The waiter had woken up. He saw us and ambled over. We ordered two coffees.
Susan said to me, “How does it feel sitting in a rooftop restaurant overlooking the DMZ?”
“I’m not sure. I feel sort of… disconnected, like I know I’m here, though it’s hard to think of this as a tourist attraction.” I paused. “But I’m glad it is. None of this should be trivialized, but maybe it’s inevitable that it will be. On the plus side, maybe the tourists can learn something, and maybe the vets can come to terms with a lot of things, and the Vietnamese can meet a lot of Americans and make a few bucks while they’re at it.”
She nodded. “I’m glad I came here.”
The coffee came, Susan lit up, and we looked out over the silent battlefields below.
I said to Susan, “Okay, here’s the brochure copy — DMZ Tours: A pleasant morning in the minefields where you can gather shrapnel and participate in a sandbag-filling contest, followed by a picnic lunch in the ruins of Con Thien firebase, after which we look for unmarked graves along Highway One, and we end our day at the Dong Ha Soccer Stadium, where we’ll see a re-creation of the surrender of Camp Carroll, performed by the original cast. Picnic lunch included.”
She looked at me awhile and decided not to respond.
Somewhere around her second coffee and third cigarette, she said to me, “As if this isn’t stressful enough for you — this return to your old battlefields — you’re probably worried about the trip up country and what you have to do there, and the people in Washington are giving you a hard time, and this Colonel Mang is shadowing you—”
“Don’t forget you.”
“I was getting to that. So, on top of all this, along comes this pushy bitch—”
“Who’s that?”
“This very forward, very brazen broad, who decides to pursue you—”
“Seduce.”
“Whatever. And you’ve got a million things on your mind, and your heart is back in the States, and your soul is on temporary loan to the dead.”
I didn’t reply.
She said, “And yet, Paul, I think it worked. Between us.”
I nodded.
She said, “But I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t go up country with you.”
“I never asked you to.”
“Maybe I’d be more of a burden than a help.”
“I think you should go on to Hanoi, and I’ll meet you there.”
“No, I think I should go back to Saigon.”
This sort of surprised me, and I said, “Why?”
“I think you have to finish your job here, then go to Honolulu… see how that works out, then… give me a call.”
“From Honolulu?”
“No, Paul, from Virginia.”
“Okay. Then what?”
“Then we can both see how we feel.”
“You mean, we have to be in different hemispheres to see how we feel?”
Susan seemed a little impatient with me for some reason and said, “I’m giving you an out. Are you dense?”
“Oh. Where’s the out? I missed the exit ramp.”
“You’re a complete idiot. I’m trying to be sensitive to your situation, and I’m willing to give up the man I love—”
“You already did that. You sent him a fax.”
She stood, “Let’s go.”
I gave the waiter a few bucks, and we rode down the elevator. I said, “I’m sorry. It’s been a stressful day. I make jokes when I’m stressed, and when I sense danger — old combat habit. Don’t mean shit, as we used to say about things that meant a great deal. Xin loi. Sorry about that.” And so forth. By the time we got to the lobby, Susan was holding my hand and telling me she understood, which was more than I could say for myself. I mean, sometimes I’m full of shit, but Susan’s self-sacrificing performance was a whole barn-yardful of it. I know an out when I see one, and that wasn’t it. For better or worse, we were going to complete this tour of duty together.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Back on the road, we drove into the town called Dong Ha Junction, which looked a lot like a truck stop in New Jersey. There was a railroad station, a bus station, two gasoline stations, and a few guest houses. We came to the T-intersection of Highway One and turned south. On the other side of the two-lane highway I saw a building whose sign said, in English, Quang Tri Tourism Office, in front of which were a few tour buses.
Susan asked me, “Do you know this town?”
“I was never here, but I know it was a marine and army logistics base.”
Susan spoke to Mr. Loc, who responded, and Susan said to me, “Dong Ha is the provincial capital of Quang Tri Province.”
“Quang Tri City is the provincial capital. Send Mr. Loc back to school.”
Susan spoke to Mr. Loc again, and then said to me, “Quang Tri City was completely destroyed by the American bombers in April 1972 and has never been rebuilt. This is now the provincial capital.”
“Shit happens.”
We drove south on Highway One, which was nearly deserted, and I said to Susan, “From here to Hue, this was called the Street Without Joy.”
She looked around at the sparse vegetation, and the ramshackle houses, and the occasional rice paddy and said, “Were you guys fighting to hold on to this, or make the enemy take it?”
I laughed. “I have to remember that line the next time I run into someone who was here.” I said, “Somewhere around here is where the marine area of operations ended, and the army AO began.”
We came to a newly constructed bridge that crossed a branch of the Cua Viet River, and I said to Mr. Loc, “Stop.”
He stopped on the bridge, and I got out. Susan followed.
I looked downstream and saw the pylons of the old bridge, and I said to Susan, “My platoon guarded this bridge a few times. Well, not this bridge, but the one that was over there.” I could see the remains of a French pillbox where the old bridge had crossed the river and said to her, “I slept in that concrete pillbox a few times. I scratched my name in the wall, along with a few hundred other names, including guys named Jacques and Pierre.”
She took my hand and said, “Let’s go see.”
“Ask James Bong if he has a flashlight.”
She asked him, and he produced one from the glove box. Susan and I walked about ten meters along the riverbank to where the destroyed bridge had been. The French pillbox or bunker was a round structure, about ten meters across, made of reinforced concrete with a domed roof to deflect rockets and mortar rounds. There must have been a time when boxes of pills looked like this, thus the name, but to me, it looked like an igloo. I could see embedded in the ground at the base of the concrete structure scraps of green plastic, which had been American sandbags. I said to Susan, “We used to sandbag the old French concrete fortifications because the newer munitions were able to penetrate six or eight inches of steel-reinforced concrete, and the sandbags would absorb that direct hit. Still, if you were inside one of these things when it took a direct, it would scramble your brains for a few hours. We used to call it ‘becoming a marine.’ Old joke.”
I took the flashlight from Susan and shined the light inside the bunker. I said, “Looks nasty in there. I can’t even see the concrete floor, just mud.”
She asked, “Any leeches?”
“Not in there. I’ll go in first and throw the snakes out.” I stepped through the narrow slit opening.
The center of the dome was about five meters high, allowing a man to stand at any of the firing slits with plenty of overhead room.
I shined the flashlight around the concrete walls and floor and saw creepy crawlers, like centipedes, and lots of webs with big walnut-sized spiders on them, plus lots of slugs, but no snakes. The walls were all mildewed, but I could see names scratched in the concrete.