Although it was the middle of the night, the heat was overbearing. The wall-unit air conditioner in my hotel room didn’t work, so I pushed away the curtains and opened the window near my bed. It was iron-barred; when I slid the frame up, I could see the concrete floor and metal balustrade of the hotel’s outdoor hallway. Each room on the fifth floor opened off this communal passage. If it had been earlier in the evening, I would have seen people walking past my window, to their rooms. A group of American tourists (all men) were just down the hall from me. I’d met them at the Internet café on the first floor, checking e-mail. Later, they lounged on plastic chairs in front of the hotel, drinking Bacardi from the bottle. They laughed and joked and called the States from a cell phone, and it was clear they had come to Vietnam for pleasure, to relax in the sun.
As I sat on the bed, I saw that all the rooms were dark except mine. I’d left the bathroom light on, and mosquitoes buzzed around it, banging themselves against the bulb. Although I’d been at the hotel for days, I had not felt comfortable enough to unpack. All my belongings (a Lonely Planet guidebook, clothes, shampoo) were stored in my backpack, at the foot of my bed. I kept it packed and zipped, as if I expected to have to grab my stuff and run. I didn’t trust that I would be safe.
I climbed off the bed, opened the door, and checked the corridor for the third time. Then, I turned the lock and propped a chair under the doorknob. The man with the sunglasses had rattled me. Shaken, so paranoid I was afraid to turn my light off and go to sleep, I promised myself I would change hotels the next day.
Jet lag had thrown off my sense of time. In the afternoon, when the sun was searing, I felt sleepy. At night, when it was a few degrees cooler, I was wide awake. I picked up a remote control, turned on the TV, and flipped through the stations, stopping to watch a black-and-white film, a Vietnamese war movie set during the fifties, during the battle of Dien Bien Phu. There were no Western soldiers in the film, only a huge French flag that was eventually captured as the Vietnamese closed in. A group of Vietnamese peasant women sang and held hands as their men—injured but victorious—stumbled home to their village.
For the Vietnamese, the wounds of the war were still fresh. In the War Remnants Museum, I had seen a display of articles and books about Robert McNamara. There were captions in Vietnamese and English claiming that McNamara’s book, In Retrospect, which outlined mistakes he felt the United States had made during the war, proved that we had been wrong and the war was a miscalculation. As I looked down at the display, I remembered a night my father and I went out for drinks, when I was in college. I had just turned twenty-one, and although my age had never mattered much at Roscoe’s, I was proud to be legal. I presented the bartender with my driver’s license as I ordered. She rolled her eyes. “Put your plastic away,” she said. “Your dad’s got you covered.”
I carried the drinks through the bar, to the back room. My father had recently read Robert McNamara’s book. Dad was never much of a reader; although he was quick-witted and intelligent, he had a hard time staying with a book. That one, however, got his attention. I don’t know if he finished it or not, but the parts he had read were memorized. He would rattle off sentences between sips of his drink, quoting McNamara’s admissions of his miscalculations in Vietnam. I tried to understand exactly what made Dad so angry, but after a while he went silent and would answer my questions tersely. Finally, he turned to me and said, “Do you know what this book means? Do you know what this guy is saying?”
I didn’t know anything about Robert McNamara back then. I had never even heard his name before. At that point in my life—before I
studied the war—Vietnam was not a historical event. It was just something that happened to my family.
My father shook his head, disgusted. “McNamara’s saying they didn’t know what the hell they were doing over there. We were wrong from the goddamned beginning.”
When I saw him stare at his weathered hands, so defeated he couldn’t look me in the eye, I felt the same sense of sadness I had felt as a girl, when I watched Dad turn away from us, numb and distant. As a girl, I believed the war had taken him from us. It was an amorphous monster that would grab hold and pull us into it, kicking and screaming. Vietnam claimed Dad’s past, his future, his health, his dreams. It was never satisfied. It came to live in our house, eat dinner at our table, sleep in our beds. It trailed me home from school; it lapped at my heels as I walked to Roscoe’s. It was an elusive yet inescapable thing skulking through my life, a Jack-the-Ripper presence that hid in alleyways and in the sewers, waiting to get me alone. We could ignore it, but it would not go away. If we managed to shake it, it would track us down, hungry for more. Although there was no way for me, as a child, to understand this presence, I knew, when I saw my father’s sadness, that he had never really left Vietnam.
After Dad made it clear he could not go, I decided to take the trip on my own. When I bought my plane ticket to Ho Chi Minh City, the travel agent suggested that I go with a tour group. He said women sometimes had a hard time traveling alone in Southeast Asia, and American tourists were sometimes met with suspicion by the Vietnamese and sometimes even followed by the police. He said I might want to travel with a male friend or relative. But I wouldn’t consider this. I wanted to go to Vietnam on my own terms.
My visa application took months to process. I was asked to submit an itinerary of my stay in Vietnam, as well as a detailed reason for coming, and although I told the truth—that I wanted to go to the places my father had been during the war—I felt uneasy. Now, as I looked out the window, too scared to fall asleep, I realized that my travel agent had been right. It hadn’t been a good idea to come to Vietnam alone.
It was daytime in the United States. I imagined Dad sitting in front of the TV, on his fat brown leather recliner, the remote control in his hand, flipping past the History Channel, past CNN, and pausing at the local sports news. I tried to call him. The phone was an ancient rotary, with a
base as heavy as a bowling ball. After a series of whirls and clicks, I connected. Kelly’s voice (she had recorded the message on Dad’s answering machine) said, I’m sorry, nobody is here to take your call. Please leave your name and number, and we’ll return your call as soon as possible.
I calculated the time difference and decided that my father was probably at the doctor’s office. Since he got sick, he’d had regular exams at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota. I knew the whole routine. When Dad came home from treatment, he would make himself a stiff drink. If we were on speaking terms, which was becoming less and less often, he would call me. Even after his chemotherapy, when it hurt him to speak, he would call. His voice was rough and whispery; I strained to hear him. “I’m going to fight this,” he would say. “You better believe it. I’m going to beat this son-of-a-bitch.” And from everything I’d seen of my father, I believed him. I knew the kind of battles this man had fought.
For Dad, being tough always mattered more than being right. He had been proud of his health, defining himself by his quickness and his workhorse strength. He was contemptuous of anyone he considered fat, lazy, slow-witted, or poor. If he saw someone begging in the street, he would say, Get a job. I had to. When Dad was in his late forties, when I still lived with him on the North Side, he worked the night shift at the train station. During the day, he worked construction; at night, he loaded boxes onto freight cars. He would come home late in the evening, so tired he could hardly stand, and crack open a beer. “I worked sixteen hours today,” he would tell me, pride in his voice. “Working double-time is the only way you’ll get ahead in this world. Work like you’re two people, my girl, and you just might make it.”
Work gave my father his edge and left him with little time to think about all the things he didn’t want to remember. It also kept him in shape. One thing I knew for sure: My father would have starved rather than gain a pound of paunch. He didn’t like sitting still and didn’t allow himself much time to rest. The only criticism I’d ever heard him make of Andy was that he was overweight. Fat was a sign of laziness, something my father could not tolerate.
When I was in high school, I struggled to stay at 115 pounds. When my weight jumped to 125, I told myself I had to be more disciplined. Although I never liked jogging, I joined track and cross-country. Terrified of slipping into a category of derision, I became a vegetarian for a year, checking out health food cookbooks from the library. When I was still
heavier than I wanted to be, I took diet pills and made myself vomit, a habit that stopped one day when my mother walked into the bathroom and caught me. I did not hear her come in, and she stood silently behind me, watching me gag. When I registered her presence, I turned. When our eyes met, she shook her head slightly—no, this cannot be what I’m seeing—and left. She never mentioned the incident to me, but there was no need; the look of disapproval and sadness I saw were enough. I never made myself throw up again.
In college, when I spent the extra money I had on coffee and books, I weighed 110 pounds. But in the months after college, when I began to take birth control pills, my weight rocketed. I gained 25 pounds in two months, putting the scale at 135, the most I had ever weighed. I began dieting again, and went to a doctor and a nutritionist, both of whom told me that 135 pounds was absolutely normal for a woman my age and height.
“I’m trying so hard,” I said, “but the weight just stays.”
They did not understand my concern. They suggested that I get some exercise and accept my body as it was. “You really shouldn’t worry so much about your looks,” the doctor said. “Many young women feel the same as you. They are afraid to leave the body they had as girls and become women.”
You don’t understand, I wanted to tell them. This curvy woman is not me. How could I make them understand that I had been raised to be tough, without a hint of softness? How could I make them understand that my father mistreated women and despised them for what he considered their weaknesses? How could I convey to these doctors why I felt so uncomfortable with my body, when I—who had not yet learned to see past the world I had grown up in—did not understand myself?
Not long after this, Kelly got pregnant. She was twenty-one, unmarried, and still living on the North Side, where she hung out in the same bars Dad had taken us as kids. Kelly bartended at Track II, the bar just down the street from Dad’s house, mixing drinks for regulars. She’d had a lot of jobs—she’d worked as an electrician’s apprentice and an assistant at a home for juvenile delinquents—but she loved working the taps at the Track (as she called it) best. She was good at it. She knew all the regulars and their families. The Track felt like home, and in many ways it was: She had spent her childhood in the North Side bars, and many of Track II’s regulars were the children of Roscoe’s regulars. Sometimes
Dad went to the Track, and Kelly bought him drinks. She told me once that she secretly liked getting him drunk. “The only time I see him showing any emotion is when he’s got a few too many brandies in him.”
As we grew to be women, Kelly and I switched places. She was no longer the shy girl who bit her nails until they bled, and I was the one who cried when Dad raised his voice. Time tempered and strengthened her, while it stripped me of my hard protective coating. I had grown more vulnerable, and it was getting harder and harder for me to be near him. But when Kelly spoke to Dad, she was loud and crude and aloof to his feelings in a way I could no longer manage. She put her hands on her hips and told him where to go. They fought regularly, ignored each other for a few weeks, and then took up where they left off. Kelly was the strong one. She had learned how to survive Dad.
But Kelly was also hard on herself. She would start her days with a Bloody Mary and work her way into the harder stuff. She dated bikers and men twenty years older than her, guys who had just gotten out of prison. Giggling, she would tell me about doing cocaine on the back of a Harley Davidson. One boyfriend (who was put back in the state penitentiary after beating his ex-wife) wrote her love letters on lined paper that Kelly would read to me, rolling her eyes as she pointed out the spelling errors. Although this guy was bad news, she liked his attention. “Nice men” (who were, by Mom’s definition, anyone who had not spent time in jail) had asked Kelly out many times—one even bought her an engagement ring—but she wasn’t interested. “I only like these fuckers who are mean to me,” she would say, dragging on a cigarette. “Thank you very much, Dad.”
Kelly’s pregnancy resulted from a one-night stand with a man she met in a bar. Needless to say, Dad was furious. One afternoon, when I went to Dad’s house for a visit, I found Kelly in the bathroom crying, something I didn’t see very often. Dad had announced that Kelly should be ashamed of herself for getting pregnant, and that she didn’t deserve to have the baby shower we were all planning. I listened as Dad sat in the kitchen, complaining about Kelly’s lack of morals. Although my father had been married three times, had all but abandoned Phil Trussoni, and had denied Rita Trussoni completely, he was angry at my sister for planning to raise his grandson as a single parent. “I just wasn’t raised that way,” he said, chewing a toothpick. “My upbringing and my religion are against going around having babies out of wedlock.”
Matt and I were ready to ignore our father, but Kelly wouldn’t let Dad get away with this. She stormed out of the bathroom, her eyes puffy from tears, and said, “At least I didn’t have an abortion!” This had the desired effect: Dad was horrified. He could not believe a child of his would say such a thing in his presence.
“No, you didn’t,” he said, pointing his toothpick in her direction. “That’s one good thing you’ve done. But still. You were raised a Christian. I don’t agree with your free and easy behavior, and I’m going to tell you so.” Dad looked around the room, his eyes glossy, slightly unfocused, as if he expected us all to forget the past and join in on this new-and-improved version of our upbringing.
Turning my back on Dad, I took Kelly by the hand. “You are having a baby shower,” I said.
“Of course I am,” Kelly said, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “What does he expect me to do, hide away in shame?”
After the birth I went to Wisconsin, to see my nephew. Kelly and I rented a room at the Holiday Inn, where all of us swam and drank margaritas and sat in the hot tub. Kelly carried her new son—whose middle name was Daniel and family name was Trussoni—with her in a hard-shelled baby carrier. Dad and Debbie sat drinking brandy and Coke at a poolside table.
I pulled up a chair and listened as Dad complained about the police, who he still believed were out to get him. He told a story about the good old days when, after being picked up for drunken driving, the cops didn’t arrest him and haul him away (as they do now), but said, “You just get back from Vietnam, Trussoni?” When my father answered yes, as a matter of fact he had, the officer would let him go with a warning. In the good old days, Dad said, being a veteran gave a man an advantage. Veterans walked around town like they owned it and, come to think of it, they did: They had fought for their country, had nearly died for it, and they were entitled to have a few drinks now and then, if they wanted to. People understood that, back then.
“Now,” Dad said, “there is no respect at all. It’s dog eat dog.” The month before, my father had been arrested for driving haphazardly through a Hardie’s drive-thru at three in morning. He was given a ticket for DUI and spent the night in jail.
“And you’ll never guess what they did next,” Dad said, taking a sip of his drink. “Those bastards started watching me.” My father told us
that the police had stationed one of their cruisers behind his house, for surveillance. Dad and Debbie would sneak out the back door at all hours to check if the cops had left.
“When I saw they weren’t leaving, I decided to take matters into my own hands,” Dad said. “I wrote their boss a letter. I told the chief of police that he better put a stop to this kind of harassment. Put a stop and good!” Dad shook his head and, finishing off his drink, said, “Don’t these people have anything better to do than harass a hardworking, tax-paying veteran? What this country needs is another war. That will solve all of this bullshit. That will make people give veterans the respect they deserve.”
Kelly brought Dad her son, and this seemed to calm him down. He held the baby with one arm while making drinks with his free hand. True to form, my father had not apologized to Kelly about how he had treated her during her pregnancy. But the baby melted him. After Dad held his grandson for the first time, all moralizing stopped.
I watched Dad play with the baby. I was still wearing my swimming suit, which felt too tight with the extra twenty-five pounds I’d gained. I wrapped a towel around my waist and crossed my arms over my stomach, to hide myself. Dad eyed my discomfort, a vicious smile growing upon his face. “Danielle,” he said, wryly, “it looks like you’re getting fat.”
Although Dad was teasing me, I interpreted his comment as a judgment and a condemnation. This time, Dad’s criticism hit me harder than usual. For the first time in my life, I felt mad enough to fight him. I squared myself, looked him in the eye, and told my father to fuck off. I had never said such a thing to anyone, let alone my father, but it worked. Dad was blindsided. He did not know how to respond. He stammered, full of indignation, and I was glad. I loved that I had shocked him. I loved that I had surprised him speechless. And, most of all, I loved being my father’s daughter, quick with a sucker punch and cold-blooded. I wouldn’t take an insult lying down.
Dad and I did not speak for months after that, which was not all that unusual. We had not seen eye to eye for many years. When we had an argument, we would not speak and then, when enough time had passed, we would both try to pretend that nothing had happened.
Once, when I was in college, I rented a room in a house in Madison. My landlord lived in the house, and although my apartment was detached from his—with a separate entrance and bathroom—we had a common phone line. The man was thirty years older than I, with a wife and a family,
and I never thought the situation was at all unusual. One evening, my father called looking for me, and my landlord answered the phone. I was not home (I was a waitress in a sushi restaurant and worked the dinner shift), and he took a message. Dad called three more times before I got home. When I came in at ten o’clock, tired and smelling of soy sauce, my landlord handed me a stack of notes. Clearly worried, he said, “Your father seems to be quite upset. You better call him back right away.”
The phone was in my landlord’s kitchen. “What’s going on?” I asked, when my father picked up the line. From the way he answered the phone, and the sound of ice tinkling in a tumbler, I knew it was a drinking night. Although I had not lived near him for years, I had spent many nights on the phone with Dad. He was always drunk when he called, and I was always ready to listen. “Is something wrong, Pop?”
“You found that one pretty quick, didn’t you,” Dad said, slurring his words.
My landlord and his family were in the next room, watching TV. I pulled a chair from the kitchen table and sat, drawing my knees to my chest. I said, “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“You get rid of one,” my father continued, “and already you’re shacking up with another.”
It took me a minute, but I realized that Dad thought I was having a relationship with my landlord. I laughed and said, “Dad, you don’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand. I wasn’t born yesterday. You girls are just like your mother. Kelly doesn’t live with them; she can’t even get one to stay more than the night. But I know what you’re up to.”
“But Dad,” I said, trying to explain.
“Don’t ‘but Dad’ me. I’ve been around the block a time or two. Some kind of slut, I see. Probably got that man paying your rent and buying your drinks. Don’t think I don’t know what goes on. You women. Get some poor sucker to pay your way. Next thing you know, you’ll be pregnant. If you aren’t already.”
“Dad.” I was whispering, so my landlord wouldn’t hear me. “You are totally wrong about this. I’m renting a room from that guy. He’s married. With kids.”
As Dad paused to consider this, I heard Debbie in the background, egging him on. Those girls of yours! I never lived with a man until I was thirty years old!
“My room has a separate entrance and everything. I just use his phone.”
“Well,” Dad said, trying to absorb this information. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Rather than admit his mistake, Dad became angry. “Who in hell lives in a man’s house like that?” he said. “What do you think his wife thinks about you, hanging around all the time? Nothing you’d do would surprise me anymore.” And with that, my father hung up.
Crying, I called Mom. I was too upset to explain myself well, and for a few minutes I simply sobbed. When I finally told her what had happened, she said, “Your father is just drunk. Don’t pay any attention to him. He doesn’t even know what he’s saying.”
Maybe Dad didn’t know what he was saying that night. Maybe he hadn’t ever understood the effects that his tirades had on us. But I always took him seriously, trailing after his words as if I might understand him by the tracks he had left in the sand. When I hung up the phone, I saw my landlord standing at the kitchen door, watching me cry. I had never felt as vulnerable as I did then, crying before this stranger. He was a decent person, and what was I?
“Is everything okay?” he asked. “Is there a problem at home?”
“It’s nothing,” I said, as I left the kitchen to go back to my room. “This is just how my family works.”
Again, months went by before Dad and I spoke. I was not the one to hold a grudge. Although he had made the mistake, Dad expected me to apologize to him. He told my sister that his father never apologized for anything, and this was how he expected it to be with us. But I didn’t think that was fair. I wanted to be treated better. Clearly, my father didn’t care to discuss our problems. He wanted me as I used to be—young, unformed, and voiceless. At twelve, I could be this girl, no questions asked. I didn’t see myself as different from him; I saw with Dad’s eyes, I spoke with Dad’s voice. I was the dummy to his ventriloquist. But I was no longer that girl. I couldn’t be her again.
During the months of silence, I missed Dad. Sometimes I tried to find him in the war, reading books and watching Platoon (the film Dad said reminded him most of his time in the jungles) and Apocalypse Now. My head would fill with tunnels, with war talk, with tanks and helicopters. At night, I dreamed war dreams, which I’d record in my notebook,
always trying to capture my father’s voice the way I remembered it from my childhood.
Eventually, I swallowed my pride and went to my father’s house to apologize. We sat like zombies in front of the TV, both of us pretending that his drunken phone call had not happened. “Nope, nothing new here,” he said, and crunched an empty can of Miller Light in his hand. “Nothing new here, either,” I said, echoing him. After a few minutes of silence, my father picked up the remote control and flipped on the TV. The weather channel flashed temperatures from Helsinki, Tokyo, New York, Rome. We sat, staring at the screen. Dad shook his head and said, “This is goddamned terrible weather we’re having this year.” I looked over my shoulder, out the window, feigning interest. “Terrible weather, Pop,” I said as I stood, went to his chair, and kissed the top of his head. When I hugged my father goodbye, I looked in his dark blue-ringed eyes, feeling miserable. We had nothing left to say to each other.
THE TROPICAL NIGHT WAS HOT AND HUMID, MY SKIN STICKY WITH SWEAT. My jeans clung stiff to my legs, so I eased them off and threw them on the nightstand, near the bed. Wearing a long T-shirt and underpants, I stretched my bare legs in the moonlight as a breeze fell through the curtains. I was almost asleep when I heard a scraping in the hallway outside my room—scratch, scratch, scratch—as if someone were sweeping the steps. Lying very still, I listened. The noise approached. I wanted to believe it would pass by, but somehow I knew that it was coming for me.
Before I had a chance to get out of bed, a sharp pain stabbed through my shin. I rolled off the bed just in time to see a metal hook—attached to a broom handle as long as an arm—jutting from the window ledge. From the floor, I watched it rise and descend, swooping near the backpack I’d left at the foot of the bed. When I reached for the light switch, the intruder saw me and dropped the metal hook onto the cement. Rushing to the door, I flung it open. Moonlight caught upon the jeans of the man with aviator sunglasses as he crawled over a balcony and climbed down to the street. Shaking, I leaned against the rough stucco wall, trying to catch my breath.
My hands trembled as I picked the hook up off the floor, propped it against the wall near the bed, and locked the door.
There was a cut near the bone of my left shin, where the hook had caught me. It was only a scratch, but a streak of silt had lodged under a flap of skin. I went to the bathroom and cleaned the wound with a white bar of soap that soon turned pink, removing the dirt with my fingernails and splashing it with water. Rivulets of blood twisted around the drain. I pressed a towel against the cut, and after a few minutes the bleeding stopped.
If I had been scared before, I was now terrified. I picked up the phone and dialed the front desk. The receptionist, who was asleep, answered. I asked him to come up to my room. When he protested—it was four-thirty in the morning, after all—I told him it was an emergency; I needed him immediately. He sighed and hung up.
When he stood in my room, I held the hook before him. “This,” I said, pointing from the hook to my wounded shin. “Did this.”
The receptionist looked me up and down, clearly surprised; I’d been so upset I’d forgotten to put on my jeans. Feeling beyond modesty, I grabbed the jeans from the night table and slipped into them then and there, as he examined the hook. It had been tied with rope to the broom handle, a layer of masking tape winding down the base for strength. The receptionist turned it before him, examining the craftsmanship. He was not surprised that someone would attempt this kind of theft, he said, but he found it incredible that the burglar would use such a poorly made tool. He said, “This was not made by a Vietnamese. Some foreigner made this.”
I leaned against the wall, hugging my arms over my chest. Although it was at least 90 degrees Fahrenheit, I felt cold. My hands shook, and I had to swallow every few seconds, to keep my throat from closing. It was as if some wayward malaria-infested mosquito had gotten into my room, landed on a throbbing vein, and begun to feast.
The receptionist put the hook outside, leaning it against the balustrade, and turned to me. “You,” he said, looking me over, “are not well. If you want, I will call a doctor.”
I didn’t want a doctor. I wanted to shut the windows, lock the door, take off my clothes, and crawl into the bathtub. I wanted to turn the tap marked HOT all the way to the right, so that the water sprayed over my feet and knees and filled the basin of the tub, inch by inch.
“I’m okay,” I said, as I led the receptionist to the door. “But I want to call the police. I saw who tried to break in. There is a man who has been
following me all week.” When I described the man (his jeans and T-shirt and sunglasses), the receptionist seemed to recognize him.
“Is the man very tall?” the receptionist asked. “Does he have a nose like a foreigner?”
When I told him yes, the man was taller than most Vietnamese men, the receptionist said, “Yes, I know him. That man lives on this street. His mother owns a dress shop near the market. His father was here in one of the wars—he was French or American, I don’t know. I see him every day. He has no father and no identity card. He cannot work legally.”
“Do you know his name,” I asked, “or why he would be following me?”
The receptionist shook his head and walked toward the door.
“If you know where he lives, will you call the police and have them talk to him?” I said. “I don’t want him following me anymore.”
“The police will come tomorrow,” the receptionist promised. “But now it is too late.”
Although I knew the man had crawled down the balcony, I touched the receptionist’s arm on his way out, stopping him. “Please check the hallways,” I said, “in case he’s out there.”
When the receptionist had gone, I turned off the light and sat in the dark, waiting for the intruder to return. I was still shaking. Trying to relax, I closed my eyes. An image of a door filled my mind. I opened the door, and another door sprang up behind it. I opened this second door, and another smaller door appeared. This smaller door gave way, and another even smaller door opened, and then another and another and another, until one final tiny door unlatched. I crawled through this door and into a room. My knees sank into wet dirt; my vision slipped through the oily-black darkness. My fingers spidered and groped for a light switch. I sat in the dark, empty, waiting. I was not finished with Vietnam. Or perhaps it was not finished with me. I threw my backpack over my shoulder, unbolted the door, and left.
THE SUN WAS RISING AS I WALKED DOWN THE STAIRS AND INTO THE HOTEL lobby. The receptionist, asleep on a fold-out cot, didn’t hear me, so I let myself out the front door. Outside, the air was cool. I hoisted my backpack over my shoulder, feeling lucky to have escaped the hotel.
As I walked toward the rising sun, I tried to place myself. Where was I? Dong Khoi? Cholon? I wondered if my father had, years before I was
born, walked this same road. He had not spent much time in Saigon during his tour, only a few nights, when he was given leave. On the day he and Goodman took their prisoner from the tunnel, they were given clearance to escort him to the ARVN base just south of Saigon. Scotty, who had come along, knew Saigon well. He had been stationed there on his first tour in ’66. “I’ll show you boys some real action,” he said, as they loaded onto the back of a munitions truck. Scotty drank from a flask and gave it to Goodman. Goodman took a swig, raised his .22 in the air, and shot a bird. As the truck drove toward Saigon, my father wouldn’t look back, toward the jungle. He didn’t want to remember that he would have to return.
Highway One was muddy from the monsoon rains. The munitions truck slid and jerked as they hit washed-out tank tracks. Scotty pulled out his .45, showed it to the prisoner, and then bound a cloth over his eyes. Only the rapid-fire movement of an eyebrow twitching above the blindfold attested to the boy’s terror. Scotty spun him around. “Find the piñata, compadre,” he said, as the prisoner stumbled and fell onto a pile of replacement APC sheet metal. Scotty shot once, twice, into the air. The prisoner lay still on his back, his eyebrow going like mad.
The truck stopped before the ARVN base.
Scotty pulled the prisoner by his arm and told the others to wait by the river. Half an hour later, he met them at the ferry, a rickety sampan made of deep mahogany-colored wood, its sides darkened by water. A woven reed canopy arched over its middle, creating a band of purple shade over the slightly scooped interior. It sat lightly on the water, prow and stern arching like a wide canoe.
The Saigon River was dirt brown. A group of peasants stumbled as they climbed in: a woman carrying a half-naked baby, two teenage girls with long black braids, and an old woman. As they stepped over the sampan’s side, an ARVN soldier gripped the plastic handle of the motor rope, lifted one foot onto the sampan’s ledge, and pulled back until the engine thrummed. The boat moved out, toward the not-so-distant shore.
They walked through the Saigon streets as the sun went down. Men in civvies sat at open-air cafés, drinking glasses of rum and coconut milk with pretty Vietnamese women. A drunk GI, a Vietnamese woman on each arm, stumbled ahead, lost his balance, and fell, face-first, to the sidewalk. He turned on his back and laughed as the women tried to pull him up.
Scotty walked into the crowd, stopping at an open-air market. “Hey, Trussoni,” he said, pointing to a small Colt .22 pistol on a vendor’s table. “You need this. Your .45 is too big for tunnels.”
Dad picked up the gun and turned it in his hand. “How much?” he asked the old lady selling it.
“Good deal for you,” the old lady said, which meant she was ripping him off. She wrote a price on a piece of paper and gave it to him. Dad gave her the money and slid the gun in his belt.
They found some seats at a bar near the river, where they ordered drinks and took a load off. Dad once said he always felt scared up-country. Every minute was spent looking over his shoulder to check who was behind him or who might be. Saigon was a relief. He felt almost human as the waitress came to their table.
She strode up, smiling. “You boys want a drink?”
“Sure, give me what you got, sweet stuff,” Scotty shouted over the music. “And I’d like to buy you a drink as well.”
“I’ll be back,” she said, turning away.
“Now this,” Scotty said, opening his arms to the tables of soldiers, “is a party.”
“Better than dying in the fucking boonies,” Goodman said.
Goodman told Dad about living in Tennessee, about his parents’ business and the way he planned to run it when he got back from the war. During the months in the jungle, they had become friends. Dad knew all about Goodman’s family—his father was a federal judge—and his girlfriend—who had broken up with him in a letter—and Goodman knew all about Dad’s ex-wife and kid back home. They made each other a promise: If one of them got aced, the other would take his belongings back to the world. If they both made it back, they promised to keep in touch.
The waitress returned with a tray of drinks. “I bring you whiskey Coke. Two dollar. And for me, whiskey Coke. Two dollar.” The waitress set a plastic cup in front of Scotty. “That five dollar, please.”
Scotty gave her some money, and she sat on his lap.
“Hey, Scotty,” Dad said. “How the hell are we getting back to the boonies?” They had lost their ride, and if they didn’t find another one soon they would get their asses chewed by Pops, that was for sure. Not that they had much to lose. Nothing was worse than the boonies.
“We’ll find our way,” Scotty said, but he was too busy with the waitress to pay much attention.
“Trussoni, let’s get out of here,” Goodman said. Dad slammed his drink and followed Goodman out to the terrace.
They sat at a table outside, drinking from plastic cups and waiting for Scotty. An enormous Sky Crane Chinook came down fast nearby, shattering the music with its rhythm. When some ARVN guys joined them, Goodman bought them a round. They spoke English well enough to say they lived in the city, close by. When the crowd began to thin out, they invited them back to their place for a drink, so Goodman and my father followed them home, where they sat at a rickety wooden table drinking rice wine and playing cards.
NEXT MORNING, THEY WALKED BACK TOWARD THE RIVER, NAMING THE streets as they walked: Tran Hung Dao, De Tham, Le Loi. They were exhausted, as if they’d been out on LP or ambush all night. It was a long way back to the jungle. My father gripped his gun and looked behind him—what if they were being watched? A guy couldn’t ask for a more perfect target. A mandatory curfew was in effect, but where were the Saigon police? Where were the ARVN? Although the streets seemed deserted, paranoia transformed every tree and fence post into the enemy. Goodman walked ahead, oblivious to danger. After an hour they stopped to share a cigarette. It seemed, as they stood in the street, unsure of which way to go, that they had hundreds of miles before them.
Soon, they found their way to District One, where they hired a taxi to take them to the ferry. As they drove through District Five, past the Seventeenth Field Hospital, a triad of camouflaged jeeps sped by. Floodlights lit up the Field Dispensary Building, shining over the cement courtyard. The taxi took them out to the bleak torn-up shanties at the edge of Saigon.
The driver pulled off onto a dirt road and parked the taxi near some trees.
“Beaucoup VC. Beaucoup,” the taxi driver whispered. He motioned with his hands: They are here. They are everywhere. When my father stepped out of the taxi, he heard voices in the distance. In the weak light, he saw shacks full of people. Chickens moved through the shadows. The heavy smell of food and burning wood filled the air. The taxi drove off, leaving them in a nest of Vietcong.
A group of men sat in front of a shack, guns in their hands. My father stepped forward, to get a better look, and kicked a rusted can lying in the road. All noise and movement in the yard stopped. One of the men faced them, his hand on his weapon.
Goodman grabbed his arm. “Stand up straight and walk,” he said. “Put your hands at your side and don’t move them.”
My father walked toward the river, scanning the narrow road, as if intent on memorizing every stone and root. He did not look up, sure that eye contact, even the slightest hint of confrontation, would be deadly. When someone shot off a round, Goodman said not to worry. “They would have shot us earlier if they wanted us.”
The dock was beyond a bend in the road. They walked for fifty yards, through scraggly trees that cast shadows in their path. The air was wet and new, morning air not yet singed by heat. At the river, the rising sun reflected upon the water’s surface. They walked to the dock and sat. The ferry was not there. They were stuck.
Goodman took out a cigarette and smoked, defeated. Mosquitoes hovered, and soon a bead of blood rose on Goodman’s cheek. The men on the porch talked; my father wished to God he understood Vietnamese. “What do you suppose we do?” he asked.
“First things first. We’ve got to get across the river,” Goodman said. He scanned the banks, looking for a narrow place, somewhere to cross. My father saw, on the opposite bank, the ARVN base, full of activity. Maybe it was the river, with its dead, mossy smell, but he suddenly longed for home in a way he hadn’t since he had first stepped off the plane, at Tan Son Nhut. The smell was a Mississippi River smell, an August smell with a summer’s worth of fish in it. He wanted to be back home, free to do as he pleased. This is war, he realized. Terror. Paranoia. Being stranded on the wrong side of the river.
“We’ll have to swim it,” Goodman said, taking off his shirt. The situation wasn’t all that serious, he said. If they could just get to the other side, they’d make it to the ARVN base and get a lift to the boonies on an early supply truck. The river wasn’t wide; it was just a channel. Goodman emptied his pockets, wrapped the contents in his shirt, and stuffed them in his pack. Mud slurped around his boots as he waded in.
My father didn’t move. He watched Goodman walk into the river.
“What’s wrong, Trussoni?” Goodman asked. “You think they’re going to shoot us?”
The men in the shacks laughed and talked. It was obvious that they had chosen to ignore them.
My father looked at Goodman and smiled, weakly. He said, “I’ve got something to tell you, Tommy. Something that you probably don’t know about me.” He took one last drag on his cigarette, flicked it into the black water, and said, “I can’t swim.”
DAD AND GOODMAN MADE IT BACK TO THE PLATOON EARLY THE NEXT morning. The Saigon River hadn’t been deep at all; they’d held their weapons over their heads and walked the whole way. A supply truck took them to the base and a chopper dropped them with their platoon before lunch. Pops took one look at them and shook his head. He kicked his boots aside and stretched his legs before him, sprinkling antifungal powder between his toes.
“No more of the bullshit you pulled last night, boys,” Pops said. “Anymore of that, and I’ll have your ass.”
“Yes, sir,” Goodman said. They acted sorry, but they weren’t. Everybody knew Pops couldn’t do much to hurt them. They were already in the worst of the war. Anywhere Pops could send them would be better than the boonies.
“And I know you didn’t get lost in Saigon. I’ve been in Saigon enough to know.”
“Yes, sir,” Goodman said.
“Probably got yourself drunk and laid.”
“Yes, sir,” my father said.
“Probably got some women and didn’t know what to do with them.” Pops laughed and wiggled his toes.
“You’re speaking from experience?” Goodman asked, grinning.
“I got a wife and two little girls,” he said. “You think I’m speaking from experience?”
“Must be rough,” Goodman said. “I mean, missing them.”
Pops dropped the foot powder. He looked at his greenish yellow feet. “It’s rough all around, Goodman.”
They set up camp in the remains of a rubber plantation. Shots sounded on and off all night. The next morning, the rubber trees seemed to dissolve in the sunrise. They heard a commotion at the perimeter: The two guards had been found dead. Both had been shot in the head and
their bodies pulled into the concertina wire. Everybody ate breakfast and smoked and pretended not to notice as the medics zipped the dead guards into body bags. The morning mail chopper lifted them away. The mechanized infantrymen respooled the concertina wire, dumped sand from bags, and loaded their APCs.
Their platoon left the combed orderly rows of rubber trees and entered tangled jungle. They tramped over hills and onto flat fields charred black by bombs. The whole area was suspect, Pops said, and not only because of the two dead guards that morning. The Ho Bo woods covered miles and miles of tunnel complexes. He said, “If the Ho Chi Minh trail funnels supplies from north to south, we’re the bucket catching the runoff.” The tunnels siphoned and distributed the supplies through the Iron Triangle all the way to Saigon.
They trekked north, toward An Nhon Tay. Goodman was ahead, on point; my father patrolled the rear. The jungle was quiet. The air seemed weighted with imminent rain. Scotty shot a spider monkey off a tree branch. The report echoed.
Scotty said, “The Michelin plantation is still operating up near Tay Ninh. Must be some money in it.”
“Bombs or no bombs,” Pops said. “It’s business as usual.”
A new GI, Rudy’s replacement, asked my father if he’d been down the tunnels. “I heard you and Goodman are tunnel rats,” the kid said. “What’s down there?”
“I’m not a guidebook to ’Nam, Cherry,” my father said.
GOODMAN AND MY FATHER TOOK TURNS. THEY WOULD FIND AN ENTRANCE—usually one or two every couple of miles—and then Goodman would blow it or my father would blow it. The smoke would clear. They’d move on. They went on like this, tossing frags and CS gas grenades. They walked for miles, all morning. By early afternoon, they had left their platoon far behind. For a while, they thought the tunnels were cold: no sweet potatoes or cassava growing, no abnormal smells, not even any rigged bamboo.
“This whole stretch is cold as Alaska,” my father said.
Goodman walked ahead, slow and relaxed, as if he liked blowing the tunnels. He said, half teasing, “Sure, Trussoni. Cold as Alaska.”
On mornings like that, when they walked through the sunlit jungle, my father realized how beautiful Vietnam was, lush and green where
they hadn’t bombed it. The heat was overwhelming, but the shade created pockets of cool air.
Then they found signs of activity—broken foliage and fresh human shit—and they knew there were VC close by. Goodman lifted a clump of leaves with his weapon, revealing an entrance. The earth was sliced clean, but the hole cap didn’t fit; a black ridge, fine as a scar, outlined the tunnel entrance. It was Goodman’s turn to blow it, so my father backed up, crouching behind a hill. Goodman lowered himself down to the entrance, a grenade in one hand, his weapon in the other. He pried the entrance up and stuck his M-16 down the tunnel. “Fire in the hole,” he said. The grenade rolled off his fingers. He jogged back behind the hill and squatted. The explosion was like a car backfiring, loud and solid, muffled by the earth. The ground rose slightly, throwing chunks of vegetation and clouds of dust into the air.
“Another entrance,” Goodman said, tossing a burned-down cigarette.
It was my father’s turn, so he moved toward the tunnel entrance, but Goodman stopped him. “I’m right here,” he said, walking to the hole. “I got it.”
Dad turned, to take cover. Goodman bent over the hole and lifted a clump of brush away from the entrance with his hand, too fast, too careless. Suddenly, my father heard an AK-47. He hit the ground just in time to see Goodman jolt back, as if he’d been punched, and fall heavily to the ground not two feet from his smoldering cigarette. The VC slipped back down in the hole.
Goodman had been hit square between the eyes, and the back of his head had been blown off. Blood mixed into the red dirt, making a black stain round as a halo beneath his head. My father looked down at Goodman, stunned, unable to fully understand what had happened. Tommy had just been there, in front of him. He threw a grenade down the tunnel entrance, hoping to get the VC before he crawled off, into the complex. It exploded, sending up gray smoke.
Dad picked up Goodman’s burned-down cigarette and took a deep drag. He told me this story many times over the years, and every time he said the same thing: “That bullet had my name written all over it. It was my turn, and Goodman took it.” Sometimes I would say, “Somebody must have wanted you around for a while,” and my father would look dismayed. “Something I always felt bad about,” he said, “was what I did after Tommy died. He had a canteen full of water, and I took it. He was
dead, lying right there at my feet, and I unscrewed the cap and drank every drop of his water. We never had enough water—or ammunition, for that matter—and seeing Goodman like that made me thirsty.”
My father hoisted Goodman up over his shoulder and carried him back to the others. Goodman was bigger than Dad, and heavier, and yet he didn’t feel his weight. Blood ran over his neck and slithered warm upon his chest.
My father heard the platoon in the distance, talking and laughing.
“You see anything interesting, Trussoni?” Scotty shouted, but when he saw Goodman’s body, his expression changed.
Pops walked to my father. He didn’t say anything, just looked at the body with a sad, defeated stare, as if he himself had squandered something precious. He said, “Shit, Trussoni, how’d this happen?” but he knew how. Tunneling was dangerous. It was bound to happen to one of them. Pops called in the dust-off and limped into the bush.
Scotty knelt down at Goodman’s side. He ran his fingers over the side of the face still intact, as if to remember the chiseled bones of the cheek and the big goofy ears. After a minute, he ruffled his blood-soaked hair and pushed his body over, unzipped his butt pack, and began to go through it. He took out two packs of Kools and a roll of purple MPC, at least a couple hundred dollars’ worth. “Sorry, buddy,” Scotty said, as he stuffed the money and cigarettes in his pack, “but you don’t need this no more.” The other guys smoked and tried not to look as Scotty went through Goodman’s ruck. He took out a small metal camera and gave it to my father. “I believe this,” Scotty said, “belongs to you.”
My father leaned his head against a tree, waiting for the dust-off. As the Huey landed and they loaded Goodman on, my father was numb. Even then he was still unsure of what had happened.
“You want to show me where?” Pops asked, and my father led them back, through the jungle, to the tunnel entrance. Occasionally he saw a splotch of blood in the dirt and knew he was not lost. Soon the platoon stood over the tunnel, staring down at the circle of black blood near the entrance.
Dad threw his rucksack to the ground, pulled out his new .22, and felt the edge of the tunnel. Using a stick, he tapped inside, feeling for traps. Then, he lowered himself down. The darkness swept over him and he felt a kind of recognition, a return, as if the tunnels had worked themselves into his senses, into his body. Now, after months of going down, he
could taste the dark. He was going to do this one fast. Go in and get out, quick as possible.
The tunnel mouth narrowed and forced him to his knees. His gun thumped against the clay. He tried to remember what Goodman had told him. First thing: Go in slow. He felt the walls and tunnel ceiling. The clay was chalky under his fingers, smooth and without roots. He listened for noise and then crawled ahead, out of the communication tunnel and into a pocket of air where the tunnel forked. There was a wide central tunnel ahead, and a smaller narrow one that veered off to the left. He sat on his heels and flipped on the flashlight. A fork in the tunnel presented him with a choice, and for a moment this seemed like a bad thing. He considered turning back. He could tell Pops anything. He could say, “Nothing down there but a dead end.”
He crawled into the left passage. The right tunnel’s possibilities, rejected, melted behind. He had made such decisions—stepping one way rather than another, taking a different path—a hundred times in the past month. Goodman had made a seemingly inconsequential decision and died. Every action led to something. He could do nothing but choose.
He lowered himself onto his forearms and pulled himself through.
Within minutes he crawled out of the communication tunnel and into a long low-ceilinged room. Tiny shafts of light broke through pinprick holes in the ceiling. Squat tables and rows of potbellied crockery sat against a wall. The room smelled of smoke. Goodman had told him about the VC kitchens. They had started making them while fighting the French. Boxes of C-rations and tinned meat, all stolen from a U.S. base, were stacked neatly on a metal shelving unit. He moved his flashlight over boxes and crates and then lifted the cover off a ceramic pot. The terrible smell swelled and he dropped the lid. It banged like a gun. He lifted the other lids: rice, tea, cassava. He trained the light over a hollow space in the wall and then stuck his head in. The VC had dug the ovens in and up so that the chimneys sent the smoke into channels the size of reeds, where it funneled out gradually, leaking slowly into the elephant grass up top. They had fires below the earth, but nobody could see them.
There were two communication tunnels leading off the room. He looked from one to the other, knowing they had been built as an escape route. He crawled into one. As he moved inward, the tunnel narrowed, and he thought for a moment that he had, in fact, hit a dead end. But
then, ahead, there appeared a coloration in the darkness. As he got closer, a terrible smell filled the air, as if a whole village’s rice supply had gone to rot. He followed the stench into a low airless room. Light hazed through a thatched entrance above.
He lay very still, close to the ground, his heart pounding. As he steadied the flashlight and surveyed the room, he saw an ankle and then a shin. The body before him couldn’t have been dead long—the skin was still intact—but the smell was awful. He could hardly breathe. He slanted the beam over the body and saw, beyond, more bodies spread across the floor, a tangle of corpses. He moved the light over a head, cocked sideways. This one had been dead longer than the first. The skin had shrunk and shriveled, and was completely gone in places.
There didn’t seem to be movement above, so he pushed through the thatch and poked his head aboveground. He found himself peering into a hut. He blinked, trying to regain sight. Palm leaf baskets were clustered next to a primitive plow, and a different variety of stench filled the hut; the baskets were filled with fertilizer.
He had heard that the Vietcong hid the bodies of their dead to frustrate American body counts. When an American body disappeared, the VC were immediately suspected. Weeklong search missions, with platoons scouring villages and dredging rice paddies, often ended without a body. He wondered if any American bodies had been hidden below, or if they’d made a separate chamber. Maybe the villagers pulled the Vietnamese bodies up, eventually, and gave them a proper burial. Or maybe they simply filled the chamber to the top with bodies and sealed it.
He lowered himself back into the tunnel, ready to backtrack. When he got to the tunnel entrance, he would take the platoon to the bodies from up top, through the village. He sat in the darkness, feeling disorientated and dizzy, waiting until he could get his balance. He turned his flashlight to the tunnel and crawled out.
When he had made it back to his platoon, he told them to follow him around, to the village. He looked down on the dark halo of Goodman’s blood as he walked away. It had already faded into the dirt.