Viet Nguyen - The Sympathizer

Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much. I, for one, am a person who believes that the world would be a better place if the word “murder” made us mumble as much as the word “masturbation.” Still, while I was more lover than fighter, my political choices and police service eventually did force me to cultivate a side of myself I had used only once in my childhood, the violent side. Even as a secret policeman, however, I never used violence insomuch as I allowed others to use it in front of me. Only when unfavorable conditions squeezed me into situations from which my cleverness could not extract me did I permit this violence to happen. These situations were so unpleasant that the memories of those whom I had seen interrogated continued to hijack me with fanatic persistence: the wiry Montagnard with a wire twisted around his neck and a twisted grimace on his face; the stubborn terrorist in his white room and with his purple face, impervious to everything except the one thing; the communist agent with the papier-mâché evidence of her espionage crammed into her mouth, our sour names literally on the tip of her tongue. These captured subversives had only one destination, but there were many unpleasant side roads to get there. When I arrived at the liquor store for the grand opening, I shared with these prisoners the dread certainty that snickered beneath the card tables of retirement homes. Someone was going to die. Perhaps me.

The liquor store was on the eastern end of Hollywood Boulevard, far from the camera-popping glamour of the Egyptian and Chinese theaters where the latest movies premiered. This particularly unfashionable neighborhood was a shady one despite the absence of trees, and Bon’s other function, besides clerking, was to intimidate any would-be robbers and shoplifters. He nodded at me impassively from the cash register, standing before a wall with shelves displaying primo brands, theft-worthy pint bottles, and, in a discreet corner, men’s magazines with airbrushed Lolitas on their covers. Claude’s in the storeroom with the General, Bon said. The storeroom was in the back, abuzz with overhead fluorescent lights, smelling of disinfectant and old cardboard. Claude rose from his vinyl chair and we embraced. He was heavier by a few pounds but otherwise unchanged, even wearing a rumpled sport jacket he used on occasion in Saigon.

Have a seat, the General said from behind his desk. The vinyl chairs squeaked obscenely when we moved. Cartons and crates hemmed us in on three sides. The General’s desk was cluttered with a rotary-dial phone heavy enough for self-defense, a stamp pad bleeding red ink, a receipt book with a blue sheet of carbon paper tucked between the pages, and a desk lamp with a broken neck, its head refusing to stay raised. When the General opened his desk drawer, my heart choked. Here it was! The moment when the rat would get a hammer to the head, a knife to the neck, a bullet in the temple, or possibly all of the above just for the fun of it. At least it would be quick, relatively speaking. Back in the European Dark Ages, according to the interrogation course that Claude had taught to the secret policemen in Saigon, I would have been drawn and quartered by horses, my head stuck on a pole for all to see. One royal humorist flayed his enemy alive and then stuffed the skin with straw, mounted it on a horse, and paraded it around town. What a laugh! I stopped breathing and waited for the General to pull out the pistol with which he was going to remove my brains in an unsurgical fashion, but all he extracted was a bottle of scotch and a pack of cigarettes.

Well, said Claude, I wish we were reuniting in better circumstances, gentlemen. I heard you had a hell of a time getting out of Dodge. That, the General said, is putting it mildly. And yourself? I said. I bet you got out on the last helicopter.

Let’s not be too dramatic, Claude said. He accepted the General’s offer of a cigarette and a tumbler of scotch. I got out a few hours earlier on the ambassador’s helicopter. He sighed. I’m never going to forget that day. We waited too damn long to get our act together. You were the last ones out on airplanes. The marines flew in on helicopters to get the rest of the people from the airport and the embassy. Air America was flying rescue choppers, too, but the problem was that everyone in town knew about our supposedly secret helipads. Turns out that we’d enlisted little Vietnamese ladies to paint those helipad numbers on the roofs. Smart, huh? Come the moment of truth, all those buildings were surrounded. The ones who were supposed to get to the helicopters couldn’t get to them. Same story at the airport, no way in. The docks, totally impassable. Even the buses going to the embassy couldn’t get in, since the embassy was mobbed by thousands. They were waving all kinds of paper. Marriage certificates, employment contracts, letters, even US passports. They were screaming. I know So-and-So, So-and-So can vouch for me, I’m married to a US citizen. None of that counted. The marines were on the wall and pounding anybody who tried to come up. You had to get close enough to give a marine a thousand dollars before he’d haul you up. We’d go up to the wall or to the gate every now and then and look for the people who worked for us and we’d point them out. If they got close, the marines yanked them up or opened the gates a bit to let just that person in. But sometimes we’d see people we knew in the middle of the crowd or on the fringes, and we’d wave at them to get to the wall, but they couldn’t. All those Vietnamese in front weren’t letting any Vietnamese in back get ahead. So we’d look and wave, and they’d look and wave, and then after a while we just looked away and left. Thank God I couldn’t hear them screaming, not over all that ruckus. I’d go back inside and have a drink, but it wasn’t any better. You should have heard the radio chatter. Help me, I’m a translator, we have seventy translators at this address, get us out. Help me, we have five hundred people at this compound, get us out. Help me, we have two hundred at logistics, get us out. Help me, we have a hundred at the CIA hotel, get us out. Guess what? None of those people got out. We’d told them to go to those places and wait for us. We had guys at those places and we called them and said, No one’s coming. Get yourselves out now and get to the embassy. Leave those people behind. Then there were the people outside the city. Agents all over the countryside were calling in. Help, I’m in Can Tho, the VC are closing in. Help, you left me in the U Minh Forest, what am I going to do, what about my family? Help me, get me out of here. They had no chance in hell. Even some of those in the embassy had no chance. We evacuated thousands, but when the last helicopter took off, there were still four hundred people waiting in the courtyard, all neatly arranged and waiting for helicopters we told them were still coming. None of them got out.

Christ, I need another drink even to talk about this. Thank you, General. He rubbed his eyes. All I can say is, it was personal. After I left you at the airport, I went back to my villa to get some sleep. I’d told Kim to meet me at dawn. She was going to get her family. Six comes along, six fifteen, six thirty, seven. The chief calls me up and wants to know where I am. I put him off. Seven fifteen, seven thirty, eight. The chief calls me back and says, Get your ass down to the embassy now, every man on deck. The hell with the chief, that Hungarian bastard. I grab my guns and drive across town to find Kim. Forget the daytime curfew, everyone was out and running around, trying to find a way out. The suburbs were quieter, though. Life was normal. I even saw Kim’s neighbors breaking out the commie flag. The previous week those same people were flying your flag. I asked them where she was. They said they didn’t know where the Yankee whore was. I wanted to shoot them then and there, but everybody on the street had turned out to look at me. I sure couldn’t wait for the local Viet Cong to come kidnap me. I drove back to the villa. Ten o’clock. She wasn’t there. I couldn’t wait any longer. I sat in the car and I cried. I haven’t cried over a girl in thirty years, but hell, there you have it. Then I drove to the embassy and saw there was no way in. Like I said, thousands of people. I left the keys in the ignition just like you did, General, and I hope some communist son of a bitch is enjoying himself with my Bel Air. Then I fought my way through the crowd. Those Vietnamese who wouldn’t let their own fellow Vietnamese through, they made way for me. Sure, I pushed and shoved and screamed, and plenty of them pushed and shoved and screamed right back, but I got closer, even though the closer I got, the tougher it was. I had made eye contact with the marines on the wall, and I knew if I could just get close enough I’d be saved. I was sweating like a pig, my shirt was torn, and all those bodies were packed against me. The people in front of me couldn’t see I was an American and no one was turning around just because I was tapping them on the shoulder, so I yanked them by the hair, or pulled them by the ear, or grabbed them by the shirt collar to haul them out of my way. I’ve never done anything like that in my life. I was too proud to scream at first, but it didn’t take long before I was screaming, too. Let me through, I’m an American, goddammit. I finally got myself to that wall, and when those marines reached down and grabbed my hand and pulled me up, I damn near cried again. Claude finished the last of his drink and banged the glass on the desk. I was never so ashamed in my life, but I was also never so goddamn glad to be an American, either.