Can remained sitting, his head on his knees. His voice came low, mixing with sounds from the stream and the rain. ‘Yes. I’m going. I know you’re a real friend. You’ll understand. Say goodbye to my mates for me.’
‘You’re nuts, Can. First, you’ve no right to escape. Second, you can’t. You’ll be caught and brought back. Court-martialled. Shot. You’ll be worse off than now. Listen to me. Calm down! I won’t rat on you.’
‘Too late. I’ve already hidden my bag in the jungle.’
‘I’m not letting you desert. Go back to the huts. Try to hang on a bit longer. The war has to end sooner or later.’
‘No. I’m off. Win or lose, sooner or later, that means nothing to me. My life is fading fast, and I still have to see my mother once more, and my village. You won’t stop me? What for? Why would you?’
‘Listen, Can, leaving like this is suicidal. And shameful.’
‘Suicidal? Killing myself? I’ve killed so often it won’t mean a thing if I kill myself. As for the shame,’ Can stood up slowly, looking into Kien’s eyes. ‘In all my time as a soldier I’ve yet to see anything honourable.
‘Back home I might be even more humiliated. They won’t let me live. Even so, these nights all I dream of is my mother calling me. Perhaps my brother is dead already and she’s ill and suffering. I can’t wait any longer. It’s you, not me, who’s been chosen for the officers’ course and being sent back. Me, I’ll just have to find my own way home. I hope my mates take pity on me.
‘I won’t get caught, not if the scouts don’t chase me. And that’s you, Kien, you’re in charge, you’re the one who can guarantee my safety. Let me go.’
Can continued softly, ‘When this is all over, well, you know my village in the Binh Luc district, Ha Nam province. Drop in when you get a chance.’
In the darkness Can grasped Kien’s wrist with his cold, thin hand. Kien slowly took the hand away and turned his back without saying a word, leaving Can by the stream.
Nearing his hut Kien seemed to awaken, and change his mind. He dropped his fishing gear and turned back, running to the stream, calling ‘Can. Caaaaaaan!’
He called again, ‘Caaan, wait.’
He rushed back through the heavy rain along the dark path to the edge of the stream. Can was gone. In the tiny clearing Kien felt imprisoned by the rain and the thick bamboo jungle wall on the other side of the stream.
The restricted visibility compressed the space. The only movement was the stream, which gurgled on.
Kien stood there, staring, then burst into tears, the rain washing over his face as the tears gushed out.
Desertion was rife throughout the regiment at that time, as though soldiers were being vomited out, emptying the insides of whole platoons. The authorities seemed unable to prevent the desertions. But the commanding officers issued specific orders for Can to be traced. They feared he would desert to the enemy and betray the secrets and the battle plans of the entire regiment.
After many days splashing around on their search the military police finally found Can the deserter. He’d only made it to a small dead-end track between hills, two hours from the huts. He still had months to travel, so many obstacles between him and home in Binh Luc.
In late September, just before the regiment’s departure from the Jungle of Screaming Souls, the men got mail from their families, their only delivery for the wet season. Kien’s scout platoon got just one letter. It was for Can, from his mother.
‘…the whole hamlet shares my joy at having received your letter and I write back immediately with the hope that the kind military post officers will take pity on me and deliver it as quickly as possible to you. I might already have died, but thanks to your letter I now continue to live and hope, my dear son.
‘…Oh, my son, since receiving word of your brother’s death from his unit, then having his commemoration ceremony in the village, and getting the Patriotic Certificate, my dear son, I have worked night and day in the ricefield, ploughing land and transplanting. And I pray always to Heaven, and the ancestors, your late father and brother, to bless you in that distant battlefield, praying you and your comrades will return safely…’
Kien read and re-read the letter. His hands trembled, tears blurred his eyes. Can was no more. The military police had found his rotten corpse. Only his skeleton was complete, like that of a frog thrown into a mudpatch. Crows had pecked away Can’s face; his mouth was full of mud and rotting leaves.
‘That damned turncoat, he really stank,’ said the military policeman who had buried Can.
His eye-sockets were hollow, like trenches. In that short time moss and slime had already grown over him. The MP had gagged, spitting at the memory.
No one spoke of Can again. No one bothered to find out why he had died, whether he was killed, or had just exhausted himself in the jungle, or whether he’d committed suicide. No one accused him, either.
The name, age and image of someone who’d been every bit as brave under fire as his comrades, who had set a fine example, suddenly disappeared without trace.
Except within the mind of Kien. Can’s image haunted him every night, returning during the night to whisper to him by his hammock, repeating the final, gloomy lines he’d spoken by the stream. The whisper would turn to a suffocating gasp, like the sound of water blocking the throat of a drowning man.
‘…my soul swims away from my body…’
Kien recalled Can’s voice. And each time Kien knelt in prayer before the platoon’s altar to the war martyrs Kien would whisper a word for Can’s soul, the soul of a mate who had died in humiliation, uncared for and misunderstood, even by Kien.
In the past months of the wet season Kien had been posted to the MIA team charged with gathering the remains of the dead from the worst battlefields. He had crossed almost all the northern sector of the Central Highlands, returning to the sites of innumerable battles. The MIA team had uncovered a vast family of forgotten members of their regiment, dead under the mantle of the warm jungle. The fallen soldiers shared one destiny; no longer were there honourable or disgraced soldiers, heroic or cowardly, worthy or worthless. Now they were merely names and remains.
For some of the other dead, not even that. Some had been totally vaporised, or blasted into such small pieces that their remains had long been liquidised into mud.
After some final touches with the shovel their graves would be done, their remains laid out. Then, with their final breath their souls were released, flying upwards, free. The uprush of so many souls penetrated Kien’s mind, ate into his consciousness, becoming a dark shadow overhanging his own soul. Over a long period, over many, many graves, the souls of the beloved dead silently and gloomily dragged the sorrow of war into his life.
Tonight, back at the camp, how strange that it is a night which is perhaps the most mystical of the hundreds of dark nights in his life, with Can’s soul whispering to him. And now his whole fighting life parades before him, with troops of dead soldiers met on the battlefields returning through a dim arch in an endless dream. The echoes of the past days and months seem like rumbles of distant thunder, paining then numbing his own turbulent soul.
Near dawn Kien suddenly shivers and half awakens to a piercing, horrible, sorrowful howl, flying up from the cliffs like an echo. Kien moves to get up but then stops and flops back into the hammock, closing his eyes, still listening to the howl.
That howl, the howl first heard in this damned Screaming Souls Jungle right by this same stream in the rainy season last year, the last rainy season of the war. The howl from the valley on the other side of the mountain, echoing down to us. Some said it was mountain ghosts, but Kien knew it was Love’s lament.