Smoking rosa canina Kien would immerse himself in a world of mythical and wonderful dreams which in ordinary moments his soul could never penetrate. In these luxurious dreams the imagined air was so clean, the sky so high, the clouds and sunshine so beautiful, approaching the perfection of his childhood dreams. And in those dreams the beautiful sky would project pictures of his own lovely Hanoi. The West Lake on a summer afternoon, the scarlet flame trees around the lake. Once in his dream-picture he had felt the waves lapping the side of his tiny sampan and looking up he had seen Phuong, youthful, innocently beautiful, her hair flying in the Hanoi breeze.
The soldiers each had their own way of smoking canina and ridding themselves of their shared harsh realities. For Cu, cassava alcohol or rosa canina conjured up images of returning home. Cu could relate the scenes vividly, making them sound so joyful that tears fell from everyone’s eyes as he unfolded the scene in soft words. Vinh dreamed only of women, describing his imagined and planned love affairs with youthful enthusiasm. As the affairs dragged on the women became more voluptuous and the affairs more complicated, the descriptions more erotic and explicit. As for ‘Elephant’ Tac, he dreamed mainly of food. He spoke of long tables laden with wonderful and exotic dishes and of sitting down to savour the moments, morsel by morsel, dish by dish.
The lethargy brought on by rosa canina spread from Kien’s scout platoon huts through the entire regiment. It wasn’t long before the Political Commissar ordered the units to stop using rosa canina, declaring it a banned substance.
The Commissar then ordered troops to track down all the plants and cut all the blooms then uproot all the trees throughout the Screaming Souls area to ensure they’d grow no more.
Along with the gambling and smoking of canina went all sorts of rumours and prophecies. Perhaps because the soldiers in their hallucinations had seen too many hairy monsters with wings and mammals with reptilian tails, or imagined they had smelled the stench of their own blood. They imagined the monstrous animals plunging about bleeding in the dark caves and hollows under the base of Ascension Pass on the other side of the valley from the jungle.
Many said they saw groups of headless black American soldiers carrying lanterns aloft, walking through in Indian file. Others paled in terror as horrible, primitive wild calls echoed inside their skulls in the rainy, dewy mornings, thinking they were the howls of pain from the last group of orang-utans said to have lived in the Central Highlands in former times.
The rumours and the predictions were all seen as warnings of an approaching calamity, horrible and bloody, and those who leaned toward mysticism or believed in horoscopes secretly confided these fears to their friends. Soon there sprang up tiny altars in each squad hut and tent, altars to the comrades-in-arms already fallen. And in the tear-making smoke of the incense soldiers bowed and prayed, whispering in prayer:
The rain had kept pounding, day after day. The fighting seemed blanketed by the immense dull sea of rain; if one stared hard and long into the dark, grey, wet-season sky, or listened to the rain falling on the canvas canopies, one thought only of war and fighting, fighting and war.
The rain brought sadness, monotony, and starvation. In the whole Central Highlands, the immense, endless landscape was covered with a deadly silence or isolated, sporadic gunfire. The life of the B3 Infantrymen after the Paris Agreement was a series of long, suffering days, followed by months of retreating and months of counter-attacking, withdrawal, then counter-attack. Victory after victory, withdrawal after withdrawal. The path of war seemed endless, desperate, and leading nowhere.
At the end of the wet season the echoes of cannon fire could be heard a hundred kilometres away, a harbinger of a poor dry season over Con Roc, Mang Den and Mang But.
That September the NVA forces attacked Kontum township’s defence lines. The firing was so loud that it shook the earth as if every square metre would rise in a groundswell and burst. In the 3rd Regiment, hiding in the Screaming Souls Jungle, the soldiers waited in fear, hoping they would not be ordered in as support forces, to hurl themselves into the arena to almost certain death.
Some of those waiting found they were hearing a musical air in their heads, the sound of guitars rising and falling with the sounds of the Kontum carnage. Soldiers of that year 1974 sang:
Late in the afternoon of Can’s escape, that wet, boring autumn afternoon, Kien was sitting by the stream, fishing. The drizzle was relentless, the day lifeless and gloomy. The stream was swollen, its waters turbulent and loud, as if it wished to wash the banks away. But where Kien sat fishing there was a silent eddy around bare tree roots, exposed where flood waters had bitten deep.
Kien nestled in his jute raincoat, hugging his knees, staring blankly into the rolling stream, thinking of nothing, wanting nothing. Now that the rosa canina had all gone there was nothing for his soul to grab hold of. So it wandered, meandering freely. Every day Kien would sit for hours by the stream, motionless, letting its sorrowful whispering carry him along.
That autumn was sad, prolonged by rain. Orders came for food rations to be sharply reduced. Hungry, suffering successive bouts of malaria, the troops became anaemic, and their bodies broke out in ulcers, showing through worn and torn clothing. They looked like lepers, not heroic forward scouts. Their faces looked moss-grown, hatched and sorrowful, without hope. It was a stinking life.
To buoy himself up, Kien sometimes tried to concentrate on uplifting memories. But no matter how hard he tried to revive the scenes they wouldn’t stay. It was hopeless. His whole life from the very beginning, from childhood to the army, seemed detached and apart from him, floating in a void.
Since being recruited he’d been nicknamed ‘Sorrowful Spirit’ and this now suited his image and personality, just as the rain and gloom fitted the character of the Jungle of Screaming Souls.
Kien waited for death, calmly recognising that it would be ugly and inelegant. The thought of his expected end brought a sense of irony.
Just the week before, in a battle with Saigon commandos on the other side of the mountain, Kien had truly made fun of death. When the Southern ARVN had faced his own Northern NVA troops both sides had quickly scattered, rushing to take cover behind tree trunks and then firing blindly. But Kien had calmly walked forward. The enemy had fired continuously from behind a tree ahead of him but Kien hadn’t even bothered to duck. He walked on lazily, seemingly oblivious to the fire. One southern soldier behind a tree fired hastily and the full magazine of thirty rounds from his AK exploded loudly around Kien, but he had walked on unscratched. Kien had not returned fire even when just a few steps from his prey, as though he wanted to give his enemy a chance to survive, to give him more time to change magazines, or time to take sure aim and kill him.