Marti Leimbach - The Man from Saigon

She feels so tense she thinks she may faint, and she wonders if they will shoot her as she falls. The first soldier nudges Son with his foot. A second approaches, this one smaller with bushy hair sticking out every direction, and Susan sees that he has a sword in one hand, his rifle in the other. He starts speaking in a rapid, insistent manner, pointing to the sky with the sword, a crude weapon that looks as though it has been made from burnt metal. All around them are flying insects, the sun so bright she squints and still cannot see. It is like being inside an overexposed photograph. Her vision fades at the edges. For a moment she thinks they are going to kill Son with the sword, bringing it down upon his head as he crouches on the ground. She cannot take this in, how they are going to kill them now as easily as if the act were a culling of stock. But the soldier seems more interested in what he sees above him, in the pale, hot sun scorching from its height above the scrub and trees. The sword does not come down on Son’s neck. Nobody is to be killed, at least for now.

Son is told to get up. He rises, his hands arranged behind his head, his neck bowed. The third of the young soldiers is with them now. He has an air of certainty about him, and circles as though assuming ownership, his weapon more loosely held than the others. They are talking, a rapid exchange that means nothing to Susan until Son speaks to her in French. His French is as good as his English, much better than hers. He does not meet her eyes.

“They want us to move fast now,” he says. “Before the air strike.”

Being captured, she discovers, is a feeling of being trapped, but worse even. Being trapped and buried alive. Son carries himself stiffly, his shoulder swollen from the earlier blow, one leg of his trousers torn at the knee with a gaping hole that seems to get larger by the hour. Her field jacket is tied around her waist, slightly damp from the morning rain and her own sweat, smelling like warm grass and mold. She has lost her hat and has only a scarf to keep her hair out of her face, the sun off her head. For now, the sun is not a problem. They walk through a dense stretch of jungle that allows in only the darkest green-hued light. The jungle has a fairytale aspect to it, with huge leaves, vines that hang like snakes, tongues of fungus that poke up from the ground. It has a smell, too. Rotting vegetation, stagnant water, hot wet earth. Her breath feels scorched in her lungs. She takes in the air and it feels empty to her, unable to deliver the oxygen she needs. She wonders how she stays standing, walking. She thinks she can feel the gaze of the soldier behind her, his eyes on her back, his rifle close enough so that she could reach back and touch it. She listens to the sounds of the jungle, the whistles and rustles, the birds through the trees, their own footfalls on the jungle’s floor. Everything spooks her. If she thinks too much about the soldier behind her she will scream.

These first hours are like no others she has experienced, not even when she pressed herself into the earth under fire. They are almost unbearable. She knows she is lucky to be alive. During the ambush, when she reeled back from the first explosion and saw the truck in front buck and collapse on its side, then heard the small-arms fire open up, she squeezed her eyes shut and listened, had no choice but to hear the cries of the wounded around her. That, too, was terrible. The battle had lasted only a short while. A matter of minutes, not even a quarter of an hour. They had run so that they would not be hit in the crossfire, and because they feared the vehicle might explode. They’d run because running was instinctive. Now, of course, she wishes they had not. She always knew it was possible to be wounded, to be shot, but it never occurred to her that she’d stumble upon the Vietcong in the same sudden, slightly incredible way that you might come across moose in a forest, and end up captured.

The plain, dark uniforms, the bushy, unkempt hair, the faces which appear younger than they are make the Vietcong seem more like a small band of lost boy scouts than enemy soldiers. They were separated from their unit when it scattered during the firefight. They had been as lost as Susan and Son were at the moment of their meeting. It was all a dreadful coincidence. Two have AK-47s. One has what looks like a Soviet semi-automatic. They have grenades and Chicoms, the appalling sword. The sword is what disturbs her most. The soldier who has it seems to enjoy swiping the air with the blade as he walks. It bothers her more than the guns and grenades, more than their acetate map that they carry, discussing where to go. The map is blackened with mildew, with little pockmarks like the actual craters that gouge the land. And it belongs, she realizes with a start, to the US Army.

“What are they going to do with us, Son? Please talk to me—tell me what they are saying—”

He won’t reply. For some reason, whatever she asks Son, he will not answer. He scowls and moves one leg in front of the other, sometimes rubbing his palms along the sides of his shirt. The sweat trickles from his forehead, his sideburns, making a damp patch beneath each arm and across his chest. She wants to know if he has any idea where they are being taken, what his guess would be, whether he is injured from where the gun struck him—anything. But he will not reply or turn her way. Perhaps this is what happens to people in such extreme circumstances. They go inward, forgetting the allegiances they once had, thinking only of survival. The minutes, then hours, pass in a dull, tense silence.

By noon, the jungle is a dark oven through which they travel. In only a few hours she has endured capture, marching, abandonment, with no prelude to these lessons. They walk, all of them tense. The Vietcong have the guns, which is why they are in charge, but there is a feeling they are as miserable as their captives, obliged to fasten themselves to these stray, anonymous people, to take charge, to point the weapons at them. Though they began the march with purposeful, angry strides, now in the early part of the afternoon they have sunk into a steady, weary step. They chat infrequently. There is a concentration of movement, on placing one foot in front of the other, every action slowed by the heat. This is no different with them than all the times she has been with the Americans, though now she is expected to move more quickly. Even so, the rhythm of their steps, the steady, almost mechanical pace is the same.

The only animation the Vietcong have shown came shortly after they set out, once the air strike had come and gone and they could hear it in the distance. The trees hid the billows of black on the horizon, but she could imagine the spiraling smoke, the planes disappearing one by one. Susan had a bag of watermelon seeds in the pocket of her fatigues, the sort of thing you buy before the Tet holiday and eat with friends. The Vietnamese soldiers took it, along with everything else she owned: her papers; a “women’s interest” story—about a triple amputee, six years old, who with remarkable prosthetics was now able to walk and use a spoon; extra socks; money; MPC notes; a signaling mirror; T-shirt; compass. They sat with their canteens and passed her comb from man to man, giggling. They tested her pens for ink. It was as though these unremarkable personal things were valuable bounty; they examined each item carefully Then they took her boots—a means of controlling her movements, kinder than tying—her gold cross, hairbands, a letter from Marc.

“Anything more you need?” she said as they tried to figure out what the Kotex was, holding it against make-believe wounds as though it were a dressing.

They have taken Son’s map, binoculars, matches, insect repellent, gum, and his cameras, which he handed over only reluctantly. They have taken everything she owns except the clothes she wears and her hammock. Without the weight of her possessions she is looser, lighter, able to move more freely, and yet Susan feels more exposed. If she could cloak herself in the things that are hers, she might stave off the disorientation which is arriving, she knows, not because she feels it yet but because it has been described to her by others, by women she once interviewed in an Illinois State Prison, for example, who were locked up for such crimes as “lascivious carriage,” which meant they had lived with a man out of wedlock. Once the women’s clothes and possessions were confiscated, once they had been dressed identically and doused with lice powder, their personalities themselves began a process of unraveling. The draftees she had interviewed some months previously reported the same feeling after their civilian clothes were discarded, their heads shaved so that they could not recognize themselves in a mirror, and every ounce of privacy annihilated to the extent that even the toilets were set out starkly in rows on a long wall with not so much as a screen between them. It did something to you, set in motion a kind of uncertainty that was easily manipulated by whoever was in charge.