The old man thought that was funny, laughed, and said something else, which Susan translated as, “The Frenchman expected to find the café where he once drank, and maybe his former… ladies.”
“Hey, that’s why I’m here. Tell him.”
Susan told him, and he laughed harder. Why he got a kick out of this, I don’t know, but maybe he’d done all the crying he had in him, and there was nothing left to do except laugh at the death and destruction.
We thanked the old man and moved on.
At the end of the path, we came to a huge open space, about a half a kilometer on each side, surrounded by peasant huts and gardens in the distance. The space was covered with high grass and small trees, and at first it looked like a village commons. But all around the space was a weed-choked moat, which had once surrounded the walls of the Citadel. Here and there around the open areas, I could see pieces of wall, none of them over three feet high, and a bomb-blasted stone arch stood where a destroyed bridge once spanned the moat.
I said to Susan, “This was the Citadel, sort of like the one in Hue, but obviously it’s in much worse shape. This was the center of the city, and it held government buildings, a hospital, bank, a few cafés, the barracks and headquarters of the South Vietnamese army, and the MACV compound— that’s the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam — American military advisors to the ARVN.” I told her, “Most of the MACV guys were killed when the Communists took the city during the Tet Offensive. Same in Hue. It’s a risky job when you have to depend on unreliable allies for your safety.”
Susan looked around at the open space in the center of the sprawling village. “It looks like a park or a sports field, but it’s completely barren.”
“I guess it’s been left as a monument to a destroyed city and to the people who died here, but I don’t even see a marker.”
“Neither do I… but look, Paul, there’s a bridge across the moat.”
I looked to where Susan was pointing and saw an intact, but shell-blasted concrete bridge that had once led to a gate in the vanished walls.
We walked to the bridge and crossed the dry moat into what was once the Citadel. The kids who were following us didn’t cross, and one of them yelled something to us. Susan said to me, “He says it is government property, and we are not allowed to be here.” She added, “He also said, ‘Thanh Than.’ Ghosts.”
I replied, “That’s what they tell the kids to keep them away from any unexploded ordnance.”
“You’re probably right. Meanwhile, don’t step on an unexploded shell, or we’ll both be ghosts.”
“Stay on the paths.”
“There are no paths, Paul.”
“Well, step lightly.”
We walked into the center of the grassy field that had once been a city, and I said, “The parade ground was about here, and the military side of the Citadel was across the field, over there… I think.”
“You remember this?”
“Sort of. I was here only once, when I had to participate in some idiotic awards ceremony that the ARVN liked to schedule too often.”
“You mean you got an award here?”
“Yeah. And it wasn’t the Good Conduct Medal.”
“What was it?”
“Something called the Cross of Gallantry, after the French medal of the same name. It was the equivalent to our Bronze Star, I think.”
“What did you get the medal for?”
“I’m not real sure. The whole ceremony was in Vietnamese.”
“Come on, Paul. You know why they gave you a medal.”
“Yeah. For propaganda. They filmed the whole thing, and showed it before the feature film — in the six movie theaters that probably existed in the whole country. Our brave American allies, and so forth. The ARVN just took the list of GIs who got American medals for whatever and gave the equivalent Viet medal. I got the Bronze Star for the A Shau Valley without a ceremony, and the Viets gave me the Cross of Gallantry here, with a lot of pomp and ceremony.”
She asked, “Did they give you a copy of the tape?”
I smiled and replied, “It was a film, Susan. I don’t think they had videotape then, but if they did, they’d have sold me a copy, which they didn’t.”
“Maybe we can find the original film in the archives in Saigon.”
“I hope the fucking thing got blown up.”
“You’re so sentimental.”
“Right. Anyway, I stood about right here with maybe a hundred other Americans from the First Cav, and I got kissed on both cheeks by a colonel… it was June or July by this time, and the temperature was ninety degrees on this parade ground, but my reconstituted company, filled with cherries now — that means new guys from the States — were out patrolling somewhere, so this wasn’t that bad. I thought I could hit a few bars in town after the dog-and-pony show, but the U.S. Army was nice enough to collect us all in trucks and take us back to Landing Zone Sharon, which, I guess, no longer exists.” I looked at Susan and asked her, “Am I a great date or what?”
She smiled and put her arm through mine. She said, “This is really an incredible experience for me.”
“Well… this is the last duty station for you. I’ve sort of taken you through my first tour — the Bong Son in November and December ’67, Quang Tri for the Tet Offensive in January and February, then Khe Sanh in April, and the A Shau in May, then back here to Quang Tri Province, where I stayed until I went to An Khe base camp in November, collected my stuff, flew to Da Nang, and on to San Francisco.”
“That must have been a hell of a weekend in San Francisco.”
I said, “I was ready to party hard with a few other guys I knew who I’d come home with… but we weren’t overly welcome in San Francisco…”
She didn’t reply.
“In truth, I wasn’t really in a partying mood anyway, and I stayed a few days in a hotel, getting my head on right… showering and flushing the toilet every half hour.” I smiled. “I slept in the soft bed, watched a lot of TV, finished two bottles of gin, and kept pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming… then I flew home to Boston. But I wasn’t completely right yet.”
“And there was no counseling available?”
I almost laughed. “We’re talking 1968 here at the height of a huge war. You saw a shrink before you got inducted, and they always said you were mentally healthy enough to go off and kill people, but they never examined your head when you came back. And you know what? I don’t blame them.”
“Counseling might have helped.”
“Sigmund Freud in consultation with Jesus Christ wouldn’t have helped. Most of us found our own way back.”
We walked across the moated acres that had once been Quang Tri City, and I stooped down and picked up a piece of jagged shrapnel that the metal scavengers had missed and looked at it. I said, “It could be from a bomb, a rocket, a mortar round, an artillery round, or a fragmentation grenade, and it could be ours or theirs. And it doesn’t make a difference when it hits you.” I gave it to Susan. “Souvenir of the lost city of Quang Tri.”
She put it in her pocket.
We continued walking under the gray sky, and I could see a few Viets across the moat looking at us, probably wondering if we were scouting this place as part of the DMZ tour. Two bucks to cross the surviving moat bridge and wander around the Citadel. The tour operators would throw scrap metal around each morning before the tour buses arrived, and everyone could take a piece home.
I said to Susan, “Okay, here’s another piece of the puzzle. The letter to Tran Quan Lee that was found on his body in the A Shau Valley was written by his brother, Tran Van Vinh, who was wounded here during the battle for Quang Tri City during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Vinh lay wounded in one of the buildings that were here, and he saw something that had to do with two Americans. Do you know this?”