WEST OF VIETNAM’S Central Highlands, somewhere between the Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri provinces, the early monsoon flooded the hilly terrain. Between the Sesan and Srepok rivers, red soil surged in streams, washing out the trails of men who now huddled in a thatched-roof makeshift on bamboo stilts. Through the breaks in the green canopy, they could glimpse the sky and imagine a glorious return.
“Eh, Vinnie!” Lee called from the hut. “Come eat.” Lee stepped out on the veranda as rain sluiced off the peaked roof onto the flowing land. The aroma of charred kouprey and manioc diffused into the rain-soaked jungle. Lee removed his narrow-framed glasses and wiped the lenses on his peasant pajamas, a size too small and ill fit for his husky build. When he returned the glasses to his eyes, he peered again into the vaporous night.
Vinnie Huynh, outstretched on an old frayed hammock knotted from parachute nylon and strung from tree branches, chanted a bastardized “Katyusha” deliriously. The rain splashed on his pale ghostly face, drenched his ripped Levi’s and Ranchero Stars and Stripes boots, tapped and bounced off the M-16 on his chest.
“Thằng ngu dại,” Lee muttered and limped into the downpour in blackened US Army boots. Vinnie’s naiveté reminded Lee of his own youth before the draft more than two decades ago. Dead of pneumonia before you make good with karma, Lee’s old tutu would have said. He made a futile effort to wring the cold rain from his overgrown hair.
Lee kept a hand on Vinnie’s shoulder as they felt their way across the flooded campground. They stepped around bomb craters that overflowed like giant goblets of burgundy toasting the pouring sky. A Russian Minsk leaned against the crater’s edge where Vinnie had crashed and bathed the morning of his arrival.
“Wait! My wheels.” Vinnie broke free from his companion’s grip and waded toward the motorcycle, tugging the M-16 through the red muddy water.
“Leave it. And return the rifle to the cave.”
The men had never remained at one spot for long, but when they discovered a womb-like tunnel in the belly of the Annamite Range, they decided to camp there for the monsoon season. They buried the bones they found in the cave and made offerings, asking permission of the old dead to use the area as an ammunition depot. Outside the cave, they erected their shelters on bamboo stilts.
“Let me carry this,” Vinnie said, clutching the rifle close to his chest. “I’ll guard us against spies, VCs, wild beasts—” He stopped and then whispered, “Did you just see that?” He slowly aimed the M-16 at the shadow beyond the bamboo thicket. Before Lee could stop him, Vinnie squeezed the trigger.
The gunshots shattered the lulling pitter-patter of rain. Men bolted from the thatched hut with weapons in hand. Some fled to the ammunition depot while others dove into the jungle.
“Bravo! Bravo!” A pair of crippled hands clapped from the window where yellow lantern light illuminated the drizzling night. The paralyzed cook was the only one of twelve who did not participate in drills or emergencies. “Another kouprey?” Cook Cu asked. “Snakes, lizards, geckos—delicacies for my moonshine?”
A voice came from the cave. “What did he hit?”
“Nothing,” answered a man in a bush.
“The kid’s trigger-happy,” concluded another behind a rock.
Near the bamboo thicket, they found Kai, a darkskinned waif, who was foraging for wild berries and mushrooms. He seemed unrattled. The youngest of the group, Kai carried at his side a long machete he used to clear paths and mark trails through the dense jungle.
The men returned to the shelter. That was the second time Vinnie startled them. Just a week earlier, he roared unexpectedly into camp on the Minsk. His appearance and knowledge of their location made them uneasy, but they believed him when he said he was sent from America. He had come via Thailand, crossing at Poipet into Cambodia, driving eastward nonstop for two days. Now, he opened fire at the slightest shadow.
After the commotion, the men ate and drank heartily. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s, packs of unfiltered Camels, and news from the Little Saigon headquarters lifted their spirits in welcoming the Year of the Goat. More than two decades in the jungle had blurred their military ranks, national allegiances, and vital statistics. Except for the bald ailing cook and young boy, the men’s features—like those of Lee Hakaku Boyden’s—were buried under shrouds of dark overgrown hair. Sometime during the Second Indochina War, the loose band of twelve had formed. They drifted back and forth across the border of Vietnam and Cambodia, ghostly vagabonds roaming a wasteland, not sure whether they were dead or alive.
“They sent a girl?” Cook Cu asked, his atrophied legs crossing stiffly on the kouprey hide. Before the rain, he had sprawled out on the mossy jungle floor beneath the burgeoning evergreens where the B-52s had failed to hit. “This is our home now,” he had told Kai, pointing to a spot beneath a creaking pine where they could see the mountain ridge trailing the sky. “When the wind shakes the pine, the roots sway like the rocking of a sampan drifting on the Perfume River of the old imperial city.” The paralyzed cook asked Kai to mark the gravesites beside the tilting pine.
“They’re sending a girl,” Vinnie said.
“Girls are good for some things.”
The men chuckled and sipped their rice whiskey, reveling in the warmth that spread through their bodies. As the night fell, the rain pitter-pattered and the wind gushed through the cracks; they felt their isolation. They thought of their homes and the women from past lives and wondered what had happened.
Even young Kai looked momentarily lost. After a hamlet on the outskirts of the Central Highlands was burned to the ground, Lee had found a scorched child. He dropped the things he carried, tucked the dark waif into his cut-up duffel bag, and walked westward into the jungle of Cambodia. The child was named Kai for the cool peaceful sea that Lee remembered of his own home on a far-off island in the Pacific. More than any other member, Kai belonged to the wilderness, to the perpetual cycle of destruction and renewal, yet at times, his innocent eyes seemed to long for permanence, a place to call home.
“Who’s the girl?”
“A decoy,” Vinnie said.
The jungle moonshine tasted grainy and bittersweet as he recalled how customs agents had interrogated him and stopped his physical entry at Tan Son Nhat International Airport, denying his return to the land of his origin.