Spearfield's Daughter (2 page)

She had been invited to bed by at least two dozen men. There had been a brigadier-general who had sounded as if he were doing her a favour and dropping his rank; several colonels, a major, half a dozen captains and assorted press correspondents from Australia, the United States, Britain, France, Germany and
Italy;
and a huge jet-black man from Nigeria, whose role she never did learn, who had suggested they go to bed and discuss the death of colonialism. She was not the only woman correspondent in Saigon and she was not the best-looking, but she was the newest and she had the most eye-catching figure. She had made a mistake having her suits made for her by the tailor on Tu Do; accustomed to making
ao dais
for the bar girls, he had assumed that she, too, wanted something tight that revealed her figure. Her looks were striking rather than beautiful; men would always gaze at her for there was a vibrancy about her that was more than just the flash of good white teeth and dark blue eyes. Though she didn't know it, being only twenty-three, she had the sort of looks that would attract attention all her life. And would be both a blessing and a curse.

She saw Pierre Cain coming across the square, dodging gracefully through the swarms of piranha-like Hondas. He came up on to the terrace, saw her and Tom, came along to their table and stood waiting to be asked to sit down. Part French, part Annamese, he had the best formal manners of each.

“Sit down, Pierre,” said Tom. “You're the best traffic-dodger I've ever seen. Twice there I thought one of those cowboys had got you.”

Cain smiled. “We have an old superstition in Annam—” He spoke as if Annam still existed, as if the present situation were only transitory, and Annam would tomorrow be again as it always had been. In his mind he still lived in Indo-China, no matter what the foreigners now called it. “If a man is haunted, all he has to do is take the evil spirit close to a motorcycle or an automobile and it will be run down.”

“What happens if the evil spirit gives you a push and you're the one who's run down?”

Cain smiled again. “Then you are no longer haunted.”

“Are you haunted now, Pierre?” said Cleo.

He shrugged, turned away to order some mineral water, then looked back at them. “I have some disappointing news. No correspondents are being allowed into the An Bai area tomorrow.”

Tom Border gave a Gallic shrug; but Cleo was angry. “Why not, for God's sake? Isn't that where they've had all the trouble with the VC? Are they afraid we might get hurt or something? Is that it?” She was afraid, but she would not admit it, not to men, even two men as sympathetic as Tom Border and Pierre Cain. “What's gone wrong this time?”

“They are bringing out our men and replacing them—it is to be an all-American operation.” He said it without bitterness or shame, as if it were natural to accept that this was now an almost all-American
war.
He was a liaison officer between the US and Vietnamese commands and had learned the diplomacy of swallowing one's pride.

Cleo looked at Tom, who said, “There you are, old girl. Nobody wants us.”

“I don't believe it. We were told only yesterday we could go up there . . .”

“Brigadier-General Brisson—” Cain always gave everyone his exact rank; he had been an accountant in Hue before the war had swallowed him up—“I'm afraid he's cancelled everything that was promised yesterday. He's in charge of the An Bai operation. He says there will be no transport available for the press.”

Cleo knew Roger Brisson; he was the brigadier-general who had invited her to bed. She had met him two days after her arrival in Saigon, at a reception at the American embassy for a party of US Congressmen come to visit the war. There had been few other correspondents there and none of the women from the press; nobody was interested in writing stories about anyone from Washington. But she was new and had gone along, to learn nothing except that General Brisson thought he was God's gift to women and the war effort.

He had taken her to dinner at the Caravelle Hotel, where he had shown he knew his way through a wine list as well as through a tactical plan. Outside, the White Mice, the Vietnamese police, paraded up and down, keeping the war at a safe distance. Come Armageddon, there will still be generals who will find time to dine properly.

“Cleo? Is that a nickname?”

“No, it's short for Cleopatra. My mother was a romantic, she saw me growing up to sail my barge down the Murrumbidgee, conquering all before me.” Brigid Spearfield had been a country girl and all her reference points had been country towns, rivers, anywhere in the bush that helped her shut her mind against the city, which she had never accepted.

“The Murrumbidgee?” Roger Brisson wondered if he had brought some sort of kook to dinner. Saigon was full of them, scores of them coming in and claiming to be representatives of the press. He decided it was time to get her out of public view into a more private place. “We'll go back to my quarters after dinner.”

“Is that an invitation to go to bed with you?”

“
Yes.” He always gave a direct answer to a direct question; it meant that down the chain of command there was never any confusion. Or should not be. “You could do far worse than me, but not any better. Not in this town.”

He was handsome, trim and fit; the twenty years' difference between them didn't worry either of them. But Cleo knew the bed would be crowded, his ego would keep getting between them. “No, thank you.”

He looked at her as if she should be put on a charge-sheet for conduct prejudicial to military order and good discipline. “You may be glad of my civilized company, you won't find any of that amongst the press corps. That is, if you stay long enough. I don't believe women have much stamina for war.”

“You may well be right,” she had said, though she wondered what sort of answer Martha Gellhorn or Marguerite Higgins would have given him. Gellhorn who had been covering the Spanish Civil War when Brisson was not yet in high school and who was still writing about war; and Higgins who had slogged her way through Korea with the best of the men and died from a tropical disease picked up right here in Vietnam. “But some of us don't find that disgraceful, General.”

The evening had ended shortly after that. He had abruptly remembered that he had to attend a conference—there was a war to be won. She had seen him only once since then, going past in a Jeep across Lam Son Square; he had looked at her and through her, then turned and stared straight ahead. She had wanted to jeer and boo, something she would have done on campus in her university days. But anti-war demonstrations were out of place in Saigon.

“Well, I'm going
somewhere
tomorrow,” she told Cain and Tom. “Where else can I get a ride to?”

“Attagirl,” said Tom; then looked at Cain. “Send her somewhere healthy, Pierre. We don't want to lose her.”

“I'll think of somewhere.” Cain raised his glass of mineral water and drank their health. Then he looked at the label on the bottle the waiter had left. “Vichy water. Do you think they bottle treachery?”

But that had been another war, ending the year she was born, and Vichy meant nothing to Cleo.

II

She sat on her pack on the edge of the air-strip and listened to the obscenities, wondering when
the
English language had become so inadequate that nothing but four-letter words would do to describe everything from the war to the weather. Four-letter words had been very fashionable back on campus, as if the students of the day had been proving that education was a barrel of nightsoil, as her father would have called it. She had always had an aversion to such language and if she had not been such a radical in other matters she would have been called a prig by her fellow students. But whatever the language back on campus, she had heard nothing like the conversation of these American grunts.

“The war's nothing but fucking shit, I tell you.” He was nineteen and back home in Chappell, Nebraska, his mother would probably have told him to wash out his mouth with soap. “Only them motherfuckers back in Washington won't admit it.”

“I come out here to fight for the fucking gooks and all the fucking gooks done was fucking run away.”

“Sensible motherfuckers. I been reading about the fucking wisdom of the East.”

“Wisdom is shit, man. I'm fucking wise to all that fucking wisdom.”

I can't write any of this, Cleo thought, not for the mums back home. She wondered how the grunts would describe the war to their mothers when, and if, they got back home.

The crew of the Chinook helicopter were polite young men, careful of their language in front of her. The co-pilot, brash and boyish, a Saturday night hero back home in Denver who had become a real hero and didn't want to know about it, winked at her and invited her to sit up front in the jump-seat just behind him and the pilot. The big helicopter was ferrying supplies to an Australian company in the hills—one that was operating quite separately from the main Australian force.

The American captain at the press centre at JUSPAO (some day she would get all the initials worked out; acronyms had become another obscenity) had worked on her like a used car salesman. “Honestly, Miss Spearfield, this is the story for you. The Aussies are doing a fantastic job up there—you ought to tell the folks back home all about it.” She had been suspicious of his hard sell, wanting to question him about An Bai. But in the end she had decided that perhaps he was right. After all, the
Sydney Morning Post
had sent her here to write about the Australian war effort. The mums back home in Sydney wouldn't care about what was happening in An Bai.

They were flying through heavy rain, the rotors above them spinning it off in a thick spray;
looking
up, Cleo had the image that they were flying under a giant circular saw. It was cold here in the bubble and she was glad she had worn her sweater; the four crewmen back in the hold of the chopper had whistled at her, but she had long ago accepted that as part of the pleasure and irritation of being a woman. Unconsciously she leaned back in her seat, lifting her bosom, and the pilot looked back at her out of the corner of his eye.

“Don't do that, miss. It's hard enough as it is flying this bird.”

She relaxed, smiled. “Sorry.” She had to shout to make him hear, so that put an end to any flirtation, even if she had felt like it, which she didn't. She leaned close to him and bellowed in his ear: “Which way is An Bai?”

He nodded to the right. “Somewhere down there. All these gook villages look the same from up here.”

“Can we go back that way?”

“What for, for crissakes? I'm not a fucking taxi pilot.” Up till now he had been careful with his language.

She saw the sudden anger in his face and then recognized the other signs. The young-old eyes, the grey-yellow pallor like that of an elderly, sick man: he was twenty-three years old, but his birthdays stretched behind him like memorials rather than celebrations. Some other pilots, the adventurers, the rebels, might have instantly swung off course to take her down to An Bai. But Lieutenant Hurd, unlike Joe Puzio, the co-pilot, was a career man, even if he was thoroughly disillusioned by his first war.

She sat back, careful to keep her bosom down, and looked out through the rain-cracked perspex bubble at the green, dream-like countryside up ahead. The whole of Vietnam had become a dream, and a bad one. She had come here excited by her first big adventure; now, only a month later, she had begun to hate the war. It was a different hatred from that she had felt during the demonstrations back home against Australia's becoming involved in Vietnam; this was anger and disgust about the
actual
war, the death and maiming in the abstract. So far she had seen virtually no real action; it was almost as if the Viet Cong had retreated to make
her
war more comfortable. But she had seen the bags on the air-strips, like the rubbish of war, all tagged with the names of this week's garbage: Jeffrey T. Partridge, Mortimer Wineburg, Lester O. Schwabe. She had used the simile of the garbage bags in her first story, then crossed it out. The mums back
home
did not want to be told that their dead sons resembled rubbish.

Suddenly the helicopter lurched to one side and Cleo saw rather than heard the pilot swear. He swung the chopper in a wide arc, steeply banking; Cleo felt the canvas seat-belt slicing into her. Her stomach seemed to roll around inside her; she thought she was going to vomit. Something hit the floor beneath her with a jarring bump and the chopper bounced. There was a loud crack and the bubble on the pilot's side burst; it seemed to disintegrate in slow motion. Then she saw Lieutenant Hurd shake his head and the blood began to spurt out of the wound in his throat.

The chopper wobbled, began to swing through the air up, down and around, a Big Dipper ride on no rails. Cleo sat petrified, wanting to be sick but with her stomach never in the right place to throw up. Then she heard Lieutenant Puzio yelling at her, jerking his head at Hurd. He got the chopper on an even keel, but it seemed to be bumping its way over a rough road of rain-filled air. She tore off her scarf, a Lanvin piece of silk given her as a going-away present by her sister-in-law Cheryl, just the thing for this year's combat zone. She strained against the canvas straps, reached across, wrenched off the pilot's helmet and awkwardly wrapped the scarf round his throat. He was slumped in his seat and made no response. Lieutenant Puzio nodded his thanks without looking at her, peering ahead through the rain which was now beating in through the shattered bubble. The helicopter was still pitching, dropping lower and lower towards the rice paddies that lay like great sheets of mottled glass below them.

Then Cleo saw the three Chinooks rising from beyond a long straggling village to their right. They swung away through the curtain of rain like giant fat turkeys that had learned to fly; as they disappeared Lieutenant Puzio took the chopper towards the village. The helicopter went in sideways above the village; Cleo saw the flower of flame suddenly bloom out of the roof of a hut below her. She saw villagers running in panic to get away from the crashing helicopter; then she realized the chopper was not going to crash and that Joe Puzio was putting it down safely. She saw the soldiers running after the villagers, who were now falling over and lying still in the mud. Lieutenant Puzio put the helicopter down with a bump and switched off the motors; Lieutenant Hurd fell forward and hung in his belting. Cleo had never seen a dead man before, not one who had been alive only a minute ago, and she shut her eyes and waited to be sick, but nothing came up out of her dry, constricted throat.