The marines weren’t taking volunteers, and Heller still wouldn’t let me on one of the big C-130 Hercules planes that transported soldiers, airmen, and sailors, living or dead, back to the States.
The French agent was still at his country house; he wasn’t about to come back until Tet was over. So, I dealt with Mr. Minh. We spoke about his family, his friends. He was highly educated. Like Ho Chi Minh, he had been sent to boarding school in France. But he had been of service to the French and to the Americans, and that would surely seal his doom if the North Vietnamese succeeded in taking over.
Yet despite his troubles, and though for the first time he seemed a little hunched over, Mr. Minh wasn’t worried about himself. He was worried about something else, and that was clear when I showed up one day with a small parcel of groceries for him.
“Please,” Mr. Minh said, “bring it to the zoo.”
“The zoo?!” I asked, incredulous.
The night Tet began, large numbers of Vietcong guerrillas had lain in wait in the city’s cemeteries, parks, the racetrack, and, Mr. Minh said, the Saigon Zoo. They had emerged from their hiding places, including a seventy-five-mile multilevel network of underground tunnels, like the catacombs, under the Cu Chi district of the capital city. That’s where the Vietcong stored ammo, weapons, food, medicine, and radio equipment, and hid for days with little air, plagued by rats and scorpions. Australian and American soldiers—nicknamed tunnel rats—who descended into this hell, armed only with pistols, flashlights, and string, were met with punji sticks or booby traps or waiting VC.
According to Mr. Minh, some of the Vietcong had crawled out of the tunnels the first night of Tet and into the zoo, an ideal spot from which to launch an offensive. It had fifty acres of botanical gardens right off the river and nobody watching but the monkeys. The VC had killed the zookeepers first thing, and the animals had remained locked up and abandoned ever since.
Some Saigon residents had gone in there and found the starving animals. These people were hungry themselves, yet they brought whatever they could spare. Maybe they were like Mr. Minh, a devout Buddhist who believed in reincarnation. He really didn’t see much difference between the animals and us.
“The Buddha told us that an animal might be your ancestor,” Mr. Minh explained. “Perhaps they did things in life that made them come back as an elephant. Though animals live in a different realm, they feel as we do. They have potential for enlightenment. And if they do achieve it, when they die, they may come back in the next life as human again. We must help them.”
If Mr. Minh felt so strongly about it, I was determined to check it out, though I still had human mouths to feed. I discreetly tucked the nonperishable groceries inside a jardinière in his garden to give him the next day and headed straight to the zoo, buying bags of peanuts from street vendors along the way. I reached the zoo’s elaborate wrought iron gate, built by the French a hundred years before. It was wide open.
There was a garden full of dead orchids. An ungodly screeching came from the canopy; I looked up, and hundreds of green parrots hung upside down from the trees. Ahead, elephants with sagging skin stood listlessly in the heat. White tigers and leopards paced in their cages; monkeys scrambled frantically in theirs. I saw an old lady feed a baguette to a crocodile through some iron bars. Man, did he snap it up, practically taking off her hand. Another lady was pushing small bowls of rice into the monkey cage. I don’t know if monkeys usually eat rice, but they were going crazy for it now.
The Vietnamese government didn’t have food for its people, let alone zoo animals. These folks were probably giving half of what little they had to the beasts. The same thing happened in Berlin and Budapest after World War II. Kindness shows up in surprising places.
I went straight to see John on the Limon, and this time I took not one but two big duffel bags with me. I was going to give the gang at the Caravelle a feast, and I was going to give the beasts a feast, too. When I told the seamen the story, they were outraged. They went through the freezer, asking questions such as: “Do monkeys eat spare ribs?” “What about corn on the cob? They must like it; they’re like us.”
“Speak for yourself,” said another.
By the time I left, night had fallen. I could barely walk down the gangway with my two Santa bags, and I knew I couldn’t carry them all the way to the zoo, my first stop.
Down at the dock, I set the bags on the street and hailed a guy on a big motorcycle. He had no problem with the bags; they carry anything on those bikes: fighting cocks in cages, three kids, grandma. He set the bags in front of him, I hopped on the back, and he tore off. I wondered why he was speeding down traffic-jammed Tu Do Street so fast, and my questions were answered when shots rang out. The motorcyclist was hit, and we hit the ground hard, sliding along the street until we came to a stop with the bike on top of us.
He was ripped to shreds on his left side, his leg torn open to the bone. His shirt was stained with blood from bullet wounds. My hands and face were scraped up, and blood was dripping, but I was a lot better off than he was.
A few minutes passed, and we lay there like sitting ducks. I was a little out of it but worried the sniper would go after us again. People helped pull us to the sidewalk. A siren blared louder and louder, and up came an open-air ambulance, like a jeep ambulance, with red flags bearing white crosses—the flag of Switzerland, where the Red Cross was also born. Two Swiss EMT volunteers ran out, loaded the biker onto a stretcher and into the ambulance. When they came back for me, I said, “No, no, I’ll be all right. Take care of him.” They said in German accents that they were going to the Seventeenth Field Hospital, which had been retaken.
They gave me a bottle of peroxide and bandages and sped off. I looked in the street and the smashed-up bike had vanished. So had one of the duffel bags—I found the other, but it had been completely torn open and ransacked, with frozen peas spilling out of it all over the street. Maybe that was the point of the shooting in the first place: robbery, not politics. I was just glad I could walk away from it all.
I limped back to the Frenchman’s house. The Caravelle and the zoo would have to wait. Mr. Minh answered the door, and he jumped back in fear for a minute till I said, “It’s me, John Donohue.” My face was covered in blood, and I guess I looked like hell. He peered out the door in both directions and then pulled me inside by the elbow.
I had never been past the front office before, but this time he took me to the bathroom in the back of the house. I was shocked by the opulence, especially considering the poverty out in the street. Carved mahogany furniture, oil paintings, gilt-framed mirrors, silk curtains, Oriental carpets. Like a socialite’s Fifth Avenue apartment. It probably belonged to the shipping agency and had been passed down since the French colonial days.
Mr. Minh helped me wash up at the bathroom sink, which had gold faucets. Two toilets were side by side. I asked him what the hell was that about—togetherness for a husband and wife? He burst out laughing, despite the circumstances. “One is a bidet, for woman or man,” Mr. Minh explained. “You never saw a bidet?” No, I hadn’t. We didn’t have bidets in Inwood.
I cleaned up as well as I could. I had a couple bad scrapes, and he applied Mercurochrome antiseptic and bandaged my leg and my arm. My clothes were torn up, but I’d live. “Please follow me,” he said in his soothing voice. He led me through hallways lined from floor to ceiling with books and into a kitchen that was bigger than some apartments I’ve had in New York. “Would you like some soup?” he asked. Provisions were still hard to get, and that’s probably all he had. I would tell him to peek in the jardinière when I left.
“No, no thanks, I’m not hungry,” I said. “A beer would be nice, if you’ve got one.”
He did: a French Biere de Noel probably left over from Christmas, and full of clove and cinnamon. But he also had a Belgian St. Feuillien. The label said it was named after an Irish monk named Foillan. Brother Foillan had come through a forest there in Belgium in the seventh century to preach the Gospel. Unfortunately, the folks living there at the time didn’t appreciate his message, and they decapitated him. I thought it was nice that a Belgian brewery would remember a fellow Irishman in this way, so I chose the St. Feuillien. I sipped it as we sat at the table.
Minh looked at me. “You’re going to leave us,” he said sadly.
“I’ve been trying to leave here since day one, Mr. Minh, you know that.”
“No, I mean all of you. All of you Americans. The French abandoned us, and now you will, too. When will my poor country ever have peace? You know, our Shakespeare, Nguyen Du, wrote metaphorically that we are ‘rich in beauty, unlucky in life . . . How many harrowing events have occurred while mulberries cover the conquered sea?’”
I don’t think old Mr. Minh was afraid, even though he would surely be a goner if the North Vietnamese took over. He had collaborated with the French and the major American suppliers of the war. I think he had a dream in his youth of seeing his country become a free democracy before he passed on to the next incarnation. I could tell, though, that his optimism had taken a hit since Tet.
“Mr. Minh, look at that beautiful Saigon Bridge. We built that, and we built the highway leading to it, and the other bridges leading to that, and we built the airport at the other end. Do you really think that after the US government spent millions of American taxpayer dollars building a whole infrastructure of highways and bridges and airports and buildings all over your country that we would leave it all behind for Ho Chi Minh to grab?”
I said it to cheer him up, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. And I wanted to go home, I wanted my friends serving there to go home, and I wanted all the mariners and all the soldiers in Vietnam to go home. Ben Hur and Mensch and the Aussies and the ROKs and all the journalists—I wanted them all to arrive home safe, unless, of course, they wanted to stay. Slan abhaile, as we say in Gaelic. Safe journey home.