Viet Nguyen - The Sympathizer

It’s going to be messy with a shotgun.

We’re not using a shotgun, genius. He opened a cigar box resting on a shelf beneath the counter. Inside was a.38 Special, a revolver with a snub nose, identical to the one that I carried as my service pistol. Delicate enough for you?

Once again I was trapped by circumstances, and once again I would soon see another man trapped by circumstances. The only compensation for my sadness was the expression on Bon’s face. It was the first time he had looked happy in a year.

The grand opening began later that afternoon, the General shaking hands with well-wishers while chatting easily and smiling incessantly. Like a shark who must keep swimming to live, a politician — which was what the General had become — had to keep his lips constantly moving. The constituents, in this case, were old colleagues, followers, soldiers, and friends, a platoon of thirty or so middle-aged men whom I had rarely encountered without their uniforms until our time in the refugee camps on Guam. Seeing them again in mufti, a year later, confirmed the verdict of defeat and showed these men now to be guilty of numerous sartorial misdemeanors. They squeaked around the store in bargain-basement penny loafers and creased budget khakis, or in ill-fitting suits advertised by wholesalers for the price of buy-one-get-one-free. Ties, handkerchiefs, and socks were thrown in, though what was really needed was cologne, even of the gigolo kind, anything to mask the olfactory evidence of their having been gleefully skunked by history. As for me, even though I was of lesser rank than most of these men, I was better dressed, thanks to Professor Hammer’s hand-me-downs. With just a bit of tailoring, his blue blazer with gold buttons and his gray flannel slacks fit me perfectly.

Thus smartly dressed, I made my way through the men, all of whom I knew in my capacity as the General’s aide. Many once commanded artillery batteries and infantry battalions, but now they possessed nothing more dangerous than their pride, their halitosis, and their car keys, if they even owned cars. I had reported all the gossip about these vanquished soldiers to Paris, and knew what they did (or, in many cases, did not do) for a living. Most successful was a general infamous for using his crack troops to harvest cinnamon, whose circulation he monopolized; now this spice merchant lorded over a pizza parlor. One colonel, an asthmatic quartermaster who became unreasonably excited discussing dehydrated rations, was a janitor. A dashing major who flew gunships, now a mechanic. A grizzled captain with a talent for hunting guerrillas: short-order cook. An affectless lieutenant, sole survivor of an ambushed company: deliveryman. So the list went, a fair percentage collecting both welfare and dust, moldering in the stale air of subsidized apartments as their testes shriveled day by day, consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile. In this psychosomatic condition, normal social or familial ills were diagnosed as symptoms of something fatal, with their vulnerable women and children cast as the carriers of Western contamination. Their afflicted kids were talking back, not in their native language but in a foreign tongue they were mastering faster than their fathers. As for the wives, most had been forced to find jobs, and in doing so had been transformed from the winsome lotuses the men remembered them to be. As the crapulent major said, A man doesn’t need balls in this country, Captain. The women all have their own.

True, I concurred, though I suspected nostalgia had brainwashed the major and the others. Their memories had been laundered so thoroughly as to be colored differently from mine, for never had they talked so fondly about their wives in Vietnam. Have you ever thought about moving, Major? Maybe you and your wife could get a fresh start and rekindle your romance. Get away from all reminders of your past.

But what would I do for food? he said in all seriousness. The Chinese food is best where we live. I reached forth to straighten his crooked tie, which matched his crooked teeth. All right, Major. Then let me take you out. You can show me where the good Chinese food is.

My pleasure! The crapulent major beamed. He was a bon vivant who loved food and friendship, someone without an enemy in this new world, except for the General. Why had I mentioned the crapulent major’s name to him? Why hadn’t I given the name of someone whose sins outweighed his flesh, rather than this man whose flesh outweighed his sins? Leaving the major behind, I made my way through the crowd to the General. I was ready for some political boosterism, even of the most calculated kind. He was standing by Madame next to the chardonnay and cabernet, being interviewed by a man waving a microphone between the two of them as if it were a Geiger counter. I caught her eye, and when she amplified the wattage of her smile, the man turned around, a camera hanging around his neck and a retractable pen with four colors of ink peeking from his shirt pocket.

It took a moment for the recognition to register. I had last seen Son Do, or Sonny as he was nicknamed, in 1969, my final year in America. He was likewise a scholarship student at a college in Orange County, an hour away by car. It was the birthplace of the war criminal Richard Nixon, as well as the home of John Wayne, a place so ferociously patriotic I thought Agent Orange might have been manufactured there or at least named in its honor. Sonny’s subject of study was journalism, which would have been useful for our country if Sonny’s particular brand were not so subversive. He carried a baseball bat of integrity on his shoulder, ready to clobber the fat softballs of his opponents’ inconsistencies. Back then, he had been self-confident, or arrogant, depending on your point of view, a legacy of his aristocratic heritage. His grandfather was a mandarin, as he never ceased reminding you. This grandfather inveighed against the French with such volume and acidity that they shipped him on a one-way berth to Tahiti, where, after supposedly befriending a syphilitic Gauguin, he succumbed to either dengue fever or an incurable strain of virulent homesickness. Sonny inherited the utter sense of conviction that motivated his honorable grandfather, who I am sure was insufferable, as most men of utter conviction are. Like a hard-core conservative, Sonny was right about everything, or thought himself so, the key difference being that he was a naked leftist. He led the antiwar faction of Vietnamese foreign students, a handful of whom assembled monthly at a sterile room in the student union or in someone’s apartment, passions running hot and food getting cold. I attended these parties as well as the ones thrown by the equally compact pro-war gang, differing in political tone but otherwise totally interchangeable in terms of food eaten, songs sung, jokes traded, and topics discussed. Regardless of political clique, these students gulped from the same overflowing cup of loneliness, drawing together for comfort like these ex-officers in the liquor store, hoping for the body heat of fellow sufferers in an exile so chilly even the California sun could not warm their cold feet.

I heard you were here, too, Sonny said, gripping my hand and unwrapping a genuine smile. The confidence I remembered so well radiated from his eyes, rendering his ascetic face with its antiseptic lips attractive. It’s great to see you again, old friend. Old friend? That was not how I recalled it. Son, Madame interjected, was interviewing us for his newspaper. I’m the editor, he said, offering me his business card. The interview will be in our first issue. The General, flush with good cheer, plucked a chardonnay from the shelf. Here’s a token of appreciation for all your efforts in reviving the fine art of the fourth estate in our new land, my young friend. This could not help but prompt my memory of the journalists to whom we had given the gift of free room and board, albeit in a jail, for speaking a little too much truth to power. Perhaps Sonny was thinking the same thing, for he tried to decline the bottle, conceding only after much insistence from the General. I commemorated the occasion with Sonny’s hulking Nikon, General and Madame flanking him while he cupped the bottle that the General grasped by the neck. Slap that on your front page, the General said by way of farewell.