“Some fireworks!” I told him as I finished extricating myself from the parachute harness. “I never saw a firecracker go off like that before!”
“I don’t understand it,” Putnam said. “Listen. That isn’t fireworks. Those are shells. They’re shelling the Embassy. And that explosion! That was dynamite!”
“No kidding,” I said sarcastically. “Well, I guess these people really do get carried away by their Lunar New Year.”
“It must be a terrorist attack,” Putnam decided.
“ ‘The American Embassy is secure. We’ll both be safe there’ ” I quoted him. “Man, Putnam, you’ve got to stop reading those CIA comic books.”
“Shut up!” He hissed the words at me as he pulled me back into the bushes. “Look over there.”
I looked. One by one, guerrillas were darting through the hole in the wall and taking up positions around the Embassy grounds. From where we were hiding, I could make out the forms of two dead American Marines. As I turned my head, I could see an American military truck crossing the grounds from the gate at the other end. The gate had evidently been reclosed after admitting the truck. The guards at the gate had then been attacked by the Vietcong hiding in the bottom of the lorry. The driver of the lorry, in South Vietnamese uniform, had been shot by one of the guards when his treachery became obvious. Another imposter had met a similar fate. But in the end, the infiltrators had overwhelmed the undermanned guard staff.
We watched as the terrorists moved across the grounds towards the Embassy building. Most of them wore the black pajamas of the Vietnamese peasant. A few wore the white shirts of the Saigon white-collar worker with red armbands around the sleeves. They were moving straight towards us. Their goal was the thick, cherrywood doors opened on the parking lot—or interior—area of the compound. Before they could achieve it, three valiant Marines inside the Embassy managed to close the doors.
Putnam and I were unarmed. There was nothing we could do. So, as the Vietcong guerrillas rushed the cherrywood doors, we took advantage of the distraction to move away from the Embassy building itself.
We thought the wall around the compound would offer better shelter from the flying bullets and shells. We were wrong. Just as we reached it, American Marines on the other side began firing over it and through the gates at the guerrillas. The Cong returned the fire. We were virtually in the middle.
It brought us up short. We didn’t know which way to run. With bullets zinging all around us, there was no time to hold a conference. We bolted in different directions.
I scrambled behind a truck parked on one side of the parking lot. I saw Putnam reach safety behind another lorry across from me. As it turned out, his choice was a lot safer than mine.
It was a chunk of broken glass lying on the ground that saved my life. I stepped on it and jumped with the sudden pain. The sharp movement sideways got me out of the way of a lunging bayonet by a split second. The bayonet jammed into the wood of the lorry instead of my back.
I whirled around. What looked like a young Vietnamese boy in the customary black pajamas was wrestling with a rifle and trying to yank the bayonet out of the wood where it had stuck. I slammed into the guerrilla with my shoulder. The Cong let go of the rifle and went sprawling.
“American murderer!” The high pitched voice spat the words at me.
“That’s no attitude to take,” I said, standing over the fallen figure. “We’re here to help you people.”
“You’re invaders! Yankee go home!”
“You’re a Communist dupe,” I assured the Cong. “We’re here to bring you democracy.”
“Napalm! You call that democracy? Ky! You call that democracy? Bombs! This is democracy? Plague! Is that what you mean by democracy?”
“You’re confused,” I said soothingly. “You just don’t understand how it would be to live under a Communist system.”
“But I understand how it is to live under American domination. And I understand how to die under it!”
Lying there on the ground with me standing alongside, the figure suddenly tensed. The hands moved up to the black pajama blouse. Peering through the darkness I suddenly spotted the two round objects concealed under the pajama blouse. Grenades! The suicidal Cong must be reaching to pull the pins and we’d both be blown to smithereens together. I dived atop the terrorist, both hands grabbing for the grenades.
My hands latched onto both targets, ripping away the material of the pajama blouse. My weight knocked the wind out of the Cong. My mind did a quick reevaluation of the situation. Those weren’t grenades which had been concealed by the blouse.
They were female breasts!
“Go ahead! Strangle me to death!”
Close to the terrorist’s face now, it was easy for me to see that the features were female. She was a very pretty girl with the heart-shaped face and almond eyes typical of Vietnamese girls. Her breasts were small, but very full and round and carried high. From what I could feel of the rest of her body as I sprawled over it, she was quite slim with nicely padded hips and supple legs.
“I’m not going to strangle you,” I assured her.
“Why not?” She was crying. “I’d rather die than go on living in this lousy mess you Yankees have made of my country.”
“How come you speak English?” I was trying to get off the subject of politics, but it was no use.
“With half a million Americans taking over my country, it is necessary to speak the language of the conquerors. I had to learn it just to say ‘No!’ to all the GIs who tried to ‘pacify’ me.”
“Well, anyway, I’m not going to kill you. There’s no doubt you can’t hold out here. The Americans will retake the Embassy in a matter of hours. When that happens, I’ll turn you over as a prisoner. That’s all that’s going to happen to you. You’ll be well treated.”
“Well treated!” She laughed without humor. “You mean I’ll be shot!”
“We don’t shoot prisoners.”
“Of course not. You get your allies to do the dirty work for you. But why wait? Why not just kill me now and get it over?”
“Now I could never kill a pretty girl like you.”
“Oh! I see! That’s it! You’re going to rape me!”
“I never rape women. My ego won’t let me. I have to feel that a girl wants me as much as I want her.”
“If I let you make love to me, will you let me go?” Her voice took on cunning.
“I can’t do that. You’re the enemy.”
“Do you always squeeze the enemy’s breasts the way you’re squeezing mine?”
“Sorry.” I started to remove my hands.
Her hands covered them and held them in place. “Are you always so aroused by the enemy?” she asked softly.
“I’m not aroused!” I denied.
“Then you must have a pistol in your pocket.”
“I have no pistol in my pocket.” I blushed.
“I didn’t think it felt like a pistol.” She squirmed beneath me and I could feel the hot fulcrum of her body pressed insinuatingly against me through the thin silk of her pajama pants. “I’m so tired of war and fighting and killing,” she sighed. “If you turn me over to the soldiers, they really will kill me. And if I’m going to die, I want to be a woman once more before it happens. I want to feel some tenderness in the world.” She raised her head. Her lips were parted. The warm perfume of her breath reached my nostrils.
I kissed her. Her nails dug into my back. Her breasts were a pair of panting doves under my hands. Her thighs parted and she ground her soft hips against mine.
Carbine fire came from the Marines at the gate. The Cong sputtered the night air with tommy gun bullets. Shells whined overhead. Outside there were sounds of more explosions and shooting.
The sounds receded from my awareness. My sense of danger was lost in the arms of the eager girl. Our hands moved together to slide the black pajama pants down her hips and legs to her ankles. She was all softness and warmth and willingness. We floated on the sensations of pure, ecstatic, non-thinking, apolitical sex.