Viet Nguyen - The Sympathizer

The General and the loadmaster stood on the ramp beckoning me as the plane taxied away, aiming for any clear stretch of runway as the Katyushas kept arriving, singly and in salvos. I was running as fast as I could, my lungs in a knot, and when I reached the ramp I threw Linh at the General, who caught her by the arms. Then Bon was at my side running with me, extending Duc with both hands to the loadmaster, who took him as gently as he could even though it did not matter, not with the way Duc’s head flopped from side to side. With his son handed off, Bon began to slow down, head bowed in agony and still sobbing. I grabbed him by the crook of his elbow and with one last push I shoved him face forward onto the ramp, where the loadmaster seized him by the collar and pulled him up the rest of the way. I leaped for the ramp, arms extended, landing on it with the side of my face and all of my rib cage, the grit of dirt and dust against my cheek while my legs flailed in open air. With the plane barreling down the runway, the General pulled me to my knees and dragged me into the hold, the ramp rising behind me. I was squeezed against the General on one side and the prostrate bodies of Duc and Linh on the other, a wall of evacuees pushing against us from the front. As the airplane ascended steeply, a terrible noise rose with it, audible not only through the straining metal but through the clamor from the open side door, where the crewman stood with his M16, firing three-round bursts from the hip. Through that open door, the patchy landscape of fields and tenements tilted and wheeled as the pilot took us into a corkscrew, and I realized that the terrible noise was not only coming from the engines but from Bon, too, pounding his head against the ramp and howling, not as if the world had ended, but as if someone had gouged out his eyes.

Shortly after we landed on Guam, a green ambulance arrived to take the bodies. I lowered Duc onto a stretcher. His little body had grown heavier in my arms with each passing minute, but I could not lay him down on the grubby tarmac. After the medics draped him with a white sheet, they eased Linh from Bon’s arms and likewise covered her before loading mother and son into the ambulance. I wept, but I was no match for Bon, who had a lifetime’s worth of unused tears to spend. We continued to weep as we were trucked to Camp Asan, where, thanks to the General, we were given barracks that were luxurious compared to the tents waiting for the other late arrivals. Catatonic on his bunk, Bon would remember nothing of the evacuation playing on television that afternoon and through the next day. Nor would he remember how, in the barracks and tents of our temporary city, thousands of refugees wailed as if attending a funeral, the burial of their nation, dead too soon, as so many were, at a tender twenty-one years of age.

Along with the General’s family and a hundred others in the barracks, I watched inglorious images of helicopters landing on Saigon’s roofs, evacuating refugees to the decks of airplane carriers. The next day, after communist tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace, communist troops raised the flag of the National Liberation Front from the palace roof. As the debacle unfolded, the calcium and lime deposits of memory from the last days of the damned republic encrusted themselves in the pipes of my brain. Just a little more would be added late that night, after a dinner of baked chicken and green beans many of the refugees found exotically inedible, the children the only ones in the cafeteria with any appetite. Joining a line to turn in our trays to the dishwashers was the coup de grâce, pronouncing us no longer adult citizens of a sovereign country but stateless refugees, protected, for the moment, by the American military. After scraping his untouched green beans into the garbage, the General looked at me and said, Captain, our people need me. I’m going to walk among them and boost their morale. Let’s go. Yes, sir, I said, not optimistic about his chances but also not thinking of possible complications. While it was easy enough to spread the manure of encouragement among soldiers drilled into accepting all kinds of abuse, we had forgotten that most of the refugees were civilians.

In retrospect, I was fortunate not to be wearing my uniform, stained with Linh’s blood. I had shed it in favor of the madras shirt and chinos in my rucksack, but the General, having lost his luggage at the airport, still wore his stars on his collar. Outside our barracks and in the tent city, few knew who he was by face. What they saw was his uniform and rank, and when he said hello to the civilians and asked how they were faring, they met him with sullen silence. The slight crinkle between his eyes and his hesitant chuckling told me he was confused. My sense of unease increased with every step down the dirt lane between the tents, civilian eyes on us and the silence unbroken. We had barely walked a hundred meters into the tent city when the first assault came, a dainty slipper sailing from our flank and striking the General on his temple. He froze. I froze. An old woman’s voice croaked out, Look at the hero! We swiveled to the left and saw the one thing charging us that could not be defended against, an enraged elderly citizen we could neither beat down nor back away from. Where’s my husband? she screamed, barefoot, her other slipper in her hand. Why are you here when he’s not? Aren’t you supposed to be defending our country with your life like he is?

She smacked the General across the chin with her slipper, and from behind her, from the other side, from behind us, the women, young and old, firm and infirm, came with their shoes and slippers, their umbrellas and canes, their sun hats and conical hats. Where’s my son? Where’s my father? Where’s my brother? The General ducked and flung his arms over his head as the furies beat him, tearing at his uniform and his flesh. I was hardly unscathed, suffering several blows from flying footwear and intercepting several strokes from canes and umbrellas. The ladies pressed around me to get at the General, who had sunk to his knees under their onslaught. They could hardly be blamed for their ill temper, since our vaunted premier had gone on the radio the day before to ask all soldiers and citizens to fight to the last man. It was pointless to point out that the premier, who was also the air marshal and who should not be confused with the president except in his venality and vanity, had himself left on a helicopter shortly after broadcasting his heroic message. Nor would it have helped to explain that this general was not in charge of soldiers but the secret police, which would hardly have endeared him to civilians. In any case, the ladies were not listening, preferring to scream and curse. I pushed my way through the women who had come between the General and myself, shielding him with my body and absorbing many more whacks and globs of spit until I could drag him free. Go! I shouted in his ear, propelling him in the correct direction. For the second straight day we ran for our lives, but at least the rest of the people in the tent city left us alone, touching us with nothing except contemptuous gazes and catcalls. Good for nothings! Villains! Cowards! Bastards!

While I was used to such slings and arrows, the General was not. When we finally stopped outside our barracks, the expression on his face was one of horror. He was disheveled, the stars torn from his collar, his sleeves ripped, half his buttons gone, and bleeding from scratches on his cheek and neck. I can’t go in there like this, he whispered. Wait in the showers, sir, I said. I’ll find you some new clothes. I requisitioned a spare shirt and pants from officers in the barracks, explaining my own bruised and tattered condition as being the result of a run-in with our ill-humored competitors in the Military Security Service. When I went to the showers, the General was standing at a sink, his face rinsed clean of everything except the shame.