“These were all over when I was here — ruined churches and pagodas. They were the only substantial buildings around, and civilians and military used to take cover in them. You’d be safe from small arms fire, but not rockets or mortars.”
She said, “It’s hard to imagine a war raging around you every day. I’m glad you were able to talk about it back there in Bong Son.”
I didn’t reply.
She took out her cigarettes and very expertly cupped the lighter and lit up quickly, just like an old combat soldier. She shielded the cigarette in her hands as she smoked. She said, “I’m cold. Can I borrow something from your suitcase?”
“Sure. I’ll get it.”
“Bring my backpack, too.” I stood and went to the Nissan. I opened the hatch door and got my blue blazer out of my suitcase, and took her backpack. I put my blazer over her shoulders.
She said, “Thank you. Aren’t you cold?”
“It’s about seventy degrees.”
Susan had a travel alarm clock in her backpack, and she set it to go off at midnight. She said, “We’ll set it every hour, so if we both drift off, this should wake us up.”
“Okay. I’ll take the first watch. Try to get some sleep.”
She lay down on the concrete floor with her backpack for a pillow.
We talked awhile, then I realized she’d drifted off.
I took the Colt .45 out of her tote and chambered a round. I put the pistol in my lap.
The alarm rang at midnight, and I shut it off before it woke her. I set it again for one A.M., in case I drifted. But, oddly, I had no trouble staying awake, and I let her sleep until 4 A.M.
We switched places, and I gave her the pistol.
I lay my head on her backpack and remembered when my own backpack had been my pillow for a year, and my rifle had been my sleeping partner. We always slept fully clothed, with our boots on, swatting mosquitoes all night, worrying about snakes and about Charlie. We were dirty, miserable, sometimes wet, sometimes cold, sometimes hot, and always frightened.
This wasn’t the worst night I’d ever spent in Vietnam; far from it. But I couldn’t blame this one on anyone but myself.
The sky lightened, bringing a false dawn, which was common to the tropics, then an hour later, the real dawn broke, and a rooster crowed. A stream of sunlight came in through a small arched window to the right of where the altar had once been. A shard of blue glass, still stuck in the window frame, cast a streak of blue light across the floor and up the opposite wall.
I sat up, and Susan and I watched the dawn unfold.
The interior of the small church was clearly visible now, and I could see the whitewashed walls and the crumbling stucco, and the places where the bullets had hit, and where exploding shrapnel had scarred a faded fresco of the Virgin Mary.
There wasn’t a single scrap of wood left in the structure, except the charred remains of a fire that someone had lit on the floor where the altar once sat.
The rice paddies don’t attract many birds, but I heard a lone bird singing somewhere. Then I heard the first vehicle on the road.
Susan said, “Today is Lunar New Year’s Eve.” She took my hand. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see a sunrise in my life.”
I could hear a truck on the road and a motor scooter. I glanced out through the open doorway and saw a farm cart and two girls on bicycles.
I remembered when the first vehicles on the road were minesweepers, tanks that could safely set off explosive devices buried in the potholes during the night. Then would come the Jeeps and trucks filled with American and Vietnamese soldiers, rifles and machine guns ready to take on any ambush that had been set in place during the night.
Then came the civilians, on foot, in ox carts, on bicycles, off to the fields, or to school, or wherever.
Within an hour of sunrise, Highway One would be open, piece by piece, from the Mekong Delta to the DMZ, and life would go on until the sun set.
I said to Susan, “Highway One is open to Hue.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In the daylight, I could see that the driver’s side of the Nissan had picked up some yellow paint from my contact with the police jeep. Susan and I each had Swiss army knives, and we scraped the paint off, while Mr. Cam, who I’d untied, used a shard of glass to help.
I cut our plastic water bottles in half and collected some rice paddy muck outside, which we smeared along the scrapes.
In the muck, we found a few bloodsucking leeches. Susan was repulsed by the leeches, Mr. Cam didn’t seem to care, and I had some unpleasant memories.
She looked at a big, fat leech in the muck of the plastic water bottle. “Do they bite?”
“They attach themselves to your skin somewhere. They have a natural anesthetic in their saliva, so you don’t know you’ve gotten bitten. Also in the saliva is a blood thinner, so your blood just keeps flowing into these things while they suck. You can have them on you all day and not know it, unless you do periodic checks. I had one under my armpit once that got so fat and bloated with my blood that I accidentally squashed it when I lay down on my side to take a break.”
Susan made a face.
After I’d returned from Vietnam, I’d probably told more leech stories than combat stories. These stories never failed to gross out people, and I got really good at it.
We used one of my polo shirts to wipe our hands.
I let Mr. Cam drive, and this made him happier than having his thumbs tied together. I sat in the front and Susan in the rear. We pulled out of the church and onto Highway One. A few people on bicycles and motor scooters looked at us, but by all appearances, we were two Western tourists with a Vietnamese driver, who had pulled over to check out a war ruin or make a pit stop.
Within a few minutes, we were in the provincial capital of Quang Ngai. I kept a close eye on Mr. Cam, and Susan was engaging him in conversation. He seemed okay, but Susan said, “He wants something to eat, and he wants to telephone his family.”
“He can do whatever he wants after he drops us off at Hue”Phu Bai Airport.”
Susan relayed this to him, and he seemed quietly unhappy.
Quang Ngai was nothing to write home about. It was, in fact, an ugly town, but I spotted a beautiful gas station.
We pulled over, and I said to Susan, “You pump. I’ll keep Mr. Cam company.”
Susan got out and pumped gasoline. A few people hanging around the gas station watched her pumping while Mr. Cam and I sat in the front. They probably concluded that Western men had their women better trained than the Vietnamese men did. They should only know.
Susan paid the guy, who had been standing near her, and the guy seemed very curious about us and the Nissan. He even drew Susan’s attention to the scrape marks and the dent. Susan pretended she spoke no Vietnamese.
I looked at Mr. Cam. If he was going to make a break for it, this was his best shot.
The pump attendant said something to Mr. Cam, who replied, and they exchanged another few words.
Susan got in the car and said to Mr. Cam, “Cu di.”
Mr. Cam started the engine and threw the car into gear.
I asked Susan, “What did he and the guy say?”
Susan replied, “The guy noticed the Nha Trang license plates and asked if we’d driven through the night. Mr. Cam said no, then the guy asked him where we’d stayed last night, and Mr. Cam didn’t have an answer. It was just polite conversation, but it didn’t go well.”
I said, “Well, no one calls the police about anything here. Right?”
Susan didn’t reply.
We passed through the rest of the ugly town and crossed the Tra Khuc River via a bridge that looked like it had been the prize in a game between Viet Cong sappers and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In the end, it looked as though the engineers had narrowly won.