That’s right, said Kien to himself as he listened to these ramblings. After all these we are the ones who are now confused and mired in shame. We are the ones who’ve become totally alienated. But we shan’t be like this forever. There must be some way out for us. But when?
As the novel continued to unfold on the cluttered desk in his Hanoi room more stories came back to him. Flashes like film reels of events he had not thought about even once since they occurred.
Saigon, 30 April, V-Day. It poured with rain. Yes, on that momentous day of total victory, after that terribly hot noon, Saigon had been drenched in rain. After the downpour the sun came out from behind the clouds and the gunsmoke.
The last counter-attack by the ARVN commandos at Tan Son Nhat airport was beaten off and Kien’s troops moved in from the edge of the main runway. Kien dragged himself over to the airport lounge to find his regiment.
Of the entire scout platoon sent in to the airport only he had survived.
In the city five kilometres away the anti-aircraft guns were being fired noisily in celebration. But here it remained strangely quiet. The smoke continued to billow from oil fires but the air had been cooled and soothed by the rain, creating a sleepy atmosphere. All around the airport the victorious troops were enjoying their greatest prize: sleep.
Kien lurched tiredly past a row of ARVN bodies, commandos in uniforms still wet from the rain, and stepped onto the polished granite stairs of the terminal. Everywhere soldiers were lying deeply asleep. They lay sprawled on tables, on bars, on benches, on window ledges, and in armchairs. The chorus of snores made Kien sleepy, too. He sat himself down by the door to the Customs office and lit a cigarette. After a few minutes the cigarette dropped from his fingers and he slid to the ground into a deep sleep.
He was awakened a short time later by noises, the heat of a fire and the smell of food. Next to him a group of armoured-car soldiers were burning mattresses and polished wooden railings from the bar.
They were cooking something in a huge pot. It smelled delicious.
‘Smells good, don’t it?’ one of them said to Kien. ‘Have some. Down here they call them instant noodles.’
Another soldier interrupted: ‘Goddammit, be quick, so we can get looking. Fuck it, if we aren’t quick the bloody infantry’ll get all the good stuff. Oh, sorry mate,’ he said to Kien, ‘you’re infantry. Well, you’d probably know where the post-office storeroom is.’
‘I know where it is,’ Kien replied.
‘Excellent. After we’ve had the noodles, take us there. I’ve got an empty armoured car out there and I’ve not had any souvenirs for ages.’
Then he looked disdainfully at Kien. ‘Shit, don’t you know you’ve been sleeping next to a corpse? Couldn’t you smell her?’
Kien slowly turned his head to see where he’d been sleeping. A naked woman, her breasts firm and standing upright, her legs stretched out and open like scissors, her long hair covering her face, was stretched out near him, blocking the entry to the Customs office. She looked young. Her eyes were half-closed. No blood was visible.
‘I was so tired I didn’t notice her. I’ll drag her away,’ said Kien.
‘Leave her. Just don’t touch her. Now the war’s finished it’ll be bad luck for us to touch a corpse.’
‘I wonder why she’s naked,’ said Kien.
‘Beats me. We’d just shot those bastards over there and when we came in she was already lying there like that.’
‘Strange. The commandos are already stinking, yet she’s still fresh. Maybe women are cleaner, so their bodies don’t rot as quickly,’ said Kien.
‘Shut up! Gabbing on about stinking corpses while we’re trying to eat.’
Behind them they heard the Customs door swing open and a crashing noise. They turned to see a huge helmeted soldier tripping over the girl’s body and dropping a crate of Saigon 33 Beer. The bottles scattered and broke, spreading the amber fluid all over the floor. The armoured-car crew just laughed.
But the big man, embarrassed, got up and kicked at the body angrily, screaming at the dead girl. ‘You fucking prostitute, lying there showing it for everyone to see. Dare trip me over, damn your ancestors! To hell with you!’ he ranted.
Enraged, the big man grabbed the corpse by one leg and dragged her across the floor and down the stairs. Her skull thudded down the steps like a heavy ball. When he reached the concrete floor at the bottom of the stairs, he braced himself, lifted the dead girl and threw her out into the sunshine, next to another pile of dead southern commandos. The body bounced up, her arms spread wide and her mouth opened as if she was about to cry out. Her head dropped back with another thud on the concrete. The lout walked away jauntily, swinging his arms as if he were a hero.
The armoured-car crew had stopped eating, stiffened, and watched in silence. After the lout walked away they rose and went into the yard. The leader raised his AK and started to aim at the big man: ‘Damn you!’ he shrieked.
But Kien rushed over and pushed the barrel of the gun up. As he did so the soldier began firing, but the bullets went skyward and fell harmlessly to earth around them.
‘Just because of that you wanted to kill him?’ Kien asked the armoured-car commander.
They looked around them. The whole airport was full of officers and soldiers alike running as though they were in a market-place. They were looting, destroying, and firing rifles into the air at random. No one had paid any attention to the scene with the corpse. Even the lout hadn’t realised he’d come within a whisker of being shot.
The soldier wrenched his gun back from Kien, staring at Kien with loathing and hatred.
‘Maybe she was an important officer,’ Kien said to the soldier, as though the treatment of her body would be justified.
‘Shut up,’ the soldier replied.
‘What?’
‘Shut up. You’re talking garbage,’ he said, narrowing his eyes and spoiling for a fight.
The armoured-car commander’s men gathered around them. ‘Drop it, the pair of you. Forget it. Today’s V-Day, have you forgotten?’
The men took down curtains from the airport lounge and began to wrap the bodies up. They found some pretty clothes in a suitcase and dressed the dead girl, combing her hair into a bun and washing her face. They carried all the bodies out and laid them out in a row to wait for the body truck to take them away.
‘That’s it. Farewell to one regime,’ Kien shouted.
The armoured-car crew took off their caps and stood to attention.
The commander, calm by now, apologised to Kien. ‘Sorry for the outburst. It’s just that we’re fed up with corpses. We’ve had human flesh in the armoured-car tracks and we’ve had to drive through rivers to wash the bits off and wash away the stink. But I just couldn’t watch that arsehole treating a body like that, and a woman, too. If you hadn’t stopped me I’d have shot him and been nailed as a murderer, and that would have been senseless. We weren’t any better, sleeping and eating by the corpse.’
‘That’s enough,’ said Kien.
‘No. I mean it. That slob gave us a sort of warning: Don’t criticise others. Be sure of yourself first.’
Kien frowned, then walked away. ‘Be sure of yourself first, what a joke!’ Kien said to himself. He recalled Oanh’s death a month earlier, the morning his regiment attacked the Police Headquarters at Buon Me Thuot.
That day the southern government’s police force had defended themselves as staunchly as any regular soldiers in the southern armed forces. It took the NVA regulars more than an hour to fight their way into the main police building. They’d been ordered to kill all men wearing white shirts and release those wearing yellow. No one knew who’d given the order but it went down the ranks by word of mouth. The attackers fired non-stop yet the white shirts continued to pour out like bees.