T. Parker - Little Saigon

“I wasn’t here.”

She blushed a little, retreating. “I just figured you knew them. I mean, they turned around and said something and waved when they left. Little dark guys. Gosh, Chucky, maybe I kinda like blew it.”

Little Dark Men.

“What kind of car?”

“Beats me. Just a car. The only car I know is a red Champ, ‘cause that’s what I’ve got.”

“What time?”

“Four maybe. Or five. Something right in there.”

Frye lay back down. The ceiling moved on its own. So, he thought, while I was at Smith’s, the Dark Men were here bagging Bennett’s tape.

“I knew I should have called the cops, but I can’t deal with authority when I’m high. Some came around a couple of hours ago, but I played nobody home.”

Frye groaned.

Long after she had left, he was still on the couch, staring at the darkness and listening to the pounding in his chest. Eddie’s garage, this afternoon. He could hear the dog roaming his house and at times see the outline of its head as it stopped by the couch to pant hot loyal dog breath into his face. Chuck, you know she’s in New York, so why do you do this?

Lucia Parsons was gone, replaced by the dizzying effects of Letterman’s Monkey-Cam.

He could sense Linda’s ambassador in the far corner, looking on.

“Keep that bitch away from me,” he told the dog. “She thinks she owns the place.”

He dreamed of Debbie, going under.

As the sun came up, Frye was sitting cross-legged in his living room, drinking coffee, and contemplating the dry mud footprint on his floor. The Dark Men got it in the cave, he thought: but where did the gunman get his? The stitches in his head hurt. Cristobel Something or Other’s dog sat beside him, relaxed, witless. Frye named him Dunce.

He stood, hovered his foot over the print and guessed a size eight. How did they know I had that tape? Bennett knew I had it. But no one else did, according to Benny. Crawley? Nguyen? Kim? No. They’re the inner circle. Is it Paul DeCord? Possibly. He’s the co-star. How would he know? A lucky guess, instinct?

As he poured more coffee, Frye knew that the only way to redeem himself here was to find the Dark Men and get back the video. What other choice was there? He couldn’t go to Minh because the tape was supposedly a secret; he couldn’t go to Bennett because Bennett had given it to him.

The Dark Men. I’ll find you bastards, he thought. Tonight, if it’s the last thing I do. In Little Saigon, the last place I’m supposed to be.

You’re wrong, Benny. I can do something.

He got Smith’s manuscript from the coffee table and sat back down. The first chapter was called “Kieu Li”, and the introduction was short and to the point.

Kieu Li played a fascinating, if minor, role in the Vietnam-American conflict. In 1970 she was seventeen years old. She was a singer. While entertaining the Viet Cong at night — often underground in tunnels, or in other makeshift “theaters” — she gathered information. By day, she would go into the village of An Cat to her work as a seamstress. There, she would meet her “contacts,” an eighteen-year-old man named Huong Lam, and an American lieutenant. During these secret meetings, taken at great risk to herself, she would pass to them the intelligence she had gathered while among the Communists. When Kieu Li’s secret spying became dangerous, she simply failed to return to the Viet Cong one night, and fled to the American base in Dong Zu. There, she continued to work in an intelligence capacity for the South. In a fascinating ending to Li’s story, she later married the American lieutenant — Bennett Frye — and now lives in Westminster, California, where she is active in helping refugees become settled in their new home. She is a popular singer. In this excerpt from a lengthy taped narrative, Kieu Li describes how she went from being a simple peasant girl to living the perilous life of a spy.

Frye knew the basics of this story. They had come from Li one hot summer night when they’d sat at Frye Island and fished off the dock. Li had told him about her first meeting with Bennett, her strange feelings toward him, his plan to use her as an informant. Bennett had contributed a few details. As always, he was more willing to talk about his patrols, his rooting out of the Viet Cong, his carousing at night, his friends and their drinking, than about the particulars of his romance. Still, Frye noted, when Li told of their meetings and the slow love that developed, Bennett listened intently, as if hearing it for the first time.

An Cat, a village twenty miles north of Saigon, was my home. I had a hut outside the village. It was small but the thatch roof was good when the monsoons came and there was a garden in the back. I wove material on a loom that I sold in the market place and I was a seamstress. This, I traded for other goods. I played my guitar during the slow market days. My mother died in 1964 of fever and my father disappeared in the spring of 1966: I believe the Viet Cong were responsible.

An Cat was supposed to be safe from the Viet Cong. But we all knew that was not true. No one could be trusted unless it was your family or best friend. The Viet Cong would put your head on a stake if you supported the South. Americans and ARVN would kill you if you supported the north. Trying to remain neutral was like remaining completely motionless in a stormy sea. It could not be done.

I saw Huong Lam one morning at the market. I was playing my guitar because no one was buying. I had known him ten years before, when we attended school together. He had left the village. Since then, I had not thought of him often. He was on a bicycle and he had grown from a boy into a young man. He seemed nervous as we talked. He said he had work for me. Two days later he came back with a small bundle. Inside I found the green cotton uniform with the patches on the shirt. It needed to be mended. I knew then that he was with the Americans. He told me one evening as we walked to the road from An Cat that he was a scout.

Huong Lam was a shy man, but very strong. I could see his courage in the set of his jaw, in the clear and unwavering gaze of his eyes. He would stand by my table in the marketplace occasionally. When there were no others around, he would become confidential. He admitted to me that for a year, he fought for the Communists. This was shocking to me, I learned that he felt betrayed by them. He feared their ruthlessness and believed that their promises were empty. He said that they were killing the Vietnam he loved.

But he spoke of the Viet Cong with a quiet respect and I began to wonder if he were secretly still with them.

We became friends.

Eight weeks later, he became very sad and serious as he walked his bicycle beside me down the road. He proposed that I express my sympathies for the Communists and offer myself to them. The Viet Cong were always in need of morale boosting — and perhaps I might sing for them. They were scattered throughout the Iron Land, just north of my village. [Editor’s Note: The Iron Triangle was an area of concentrated Viet Cong influence, the southern tip of which lay some thirty miles from Saigon. It was among the most vigorously bombed, shelled and defoliated areas of the war. The triangle’s points were the villages of Ben Cat and Ben Suc, and the junction of the Saigon and Thi Tinh Rivers.] Some of the people of An Cat, I know, were Viet Cong by night. Lam told me that I was risking my life to spy on the Viet Cong. He seemed both eager and afraid for me. With the disappearance of my father still fresh in my heart, and the stories of murder and torture by the Communists, I agreed to try. Even as a girl, I always felt the need to support one’s beliefs with action. It may have helped that I was seventeen and rather naive. If more of the Vietnamese had felt that way, our homeland would not be under the Communists today.