veterans only.”
I looked at Mr. Tram. He seemed pleasant enough, and if he was with the Ministry of Public Security, it was probably only part-time. In any case, I’d found him, he hadn’t found me, so he had nothing to do with me. Maybe he and Mr. Loc knew each other.
Mr. Tram asked me, “May I inquire about your profession?”
I replied, “I’m retired.”
“Ah. You retire so young in America.”
Susan said, “He’s older than he looks.”
Mr. Tram and Ted chuckled, and Ted glanced at both of us and decided we were sleeping together.
We all chatted awhile, had another round of beers, and everyone hit the backhouse.
Mr. Tram was not the first North Vietnamese soldier I’d met here, but he was the first I’d had a few beers with, and my curiosity was aroused. I asked him, “What do you think of all these Americans coming back here?”
He replied without hesitation, “I think it is a good thing.”
I don’t like to get into politics, but I asked him, “Do you think what you were fighting for was worth all the death and suffering?”
Again, without hesitation, he replied, “I was fighting for the reunification of my country.”
“Okay. The country is reunified. Why does Hanoi treat the south so badly? Especially the veterans of the South Vietnamese army.”
Someone kicked me under the table, and it wasn’t Mr. Tram or Ted.
Mr. Tram thought about that, then replied, “There were many mistakes made after the victory. The government has admitted this. It is time now to think of the future.”
I asked him, “Do you have any friends who were former South Vietnamese soldiers?”
“No, I do not. With my generation, it is hard to forget.” He added, “When we see each other in the street or on a bus or in a café, we are reminded of the suffering and the death we brought to each other. We look with hatred, and turn away. This is terrible, but I think the next generation will be better.”
We all went back to our beers. Oddly enough, ex-Captain Tram would have a beer with two Americans who’d tried to kill him, not far from here, but he wouldn’t even say hello to a former South Viet soldier. This animosity between the North and South Viets, the victors and the vanquished, went on, and it was a very complex thing, having less to do with the war, I thought, than what came after. War is simple; peace is complex.
Ted said to Susan and me, “The bus leaves in about half an hour. I don’t think they’d mind if you came along.”
I replied, “We have a car and driver. You can come with us now.”
“Yeah? Okay.” He looked at his guide. “Okay?”
“Of course.”
Ted insisted on paying for the beers, and we left the crowded café.
We found Mr. Loc where we’d left him, and he said something to Susan, who replied in Vietnamese. This blew Ted away, and he said, “Hey, you speak gook? I mean, Vietnamese?”
Susan replied, “A little.”
“Jesus, who the hell speaks Vietnamese?”
Susan and I and Mr. Tram squeezed into the rear of the RAV, big Ted got in the front, and off we went.
We headed east on Highway 9, and Mr. Tram, wanting to start earning his pay, said, “If you will look to your right, you will see the remains of the old French Foreign Legion fort.”
We all looked, and Susan snapped a picture and so did Ted.
Mr. Tram continued, “The People’s Army occupied the fort until the arrival of the…” He looked at me, sort of smiled, and said, “Until Mr. Paul arrived with hundreds of helicopters.”
This was really a little strange. I mean, here I was sitting ass to ass with this guy who I’d have painted bright red in a heartbeat if I’d seen him here way back when. Or he’d have killed me. Now he was my guide, telling me when I’d air-assaulted in here.
Mr. Tram went on with his tour and said, “This road to your right that intersects here was part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and it travels south to A Luoi in the A Shau Valley, the scene of many terrible battles. On this trail, one kilometer south is the Dakrong Bridge, which was a gift to the Vietnamese people from our socialist Cuban brothers. We can visit the bridge later, if you wish.”
Susan said something to Mr. Tram in Vietnamese, and he nodded as she spoke.
Ted heard this and turned around again. “What’s happening?”
Susan explained. “We just came from the A Shau Valley. Paul was there once.”
Ted said, “Oh, right. You guys went from here to the A Shau. How was it?”
I replied, “It sucked.”
“Couldn’t be worse than Khe Sanh, buddy.”
There are descending circles of hell, even in war, and every soldier is convinced he’s in the worst circle, and there’s no use trying to convince him otherwise. Your hell is your hell, his hell is his hell.
Mr. Tram said, “I had a brother who was in the A Shau Valley.”
No one asked him how his brother was doing now.
Mr. Tram returned to the packaged tour and said, “As you see, the fields on both sides of the road are under cultivation. Coffee and vegetables and pineapples are the main produce. During the war, the valley was uninhabited, except for some hill people who had allied themselves with the Americans. Very few of the original inhabitants have returned, and there are mostly new settlers from the coast. They name their villages after their old villages, so when family or friends from the coast come to visit, they need only ask for such and such a village, and the local people can direct them to the new village, which has the same name as the village from which the settlers have come.”
Ted informed Mr. Tram, “We have the same thing in the States. New York, New Jersey, New London, New whatever. Same thing.”
“Yes? Very interesting,” said Mr. Tram, who hadn’t gotten paid yet. Mr. Tram continued, “You see those many ponds in the area? These are not ponds, but bomb craters. There were once thousands of them, but most have been filled in with earth. The remaining ones are used to raise ducks or to water the animals.”
I remembered this landscape when I flew in, and from the air all you could see was the dead brown defoliation, the gray ash, mile after mile of North Vietnamese trenches, and crater after crater, like the surface of the moon.
I imagined Captain Tram and his comrades sitting in their bunkers or slit trenches at night, smoking and talking, hoping for a quiet evening. Meanwhile, six miles overhead, too high to be seen or heard, a flight of huge, eight-engine B-52 bombers all released their thousand-pound bombs simultaneously. The bombs did not whistle or shriek on the way down— the shrieking came from the people on the ground as the hundreds of bombs hit without warning.
Arc Light Strikes, they were called, and they transformed the earth below into a here-and-now hell, as though the nether regions had surfaced to engulf the world. And there wasn’t a bunker built or a tunnel deep enough to withstand a delay-timed fuse, which let the thousand-pound bomb burrow into the earth before exploding. And if the bomb didn’t actually hit you and vaporize you, the concussion turned your brain to Jell-O, or ruptured your internal organs, burst your eardrums, and threw you into the air like another clod of dirt. Or sometimes you got buried alive when your tunnel, trench, or bunker collapsed.
We’d found hundreds of North Vietnamese here, lying down, staring up at the sky, blood running from their ears, nose, mouth, or wandering around like zombies. They weren’t worth taking as prisoners, they were beyond medical help, and we didn’t know if we should shoot them or not waste the time.