Hwang Sok-Yong - The Shadow of Arms

“Hey, Leon and you, Ahn, how’ve you been?”

Stapley already had a start on the brown beard of a pacifist and was wearing Vietnamese-style black clothing.

“You crazy bastard!” Leon said, giving him a punch in the shoulder.

Stapley ignored Leon’s remark and ushered them into a room. A box resembling a dresser was in the corner and a lit kerosene lamp was on top of it. In the center of the room stood a Buddhist altar draped with red silk, holding a white ceramic bowl filled with rice in which was stuck a red stick of incense shaped like a chopstick. It smelled like greasy cosmetics. Against the right wall there was a bamboo cot, and facing it was a long wooden bench with cushions covered in rough hemp fabric. Sitting down on the cot, Stapley said to Leon and Yong Kyu, “Have a seat.”

The Vietnamese girl, clad in brightly-colored clothing with a pattern of tiny flowers, stood at the door with another woman watching the three of them. The other woman was heavily made up and dressed in tight sky blue pants and a T-shirt.

“This is Sang and that’s her older sister, Ran. This house is theirs. Now, what’ll you have to drink?”

“Any whiskey?” Leon asked.

Sang, who understood English, announced, “We have whiskey and Coke. Lemonade, too.”

When the two women had gone, Leon asked, “Are they both whores?”

Stapley shrugged his shoulders and then nodded. “That’s their line of work, all right, but generally speaking they’re very gentle and good-hearted women. Their family lives out back across the yard. Besides them, there are three more women working here. If you call, they’ll be here right away with towels. The boss is Sang and Ran’s mother. She handles the money.”

It had been only five days since Stapley went AWOL, but already there was no lingering trace of his having been a soldier. He might have been a hippie on a tour of Asia. He kept on chain-smoking those grassy Truong cigarettes. He had ditched his army boots and in their place he wore Ho Chi Minh sandals with soles made from tires. Around his neck hung a pendent carved from a tree root with the words “Run, Rat!” burned into the wood.

“What the hell are you planning to do?” Leon asked.

“I’m getting out of this infernal shithole, if I can.”

“You’re in one hell of a fix. Nobody’s on your side. The jungle is crawling with enemies, and our guys want to arrest your ass and lock you up. Better turn yourself in right now. After doing your time, they’ll send you right back to your unit.”

Stapley turned away from Leon and asked Yong Kyu, “Ahn, what do you think? Am I wrong to oppose this war?”

Yong Kyu smiled. “In the Korean army, deserters can be executed by a firing squad. And… if I felt like you, I wouldn’t have come here in the first place. We sort of volunteered for this.”

“You volunteered to come here? I’m shocked.”

“I had no choice, actually. Once our basic training was over, my whole unit was transferred here. Anyway, your government probably promised our government some kind of military aid or economic grants. The way I see it, if you felt this strongly, you shouldn’t have come here at all, or else you should wait it out and then once you’re back home you should do something with your friends to stop this war from continuing any longer.”

“I was a draft resister, of course,” Stapley said. “At first I fled to a different state. Those were hard times — I couldn’t get any work. In the end I was arrested. To prison or to Vietnam, that was my choice. I chose to come here. Some did go to prison in the end. Compared to the deep scars I’ve gotten since arriving here, theirs may be lighter to bear. For a time I was a gunner in a helicopter, in those days I saw plenty. If I’d gone to prison they would have called me a coward and deprived me of civil rights, but at least I would have felt light-hearted like a martyr.”

“Enough,” Leon said. “What Ahn said is right. You’re already here and you’ve already been through it all. All you need to do now is wait it out for a little while and then go home.”

“It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t hold out. I’m never going back to America.”

They heard glasses clinking through the back door. It opened and Sang and Ran came in.

“I need a place to hide out for about twenty days. Have you found one?” Stapley said, glancing at Yong Kyu. “Somdomeh is an off-limits zone, and MPs often patrol around here. I can’t stay for long.”

“We’ve found you a place,” Leon replied. “You can move over there tonight if you want.”

“No, not until tomorrow morning,” Yong Kyu said. “My friend Toi knows the place.”

“How much?”

“Sergeant Ahn rented it for a month,” Leon said offhandedly, “the price is still to be settled.”

“I have to get to Saigon. I heard there’s an AWOL rescue organization there.”

“We know that. But the roads out of here are all closely watched. You won’t be able to get onto the air base and there are sentries posted at all the piers.”

Yong Kyu thought otherwise. “There may be a way. If you go by Route 1 the trip takes three days. You could hide in a cargo truck. Five thousand piasters is the going rate, but since you would be risky cargo, they might charge two or three times that. On the road you’d have to pass quite a few NLF checkpoints.”

“It’s impossible to go by water? A ship from a neutral country would be ideal.”

“Every so often a third-country vessel — India, Burma, Japan — comes in. But as soon as you try to book passage they might turn their back on you or, worse, turn you in. Unless you can find somebody in Da Nang to hook you up with the AWOL network in Saigon, then the land route to Saigon is your only bet.”

Yong Kyu explained the results of his inquiries over the past few days. As he mixed them some drinks, Stapley displayed a strong resolve. “I have three thousand dollars. For half that amount, I bet I can get a passage to Burma at least. Or maybe to Bangkok.”

Sang and Ran perched on the wooden bench side by side like a pair of birds and waited for the conversation to end. Leon gulped down a few drinks and murmured with a yawn, “I’m getting sleepy. It’s been a hectic day.”

“Go in and get some rest. The boys all are doing OK, I hope?”

“We made a wager — I bet twenty dollars on your successful getaway.”

“Who’s on the other side?”

“Everybody but me. Nobody thinks you’ll make it.”

“You’ll be the winner, I’ll see to that.”

“You crazy bastard! I’m going in to take a nap.”

Leon stood and looked at the two girls. “Who’s going to be the mommy to sing a lullaby for me?”

Ran smiled and followed him inside. Stapley held up his glass to Yong Kyu. “Let’s drink to my homeland.”

Yong Kyu quietly observed Stapley, thinking. What will become of the two of us? Will we always be able to propose a friendly toast like now? His fate and mine could be completely opposite. He’ll end up being a good American citizen, grimacing at his monthly bills. By then bombs may be raining on my homeland and the ragged corpses of my fellow countrymen will be strewn all over a war-ravaged land. Reading the newspaper over breakfast some morning, he may happen upon an article about devastation in a foreign land far away. Yong Kyu realized that for the first time he was getting to know an American as an individual.

“Do you not want to go home?” Stapley asked as they drank. Yong Kyu answered in a somber tone.

“You don’t have to return to America if you don’t want to, but I have to go back to Korea even if there’s no home to go home to.”

“What do you mean?”

“Our country is divided, like a body severed in half. My real home is in the North. It was only after I came to Vietnam that I began to see my homeland objectively. You people here. . you taught me to do that.”