The Man Who Walked Out of the Jungle Read online

  Gribley slumped into one of the metal chairs; Lieutenant Hazelton sat down without allowing his shirt to touch the back—it would have wrinkled the starch. Aligning his folder in his lap, Hazelton said, “As I’ve explained to Mr. Gribley, it’s unusual for the military police to comment at this stage of an ongoing investigation. He still insisted on talking to you.”

  Gribley’s smile showed no pique; he was probably used to depreciating tones. The Tet offensive had changed the relationship between the military and the press. Overnight, Walter Cronkite had gone from the war’s patriotic proponent to its most influential critic. Voices like his and the graphic evening news footage had done much to sour American public opinion about the conflict. No surprise that the military distrusted journalists. Officers saw them as the embodied contradictions to MACV’s claims we were winning, insidious bystanders who tattled in modulated phrases always prefaced with gainsay, backstabbers who oozed sympathy for the other side and portrayed the U.S. military as so incompetent that it had become evil, the institutional gun hand behind the March 1968 My Lai massacre in which a unit of clown-led miscreants had murdered hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese villagers.

  Gribley flipped open his notebook. “Do you mind if I ask you something off the record?”

  Hazelton cut in. “The press generally honors its promises to keep comments off the record. But there’s no guarantee.”

  I said, “Go ahead.”

  “How do you feel about General Cobris running your investigation?”

  “The Provost Marshal controls investigations.”

  “Maybe overseeing is how to put it.”

  “It’s not.”

  Gribley’s eyebrows went up. “So you haven’t heard?” He turned to Hazelton. “Can Major Tanner and I have a few private words?”

  “Up to the major. Standard procedure is for a PA officer to sit in, sir, for your protection.”

  “It’s okay. Sergeant Lopez can get you some coffee.”

  Ruffled, Hazelton pushed up from his chair, leaving the folder on it to mark his territory. When the door fell shut, Gribley slouched lower, as if in the presence of an old friend. He said, “Sorry, I must have sounded like a smart aleck.”

  “Don’t feel bad. It’s your thing.”

  He shifted in his seat, mouth ajar, unable to determine if I was joking. “I just took a statement from Major Vangleman. He said Cobris is overseeing the investigation—his words verbatim.”

  Here was the MACV staffer Vangleman again, and I had no idea who he was or what he was doing.

  Gribley went on. “He said you’re close to proving the Tay Ninh KIA wasn’t an American. I understand you can’t comment officially, but can you flesh it out a little? What are we dealing with? Fingerprints, documents, forensics? Have you found somebody who knew him?”

  “You’re right. I can’t comment.”

  “The incident happened ten kilometers from the Gavet Rubber Plantation. Outfits like Gavet and Michelin are staffed by Europeans. Any significance?”

  “None that I know of.”

  His mouth canted like a shovel digging in the sand. “French bigshots run those places. They don’t like publicity. When I hear that an unidentified vagabond got blown up right outside a rubber plantation, and that General Cobris is putting both his feet in the investigation, it makes me think the Gavet Company has a line to MACV Headquarters.”

  “Been out in the jungle, Alton?”

  “To firebases once or twice, sure.”

  “Firebases. You probably sat on the sandbags and ate C-rations and smoked and joked with the GIs. Maybe you witnessed a firepower demonstration, a noisy mad minute. You got a briefing from some Army major in clean fatigues in front of a map board. And when you plotted the point on the map where the man you called an unknown soldier died, you spread out your fingers, like you saw the major do, and the distance from thumb to pinky is about 10 klicks. Sound right?”

  Gribley squirmed. “Yeah.”

  “But I asked, have you been in the jungle. It’s a different world entirely. In places the vegetation is so dense, men carve toeholds in the hillsides so they can stand steady enough to whack their machetes against the walls of bamboo. To go a few meters, they chop until their forearms balloon up and they can’t hold the machetes anymore. They don’t use trails. Trails are death traps. On foot, ten kilometers isn’t right outside the plantation. You would take two days to cross it.”

  He straightened in his chair. So we were not to be friends after all. “Okay, so it’s bullshit, the connection to Gavet. I won’t mention it in my next article.”

  “Glad to hear.”

  “Believe it or not, I appreciate your comments. Obviously there’s a lot I don’t know.” He stood, leaving a film of sweat on the seat. Set his card on the desk’s edge. “If you think of anything, you can leave a message for me at the Caravelle Hotel.”

  Hazelton scurried in to collect his folder and followed the reporter out.

  My turn to slump. My speech about hacking through the jungle clanged in my ears. A show-off lecture worthy of a rookie. In delivering it, I’d opened a window on myself, declaring I’d been in the jungle and it mattered to me enough to pontificate about.

  I was grateful the door had been closed and Lopez hadn’t heard.

  Worse, my speech was inaccurate. The jungle wasn’t a uniform state of dense undergrowth and obstructions. In places, yes, there were impenetrable walls of bamboo. In others, you could move easily under the canopy, traverse the terrain quickly...

  I unfolded the map. With a grease pencil I drew a line from Hill 71 to the closest edge of the Gavet Plantation. The line equated to 10.5 kilometers.

  Having seen Hazelton and the reporter out, Lopez reappeared, coffee cup in hand. He leaned in the doorway. “What’s next, sir?”

  “Call G-5 and ask them to get in touch with the Gavet Rubber Company. Have them set up an appointment for me with somebody in the company’s management.”

  “For when?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  * * *

  I returned the jeep to the motor pool, walked to Tan Son Nhut’s main gate, and caught a scooter cab into Saigon. In my lap nestled my leather pouch with the photos, the map, and my Colt .45. Not many U.S. servicemen had unrestricted access to Saigon, fewer still were authorized to carry a firearm downtown. I always brought my pistol. Going unarmed might be safe on protected avenues like Tu Do and Nguyen Hue, but I roamed deep into the alleys of Cholon, where Americans were like the albino pheasant, rarely seen except in a fancy cage.

  Scooter drivers took varying routes depending on traffic and checkpoints. Tonight’s ride sped me along the Cach Mang commercial strip. Lancing past the bars and stalls that crouched shoulder to shoulder, I watched the merchants ratchet down the grates on their storefronts. It was dinner time. They’d reopen later, to cater to the whimsical tastes of GIs who bought the rococo fans and ceramic elephants—favorite trinkets to send home. Less tangible mementos availed in the whorehouse bars where greed and naïveté enacted their age-old exchange. On the sidewalk, a peddler shouted as I buzzed past.

  Saigon was an armed camp, a city of nightclubs, a center of commerce, the locus of an existential storm. Really there were two Saigons: the precinct of facades protected by martial law and barbed wire and gun-jeeps; and the realm of catacombs—the backstreets and alleyways, their balconies rigged with clotheslines that gamboled as if they were all tied together and plucked by a hidden hand. Detouring into the city, my scooter driver stopped at an intersection where a joint Vietnamese-American military-police roving patrol checked papers. The streets lay nearly empty; rain impended in swarthy clouds. The patrol stopped us and examined my ID card. A duck merchant pedaled past, the caged fowl on his head like a distended hat in the gloom, the animal honking out a warning.

  At this intersection seven years ago, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc had burned himself as a protest against oppression. Tuy had told me about the incident. A crowd had gath
ered, summoned by loudspeakers. The monk posed cross-legged on the pavement while a helper doused him with gasoline, pouring liquid over his slight figure, upending the jerry can as if well practiced at human immolation. Thich Quang Duc didn’t falter when the match ignited him. Fiercely aflame, he didn’t topple, not right away; he balanced on bent legs fused together, his skin turning black and his body’s effluent boiling and crackling. The smoke swirled into a vortex that convulsed like a snake whose head is caught in a trap. His death set off a crisis in South Vietnam. More monks burned themselves. Fire alarms went off in the Kennedy White House—the realization that President Ngo Dinh Diem might be a bad bet, antithetical to our values. The American shuddering stoked a Vietnamese military plot. In early November of that year, the participants murdered Diem.

  Murder in the pursuit of American values. Was it justified?

  I didn’t know.

  Three weeks later, Kennedy was assassinated.

  What had changed? Saigon remained a city at war. But if the South Vietnamese government still survived upon the elites that suckled to a foreign power, they were smarter now. More attuned to the Vietnamese people. Succeeding in ways that had eluded them in the past and overcoming the legacy of French colonialism and the ugliness that had surrounded Diem’s era. So said MACV’s briefers.

  Were they right?

  Not a clue.

  The scooter entered Cholon. Years ago, it had been a separate municipality from Saigon. The sprawl that knit them together had left no obvious seam. Even so, I felt the vibe change from crass city to small town. A block from Tuy’s apartment, I paid the driver. I always dallied in the shadows to test the surroundings before I took the final leg. An attempt at security. Yet there was no way to be an anonymous American on this side street. So often had I ambled along these cobblestones that the neighbors recognized me, the lanky paleface who came and went from address number 18. They smiled politely when we crossed paths. As to what they thought, I had no idea.

  At the alley’s far exit stood the policeman my friend Trong had posted to watch the neighborhood. The policeman regarded me with the aloofness of a high mandarin, and I wondered whether his indifference was pretended or real. He was helpful to discourage street thugs and urchins who might otherwise bother me; he wouldn’t deter a resolute enemy. If I learned that the Viet Cong had targeted me for assassination, my plan was to flee to a military base and take Tuy with me.

  From the doorstep, I collected the evening newspapers. Tuy read as many of the dailies as she could get her hands on; her average was four. Typically she sat cross-legged on the straw mat, the papers spread in front of her in a fan between the floor lamp and the portable radio—another present from me—its handle flipped upward for easy toting. Absorbing the printed news, sometimes she laughed her quintessential three-syllable laugh, each syllable a pure tone. I couldn’t imitate her laugh any more than I could reproduce the phonemes of the Vietnamese language. It was the sound of her spirit, and the newspapers brought it out in her. She described her late father, a publisher, as having been similarly obsessed with the dailies, and I wondered if he’d been as reluctant as Tuy to discard the old editions. When I left for work in the morning, I adiosed them to the trash bin outside. In the corner behind the tub she kept a pile of them I wasn’t allowed to throw away. A meter tall, its topmost paper formed a handy shelf where she kept her shampoo, soap dish, and ashtray for smoking while soaking.

  I sat on the floor and unlaced my boots. She said nothing. The radio bleated last summer’s incessantly played Fifth Dimension hit Aquarius, a song of the peace generation that had nothing to do with me. Even so, sliding my leather pouch and .45 into the corner, I became, momentarily, a non-combatant.

  For tonight’s dinner, she served slivers of crab, chopped asparagus, spicy Nuoc Mam sauce, and Rang Chon—an elegant, long-grained rice whose name in the villages meant ‘fox fang.’ We ate on the floor above a straw mat that served as tablecloth and table alike. Few American servicemen would touch authentic Vietnamese cuisine. In newcomer briefings, the sergeants warned the soldiers that local food would give them the infamous green runs. Men who went to the jungle with the runs slashed open the seats of their pants—they barely had time to step out of column and squat, let alone to undo their belts and web gear. Toting loudspeakers, strutting around in their starched fatigues, the indoctrinators heaped misinformation. Most of them had neither sampled the food nor been in the jungle.

  I said, “Do you know the Cercle Sportif?”

  Tuy tilted her chin high, a haughty gesture, perhaps a gift from her French grandfather. “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “I have to go there tomorrow to meet a French bigshot from the Gavet Rubber Company.”

  “So, you need to know the way?”

  “I want you to come along. For help with the translation.”

  Eyeing me, she chewed a clot of rice and crab as if it were the permutations my request represented. Though she was a quarter French, it was the part she’d consciously abandoned, as her father had done. He’d died when she was eleven years old, and she’d spent her adolescence in the household of her uncle, a colonial-administration functionary who, like others of his social caste, had wanted to be the thing he served. Her uncle’s identification with the French had been so complete that it survived their defeat. His ambition for her had been that she too would imitate the supercilious colonialists, some of whom had remained in Vietnam. In this he’d been successful for a time, particularly in summoning her to their perusal, where she became a curio, worthy to be held up to the light, though not to be invited into their society.

  “People will recognize me at the Cercle Sportif.” She sounded irritated, and I wondered on what level she’d have to deal with these people, whoever they were. By Vietnamese standards, she was not poor. She owned this building and another below Tran Quoc Toan Boulevard that she rented to a European airline for its offices; from time to time she gave Vietnamese language lessons to the airline’s employees. In a city where hopelessness sloshed at your feet, she was a successful person, with no cause to humble herself. Yet what was a gathering of former colonialists, if not to humble those they’d once subjugated?

  I asked, “Do you have a dress to wear?” When we went out, she normally wore the ao dai, the traditional Vietnamese woman’s garment that hugged the torso and hips and draped loosely around flowing pantaloons. Not the Americanized image I wanted her to show at Le Cercle Sportif.

  “I have a dress. It’s not new.”

  “Perhaps a new one would be better.”

  “And make them think I’m a whore for the Americans.”

  I retreated into silence, hoping that whatever vexation I’d caused would subside.

  It didn’t work. Her eyes were bayonets. “Are you going out tonight?”

  “I have business with Lieutenant Trong.”

  “Business?”

  “Tomorrow I will be asked if I have seen my contacts. I want to say yes.”

  She shifted her gaze to her rice and crab scraps. “You’re very proud of your contacts, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I am one of them, I suppose.”

  “Not the same.”

  “No?”

  She looked at the food scraps she’d arranged in a little crescent, the kind of plate doodling you pause before eating, because you’ve spent time constructing it. Perhaps she was thinking of my contacts. She said, “You’d better go. It’s starting to rain.”

  * * *

  At a vender’s stall, the rain slapped the canvas awning and gamboled into a gossamer screen that helped obscure my presence in Cholon’s red light district. In French Saigon, Dong Khanh had been Rue Des Marins—Sailor’s Street—the site of the infamous Grand Monde Casino, run by a criminal gang that had flourished until President Ngo Dinh Diem crushed it in the mid-1950s. Tonight the mood was more subdued than grand. The downpour smocked the modest opium dens and hash dives. The taxi drivers had parked to wait it out, and I
was lucky to spot one of the yellow and blue Renaults nudged against the curb. Ducking in, I directed the driver northeast toward Trong’s neighborhood.

  To Tuy, the police were parasites who treated themselves to every sop and kickback their sticky fingers could grasp. Her view might have softened had she known Trong, a modest family man and lieutenant of detectives. Yet I’d resisted an introduction. I worried that she wouldn’t read him as I did, and that she’d brand him according to her preconceptions. And what would Trong think of her? She was my woman, to be honored. Yet an introduction inevitably would include his wife, who spoke almost no English, and whose views I didn’t remotely apprehend. Tuy and I were not married. Would Trong’s wife classify her as a whore?

  His standing invitation to me was to call on him at his house between eight and nine at night. He worked long days, and he gave few people carte blanche to puncture the hours he reserved for himself and his family. I did what I could not to abuse the privilege.

  Dealing with the Vietnamese apparatus, most Americans paid formal office calls and dispatched memoranda through channels. The few who cut their own way did so by handing out booze and other goodies, befriending corrupt bureaucrats or corrupting those who were straight. I’d come across Lieutenant Nguyen Quan Trong in a different way. Soon after the Tet offensive, he’d visited me at the Long Binh military hospital, where I was recovering from wounds from a Viet Cong ambush at Phu Lam, on the southwestern edge of Cholon. The same ambush had trapped Trong’s son, an enlisted man in the ARVN MP company I advised then. His son had related how I’d saved his life by shooting my way through the kill zone to reach him and a few others. I explained to his father that the rescue had been serendipitous—I’d been shooting my way out of a situation just as bad a few feet away. Maybe he thought I was being modest. Or, to him, the distinction was irrelevant. His son was alive, and Trong wanted to say thanks. He was still doing so.