Grasping the edge of the tunnel entrance, I pulled myself into the darkness. The guide was ahead, somewhere, and so I worked myself inside, past the entrance, where I sat on my haunches, feeling the cool crumbling walls, looking forward and then behind, sizing up the dimensions of the hole.
If the tunnels began as a haphazard network of underground hideouts, they were transformed by the Vietcong between 1954 and 1968 into a regulated, standardized city under the ground. A captured Vietcong tunnel manual (translated and held by the American Defense and Intelligence Agency until 1968) gave the official instructions for tunnel construction. In it, every dimension was prescribed. Communication passages between chambers were required to “zigzag at angles between 60 and 120 degrees,” in order to divert chemicals, explosives, and bullets. The passages were to be “no wider than 1.2 meters, no narrower than 0.8 meters, no higher than 1.8 meters, no lower than 0.8 meters.” Each tunnel was expected to conform to exact measurements, all of them smaller than the tourist tunnel.
Other mandates of tunnel construction were similarly precise. A-shaped shelters—small conical grooves in a tunnel wall—were designed to withstand bomb and artillery fire. A snake-shaped curve, or U-bend,
was molded into the passages to cleanse the air. Each room was supposed to contain two or more entrances, to ensure a quick escape. Even the layer of earth that separated aboveground from below had specific requirements: Each tunnel ceiling had to be 1.5 meters thick (about five feet), which according to the manual was the appropriate thickness to absorb the aftershocks of bombs. As the tunnel manual made clear, a tunnel system should be used not as a bomb shelter but for the transport of food, munitions, and guerrilla fighters. Each entrance, passage, and chamber must contribute to the larger purpose. Every tunnel was a small part of a large weapon.
When Dad was in Vietnam, locating an entrance was the most difficult part of tunnel destruction. Soldiers would Rome-plow the jungle or singe the foliage with flamethrowers and still miss them. When they did find an entrance, they used a commercial air blower called the Mighty Mite to pump down smoke, which rose through other entrances and into the air, creating a misty aboveground map of the network. Smoke spiraled in ringlets every ten, fifteen, or twenty feet. To clear the tunnels, men flooded the entrances with river water and acetylene gas. They threw down grenades and crystallized CS-1, to contaminate the air. With every technology available, they smoked the guerrillas out.
But today the tunnels were nothing like they had been during the war. They had been filled in, neglected, ignored. Most had filled with monsoon rains and collapsed. Jungle claimed the rest, piece by piece. Only the Ben Duoc tunnels had been preserved, and although I knew they were just a memorial, a tourist trap, a Disneyland kind of history, I could hear something ahead, breathing. It crouched in the dark beyond, waiting.
Perhaps my guide was closer than I thought. Lowering myself onto my palms, I crawled forward to find him. Rats knew that entering a tunnel was the most dangerous part of exploration. Sometimes they sent German shepherds in first—trained to sniff out the enemy—to clear the way. The dogs would go blind with dust and excitement and set off booby traps: boxes of bees, trip-wired grenades, red ants, punji sticks dipped in poison or urine, each one sharp enough to slip through the body, impaling soft unprotected organs. The dogs fell prey to scorpions and boa constrictors and vipers. Injured dogs whimpered in the darkness, helpless and forlorn as sick babies.
Not three paces in, I bumped into a wall, brushing my cheek against the rough clay. During the war, microorganisms lived on the damp earth near the entrance. They would fall upon the exposed skin of tunnel fighters as they passed, dig through layers of skin tissue, and lay eggs. In the moist wet underground, the skin would erupt with stinging, crawling, biting chiggers. The only way to remove these parasites was to burn the skin with a sterilized knife. Chiggers, the Vietcong said, were their worst enemies. They feared them as much as they feared the Americans.
The tunnel was quiet. Although my guide must have been nearby, I could not hear him. Well trained, he had melted into the network. I rested my head against the wall, unable to go forward. Perhaps I had come too close to my father’s past. I could almost see him—white T-shirt soaked with sweat, .45 cocked at his ear. He was just ahead, and I was a girl again, running to keep up. He paused to light a cigarette outside of Roscoe’s, his face tinted blue from the neon light. The door swung open, my father’s fingerprints smearing the glass. After you, Danielle-my-belle.
MANY YEARS BEFORE, I HAD TAKEN A GREYHOUND BUS HOME AND WALKED through the wintry streets to Roscoe’s. I was in college at the time and had become obsessed with the tunnels. I wanted to write about them for a history class I was taking, and I was sure I would find my father on his usual bar stool, smoking and rolling for a drink during happy hour. Sure enough, his cowboy hat stood out at the far end of the bar. After pushing through the crowd, I pulled up a stool next to his. My father’s third wife, Debbie, a tall pretty Roscoe’s regular with perpetually shocked blue eyes, put a Virginia Slim between her lips, grabbed her lighter, and sauntered to the jukebox to play Kenny Rogers songs.
“Well, my dear,” Dad said, as he made room for me at the bar, “how’s college been treating you?”
I’d been having a rough time, working to pay for rent and books and tuition while maintaining an A average, and my father knew it. “Great,” I said, nonetheless. “School is great.”
Dad ordered me a beer. A bartender I did not recognize (Jan had long since quit) placed a bottle of Old Milwaukee before me. I told Dad about my classes (I was double majoring in history and English) and about an award I’d received from the English department. After we had
a few drinks, I told him I wanted to write a paper about the tunnels for a history class. Would you mind doing an interview with me? I asked him, placing my notebook on the bar. “I want to know,” I said, “what it really felt like in those tunnels.”
My father gazed at the television, unsure of what to say. He didn’t know why I was so interested. He sighed and said, “The truth is, I’m sick of thinking about that place. The day I left Vietnam was the best day of my life. I didn’t think I would ever get out of there. I got in the plane and pinched my arm, like this—”
“Ouch!” I said, pulling my arm out of Dad’s reach.
“I told myself, You are a lucky man, Trussoni. I decided then and there I was going to forget Vietnam. Some guys couldn’t make it after they came back. I know those guys. They don’t work. Can’t have a family. Don’t do anything but think about where they were. But I’m not like that. I never used the war, or my disability, as an excuse for anything. I let it go. I don’t keep none of that war with me.”
“Where is it then, Dad?” I asked. It was painful for me to see that my father did not realize how much the war had damaged him. He seemed to really believe that all his experiences had been shelved away and forgotten. But I knew my father better than that. I had seen how hard it was for him to forget. “Where is it?” I asked again. “Where has it gone?”
My father cleared his throat. He was quiet for a moment, and I suspected that he might be gearing himself up for some confession, a bit of self-reflection about how the war had changed his life. But he gave me a devious look—half love, half malice—and flicked my notebook with his finger. He said, “I gave that war to you.”
DAD WAS SITTING ON THAT SAME BAR STOOL A NUMBER OF YEARS LATER when he told me he had throat cancer. The first symptoms had surfaced a month before, when he lost his voice. The harsh buoyancy of his speech calloused over and became husky, muted, whispery. He went to a hospital in La Crosse, where he was told he was experiencing a reaction to his stomach acid. A few months later, when his symptoms had not abated, he went again, requesting a more thorough examination. Although his doctor performed a biopsy, Dad was told he was fine and was sent home. This continued for a year, until my father could not swallow or eat food properly. He could speak in only a hoarse croak and was
in so much pain that he took off time from work. When he went to the VA hospital for another opinion, the doctors asked him questions about his tour in Vietnam. They asked him when and where he had served. They asked him if he had had contact with defoliants, especially Agent Orange. They questioned him about his level of stress, the health of his children, his premature balding, the ulcer he developed before he was thirty. Had he, they wanted to know, ever had a psychiatric evaluation? When they finished asking questions, the VA doctors told my father that he would need to go into surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, as soon as possible. They had located a tumor the size of a bird’s egg tucked behind his larynx.
Over the next few years, my father’s cancer disappeared and returned. He would go into chemotherapy and into remission and back into chemotherapy. Just when he believed he’d beat it, his doctor at the Mayo Clinic would call to inform him that they’d found something unusual in his scan, and another round of exams would begin. When it was time to go, Debbie backed their pristine white Cadillac from the two-car garage, careful not to nick the paint. Dad’s Caddy had a vanity plate that read CIB68, which stood for Combat Infantry Badge 1968, the year he was awarded it. Debbie drove my father over the skeletal ironwork bridge that traversed the Mississippi River. They drove through Minnesota with the radio on a country music station. My father had a jade-green scarf—a python of a scarf that I knitted for him one Christmas—around his neck and a cowboy hat tipped over his eyes. After chemotherapy, a net of fine red veins had opened over his cheeks, as if his skin were experiencing a second youth.
His life changed after his diagnosis. He closed his construction company and retired early. Although his work truck (the tank filled with gas) was left unused in the garage, Dad still woke at five in the morning and looked out the window at the cold snow-covered streets, ready to go. He was a creature of habit. He hated to change his routine.
At night, Debbie cooked, setting her cigarette at the edge of the sink as she opened a can of Campbell’s string beans. Debbie had a weekly menu, one she never varied: Monday hamburgers, Tuesday spaghetti and meatballs, Wednesday casserole, Thursday frozen pizza, Friday steak, Saturday wild card—either leftovers or delivered pizza or a restaurant dinner. Dad and Debbie no longer went to Roscoe’s. They mixed drinks at the kitchen counter. If I was there, Dad would pour me two fingers of brandy. He’d say,
Shit, I should’ve made my own drinks years ago. Bars make three hundred percent profit on liquor. Think how much money I’m saving!
One evening, over drinks, my father showed me his post-traumatic stress disorder diagnostic report. In order to receive medical benefits from the government, he was required to undergo a mental health evaluation. He had gone to see a psychiatrist the previous month and had just received the results. As he had recently finished another round of chemotherapy, his voice was barely audible when he said, “Bet you never knew your old man was nuts.”
He gave me the report. I looked over the list of symptoms, written out point by point. The report listed my father as suffering from the following:
Being overly alert
Feeling emotionally numb
Experiencing feelings of paranoia, excessive sensitivity, or that life has “backed you up against a wall”
Experiencing physical reactions when you are reminded of the traumatic event
Reliving the traumatic event, acting or feeling as if it is happening again
Trying not to think about, talk about, or have feelings about the traumatic event
Having bad dreams or nightmares about the traumatic event
Not being able to remember an important part of the event.
The bottom of the report read: Mr. Trussoni’s Symptom Severity Score is 41 with a Symptom Severity Rating of SEVERE. His level of impairment in functioning is recorded as SEVERE as well. His GAF score is 43.
As I read the report, I felt a wave of recognition wash over me. Problems I had been grappling to understand for years seemed, suddenly, clear. I’d never had a language for Dad’s illness, and simply seeing his diagnosis written on a piece of paper made his pain somehow manageable. I believed, as I studied the report, that Dad would finally accept that he was sick and get help.
The psychiatrist who performed these tests recommended extensive individual and group therapy. Dad, of course, had no intention of going. He had agreed to do the diagnostic test only to get medical benefits. After he’d qualified for the benefits (which included a monthly stipend
of over two thousand dollars and full medical coverage for the duration of his illness), he did not plan to go back for counseling. Despite the report, he believed he didn’t have a problem. In his mind, he had survived the war intact.
My father’s PTSD diagnosis was made thirty-five years after he served in Vietnam. I wondered, as I looked over the report, what his Symptom Severity Score would have been in the early years, when he was fresh from the jungle, in the years of my childhood, when he drank to keep his depression away. In those years, we watched our mother struggle to understand a man who had built a wall so solid, so protective, that she could not break through it. We watched her turn around and go back to him, again and again. We struggled to be close to him and were shoved away. All of us absorbed the radiation of our father’s memories, all the sad things he said late at night, after the bars had closed and he sat at the kitchen table having a nightcap. We absorbed all the things he didn’t say too. We knew, when he shook his head and mumbled Things were fucking crazy over there, that some of the things he experienced in Vietnam were too terrible to talk about.
When I asked my father why he would not go back for counseling, he smoothed the edges of his PTSD report, clearly embarrassed that he had gone to see a psychiatrist in the first place. “I don’t feel comfortable,” he said, “telling a stranger about what happened.” He didn’t think he had a right to complain. “What do I have to bitch about,” he said, “when I lived?” He did not consider that his problems had affected all of us, and this made me angry. I wanted him to get help. I believed that, if he did, my relationship with him would improve. I took the report and read it again. “Why didn’t you get therapy when you came home? You could have been happier. Things could have been different.”
Dad sipped his drink, set down the glass, and gave me a cocky half-smile. He had always been contemptuous of pain, especially when it was our own. “I didn’t want their help,” he said. “After I left Vietnam, I wasn’t going to be a part of that again. Ever. Besides, I was too busy raising you kids for all that emotional hogwash.”
THE TUNNELS STRETCHED AHEAD, ENDLESS. MY FATHER’S VOICE—THE VOICE of my childhood—resounded through the darkness. I crawled forward to meet it. The air was sticky-wet, without oxygen. I touched my arms and
face, as if trying to brush away a cobweb, but the air clung to me as I moved. Why hadn’t the guide returned? Please, I said to the tunnel, to my father, to no one in particular. Please, get me out of here.
The tunnel floor was rock-hard clay. I pressed my hands flat on its surface. I had nothing to dig with, so I pushed my fingernails into the earth—pointer, middle, ring—and pried. Small chunks gave way. I clawed deeper, scratching out a tiny hole. Drops of sweat rode my forehead and fell across my nose. I dug until, after a too-vigorous scoop, part of my fingernail ripped. Out of instinct, I put the wounded finger in my mouth. The sweet-salty taste of blood suffused my tongue.
Then, as if smelling blood, the guide was upon me, tugging at my arm to hurry, hurry, follow him. I placed my hands over the tunnel floor, feeling the contours of the small hole I’d made. Fumbling through my pockets, I found a few wads of paper, some dong, and a AA battery. I put these things in the hole, an offering, and covered them with the loose dirt. I had nothing else to give.
The guide turned a small flashlight upon me, shocking my eyes. When he moved the flashlight to the wall, I saw nothing but blobs of orange. Blinded, I reached for him. He took me by the arm and led me through the tunnel, to the exit.
MY FATHER USED TO SAY THAT TIME MOVED DIFFERENTLY IN THE JUNGLE. Nobody could keep the days straight. You’d think it was Tuesday, he would say, and it would be Sunday. You’d think it was July; it was March. A week would pass, then two, but it always felt like the same damn week.
George, the platoon’s machine gunner, marked his days in-country on his helmet with a black marker. When it rained and the lines washed off, he would begin again. He said, “It feels like I start my tour over every time I get wet.”
“But it’s the monsoon,” my father said. “It rains every day.”
At night they camped in the jungle, digging foxholes or sleeping under ponchos. During the day, they patrolled, humping over hills, through jungle so thick the rain didn’t make it down to them. Droplets spattered above their heads, pounding like a machine gun that never jammed.
Scotty, a grunt halfway through his second tour, said the VC were slippery little fuckers, invisible yet ever-present, and my father believed
him; he’d been in-country two weeks and hadn’t seen the enemy. Their platoon was instructed to find them and destroy their operational bases. They never stopped moving, sleeping half awake under canopies of palm leaves and spiderwebs. In the thick of the jungle, among snakes and swamp and indistinguishable peasants, they searched for an invisible enemy who, they believed, saw everything.
On the Fourth of July, they sat on listening patrol, dug into the side of a hill overlooking the jungle about a hundred yards outside camp, as their platoon shot off rockets and tossed grenades into rice paddies. Someone hiked a boom-boom girl up from the nearest village, and she stationed herself against a tree about fifty feet from camp. A platoon a couple of klicks west sent up flares and sang the national anthem. Red streaks reflected in black pools of water. It rained, on and off, and wasn’t much different from any other night out in the boonies, except for the fireworks and all the singing.
It was late before the grenades and rockets faded into the nervous stillness they faced every night. My father had set up a couple of claymore mines fifty feet away, just in case. Claymores, my father liked to say, had two advantages: They were mobile and small. He held the detonator in his hand, running his thumb over its surface. Goodman was restless, pacing and chain-smoking, slapping mosquitoes and looking into the night, as if he could see past the monsoon clouds blocking out the moon and stars.
Rudy and George hiked the hill and sat down. Goodman examined the jungle, as if the VC were right there, camouflaged, hanging from the trees. “Look at this,” he said to my father, bending down. “There’s an entrance back here.”
Goodman turned on his flashlight, pushed away a bank of leaves, and found a tunnel entrance, camouflaged with weeds and sticks. Bamboo was embedded in the clay around the entrance hole, strengthening it. Rudy and George joined them, Scotty sauntered over, and soon all five soldiers stood over the hole. “See how the bamboo is all straight here?” Goodman said, as he shook one tree and three others moved. “They’ve been tied together to look natural.”
Suddenly a shot went off, the distinctive pop of an AK-47. A Vietnamese soldier ran to a tunnel entrance about thirty feet away. Making a quick vertical descent, he dropped fast and graceful into a space that couldn’t have been more than two inches wider than his body. Watching
him was like watching a pole, greased with oil, slide into the earth and vanish.
Goodman threw down his bush hat. He was decisive, gung ho.
“You don’t need to go down, man. You’re relieved,” Scotty said, but Goodman stuck his flashlight in his belt and shrugged off his rucksack. “Take this back to camp for me,” he said.
Watching Goodman, my father felt excitement growing in his chest. Although he didn’t understand why he wanted to go down—he knew it would be better to leave this one to Tommy—he felt that this tunnel was his. He tucked his pants into his boots and loaded his pistol.
“This one isn’t cold,” Goodman said, as he crouched near the entrance, touching the edges gently, feeling for wires or bamboo triggers. He pushed himself in headfirst. His boots rested at the entrance for a moment, and then he was gone.
Scotty and my father walked up the hill, toward camp. George and Rudy stayed near the claymores, on watch. It was near sunrise, and the darkness had changed from black to light gray. Scotty said, “You have no idea what you’re dipping your ass into, Trussoni. Your buddy, he knows what he’s in for. Shit, he’s praying for it. But you’re just following after him like a stupid country boy.”
“I don’t follow anyone,” Dad said, and left it at that.
As they hiked the hilltop, the sun rose in the distance. Dad always said he’d seen more sunrises in Vietnam that he had seen on the farm in Wisconsin. He watched the sky, when, all at once, he knew that he was alone. Scotty was a hundred yards back, crouched, watching. Branches broke at the base of the hill. A group of NVA soldiers—between ten and twenty of them—crept below them.
Scotty was on his belly, his M-16 before him. “Stay the fuck away from me, asshole,” he whispered, so my father crouched down where he was, above the NVA soldiers. He couldn’t distinguish much more than their strangely shaped hats and the shape of their AK-47s, but he knew he was in trouble.
Scotty let go of his weapon and slowly, quietly, tied his hair back with a bandanna. The NVA moved around the base of the hill, toward George and Rudy. My father stayed flat against the ground, hoping they wouldn’t see him. He knew his odds—he was alone, in the open, an easy target. He held his weapon close, too terrified to move. He hoped Goodman wouldn’t come up anytime soon.
At the top of the hill, Rudy and George smoked and talked, unaware of what was happening below them. Scotty began to crawl around the base of the hill. Near the bottom, he jumped up and ran, closing on the NVA soldiers from behind. Before my father had a chance to follow, Scotty opened up on full automatic. One, two, three, four NVA fell instantly, the entire back of the group. Rudy and George heard the gunfire and started shooting, taking out another two or three.
My father opened up from his position. Bullets sputtered rhythmically. George scaled the side of the hill, fast and steady. Scotty had once said it was better to be high than drunk during a firefight, that pot doesn’t immobilize you like beer. George, who was so stoned he never came down, was living proof of this; his movements were fast and precise. He hit the ground not twenty feet away and started picking off the right flank.
Rudy, alone on the hill, threw down his gun and went for the claymore detonator.
Suddenly, Scotty backed off. Perhaps he’d gone through his ammo—two magazines wasn’t much in a firefight—or maybe he simply wanted to see how many NVA were left. George, as if taking telepathic orders, stopped firing as well, and in the brief silence that followed, Rudy set off the claymores. A terrible scream rang through the jungle. Somehow, although nobody knew how they had pulled it off, the VC had turned the claymores around. The mines fired backward and Rudy got it all, ball bearings and C-4 plastic explosive. George ran back, over the hill, to Rudy. Rudy’s fatigues were all but gone from shoulders to waist, and his back was a shredded, bloody mess.
The remaining NVA ran off into the bush, leaving their dead and wounded. Scotty walked slowly, almost languidly, to the bodies, stopping to kick a dead NVA and rummage in his pockets. One of the wounded groaned, and Scotty finished him off The shot seemed somehow more terrible than the barrage of shots before. It echoed through the trees.
“Fuck, man,” George said, as he cradled Rudy’s head in his palms. “Go back and radio a dust-off.”
Half an hour later, Pops walked through the jungle, a clipboard in hand, taking the all-important body count. My father always said that the war fed itself on the body count. Stars and Stripes published the numbers; the papers stateside published the numbers. Before my father had come to Vietnam, he thought our side was surely winning the war.
How could we be losing, with a kill ratio like that? He found out soon enough that the numbers were inflated. His platoon could get little extras—beer or better food or time in the rear—and Pops could get promoted if the numbers were high.
Pops said, “OK, boys, how many dead? How many wounded?”
“Got twelve dead NVA, Pops,” Scotty said.
“Any wounded?”
Scotty smiled. “Not anymore.”
“How many you see?” Pops asked George.
“I saw twelve dead.” George was shaking and looked sick.
“How about you Trussoni? Twelve?”
“There were twelve dead,” my father replied.
Pops said, “Nice work, boys. Four times twelve. Forty-eight confirmed dead. Eat. Rest. We’re heading out in an hour.”
THE BUS DROPPED US ON DONG KHOI STREET BEFORE THE TOUR OFFICE, among swarms of rickshaw drivers. Jim bent to tie the shoestring of his Nike trainer. As he did, a black nylon money belt (tucked in the back of his khaki shorts) rose above the waistband. Patty tucked the belt back into her husband’s shorts and pinched his bottom. Her mood had improved since we’d left the tunnels. She ran her fingers through her curly auburn hair and checked her pink Swatch. “Cocktail time!” she said. “What do you say? Our hotel has the best view in Ho Chi Minh City.”
We crawled into a dilapidated Lada taxi. Masses of people—kids in school uniforms, tourists with tie-dyed T-shirts, vendors carrying baskets of mangoes—blocked the road. As the driver eased into first gear and the taxi inched through the street, the crowd displaced itself onto sidewalks and alleyways. Jim and Patty paged through their guidebook, looking for the address of an ex-pat nightclub called the Apocalypse Now Bar. They wanted to see if it lived up to the movie.
Rickshaws and bicycles moved by my window. I focused on the slow revolutions of a bicycle tire; it moved round and round and round. It would have been easy to fall asleep like that, warm, hypnotized, especially with jet lag setting in. But then, from behind a group of backpackers, I saw the man with the aviator sunglasses. He leaned against a telephone pole and crossed his arms, staring at me. I sat up straight and
pressed my hand against the window, as if to block him from view. When he saw that he had my attention, he eased his baseball cap off, so that his long black hair fell over his shoulders. He nodded at me, letting me know that he had been waiting.
Abandoning the telephone pole, he began to walk at our pace, on the sidewalk, just in line with the taxi’s window. With each step closer, I felt a tightening in my chest. I almost believed that if I looked straight ahead and pretended he was not there, he would disappear. I told myself it was a simple coincidence. If not, how could he know to find me at that particular place at that particular time? Had he been waiting at the tour office all afternoon? Did he know where I was staying? What did he want from me?
“Here, give me that,” Jim said, taking the book from his wife and turning to the index. “You can’t read a map to save your life.”
“That’s true,” Patty said, winking at me. “I can’t.”
I pushed the lock on the door and rolled up the window. The air in the cab became hot and stagnant. The taxi driver looked over his shoulder and said, “This car has no air conditioner, mademoiselle.”
The man with the aviator sunglasses moved closer to the taxi. Agile, he slithered through the crowd toward me. Fear, pure and simple, took over inside of me, but all I could think to do was to sink into my seat. Suddenly, I felt something that I had never expected to feel—that Vietnam might not let me off easily. However illogical, I was sure, suddenly, that I had inherited a debt and this man had come to extract it. As he walked closer, I believed in fate, retribution. That nothing of the past was forgiven. Or forgotten.
Jim held the guidebook toward his wife. “Maybe you’ll like this restaurant, Sweetie. It’s called Bibi’s. It’s French.”
“Pass,” Patty said. “I’m in the mood for Vietnamese.”
The taxi paused as a rickshaw driver filled his buggy with clients. Our driver pounded the horn, and it sounded to me, with my heart beating and the blood quick in my ears, like the low, suffering baa of a sheep. Baa, baa, baa. Baa, baa, baa. I sank farther into the metal-sprung cushion of the backseat as the taxi driver unrolled his window to dispel the unctuous heat. When the man with the aviator sunglasses appeared at my window, leaning close, as if he would press his thin lips to the glass, I turned toward Jim and Patty, panicked. I said, “Why is the taxi moving so slow?”
“Hey,” Jim said, studying me. “Everything OK?”
“Did those tunnels give you have a headache?” Patty asked. “I’ve got about a gallon of Advil in my purse.”
The man was so close to the window I could have unrolled it and run my fingernails across his pockmarked skin. Then, he raised his hand and—opening his pointer and middle fingers in a V—he pressed them on the glass and walked back into the crowd.
Jim said, “Do you know that guy with the Yankees cap?”
“Who?” Patty asked, angling her head toward the window, to get a better look.
“Some native,” Jim said. “He waved at us.”
Patty found the man in the crowd, looked him over, and said, “Now there is a guy in need of a new T-shirt.” Turning her attention to her handbag, she pulled out a hairbrush, a tube of lipstick, and a hand-tooled leather wallet and came up with a bottle of Advil. “I hope he’s not a friend of yours,” she said, as she tapped the bottle in her palm and gave me two pink pills. “They wouldn’t allow that guy within a mile of our hotel.”
THE TAXI PICKED UP SPEED AT THE END OF DONG KHOI AND TURNED ONTO Nguyen Du Street. Shifting through a number of small unmarked roads, we exited upon Dai Lo Le Duan, a capacious boulevard spiked with palm trees. Across the way, there was a huge park that housed the Workers’ Club and Reunification Palace. I remembered reading that the North Vietnamese Army came here on the morning of April 30, 1975, to claim the South. An NVA soldier climbed the palace stairs and hung a red flag with a yellow star at its center from a fourth-floor balcony.
Wind whistled through the cab as we drove past lush hotels with topiary-sharp lawns, many of which had been built during the mid-nineties. For a few years, after the United States lifted sanctions in 1994 and the Communist government eased strictures on trade, Vietnam was a place for optimism, joint ventures, and cases of champagne. Luxury hotels and ayurvedic spas opened in Da Lat and Nha Trang. For a little while, Vietnam was a paradise of opportunity. When the bubble popped in the late nineties, many investors were left to fall without a parachute.
I waited in the hotel lobby as Jim collected the room key from the
reception desk. A red-uniformed doorman opened the door for a group of businessmen. They walked past, sending a ripple of Japanese through the lobby. Patty browsed the gift shop, examining a display case filled with Vietnamese antiques. There was a water puppet and a wooden Buddha. She asked to see a carved jade bracelet and bought it.
A vase of pink and yellow orchids, hundreds of them tangled around one another, bloomed from a marble pedestal. There was a full-length mirror beyond, and, when I looked into it, the explosion of color doubled. I saw myself (behind the orchids), a woman with short messy hair and a smudge of tunnel mud on her cheek. My tennis shoes were dull against the glossy marble floor, my jeans scuffed and dirty. When my hair was long, and there was a little more roundness in my cheeks, I looked like my mother. Family friends would always compare us, saying how lucky I was to look like her. But now, with my hair sheared and my face gaunt, I saw what I had inherited from my father: the high cheekbones and an overwrought expression around the mouth. The pale skin and dark circles under my eyes. I looked closer, examining my black eyes, checking for a slight blue penumbra. I hardly recognized myself, but I was not surprised. I always expected to see someone else when I looked into a mirror. I always expected to find a girl of twelve, tanned and crooked smiled, staring back.