The road rose into the hills ahead, and I could see higher hills with mountains behind them. We didn’t speak much because it was hard to get the words out with all the bouncing.
It was almost dark, and I was looking for a place to stop for the night. We were definitely in the hills now, and the Viets didn’t live much away from the towns, villages, and agricultural areas. Pine trees came up to the sides of the road, and it was getting spooky. I stopped the bike and took a rest. I said to Susan, “Maybe there’s a ski lodge up ahead.”
She took the map out of her jacket and looked at it. “There’s a village up ahead called Lang Chanh, about twenty klicks.”
I thought a moment, then said, “I don’t think I want to go into a North Viet village after dark.”
“Neither do I.”
“Well… I guess this is it.” I looked around. “Let’s find a place to hide us and the bike.”
“Paul, nothing is moving on this road now. You could sleep in the middle of it.”
“Good point.” I wheeled the bike up a few meters and rested it against the trunks of some pine trees.
Susan opened a saddlebag and took out the last two bananas, the last bottle of water, and the two rain ponchos.
We sat near the bike with our backs against two pine trees, and I peeled my banana. I said, “Here’s some good news. No land leeches in the pine forest.”
“Chiggers and ticks.”
We ate the bananas and drank the water and watched the light fade. There was a thick cloud cover, and it was pitch dark around us. We could hear sounds in the pine forest, like small animals scurrying around.
She lit a cigarette and looked at the map by the flame of her cigarette lighter. She said, “Another four hundred kilometers to Dien Bien Phu.”
We sat in silence and listened to the night. I asked her, “Did you camp out as a kid?”
“Not when I could avoid it. Did you?”
“Well, not when I lived in South Boston. But in the army, I camped out a lot. I once figured that I spent over six hundred nights under the stars. Sometimes it’s nice.”
A loud clap of thunder rolled through the hills and a breeze came up. It was either cold here, or I’d been in ’Nam too long. I said, “Sometimes it’s not.”
Susan lit another cigarette and asked me, “Want one? It curbs your appetite.”
“I just had a banana.”
It started to rain, and we put our ponchos over our heads. We moved closer together to conserve body heat and wrapped the ponchos tighter around us. I said, “Crachin. Rain dust.”
“No, this is real fucking rain.”
The rain got heavier, and the wind got stronger.
Susan asked me, “How much are they paying you for this?”
“Just expenses.”
She laughed.
We were both soaked, and we started to shiver. I remembered these cold, wet evenings in the winter of 1968, dug into the mud with nothing more than a rubber poncho, and the sky was filled with pyrotechnics that had a terrible beauty in the black rain.
Susan must have been thinking the same thing, and she asked me, “Is this how it was?”
“Sort of… actually, it was worse because you knew it was going to be the same every night until the winter rains ended in March… and you had the extra problem of people on the prowl who were trying to kill you.” I paused and said, “That’s it for the war, Susan. It’s over. Really.”
“Okay. That’s it for the war. The war is over.”
We wrapped the ponchos around us, and lay down together in the rain under the pine trees.
It rained through the night, and we shivered in the rubber ponchos and got as close as we could to each other.
Tomorrow was Dien Bien Phu, if we made it, then the hamlet of Ban Hin, and the person or grave of Tran Van Vinh.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
A gray dawn filtered through the dripping pine trees.
We unwrapped ourselves from the wet ponchos, yawned and stretched. We were both soaking wet and cold, and a chill had seeped into my bones. Susan didn’t look well.
We shook out our ponchos and rolled them up. We opened the saddlebags and took out dry socks, underwear, and clothes from our backpacks, changed, and threw our wet jeans and shirts into the trees; we didn’t need many more days of clothes. Maybe fewer than we thought.
Susan had more Montagnard scarves in the saddlebags, and we used one to wipe down the bike, then put on the others and changed tribes.
We did a quick map check and got on the BMW. The engine started easily, and off we went, north on Route 15 to Route 6.
The road was mostly red clay and bits of shale that provided some traction if I didn’t gas the engine too quickly.
A kilometer up the road, I spotted a small waterfall cascading from a rock formation into a stream by the side of the road.
I pulled over, and Susan and I washed up with a piece of orange soap she’d brought along, and we drank some cold and hopefully clean water.
We mounted up and continued on. There wasn’t anything moving on the road except us, but I couldn’t get the speed past sixty KPH without losing control. Every bone and muscle in my body ached, and the last real meal I’d eaten had been in the sixteen-sided pavilion restaurant, and that was Sunday, New Year’s Day. Today was Wednesday.
We approached the small village of Lang Chanh, and beyond the village was the beginning of the higher hills, and beyond that, the mountains whose peaks I couldn’t see because of the low clouds and mountain mist.
I slowed down as we entered the squalid village of bamboo huts and ramshackle pine log structures. It was just a little after 7 A.M., and I could smell rice and fish cooking.
There were a few people around and lots of chickens. Susan said, “I need to get something to eat.”
“I thought you had a banana yesterday.”
She put her hands around my throat and playfully squeezed. Then she wrapped her arms around me and laid her head on my shoulder. I noticed her arms weren’t very tight around my chest, and I knew we needed to get some food.
We passed through Lang Chanh and continued on. The road rose more steeply here, but the BMW was an incredible machine, and it ate up the mud as we climbed into the high hills.
Susan said in my ear, “This is actually nice. Almost fun. I like this.”
It was actually fun, in the middle of nowhere, on the way to the end of nowhere.
I had no way of telling how high we were, but the map had shown benchmark elevations of 1,500 to 2,000 meters, over a mile high on the mountain peaks, so we were about half that elevation on this road. It was cold, but there was no wind, and the drizzle had stopped, though the cloud layer had not one break in it.
Now and then I saw huge stands of mountain bamboo surrounded by taller pine trees, and I was reminded of corn fields in Virginia, surrounded by towering forests of white pines. I recalled from last time I was here that when things that don’t look anything like home start to look like things from home, then it’s time to go home.
I glanced at my odometer and saw we’d come forty kilometers from Lang Chanh, so right ahead should be the village of Thuoc. The last forty klicks on Route 15 had taken an hour, but I felt confident I could make up some time when I reached Route 6, which was designated on the map as an improved road, though that’s a relative term.
The road swung sharply to the left and a few minutes later, I slowed down for Thuoc, which looked like Lang Chanh, except there were fewer chickens here.
As we passed through the village, a few people followed us with their eyes. I was fairly sure that they saw dirt bikes now and then, and I was also sure they couldn’t tell what or who we were. I could tell what they were, however, ethnic Vietnamese, so we weren’t yet in hill tribe territory and, in fact, I hadn’t seen any longhouses.