Susan pulled out of the parking area, and we headed south and crossed another small bridge over a stream, and off the island. To my left I could see the wide expanse of the Saigon River, filled with pleasure boats on this Sunday afternoon.
Susan pulled off to the side of the road, turned to me and said, “If they think you’re up to something, they won’t kick you out. They’ll watch you.”
I didn’t reply.
“If they arrest you, they’ll do it in some small town where they can do what they want with you. That’s why it would be good if you had someone with you.”
“Why wouldn’t they arrest you, too?”
“Because I’m an important member of the American business community, and it would cause a real stink if I were arrested for no reason.”
I replied, “Well, if I need a nanny along, I’ll let you know.”
She said, “You’re a cool customer, Mr. Brenner.”
“I’ve been in worse situations.”
“You don’t know that yet.”
She gunned the motorcycle and bounced back onto the road.
CHAPTER TWELVE
We headed west through a mixed landscape of rural and urban: rice paddies, new industrial parks, primitive villages, and high-rise apartments.
Within twenty minutes, we had left the urban sprawl behind us, and we were into the open country. Motor traffic was light on a Sunday afternoon, but there were lots of ox carts, bicycles, and pedestrians, which Susan wove through without slowing down, horn honking almost continuously.
The countryside had gone from low-lying rice paddies to rolling terrain; vegetable plots, pasture, and clusters of small trees.
Now and then, I’d see a pond, which I could identify as a bomb crater. From the air, they used to come in three colors: clear blue water, muddy brown water, and red water. The red water indicated a direct hit on a bunker with lots of people in it. People soup, we called them.
Susan shouted above the noise of the engine, “Isn’t this beautiful country?”
I didn’t reply.
We passed four wrecked American-made M-48 tanks, which all had the faded markings of the former South Vietnamese army on them, and I assumed they had been destroyed in April 1975 by the North Vietnamese as they drove toward the final battle of Saigon, which mercifully never took place.
A huge cemetery appeared around a curve in the road, and I said to Susan, “Stop here.”
She pulled off the road, and we dismounted. I went through an opening in a low wall and stood among the thousands of lichen-covered stone slabs lying flat on the ground. Stuck in the ground beside some of the slabs were red flags with a yellow star in the center. On each of the slabs was a ceramic bowl that held joss sticks, some of which were smoking.
An old man walked up to us, and he and Susan had a short conversation.
Susan said to me, “This cemetery is mostly for the local Viet Cong and their families. That part of the cemetery is for the North Vietnamese who died liberating the South — well, he said liberating. I guess you — we would say invading.”
“Ask him if there’s a South Vietnamese military cemetery around here.”
They conversed, and Susan said, “Such cemeteries are forbidden. He says that the North Vietnamese bulldozed all the South Vietnamese military cemeteries. This makes him sad and angry because he cannot honor the grave of his son, who was killed while serving with the South Vietnamese army. His other son was a Viet Cong and is buried here.”
I thought about that, and about our own Civil War cemeteries that honored the North and the South. But here, all memory of the defeated nation seemed to have been obliterated, or displayed in a dishonorable way, like the wrecked tanks that had been left as reminders of the Communist victory.
I saw an old lady sitting against the wall selling joss sticks. I gave her a dollar and took a joss stick. I walked to the closest grave and read the inscription: Hoang Van Ngoc, trung-uy, 1949”1975. He was born the same year as me, but thankfully that’s all we had in common. Susan came up beside me and lit the joss stick with her lighter. The smoke and smell of incense rose into the air.
I don’t pray, unless I’m being directly shot at, but I put the stick in the bowl, thinking about the 300,000 North Vietnamese missing who had no grave markers, our two thousand who were missing, and the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers who I’d just discovered lay underground in bulldozed cemeteries. I thought about the Wall, about Karl and me standing there, then about Tran Van Vinh.
One part of me said that Tran Van Vinh could not possibly be alive, while another part of me was convinced that he was. My conviction was based partly on my own ego; Paul Brenner had not come this far to find a dead man. Partly, too, there was that almost miraculous set of circumstances that had led me here, and which, as a rational person, I wanted to discount, but couldn’t. And finally, there was this suspicion that Karl and his friends knew something I didn’t know.
I turned away from the grave, and we walked back to the motorcycle.
We continued on. I remembered this area west of Saigon because I had ridden shotgun a few times with convoys to Tay Ninh near the Cambodian border. In those days, the rural population lived mostly in strategic hamlets, meaning guarded compounds, and the ones who didn’t were Viet Cong who lived in the Cu Chi tunnels. Then there were the part-time VC — pro-Saigon government by day, dinner with the family, then off to the night shift with the AK-47.
This area between the Cambo border and the outskirts of Saigon had been heavily contested throughout the war, and I recalled reading somewhere that it was the most bombed and shelled piece of real estate in the history of warfare. That could be true, from what I remembered.
I also recalled a lot of defoliation with Agent Orange, and when the vegetation was all dead and brown, the American bombers would drop napalm and set the countryside on fire. The pall of black smoke would hang for days until a rain came and deposited wet soot on everything.
This is what the generals could see from the rooftop of the Rex, if they looked west during dinner.
I saw that the vegetation had come back, but it didn’t look right; it looked scrawny and sparse, the result no doubt of the residual defoliants in the soil.
The Ural 750 made a lot more noise than an equivalent American or Japanese motorcycle, so we didn’t talk much.
We’d been on the road about an hour, and now we were heading northwest toward Cu Chi and Tay Ninh, which was where Route 22 went. Funny, I still get lost in northern Virginia, but I knew this road. Obviously, it was important to me once.
We entered Cu Chi, which I remembered as a small heavily fortified provincial town, but which was now a bustling place of new buildings, paved streets, and karaoke parlors. It was hard to imagine the intense fighting that had gone on in and around this town for thirty years, beginning with the French Indochina War in 1946, through the American War, and ending with the Vietnamese themselves in a fight to the finish.
Red flags flew everywhere, and in the center of a traffic circle was yet another North Vietnamese tank on a concrete platform surrounded by flags and flowers.
Susan turned into what looked like the main street, then she pulled over and stopped. We dismounted, and I chained the motorcycle to a rack as Susan took her camera out of the saddlebag.
We stretched and beat the red dust off our clothes. She asked me, “Have you ever been here?”
“A few times. On my way to Tay Ninh.”
“Really? What were you doing in Tay Ninh?”