Someone behind Kien touched his arm, whispering to him in a trembling voice. ‘Kien, why don’t we forgive them for now and send them to our superiors to decide?’
Kien turned. It was Cu. Kien burned with anger and he let fly in fury, sticking his gun into Cu’s mouth. ‘If you want to show your love for them go stand in the line with them. I’ll kill you too! You too!’
‘Kien, Kien, what the hell makes you cry so loudly?’
The truckdriver’s beefy hand pushed through the hammock onto Kien’s shoulder, shaking him awake.
‘Get up! Get ready! Quick!’
Kien slowly opened his eyes. The dark rings under them revealed his deep exhaustion. The painful memory of the dream throbbed against his temples. After some minutes he got up, then slowly climbed down from the hammock and dropped from the back of the truck to the ground.
Seeing how sluggishly Kien ate, the driver sighed and says, ‘It’s because you slept back there, with nearly fifty bodies. You’ll have had nightmares. Right?’
‘Yes. Unbelievably horrible. I’ve had nightmares since joining this team, but last night’s was the worst.’
‘No doubt,’ the driver said, waving his hand in a wide arc. ‘This is the Jungle of Screaming Souls. It looks empty and innocent, but in fact it’s crowded. There are so many ghosts and devils all over this battleground! I’ve been driving for this corpse-collecting team since early ’73 but I still can’t get used to the passengers who come out of their graves to talk to me. Not a night goes by without them waking me to have a chat. It terrifies me. All kinds of ghosts, new soldiers, old soldiers, soldiers from Division 10, Division 2, soldiers from the provincial armed forces, the Mobile Forces 320, Corps 559, sometimes women, and every now and again, some southern souls, from Saigon.’ The driver spoke as though it was common knowledge.
‘Met any old friends?’ asked Kien.
‘Sure! Even some from my own village. Blokes from my first unit. Once I met a cousin who died way back in sixty-five.’
‘Do you speak to them?’
‘Yes, but… well, differently. The way you speak in hell. There are no sounds, no words. It’s hard to describe. It’s like when you’re dreaming – you know what I mean.’
‘You can’t actually do anything to help each other?’ asked Kien. ‘Do you talk about interesting things?’
‘Not very. Just sad and pitiful things, really. Under the ground in the grave human beings aren’t the same. You can look at each other, understand each other, but you can’t do anything for each other.’
‘If we found a way to tell them news of a victory would they be happier?’ Kien asked.
‘Come on! Even if we could, what would be the point? People in hell don’t give a damn about wars. They don’t remember killing. Killing is a career for the living, not the dead.’
‘Still, wouldn’t peacetime be an ideal moment for the resurrection of all the dead?’
‘What? Peace? Damn it, peace is a tree that thrives only on the blood and bones of fallen comrades. The ones left behind in the Screaming Souls battlegrounds were the most honourable people. Without them there would be no peace,’ the driver replied.
‘That’s a rotten way to look at it. There are so many good people, so many yet to be born, so many survivors now trying to live decent lives. Otherwise it’s not been worth it. I mean, what’s peace for? Or what’s fighting for?’ Kien asked.
‘Okay, I’ll grant you we have to have hope. But we don’t even know if the next generation will get a chance to grow up, or if they do, how they’ll grow up. We do know that many good people have been killed. Those of us who survived have all been trying to make something of ourselves, but not succeeding.
‘But look at the chaotic post-war situation in the cities, with their black markets. Life is so frustrating, for all of us. And look at the bodies and the graves of our comrades! The ones who brought the peace. Shameful, my friend, shameful.’
‘But isn’t peace better than war?’
The driver seemed astonished. ‘This kind of peace? In this kind of peace it seems people have unmasked themselves and revealed their true, horrible selves. So much blood, so many lives were sacrificed for what?’
‘Damn it, what are you trying to say?’ Kien asked.
‘I’m not trying to say anything. I’m simply a soldier like you who’ll now have to live with broken dreams and with pain. But, my friend, our era is finished. After this hard-won victory fighters like you, Kien, will never be normal again. You won’t even speak with your normal voice, in the normal way again.’
‘You’re so damn gloomy. What a doom-laden attitude!’
‘I am Tran Son, a soldier. That’s why I’m a bit of a philosopher. You never curse your luck? Never feel elated? What did the dead ones tell you in your dreams last night? Call that normal?’ he asked.
On the way out the Zil truck moves in slow, jerky movements. The road is bumpy, muddy and potholed. Son stays in first gear, the engine revving loudly as if about to explode. Kien looks out of the window, trying to lighten his mood.
The rain stops, but the air is dull, the sky lead-grey. Slowly they move away from the Screaming Souls Jungle and the whole forest area itself. Behind them the mountains, the streams, all drop away from view.
But strangely, Kien now feels another presence, feels someone is watching him. Is the final scene, the unfinished, bloody dream of this morning, about to intrude itself in his mind. Will the pictures unfold against his wishes as he sits staring at the road?
Kien called to Son over the roar of the engine, asking if he’ll be finished with MIA work after this tour of duty.
‘Not sure. There’s a lot of paperwork to do. What are your plans?’
‘First, finish school. That means evening classes. Then try the university entrance exams. Right now my only skills are firing sub-machine-guns and collecting bodies. What about you, will you keep driving?’
The truck reached a drier section of road and Son was able to go up a gear, dropping the loud engine revs.
‘When we’re demobbed, I’ll stop driving. I’ll carry my guitar everywhere and be a singer. Sing and tell stories. “Gentlemen, brothers and sisters, please listen to my painful story, then I’ll sing you a horror song of our times.”’
‘Very funny,’ said Kien. ‘If you ask me we’d do better to tell them to forget about the war altogether.’
‘But how can we forget? We’ll never forget any of it, never. Admit it. Go on, admit it!’
Sure, thinks Kien, it’s hard to forget. When will I calm down? When will my heart be free of the tight grip of war? Whether pleasant or ugly memories they are there to stay for ten, twenty years, perhaps for ever.
From now on life may be always dark, full of suffering, with brief moments of happiness. Living somewhere between a dream world and reality, on the knife-edge between the two.
I’ve lived all these lost years. No one to blame for that. Not me, not anyone else. All I know now is that I’m still alive after twenty-nine years and from now on I have to fend for myself.
There’s a new life ahead of me, and a new era for Vietnam. I have to survive.
But my soul is still in turmoil. The past years out here imprison me. My past seems to enfold me and move with me wherever I go. At night while I sleep I hear my steps from a distant peacetime echoing on the pavement. I just have to shut my eyes to conjure up those past times and completely wipe out the present.
So many tragic memories, so much pain from long ago that I have told myself to forget, yet it is that easy to return to them. My memories of war are always close by, easily provoked at random moments in these days which are little but a succession of boring, predictable, stultifying weeks.