Before he could say anything, I said, “Any more questions? If not, I’m leaving.”
He shouted at the top of his lungs, “You stay! You stay here!”
I pulled up a chair, sat, crossed my legs, and looked at my watch.
He seemed confused, but then realized he should sit, which he did.
He cleared his throat and pulled a piece of paper toward him. He clicked a ballpoint pen, got himself nearly under control, and asked me, “How you get to Hue?”
“Bus.”
He wrote that down and asked, “When you leave Nha Trang?”
“Friday afternoon.”
“Get to Hue what time?”
I took a guess and replied, “Ten or eleven o’clock Friday night.”
“Where you stay Friday night?”
“Mini-motel.”
“What is name of mini-motel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why you not know?”
When you need to explain missing time periods to the police, always come up with a sexual liaison, but do not use this excuse at home. I replied, “Meet lady on bus. She take me to mini-motel. Biet?”
He thought about that and asked again, “What is name of mini-motel?”
“The Ram-It Inn. Fucky-fucky Mini-Motel. How the hell do I know the name of the place?”
He stared at me a long time, then said, “Where you go from Hue?”
“I don’t know.”
“How you leave Hue?”
“I don’t know.”
He tapped his fingers on his desk near his holster, then said, “Passport and visa.”
I threw the photocopies on his desk.
He shook his head. “Need passport and visa.”
“In hotel.”
“You bring here.”
“No.”
His eyes narrowed and he shouted, “You bring here!”
“Go to hell.” I stood and walked out of the room.
He ran after me and grabbed my shoulder. I pushed his arm away, and we faced off out in the corridor.
We looked into each other’s eyes and both of us, I think, saw the same thing: a bottomless pit of pure hate.
I had been this close to only three enemy soldiers, and with two of them, what I’d seen and smelled was fear. On the other one, however, I’d seen this look that was not combat hostility, but a pure hatred that was ingrained in every atom of that man’s being, and which ate at his heart and soul.
And for a second, which seemed like an eternity, I was back in the A Shau Valley, and that man was staring at me again, and I was staring back at him, both of us looking forward to killing the other.
I came back to the present and tried to regain some sense of sanity, but I really wanted to kill this man with my bare hands, to bash his face to a pulp, pull his arms out of their sockets, smash his testicles, crush his windpipe, and watch him suffocate.
He sensed all of this, of course, and was having murderous fantasies of his own, probably having more to do with a sharp filet knife.
But unlike on a battlefield, we both had other orders, and we each reluctantly pulled back from that darkest place in our hearts.
I felt drained, as though I’d actually been in battle, and the cop, too, looked spent.
Almost simultaneously, we each nodded in recognition, and we turned and parted.
Outside, on the street, I stopped and took a deep breath. I tried to clear the bad thoughts from my head, but I had this almost uncontrollable urge to run back in there and smash that son of a bitch into a bloody pulp. I could actually feel his flesh splitting under my knuckles.
I put one foot in front of the other until I was well away from the police station.
I walked aimlessly awhile, trying to burn off the adrenaline. I found myself kicking bottles in the street and punching signposts. This was not good, but it was inevitable, and maybe it was good. Unfortunately, it wasn’t cathartic; quite the opposite.
It was about 9 A.M. now, and the New City was starting to stir. I walked toward the Perfume River via Hung Vuong Street, which took me to the Trang Tien Bridge. In the river near the bridge was a floating restaurant that I’d noticed the night before. There were a few people sitting at café tables on the deck, so I walked to the restaurant, crossed the gangplank, and was greeted by a young man who looked like he hadn’t yet gotten to sleep.
He showed me to an outdoor table, and I ordered a coffee with a double cognac, which pleased him and would please me more.
The deck was strewn with decorations, paper party hats, champagne bottles, and even a lady’s shoe. Clearly, not everyone had spent midnight gathered around the family dinner table and the home altar.
The coffee and cognac came, and I poured half of it down my throat. My stomach was already churning with bile and acid, and the coffee and cognac just added to the unhealthy brew.
I sat there on the gently swaying deck of the floating restaurant, and stared across the misty river at the gray, brooding walls of the Citadel.
I really didn’t want to dwell on what happened at the police station — I knew what happened, why it happened, and I knew it could happen again, any time, any place.
I finished the coffee and cognac and ordered another. The young man put the cognac bottle on the table, recognizing, I guess, a guy who needed a few drinks.
After my second C&C, I felt a little better and thought about my job. My problem at the moment was to shake any tail I might have, and meet someone on the other side of the river at noon, or two, or at four. And if those rendezvous didn’t work out, I was to await a message at the hotel, and be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice.
If, however, I made a successful rendezvous, I’d know where I was supposed to go next.
Every man or woman on a dangerous assignment has a small, secret wish that the whole thing would just fizzle out. You want to know in your guts that you’ll go, but you’re not going to be disappointed if they say “Mission canceled.”
I remembered this feeling when we’d moved out of the foothills toward Quang Tri City with orders to retake the city from the Communists. By the time we got there, the South Viets had done the dirty work, and we were all secretly relieved, but outwardly we expressed great disappointment that we hadn’t gotten a piece of the action. No one, including ourselves, believed a word of it. But that’s what macho posturing is all about.
Then, in late March, we got our wish to get a piece of the action; we were told we were going to Khe Sanh to face twenty thousand well-armed, well-entrenched North Vietnamese troops who had surrounded the marines at the Khe Sanh firebase since January. This is not the kind of news that brightens your day.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sights and sounds of hundreds of helicopters picking up thousands of infantrymen and air-assaulting into the hills around Khe Sanh. If ever there was an apocalyptic vision on this earth, short of a nuclear explosion, this air assault was it; fighter-bombers dropping hundreds of thousand-pound bombs that made heaven and earth shake, jet fighters releasing tumbling canisters of napalm, the earth aflame, rivers, streams, and lakes burning, forests engulfed in fire, and great fields of elephant grass and bamboo ablaze and, all the while, the helicopters are firing rockets and machine guns into the inferno below, and artillery shells are raining down high explosives and burning white phosphorus, making the dark earth erupt like mini-volcanoes. The sky is black with smoke, the earth is red with fire, and the thin layer of air in between is a killing zone of streaking red and green tracer rounds, hot, jagged shrapnel, and plummeting helicopters. Apocalypse now.
I remember the helicopter I was on swooping in for a touch-and-go landing, and I was standing on the landing skid, ready to jump, and the guy standing on the skid beside me put his lips to my ear and shouted over the din of explosions, “Hey, Brenner, you think this is a go?”