“You tell me.”
“I told you. It’s time to go home. There comes a point of diminishing returns.”
“How do you know when that is?”
“You have to know.” I said to her, “During the war, the military limited the tour of duty here to twelve or thirteen months. The first year, if you survived it, made a man out of you. If you volunteered to stay, the second year made something else out of you.” I added, “At some point, as I mentioned in Apocalypse Now, you couldn’t go home, unless you were ordered to leave, or you went home in a body bag.”
She didn’t respond.
I said, “Look, this place isn’t so bad now, and I see the attraction, but you’ve got your Ph.D. in life, so go home and use it for something.”
“I’ll think about it.” She changed the subject and said, “We should take a boat out to those islands.”
We stood there in the water, and I took her hand, and we looked out at the sea and the night sky.
It was pushing 2 A.M. by the time we got to the hotel, and a guard let us in. There was no one at the front desk, so we couldn’t check for messages, and we walked up the stairs to the third floor.
We got to my room first, and I opened the door and checked for a fax message. There was none, and we walked to Susan’s room.
She opened the door, and there was a single sheet of paper on the floor. She went into the bedroom, turned on a lamp, and read the fax. She handed it to me, and I read: Your message received and transmitted to proper authorities. I am very hurt and angry, but it’s your decision. Not mine. I think you’re making a terrible mistake, and if you hadn’t gone to Nha Trang with someone, we could have discussed this. Now, I think it’s too late. It was signed Bill.
I gave the fax sheet back to her and said, “You didn’t have to show that to me.”
“He’s such a romantic.” She added, “Notice he didn’t bother to come to Nha Trang.”
“You’re tough on men. God knows what you’re going to say about me over drinks in the Q-Bar.”
She looked at me and said, “Anything I have to say about you, I’ll say to you.”
There was this awkward moment, and I looked around the room, which was much like my own. I noticed the snow globe on her night table and a few things hung in the open alcove. I said, “Did they give you any soap or shampoo?”
“No. But I brought my own. I should have told you.”
“I’ll buy some tomorrow.”
“You can have half my soap bar now.”
That wasn’t what I had in mind when I brought up the soap problem, and we both knew it. I said, “That’s okay. Well…”
She gave me a big hug and buried her face on my chest. She said, “Maybe before I leave. I have to think about it. Is that all right?”
“Sure.”
We kissed, and for a moment, I thought she already thought about it, but she broke away and said, “Okay… good night. Breakfast? Ten?”
“Fine.” I don’t like lingering good-byes, so I turned and left.
Back in my room, I took off my shirt and peeled off my wet pants and threw them on one of the beds.
I pulled a chair out to the balcony and sat with my feet on the wrought iron railing. I looked up at the starlit sky and yawned.
I could hear music from the beach and voices carried on the night breeze, and the surf hitting the sand. I listened for a knock on my door, but there was no knock.
My mind drifted back to May 1968, when I was here in Nha Trang, with only one worry in the world — staying alive. Like a lot of middle-aged men who have been to war, there were times when I felt that war had a stark and honest simplicity to it, an almost transcendental quality that focused the mind and the body as nothing else had done before, or would do again.
And yet, for all the adrenaline rushes, and the out-of-body experiences, and the incandescent flashes of truth and light, war, like a drug, took its toll on the body, the mind, and the soul. There was a point of diminishing returns, and a price to pay for spitting in the eye of Death, and getting away with it.
I stared at the stars and thought of Cynthia, of Susan, and of Paul Brenner, and of Vietnam, Part Three.
I got into bed and pulled down the mosquito netting, but I couldn’t sleep, so I played taps in my head: Day is done, gone the sun, from the lakes, from the hills, from the sky, all is well, safely rest, God is nigh…
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I got to the veranda at 10 A.M., and Susan was already sitting at a table with a pot of coffee, reading her Economist.
There were a few other people having breakfast, all Westerners, so I concluded I wasn’t under the eye of the Ministry of Public Security. I kind of wished I was because I had no anti-government activities planned for the day.
The great minds in Washington had scheduled this as a down week, the week in which Mr. Paul Brenner, Vietnam veteran, established his innocence as a tourist. This was standard tradecraft. Very short trips to faraway places always look suspicious to immigration and customs people. Similarly, visas applied for shortly before a major trip also look suspicious, as Colonel Mang indicated. But it was too late to worry about that.
I sat and said to Susan, “Good morning.”
She put down the magazine and said, “Good morning. How did you sleep?”
“Alone.”
She smiled and poured me a cup of coffee.
Susan was wearing khaki slacks, as was I, and a sleeveless navy blue pullover.
It was a beautiful morning, the temperature was in the mid-seventies, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
The waiter came, and Susan informed me, “They have only two breakfasts — Viet and Western. Pho soup or fried eggs. They don’t know scrambled, so don’t ask.”
“Eggs.”
Susan ordered in Vietnamese.
I asked her, “Did you have hot water?”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you. There’s an electric hot water tank above the toilet. Didn’t you see it?”
“I thought it was part of the toilet.”
“No. There’s a switch you turn on, and it heats about twenty gallons of water. Takes awhile. They turn off the electric to the tanks at 10 A.M.”
“I didn’t have any soap anyway.”
“We’ll go to the market later and get a few things.”
I asked her, “Do you think that when Bill contacted the consulate, he mentioned to them that you’d come along to Nha Trang?”
She lit a cigarette and replied, “I thought about that. On the one hand, he should have told them, if he’s serious about being useful to the consulate. On the other hand, they all know he and I are — were — dating, so maybe he’s embarrassed to tell them I took off with you.”
I nodded.
She asked, “Do you think you’d be in trouble with your firm if they discovered we’d made this trip together?”
I replied, “They would not be happy, but what are they going to do about it? Send me to Vietnam?”
She smiled. “Sounds like something you guys said when you were here.”
“Every day.”
“Well… I’m sorry if this winds up causing you a problem.”
“No problem.” As long as Karl didn’t rat me out to Cynthia. But he wouldn’t do that — unless it served a purpose for him.
The eggs came. Susan said to me, “I was thinking about what I told you about Sam, and why I’m here and all that. I didn’t want you to think that a man was the cause of me being here.”
“That’s exactly what I thought.”
“I mean, he was not the cause of me being here. I made that decision. He was the catalyst.”